Category: ungrading

324. Unmaking the Grade

Posted in blogging, engagement, feedback, grading, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, reflective practice, teaching, ungrading, writing
January 17, 2024

A growing number of faculty have been experimenting with ungrading. In this episode, Emily Pitts Donahoe joins us to discuss her ungrading approach and the documentation of this process on her blog. Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: A growing number of faculty have been experimenting with ungrading. In this episode, we discuss one instructor’s ungrading approach and her documentation of the process.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Emily Pitts Donahoe. Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. She experimented with ungrading and chronicled her experiences in her Unmaking the Grade blog. Welcome, Emily.

Emily: Thanks. I’m really excited to be here.

John: We’re very pleased to be talking to you. We talked recently at the POD conference, and I’m looking forward to this additional conversation.

Emily: Yes, where I got this lovely tea for teaching mug from John, which I’m so excited about and drinking from right now.

John: And since this is only audio, Emily was holding the mug [LAUGHTER]…

Emily: I’m showing it off.

John: So our teas today are:… Emily, are you drinking tea in that mug?

Emily: I am. [LAUGHTER] I am drinking tea out of my tea for teaching mug. I’m a big tea drinker. And so today I’m drinking my favorite tea, which is a strong black tea called Scottish morn. And I got this tea from a tea shop called Apothica in Niles, Michigan, which I used to go to when I lived in South Bend, so highly recommended if you’re in that area.

Rebecca: Sounds wonderful. I was ready for you to say that you had coffee or something in the tea for teaching mug so it’d be completely blasphemous… [LAUGHTER]

Emily: Never.

Rebecca: …because coffee is one of the most frequent flavors. [LAUGHTER] Emily, you’re doing it right. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea today.

John: And I have Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: So, we invited you here today, Emily, to discuss your experiences with ungrading. Your blog is based on your spring 2023 course experiences but your ungrading experience predates this course. Can you tell us a little bit about your initial experience with ungrading?

Emily: Sure. So I have a background in Writing and Rhetoric and English literature, and so a lot of what we do in Writing and Rhetoric, I think, is already pretty aligned with some ungrading goals and practices. So in my courses, students have always had the opportunity to revise their work based on feedback, and include it in a final portfolio, and most of their grade is based on their revised work. So it’s not just that they get graded and then that’s the end of it, they always have a chance to improve based on feedback. The first time that I stopped putting letter grades and percentages on student work was in spring of 2022, when I was teaching a general education literature course at Notre Dame, and so the course was on pre-modern and early modern literature, but with a focus on how the texts that we were studying might help us examine or wrangle with some of the questions that we’re preoccupied with as a culture and society today, and thinking about how those texts might relate to student lives. So it was a course for kind of all levels and all majors, which I think made it a good course to experiment with. So I had first-year students all the way up through senior-level students from engineering and business and English and psychology and all kinds of different majors. So like all teaching experiments, I think there were definitely some kinks to work out after that first course; they never go exactly right the first time. [LAUGHTER] But I would say that, overall, it was a huge success. And that’s not because I did it perfectly, or even because I did it particularly well, but because I think ungrading really helped some of my students move beyond this idea of the school as a points game, to help find their interest and their motivations to study the material that we were studying for their own purposes, and to focus on developing the skills and knowledge that they wanted to develop rather than on attaining a specific grade.

John: And the second time you did this, you created a blog describing the process. What prompted you to create the blog?

Emily: So, I was inspired by a post written by Robert Talbert, who’s the co-author of a recent book, Grading for Growth, which I really highly recommend on alternative grading, and he and David Clark, his co author, also had a blog and substack newsletter on Grading for Growth. And so in December of 2022, Robert posted a stop, start, continue for the ungrading community. And if you’re not familiar with stop, start, continue, it’s an evaluation exercise used for mid-semester reflection, very often in classrooms where the instructor or another facilitator will ask students: “What kinds of teaching practices or classroom practices would you like to stop, start, or continue in the class?” And so Robert’s post was a stop, start, continue for the ungrading community. And one of the things that he recommended that the ungrading community start doing was getting into the weeds and writing in detail about the daily experiences and specifics of upgrading, so: what we’re doing, what kind of successes we’re having, what challenges we’re encountering, how we’re adjusting in real time, and he recommended keeping this as the kind of blog or like a captain’s log of weekly reflections. So when I read his post, I thought, “Well, I could do that. It didn’t sound that hard, and it sounded like a lot of fun.” So that was what prompted me to start writing weekly reflections to share some of the methods that I was using, successes and challenges that I had, and even some of my doubts or misgivings about some of the things that I was doing in the class.

John: And just as an aside, we were so impressed by Grading for Growth, that we’ll be using it in the spring reading group here, both at SUNY Oswego and at Plattsburgh with Jessmyn Neuhaus. So we’re very much looking forward to that. And Robert and David will be giving a keynote address at the start of our workshop series in just a few weeks in early January. So we’re very interested in doing more of this on our campus as well.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your decision to delay posting the blog until after the semester ended?

Emily: Sure. So the selfish reason is that it’s supposed to be an unfiltered look at the ungraded classroom. And part of me thought, what if I messed this up so badly that I’ll be embarrassed to talk about it. So it was partly that, but I would say the more important reason is that I thought it might be weird for students if I was talking in public about what was happening in the classroom in real time. And I was concerned that it would damage the relationship of trust that I wanted to build with my students if they knew that I was reporting on our conversations to a larger audience about the class. So I offered to hold things for that reason. But the other thing that I wanted to do was make it clear to students that I was writing these reflections that might later be published, and then to get their input on them. So some of what I shared on the blog, I didn’t really want to share without getting students consent to do that. But I also wanted to get their input on some of the things that I was talking about. So I believe really strongly in taking a students as partners approach to higher education and learning experiences. And I try to employ that in my educational development work in the classroom. So that means bringing students into conversations about teaching and learning and asking for their experiences and their expertise as students really and then using that to inform our practice. So delaying the posting allowed me also to get some input from students and to be able to share some of their thoughts and opinions on the blog whenever I could.

John: In reading through your blog, your spring 2023 class seemed really interesting. Could you describe that for our listeners?

Emily: Yeah. So this is the second course in our sequence of first-year writing courses here at the University of Mississippi, but it’s a little bit different. So for the second course in the sequence, students have the opportunity to take either Writing 102 or Liberal Arts 102, and I was teaching Liberal Arts 102. And so the goals of each course are really the same. But Liberal 102, as we call it, is conducted within the context of a research area in a specific discipline. So that means that it can have a very specific theme. So some of my really excellent colleagues in the department and in other departments have taught courses like writing about true crime, or the rhetoric of sports, or I believe there’s a course on fashion. So because one of my areas of expertise is teaching and learning, the course that I taught was called Examining Higher Ed Teaching and Learning in a College Classroom. And so I think this is a great course for first-year students as they’re entering this next phase of their education to reflect on where they’ve been and where they want to go. And so what we did was looked at questions like: What’s the purpose of a college education? Why are we all here? What kind of benefits does it provide to individuals or to society? What kind of collective benefits does it provide? And then how are those benefits enacted or engendered in the classroom. And so we explored a lot of debates around higher ed in the US and students have an opportunity to reflect on and draw on their own experiences as students and their expertise as students, and then integrate that with larger areas of research on education or current events in education. And then they communicated their ideas about education to audiences outside of our classroom. And so it was really, I think, an ideal course for ungrading because we could talk about grades, not only as a matter of course policy, but also as a core subject matter. So in the beginning of the semester, we read Alfie Kohn’s piece “The Case Against Grades” and talked about it both as a way to introduce the course grading system and as a kind of larger prompt for reflection about grades as an issue of concern in higher education right now.

John: And it sounds like a great opportunity to have students reflect on what you’re doing as you’re doing it. How did students respond to this?

Emily: So I think every time I’ve ungraded a class now, and I’m currently on my third ungraded class, students have responded a little bit differently every time and of course, every individual student is also different. I think there are three broad categories of response that I see. One is just enthusiasm; some students are really excited about ungrading, and usually that’s students who feel that, for one reason or another, their grades in the past haven’t been representative of their learning or who feel that some of their creativity or their risk taking has been stifled by their desire to get a good grade. So I wouldn’t say this is a lot of students, this is probably a smaller group of students, but some students are really excited about it. I would say another group of students are really hesitant because ungrading is a big unknown for them, especially for students who are dead set on getting that “A” grade. It can be really nerve racking not to know kind of where you’re at in the middle of the semester. When I get negative feedback on ungrading, it’s almost always students who say,”This is really interesting, but I never know where I’m at.” And so they’re really concerned about how they’re going to measure their progress. But they’re not thinking about their progress in learning, they’re thinking about their progress toward a specific grade, which is really understandable because grades are important. And so that’s also a smaller group of students. But I would say, by far, the biggest reaction I get from students is something like cautious optimism. So I always start ungraded courses with a conversation about grades and learning, and I ask students to share with me their experiences of grades and share with each other. And very often, they have a lot of negative experiences to share, and sometimes positive experiences as well. But we talk about the relationship between grades and motivation and grades and learning and they have a chance to reflect on that. And so I use these conversations as a jumping off point to explain why I use the system that I do and how I think it will benefit them as learners. And I think students find it really helpful to be able to talk about their experiences with grading openly and to be heard by a teacher. And I think that that alone makes them more willing to buy into the system. So once it’s explained fully, and once students start to see the potential benefits, I would say that most of them are cautiously optimistic.

Rebecca: I think that largely aligns with my experiences and explorations when ungrading as well. In your class, you included five different assessments and opportunities for revision. Can you talk about and describe these assessments?

Emily: Sure. So the first thing that students had the opportunity to do were weekly writing practice assignments. So these are what you might think of as formative assessments, they’re preparation for class discussion and major assignments that mostly involve reading or short writing prompts. And these students weren’t able to revise, they either kind of did it or they didn’t. But then students had an opportunity to do more longer major assignments, which are more typical assessments for the writing class, a series of papers and a multimodal kind of project or two, with an imagined audience kind of outside our classroom. And so these students could revise up to three times if they wanted to do that. And so I had to, for this class, adjust a little bit and do slightly fewer assignments than I might have done in a traditionally graded class, because the expectation is that students would be doing more intense work on each assignment in their revision. I also asked students to do self assessments periodically throughout the semester. So students would answer a series of questions about their progress toward the learning goals, about their goals for the remainder of the semester. And they would also propose a current grade for themselves based on evidence that they provided. And this is a similar activity to what we did at the end of the semester to determine their course grades. They were also assessed on their final portfolio, which had revised versions of their major assignments. So their work… basically as good as they could make it… their best version of their major assignments, plus another final self assessment of their work in the class. And then they were also assessed on class engagement, so their class attendance, their preparation for and participation in class discussion, the timeliness of their work, their support for the learning community and fellow students and things like that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you provided your feedback on those assessments?

Emily: Sure. So for the writing practice assignments, usually I just wrote a sentence or two in response to students work to let them know if they were on the right track, or they may be needed to adjust slightly as they prepare for their major assignments. For the major assignments, I did do a lot of longer written feedback, and a lot of this looked like feedback that I would give in a traditionally graded class. But I think it was a little bit more oriented toward future growth, rather than reflecting on past work. It was giving them a lot of direction on how they might want to revise to make their work better in the future, not just for future papers, but for this particular paper. And with that feedback, I also gave them a rubric, where I marked kind of where I thought they were at along the specific assessment categories and criteria that we were using for that assignment. So for example, we might have a category for audience and purpose. Students could see whether I think their work on that category was still developing, whether it was at the level of proficient or whether it reached the level of excellent, so I had these different categories and these different kind of progress metrics, where I would indicate this is a skill that I think you’re still working on, or this is a skill that you’re doing really well in. And I also provided feedback to students through our individual conferences. So we met once at midterm, I met with each individual student, and then once at the end of the semester, to have a face-to-face conversation about how students were doing and if they needed to make any adjustments to reach their goals for the rest of the semester. And I didn’t give any feedback through letter grades or points. Those are not really great forms of feedback. They don’t actually give us a lot of information about our progress. So most of the feedback that I provided was kind of qualitative feedback.

Rebecca: You just talked a little bit about rubrics as part of a feedback that we were providing students, can you talk a little bit about how those rubrics were developed?

