The Teacher Burnout Podcast

Rethinking Grading: Strategies for Meaningful Assessment and Reduced Teacher Burnout with Starr Sackstein
[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the teacher burnout podcast. Today. I am back with star 16. We did an episode last week where we talked about teacher burnout and reigniting your passion for teaching. If you didn't listen to that episode, go back and listen. It was a great episode. About finding something in teaching that you love and dealing with burnout.
But today we are going to be talking about grading and there is so much that goes into grading. So I think as a classroom teacher, you will find this conversation helpful, and hopefully you'll find some tips that you can pull out and utilize in your own classroom.
I hope you enjoy the podcast.
Welcome to the Teacher Burnout Podcast, where we explore the challenges of burnout for teachers and share practical strategies to support teacher well being. I'm your host, Barb Flowers. If you're a teacher looking for ways to prevent burnout or an educational leader searching for strategies to support your team, this podcast is for you.
Let's dive in.
Well, welcome everyone to the [00:01:00] podcast. I'm here today with Star Sackstein and she's going to talk to us about her experiences in education. She has a lot of different experiences, a lot of advocacy in education.
So I'm excited for our conversation today. So welcome to the podcast, Star. Thanks so much, Barb. I'm excited to be here. If you could just start by telling us about your experience as a teacher and all the work you've done now outside of the classroom. Sure. So, I spent 16 years in the classroom, high school English mostly, journalism, and also, , I did humanities, which was social studies and English together in middle school.
So you have talked a lot about grading and this is a topic we haven't really covered on the podcast.
And. I love the topic of grading because it can be so controversial, but it can be such a frustrating topic in schools. I know even in elementary, , we've done a standards based report card and, , great stuff, but Sometimes we do like a hybrid between standard [00:02:00] space and non standard space.
And then we're not even doing effective grading practices and all kinds of things. So talk to us a little bit about what grading systems you recommend. What have you talked about in the past? So I think I came to the realization probably. Around, like, my eighth or ninth year of T, maybe, like, seven, eight, like, later middle career, , in the classroom, that what I was doing wasn't working.
In the beginning, it was very traditional, , I was doing to kids what was done to me. If they didn't submit work on time, they were losing points. They were losing points for everything. And I, shamefully now, you know, was proud of how many kids didn't do well in my classes. , that somehow proved rigor.
somehow. And what I learned along the journey is that was foolish and that learning should really be a joy and that we should be looking for assets in kids instead of the deficits. We all have deficits as learners, but it's not [00:03:00] very engaging or inspiring or motivation, you know, motivating to constantly hear all the things we don't do right.
So I think for me as a high school teacher, my son was in a standards based elementary school at the time, and I saw what his report card looked like, and I was like, oh my god, this is so much better than like, I'm teaching AP English, I get one grade, like one line item for god knows dozens and dozens of standards that we address, and if I'm averaging scores to put that on the report card, you're not really getting any kind of robust understanding of what your child knows and can do.
I mean, you have a general idea, but a B could mean 30 different things. It can mean an infinite number of things. And if you compare the learning profile of different kids who got the same score, it's sort of all over the charts. Like maybe they were really strong in one area and really weak in [00:04:00] another area.
And if I was doing a standards based report card, you'd know that you'd see the four at the You know, and you'd see the two maybe at the other one, , but after a while, I just saw the inequity and what was going on and really who was I to be the final determining, you know, the, the final, the final person to say, this is what you know, and can do so much of learning isn't visible to a teacher.
, I learned that when I was doing my national board certification, all the reflection that was built into that process. I was like, I want to bring that into my classroom. And that was one of the things that really changed the way that I assessed kids, because now I was asking them to reflect at the end of every assessment so that they could tell me what they learned from the experience.
They could tell me where they wanted to set goals and work on things. And that did a lot of things for me. It made me, first of all, know where I needed to reteach with small groups of kids. It made Help me give them better feedback, because if I knew the goals they were working [00:05:00] on personally, I could provide feedback that differentiated for the specific things they were working on, instead of just having my rubric and giving everybody the same feedback based on my own expectations of what I wanted them to do.
