Tag: Grading

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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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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.

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Toward Fairness and Equity: Labor-Based Grading During and After COVID-19

eoq_jwiwaaar5uxIn “Our Pandemic Summer,” a recent article in The Atlantic, Ed Yong argues that framing the future in terms of “going back to normal” is a wasted opportunity to think about what a fairer and more equitable world might look like going forward.  There have been so many changes in a relatively short amount of time in education that imagining simply returning to the status quo—which was deeply inequitable and unfair—seems as untenable as ever.  One of the most substantive changes in many districts is changing the way grades are given—some districts have even removed grades entirely in favor of a credit-no-credit model—and it feels disingenuous at best and immensely damaging at worst to return to systems of ranking and sorting that have created incredible tension, anxiety, and disparity.  Grading is a space where we, collectively, need to reimagine a different future, and returning to “normal” undermines the commitments to equity that should be at the center of our work.

My district has essentially moved to a labor-based grading model for students, where learning and judgments about quality, which are always-already biased because of their roots in single standards, have been separated.  This separation, which radical for some, is a welcome relief to others, including many students.   Students earn credit when they complete 10 of 18 assignments, permitting students to make some choices and allowing for grace in the midst of a pandemic where tens of thousands of people in Michigan are sick.  If a labor-based grading system is what’s best in terms of equity and fairness for students now, it’s also best for students when they return to brick-and-mortar classrooms in the future.

In our English department this year, we reflected frequently this year about the inclusivity of our spaces, and one of the most crucial realizations that emerged was that most of the writing that was presented to students as “good” was rooted in dominant culture notions of what that means.  This couldn’t help but have an effect on who sees themselves as a writer and what counts as “good” writing during grading and evaluation.  I’ve previously talked about the ways grading is rooted in whiteness here.  One of my colleagues, who I discussed in a previous post, used this year to experiment with a new grading system as a result of some of our reflections and our one-on-one coaching sessions, and a few others are starting to make some important shifts, too.  That said, my own shift away from traditional grading took years of fits and starts, so patience with ourselves is in order.  Working against “common sense” and engrained notions of things like “rigor” take time; there’s tons to unlearn.  Even with all of those caveats, fragility remains, but attacks on grading aren’t necessarily personal, but questions about grading do force us to consider systems in which we’re complicit in upholding somehow.  Asao Inoue reminds us, “in all schools, grades are the means of discrimination, the methods of exclusion, not inclusion, no matter what we think they might do for our students.”  One of the biggest pieces of pushback that I get when I talk about grading is how it doesn’t “prepare students for the next level,” and it’s important to remember that just because other environments are oppressive doesn’t mean we have to replicate them.  Remember: we’re imagining a different future together, not attempting to reinscript what existed already and served only a privileged few.

Rightly, much of the current emphasis has been on building relationships—Maslow before Bloom—and student wellness and safety, both mentally and physically.  While our mouths may say these things, sometimes our actions indicate that these might not be the foundations of our classroom, even if we might like them to be or think that they are.  There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter that school is a student’s “job” and that grades are their “compensation,” and that, to me, seems like that end result overemphasizing outcomes and underemphasizing. relationships: we start to see students based on the products they produce rather than as human beings with a complex set of circumstances.  In these environments, students start to only judge themselves by the products they produce, and often devalue their really thoughtful, important work when it doesn’t reach certain graded outcomes, which, again, are rooted in center with no accounting for the margins.  Put differently, a system that rewards labor only when it meets a pre-defined outcome is going to be exclusive rather than inclusive.  It’s really important to teach students to identify, talk about, and, most of all, value their labor outside of any external validation.   The idealist in me hopes that this awakens students to start valuing their work more and that teachers help them do so.  Inoue takes an important point from Friere, which we sometimes forget: we can’t liberate our students—we’re not saviors—but we can set up structural conditions where they can liberate themselves by moving away from compliance and toward agency.

In addition to rethinking some of the ways students work and evaluate work, labor-based grading has also had other important byproducts, especially forcing teachers to think more carefully about what they assign and how they design assessments, especially when grades can’t be used as currency or, worse yet, a weapon to compel compliance.  This moment of reconsideration is important: what now?  Indeed, assignments and assessments need to be meaningful, authentic, and compassionate if we want students to complete them in the midst of a pandemic.  This means that students need to be able to make choices about what they learn, how they learn it, and the modalities in which they demonstrate their learning, and, without the daunting pressure of grades, they have expressed a certain freedom to take intellectual risks, share their own thinking rather a reheated version of a teacher’s lecture, and marry their funds of knowledge to their academic work in ways that didn’t seem possible—or weren’t deemed valuable—before.  In other words, teachers are getting a crash course in the amazing things that come from trusting their students.  Grading often interferes with the relationships we want to have with our students, and removing the barrier can help us start to rehumanize our classrooms.

