Teaching Philosophically

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“Doing Shit Differently Right Now:” Standing with Students #AgainstSurveillance

In April 2020, the Georgia’s State Superintendent, Richard Woods, sent an open letter to school districts, teachers, parents, and students that encouraged them to “choose compassion over compliance,” especially given the unique circumstances each student was facing amidst the unfolding crisis.  The letter extolled teaching as heroic, noted the foundational importance of school-community connections, and underscored that grades and standardized tests were a distant second to shared well-being.  School leaders across the country echoed similar themes, calling for grace, self-care, and solidarity against COVID-19, as schools leaned in to being sites of community care, distributing meals, connecting families to technology, and, in some cases, providing ongoing mental and physical health services.

Away from the public eye, internal conversations about instruction and assessment in many districts did not match the public messaging about grace, care, and compassion, as tensions about what it meant for students to be “accountable” during the last few months of school took center stage.  In my context, this meant hours-long meetings fraught with worry about incomplete content coverage, issuing grades, and monitoring student behavior, even while they were home.  By April 2020, NWEA had already issued a report on the so-called “COVID slide,” a learning-loss progenitor, complete with alarming graphs and charts that forecasted deep drop-offs in achievement, and other organizations, like McKinsey, quickly followed.  

These reports quickly framed the conversation—they became the unquestioned common sense—about what it meant to teach and learn during COVID.  Teaching and learning became about “catching up,” which involved sorting kids into who needed remediation and who needed acceleration, often with the help of those issuing reports, but “catching up”—and “catching up” fast—required more seat time, more content, and, ultimately, more control.  Taken together, what it meant to support students, especially in a time of upheaval and uncertainty, became primarily about maintaining and raising traditional metrics of achievement, the very thing school leaders said were secondary just weeks earlier.

While organizations like NWEA and McKinsey were issuing reports, ed tech companies were also sharpening their pitch to schools and districts with programs that promised remediation, acceleration, and, most of all, an ability to track student behavior, even if they were virtual.  Slick marketing campaigns tying software to address the “COVID slide” were inevitable and effective, especially as it became clear that software could be used to compel compliance.  For instance, seamless integration from assignment turn-in to the always-on gradebook meant instantaneous zeros for missing work, and, in many cases, immediate notification of adults.  Ruthless efficiency was critical, especially since we were locked in a race against lost learning.

When Minneapolis Police murdered George Floyd in May 2020, the questions abolitionist students, activists, and organizers have been raising about policing, especially policing in schools, for decades finally received national attention and interest.  Conversations about how schools had more police than social workers and counselors were moved to the front burner, and there were more public proclamations from school leaders about the need to reimagine the existing systems and structures, but the technological purchases districts were making told a different story.

Indeed, the pedagogical and instructional conversations in many districts didn’t mirror the public-facing discourse about policing, as less obvious, but no less insidious forms of command and control remained, including many of the surveillance technologies that schools and districts had just purchased to ensure kids were “catching up.”  That new learning management system (LMS) could tell you when students logged on, for how long, and what they clicked—or didn’t—while they were there.  These were billed as tools to support students, but, for these companies and for many districts, student support really meant figuring out how to ensure students were compliant even when they were in their own homes.  

In virtual settings it became less and less clear where the school’s authority stopped, as their surveillance software kept tabs on every click that students were—or weren’t—making, especially if they were using a school issued device.  Many of these systems also offered integration of other surveillance tools, like plagiarism detection software, which further extended the reach of the institution’s prying eyes, as schools became increasingly concerned about academic dishonesty during this period, a moral panic that has carried over into conversations about AI.

A particular form of academic dishonesty, cheating on tests, seemed particularly arresting to many schools and districts, including my own at the time.  With a slick pitch, we heard about and from virtual proctoring companies that offered a range of options, from locking students into a single web browser to video recording their every move, all in the name of academic integrity and test security.   The district I was in chose a program called whose website tells teachers they can “manage class like magic.”  The system allowed teachers to monitor the online activity of their students on school-issued devices.  This monitoring included seeing screens in real time, full access to browser histories, and the ability to freeze or lock screens.

