Grading ≠ Feedback, and Sometimes You Don’t Need to Do Either

Until we get smarter about grading, feedback, and when to use which, we won’t meaningfully increase the quantity and quality of writing our students are expected to do. Teachers are already stressed, already pressed for time, and if every time they hear “increase writing volume” they see stacks of to-be-graded papers in their minds, then they are not going to be able to sustain writing-oriented efforts.

Here is how I think about these things:

• Feedback, not grading, is what makes writers better, just like a tennis player improves not because of the score of their last match but by the feedback she received on her last match’s play.
• Therefore, only assignments in which the goal was improving the quality of writing (not writing quantity) need feedback. (Read “Better and Saner Grading Tip: Start with the End.”)
• Scoring in a tennis match, of course, can be feedback, and insomuch as it is it will help the player get better. Grades can also be feedback when our students have a strong understanding of what their grade on a particular assignment means. Some of the rubrics I have been required to use in my career have not made a ton of sense to me, so it is doubtful that the scores students received from those rubrics made a ton of sense to them. When required to use a wonky rubric, I recommend either A) quick, satisficed work, or B) studying the thing until it makes enough sense to you to make sense of it to students.
• At the GPA level, grades are significant; at the individual class level, grades are less so. Grading is something that I satisfice; my goal is to be fair, consistent, dispassionate, and fast when it comes to grading. It's been years since I lost any sleep wondering how my grades compare to teachers down the hall. The Foundations Framework is the focal point of my work; grading is not.
• If our objective with a writing assignment is to increase the volume of writing that our students do, then we don’t need to give feedback and we often don’t need to give a grade.

To illustrate that last point, consider the daily quickwrite warm-ups that I use: classic examples of provisional writing at the bottom of the Pyramid of Priorities. I can use these warm-ups to activate prior knowledge, review previously learned material, evaluate cause/effect relationships, or whatever else I think will reinforce the knowledge and the skills I want my students to master. I communicate to my students early on that part of us doing hard things this year will be us out-writing the average history student in the USA. When they ask why, I share information like this, and I teach “the tyranny of low expectations.” I walk around the room occasionally during the warm-up time (after I’ve taken attendance) to see what they’re doing, how organized they’re keeping their warm-ups, whether they’re getting bad habits — and then I quickly teach toward what I want to see them do better. This walking around makes it so that I rarely even give a grade for this assignment, which over the course of a semester adds several thousand words to the amount of writing they do in my class.

Several thousand words, little to no grading, because grading is not equal to feedback, and sometimes you don’t need to do either.

Thanks for reading to the end 🙂 My all-day literacy workshop treats writing across the content areas in greater depth, and it includes these concepts. Learn more about that workshop here.