244. Unlearning

To deepen our understanding or improve our skills, it is often necessary to question our preconceptions and unlearn some of our past practices and assumptions. In this episode, Lindsay Masland joins us to discuss her unlearning journey. Lindsay is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and the Associate Director of Faculty Professional Development in the Center for Academic Excellence at Appalachian State University.

Show Notes

  • Blum, S. D. (Ed.). (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.
  • Jesse Stommel’s website
  • Stommel, J. (2018). How to Ungrade. Blog post, Jesse Stommel. March 11.
  • Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.
  • Wisniewski, B., Zierer, K., & Hattie, J. (2020). The power of feedback revisited: A meta-analysis of educational feedback research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 3087.
  • Hattie, J., & Clarke, S. (2018). Visible learning: feedback. Routledge.
  • Pittman, C., & Tobin, T. J. (2022). “Academe Has a Lot to Learn About How Inclusive Teaching Affects Instructors.The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 7.
  • Chavella Pittman and Tom Tobin (2022). Include Instructors in Inclusive Teaching. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 231. March 16.
  • Prentis Hemphill

Transcript

John: To deepen our understanding or improve our skills, it is often necessary to question our preconceptions and unlearn some of our past practices and assumptions. In this episode, we explore one faculty developer’s unlearning journey.

[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 Lindsay Masland. Lindsay is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and the Associate Director of Faculty Professional Development in the Center for Academic Excellence at Appalachian State University. Welcome, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: Are teas today are… are you drinking tea, Lindsay?

Lindsay: I am not because I’m one of those people that can’t have a lot of caffeine in the afternoon hours and this is afternoon hours for me, so I am drinking store brand seltzer. So, very fancy.

Rebecca: It sounds very fancy to me. [LAUGHTER] It sounds perfect. I’m celebrating the fact that it feels like it’s a summer day here, which is magical. And so I made iced tea fresh.

John: And what type of iced tea is this?

Rebecca: This is English Breakfast iced tea.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Decaf.

John: Lady Grey, by the way, makes a superb iced tea.

Rebecca: It does, you’re right.

John: I had that for the first time at the English P=avilion in Epcot when we’re at one of the OLC conferences, and I had to ask them what the tea was because it tasted superb. I had never had it as an iced tea before.

Lindsay: Sounds like I need to branch out because I am in the south, you know, and we do like our iced tea. And I mostly have iced tea that I brew the tea myself, but it’s always English breakfast tea. I hadn’t thought to branch out.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: Since this was an English pavilion, it was probably acceptable to try that.

Rebecca: You didn’t say what kind of tea you were drinking, John.

John: I have a black raspberry green tea today from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice.

John: It is good. I haven’t had it for a while.

Rebecca: I don’t usually think of raspberry and green tea together. I always associate that with black tea. That’s all… That’s the whole thought. [LAUGHTER] There’s nothing more there. And welcome to our land, Lindsay. [LAUGHTER] It’s the end of the semester. So we invited you here today, Lindsay, to talk about unearning. Can you talk to us a little bit about what unlearning is?

Lindsay: Well, I guess I should first say this is not my term. There are probably other people who could more likely say that this is their term. But I just know that when I think about my own experiences as a faculty member over the last 11 years (that’s how long I’ve been in academia), and then a faculty or educational developer for the six or so, that the main thing that’s happened for me is recognizing how much that I used to believe was true, that simply wasn’t serving me anymore. It wasn’t serving my students, for sure, but it also wasn’t serving me just as a person. And so to me, that’s what unlearning is, is when you have those aha moments, the achievement of threshold concept moments, if we want to connect to some of that language from faculty development, where you realize this is not something that I want to continue to believe or live out.

John: And I think this also applies to our students’ experiences and to our role in teaching students… that they come to us with a lot of preconceptions, as we come to teaching with a lot of preconceptions, and some of those don’t hold up very well. So I think it’s a great topic to be discussing. What are some things that you have unlearned, since you’ve been in this role?

Rebecca: Or are in the process of unlearning? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes.