Emily: Yeah, so I’ve tried several different methods of creating rubrics. And one of the things that I like to do is co-create them with students or get students input on rubrics. And I attempted to co-create rubrics with students in two different classes and have done it a few times. And sometimes it’s a huge success, and sometimes it really does not work very well at all. And in my spring class, it didn’t work very well at all. [LAUGHTER] So basically, what I’ve done previously is ask students what they think makes a good argument or a good piece of public writing, or whatever it is that we’re working on. Or I ask them what kinds of things they believe their writing should be assessed on, and how we would determine whether or not their writing is successful. And then we have a conversation about that. I make notes on the board as we’re talking. And then I go away and distill those notes down into a rubric with about five categories in which student work is assessed. And then there’s the three metrics, so developing, proficient, and excellent. And sometimes this works really well. But in my spring class, I think the students were really at a loss when I asked them about assessment, and even when I asked them what good writing looks like. And I think that’s because that no one has ever asked them to think about that before. They’re used to being told what their work should look like by someone else, and then trying to conform their work to those expectations, or to someone else’s standards. And obviously, we need to have standards and expectations for student work. But one of the things that that does is get the students only thinking about what the teacher wants and not what they want. They’re not thinking about what they want their work to look like, or what their standards are or what they’re trying to accomplish. And so I think, ultimately, if we’re preparing students for the real world, whatever that is, this is what we want them to be able to do, not just to blindly follow somebody else’s standards, but to create and work independently in a self motivated way, and then assess their work independently. So I think we have to kind of start with baby steps in that process. So in the spring course, the rubric activity really turned into a conversation about how students have been assessed in the past and why they’ve been assessed that way. So when I ask them about their experiences, how their writing had been assessed, they would say things like, we were graded on the word count, or we were graded on whether or not we included two sources in every paragraph. And then we use that as a jumping off point to talk about the principle behind those what they viewed as arbitrary rules. And so if your teacher is concerned about word count, it’s because they want you to make a substantive argument. And what does a substantive argument look like? If your teacher is concerned about including sources, it’s because they want you to make an argument based on strong evidence. And so what would strong evidence look like? And so we use that conversation to think about the assessment criteria for their college level work, and how that might be similar or different from what they experienced in the past. So in that way, I do think that conversation was helpful. And I do think based on my few experiences, that it helps to have students extrapolate criteria from some examples, rather than from thin air, kind of as I was asking them to do, but either way, having a transparent conversation about what students are being assessed on and why and a purpose behind the criteria is key to their success.

John: In one of your blog posts, you describe some of the writing assignments that you used in your class, and they seem quite interesting. Could you describe some of the writing prompts that you gave to students?

Emily: Yes, I was really excited about some of the assignments that I developed for this class. And I think I’m going to keep using them or versions of them in future classes. So for this class, I had a menu of assignment options. So the students could, for each major assignment, choose the kinds of projects that they found most compelling, or they would really draw on your strengths. And I thought this was important, partially because we were working some with generative AI in the class. And I’m sure everyone is aware by now some very serious data privacy concerns, ethical concerns around the use of generative AI. So I didn’t want to mandate that students work with AI if they didn’t want to, and some really didn’t want to. So I tried to offer them several options. And I was really happy about some of the options that I came up with. So obviously, one of the things that I was thinking about going into this semester was how to deal with generative AI and I have a lot of thoughts about that. But one big way to think about how to discourage inappropriate use of AI or encourage appropriate use of it is to think really carefully about assignment design. So one of the things that I did to help students navigate AI was lean into some multimodal work, think about argumentation in media other than writing or that kind of worked alongside writing. So we didn’t abandon writing entirely, but I did include a photo essay as one possible assignment in a menu of options. And for this course, I asked students to take a look at a book of photographs by Cassandra Horii and Martin Springborg that’s called What Teaching Looks Like. It’s a really, really cool book with candid photos of college teaching. And so we use this book to talk about visual rhetoric and also to use the photos as a launchpad for this discussion about college teaching practices and students’ experiences in the classroom. And so the assignment that students did based on their work with this book was to create their own photo essay called “What Learning Looks Like.” So instead of what teaching looks like, what learning looks like, with a specific audience and purpose in mind. So that was one of the assignments that I liked. Another one that I thought was really promising was something called “share your story,” which asks students to tell a personal narrative about their educational experience, and then connect that to a larger issue of concern or a body of research in higher education. So of course, this is not totally AI proof. ChatGPT can make up a story, but it can’t tell my students’ own stories. And I think most of us really like to tell our stories to other people. So I think that provided a little more motivation for students to do their own work. And then the last assignment that I really liked was an assignment that actually asked students to work with ChatGPT. So they created a prompt based on a template that I provided for an argumentative piece that they then fed to ChatGPT, so they gave ChatGBT the prompt. And then they took the ChatGPT output and critiqued it. So they annotated it, noting what pieces they thought were strong, whether or not the piece had weaknesses, and what those weaknesses were, where it might need revision or overhaul. And then they had to totally rewrite the piece that ChatGPT produced and make it their own. So they had to do a substantial revision. And then they had to annotate their own work and tell me why they made the revision decisions that they did. And so I want to clarify that I do think it’s important that students learn to generate first drafts on their own, because drafting is an essential part of the writing process, and it’s where a lot of the thinking happens. But I like this assignment as just one assignment in the sequence, because it does help students learn about generative AI and develop some AI literacy. And it also helps students get over that terror of the blank page. So a lot of students procrastinate because they don’t know how to get started. They’ll open their laptop to begin a paper and stare at the blank screen. And I find it really difficult to get over that first hump of starting work, and just close their laptop and go away and try it again later, usually the night before it’s due. So I think starting in this way, with a ChatGPT prompt and an essay gives them a jumping off point, and it’s an easy way to help them start building the confidence they need to do their own first draft.

John: We should mention that we did talk to the authors of What Teaching Looks Like, and we’ll include a link to that discussion in the show notes. One of the things you described in your blog is that having this ungraded environment encourages students to be perhaps a little more open and honest with their instructors, but that could lead to some challenges in terms of additional emotional labor. Could you describe the challenges that you faced in this class with that?

Emily: I think one of the big themes in the spring class in particular was that I asked students to share with the class and for audiences beyond the class about their previous experiences in school, or their current experiences, and I think this also happens in a lot of ungraded classes. One common method of introducing an unfamiliar grading system is getting students to think about their previous experiences with grades. And so one thing that happened in this particular class is that students’ related a lot of past educational trauma to me, and usually that involves bad experiences with previous teachers. And I’m really glad that they were able to speak honestly about that sort of thing. And I think it helped them to have a teacher take them seriously when they related those stories. At the same time, it was pretty difficult to navigate those conversations, because I was managing their emotions, my emotions, and also doing that when sometimes I only knew one side of the story. And so that was a little bit difficult. Another thing is that students in this class didn’t seem to feel that their grade depended on telling me what I wanted to hear. So I think they were a lot more honest about their views than in other courses that I’ve taught. So in my traditionally graded classes, or I think, in any class where students are discussing hot button issues, they tend to think that they’ll be graded more harshly if they express views that the instructor disagrees with. So very often, I think, they try to say what they think you want to hear rather than what they really think. And that didn’t seem to happen as much in my spring course. I had several students endorse viewpoints that I definitely disagreed with whether they knew that or not. And I think that’s good, because students have to sort through their own views and values. But it also required me to do a lot of thinking about how I would approach and address students not just whose views I disagreed with, but whose expression of those views might be damaging to others or to themselves. And so, we need to do some work around community building and relationship building in the class. And then of course, when you build relationships with trust with students, they’re more likely to tell you about the personal problems that they’re facing, whether that’s their mental or physical health or their personal relationships or family emergencies or grieving. And it’s really just a lot. And I do sometimes lay awake at night worried about my students. And there’s a lot of care work happens, I think, in all classes and also especially ungraded classes. And so there’s a lot of work in referring students to other resources and helping them navigate campus resources, and also just a lot of kind of management of your own emotional state [LAUGHTER] that has to happen. So I did want to be honest on the blog about some of the emotional toll of the work of teaching in general and of ungrading too.

Rebecca: You’ve described the care work, you’ve described individual conferences with students, you’ve described students’ anxiety over not knowing where they are sometimes and allowing substantial revision. Can you talk a little bit about how all of those things play into workload and how you’ve managed things?

Emily: Yes, this is a good question. And I feel like I have a very complicated answer to whether or not ungrading has increased my workload, because I get asked this question a lot. In my traditionally graded classes, giving all that feedback felt like a waste of time for a few reasons. First, because I had the sense that students weren’t really reading the feedback. So we know from research that when students receive a letter grade and also feedback on their work, they tend to see the grade and then ignore the feedback, or at least receive the feedback as a justification for a grade, rather than something that’s going to help them improve their work in the future. So I also spend a lot of time in traditionally graded classes worrying about how students would receive my feedback if they got a low grade on their paper. So how could I write feedback that would be appropriately honest, but also appropriately encouraging, so that students didn’t just see a C-minus or a D on their paper, and then give up and throw it in the trash. So I don’t really worry about those things since I’ve adopted ungrading. I provide feedback honestly, and with the mindset of a coach rather than a judge. And I provide it with at least some confidence that students will read it and use it. So they have plenty of opportunity to revise. And in fact, their ultimate achievement of the course is measured by their growth in specific areas and their demonstration of learning that arises from taking a piece of writing from not so good to much better. And so the expectation is that what they turn in the first time is not their best work and they’ll only get to their best work after they incorporate feedback. So I do spend a lot of time responding to student work now that I’m ungrading. But the process is more efficient because it accomplishes my goals rather than wasting my time. And it’s more enjoyable, because it causes me less angst. So I guess it is more work to provide feedback, but it’s also more efficient and enjoyable work. I think I feel kind of the same way about individual conferences with students, that it does take quite a bit of time to do those and it would be, I want to acknowledge, so much more difficult, it may be impossible to do if I was teaching more classes and more students. I’m very lucky that I teach small class sizes. And because I work in educational developments and work in a teaching center for most of the time, I only teach one course at a time. So I think there are ways to do this with larger courses, but I’m very fortunate in my course to be able to conference individually with each student twice in the semester. And those conferences are incredibly time consuming, and they can be really draining, but they are also really joyful. And I think it’s really important that students are able to have those one-on-one conversations with me. And they are much more, I think, effective in accomplishing a lot of the goals that I have for student learning than just simply doing written feedback or peer review or things like that. Having that face-to-face time to give students some individual attention is a really both enjoyable and effective part of the learning process.

John: A question that often comes up from people who have not tried ungrading is how well do students’ perceptions of their learning align with your perceptions of the learning when you do have to assign those midterm or final grades in the class?

Emily: Yeah, this is a really good question. And I would say I’ve had to do a little bit of work on my process to make sure that our expectations are aligning well. Sometimes, there are cases where students don’t automatically start off knowing what I expect from their work and what good work looks like, even when I thought that I was clear about that. So that is an issue that I’m working on. I would say for the majority of students, they do understand what good work looks like. And when they’re asked to provide evidence for their course grade, most of the time they know what good evidence looks like and are able to demonstrate to me in really, sometimes ways that I hadn’t anticipated, that they really had learned in the class and progressed and improved their work. For those students who struggle, and I think it’s more frequent for first-year students to struggle with this than more advanced students, for students who do struggle, I think it is important to be able to show them models of student work early in the semester so that they can get a sense of what a successful assignment looks like or what’s kind of level of expectations we have for what student work counts as really excellent work. So that’s been really helpful. And I’ve also made some changes to my class this semester to help clarify for students a little bit what kind of evidence might be good evidence for specific grade proposals in the course. So if they are really shooting for an A or B in the course, what kinds of actions or behaviors or demonstrations of quality work do they need to be able to show in order to attain that grade?

Rebecca: I know one of the things that I struggled with in some of the classes where I’ve done ungrading is that sometimes the midterm conference feels like it comes too late. So I experimented, I think once with like a one-third, two-thirds, three thirds approach, but then that was so much more conferencing.

Emily: Yeah.

Rebecca: So I’m curious about your timing and how the midterm time works in the classes that you’ve been teaching.

Emily: Yeah, I think that’s where the self-assessment assignments come in. So I do think midterm is quite late for students to be getting the first level of feedback. And so I have students do a self-assessment form, I guess, a quarter way into the semester. So we start that process really early of having them look back at the work that they’ve done, and propose a grade for themselves based on that work. And when they do those self assessments, I don’t conference with students every time they do a self assessment, but I do look at where their grade proposals are. And I’m able to say if our expectations are very, very different, or assessments of that students work is very, very different, I’m able to reach out and say, “Hey, I don’t think we’re aligned here, and here’s why.” And being able to intervene early on that I think is really important.

John: We’re recording this near the end of the fall semester of 2023. And you’re currently teaching another ungraded class, could you tell us a little bit about what types of changes you made from the spring class to the fall class?

