There are certain ways of doing things in the world of education that are universally accepted. As those who have chosen less traditional ways of educating children, Ambleside practitioners and families are especially attuned to these widely-accepted norms.

The institution of the grading system is perhaps the most unchallenged of all educational norms, and its practice in almost every type of school environment spans nations and people groups. Its use is pervasive.

Ambleside Schools International believes there is a more effective approach to the evaluation of students’ growth and knowledge than letter or number grades can achieve. We have found the traditional grading system to be so inadequate that we have jettisoned its usage entirely.

In doing so, we open the door to a more complete evaluation of progress — one that is only possible inside an educational system designed around relationships rather than efficiency.

Remembering The Purpose of Education

Schools are fundamentally about growth and knowledge. Every educational institution is in the business of ensuring that students are engaging with the learning process and then trying to understand what students know following instruction.

Traditional grading systems are theoretically designed to:

1. motivate students, and
2. reflect the student’s understanding of a subject.

But the true test of any grading system is its efficacy in representing an individual’s actual learning and its ability to enhance their relationship with learning at all.

In following the trend of the Industrial Revolution, traditional schools employ a factory-based approach, as if children were products to be created at scale. The system has to be designed to be extremely efficient because it favors higher numbers of students in a classroom. Therefore, the system of evaluation has to be designed to be efficient first and foremost, which typically deprioritizes effectiveness and accuracy.

What is supposed to be efficient, though, in the end actually isn’t, because it does not provide enough information nor does it intrinsically motivate students to learn without the promise of reward.

The student is generally provided with a single score overall (say 73%) with very little context (perhaps a phrase or two, such as “works hard,” “incomplete work,” “poor participation in class,” etc). The child and parents need much more information than that to really understand how the child is engaging with the subject.

Ambleside provides it.

Redefining the Process of Evaluation

Ambleside uses a narrative approach to evaluate mastery of a given subject because it allows the teacher to describe the student’s relationship with the elements covered in that subject: what the student knows and what the student doesn’t know. Sometimes this will involve specific scores, but what is most important is the specifics of how the child interacted with the material, what they understood or did not understand, and what their relationship with the subject is like overall.

Constant evaluation is occurring in an Ambleside classroom. Teachers are trained toward it. Immediate feedback is paramount. Whiteboards, oral responses, written responses, and visual responses are all incorporated. In math, students are explaining the process rather than merely producing the correct answer.

Teachers are trained to know how much the child is engaging with the text and retaining information. The observations and conclusions of this process are then communicated in the student’s report of growth, which is one of the most important things a teacher does.

Motivating with Joy Instead of Fear

What we achieve by removing the external systems that reward knowledge through the earning of letters or numbers (prizes) is the most important purpose of all: fostering an intrinsic motivation to learn.

We are motivated creatures, and we act according to our motivations. Grades use fear to motivate. Charlotte Mason advocated for a process of evaluation that fosters joy in doing the work, figuring out a problem, overcoming a difficulty, learning all that we can know within the bounds of our God-given ability — and feeling satisfied with the effort.

The result is that we are growing students into functional adults who have natural curiosity, desire to work hard for the sake of doing work well, are able to motivate themselves internally to accomplish necessary work, and are not anxious or fearful about encountering new challenges.

What we draw them with, we draw them to.

Cheryl Ward, M.Ed.

Executive Director/Head of School

Calvary Schools of Holland