Ok, one last example from 2018. We started the year with a presentation on Moonshot Thinking and then followed that up with Houston, We Have a Problem which included the Marshmallow Challenge. I felt like we needed one more thing, dessert. So, once again with groups of faculty, students, and parents we convened small groups and participated in an exercise designed to challenge the status quo in education, this time specifically around grading practices.
I started by telling participants that they needed to imagine that we were in a cooking class and were given a specific assignment to make cookies. That’s it. Then, I told them that the night before I had done just that, and showed them my results:
I asked each of them to give me a grade from 0 – 100, and we went around the room writing their responses on chart paper. The answers were varied to say the least. If I remember correctly answers varied from 0 to about 70. I asked why, and some people told me that I earned points for trying and others that I hadn’t completed the assignment.
So, I told them that I wasn’t happy with my results either and that I had made a second attempt. And then I shared my results:
It may be hard to tell from the picture but they were burnt, very burnt. Again I asked them to grade my attempt, and again the results were all over the place for all of the same reasons. So, I told them that I was going to try again, but this time we were going to settle on a rubric and score my work on a scale of 1-4 for each of the rubric’s criteria. We settled on what that would be, and then I told them that yes, I had in fact made a third attempt the night before. Again I showed them my results:
Again, it might be hard to tell from the picture but these were pretty good. We all sampled the brownies and I asked them to grade me again using the rubric. The results weren’t perfect, not everyone agreed and they weren’t all perfect scores, but in the end everyone agreed that the results were much more consistent and valid. And then I asked them a question, what if I tried again? Ok, to be honest I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went at this point, this was nearly two years ago after all, but again I showed them my results:
And what we talked about was this: if I knew I was going to have the opportunity to try again if I failed, I was much more likely to take risks. In this case the result was a Smore’s Brownie with graham cracker and marshmallow topping, but what does this mean for our classrooms, our students, and their learning. It was a fun conversation.
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