This move highlights the detrimental aspects of the report card: its impetus to provide provisional self-esteem to children on the basis of a letter grade. Sure many students feel short-changed because they will not know how they did in a subject, but why do students need the authoritative approval of a teacher to determine whether or not they gave their best effort in a subject, or rather how well they did in a subject? You could make an argument about how important grades are to high-schoolers; but in elementary school, does a kid really need to see an A, B, or C on a report card to figure out how they ought to position themselves in relation to others their age? More importantly, do the positive aspects of promoting achievement based on a ranking system (that is rather subjective) outweigh the damage that such a system has the potential to create? What does the kid who consistently gets “Cs” in subjects come to believe about himself by the time he reaches the ripe old age of 12? Report cards are important for offering an accurate assessment of a child’s academic work in a subject, but they do little to promote optimism and a growth mindset for our younger school children who are “on the fringe” academically.

And what about the teachers? One teacher I spoke with regarding the move to not writing report cards this year lamented that, “it’s not fair that the kids who didn’t work hard get the same exact ‘recognition’ as the kids who tried hard all year”. He was clearly upset at the missed opportunity to one last time punish students who did not fit his idea of excellence. While I feel that there should be tangible “reflections” of student achievement (or lack there of) , I question a teacher’s motivation when a primary reason for giving out grades is to “teach students a final lesson”.

Students who work hard in school deserve recognition and validation. But we are so absorbed in traditional models of pedagogy that we seldom look to the benefits of doing things differently.

The current contract situation in school boards across Ontario is unfortunate for students and teachers alike. But the glimmer of optimism it provides rests in the opportunity we have to explore how politics of accountability and traditional forms of professionalism impact teaching practice. Teachers don’t have to write a report card! The archetypal moment in the teacher’s year has been erased – there is absolutely no way this will not impact every single teacher and student affected. The question is how? And it’s a question worth careful consideration.

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It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that every teacher teaches with the “burden” of getting through curriculum. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that the curriculum currently prescribed cannot be adequately covered in 10 months of school. Teachers adapt by skimming over parts of the common core and going deeper into others, teaching topics that they have a passion for, and being flexible to students’ needs. But unfortunately, when that end of the month (or curriculum unit) comes, it usually signifies test time and we move onto the next “strand”. Under the pressure to cover curriculum, we move on whether students “get it” or not. And we do this primarily because we have to write a report card at the end of the term or year. We have to show proof of what we did with our students.

I asked several teachers how not writing a report card would change their practice. Some pointed out that they would slow down and teach according to student needs (what a novel idea!). Others suggested that they would, “teach what they wanted to teach and not what the curriculum dictated as important”. While this idea has the damaging potential to re-create provisional self-esteem and privileges the teacher once again in the power dynamic of the classroom space, teachers who are engaged with the material would also exponentially benefit student learning.

No report cards would change my classroom immensely. It would afford the opportunity to truly co-create an educational environment where kids would enact agency in their learning. We could establish relevance and engagement in a way that goes beyond what any burdensome report card produces. No report cards – fine, we can introduce peer reviews and grading, that way the teacher is not the sole authoritative figure dolling out some final piece a paper that is supposed to mark their idea of how they think a kid did throughout the school year.

If used correctly, a final pass/fail letter could be a great move. Our current system is intrinsically flawed anyways. So despite the political maneuvers between government and teachers’ unions, below the surface this “no report card thing” marks a tremendous opportunity to re-examine the paradigm of education and how we demarcate student success. Not having a traditional report card is unfortunate for the children who are programmed to base their academic validity on a letter grade or a percentage. But despite its shortcomings, it is also a unique opportunity to explore how the politics of accountability and traditional forms of professionalism impact how teachers teach.

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The age-old pedagogical questions when teachers grade work always seems to eek its way on to the table of progressive practice year after year. Ultimately, grading involves notions of fostering self-esteem or delivering “objective” (but very subjective in most cased) assessment. So, where do you fit on the continuum of “grade dealers”?