Lindsay: Yeah, I think that’s a really important caveat is that I feel like we never arrive, I think as teachers as humans. And so we’re always in the process of doing something I think a lot of the times, we’re thinking about being in the process of learning. But simultaneously, I think we should be in the process of unlearning the things that don’t serve. So I think one major thing that I was kind of socialized into is… my background is Psychology, my PhD is in Educational Psychology with a concentration in Quantitative Statistics, and I only bring that up because I think it’s really important for understanding, I guess, the baggage [LAUGHTER] that I brought in some ways to the teaching role, because psychology, especially when I was getting my PhD and the time before that really overprivileged a quantitative “objective” view of the world. And so that is what I was socialized into. We didn’t learn any qualitative analysis, for example. And so that’s kind of what I was carrying with me. And I also think… I don’t want to blame it on psychology, I see why psychology is that way… because psychology at one point kind of split off from philosophy hundreds of years ago. And one way they were able to distinguish themselves from philosophers was to say, “Well, we have science and we collect objective observations about things that feel really non-objective, because psychologists study feelings and behaviors and ideas and thoughts… things it seems like you shouldn’t be able to quantify those.” But like, our whole shtick is that we can. And so I bring that with me, I think, into the teaching, into educational development. And I don’t think that was very helpful, [LAUGHTER] necessarily, because what I think ends up happening is you start, at least I know I brought kind of a deterministic way of thinking, like, “Okay, we just got to figure out what are the evidence-based teaching strategies, and I’m going to learn those, and then once I become a faculty developer, I’m going to teach those. And then if we all just do that, everything will be great.” Because that’s a very, like, if then we measure this, we do this, we get this clear result. That’s the whole thing with psychology is trying to predict behavior. And so if you bring that into the classroom, it’s like, I’m going to design in a way that’s going to predict everybody’s behavior. So I think that was something I needed to unlearn. When I realized, you can’t predict behavior, [LAUGHTER] that teaching choices are not deterministic, they are contextual, and that you really need to bring some chaos theory [LAUGHTER] into your understanding, honestly, of teaching. So I think it was when I started to read some books seriously about chaos theory, and also about different types of statistics that were intentionally modeling either context or randomness. And I was like, wait a minute, we’re taking a math equation, and we have like a thing in the math equation that is measuring “randomness.” I was like, what’s that? But it made me realize, like, wait a minute, okay, if the physicists and the mathematicians are doing that, we need to get on board.

John: This really resonates with me, because my background is that I’m an econometrician. And I got interested in this by doing some research on what techniques seem to work in my classes and in other classes. And those error terms, though, I’ve always taken pretty seriously. But in recent years, I’ve become much more interested in behavioral economics, which introduces all the ways in which we don’t behave in ways that are entirely consistent with the economic models that we normally teach in our classes. Actually, I’ve been bringing in more psychology into economics, which is probably even more deterministic than psychology ever was.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s a good point. But it’s so funny, because in so many of these models, we’re always trying to reduce the error term, or control for the error term, like make it irrelevant by our methodology, we’re going to control for the error. And I think once you start teaching, you’re like the “error,” first of all, that’s like a really problematic label [LAUGHTER] for your students, but the “error,” it’s like, that’s where it’s at, like, we need to actually be designing for that, because there is variation in ourselves and in our students. That’s, I think what successful teaching is. But, it’s important, because I’m seeing this discussion right now a lot on social media is people are expressing their, what I would call righteous frustration about certain teaching strategies, assessment strategies, belongingness strategies, any of that… certain strategies being kind of like heralded as the ideal, and then other people responding like, “Well, I can’t do that. That’s not feasible for me. So does that mean that I’m not going to ever be a good teacher?” Because that’s not effective. And to me, I’m like, “Okay, this is just all playing out now in our discussions, is people are starting to embrace the idea of context or interactions.” I mean, I think about it in terms of statistics. And in statistics, we have things called main effects where there’s one variable, and it seems to affect everybody equivalently. But most of the time, there’s also an interaction where different variables are interacting. And anytime there’s an interaction, you pay attention to that thing, not the other thing. And so I’m kind of excited that people are getting angry about “Well, I can’t ungrade…” …for example, or something like that… things that are a lot of people are talking about, I’m like, “Well, good, let’s have a discussion about that.”

Rebecca: As an artist, I really appreciate you coming to my site.

Lindsay: Actually, this connects well to unlearning. My day job, I guess we can call it, is an academic. But I have a second kind of life after my day job, which involves being on the stage, I have a lot of theater and dance activities that take up my time. So I actually have this whole artistic side of myself. But one of the things that I was kind of socialized into was keeping those separate. Academia is for serious people and art is not serious. And I want to really make it clear that I don’t believe that, but like, that’s what I was socialized into. And then it was a big unlearning, honestly. I stepped away from theater and dance for like 10 years, when I was finishing my PhD, and up until getting tenure. And in retrospect, I think I was doing that to be more serious. I was always saying to students, I get tenure, I’m going to do a musical again. And I did it. And I’m even getting emotional thinking about it. I was like, how did I live without this part of myself for 10 years, and that was really damaging. And I was like, I shouldn’t have had to do that. And I don’t want anybody to have to do that anymore. So, I think it’s really important because that was damaging to kind of live without that side of myself and now they’re together and I feel like a whole person again, because I’m bringing the subjective and the objective in together.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to remember that we’re all human. And that often gets lost when we’re thinking about teaching or we’re thinking about scholarship or we’re thinking about a trajectory. As a faculty member, the humaness and the things that are outside of the Academy are often lost or not attended to, at least during that tenure process.

