Summer Reading: The case against grades

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Educational Leadership, 69(3). Retrieved July 14, 2013, from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcag.htm

I hope that everyone has had a pleasant and restful summer. I wanted to give you some thoughtful and provocative readings as you all ease back into school later this month. Kohn (2011) makes a well informed and impassioned argument against the way that most schools use grading. While I have my own thoughts on the subject, I am far more interested in your ideas on Kohn's article and the nature of grading in school.

Please also take this opportunity to familiarize yourself with this blog, although some of you already started reading this blog towards the end of the last school year. My plan for this year is to post all of the classwork (games, simulations, projects, readings, written prompts, and more) to this blog. This means that for the 2012-13 school year, both Glopo HL1 students (11th graders and Glopo HL2 students (12th graders) will be reading, writing, and interacting together in this shared space. As such, I think we have a great opportunity to start off our year by reading this article carefully at your convenience and then providing written commentary and questions to this post. You may choose to respond directly to my questions (listed below in bold) or craft your own narrative; the choice is yours to make.

As you read and reflect on Kohn's article, we'll all participate in a "Sentence, Phrase, and Word" routine (scroll down the page for the description), posting our ideas as a comment to this post. After reading each others' ideas, we'll then want to look for common themes and discuss the implications of our ideas

I look forward to reading all of your thoughts and ideas in the coming weeks; have a relaxing remainder of the summer.

/CG