Effective Instructional Practices for Educators Working with Students Afflicted with Bipolar Disorder

By Anthony L. Hubbard

Despite the advances in designing instructions for students with learning disabilities, a lot of educators across the country still face significant challenges in addressing the needs of students who suffer from behavioral and emotional disorders. To add to this existing conundrum, there are a lot of students exhibiting bipolar characteristics who remain undiagnosed. Despite the existing federal mandates to better integrate disabled students with their peers, the plight of educators has not been addressed sufficiently. Let us take a closer look at the classroom characteristics of bipolar disorder.

·      Impact on cognitive and academic functioning – Adolescents and children with bipolar disorder struggle in the classroom with regards to their cognitive functioning and academic achievement. There have been a lot of studies exploring neurocognitive impairments in students with bipolar disorder. It has been found that these students score more on their verbal measures than on their spatial-visual measures, suggesting that they have difficulties with math and decoding of nonverbal social cues. Studies have also shown that students with bipolar disorder are impaired in verbal memory, executive functions, self-monitoring, systematic problem-solving, planning, set-shifting/inhibition, and spatio-visual tasks. 

·       Impact on social functioning – Studies have shown that students with bipolar disorder tend to have few friends. Children suffering from this condition have also reported a lot of difficulties with their peers, and parental reports have more or less confirmed these difficulties. In one of the studies, teachers reported that children in the age group of 8 to 11 had moderate to severe difficulties with interpersonal skills, antisocial behavior, and self-management. They were also reported to exhibit higher levels of aggression that their peers.

Classroom accommodations

Students who have bipolar disorder can benefit a lot from environments that reduce distractions and help them in organizing and attending to tasks. Here are a few helpful tips.

·      Frequent fluctuations in energy and mood – Make sure that the instruction and scheduling you provide allow for flexibility. Minimize the surprises and distractions, and maintain a stable environment with consistent expectations. It will provide the students with predictability and structure, and reduce the level of undesirable reactivity to the instructional demands.

·      Decreased stamina and low tolerance – Pay attention to the characteristics of agitation, fatigue, tolerance, and frustration levels that can magnify the bipolar symptoms. Modify the instructional pace, opportunities to practice, activity level, work demands, and the students’ degree of interaction with their peers.

·      Non-compliance and irritability due to rapid mood cycling – Provide your students with additional time to assimilate and practice academic skills. Use strategies like “big ideas” and categorization, graphic organizers, concept mapping, and guided notes.

·      Irritability and anxiety – Make a picture schedule of the sequence of activities that the student has to go through during the day. It will help you to preplan better. If there are going to be any changes in the daily activities or the classroom environment, make sure that you give your student advanced notice. Develop a “down time” plan for the unstructured periods in a day.

·       Regulating emotion and performance – Teach your students to develop long and short term goals. Use visual organizers and daily planners, assignment completion checklists, to-do lists and provide more feedback. If there is a manic episode, assist students in taking up more realistic projects and extracurricular activities. Work with their parents to develop a more structured and consistent routine across their school and home environments.

Social and behavioral management accommodations

While medication has known to assist students in controlling their behavior, they are reactive to fluctuations in their impulses, moods, and the surrounding environmental stimuli. Here are a few strategies to help them manage their behavior.

·       Staff knowledge and response

o   Maintain calm, positive, patient, firm, encouraging, and consistent interactions with the students

o   Educate the school personnel about the disorder

o   Facilitate long-term changes to their lifestyle through positive, proactive, and functional interventions and strategies

o   Ensure that there is a “safe” adult that the student may seek out when he/she is feeling overwhelmed

·       Behavioral/social, vocational, and academic deficits

o   Design interventions to address the skill deficits that result from the disorder

o   Foster an inclusive environment in the classroom through open discussion, peer mediation, and support. Protect the students from rejection or ridicule and set the occasion for collaborative, positive working relationships.

o   Include the students in more social skills groups, and increase their lunch and playground time supervision, so that you can avert any problems during those times

o   Identify the possible triggers that precede loss of control

o   Allow the students to take walks or breaks when they become frustrated by the academic or social demands

o   Have a game plan for managing crises, explicit instructions for managing unsafe behavior, backup plans if the safe place does not work, and recovery procedures for the people involved in the crisis. 

