How Grading Works in Grade Abatement
At the end of the quarter, a salve for potential anxiety
Perhaps the simplest version of what grade abatement does is this: Students shape X by learning how to shape X, where X is the set of skills and traits universal to effective learning. They improve through incremental and evidentiary assessment that culminates in a grade abatement profile at the end of each quarter.
It’s really not that simple, I know, which is why the following three explanations are themselves examples of this sort of iterative thinking — of building meaning alongside a meta-awareness of how meaning is created, clarified, and deepened.
The framing question:
How does grading work in grade abatement?
Iteration 2.1: A Simple Response
As we reach the end of a quarter, it is important to revisit the ways that grade abatement, a new and radically different system, helps students. (This is the same general information made available online in a dozen different places, and there are links to that material at the end of this section.)
First, the day-to-day lessons for a course using grade abatement are no different from any other course. We give the same assignments. Students complete the same kind of homework, essays, discussions, and even tests. The syllabus stays the same, and the assured experiences by grade level remain intact. Students are given continual feedback and redirection.
What changes is how we arrive at the number on the report card. The score is based on evidence that students build over the nine weeks of the quarter, and that evidence is sorted into universal skills (for example, close reading and effective communication) and universal traits (for example, empathy and self-awareness). At the end of each quarter, each student writes or conferences about their evidence and receives a profile score.
This shifts ownership of the learning process from teachers to students, and it shifts the ongoing focus for both students and teacher to the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful. Grade abatement creates a different kind of partnership between us by eliminating numbers from the day-to-day learning process and giving us more time to develop mutual understanding.
That partnership is also about honoring student choices and individual needs. For example, it gives us a way to reward students who might not be strong writers but who are strong in other areas, such as class discussion or critical thinking. We can encourage risk-taking and greater depth throughout the curriculum, and that builds honesty, teamwork, and transparency.
To learn more about the specifics of grade abatement, please visit the following links:
▸ Grade abatement profiles and GAP tiers
▸ Guides to grade abatement in chronological and evolving order:① Explained | ② Clarified | ③ Amended
▸ Essays about grade abatement and related teachings: Sisyphean High: How to Climb the Mountain
▸ Real-world proof of the application of grade abatement: Top 10 Skills You Need at Work
Note that these links are to the most recent versions, so there may be slight variations from teacher to teacher. Grade abatement is modular; you should see variation.
Iteration 1.2: A More Complex Response
Grade abatement produces a quarterly report that is the product of “collective human judgment based on evidence,” to use Tony Wagner’s language. That report analyzes evidence of 8–10 universal skills and traits, all of which are inculcated through a flexible and individualized program of study. Once collected and analyzed, the evidence is assessed as a body of work that corresponds to a grade abatement profile. These profiles use precise language and clear threshold mechanics to sort student growth and performance. They also provide blueprints for improvement in those skills and traits:
- Effective communication, especially through rubric-driven writing
- Critical thinking, especially metacognition and reflection
- Close reading, especially to emulate or to internalize
- Organization, especially as it pertains to autodidacticism
- Assiduousness, especially its relationship to self-efficacy
- Amenability, especially its relationship to self-awareness
- Collegiality, especially its relationship to imaginative empathy
- Integrity, or student ethics and character
- Demonstrable growth and/or proxy teaching of timed analysis and argument
- Demonstrable growth and/or proxy teaching of timed multiple-choice work
The benefit of using grade abatement over traditional grading is the ability to treat these skills and traits as part of a continual and sometimes desultory process, one in which it is okay to take risks and even to fail along the way. That process isn’t meant to be scored traditionally, which is why I like what Alfie Kohn says about it:
To talk about what happens in classrooms, let alone in children’s heads, as moving forward or backward in specifiable degrees, is not only simplistic because it fails to capture much of what is going on, but also destructive because it may change what is going on for the worse. Once we’re compelled to focus only on what can be reduced to numbers, such as how many grammatical errors are present in a composition or how many mathematical algorithms have been committed to memory, thinking has been severely compromised. And that is exactly what happens when we try to fit learning into a four- or five- or (heaven help us) 100-point scale.
