Hi, my name is Angela Solic and I'm the director of Rush University Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation fondly called CTEI. In this episode, I'm going to be talking with Susan Blum. Katie Lee Bunting, Kasey Edwardson and Jesse Stommel about an interesting term called ungrading, which is also referred to as alternative grading. You can read the descriptions of who each of these people are in the description of this particular podcast. But for right now, I'm going to have the participants give us a very brief introduction, including their position and where they work. You're up first, Susan.
Thanks so much, Angela. Happy to be here. My name is Susan Blum. I'm a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in the US.
I am Katie Lee Bunting, my pronouns are she/her. I feel really humbled and excited to be part of this conversation. I'm an assistant professor of teaching in the Masters of Occupational Therapy Program at the University of British Columbia, which is on Musqueam First Nation land in British Columbia, Canada, etc.
Hi, I'm Kasey Edwardson. I'm a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas.
Jessie. Hi, I'm Jessie Stommel. And pronouns are he him, and I'm a faculty member in the Writing Program at the University of Denver, and I'm also the executive director of hybrid pedagogy, the Journal of critical Digital Pedagogy.
Yes, we all need to check that out, too, for sure. All right, we're going to jump right into the questions today. The first question is, why did you become interested in this topic of on grading, or alternative grading? So Kasey, I'm going to have you talk first. All right.
So for me, it was kind of a two part thing. On the day of my graduation from my PhD, my advisor, told me he was taking a semester off, so that he could ungrade his classes. And I thought, that's interesting. At that same time, I was doing a review of Midwest medical lab tech and medical lab science programs. And I found that the grading skills were all over the place where out of 21 programs or 20, unique grading scales, and that kind of infuriated me because different programs require different percentages. So for example, one program actually had a minimum of an 80% to get a C. And that just seemed weird to me. So having the thought of my PhD advisor on grading combined with this frustration, I started looking at ways of kind of mitigating those differences between the laboratory programs and alternative grading was kind of an answer to that. It's,
that's kind of interesting, like the most, like, mundane little thing. got you interested in if that's cool. How about you, Susan? Okay,
it's kind of my whole life story here. But I will give you kind of the proximate cause and the medium cause and maybe the ultimate cause. But I'll try to do it very briefly. The the proximate cause was that I had written about education for about 15 years, and I had become very familiar with the literature on motivation, and the fact that grades are the quintessential extrinsic motivator. And for all kinds of reasons. This is not a good way to motivate students in particular, I read the work of Alfie Kohn, I had written a book called, I love learning, I hate school, an anthropology of college and thank you for laughing. Because myself, I had always loved school. And for me, school was a really great way of learning. But doing my ethnographic research, I found that many students don't feel that way. And they're perfectly wonderful learners, they just have found school oppressive, and not necessarily conducive to learning. So at the end of that book, which came out in 2016, so I finished writing it in 2015. I had a sentence that said, if I could change one thing about education, it would be to get rid of grades. I haven't chapter in the book about grades up called What do I have to do to get an A, and I was really kind of in a more than a funk. I was really troubled by what I saw as a mismatch between what I knew about learning and the practices we were doing in the academy and I hope and slowly relinquishing my own focus on grading for a very long time, introducing the idea of reflection and self assessment and trying to give a lot more narrative feedback rather than focusing on the grade. But I didn't know, I really wanted to get rid of grades, and I didn't think I could. And then I came across a very small book by Starr Sackstein, called Hacking Assessment, how to go grainless in a conventional or traditional schools, traditional grades, school. And so for me, that was the kind of key that freed me to actually get rid of all grades until the end of the semester in my own classes. So I went into my department chair, and I said, I am not grading anymore. Here's a book that says it's okay. And I have not put a grade on anything, except at the end of the semester, since then, and that was in 2016. And I would never change anything since then. Anything at all. But then that inspired my own experience expired inspired me to do a little bit of writing. And then I decided I needed a company in this endeavor. And so I went out seeking other people who were also doing it. And I found Jesse Stommel, and many others who were also embarked on the same adventure of how to help students learn. So that's kind of the medium and quick answer. And it wasn't very quick. I apologize that
