Tyler Rablin on Ditching Old Assessment Systems to Build Student Motivation
Frustrated by the narrow lens of traditional grading, this instructional coach and former English teacher redesigned his grade book to encourage authentic student buy-in.
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Go to My Saved Content.All the professional development in the world couldn’t prepare Tyler Rablin for postpandemic teaching. Up against students’ cell phones and the personal struggles they brought back into classrooms, he found that it became increasingly difficult to capture their attention, let alone sustain it through an entire class period.
Once-reliable strategies like gamifying lessons or fun takes on formative assessment no longer yielded the same results, as student attention wandered and engagement petered out faster than ever. “It came down to me asking myself: Do students understand that what they’re learning is important?” Rablin recalls. “Do they feel like they’re making progress and can be successful?” Without these important pieces in place, “I was relying on fun and flash, and that wasn’t sustaining students.”
Through trial and error, Rablin—an instructional coach, consultant, and former high school English teacher based in Washington state—began to clarify what really worked inside his classroom to activate and sustain deep student motivation. His reflections became the foundation of his first book: .
I recently spoke with Rablin about the harmful messaging students receive from the assessment process, the early-career catalyst that inspired him to overhaul his grading practice, and the small but mighty question that changed how he thinks about student motivation.
PAIGE TUTT: Your book is titled Hacking Student Motivation, but it’s focused mostly on assessment. Why do you think assessment and motivation to learn are so closely linked?
TYLER RABLIN: Assessment is really a communication tool to help students understand whether they can or can’t do something yet. If we’re not careful, students can hear “You can’t” over and over until that message becomes internalized.
As a student, if I don’t have any evidence of success in my previous assessments, how am I supposed to believe that I’m going to be successful in the future?
The aim isn’t to falsely tell students they can do something, but to be very mindful that when we’re telling them “You can’t quite do this yet,” we’re also ensuring there’s a next step. Maybe they can’t meet the end goal yet, but they can do this. Every kid—no matter where they are in my classroom—should be able to tell me what they can do. That’s where you start linking assessment practice to motivation.
TUTT: That was my experience in math—Cs, Ds, and Fs over and over. I really never saw any evidence of growth. That’s when I decided I just wasn’t a “math person.”
RABLIN: Our brains are wired to find the most efficient path to an end point. If a student consistently has not seen a win, the obvious end point is “I’m not going to be successful; I’m going to get an F.” Then the brain is wired to say, “Well, if łŮłó˛ąłŮ’s where we’re going to end up, what’s the most efficient route?” Eventually that answer is to stop trying.
The most important thing I can do is give students a win so they question the inevitability of that end point. Give them something early on, even if it’s just four terms they have to understand in this unit. Make sure that when the student understands those terms, that they celebrate it.
TUTT: How do you shift students toward understanding that assessment is meant to communicate information, not judge them?
RABLIN: It’s a hard thing to change. A lot of times, it takes having an experience that shifts the norm for them about how grading happens: giving them an experience where they struggle or fail, then do another assessment and let that low grade go.
We don’t often think about messaging in a system that averages students’ attempts. When we think about grading as communication, then even if a student grows toward the end, they’re told through their grade, “You can’t do this very well because you struggled early.”
TUTT: It sounds like you’re saying there’s a lot of unintended messaging in the assessment process—specifically, in how students perceive grades?
RABLIN: As simple as grading often feels, we’re really communicating value. We’re telling students who they are as learners in a numerical form, and we have to be really mindful of how we’re doing that. If we’re averaging scores over time, the reality is their failures will outweigh their successes in their final grade. The message we give to students then is that it matters more where you start than where you end up. What you come to me with will dictate how far you can go.
I want to make sure all of my students know if you are successful, you’re successful. Regardless of the path we took to get here, I want to celebrate where you are now, what you’ve learned and achieved.
TUTT: In your book, you write that grade books can provide a lot of data, but not a lot of insight. Can you explain what you mean?
RABLIN: This realization stemmed from early in my career. I was teaching junior-year English at the time. At the end of the year, I was walking my grade book down to the office and had this moment of looking at it and thinking, if I handed this to their senior-year English teacher and said here’s the information you need to help students pick up where they’re at in their learning and keep growing, they would have laughed at me. There was nothing there that was useful.
I was just using the traditional approach—each row was a student, each column was an assignment. It was really hard to see trends and patterns. I had to start questioning what the purpose of my grade book was. It’s communication. What do I want communicated, and how do I prioritize that?
TUTT: How did you recalibrate your grade book to make it more meaningful for you, your students, and their next teacher?
RABLIN: A simple reorganization was the jumpstart I needed to help me rethink my entire assessment philosophy; instead of just randomly organizing assignments into their own column, I would clump them.
