The Quest to Ungrade

While some people are undeniably more grievously impacted by colonization make no mistake we are all affected by colonization. Colonization and the arrival of the West on Turtle Island has affected our worldview, our history, our languages, our laws, and the way we live and interact with the world. This results in systems that reify this worldview. This is particularly evident in our education system where we educate and assess in ways that ensure the maintenance of the current colonial system.  Following the ideas of Marie Battiste, we need to move away from systems that uphold colonial thinking, and move towards holistic, lifelong, purposeful, experiential, communal, and spiritual learning. In order to do this we need to interrogate our curriculum, classrooms systems, pedagogy, and assessment. Current assessment practices risk upholding singular notions of Truth, individualizing learning, and naturalizing competition. It seems to me, if we rethink our assessment, our pedagogy and classroom systems will necessarily follow. 

I often teach Canadian History. Unfortunately history is very misunderstood and many  students dread their first history class, entering the room already anxious.  They are afraid of the idea of regurgitating stories, dates and names, and not everyone’s stories, dates and names mind you.  While some students are afraid of how history does not represent them, all are terrified that at the end they will have to sum it all up in a high stakes exam, test or presentation that will ultimately stress their capacity to memorize and write. In the end, and this is true of all classes and not just those in Social Studies, their efforts, their entire experience and learning trajectory, their family stories, their essays, thoughts and questions, their growth and dreams for the future will ultimately produce… a number. This number reductively communicates the degree to which the student has received and represents their retention of the prescribed curriculum in the prescribed format.  

But, this system of reducing students to numbers does not align with the broader purpose of a good public school education. How we assess our students is ultimately connected to how we teach, treat, and include them in our public schools. That is, if we assess students in our history classes on their ability to recall information, we are suggesting: that there is a singular version of history; that we do not value critical thinking; and that we think learning can be encapsulated by a summative assessment. Whereas, if our pedagogy recognizes that history is only ever an interpretation of the past, that students actively engage with evidence to develop their own interpretations, and that learning history necessarily involves critical and historical thinking, then our classroom practice and assessment should also follow these principles. The focus on percentages pipelines students into futures of individualism, competition and neoliberal ideals fomented through years of exposure to this tacitly accepted anchor on our public education system, the numerical grade.  

Public school education is intended to be the great equalizer, it is supposed to be for all, for the benefit of all, and for the sustainability of a flourishing democratic society and mother earth.  As a teacher, time and time again, I would see students’ hopes and dreams dashed away as they saw their grades come in and they ‘did the math’ only to realize that they had no numerical chance of passing.  For others, on the other end of the grade spectrum, doing well was somehow never well enough.  As the bar to enter programs and faculties slowly creeps up and up, students’ slightly deficient grades dash their dreams for a future at universities or colleges that are themselves moving away from these methods of assessment; recognizing the inherent bias and deficiency in producing students that do not continue to ask questions after they have been given the answer.  I saw in my classes how my assessment pitted student against student as they physically erected dividers between them before doing tests.  These literal dividers were emblematic of a system built on competition, and a view of learning as an individualized feat. If it takes a community to raise a child, what do our community practices do to them? How do our modes of assessment and grading normalize systems that do harm–privileging ranking over learning?

As teachers, we all have the ability to make little changes in our classrooms, our little zones of nominal autonomy.  We can make changes about how we treat students when they enter the room, how we use their names and preferred pronouns, how the class is set up to be welcoming and accessible to all, or maybe even the languages that they see on the walls or hear when they are welcomed.  If the connection between grading and teaching is inextricable, then for me the first step to making my assessment more decolonized, equitable, fair, and socially just was to begin with how I treated the students in class daily.  I do not treat them like a number. I make my classes more welcoming through a pedagogical foundation of caring, inquiry, and inclusion. I make just a little more time for student voice and direction everyday.  My first step was a baby one. It was easy for them and it was easy for me. Then I took the time to observe and feel how simply making my class more welcoming and student centered had such positive and warming affects on my students, how they interacted with each other, myself and the learning environment/experience.  That act alone helped my students attend, reduced classroom management issues and made students more open to each other’s narratives as they began to hear them and see them reflected around them more.  

Although I started with tiny steps, the positive impact that it had on my class was clear and it set the foundation for me to continue to make more changes to my classroom practices, to make my classroom practices, pedagogy and my assessment align. For me, this journey was informed by the work of Jesse Stommel. Stommel’s work challenges the way students are often distrusted in assessment, and advances grading systems that are more compassionate, or move towards ungrading.  I really wanted to align my practices and assessment and finally I had a starting point, and it came in the form of ‘A Quest’. 

Not only is the Quest ‘openbook’, it’s open source.  Students decide independently what sources they value to use and sometimes have to justify their use when answering.  Students have input in the method that they would like to represent their knowledge and even in some cases the nature and scope of the critically thinking oriented questions that they are addressing depending on what aspects of the original question they value.  When stumped, the students can even ask the adults in the room questions, because even the teacher is a member of their community who is “a” source of knowledge, but not “the” source of knowledge.  When they ask me questions during a Quest I answer them using the Socratic Dialectic, challenging their assumptions and cultivating new questions.  Students all work together towards one goal, they represent their knowledge how they see fit (which respects and invites varied literacies) and they use and reflect on the knowledge that they value. 

When we do Quests there is more academic success for all.  When we do Quests, the room is alive with discussion, devices are humming for the right reasons, and many people are communicating and debating their ideas as they are encouraged to just kinda do what they do.

Even the students that thought that they knew 2/10 in their mind when they came in, leave the Quest knowing more and having the methods of success modeled to them by their peers. The Quest moves the focus of assessment more towards assessment FOR and AS learning, so the time it takes can be left up to students as they are learning while they are being assessed.  

Despite this method of assessment reflecting sound assessment practices that are moving towards decolonizing our classroom spaces and that reflect education’s commitment to the TRC,I still have to give students a numerical grade, as outlined by Manitoba Education and by my contract. By making the focus of that grade more oriented towards assessment FOR and AS learning, I can help minimize the gap between what that grade means and what I, what we, want it to represent.  This is an element of my practice where I am still learning and continue to struggle with, and in order to make meaningful changes, I needed to turn to my teaching community.

By asking for feedback from students and in some cases incorporating students’ suggestions on how to make their performance and the Quests better, I became a better teacher.  But I needed more than just their suggestions, I needed my community too if I wanted to raise my practices for tomorrow’s challenges.

For any teacher or anyone trying to ungrade, change their practice, or make a change in any way; I would say to them after step one; baby steps, step two is to find or create your community.  Find your people and share your quests, ideas and support.  That’s how teachers can make change, by following the directions we give and allow the community to raise our practice up too.  The first Quests look very different than those I give today, and will continue to change to meet the needs of students and society.  In my school, we have cultivated a group of teachers, guidance counselors, consultants, administrators and community stakeholders that get together every once in a while at lunch to eat baked goods and chat about what we are doing, what we are  thinking about and seeing in our fields, and how we are making our classes better for our students and tomorrow.  Other than the strength and support that this group brings, it also showed me that I am not alone. Many other people see the problems with grading and our colonial education system and want to make change.  I am not alone. You are not alone. One of the most important lessons in history was taught to me by others, by my students, so that I can teach it back to future theme.

 Samir is a husband and father.  He has been teaching in Winnipeg for about 15 years at the senior years level.  While he has spent most of his time teaching Social Studies, he has also taught Math, Science, ELA and Philosophy.  In his spare time, he likes being outside with his family and camping.