We know that returning to “normal” is going to be impossible, but we might also think about what “normal” has cost us. We frequently hear talk about a “new normal” as negative, but we have the potential to reimagine parts of it as positive.

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Coaching Notes: The Year of Ungrading

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A group of teachers thinking about assessment and evaluation differently at #NCTE19 in Baltimore, Maryland.

In her book Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown urges those interested in making substantive change to start small because, often, seismic change is too unwieldy and overwhelming to be successful.  Changes that work at the micro level are more likely to work at the macro level; in other words, it’s all about scaling up rather than scaling down.  The most exciting part of coaching this year was the number of teachers that asked for help disrupting traditional grades and grading in their classes.  This enthusiasm was also palpable in my team’s NCTE presentation about using face-to-face conferencing as a replacement for assessments that make the writer ancillary: many teachers are ready for something different.  In my excitement, I went into meetings with my colleagues ready to smash the traditional system (which I’ve talked about here), but my colleagues were in a different place, wondering how they might experiment with different systems to find out what works for them and for their students.  As a coach, I had to remember Brown’s emergent strategy: small is good.  Rethinking grading, which is a core tenet of education and often a deep-seated part of our pedagogies, takes courage and time. My goal as a coach wasn’t to put the cinderblock on the gas pedal with my colleague terrified in the front seat, but, instead, to help them navigate their own course toward change at their own speed, giving them needed encouragement and support along the way.  This reminded me of another of Brown’s emergent strategies–move at the speed of trust—which is key for making change sustainable.

My colleagues made some amazing changes this year in their classrooms to push back on these dominant systems to reduce the emotional toll grades have on student mental health and well-being and to work to be less unfair and more equitable in their evaluations.

Single-Point Rubrics

One of the small-yet-significant changes made by several of my colleagues, particularly in the disciplines, is using a single-point rubric.  Single-point rubrics, especially those that are ungraded, help students focus on the skill they’re working on without tying their process to grades.  These rubrics prioritize feedback over ranking and sorting, which more traditional rubrics do with overly-restrictive categories that tend to focus on what students can do wrong rather than what they can do right.  Even as evaluators, traditional analytic rubrics cause us to look for error rather than celebrate assets.  The rubrics that we use send messages to students about what we believe about an individual assessment and school writ large, and we can change the message we’ve been sending by changing the rubrics we use.  Several of my colleagues asked themselves if their evaluation of student work aligned with their values as educators, which provides opportunity for healthy self-reflection.

One of the biggest issues I’ve heard teachers discuss with single-point rubrics is time.  Moving away from easy analytic rubrics does reduce grading efficiency, but changes almost always require additional labor, particularly as teachers and students learn how to navigate a new system.  The narrative feedback required by single-point rubrics forces us to be thoughtful and intentional about what we’re telling students about their work and how we’re telling them, which is never easy.  Despite the additional time that my colleagues are spending giving feedback, they are finding that students’ relationship to assessment is changing in a positive way. Students seem to be taking more risks, asking more questions, and seeing assessment as less transactional.  The other benefit is that, with a “bless-press” or “plus-delta” model, all feedback is actually feedforward.

Together, our next steps will be to involve students more in better understanding the “why” behind these changes and involving them more in the continued development of assessment and assessment criteria that better aligns with their needs and their goals.  We should always need to remember that students are experts on themselves and their own learning, and, as a result, should be welcomed into conversations about assessment and assessment criteria. 

Student Surveys and Feedback

A few colleagues did take up the important work of involving students in assessment and evaluation design this year.  This started with asking students to do some reflection on self-assessment on what they wanted to learn, how they wanted to learn it, and the ways in which they wanted to show their learning, which, in itself, is an awesome step.  Often, we spend time differentiating instruction only to standardize the assessment, which can be frustrating for students who want a more relevant and authentic way to display their knowledge.  This requires flexibility on the teachers’ part, as they have to be willing to cede control over large parts of the learning and assessment process to students.  Some teachers have expressed reservations about managing students who are all doing different projects and who may be at different points in their project.  While the feeling is understandable given the way we collectively imagine the classroom to be, the truth is that students were likely always in different places anyway.  Not all students learn in the same way or develop skills at the same time, no matter what we say.  This willingness to involve students in important decisions about learning and assessment marked a small-but-important step away from giving students assessments that weren’t relevant to their learning and that they weren’t ready to take.