I would have . Even just saying quiz one, test one, and project one all connect to this standard, all of a sudden I started seeing patterns. That was key for me—seeing the connection between assessment and future learning, and helping students bridge that gap so that motivation doesn’t die in the space between.
TUTT: How do you shift students toward focusing on learning rather than grades?
RABLIN: As much as possible, create space for students to sit with the learning without a grade showing up. Out of sight, out of mind. As an ELA [English language arts] teacher, I would have students write a draft. They would get feedback, but no grade for as long as possible—I wouldn’t update grades for two weeks so in that time period students knew they could struggle and it was OK.
This has to be paired with intentional design around culturally responsive practices, interests, and passions, things like that. Yes, I want them focused on the learning, but I also want them engaged in something that matters to them. If the task can matter to them, łŮłó˛ąłŮ’s oftentimes when they start to care about the learning that goes with it.
TUTT: You emphasize the word “meaningful” in the section of your book on student ownership of learning. How do you provide meaningful opportunities for ownership and autonomy?
RABLIN: I was guilty of giving students the appearance of choice—smoke-and-mirror choices. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, I would say basically it’s a free-for-all: Here’s all these resources, just go.
When we give students autonomy, they still face a fear of failure because there is a power dynamic in the systemic structure of school. If I say, “Do whatever you want,” they’re going to look to me and say, “Well, what do you want me to do?” I was giving students ownership, but it wasn’t meaningful because they were still so dependent on me to define for them what success looks like. That’s why I started using learning progressions.
TUTT: For those who aren’t familiar, can you explain what learning progressions are?
RABLIN: A learning progression takes a standard and precisely states the goal. It asks: What are the skills required to become proficient at this standard?
It’s my job as an educator to say, “As someone who has studied this content, these are elements that are hidden in here that you can see early success on.”
If the goal is that students can analyze how a character develops and impacts the message of a text, I might make a first phase for that learning progression: “I can define protagonist, antagonist, plot structure, and conflict.” Once students learn those definitions, I can say, “How do you feel about that? Do you feel good about what you know? OK, let’s do the next step of being able to identify that in a text.”
It gives students something more tangible to hold on to than just saying, “You’re 60 percent of the way to proficiency.”
When I had a student who wasn’t engaged, my first question was, “when was their last win?”
Tyler Rablin
TUTT: What sort of impact did that have on your classroom?
RABLIN: When I had that in place—in addition to a grading system that allowed students to make mistakes without it being held against them—łŮłó˛ąłŮ’s where I started seeing students taking more risks and really trying to push their learning.
When students are afraid of making mistakes, you don’t grow creative, resilient, interesting writers. You grow writers who are obsessed with doing exactly what the teacher wants. Instead of saying, “This is exactly what you need to do,” or having a free-for-all, I’d say, “This is what we’re working on; these are the phases of learning you might go through. Let’s work on our writing. If you make a mistake, it’s not going to be held against you. We’re going to drop that and move past that. It’s not averaged into your score.”
Creating that environment of clarity and flexibility, łŮłó˛ąłŮ’s where I really saw ownership become more meaningful for students.
TUTT: You mention student conferences in the book as a key approach. What role do these play in assessment?
RABLIN: Assessment became a two-way street, a conversation. My assessments were bricks, but those conferences were the mortar. They gave students agency to advocate for themselves and communicate.
I would give students an assessment result and say, “This is what I’m seeing,” and during the conference, the student could now say, “Here’s something else that shows that I really know this. Yes, I struggled here, but look at this other piece of writing where I did well.” That opens a dialogue where it’s not simply me delivering a score, but rather an environment that says, “Here’s your score, here’s what I saw, what am I missing?”
TUTT: To prepare for this interview, I asked ÁůşĎ˛Ę˛ĘƱ readers if they had any questions for you, and probably the most urgent ones were about motivation—or students’ lack of motivation. Patty on Instagram says she has to “bribe or threaten” students to do their work, and Sean wrote that his students would rather be anywhere but class. What’s your advice?
RABLIN: It’s tough, and I don’t want to paint the picture that I had 31 kids in my room who were in love with ELA and constantly motivated and focused. But when I had a student who wasn’t engaged, my first question was, “When was their last win?”
That question changed my mindset as I approached the situation. We have students who come to our classroom feeling like it’s been a long time since they really had a win in school. That question prompts me to ask how I can redesign my assessment scaffolding, my process, and my unit planning so that there’s an accessible win for students early on.
It’s not going to solve the problem entirely, but my question often is, “How do I give this student a real, meaningful win that I can reference in the future to help them engage?”
This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.