Surprise!

Surprises can be fun, like when a big chocolate cake is delivered to your workplace on your birthday by a former coworker, when kids fix Mom breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day, when teachers receive an e-mail from a former student who, years later, decides to say thanks for making a difference, or when you turn on the tv on a lazy Saturday afternoon and stumble upon a back-to-back showing of Grease and Grease 2.

Other surprises are less delightful: seeing the cop car as you round the bend and realize you’re doing 45 in a school zone, receiving your electric bill for the hottest month of the summer, finding out that you owe way more than you planned on your income tax, receiving a call from your teenager informing you that your new car he borrowed is totaled, or arriving home after a long weekend getaway to discover your hot water heater has leaked and flooded the house. Surprise!

No one likes an unpleasant surprise they could have done something about if they had been aware ahead of time. This statement is especially relevant this week, the week when students’ midterm report cards arrive. As educators, it’s important for us to grade ourselves on how often we surprise our students.

Back in the days before online gradebooks, it was highly likely that the first time a student saw his average was on a report card. Surprises were frequent, and teachers kept their pen-and-ink gradebooks under lock and key. As a student during that era, I don’t recall ever really knowing how I was doing in classes, nor could I tell you what was expected to make a certain grade. Grades just appeared on assignments and projects, determined by some intangible “teacher expertise” scale. I’ve heard teachers since then say things like, “I just know what an A is,” as if that were sufficient criteria to bestow an evaluative grade. It’s a good thing they “just know” because their students don’t.  

Certainly, grade surprises are ones that should be—and, now that we have gradebooks that can be accessed remotely 24/7 even on our smart watches, could be—avoided, but I think the most crucial surprises to avoid are the ones where students are unaware of their levels of proficiency in a course. The grade on the test shouldn’t be a student’s first indication that he doesn’t know how to factor a polynomial, explain the theme of a short story, or trace the path of a potato chip as it passes through the digestive system. At frequent spots along the way to the final grade, the student should have had opportunities to receive crystal-clear feedback about how he is doing. He should understand what mastery entails and where he stands on the ladder to reach that level.   

I’ve found that many teenagers are acutely unaware of themselves academically. Left to their own devices, most students have no idea what they don’t know or when their understanding is sketchy or precarious. They confuse time and effort with mastery (“I studied for six hours. How could I make a grade that low?”). Unless their teachers are explicit in their low-stakes formative assessments and are strategic about how those assessments provide just-in-time feedback and and an action plan for students to improve, students will remain in the fog of self-delusion that leads for future surprises.

Questions like these are worth discussing with colleagues and teammates as you shape your formative assessment and feedback plans:

• How do I communicate what proficiency entails to my students and their parents?
• Does my gradebook provide useful feedback with grades that reflect mastery of curricular objectives or learning targets rather than non-academic factors?
• Do my rubrics and proficiency scales offer descriptive criteria that are used to instruct and offer feedback to students, not to justify a grade?
• Am I grading against end-of-the-year mastery criteria at the beginning of the year, or am I allowing my students to experience success in learning that is tiered with increasing expectations as students progress in their proficiency?
• What am I doing to help my students see themselves as learners, not performers, and to give them guidance about the next step to take, wherever they are on the road to mastery?
• Do I see my students as learners who can improve throughout the year, or do I view some students with a fixed mindset that suggests progress is unlikely?
• How often do I give formative feedback that is not linked to a grade?
• How long do students have to wait to learn how they are doing?
• Do my students know what to do to improve?
• Is the path to improvement for struggling students only available to those students who are willing and able to come in for extra help outside class time?
• Are there daily grades in my gradebook that provide an idea of how well students have mastered the content or skills measured on each major assessment?

For some of us, the answers to these questions reveal some uncomfortable truths about practices we’ve held onto for years. The answers aren’t easy, but the discussion that follows can be a rich opportunity for transformation of your teams, departments, and campuses, which will lead to greater student achievement and so many fewer surprises.

Thanks for all you do to minimize the unwelcome kind of surprises for your students.