I recently finished marking a pile of culminating Language assignments. This is the second part of the job that I would love to avoid if I could. What usually tends to happen is that soon as I get around to marking a set of assignments, I collect another pile of work! Unfortunately for teachers, the turnstile of grading work never stops. Teachers must not only mark but must also wrestle with the dualistic realities that are espoused through grading a student’s work. Two prominent and dueling philosophies arise when teachers talk about the “purpose of grading.” One is grading to send a “wake-up call” to students and the other is grading work to boost student’s “self-esteem.” Put into context, this means there is usually two different ways that most teachers’ grade work. Some give a student a little better mark than their work deserves because they want them to live to those expectations set for them in the hopes that the elevated mark will boost their self-confidence and make them believe that they are actually capable of achieving success. This sort of self-fulfilling prophecy works in athletics all the time (which is a loaded sentence in itself and a topic I may eventually blog about).

By using the “positive validation” method, you also run the risk of inflating their competence and diminishing their understanding of effort. Youth are forever internalizing experiences. If they know they did not put their best effort forth and still got an A, instead of wondering how well they could have done if they worked their hardest, they may be satisfied and fall into a complacent false consciousness of what merit, self-worth, and effort all mean. But again, it depends on the student and their character.

Then there is the other pedagogical side of “waking up” your students with an assessment that delivers the brutal and “honest” truth (and at times, may even exaggerate it). A numerical “you need to step it up” can sometimes shake up students and re-focus their efforts and eventually churn out better work in the future. Whatever philosophy you begin to employ, grading is an especially fragile subject near the beginning of the year. From my own personal experience as a student growing up, high scores on early assignments encouraged me; they pushed me to continue working hard in class to maintain the high grades I initially received. They also demonstrated to me that my teacher thought I was smart. Conversely, once I received a low grade or two at the beginning of a course, I subconsciously “checked out” of that class, putting forth minimal effort with the simple intentions of sliding by since attaining excellence seemed unreachable. This dynamic speaks to the adolescent mind and what the beginning of a new school years means to them. The beginning of the year serves as a fresh start for students; a chance to create or improve an ever-developing identity in a whole new classroom and an opportunity for them to “re-classify” themselves.

Individuals have a multiplicity of motivations that run their daily hopes, goals, and ambitions. These internal drives combine with external experiences to create one’s character. With grading, you have to judge it on a case-by-case basis. When you are looking at a student’s work, it is important to have a thorough understanding of that student. Some students need a boost in confidence; others need to be brought back down to reality. Grading then becomes especially effective when you have a feel for your students. This is precisely why I don’t support the idea of “blindfold” grading. Teachers often tell me, “I cover up the names when I mark that way I am objective.” And while I understand the premise and logical pedagogy behind their statements, I feel that a teacher is more that a body whom is simply distributing “un-biased” assessment. Grading is yet another facet in which we teachers are provided the opportunity to build and nurture tomorrow’s future, our students. So we need to be a little personal about it.

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When writing report card comments for the first time it is good to refer to a comment database that may be floating around the school or in the hands of a veteran teacher. Use references (veteran teacher’s comments, examples, etc.) to get an idea of the tone and style of writing subject and student comments. But it is also important that you begin to develop your own database of comments with your own unique style and tone. One of the worst things that can happen to a new teacher is hearing from a parent who claims you have left a comment on her son’s report card that is exactly the same as his older brother’s from three years ago! Take a look at what others have done in the past, but be unique and develop your own voice.

Examples from veteran teachers and comment databases are a trusted go-to, especially if you can personalize them to your own program. Mix and match, build, and personalize each subject and leveled comment so that you have a bank of personal and unique comments suited to a multitude of students. I am not going to lie, I will not have 30 unique comments for every single student in my seventh grade history program. But I will design my comments in a way that can be tailored to each student based on the learning they have demonstrated and the unique projects they have completed. Here’s one hint to make sure you are unique: a project may have demonstrated a learning skill acquired (e.g., understanding different persuasive techniques in writing) but that project (e.g., a speech) should be different (in terms of topics) for most, if not all, of your students. This is where differentiated instruction and report cards go hand in hand. If you ensure that you are differentiating your instruction, inevitably your report card comments, while underlining the same key objectives, will be unique to the particular student.