that's awesome. It's fascinating, though, I know the other participants are probably thinking, the exact same thing. So So Katie, and after Katie will go to Jesse, and then we'll jump. Yeah,
so I am thinking the same thing, Angela, because it was through Susan's book on grading that I came to this work. So for me, I would say like I My background is as an occupational therapist, and I taught clinically, for 10 years before I moved into education, where I've been nine years now. And when I moved into education, I was conditioned through traditional education in Canada, that to do a good job and to do what was expected of me. That's how I had succeeded. In elementary school, high school, undergrad, graduate school was like what's expected of me and then reaching toward that goal, which very much, much aligns with traditional grading. So when I moved into education, I was just really focused on okay, like, how can I do a good job here? How are people doing this? And so I stepped into traditional grading methods. And I always felt unsettled. With that approach, there was always something sort of within me, that was telling me this wasn't the best way to do it. But this wasn't right. But I struggled with naming that, I think, because, again, I was just wanting to do a good job. And I felt like, you know, to prove my worth and being there was to sort of do what I saw other folks doing No, no judgment on what other folks are doing, because it's very, very common to use traditional approaches to grading. And so this, I teach a first year theory course, in our masters of occupational therapy program, it was right before the end of term, the winter term before the pandemic hit. And I remember, you know, sitting in one of our labs, I was like, invigilating half of the class, I didn't even know that term invigilating till I started education. But I was invigilating, half the class, and I'm sitting there, and I teach in quite a relational way, which I think has been, I certainly have stepped more into over the last few years. But all that to say that like really central to who I am as a person, and my teaching philosophy is relationships. So, you know, I'm sitting there, I see students coming into the room, they're looking tired, their eyes are red, they're looking really stressed, there was not that energy, you know, vibe and joy that's typically there in the teaching space. And, you know, while I don't, well, I'm not so like such a megalomaniac to think I've total control over how these students are feeling in their life. I couldn't help but be very aware that like, the decision that I made, around how I was assessing their learning in this class was causing them harm was hurting them, you know, and I don't feel like that's hyperbole, you know, I was harming the well being of these students, and that it was completely unnecessary. So as I was sitting there, I just had this real clarity that I didn't want to do this anymore, and then it wasn't okay. And then when the pandemic hit, and I'd had sort of ideas bubbling in the back of my head, but I just hadn't brought them forward. And so when the pandemic hit you You know, I think for many of us, the oppressive systems that pervade our entire society and therefore, our president, higher ed, became really visible, you know. And so for me, that hegemony that weighs heavily in higher ed institutions in Canada, and I think in the states to made it really clear to me of how oppressive many of the choices are that we make, that I was making as an educator, and that those choices were sort of systemically at a systems level supported. But with the pandemic, I think the experience for many educators was that, you know, while it was a really stressful, frantic time, it was also an opportunity where, you know, folks just wanted to keep their program going. And if I had a good rationale, I had the liberty to move away from traditional methods of assessment and really embrace more non traditional alternative approaches to teaching and learning as well as, you know, assessment of student learning. And so I felt like I just had room and I had more agency to, to make changes that I felt were more aligned with, you know, who I am personally with my teaching philosophy, and that I hoped would really send her students as human beings and really sent her humanity and student assessment. And also, during the pandemic, I leaned heavily on teaching podcasts, and I can't remember which one it was. But as my husband was teaching our kids at home and struggling, I would leave the house, take your dog for a walk and listen to teaching podcasts. And that's where I heard you speaking Susan, and I just a lightly I thought, Yes, this is it. And I ordered your book, and I was actually looking through your book today, and I have so many underlines, saying yes. And Mike drop and oh my gosh, yes. Wow. You know, and like curse words of like, holy curse word. And just like it was just like, yes, you know, so. So that's how it started for me. And I've just, you know, tried to keep up that momentum since I love it.
I love it. I love it. I bet you Susan is smiling very widely right now. I think I
need to jump in here and say that I laughed out loud as you were saying that so that we could help you curse words and all big.
