We Stopped Using Grades and You Should Too: A Catholic Manifesto for Ungrading
The Church Life Journal has published many articles reflecting on the cultural context in which the Church needs to bear witness to the Gospel and educate people. To mention a few examples from the recent past, Roberto De La Noval has written carefully about the challenges in teaching introduction to theology courses to today’s undergraduate students and proposed a way to overcome them. Jason King has espoused the benefits of Catholic education and what it takes to save its soul. Terence Sweeney has articulated what can make Catholic education distinctive, and Brendan McInerny has analyzed the tension between the technocratic paradigm and the Church’s view of education. We want to join the conversation by asking a question that is often overlooked. It is important, of course, to focus on the context in which we teach and on what we teach. Yet, how should we teach it? What pedagogical practices align with a Catholic vision of education? Which ones are detrimental to it, instead?
Traditional modes of grading—and the behaviorist presuppositions that inform them—do not help create a learning environment where students and teachers grow in their ability “to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments, and to develop a religious, moral, and social sense” (Gaudium et Spes §59). Thus, we have stopped using them and think you should too. We do not coerce participation in our course via grades. Instead, we ask students to name the course grade they want to work for, and then we commit to helping them do that work. We see this as an opportunity to move away from coercion to the vulnerability of fascination and freedom. This vulnerability is twofold: 1) the students become vulnerable by becoming more responsible for their own education, and 2) the professor becomes more vulnerable by partnering with students. The result is a way of teaching theology that is more appropriate to the current cultural moment, better for our students’ needs, and more conducive to our flourishing as teachers.
The Church’s Pedagogical Commitments
In the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Gravissimum Educationis, the council fathers asked Christian educators to be “endowed with an apostolic spirit,” to create “a special atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity,” and to “do all they can to stimulate their students to act for themselves” (§8). Furthermore, the declaration emphasized that Catholic education “promotes friendly relations and fosters a spirit of mutual understanding” between pupils of different talents and backgrounds (§5). All the post-Vatican II popes and numerous documents published by Vatican dicasteries have affirmed and expanded upon such commitments. Yet, our current pedagogical practices and teaching strategies do not foster an environment where the Church’s vision of education can be embodied.
Against Behaviorism
To explain why the way we assess students needs to change, we want to highlight the scholarship of Alfie Kohn, one of the leading critical voices against both clinical and pop behaviorism for the last forty years. In 1993, he published his most influential work, Punished By Rewards, where he addresses the ubiquity of behaviorism in education, parenting, and management. In all three domains, Kohn identifies an unconscious acceptance of the supposed insight that people behave and learn best when coerced to do so through external rewards and punishments. Consulting an array of psychological research, Kohn examines whether it is true that external rewards and punishments are suitable methods of securing the behaviors we want from others. According to that research, we can demonstrate that such rewards and punishments are counterproductive.
Kohn speaks directly to issues intimately related to the relationship between coercion and fascination. According to Kohn’s research, external rewards, like the personal pan pizzas of the “Book It!” program and grades, do in fact coerce students to engage in the behaviors attached to them. There is no question that external rewards are effective. The problem is that while such rewards coerce effectively, they simultaneously undermine both the student’s internal motivation and learning. In other words, external rewards reduce both desire for and contact with truth. And in so doing, they compromise the fascination essential for the adventure of education.
Kohn offers five causal explanations for why external rewards are counterproductive. First, rewards punish because they are methods of controlling rather than dialoguing with people. Second, rewards increase competition, which may increase the agency of those who “win” but can also diminish the agency of those who do not. Neither does competition contribute to cooperation. Third, rewards enable us to bypass the difficult work of discovering why a behavior or outcome is occurring or not. Fourth, rewards discourage recipients from taking risks. Finally, and most dismally, rewards diminish internal, native interest in the behavior or outcome being rewarded.[1]
Within such a pedagogical paradigm, the Church’s commitment to forming students who “act for themselves” in the pursuit of truth becomes less and less intelligible, for external rewards create students who only act for treats. Moreover, the Church’s commitment to cultivating “communion in learning, holy intercourse, habit of life, [and] interchange of affection” (Veritatis Gaudium §4c) among teachers and students becomes optional fluff rather than the essential condition for pursuing the proper ends of education. Such a state of affairs would be benign enough if external rewards were only used in extracurricular experiments like the “Book-It!” program. However, U.S. education is saturated with external rewards, from stickers in elementary school to grades and ranks in upper levels of schooling, college included.
