Ungrading: Reflection Post #8 (Ch3: Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments, by Susan D. Blum)

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!

Uniformity != Equity

Blum talks about some of the ways that grades make things worse by not being uniform, which makes a ton of sense. But all teachers doing the same thing doesn't necessarily mean that there will be certain equity as a result of that uniformity. We might just all be uniformly oppressing our students with our grading system. I also think that teams (from departments, to districts, to entire countries) embrace seeking uniformity as a proxy for seeking equity, because it allows us to seek something that is almost surely more equitable, without actually challenging the system itself.

I think uniformity is sought also for a more insidious reason: it provides cover for expressing the culture of domination that lies at the heart of Western, white supremacist, capitalist culture. Teachers, schools, and districts can be coerced into “getting in line” for the sake of equity.

Grade Abolition Over Reform

My current school seeks to use Competency-Based Grading (CBG). In an early onboarding session, they were teaching us how the competency grading system worked. They used the analogy of riding a bike as a case study to practice using the continua and systems they used for CBG. It was pretty effective, and certainly helpful.

Here is the irony, however: at no point did I or the facilitators seem to consider the reality that it would be ridiculous to try and grade someone at learning to ride a bike. Indeed, this chosen example for how to grade someone using CBG was perhaps an even better example of how unnecessary it is to grade someone in the first place.

A classic math proverb: Not all that matters can be measured. Not all that can be measured, matters. Back in Chapter 2, Blackwelder described a super big, messy, cool project they did in that class that was never graded at any point. In fact, he said, “To grade this work would be ridiculous.” And that anecdote is making me think differently about what it means to “ungrade” my course.

The goal isn’t to take what I was doing, and figure out how to tweak it so that it succeeds without grades. In that way, I would still be trapping myself within the narrow oppressive framework of grading, and falling victim to it's inevitable shortcomings. I’d be trying to move forward with a course designed principally under the conditions of “grading." Instead, our goal can be to rethink what the goals and work of our classes actually are, and allow them to be rich, complicated, and sophisticated in a way that we would never have even dreamed of in the context of grading.

A modern (?) anarchist proverb: Become ungovernable. In my quest to ungrade my teaching, I feel that the true vision is to become ungradeable.