Emily: Sure, there are a few changes that I’ve made, because there were some things that I think did not go very well in the spring and I wanted to try to improve that. So what didn’t go well was that I had a real problem with attendance, there were quite a few students who struggled with their attendance, especially in the latter half of the semester, and quite a few students who struggled to submit their work on time kind of throughout the semester. And that made it difficult for me, but I think more importantly, it made it really difficult for the students who once they missed an assignment, they found it really difficult to get back on track. So my challenge is really to figure out how to motivate students to attend class regularly and submit work on time without penalizing them for absences or late work or without a kind of point system to encourage them to show up to class and to submit their work on time. So that was one thing I wanted to address. And then the other thing is that students’ anxiety about not knowing where they stand in the midst of the semester at any given point. So what I developed to address all of those challenges was a course progress tracker. And so this is a document, a pretty comprehensive document, inspired by David Clark’s Grading for Growth post about grade trackers that I read during the summer while I was designing this course. And so the document is really a series of tracking worksheets in three different categories. So the first category is readings and assignments, students can see each week at a glance what work they have to complete, and then they can check off boxes as they complete that work, and then note, if there are assignments they’re submitting late, they can record those late submissions. There’s a category for attendance and engagement where students can check off the classes that they attend, and then make notes about their in or out of class engagement during each week of the semester. And then there’s a section… the most important section… for learning and growth where students can remind themselves of what the course goals are, and then track their progress along those goals, so they can see and make notes about where they’re still developing, where they’re doing excellent work, and how they’re improving their writing as the semester goes along. So, so far, it’s been going really well. And I’ve had fewer challenges with attendance and late work this semester than last semester, though, I can’t say to what extent that’s just a result of a different population of students or the fact that it’s fall instead of spring. So I will add that caveat, but I have surveyed students about their use of the progress tracker last week, and I’m really looking forward to diving into that next week. So the last thing that I think the progress tracker does, which I didn’t totally intend, but which has been really excellent, is that I think it helps students a lot with their self-assessment work, which they also struggled with, to some extent last semester, or I should say, maybe I struggled to teach really well. So I had a realization at the end of last semester, that when I sat down to think about a student’s work over the course of this semester, I was really thinking about three things. And so the first thing is quantity. How much work did students do? How much labor did they put in? How many assignments did they submit at a satisfactory level? How many class days did they attend? How much time did they spend on their major assignments? So that was one category. The second was quality. So how good was the work that they were doing according to the standards that we laid out? Was it still kind of developing work? Or was it excellent work? And then the third thing was growth. So how and how much did student work improve over the course of this semester? And can they demonstrate that they’ve gained knowledge and skills that they didn’t have before? Or can they demonstrate that they’re better off from having taken the course. And so while we’ve had conversations about those things in the spring, I never articulated to myself or to my students, that particular model; I never kind of said it in quite this way. So the last section of the progress tracker includes a guide to determining final letter grades for students. And it gives them space to think about quantity, quality and growth, and how that might contribute to the grade that they propose for themselves, if they’re interested in the specific letter grade. And it gives them a sense of what kinds of evidence they could provide if they want to show good evidence for a specific letter grade. So you can provide good evidence for an A if your work rises to the level of excellent on multiple assessment categories. Or if you attended class every time that you were able and submitted the vast majority of your writing practice assignments. So all of these things are good pieces of evidence if you want to propose an A grade for yourself. So there’s some flexibility there, I don’t prescribe exactly what students have to do for a specific grade, but I do make suggestions and say, here’s a guideline for you. If you’re confused about what kinds of work you need to be doing, or what you need to do to demonstrate that you’ve attained a certain letter grade, you can take a look at this guide, and learn a little bit more about what the expectations are. Currently, it’s just something for the students to use for themselves. I have provided time in class for students to fill out sections of it, because I think that if I did not ask them to do it in class, they might struggle to keep up with it outside of class. But I think maybe in the future, I will consider asking them to keep up with it. And then periodically checking in on those progress trackers throughout the semester so that I can intervene early, if there are any issues and maybe leave comments on the documents to let students know if I think they’re struggling in a specific area, or if they’re doing really well in a specific area. I am playing around with that idea for my next version of the class.

John: So we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Emily: So this spring, I won’t be teaching an undergraduate course, but I will be working with graduate students who are preparing to teach their own Writing and Rhetoric courses. And I’m really looking forward to talking with them about teaching. And I’ll also be continuing to write about ungrading on the blog. So specifically, I’m hoping to share a bit more about what I learned from my experiences this semester. And I’ve been collecting data from my current students about their use of the progress tracker, about their use of AI in their writing this semester, and about their feelings and impressions of ungrading. And what I’m planning to do throughout the spring is share some of those student thoughts with the readers of the blog, and I’m really excited to be able to share students’ ideas about ungrading and other topics as well.

Rebecca: Sounds great. We’ll look forward to reading that for sure.

John: Thank you, Emily. It’s great talking to you and we look forward to future conversations.

Emily: Thanks, this has been fantastic.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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217. Grading Justice

Posted in diversity, equity, feedback, first-generation students, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, syllabi, teaching, ungrading
December 8, 2021

Traditional grading systems can encourage students to focus on their grades rather than on their learning, and favor continuing generation students who are more familiar with the hidden curriculum of higher ed. In this episode, Kristen Blinne joins us to discuss grading strategies that promote equity and encourage learning.

Kristen is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Communications and Media Department at the State University of New York at Oneonta. Kristen is also the editor of Grading Justice: Teacher Activist Approaches to Assessment. Judie Littlejohn, the Instructional Designer at Genesee Community College and a frequent guest on the podcast, joins us again as a guest host.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Traditional grading systems can encourage students to focus on their grades rather than on their learning, and favor continuing generation students who are more familiar with the hidden curriculum of higher ed. In this episode, we discuss grading strategies that promote equity and encourage learning.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Kristen Blinne. Kristen is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication and Media Department at the State University of New York at Oneonta. Kristen is also the editor of Grading Justice: Teacher Activist Approaches to Assessment. Judie Littlejohn, the Instructional Designer at Genesee Community College and a frequent guest on the podcast, is joining us again as a guest host. Welcome, Kristen.

Kristen: Good morning. I’m very happy to be here with both of you.

Judie: Good morning.

John: Today’s teas are… Are you drinking tea?

Kristen: I am, it is a jasmine green tea, my favorite of the tea world.

Judie: And mine is a Twinings Lady Grey.

John: And I am drinking Tea Forté black currant tea, which is one of my favorites, with some honey from Saratoga Tea & Honey. I think you both met through Judie’s work on the FACT2 Subcommittee on Social Justice Assessment. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Judie: The subcommittee is part of the larger Innovations in Assessment Committee and Chilton Reynolds is one of the co-chairs of that, and he is at Oneonta where Kristen is. And so he notified our group that she had published this book. And Chris Price in our group reached out to Kristen and asked if she’d be willing to meet with us. And she did, and we had a great conversation. Unfortunately for me, I was driving that day. So I was on the thruway trying to participate as well as I could. And it was great, it was a very engaging conversation, a nd it was great to hear from Kristen and hear her enthusiasm and all her great ideas. So it’s great for me to meet with you again and to finally see you this time. [LAUGHTER] So welcome, I’m glad to see you here.

Kristen: Thank you, I was so excited to receive that message about the FACT2 Social Justice Assessment group. I didn’t even realize that that existed at the time that that email was received. And so I was truly overjoyed that these conversations were happening in a coordinated way in the system, and to be able to just have that moment to jump into the conversation here, kind of what the group is doing and the vision for moving forward. And it’s exciting to see even the website materials that are up that are situating these conversations for a broader audience.

John: We’ll share a link to the website for that group in the show notes. So, we’ve invited you here today to talk about this book. Could you tell us a little bit about how this project came about?

Kristen: Yeah, so the Grading Justice book project really grew out of a few different streams in my experience just teaching, but also my experience as a learner, as a student going through a system. I have to say that it was born out of a lot of frustration that I had as an instructor. [LAUGHTER] And I hate to frame it in that way, because it’s kind of a negative framing. But I think most instructors can agree that we spend a lot of time grading, and the grading comes with a bunch of challenges, especially if you’re doing any kind of activist or social justice work or you’re trying to create equitable learning spaces. Trying to do grading in a fair way that best meets the goals of the course and to have students on board with that process is difficult work. And so in my case, I looked back to my experience as a student when I tried to build my classes coming in as a college instructor. And I realized that as a student, I really didn’t have a very positive relationship with grades. They didn’t matter to me that much, I was always in it for the learning, but I had a lot of difficulty going through the system because of the emphasis on grading. I wanted to be a learner and I wanted to explore my creativity in ways that maybe didn’t fit with the limited grading structures that I encountered as I went through K through 12 and into my college experience. It wasn’t until I finally landed at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, an institution that doesn’t do grading, that I’ve really embraced my learning in a new way. So when I came into my own teaching process, I realized it’s like, “Wow, okay, I have to now impose these grades on the learners in my classes. And how can I do that in a way that honors the journey I went on, recognizing that other students may be also experiencing the same struggles that I had?” So I came to this Grading Justice project because I wanted to have these conversations with educators, really across disciplines, but the book is focusing a lot on people who are working within the field of communication and critical pedagogy but also critical communication pedagogy. But my hope is that it has appeal to a wider audience than that. Aside from the frustrations, another thing that I noticed because I do a lot of social justice work is… How do you assess social justice work in an equitable way? So that was one of the questions I came into the project with: How do we assess social justice work? But then… What would a social justice approach to assessment look like in our teaching and learning processes, especially in the realm of critical pedagogy, because it was part of a critical pedagogy book series? I’ve noticed that a lot of people who embrace critical pedagogy, they may still be using traditional learning systems. And so how do you, as an educator, work with that tension that might be coming with reinforcing systems that may be perpetuating inequality while you’re also trying to undo systems of oppression and engage in power sharing with students? And so I was finding this contradiction that inspired me to want to really pursue this in a very serious way.

Judie: A major theme of the book is that grading systems can either perpetuate inequality or work toward equity and justice. How might traditional grading and assessment systems perpetuate inequality?

Kristen: So one of the things that really spoke to me as someone who was trying to navigate how to create a more equitable classroom, because I’m really invested in making my classroom as diverse and inclusive and accessible as possible, is having conversations with students about assessment. Because what I found over time is that students, as I mentioned about myself, many of them have a pretty negative relationship with grades and grading. And a lot of them don’t see them as accurately measuring their learning, at least in the experiences I’ve had in having these conversations across my classes. I had this lightbulb moment when we had a guest speaker come to SUNY Oneonta, Ernest Morrell came as part of one of our teaching institutes. And he said something in a small group session that, really, I think about a lot in regard to this question about grades perpetuating inequality. He said, “We need to stop measuring students’ success against failure.” And in that moment, when those words kind of tumbled out of his mouth, I just was like, [EXPLOSION SOUND]. It occurred to me, I always have wanted to encourage… I don’t want to say encourage failure in the class… but I want to encourage experimentation… classroom as living laboratory where people can try things and have it maybe not work out. An example I could give of that is I taught public speaking for many, many years. It’s a class that students have a lot of anxiety about taking in many cases, and there’s a struggle there. And so one of the things one of my students did once is they decided to sing a poem about Rachael Ray. I wasn’t sure if this was a great idea, but they did it. And if you ask them, they would say it was an utter failure. And it didn’t work out in the way they wanted it to. But why would I grade someone on that failure? And say, “Well, it didn’t work out as you wanted to, the audience wasn’t really that invested in that approach of singing a poem.” There’s a way that that could actually have worked very negatively and inspired a student not to take a chance in this case, but it allowed them the space to try something. So one of the things that I think about with this quote of Ernest Morrell is stop measuring success against failure. What does that mean if we think about grades in regards to equity and inequity? Well, first off, what does grading do? It quantifies our learning. It creates some kind of measure that we’re using as a tool of comparison. It operates, in my opinion, a lot like a credit score. It gives us a numeric value or worth that can grant us access to or limit us from different opportunities. Those opportunities can be admissions into something, whether it be grad school or undergraduate, teaching assistantships, it can offer us opportunities for funding and scholarships. There’s lots of ways that it serves as this gatekeeper process. It’s also something that labels us as learners: the A-student versus the C-student versus the student that we might say is the failing student. And in that way, it can stigmatize pretty extensively. It’s also, in my opinion, a system that both rewards and punishes. And what it’s rewarding and punishing is really dependent on the way that the instructor situates grading in their course, of course. Beyond that, I would argue that, as many other educators working with non-traditional assessment might suggest, that it oversimplifies complex learning processes. It creates a snapshot of a moment that doesn’t give us the full context of what’s happening in that student’s life in that moment. So we don’t have any idea most of the time about all the many struggles that our students are facing, until often maybe it comes about at the last part of the semester, when they’re trying to finally disclose some of the struggles that they’ve had. Aside from that, of course, beyond that comparison, and then like a mechanism of standardization, it also is something that’s applied pretty inconsistently across instructors, which in some ways renders it as a kind of arbitrary measure in the sense that my B isn’t your B. They don’t mean the same thing necessarily. So how are students supposed to make sense of a process where they can’t recognize this standard across this thing that’s supposed to be standardized? Because it invites, I think, when you take all those factors into account together, an opportunity for students to look at this system as a kind of game that they have to navigate. And not a game in a fun way where we’re enhancing our learning, but a game in the sense that, “All I need to do to be successful in this system is to learn what the professor wants. How do I make sure that I meet this deadline or I can amass as many points?” And it becomes this process that for many, I think, is very decoupled from the learning itself. And then we can, of course, see how this snowballs into all kinds of conversations about grade inflation and its relationship to evaluations of instruction and marginalization in regards to the bias that can happen as instructors grade across the different learners in their classes and their abilities and understandings. And all of that is, in the end, we need to start asking that question, I think, more and more: “What do grades mean? What are we actually trying to measure to kind of undo some of the ways in which grades function in an inequitable manner?”

