Pat Gere education, learning, teaching

The last week of school and grading gets a failing grade

Assigned work and grading detracts from life-long learning.

It’s the second last Wednesday of the school year. My Grade 8 granddaughter is musing that tomorrow is the last day her teacher will accept assignments. “What about any work we do in the last week. How does it count?” Such a pertinent question! 

“How does it count?” When schooling is about doing what you’re told to do, in the way you’re told to do it, in order to be told how well you have done, in order to get a grade, it fails even if students get ‘A’s.

Image AI generated

Learning for the sake of learning; learning how to learn and discern, being engaged, being curious. These are the attributes humans need to thrive in today’s world. A thirst to learn, discern and act. A wonderment and a belief that we have a role to play in this world of ours.

Our curriculum-centred, teacher-directed, graded schooling does not encourage these attributes; in fact, it squashes them.

Several years ago, the parent of a second grade student named Meg engaged me, the principal of an independent K – 8 school, in a quick conversation on the sidewalk after morning drop-off and before rushing onto her job.  “I thought this school didn’t assign homework.”

She was correct. Our school did not assign students homework except if a student had a special need where a small amount of repetition at home would help, such as practicing math facts for 5 minutes in the car on the way to school. We did assign parents ‘homework’. We asked parents to read daily with their children. We asked them to spend time with their children doing something together that they both enjoyed like going for a bike ride, or something that needed doing like making a meal. Driving to an activity or watching a screen didn’t count!

Why was she asking? Meg’s mom explained that the previous night she had found a book about animals, a pencil and some papers where Meg had made notes – in Meg’s bed, where she had obviously fallen asleep while working. Why hadn’t she been told that Meg had an assignment due? She and her husband would have been happy to help her complete the work. I said I’d look into it for her.

Image AI generated

Well, it turns out there was no assignment, there was no homework. Meg had become interested in marsupials and had decided to do a project. School ended for the day but Meg wasn’t done so she took the book and her notes home. Meg didn’t ask her teacher; she just assumed that her exploration, her work, could continue at home. Why not?  Meg wanted to know more and didn’t see the need of waiting for school. This was her learning. Meg believed it could take place anywhere, whenever she had time, even in bed before falling asleep.

Schooling would do a much better job of educating youth if the system supported this type of learning – student-driven, curiosity-driven, I-can’t-wait-to-find-out driven!

Superintendents, principals, teachers, and most parents expect work to be assigned and assessed. As a result, the last weeks of school are often filled with entertainment designed to keep students quiet as teachers need time to receive work, mark it, write up report cards and have those reviewed. This is a systemic problem, the system encourages completion of assignments for the sake of getting a good mark rather than encouraging learning for learning’s sake.

But how will we know how well students are doing if we don’t grade? How about keeping track of mastery? This is what we did in Meg’s school. We didn’t give grades. We did keep careful weekly records of what each student had been introduced to, was working on and had mastered. This was essential for us because our teaching was individualized even though we had classes of 25 to 30 students. It all worked because we relied on students’ natural desire to be challenged and we tailored our interactions to their interests, abilities and needs. We could say what a student could do well, what they were working on and what they were just being introduced to in any week of the year. We had no need to give them a grade to be able to discuss who they were as a learner and where they were on that journey.

Think about it. We don’t give toddlers marks for learning to walk or talk. We support each toddler where they are with encouragement, support and joint celebration of their accomplishments. We don’t compare or grade them and yet they all become accomplished walkers and talkers unless there is some disability and even then they are driven to achieve these skills in whatever way we can help make possible.

A non-graded schooling model based on students initiating their learning for inherent joy and accomplishment would lead to a much different learning culture than the one that is most common now. The last weeks of school would have as much learning value as all the other weeks of school. And, as Meg demonstrated, learning would more likely continue outside of school, in the evenings, on weekends, and even over the summer break.

Instead of learning only in and for school, youth should be groomed to learn for life. Then our education system would be much more likely to meet today’s ever changing needs. A thirst to learn, discern and act – here are some Canadian, Indigenous and international programs that are stepping into this possibility and some organizations and individuals who are encouraging it.