While these surveillance technologies were billed as keeping kids laser-focused on academic acceleration to “catch up,” their use could never be apolitical.  The use of electronic surveillance mirrors the patterns of physical surveillance, meaning that those who were always-already vulnerable, including students of color and disabled students.  Infamously, the facial detection features on some video proctoring software struggled to recognize Black and Brown faces and consistently flagged neurodivergent students for not maintaining eye contact with the webcam.    Whenever a “suspicious” movement was flagged, a notification would be sent automatically to the instructor, complete with clips and an abnormality rating, almost mirroring the seamless integration between the LMS and the gradebook or its integration with plagiarism detection software.  This engages teachers in a kind of “broken windows” policing, where only certain students—those flagged by the algorithms, students of color and disabled students—are being surveilled.

The root causes of surveillance technology—fear, mistrust, and insecurity—also influence how teachers teach.  Concerns about academic integrity have meant that students are subjected to more in-person timed writing and, barring that, resorting back to the browser lockdown programs that were popular during virtual learning.  Recently, Turnitin announced that they were working on software that could detect whether a paper is AI generated, an announcement that was widely celebrated.  The irony of the celebration is the data students were compelled to put into systems like Turnitin are, in part, responsible for the rise of AI.  John Warner has repeatedly sounded the call for instructors to revisit their writing pedagogy and practice rather than use surveillance software.

Yet, fear, mistrust, and insecurity means surveillance software is as popular as ever, some software even promises to monitor student files to protect against would-be attackers, even sending information directly to law enforcement, creating even closer ties between schools and policing, ties which we disavowed and promised to reimagine in the summer of 2020.  Like video proctoring software, this sort of surveillance software offered many false flags.  There was a report of the software flagging profanity in a school’s literary magazine as suspicious, and a story in Wired revealed that school administrators in Texas had access to students’ conversations on private devices because students had plugged them into their school-issued laptops to charge.  This becomes especially troubling as bans on abortion and gender-affirming care become the law in many states across the country, meaning that students might be outed, even if their searches occur on private devices.  The same Wired story pointed to a Boston Globe story that revealed school surveillance software exposed the records of undocumented students to law enforcement, exposing them to a greater risk of deportation.

There are many stories that we can tell ourselves about ourselves when it comes to surveillance, stories about averting “learning loss,” maintaining academic integrity, or hardening schools against the next attacker, but, in each case, fixing “flawed” individuals is centered over fixing unjust and unresponsive systems.  These stories also buffer teachers, administrators, and others in schools from reflecting on their acceptance of surveillance.  The websites for many of the companies feature enthusiastic quotes from teachers and administrators in districts, and, even anecdotally, most people I’ve interacted with see these technologies are generally accepted as benign or even helpful.  

Audrey Watters visited one of my virtual classes in 2020, and she spoke about how the popularity of these technologies is derived from their perceived ability to bring order to the disordered chaos of teaching, to make the metrics and parameters of a complex enterprise legible.  It also outsources these functions to algorithms, leaving discipline to the machines.  It’s not what you can do for surveillance technology, it’s what surveillance technology can do for you.  Watters said this:

Surveillance in schools reflects the values that schools have (unfortunately) prioritized: control, compulsion, distrust, efficiency. Surveillance is necessary, or so we’ve been told, because students cheat, because students lie, because students fight, because students disobey, because students struggle.

Sounds like what Jeffrey Moro calls “cop shit” to me.

In the Summer of 2020, about six weeks after George Floyd’s murder, during an online lecture, Fred Moten talked about the ways in which abolition forces us to make disquieting links between institutions and ideas we want to believe are separate, like school and surveillance, especially in as much as its tied to law enforcement.  Those disquieting links, hopefully, cause us to “do shit differently right now” in the interest of a better present and future.  Moten talks about how movements away from policing are incomplete if they don’t consider how administrators and faculty also need to relinquish the policing present in their roles.  Put differently, moving away from policing requires those of us in and around schools to “do shit differently right now.”   