John: And I had a very similar experience in terms of playing music up until the time I was in grad school. My band got together and went on tour, and I stayed in grad school. It was probably 15 years or so before I started playing again, and it’s gone back and forth a few times. But it is much more interesting when you can be that full person. And going back to the analogy with empirical studies, most of the variation in most studies of teaching is in that random component. And those random components are the people, the instructors and the students in that relationship. And it’s important not to forget that. So this is a really good point, it’s really easy to forget in our day-to-day work. So it’s good that you’re focusing in this direction, I think we all probably should focus more on being that whole person, especially now.

Rebecca: And we’ve all had those experiences of that randomness, because you might have two classes that feel entirely different, but it might be the same subject, the same syllabus, the same teacher, but the students in the room are different, the time of day might be different. So therefore, the context is now different.

John: What are some of the other things you have unlearned?

Lindsay: So another thing that I guess kind of follows on from that unlearning the obsession with objectivity is also disentangling or coming to understand what is my proper role in the classroom. And so starting in academia, I think a lot of people have this kind of experience, I guess I was 29, maybe, or just turning 30, when I was in my first tenure-track position, which is the position I’m still in, I’ve been at the same institution the whole time. And so I’m a female, I’m still in the same decade as some of the students that I’m going to be teaching. And I also am somebody that has a young face. I’m not tall, kind of like pint-sized, in some ways. [LAUGHTER] And so I have all of these kinds of status things that are, I guess, in some ways, possibly working against me, in terms of me thinking I can…I would never use this phase now, but… control a classroom, I think that’s kind of what I was thinking is like, “Oh, gosh, I’m going to do this.” And so I think you’ve kind of come at it with a lot of like, I’m the authority and I know this stuff and so that’s why you should trust me to grade you. I guess that’s kind of the unspoken thing that’s being shared there. That’s not to say I was extremely strict, because I don’t think that’s true. But I do think that I felt like my job was to show that I was smart. And I can’t fault myself for that, because that is your job in grad school, to show the people looking at you that you’re smart. That is your job in college. And honestly, it’s your job in K through 12, [LAUGHTER] the way a lot of the systems are set up. I’m not saying it should be the job, but a lot of the reinforcement systems are set up, that is what you’re supposed to be doing. So I can’t get mad at myself for being reinforced doing that for the first 30 years of my life. So that’s why you have to unlearn it. Because if you’ve been reinforced and rewarded for a certain way of being, of demonstrating your expertise, and I have a right to be here, then it’s going to be hard to turn that off. And then the other thing that connects to that is when I started to really think about my values, my pedagogical values, and what I was trying to live out in my teaching, what I was trying to bring to the classroom table, I realized that like expertise and being an expert and authority that was not on the list. That was never on the list. And so if that’s true, then that’s not a value for me, then why would I be doing things that are about reinforcing authority or reinforcing my expertise? So I think that’s another thing that I had to unravel and am still unraveling,

John: When you start as a new faculty member, might that be something that is perceived as being important in terms of affecting your student evaluations, and perhaps affecting peer evaluations, who’ve also been trained in that type of perception of the sage on the stage, the scholar who’s the expert in the room, I think those incentives continue on and it’s a lot easier to break that once you get past that tenure stage.

Lindsay: I think that’s so true, and that’s one of the things I struggle with a lot in faculty development. Before I was the Associate Director for Faculty Professional Development, my kind of stair step into this position was as early career programming coordinator. And I still have that role right now, we kind of pulled that into my position. But so what that means is that in addition to doing things like new faculty orientation, I’m working really closely with brand new faculty in learning communities and book clubs, and one-on-one consultations. And I continue to struggle with wanting to tell them: “Go break the rules, like go do this. Go live out your deepest values, because I know that, at least as a person, you’ll feel better because you’ll be living aligned to your values.” But then the other side of me is like, that feels irresponsible in some systems. And so that’s why in my non-early-career-focused work, I’m working to change systems of teaching evaluations, systems of promotion and tenure and reappointment, those kinds of things… though, I mean, I think it’s a both/and… we can work on them in both ways, and recognize that it’s inherently problematic for me to encourage that. So I do spend a lot of time with both the early career folks that I work with, but also anybody is talking about get really clear about your own personal margin for error, I guess, if we want to keep going with this statistical metaphor we’ve been using… but really just like the margin for you to get in trouble, like, what realistically could happen to you if you break these spoken or unspoken rules, either at your department level, your college level, et cetera. And as long as you’re really clear about that, then you kind of know like, “Okay, how far can I push it,” and then I say push it as far in the direction of your values. And if that means, like, being radical or progressive, as far as you can go without threatening other things that are important to you. So I totally agree, John, that it’s really hard to be saying, like, go break rules and say, but that might have dire consequences for you. [LAUGHTER]

John: My advice to junior faculty depends very much on which department they’re in and the culture of that department. And I let people know that what they want to do is really good and it’s really consistent with what we have learned about effective teaching. But some of it may have to wait until they get past that tenure threshold, unless there’s some type of revolution in their departments, which isn’t always likely.

