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?