On Ofsted (or what every teacher knows about grading)

Almost every teacher has experienced that sinking feeling of handing back a pile of carefully marked assessments full of formative feedback, only for the students to instantly turn to the grade before tossing the paper to one side in jubilation or despair.

You see, as much as the formative feedback might actually be the most useful part of our marking, it’s the grade that students are asked about, have celebrated or commiserated, and are rewarded or penalised over.  Rarely are they asked how successfully they implemented a particular skill or leveraged their propositional knowledge to produce their answers.  And no one, except their teacher (and perhaps the people most invested in them), is really interested in the target that will help them to get better next time. All anyone wants to know is the grade. And the consequence of this is that the person who has been assessed also becomes fixated on that grade, experiencing shame, demotivation, complacency, anxiety, satisfaction or pride as a result.

And so what do savvy teachers do? They withhold the grades initially, perhaps even avoiding the awarding of a grade altogether. Savvy teachers focus on the feedback, for example by constructing a process of reflection to encourage response to that feedback, a process that allows their comments to become a supportive action which leads to future growth and improvement.  Because, when it comes down to it, real improvement comes from an assessment process which is based on:

• Understanding of the student’s context and potential
• Providing support to help move the student onto the next phase in their development
• Enabling the student to invest in bringing about change because the dialogic nature of the feedback requires a response.

Providing a grade, or even 9 of them, might be helpful for confirming if the assessment outcome warrants celebration or commiseration. Providing a grade(s) are certainly helpful for compiling on a spreadsheet. But what grades absolutely cannot (and do not) do, is help the student get better. More time spent supporting the students’ responses to formative feedback is where it’s at.

And so, while there are many other aspects that could be commented on with respect to the new Ofsted proposals (not least vague grade descriptors that substitute one adjective for another), it is the fundamental problem of prioritising grading over formative support that jumped out at me yesterday.  Perhaps we could have a better system if we just don’t have grades at all?

Ask any teacher. I’m sure they’d be happy to share.