Gradeless Classroom and a “Titanic” problem

    Recently I have completed my two mandated formal evaluations for this school year.  I haven’t worried about formal observations since my first couple years of teaching, and this year was no exception.  What was different, however, is how my observations made me feel.  This is the first time that my eleven years of teaching that my formal observations made me frustrated and sad.

    Part of my struggles with being evaluated is that so much of what occurs in my classroom is invisible, even to trained professionals. (I should note that my evaluator is an excellent administrator who I greatly admire.) For example, during my second observation, I ran a lesson that was basically act out a scene from the novel we are reading. My observer noted that “All students were engaged in these activities…” and that “The pacing of the lesson was appropriate.”  However, here are the myriad conscious decisions I made that were invisible to everyone in the classroom but me:

• Differentiated pacing:  My students have been reading To Kill a Mockingbird for about 2.5 weeks. Instead of forcing quizzes and graded assignments that force a student to be at chapter 11 by Friday (or lie to me and read spark notes,) I intentionally made the assignment be applicable to where-ever they were in the novel.
• Group work as novel review: Groups had to act out and read scenes from the book.  Many of scenes chosen have subtle events that are lost on the first or second reading. (The shadow of a man on the porch when they sneak into the Radley’s back yard, for example.) Having students act these scenes out forces them to read the text again and more closely.
• Redirect from grades: Students continued to obsess over how many points this activity was worth.  What they were really asking was “Can I skip this activity and still pass the class?”  My response was that if they chose not to do the assignment it was a behavior issue and not an academic issue. [finish]
• Redirect from grades part two: I am not going to give my students any graded reading comprehension quizzes for the entire novel.  I know from past experience that as soon as I give a graded reading comprehension quiz, 30-60% of the class will go to Sparknotes and never return to the text.

Now, I know what you are thinking- all classrooms operate like that.  It’s true. Just talk to any student teacher and mentor teacher pair. However,  However, a gradeless classroom relies on the unseen and sometimes unspoken decisions that make it function. Traditional classrooms rely on extrinsic motivation, which is both short term and measurable.  Extrinsic motivation is opposite. Because there is less to measure and see sometimes, we must deliberately communicate our instructional decisions to those observers.