Love it. So Jesse, last but not least, how did you get interested in this stuff? Yeah,
so I started teaching, I was a TA I started teaching as a TA in 1999. And then 2001, I started as an instructor of record, and I was really influenced at the start of my career by three different teachers that I co taught with, from the start of my career, collaborative teaching and co teaching was a huge part of my development as a teacher. And the three teachers that influenced me the most were RL Widman, Marian Payne, and Martin Beckman. In 2001, when I started teaching my first class, as instructor of record, I was influenced specifically by Martin Beckman, who was the only teacher that I had in all of undergrad, all of graduate school, I think all of K through 12, who did anything that even resembles on grading, or alternative approaches to grading? And so when I started teaching in 2001, I adopted some of his approaches and philosophies, and was influenced a great deal by him. And so because of that, I haven't put a grade on a piece of student work ever in my, I guess, how many years is that to wait many years,
that's a long time, one year less than me. So I don't want to even know that
22 or 23 years of my teaching career. And I started doing work as a faculty in faculty development in 2003 2005. And that was really when I started to think about what the connection was between my teaching philosophies, a lot of which were influenced by my mentors, as well as by work and critical pedagogy by people like Paulo Freire and Bell Hooks, and really coming to a sense of what would it look like to name and start talking about the philosophy that undergirds my approach to assessment, kind of fast forward to around 2017. And that's when I started writing more publicly using the term on grading I had previously written about grades and various different other posts. I have one piece that specifically about Bell Hooks, learning management systems and the grade essentially arguing that in the learning management system, all roads lead back to the grade book, and then thinking through some of the philosophies of Bell Hooks, and trying to imagine how critical pedagogy would ask us to reimagine or rethink our approaches to assessment. And so ultimately, I guess I would say that it's hard for me to talk about when I started thinking about engraving or doing the work of engraving, because to some extent, I've never done anything else. But one of the things that I think is really important is the way that the community of people who are doing this work alongside me have constantly asked me to re inspect my own approaches and to rethink my own approaches. So I guess the answer is that I've always been doing it. And also, I'm always constantly figuring out how to do it alongside some really amazing folks.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jesse. I think like, just in this first question, there is so much passion and so much feeling of empowerment. I think that anybody listening right now will already will feel that, because, you know, I got goosebumps from head to toe just during that first question. So that that gives me shows me, this is awesome what we're doing here today. So if someone, by the way, has never even heard of this term, right, and they listen to that whole first question, like, I don't even know what they're talking about, what are we talking about here? So what does this mean? I'm gonna have Susan go first on this one.
Thanks. And one of the, I just want to follow up a little bit about Jess with Jesse's comment, because in 2017, I was also writing for the first time about engraving. And I also use the term for the first time kind of on the model of unschooling. So, and which it turns out comes from people like John Holt, who were using the model of the uncoiler. And so there's a whole litany of terms that are unified around this idea of on Alfie Kohn himself uses the the term d grading for me on grading is related to alternative assessment, but it's not alternative assessment there. And I want to point out that Josh Eyler, is writing a book called Scarlet letters, which is about grading. And he's got a whole bunch of very precise terms about the different kinds of alternative assessments and that from contract grading, labor based grading, specs, grading and all that. But for me, the idea of engraving is not focusing on grades, moving the attention from grades to learning. And there may be different ways of doing that. I found, as long as I was putting a grade on anything, I could tell students over and over again, don't pay attention to the grade. But as long as there was a grade, they were paying attention to it, I could say, the points don't matter. But as long as there were points, that's what they were trained and socialized to pay attention to. So it was only by removing all conversation about grades, that I was able to really get the students to relax and stop focusing on the grades, but different people are using the term on grading in different ways. Some people don't like it anymore. Some people are afraid to use it. They're afraid they're gonna get in trouble. I had a grad student asked me, they were applying for jobs, and they practice engraving. But they asked me should they use this term in their cover letter? And I warned them maybe I suggested maybe don't use the term right now because it isn't widely known, although it's becoming more widely known. But some people in the non grading alternative grading engraving world want to distinguish their own practices from other people's practices. So I like to think of it as an engraving umbrella. Because anybody who wants to question the orthodoxies is welcome. But other people want more precision and nuance. And that's okay to
say, Do you want to add anything to what Susan said?