Most of the children who are diagnosed with bipolar disorder are prescribed medication to address their symptoms and improve their functioning. They undoubtedly result in a number of side effects. Antidepressants and mood stabilizers can impact their attention and focus, cognitive functioning, alertness, learning, cognitive functioning, stamina, and memory. It also causes a lot of physical side effects like increased thirst and frequent urination, not to mention rebound effects like weepiness, irritability, and hyperactivity. Instructors need to understand all possible side-effects and work with parents and medical professionals to determine whether their in-school medication schedule must be adjusted.

Sources:

http://www.schoolbehavior.com/Files/tips_mood.pdf

http://ibpf.org/article/accommodations-students-bipolar-disorder-and-related-disabilities

http://www.helpguide.org/articles/bipolar-disorder/helping-a-loved-one-with-bipolar-disorder.htm

http://www.bphope.com/kids-children-teens/bipolar-college-success/

How Can Educators Create an Effective Connected Classroom?

A connected classroom is a smart-learning environment that is open to the outside world. With this approach, students get to learn from real-life situations and connect with other learners across the globe. With the widespread use of internet and web 2.0 technologies, creating connected classrooms has become much easier. Before we look at the web tools that you can use to open the classroom doors to a global audience, let us look at some of the academic advantages of adopting such an approach.

Connected classrooms can help students:

• Practice and learn a foreign language with native speakers of the tongue
• Discuss problems with other learners from far off locations
• Invite experts in a particular field to the virtual classroom and learn from them
• Expose themselves to other cultures and develop a more holistic global awareness
• Set up virtual trips to places of interest

Skype and Google Hangout are great tools to create a connected classroom. They stand out for a number of reasons:

• They are completely free to uset is easy to set them up and you do not need any in-depth technical knowledge to operate them
• They are web-based and don’t require software installation
• You can do both video and text chat on them 
• They offer group calling services
• Hangout videos and Skype calls can be recorded and shared with anybody
  Let us take a look at a practical way in which we can use Google Hangout and Skype to create a connected classroom

The Mystery Hangout/Skype

A Mystery Hangout/Skype is an educational classroom game where students from different parts of the country get to meet each other on Skype or through Hangout video and get to ask each other questions about each other's locations. The aim of this game is to help the students guess the location of their peers’ class. In the process, they get to practice a number of academic skills like web searching, speaking, note taking, writing and a lot more.

This activity is suitable for children of any age group and can also be used to teach subjects like geography, history, mathematics, languages and science.  There are various ways in which you can go about selecting the class to partner with. For instance, you can use the Hashtag #mysteryskype or go to this page to find out more about the different classes that are featured there. If you want to organize a Mystery hangout for your class, you can check Google Plus’ Mystery hangout Community. If you find a class that you want to connect with, get in touch with its teacher and set up a meeting. But before you get started with the Mystery Hangout/Skype class, make sure that your students are adequately prepared. Here are a few handy tips to get them ready for their first connected learning experience:

• Make sure that your students fact check the information that they are going to provide in their answers. They can use the internet to look up information on their geographical location, the population of the city they live in, the languages they speak, the historical monuments, their city’s economic mainstay and more. 

• If you want to connect with classes that are in a different time zone, you need to know the time differences between both the locations. You can use the following tools to overcome the problem:

• Online conversion 
• Meeting planner 
• World clock 

If you want your students to make the most of the time they spend connecting with their guest class, make sure that you assign each one of them a specific task to carry out. Some of the roles include – greeters (the students who will greet the guests when they connect), the questioner (students who pose the questions), note takers (students who are entrusted with taking detailed notes) and photographers (students who are entrusted with taking pictures during the call). If you want a more detailed web resource with a list of tasks that you can assign to your students, check out this page.

