Grading What Matters: Rethinking Student Learning and Assessment | Marc Aronson

Imagine a school where grades reward collaboration, character, and genuine mastery—not just memorization and speed. In this episode, Dean of Academics Marc Aronson shares how his school, Cheshire Academy,  rethought assessment through Grading What Matters, a framework focused on authentic learning, student agency, and mission-aligned outcomes.

We explore Final Demonstrations of Learning instead of exams, a Community of Learners model that grades students on contribution and engagement, and a fully open honors pathway where any student can earn honors inside their regular class.

Drawing from research by Grant Wiggins and Eric Mazur, Marc explains why performance assessments build deeper learning, why narrative feedback matters more than percentages, and how shifting to mission-based grading builds belonging, confidence, and durable skills.

What you’ll learn:

• How to design authentic assessments & FDOLs

• How to grade collaboration and community contribution

• Why narrative feedback drives real motivation

• Practical steps to begin grading what truly matters

If grades shape how students see themselves, let them measure what counts: mastery, growth, and contribution.

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Sponsored by Dr. Gregg Hassler Jr., DMD
Trusted dental care for healthy smiles and stronger communities—building brighter futures daily.

Chapters

• 0:38 Why Traditional Tests Fall Short
• 1:53 Performance Assessment And Research Roots
• 3:14 Meet Mark Aronson And Mission
• 4:24 Defining Grade What Matters
• 6:47 Final Demonstrations Of Learning
• 8:14 Building A Community Of Learners
• 9:36 Feedback That Drives Growth
• 10:45 Agency, Ownership, And Durable Learning
• 12:26 A Global Portraits Project
• 13:00 Honors For All, Not Just A Track
• 15:19 Change Management And Time
• 17:28 Where Teachers Can Start
• 20:52 Rethinking The Percentage Scale
• 21:48 Closing Takeaways And Next Steps

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:19

When a student at Cheshire Academy presents their final project to a panel of teachers and peers instead of taking a traditional exam, something powerful happens. They're not just reciting memorized facts, they're defending their thinking, responding to challenges, and demonstrating real mastery. Research shows that 70% of what students cram for traditional tests is forgotten within weeks. Meanwhile, schools across the country are discovering that grades can measure growth, collaboration, and the skills that students actually need for life. Mark Aronson is here to show us how his school is making that vision a reality. Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation, and resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables? And how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? Are we measuring what really matters? In the late 1990s, Grant Wiggins challenged schools to think differently. He noticed that while the real world runs on collaboration and creative problem solving, we were still grading students on isolated tests and homework. He championed performance assessments, things like projects and presentations that a mirror how people work and learn in real life. Others, like Linda Darling Hammond, found that these kinds of assessments don't just measure skills like critical thinking and teamwork. They help students develop them. And Susan Bruckhart discovered that when we give feedback focused on learning goals instead of just points, students shift from asking, what do I need for an A to how can I get better? But here's where it gets really interesting. Dr. Eric Mazur, a Harvard professor who joined us on a previous episode, called traditional assessment the silent pillar of learning. He's found that the way we typically test students alone, under stress and with no resources, actually undermines learning. His solution is to let students access information during assessments, work in teams, and demonstrate their learning in ways that reflect the real world they're entering. So the question becomes if grades shape how students learn and how they see themselves as learners, shouldn't we make sure they're measuring the right things? To tackle that question, we are joined by Mark Aronson, Dean of Academics at Cheshire Academy in Connecticut. Mark and his team have been rethinking grading from the ground up through their Grading What Matters initiative. They've replaced traditional final exams with final demonstrations of learning, opened honors pathways to all students within regular classes, and created ways to recognize not just what students know, but how they contribute to their learning community. His work asks us to consider what if grades could shape better learning instead of just measuring it. Mark, welcome to the show.

Marc Aronson: 3:30

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 3:31

So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and when you realized that traditional grading systems needed to change?