John: And so students spend a lot of their time focusing on learning the rules of the game. But it’s a different game in each and every class that they take, which I think you’re arguing would distract them from actually focusing on learning the material that we’re hoping they get out of the course. Your book is an edited work, where you have a number of contributors. How did you solicit the contributors for this project?

Kristen: I first started by doing an open call in the National Communication Association listserv. At the time, it was called CRITnet, which is Communication Research in Theory Network, it is now called something else. But at the time, I sent out an open call there. I also handed out flyers at the national convention we had in Salt Lake City the year that I was putting together this project. And so I was really excited by the people who responded to that call. I also reached out to a few of the contributors based on work that I knew that they were doing in this area to try to round out the collection. And I can imagine that this could have had multiple volumes, just with the really interesting work people are doing in grading and assessment. So the chapters in the book are diverse in their scope, and even still, they paint a very small picture of a very big conversation. So we had a chapter that focused on grade inflation, just about the rhetoric of grading. Chapters that looked at team teaching and types of collaborative course construction. Assignments that are focused on, I say the “borderlands” or looking even just at activist work in general. And then chapters that explored going into critical Universal Design for Learning, moving into discussions about teacher evaluations, but also just assessment more broadly. And then my own chapters focused on my experiments with non-traditional assessment, the experiments I’ve had in that realm, and the work that I’ve done in addition to setting the stage through the introduction. And I’m so grateful for the collaborators that were part of this project. I mean, I really see it as our book. Of course, my name as the Editor, but we were a team. And we were a team that went about this project in a way that I thought was really beautiful, because I did invite the chapter collaborators to read each other’s chapters and offer feedback as part of the process in addition to my feedback. And we also then worked together at a national convention post the publication of the book to do a short course where we actually taught about our respective chapters. And it was well-attended, and we had some really robust and interesting conversations about how instructors could carry these ideas forward.

Judie: Kristen, in chapter seven you discuss your own experiences with non-traditional assessment. Could you tell us a bit about how your assessment strategies have evolved?

Kristen: I’d love to explore that more. As I said, I feel like my journey with learning to do assessment really started with my work being a student at Goddard College. I was building my own course plans as part of the way that Goddard is set up because it’s working in a tutorial model where, in my case, at the time I was there, you did 15 credits with one faculty member. You built the content for that course and they helped guide you through that process. At the end of that journey, you did a self-evaluation, and they did a narrative evaluation that went into your transcript. So that really, for me, set the foundation for this experience. But then when I went into graduate school, I had the opportunity to work with one of the faculty at the University of South Florida, Mariaelena Bartesaghi, who was, at the time, working with our Interpersonal Communication course. Many TAs oversaw that course. And she had done a grant that she had designed to reimagine that course around process pedagogy and portfolio work, and was really drawing on the work of Peter Elbow and Jan Danielewicz’s work on the unilateral grading contract. And so that was where I really started dipping my toes into finding a way outside of more traditional grading systems when I was a teacher versus a learner. And so I have to say that my own approach started with that approach, the unilateral contract. And for those people that may be unfamiliar with that, it’s a process that really creates the B as a baseline, the B grade. So it’s behavioral in the sense that students are assigned a series of expectations that they must meet in the semester and if they meet those expectations—whether it be number of classes missed, or work turned in, following the instruction, so it’s up to the instructor to determine what those criteria are—then they’re guaranteed that B grade. And anything that goes above a B is up to the discretion of the instructor as far as whether they’re working with a plus/minus, a B+, A-, A. And often in that case, there may be a focus on the quality of the work, there may not be, depending on the instructor and how they implement that plan. One of the things that I found in Elbow and Danielewicz’s system, is that they maintain a strong hold on the course policies. But I was more interested in trying to find a way to go more in the direction of your assured work and thinking about how I could share power with students and have them collaboratively construct course policies. So pretty quickly, and what I kind of call in the text, the guaranteed B approach. One of the ways that I started was always about collaborative course content construction with the students. So consensus process to build ideas about: What does participation mean? How does it function in our class? What role should attendance play in this process? What would an A look like based on the assignments that we’ve done this semester? And so letting them have a voice in that and having a lot of conversations in the context of the class about grading and assessment. So really involving their voice in the process was important to me. I will say that, just kind of broadly, as far as my own approach, I don’t do tests and quizzes, I prioritize other types of assignments. I don’t use percentages or points. Early in my process, I used a lot more markers in my grading. So like a check, check-minus, check-plus, or I would use markers like “meets criteria for a B,” “does not meet criteria for a B,” “exceeds criteria.” Because at the time, I still thought that students really wanted that marker to help keep them on track. And that part has really evolved for me. And I think earlier in my process, I was a lot more attached to attendance and participation models. Even though they might have been student-identified and selected, I put more weight on it than I maybe do at this point. So from the guaranteed B approach, my focus went further into a tiered method that I call kind of a pick-a-plan grading where it was, I think, most similar to what some may use, like a labor-based grading, where you’re actually doing more work for higher grades. And I found that students really responded very positively to that. It still had that kind of guaranteed B if you did this level of work based on the same kind of criteria, but then it allowed more work equals a higher grade. You weren’t guaranteed that more work would equal a higher grade, but it allowed them to make choices upfront saying, “Well this semester, I have a lot going on, so I’m going to choose to do less work,” and that’s okay. And I had quite a lot of students do that. From there, my process evolved to I think what I consider one of my favorite approaches in my experiments over the years was what I called the 100% participation or engagement plan, if you want to use it as a plan, which I think scares a lot of instructors, that idea [LAUGHTER]. Because participation is such a murky realm already for many. What does that even mean? What does that look like in practice? So for me, what that meant in my class is that the students dictated: What does 100% participation look like? And as part of that, I required that students meet with me to discuss their own participation and engagement in the course, we create a consensus around that. And then at the end of the semester, would actually meet to finalize each person’s grade based on what the class determined as their overarching grade categories and the students’ own assessment of their participation. In the text I also talk about the group-focused version of that, which I won’t get into at this space. But the last thing that I talked about as part of my experiment, is that in some semesters, I would just ask the students to pick what kind of assessment they wanted in the class. So I’ve given them some of these ideas: “Do you think you want to do a guaranteed B approach? Do you want to do more of a tiered pick-a-plan approach? Do you want to do an approach where you are doing 100% participation and engagement?” And so it would not be uncommon for me to have some semesters where every class had a different assessment system, based on what the group themselves decided. And key to that is that I always just remained flexible and adaptable to shift it if it wasn’t working, because we had other tools that we could draw from. Another way that the select your own assessment process has worked for me is that you can ask students to decide what they want to be assessed on in the class, this paper versus this—I don’t do tests, but you could do it with tests—as a method. So all of those were really great experiments for me, and “experiment” I almost think it sounds negative in the way I’m saying it because I tried and I had a lot of failures trying these different systems, a lot of struggles, and things that came up. And it occurred to me along the way that maybe some of these practices, while they were kind of masquerading as being more just and equitable, I was maybe falling into some of the exact same traps that I would have been had I been using points and percentages in a more traditional approach. And so that was another huge “aha” moment for me that contributed to the construction of this project. How do I actually embody a system that maybe isn’t falling into some of those traps, even if I think that I’m doing that work? And that’s where I found myself developing my approach to ungrading that I call “awareness pedagogy.”

Judie: That’s interesting how you’re trying to do the right thing, you’re trying to make something better, and then you find out or realize that maybe it’s not better. It’s frustrating. I’ve run through that with offering extra credit, and then I read an article that said that extra credit inherently favors the students who are already doing the best and have the best time and the best preparation. And I thought about that for a long time and realized, “Yeah, I’m doing a disservice to a lot of students by adding to the pressure with more extra credit.” And it wasn’t easy to get to that. I kind of had to see it and then reflect on it for a while, and it was frustrating. So, I don’t do that anymore.

John: Especially when students are asking for extra credit, especially late in the semester. Explaining to them why you don’t do it, though, perhaps could be a useful learning experience for them too.

Kristen: It’s interesting. Because I can’t even remember the last time a student asked me about extra credit in a class. [LAUGHTER] Maybe they just assumed that it just doesn’t exist.

John: Both faculty and students generally find grading to be a very unpleasant experience. And I think many faculty would like to move away from this to some extent. But they may be facing pressures, especially if they’re untenured, and probably especially in the STEM fields, to use traditional grading systems or grading approaches. Are there some strategies that faculty could use that they want to move away from really bad practices to somewhat more equitable practices of assessment?

Kristen: Yeah that’s a great question. And absolutely, I think it’s so important to just acknowledge that not everyone has the same access to actually utilizing a non-traditional assessment in their classroom, whether it be because they’re mandated to assess in a specific way, “Here’s the syllabus, here’s what you’re teaching, go forth and meet your class.” Or if it’s because they maybe are in a marginalized space in the process or they’re in a precarious position. So some of the things that I think that I would invite instructors to consider to lessen the impact of grades and to maybe make the grading process more purposeful is to just, first and foremost, revisit your course policies. And whether you collaboratively construct them with students or not, revisiting our course policies is a really interesting way that we can start to look at the consequences of what we’re setting forward for students to do in our class. So as I said, I used to lean a lot more heavily on the role of late work in my class, like the no late work. And also just having more strict attendance policies because, again, I was thinking about it in terms of this behavioral approach that Elbow and Danielewicz had outlined. And I just stayed with that for a while, and it made sense to me at the time. But after I started seeing that maybe reinforcing these non-academic behaviors was actually not in accord with the learning goals that I have for the class. And I wasn’t really taking into account the whole picture that the student was experiencing, I started to go back and go, “Okay, how can I soften the role that those behavioral policies play in my course?” I think that’s one thing that instructors can do: look at what they’re determining in regard to attendance, late or makeup work, participation in general, and just having conversations with our classes about what it means to participate in the context of this class. What does attendance do or not do in regard to your capacity for success in this course? And also, just more broadly, makeup work and late work is something where we can see a lot of students really suffering in their grades in the end, and it could be that they have any number of things going on that they’re not ready to disclose to us. So that’s one thing. Another thing is aside from course policies in general, and rethinking the non-academic things that we’re actually grading is to consider the possibility of doing minimum grading. As outlined by Thomas Guskey or Douglas Reeves, this idea that eliminating the zero in our gradebook. The zero is a powerful tool that can really keep students from progressing. They may have had something come up that caused them to miss that assignment, maybe were not willing to budge about it, but that zero is going to have a ripple effect that it’s very difficult to recover, depending on the weight or the points of that assignment. So consider minimum grading, a 50 If you’re working with 100 points. What if you give them a 50 versus a zero, that does something that can maybe allow the student some possibility of bouncing back. Because how does it motivate someone if they have a zero and they know they can’t recover? It’s like you’ve lost them. And then what is our learning doing in the class? Are we just going to let them be adrift and not try to find a way that we can move forward? So I would encourage that. I would also say that if we’re thinking about it from a social justice standpoint, that we should stop averaging when possible… again, because if we look at grading as a kind of reward or punishment, averaging can take that moment where we did that zero or we froze them in that time when… Who knows what happened? Maybe they lost a loved one, maybe they just received a very scary diagnosis of their own health, maybe they’ve been working more than 40 hours a week or something that we just don’t know about… they’re experiencing trauma at home or in a relationship. And so averaging, I think, is one of the things that I would encourage instructors to consider reducing their reliance on or even curving. But that, of course, gets us into a whole ‘nother realm of like, “Okay, well, how does that impact now, if you’re going up for rehire, or on the job market, or a tenure and promotion? If you start putting these policies in play, how will your colleagues understand them as they’re assessing you?” Which, in itself, requires a lot of additional labor which I think keeps some instructors from stepping their toes into these different possibilities.

Judie: I read in Jesse Stommel’s blog post, “How to Ungrade,” where they start off their class with maybe the first few weeks the students’ work is not graded, it doesn’t have a point value, it just is for them to learn how to do the assignments and get the feedback. And then they could start from there for some sort of point value, so that they have a chance to grow accustomed to how the course works and what the expectation is before they’re graded.

Kristen: And that’s a beautiful way to think about it too. And that was one of the things that I’m glad you raised it, because I also wanted to mention that, is building in more space for pass/fail opportunities or for ungraded assignments. And even extending that further is maybe building in more space for peer evaluation and self evaluation. Having those conversations with students about what constitutes good peer evaluation or peer feedback and creating guides for that. And even having conversations with your class about what constitutes a good discussion in class, if you’re a discussion-based class, because maybe not a lot of students have actually learned how to engage in productive discussions or dialogues, especially across difficult topics. So creating those opportunities to have space in your calendar to allow those conversations to happen, I think is really, really helpful.

