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

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Uniformity != Equity

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

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

Grade Abolition Over Reform

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

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

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

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

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

Ungrading: Reflection Post #7 (Ch2: What Going Gradeless Taught Me About Doing the 'Actual Work', by Aaron Blackwelder), part 4

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Why Are We Driven to Learn?

Daniel Pink, in their book Drive, identified three things that motivate us to learn:

- Autonomy (the desire to be self-directed)

- Mastery (the urge to get better at something)

- Purpose (the idea that was it being done has meaning)

As a high schooler, I think that ‘Mastery’ was my biggest driver. Not necessarily mastery over content, but mastery over the task of being a student in a public school (it was a pretty cool new thing, after being homeschooled grades 2-10). This drive was transformative for me.

Towards the end of high school, and for large sections of my college experience, I was committed to being a high school math teacher. That gave me a new drive—Purpose. Suddenly, I saw everything as steps along a journey to “becoming the teacher my future students deserved.” This was a new kind of drive, also transformative for me.

The most impactful time I’ve felt driven by ‘Mastery’ was my growth as a writer throughout high school. I grew up receiving feedback (explicit and implicit) that my writing was poor, and I came to hate and fear writing. But shortly after starting high school, I decided I didn't want that feeling. I committed myself to my English classes above all—I was deeply driven to master the craft of writing. And I developed a TON as a writer. I don’t think the task of mastery ever really concludes, but I was able to see my growth, and be proud of it and myself.

As I’m reflecting on these times in my life where I’ve felt “driven” in my education, it’s not lost on me how all three of them I consider to be major arcs that are pretty central to the development of my identity as a whole. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

When we are able to follow the innate human drives to learn, we are humanized. These drives are born within us, and so as we listen to them, follow them, and shape them, we are getting closer to ourselves. At the same time, we are able to both find and construct who we are. Isn’t that what we hope to experience in our education? That process certainly feels more meaningful, human, and compelling than an education designed to make us employable.

These drives are super lofty, abstract, and honestly a little amorphous (at least to me at this point). If we want to build a course around these three drives, we will need to spend a TON of time reflecting on them constantly with students. And that's definitely something I need to learn more about.

Ungrading: Reflection Post #6 (Ch2: What Going Gradeless Taught Me About Doing the 'Actual Work', by Aaron Blackwelder), part 3

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Feedback and Revision

For the most part, I consider the majority of the feedback in my classes to be “in time.” This feedback either comes in conversations between me and students, students and other students, or students and the math itself (see Dan Meyer and the Team Desmos’ discussion on ‘interpretive feedback’). But very rarely (pretty much never?) do I look at student work, make comments about it, and return it to them with the expectation that they interpret and understand what I said, and use it for future progress.

What I do instead is:

—> Assess

—> learning activity not directly connected to the assessment, but about the same stuff

—> Re-assess.

My theory is that if learning is happening, it should transfer to improved performance on assessments. I’m generally worried that if I’m focused on coaching students on how to perform on the assessments specifically, their increase in performance will be a reflection of them better understanding the arbitrary design of the assessment, and not necessarily a reflection of any abstract transferrable understanding.

I still believe that theory, however over time I appreciate more and more how that transfer demand is a non-trivial lurking variable when it comes to “collecting data” about what students “know.” And that lurking variable presents an inequity.

Direct concrete feedback about work that you have done feels valuable for learners. And not just evaluative feedback, like my quiz grades. I just assume students will understand what the grade I give them means for them and their arc of learning. It’s kind of like students are running around trying different things to learn and show what they’ve learned, and I’m just telling them “hot” or “cold.” Thinking about it that way, it’s pretty clear that grades are a poor substitute for direct, concrete feedback.

The open question here, then, is how to provide that feedback sustainably, given that I have 110 students, and basically zero time to provide such feedback. I don't think there's a quick answer to that one, but instead a constantly developing, increasingly sophisticated, toolbox of strategies and big ideas.

Ungrading: Reflection Post #5 (Ch2: What Going Gradeless Taught Me About Doing the 'Actual Work', by Aaron Blackwelder), part 2

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

The Work of Teaching

Blackwelder, from Chapter 2: "I was easily convinced I had to eliminate grades. However, this meant I couldn’t use them to make my students work. So could I engage students without points and letters? … This is the actual work of a teacher.”

