Recently, I wrote about a grading conversation that changed the trajectory of a department I was leading. But, years earlier in my career, a different grading conversation almost made me quit teaching altogether. It was both the most infuriating experience of my career, and the one that changed me the most.

But first, a little context.

There is a good chance you know this feeling: you're sitting at your desk staring at your gradebook or your school's LMS, trying to land on a grade for a student, but something inside feels off. Maybe it's the uncertainty of taking everything a student showed you about their learning and forming it into a single grade. Maybe it's something else. I'd bet that at some point in your career, you have felt less confident about grading than you would like.

This is not a critique aimed at you or any PE teacher. Rather, it is naming a reality that has run deep in our field for a long time: grading has never been made clear.

Most of us PE teachers received little, if any, education on this during our pre-service teacher training. The PD we've had as a teacher rarely speaks to the nuance of grading in PE, so we are left to figure it out on our own with time we don't have. Some of us might even go looking online for ideas, and that can often leave us more confused than when we started.

A recent Facebook post from a PE teacher looking for advice. By the time I wrote this, it had 51 replies. No two were the same.

The posts aren't the problem, and neither are the teachers offering to help. The problem is what sits underneath the answers. Almost all of them are practices for calculating a grade or deciding what to take marks off for. Very few are grounded in what a grade means and represents. And without this clarity, any and all practices seem to fit.

None of this is trying to pinpoint who is right or wrong. Rather, the range of responses highlights an ongoing lack of clarity around grading in PE.

Who cares? Why does this matter?

It is fair to ask if this really matters, or if it's just a small frustration we live with. But when the topic gets raised, the response says otherwise.

Here are two posts I made about my four-part grading series in PE, one at the start and one at the end. The engagement from around the world shows how much interest there is in gaining clarity on grading.

PE teachers want clarity. It just hasn't been there.

And when that uncertainty goes unaddressed, it does not just sit quietly. Students feel it, in grades that are confusing and disconnected from what they know they can do. And it wears on us too, chipping away at our confidence over time.

I know that last part more than I would like to. Because the uncertainty I am describing once brought me to the edge of leaving this profession.

The grading conversation about Chris

Years ago I had a student I'll call Chris. He was difficult. Arrogant, unwilling to help out, and unmoved by anything I tried. I contacted home and heard nothing back. I went to admin and counsellors and got no real support. Nothing changed.

The one thing I felt I still had was his grade.

Chris thought he was the best at everything, so I figured a B instead of an A might get to him, and maybe get his family's attention too. I went into my gradebook and moved a few scores around until they landed on 75%, a B where I teach. It wasn't hard. The numbers went where I needed them, and the grade came out where I wanted it. At the time, it didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong. It felt like using the system the way it worked.

A week later we held parent-teacher interviews, and Chris's mother signed up. I was glad. I would finally get to tell her everything I had been dealing with. She arrived with Chris beside her, and I was glad about that too. I could say it all with him sitting right there.

We made some small talk. Then she asked me why her son got 75%.

It felt like a pointed question, so I did the confident thing. I pulled out my gradebook and showed her. The categories, all labelled. The scores inside them. I ran my finger down to the final grade and waited for that to settle it.

She looked at it, then looked at me, and asked something I was not ready for.

What does this have to do with what he was learning in class?

I pointed at the categories again. The numbers. The total. It was right there, but she kept looking at me with the same question on her face. I was nervous, and getting flustered, but underneath that was something worse: I could not actually connect any of it to what Chris had learned.

Then, without meaning to, my eyes drifted to Chris. He had a small smirk on his face. That nearly put me over the edge.

Then the interview time ran out. They left without an answer.

I don't remember a single conversation I had with any family after them.

Her question exposed something I had been trying hard to hide. I knew very little about assessment and grading, and as a teacher, I thought that was inexcusable. In that moment I felt like a fraud. What made it worse was that it all happened right in front of Chris. I knew I couldn't go on like this.

But that interview did not end my teaching. It changed it.

Since then

What I know now, that I did not know then, is that I wasn't alone in this feeling. This lack of clarity about grading is something our field has been living with for a long time.

That interview sent me looking for new ways. I read, I asked questions, I got plenty of it wrong along the way, and I learned. Soon, grading became clearer for me, something I understood instead of something I feared.

These days, when a parent asks me about a grade, I do not reach for a spreadsheet to hide behind. I can tell them what their child was learning and what the grade actually means. The conversations I once dreaded are now ones I welcome.

What's more, the area I once felt most exposed in, the one that nearly pushed me out of teaching, is now something I get to support other PE teachers with. I spend time with them helping them find the clarity they are looking for to make grading work in their PE class.

Looking ahead

So why bring this up now, in the middle of summer?

Because grading is hard to rethink once the year is going. There is little support for it in our schools, relevant PD is hard to come by, and finding clarity while every class is running is more than most of us have room for.

Summer is different. It gives us more time to breathe and think. And that space is often enough to head into the new year with a clearer sense of what grading can be, for us and for our students. No more reliving the same uncertainty when the first report cards roll around.

As the summer break rolls on, I will leave you with a question that helped me get more clarity:

If you had to clearly explain what a grade in your class says about a student's learning, what would you say?

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What if grading felt clearer?

Most of us don't want to become grading experts. We simply want it to be clearer and something we no longer dread.

We want to be able to consider what we know about a student's learning and confidently determine a grade without second-guessing ourselves. And we want to do it without spending hours figuring it out.

That is what Making Grading in PE Clearer is built for. A course that takes the guesswork out of grading.

You'll get clarity on what a grade is, what goes into one, and a process you can use to determine a grade that reflects student learning. Short videos, templates, and resources help you get there.

And, you get lifetime access to it, so you can revisit it whenever you want.

Bring more clarity to your grading this year.

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