Evaluations That Go Beyond Grades
January marks a busy time in the ebb and flow of the school year. In the classrooms, students are wrapping up some curriculum and gearing up to start others. Outside of the classroom, teachers are preparing to write their first semester Reports of Growth.
One question that I hear from casual observers every now and then is that if we don’t give grades, how do we write a Report of Growth?
While it is true in the literal sense that students’ papers are not bedecked with a grade from the standard letter scale—an evaluation by the teacher does happen. Oral disciplinary work is either correct or incorrect and is communicated on the spot. An incorrect answer would result in a simple “try again” or “incorrect,” while a correct answer may simply get a nod of the head. White board work in the disciplinary subjects gets a similar response. Assessments in classes such as math, spelling, phonics, and grammar have an evaluation written at the top stating the number correct over the total.
Written work in the form of narrations in the inspirational subjects such as Bible, science, and literature have their own evaluations. Comments to encourage such as, “good use of the author’s language,” “an almost word for word retelling,” and “you really captured the mood of the scene here,” and comments to instruct such as, “missing a section of the beginning,” and “what else did the author say about this?” accompany narrations reviewed by the teacher.
Maps, Nature Study entries, and illustrations are reviewed for neatness, accuracy, and care. Feedback abounds. “Careful attention to the coastline is apparent,” “keep diagram labels horizontal,” and “coloring strokes should be short and in the same direction.” And in all this, fastidious record books are kept, enabling the teacher, when sitting down to write the Reports of Growth, to do so with a clear record before them.
Insight and care are the hallmarks of this process. Our desire is for parents to get a clear picture of how their children are working and growing in our classrooms.
Charlotte Mason observed that all people, children included, have what she called “natural desires.” These, like the desire for approval and friendship, are natural, but when out of balance, can be a detriment.
One of the desires that can be particularly suppressing to the desire for knowledge is the desire to excel. Mason wrote in A Philosophy of Education that “nothing worse could have happened to our schools than the system of marks, prizes [and] place-taking.” Marks, like traditional letter grades, prizes, and places are purposely left out of our classrooms because we don’t want them to have any negative influence on our students, triggering them to “work for the grade.” Oral and written feedback and the simple, “correct” or “incorrect,” are not absent but play an integral part in what we do.
What is absent are the marks, prizes, and places which can hijack our children’s attention from the greater aim of education: knowledge.
“The work of education is greatly simplified when we realize that children, apparently all children, want to know all human knowledge; they have an appetite for what is put before them, and, knowing this, our teaching becomes buoyant with the courage of our convictions.”
- Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education