This was almost painful to read. But like...in a good way. This framing has helped me to see the ways in which I was assigning responsibility to my abstract grading system, as opposed to assuming it as an educator. Being an educator is one of the most impactful identities I carry with me, and I am letting it chip away (or at least go un-constructed), because I continue to allow grades to mediate the entirety of my work.

I think this is a really tough and important message to receive. I think if most teachers picked up this chapter randomly, and read it, would feel alienated, attacked, and hurt. Which is a rational reaction given the degree to which the oppressive construct of grading has for so long been the smog we breathe. Heck, I am actively seeking to reflect on these ideas, knowing full well that it’s going to be a super tough journey, and I’m *still* feeling pretty raw after reading this chapter. It’s just…it’s heavy.

Ungrading: Reflection Post #4 (Ch2: What Going Gradeless Taught Me About Doing the 'Actual Work', by Aaron Blackwelder), part 1

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Who Gets to Say You’re a Mathematician? Grades? Me? Anyone?

Blackwelder talks about the role that grades play in both somehow empowering and disempowering teachers as “gatekeepers.” Without loss of generality, I’ll reflect on this from my position as a math teacher.

I am a mathematician. I am a part of the community of mathematicians. My primary role in that community is as a math teacher. I have assumed the power and responsibilities of bringing/inviting others (typically children) into the community of mathematicians.

This process *can* be rooted in relationships. My relationship with my students, and our own relationships with math. But the theme of Blackwelder’s chapter is that the mechanism of grading actually rends that process from the humanizing space of relationships. It instead relegates it to an abstract numerical and ultimately dehumanizing “black box” of grading. In this way, grading disempowers me as a gatekeeper.

I think most educators would defend their grading system as humanizing. Properties like “dropping your lowest quiz grade” or being “standards-based” are definitely steps in the direction of equity and re-humanization. But steps like those feel more like liberalism than truly radical abolitionism, in the sense that they don’t actually threaten to deconstruct the system of grading as a whole (a move which I believe to be essential for a humanizing education).

This is all to say that I identify as a human mathematician, who has assumed the responsibility of helping other humans find community amongst mathematicians. I believe that community is principally mediated through relationships. So I need to find ways to re-center those relationships as the means by which students find themselves (hopefully) more connected to the community of mathematicians.

The relationships that are centered extend beyond the ones between my students and me. They exist between my students as peers, and between them and the broader community of mathematicians and math itself. I don’t think it is my role, responsibility, or even my opportunity to officially “induct” students into the community of mathematicians. Our identification as community members is co-constructed between us and the community, not ordained by some minister of judgement.

“Grades” make this decision of “admittance” for us. If a student gets a “good enough” grade, they are given some state-approved stamp of approval. This process then allows me as a teacher to define the system of grading, falsely empowering me alone to pass judgement, a power one which ultimately is not alone mine.

Ungrading: Reflection Post #3 (Ch1: How to Ungrade, by Jesse Stommel)

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Point/Counterpoint

I'll just leave this tweet here, by one of my favorite and most valued accounts on Twitter @ButchAnarcy. 

I'm constantly feeling myself push against, and push back, my fears, uncertainties, assumptions, and expectations in this job. Lots of my reflections on this book are me trying to understand, deconstruct, and ultimately dispose of unhelpful beliefs.

How Am I Doing?

The part of grades that feels valuable is the ability for a student to quickly assess--how am I doing? Am I doing ok? Are things going well? Yeah, there's a bunch I could work on, and a bunch I've already done, but in general...am I doing okay? It's super valid to want to know how you're doing. And I want to honor that.

And I also think it's both impossible, and unhelpful, to try to boil down "how we're doing" to just a single metric. Imagine if a parent was trying to determine if a school was "good" for their child, and all you told them was that the average grade of all the students was a 76. It hides too much meaningful information.

