In the last few months, I've led numerous workshops at conferences and with schools in different parts of the world. Regardless of the location or how I'm engaging with PE teachers, the same tensions about grading in PE keep showing up. These aren't new tensions either. I've seen and heard them surfacing over the years I've been working in this area.

Some of these tensions sound like this:

Is grading in PE meaningful, or is it arbitrary?

I have to grade, but what do I use for grading?

Doesn't grading just favor the students who are already active outside of class?

If you've been wrestling with any of these, or others, you're not alone. After all, grading is something most teacher education programs skim over, and PD for PE teachers in these areas rarely fills the gap.

These tensions don't come out of nowhere. They tend to show up when the practices we use for grading are not grounded in principles about grading.

Example: a PE teacher tells students they'll be graded on their learning. But then daily behaviours like effort, respect, and having the right clothing end up shaping the grade. The principle the teacher was aiming for is that grades reflect learning, but their practice didn't align with it.

When our practices are misaligned with principles, the process can start to feel inauthentic and arbitrary, and create confusion for ourselves and students.

One way this PE teacher could align their grading practice with the principle of grades reflect learning is to separate and communicate information about behaviours separately. Some jurisdictions might have a separate area on the report card to do this, a section for comments, or even a different grading scale for behaviours.

The point of this is that to stay true to this principle, and to honour the importance of behaviours in a student's learning journey, they should be communicated separately from learning.

Behaviours still matter. They're just being clarified and shared in a different space with students and families, not inside the grade itself.

There are several principles, like grades reflect learning, that are important to consider when it comes to grading in PE. They have direct impacts on our practices, how we sit with them, and how they land with students.

A 4-Part Weekly Series on Grading in PE

Over the next 4 weeks, I'll be writing a weekly article about some key principles that can help make grading in PE feel more authentic, clear, and meaningful, with a careful focus on keeping things practical for teachers.

Unlike most books and literature on grading in school, I'll start at the very end of the grading process, determining a grade, and work backwards from there.

Here is the schedule for the next 4 weeks:

1. Determining a grade
2. Organizing and summarizing evidence of learning
3. What counts for grading
4. The purpose of grading in PE

See you next week, when we start looking at how we can determine a grade reflective of student learning achievement.