In the wake of COVID-19, public schools have had unprecedented amounts of pressure put on them to offer students a high quality education, to pay their employees and to respond with compassion in their communities.
This is Part II to What School Should Be Doing More or Less Of. You can read Part I here.
Reconsider Grading
In March (2020), when schools were required to roll out a full remote learning curriculum with no time to plan, grades took a backseat. This was a momentous change to the paradigm of traditional schooling in the U.S. It was also a good thing!
While there are both disadvantages and strengths to remote learning in general, let’s take a look at what happened to grades.
Most districts, since they couldn’t calibrate how to evaluate students on a traditional 100 point scale, had to reconsider how progress would be measured. What was adapted was something was a Pass/Fail model based upon each student’s individual progress. Typically, this model is used in the lower grades as students are building the developmental skills of writing, writing, explaining, and basic math.
Once these skills are built, ( around 2nd grade), suddenly we thrust this 100 point or ABCDF scale upon students. At this stage in the education game, what we subconsciously communicate is the grade is the objective. When our learners were young, we were process focused, but now the product is the thing that is important. Schools are not incentivized to marry the two because process-based learning doesn’t bring home the bacon $$$.
During my years in the classroom, I can’t count how many times I’ve had a student ask me, “What do I need to do to get an A?” For one student, the bare minimum may get them the A. Per the grading standards, I must give them an A even though they put in a minimal amount of effort and did not stretch themselves to learn more and to refine their process. Again this ties in greatly with the point I made about building character in Part I.
For another student, their absolute best effort may earn them a C. Yet they developed more character in the process, even though their product might have been below the standards. The question becomes, what are we grading?
With the advent of COVID-19 disrupting public education on a massive scale, learning was forced to return to a process-based model. While creating a good product is necessary, we can’t put the sole focus on the product. Students aren’t professionals. They are learning, growing beings. Their process must be cultivated and encouraged. Risks must be taken to encourage this. We have to create a risk-safe environment to build resilience and not make our kids risk adverse. The traditional grading method discourages risk taking and encourages the perception of achievement over deep learning and building character.
Schools and educators would do well to reconsider how we grade, what we grade, and what it means in order to marry both the process-based and product based models.
Reconsider Schedules
Where does our current model of school scheduling come from?
I’ll let you start with this quote from former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan:
“Our K–12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools. But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century.”
That’s right. Largely, our get-to-school-sit-in-a-desk for eight hours is a hangover from the industrial age. As we have moved into the information age, with the advances and access to technology, our classrooms and our scheduling should look different. This is clear at the secondary level, particularly grades 9–12.
Theoretically, our schools are training students to be functional members of society. So we’ve religiously pushed the grades to college to big time money job mantra for the past 30 years. As the job market as changed with the advent of technology in the information age, our public schools have not kept up.
To be honest, as an educator, I’m a bit jealous of the current school-aged generation. The information it took me years of painstaking research (and hefty fees for access to university libraries) I can now access for free in a matter of minutes. The world is moving past us in public schools. Why are we still stuck in a model that is almost 100 years old?
Even if college were the ultimate goal, is the normal eight hour school day conducive to preparing students for the university life? No. As we all know, the college life is hardly a sit-in-your-desk-and-ride-it-out-for-eight-hours affair. Students may attend a subject only once or twice a week. Homework is assigned, but not mandatory. It’s assumed that students are young adults, so they are allowed the autonomy to operate as such.
If we’ve learned anything from the adaptations made during the first wave of COVID-19 it’s that school can be done differently, and students will rise to the challenge.
Point being, public schools in the U.S. are already behind the curve. If we don’t adapt, we will fall further behind and it is our children and future generations who will suffer. Our job as educators is to prepare students for the world they will inhabit, not one that existed 60 years in the past.
Students would benefit and be more prepared for the world of the future in schools with schedules that meet the current demands of society. We should be thinking in terms of shorter school days and blended learning at the secondary level, while allowing more opportunities for project-based pursuits and open tutorial sessions with staff.
Increasingly it is apparent that students learn best by doing. With an unprecedented wealth of information at our fingertips, we would be remiss not to marry these capacities for the betterment of our students, and ultimately, our communities.
