Ungrading: Reflection Post #3 (Ch1: How to Ungrade, by Jesse Stommel)

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Point/Counterpoint

I'll just leave this tweet here, by one of my favorite and most valued accounts on Twitter @ButchAnarcy. 

I'm constantly feeling myself push against, and push back, my fears, uncertainties, assumptions, and expectations in this job. Lots of my reflections on this book are me trying to understand, deconstruct, and ultimately dispose of unhelpful beliefs.

How Am I Doing?

The part of grades that feels valuable is the ability for a student to quickly assess--how am I doing? Am I doing ok? Are things going well? Yeah, there's a bunch I could work on, and a bunch I've already done, but in general...am I doing okay? It's super valid to want to know how you're doing. And I want to honor that.

And I also think it's both impossible, and unhelpful, to try to boil down "how we're doing" to just a single metric. Imagine if a parent was trying to determine if a school was "good" for their child, and all you told them was that the average grade of all the students was a 76. It hides too much meaningful information.

On one hand, value of this summary statistic of "a grade" is that we don't have a ton of time to communicate with any nuance. We need to prioritize efficiency given that I've got 120 students, across 5 sections, and 80% of my day is active instruction. To which I say:

• The prioritization of "efficiency" is a characteristic of white supremacy culture
• Even if I *did* prioritize efficiency, consider how much time/resources are lost because of the negative effects of the oversimplification of grades
• Since when was doing something harmful (and grading is harmful) worth it just because it was "efficient"? There are a TON of super-efficient, very ineffective things that educators have learned to not do.

It's unsettling to not be able to just look at a number and know simply, "How am I doing?" But how we are "doing" isn't just a simple fact. So let's not try to make it one.

Maximizing Opportunities for Feedback

The richest learning environments are "feedback rich" (to use a phrase I learned from Dan Meyer). There are three people in the classroom that can provide feedback to a student about their work: 1) peers, 2) teachers, 3) the student themselves. I think Dan would want to throw in another options, 4) the math.

In general, I've always been kind of nervous about peer feedback and peer review. I've always felt that grades were kind of a private thing? That said, if it's not about graded work, it's just about work, that issue does kind of go away. I would definitely characterize my pedagogical vision as centered on group-work (however well that's actually realized). For groups to function, they need to be comfortable sharing their partial understandings, potential miscues, and brave ideas with their peers. Sometimes that could happen in real-time during a group task. Other times it could happen with a little bit of delay, after they work independently on a task, and then compare work after.

Self-reflection, self-analysis, meta-cognition...that's the real stuff right there. Again, I'm always talking to my high schoolers about how important it is for them to develop independence and self-direction. I definitely need to learn more about how to facilitate that kind of self-study.

Assign Your Own Grade

Given that I'm probably going to have to give them *some* kind of grade at the end of the course, what about the "pick your own grade" option? I would be nervous that the highest grades simply go to those who feel the most entitled to ask for them. And those students are often not the students who "deserve" them!

Contract Grading

In a previous post, I talked about being interested in "contract grading." As I understand it, contract grading basically means this: I outline some very clear, general conditions under which a student gets a given grade. I could consider something like, "As long as you are here for more than x% of the classes, and you do [insert task?] on those days, you'll get a A." Or something like that.

I like how simple it is. I don't like how transactional it feels. I like how it takes some of the grading out of the hands of the teacher, because the student can really just see what's happening and determine what their expected grade it. I worry that it might result in some hyperfocus on the minimum conditions under which the desired grade is achieved.

Ungrading: Reflection Post #2 (Introduction)

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Hope and Pessimism

By the time students come to us in high school, it's natural to feel like it's "too late." It's too late for us to do the seriously difficult work of reprogramming students and ourselves to not be obsessed with grades. But if we don't do this in high school, students will continue to suffer under the oppressive practices of grading for their last 3-4 years. What if it takes 2-3 years for us to transform our/their understanding of the (non-)relationship between grading and learning? I think that even just one year of an education unencumbered by the oppressive cloud of grading is worth it.

Moreover, they can spend the rest of their lives with a happier, healthier view on learning. Yes, I'm pessimistic and negative. I'm pessimistic in my insistence that what we are currently doing is harmful and inadequate. But for me that pessimism stems from a deeply rooted sense of hope. Hope, and understanding, that things can be better, and that we all deserve better than this. And I would rather my pessimism be hopeful, than steeped in resignation that the status quo is as good as we're ever gonna get.

