Grades are Obsolete

When I was working on my teaching credential, I had an assignment in one of the classes that I liked. While I’m sure my colleagues were stumped, I knew what to write. The prompt was, “What would you do if you no longer could give grades? How would you motivate your students?” I had been doing that for years!

In my leadership education experience, I rarely gave any grades. Students were working for other things. They were inspired and wanted to learn. The times that I did provide a grade, it was more of an editing exercise. I wanted them to take what they had given me and improve it in some way (usually something like a grammar problem). In my more traditional teaching experience, I found that some students worked hard for grades and others did not. When I gave opportunities to improve grades, it was the student that got 95% that wanted to raise it to 98% that took me up on the offer, not the students that failed.

One man’s experiments in India illustrate what kids can do. Sugata Mitra was trained as a physicist but was working at a computer firm in India when he tried something. The company was located next to the poorest slums in the city and had a wall separating the two. He cut a hole in the wall and put a computer hooked to the internet in it. And then he watched. (Check out one of his several Ted Talks HERE.)

These kids (that didn’t know English) were able to figure out how to use the computer and the internet … without the help of an adult. They were also able to teach each other. They not only learned how to operate the machine, but they also were learning English! Not because they were getting rewards. It was because they wanted to.

Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiment was replicated in other areas and finely tuned. He received a grant from TED to do even more. He started a project called “School in the Cloud” and opened seven “schools” where there was no teacher or grades, just computers with internet. This time he included two in England as well as India.

He also included another element – the Granny Cloud. He stumbled upon this in a previous experiment where he put a computer in a remote area of India and asked the kids to learn about a specific type of biology. He tested the students before they started, and they didn’t know anything about the subject. After a couple of months, he went back and rechecked the kids, and they got 30% on the test. This feat, in itself, is AMAZING. These kids were not doing it for any reason other than to learn. They had no teacher, just the computer. The next thing he did was brilliant! He asked a young woman in the village to watch the kids and encourage them. He specifically told her not to help them, only ask them about what they were doing and praise them like a grandmother would. He went back in another couple of months, and the students were able to get scores of 50% in the subject (a score comparable to what students in cities were getting after taking a class).

With this insight, he decided to include the “granny” influence in his “Schools in the Cloud.” With the internet, he was able to have retired women (and men) skype in and talk with the kids. They helped the kids with their language development, and also gave them the encouragement they needed to learn.

Keep in mind that these kids had to take everything they found on the internet and put it in a translator to figure out what they found!

Some might say that these kids had an excellent reason to want to learn. They understood that to get out of the poverty they lived in, they had to leave their village and improve themselves. To do that, they had to learn English and do well in school. But other research shows that extrinsic rewards like grades are not productive, especially in the type of learning environment kids today need.

In Daniel Pink’s book “Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us,” he shares how the carrot and stick don’t work. He discusses how people used to think that what motivated people was more primal. In actuality, altruism is one of the biggest motivators.

One experiment he cited had 200 people come to talk about donating blood. The researchers separated these people into three groups. The first group would not get paid, the second would, and the third would but had the option of donating the proceeds to a charity right away. What they found was that the first and third groups had a much higher participation rate than the paid group. It meant more to the participants that they were helping people than making money.

In another experiment, researchers decided to charge parents a fee if they were late when they picked up their children at daycare. They were hoping to reduce the practice. What they found was exactly the opposite. Where before the parents tried very hard to get there because of their relationship with their child’s teacher after the additional fee was put in place, they felt like they were paying for a service.

Pink goes on to share that when the work is creative extrinsic rewards are not effective. The only time the “carrot and the stick” work is when the work is mindless.

Students today, to be prepared for the future, need to be in a more creative environment. We don’t know what the workforce is going to look like in ten years, much less 20, but it most likely won’t be the factory environment students are currently being prepared for in many classrooms.

If you look at today’s workplace, most employees are expected to collaborate, ask questions, and continue to improve until they get it right. In school, students are expected to do their own work, keep with the class, and continue, even if they have not mastered the material. They also are supposed to all do it the same way.

It doesn’t work, and our kids are suffering because of it.

Let’s throw away the old system and start implementing all the research that is out there. Some schools are, but many aren’t. We don’t need educational reform. We got things like “No child left behind” and “common core” when they tried to reform. You can’t improve something so broken. Instead, let’s transform and let our kids’ genius shine!

The documentary about Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” followed the kids for three years. In one of his first schools, one of the students loved the school and was very involved with it in the beginning. By the third year, her father told her she could no longer spend time there. She had to do well in her studies or he would marry her off. She desperately wanted to join the police force. In the last interview of her, she shared how she missed the “School in the Cloud.” She learned there. Her mother let her go when her father was away. Her daughter was their only child, and all their hopes were pinned on her. She wanted her to succeed.

Maybe altruism, helping their family and village, was the reason the children in India were there after all.