Lindsay: Yeah. And so I guess what I’m trying to do is to plant the seeds of that kind of, in a lot of cases, it is more progressive pedagogy, or just more aligned to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which is not always necessarily what I would call progressive, but it’s at least aligned to something, either evidence or values. But I guess my thought is, if I kind of plant those seeds, and then some of the early career faculty can run with it, because they find themselves in a department where they can do it, the other ones who have at least heard the message, and then maybe they will circle back to that when they get to a point where they feel more safety. But I know like even in my own department, because part of my time is in a Center for Teaching and Learning, but the other part is, I am a regular faculty member, and we even had to do some of that work in our own department. I mean, so we’re psychology, we’re the people who do the science of teaching and learning at a science level. That doesn’t mean there are people in my department who do that, per se, but at least everybody who’s a psychologist, at least in grad school, learned about cognition, motivation, emotion, we learned all the things that we talk about. So we have I say, a step up in our department, even though that’s true,that we have that privilege of knowing some of that information, we still were really in that sage on the stage expectation. And like even our peer review of teaching form, if you looked at it was really a form about entertaining public speaking, I would say. Like, that’s what the behaviors that were being measured. And so we had to go through a whole process that took, I’d say, at least two years to read, design that form, and get the buy-in from everybody, senior faculty and junior faculty alike, to approve, to adopt that form. And that form is more aligned to concrete behaviors that connect to the science and every behavior is like footnoted and hyperlinked, and things like that. And that’s kind of what we needed to do to get everybody on the same page about what does teaching excellence even possibly look like and how is it different from entertaining public speaking? So I totally agree that I guess that’s another data point for our idea that context matters, context matters in that case about how progressive can you be.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the thinking through that in terms of tension or in terms of risk, and really thinking about that that context matters for each person, and that they have to determine that for themselves, and really know that for themselves, and that it’s an individual choice. And those choices might be limited by your context. And that we might not have had models that demonstrate how that might be or how we might want those values to play out in a system. So I think it’s interesting that you’re talking about having to define values, but maybe not always having a model who had those same values.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s a good point. When I think about the things that I would most like faculty to learn from me or from other faculty developers, it’s not actually the teaching strategies. It’s really about how to be self reflective. And how do I do that? How do I figure out what my values are? How do I figure out what my risk is? And then how do I put those two things together? And I feel like that’s maybe something that’s somewhat new in faculty development, because old models were really about: “come to a workshop to learn how to do this formative assessment technique” or something like that, but that completely ignores the context and the risks and the person who we’re asking to learn to do these things. Maybe it is an “evidence-based practice,” it’s in a journal somewhere, but it would fall totally flat, given this person’s personality, or given this person’s own neuro-divergence, or whatever we want to talk about in terms of the actual instructor themselves. And so that’s kind of what I am really interested in right now is figuring out how to best scaffold people into doing that. Because then it’s not about looking at some new teaching strategy and being like, “Oh, that’s awesome” or “Oh, that’s not awesome. So I’m going to bad mouth it.” It’s more “Does that work for me? No, it doesn’t.” And that’s fine. [LAUGHTER] I decided, “Oh, I totally see why that would work for so and so, but it doesn’t work for me.” And we’re all okay with that. But I feel like we have some distance to travel, [LAUGHTER] both as instructors and as people who do faculty development,

Rebecca: one of the things that’s often associated with expertise and authority in the classroom is grading and assessment. Can you talk a little bit about where you have been unlearning in that area?

