Motivation Without Grades

The second misconception that caught my eye in the opinion piece entitled Proficiency-based Overreach by Curtis Hier (the same one I referenced in this previous post) from The Burlington Free Press is that students will no longer be motivated in a proficiency-based system because there won’t be traditional grading. The first assumption that is problematic in this argument is the assumption that kids had been previously motivated to learn by grades. I think a more accurate way to describe what has been going on for many years with traditional grading is that students were motivated to comply in order to get what they want. They were not motivated to learn. This is certainly a shift. In a proficiency based system, we don’t want kids to comply; we want them to be intrinsically motivated to learn. We want them to be invested and own their learning. Proficiency based learning requires students to learn and demonstrate that learning through evidence. In addition, Vermont’s Act 77 offers the opportunity to provide flexible pathways for this demonstration of learning. So the shift in thinking is that we are now looking to motivate students to learn and the way that happens in a competency based system is that learners have more voice and choice in what that learning looks like.

The second assumption that is problematic with this thinking is the implication that students don’t have any internal drive to learn. We know this is not true. Anyone who has had young children knows that when kids are young, they are avid learners. They question everything and have endless curiosity. It isn’t until formal schooling that this innate drive to learn seems to be replaced by compliance. I would argue, it is in fact our current system of education that drains a person’s innate drive to learn (or an enormous coincidence) . Kids are not born needing to be motivated by external factors like grades and money. Again, those external rewards are used to promote compliance not learning. Kids are not innately averse to learning.

In order for people to succeed in a global economy, they need to be intrinsically motivated to take initiative. They need to be able to constantly take the initiative to learn new skills and technologies to keep up with the rate of change that their jobs will require. We don’t need to push out people who are compliant; we need to create avid learners. Our current education system is slow to understand and model this important “why” of what we are doing.

Comments 4

  1. I had to explain to my kids who worked very hard over Thanksgiving weekend to get their papers done that the ones who hadn’t could get the same grade as they. Deadlines matter. But not in the proficiency/habit of work model. Just in college and the real world.

    1. Again, proficiency based education systems are not about grades; not about getting papers done. We need to change the conversation. Timeliness is a transferable skill included in our graduation requirements. Not attaching it to the academic achievement seems to make perfect sense. If a student can demonstrate a skill and we say they can’t because they were late, that’s hardly accurate. Reporting these two discrete skills seems reasonable and holds kids accountable as well. Many districts did begin by changing the grading system rather than changing the teaching and learning in the classroom, a mistake I am glad we inadvertently didn’t make. But still, grades solve a problem or prepare students for jobs we can’t even predict? I don’t think that is a simple answer.

      1. “In a proficiency based system, we don’t want kids to comply; we want them to be intrinsically motivated to learn. We want them to be invested and own their learning. Proficiency based learning requires students to learn and demonstrate that learning through evidence.”

        Think how contradictory those sentences are.

        1. You’ll have to elaborate. I wouldn’t have written them if I thought they were contradictory. Do you mean because there is still a requirement of them? An expectation that they demonstrate their learning?

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