John: You mentioned how students can learn from their mistakes. And as academics, we know that we often learn the most by trying something and failing, and we want to encourage students to do that. But when we use high-stakes exams, that certainly deters students from taking risks and trying new things. What can we do to help relieve some of that pressure to encourage students to be willing to learn from mistakes, because that’s not something they’ve learned from their past educational experiences?

Kristen: Absolutely. And I think that’s why I prioritize revision in my classes, like every course I teach has some element of revision built into the process. So for example, in the courses I’m working with this semester, everything is ungraded up until the final project, which is the primary way in which the course grade is determined. So everything’s a draft until that final project that they turn in. So they have their self-evaluation process as part of that. They have a peer feedback component, and then they get my feedback, they build in that revision. And then we actually do our grade consensus process at the end when they’ve gone through all of that revision and feedback, so that they have that last layer of opportunity to revise it even further towards their grade goal in the semester. And so I think revision is one way that we can do that. And not every class lends itself equally to utilizing a revision project, I realize that, but there are ways that you can do it in a manner that I think students can still gain something from, even if it’s just to show them that not every assignment is one and done, that it’s a process that they can find ways to improve it and to gain new information.

Judie: If we look at the students that are in a classroom, how can faculty leverage the diversity of student backgrounds to create an equitable learning environment?

Kristen: So one of the things that I really wanted to share with you all that I tried this semester for the first time, and I thought the results were pretty great. At the beginning of this semester, I asked my courses to do a syllabi inventory of their classes. And we all know, I know we hear instructors say it all the time, like, “It’s on the syllabus. Return to the syllabus, it’s there.” And it’s this often unread document that creates the roadmap for everything that’s ahead. I know that there’s lots of ways that instructors try and get students to read the syllabus. They create syllabi quizzes, and they do all these little things to get them involved. But I thought, ‘Well, why not ask them to go into their syllabi for all of their courses this semester and to answer some questions?’ So I just used Microsoft forms to build something for them where they went in and they told me about the number of courses they were taking. They did a comparison of the attendance policies across their courses, how participation was defined across their courses. They looked at late work policies, grade grievance policies, policies around accommodation and support, policies that may be focused on communication in the classroom, or specific instructions about how to communicate with your instructor. And not just by email, but how to address them or other things that instructors mention. There were also questions about behavioral focused policies. So what are the things that might cause them to be penalized in a class, whether it be disruptive use of cell phone or technology in the classroom, whatever it is. At the end of that process of looking at the similarities and differences across all their course syllabi, to tell me what their ideal course would be if they were building it based on what they saw in the classes that they’re taking in this semester. And then I use that data in the next class session to say, “Well, how can we build this class to take that information that you’ve gained and to create policies that would be compassionate, but also hold you accountable for your learning choices so that you’re getting the most out of this class that you can?” And it just was such a fun conversation. And I got a lot of feedback from students that was unsolicited in the sense that they said, “Well, I just had never looked at my syllabi in this way before. And I actually feel a lot more prepared for the semester now that I actually compared.” And it gave me a sense of just, like, how much stress students face trying to navigate the different instructor expectations. I was, I don’t want to say shocked, because we’ve been doing this for a long time and you have a sense because you talk to your colleagues about what they’re doing, but just the level of work, expectations that were there, and the huge spectrum from very flexible to very inflexible, and how it would be a full-time job for students to just navigate those expectations. So it makes sense to me even more now that we’re maybe putting our emphasis in areas that we could rethink, as educators, to help students get the most out of their learning, and less about having to make sense of what we want in a class.

Judie: I can relate to that, because I teach history online, and I keep weekly schedules. But if students need more time, they just have more time, they have until a date at the end of the semester when everything is due. And I try to re-emphasize that you take the time you need, it’s fine, there’s no “late,” there’s no penalty, just relax. And when you can do it, you do it. But then I send them reminders that this phase is ending, this next one is starting. So it’s a good idea to try to stay on track. And often I’ll get emails from students saying, “I’m so sorry, this is late. I understand there might be penalties.” And I think, “Why do they understand there’ll be penalties?” And all sorts of apologies. But then I kind of took a step back and thought, “Oh my gosh, if they’re juggling five and six classes and all these different policies, of course they’re confused.” And I just try to write back and reassure them that I understand that people have different situations, and you have to take the time you need without penalty. And please, don’t let my dates add to your stress. But it’s got to be really difficult for students to try to keep track of everybody’s policy on top of all the reading and work that they have to do in all their courses.

Kristen: Absolutely, yeah. It was a real eye-opener for me to just see the data in front of me. And to contextualize that with the broader conversations we had about just their general relationship with grades and grading and their own perceptions of whether grades accurately reflected their learning in their classes. So it invited us into a space that I thought was vulnerable, but also really powerful for imagining a way to do it differently. And of course, we have this backdrop that we’re facing with the pandemic and how campuses are navigating the return from remote learning to in-person instruction and the stresses that come with that as students maybe are now navigating not only different policies, but different platforms. So that was another question that I asked is, “How many classes are you doing remotely versus in person? And how is that impacting knowing what you’re doing and when and where and how in your process?” Again, a lot of stress. As a new Chair, I can say that I have had so many conversations with students this semester, just in tears, trying to make sense of maybe unclear expectations that are being set forward in their courses, or just lack of communication that’s happening. And I just get this sense that so many of them feel adrift. And I know that, at least among my colleagues on campus, our motivation has been challenged because you go out and into your classes and you maybe see that people aren’t as engaged or connected as maybe previously pre-pandemic. And it’s like you feel like you’re tap dancing really vigorously to get everyone to be part of a process, and it’s this delicate dance we’re all doing to make this matter.

John: You started this project before the pandemic but it was completed during the pandemic. How did the pandemic influence the final work on the book? And do you think the experience that faculty had in more directly observing some of the challenges our students faced might make them more open to considering non-traditional grading practices?

Kristen: I definitely think it has made faculty more open. I’m part of a lot of social media pedagogy-focused groups where there’s been pretty strong debates about what we’re doing in this moment as we teach and learn in a pandemic. And some people feel pretty strongly about maintaining this perception of rigor and these strong standards as a way to keep everyone on track and hold on to that perceived norm that we had pre-pandemic. And then there’s others that have, I think, done so much emotional labor, bending over backwards to be as compassionate as possible to recognize just the weight that everyone’s carrying in regard to just the heaviness of this pandemic, and the impact it’s had on us personally, professionally, and just socially. And so, especially at the earlier stages as this book was coming out, I wanted to go back in before it actually went to print to talk about the ways in which institutions had transitioned to different grading models in 2020, to try and attend to the impact the pandemic was having. So we learned that, institutionally, while it seems like you can’t decouple traditional grading systems from academia in general. We did. We went into so many institutions, created pass/fail options, credit/no-credit options, a variety of different system-based changes where students could not have their GPA directly impacted by the pandemic. And then, of course, we saw that happen, and then we went right back to the previous methods and models pretty quickly after that semester, returning to this norm. So I say “norm” kind of in air quotes, but it reminded me that we can do it, we can make some transformative changes in our learning if we want to collectively embrace that. But it’s also something that I think people still have a lot of discomfort about. I think many instructors, at least I hope, want their students to succeed, and they want to be compassionate and to help them succeed. But we don’t always know the best way to do that because we are managing, ourselves, a lot of expectations just in our own responsibilities and roles. And we’re also tired, and many people are stressed, and just definitely surviving, not thriving, in this moment. So I know that people are also getting fatigued… compassion fatigue happening. They’re becoming a little bit less trusting of the many emails that students are sending, asking for exemptions and extensions and extra credit. And so I think we’re in this moment where we’re all invited to say, “Where do we want to go from here? What kind of learning model will best meet the needs of our future generations because so much is impacting it?” We have this huge political opposition that’s permeating our social world and conversations in the public sphere. We have this fear and anxiety about climate change. We have just so many things going on that this is a beautiful moment for us to imagine a new way forward that could best meet everyone’s needs, I hope, to thrive more in our learning environments.

John: Behavioral economists have found a lot of evidence of status quo bias, that people tend to do the same things in the same way, unless there’s some sort of disruption. And I think this pandemic, and all the other things you mentioned, have led to a disruption which makes possible transformative change in ways that would be much less likely to occur at the same rate in other time periods. I’m hoping, at least.

Kristen: Exactly, and I know I think about it a lot in just regards to changing our own communication patterns in our relationships. I mean, one of the ways that we go about doing that is to do what comes unnaturally, to do the opposite… cultivate the opposite, jostle ourselves out of our norm so that we can imagine another possibility. So I’m hopeful. I think that we’re seeing just these conversations just taking hold in a lot of ways. I mean, I lean a lot on the Facebook group, Teachers Throwing Out Grades. It’s a big group of people, about 12,000 people at this point, that are having these conversations just in that one space. I mean, I know they’re happening in all kinds of other spaces. But that one is one that I like to follow very closely. And even, if we’re using Facebook as an example, the Pandemic Pedagogy group is where you see a lot of people having debates about these issues that we’re facing as teachers and learners.

John: Yeah, those groups have been really helpful in the last year and a half or so, as well as the Twitter conversations.

Kristen: Oh, absolutely. Yes, the academic Twitter and other spaces.

John: And we’re recording this at the end of the semester. And you mentioned all of the emails and requests from students. And one thing I’ve tried to convey to my students is, unless there’s really extraordinary circumstances, I’m not going to make special exceptions only for the students that approach me, that I’d rather build it into the course structure itself so that those opportunities are available for everyone. Because, otherwise, the students who are most likely to request extra credit and so forth are the students who generally come from continuing generation families. And there’s a lot of students who don’t realize that they have that opportunity to request things. So in general I try, in my courses, increasingly in the last few years, to build in more opportunities for revision, for submitting things late, and so forth. But those are open to everyone on an equal footing. And I say if they’re having some major crisis, then I’m happy to talk about it. But in general, I think we have to be careful not to only make exemptions for those students who come forward. It’s much better, I think, to build those opportunities for everyone, including those who might be afraid to ask for those special cases.

Kristen: And I agree, and I definitely try to structure my courses in that way. But I’m thinking now from kind of the perspective as a Chair or just as a Faculty Advisor… What do we do with the students that, in those classes where they have those opportunities, they’re still succeeding because those opportunities exist, but they also, maybe in three of their five classes, are dealing with these very rigid policies that maybe instructors are not understanding that they just got a major medical diagnosis, or they’re on the verge of needing to take a medical withdrawal because they’re having a mental health crisis? And then how do we help those students still succeed? And those are questions that I don’t have an answer for. I keep asking myself that because I know that, when I think about grading broadly, often grading is a disruptive tool that impacts the relationship between the teacher and the student. And so maybe students don’t always feel comfortable coming and talking about it until the end where they’re saying, “I didn’t get the grade I was seeking,” perhaps, or, “Is there anything I can do to recover the grade?” But then where can we plug in in other spaces, I think, instead of being in that instructor role, but in advisor roles or in other, like, role-model positions with students where we can help them? Those are questions I keep asking.

John: Certainly there’s a difference in instructor flexibility, which is a major problem that students face. And as we talked about before, they have very different requirements in each of their classes. And just yesterday, I had five requests for extra credit. And each time I referred them to the opportunities that were already built in. And I said, “I’m not going to ask you to do extra work when you haven’t done some of the required work that you still can do. Before you ask to do something more, maybe you should look at the things that are available for you that you’ve been asked to do since the start of the semester and start there.” And that doesn’t always get the most positive response.

Kristen: And that’s where I think self-assessment can be a really great tool that, if instructors actually build in, whether it be on an assignment basis, or just the broader course, a self-assessment. I know that I’ve worked with asking students to kind of keep a log of their process in the class, the work that they’re doing in-person or out of class. If you’re remote, of course, those distinctions aren’t important. But it’s been helpful, I think, for us to have those honest conversations at the end of the semester. It’s like when we’re talking and you’re saying, “Well, I think I deserve an A in this class.” But then I’m saying, “Well, but you weren’t there for more than 50% of the semester. And these are the assignments that were not turned in. Please help me understand your perspective so that I can say, ‘How is that fair for those students that maybe have been there and participating in a way that you weren’t. Help me understand how you’re understanding this.’” [LAUGHTER] And then I would say 9 out of 10 times that student comes back and says, “Wow, that probably isn’t fair to the other people.” So anytime that I think we can pull back the curtain and just have these process conversations, I just continue to be so inspired by what can come out of them. Of course, you’re always going to have the student that’s like, “I deserved an A. I know I didn’t turn anything in and I wasn’t there.” Because I think they’ve learned that in the game, or the rules of the game, that if they just keep self-advocating for the A, that maybe we’ll somehow meet them in this, like, maybe you’re failing them and they get the A, maybe, and you’ll land at the C or something. And they see it as this negotiation practice. But more often than not, I would say I have found that, at least in my classes, that students actually are harder on themselves in their self-assessments than I would have even been.