These conversations led to other conversations about how it didn’t feel “right” to grade student-centered learning in a traditional manner.  Coaches are tasked with helping folks reach their own conclusions about their practice, and I was happy that those that I worked with were able to see the incongruence between fledgling student-centered, liberation-oriented practices and the traditional practices we have in place. We can’t truly seek liberation for ourselves and our students until we change the oppressive practices that brought us to the current reality.  Many of my colleagues took an additional step of surveying their students regularly about their teaching practices, and while vulnerable, they have learned a great deal about how to be the best teacher they can be for each of their students.

Again, these changes are small, but fractal change is a key to success: asking students what they want and need and working to create structures that make it possible is a considerable move in a liberatory direction.

Portfolio-Based Grading

One of my amazing colleagues took a huge plunge into portfolio-based grading this year, and it was really great being able to help them navigate the nuanced complexities of a new system.

One of the first significant hurdles was describing a portfolio-based grading system to students and parents, especially in an AP course where students have, most often, benefitted from traditional systems that privilege being “best,” which relies on some transactional notion of ranking and sorting.  Under this system, students would be writing more, receiving fewer grades, and self-reporting the grades they did receive after conferencing with the teacher.  For our community, we gathered research about the benefits of pushing back on traditional grading structures, generally, and portfolio-based systems, specifically.  My colleague also stressed the humanizing element of portfolio-based grading: the opportunity to talk with each student about each piece of writing multiple times, allowing them to feel valued and supported as a person and writer throughout the process.  After some nervous moments during Open House, most—if not all—parents in attendance were supportive—or at least not actively unsupportive—of the new system.

As the system was implemented, however, the teacher started to feel the crunch of time.  While portfolio-based grading with student conferences are meant to push back against efficiency, there are practical limitations on time.  In talking with the teacher, we realized that she wasn’t keeping close track of time, often letting conferences extend to 20 minutes or more.  Talking to students is legitimately the best part of our job, but my colleague had already talked to them several times during the formative stages of their writing, so such extended summative conferences weren’t needed.  We also talked about focusing the conferences—“bless-press”—rather than going line-by-line through the paper, a practice that mirrors the generally ineffective on-paper feedback that marks up everything.  Moreover, the shifting of language away from evaluation to learning is hugely positive.  Future conferences were shorter and more focused, which helped the teacher get back important minutes in their day and helped students get the high-level narrative feedback they needed to improve.

Toward the end of the term, we developed an anonymous student survey about their experience.  Student responses were overwhelmingly positive, especially around feeling the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, but a few students had difficulty with not understanding their progress in relative terms: they wanted to know where they were in relation to their classmates, not just themselves.  These students, though few in number, reported actually having more anxiety without the competition.  School has been extremely successful in getting stakeholders to buy into its transactional metrics of success and to feel lost without them, so much so that the only way to feel safe again is to return to the overarching authority of grades. Continued work with students is necessary to help the reimagine the possibilities of school and their learning, as we can’t expect them to work through seismic shifts in their educational processes any better than we can.  It’s important to be patient and empathetic to students who are working with new systems and frameworks; as Brown reminds us, move at the speed of trust.

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Stories We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves: Uncomfortable Truths About Grades + Grading for White Educators

Stories We Tell Ourselves: Grades, Grading + Whiteness

Discussions about disproportionality often focus on outcomes, but rarely, if ever, do we discuss the practices that lead to inequities.  As a white educator who works with many other white educators, I would argue that our unwillingness to question practices lies in a fear of finding out the answers, answers which might require us to change deeply held personal beliefs and pedagogies that we have practiced and have likely benefitted us as we moved through our formal schooling.  Indeed, many of the systems that have privileged us have necessarily subjugated those unlike us because we like and support, even implicitly, practices that support the cultural mythology that we’re “best.”  These practices and pedagogies have become so central to our identities that changing them comes with great personal risk: interrupting the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and, importantly, the stories we tell about those unlike us that allow us to retain our perceived identities.  Going from not having to think about these uncomfortable truths to having to think about them raises the potential for white fragility: we need to sit with our defensiveness, and we need to consider what about grades and grading is making us feel that way and whether those feelings are worth the costs of disproportional practice.

