That Number

Photo by Mr. TinDC

So yesterday, I told my kids in the IA that we’d be crowdsourcing grades. I frankly expected it to be a piece of cake for students because, let’s face it, in the last two months we’ve been throwing all sort of design challenges at them, and they’ve always responded with great resilience and courage. However, this time, something was different. The same kids who had fiercely taken on complex and unfamiliar challenges, were now staring at me somewhat terror-stricken.

The idea was simple enough. Students would look at their growth chart, which outlines the essential skills and concepts, and would then be grading themselves for each of the 4 disciplines using post-its. The post-it would then be stuck to the board and peers would give each other authentic feedback. This would allow students to call on each other if they decided to rate themselves too high or too low.

Is this idea so preposterous? After all, we’re always pushing ourselves to have a growth mindset. Wouldn’t peer assessment be a perfect avenue for us to reflect and become self-aware? As one of the students, Cristobal, put it, years of brainwash cannot be undone in 2 months of IA .

Aha, grades.

When I asked them for feedback, students explained that while they’d welcome the opportunity to nominate those students who have achieved high grades, they’d feel rather uncomfortable shaming others.

As I continued to prompt students, it became blatantly clear that they did not want to confront each other on grades. Even though these students give each other formative feedback all the time on skills and content, they were terrified of giving each other a number.

But why that number?   

When I went home I kept on trying to wrap my head around this. These students see grades as a stigma because they identify themselves with that number.  Sadly, in traditional education grades are really used to sift students into different categories-categories that are virtually impossible to break free of.  

So should we really blame students if they feel so anxious about that number, especially when that number is closely tied to their identity? This is the biggest deceit we instill into kids and now I’m putting it onto my students to help me try to shift their mindsets.

Any ideas? 

PS. Thank you Corey for the help with this post