On one hand, value of this summary statistic of "a grade" is that we don't have a ton of time to communicate with any nuance. We need to prioritize efficiency given that I've got 120 students, across 5 sections, and 80% of my day is active instruction. To which I say:

• The prioritization of "efficiency" is a characteristic of white supremacy culture
• Even if I *did* prioritize efficiency, consider how much time/resources are lost because of the negative effects of the oversimplification of grades
• Since when was doing something harmful (and grading is harmful) worth it just because it was "efficient"? There are a TON of super-efficient, very ineffective things that educators have learned to not do.

It's unsettling to not be able to just look at a number and know simply, "How am I doing?" But how we are "doing" isn't just a simple fact. So let's not try to make it one.

Maximizing Opportunities for Feedback

The richest learning environments are "feedback rich" (to use a phrase I learned from Dan Meyer). There are three people in the classroom that can provide feedback to a student about their work: 1) peers, 2) teachers, 3) the student themselves. I think Dan would want to throw in another options, 4) the math.

In general, I've always been kind of nervous about peer feedback and peer review. I've always felt that grades were kind of a private thing? That said, if it's not about graded work, it's just about work, that issue does kind of go away. I would definitely characterize my pedagogical vision as centered on group-work (however well that's actually realized). For groups to function, they need to be comfortable sharing their partial understandings, potential miscues, and brave ideas with their peers. Sometimes that could happen in real-time during a group task. Other times it could happen with a little bit of delay, after they work independently on a task, and then compare work after.

Self-reflection, self-analysis, meta-cognition...that's the real stuff right there. Again, I'm always talking to my high schoolers about how important it is for them to develop independence and self-direction. I definitely need to learn more about how to facilitate that kind of self-study.

Assign Your Own Grade

Given that I'm probably going to have to give them *some* kind of grade at the end of the course, what about the "pick your own grade" option? I would be nervous that the highest grades simply go to those who feel the most entitled to ask for them. And those students are often not the students who "deserve" them!

Contract Grading

In a previous post, I talked about being interested in "contract grading." As I understand it, contract grading basically means this: I outline some very clear, general conditions under which a student gets a given grade. I could consider something like, "As long as you are here for more than x% of the classes, and you do [insert task?] on those days, you'll get a A." Or something like that.

I like how simple it is. I don't like how transactional it feels. I like how it takes some of the grading out of the hands of the teacher, because the student can really just see what's happening and determine what their expected grade it. I worry that it might result in some hyperfocus on the minimum conditions under which the desired grade is achieved.

Ungrading: Reflection Post #2 (Introduction)

As part of some professional learning I want to do this year, I'm reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. As I did w/ Feldman's Grading for Equity (first post here), I'll be blogging my way through it, to help me process and share my thinking as it evolves. I'm always pumped to learn with others about this stuff, so get at me on Twitter @BearStMichael if you want to talk about any of this!

Hope and Pessimism

By the time students come to us in high school, it's natural to feel like it's "too late." It's too late for us to do the seriously difficult work of reprogramming students and ourselves to not be obsessed with grades. But if we don't do this in high school, students will continue to suffer under the oppressive practices of grading for their last 3-4 years. What if it takes 2-3 years for us to transform our/their understanding of the (non-)relationship between grading and learning? I think that even just one year of an education unencumbered by the oppressive cloud of grading is worth it.

Moreover, they can spend the rest of their lives with a happier, healthier view on learning. Yes, I'm pessimistic and negative. I'm pessimistic in my insistence that what we are currently doing is harmful and inadequate. But for me that pessimism stems from a deeply rooted sense of hope. Hope, and understanding, that things can be better, and that we all deserve better than this. And I would rather my pessimism be hopeful, than steeped in resignation that the status quo is as good as we're ever gonna get.

There's no way that what happens in schools grades 1-8 should determine a developing human's worldview about what learning can and should be for the rest of their lives. Yes, the earlier we can disassociate learning from grades, the better, but high school can't possibly be too late!

My Elective

I am so so so glad that I am teaching an elective this year (and have had the chance to do so in the past). This really provides me with an experimental context under which to try different instructional and grading approaches. I'm teaching a Discrete Math elective this semester. Next semester, I was gonna do a second semester of it, but I decided quite recently to pivot it instead to an Math Art class.

