The Gradeless Classroom: The Greatest Teacher

I've been reading end of year posts. They are everywhere. Best of lists, books to read in 2018, #oneword posts, reflections on successes and learning experiences, and so on and so forth...

And I just feel like... a failure.

The beginning of 2017 found me optimistically charging into the future, armed with a 125-book Goodreads challenge, a resolve to better use social media for professional learning, a list of ideas to implement in the classroom, and a copy of Ron Chernow's Hamilton, to read outside of my comfort zone. The 2017-18 school year started in much the same way, with a dramatically enlarged classroom library, a newly renovated learning space, a better plan for going gradeless, and a blog that people were actually starting to read. I had high hopes to continue posting at least once a week, high hopes to change readers and writers, high hopes to continue becoming the teacher, learner, and human I want to be.

And here I stand at the turning of the year. Looking back on my goals for the year, there are no spectacular failures. I read 99 books. I expanded my Twitter PLN, participated in chats, and joined a few new Facebook professional groups. I implemented a lot of ideas in the classroom. I finished Hamilton (it only took 6 months)! My classroom is beautiful, and my kids are reading and writing. My blog postings didn't fizzle out until mid-October. But they did fizzle out, because I fizzled out.

Where there were no spectacular failures, there were also no spectacular successes. I am a modestly better teacher now than I was at this time last year. I have a better plan, but there is still so far to go. I guess the thing is that for the past three years, I have radically changed everything about my classroom practices. I implemented reading and writing workshop, expanded my classroom library from roughly 150 books to more than 700, tossed out traditional desks and grades, and attempted to firmly plant student choice at the center of everything I do. After all of these radical changes, I expected radical results. But the results have been, at best, modest.

In the social media world we live in, it is impossible to avoid comparisons to others in similar situations to our own. I see teachers just like me who found time to read hundreds of books, and I feel like a failure. I see friends of mine on social media with thousands of followers, and I feel like a failure. I read about lessons and activities taking place all over the country in classrooms just like mine, and I feel like a failure.

So what's the takeaway from all of this?

I can't help but think that this is the way many of our students feel every day. I know that there are some students I teach for whom finishing one book (just one book) on their own is a tremendous, radical accomplishment. So is improving a test score by a point or two. Learning that revision is actually a thing that writers do. Successfully arguing their case for a B, when they have been a D student their entire school career. These things seem like sweeping changes from one perspective, but taken as part of a larger picture, they are tiny. Slow, plodding, incremental changes are hard to see from far away. I will try, this year, to see the small picture for each one of my students, and celebrate those small steps. I will try to do the same for myself.

I will continue to create a classroom that is based on collaboration, not competition, for my students and myself. I will remember that everyone had to start somewhere, and that the only person I need to be better than is the person I was yesterday.

There is a scene in The Last Jedi where Luke confesses to Yoda that he thinks it is time for the Jedi order to end. Yoda wisely observes that Luke is projecting his own failure as a teacher onto the entire system, and that it's not time to end, but it is time to change. Yoda tells him that the best way to teach Rey is to share with her. Yes, share successes and wins, but most importantly, share failure. Failure is our greatest teacher.

I don't really know how to begin sharing my failure with my students, but I will start, tomorrow, by telling them about all of the things I wanted to accomplish in 2017 that I didn't. I will share with them that sometimes, we just don't meet our goals, but that doesn't mean we stop working toward them. We reevaluate, we take stock, and we realize where we can learn from failure, and where we are setting unrealistic goals for ourselves. Most importantly, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and keep going.