Having spent a good deal of time learning about creating a gradeless classroom, I returned to the classroom ready to make a change.

In a gradeless classroom, students are expected to be creative, take risks, fail, and learn from their mistakes in the name of improving themselves and gaining knowledge. In my classroom, students assess their own work and one another's.

Last summer I made the plunge to finally go gradeless. I was ready for my classroom to be centered around learning, not grades. I had visions of motivated students, a continuous flow of feedback, and energy for reviewing student work.

Much of the evidence for the gradeless movement focuses on its positive effect on students, as it should. However, when reflecting on the impact of deciding to shift away from traditional grading practices, I realize how much it taught me.

Does AP English Literature and Composition by its very nature privilege whiteness and a white view of literature? Why content and the canon are only part of the problem.

I was nervous that going gradeless just wouldn’t work and I would have a revolt from the students and parents. None of these things happened. In fact, in all of my years of teaching, I don’t think that I have enjoyed myself more than this past year.

When each new assessor and every new rubric category introduces more discrepancies and more variance, what does a grade even mean anymore?

Alfie Kohn has suggested learning should be something teachers do WITH students rather than TO them. Strict deadlines and an expectation to complete our assignments is a doing TO education.

I made a simple but effective change to my explanation of the system: I started referring to these courses as averageless instead of gradeless.

By continually training our eyes on a horizon “beyond the walls of the school”—whether that be achievement, authentic audiences, the real world, the future, even buzz or fame—have we drained school of its meaning, turning it into a wind-swept platform where we do nothing but gaze into another world or brace ourselves for the inevitable?

We are famous, as educators, for asking others to take risks. Teachers do this to students, and administrators do it to teachers. We see risk taking as a key element of learning and growth. The problem is that we often assume that the conditions for risk are optimal.

While I had grown accustomed to standards-based grading in my old school, going gradeless was a split-second decision I made at the beginning of the school year, without really knowing what it meant. Luckily, the shoe fit.