Unfortunately, the system that entraps us requires us to pause every nine weeks and transform that incremental and authentic learning into a number. When we must do this, we use the grade abatement protocol to convert evidence into profiles and profiles into numbers. It is an ameliorative and objective process — a review of sorts, and one mostly removed from the toxicity of grades themselves.
The silver lining of this arbitrary break in learning is that the number generated for a report card by grade abatement means something specific, individualized, and precise. There is no floating standard, no draconian severity, no ambiguous or ill-fitting heuristic. The student is entirely responsible for the choices he or she makes, and all positive choices are honored and validated by the system.
Furthermore, because the profiles rest on universal skills and traits like empathy, collegiality, communication, and so on, there is no barrier to entry. The learning is transparent. Parents can involve themselves in each and every step, if they choose, without having to wait until that report card flattens several months of work like a car being crushed into a cube.
What is lost through grade abatement, of course, is the ability to check a student’s progress regularly through Infinite Campus or some other online mechanism. Leaving aside how distorted that window can be — one bad quiz grade can temporarily warp a final average, for instance, and elements like weighting and total points further confuse things — I will just quote Alfie Kohn again:
It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
We need to be involved in each student’s progress in an authentic way. Grade abatement removes the obfuscating clutter of grades and lets us talk about what is really happening and why it really matters. The most important part of that idea, however, is easy to miss: It lets us talk. The first skill stressed in grade abatement — effective communication — is the first universal skill we all need to hone.
Iteration 1.3: A More Complete Response
This one actually resembles an essay, so we should break, give it a title and subtitle, and work from there.
The Metamorphic Mindset
Shaping and shapeshifting
I think often of the idea of transparency as I build grade abatement, because the building of it will continue. Some elements, like the grade abatement profiles, will see only cursory revision; other elements, like the idea of radial and proxy feedback, are new and still evolving. This is an engineering or programming mentality, which means that iteration is paramount. We will never see a final version of the program, just the most recent and most effective version.
So transparency is the key. As more teachers become involved in grade abatement, that transparency requires parents and administrators and students to embrace the iterative nature of the program. As in all things, we need to study history in order to understand the present. We must also embrace a paradox:
- Grade abatement is a precise, individualized, and ameliorative form of assessment; yet
- grade abatement normalizes a kind of uncertainty and ambiguity in students.
There is some educational jargon there (“normalizes” doesn’t pop up in normal conversation, oddly enough), but the crux of this is the metamorphosis made possible by paradox. Students move from raw potential to nascent strength. They move from confusion to clarity. It’s a spectrum we should all embrace — and one that traditional education has collapsed into a binary and sometimes dichotomous kind of thinking: You fail or you don’t.
In grade abatement, students are shaping universal skills and traits by learning how to shape those universal skills and traits. We use the prefix “meta-” often to indicate the self-efficacy and self-awareness necessary to do this. The process is individualized, for instance, through a sort of meta-pedagogical structure: Students collaborate with teachers to determine the best way to teach themselves and, therefore, to learn.
When we are required to do more than provide individual (and usually narrative) feedback — when, in other words, we must break from the good and often desultory work of real learning in order to put a number on a report card — we use what Tony Wagner calls “collective human judgment based on evidence.” In those moments, the certainty of the paradox comes from the profiles and protocol, which are most often updated through Sisyphean High or the current year’s course website.
The profiles guide the quarterly assessment of a body of work. That assessment is a collective and evidentiary process — a fact-finding mission undertaken by student, peers, and teacher together. The language of each profile is precise, and the mechanics that separate each threshold are clear and obvious. The first section of this essay explains those threshold mechanics in more detail:
The precision is most felt when the profiles’ language is traced through the 8–10 skills and traits that form the substructure of grade abatement. (The extra two categories are those relating to standardized test prep, so they only appear in quarters where that kind of gamesmanship is required.) The profiles are designed to allow an individually crafted experience; at the same time, the interconnected nature of the skills and traits means that the learning is universal — that it can be carried from classroom to classroom and into the future that lies mercifully beyond formal schooling.