Yeah, I think so. The way that I've defined it in my writing is raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply not grading, the word is a present participle an ongoing process, not a static set of practices. And really, what's important for me there is that engraving is a conversation. It's a series of conversations. And ideally, it's conversations that teachers are having together with their colleagues. It's a conversation that teachers are having with their institutions, and also a conversation that teachers are having with students. And when I say that it's distinct from not grading part of the part of what underlies that is people often point to engraving and and suggest that it's a misnomer, because most people who are doing some version of engraving are still putting a grade on students. Giving students a grade at the end of the term as Susan described in her practice, which is also similar to mine. All of the institutions where I've worked have required me to give students to final grade, ultimately, how I give that final grade is through a set of conversations with students. But ultimately, I don't think it's a misnomer, because it isn't necessarily about not grading, it is about decentering grades. But in some ways, it's also about shining a light on grades, which so there's kind of a bit of a, a conundrum there that you're both decentering grades at the same time as you're having hard conversations about grading. Because ultimately, I think the only way we can dissenter grades is to ask hard questions about how grades work, what grades do to us, how grades, change the relationships that we have one another. So ultimately, I just wrote a post today that I published called do we need the word on grading? And ultimately, I argued that I don't, I'm not necessarily attached to any one specific word to describe this work. What I think we need is the huge number of people who are using different approaches to grades and using the word on grading, in some cases, to ask hard questions about grading. And in that piece, I argued that for me, there was two components to my definition. And one is that it's an active and ongoing critique of grades as a system. And to that, it's the decision to do what we can depending on our labor conditions, to carefully dismantle that system. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean we snap our fingers. And tomorrow, grades cease to exist, grades have actually in some ways constructed. So many of the systems that we work in, they are the fabric of a lot of those systems. So trying to dissenter them requires us to kind of take a hard look at that fabric and start to break it apart and start to figure out how we can build upon a different foundation.
Very interesting. Kasey, do you have anything to add?
I think they hit most of it, I would just echo what they said. It's a shifting of the learners focus from the grades and really moving that focus towards actually learning, we all know that the learners are there to gain some knowledge. And especially in the health field, we are looking for them to be able to take care of people in one way or another. And so in most health professions fields, they have to pass an exam at the end. So we want them to truly know that material, but not just know it to pass the exam, we want them to know it to be able to apply it to their healthcare practice. And especially when you have those grades, there's that huge focus on I have to get an A or I have to get a B rather than I need to learn this to take care of my patients. And so it's really shifting it away from giving them that grade and saying, let's look at this as a patient, let's look at this is the material that you need to know to do your job. And I'd say isn't simply just throwing out grades, it's not just passing or failing someone, there is a lot of work to it. As Jesse mentioned, it's kind of a conversation, I use a lot of self assessments where the learners will kind of evaluate themselves. And a lot of places do require us to submit grades at the end of the semester. And so they still get a grade at the end. But it's kind of a culmination of just different techniques and approaches that don't rely on that letter grade or the percentage attached to a paper or assignment or something like that, so that they can focus on truly learning and mastering the content.
That's it's definitely this is kind of like maybe when the car first came out, and people were like, I'm not going to use that. I'm going to stick with my horse. Right? A little bit of fear around this, I'm sure. So we'll see what the next you know, several questions how people feel about it. So the next one is how do you think the process of or the idea behind on grading affects students? So Katie, you're up first on this.