From Kohn’s perspective, the ubiquity of external rewards helps us understand why so many students come to loathe school. Those of us teaching in colleges and universities can verify this loathing. Many of our students arrive already exhausted and frustrated. We expect them to study from a deep well of internal motivation. But we find that many of them are slaves, simply waiting to be told what to do next. They are not the protagonists in their education. They do not seem like free, responsible, self-possessed persons who act for themselves. And so, they also struggle to contribute to the communion necessary for pursuing truth together. From a Catholic perspective, the glory of their dignity as knowers and lovers is both diminished and obscured. Thus, for our students, the great adventure of education often has nothing to do with liberation and everything to do with yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly cycles of surveillance and control. In our experience, many of them can actually recognize that this loathsome situation is the product of a specific type of education. In other words, this situation is not inevitable but is the product of philosophically and anthropologically motivated choices. According to Kohn’s research, behaviorism is the most likely culprit.
From Coercion To Fascination: Education As Risk
Moving away from coercion to rediscover the connection between education and fascination as Kohn teaches is necessary in all ages. Yet, it is especially necessary today. We live amidst what Pope Francis calls an “epochal change,”[2] a moment in which “what is in crisis is a whole way of understanding reality and of understanding ourselves.”[3] This profound crisis causes many to feel like people who have endured a shipwreck that has left us “in difficult times of disenchantment, postmodernity, and changes.”[4] Many of the certainties that used to sustain our common life are gone, and even those that remain are being radically questioned.[5] “According to some,” Francis says quoting John Paul II, “the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral.”[6] In these circumstances, as one of us previously argued in this journal, Christianity cannot simply rely on broader cultural assumptions and practices to be handed on to future generations nor expect that students may be somehow forced into appreciating the truth of the Christian proposal.
In this day and age, the Church must ground her witness in a renewed commitment to people’s authentic freedom. Men and women today need to be accompanied in a process of discernment,[7] and Christian educators must “equip them with tools to do so well” (Christus Vivit §46). Mentors should nurture the seeds of faith “without expecting to immediately see the fruits of the work of the Holy Spirit” (Christus Vivit §46). In fact, when a person accompanies another in the journey of faith, she “does not substitute the Lord [and] does not do the work in the place of the person accompanied.”[8] Instead, education is always a form of accompaniment, whereby a mentor walks alongside others while “encouraging them to interpret what is stirring in their heart, the quintessential place where the Lord speaks.”[9]
Unfortunately, such interior freedom on the part of both teachers and students does not come naturally. Francis reflects on Dostoyevsky and his parable of the “Grand Inquisitor.” In it, Jesus secretly returns to the earth, and the inquisitor reproaches him for having given freedom to men and women.[10] Such an attitude of suspicion against freedom can become part of the Church’s life and educational institutions as well. How can Christian teachers avoid such enmity against the adventure of freedom while also providing a formation that can stand up to the challenges we face in the epochal change we live in?
