When the 2021-22 school year begins, we will feel a powerful gravitational pull to return to pre-pandemic schooling. We’ll have the psychological need to put the previous 18 months—the trauma, the challenges, the stress, and the isolation—behind us, and find some solid ground in the structures and processes we’ve come to know as “school”. We must resist this pull, particularly when the pandemic revealed how inaccurate, inapplicable, and harmful so many of our traditional grading practices are. We saw the folly and harms of collapsing when students learned with what they learned, the stress on both students and teachers that came from tracking points for “engagement”—whether a student responded to a chat or showed their screen--and we gained greater humility and empathy for both our students and our colleagues, witnessing our shared resilience and fragility. Ultimately, we realized how more equitable practices improves teaching, supports those students who have been denied access to a number of resources, reduces stress, strengthens classroom communities, and empowers students in their learning.
We therefore must pause long enough before our return to school to ask ourselves three questions:
What in our grading during the pandemic do we want to preserve?
What in our grading prior to the pandemic do we want to reject or improve upon?
How will we improve our students’ experiences with grading and, therefore, their approach to learning, when we return?
As you think on these questions and the many others still looming over our heads, we hope that you are hopeful, motivated, and ready to continue making the lives of our students better every day.