Yeah, thanks. So what I've noticed so as I mentioned, you know, I started this work in 2020. So fairly recently, and I've been fortunate to get some funding through the University of British Columbia to do a small qualitative research project on one of the approaches to engraving in that first year course that I teach. So, for this project, we spoke to 13, masters of occupational therapy students, and for this sort of summative assessment, students are given a choice so they can choose to do an online, open book, more traditional test, and I post, you know, sample questions, sample answers, we chat about it, etc. Or they can choose to do a more creative project where they apply critically reflexive lens to be to develop sort of an artifact that represents the learning that they're still wrestling with. So the learning that is not resolved You know, at the end of this course, and I got that idea from my colleague and friend, Dr. Judy Chan, who's an educational consultant at our Center for Teaching and Learning Technology here at UBC, where she encouraged me to use that frame of like, what are you still needing to learn about, and I mean, it really aligns with the philosophy that underpins the broad spectrum of engraving. So we interviewed both students who did the test and students who did the creative project. And the creative project is a blend of our students self evaluating, as well as getting feedback and evaluation from from myself, or one of the other instructors, le Park. So in this, you know, what we're hearing from students, we haven't done the full analysis yet, we're just coming to that. But in looking through the transcripts, and speaking with the research assistant, who led the interviews, you know, what students share is what we already know, you know, that students, first and foremost feel seen as human beings, which aligns with a critical pedagogy that you were speaking to Jesse, I mean, that's central to critical pedagogy of really creating educational opportunities for students are seen as complex human beings, and that they're seen as more than, you know, quote, unquote, just students. And that was the language that students used in an interview that they really felt even cared about and valued, you know, by myself as their instructor. And in the creative project, you know, they're encouraged to use their own passions and interests and in developing this artifact, so students really also valued the opportunity to have that autonomy to really bring forward and center their strengths and their interests and to share that with myself, to share that with others, and then to really use that to explore continued learning so. And the other piece that students really valued was, again, normalizing that, you know, I don't expect you to know everything at the end of this course, I don't know everything, and I teach this course. So just normalizing and, and really highlighting the importance of understanding what we don't know, normalising and destigmatizing that we were, we will always be learning, and really providing students with an authentic experience where they can engage in a way that aligns with their interests, with their strengths, engage with that continued learning and and part of the project too, is that they develop a bit of a plan of like, how am I going to continue to maybe use my artifact and engage with this learning as they enter my first practicum, which follows the end of this course. So, you know, for me, you know, that's, that's what's really resonated, in terms of how it affects students, you know, first and foremost, they, they know that they are seen as human beings. And for me, that's everything. You know, if we're not treating students at every step of the way, as human beings, then we're, we're really failing.
Yeah, I agree with you, Susan, what, what do you have to say about this?
I asked my students every semester, on both named reflections, and also anonymous, surveys, how they feel about ungrading. And I would say every semester, probably about 90% of the students love it, and prefer it and tell me things like, for the first time, I'm learning for myself and not for the grade. Or they say things like, because I didn't have to do it. I wanted to do the work. Or the work in this class was so interesting that I did it before I did the work from my boring hard grader geese. Or they say, I don't know why more professors don't do this. They say all kinds of things. There are often a few, maybe every semester I have one or two, who remain committed to the conventional status quo, because that's what they're familiar with. And they've been successful in the system. And they like it because it tells them precisely what to do. I had a student a few years ago, who led she wasn't completely on board. She'd had a couple of classes with me, and she liked me and I liked her. And we got along well and everything. And she never was openly hostile, but she had some reservations. And then she graduated. And she got a job. And she wrote to me later and said, Now I see what you were doing. Now that I'm out of school and in the world and working and self motivating and judging myself in the quality of my work. I understand exactly the point of your engraving practices. So I think most of my students really rise to the occasion. They learn a lot. I promised them basically at the beginning and throughout the semester. We're going going to be having fun learning a lot working together and it won't be stressful. And the student well being the students full humanity are definitely part of the equation, I'd like to add one other thing, I have a lot of assignments where students have a lot of choices. And they can do something called an an essay if they want, which might be a podcast, and it might be an infographic and it might be a film, and it might be a poem, and it could be a sculpture or a dance, or whatever it is they want to do. And for many of them, they want to try something like this. But they've never dared do it before, because they might not be good at it. And they realize in this class, that they have no danger, because if it's not great, they can say so and it won't harm them. And so I have students taking risks on things that are meaningful and creative for them. And they often are really excited about it. And you know, certainly excitement is a really good motivator much better than a fear of a bad grade. And so I would really welcome any, anybody who's considering engraving, at least partially to talk to your students about grades and what they've done to them. The fear that terror the stress that conventional grading practices bring, and see if by removing some of that we can free the students to be a little bit more seen, but also free to learn in ways that matter to them.
Thank you so much. Casey, do you have anything to add about this?
Again, just kind of echoing what people have already said it, it has had a really positive impact on my students ability to learn and master those skills. I teach both undergraduate and doctoral students. And I use this in both levels. And my doctoral students do a lot of memos and self evaluations and reading through their memos. A lot of times unprompted, they will report I like the setup of this class, I can focus on learning, I'm able to learn a lot while focusing on my mistakes without the punitive nature of grading. And so even though they still notice their mistakes, it's not an Oh, no, I'm failing or I did bad. It's a, I'm going to learn from this mistake, which is what we want them to do, right? So the undergrads also have reported that they felt less stress. And they again, are able to learn from those mistakes without being terrified of failing a class or doing poorly. So again, I'm going to say that in health professions, that's huge, because we want them to learn the material, we want them to be able to take that into their future jobs. So just a huge positive impact. I will say there are learners who do like that external motivation, it feels great to get an A. But in the end, everyone has reported some sort of positive impact from experiencing the alternative grading in my courses.
