Ya, You Get Straight A's — But Can You Tell Me About Your Learning?

The conversation on communicating the progress of student learning and making learning visible happens every day at FreshGrade HQ, along with our education partners and user community but when that conversation extends to my kids….well that gets me super emotional and is makes it difficult to even describe how excited I get about the problem the FreshGrade team is solving. 

Showing evidence and defending your learning is something I talk to my two kids about often.  Unbeknownst to me, I was so proud when my daughter sent me the essay she wrote (below) and was asked by her teacher to read it aloud to her classmates which provoked incredible dialogue amongst her peers.  I couldn’t be more proud of how Faith continues to truly owning her learning (so is Noah BTW but it looks very different for him which I’ll share later) and how fascinating it is to watch how much more passionate she is about her schooling since she started to turn her focus around the learning and not the grade. 

She allowed me to share her work with you.

Faith Wandler 

Block 1-2  

September 2015

Ya, you get straight A’s, but can you tell me about your learning?

  My dad is an entrepreneur making him have a strong opinion on things he is passionate about, I may or may not have picked this certain trait up from him as well. He is also very easy to talk to about anything because you always know that he will help you look at the situation from every aspect.

  We talk a lot about education and what happens in school within our household. My brother has a form of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD) he also has quite a few issues with reading and writing. My brother and I are polar opposites when it comes to school, as far as grades and handing in homework. I am definitely the one who gets the higher grades but he seems to have a better understanding of how things work. That’s why almost on a weekly basis the topic of letter grades come up in the Wandler household. “How does a letter grade truly show what you know or have learnt?” Dad brings this to light whenever a grade is mentioned around him. He always reminds us to never worry to much about a test or quiz because at the end of the day it is only a percentage and that percentage does not define you or how smart you truly are. Just because one child  has a B in math does not mean he hasn’t learnt anything or isn’t smart. He may have had a C at the beginning year and has now progressed to a B. This child with a B though doesn’t necessarily get rewarded or validated as much as a child who had a B and now has an A. Now the child with an A is sitting in an assembly getting a medal because they have an A or maintained to keep an A all year long. But what has that child learnt? Both moved up a letter grade. So why is the child that has a C not getting that phone call to be invited for an award of their achievement? The child with a C may perceive that as a negative and think “oh, I guess the improvement I made isn’t valued as much as theirs, why should I even try?”. This is how our dinner conversations end up to be or small talks in the car become loud rants of how unresolved our world is we just use the education system as a branch off of the whole tree.

  This past summer my dad and I had a talk about what my standards should be for this year. He said “Faith don’t worry about the letters and percentages they give you, instead pay attention to retaining what you find interesting and  most importantly pay attention to your learning”. I always try to explain to him how hard that can be. It has been drilled into our heads that if you do not get a good grade or percentage on one assignment or test that it is the end of the world. Standardized testing has taught us to try and memorize as much as we can so we don’t fail a class but memorizing and learning are two very different things. Standardized testing does not necessarily show what a student has learnt throughout the school year. Having to take a test that has been written by someone who was not teaching you the specific material all year can lead to lots of loose ends. Putting in questions that are meant to trick you don’t help show what you learnt. Going into a class for extra help and doing some practice exam questions to prepare yourself is fine. But when you ask the teacher for guidance with one of the questions and they say “oh yeah this one! don’t worry I didn’t get this one right the first time I did it either”.  How is that fair? You can not completely tell what someone has learnt by handing them a sheet of multiple choice questions if they do not know how to get the answer for a question they still have a one out of four chance to get it correct. So the results of a standardized test don’t truly show what a student has learned throughout the school year.

  Although this is one of many topics my Dad and I discuss this is one of the ones that me and him relate on a bit more together. We can talk for hours. It is one thing that I appreciate most about our relationship. Sometimes we do sit in silence but only because the gears are going round and round and there’s almost too many things to say that we can’t decide what to bring up first.