The report card season is long and grueling, but it is so rewarding when it is over! Set up a schedule and a timeline for completing your report cards. If you make a plan and stick to it, your “report card season” will not be as strenuous as you fear. But one thing is for certain, report cards seem to be the “Holy Grail” of teaching; the basis of all substantiated and empirical evidence of what you have done and what they have learned. So do not leave these to the last minute and do put in a sincere effort to ensure that each student gets as accurate a comment as you are capable of imparting.

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Congratulate yourself if you have made it intact halfway through your first year! It seems like a small and meaningless milestone but sometimes you find happiness in the small things. Another reason why you should congratulate yourself is because you are about to embark on something that might thwart you from wanting to get through to the end of the school year, and that is report cards. For a new teacher, often times the things happening outside of the classroom are the things that have the biggest impact on your day. Writing report cards is always burdensome. This is universal. New and veteran teachers feel exactly the same way about the process. Report cards require a lot of paperwork, curriculum jargon spitting, editing, and back checking. The process becomes even more arduous with Board-wide and perhaps school-wide restraints regarding what gets written and how. We are in a day and age where report cards must be unique to the individual but also follow strict discursive guidelines regarding how and what to say. With this being the case, I often wish I could just write anecdotal report cards for all my students. It would take a lot less preparation and it would undoubtedly be a lot more authentic. Sometimes it feels as though we are missing authenticity in education these days. With scripted, down to the minute lesson plans for this and teacher guides for that, that uniqueness of teaching and learning sometimes gets thrown to the wayside with the red-tape politics of education.

At our school, we must provide a comment bank to our principal. This comment bank consists of sample comments for A, B, C, and D students. But we are also told not to use “modifiers”; which are adverbs that attest to student achievement as correlated to the curriculum. For example, students are given a concept to learn. Some students “always” demonstrate their understanding, while others “rarely” demonstrate their understanding. By reading that, I can understand where each student would fall on the academic continuum. Creating report card comments becomes extremely difficult in regards to how they are differentiated. If I write two sentences about a subject and I do not use an adverb, how are you supposed to differentiate which student earned the A and which earned the D? If Rosalie “demonstrates how to order numbers” in grade 4 math, while Johan “understands how to round to the nearest tenth” in math how does that show that one student is an A student and one is a C student? It seems that the politics of reporting has handicapped the authenticity of writing student comments while at the same time clouded the uniqueness of each student. With the hoops we must jump through during report card season, teachers try their very best to be authentic and accurate. It just seems as though each year it gets harder.

I miss the handwritten report cards that I would get from my teacher. When you read those you thought, “How the hell did they know that? Ms. Sanjiv has me pegged to a tee”. Today’s report cards leave few parents and children able to read a report card and say a thing like that. Today, a student could grab a handful of report cards, jumble them all up, pick out one and I bet they wouldn’t be able to tell their own apart from a peer’s. Either way, report card comments have to get done so when the time of year hits, be prepared, and do them in a timely fashion or else you’ll be spending your entire weekend in front of your laptop. Yeah, weekends… you may have thought being a teacher was an 8:30 am to 3 pm job. By now, I assume you know better, but we’ll get to that another time.

I have reached that midway point of the year. And while I am congratulating myself for surviving thus far, I know that I have to get started on these first term report cards. We have a PD day right around report card time. Its primary purpose is for teachers to be able to work on their report cards so I am planning on using that day to get started and dig in deep. I hope my coffee cup is ready (Even though I don’t drink coffee!). As I think about what needs to be done, I want to offer some pertinent advice. First thing is, I suggest that you dive in and get started, and the sooner you do so, the better. Some principals will ask for a “comment bank” a few weeks prior to the report card rough draft due date. Every school will have a different protocol. Every school will also have teachers that will moan and complain about said protocol. That’s a plain fact of teaching! My strategy: if something you deem “unnecessary” is asked for, figure out a way to make it necessary. Even though some teachers complain that a comment bank will not get used when they go to make their report cards, I am going to put effort into mine so that I do refer back to it when I create my report cards. Whether you agree with a principal’s demand or not, most of the time those demands do have their benefits. Seek out what that benefit will be to you. It will pay off in the end.

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