Tell the Truth About Learning

Hello,

In my last post, "Grades: Education's Tug-Of-War" I wrote about the tension that emerges when we link grades to motivators—particularly behavioral ones. I ended with this:

Penalizing grades for behaviors unrelated to learning may seem like the only way to hold students accountable, but it comes at the cost of clarity, honesty, and long-term engagement. At the same time, separating behavior and learning feels like a risk in systems that equate compliance with success. That’s the tension. And it’s worth sitting with.

I still believe that. And yet, sitting with it has raised even more questions.

Yes, I talk a lot about engagement—and not just whether students are compliant, but whether they’re truly interested, even absorbed. But here’s the catch: even the “interested” level of engagement relies on external motivators. These are the students who do the work because they see value in it and because there’s something in it for them—a grade, a compliment, a GPA bump, a path to something bigger.

That’s not a failure. That’s human nature.

Because here's the truth: even with everything I know about engagement—even with years of research, experience, and work with educators across systems—I still struggle with how to decouple content knowledge from behavior. I know what best practice should look like. I can name the theories. I can sketch the frameworks. And still… in the day-to-day realities of schools, it’s messy.

Part of what makes it so hard is the persistent lack of engagement many students experience in school. When the choice is between non-compliance and compliance, compliance starts to feel like a win. And it often takes a steady stream of carrots and sticks to get us there.

It’s not that I want to use grades to incentivize things like turning in work or meeting deadlines. But in a world where motivation is low and disengagement is high, it’s easy to default to using grades as leverage. Because honestly? Sometimes that’s the only thing that seems to work.

So maybe the question isn’t how do we eliminate extrinsic motivation? Maybe it’s how do we shape those motivators in ways that support learning—without reducing grades to tools of control? Because right now, too many of our motivators are behavioral in nature: points off for lateness, bonus points for neatness, zeros for missing work. These tactics aren’t just motivating behavior—they’re grading it. And in doing so, they blur the line between what a student knows and how a student acts.

I keep circling back to this: what are grades really supposed to represent? And how do we make sure our answer reflects our values, not just our systems?

This tension is at the heart of the work. Not offering easy solutions, but sitting in the discomfort long enough to ask better questions.

• How do we honor students’ academic progress without ignoring the importance of work habits?

• How do we hold students accountable without reducing learning to compliance?

• How do we support engagement when intrinsic motivation isn't enough, but behavioral incentives feel like a trap?

Let’s keep sitting with that tension. Not to resolve it once and for all—but to better understand what this tension is asking of us.

While I don’t have perfect answers, I do know that changing how we grade means shifting our mindset.  It means recognizing that learning and behavior are not the same thing—and shouldn’t be assessed the same way.  It means designing systems that build skill, not just demand obedience. Grades should be a mirror of mastery—not a scoreboard of compliance. This kind of change is messy. It’s uncomfortable. It challenges the way we’ve always done things.

But it’s worth it.

Because when we grade with honesty and purpose, we send a message that learning matters. That students matter. Students deserve grades that reflect what they’ve learned—not how well they’ve learned to play the game. That who they are and what they know are not the same thing—and that both deserve our attention.

Let’s stop asking grades to do it all—and start asking them to do what they were meant to: tell the truth about learning.

~Heather

P.S. In was on a hunt for some new information on grading and stumbled across the Human Restoration Project podcast with my Catch of the Week, Joshua R. Eyler, Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. While I certainly recommend listening to the podcast, I also highly recommend buying Eyler's newest book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It. Eyler gets right to the heart of how grades are harmful and provides some innovative ways to address this work differently (ever heard of ungrading?). I'm really excited to read his first book now, How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching--because I can't wait to learn what he has to say about the learning process!

P.P.S. Please remember to...

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