There's no way that what happens in schools grades 1-8 should determine a developing human's worldview about what learning can and should be for the rest of their lives. Yes, the earlier we can disassociate learning from grades, the better, but high school can't possibly be too late!

My Elective

I am so so so glad that I am teaching an elective this year (and have had the chance to do so in the past). This really provides me with an experimental context under which to try different instructional and grading approaches. I'm teaching a Discrete Math elective this semester. Next semester, I was gonna do a second semester of it, but I decided quite recently to pivot it instead to an Math Art class.

I'm hoping to apply some of what I learn from this book study to the grading of that class. Some of the things I'm hoping to do are:

• Pass/Fail Grading. I don't know if that's even an option at my school/district, but that's my goal. I definitely would need to ask around to see what the "unsaid" culture around pass/fail courses is in my school/district.
• Narrative Feedback. I don't know much about it, but it feels like a major key, and I expect to learn more about it in this book.Here's how I'm thinking about the structure of how the course is graded so far. (For context, it's a once-weekly, 16 week course.)

Here's how I'm thinking about how the course is designed.

• I present a math art topic, likely inspired by Annie Perkins' #MathArtChallenge.
• We just spend the class making art.
• At the end, and throughout, students are filling in a big Notice/Wonder individually in their art journals/books/else. Maybe we make one big shared N/W poster that we post outside with the artwork?

I'd have to figure out *what* it is exactly that I'm grading? Which I guess would follow from me identifying *why* exactly I'm grading? I can't really think of a reason why I should grade this, though? All I care about is that students are there, and doing math/art. This feels like the kind of justification that "Contract Grading" could be well-suited to. Though I need to learn a bunch more about that.

End of Year Make-ups

The book mentioned a practice in European universities of yore, where end-of-course examinations were pass/fail. If a student failed the examination, they could just retake the examination again until they got a "satisfactory" result. This feels "better" than asking students to repeat a whole course after failing a final summative assessment.

What makes this retake policy difficult for lots of teachers I imagine (myself included), is that it makes-visible the idea that the whole course can be boiled down to a single assessment. I wrote about this in an earlier post (link) about an end-of-term makeup assignment I made last year:

• When compiling work to put into a the Q3 make-up assignment, here's the idea I was working from: "If a student can complete all four of these activities, and do well, they should pass the quarter." I only ended up doing this after Q3. But what if I had done it after every quarter? Then I would theoretically have four big make-up assignments, each roughly "worth" a quarter of work. If a student did *only* the quarterly make-up assignments, but did them well...how would I feel about them passing the class?
• Answer: I'd feel poorly about that. I'd be discouraged that a full-year course was distilled to ~16 tasks which could be completed independently and asynchronously. I'd feel like I'd gone all in on the "transactional" nature of a lot of modern high school education. You give me a certain amount of work, I trade that for a credit. You accumulate those credits, and trade them for a degree.

Not only am I discouraged by the transactional nature, I'm discouraged by the apparent low "cost" of my end of the transaction--the course itself. I feel poorly about "valuing" one of my year-long, 180 day, courses at only ~16 hour long tasks. And that's because I hope that there are many more valuable things that students get from my class than just ~16 arbitrary math standards. Having to package the course into an "economical" package of assessments/tasks does less to "distill" the course's most valuable content, and more to drain it of its actual..."value."

I also realize that I'm using a lot of language steeped in "transaction," "value," and "costs." I wonder how much of this is actually an honest and meaningful schema, and how much of it is just me applying capitalistic ways of thinking.

Grade Level Equivalents

At this point, I don't think it's particularly contentious to say that the IQ test, and other age-normed tests are super oppressive and bad. But I think even while believing that, lots of educators are okay with the idea of talking about "grade-level equivalents," which operate on the same principles of age-norming developmental progress.

The Limits of "Empirical" Research

I do seek to be reasearch-based in my development and practice as a teacher. This book talks about the limits of classic "empirical" approaches to researching teaching and learning. To quote a quote from the book, originally by John Clifford, "The 'context-stripping' that their empirical scrutinizing demands casts serious doubts on how closely protocols mirror real classrooms..." This is something I think a lot of educators would agree with.

In addition to recognizing the limits of "empirical research," I need to learn more about what more holistic, humanizing, contextualized research could look like. How can we research and learn through relationship-building, dialogs, ethnography, biography, art, and more "contextualized" sources? This question isn't just limited to an analysis of grading, but is a question for how to be "research-based" in the field of education more generally.