Why is it a Big Mistake to Label Kids?

By Anthony L. Hubbard

We have all been through high school. As a junior, we are sure you remember the fellow student in your class who was always glancing up at the clock. You might have caught yourself wondering – “Is he anxious to get to work?” “Does he want to go smoke a cigarette?” “Is he waiting to leave the classroom?” Would your perception change if you knew that the student was being assigned to an alternative school where students who were “at-risk” of not graduating were being sent? Would it change if you found out that he just got accepted into a prestigious college?

Look closely at the above example. Firstly, you are making an attribution about the student’s cause of behavior. Secondly, you are implicitly considering the characteristics of the person exhibiting the behavior. Thirdly, the descriptions that are provided about the student sets in motion a host of beliefs and stereotypes about the causes of the said behavior. This should give you a fair idea of the kind of negative impact that can be caused by labeling students as “at-risk”. 

Effects of an academic label on attributions

Attributions are made because they are convenient cues and the human brain is primed to follow the path of least cognitive stress. However, the subtle cascading effect of negative labeling is something that we should better acquaint ourselves with. Let us take an example. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where someone put you down unfairly and it just threw you off your rhythm for the rest of the day? We’d venture to guess that it has happened at least once in the last two months. Now imagine if that were to happen on a daily basis. Just think about what that would do to your morale? 

Behavioral psychologists have a term called the Pygmalion effect, which refers to a phenomenon where higher expectations lead to an increase in performance. The more we expect from our kids, the more motivated they are to live up to the expectation. SO, it is always for the better to call them out on their strengths instead of admonishing them for their weaknesses. Worse still, if we categorize children by their family’s income bracket, ethnicity or special education needs, then we are making the assumption that the child has a deficit. How would you feel if you were called an ‘at-risk’ educator because you failed to reach out to a kid?

Labeling faux pas educators should strive to avoid

• Never discuss children in front of other children or parents. They listen to and understand a lot more than we realize.

• Comment on their behavior, not on their character. For instance, it is always better to say “Lisa, you have put a lot of hard work into your art project” instead of saying “Lisa, you are a great artist”. 
• Never use labeling as a motivational or a behavioral tool. You cannot motivate an overweight kid to exercise by calling him fat. Similarly, you cannot get them to perform better by calling them stupid. 

• Encourage kids to explore all kinds of activities. They should never be limited in their opportunities just because it does not fit our ideas of what their weaknesses or strengths are. 

What are educators missing out on?

If we want our mental health and education systems, which should be operating in collaboration, to better serve our diverse and multicultural youth population, we must make sure that they are adapted to be culturally responsive, strength-based and youth-centered. 

A lot of the time, educators fail to take into account that most kids from underprivileged urban areas beat some really great odds to show up to school. From lack of parental support to growing up in tough neighborhoods without enough money, they go through a lot every single day of their lives. They must be encouraged for braving their daily ordeals instead of being put down for not living up to the standardized set of rules and behavior. Labeling them as delinquents, at-risk or hopeless is not doing anybody any good. It does not give us or the student a better understanding of the situation.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of those kids. For them, the microaggressions they face in the classroom is not very different from what they have to face in their daily interactions. It creates a hostile and invalidating climate in the school campus, perpetuates the stereotype threat, assails their mental health and affects the problem solving abilities and the academic productivity of the kids. 

How can we reduce instances of microaggressions in the classroom?

Racial ignoring and racial spotlighting are two of the most common instances of racial microaggressions. Racial ignoring is when students of color do not receive any recognition or acknowledgment by the white students or teachers. Racial spotlighting is when these same students frequently find themselves being the object of uninvited attention, like when they are asked to give their opinion on racial matters just because they are a part of that racial group. It happens more often than most teachers would like to let on. 