Marc Aronson: 3:38

I am the Dean of Academics at Cheshire Academy, a small New England independent boarding and day school in Connecticut. And I've been here for 18 years. I started as an English teacher and a coach and a dorm parent. And as happens when you stick around places like this long enough, you wear a lot of different hats. But I've been in the academic office now for six or seven years. In that time, we have worked hard to flatten levels and increase access for our students. And in doing that, we discovered that it was really important both for our mission statement, which is about helping students flourish as purposeful global citizens, but also for their sense of self and their sense of belonging, for our classes to have course goals attached to them that go beyond the typical subject and content and discipline specific goals. You know, we've said if you're taking an advanced math class, for example, yeah, you're going to be learning some advanced math in that class, but it's also a good idea for you to be learning how to look at the world differently than you looked at it before that class. Well, if that's going to be a goal of that course, or if we're going to use a math course to increase empathy as a goal of a math class, we have to assess that. So all of the moves that we've made around assessment and grading really trace back to this idea of course goals that transcend the subject or the discipline or the content and are more metacognitive or more mission-aligned.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 5:15

So you talk about grading what matters. Can you explain what that means in practice and the need for clear academic standards with valuing things like collaboration, engagement, and community contribution?

Marc Aronson: 5:29

So when we say grade what matters, we're a mission-driven school. Our mission statement, in addition to that, flourishing as purposeful global citizenship clause, talks about character, critical thinking, and confidence as core skills that we want students to develop. We have four core values as a school, which are belonging, engagement, collaboration, and growth. And so if those are going to be the values that drive us, then our academic program should be driving to assess students on them. We needed to ask bigger questions about why are you learning those things? If we can ask of our students, bring something of yourself to this. And what we're going to measure you on is beyond what you would typically expect to be measured on. Aren't you then going to find that you're actually growing into your learning more authentically?

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 6:22

Can you give an example of that?

Marc Aronson: 6:23

We've done a couple of things that have expanded our assessment model. One is we moved away from a reading week and an exam week at the end of the year to this concept of final demonstrations of learning. And our students and faculty now refer to those as F-DALs because final demonstrations of learning is a bit of a mouthful. These measure how much students have grown toward those course goals that I was talking about. And so that can take a lot of different forms. It can take the form of an ongoing collaborative project. It can take the form of a service trip and create a reflection that we'll bring back and talk about. And then beyond that, we've asked all of our courses to adopt a community of learners model and a community of learners rubric. The idea there is if we are going to say that collaboration is a thing we value, and if we're going to say that true engagement, which comes from belonging, is a thing that we value, then part of students' grade should be the degree to which they are in good faith collaborating and engaging, not just with their own learning, but with a responsibility for the learning of their peers in the class and with a sense of responsibility for the learning of the whole group.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 7:39

Then how does grading for responsibility for others' learning look in the classroom?

Marc Aronson: 7:44

The general way of using them is to say to students, I'm going to be looking for you to be contributing to our discussions in class in ways that are actively creating better conditions for other students to learn. That's about are you echoing and amplifying what other people say? That's about are you asking good questions of your classmates? That's about are you providing constructive feedback or even constructive pushback when a classmate says something that you're not 100% on board with or that you don't fully agree with in a way that sort of advances the discussion and advances everyone else's learning? I'm very fond of saying that our students aren't just future people. They're people now. They have identities that they're honing and shaping. They have worldviews that we're hopefully helping become more flexible and dynamic and grounded in values, but they have worldviews. What's their responsibility to bring that into a classroom setting so that other students can benefit from their presence, from their authentic self, from their experiences? Then we do need to say, okay, now students, you have to bring something to the table that helps everybody else.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 8:58

And this is a per class. So each class has its own way of assessing their community of learners. Yep.

Marc Aronson: 9:05

The critical thing is to provide students feedback on it. Right. So in my classes, every time a community of learners' grade goes up, I send a student an official note through our LMS explaining why they are doing better at it than they were before. Anytime a community of learners grade goes down, that's for me an opportunity to have a conversation with a student about, hey, I'm going to toggle your community of learners' grade down a little bit. Here's the reasons why. Here's what you can do to bring it back up to where you and I think it ought to be. And then I follow that up in writing as well. So the narrative feedback is really important.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 9:41

So have you found that the students are responding well to this? Do they like it?

Marc Aronson: 9:46

Yeah. What I have really found is that students who are looking to get that A pretty quickly recognize the first time that their community of learners grade gets entered or the first time that it drops a little bit, and I explained to them why. It doesn't take long for their sort of good faith engagement with their classmates to turn around. So it is, it is motivating in that way. And our hope is that it takes this external, extrinsic, stressful motivation of grades and flips that to drawing something more intrinsic and internal out of students the more that they're collaborating with each other.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 10:22

And then the replacement of final exams to the final demonstrations of learning. What kind of impacts have you seen with that replacement?

