Grow Beyond Grades

• Everything is Assessment⁠ (TG2 blog post)

• ⁠Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students: A Teacher’s Guide to Inclusive and Culturally Competent Classrooms⁠ (book by Dr. Carissa McCray)

• ⁠Mirrors and windows: Using the five senses and more to plan culturally responsive instruction⁠ (interview for the Yes and Know podcast)

• ⁠Five things we need to stop saying about our students⁠ (interview for the Leading Equity podcast)

• ⁠Multicultural Literature as Critical Literature: Redefine the Trajectory for Students of Color⁠ (chapter in the anthology Research Anthology on Racial Equity, Identity, and Privilege)

• Discovering The Spark Of Teaching & Learning Through Equitable Grading (article for California Virtual Campus Online Network of Educators)

• Grades Suck: Fabi’s video representing her core beliefs about learning and the problems with grades. The implementation of UnGrading will be provided in the Orientation Module is Canvas.

• UnGrading In Ethnic Studies 121: Fabi’s webpage for explaining ungrading to her students.

Jesse Stommel is a faculty member in the Writing Program at University of Denver. He is also co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy and Digital Pedagogy Lab. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy.

Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, digital studies, and composition. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, a clever cat, Loki, and a badass daughter, Hazel.

Originally aired as a live Community Gathering, where Vanessa Ellis interviewed Jesse on his book, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, and then opened the floor to questions for participants.

Topics include

• Do we need the word 'ungrading'? Why can this term be problematic?

• What ungrading has looked like throughout Jesse’s career

• How the work of scholars like bell hooks, Kevin Gannon, and Paulo Freire have influenced Jesse’s ungrading philosophy

• Why ungrading is not ideologically neutral work

• How ungrading can empower students and support their agency

• Why ungrading is less about shifting policies and more about building community

• The "necessary practices" educators must implement to make teaching and learning more equitable

Other resources

Blog posts included in Jesse’s book:

• An Introduction to Ungrading

• Toward a Cointentional Approach to Assessment

• Ungrading for Equity

• What We Do: Key principles, features, and benefits of the Mastery Transcript
• MTC Community Talkback: Competency-based Credentials: This topical, cross-sector discussion features insights from representatives of America Succeeds, CAPS Network, Education Reimagined, Envision Learning Partners and Jobs for the Future.
• Mastery Transcript Tour: Susie Bell, Senior Director of Member School Engagement, explains Mastery Learning and how the Mastery Transcript facilitates and propels it.

Alex Shevrin Venet is an educator, author, and professional development facilitator based in Vermont. She teaches community college and graduate teacher education. Previously, she was a teacher and leader at an alternative therapeutic school. She is the co-founder of the Nurturing the Nurturers collective, a healing community for educators. Her first book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, is a bestseller at W.W. Norton. She is also a long-time ungrader!

Topics include:

• How Alex’s personal background and professional experiences led to her interest in trauma-informed education
• How Alex defines trauma in the context of her work in schools
• How centering four “proactive priorities” can help schools move toward more equitable and trauma-informed systems and decisions
• How the proactive priorities can be used to make ungrading more equitable, inclusive, and trauma informed
• How teachers can collectively work to make change at all levels of the system at the same time
• Why grades can be a barrier to unconditional acceptance

Other resources:

• Alex’s book: Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education
• Alex’s website: unconditionallearning.org

Nate Bowling teaches Social Studies at a US Embassy School in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. He is a past Washington State Teacher of the Year and National Teacher of the Year Finalist. He and his wife blog about living and teaching overseas at BowlingsAbroad.com and he is the host of the Nerd Farmer Podcast on the Channel 253 Podcast Network. He writes a weekly newsletter called Takes & Typos on Substack and you can find him on Mastodon’s Scholar.Social as @natebowling.