Co-constructing a Syllabus

They mention the idea of co-constructing the syllabus for a course. That seems soooooo interesting to me. I don't know anything beyond the idea that it's possible, but can totally see myself trying that in the future? I wonder what that would look like at the high school level?

Ungrading: Reflection Post (Foreword + Preface)

Over the summer, I read Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms, by Joe Feldman. I blogged my way through the book, as a kind of reading journal. (See the first post here). Blogging throughout the book helped me to process what I was learning. So I'm going to do the same thing with another book, also about grading--Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), which was edited by Susan D. Blum.

Grading for Equity helped me to better understand, and refine, my practices around assessment and grading. However, it also made me more aware than ever how many issues come not from "how" we grade, but really "that" we grade. That is, grades (as we commonly understand them) are oppressive not because we are doing them ineffectively, but precisely because we *are* doing them effectively. 

This effort to abolish grades feels connected with the general abolitionist, anarchist, communalist philosophy I'm increasingly aligned with. Traditional grading, and even progressive Standards-Based Grading (SBG) or Competency-Based Grading (CBG), is a social organization theory rooted in domination. In this way, it's like capitalism, or white supremacy. At it's best, however, education is about the humanization of the learner, a goal antithetical to domination. So when we are doing our best to grade effectively, we are actually doing our best to run in the wrong direction.

Even just reading the few pages in the Foreword and Preface, I can feel myself straining against the fear, doubt, and uncertainty of abolishing such a deeply-rooted institution as grading. Immediately I can feel myself thinking things like, "Well I do that because..." or "That would never work because..." or "That's not my exact situation, so that doesn't transfer..."  But I know that this is the natural arc of learning, which often comes with un-learning. So I will try to note and observe these doubts as they come up, track them, and be keep them in the, "We'll see!" category until I've done a bunch more research and learning.

So here are some ideas/reactions I've got so far, and they're mostly questions at this stage of reading:

Feedback Without Grades

During my student teaching, my coaches talked a lot about including a "Criteria for Success," where students can see listed out all the things they need to do/show in a task in order to meet the objective. These weren't necessarily attached to grades--they were just meant to make sure the student and teacher were on the same page.

While I could see the value, I also feel that having a precise "Criteria for Success" posted right there on the paper could be a spoiler for a lot of things. Part of the goal of learning, I feel is the internalization of those criteria. So yeah, we can include it in tasks, but when it comes time for me to really ask a student to "show what they know," it feels important not to include that on the paper.

I also don't believe that all learning objectives can be distilled to a discrete list of elements that can be conveniently listed on a checklist. But how much of that attitude is simply a reflection of my lack of understanding of how to make and use a Criteria for Success? How much is a subconscious effort on my part to "withhold" critical information, and so ensure that I have the ultimate power of assessment and the ordainment of "proficiency"?

This is all to say, I might be coming around on the value of using a Criteria for Success. I even started using them (albeit half-heartedly), by posting them at the top of quizzes. But I don't talk about them with students, so there's no reason to believe they're using them. I don't use them when grading, because I've already got an idea in my head of what I'm looking for, and "I'll know when I see it." Which is cringey to say out loud. But here's an example of the top of a quiz on a topic in my Algebra I class:

What brought this up was the idea of trying to provide students with feedback (at best) or judgement (at worst?) without actually assigning a single summary statistic, i.e. a grade. What if I just posted this Criteria for Success (CfS), and when I was grading I just checked off what they did, and what they didn't do? So when they got it back, they'd know what they did and what they didn't do?

On this quiz, for example, there were a lot of students who didn't realize that it was useful (essential, really) for them to analyze the tables I gave them, and try to find a common difference or common ratio. If all students understood how to use this CfS, that would not have happened. So a student would only have missed that part of the quiz if they simply did not know how to find a common difference/ratio. And that's better info for me, right? Right?

Utility of Grades

At one point, the book cites a collection of studies that point out that GPA is not a meaningful indicator of postgraduate success. But they're talking about undergraduate GPA vs. success in the workforce, and GPA vs. success in MD/PhD programs. I suspect that high school GPA is a better indicator for postsecondary success, even if it's for all the wrong reasons (privilege, etc.). I'd love to read more research on that, and hope this book talks about that.

In general, I suspect that there are a lot more conversations around "Ungrading" at the undergraduate level, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is ageism, and the willingness to extend humanity to adults (even 18-21 year olds) sooner than you would a child. As a high school teacher, mostly specialized in 9th grade math, I very much hope that this book has research and experience grounded in high school and middle school education.