As for the uncertainty of the paradox: Well, we are monitoring these skills and traits without using numbers. Progress, in the past, was understood primarily through scores and GPA, and there is an obvious comfort in that, even if it’s just as obvious that those numbers could sometimes be inflated or inconsistent. The grading heuristic is simple: The closer a student gets to 100, the better.
Grade abatement helps us move away from that quixotic quest. The score that appears on a report card is derived from a profile, which is a more authentic way to understand and communicate learning. The evidence that comprises that profile, and which is gathered over the previous 9–10 weeks, is intricate and ramiform. For all of us, each individual student's profile is, therefore, much more about the process than wherever we end up.
Which is a hokey and trite way to say that we must have what is called a “beginner’s mind.” This is a staple of creative work, called shoshin in Zen Buddhism and abecedarian learning (when I want to use that word, which is one of my favorites) in grade abatement. Students must embrace, as Robert Aitkin Roshi wrote in The Gateless Barrier, “a body full of doubt” and “a conceptual fog” in order to answer the question, “Who am I really?”
The difference between the usual koan abstraction and grade abatement is that we can answer some of those questions in a concrete way, because we are utilizing those 8–10 universal skills and traits and studying them in an academic setting. We build a substructural understanding of what it means to learn — the how of it — and then let students explore.
That’s how we can recognize the inevitability of grades, give out a number every nine weeks, and still see student learning improve. We can still ague against that quixotic 100, too. Strength and understanding are relative, and a student who earns a GAP 9 in grade abatement hasn’t reached a plateau. He or she will still grow and develop. In grade abatement, in fact, that 9 is the product of teaching others and reflecting on the self as much as it is developing the skills necessary for success; and we know, of course, that teaching is not only the best way to internalize skills and knowledge, but a habit of mind that improves with time.
Grade abatement also emphasizes empathy as much as analysis. Because of that, we can make this discussion of “how grading works in grade abatement” one that enlightens us a little bit. We can preserve our mutual integrity and avoid conveying to students a dangerous sort of finality.
This ongoing ambiguity is best thought of as the opposite of the traditional, staged sagacity of teacher-centric and inflexible “expertise.” In a grade-abated classroom, the teacher’s expertise is also about a beginner’s mindset. We know more, and we are skilled in helping students to know more, but we model learning as much as we teach it.
In fact, I keep thinking today about all this in terms of what led to grade abatement in the first place. One piece of it stems from a Piet Hein quotation worth highlighting (not least of all to mention his grooks, which is what he called his poetry):
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
So it is here. Grade abatement isn’t a grand and unifying theory that solves the problem of grades and grade obsession; it is, instead, the kind of art where the shaping of instruction is the instruction. It evolves because it is in use.
To best understand the current iteration, parents ought to start with the following two websites, which archive all of the writing on this program:
▸ Sisyphean High | The philosophical and iterative background
▸ English 11 | What it all looked like in practice in 2015–2016
▸ English 10, English 11, and AP Lang. | What it looks like in 2016–2017
Recognize that even here, in this essay, I am building in a kind of systems redundancy — repeating ideas, pasting in the same links, reiterating logic, and so on. In recent weeks, I’ve put together close to 10,000 words on grade abatement, answered questions from students in 14 different classrooms, and prompted student to collaborate through a student-built subreddit. To me, that is a kind of weaponized transparency, with failsafes designed to help even the most cursory readers.
But I’m not just throwing ideas at the walls of my house like a poor man’s Goya. I want to involve parents directly and immediately in what students are learning — to make clear what would otherwise not be clear. If full immersion in all this history and evolution is daunting, parents can look simply to the profiles and the protocol for the program.
All students in a grade-abated course should be able to articulate how this works. All students should be able to sort their choices and the artifacts they’ve created accordingly. And any student who cannot do this knows that there is always another chance to change.