To make a difference, educators need to be more self-aware of their own conduct in the class. As long as the microaggressions remain invisible, hidden, unspoken and excused as an innocent slight, people will continue to demean, insult, alienate and oppress the marginalized groups. It is up on the educators to make sure that they take every step to recognize and address instances of microaggressions when they see them. 

Mental Health in Urban Schools

Mental Health in Urban Schools

When it comes to the issue of mental health, urban schools have a lot of untapped strengths and assets which reside within the students and their families, the school staff and the community resources. Urban schools are ripe for exploration as we understand the importance of promoting a healthy emotional development and also because of the critical issues faced by students during the school year. Some of the students misbehave, some go through physical or sexual abuse, some of them are emotionally upset and others have difficulty getting along with their peers or adjusting to the school requirements. The central question behind any mental health approach should be – How can the schools engage these challenges?

What is it all about?

A lot of people think “mental illness” when they hear the term “mental health”. Others think it is all about counseling and therapy. But that isn’t the whole picture. Mental health is also about:

·      Instituting programs to promote emotional-social development, preventing the occurrence of psychological problems and enhancing the protective buffers and resiliency of students.

·      Providing services and programs to intervene as soon as behavior, learning and emotional problems are detected.

·      Supporting and nourishing the mental health of school staff and families.

·      Engaging in capacity building so that school staff can address the barriers encountered in learning.

·      Addressing the systemic issues which affect mental health, like high stakes testing and practices which lead to bullying, alienation and disengagement from any form of classroom learning.

·      Drawing on the empirical evidence to develop a multifaceted, cohesive and comprehensive continuum of community-school interventions to address the barriers to learning and promote a more holistic development.

What does the urban school system currently provide?

Most of the urban schools have some programs in place to address mental health and psychosocial concerns, like school adjustment, problems with attendance, dropouts, sexual and physical abuse, substance abuse, emotional upset, relationship difficulties, violence and delinquency. Some of them are funded by the schools themselves while others are a result of links with youth development agencies and community service. Some of the programs are district-wide while others are linked to specific schools. The intervention might be offered to all the students or those recognized as “at risk”. The recommended activities might be implemented in either regular or special-ed classrooms or even as a pull out program. They are designed either for an entire class, individuals or groups.

The personnel who assist with mental health concerns include “support services” or “pupil services” specialists, like counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers as well as a number of paraprofessionals. Most of them focus on the student as a problem or as having a problem.

The students and the staff who work in schools are a diverse bunch, They vary in gender, ethnicity, race, national origin, migration and refugee status and experiences, spirituality, religion, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, language, communication modality, group identity, levels of assimilation/acculturation, developmental stages, workplace culture, lifestyle and family, and popular culture.

Interventions must consider the significant group and individual differences. The personnel must be competent enough to deal with diversity in their daily practice. Despite the range of activities, few schools have actually come close to having the adequate resources to deal with the complex mental health and psychosocial problems through the traditional responses.

What are the emerging trends?

The central problem is that activities that are related to mental health and psychosocial concerns are not given a high priority in schools. They gain visibility in the case of an event, like a student suicide, shooting on campus or an increase in the bullying of students. The efforts that are undertaken are developed in a piecemeal, ad hoc, and marginalized way. This has led to redundancy, fragmented approaches, and inadequate results.

Modern approaches focus on much more than the one-on-one interaction of the older models. It advocates a more comprehensive approach that strengthens the families, schools, students and the neighborhoods in ways that can maximize caring, learning and well-being. We need to fully integrate an agenda for mental health into the urban school framework.

Although one-on-one interactions with troubled students are effective and must be appreciated for the amount of clinical work put in by the counselors and psychologists, we need to focus on building better bridges so that we avoid problems even before they occur. However, many people still believe that education must be the primary concern of schools and mental health is not their business.

How can schools use the natural opportunities to improve the mental health of their students?  