Marc Aronson: 10:30

It's led to much more experiential learning. It's led to much more just authentic assessment that marries the stuff we want students to learn with things that they are bringing of themselves. And it really has forced us to sort of go back to the studs with what are the purposes of our courses and design backwards from those purposes. You know, is it the case that over the course of a Spanish intermediate level language course, there are specific Spanish language targets that we want our students to achieve, sure. But if their F-DAL in Spanish is going to be some sort of collaborative experiential project that requires them to use the facility in Spanish they've they've gained, that's going to be a much richer, valuable experience that A is going to have much more durable learning. But it's it's also, I really think this matters. It's going to provide the students with a more positive vibe of high school. So often, high school is a thing that just happens to students. It's a series of hoops they have to jump through where they have no say in how high they are or why they are or when they show up. And we want them to have more agency in it and more ownership of it because we don't want it to feel transactionally like it's just an investment in some future thing. An overfocus on the future takes away from not just sort of in a woo-woo way being in the present, but it really takes away from the fact that our students are people now and they should be having a good learning experience now.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 12:04

Is there one that you'd like to share?

Marc Aronson: 12:07

So our recently retired head of our fine and performing arts department ran a project with our art major class where they had initiated essentially a pen pal partnership with refugee families in sub-Saharan Africa. And they wound up doing portraits of the children of those families and shipped to them. And the letters we would get back and sort of this ongoing collaboration was so rich, but also it felt like we were doing something around our mission of being purposeful global citizens.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 12:41

So traditional honors tracks often separate students from the start, but you've opened honors opportunities to everyone by embedding it within their regular classes. How would that work?

Marc Aronson: 12:51

We wanted to change how we did honors. We decided, well, what if instead students could earn honors on their grade in a given class? So in my class, for example, I might get an A minus, and you might get an A minus H because you've achieved enough of the achievements that I set in the syllabus at the beginning that are required to earn the honor designation on your grade in the class. So you're not in an honor section of it, but you've earned honors on your grade. And the overall achievement learning experience of all the students in the class will go up, especially for students who try for it but don't quite earn it. Right. Because they will wind up having done more than they would have otherwise done had it not been an option anyway.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:44

Yeah. And that intrinsic motivation, sometimes, you know, you just want to see like, I want to see if I can get it too.

Marc Aronson: 13:50

Yeah, we're very excited about it. I I think it's really important to reward students who are ready for and capable of and demonstrate that they can go above and beyond what the standard even for an A is. But I think it's equally important to say this is something anybody can try for. And yeah, it should be hard. And yeah, most people won't get it, but it's not something exclusive in that you you only get this thing that looks good on your transcript if someone ahead of time said you're worthy of that. That doesn't feel authentic to me. It feels much more authentic to say, here's what you've done. That means you have earned it on this thing, not you've earned placement in something later.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 14:36

So I think it's wonderful because then it just tells the student that this is ready for you whenever and if you want it. So it gives them that ownership and I like that agency as well. You're talking about increasing student agency, and that really does put it in their pocket. What kind of challenges did you face when you were implementing these reforms? And how did you bring your faculty, your students, and your parents on board?