Lindsay: I just want to point out that was a beautiful segue. I love that Rebecca. Yeah. And so ungrading is something that, honestly, I’m pretty new at, but like many threshold concepts, it’s one of those things that when you learn it, it can’t be unlearned. And also, you can’t turn off thinking about it, and it shows up in everything. So that’s how it’s been for me. So I’ve only really been dabbling with ungrading the past academic year. But I have been moving towards that, I’d say for five years, probably. And so for me, it was just reading. I read the book, edited by Susan Blum on Ungrading, of course, as many people have, but it was also just reading Jesse Stommel’s posts, and all of the things that he links to there… just questioning “what are grades?” It kind of brought that kind of naive look to it. But I don’t think I recognized how ubiquitous grades were and how we just assumed that’s just part of it. That’s just what you do. And that’s funny that I hadn’t questioned that because my scholarly expertise even before coming to all of the teaching and learning was academic motivation. That’s what my PhD is in. That’s my master’s thesis… even all the way back to my honors thesis was about motivation and learning. So it’s kind of blows my mind that I had not stopped to disentangle grades before, because they’re an extrinsic reinforcer. And so maybe that’s why it was so powerful for me when I read some of these arguments as saying, “Okay, is putting a letter or a number on to an assignment, actually accomplishing important things?” And I think the answer can be yes. But just simply asking the question, that’s not something that people had done before. And I was somebody that before I did ungrading, I did a lot of feedback. So I’m well aware of work by like John Hattie, and other people that show that quality of instructor feedback is one of the things that are within our controllable factors that can move learning forward the most. It has the biggest effect sizes in learning, the quality of feedback. And so like, I knew that, and so I was always assessing work with that in mind and giving a ton of feedback, but I was ending it with putting a letter grade on it, or a number, or something like that. And so reading about that made me really question, does actually putting the letter grade as the cherry on top, does that actually add anything else to what I’m doing? And I was like, wait a minute, it’s not. And in fact, there is, again, scholarship of teaching and learning research that shows that when you give students the feedback and the letter grade, at the same time, they orient their attention to the letter grade, and sometimes never even process the feedback. And so we’ve seen all types of experimental manipulations, where if you give the students just the feedback first, and then you let a period of time pass before you unhide the letter grade or something, students actually engage with the feedback and the quality of their work improves. So if we know all that stuff, I do all that stuff before I’m grading, but I just had never sat there and said like, well, what would happen if you stopped doing that? And that is what has happened for me in the last year. And so that’s one of my most current unlearnings. And so I did it in two graduate courses. Well, one graduate course first as an experiment, because that was a 10-person cohort. And I thought, first of all, it’s really small. And second of all, they’re graduate students. And so it seemed like a much lighter lift. And then this past semester, I did it with a new grad class, it’s a statistics class. So a lot of times when people talk about ungrading, they say that really only works in writing-focused courses. A lot of people who are English professors use it. And so I was like, “Well, I’m going to do it in statistics.” And so I tried that. And then I also tried it with a 50-student undergrad course this semester.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about how you implemented this in your statistics course? Because this is something I’ve considered for my econometrics class, but I’m not really sure how I could implement it very effectively.

Lindsay: Sure. So I think it’s important to say that the statistics course is a graduate statistics course. And so I could not say that you can do exactly what I did, because it’s a different context, right? And the context is probably pretty important too. So the graduate program that I’m affiliated with is a master’s and specialist level school psychology program. So the students go through three years of training. And at the end, after they take a test and stuff, they are licensed to be K-12 school psychologists, not school counselors, that’s different, school psychologists who are doing database decision making in schools. So these are not PhD level, but not undergrads. And the other thing that it’s important to know contextually, is almost no people go into school psychology wanting to do statistics. So none of them are like, “Oh, yes, I love math. And I love statistics. I’m going to be a school psychologist.” So I’m just rare in that all those statements are true for me, but almost nobody, [LAUGHTER] almost nobody else is that true for. So, that’s important context, because I’m talking about 10 students, I see primarily women, because that is who school psychology field draws, who are math phobic, and who in their heads are thinking, “I’m never going to do stats again after this class. I’m just going to get through this. And we’re going to move on.” And so for me, the goal there is to make them realize the power of statistics in their day-to-day future career as school psychologists. And so getting really clear with myself about like, “What’s the point? What’s the goal? Who are these people?” See, notice, I haven’t said anything about a teaching technique or an assessment or anything, yet, it’s just like, what are we trying to do here? And for me, it’s them to not be afraid of statistics anymore, and to be able to use it in their day-to-day lives. And I should say the third one is for them to recognize the power of statistics for social justice and how they could, for example, in their future schools, identify disproportionality in suspensions. Meaning what if your school over suspends black children when compared to white children for the same exact conduct offense or something like that? I want them to know how to point that out using numbers. Because we do know a lot of people seem to believe numbers more than words… not saying it’s okay, but they do. So I want them to be able to use that. So because that is my focus, what that allowed for me to do is really trim down my curriculum. And so I don’t teach a lot of statistics that most people would think surely you teach this, and I’m like, I don’t, because they’re not going to use that as future school psychologists. So that’s one thing I would say is important is cut out anything you can cut out, [LAUGHTER] that’s possibly feasible, because you need the space just in your semester to be able to do this kind of stuff. The next thing that I do, and I did this before ungrading, but it connects them, is the whole class is set up to be really scaffolded. And to follow like an I do, we do, you do approach. And so what we will do is if we’re learning some specific statistic of the day, or the week, or, you know, of the two weeks, first off, give them a general overview of it, not a mathematical way, but in a problem-based way. So what if this is what a school wants to know the answer to? This is the statistic you use for that, now let’s kind of figure it out. And then we will all work through together solving it. And then I will put them into groups. I’ll give them a new data set. But it’s the same exact thing we just did, y’all go do it. And then the homework assignment is again the same exact assignment, but a new data set. And so all that’s like really intentional scaffolding. So hopefully, by the time they have to do it themselves, they totally know how to do it. Now, where does the ungrading come in? In a class like that, to me, it kind of feels like, especially with graduate students, adding letter grades on to a process that has gone from, we’re all working together, then you’re working in groups, then you’re gonna do it yourself. And there’s tons of feedback and community the whole time, it feels almost insulting to put a letter on the end of that deep cognitive work, because by the time they get to doing it themselves, they should know what they know and don’t know, they should know what they’ve mastered and what they still need help with because we’ve been doing it so much. And so it almost just feels natural to when they then turn in that individual work, if there’s something they missed the boat on, I just like, “Hey, you didn’t do this right. Here’s how to do it properly.” And then we’re going to use that skill again later down the road. To me putting a letter or a number on that doesn’t help them anymore. But the real important thing about all of this is that if we never came back and did that one statistic again, why would they ever read the feedback in the first place, because now we’re moving on to a new unit. So at the end of the course, I have some kind of culminating assignment where they pull it all together. And in order for them to be able to make the case that they have earned some certain grade at the end of the semester, one of the course objectives is the ability to use feedback appropriately. So they have to go engage with previous rounds of feedback in order to create a final product that they could use. lobby for an A for. So that’s kind of how I do it.