As a department chair, one of the challenging conversations I have with colleagues is about grading, not because grades mean anything or accurately communicate anything about student mastery of skills, line items for behavior compliance and extra credit have rendered the numbers and letters useless, but because of the stories that grades tell.  Indeed, attaining good grades have become attendant with some sort of moral virtue, largely because grades are about aligning oneself, and in writing, their ideas and their voice, with the dominant culture.  Many schools have difficulty honoring non-dominant literacies and valuing non-dominant funds of knowledge because they are a threat to our supremacy and the beginning of slippery slope.  Powerful people fear losing the tools of their oppression.  Indeed, grades help us create a system of reward and punishment designed to modify behavior toward our white, heteronormative, neurotypical beliefs and values.  They help us stand guard at the gates of our space: ask yourself, for instance, who owns literacy and language in schools because of how we’ve graded and labeled reading and readers and writing and writers.

Many of our gaps in achievement and opportunity are created by our unwillingness to confront our own practices.  When related to grading, this means that we need to engage some uncomfortable truths about the way most of us our currently grading.

1.  Grading is for teachers, not for students.

In general, students aren’t involved in the grading process, which makes it mystifying; it’s something done to them rather than for them.  Students don’t consent to what grades mean or how they’re tabulated.  As teachers, then, we have all of the power, power which is easily weaponized to compel compliance with our norms: Asao B. Inoue asks us to consider the process by which we obtained our grades.  If we think not just about what grades we received, but the things we had to do to receive them—perhaps bringing in Kleenex boxes (buying our way to a grade) or subjugating our own ideas and identities for agreement with an authority figure—we might not be that proud. Sebastaio Salgado argues, “we photograph with all of our ideology,” and that’s true of grading, too.  For educators, grades are numerical manifestations of our beliefs and values that we project on to others, and if we’re not careful about interrogating our beliefs and values and the positionality we have to project them, we create problematic practices where we label, exclude, and limit based on congruence with our ethos.  One of the stories we often tell ourselves as teachers is that we’re “fair” graders, but I would argue that, accepting the premise that fairness is the goal, it is impossible to be completely “fair” in our grading because of our implicit biases and personal assumptions, especially if we’re are in privileged subjectivities. 

A good first step toward moving to “ungrading” is letting your students self-report their grades.  Before you engage in this process with your students, be sure that you’ve built substantive, trusting relationships with them because while you’re giving away some of your power, your presence as an authority in the conversation looms large.  There’s a tendency for students to want to please the authority figure, and there’s a tendency to steer students to the outcomes that we want: both of these need to be avoided.  This is only scratching the surface, but there’s some unlearning that needs to happen on both the teacher and student sides of this equation for self-reported grades to be substantive and not merely performative.  Students have to trust that self-reported grades aren’t another manipulation tactic that will end up being used against them in the long run, and we have to trust that students are not trying to put one over on us.

2.  Using a single standard to grade students is deeply inequitable.

While a single standard may seem “fair,” they are actually anathema to notions of fairness.  A single standard is unfair to many students, as single standards, by their very nature, are exclusive rather than inclusive, and to be “fair” means to reject systems and grading practices based on single standards.  In many cases, our single standard is the product that gets produced, but there’s so much that often gets overlooked when we only focus on the end result.  As Inoue writes, we can’t use a single-standard to simply define the quality of a student’s work, especially their writing, when could also look at the time and effort a student put in or the way in their process evolved.  Inoue encourages us, rightly, at least in my view, to think about assessment ecologies rather than standards, and, importantly, he encourages our students to do the same, a task that’s made easier when we trust them and engage them in playing in active role in building the frameworks to which they’re beholden.

Using a single standard—only looking at the quality of the finished product—also promotes competition for students to be the “best,” as we’ve defined it, which is often through white, heteronormative, neurotypical lenses.  High levels of academic competition are toxic, and there’s no reason to reproduce what standardized testing and college admissions processes have wrought in our classrooms, especially when fulfilling requirements for grades requires that students leave much of themselves behind.  As my Writing Center tutor Carsten Finholt argued at the IWCA collaborative this month, every student deserves a safe entry point to literacy that values who they are and what they know, and grades based on a single standard aren’t it.  A classroom graded on a single standard that pits students against one another for scores isn’t culturally responsive. 

IWCA CCCC 2019

An important note: not having a single standard doesn’t mean that there are no standards.   It means that instead of competing to be just like us, our students are working for themselves and their own improvement.  Here, they create their own standards based on their own goals.  If we don’t think students are capable of creating their own standards and their own goals based on what they need, we need to engage in some hard thinking about those believes based on our own racial and cultural perceptions of who can do what work and who can be responsible for shaping the learning environment and ecology for their own purposes.

Conclusion

A commitment to equity means working toward abolishing grades, even if that means that many of us may lose a source of our power and part of our privileged identities.  The risks of changing our interpretive stories are far less than the risks of continuing grading for another generation of students who will be labeled and defined forever by the letters and numbers we enter in a learning management system.