Topics include:

• Nate’s changing perspective, from urging equitable access to AP classes to calling for an end to schools’ partnership with the College Board

• Why Nate thinks states and state universities can serve the same purposes of—and do a better job than—the College Board

• How the pandemic changed some of Nate’s thoughts and practices around grading

• How Nate’s narrative transcript from Evergreen State College in Washington informed his thinking about assessment and evaluation

• The best and worst things that Disney has done with the Star Wars franchise

Other resources:

• On Teachers Going Gradeless:

  • We Don’t Need the College Board

  • Taking Unneeded Anxiety Out of Assessment

  • Testing, COVID-19, and the College Board (TG2Chat LIVE! Episode 17, April 20, 2020)

• An open letter to the College Board about online, at-home AP tests (April 22, 2020)

• Toward assessment utopias! A call for educational activism to address the issues of power in grading (blog post co-written with Chris Dite)

• Assessment for Inclusion: rethinking inclusive assessment in higher education (Journal of Higher Education)

• www.juusonieminen.com

• On Twitter @JuusoNieminen

• Blog posts on Teachers Going Gradeless:

  • Not Yet Gradeless, but Grading Less

  • Where Do We Go From Here?

  • Different is Not Deficient

  • Avoiding Quit Point

• Vanessa on the web:

  • On Instagram: heymrsellis

  • On Twitter: @heymrsellis

  • On Linktree: @heymrsellis

  • YouTube Channel

TG2 team member, Michelle Cottrell-Williams, interviews Jan McArthur, Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK. Jan’s research focuses on the nature and purposes of higher education and how these relate to practices of teaching, learning, and assessment. Jan McArthur coauthored the piece, A Womanist Approach to Care-Full Feedback, with Ameena L. Payne, which received an overwhelmingly positive reception.

Professor McArthur has a particular interest in critical theory and in her published work explores the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Axel Honneth, applying these to higher education. Her book, Rethinking Knowledge in Higher Education, explores how Adorno’s critical theory can inform our understanding of, and engagement with, knowledge in higher education for the purposes of greater social justice. Her second book, Assessment for Social Justice, uses Honneth's conceptualization of mutual recognition to rethink the nature of assessment in higher education. 

Liz Norell is passionate about great teaching and student success. As a political scientist (well, really, a political psychologist), she's motivated to understand how/why we develop the political beliefs we do...and how to have more productive dialogue across differences. As a faculty member and mentor, she loves brainstorming ways to make classrooms more inclusive, engaging, exciting, relevant, and welcoming spaces for learning. She embraces pedagogies of equity and care, including the full spectrum of ungrading. She loves to talk with other teachers about teaching. You can follow her musings at her blog, www.liznorell.com, and on Twitter @liznorell.

Mike Rutherford is a lifelong teacher and learner. Eight years ago, he returned to the classroom as a middle school English and Social Studies teacher after many years in the education private sector with Blackboard and Just ASK Publications & Professional Development. Prior to his time in the private sector, Mike was a middle school teacher and technology training specialist in Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia, and an EdTech Director for the City of Manassas Public Schools. Mike created gotLearning as a classroom teacher to manage the constant barrage of student learning data coming from so many different sources. Mike lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania with his educator wife, Elizabeth, and two dogs, Luna and Bella, who are two of gotLearning's four official office dogs.

Because ungrading is essentially an emancipatory practice, it cannot be held to one formula or singular standard. Instead, ungrading relies on a robust community of educators to circulate, celebrate, and elevate the practice in its various forms. Lisa Wennerth, welcomes four trailblazing educators—Liz Leininger, Rita Shah, Firas Moosvi, and Taylor Vivanco—whose article “Why There Isn’t One ‘Right Way’ to Practice Ungrading” posits ungrading as a fundamentally open, welcoming, and responsive practice for all—not just the elite few. This podcast originates from an earlier Special Community Gathering, where Lisa first facilitated a discussion with our guests and then opened the floor to questions from participants.

Sarah M. Zerwin teaches Senior Language Arts and AP Lit at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado, and author of the book Point-Less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More. You can follow her blog The Paper Graders and on twitter at @SarahMZerwin

Topics include:

• What led to the idea that points get in the way of learning.
  
• How to identify learning targets and communicate them to students.
  
• How to establish a culture of feedback and maintain it throughout the year.
  
• How to report a final grade at the end of a term.
  

Resources:

• Sarah’s book Point-Less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More.
  
• Sarah’s blog The Paper Graders
  

This episode is the continuation of my conversation with college educators Maha Bali, Jesse Stommel, and Asao B. Inoue (you can listen to the first half here). As college institutions struggle with the implications of COVID-19, it’s important for them to place equity and access at the center of considerations about ways in which college can resume. As Professor Inoue pointed out, however, we also have an opportunity to fundamentally revolutionize the academy and the way we identify and support student success.