What might it mean to “do shit differently right now” and stand with our students against surveillance in practical ways:

  • Lean into Jesse Stommel’s invitation to start by trusting students and directly work against fear, insecurity, and mistrust.  In other words, students are not adversaries, and we can’t start with that assumption.  Moro calls philosophies and structures that pit teachers and students against one another as “cop shit,” and starting with trust is a good first step to avoiding “cop shit.”
  • In addition to trusting students and avoiding “cop shit,” we must actively resist the use of surveillance technology in our classrooms.  Standing in solidarity with our students, especially those at the margins, means not requiring their engagement with any of these technologies.  It’s also important to advocate against the purchase and use of these technologies to decision makers in schools and districts.  Cathy Flesicher and Antero Garcia have a useful framework to help teachers be “everyday advocates” for causes that matter to them.
  • We can heed John Warner’s call to reimagine our pedagogies and practices to be more generative, responsive, and liberatory in resistance to the rise of Skinner-inspired technology.  As he reminds us, we do not do our best work when we are under surveillance, especially constant surveillance from someone—or something, like an algorithm, that hold power over us.

There are probably a thousand more ideas, but as Audrey Watters said to my students, it’s time to disentangle ourselves from fear and mistrust that makes surveillance technology an attractive option and develop a cohesive vision for a more trusting, less algorithmic education system.  It’s time to stand in solidarity with students against surveillance for a better present and future.

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Breaking the Insidious Link Between Grades and Morality

Perhaps the most insidious part of grades is how casually-yet-deeply they are linked to a sense of morality.  Grades function as a kind of semiotic shorthand for how teachers and caregivers are supposed to view students and how students are supposed to view themselves.  As a thought exercise, we can consider what comes to mind about a student when we hear they have all As and Bs versus what comes to mind about a student who hasn’t passed a class yet this year.  If we’re honest with ourselves, the former, the student with the high grades, is seen as compliant, industrious, future-oriented, and an overall “good kid,” while the student who hasn’t passed yet is seen as unserious, uncommitted, and unworthy of our time.  After all, we can’t care about their grade and their future more than they do, as a recent tweet with more than 600 likes reminds us.  This sentiment commonly plays out on Twitter, in copy rooms, and in how schools communicate with caregivers each day because our language is saturated with the verbiage of competition that compels us to rank, order, sort, and judge.  Language is never benign, it incites action against those who are always-already vulnerable, and, worst of all, it makes us believe that they deserved it.  Those with the “bad” grades need to be placed in an intervention, sent away to that alternative school, or expelled entirely because they are poisoning the well and making it difficult for those “good” kids to learn.  All the while, these same schools will tell you how invested they are in restorative justice. Grades don’t just communicate how good someone is at something, the insidious links between grades and morality mean that they communicate how good someone is and what they deserve as a result.

I’ve written before about Cornelius Minor’s concept of “deservedness”—“I’ll agree to teach you if you show me you deserve it”—which is, bluntly, one of the most substantial roadblocks to any change in schools, but especially changes around grading.  Deservedness is pervasive.  It allows us, individually and systemically, to disinvest from some kids because they aren’t worth the time; they haven’t, based on our construction of it, earned our attention and expertise.  I think about all the conversations I’ve had over the years with teachers, especially in AP and honors classes, who vehemently argued for students to be removed who they believed didn’t meet some mythical standard; they didn’t “belong.”  Pushing students out of these environments, either overtly or covertly, was an act of violence, but, under deservedness, that violence was justified.  Put differently, the rationale is that while these students didn’t “earn” the time, expertise, attention, or seat in the class (“they haven’t ever gotten above a C- in English”), they did “earn” the harm resulting from being pushed out by virtue of their metrics and what those metrics signify.  It saddens me to think about how far we are from Jesse Stommel and Sara Goldrick-Rab’s seemingly simple statement: “We must teach the students we have, not the students we wish we had.”  Unsurprisingly, the narratives of deservedness become self-fulfilling, as our actions create conditions where students on the margins are denied dignity, opportunity, and care because they aren’t the students we wished we had.  The link between grading and morality has impeded our construction of humanized classrooms and schools, and it has given us permission to not ask any questions about those who we disinvest from because based on our ranking, sorting, ordering, and judging, they don’t deserve it.  Mariame Kaba talks about the way that we have been conditioned to look away from “profound harms,” especially for those we think worthy of harm, and that’s at work here.   These students that were casting off only deserve what they’ve got coming to them, right?

