Attitude of Gratitude #24: My Dream? Do Away with Grades!

Participating in TeachThought's blogging challenges introduced me to a host of bloggers and education websites. Educators from all over the world share lessons, digital gadgets, philosophies of teaching and learning, and all kinds of learning trends. And I get it all for free, learning on my own schedule, often on my smart phone.  I'm grateful for this new way to stay connected with the field and my colleagues. I'm "getting" what it means to find and nurture my own personal learning network. 

Because of the challenges, I now follow Mark Barnes, the educator and blogger behind Brilliant or Insane: Education on the Edge, His provocative ideas about assessment, testing, and learning bring me to today's prompt: "What are your dreams for education in the future?" 

Barnes advocates doing away with tests and grades. He's not against evaluating or assessing, but he is against the sort of standardized testing, the sort that privileges teaching for coverage rather than teaching for learning. 

What I Love Most About Teaching

A baker's dozen of what I love most about teaching. 

1) Hearing students deeply engaged in group discussion - without me having  to facilitate

2) Observing students watch out for each other, keeping each other on-task and connected to our shared purpose

3) Feeling the electricity in writing lab when students create and develop their ideas at their keyboards

4) Reading student journals where students cop to finding out the lesson was more meaningful than they might have expected

5) Sharing and brainstorming with my teaching colleagues

6) Seeing the intense interest students pay to my written feedback on their papers

7 )Prepping for class - one of my most favorite things to do!

8) Being held up after class by students who want to keep talking about what we were doing in class

9) Hearing students say that the class time flew, not realizing that thinking could be fun, or at least pleasurable in ways they hadn't expected

10) Hearing former students talk about how what we did together is now making sense to them

11) Seeing students build self-confidence and practice self-efficacy

12) Watching students shift from victim mentality to creator mentality, from  fixed mindset to a growth mindset 

13) Seeing students realize that they can "get it"