Topics include:

• How we can co-create intentionally equitable, hospitable spaces in our institutions
  
• What troubling practices emerged as institutions pivoted to remote education
  
• What does “access” mean, and what is being accessed when we say we are providing more access
  
• How the pandemic has problematized the practice of grading
  
• How institutions must empower and give agency to faculty as they reimagine education within the pandemic
  

In this episode, I sit down with three college educators known for their commitment to creating inclusive, humane educational spaces—both in the classroom and online. All three of them have experimented with different forms of going gradeless as part of this commitment. All three have given considerable thought about teaching under the current pandemic. You can check out Part 2 of this interview here.

Maha Bali is associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She is also the co-founder and co-director of Virtually Connecting, a grassroots movement that organizes hybrid hallway conversations at conferences for virtual participants, and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound, an equity-focused intercultural curriculum for teaching digital literacies. You can find more of Maha’s writing at her blog Reflecting Allowed and follow her on Twitter at @Bali_Maha.

Asao B. Inoue is Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He is the 2019 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He has published a co-edited collection, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and The Advancement of Opportunity, and a book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. You can find more of Asao’s writing at his blog Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words and follow him on Twitter at @AsaoBInoue.

Jesse Stommel is a Digital Learning Fellow and Senior Lecturer of Digital Studies at University of Mary Washington. He is co-founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy. He is co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, and new media. Jesse experiments relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. You can find more of Jesse’s writing at jessestommel.com and follow him on Twitter at @jessifer.

Sheldon L. Eakins, Ph.D. is the founder of the Leading Equity Center and host of the Leading Equity Podcast. With over 11 years in education, he has served as a teacher, principal, and Director of Special Education. Dr. Eakins has a passion for helping educators accomplish equitable practices in their schools. You can follow him on Twitter at @sheldoneakins.

Topics include:

• What is equity and how we make sure it maintains that urgency and doesn’t become another buzzword or checklist
  
• What elements of equity have been most endangered under COVID-19
  
• How to examine distance learning practices from the standpoint of equity
  
• How COVID-19 may have removed certain barriers to equity
  
• How grades undermine efforts toward more equitable, culturally sustaining practices
  
• How educators should respond to ongoing racial injustice and violence
  

• Jay’s blog post Grading in the New Normal: Seizing Hope in a Time of Crisis
  
• #TG2Chat: Grading in the New Normal - May 24, 2020
  
• Jay's TEDx Talk: "Make Grading Point-less: Eliminating Points to Foster Student Motivation"
  

On April 22nd, Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Chris Reykdal, released a video announcing its Do No Harm grading policy. The State’s policy was written to ensure that students were not punished for a situation outside of their control that could impact future opportunities. The policy states that high schools will only give letter grades of A-D, no student can receive an F, and student grades cannot be negatively impacted—they can only improve.

This episode explores three perspectives on grading during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Monte is an English teacher in Chaney, Washington. He is a 2013 Washington State Teacher of the Year finalist, Adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, and the author of the blog Project 180.

Let's Change Education Blog

Dr. Manuel Rustin. Manuel is a high school history teacher in Pasadena California. He is the co-host of the show All of the Above, authors a blog on Medium, where he published his piece, Give them All A’s and the recipient of the Milken Educator Award in 2011.

Dr. Rustin's Blog on Medium

All of the Above Podcast

Ken O’Connor is an education consultant, speaker, and author. Ken’s books include 15 Fixes for Broken Grades and How to Grade for Learning,

O'Connor Grading

Joe Feldman is the author of Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms (Corwin). Joe has worked in education as a teacher, principal, district administrator, and is now founder of Crescendo Education Group, which since 2013 has supported schools in adopting assessment, grading, and reporting practices that improve equity outcomes in schools.

