With our book set to be released this month, I thought I would take some time to address how we hope our audience interacts with both the book and us. When we started this mission 6+ years ago, writing a book was not even a thought. We were trying to make meaningful changes to our classrooms. As part of that process, we made plenty of mistakes, continually revised the model, collected a ton of data, and learned a lot. About two years ago we got to a point where we felt we were compelled to share all that we had learned throughout this process. For me, there are two outcomes I desire. The first is to accelerate the learning curve for anyone looking to make this shift. The second is a little more selfish. I want your feedback. 

 The result of our years of work is a model that students understand, recenters learning as the goal, and is accessible to all students. That’s not to say our model is perfect and we have all the answers. There has not been a school year that has passed where changes weren’t made. However, the changes are now more fine tuning as opposed to major shifts in our approach. Getting to this point was the result of a significant amount of research, especially when we saw that student progress had plateaued. One of the things that I found extremely frustrating as I went through this process was the lack of perspective from classroom teachers represented in this area. There are plenty of resources from administrators and consultants explaining the theory behind the need to shift and they did offer some suggestions as to how to implement a gradeless model. Unfortunately, none of it was ultimately helpful to us. We had already tried many of these approaches and saw the drawbacks, whether it was the ineffectiveness or the inefficiencies that caused each of them not to be a viable solution. Once it became obvious that approach wasn’t moving us forward, we made the decision to go to the original educational research and start from the ground up. While it did make it a little more labor intensive and front-loaded, it did crystalize our purpose and understanding of assessment and learning. After going through that, we didn’t want teachers to have to start from the ground up. So we wanted to provide a resource for teachers that references this research and shows concrete examples of how it is used by teachers that are still in the classroom. It was important to us that this would be useful to teachers in any phase of their transition to a gradeless classroom. To that end, we open our entire classroom to you, every aspect. That’s why the book was necessary. Although I love discussing this through social media or podcasts, the volume of information that has gone into the development and implementation of this model is too much to effectively communicate on those platforms. Our hope is that this book will allow you to do what took us 6+ years in significantly less time. 

 Now to my selfish motivation. I want to know what you think. Reach out to me on Twitter (@DavidFrangiosa) and I will respond. Email me. Let’s set up a virtual forum where we can discuss this. I’m open to all of it. While I know my students are benefitting from this shift, I know it can be better. One of the challenges with traditional grading is the inconsistency from class to class. Different teachers value different things even though they report it the same way (A-F). The challenge we’re facing now, and where I need your help, is scaling this beyond our content and grade level. One of the most common negative comments I get is that I am the only teacher they have doing it this way. I get it. It is very difficult to ask a student to change their entire mindset just for your class. And in some cases, we are the only class in their entire public school education that approaches assessment this way. Imagine if we didn’t have to take the time to explain, deprogram and build students back up how much further we could take our courses. While it is necessary for individual teachers to explore the world of alternate assessment, it is imperative that we don’t fall into the trap of “this is how I do it.” We need to identify, collectively, what is important, and how to assess and communicate it. We can develop common language around learning, showing students the interconnectivity of all content areas. We shift from “the way I do it” to how students approach learning. While this may seem like it is removing the autonomy from teaching, it is the exact opposite. This is merely a framework for tracking and reporting student progress, which allows the individual teacher to use their own personal style to get students to the common goal. Learning.