The Field Guide › Paper
Kohn assembles the case that grades, far from neutrally recording learning, actively damage it. Drawing on decades of research he identifies three consistent effects of grading: it diminishes students' interest in whatever is being learned, turning attention from the material to the mark; it produces a preference for the easiest possible task, because when a grade is at stake the rational move is to minimise risk rather than to stretch; and it reduces the quality of thinking, pushing students towards shallow, surface strategies and away from the messy, creative engagement that deep learning requires. To these he adds a battery of further problems: grades are far less reliable and objective than they appear, varying with the marker and the moment; they invite cheating; they corrode relationships, setting student against teacher and student against student; and they raise anxiety while narrowing the curriculum to what can be scored. Underneath sits Kohn's broader argument against extrinsic motivators, that dangling an external reward or judgement over an activity reliably undermines intrinsic interest in it. His remedy is what he calls de-grading: replacing marks wherever possible with narrative feedback, portfolios and student involvement in assessment, so that evaluation serves learning rather than sorting. For a corpus about psychological safety the relevance is direct even though the setting is a classroom. Grading is the measurement-distortion argument in its purest everyday form, a metric that changes and degrades the very behaviour it claims to capture, and it is also a safety argument: a graded environment teaches people to avoid challenge, hide difficulty and fear the mistake, which is exactly the risk-averse, self-protective posture that psychological safety exists to dissolve. Kohn's classroom stands in for any place where people are ranked and judged rather than helped to learn. Its limits are those of an advocacy essay: it marshals the evidence forcefully towards a conclusion Kohn already holds, and the practical path to de-grading is sketched more than solved, especially inside institutions built around the mark. (Based on Kohn's 2011 Educational Leadership essay, 69(3), pp. 28-33.)