Someone's URSA Experience 2022

This week I worked further on the curriculum that I am building to better education for neurodivergent students. The main thing I looked at this week was grades and content. I had mentioned grades briefly in my last post, but I felt it needed more explanation and further examination on my part. I also want to cover more on how teachers should conduct class in a way that all students can follow along and how the new curriculum can cater to students at all levels so students who are at the top of the field can still be engaged in a challenging and fun way, while students who at lower levels of understanding can still learn and be engaged.

Let’s start with the grading aspect. I mentioned before that removing grades would be difficult for a couple of different reasons. For those reasons, the biggest issue with removing grading is assessing students in their understanding of the material. Seeing where students are in the content and showing how much they understand is very crucial to their education, but putting values on their understanding is the issue we see here with this process. A’s, B’s, and C’s are all passing, so why categorize them differently? There are already some schools that have removed the F grade, so why haven’t we removed the rest altogether? The main argument from people against this movement says that removing grades would result in lower expectations in classrooms and rigor in classrooms. This notion is ridiculous, seeing that with this new way of educating students, difficulty and rigor would be customizable in a sense, and students at all levels could still learn with that added difficulty to push them as needed. Another thing people bring up often with the cons of removing grades is that grading this way makes students responsible for their work and therefore their grades. With this thinking, the topic of risk is also brought up often, stating that without the risk of getting a low grade, effort in work will decrease and students will become lazy. This also is ridiculous, as there shouldn’t be risks when speaking about education. Students should not have to be afraid of school or anything having to do with school. As we know, learning happens in all sorts of ways and everyone learns differently and at different paces. Pushing grades on students is almost a sort of punishment for them if they do not learn as fast as other students, and with this mindset, it only pits students against each other makes learning a competition when it is not. This competitive attitude makes students feel as though they have to get an A or 100% on an assignment and to achieve that students feel the need to cheat. Eliminating the grading system would put an end to students feeling the need to cheat to get ahead. There are other pros and cons to this debate, but needless to say, abolishing this system will only help both neurodivergent students and neurotypical students alike.

Content in today’s schools is highly regulated. Most parts of education are controlled heavily by the government, locking teachers in core curriculums that simply just do not fit what students today need in education. To solve this, content should not be regulated, but the way of teaching should. Let me explain further. Teaching neurodivergent students requires teachers to adjust the format of lessons and be more clear and precise with how they teach. This should be the case for all classes. Teaching in a simplified format will help all students understand better, and for students that need the extra challenge/are more ahead in the topic, teachers can provide challenging questions or extra credit opportunities for prizes so students are pushed healthily. Making learning fun and enjoyable is also a crucial part of this new curriculum, and pushing students healthily and engagingly through positive reinforcement will only better students’ education. Negative reinforcement should be as removed as possible from this new curriculum, as associating school with something negative puts the competition aspect back in and also makes the student feel less than if they are told they are not good enough or are not as smart as others.

Next week I will officially build the first pieces of this curriculum, and as always, there will be more to come soon,

-Chloe