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.