Introduction
A Problem of Practice In a traditional grading model, when a student fails or fails to complete an assignment, test, essay, or other graded work, the teacher enters the grade in his or her gradebook without the student being able to revise or redo the work. The grade was the grade, and the student simply had to live with it. Writing for Edutopia, high school English language arts (ELA) teacher and adjunct professor of education Monte Syrie (2016) argues that as much as teachers assess “under the pretense of validity, reliability, and infallibility,” most teachers “end up grading the way they were graded.” In my experience, teachers who are not part of a collaborative team seldom discuss their grading practices other than to explain them to their students when distributing the syllabus or classroom expectations at the start of the year. Such practices are typically inconsistent from teacher to teacher. According to Seth Gershenson (2020a), an associate professor of public policy at American University who conducted a series of interviews with secondary teachers: Teachers may base their grades on a mix of both results and pupil effort, and the meaning of each letter grade is neither clear nor consistent for these teachers. Some hold onto the traditional view that “C is average,” while others indicate that a B is the new average. (p. 18)
Such unconstructive and inconsistent academic experiences can cause students to feel disheartened with the learning process and eventually put them on a path to dropping out before graduation. In “Why We Drop Out,” authors Deborah L. Feldman, Antony T. Smith, and Barbara L. Waxman (2017) write: The overwhelming majority of interviewed youths experienced academic challenges that undermined their faith in themselves as learners, leading to a debilitating sense of helplessness and hopelessness, academic failure, and, ultimately, a rejection of school. (p. 2)
This finding is not surprising to experienced teachers, who can easily think of a student whose reaction to failing or falling behind amounted to, “Why should I keep trying? No matter how hard I work, I won’t be able to dig myself out of this hole.” But here’s the part that no one wants to talk about—even the most successful among us have experienced educational disappointments. We remember the test score that was less than what we were hoping for and the group project where we did all the work for the presentation but suddenly couldn’t remember the topic when it was time to present. Instead of accepting that such educational interruptions happen and growing from them, many teachers errantly convey to students the idea that they
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