So let's say like right now, the people listening are like, oh, yeah, I want to do this. And they feel super excited. So to you, what do you think is one of the most important skills or an important skill that an instructor would need to implement this type of change successfully? Jesse, I'll have you go first.
Yeah, I'm actually going to apologize. I think it's a wonderful question, but I'm going to sidestep it a little bit. It's mostly because I think that there's something that we need before there's something we need first. And in part, because I want to take this out of the space of instructor responsibility. I think often times, when we're talking about pedagogical practice, we imagine that these are things that any teacher can just implement tomorrow. And ultimately, I think what we need first is we need some systemic change. And so I would actually ask, what skills do institutions and institutional administrators need in order to help better support and prepare teachers to do this kind of work? And so to me, the work begins with us ranting up to our institutions and asking institutions to create a fertile ground for us to do this kind of work. And what does that mean? For example, in higher education, collaboration is discouraged systemically, at almost every institution that I've visited. You'll often hear things like, well, we could collaboratively teach but how would like how How would it count? Who would get the credit for the course? How would I talk about my participation in that course? Who would get paid for the course. And so there's all these systemic barriers to collaboration. And ultimately, I think the only way we develop our pedagogy is is in collaboration with other teachers. Another example is that less than half of teachers in higher education, get basically any preparation at all for the work of teaching. And so how do we change our institution so that our institutions are adequately preparing teachers for the work of teaching, and then also supporting that work? And how do we change our institutions, so that the work of teaching is valorized, to a degree where time spent on improving our teaching is seen as valuable. So to me if those institutional transformations don't happen, or begin to happen at every single institution, it's really hard for me to imagine what individual teachers can do. Now that said, I think that we work we work within systems, and ultimately, we have to figure out how to negotiate those systems. So to answer your question more directly, I would say that the things that we can do as individual teachers, is figure out how to negotiate the institutional systems where we work, how can we balance, ranting up to our institutions, while also protecting our own livelihood and making changes in our own classrooms?
I appreciate you bringing up that that is incredibly important. And I leave that to my own ignorance about ungrading and thinking, oh, yeah, we can just do it. But you're very, very right, that without that support, it'll be very difficult. So Kasey, you have something to add to this, too. What
do you say?
I,
you know, there's a lot of things that someone needs, but I think flexibility is one too, it's not going to be perfect, the first time you do it, you can't wake up one day and say, I'm going to upgrade my class, it just doesn't work that way. So when you do first implemented, it probably isn't going to go as perfectly as you hope it does, you're going to probably need to make adjustments the next time you run that class with that upgrading, or alternative approaches. And I'd say that not all of the approaches, if there's different assessment techniques that you can use, not all of them are going to work the same for every course, I mentioned, I teach both undergrads and graduate students, I do different things in both of those levels, because it works differently for each level. So flexibility.
That's great. Katie, what's your what's your skill?
Well, I don't know if it's, if it's my own skill, per se. But, you know, I think having a really clear understanding of why you are engaging and engraving work, I think it connects to Jesse's point that, and I think specifically I can speak to, you know, health professions education, but you know, health professions, education is rooted in a scientific epistemology, which, you know, sort of valorizes objectivity and rationality and distancing of oneself from the other. And that permeates through in terms of how we assess health profession students. So through engraving, you're really pushing back against that sort of hidden epistemology that pervades health professions education. And so I think really being taking the time to really think about, you know, what's driving you what's motivating you, and doing this work, will not only allow you to articulate a clear rationale, why, and then provide, of course, all the evidence based reasons why you're doing it, but it will also sort of sustain you in in pushing against that, that larger system that really doesn't, you know, I mean, at least for you know, in Canada, you know, higher ed institutions struggle to center relationships. It's just it's not how the institutions were built. Yeah, so I think having that kind of clear why you're doing it can help you sort of with that maintaining the work. Awesome.
And last, but not least, Susan, what's yours?