Breaking the link between grades and morality is imperative if we hope to build restorative schooling environments, and breaking that link requires us to rid ourselves of deservedness.  This isn’t about us being nice or kind, a trap that Cornelius Minor also warns us about, and it isn’t about shifting toward some list of “best practices,” but it is about taking fundamental steps to reorient ourselves and the systems in which we work toward the intersection of equity and care in ways large and small.  This means divesting ourselves and our systems from deservedness and untangling ourselves and our systems from practices like grading, which are manifestations of deservedness.  Our endless celebration and valorization of “good” grades and the “good” people that get them has limited the field of possibilities.  Maha Bali and Mia Zamora’s equity-care matrix helps us imagine what it can look like at the intersection of equity and care, pushing us beyond the limitations of our imagination:

“Socially just care” lives at the intersection of equity and care in the upper right quadrant of Bali and Zamora’s equity-care matrix.

Per Bali and Zamora, “Socially just care, rather, promotes social justice and parity of participation in its designs and planned processes, and is enacted with care such that it always iterates to nurture self-determination, agency and justice for all involved, in whatever manner meets their diverse care needs, and addresses the multiple dimensions of injustice individuals and groups may face.” Deservedness asks us to remove those who we think are undeserving, but operating at the intersection of equity and care asks us to design spaces with the fundamental goal of ensuring people can come as they are without having to be someone or something they’re not.  When we rid ourselves of deservedness, we stop looking for off-ramps and installing trap doors, and we start installing nets, handrails, and guideposts.  We stop looking for reasons for people to leave, and we start considering how to help them stay.  No one has to “earn” their place by living up to standards that we invent.  In this, grading, as a manifestation of deservedness, cannot exist in any traditional way at the intersection of equity and care.  We can’t have both ways: either we lean into restorative and transformative principles, or we continue to lean into deservedness and its offshoots.

Unraveling our ties to deservedness and its manifestations is a process often slowed by feelings, especially the feelings of the most powerful.  I mentioned Mariame Kaba earlier, and one of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned from abolitionists is that personal feelings are less important than the transformation of material conditions to reduce and prevent harm.  When we engage in endless “change management” to protect feelings, we lose sight of the need for a vision, a comprehensive set of core values, on which our work needs to rest.  Relying too much on our personal feelings—and notions of emotional satisfaction—have led us to deservedness, and, now, we’re required to take a different path if we’re committed to humanizing schools, especially if we want to claim were as committed to practices restorative justice as we say.

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“The Limit Does Not Exist:” Mean Girls and the Future of Ungrading

Image ID: A photo of the cast of Mean Girls wearing pink.

“On Wednesdays we wear pink.”
–Karen Smith

A few years ago, I wandered into the ungrading conversation on Twitter looking for people to sit with and talk to about things I was trying and learning more about things that others were doing, especially since, locally, the opportunity for connected conversations didn’t really exist.  I know that when I started tinkering around with ungrading that there were people who I could look to for support, even if I didn’t quite know who they were yet.  Like the first day in a high school cafeteria, the sheer volume of the conversation was intimidating and the things I didn’t know I didn’t know loomed large, especially the politics of the space.  It’s hard knowing where you can sit and where you can’t and what we wear on Wednesdays because, even tacitly, you know there ate tiers and territories, but the exact boundaries are nebulous.  You only find out where the actual boundaries are when you cross them, which is safer for some than others.

The recent conflict about who is really ungrading is at least in part about saying overtly what was only gestured to in the past: there are tiers, cliques, fences, and walls around who can sit at the “top table.”  There’s an in group and an out group and being in the in group requires wearing pink on Wednesdays, but you must know to wear pink on Wednesdays, among other things.  You have to look a certain way, sound a certain way, act a certain way.  You can’t keep trying to make fetch happen. The unwritten rules are just being formalized and codified now.

I was rereading part of Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure a few days ago (actually, his use of “low theory” was inspirational here), and there’s an interesting question near the front: “Do we really want to shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared interests and intellectual communities, or might we rather take the opportunity to rethink the project of learning and thinking altogether?”

That’s a big existential question, but if we are genuinely interested in using this moment for rethinking the project altogether, what does that really mean?  What would that genuinely require?