John: And at the other extreme though, might stereotype threat play a role in some of the self-assessments as well, for students who are in marginalized groups?

Kristen: Absolutely. One, you could say the idea that many people have an inflated sense of their effort, or their knowledge of a topic, right? So we have that. And then they just hold to it. And then we have the ways in which we’ve embodied these negative stereotypes and stories about who we are as people and learners in different identity groups. And of course, that’s going to impact. That’s why the thinking about difference and how difference punctuates every part of our process is so vital, right? It’s a difference, because we all come to the table with different capacities. I think this is why, more than anything, I started asking in my self-assessments, I mean, the most important thing for me to know is, “What was most meaningful to you in this class? How are you going to build that into your life in some capacity and take it forward?” So it doesn’t mean that I’m not chasing concept understanding, it just means it’s more for me about what matters to them, and so it just changes the assessment conversation. If they can’t articulate what’s meaningful to them, that tells a pretty specific story. That’s quite different than the student that says, “I’m not such a good writer, or I had all these struggles that impacted my capacity to turn work in in this way or that way or to participate as much as I would have liked to because I have a lot of anxiety and I don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of the class. But here’s what mattered to me, here’s what I’m going to say. This has changed who I am as a person, because it changed my thinking.” That’s what I want to assess. That’s what I want to know, as a teacher.

John: And that type of metacognitive reflection, we know, helps increase learning, and there’s a lot of research to support that. So, by itself, that’s a really good practice to encourage. So we always end with the question, “What’s next?”

Kristen: So what’s next for me is I’m hoping to continue to have these conversations and continue to experiment in my classes with ways forward that I can refine what it means to do assessment and grading from a social-justice perspective. How we can best harness our communication resources—whether it be our theories, or our methods, our conversations in the classroom—to create a system that’s more just in the realm of teaching and learning. So what I’m really working on now is expanding this thing I’m calling “awareness pedagogy,” which is something I wrote about in the book in chapter eight. This process that’s built out of ungrading. Ungrading is an umbrella term that I think has been pretty widely adopted by many people to talk about a type of grading process that decouples grading from feedback. And it really focuses very heavily on learner self-assessment. In many cases, for people doing ungrading, that means that the learner themselves assigns their grade through a self-assessment process with the instructor’s support and sometimes integrating peer feedback. So, in my case, awareness pedagogy, I’m using five broad categories that I work with to help students build awareness in my classes across the kind of courses that I teach. And I teach classes in Communication, I’m doing classes on listening and interpersonal communication, intercultural communication, classes focused on conflict. And so it’s really well-suited for that discipline, which I know is different than other people that may be listening. So I’m working on that. My next project is to expand what I introduced in chapter eight into a book-length project to really get into the nuts and bolts of awareness pedagogy as its own kind of approach to social justice assessment in the classroom and what that looks like. Especially in the realm of thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, but also integrating a lot of contemplative pedagogy as part of it because that’s an area that I’m extremely attracted to in my own work.

John: Well, thank you. And it’s been great talking to you, and thank you for all of your work on behalf of students.

Judie: Thank you.

Kristen: Thank you so much. It’s been wonderful to spend this time with you all.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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197. Humanized Teaching

Posted in belonging, edtech, equity, grading, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, ungrading
July 21, 2021

Looking to the future as an instructor in higher education can seem daunting, especially as we plan for a more equitable future.  In this episode, Jesse Stommel joins us to discuss some of those challenges, search for hope, and discuss ways forward that are ethical, humane and flexible. Jesse is the Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy nonprofit organization, and organization he founded in 2011. He is also the founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Jesse recently served as the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He is the co-author,  with Sean Michael Morris, of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and, with Dorothy Kim, co-editor of Disrupting the Digital Humanities.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Looking to the future as an instructor in higher education can seem daunting, especially as we plan for a more equitable future. In this episode, we discuss some of those challenges, search for hope, and discuss ways forward that are ethical, humane and flexible.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guest today is Jesse Stommel. Jesse is the Executive Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy nonprofit organization, an organization he founded in 2011. He is also the founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab. Jesse recently served as the Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-author, with Sean Michael Morris of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and with Dorothy Kim, the co-editor of Disrupting the Digital Humanities. Welcome, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi, it’s good to be with you all. Looking forward to our chat.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Jesse: I’m actually drinking peach honey sparkling water. It’s sort of tea infused.

Rebecca: Okay, that’s good. That counts. Also, it sounds really good. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have ginger peach black tea.

Rebecca: …and I have a decaf Assam.

Jesse: I feel jealous of both of your teas.

Rebecca: It’s sad that we don’t have you in person in our office where we have a giant selection that you could choose from, we’ll send you a picture so you know what you missed out on. [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Well, we’ll have to do that in the future.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

John: They’re slightly aged teas compared to when we last saw them about a year and a few months back, but they are there and some of them we’ll probably have to dispose of. [LAUGHTER] You’ve been a really important voice on behalf of inclusive teaching and very vocal on topics like trauma-infused pedagogy, designing with care in mind, ungrading, and equity more generally. What does it mean to be an ethical instructor as we approach the fall, still amidst the last stages of a pandemic?

Jesse: I wrote a piece with Sara Goldrick-Rab a few years ago, and for folks who don’t know, Sara Goldrick-Rab is an expert in higher education policy, particularly focusing on food and housing insecurity. And she and I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Teaching the Students We Have, Not the Students We Wish We Had.” And ultimately, the thing that that piece charged me to do, and I’ve been working with Sara for, I think, close to eight years now and her work and the research that she’s done has really put a kind of specificity to my work on inclusive pedagogies and critical pedagogies that has charged me to think really carefully about how the material circumstances of our students affect their learning experience, and also how the material circumstances of teachers affect their teaching experience. And so if I think about how we begin to move back into classrooms, to find our way back to our institutions, to find our way back to the collaborations and colleagues we may have worked really closely with, I think that the key is for us to do really deep work thinking about who are our students? What do they need to be successful? How have they been affected by the last 18 months? And to do that same work with ourselves and our colleagues. Ask ourselves: who are we as teachers? What do we need to be successful? And I think institutions have a charge that they have to be really careful about how they quote unquote, pivot back to business as usual. I don’t think there’s a neat and tidy pivot back. And I don’t think business as usual is the appropriate place for us to turn to at this moment. So for institutions to ask hard questions of themselves, interrogate the things that they may have done to exclude many of the people who found themselves struggling during the pandemic, the things they did to exclude those students and faculty members well before the pandemic, to assure that they don’t continue the kind of exclusive practices that I’ve seen so many institutions coming to grips with in the last 18 months.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the focus that you’ve put on both students and also caring about colleagues and making sure that we’re being reciprocal in thinking about each other as humans and not just robots that we work with or something. In this conversation of getting back to campuses in the fall, what can we do to continue to humanize this practice with our colleagues too, that you just kind of focused a little bit on students, but what does this mean when we’re thinking about our colleagues and our relationships with our colleagues,

Jesse: I’ve been at several institutions that were struggling. So many of the people listening have found themselves at institutions that were struggling, I feel like the whole of public education is struggling at the current moment, but I’ve had some very specific circumstances at the last few institutions where I worked. About 10 years ago, I worked at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, and Marylhurst University ended up closing down because of financial insecurity. And I was there a few years before they closed down and sort of dealing with the environment and watching the writing on the wall get darker and darker. After that, I went to University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the Governor, Scott Walker, obliterated tenure across the system, taking one of the best public education state systems in our country and making it a mockery. And his decision had a rippling impact across the entire institution. And what I found in both of those situations was that in situations of precarity, situations of financial austerity… and in many cases, those are manufactured, and they’re manufactured, especially in the case of Scott Walker, for very particular political reasons. In situations of austerity and precarity, people start to turn on each other, the sort of fabric of the community that existed prior to those moments that I found myself in at those institutions, I watched it erode and it eroded very quickly. And so the importance of being kind to one another, the importance of supporting each other, supporting our students, certainly, but also supporting our colleagues, and the importance of administrations focusing their efforts not on finding a new contract to a remote proctoring solution, which will do harm to all of the students and all of the teachers at the institution, but to focus their investment and their energy on finding ways to support the community that beats at the heart of the institution. That’s ultimately what we have to do. And it’s so important right now, because I saw over the last 18 months, the same thing starting to happen at a lot of institutions. I saw institutions beginning to create cultures that were inhospitable to the kinds of work that we really want to do in education.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that comes up in addition to food insecurity and housing insecurity with our students is that during the pandemic it became visible, I think, for some folks, that part-time faculty, adjunct faculty, also have some of those insecurities that we often just don’t address or think about. How do you see us, as a larger higher education community starting to support those faculty more and really addressing those insecurities? What can we do?

Jesse: I think there’s an easy answer… that we should all commit to having a permanent full-time academic workforce at all of our institutions. And the truth is that when you look at what the expenses are of our institutions, there are ways to cut costs. Imagine an institution that has just spent $500,000, or if you’re the State of Illinois, just spent $23 million on a multi-year contract with a remote proctoring solution. Think about all of that money, and how many adjunct or precarious faculty that money could support. If you think about the pedagogical benefits of making faculty full-time non-precarious, versus the pedagogical deficit that gets created by creating a culture of suspicion at our institutions, there is money being spent on things doing harm to students that could be easily re channeled towards something like certainly student support, supporting students basic needs, or supporting the basic needs of faculty who are struggling. I think that there is a need right now for us to be really honest about how money is getting spent at institutions and how that money signals what our institutions value and what our institutions don’t value. It is quite clear, across the entirety of higher education, that the vast majority of our institutions do not support teachers or the work of teaching. And that is quite clear via the mass adjunctification across our institutions, as well as the failure to properly invest in the preparation of teachers or pedagogical support for teachers. And that didn’t change in the pandemic. I have not seen a huge amount of money suddenly getting funneled into faculty development and support… at most institutions, anyway.

Rebecca: I think many of the things that we’re talking about right now are all things that were happening before the pandemic, they just became more visible to some people during the pandemic.

Jesse: Yeah, and you mentioned food and housing insecurity, and then alluded to other struggles that people were having… mental health issues… certainly, we are all experiencing acute mental health issues because of the last 18 months. But there are so many people who were experiencing acute and chronic mental health issues prior to the pandemic that weren’t getting properly addressed. And if you also think about disabled students and faculty, and the ways that their needs were not being met prior to the pandemic. We figured out how to do remote work and remote teaching in the midst of the pandemic, or we figured out how to do it as best as each individual institution might have done, which is… your mileage may vary, I guess. [LAUGHTER] But, the truth is that there are so many faculty and students who are disabled in various ways who needed that kind of support well before the pandemic.

John: On a positive note, though, didn’t the pandemic help make some of these issues much more clear to faculty and administrators, when they saw the problems that students had in continuing and when they recognize the need to provide support for faculty who didn’t have computer access at home to even connect with their students remotely? Might that perhaps help lead to a change in mindset?

Jesse: On my Twitter bio, I am called an irascible optimist. That was a moniker given to me by Sean Michael Morris. And when he said that I thought: “That is indeed me.” And I’ve worn that moniker ever since he gave it to me, irascible optimist. I’ll be honest that I have been less optimistic in the last 18 years. And I recognize I’m being less optimistic in this initial start to this conversation than I would have been if we had talked two years ago. And part of that is because of what I have seen over the last 18 months, and the deep, deep struggles that I’ve seen so many of my students having, and so many of my colleagues having, and also the failures of so many state governments, the federal government, and institutions to really figure out what to do and how to handle this particular moment. So if I think about what we’ve learned, is that we’ve learned to listen to our gut, we’ve learned to acknowledge the things that we were already seeing. It’s not like suddenly we saw new things over the last 18 months, we were already seeing them. And so we learned that we actually have to take action. One of the sad things and this is going to keep us maybe on the pessimistic place for just a few more minutes, is that I worry that so many institutions came to grips with these things, because these things started to hit them in their pocketbook. And I hate that that was the reason that many institutions started to solve these issues. On the other hand, what I will say is that the kinds of conversations that I’ve had with fellow teachers over the last 18 months have felt incredible. I have felt more connected, even if my work has been harder than it ever has been. I have felt more connected to that work and more deeply connected to the colleagues that I work with. And I have found new connections, because I have seen so many individual teachers struggling and working so hard to help meet the needs of our present moment.

John: And I’m still fairly optimistic because of that. A lot of faculty were able to avoid some of those issues, even though they may have been generally aware of some of the challenges our students face. When they interacted with them in the classroom it wasn’t quite as clear as when they were hearing from students who were dealing with problems of just being at their class because they had work commitments or because they had other responsibilities. And they had network issues because they didn’t have stable network connections, or they were using a laptop that was 10 years old, and it wouldn’t work consistently. And I think faculty in general have become much more aware of the challenges of our students. I’m hopeful, at least, that that’s not going to disappear. And that that could help lead to more consistent support of students once we do return to whatever the new normal happens to be as we move back to more campus instruction.

