Dr. Bee's Biology

There is a lot of talk in education right now about bias. One type of bias that impacts those of us in education that I haven’t heard a lot about is status quo bias. Turns out, this is one of the reasons changes in education can feel so hard. Everyone goes through school and experiences the education field as a student before becoming a teacher. We’ve all experienced how things are done in a classroom before we ever step foot into our own classrooms after graduation. 

Status quo bias refers to the practice of hanging on to old ways. We stick to what we know and what we’re familiar with because it’s there and it’s comfortable, when change can be risky, scary, and require us to develop new systems and practices. 

I did not go through a traditional education program. I was a bio major and a working biologist before I was ever a teacher. And then I went through an accelerated program partnered with a large city district, meant to fast track want to be science teachers into the classroom. When I had to write my first syllabus I had no idea how to describe my grading policies. I went along with the crowd and matched mine to those in my department. 

For a long time I was absolute in not accepting late work. After all, what’s the point of accepting a pre-lab assignment after the lab is already complete? I was steadfast in my belief that work should be completed on time for credit. I never had an education class that focused on grading or different grading policies. I was never asked to think about how these policies could impact my students, or their grades. When I was first asked to think about this, I was 5 years into teaching and assumed I was the only one in the room that hadn’t had these conversations before. After our first faculty meeting focusing on grading I figured out pretty quickly I wasn’t the only one confronted with this. None of us had had these conversations in our preservice programs. None of us had been asked to defend our grading policies or even explain how we came up with them beyond, “because that’s how it’s been done in the past”. Why do we use a 100 point system? How did we come up with the letter grade cut offs? How do we use homework? How much should it be worth? How much should quizzes be worth? What about tests? Can we grade students’ behavior and participation? How do we account for differences in students that we can’t actually measure if we’re going to include those things in our grades? What do we want our grades to actually show and communicate to our students and their families? Is that what our grades actually mean? 

There are so many different things to think about and consider when we talk about grading and our policies. Do our students look and live like us? Do they have the same resources we have? Do we even know what resources they have at home? If we don’t know, then can we be sure students are able to do homework at home? And if they can’t, can we grade them on that? How can we make sure our students’ personal lives aren’t impacting their grades? How can we make sure their grades actually reflect their knowledge and skills? 

These are some of the questions I want to talk about here. These are the questions that changed almost everything about my career 12 years ago. And these are the questions that I still think on a nearly daily basis 17 years in. I start year 18 in a handful of days. I’d like this year to be one that allows me to continue the conversation with other teachers and learn more from teacher friends near and far. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the questions referenced here. How do you grade and why?