“I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school. I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy.”
–Girl Who Doesn’t Go to the School

We often try to rely on imagined pasts to make future decisions, and much to our detriment.  Relying on imagined pasts causes us to recreate them, only this time a little bit more nicely.  There’s no history of cakes filled with rainbows and smiles here, and there are some long legacies of gatekeeping because of those materially benefitting from being the “right” side of the gate. Gretchen, Karen, and Regina understood this deeply, and their rituals of control—formal and informal—were a consolidation of power.  I get the sense sometimes from the head table that there’s just too many people here now and remember the good old days when this was our niche.  All of this is a long way of saying that rethinking the project altogether, as Halberstam says, requires people who have power to cede some of it and to ensure that those that ungrading have been actively excluded from ungrading conversations are actively included.  Even Regina, Karen, Gretchen learned that Janis had something meaningful to say, too.

I want to return to the Queer Art of Failure for a second where Halberstam writes, “I propose the goal is to lose one’s ways, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than their way.”  Large-scale shifts in the Narrative are challenging and disorienting, but they’re also necessary.  There are things that we;’ve gotten too certain of and that have become fossilized as kinds of ungrading’s cultural common sense.  Rather than making the circle smaller and steeling our commitments to logics of orderliness (“here’s the right way!”), a period of nostalgia-defying disorder might be required to lose our way and more than our way.

In other words, if ungrading in our classrooms isn’t about saviorism, ungrading itself and those attempting to do some version of it under adverse conditions don’t need saviors either.  The “tsk tsk” doesn’t feel great.

“Grool. I meant to say cool but then I started to say great.” 
—Cady Heron

I’ve invoked Halberstam here a couple of times, so I want to talk a little about failure.

I’m a failed ungrader (among other things).  I’ve tried different practices, developed variations on existing practices, and tried to be responsive to the reactionary cultures of where I worked and the expressed needs of my students, so none of my practices would pass an ideological purity test.  I suspect I’m not the only one.  I don’t want to turn this into some saccharine “failure is okay!” classroom poster, but I’m proud of failing.  I’d hate to think about where I’d be without it because I’d probably also be stuck in the loop of the places I worked.  

Be Oakley and Noah LeBein write, “Failure is a project,” and Halberstam writes, “Failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering unruly childhoods and predictable adulthoods.”   I’ve said elsewhere that ungrading isn’t about mastery of a specific set of tasks or meeting a single standard, but it is about processing values and becoming comfortable with acting on those values.  The process really is more important than the product.  There’s something to be said for reveling in the mess, and I think more of it might be required.  Maybe we need to talk about failure together more?  Returning to Oakley and LeBein, “In failure, I discover…how to embrace the failures of others, to hold it in and make it my own.”  Fred Moten talks about the wealth of sharing needs rather than solving problems, which might be a good idea, too.

These statements get some pushback, but, for me anyway, failure has been a critical part of my identity and my survival, if I’m being honest.

“I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me, but I can’t help it that I’m popular.” 
–Gretchen Wieners

I’m hanging out with Janis and Damian, but the question in conversations that circle around complex, intersectional, messy questions of access and power is what are those at the top table willing to give up?  What doors are they willing to open behind them so that more people—especially those most silenced—can walk through?  There’s people that have really helped me and students in ways that probably kept in the classroom a lot longer than I might have otherwise been.

It’s easy to read some of this as jealousy or sour grapes or grievance politics or whatever else, but I don’t read the calls for more openness and access as desire for clout or popularity or fame, but a desire for some parity of participation in the conversation around ungrading.  It doesn’t seem to be about being at the head table, but it does seem to be about a more polyvocal conversation.  Who are we missing, intentionally or unintentionally, and how does their absence that hurt all of us?  Who is screaming into the abyss, and how can we listen to them?  How can this lead to generative conflict and principled struggle rather than just conflict?

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Stop “Assuming Positive Intent”

Image ID: A red traffic light against a cloudless blue sky.

Since the start of the school year is here, the tweets from districts and leaders about their values for the year are here, too. A common thread in many of these tweets is some form of the phrase “assume positive intent,” which is generally designed to be a banal, inoffensive way to talk about belonging or inclusion.  At best, “assume positive intent” is kind of boilerplate corporate eduspeak, but, at worst, the phrase stands in the way of the generative conflict and accountability schools and districts need to foster equity, justice, and belonging.    