John: Since you do have to assign a grade at the end of the course, how do you go about that process?

Lindsay: One big thing that I have learned, not unlearned, but learned, about ungrading this year, is that the true ungrading where we never put any letters on anything until the very, very end, when our institution requires that of us, at least for me, and for my context, I think that works best with graduate students. I’ve found over the last year of doing it, that if we have a list of learning objectives, and I also have a list of skills and dispositions that we’re trying to cultivate in them as future school psychologists, if I give them that list, they are very accurate at assessing whether they’ve got an objective or they don’t. So it’s like I never have to change the graduate students’ grades unless they have been too hard on themselves. And then that kind of feels like a gift of like, “Well, this is what I see. You’ve actually mastered everything. So how could this be anything other than an A?” So, that’s good. Undergrad is slightly different, right? They are in a different place, they need more support. And also, they’re not like grad students who have all truly willingly gone on, where undergrads… obviously college isn’t compulsory, but societally it feels kind of like it is. So with the undergrads I’d say what I’m doing there is something that should better be labeled collaborative grading, not ungrading. And we started to see some discussion about this of ungrading from an equity perspective. Some students are so focused, or have been so reinforced… so we connect back to what I was saying about how you reinforce your whole life. They’re so reinforced by a system that does put letters on work, that it requires a lot of unlearning for them and it may be too much to ask within a single semester and usually within a single course. It’d be different if a whole institution was doing ungrading and that institution was set up around preparing students to be successful in ungrading. Then I think we could totally get rid of all the grades. But that’s not my context. In my 50-person class this past semester, there were two students who had experienced ungrading before, 48 who hadn’t. I was kind of excited about the two, honestly. But there were 48 who hadn’t. And so to me, it felt irresponsible to throw them in that deep end. So what we did is a whole bunch of assignments, heavy feedback, all of that. But on the more high-stakes, or slightly more summative types assessments, I did include a rubric, but it was a rubric that didn’t have points, the levels were not included, approaching expectations, meets, or exceeds expectations. And so a lot of people have talked about like kind of a two point rubric or things like that before. So that was my variation on it, just you didn’t do it, you did it but it’s not there yet, or you get it. And so I did include that feedback for them, because I felt like they needed that level of structure, but I didn’t feel like putting letters or numbers on at that point were helpful. But we did bring in letters ‘cause three times during the semester… so at the third, two thirds, in the end… they did a process reflection, which is really common to ungrading where basically the instructor scaffolds the students thinking through their body of work up to that point. Now normally in ungrading, that kind of thing happens at the very end. So they’re thinking about the body of work for the entire semester. I was thinking the cognitive load of that is going to probably be too much for my undergrad students. So let’s have them do it first, just a third of the way in, and they’re going to think through: am I meeting learning objectives? Am I’m meeting habits and dispositions? Can I give evidence for why I think that’s true? And then I have a table at the end of that process reflection that says, from my perspective, as the instructor, these are the kinds of behaviors or benchmarks or assessment types of feedback you would receive that line up with an A. These are the ones that line up with a B, so kind of self diagnose, based on all of this. And so they do that, and we’re only a month or so into the semester. And so then I give them feedback on whether or not I feel like they’re on target with that letter. And so we did that two times during the semester before the final time, which gave us the chance to get on the same page about what letters mean. But it still feels kind of like ungrading to me, because I never put a letter on a single thing that was turned in, like one assessment or one assignment. It was always assess your body of work against these learning objectives and levels of quality, assess your body of work. Next time when I use it with them. I might not call it ungrading, I might call it collaborative grading.