We can group the natural opportunities available at schools for countering mental health and psychosocial problems into two major categories:

1.     Daily opportunities – Schools are a vibrant and active social milieu. Students get to interact with many of their peers and adults during the day. All the school staff, especially the teachers, must be trained in ways to make use of the encounters and minimize transactions which work against positive growth. Are students being instructed in ways that strengthen the development of interpersonal skills? Is their understanding of themselves and others getting better? Is sharing and cooperative learning promoted? Is the climate supportive, safe and caring? Are the interpersonal conflicts suppressed when they happen, or are they used as learning opportunities? Is every student given a role to be a positive helper in the school and the community at large? How safe do the staff and students feel when they are at school? Having metrics to answer each of these questions will be the right way to go forward.

2.     Yearly patterns – The beginning of a school year is a period of hope. As time progresses, a number of stressors emerge, from increasingly difficult homework assignments, interpersonal conflicts, and grading and testing pressures. Holidays, sports, social events, grade promotions and graduations give rise to additional stressors with their own developmental experiences. Having monthly themes to reduce the stress would be a great way to go.

a.     September – Get off to a good start.

b.     October – Enable adjustment to the school.

c.     November – Respond to referrals in a way that can actually stem the tide.

d.     December – Re-engage the students and use their time off in a way that will pay off.

e.     January – A time for a new start for everybody.

f.      February – The mid-point of the year accompanied by conferences and report cards. It presents another challenging opportunity.

g.     March – Reduce the stress and prevent burnouts.

h.    April – Springtime can be a period of high risk for the students.

i.      May – This is the time to help families and students plan for a successful transition to a new school/grade.

j.      June – Summer can be a great time for the kids to get a taste of the world of adults and learn to be independent by getting some seasonal work.

k.    July – Use the down time to plan for better ways in which everyone can work together to provide a better learning support.

l.      August – Develop ways by which you can avoid burnouts.

How can schools provide a mentally healthy living environment to their students?

Schools should be more proactive in developing a positive atmosphere for their students and staff. Literature advocates:

·      Providing a caring, welcoming and a more hopeful atmosphere.

·      Social support mechanisms for the staff and students.

·      Offering an array of options so that students can pursue their goals.

·      Meaningful participation by both the staff and students in decision making.

·      Changing the infrastructure of the classroom from a bigger set into a number of smaller units that are organized to maximize the intrinsic motivation of students for learning.

·      Providing instruction and responding to the problems in a more personalized way.

·      Using a number of strategies for addressing the problems as soon as they arise.

·      An attractive and healthy physical environment which is conducive to teaching and learning.

Every school needs a welcoming induction and continued support for creating a more positive sense of community. It will facilitate student and staff adjustment and performance. The strategies must be school-wide and must enable the students, staff, and families to positively interact with each other and identify with the school and its goals. 

References:

1.     https://www.epa.gov/schools/implementing-coordinated-school-health-guidelines

2.     http://www.maine.gov/education/mainecshp/tools/advocacy/practices.doc

3.     http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec09/vol67/num04/Coordinated-School-Health@-Getting-It-All-Together.aspx

4.     http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326985ep3304_1

5.     http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/promoting-student-success-through-collaboration/

6.     http://www.ocde.us/PBIS/Documents/Articles/Addressing%20Barriers%20to%20Learning.pdf

7.     http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/schoolsupport.htm

Poverty and Brain Development

How Does Growing up in Poverty Affect the Development of a Child's Brain

It wasn't long ago that scientists believed that the brain was a predictable organ with rigid confines, not that different from the liver or the lungs. They postulated that genetics pre-determine the learning ability, baseline intelligence and problem-solving capabilities of an individual.

However, with the latest research shedding more light on the neuroplasticity of the brain, scientists are beginning to acknowledge that the brain is highly responsive and constantly evolving, with the innate ability to change at large-scale and cellular levels due to experiences and environmental influences. Already, this research has gone a long way into explaining certain phenomena, like how people whose vision is impaired can re-allocate areas of their brain meant to process sights for analyzing sound.

