What if, in some post-apocalyptic society, the remaining clans of humanity had an annual coming-of-age archery tournament and it is your year to participate? What if afterwards, no one rejoins their childhood clan and the results of the tournament determine how welcome you will be in any of the others because only those who can hunt, survive?

High stakes assessment, no?

Separate 

What if some participants have grown up in clans with access to forests full of the best raw materials for crafting hunting tools? What if they are even permitted to opt out of tournament-provided weapons, arriving with bows bearing their own names carved by the deft hands of moms who, in this savage new world, have sourced sharp rocks to replace their Sharpies? What if one clan has the best archer on this future-Earth and their twin progeny are fellow participants this year? What if your clan has a disproportionate occurrence of near-sightedness swimming around in its gene pool? 

But Equal 

What if upon arrival you notice a line, drawn in the sand, running as far as your unassisted eyes can see and overhear it being called The Equalizer? What if you discover, just before you are about to compete for non-starvation, that archers must shoot simultaneously—and that there is only a single target. What if participants have to jostle for less disadvantaged positions behind The Equalizer that runs, it turns out, parallel to a single, flat circular target no wider than a deer’s rib cage.

This Waking Nightmare 

As nightmarish as this scenario may sound, it is just not that far from analogous to the grading inequities experienced by young people in the United States today. Pedagogue Joe Feldman describes them in excruciating detail within the first part of his book, Grading for Equity, before proposing manageable ways educators could render them irrelevant. Pedagogue-me witnessed and sought to undermine many of them as well, first in the context of my own many classrooms as a secondary English teacher and again as a parent of secondary school students. That is how I came to be sitting across from the director of secondary education for my family’s district, discussing the troubling meaninglessness of grades assigned by teachers laboring under the false suppositions of century-outdated—but still embraced everywhere from preschools to prisons—psychoneurological theories regarding human motivation, neuroplasticity, and behavior control. He handed me his copy of Feldman’s book, the issues of which his principals are discussing to initiate the much needed changes I too had most felicitously come there in part to discuss.

Brainhurricaning

I finished it a few days ago, on the heels of finishing months of graduate school study of assessment-led learning design, iteration, and reflection. Immediately I started writing about the way things are and could be, about the problems young people are facing and the resilience they could demonstrate if afforded opportunities to experience learning assessments as problem-solving challenges rooted in their lived experiences. Filling up what was left of a sixth page, I started a spreadsheet-housed example gradebook showcasing design features I originally developed in those former English classrooms. These features match the guidelines Feldman prescribes so exactly you would think he had written his book after hacking into my 2018 PowerSchool account. Finally, I designed a formative assessment protocol that could serve to calibrate teachers’ application of equitable practices.

My Proposal

In a school with weekly faculty and PLC meetings already built-in, teaching staff could assemble in randomized small groups within the respective classrooms of each week’s randomly chosen host teachers of focus. Each small group could sit together with laptops open to this rubric and take a guided tour of 

• their host’s projected gradebook as a whole, 
• one learning standard/substandard-representing entry within it, 
• the teacher-students co-authored assessment designs with which said entry was coordinated, 
• the teacher-student co-authored plans for interpreting the data these assessments rendered
• the teacher-student co-authored plan for reassessing as needed. 

I propose that these small groups could discuss each domain one at a time, documenting findings, questions, epiphanies, and recommendations–all in service of ongoing, recursive assessment of one anothers’ assessment practices with the end goal of a school transformed by zeroing in on, well, the end goal.

What infinitely expanding ripples might be triggered were we to make even just the equity of the tournament our bulls-eye?

Reference 

Feldman, J. (2018). Grading for Equity. Corwin.