Rebecca: I think sometimes the use of “ungrading” when there ends up being a grade is super confusing.

Lindsay: [LAUGHTER] That’s such a good point, because now there are a couple of colleges where they truly don’t have grades, but the rest of us it’s like there is a grade at the end, y’all. [LAUGHTER] And so I think you have to have a really small cohort that you can spend so much time individually making sure everybody understands like, “Well if it were up to me, there wouldn’t be a letter at the end, but there is…” …making sure everybody internalizes that. But most people don’t teach in a tiny context like that and don’t have that luxury. So that’s why I’m kind of thinking that this kind of collaborative periodic benchmarking of your body of work so far still to me does what Jesse Stommel says ungrading is. One of his definitions is that kind of skeptical eyebrow raised at conventional grading systems. To me, collaborative grading is still the skeptical eyebrow raise. But it also is respecting the context that is our students’ reality and our own reality.

Rebecca: …really cultivates a reflective practice too. And in some ways it’s like reflective grading, reflective practice, or something, you know? [LAUGHTER] I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too. I was experimenting this last semester with such things. And I was really uncomfortable with the term ungrading when there was a grade, ultimately.

Lindsay: Yeah, and you know that bit with reflection, like we’ve known for a long time that metacognition is really strongly correlated with student achievement. And so way before I’d ever heard about ungrading or untraditional assessment and things like that, I was already doing even scholarship in teaching and learning around like, “How can I kindly force my students to reflect? How can I gently get them to actually read my darn feedback? …because I had some statistics from my LMS that showed that only 10% of my students were spending more than 30 seconds on their feedback. And these were on like really comprehensive projects. And the LMS only triggers a view of the feedback if it’s been 30 seconds or more. And I was like, it would take anybody more than 30 seconds to read the feedback, and they’re not doing it. So I’ve been experimenting for a really long time with adding on assignments where you couldn’t complete the assignment unless you read my feedback. And you’ve probably heard of these exam wrappers… is what they’re frequently called. Yeah, I got rid of exams a long, long time ago, but I still had that wrapper thing where it was like, go and tell me what one of your strengths is, according to your feedback. Like you cannot answer that thing for a grade… this is back when I did grading… unless you could read the feedback. So yeah, I think that reflection is where it’s at. I think honestly, that’s what I think this whole upgrading thing is about. it’s about two things: it’s about questioning unquestioned assumptions and assessment. And then it’s also about leveraging the power of self reflection.

John: I think for undergraduates, providing those breaks in the process of the course can allow students to do some course correction, because students tend to procrastinate, as we all do. And if they know that the final evaluation occurs at the end, there may be a tendency to put off doing that reflective practice and the course correction that might be helpful for them ,until it’s sometimes too late. So giving them that feedback that perhaps has a little bit more weight to it, or may be perceived as having more weight in terms of its impact on their overall success in the course, I think is really helpful.

Lindsay: Absolutely. And I will say one thing that I learned this past semester doing it and I added it to what I call my “to fix” document. I have one of those for every course, just a bulleted list of things like “Don’t do that again.” And one thing I added just like a few days ago, because I was turning in final grades a few days ago, was add to the rubric… so that rubric of suggested grades have these behaviors line up with As and these behaviors line up with Bs… add to the A category, “shows evidence of responding to feedback.” That wasn’t one of the things. And there were people where I was like, I’m not convinced that you listen to that three-minute recording I did about your paper because you didn’t necessarily change it. And so I’ve already been reflective myself about that should be one of the learning objectives is learning how to use feedback. And so I’m already going to be changing that in my course.

Rebecca: Leading up to our conversation you mentioned student-centered teaching is one of the places that you unlearned, too, can you tell us more about that?

