Because of Pierrepont School’s mission to connect engaged students with deeply knowledgeable teachers, it has always been true that we would not use grades, rankings, or other similar means to assess student work or student standing. There are some key values of Pierrepont School that grading systems (including more progressive models of grading) run counter to.
In our approach to the work of our classes, we are process oriented rather than product oriented.
- Students are willing to take risks and take on ambitious challenges. We teach key skills, ensuring that students build solid foundations in reading, writing, math, movement, reasoning, and more. At the same time we can show them the horizons they are heading towards by providing them with ambitious work that causes them to reach towards something still out of their grasp, transforming curiosity into inquiry and whetting that intellectual and creative appetite. Our process-oriented approach encourages risk-taking. We value the flash of insight that needs refinement, the experiment that doesn’t quite succeed but teaches us something, the race almost won. Our written reports allow us to describe how students take on work that we design to be deliberately challenging. We can be explicit and clear about how we value those risks and moments of authentic effort in our reports.
- Our written assessments don’t create ceilings; grades do. If you are a bright and capacious student, an A+ might tell you where to stop. (You’re done. You’ve reached the end.) We want something different for children. We want there to be no ceiling. We want there always to be a horizon for our students.
- We are realistic that students grow and develop unevenly. If you look at the bud scales of a long branch or the rings of a massive tree, there are legible signs of the seasons of more and less growth. This is the nature of growing things. Students are on a long journey and the cycles of an academic year don’t always represent or align with the rising tide of growth in a child’s life. Writing assessments allows us to attend to the process of that growth in a way that is honest and realistic.
- There’s room to find playfulness and joy in the work. Play and experimentation are essential elements of innovation and social community building. Being process-oriented rather than product-oriented encourages that side of student development and encourages teachers to make space for how playful ideas can deepen the work rather than be an escape from it. This requires a responsive environment that cares about the quality of the process of learning.
- Teachers can make full use of their expertise. Our model not only allows students to explore, it encourages teachers to be responsive as well. We believe that all students should be active, creative members of their classes. Teachers offer material and curricular content to our students, but the questions students ask, the conclusions they come to, the experiments they run all enhance and enrich what that material is. We hire people deeply steeped in their fields so they can hear the sophistication in a six-year old’s question and know all the points on the horizon where that question leads.