Setting the Conditions for Large-Scale Reform

Intent

Being thoughtful and deliberate about setting the conditions for large-scale grading reform, e.g. across institutions, increases the chances for success and buy-in.

Problem

Grading remains a highly individual and individualized activity. Grading, consciously or subconsciously, both encodes and reflects individual instructor values and beliefs about education and assessment. Top-down proposals for large-scale grading reform, e.g. across a school district or among multiple institutions, run the risk of running afoul of these individual values and beliefs, decreasing the chance of instructor buy-in.

Solution

The following factors may increase the odds that large-scale grading reforms find success and buy-in among instructors:

  1. A strong system of distributed teacher leadership. Teacher leadership may include early adopters / champions of alternative grading strategies and/or the proposed grading reforms; department chairs; teachers with seniority; etc. Teacher-leaders can plan and facilitate workshops, collect and analyze data about current grading practices among their peers, lead discussions about the proposed reforms, propose how to implement reforms, etc.
  2. Common assessments and curricular pacing charts. Agreement among subject area instructors as to how knowledge will be assessed, and the order and timing of topic coverage, plays a key role in buy-in, as well as “evens out” the experience of students taking the same course from different instructors. This may also have the downstream effect of allowing instructors to rely on students coming in to subsequent courses having similar background knowledge.
  3. Dedicated time for teacher collaboration and data analysis. Allowing time for potential reforms, and the implementation of those reforms, to be broadly and deeply discussed and debated, increases instructor ownership over the reforms, and makes the reforms more robust. Allowing time to examine the data resulting from the reforms, and discuss and debate the repercussions, helps instructors evaluate whether specific reforms have the intended effect and propose appropriate changes and fixes.

Applicability

While this play explicitly addresses buy-in across large organizations, these conditions are beneficial for any size organization, as they focus on trust and autonomy of educators and their experience.

How to Implement

See the Solution section for details. (Note: the source article focused more on teacher attitudes rather than implementation details. I tried my best to extract a play but would love some help fleshing this out more.)

See Also

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Source

Source: Cox, Keni Brayton. (2011) Putting Classroom Grading on the Table: A Reform in Progress. American Secondary Education 40(1), Fall 2011, pp 67-87. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23100415

Described by: Amy Csizmar Dalal, adalal@carleton.edu

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References

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