Talbert sympathizes with the push to minimize or eliminate grades and respects the people leading this work. He has tried ungrading himself and has raised some tough questions about how ungrading works, and for whom.
In the January blog post, he offered a challenge to the champions of ungrading: Take your colleagues behind the scenes and demonstrate how it works. “Give us the details,” Talbert wrote. “Get unapologetically into the weeds through longer-form approaches of communicating your practice.” A good way to do this, Talbert recommended, would be writing a blog.
Emily Pitts Donahoe has taken up that charge. Donahoe, associate director of instructional support for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, is blogging about the ins and outs of a course she taught using ungrading last semester. As Donahoe describes in her first post, she kept a weekly journal about ungrading her first-year writing course, told her students about the project, and let them decide how to participate. But she waited until the semester was over to post any entries to the blog, at which point she released them weekly so readers could follow along as if the term were unfolding in real time.
When I asked Donahoe what made her decide to take this on, she described running a series about ungrading with Josh Eyler, who heads their teaching center. When Donahoe talks with instructors about ungrading, she said, “they’re at least on board with the critique of traditional grading.” Where they get stuck, she said, is either skepticism of new methods or “being really interested in the new methods but not knowing at all how to implement them, or lacking concrete examples of them, or being worried about how it’s going to go.”
Offering up her own experience, Donahoe figured, could help. In keeping with Talbert’s request, Donahoe walks through the specifics of her ungrading approach, and her thinking about it, as well as her own real-time thoughts on how well it was working and where there were pain points.
Donahoe’s project was timely. Sure, she responded to Talbert’s request, one made at a time when ungrading was gaining popularity, in part because the challenges of teaching through the pandemic pushed many professors to rethink their usual approach to grading. But the timing of Donahoe’s ungrading project also syncs nicely to the current conversation around ChatGPT.
As Donahoe writes: “My traditionally-graded courses used to emphasize traditional essays, sometimes of the five-paragraph variety. Around the time I moved to ungrading, I also started creating assignments that felt more authentic, that asked students to draw on their own expertise and experience (rather than someone else’s), and that incorporated metacognitive elements. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such assignments are better suited to the age of ChatGPT than the traditional essay. Prioritizing the development of the student as a human being rather than the student’s production of tedious and formulaic, but word-perfect, final products, seems like a more sustainable teaching model in a world where this tech is advancing so rapidly.”
This observation certainly tracks with what I’ve heard from other professors who’ve used ungrading: It seems to pair well with authentic assignments.
If you, too, are curious and would like a closer look at ungrading in practice, you can read more about Donahoe’s experience here.
And I want to hear your thoughts on ungrading, too. Have you tried it? If so, how did it go? Are you curious about it but not at a point where you think it can work for you, for whatever reason? Or are you skeptical about this push against traditional grades, and if so, why? Share your thoughts with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may draw on them in a future issue of the newsletter.
Gradebooks
This summer, we’re sharing teaching books recommended by our readers. This week’s selections have to do with grading:
- Tai Munro, an assistant professor in sustainability studies at MacEwan University, in Canada, recommends Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms, by Joe Feldman. “Even though the book is focused on K-12 education, the inequities and solutions that Feldman identifies apply to postsecondary as well,” Munro writes. “It is an excellent resource for helping to highlight where inequity is unintentionally happening through your grading and provides concrete strategies for changing this.”
- Stephanie Kratz, a distinguished professor of English at Heartland Community College, in Illinois, recommends Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. “The ungrading, or alternative assessment, movement has changed the way I think about student learning,” Kratz writes. “The strategies discussed in the book have reframed my views about how to trust students, how to encourage their regulation of their own learning, and a supportive community of teachers to whom I can turn via social media (academic Twitter, please stick around as long as possible!).”
Is there a book that’s helped shape your teaching that you think other newsletter readers might enjoy? It’s not too late to recommend it here.
One more thing
In keeping with Talbert’s observation about ungrading catching on, ungrading was the subject of a recent NPR story. You can listen to it here.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
-Beckie
Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.
