Potential

“… And while flight paths are now generally frowned on, the underlying idea strangely persists. I sometimes worry when I hear the expression ‘fulfil his/her potential’. It’s almost anti-curriculum. It masks assumptions that curriculum content itself doesn’t have agency.”

Christine Counsell

Feelings of guilt immediately followed my reading of this tweet a few days ago. I dread to think how many times I’ve written that phrase, or similar, in a report, “Billy needs to do … to reach his full potential.” When I have written that, I’ve really been saying, “To achieve the best result he can based on what Billy is able to do now, and when these exams are, Billy needs to …”. But is this how it has been read by Billy and his parents? Or have they read it as, “To achieve his target grade Billy needs to …”? Do Billy and his parents see his target grade as his ‘potential’? I suspect that in many cases they do.

As a 14 year old I was given target GCSE grades. I can’t remember exactly when, and I can’t remember what most of them were, but I know that my target grade for English was B. I remember this, because I saw that grade and thought, “I can’t get an A grade in English, my teachers don’t believe that I can get an A grade in English.” I had no idea how that grade was generated or who had decided on it, but I really believed that it was the ceiling of my capabilities and it knocked my confidence in English. Thankfully, I had a teacher who did believe in me and supported me (even though she must have known I really didn’t enjoy English!) and I had parents who encouraged me to work hard and do my best regardless of the target grade. But this didn’t take away that voice in my mind which often told me, “it’s impossible for you to get an A grade in English.” That’s how I viewed that target grade.

This language of targets and potential is so ingrained into the thinking of so many teachers, students and parents, that it’s hard to get away from it, even if we profess to believe, as I do, that we’d be better off without target grades, and that flight paths are a thing reserved only for aeroplanes. 

Pondering this made me think more about target grades and other things in my practice which could be unintentionally giving students the idea that I have placed them in a particular box which limits what I believe they are capable of achieving, as well as what we can do to promote a different culture.

Giving target grades can stifle a student’s aspirations and plant seeds of self-doubt in their mind which are difficult to root out. I’ve seen students react to target grades in many different ways. Some, like me, see them as a limit and doubt their ability to do better even if they have aspirations to do so. Others see them as a target, and are satisfied as soon as they think they’ve reached that level, even if they could do better, they have no motivation to do so. A third group of students see their target as being so low that it’s not worth getting, and if that’s all they can achieve, why bother at all? Or there’s the opposite case when a student gets a high target which they see as being completely out of their grasp, stress and anxiety kicks in and these students buckle under the pressure of what may or may not have been realistic expectations. A very small minority see a low target and think, I can beat that – perhaps the target grade is a positive for them. My experience is that target grades more often do harm than good to individual students.

This year, as a school, we have stopped giving students grades for some pieces of assessed work, such as tests. The response of students to this has been interesting. Thinking of my Year 11 and 12 classes, they were initially incredulous at not being given a grade – how could they possibly know how they’re doing? But this opened up conversation in the classroom about the collective meaning of grades in public exams and how it’s impossible to grade an individual piece of work in a similarly meaningful way. 

In one of the most enlightening conversations with my Year 11 class, I asked why they were so bothered by not receiving a test grade. The answers were all along the lines of, “Because I don’t know if I’m doing well enough, or if I need to work harder.” or, “Because I don’t know if it’s worth me putting in more effort.”. When I explained that being 1% into the A grade boundary that I could have made up for this particular test would not translate to a guaranteed A grade in their exams, and pointed out that none of them had achieved 100%, so there was room for everyone to improve, they seemed to get the point and were more interested than previously in thinking about where they had made mistakes and what they could do to avoid them in the future. When I give feedback, I want students to be engaging with what it is in the curriculum they don’t know, and how they can improve, not whether or not they have reached a particular, ill-defined grade. The removal of grades from their assessed work has opened the door to more productive conversations.

With my Year 12 students the conversation followed a similar line but moved beyond this into broader questions about how they can engage with independent study. What resources and study strategies could they use to plug gaps in their own knowledge? How could they identify these gaps before the assessment? What are the best strategies for reviewing work and revising? How much more fruitful these conversations are than worrying about whether or not a target grade has been achieved.

Having reached the conclusion that target grades (and other similar tracking tools) can have a negative impact, how can we work to shift this culture and reach a point where students are more interested in how to improve than what grade they achieved? I offer a few thoughts from my experience which are by no means exhaustive, and whole blogs could, and have been written on all of these. I will just list a few key priorities:

• A shared understanding among staff so that a similar language and philosophy is applied across the school. Not grading individual pieces of assessed work has led to some of the most interesting education based conversations in the science staff office over the past half term as we have discussed the pros and cons of grading and reached a clearer consensus regarding the benefits of the change in school policy. 
• High expectations in the classroom – in terms of behaviour, quality of work, expecting all students to engage fully with the curriculum.
• Carefully planned, targeted feedback from assessments with plenty of opportunity for students to think about and practice those areas which need developing further – not just talking through the markscheme as I did for years. This can model to students how they can go about improving independently, as well as giving them the motivational boost of experiencing success in something they had previously found challenging.
• In conversations with students in the classroom and in communication with parents (parents’ evenings, reports etc.), focus feedback on specifics in the curriculum that students know/understand and what they can do to move forward. Try to steer the conversation away from questions like, “How can Amy get a grade A?”.

Do I really think I did wrong to write about fulfilling potential on students’ reports? Probably not, but in a culture so ingrained with the idea of targets and all the assumptions which surround them, I think I’d do better to focus on specific things that Billy can work on to improve and to ensure he is secure in as much of the curriculum as possible, this will enable him to develop a fuller understanding of the subject whatever grade he goes on to achieve.