When Measuring Academic Health
As an educator and teacher trainer, I have asked teachers the following question on numerous occasions: “At the end of the school year, how do you want your students to feel about themselves as thinkers?”
Many teachers responded that they wanted their students to be curious and have a love for learning, to be competent and persevering problem solvers, to be critical thinkers who are able to ask questions and make arguments, to be strong communicators and willing collaborators, and to learn what they need moving forward.
It is evident by these answers that most teachers are familiar with the growth mindset language of the future but when I ask students to tell about their experiences as learners, their answers are quite different from the ones above given by teachers. Most students reply with some sort of grade or some sort of fixed mindset answer. “I am a 70 percent student.” “I am good (or bad) at Social Studies.” “I love (or hate) math.” Or the most alarming: “I’m not a language person.”
There appears to be a huge disconnect between the students we want to create as educators and the students we are creating. There’s a disagreement between our purpose and our practice.
One of the essential purposes of schools and for the teachers who work in them, is to prepare citizens for life in our society. For better and worse, schools are in the business of identity formation. Students’ identity is formed by the messages they receive in schools.
We as teachers and educators are currently asking “How talented is this child?” whereas we should be asking “In what ways is this child talented?”
Let me make some definitive connections between the dynamics of dieting and weight loss and some of the practices in our classrooms. I’m suggesting that as teachers we all want to encourage competent students who have a positive and accurate awareness of their abilities and also have a growth mindset around their abilities to learn and enjoy learning. We value students’ health but that is difficult to measure, as it’s much easier to measure how much a child knows using tests. And like weight loss, written tests scores have replaced our vision for overall student health.
Instead of measuring what we value, we are asking them to stand on a scale and weigh in and this practice is damaging to the overall learning mindsets of our students.
I want us to reclaim our power as educators and create the identities we aspire to create, by thinking more critically about some of our teaching and assessment practices. The issue how we create a culture of learning in our classes is urgent.
If we follow a top down approach,we are asking our students and teachers and schools to stand on more scales. If we are to become more effective as educators and create the students the world needs, we must work from the bottom up and this is where I am asking you to function like a Fitbit . I’m asking you to think about the cause of the disagreement between the students we want to create and the students we are creating. And I’m inviting you to think about two practices where I think the disagreement is created in our classrooms.
I think one of the most damaging moments in a classroom is the day when we hand back a test with a grade on it. What do we want students to get out of that moment when we hand them back their tests? Is this a practice that measures what we value?
How many of us see our students throw their test in the bin ? And why wouldn’t they? If they passed the test, they reached some level of acceptable performance and there’s no need to learn more. If students failed the test , they leave the classroom feeling the exact opposite of the child we’re trying to create. They leave hating school and learning, feeling less confident and more stupid, and they learn to self-identify as a failure.
Research suggests that giving descriptive feedback is more effective for learning than giving grades. Even if that feedback is just generically marking problems that require more attention on every day basis. Students can practice becoming the students we value, rather than simply students who feel measured by us and the grades we give on tests.
I would like us to stop putting grades on tests and structure learning opportunities in the days after the test for students to analyze their mistakes and find ways to relearn content and skills so that they can grow as learners. This is true for all learners, even our ‘high achievers’ who ‘get good marks or A grades.’ They deserve opportunities to grow too! The most important learning opportunities can occur during the days after a test…not on the day of the test.
And if we remove this thinking for just a moment, we realize how the act of grading is like standing on the weighing scale. Putting grades on tests encourages students to think about overall learning as a game of points. Remove the focus from points and grades and shift it toward the other things we value. Find ways to measure that… it’s hard, but we need to create the time and the space and culture in our classrooms where that measurement can happen.
We have the resources within us to create such classrooms. One way to do this is to shift the kind of experience that we give to our students when we hand back an assessment, by not putting grades on it instead providing more descriptive feedbacks.
This leads me to my second point: encourage students to be self-assessors. Sometimes the best way we can get what we want from others is to empower them. And if we want them to foster a love of learning ,give them a voice (and a significant one) in their own assessment of their abilities. Because we need to be more honest with our students. Measuring what we value in our classroom using tests is equivalent to measuring our health by simply standing on a scale.
It’s not a complete picture, nor is it necessarily a worthy one, and it’s a practice that limits the potential growth of our students. This is where the fitbit philosophy drives in where measurement of growth is in the hand of the learner!
We need to be more honest that there are more important ways to measure our growth and progress as learners. And we need to start incorporating practices that give students more power in their own assessment. As teachers, we need to create a classroom culture that encourages students to give us their consent.
Because just as it’s easy to stand on the scale, it’s easy for our students to sit there and be told who they are and what they know or don’t know. It’s easier for them to accept their fixed mindsets and their academic fate.
But with this change in our stance we are asking them to take ownership and I think students in these classrooms will feel what they want to feel about their academic identities.
I invite you to function and think like a Fitbit that collects a variety of data and gives feedbacks (not judgments) that are more meaningful about our own health. How about following the same approach to measure students’ academic health!
I’ve offered two strategies to help this shift. First to stop putting grades on tests as well as to provide a different sort of feedback. The second to shift the focus away from the “teacher as an accountant of points” towards “students self-assess to take ownership of their own learning and progress”.