Grading For Equity; Destroying Student Resilience?

...use a 4-point grading scale, weight more recent performances, promote productive group work and high-quality work without a group grade, exclude behaviours from the grade (e.g., lateness, effort, participation), provide non-grade consequences for cheating, use alternatives for late work, reframe homework, allow retakes and opportunities to improve grades, use rubrics to calibrate learning intentions, promote students’ self-regulation and agency through student trackers and goal setting, and more.

Zero-grades, averaging, and extra credit, by contrast, are practices Feldman argues should be dropped.

While some of these processes such as weighting more recent “performances” on classwork, the exclusion of group grades (something I never agreed with), or allowing re-tests, most of what follows is removing any accountability of students for meeting deadlines. Not demanding that students complete work accurately, removing averaging of many grades and eliminating zero-grades when work is not done, are effectively killing the resiliency of our children.

Before we examine resiliency, let’s acknowledge that some of the practices listed above have been incorrectly or overused by some teachers merely to punish some students and favor others. Teachers, like any other profession, are good and bad, excellent and poor, etc.