Pat Gere education

Choosing an Education Paradigm: Curriculum-Centered or Learner-Centered?

By Pat Gere

First let me say that I’m always apprehensive when I’m looking at anything from an either-or mind set. It’s a prevalent mindset in my Western culture and can miss so many nuances – nuances that matter deeply, like the culling and then return of wolves to Yellowstone and the deep impacts each had. Life is more like an ecological system with deep, intricate patterns than it is a grocery aisle where you pick this or that. Still either-or can help us have clarity in choosing. Do we really want the cinnamon, sugar-coated ready-to-pour-and-eat cereal with ingredients we can’t pronounce or should we choose the rolled oats – simple ingredient and greater flexibility but more time intensive?

Our current educational system is built on a curriculum-centered model. This made sense when it began in North America. Youth spent most of their time at home helping their parents on a farm, in a small store or business enterprise, or at home with a big family. Schooling was a limited part of children’s lives, dedicated to reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Strict discipline kept everyone in line.

Now youth spend less and less time with their parents and in their parents’ lives, and schooling has taken on a greater and greater role in their growth and development. But the model hasn’t changed to accommodate that. There is more curriculum – history, geography, sciences, second languages, IT, etc. There are more add-ons – values of the month and extracurricular clubs and sports but the model of curriculum centricity has not changed.

The result is the type of classroom I described in my last post – sage on the stage, do what you’re told, when you’re told; get as many ‘A’s’ as possible; a scarcity mentality where only one can be best. It is not an efficient way to learn, or to teach. It does not provide the non-intellectual skills that humans need to exist together on this planet.

There are significant, troubling outcomes of curriculum-based education in today’s world. Youth who know how to use YouTube and ChatGPT but don’t know how to care for themselves, so much so that several universities are adding courses to help youth learn basic practical life skills such as how to shop and cook for themselves, do laundry, manage finances. (‘Adulting 101′ programs help Gen Z catch up on key life skills, CBC The Current, May 24, 2025) Now this isn’t all schooling’s fault. ‘Gentle parenting’ and protection bears a part but schooling takes up more of a young person’s time and energy and being curriculum centred does not help fill in the gaps.

Also, curriculum-centered education keeps young people with their age mates for the most part, so young people spend less time than previously with different ages. There are fewer older or younger siblings and sibling friends to hang out with, less time with a new baby or toddler, fewer ‘old folks’ at home or in the community. In fact, less time in community at all. Again, not a fault of the schooling but these are experiences young people used to have but don’t have now, that a different, more flexible type of schooling might help address.

And even if a teacher in this curriculum-centered system saw and wanted to respond to young people’s needs, they rarely have been prepared by their own schooling to do so. The credentials required for teaching focus on teaching curriculum, classroom management, navigating the profession of teaching but, at least in Ontario, there is no requirement to learn about human development – the physical, intellectual, emotional and social characteristics that humans have at different stages. How can a teacher respond to the missing pieces of their students’ lives if they don’t know what they have to work with?

One growing alternative to curriculum-centered education is learner-centered programs. The curriculum still exists in learner-centered programs. These are not do whatever you want programs, but programs that take as a focus the learner and the environments that the learner is a part of – the natural world, their physical location, their community, From that focus comes a spark, an activity that engages and enlivens the learners so that they learn curriculum from their deep, innate drive to become competent humans. Since learner-centered education responds to the needs of learners and the resources available in their communities, it embodies more opportunities to respond to the complexities that make up our human life.

More and more we humans are becoming aware of our place in the world. We are part of a complex system, a complex system of complex systems. We have enormous power and if we hope to survive we must deeply understand and appreciate the complexity of the systems we impact, and we impact everything, all the time. We must also have a sense of how this power in embodied in ourselves and our fellow humans so we don’t become overwhelmed, distraught and disengage.

