The Radical Magic of Gradeless Classrooms, Part II

At my last micro-school, we didn’t use letter grades or other external standards to track progress. I found those traditional methods to be counterproductive to the goal of helping my students develop intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and creativity. 

In place of these external ranking systems, we used individualized, thoughtful methods to document growth as well as any accommodations that were made to account for each student’s strengths. When a caregiver enrolled their child in Sunnyside Micro-School, they agreed to forgo letter grades, high-pressure performance assessments, and other such measurements in favor of holistic documentation of student learning.

My first hire for Sunnyside was a seasoned Montessori preschool teacher certified in the Reggio Emilia approach. Both Montessori and Reggio Emilia approaches favor project-based learning with a heavy emphasis on process. While Montessori philosophy is more structured, Reggio Emilia is more open-ended. One very special aspect of the Reggio Emilia approach is the style of learning and classroom documentation/record keeping. Each child’s progress is monitored through pictures, videos, and short transcripts of interactions between the student, teacher, and other students. It’s a beautiful, natural strategy for noting growth while encouraging creativity.

Choice is not only essential to protecting freedom—a pillar value of Sunnyside—in the classroom, but it’s also necessary for inspiring creativity. Put into practice; this means that our students were given the space to create projects that aligned with their strengths and personal creative style. For any given topic of learning, students may have created comics, written scripts for plays, or developed songs. I still have a video of a child performing an interpretive dance of the water cycle—it’s both adorable and educational! 

Allowing for choice is especially key for allowing for asynchronous development—the defining characteristic of a twice-exceptional child—which in turn leads to asynchronous performance. Asynchronous performance can otherwise really stump an educator. How do we assess the academic trajectory of a child performing at so many different grade levels at once? Conventional, linear classrooms punish twice-exceptional children simply for being themselves, a flaw in their design. 

At Sunnyside, we took a long and wide view when determining if a student was advancing. The best educators of twice-exceptional children know when to let go of linear learning, which is often. 

Depending on the profile of the child, asynchronous performance can look like large gaps in ability from skill to skill, even within a grade level. A student’s ability to remember, recall, and communicate about any given lesson or topic is influenced by stress. As Susanne Vogel and Lars Schwabe documented in their 2016 Nature paper, “Learning and memory under stress: implications for the classroom”: “Research over the past two decades identified stress and the hormones and neurotransmitters released during and after a stressful event as major modulators of human learning and memory processes, with critical implications for educational contexts.” A child who is prone to anxiety and other forms of dysregulation, as twice-exceptional children are, will have a difficult time performing consistently in the conventional learning environment.

I’ve worked with multiple children who could recite their math facts with ease on one day and couldn’t point out a subtraction sign the next. Imagine how it must feel to be that twice-exceptional child. What they did with ease yesterday, today seems like an insurmountable task. Which is real: the progress they made yesterday or the struggle they’re having today? Both... and that must be explained to them in an effort to ward off anxiety and issues with poor self-image. That’s why learning environments must be designed to accommodate for their asynchrony.

At some point in time, I realized that the sooner I let go of my attachment to linear short-term progress, the happier both my students and I were going to be. I now look at the big picture when it comes to a student’s progress, and I design learning environments that do the same. Depending on the circumstances, I may not give much weight to a bad day or even a bad week. I’ll observe progress over the last six weeks or months to determine if I’m on the right track with a student. 

This is another vote for the Reggio approach I outlined above. When we opt for discrete observation over time in lieu of grades or other judgemental metrics, we reduce the performance aspect of the classroom and cut down on stress and anxiety for these already very sensitive children.

As I described in Part I, each Sunnyside student had a dedicated Google Drive folder shared with each authorized caregiver. In it, caregivers could find things like pictures and videos of projects that were in-progress or completed by their child, 

• regular updates on their child’s personal education goals, 

• student-created reflections on completed tasks or experiences at Sunnyside, and more.

Other physical work samples were sent home as they were created and completed by each child.  

This is why a project-based curriculum works so well with twice-exceptional children. There are many facets to a project, and if one aspect isn’t working so well, it can be shelved until a better time; the whole approach to the day is reframed to become more holistic and gentle to the child. Some projects will take a day to finish, others weeks. True mastery of a skill is not a cold list of objectives that can be demonstrated at the teacher’s whim. Mastery is the sense of satisfaction that children feel when they’ve acquired the skills and knowledge they worked for. I believe that when you hold the concept of mastery in this light, you encourage a love of learning as well as a love of self and the world around you.

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Appreciate you all,

Jade