“Assume positive intent” is an example of what Paul Gorksi calls an “equity detour,” an action taken to divert attention, resources, and sustained commitment to justice.  It allows us to stay “clean,” by avoiding questions about our own beliefs and actions and the beliefs and actions of the systems in which we operate.  “Assume positive intent” is an example of Gorski’s first detour: “pacing for privilege.”  In this detour, the feelings and needs of those least committed to equity and justice over those who are directly harmed by inequity and injustice.  “Assume positive intent” allows us, individually and systemically, to gloss over harmful actions, practices, and policies without naming them as harmful; it privileges the intent of the actor, not how the action, practice, or policy impacts people.  Put differently, meaning well isn’t enough; we must commit to doing well, and “assume positive intent” discourages that because there’s never any real accountability.  “Assume positive intent” creates a context where equity and justice are individually and collectively optional rather than required.  The list of harmful policies and practices implemented and supported because of “good intentions”—“responsibility rooms,” culturally unresponsive curriculum, traditional grading—is bottomless.

Accountability is an important component of systems that prioritize equity and justice, and “assume positive intent” allows people and systems to avoid taking it.  When we “assume positive intent,” there’s always plausible deniability for harm.  “I didn’t know” or “I meant something else” impede our ability to own the harm caused, make a genuine apology, and take actions to make that harm less possible in the future.  I’m grateful for Maha Bali and Mia Zamora’s words here, too, about making schools and classrooms intentionally equitably hospitable: “I didn’t know” is an insufficient response to systemic injustice or partial care.  Doing better is required.  In other words, accountability isn’t about—or shouldn’t be about—punishment, but it is about transforming ourselves and the systems that we’re in. 

Mariame Kaba, invoking Shannon Perez-Darby, says that accountability is “a process that we do with ourselves for ourselves.  When we’re being accountable to ourselves, we’re acting in a way that honors our values.  We’re acting with integrity by taking responsibility for who we are in the world and living in alignment with our values.”  If someone is harmed and then we ask the harmed person to “assume positive intent,” who is being seen, heard, and valued?  Who is accountable, and to what?  In a school setting, when teachers act in ways that harm students, students should not be asked to be the burden of “assuming positive intent” to make the problem go away for the powers that be.  Instead, we need to ask the person committing the harm to be accountable; someone was harmed, whether that was the intent or not.

This raises the issue of generative conflict, which is required for us to grow toward equity and justice personally and systemically.  “Assume positive intent” is a silencing mechanism that avoids conflict—and its possible fallout—at all costs. Again, the goal of the leaders using this term is to stay “clean.”  One of the major ways that “assume positive intent” avoids conflict is by seeing each instance of harm as a separate individual issue rather than as part of larger systems and structures that make harm possible.  Put differently, “assume positive intent” allows the “one bad apple” theory to thrive; it seems harm as an individual problem rather than seeing the systems that prop up, support, enable, and even elevate the harmer and others like them.  While individuals taking accountability for harm is important, it is as—if not more—important for systems, structures, and organizations to take accountability for their harm and work to permanently eradicate that harm.  Systemic solutions are generally preferable to individual solutions.   This is not a statement that people can’t grow and change, they absolutely can, but “assuming positive intent” isn’t a path forward to that growth.  If we’re truly committed to equity and justice, we can’t blame the victim and change the subject when harm occurs.  It’s time to get messy.

I want to make a quick distinction here between “assuming positive intent” and the concept of “unconditional positive regard,” which Alex Shevrin Venet writes about.  These are not the same: unconditional positive regard asks us to care for all those in our orbit relationally and building relationships with them not out of a transactional need, but a desire to genuinely connect with them.  The desire to stay in relationship and care for those in our organizations is powerful; accountability is not about exile, but about being in—and remaining in—community.  This is challenging work, especially since this isn’t our default mode of operation.  “Assuming positive intent” is different because it ignores the power plays at work and asks victims of harm to sweep their feelings away to avoid conflict and difficult conversations about equity and justice.

If you’re a leader, there’s still time to rethink your messaging and your values before this year starts.  Instead of “assuming positive intent,” let’s lean back into generative conflict and the equity and justice work that’s in line with equity and justice values.  Help your people and systems be accountable to grow, change, and evolve to be safer for everyone. 

No detours, no distractions, no diversions.