The brain of children is particularly vulnerable to changes – research has demonstrated how growing up in a poor household under strained conditions can impair a child's cognitive abilities that last their entire lives. Let us take a look at some of the ways poverty can affect brain development in children:

·       A recent study employed fMRI (to detect the flow of blood in different areas of the brain) to study how emotions are regulated in young adults. They were part of a long-running study on the effects of poverty. The study showed that the participants who grew up in dire circumstances showed more brain activity in their amygdala (associated with fear, anxiety and other emotional disorders) as well as a marked drop in their prefrontal cortex activity (which plays a key role in restricting the amygdala and prioritizing long-term decisions over impulsive reactions) when they were shown disturbing images. Researchers postulated that chronic stressors, like noise, crowding, separation or family turmoil could affect the brain's development and explain the observed correlation.

·       Another study examined the relationship between childhood nurturing and brain tissue growth in a controlled age group (6-12). Children whose parents were known to have poor nurturing abilities showed slowed growth in gray matter, white matter as well as reduced volumes in parts of the brain involved in coping with external stress and learning skills. The children were similar in all other aspects except the nurturing skills of their parents, which practically retarded their mental development at least by two years. The study also found that impoverished parents had poorer nurturing skills. To an objective observer, it might seem heavy handed to judge the parenting style, but the researchers took into account chronic stressors as well – children who were brought up in a poor household, but did not have as many stressful events (the frequency of which was determined by annual assessments) showed smaller reductions in their neural development.

·       Some studies have looked at more specific effects. A recent study conducted by the Northwestern University found a correlation between children who came from disadvantaged backgrounds had less efficient auditory processing skills – the part of the brain that was responsible for processing daily sounds responded to distracting noises more than the main activity compared to control participants. According to the researchers, it could be explained by the well understood correlation between noise exposure in more urban areas and low income households. However, it is not yet established as to whether the observed effects are temporary or permanent.

·       Dishearteningly enough, a recent study published in Science showed that being preoccupied with the concerns of poverty – struggle to pay the bills, for example – taxed the brain and left less bandwidth to make long-term decisions and solve complicated cognitive problems. It was observed that just getting the volunteers in the study to think about their economic problems led to a much poorer performance on the IQ and impulse control test.

Although the problem of less bandwidth is a temporary one, it does go a long way in explaining how making decisions can be considerably harder for someone who is mired in poverty. Parents should make sure that they don't inadvertently contribute to an environment which keeps their kids from overcoming their difficult circumstances.

How to Solve Systemic Racism

 Although racism has been largely banned in America since many decades now, it is still a reality faced by hundreds of thousands of colored people across the country. It is silent, and it may not be apparent at first, but careful observation of various social systems reveals the fact that is, unfortunately, a part of every aspect of our society. Boys and young men of color are denied many opportunities due to systemic racism, and there is very little that the oppressed individuals can do to help themselves.

Interconnection of the education system with other parts of society

Our society is held up by the contribution of various pillars apart from education, including health systems, criminal justice systems, housing system, employment system, and even the community. Educational institutions, over time, have become more and more sensitive towards boys and young men of color, and have become one of the primary drivers towards providing equal opportunity. However, leaving racialization untouched in all the other parts of the society does not provide enough of a foundation to allow these boys and young men to gain a foothold in the society.

The problems of race-neutral policies

The most basic attempt towards fighting racism is to put “race-neutral” policies in place, with the hopes that it will create a level playing field for all the people of this nation. However, by observing who has benefited the most from this kind of reforms, it becomes clear that “race-neutral” policies are not very helpful towards the colored youth. For instance, government programs such as Social Security, 30-year mortgages and the GI Bill contributed heavily towards the benefit of the white middle class, but were not very effective in supporting African Americans. Such policies have ignored the difference in starting points for people of color and the possibility of racial segregation within the system, leading to limited success in execution.

