As we approach the end of this school year, the thoughts of many students turn ever more pressingly to grades. While it may well seem that some of these students are considering their final grades for the first time, most in our buildings are looking at the bottom line and, typically, they are wanting to know how to move it. The ante is upped this time of year and the pressure around grades seems to rise with each passing day in May.

There has been a significant and important conversation in academic circles around the entire concept of grades and educators, too, are ramped up about them at the end of the school year. Many avoid the term “grades” and substitute the word “assessment” when they discuss their students’ progress in their classes. Many talk about “mastery” and “progress” and “formal and informal reflections” and these terms are not simply turns of phrase. 

“Grades” is a word that suggests the result of a review of a final product. Other words connote the overview of a process.

This is a very important distinction and how a school in general and a teacher individually measure student progress says very much about how both the school and the teacher function. It also indicates how the learning process is conceptualized by school leaders.

A focus on end result versus a focus on process defines much of what a school does and defines almost all of what a teacher does. Grading is a teacher-centered process: the teacher grades the assignment; the student is graded. Assessment is a collaborative process: the student illustrates her progress towards understanding and mastery; the teacher collaborates with the student.

If the days of asking students to memorize and return sets of facts and figures to their teachers are not over in your school, I would suggest you might wish to ask yourself some questions about your method of proceeding. Neither do students of today truly learn this way, nor does the world of today function this way. Grades tend to value how students master a series of objective facts. Assessment tends to value how students master the overall process of learning.

Schools which are focused primarily on grades – on the product and not the process – are schools preparing students for a world that is long past. 

At this point of the school year, it is far too late for a school or teacher to change the approach to end marks. However, the summer approaches and the cyclic nature of our work means fall cannot be far behind.

As summer begins, take a deep breath, enjoy a few moments of down time and then consider the tension between assessment and grades. Consider how you value each. Consider why you ask your students to do what you ask them to do and consider the type of reality for which you are preparing them. Are you more concerned with what they can produce or how they produce? Is not how our students critically think at least as important as what they think? Is not what they think deeply influenced by how we have taught them to think? 

How do we know?

May 2024.

Already.

In schools, we have much to do, much we are asked to do and much that we take upon ourselves. We have full calendars, overflowing plates, and deadlines – many of which we truly cannot miss. We work with students and adults who present challenges to us, who make demands on our time and who, on occasion, may cause us stress.

Stress happens.

At this time of year in particular, we sometimes feel stress, sometimes feel strung out, and sometimes feel we are not at our best.

So, please, listen to me: walk the track.

Somewhere in your building or on your grounds, I trust there is a space you can walk – an open, extended space where you can get out of your typical environs, get moving, get a pace on. Hopefully there is someplace you can go when you need to stretch your legs.

Perhaps there is a track.

Getting up and walking is more than a chance to change your venue and your vantage point. It is a chance to get up and get out, to exercise whatever feelings have built up in you by exercising yourself. It is a chance to shake off ennui and frustration and to do something proactive to assist in your own renewal. It is a chance to refresh and renew and get ready for the next item on the stretch run.

A person with whom I used to work and whom I respect very much made a pledge to our entire leadership team one May not too long ago and I have not forgotten it. 

“I promise, if you need to, if you want to, I’ll walk the track with you,” he said.

I think I should have taken him up on that request more often than I did. 

I am at a new school. It has a track.

Leaders navigate waters both smooth and choppy. They encounter colleagues, students and parents at both their best and their worst. They inspire positive experiences. They are held responsible for negative ones.

Leaders have histories.

Leaders create histories.

Leaders leave histories behind them in their wake.

And leaders are human. There are moments in their histories of which they are very proud. There are moments in their histories of which they are not. There are students and colleagues they truly enjoy. There are students and colleagues they would like to never consider again. There are signposts they can point to which are very positive and there are those that are starkly negative.

They have met people and done things.

They have left footprints.

The best leaders let all of that go. 

Leaders who are successful understand that, while they have a track record, they do not have to be defined by it. Nor do they allow themselves to be.

They do not live in their successes and they do not dwell in their failures. They do not revisit the past unless it is helpful for them to do so. They neither hold grudges nor are they swayed by their own press.