Rebecca: I’m really hoping that faculty, given this kind of acknowledgement of a wide variety of struggles, will really work together and push administrators and push universities and push systems to change. Because if we don’t speak up together in a unified way, it’s not gonna happen.

Jesse: Yeah, Paulo Freire and bell hooks both talk about what they describe as critical hope… that hope is an action that we take not a passive state, that hope is a work… that hope is struggle. And just that idea that hope isn’t passive, we don’t sit back and wait and hope. Instead, we take the action of hope. And Maxine Greene, also a critical pedagogue, talks about imagining the world as though it could be otherwise. And so her word there is “imagination.” Again, something active, imagining the world as though it could be otherwise requires us to recognize our agency and how we can have a positive impact and a positive effect. And so pushing back where we can, drawing students into these conversations where we are able, insisting that student voices be centered in these conversations, these are things that we can do and that will have a necessarily good impact, even when we’re precarious and where we feel like our job might be at risk, there are still actions that we can take, and it’s a matter of figuring out how do I engage in the work of hope or the work of imagination.

Rebecca: See, we got to a more positive place. [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Just give us a few minutes. [LAUGHTER]

John: One of the things you’re really known for is your work on ungrading and creating an environment that’s more conducive to learning. Could you just talk a little bit about that?

Jesse: So I’ll just say that I have been quote, unquote, ungrading for 21 years, it’s a practice that I started my first semester of teaching. And it’s a practice that has grown and changed over time. But, I often say that I have never put a grade on a piece of student work in my career. The truth is that that’s not exactly true, because I love co-teaching and when you co-teach you negotiate a pedagogy with your co-teacher, and so I have put grades on individual students’ work but it was always a discussion and a sort of process that I came to with another teacher. The interesting thing is that I’ve been doing this work as part of my practice for 21 years, but I didn’t start talking about it publicly. I mean, beyond just having conversations about it publicly. I didn’t start publicly writing about it, giving keynotes about it, etc., until 2017. So four years ago that I really started writing publicly about this. Ungrading was a word that I had used, but it wasn’t something that an entire way of my pedagogical thought was centered around. So it has been interesting to watch the transition in me as I’ve moved towards talking about this more publicly. And I’ll tell you the reasons I didn’t talk about it publicly. I was a road warrior adjunct for about nine years of my teaching, teaching at up to four institutions, nine classes a term, dealing with the rules and restrictions at four different institutions. And I also felt like my pedagogical approach to grading felt like something between me and the students I was working with. It was no one else’s business. It was a conversation I had with them. And I felt like I wanted to protect that space for students and me to work through that together. The reason that I changed my thinking and started writing more publicly is because, over the last 20 years, I’ve watched education become increasingly quantitative and watched the reliance on learning management systems, which turn students into rows in a spreadsheet and their work into columns in a spreadsheet. I’ve watched institutions grade and evaluate their teachers in increasingly quantifiable ways. And then I’ve watched, obviously, the turn towards algorithms and the Internet of Things and weird tools like plagiarism detection software that again, feels like it reduces us to cogs, and reduces our work to bits, ones and zeros. And so I felt the need to create a larger conversation and dialogue on this because increasingly, I recognize that grades were the biggest thorn in the side of critical pedagogy and the biggest thorn in the side of my pedagogy. And so many people felt like we’re increasingly struggling with grades as the thing that got in the way of them creating productive relationships with students. And ultimately, when I started writing about it, I was amazed at the response. And to some degree, I feel like there were so many people that had hit that wall, and that we’re feeling that increased quantification over many, many years, almost like frogs boiling in a pot of water. And the other amazing thing was how much conversations with the larger community of teachers, a larger community of students, helped continue to evolve and change my practice. I guess one of the other reasons I started writing and talking about it more publicly was because I needed a push. I needed students and colleagues to ask me to work even harder to ask even harder questions of myself. And the last thing I’ll say is that ungrading is just a word. The one thing I can’t stand about the word ungrading is it tries to take a huge variety of practices that push back on traditional grading, and tries to lump them into one word as though there is upgrading tm, you know, the thing Jesse invented and that you can buy from him for $19.99, [LAUGHTER] three payments, and that he’ll deliver it to you and it will be a stack of 20 best practices that if you implement will change your life and make your relationships with students better. And that’s just not the way pedagogy works. That’s not the way teaching works. And that’s certainly not the way something as complex as assessment works. And so ultimately, this has to be an ongoing dialogue, conversation between teachers, between teachers and students. And what works for one teacher in one context with one group of students won’t necessarily work neat and tidily for another.

John: You mentioned that your practice has evolved in some way. Could you talk a little bit about how your practices involving… I don’t want to say ungrading again… [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: No, I did help coin the term.

John: Ok.

Jesse: So I’m all right with us using the word “ungrading.” I think it is good for us to have a word for us to rally these conversations around because we need the energy and the catalyzing force that that term has caused, and so it’s useful and productive in that way. So I’ve done self evaluation, asking students to write process letters, to analyze their own learning, to reflect on their own learning. I’ve asked them to reflect on group and peer learning. And I’ve asked them to grade themselves. And over the course of my career, I almost always give students the grade they give themselves. For the most part, when I change a grade, it’s to raise the grade, especially in situations where I feel like bias has influenced the grades. The thing is bias, even self-internalized bias, affects how we review and evaluate our performance. And the thing that I’ve changed most about is I’ve started to get this nagging feeling that when I have students self evaluate and self grading that I’m taking everything that I don’t like about grades, everything that the research shows is ineffective about grades, everything that is emotionally harmful about grades and giving grades, and taking that and kind of passing the buck on to students. And so my project in ungrading, or my project in my own assessment practice, has always been to turn grades over on their back and inspect them and ask hard questions of them and wonder at them and raise our eyebrows at them so that we feel like we have more agents within a quantified system like we work in. And I don’t think I can necessarily do that by just taking all the problems of grades and passing that over to students. So I’ve started to rethink how I ask students to do that work of grading themselves. One of the things that I found is, over so many years, giving A, A-, B, B+, B, B- is that when students went to grade themselves, they would give themselves something like, “Oh, it’s either an A plus, or an A minus, or it’s a B plus.” And they would quibble these tiny details, which that kind of evidence suggests to me that I had passed the anxiety of grades and quantification on to them. And so recently, in the last two years, I’ve removed A minuses and pluses from the approach that I use, I tell students just round up. And it’s interesting, because the second that I did, that students stopped quibbling the tiny details, and this is really drawn from some writing by Peter Elbow, where he writes specifically about minimal grading, which taking 100 point scale or 1000 point scale and reducing it to a 10 point scale, or a five point scale, or a three, two, one point scale. And the more we reduce it, the more clear it becomes, and the more it communicates, and the more effective it is as an assessment tool. And so giving students less gradations to quibble about. But on the other hand, I also recognize that these are decisions that I’m making, that I still have power in the classroom and trying to think about an inspect my own power and privilege in the classroom and how I can begin to at least dismantle that, not to remove it, because I think classrooms need strong leaders, but at least to dismantle it enough that I’m leaving space for students to sort of carve out their own space within their educations.

Rebecca: Seems to me that a lot of the ungrading work is really tied to this idea of flexibility that you’ve talked about pretty frequently: being flexible as a teacher and offering options, but it’s also in popular in frameworks, like UDL. But I also know that the idea of providing flexibility can cause a lot of anxiety to a faculty member in trying to figure out how to do that and make it manageable and make it sustainable. Can you share some ideas about making that a sustainable practice and also what you mean by flexible options for students.

Jesse: So the interesting thing is flexible does become more complicated. If we are engaging in the work of teaching as a form of policing student learning, or even not policing, just monitoring, even, monitoring student learning, or collecting or gathering student learning or gathering evidence for student learning. The second that we as teachers move away from that role of feeling like we are the evaluators, we are meant to rank students, we’re there to police their learning, we’re there to ensure compliance…. which honestly, even good teachers, so much of that is baked into just how our system is structured, that we do it without even realizing that we’re doing it… even the structure and shape of a syllabus has so much of that baked into it. I think that flexibility becomes a lot easier when you hand that over to the students. So people often say, “Oh, well, you let your students do five different things for an assignment or you let them just pick something… anything?” And I say, “Well, I don’t let them I invite them to do that, first of all.” Second of al, “Well, then how do you manage all the different things you get at different times?” I say, “Well, I don’t consider myself the primary audience for student work, I create a space in my course where they can share this work with one another. And they can give one another feedback.” And then, “Well gosh, how do you deal with all of the requests that you might get?” I don’t ask my students to ask permission. I invite them to modify, remix, to take advantage of flexibility. So in other words, the more that I remove my bureaucratic burden, the more flexibility becomes super easy because if a student says to me, “Well, can I” I can say, “of course you can. I invite you to change, remix,” in some ways, I don’t even have to do the work of considering the request. Because the request isn’t necessary to the relationship. I’m sort of there to offer feedback to students, and to be surprised and to marvel at whatever it is that they end up doing for the course. The other thing that we often do is we think that our role is to rank students against one another. That’s one of the reasons why I can’t stand rubrics, because I feel like the entire structure of a rubric is set up to put student work into neat and tidy boxes. And when we do that, we essentially are ranking students against one another. And so if one student does something that is just in a completely different universe from another, how do you assure that they both earned the A ? Well, ultimately, if you just remove the idea that our work is to compare students to one another. One student does a traditional academic paper and the other gives you a piece of installation art that moves around campus and that you can’t even quite make sense of it. You don’t have to hold them up and say, “Well, how do I really justify giving that piece of performance art an A?” You take it on its own merit, and you recognize what it is, and you marvel at it. And you allow yourself to be surprised by it. The more flexible I am, the more fun teaching ends up being, people often when I say things like that think, “Oh, your classes, just chaos.” And actually, no, I’m a pretty type A person. I’m pretty OCD, I actually structure a really neat and tidy syllabus, the structure of my course, is very organized, partly because I sort of subscribe to improvisation within a frame, which I take from jazz music, but I don’t know much about jazz. So feel free to tell me if I’ve interpreted that completely wrongly. But this idea that we need a frame and a structure in order to improvise within it. And so you set up the sort of guardrails for students, to some extent their boundaries, but it’s more like their guardrails, you set them up so that students feel like they can experiment within the space of the classroom. And then, to some extent, it allows you and gives you the freedom to play without worrying if you’re just going to go completely off the deep end,

John: You mentioned being surprised by some of the things your students have come up with as ways of demonstrating their learning. Could you give us just a few examples of some of the more interesting projects your students have selected?

Jesse: I kind of alluded to it in our last conversation. But this was at University of Mary Washington, and the assignment was to reinvent, rebuild the internet. And the assignment had a very short prompt that gave space for students to interpret the instructions in so many different ways. And the answer to this assignment for a group of students was to create a pile of trash. And that pile of trash had multicolored bits of crumpled paper in it. And it was a piece of installation art that migrated around campus. And they took pictures of it in different locations around campus. And then at one point it showed up in our classroom, and they wrote an artist statement that talked about the detritus of the web, the deep and dark web and all the bits you can see and the bits you can’t see. And that was marvelous. The sort of meat of the project was how captivating and how just seeing this thing, and wondering at how this fit as an interpretation of the assignment. I often come into class, and when I’ve just picked something like a reading or designed an assignment, and I’ve kind of done it instinctually maybe it’s because I’m doing that reading for the first time, I’ll often go into class, and I’ll say, “Why did I choose this reading?” And I mean that honestly, it’s not a rhetorical question. It’s like, this is the first time I’ve taught this and I’m trying to figure out whether it fits and how it fits. And so ultimately, that’s what this group of students’ project did for me, is it forced me to ask myself, “Well, gosh, what is this course even about?” And to me, that project managed to get at the biggest question of the course, which is, what are we even doing here? Why are we talking about the internet, and for me, that was marvelous. On the other hand, another teacher might look at this pile of trash and say, “Hey, that’s just a pile of trash.” And so there’s something idiosyncratic about how we engage with student work. I’ve also read really, really good academic papers. And so even some of those have surprised me, in part because sometimes it’s that punctum in an academic paper where the academic paper is just going along, going through the motions of a traditional academic paper, and then it just veers. And then you have this moment like Roland Barthe’s punctum where all you can see, you almost have it burned into your retina, this sort of moment of friction within the work. And truthfully, those are the most interesting parts of education in general, is the parts where we do something that we weren’t expecting, or where students turn something in that we never would have imagined for a particular assignment.

Rebecca: One of the things that sometimes comes up with flexibilities not just the trepidation of a faculty member, but also of students. When there’s a lot of options available, students sometimes can freeze and not know what to do. You mentioned the guardrails. So how do those function? Or how do you make sure that those students that are overwhelmed by choice feel included?

