Assessment’s dark side

There’s a part of assessment that’s not discussed enough amongst teachers. It lurks behind every task, assignment, and deliverable we ask of our students. We often neglect it in our pursuit of robust, thorough, and creative assessment strategies. School leaders, with their eyes set on outcomes, also do a great job of blinding us to it.

What am I talking about? There’s probably a fancier name I could come up with, but I’ll keep it simple: grading time.

I think part of the reason we don’t talk about grading time enough is that we’re not “supposed” to. School leaders expect teachers, at least in my experience, to find the most comprehensive methods to gauge what students know. Nothing should go unassessed. Huge, sweeping projects are the name of the game. It’s progress monitoring above all. As for the time it takes to sift through and process all the information we gather from student learning? Totally negligible. There’s an unwritten rule in the world of teaching that teachers make time for all that needs to happen post-assessment, including grading. It’s up to us to navigate assessment’s dark side.

This ignores the very human element that comes with being a teacher. In case it’s not obvious, I’m not a robot! That stack of exams on my desk is going to remain a stack of exams on my desk unless I build in time to grade them, which doesn’t interfere with personal time or time spent with family.

I absolutely accept a modest level of work outside of the official school day. Every respectable teacher I know does. But grading, because of its routine appearance in my work, should be planned for. When designing an assessment, whether it be a project, quiz, exam, or whatever, I should factor in the time it will take for me to make sense of student thinking and decide on a way forward. Not doing that is a recipe for inefficient grading practices and creates loads of stress. It’s not sustainable.

Strangely, teachers know this. We just don’t honor it enough when designing assessments. Generally, time spent grading is inversely proportional to years of teaching. Newer teachers are the most susceptible to getting lost in assessment’s dark side; they often enter the profession with wide eyes, eager to collect every assignment they can get their hands on.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of time to grade during the school day. I also know that I can’t take grading home. It just won’t get done. Consequently, I stay away from lengthy assessments. Instead, I opt for smaller, bite-sized ways of gauging student understanding. I use a lot of whiteboarding and student conferencing for on-the-go, in-the-moment assessing. Also, all of my quizzes are one problem, which I give a few times a week. These are quick to grade and provide me needed insights into student thinking. Similarly, my unit exams are small but frequent (they happen every two weeks). I believe these routines are good for students (less information to remember + constant stream of feedback), but they also align with my needs (less time needed to grade in one sitting + more frequent check-ins to inform my instruction).

In the midst of bloated requests to monitor everything students do and say, it is challenging to find assessment routines that are lean, but impactful. What do I need to collect? What don’t I need to collect? What will give me insight into student thinking and yield a quick turnaround for feedback, but not bury me with paperwork? How do I build efficient grading practices into my teaching? These are questions I wrestle with every day. They’ve gotten easier to answer the longer I teach, but they still catch me off guard.

bp