They live in the present. They work in the now. They plan for the future.

None of this can happen effectively without letting go.

Leaders allow the past to stay in the past. They forgive and actually try to forget. They do not prejudge a situation or a person based solely on past contacts and histories.

Leaders who find ways to let go of the past, to understand that conflict and praise are both fleeting, to look forward and not backward are leaders who inspire.

They are leaders I yearn to follow.

In recent years, a significant thread in educational research around achievement has emerged and it is something that, back when I was in “teacher school” we never discussed. 

As educators, the theory holds, we should encourage our students to fail. We should create conditions in which it is safe for them to fail. We should challenge them to attempt things at which we know they will fail.

Fail early and avoid the rush is a paraphrase of something my father would have said. He would have loved this idea.

When I was learning to be a teacher, failure was not thought of as a function of success. My education classes would, likely, have hammered home strategies to specifically avoid failure.

It turns out that failure is as important as success in development of a growth mindset.

I find that this idea is challenging for many educators to grasp. For many, this is a revolutionary thought. The concept of linking failure to success was outside-the-box thinking. The idea that failure was anything but, well, failure is tough to grasp. 

Let us be honest: in our work in schools where we pin much (too much) of our opinion on of success on scaled benchmarks and grades and academic achievement and where we as professionals are all-too-often assessed on how our students do, the idea that failure is a good thing can be a difficult sell. More challenging still is the growing understanding that excellent educational leaders create conditions in which failure is planned for, is monitored and is celebrated.

However, we are called to create conditions for our students where failure is okay, where mistakes are rewarded, where missing the mark is celebrated as a necessary and critical step towards making it.

Educational leaders understand that this idea applies not only to student mastery work in classrooms, but it also applies to staff work as they attempt new things. Too often we believe that teachers should be able to implement new plans, programs and technologies without a hitch and that growing pains are signs that teachers are not trying hard enough or that professional development around a given topic is lacking. Too infrequently do we build in time to fail and less frequently still do we highlight failures as good steps on the road to successes.

This is not how we have been wired.

Accorting to Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett we should “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Well said, sir. Can we give the guy a little credit for being way ahead of his time on this?

It is time to rewire. It is time to acknowledge and celebrate failure. 

It is time to fail better.

Confession: I am a maker of lists. When presented with a complex task which I know will eat up hours and the completion of which will take a significant amount of time, I get fired up when I chart out potential steps and timelines, chunk together the major pieces, draw it all up on a sticky note or on a far too complex and color-coded spreadsheet.

There is something so gratifying about sketching little squares next to words or designing an electronic to-do list with items organized just so, knowing that I will check them off at some later date.

I completely get into the planning.

Applying this approach to our work as educators has always made sense to me. In my experience, this type ofpreparation is critically necessary to balance all that teachers and administrators must complete in our days, weeks, and months.

From a broader perspective, the creation of committees and the composition of strategic plans are large-scale approaches to making checklists. When addressing issues that are likely more complex than what we approach individually on a daily basis, these marco-structures help move things forward in our schools. I am not sure we could run our schools without them. 

How do we work on curriculum revision? Form a committee. Where do we want to be in five years? In ten? Draft a strategic plan.

Often, when I make a list or sit on a committee, I can find myself overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject of the list or the charge of the committee. What to do then? Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Likewise, I can also get down deep into the minutia of a task, look at it from all angles of which I can conceive, and break it into its most simple parts. Then, I can assign pieces to timelines, ask people to perform tasks, allocate resources and color in spaces on the calendar. Planning of this sort can be invaluable to our schools.

Until it isn’t.

Here’s the thing: I can spend hours in the planning, days in the design, weeks in the idea. Sometimes I forget it is in the doing that things get done.

I know that I spend a metric ton of time on the planning – the measuring twice, cutting once approach – of my work.

I spend an awful lot.

This is not a bad thing. I am not advocating the abandonment of list making. My God, I would feel lost without my lists. Nor do I think that our schools should disband all committees (though I bet they could do without a few of them) and scrap all strategic plans (but I would be most careful with deadlines associated with them). 

These are tools of the trade: these lists and committees and plans.

But they are not the trade.

It’s in the doing that things get done.