I wouldn't call this a skill, but I would call it a condition and it's connected a little bit with what Jesse was talking about that we work within institutions, and many people, probably most faculty now are not tenured like I am. And many people are in positions of precarity. I did that way, way back in the beginning of my career, but graduate students, adjuncts, postdocs, people without tenure lectures, in terms of the structures of higher ed, and then their own positionality people of color women, people with disabilities, people in the LGBTQ community, people from non us in the US context, backgrounds, people who are not first language speakers of English, there are a whole bunch of people for whom higher ed is more dangerous. And so a lot of people don't feel safe, taking the risk and doing something that is not conventional. So I think the ungrading practices are spreading. But one of the reasons I wanted to publish this book, this collection, I was the editor, not the writer, of course, was so that people in positions with less power could take this book to their supervisor and say, Look, there's research, it's respectable, I didn't make this up, I'm not being flaky and lazy, but I'm doing something aligned with good practices. But at the same time, I encourage people to find a buddy, somebody at the same level of institutional hierarchy as them with whom they can be honest, because it's not easy to just do something different. So somebody with whom you can process the experience, but then also find a champion, somebody, a department chair of Vice Provost, somebody at the Teaching and Learning Center, somebody who can also vouch for these practices and show that these are not one off things that somebody is doing, but that they there is a growing recognition that what we're doing has to change, it is not working. And because it's not working, we are, in my view, obligated to change it, but we can all change it as individuals, and those of us with more security, I think have the obligation to go first. I
love it. I love it. All right. Next question. What are some potential drawbacks of implementing blinding this kind of assessment strategy? Katie?
Yeah, so I think folks have already mentioned this, but and, and, you know, Jesse and Susan had mentioned this in their work, and Casey in her research. So, you know, we sort of conflate traditional methods of assessments with being more rigorous, credible, the gold standard, and any movement away from that can be quite sort of fear inducing, that somehow we're being less rigorous, where we're not evaluating students in a way that that sort of just as in line with, like, historically, how we how we view best practice around student learning, so it's so heavily entrenched in how we think about, you know, best practices and Student Assessment being, you know, pencil paper, tests, exams, essays, etc. So I think, you know, when you're introducing this work, it's really important to be transparent, and engage in dialogue with, you know, students and faculty and staff around, you know, why you're doing it, and really being clear and transparent in your explanation of that, I think Susan mentioned that before. So that so that there's no surprises that you can unpack some of the judgments that are, you know, attached to, you know, even the word engraving that can you know, the reactions that can evoke in people. So, just providing that time to really, you know, gather, you know, evidence so you can really contextualize your your reasoning. And I think, you know, like other folks have shared, you know, engraving isn't an all or nothing. So, really letting folks know that it's a continuum and educating folks on like, how you will be stepping into this work, and that there's many ways to do it, I think can help mitigate some of the some of like, the tension around it. Awesome.
What do you think, Casey?
I think that
some of the drawbacks might be faculty might feel that it's a lot of work usually is going to include a lot of feedback. Now, we already give feedback. But I've found that upgrading or alternate assessment approaches, has required me to give even more feedback. And so people have asked me, Well, how do you have the time for that? I make the time I have things set in my calendar to dedicate that time to providing that feedback. Like I said, You should be giving feedback anyways, it just might be a little bit more substantial. I will also echo what Jesse had mentioned with the institutions, there is a little bit of red tape or requirements we have I am still required to give a grade and so figuring out how to do this, but in the end, giving a grade at the end of the semester. As for the learners, some of them might miss that motivation, that external motivation of trying to achieve a certain grade, however, milers that do thrive off of that motivation have reported that they feel like they still learned more without that distraction. And so that's a really great thing where, you know, we're getting rid of that external motivation and moving it to a I'm learning, I'm having fun, moving it to that internal motivation, which helps the learning process. So there are drawbacks, but I think that there's ways to kind of work around them. As Katie mentioned, contextualize it, I put it in my syllabus, and I give the students reasons why I'm doing this. I have a paragraph that explains what I'm doing, why I'm doing it and how it should hopefully benefit them in the long run.
Love that. So our final question we're getting at the close of our time here. The final question is, so now if a faculty member is super excited, and very interested, and wants to think about doing this, where should they start? I'm going to start with you, Susan.
