Most classrooms are segregated based on students' grades. The students who show promise are selectively groomed by teachers, gradually pushing others to the bottom. One study looking at some of California’s highest achieving high schoolers found that 70% of students surveyed were often stressed by their school work and 56% reported worrying about grades, tests and college acceptance.
This culture of honing in on grades at the detriment of one’s mental well-being likely carries over into college. In a more nuanced educational setting, closer to the workforce, salaries and career benefits are a carrot on a stick, baiting students into cheating or overworking their way to a higher GPA. In this context, students can easily lose focus of what their education should be all about. As a teacher, it's your responsibility to make your students genuinely curious by the challenge of finding connection between their current knowledge and new opportunities to experience the true joy of learning.
Here are 4 strategies to help your students focus on learning, rather than grades -
1. Encourage Self-Reflection
Help students reflect on learning experiences throughout the course. Ask them to think about their professional ambitions and the skills and knowledge they will need. Have them make a list of those and use the list after every assignment or activity to write a short reflection on how the work they completed furthered their development.
2. Delay The Grades
A smart way to stop students from discussing a grade is to delay them. When students anticipate receiving the grade, you can discuss their performance in a test and help everyone understand the solutions to all the questions that appeared on the test. You can also annotate the tests and return them to the students without adding a grade. After that, you can encourage the students to reflect on the notes and make corrections based on them. While this activity can irritate students because they're fixed on the grade, they'll soon realize that learning from and correcting their mistakes can help them understand a concept better.
3. Lower The Stakes
Several research studies point out that homework shouldn't be graded. While many teachers have grades for completing homework, it can be detrimental to a student's learning curve. You can keep a tab of who's completing their homework and who isn't so that you can discuss it in the parent-teacher conferences. Homework provides a chance for students to learn and practice to explore a topic, not to compete with others. By lowering the stakes, students can practice at their own pace without worrying about failing the homework grade.
4. Allow Retakes
"Learn from mistakes" is a phrase that is commonly associated with learning and education. If students are supposed to learn from their mistakes, then teachers should give them the option to fix their mistakes. By retaking assessments, students have an opportunity to improve their learning, master concepts and also raise their grades.
Shifting the focus from grades to learning requires faculty to go against the tide of today’s prevailing academic culture. But making a few changes in how you think about teaching and following the four above-mentioned strategies can go a long way to improving student perceptions on the importance of learning.
