Grant Wiggins and I recently completed an online conversation, begun last fall, on the topic "Testing and Assessment." Grant is a former teacher and heads Authentic Education, an education consulting company. Grant is a nationally known, highly respected expert on education. He has published many articles and books, and speaks frequently to teachers and administrators in schools across the country. Part 2 of our slightly edited conversation is published here. Part 1 was published in our fall 2005 issue.
SI: In our first conversation, you talked quite a bit about "assessment." As I understand your use of the term, assessment includes a number of things including attainment (or non-attainment) of goals for the teacher as well as the student, evaluation of the quality of the work, and feedback to the student. Grades, and assessment generally, are such important issues that I want to concentrate on these topics in this conversation. As our jumping off point, I want to remind you of a comment you made in our first talk: "we evaluate far more than we should and we assess far too little than we should." Will you please say more about this?
GW: To assess is to sit beside and make clinical diagnosis and prescription (from the Latin assidere, to sit beside). To evaluate is to judge worth, put a value on the thing. So, more assessment, less evaluation. Let's not call it formative assessment; let's call it feedback to make the point clearer. The research on learning is unambiguous: people improve performance with more feedback and opportunities to use it. Then my comment is just common sense: students don't benefit from more grades, they benefit from more opportunities to get useful feedback and use it. [I refer readers to both How People Learn and the widely-read Black and Wiliam articles in the Phi Delta Kappan on the critical role of feedback in improving achievement].
Of course, teachers are often under pressure to have sufficient grades to justify a midterm or final evaluation. That's only fair, too: reliability and fairness both demand a sufficient number of grades to find a defensible pattern. But it is clearly bad pedagogy to grade all homework quality, for example. That's like grading every rough draft of a paper. Or grading every teacher on the first time they teach a new lesson. It's just not fair. Sure, let's grade homework completion or meeting one's obligations or effort or whatever you want to call it. But please let's stop this knee-jerk reaction of grading the quality of all initially-submitted work. Or, be more fair in terms of reliability; do what we do in the Olympics: throw out the high and low scores or weigh the trend of progress more heavily in the final grade.
SI: More assessment, less grading sounds exactly right to me. Can we use English teachers as a model? Many English teachers that I know write copious notes on papers so that students can effectively rewrite them. They also meet with students frequently to discuss how the student can be a better writer. I take it from what you say that all teachers should be doing this.
Fewer grades may be desirable from a teacher's point of view but our parents and students are clamoring for more and higher grades. Students want every conversation to be about grades. Students and parents, especially in independent schools, see high grades, not deep understanding of subject matter, as the ticket to admission to a great university. Can one teacher change this focus? Can one school?
GW: You know, I hear this lament a lot about kids and grades. I beg to differ: kids grade grub when teachers make grading imperious and fail to make the course designed to demand more intrinsic motivation. I don't think the average course is sufficiently fascinating and culminating in rich authentic tasks enough to defeat the legacy of constant extrinsic motivation it engenders. These are the same kids, after all, who beat themselves up to get the musical or give and go just right, irrespective of any grade.
On the other hand, fairness demands that there be enough grades because reliability depends upon increasing the likelihood of a defensible pattern. But the dilemma then is clear: enough grades but grades that reflect the goals and a supportive environment. This is what each academic department should be doing a better job of discussing and formulating policy about. Is it an issue? Sure! Have departments really sat down and tackled it? They have not. So, once again, we are left to our own individual devices and kids and parents play us off one another. Why is it that teachers have a hard time seeing that their own desire to be left alone is at the root of the problem?
OF COURSE parents and students want higher grades! Why shouldn't they? We're competing here, remember? Are we really so naive as to believe that student and parents shouldn't care about how their performance is stacking up for admissions? That's no different than parents wanting the football team to win or ensuring that Suzy gets in the musical. Let parents be parents; stop being so thin-skinned and unempathetic. And it is the faculty's job to teach people to love the subject. More importantly, PLEASE stop letting one or two really bad apples call the shots and cloud the picture. I question your premise: "Students want every conversation to be about grades." A) I don't think it is true, B) if it IS true then you have an unhealthy school. But don't take my or anyone's word for it. Do a survey each semester on whether kids and parents think the grades/comments are helpful, and of teachers as to the % of students who are impossible grade-grubbers, to stop having the tyranny of the anecdote and a few squeaky wheels dominate faculty conversations and warp our thinking. I am tired of faculty whining about parents and students.Its unprofessional, in my view.
SI: I want to focus on three things you said. First, "make the course designed to demand more intrinsic motivation." This is certainly a tall order. Can you expand on this? Can you give someexamples of "rich authentic tasks"?
GW: The research on motivation is clear: a worthy challenge, a public challenge, opportunity to do important work in a quality way, play to my strengths and interests, let me work with others to achieve a worthy goal. And those criteria related to authentic tasks, obviously - that's what real work in the world demands of us.
SI: Second, you say "[w]hy is it that teachers have a hard time seeing that their own desire to be left alone is at the root of the problem?" I think that most independent school educators would say that the freedom independent schools give them to teach the way that they think is best is one of the most important reasons for teaching in an independent school. What kind of departmental standards do you think need to be put in place?
GW: Teachers are confusing the freedom to teach with the obligation of the learning to be coherent, valid, and engaging. What does it mean to have departmental goals if people are free to ignore their obligations to their colleagues and to learners? The standards we need have to do with three kinds: vetting syllabi against 1) principles of learning, 2) what the stated outcomes of the course, department, and school demand, and consistency in grading so that we clearly have standards that the student can count on, not just highly subjective quirks in testing and grading that inhibit excellent work.
SI: Finally, "it is the faculty's job to teach people to love the subject." Surely you can't mean that in an excellent school every student loves every subject! It is reasonable to expect each student to appreciate the need for each subject and to see the value of each subject, but love is too much. Have you been to schools in which every student loves every subject? Or are you saying that that is the goal even though we all know that it is not possible to achieve?
GW: I didn't say that this could always happen. I said it is a goal to strive for. It's no different than saying the goal is to be a lifelong learner or have a global non-ethnocentric perspective. It may not happen, but it is the right goal to keep aiming for. Too many secondary teachers, by contrast err on the other side: they act as if they have no obligation to make learners love the subject, that sufficient love must be presumed or that minimal begrudging compliance is all we can hope for. Nonsense! The best teachers always make students learn to love coming to class and they try to get students interested in doing more work in the subject. On the contrary, more and more independent school teachers act like mini-college teachers who think that the job is to master the technical aspects of the subject in the least painful way possible. That simply overlooks our obligation and the clients' needs.
Maybe love is too strong. But try this thought experiment: suppose your school were like Harvard and students had 2 weeks to commit to the teacher and the course as part of shopping period. And suppose enrollment in overall courses was linked to staffing decisions. Wouldn't you teach the course a little differently? Most groups I have actually tried this out with have agreed they would - especially math teachers. Our problem is that we fall back on tradition way too fast and use that as the justification, without having to design courses and self-assess success against a set of criteria for "successful course". Everyone should read Ken Bain's book on what the most successful college teachers do before they argue this one too far in the other direction, and look hard at the student satisfaction data coming from the NSSE project in colleges. There is a consistent finding on these points - students respond best to learning that focuses on challenging, provocative work where there is an obvious love of subject that the teacher is trying to cause learners to have.