An Ontario high school teacher plans to continue with an alternative method of assessing her students in the new school year after an experiment last semester.
Stacey Oliver teaches at AB Lucas Secondary School in London, Ontario. and recently started a new method of determining the midterm and final grades of its students.
Speaking on Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Christy Cameron, Oliver said she and her students work together on assessments twice a year, during the semester and at the end of the semester.
“Students come up with their own score on these two points and then have to justify and prove to me that they’ve earned that score,” Oliver explained.
“We have digital portfolios that they create throughout the semester that show not only their best work, but all the attempts they made along the way to get to that ‘showcase’ that they consider their best performance their training.”
Oliver says students must demonstrate that their work meets expectations in the provincial curriculum.
“They understand the curriculum document very well and can talk about how their work meets and/or a lot of the time exceeds those expectations,” she said.
Known as “non-assessment”, Oliver said the method is about changing the understanding of how to measure learning success.
“There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that ratings are very subjective,” she said. “It’s hard to be able to objectively say, ‘This number is the number that really captures learning.’ What might that be in my classroom — is it the same in another department, another subject area, another school?”
But the bigger aspect, Oliver says, is how students tie their self-worth and identity to their grade numbers.
“What ends up happening is they don’t feel like it’s all worthless because they can keep doing it — whether it’s a task or practicing a skill — they can keep practicing it until they assure that they are familiar with it. I think that’s really important and it feeds the students because then they want to learn and they want to get better,” she said.
Oliver said students in every classroom have different attitudes toward grades. She says the de-grading experiment allows students on the spectrum to take ownership of their learning.
“What ends up happening is they don’t feel like it’s all worthless because they can keep doing it — whether it’s a task or practicing a skill — they can keep practicing it until they assure that they are familiar with it. I think that’s really important and it feeds the students because then they want to learn and they want to get better,” she said.
Oliver said she reserves the right as a teacher to tell a student they didn’t justify a grade they might be arguing about, but she says most students’ grades on their work are pretty close to hers.
“If I had to change a grade, which wasn’t a long time, I would raise the grades. I’ve had students tell me that they don’t want to appear arrogant or think too highly of themselves, so they give themselves a lower grade than they would otherwise,” she said.
Oliver says her principal and school board approve of the grading scheme, and she plans to continue it in the fall.
“My principal has a strong interest in this thing we call ‘undervaluation’ and so he’s been very supportive from the start and so has the board, so it’s been great.”
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