To answer the question above, we turn to the theology of education of Luigi Giussani, a prolific Italian theologian and educator. According to Giussani,[11] an authentic Christian education must propose the Church’s tradition—the truths that the Church has received and professes—in an effective and adequate way.[12] To teach people about the Christian tradition is to offer them a working hypothesis, that is, a hypothesis about the ultimate meaning of things or the fulfillment and destiny towards which human beings strive. But it is not enough to introduce people to such a meaning. Instead, an authentic education must seek to empower them to become certain about the truths it proposes.[13] It cannot be a blind imposition but must encourage a journey toward personal certainty.[14] Ultimately, to become convinced of the Christian truths means to investigate them and make them one’s own, that is, to compare them with the heart—the person’s authentic human nature, namely, the desire for truth, goodness, and beauty that God has placed at the core of who we are. We become certain of the truths the Christian tradition offers us as a working hypothesis by discovering whether they correspond to our authentic yearning for fulfillment.[15]
Giussani argues that, at times, the Church has not taken the need for people to investigate and discover the truth of the Christian tradition seriously enough. The Church has feared it. To educate in an authentic way, though, more is needed than to propose with clarity the meaning of things and give witness to the truths of the Christian tradition in a convincing way. People need to verify what is offered to them and discover its truth, and such a discovery, ultimately, is only made possible by the personal initiative of the person. Thus, theological education is supremely interested in teaching people to compare themselves and their lives to the hypothesis that it offers so that they might discover whether it stands up to the demands of their hearts and their existence. True education constantly insists on the personal responsibility that students have to commit themselves to such a journey of discernment and discovery.[16] Thus, theological education needs to let the person take more and more responsibility for her choice in front of the ideals it proposes.
In light of all the above, Giussani argues that theological education must love freedom to the point of betting everything on it. Saint Paul invited all Christians to live “the truth in love” (Eph 4:15), that is, to come to embrace the Christian event with one’s whole self—with our whole heart, whole being, and whole strength (Deut 6:5). In time, the hearts of Christians should burn with the desire to let Christ become the totality of existence, to allow the love for him to become the person’s single desire. In fact, Giussani describes the life of a Christian by quoting from Guardini: “In the experience of a great love everything becomes an event,”[17] that is, in light of Christ and the love for him, everything becomes pregnant with meaning and filled with hope.[18] Faith is ultimately inconceivable without the vibration of such an experience of love for Christ in the present.[19] Obviously, the Christian educator cannot force such an event to happen in the lives of the people she accompanies.
Instead, all Christian educational proposals are rooted in charity, that is, a love for the other and her destiny rooted in one’s relationship with God.[20] Furthermore, Christian educators must be humble. Their attempts are sustained by the hope that people might experience a grace-filled encounter with something beyond the educator’s power and strength.[21] In summary, education requires respect, a sense of fear and trembling for the mystery that dwells in the other person. Such a sense of reverence is essential because another person’s life and destiny are sacred and beyond one’s capacity to possess or fulfill.[22] Educators accompany people to a reality that is greater than them. They must love the persons entrusted to them and their freedom, trusting that the “unpredictable ways that human freedom opens in the dialogue”[23] with reality and the mystery of God might lead people to their fulfillment and destiny. In the end, Christianity proclaims that the supreme law of all human relationships is charity—gratuitous and complete love for the person and, thus, love for her freedom.[24]
Our contention is that the behaviorist pedagogy that grips our imagination is unsuited to providing such a thick formation in which the person’s freedom is fully engaged and an authentic discovery of the truth of Christianity is made possible.
What pedagogical strategies can help us embody the theological commitments we espoused? How do we move away from the behaviorist practices currently gripping our imagination?
Ungrading
As a result of our encounter with Kohn and his followers, we have both embarked on our own experiments with ungrading.[25] We have adopted a system wherein, at the beginning of each semester, the students sign an agreement expressing the grade they want to achieve in our courses. Through this agreement, the professor promises to help the students reach the level of learning they say they want to attain. For their part, the students promise to demonstrate that their learning matches their desired outcome by choosing and submitting different forms of work that the professor can assess. If the students’ work does not exhibit the learning they desire, the professor gives them extensive feedback, engages in various forms of collaboration to help them improve their understanding, and allows them to submit new work to display their knowledge again.