How a proper policy system should be developed

Instead of simply releasing a general policy for people of all races, it is important to acknowledge the fact that it needs to target communities of color so as to have the desired outcome. Presently, there are significant disparities in income, education, and healthcare amongst colored people and the whites in America, and this leads to problems like lower life expectancy, lower accumulated wealth and higher rates of incarceration. The policies that allow the prevalence of structural racism generally shows the following characteristics:

Consideration of legacy: Although this can be used to correct historical injustices, many policies that consider the legacy of a person has a high chance of allowing systemic racism. 

Segregation of risk and available resources: Distributing the available resources according to the associated risk, such as redlining, zoning policies, and so on.

Differential valuation of races: Propagation of certain histories that provide a lopsided view of colored people.

To reduce systemic racism, we need to involve colored people in the development of policies and target incentives towards colored boys and young men to help increase their civic participation. It also should address the disparities in the financial situation of people of color and reduce the barriers towards resources. With proper policy planning, racism can be removed from the systems that support our society.

Why We Need To Move Towards Standards-Based Learning

As of last year, there were an estimated 50 million students in the United States who were attending public elementary and secondary schools. Within the next few years, these children will be having full time jobs and contributing towards the growth of the nation. It is no secret that good education has an effect on progress of a people, which is why it is important to ensure that education systems are constantly evolving. In this spirit, the grading system that is employed by majority of the schools in the USA is observed to give rise to many problems, and it will have to be changed if we want the children of the future to be competent.

The present scenario

The present system makes a student sit through a class for an entire year and allows progression to a higher grade once they prove their proficiency at the end of the year. This kind of a system assumes that students have gained expertise in their subjects before they are made to sit through more advanced classes. But empirical evidence shows that students can progress to higher grades even when they are not competent enough to grasp advanced concepts.

The grading system has, for many years, been the subject of criticism as many people become acutely aware of the effect it has on children. One of the primary issues is that the grading system focuses on achieving marks, instead of learning the concept thoroughly. The intrinsic motivation for students in such a system is to get good grades, and this forces them to take lesser risks in their learning process, instead of exploring topics that lie beyond their current skill set.

The very approach to learning is corrupted when the message given by an educational institution is “grades matter more than learning”. As the students study a book with the intention of memorizing facts, their quality of understanding the essence of the text is diminished, and this effect is magnified as the students progress through higher levels of the education system.

Why improvement would not really help

Many people are of the opinion that an improvement in the education system is a necessity, but they may not be very open to completely doing away with the grading system. Several schools around the country try to augment the grading system by introducing innovative policies, yet these methods do not stand the test of time. The reason that superficial improvements to the grading system do not work is because it is psychologically flawed.

Experts of pedagogy agree that the learning process inherently motivates students, not because they stand to gain good grades, but because the subject matter interests them. The grading system, instead of acknowledging this quality, forces a structure of rewards and punishments in the hopes of spurring young minds to work harder. Studies conducted by educational psychologists reveal that simply focusing on the assessment process can undermine the quality of learning, as the students monitor their performance instead of trying to grasp the nuances of the subject matter.

How to move towards standards-based learning

The process of change towards standards-based learning is arduous and it will require the combined efforts of school administrators and teachers, if a school hopes to use such a system in the long run. To make a gradual move away from the grading system, a school administrator needs to first have extensive discussions with teachers, parents and even students about the effects of the present system. The main rebuttal people have against changing the grading system is that it becomes nearly impossible to collect data about a student's performance. But there are far better methods of assessing mastery which involves gathering information about the capability of students.

Once a considerable number of people are in support of the idea of moving away from the grading system, a school can start to eliminate the traditional system for the youngest students, so that the system can be continued as they progress through their education. Instead of completely eliminating grades, an educational institution may choose to reduce the focus on academic success to show students that learning is more important that scoring well.

Teachers will have a major role to play in the efforts of an educational institution, as they will need to adapt to new methods of assessment. There will also be considerable resistance from parents and students alike, who will argue that excellence needs to be documented with data. When faced with such situations, remember that the goal of a school is not to grade students competitively, but to increase knowledge within each student. With persistence and skill, it is possible to eliminate the grading system and move towards a competency based learning system in the long term.