How about writing directly to students from the time they start school?
Rethinking Report Cards
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Tag Archives: report cards
Rethinking Report Cards-Conclusion
What forms will the pushback against alternative report cards likely take? Several. First, many middle aged and older people will argue “Traditional report cards worked just fine for us back in the day. My friends and I turned out okay.” Change is threatening. “Was my education incomplete/imperfect?”
Schools should be continually reinventing themselves to better meet the needs of students who must adapt to a rapidly changing world. Reformers should be mindful that propositions like mine will make many older people defensive, but they should not let that dynamic thwart them from making the necessary changes.
Second, the families of students who have been most successful within the traditional reporting system will protest. Good grades are way of maintaining one’s privilege in an intensely stratified society. Alternative report cards should be designed so that they can’t be easily co-opted by the academically privileged. Probably easier said than done.
Third, teachers will most likely protest the additional time that will be required to write individual report cards. Calculating grades take secondary teachers a long time, but these narrative report cards, if done thoroughly and thoughtfully, will take even longer. We need to attract teachers who embrace the additional time as a worthwhile trade-off for providing substantive information that makes teaching and learning much more meaningful. How to do that probably requires another series at another time.
Thoughts?
Rethinking Report Cards 1
Grade-based report cards are a “regularity of schooling”. Regularities of schooling are those features of school life whose utility we rarely question, such as age-based grade levels, starting school in September and ending in June, and assigning students grades based upon the quality of their work (Sarason). Regularities of schooling result from teachers being far too busy to stop and reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of the daily practices they inherit from the veteran teachers they replace and way too busy to envision promising alternatives.
The question, “Why are we doing this, this way?” is rarely asked, nor the natural follow up, “Is there a better way?” The unspoken answer, “Because it’s always been done this way.”
Similar limits of time result in parallel regularities of consumerism, church life, health care, marriage, and, I suspect, every sector of life and the economy. On those rare occasions when we have spare time to thoughtfully evaluate the usefulness of our personal and work life activities, we tend to fill the quiet empty spaces with television, internet surfing, and related noise/activity.
We aren’t disciplined enough to stop, reflect, envision, and thoughtfully implement promising alternatives to the regularities of our personal and work lives.
Why have grade-based report cards stood the test of time with hardly any variation despite radical changes in the world in which we live? What purposes do grade-based report cards serve? If they were to be radically redesigned, how might teaching and learning be revitalized? What form will the pushback against updated alternative report cards likely take? I begin answering these questions tomorrow.
Pressing Pause 