Marc Aronson: 15:00

So, students and families, anytime there's a change, there's questions. But I was actually remarkably surprised as we rolled out the final demonstrations of learning, as we emphasized these non-content discipline specific aligned course goals more and more as they started to see community of learners pop up and now become universal. I was pleasantly surprised at how little we heard from anybody about it. And I think it's because we weren't doing anything that didn't feel authentically us. We've always been a school that has valued the kinds of things I'm talking about. There were just some times where we lacked formal structures for them or where we lacked a common language around them. And so, really, all we've done is create formal structures for and common language around some of the things that we always had at sort of the essence of the feel of the place. In terms of faculty, the main issue has been time. And so it was a few years ago that we decided we wouldn't make any changes to the courses in our curriculum guide without there being an 18-month lag on it. So now we update our curriculum guide in May and June of a year, not for that coming fall, but for a whole year out so that faculty have a whole year and a summer to plan and build and design. And so we followed that same model with the honors designations specifically, knowing that asking every faculty member to go into their syllabi, to look at their course goals, to come up with a pathway for a student to earn an honors designation in the class that was clear, articulable, but hard. So time has been the real obstacle. And, you know, that amount of time has led to the opportunity to have really good conversations to say to faculty members, here are some of the benefits that will accrue to you in your work from this, you know, those practical problems that get solved by doing things like this. But it has also allowed for departments to have much more time to meet and discuss and hammer out how they want to go about things. So there was really good give and take about how we wanted to do it. We we had, I think, you know, there was a really healthy debate about whether there should be a grade cutoff for earning honors, for example. So should it be possible to get a C in the class but earn honors? Right. And I didn't think that should be possible. And in the end, we landed on no, there should be some cutoff. So we've said you can't get it if your grade in the class is below a B. And that opened up a really good conversation about should trying for honors but not earning it affect your grade in the class? Right. And so there were some teachers who thought, no, if you try a harder problem and don't do well on it, that might hurt your grade on that assessment. And then there were those of us who said, well, no, this is meant to be demonstrating above and beyond. They should be already earning the grade they're getting. The this, the rest of it should just be a binary. Are they doing what they need to do to earn honors or not? And so we were able to use that 18 months to hammer out our answers to all those questions.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 18:05

I'm just thinking from a leadership perspective, how flexible and respectful you're being of your teachers' time by considering their concerns. I think that that had to be appreciated by your staff.

Marc Aronson: 18:18

I think there's a valid point to be made of we're doing our jobs really well. Can we not be allowed to for a while just do our jobs really well without constantly adding more work? So I I'm trying, we are institutionally trying to provide them with the time they need to do their work. But I wouldn't want to sit here with rose-colored glasses and say that everybody feels like they have all the time they need to do everything we're asking them to do. They definitely don't feel that way. And we need to remember that, right? Change management does require managing how something feels when you're doing it. And I I do think we asked a lot of our faculty, and I'm I'm appreciative of them for the work that they put in. I know it was a heavy lift.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 19:02

If a teacher wanted to start to implement some of these changes in their own classroom, where do you think that they would begin? What would be a good place to start?

Marc Aronson: 19:11

I think the place to begin is to think about what are the actual goals of your course that have nothing to do with or that are only thematically or tangentially related to the content and discipline-specific skills of your course, right? What's the metacognitive value of the work you're asking students to do? What's the community-based value of the work you're asking students to do? If you work in a school that is mission-driven, how does the course you're teaching help achieve the nouns and verbs in the school's mission statement? If you start there, then you're gonna plan backwards. All right, if my course is doing those things, how am I actively gonna assess them? And if I'm actively gonna assess them, how am I gonna actively incorporate teaching and learning around them in my classes? I think that's the starting point. It really does go back to that idea of course goals that are more transformational than they are transactional.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:13

Yeah, that that actually is a great way to think about it because then you're living your mission, which makes you more of a community of learners within that institution.

Marc Aronson: 20:23

And on a practical level, I think another thing I would encourage folks to do is question some of the basic assumptions about grading that we've internalized. To me, the biggest one is the percentage-based scale. And there's tons of reading and writing and thinking to be consumed about this. You know, everything from the, well, we have 59 versions of failing and 40 versions of passing kind of thing. But just also the idea of what if you gave students qualitative descriptors for the kind of work you wanted to see for them to earn the grade you want? And what are the odds that in doing that, you're actually gonna land on there being a difference between an 87 and an 88? Or what are the odds that in doing that, you're gonna land on the idea that, well, if they got eight of the 10 things that I wanted them to get done, or if they did it to eight tenths of the level of quality that I wanted them to get, that that means they get a B minus. That that's that's extremely arbitrary. And it's it's a box that once you're out of it, feels so liberating as a teacher.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 21:28

Thank you so much for sharing all of your concrete examples and your insights. Your work proves that grades don't just have to measure student outcomes, they actively shape how students see themselves as learners and community members. And you've given us a beautiful roadmap for making assessment both meaningful and rigorous.

Marc Aronson: 21:48

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 21:48

To learn more about Cheshire Academy, you can go to their website at Cheshiracademy.org. That's C H E S H I R E and reach out to Dean Mark Aronson. Now, here's something to try. The next time your child shows you a grade, ask them about their growth and how they contributed to their classmates' learning. Sometimes the smallest shifts create the biggest changes in how we think about learning. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at Lisa at dr lisaarhastler.com or visit my website at www.drlisaarhastler.com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.