Accountability: Teaching through Assessment and Feedback, Not Grading.

ABSTRACT Grading policies such as refusing to accept late work, giving grades of zero, and refusing to allow students to redo their work may be intended as punishment for poor performance, but such policies will not really teach students to be accountable, and they provide very little useful information about students' mastery of the material. Assessment and feedback, particularly during the course of learning, are the most effective ways for students to learn accountability in their work and in their personal lives. True story: It was class transition time, and students filled the hallway outside my room. I sipped on a bottle of water while standing in my doorway watching over the traffic flow. Four classrooms away, my colleague, Jerry, burst from his room, hands waving in the air over his head. "Four-fifths of my students keep failing my tests," he shouted to me from his doorway. "Well, screw 'em if they can't study! " The water leapt suddenly to the wrong pipe in my throat - I choked. Did I just hear Jerry say what I think he said? I coughed twice, wiped the spittle from my mouth, and started making my way to my friend through the river of students. What if there were parents in the hallway at that moment who heard those comments? Well, I thought, there were parents here by proxy; any one of these students can go home and tell mom and dad what Jerry yelled down the hallway. As I walked, I prepared what I was going to say to my colleague. My first thought was something like, "Maybe you've misjudged the date of your retirement. " When I finally arrived, however, I actually said, "Look, Jerry, this is not cool. If eighty percent of your students are failing your tests, maybe there's something wrong with what you're doing, not what they're doing. " Then, as I pointed to his doorway, I added, "Now get back into that classroom and live up to the promise of teaching. " His eyes widened, his body and mind still caught up in his exasperation. After a moment, though, his features softened, and he said, "You're right. I'm sorry. " Then he headed back into his room. Students followed him through the doorway. He had just a few moments to get it together before inspiring young minds once again. I returned to my own classroom realizing what a thin line we walk. Would someone be there for me? Accountability is not a one-way street, nor is it departmentalized. In simplified terms, teachers hold themselves accountable to students, the school system, the curriculum, and a set of professional ethics. They hold students accountable for hard work, civil behavior, and learning the material. None of these is a sole connection, of course. In efforts to find liability and for what a student is answerable, we sometimes forget that a student learns from an aggregate of factors: the teacher, the student himself, the curriculum, his parents, his friends, the media, the community, available resources, time, and socio-economic status, just for starters. Who or what will we hold in contempt, then, for the student's failure to thrive, should it happen? And if the student soars beyond expectations, who will reap the accolades? It's interesting that humans so often need to identify the one responsible. We are causal junkies, sometimes to our detriment, as if causality provides coherence or justification for our feelings towards another. We dash dreams and break whole careers based on often limiting explanations that are force-fit into containers we can classify and stack. Does the need to categorize people, causes, and effects limit what we learn from working with students and colleagues? In many cases, yes. In education, we are so focused on causal relationships that we often fail to see the organic nature and fuzzy logic of human learning. The best educators, then, embrace systems theory and a culture of multi-faceted response over a pure scientific design and a myopic focus on single factors working in isolation from one another. …