And as a writing teacher, that's really hard, because writing is pretty subjective. Like, yes, there's grammar, but to me, grammar's the smallest part. Of what writing is about. So, and some people put so much emphasis on the grammar versus the content. It's actually one of, like, as an outside consultant, it's one of the hardest things for me to not be very judgy about because, like, you know, The more important like on a first draft, why are you circling punctuation that's wrong or like that's irrelevant in a first draft.
What you want to really make sure is that there's clear organization that they're communicating their ideas. Well, those are big problems. you know, bigger issues to really making sure that their [00:06:00] evidence supports the argument that they're trying to make. So. For me, as long as I can understand what they're saying and it's not written in another language and I can't understand it, then we'll worry about the grammar when we're in the editing phase, not in revising phase.
And so, like, for me, I started disassociating grades. From all the things that we were doing and instead feedback became the major conduit between me and the students, which shifted the energy in the space because there wasn't so much fear. I stopped giving regular tests. even in my AP class, I wasn't giving tests.
It was always. Group work to like that there would be some group project to learn this skill, practice the skill, do the thing. And then there was an independent assignment afterwards that they had an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned from that. So I would say for The first thing is, , it's not just grading you're changing.
And when [00:07:00] schools come to me now and say they want to do grading reform, I'm like, Awesome. Have you done clarity work? Have you talked about instructional practices? Have you looked at your assessments? What are your expectations and all these things? And they're looking at me like, well, we just want to change.
I'm like, well, you could change your policy, but it's not going to change anything in the classroom unless you address, , , the variety of things that have to be addressed before you even get to the grade. Because, I mean, there's a culture of learning in there, too. Like, if we have a culture of extra credit, or not accepting late work, or, you know, reassessment as another, you know, Barrier like so when you said what's the best paradigm I would say mastery learning on some level competency based learning where kids have a little bit more ownership of how they demonstrate their learning and teachers.
We emphasize grades so that you're not grading every assignment kids do if you have to give grades in New York City public [00:08:00] schools I did have to give a great at the end but what I ended up doing is conferring with students. Looking at their body of work. And then we came to an agreement together on what was going to go on the report card.
And that just felt better. Like I wasn't doing something to them anymore. I wasn't the sole arbiter of what they knew and could do. And they had multiple opportunities to really show me what they learned. And as long as they could demonstrate that they were proficient in the variety of standards that we were addressing at that time, I didn't really care what the grade was on the report card, especially if they could articulate it themselves.
And that was my goal, right? I mean, when we send them off into the world, we want them to be able to advocate for themselves. And this was just another way for them to be able to say, actually, I am good at that. If you look at this assignment, I could demonstrate that I showed you here, but I was good at that.
Something I'm still struggling with is this. And if you have a student who could really articulate [00:09:00] that, well, I think you're doing your job. Right? Because now you know what to give them to support them in that place too. Yeah, that's such an amazing way to do it because I had the experience.
I taught first and third grade and first grade we had standard space report cards. Third grade was just enter a grade for reading and enter one for math. And like you were saying, I just felt like, who am I to decide? I'm basically finding my own curriculum and reading, you know, ,, and then I'm giving them a grade and.
At that time I did guided reading and so , I have this other way that I'm teaching and you don't really grade that. It's just about. Moving them up instructionally. So I hated grading. That was such a stressful thing for me. and then you have, you're talking about a classroom culture of grading, which I love.
And then you have the parents, right? Like, and even as a principal, I'd have parents be like, well, my child's a B student and I thought, well, what does that mean? Who's their teacher? What assignments were they given? What accommodations, that could mean a lot of things. [00:10:00] So it is, and there is so much behind a grade.
When you're talking about changing it. I mean, there's so many factors that go into that grade and to have consistency across the school. That's a really hard thing to change. Yep. And I will say that parents are usually one of the biggest. challenges for grading reform because they know what they know and they're not very quick to understand that something different like while I was first researching hacking assessment when I wrote that a long time ago, , I started talking to colleges because one of the biggest, like one of the biggest pieces of pushback at high school was, well, how are they going to get into college if they don't have a traditional transcript or how are they going to be successful if they want to play.
Sports, and there's some kind of threshold for when a student's allowed to do that for eligibility. And so I started talking to colleges, and frankly, homeschooled students don't have traditional [00:11:00] transcripts. They don't necessarily have grades. They get into college all the time. There are many, many colleges now who are ungrading also.