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Ungrading and Saviorism

first-aid-gce2f88335_1920In my previous role as an instructional coach and a department chair, I felt strongly about advocating for grading reform, especially given the multiple ongoing crises impacting students.  My students spoke openly about the negative effects of grading on their mental health, and a few even worked on a grading reform project that surveyed their peers and made recommendations to experts based on research they’ve done about alternative methods.  Unsurprisingly, the resistance was fierce, and some of the fiercest resistance was around whether ungraded classrooms could prepare students for the rigorous expectations of college professors and corporate bosses.  One colleague even said that ungrading encourages students to “want something for nothing,” as he vigorously defended traditional grading as way to instill notions of capitalist accountability, which he saw as vital to the work of schooling.  Ungrading was just a fancy name for low expectations.

I started taking steps toward ungrading about a decade ago because grades negatively impacted my relationships with students and students’ relationships with their work in the course.  While I’d encourage students to take risks in their work in ideas, genre, and form, my reliance on traditional grading sent a different message.  After all, we are what we do.  Because of the mixed messages, students often took the surest path to an “A,” even when they were encouraged to do more.  Who can blame them?  Over time, I grew resentful that students played it safe, and they were resentful that my words seem disingenuous based on my actions.  This mutual frustration wasn’t sustainable, especially if I was going to stay in teaching.

This story isn’t unique—I’ve told it before, and it probably mirrors the origin story of many other ungraders—but lifting again feels critical to make the point that, for me, ungrading wasn’t about what students couldn’t do, but what they could do when they weren’t, as Alfie Kohn says, punished by rewards.  Put differently, I turned to ungrading because I had higher expectations—not lower expectations—for both my teaching and my students’ learning.  One of my biggest realizations about traditional grading was how just how much pushing students toward a single standard that I created based on preferences, experiences, and ways of knowing was rooted in pervasive deficit orientations.

Problematically, deficit orientations combined with good intentions—“preparing students for college” “upholding standards”—is saviorism (Alex Shevrin Venet’s work is vital on this topic, especially for white teachers).  Part of my moving away from saviorism and restoring my relationship with students on healthier terms required me to also move away from traditional grading.  Imagine thinking so highly of yourself and so little of your students that you believed their only motivation is points.  This is, at least in some circles, and prevailing view, and to borrow from Jesse Stommel, if we believe that students need a reason as banal as points to do our work, then they’ll likely believe it, too.  For me, breaking up with traditional grading meant breaking up with my ego, and it made me a better teacher by compelling me to, with students, consider reasons for our work together that pushed beyond banal point accumulation; we leaned into purpose, into mission, into values, and into imagination and world building.  I had to listen, to be wrong, to be apologize, to repair harm I had caused, and to change my actions.

There are some things to acknowledge here: ungrading, like anything, can also be a weapon that causes harm (we might think of Autumm Caines’ work on the weaponization of care as an example); sometimes ungrading can also cross into savorism, especially if the shift isn’t rooted in high expectations or accompanied by changes to the pernicious pedagogies underlying traditional grading.  In other words, simply “going pointless” tomorrow isn’t going to change much at all, maybe except the window dressing.  We can ungrade and still find ourselves complicit with grading when our philosophies and core values are still doggedly rooted in compliance, command, and control, our practices still compel students to perform to a single standard, and our personal interactions with students lack relational care and are abundant in what Cornelius Minor calls “deservedness.”   Jesse Stommel, as usual, tells us what we might need to hear: “We can’t simply take away grades without re-examining all of our pedagogical approaches, and this work looks different for each teacher, in each context, and with each group of students.”  Jesse warns us to beware of the Zeitgeist.

There’s nothing particularly heroic or sexy about ungrading; it’s comprised of small-yet-intentional changes—what we might call “micro-moves”—over an entire career to make learning environments more humanizing and relationally caring.  There’s no seismic shift, shining spotlight, grand pronouncement, or enduring fame, and that’s okay.  I just wanted better relationships with students and students wanted to have more freedom, so I had to figure out, in my classroom, how to make that happen, and I’m ever grateful for a network of people that helped—and continue to help—me, whether they know it or not.  I hope that the might help someone else in the same way I’ve been helped.  Each time we model just practices and relational care, help create conditions for students to feel safe taking intellectual risks, or see students advocate against harmful systems and structures, especially those based on flawed foundations like rigor, accountability, ranking, sorting, and exclusion, we’re pushing against the traditional system, urgently, even if it might feel like we’re moving in slow-motion.

Ungrading doesn’t make you a savior, but, if you’re like me, it might stop you from trying to be one.