13: Could You Teach Without Grades?

This year, Starr Sackstein made a drastic change in her high school English and journalism classes: After years of feeling as if students cared more about their grades than they did about learning, she decided to stop giving grades altogether. In this interview, Starr talks to me about how she runs a no-grades classroom in a school that still requires traditional grading. She shares her strategies for helping students learn to self-reflect, describes how her teaching workload has changed, and talks about how throwing out grades has improved students' learning.