I know Susan Bloom, I contributed to her book, Ungraded. And so it's happening at higher ed now, and they're recognizing that, grades actually stunt learning. They don't help learning. And there are so many really talented people talking about this now. Alfie Kohn's kind of the GOAT when it comes to like talking about grading, and you could even go back to Montessori because her style of teaching was also very organic and not labeled the way That we label stuff now, but, I would say in the last 10 years, there's been a real concerted effort on the, on the behalf of many, many teachers and edu, like educators across the spectrum who are trying to raise, you know, The profile of moving away from [00:12:00] traditional grading, and I think a big part of that is making time to have parent universities and workshops so that they understand that they're actually going to get so much more information about their children, and they're learning in this other paradigm and that they're still going to get into school and they're still going to be successful, but that they have to trust the school to know that This is the best way to know what your kids know and can do.
And you might be able to have a very different conversation with your child. Like, when they come home from school, don't ask them what they got on a test. , that's the quickest way to really shut down a conversation about learning. Ask them what they learned. Ask them how they know they learned it.
And then, , kind of give them the opportunity to share what was happening, what they enjoyed most in those spaces, instead of always making it about the bottom line. That's a conversation ender, not a conversation starter, generally. Yeah, because another thing, I'd hear all the time as a principal, even with standards [00:13:00] based, , how do you deal with those with students who wouldn't get any work done?
Right? And then if you have a teacher who puts a zero in. And it's like saying they didn't master that standard because it's based on effort, so there's so many dynamics as teachers that I think that we really need to think about, when we're talking about grading. So if I'm a teacher and I'm in this school that has that traditional grading system, what would just be your biggest takeaway for that teacher who might be stressed about it?
So, I mean, I will say that, like I said, I was , in a system that required them, and I was tenured when all this stuff was happening, so it was kind of easy for me to ignore a lot of the rules and kind of ask forgiveness instead of ask permission. Yeah. Because I, I really did believe that, The learning would stand on its own.
Once I had some evidence of classroom work that was going to support what I was saying and doing, and it did, by the way. So those of you who haven't tried it yet. My [00:14:00] AP students were all very successful. They'd come back after they went to college their freshman year and tell me how much the class prepared them for what came next.
And they never talked about, the grades. They talked about the skills. They talked about the things that they were aware of. Going in. So I would say the first thing anybody could do is just stop grading everything, but there's no reason to put a grade on every single thing a child turns into you.
And tell kids that. And if they say, does it count? You say, it all counts, right? I mean, formative learning is where we practice, and you're going to need this feedback so that when the summative opportunity comes, you'll know that you're prepared to do well on it. And I always used to tell my students that, , the more prepared you are, the more exposure you have to different content and different skills, and the more ways you could see that in different.
Situations, the better you're going to be able to transfer those skills to other spaces. especially if you have a school culture where you [00:15:00] have a shared vocabulary of what things are, because , that's another early step that most schools skip. , when I say formative and summative, when I walk into a room full of teachers, everyone thinks they know what those two terms mean.
And maybe definition wise they do, but in practice, if you have percentages, for example, like the 80, 20 or the 40, if formative has any percentage that counts in a grade, then you don't know what formative is, right? I don't want to be scored on my practice, give me feedback, tell me how to be better.
So , I would say work on your feedback, make sure it's. , task aligned, make sure that it's very strategic and specific to the skills that you want them to learn and not just this is good or this is bad, but what could they do to improve it specifically? And then, , use some kind of learning progression instead of a grade where kids could start to identify where on the [00:16:00] progression they are.
And then if you remove the scores on both sides of it, it's not as. I don't, it's not as hard to see when you're at the beginning of a spectrum because it's like a not yet. And if we keep thinking about things in a formative sense, they'll have multiple opportunities to try. And if you're not grading those things, not every kid needs to do every opportunity because not every kid needs it.
But we want to see. demystify the need to do these things and not pit kids against each other. So, one kid feels like I'm dumb because another one doesn't have to do as much to get there. , we're all different learners. We kind of have to promote that and then be transparent and vulnerable ourselves.
as classroom teachers, to share when we don't know as well as we need to. And I think that took me at least a decade in the classroom to be comfortable saying, like, I am not an expert on this text that I am teaching, and I am eager to hear your thoughts and [00:17:00] impressions with the context you're reading it through.