So, instead of ambiguous grades and defensive comments that shut down dialogue, the students and the professor enter a cycle of revisions in which feedback and collaboration are essential to the students’ achievement. Students can continue working and resubmitting their assignments until the professor establishes that they demonstrate the learning the students want to achieve in the class. Alternatively, the students may decide that they are satisfied with the learning and grade they have gained, even if it does not match the goal they set for themselves at the beginning. In some cases, the professor realizes that the learning outcome students selected in the agreement is, for various reasons, out of reach and thus works with each individual to find a suitable path.
This method of eliminating external rewards has several strengths but also poses some challenges. Let us start by highlighting the challenges. First, this method is time-consuming. Grade agreements put pressure on professors to attend to students’ individual progress and needs and often require students to revise their assignments after the first submission. Second, this method sometimes necessitates uncomfortable conversations with students who—for whatever reason—do not seem capable of working at that level they set as a goal for themselves, no matter how many chances they get. Third, it places a special responsibility on students to work independently from hard-set deadlines enforced by penalizing mechanisms. Fourth, it can be challenging to use in large seated classes and fast-paced online courses where creating a personal rapport with each student is more difficult. Finally, the method relies on a level of dialogue and personal initiative that might pose unique challenges to some neurodivergent students.
But most of these challenges are the shadow side of this method’s strengths. The feedback method we use encourages deeper learning, facilitates meaningful interaction between students and their professor, and puts agency back where it belongs, namely, into the student’s hands. Instead of wondering whether they can measure up to their professor’s mysterious expectations, the students begin the semester knowing their professor is committed to their success. As a result, the students are invited to approach their education as their education rather than as a contest or an ordeal imposed on them by an external, punitive force. They are not anonymous members of a group. They are protagonists in a journey of learning in which professors play the role of stewards and companions rather than enforcers and guards.
Furthermore, this method allows for refreshing honesty. Professors can be forthcoming about students’ work in a way that does not threaten or discourage them. It is one thing to say, “This is not an A.” It is another thing to say, “Given your desired learning outcome, let us try again!” Similarly, students are invited to be honest about their own work. If they are not working at an A-level but have opportunities and resources to help them do so, then they have to be candid about what is holding them back, be it a lack of effort or other circumstances (family, work, health, etc.) that are making it difficult for them to work effectively. Finally, the method encourages students who are in our classes solely because they fulfill the general education requirements. Such students may lack the motivation to take ownership of their education. But our method has proven provocative and energizing for this type of student. In contrast to traditional methods of grading, we find that our method is far more conducive to creating a community of learners who can pursue the truth in love.
Conclusion
To conclude, our pedagogy is rooted in two interconnected theological commitments. First, we follow Pope Francis’ frequent affirmation that, in a time like ours when faith is no longer an evident presupposition of social life, the Church must make room for the adventure of freedom. People need to be empowered to truly explore their lives and faith to move past a mere formal certainty about their calling into a true conviction born out of careful discernment.
Second, we learn from the theology of Luigi Giussani, who conceived of education as taking a risk, namely, the risk that teachers and students accept of discovering together whether and how the Christian proposal stands up to the full depth of the person’s reason and freedom. Informed by these commitments, we have argued that ungrading methods such as the grade agreements we use in our classes increase the vulnerability to wonder, help teachers and students alike become greater protagonists in the journey of learning, and thus foster everyone’s flourishing.
Overall, we are convinced and inspired by what Giussani wrote in The Risk of Education:
A complete autonomist education leaves the young person a prisoner of her tastes and instincts, thus void of any way to mature. But an education marked by fear that the young person will face the world—an education exclusively set on protecting a young person from the impact with reality—turns her into someone who lacks personality in the relationship with reality or is rebellious and unbalanced. Sadly, we face many educators in families and schools whose supreme goal seems to be to avoid risking anything. However, the educational method that is more capable of pursuing the good is not based upon fleeing reality to affirm an idea of the good that is separate from it. It is instead a method . . . that engages the world, that is, the entire reality. We could call it a risky encounter, or better, a challenging encounter—an encounter that requires our total commitment.[26]
We have stopped using traditional grades to take the risk of educating. Will you join us?