Well, everything is intertwined. I just gave a talk a few days ago, about four dimensions of my own teaching transformation. And you can't really change one thing without changing another thing. But I think it's important to think about the overall goals and motivations of both the instructor and the students try to figure out how to create conditions that will foster intrinsic motivation. In terms of feedback, it doesn't all have to be instructor to student there can be student student feedback, which I find actually very helpful. But if there's one thing that I think, is really transformative in this thing that I'm obsessed about right now, which is students' agency, in their own education, I would say the most critical thing is reflection, that the students can be trained and prepared to do their own reflection on their learning and the product of their learning. So that the instructor isn't even completely necessary all the time. And that I think, prepares them so well for life after school. One of the things I'm really committed to right now is self directed education. And the students own confidence in themselves as an independent learner, which they will have to be one school is over. So if we can sever a little bit of the dependence between the student and the teacher, by having the students begin with their own reflection, I have found that really, really transformative. The students don't all like it, because it takes it's another task that they have to do. But it is the most useful thing. I think that I read all semester, I often learn more about the students learning from their reflection than I do from anything else. And it's not i Anyway, I so I would say that would be one place to begin. Great.
Thank you, Susan. Jesse, what about you?
Yeah, I, I think that it's worth going back to something that came up a little bit earlier, which is making the distinction between ungrading and alternative assessment practices, lots of different kinds of alternative assessment practices. So to some degree, when I think about for me what's at the core of engraving, and what do I do to begin doing that work? That for me, again, is a series of conversations. And those conversations start by talking to our students. And so I think any teacher can do this immediately. Tomorrow in some cases, which is have a conversation with students about grades. Ask students how and when they learn. Ask how being graded makes them feel, ask what motivates them, talk really honestly about how it feels to grade, talk really honestly about our own experience of our own education. Having that conversation with students I think is a really great start to understand our students better, and also understand how whatever assessment mechanism we're using is impacting our students. And then if I think about my own approach to assessment, which is also to use quite a bit of self reflection, I've read over 23 years 1000s of letters that students have written to me and ultimately those letters are a source for me of sort of deep knowledge about who the students that I've worked with are but what I found more than anything over all of the years that I've received those letters, is that each of my students is different. I can't make a statement about my students as a group and ultimately those letters are what have allowed me to see my students as so utterly different from one another. so that each of them is experienced in the class in different ways. And that's what caused me to build so much flexibility into my courses, so that each student, regardless of what they're experiencing, and how they're experiencing their education, and find their way in, can find their way into the community that we have in the course. So ultimately, those are two sort of different things, but connected things that I think people can do. It's very,
very empowering. So if our final statement for today, Kasey, what would you suggest, I would
suggest taking a step back and looking at the course that you want to do this in and seeing what can be easily adjusted without completely redoing your course, there might be some things that are fairly easy to use alternative assessments or to ungraded. For me, I'm in a health professions field, and we do a lot of laboratory classes. And that's what they're going to be doing their jobs. And this is really a competency we're looking at, can you do the job with a minimum competency? And a lot of health fields use competency competency based assessment or competency based education? And that's a really good starting place to do some minimal grading. Are they competent? Or are they not? Did they pass that skill? Or did they fail. So that's just an example find things in your course that you're already doing. That can be an easy adjustment and kind of dip your toes into what is easy to adjust rather than completely redoing or class because you might not have to completely redo anything to do this.
That's wonderful advice. And I'm going to end this with some advice from a could be my faculty at Rush that might be listening to this or faculty elsewhere. If you use the learning management system canvas, you can use the Mastery Gradebook instead of the traditional gradebook. And the Mastery Gradebook can help you if you would like to do something like this, since it's just a little bit different than having numbers. And also if you need a support if you need support. And no matter where you are, if you have a center for teaching. Ours is called CTEI, every almost everyone has one, go to them and see who might be able to be your champion and might be able to help you because you don't have to do this all by yourself. And there's a lot of resources out there. We're going to add resources to the description, including stuff from Jesse, Susan and Katie, and Kasey. So we'll include everything that you can go to there to get you started. But I really appreciate everyone's time today. This this podcast has made me feel so wonderful inside. warm and fuzzy. I don't know about all of you. But thank you so so much for your time today, everyone.
Thank you so much. Thank you and this time with you all this
has been really fun and empowering. So thank you very much