Jesse: One thing is to have very clear parameters, and I tend to have really short provocations for students… let’s call them provocations instead of assignments, because even the idea of assignment suggests a transactional relationship between a teacher and students, I still haven’t found quite the right word, invitation doesn’t feel strong enough, but maybe provocation is what it is. So I try and be very, very clear to have very explicit instructions. And also to have them very short. I find that so often, we create assignment sheets that end up being longer than the papers themselves. I’ve seen two-page responses that have an assignment sheet that’s three or four pages describing what students should do and their two page response paper. And I think partly we do that because we’re anxious about the questions that we’ll get, and we’re anxious about students falling through the cracks. When what happens is the more words that we put in our assignments, or provocations, whatever you want to call them…. I think I’ll, for the purposes here, I’ll keep calling them assignments. I think that’s fine. We fill our assignments up with language that’s all there, in some ways defensively, but every single word we put in there is a pothole that a student might fall into. It’s a rabbit hole a student might fall down. And I find that the shorter my assignment descriptions are, the less questions I get, the longer they are, the more questions they get. And people just think, well, if I just answer all the questions in advance that I won’t get any questions. And that isn’t how it ends up working out, because students are really worried about what our expectations are. And I think we have to break that down. And the reason that a student feels overwhelmed by choice is because they’re worried about meeting our expectations. And so we have to make sure that, in our language, we make clear, this isn’t about my expectations, it’s about what you expect of yourself. And here’s the thing I don’t necessarily know that works if we’re using traditional grading systems, because ultimately, if you’re putting a grade on a thing, your expectations are what matters. But if you’re giving over some, or even all of that work to students, it starts to break down this idea. They recognize, “Oh, he’s not grading this anyway. So this really is about my expectations.” And if, when I engage with the work rather than approving of it or disapproving of it, instead, I encounter it the way a reader would, by having a reaction to it and telling students what my reaction is. And then I encourage students to do that for each other. Peter Elbow talks about ranking, evaluating and liking… ranking being the thing that we shouldn’t do, we shouldn’t rank students against one another, evaluating being a thing that still has a place because certainly there are times when students do need some amount of evaluation from an external mentor, I think those moments are much fewer than we end up doing. And then he talks about liking, which is just giving ourselves space to appreciate student work, to not have to evaluate it, to just enjoy it, and to respond to it and to be an expert reader for students.

John: Could you elaborate on that notion of being an expert reader for students? What sort of feedback do you provide them as an expert reader?

Jesse: Well, I think one of the things is that so much of our so many of our traditional grading systems call for us to be objective. And we can probably have a whole other podcast around objectivity versus subjectivity and whether they’re even possible. There’s a lot of research that shows the idea of objective grading is just a fallacy to begin with. But I think that it’s about allowing ourselves to have a subjective response, allowing ourselves to bring our full humanity to that moment of engaging with student work, to laugh at it, to wonder at it, to marvel at it, to be silent, to be struck silent, to raise our eyebrows at it, to ask hard questions of it. And so what that might actually look like with a group of students is letting them see me puzzling over it, letting them see me just work through my thinking about what I’m seeing. And so oftentimes, I have students do sort of expos in class where they bring all of their work and they just lay it out, whether it’s a paper, whether it’s a pile of trash, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a documentary, they lay their work out, and we just hang out together and go around and look at each other’s work. And what I sort of see my role there is just to model what it looks like to appreciate the efforts that they’ve made and to encounter their work and talk about my experience of it, as opposed to saying, “Oh, you did this? Well, this needs improvement.” …to sort of hold back that this needs improvement, because there are moments when that’s really important, but then other moments where it isn’t. For example, I taught first-year writing for a long time, and in first-year college writing, it’s not getting to success, it’s about just getting comfortable writing, just getting comfortable in your skin as a writer. And that means not a lot of that kind of evaluative feedback, it means more just here’s what happens to me when I encounter your words.

Rebecca: Some of what we’ve been talking about with this flexibility and ungrading is really starting to get a sense that individual students and members of a learning community really being members and belonging to that community. Can you elaborate on ways in addition to this flexibility idea that might help students from a wide variety of backgrounds feel like they belong, especially those that we saw during the pandemic and we know they existed before that, really struggling or having barriers and helping them really feel like “You really do belong here. You really should be here. We want you here.”

Jesse: I think that we do that from the very beginning and how we structure education at so many of our institutions, the reliance on the idea of seat time. classes that meet two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday for a set amount of hours, classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday, really bizarre ways of thinking about hybrid learning or online learning where there’s too much of a reliance on synchronous engagement. Ultimately, when we make those kinds of decisions with how we structure education at our institutions, we’re telling whole swaths of students: “This isn’t built for you, this isn’t made for you.” And increasingly people talk about adult learners. Well, at the college level, all of our students are adult learners. And increasingly, the vast majority of them are working adult learners. And we’re not doing enough to structure education so that it acknowledges their experience. I had a student who was disabled, he had chronic migraines. And, luckily, at the time I worked at an institution where I was developing a new hybrid degree program. And I had in a sense developed the program not just for him, but for all of the students I was working with, who were like him in various ways, who had no access to education, without serious rethinking about how we build our curriculum. So thinking about when we move online, relying increasingly on asynchronous ways for students to engage asynchronously, because most of the students who turn to online need more flexibility, their time is not their own in many cases. And when we’re designing degree programs, rethinking things like the 15-week semester, rethinking things like seat time, rethinking things like classes that meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 50 minutes over the course of a 15-week period. Honestly, I increasingly think that’s absurd. What a weird structure…50 minutes three times a week, how is where a student is at on Monday any different than where they’re at on Wednesday, is 15 minutes really enough time for us to develop the kinds of thinking that we’re trying to get at in our courses. Ultimately, I think, just asking ourselves, are we continuing to teach students in the way that we are just because this is the way we have always done it? Or is this actually what will help students learn and give space for students to learn? Also, if we go back to those adjuncts, when I was a road warrior adjunct trying to teach a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class that met for 50 minutes, that was 45 minutes from my house, trying to fit that into my schedule with my other eight classes, was nearly impossible. What I needed more than anything was not just one approach, I needed to be able to teach one course asynchronously, one course on a tuesday, thursday schedule. So I needed a variety of different things in my schedule. And that’s what a lot of students are needing. The students at my institution, where I’m currently teaching still at University of Mary Washington, so many of them are quote unquote, traditional students who want face-to-face interaction. And so the institution says we are on ground residential institution, we will be back full time, everyone will be back at their desks in the fall. But that’s not what the students actually want. The students want most of their educational experience to be face to face, but they’re struggling to fill a schedule, because they’re also working. And so they need to be able to take some courses online, some courses hybrid, some courses face to face. And they really want to be able to build a much more thoughtful approach to education. And also, when we think about specific classes, some disciplines, some courses, lend themselves to one format, some lend themselves to another. So I think that that’s the way we invite students in is, from the start, actually building with the students. And not just for the students building for those students would be great, but also finding ways to build with them, and to design curriculum alongside of them. So it really meets their needs and challenges them appropriately.

John: One of the things that’s going to be a bit different this fall is that we’re going to have some students who are sophomores, even, who’ve never been on campus. And most students have not been interacting in person in classrooms for the last year and a half or so. What can we do to help create a sense of community when we bring these people together for the first time after this long break from face-to-face interaction?

Jesse: The first thing I’m thinking about is something that I started saying, from the very, very start of the quote unquote pivot to online, right around the beginning of the lockdown last year, I started to say, we need to make sure that it isn’t continuity of instruction that we’re trying to maintain, but continuity of the communities at the heart of our institutions. I don’t know if many institutions figured out how to support those communities online. I think they figured out how to keep the lights on and to keep people taking classes. But, I don’t necessarily know that the communities were maintained. What I worry about as we return to campus is that we will try and pick up right where we left with that continuity of instruction. Rather than realizing that where we need to most place our efforts is not just starting up the wheel of delivering content to students, what we need to do is figure out how to revitalize those communities. And that needs to be a huge part of our efforts. So if every teacher is imagining that they’re going to go back to teaching the same amount of content that they taught before the pandemic… one, they were probably trying to teach too much. They were probably teaching too much at the expense of developing community even two years ago, but recognizing that we need to put a lot more breathing room into our courses. And also a lot more conversation between courses, because communities don’t just exist in a vacuum, you don’t just have a community in your first-period class, and then a community in your second-period class community is living, breathing, and it’s sort of echoes between those spaces. So thinking about what happens between period one and period two. How are those two courses connected? What are students doing on campus? Where is the life of the institution? And how can we invest as much as possible into supporting that, and I don’t think it’s with algorithmic retention software. That is the worst possible thing that I see institutions turning to to try and support community. Algorithms are not going to help us build and maintain community, human beings are the ones who are good at that. So any dollar you’re spending on an algorithmic retention software, please give that to adjunct and contingent instructors.

John: In terms of reducing the amount of content in classes, I think a lot of faculty realized that when they switch to remote or online instruction. Is that something you think people will automatically recognize or do you think people are going to try to go back to how things were before and forget the lessons that they’ve learned about this during the pandemic?

Jesse: I think a lot of individual faculty, individual teachers, individual students will take so many of these lessons back to their work this fall and beyond. I think institutions are much harder to shift. And so the problem is, I don’t know that institutional culture will change in the way that it needs to in order to support the efforts of those students and faculty. And so this is really a charge to institutions and administrators to put that breathing room also in the institutional culture and important ways.

Rebecca: And maybe even really, to push it within a department because that might be a place where faculty can start to expand it out. And think about it. When you were talking, I was imagining a time that seems so long ago now. It may have been 10 years ago, and seems like a really long time now.

Jesse: Yeah, it feels like it’s either a week ago, or like 10 years ago, to me,

Rebecca: I had colleagues that we would, if we had classes at the same time, we would actually schedule activities together. We would cross pollinate to have some of that community. We’d have design challenges and investigate and do different things with each other. We’ve lost some of that play, just over time with assessment requirements and this and that. It has fizzled. So I’m hoping that this fall will bring back the play, bring back the fun for that community that to marinate a little bit.

Jesse: And if I can think of some really practical things institutions can do in order to seed that community that you’re describing. If your institution is not paying adjuncts and contingent staff for faculty development, it needs to. Even Walmart and Subway and Starbucks pays their employees for required job training. But then the other benefit is that those are the spaces where community germinates. Another example is there are so many barriers to collaborative teaching at our institutions, “Oh, well, who’s going to get the credit for it? Whose load is it going to count towards?” If that’s your answer to collaborative teaching, you need to stop right there and ask yourself, “What kind of environment are we trying to create?” And if we want a collaborative environment, if we want a community amongst our faculty, then right then and there, decide and commit yourself to figuring out the obstacles to collaborative teaching, which I’ve watched get worse and worse and worse over the last 21 years that I’ve been teaching. And those are just two small things. And the truth is, they’re relatively easy. There are bureaucratic systems that feel like “You can’t possibly… how are we going to deal with that within our institutional database?” Like get over it, figure it out. [LAUGHTER] The truth is that those are things that we all know we want. I’ve never talked to someone who says “no, no, we don’t want people collaborative teaching” then why don’t institutions charge themselves to figure that out?

Rebecca: So many good questions raised in this conversation, Jesse. As always, I wouldn’t expect anything different with a conversation with you. We always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?”

Jesse: Oh, wow, that’s a really, really large question. What’s next? Okay, well, I’m gonna say that, as some folks listening to this may not know, my husband and I and my four-year old daughter just opened a game and toy store which has a classroom and a makerspace in it. And I am really thinking about how helping my husband with this endeavor is going to push me to think about my teaching in new ways. So, it’s a small retail space, 1600 square feet on the main street of Littleton with a retail section and a classroom and a maker space. We’re going to offer classes for kids and adults, so that it isn’t just about selling people toys and games, but teaching them how to design and make and manufacture their own toys and games. And it feels like a respite for me in some ways… one, to have my own project that I’m focusing on, but also to have a space where nobody’s telling me I have to grade. I just get to decide how I approach the work inside this space. So I’m excited to see how helping my husband with this project informs the rest of my practice and thinking about education.

Rebecca: That sounds so fun. Can I come? [LAUGHTER]

Jesse: Yeah. yeah, yeah, ou can. Do you want to be a teacher? We haven’t hired our first teacher. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That sounds really fun. Actually. I’ve taught makerspace things before with kids. That sounds totally fun.

Jesse: And I guess that what’s next is to find joy in this work, because the last 18 months have been so hard. And I think that joy… bell hooks also writes a lot about joy. Joy is also a practice, joy is also struggle… but figuring out how to find the kernel of the work of teaching that has kept me doing this work for 21 years. That’s really something I feel charged to do.

Rebecca: Perhaps a charge we should all have moving into the fall.

Jesse: Yeah, I’m determined to become an irascible optimist again. We’ll see. Check back with me in a year maybe I would have gotten there. [LAUGHTER]

John: And perhaps shifting some of our focus away from grading can help restore some of that joy.

Jesse: Absolutely,

Rebecca: Indeed, indeed. Thanks so much, Jesse.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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