Lindsay: Yeah, so this one might feel like a little bit of a left turn [LAUGHTER] because we’ve been talking about things that are I feel like usually squarely associated with student-centered teaching, thinking about the student and the instructor as a whole person, me ceding some of my authority, me doing collaborative grading like that all sounds super student centered. But the unlearning piece around student centered connects back a little bit to the risk and margin discussion we were having. But it also connects to something that we have seen is that the people who seem to be the most student centered, will sometimes kind of martyr themselves in service of that value that they hold. And so it will become clear that all of their pedagogical values are about the student. And one thing I have learned is how important it is to support faculty in selecting pedagogical values that are about the teacher as well. And this connects to Chavella Pittman and Tom Tobin’s Chronicle article and I know you all interviewed them about inclusive teaching. And it’s so funny because for a few years I’ve been doing a faculty workshop called “Inclusive Teaching Includes You Too.” And so when that came out, I was like, “What? That’s what I think too.” So, I was like, so excited. Like I immediately messaged Tom and I was like, “This is so funny when this kind of thing happens that the same idea comes out of totally separate areas.” But for so long we’ve talked about student-centered teaching and there’s always this like implicit thing that like teacher centered is bad. But I think for a lot of us, especially those of us who have been at the forefront of student-centered teaching and have continued to like “How much more student centered can I be? How much more student centered?” We’ve gotten to a place where we are thinking that the instructor is irrelevant. Like, I’ll do anything for my students, I’ll make any choices, because it’s for their learning. But I want to make sure that we don’t forget how important we are too. Because if we only do this for the students, and we don’t do this for ourselves as teachers, and really value how important we are to this whole system, then we’re going to end up in that martyr place, we’re going to end up in a place where we’re making choices that lead us to burnout, that do not respect boundaries. And so I’m starting to think about bringing us back to instructor-centered teaching, but redefining what instructor centered means. And that it doesn’t mean sage on the stage, expert on the stage. It means human in the classroom, right? It means I know who I am as an instructor, I know what I bring to the table. And that is at least as important as everything that students bring to the table.

Rebecca: Imagine that, humans in a room, all treated as humans.

Lindsay: I know it sounds so obvious when you say it, but it’s like, but we’re not living in a way that makes us think we believe that. If there were like Martians watching us, they’d be like, What are these beings doing? [LAUGHTER]

John: I think that’s especially relevant now as we’ve come through the pandemic, where there has been so much emphasis in professional development on student-centered teaching. And I think a lot of faculty are experiencing a tremendous amount of burnout, because much of that has involved a lot of additional work on their part. And that sort of balance is important and forgetting your own human needs is not going to be very helpful in the long run if you’d like to continue to be helpful for students.

Lindsay: That’s the ironic thing is that if you are too good at being student centered, you will run yourself out such that you are no longer available to be with students at all. That’s the ironic thing about it. So learning how to set these boundaries, which a lot of times does involve saying no to students, which I think is something that a lot of people think we can’t do if we’re student centered, we say yes to everything. So I think a really important thing for us to be able to do is say no to our students, which feels strange for somebody who has typically conceptualized themselves as a student-centered teacher, it feels like you’re supposed to say yes to everything the students asked for. But there’s this amazing quote from an embodiment practitioner named Prentis Hemphill. And this is what they say… they say, boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. And I think teaching a lot of the times is love work, even if we don’t like to call it, that it is kind of like living out our values, living out our love for teaching and learning. And that in order to do that the best, I have to have boundaries so that I can teach you and me simultaneously. I can love, I can learn, you and me simultaneously. But I think that will be a huge transition for a lot of students-centered teachers is recognizing that boundaries are empowering, not always limiting.

Rebecca: I think that’s a perfect moment to end on. So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Lindsay: That’s a good question. My hope is that nothing is next. [LAUGHTER] We’re coming into summer, we’re also going through some changes on my campus that may or may not have impact on what our year will look like and things like that. And so instead of overthinking about that, I just want, in some ways, to ignore the liminal space I’m in about academic career stuff and say, “You know what, this is a great opportunity for me to not work.” And so I typically teach classes in the summer, it’s not a requirement, it’s something I do extra. This is the first time in six years I have not taken on any summer courses, I’ve taken on summer faculty development, but I’ve tried to put it all in May, or the very beginning of June. So for me, my hope is that what’s next is a lot of reading and gardening and pondering and playing with my new little puppy.

John: That sounds wonderful. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: That sounds like you’re putting the instructor first a little bit here.

Lindsay: Right? I mean, I am trying to live out my values and values or boundaries, joy, ease, so like that sounds like that. Yeah,absolutely.

Rebecca: That sounds perfect. Thanks for joining us, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Absolutely. It was great to talk to you all.

John: It’s great talking to you. We’ve been following you on Twitter and have appreciated all your posts and we’re glad we finally had this opportunity to talk to you and I hope we’ll talk to you again soon.

Lindsay: Absolutely.

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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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