Celebrating Our Learning

Since we don’t have grades at HMLC, we wanted to find a way to honor our learners’ hard work. We learned about how other nontraditional schools handle honoring learning and decided to try the strategy of offering our learners badges for what they accomplish. 

Our learners can earn badges in a variety of ways. They can set individual goals and decide on what badge they want to earn. We have a chart in our classroom where we can check off the progress each learner makes toward their personal goal. This could be for learning to add fractions, memorizing multiplication tables, following directions, finishing a novel, or learning the letter names and sounds. Most of these specific goals were determined by the learners themselves, sometimes through discussions with a facilitator about what they want to do and how they can accomplish it. Charting their progress allows us to celebrate the incremental steps in learning and reminds us that learning doesn't happen over night. (This is taken from my co-author’s ideas - you can find it in our book.)

Learners also earn badges for completing projects we set out for them, like our historical person unit, our candy-village unit, and our family narrative project. Sometimes, learners earn badges for contributing to our community, like when they’ve worked together to plan a party for our school, or when they created a scavenger hunt for everyone to enjoy. The highest honor badge may be our Flexibility Badge, which is given to learners who have shown remarkable flexibility in the face of challenges and when things don’t go as planned.

Initially, the reactions to the badges were mixed. Some learners loved them and were very proud of them. Others were more resistant to the idea. These learners don’t like setting public goals. While they do things for our community and participate in projects, they were very clear with us that they didn’t do these things to get a badge and don’t need to be recognized. Since much of our work is designed to be centered around learner choice, any of these reactions are accepted. We’ll offer badges but the learner certainly doesn’t need to take the badges or keep them. 

Our last badge ceremony was a week ago. A learner who had resisted participating in the badges before, took them with hidden pride this time. She even let me know I’d forgotten to give her one, and then advocated for getting another one for a goal she set but never put up on our goal-tracking wall. When our ceremony was over she asked if she could have some of the materials I used to make badges. An hour later she presented everyone with an HMLC BFF badge, wanting to acknowledge the friendships in our community as much as the academics and successes we’ve had. We got chills as she handed them to us. I proudly wore that badge all evening as a symbol of the community we’ve built this year.