"We separated play and playfulness from the learning process and treated education like an assembly line."
In theory, the rhetoric around grades names the following as the purpose:
hold students accountable for work
give students information about how they are doing in a class
motivate them to work harder and improve
While grades do hold students accountable for work, there are other ways to do this that more effectively provide students with evaluative or formative feedback without undermining motivation.
Behavioral studies from a variety of sources have shown that external motivation systems (like rewards and punishments), although superficially effective, actively undermine intrinsic motivation. In other words, the more we use grades to force students to do work, the less they care about the actual work and the more they care about the grade.
In terms of evaluation, grades do a poor job of communicating to students what their actual strengths and weaknesses are with a given topic because they are arbitrarily connected to the material under study. Further, studies have shown that when given a grade and feedback, students are more likely to ignore the feedback and only pay attention to the grade. Conversely, when given feedback without a grade, students pay attention to the feedback.
When it comes down to it, grades are ultimately a system of control. What do we do when a student doesn't want to do their work? We say, "if you don't then you'll fail." It's easy to control behavior with threats and incentives, and grades are an easy carrot and stick, but doing so actively destroys the authentic engagement that students need in order to learn.
So, how else can we motivate students and make sure they have a thorough understanding of how well they are doing without using grades?
According to Daniel Pink in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, intrinsic motivation is driven by three primary components:
Mastery
Autonomy
Purpose
In order for students to produce high quality work, they need to know what the goal is. There are several ways to achieve this in a classroom.
Models and exemplars: Having students analyze exemplars and compare their own work to models, or compare other students' work to the exemplars, rubrics, or criteria for success helps them not only to understand what the goal is, but understand how well they are doing with the skills they are practicing. This can further be used to help them set goals for themselves. The more students engage in this type of analysis, the more they will be able to ask meaningful questions, seek specific feedback, and take ownership of their learning.
Think Alouds: Sometimes students need more support in thinking analytically or pulling what they need from models of student work. In this case, doing a think aloud to walk them through it provides them with a model not only for the work itself, but also for the thought process behind it. This is good for students who are younger, or need a bit more guidance, or are risk averse.
Criteria for Success (CFS): Providing a list of key features or components in a checklist form can help students evaluate their work along the way and ensure that they are thoroughly completing it, and completing it well. This helps them set a clear goal. *Note that this is a form of scaffolding. Ideally, students would be able to look at a model, analyze it, and generate their own criteria for success. However, while building that skill, you might use a think aloud to generate the CFS as a group, and then slowly move toward students learning to generate their own CFS on their own and eventually use the models independently.
Student choice is crucial for authentic engagement, however, not every assignment can be entirely student led, and too much choice can cause decision paralysis. So how do we ensure that students have autonomy in their work?
For any assignment, there are generally multiple factors of which students could be given choice for one of them. Maybe they get to choose whether to do the assignment independently or with a partner. Maybe their group is assigned, but their roles are self determined. Maybe their final deadline is pre-determined, but they can choose from three ways of completing the assignment, or they are given three prompts to choose from, or 15 math problems of which they must complete five.
There are a variety of ways to give students choice, but the key is that they have some choice always either in what they are doing, who they are doing it with, the manner in which it is done, or how long they have to do it.
This can also be scaffolded depending on age and level of students in question. For example, younger students tasked with determining roles for their group may be given a list of roles and then they choose who gets to do each role. However, this kind of scaffolding limits creativity. If you want my personal advice, I would say give students as much freedom as you can in whichever element they have choice, and then add scaffolds only when necessary.
Last but not least, (in fact probably the most important) is the big existential question that every human has been asking since they learned to speak: why?
The long and short of it is, if our assignment doesn't matter to students, they won't put much effort into doing it well. So we have to make sure to convince them that it matters.
This means no busywork. Without grades, you won't be able to force compliance on work that has no value for students, so make sure that all of your assignments are meaningful and that you can explain in clear terms why whatever it is you are doing is important for them.
In order to do this well, you have to address students on a personal level. Who are they? What are their values? What do they care about? What goals do they have for themselves? If you want to successfully connect the work you are assigning in your class to student goals and values, then you have to know what their goals and values are.
For most students, these analytical and self reflective skills are relatively new and unpracticed. They will need guidance in developing their metacognitive abilities: their abilities to think about how they learn best in order to figure out how to overcome the barriers between them and their goals.
Grades are the easy way to get compliance, but they destroy authentic engagement and intrinsic motivation, which means they are ultimately antithetical for learning.
Since I've stopped grading students, the conversations in the classroom have shifted. Instead of "Miss, what assignments do I need to turn in to improve my grade?" students ask, "Miss, how do I unpack this question?" "Miss, can you read this and give me feedback?" "Miss, how do I explain this?" "Miss, I need to write a few more sentences but I'm stuck. Where do I go from here?"
My role has changed from Keeper Of The Gradebook to intellectual advisor. Instead of rating student work, I tell them what they did well and what they can look to improve next time. I coach them with guiding questions to set their own learning goals and evaluate their own work.
And that's the bright spot. Ultimately, I am here to facilitate learning and personal growth, not judge students ability on some arbitrary scale.