[1] Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards, 49-67 and 68-95. Kohn devotes an entire chapter to the fifth reason that rewards fail: the destruction of a person’s fascination. He calls this the “most tragic single consequence of applied behaviorism” (68).
[2] Francis, “Meeting with the Participants in the Fifth Convention of the Italian Church,” November 10, 2015.
[3] Jorge M. Bergoglio, Educar: Exigencia Y Pasión (Buenos Aires: Editorial Claretiana, 2006), 29. Translation is ours.
[4] Jorge M. Bergoglio, Education for Choosing Life: Proposals for Difficult Times (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2014), 85.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Fides et Ratio §91, quoted in Francesco, Nei Tuoi Occhi È la Mia Parola: Omelie e Discorsi di Buenos Aires, 1999-2013 (Milano: Rizzoli, 2016), 95.
[7] For more on the topic, see the cycle of catechesis on discernment Francis preached during his Wednesday General Audiences between August 31, 2022 and January 4, 2023.
[8] Francis, “Spiritual Accompaniment,” General Audience, January 4, 2023.
[9] Francis, “Spiritual Accompaniment,” General Audience, January 4, 2023.
[10] Francis, “Address to the Slovakian Bishops, Priests, Religious, and Seminarians,” September 13, 2021.
[11] The following paragraphs will follow the arguments Giussani developed in his book Il Rischio Educativo (Milano: Rizzoli, 2014). Please note that we relied on the original Italian text and translated it on our own. There is also a published English translation of the complete text that readers can refer to, namely, The Risk of Education (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). In the footnotes, the pagination of the English translation will follow the Italian one in parenthetical. Also, similar reflections are present in other parts of Giussani’s very extensive body of work which comprises more than sixty volumes and numerous essays and reflections (with more still unpublished). For a complete bibliography, please see the official archive of Giussani’s work at https://www.scritti.luigigiussani.org/.
[12] While Giussani is especially interested in the communication of the Christian tradition, what he says is applicable more broadly. All the great discoveries and new creations of human ingenuity depend upon first becoming familiar with a tradition. In fact, only the person who is first able to listen to and understand what has been entrusted to her by others can grow in maturity and be able to evaluate what she received (Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 69 (29)).
[13] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 67 (27).
[14] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 70 (30).
[15] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 18 (xxix-xxx).
[16] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 88 (46-7).
[17] Romano Guardini, L’Essenza del Cristianesimo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1981), 12.
[18] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 24 (xxxv).
[19] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 25 (xxxv). We want to highlight that neither Giussani nor we want to claim that the classroom by itself is the place where such a life transforming experience may take place. Instead, to become completely certain of the ideal proposed to them, people need to be helped in the environment where they live. If the ideal does not stand up to the needs and questions that the surrounding culture elicits, people will inevitably find themselves unconvinced by it (Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 94-5 (52-3)). Furthermore, people need a community of faith that invests their whole lives (Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 96-7 (54-5)). Finally, Christian educators need to find ways to propose the commitments they want to transmit in such a way that they invest people’s free time, that is, the moment in which following an ideal is transformed into authentic fascination rather than simply remaining a duty (Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 98 (56)).
[20] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 124 (81).
[21] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 105-6 (63).
[22] Luigi Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo: Come Creazione di Personalità e di Storia (Torino: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1995), 142. We are referring to this other, earlier edition of Il Rischio Educativo because this section was omitted in the later one we used throughout. This earlier edition was published in English as The Risk of Education (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001), 125.
[23] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 105 (63).
[24] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 124 (81).
[25] Educators have experimented with different ways to limit the use of grades in the classroom and have done so for various reasons, spanning from pedagogical concerns to issues of fairness and racial equality. While our approach to ungrading is distinctively theological, we know and have learned from such an ongoing conversation in the teaching community. For an overview, see Susan D. Blum (ed.), Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning and What to Do Instead (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2020).
[26] Giussani, Il Rischio Educativo, 106 (63-4).