Climate change, wars, extinctions – we humans have created disasters with our power but we also have enormous opportunity to prepare our young to handle power and create positive change. It exists in the special human power of adaptation. Each human generation adapts to the world that exists around it, to the culture and world that exists around the infant/child as they grow, to the child rearing practices we use, and to the education system they experience. Today’s world needs an education system that takes as its basis not the curriculum to be taught but the learner and the ecosystem that that learner is to be a part of. An education system that can do more – by responding to the individual and by layering the teaching of curriculum with ways of being in the world and with one another. A system that is flexible to the times and the individual learners so that we, humanity, can maximize the gifts each individual brings to create the ecosystems that sustain us and the world of which we are an integral part.

We’ve seen changes in schooling come and go: open classrooms, phonics, whole language, rote math, new math, new curriculums. What we need is a deeper, more all-encompassing change, a change in underlying assumptions and goals, a change in paradigm away from curriculum-centered to a more responsive model. A model that capitalizes on the fact that how we educate is as important as the curriculum we teach; a model that recognizes that we learn more deeply through experience than mere instruction. We must educate our young people so they know who they are and how to care for themselves; so they value the richness of community and society; so they understand the importance of their roles as citizens, world citizens; the importance of their best selves to the future.

Take a look at some alternative models including a brief overview of Montessori education.

Just adding skim milk to our processed cereal is not going to create the change we need. It’s time for a new education, starting with the basic foundations of human development and societal needs.  It’s time for a paradigm shift and perhaps learner-centered programs are leading the way.

Pat Gere Uncategorized

Active Hope for Education: Creating a Better Future

Fortified by tea and a desire to get on with my day, I open the national and local websites daily. Political, ecological and financial crises vie with homelessness, drug use, petty crime and senseless acts of violence. I’m tempted to catastrophize or simply turn away but I really don’t do well with hopelessness. Who does? Instead, I’ve chosen the strategy recommended in Active Hope, by Joanna Marcy and Chris Johnstone, of choosing something I can do, no matter how likely it is to succeed. Following the news with action, however small and uncertain, lightens my steps and my heart. For me, that action is related to education and to partnering with others to understand what role education can play in creating a better future.

Humans have a long developmental period, from birth to age 18 or even 24, longer than any other organism on earth. This allows humans to adapt to surrounding conditions rather than rely on instinct alone. I’ve been on a pedagogical journey for over fifty years. I am certain that the way we educate is just as important as curriculum; that how children and youth interact with the world, one another and society as they grow and develop is deeply connected to who they will be as adults and the world they will create. 

Our current child rearing norm is for children to be in institutional care (childcare or school) from a very young age, for at least thirty hours a week for most weeks of the year. What an amazing opportunity!

What if we stepped back from the systems we have and considered the situation anew? Who do we know children and youth to be? How do they naturally develop? What do we think the world will need from them as adults? . . . I wonder what pedagogy would arise?

Here’s what we have: Children segregated by age, with a change of classmates and teacher each year. A teacher giving lessons, preferably very entertaining ones. A culture of conformity, of doing tasks at a time dictated by the teacher (math time, spelling period). A detailed, year-by-year curriculum that a student moves along regardless of mastery. Testing to demonstrate the effectiveness of the teachers and schools as well as the academic level of the students.

This paradigm can reward conformity; value being best and undervalue doing your best; undermine the perseverance that comes seeing failure as a natural part of learning; encourage individual success over offering and accepting assistance. Teachers do their best to support students individually and to develop cooperation and exploration, but they are hampered by a system that was designed to do neither.

Maybe what we envision will be similar to what we have now but maybe not. There are different pedagogies and innovations in use now that may point a way forward. Perhaps there are possibilities that haven’t yet been dreamt. As difficult as it is to look beyond the current pedagogy, I believe it is possible and that is my active hope.

The website Convening Education Change is this hope materialized, an opportunity to challenge our thinking, share what is being done, and offer opportunities for dialogue and action.

If this resonates with you I hope you’ll drop by and join the conversation.