Sure, I've probably read a dozen scholarly, articles about what, this means. I always kind of go back to great Gatsby as an example. Like I remember teaching that the first time and six different people saying what the green light meant and how all these things kind of came together.
And my students would come up with something different. And I would always say to them, you know, the one thing that's awesome about English is that as long as you find support in the text, you're right. Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to look at it. , I don't have to see it myself until you point it out, but, I think we have to give kids more autonomy in that place and then trust them, support them along the way.
Yeah, and , I think those are , great tips that you're giving. And if you're just grading the summative, that takes away so much, the other thing I want to talk about really quick before we end with grading. So you were high school English. My best friend, we actually lived together for a little bit and [00:18:00] she was a middle school English teacher and would grade papers and spend hours grading.
I mean,, her whole weekend was grading. What tips and advice? And I think for her, she gave such detailed feedback that I'm like, those kids, I don't know that they would utilize that. And that's what she would say too. So two things with that, never give more than two pieces of constructive feedback in a piece.
I think sometimes we get excited and we want to tell them everything. I think it's important to validate one, one, one or more things that they're doing really well in the piece. And then identify one to two things that need work, and then stop. Just stop. Like, don't go through the whole piece, especially if you see them making the same mistakes over and over again.
You don't have to mark it up every single time. Mark it up once, give them the feedback to keep looking, and say, you know, I need you to go through the rest of the piece looking for the same challenge, Because it's happening throughout and I [00:19:00] think as soon as kids see like things written all over their papers, it's a surefire way to shut them down and also make them hate writing.
So if we limit the amount of feedback that we, the constructive feedback at least, , I think that they're more likely to do the revision if it's only one or two things that they have to focus on, especially if they're big things. The second thing is peer feedback. I know it's super, super challenging to get those peer feedback.
Structures in place in the classroom, but you can't quit on it. You got to do it 234 times before the kids get comfortable with it, and you have to give them feedback on their feedback so that that's another way. That's another touch point where they could be getting feedback from their peers. And another thing that you could also do is in class when you're giving them verbal feedback, what I used to do is have them keep a feedback log.
So if they asked me a question, I wasn't the one keeping the record of that feedback. They were keeping the record of the feedback. And in middle school is the [00:20:00] perfect time to start training them to do that. Whether they're keeping it at the back of a notebook or in a Google doc or whatever structures you're using.
If you have a portfolio system and they're, Tracking which assignments they're working on in that way. I think that's a way to take some of the onus off teachers. and then conferring during class time. Instead of taking all the work home with you, don't wait till the end to give them the feedback. Kind of take the opportunity to meet with groups, small groups in class, meet with kids one on one in school, so that it's not infringing on all your personal time, which I taught AP, , English, , AP Lit, , which basically meant my kids.
We're submitting tons of written work all the time. And in the beginning, it becomes that you want to talk about something that could burn a person out real fast. Yeah. That, that could be it. Especially if what you've taught isn't [00:21:00] being demonstrated. And like, it becomes almost demoralizing. Like, what did I do wrong that so many of these kids have missed these really important things.
Yeah, that's another great way. Not only are you at home spending 8 to 10 hours grading, but then you're feeling like a terrible teacher. So, yeah, I think that's great to do as much as you can in class. And I always felt like that. Now I was elementary. So grading was way different. But, , yeah, do as much as you can at school.
I'm going to so much,
Star, for being here today. It has been such a great podcast. How can people reach out to you or find you if they want to learn more about what you're doing? Sure. So I have a website, Ms. Saxine. com. Basically everything is branded Ms. Saxine. I'm still on X, but I'm not really on X anymore.
Like once we switched to X, , weird stuff happening on Twitter these days. , I'm mostly on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find there. I probably the only store [00:22:00] Saxton, if you put in my name on there and , like I said, my website. , and my, my email is actually Ms. Saxton at Gmail. So if folks read something I've written and they want to chat about it, I'm always happy to have those conversations.
Awesome. Well, I'll put all that in the show notes as well. And I appreciate you being on the podcast with us today. Thanks so much.