On Grades
Should a school grade its students? It's valuable for a learner to see their progress, but traditional grading methods are designed for the benefit of the education system rather than the individual students. At Inner School, we take a learner-first approach to grading.
We don't give letter grades. The A-F system is a judgment against a set standard that demotivates students in several ways. Instead of learning out of personal curiosity, that independent motivation is supplanted by a desire to please or avoid shame. A true learner's goal is to be better today than yesterday, regardless of where they are. Setting a fixed bar diminishes the improvement of slower students and caps the ambition faster students to surpass that bar.
Instead, each subject has achievement milestones. These are skill tests that students take when they feel ready, and can retake as many times as needed. The goal is to cement that skill, not to make a single attempt and then move on independent the result. Students will progress through three milestones for each skill: learning (simple foundations), proficient (full understanding), and mastery (optional extra challenge). This skill tree is limitless--there is no need to stop at the boundary of a grade level curriculum
The goal is for each milestone to celebrate improvement at each learner's individual level. There is no expectation for every student to reach mastery in every subject, and there is also no grade-level cap on progress if the learner is ready to keep moving forward to new skills. As teachers encourage and support with praise for the work and the drive to keep going for every student, from D- to A+ level.
But how will I know how my learner is doing? We strongly prefer to focus assessment on work rather than on the individual, but we also understand that having grades to share may be needed externally (e.g. for applications to other schools). In addition to being able to see the skill milestones and assessments your student has completed, we will be able to convert these milestone achievements into a subject letter grade for each subject on request.