I'm hoping to apply some of what I learn from this book study to the grading of that class. Some of the things I'm hoping to do are:

• Pass/Fail Grading. I don't know if that's even an option at my school/district, but that's my goal. I definitely would need to ask around to see what the "unsaid" culture around pass/fail courses is in my school/district.
• Narrative Feedback. I don't know much about it, but it feels like a major key, and I expect to learn more about it in this book.Here's how I'm thinking about the structure of how the course is graded so far. (For context, it's a once-weekly, 16 week course.)

Here's how I'm thinking about how the course is designed.

• I present a math art topic, likely inspired by Annie Perkins' #MathArtChallenge.
• We just spend the class making art.
• At the end, and throughout, students are filling in a big Notice/Wonder individually in their art journals/books/else. Maybe we make one big shared N/W poster that we post outside with the artwork?

I'd have to figure out *what* it is exactly that I'm grading? Which I guess would follow from me identifying *why* exactly I'm grading? I can't really think of a reason why I should grade this, though? All I care about is that students are there, and doing math/art. This feels like the kind of justification that "Contract Grading" could be well-suited to. Though I need to learn a bunch more about that.

End of Year Make-ups

The book mentioned a practice in European universities of yore, where end-of-course examinations were pass/fail. If a student failed the examination, they could just retake the examination again until they got a "satisfactory" result. This feels "better" than asking students to repeat a whole course after failing a final summative assessment.

What makes this retake policy difficult for lots of teachers I imagine (myself included), is that it makes-visible the idea that the whole course can be boiled down to a single assessment. I wrote about this in an earlier post (link) about an end-of-term makeup assignment I made last year:

• When compiling work to put into a the Q3 make-up assignment, here's the idea I was working from: "If a student can complete all four of these activities, and do well, they should pass the quarter." I only ended up doing this after Q3. But what if I had done it after every quarter? Then I would theoretically have four big make-up assignments, each roughly "worth" a quarter of work. If a student did *only* the quarterly make-up assignments, but did them well...how would I feel about them passing the class?
• Answer: I'd feel poorly about that. I'd be discouraged that a full-year course was distilled to ~16 tasks which could be completed independently and asynchronously. I'd feel like I'd gone all in on the "transactional" nature of a lot of modern high school education. You give me a certain amount of work, I trade that for a credit. You accumulate those credits, and trade them for a degree.

Not only am I discouraged by the transactional nature, I'm discouraged by the apparent low "cost" of my end of the transaction--the course itself. I feel poorly about "valuing" one of my year-long, 180 day, courses at only ~16 hour long tasks. And that's because I hope that there are many more valuable things that students get from my class than just ~16 arbitrary math standards. Having to package the course into an "economical" package of assessments/tasks does less to "distill" the course's most valuable content, and more to drain it of its actual..."value."

I also realize that I'm using a lot of language steeped in "transaction," "value," and "costs." I wonder how much of this is actually an honest and meaningful schema, and how much of it is just me applying capitalistic ways of thinking.

Grade Level Equivalents

At this point, I don't think it's particularly contentious to say that the IQ test, and other age-normed tests are super oppressive and bad. But I think even while believing that, lots of educators are okay with the idea of talking about "grade-level equivalents," which operate on the same principles of age-norming developmental progress.

The Limits of "Empirical" Research

I do seek to be reasearch-based in my development and practice as a teacher. This book talks about the limits of classic "empirical" approaches to researching teaching and learning. To quote a quote from the book, originally by John Clifford, "The 'context-stripping' that their empirical scrutinizing demands casts serious doubts on how closely protocols mirror real classrooms..." This is something I think a lot of educators would agree with.

In addition to recognizing the limits of "empirical research," I need to learn more about what more holistic, humanizing, contextualized research could look like. How can we research and learn through relationship-building, dialogs, ethnography, biography, art, and more "contextualized" sources? This question isn't just limited to an analysis of grading, but is a question for how to be "research-based" in the field of education more generally.

Co-constructing a Syllabus

They mention the idea of co-constructing the syllabus for a course. That seems soooooo interesting to me. I don't know anything beyond the idea that it's possible, but can totally see myself trying that in the future? I wonder what that would look like at the high school level?