Topics include:

• How Joe came to see equity as the central issue in grading practice
  
• Common grading practices are most susceptible to implicit bias and inequity
  
• How grading policies for remote learning during COVID-19 can mitigate or exacerbate inequities
  
• What we can take from the COVID-19 crisis that could lead to more equitable outcomes in the future
  

Resources:

• gradingforequity.org
  
• Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms
  
• Grading for Equity Online Course
  
• #TG2Chat: Grading for Equity During COVID-19 - April 26, 2020
  
• Panel Discussion on Grading/Crediting Policies During COVID-19: Joe is joined by Denise Pope, Ph.D., Stanford Lecturer and Co-Founder of Challenge Success; Stacy Caldwell, M.A., M.B.A., Executive Director or Mastery Transcript Consortium; and Randall Booker, Superintendent of Piedmont Unified School District.
  
• Open Letter to the College Board on Plan for Online Testing During COVID-19
  

Make sure to join Joe as he moderates #TG2Chat this Sunday, April 26, at 9 pm EDT/6 pm PDT!

• natebowling.com
  
• Teachers United
  
• Nate’s Twitter thread on 2016 Teachers of the Year Finalists
  
• Nate’s testimony to the Washington State Board of Education
  
• Nerd Farmer Podcast
  
• Open Letter to the College Board about Testing During COVID-19
  

• Blog
  
• Twitter
  
• Golbal School Play Day
  

• The Human Restoration Project Website
  
• Twitter
  
• Instagram
  
• Facebook
  

• Skylar’s Blog on Medium
  
• Skylar’s Blog on Teachers Going Gradeless
  
• PBL Works Website
  
• List of articles about Project Based Learning on Edutopia
  
• North American Association for Environmental Education
  
• Green Schools National Network
  

• "1 Week, 170 Conferences"
  
• "In Her Words" (Full interview with Soleil)
  
• Jeff's Blog Site
  

As a teacher/activist, Julia Torres's work is grounded in empowering students to use the Language Arts to fuel resistance and positive social transformation. Ms. Torres facilitates workshops and professional conversations about anti-racist education, social justice, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. She writes about these and other topics at at juliaetorres.blog.

Topics include:

• How Julia uses side-by-side teaching, expert groups, and culturally relevant texts to shift traditional power dynamics in her classroom
  
• How grades foster attitudes of competition, compliance, and insecurity in students of color, dividing them and pitting them against one another
  
• How Julia helps students "unlearn" disempowering attitudes from past experiences
  
• Why implementing progressive practices like going gradeless can be extremely difficult in urban school settings
  
• Why teachers from non-urban settings should visit and learn from teachers in urban settings
  

Resources mentioned:

• Julia's Twitter thread on grades
  
• Going Gradeless in Urban Ed (Teachers Going Gradeless)
  
• On Reading...and Grading (juliaetorres.blog)
  
• Building Bridges (juliaetorres.blog)
  

This episode features an interview with high school student, Bennette Jester, founder of #mygradingstory and author of the website My Grading Story, and advocate of student voice in learning.

Topics include:

• #MyGradingStory
  
• Montessori Education
  
• Student voice in learning
  
• How to motivate students
  

This episode features an interview with Andrew Burnett, middle school math teacher, author of the website BurnettMath, and advocate of The Thinking Classroom.

Topics include:

• Choosing learning targets
  
• Providing feedback
  
• Reporting learning to parents without grades
  
• Building student metacognition
  

This episode features an interview with Dan Scratch, high school social studies teacher, author of the website Teaching for Equity and Social Justice, and advocate of teaching for social justice.

Topics include:

• Why it is important for students to engage in social justice
  
• Building relationships as a foundation for social justice
  
• How social justice impacts classroom management
  
• Applying social justice education in STEM disciplines
  

Countless educators, including many in Teachers Going Gradeless, consider Ken O'Connor one of the first to introduce them to the idea that traditional grades are “broken” and that a better approach is possible. Ken is an independent consultant and author of the book A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades. Just recently, Ken published the fourth edition of his seminal book How to Grade for Learning. I believe I speak for many of us in expressing gratitude to Ken for the profound impact he has had on so many of our teaching practices.

Topics include:

• How Ken's experiences as teacher, curriculum coordinator, and field hockey coach informed his ideas around assessment and grading
  
• Why we should shift our grading practices
  
• Reasons for optimism regarding shifting grading practices in schools
  
• Why going gradeless and standards-based learning are "in the same chapter if not on the same page"
  
• Highlights from the new edition of How to Grade for Learning
  

This episode, I interview Mariana Morales Lobo, who taught high school in Madrid and Barcelona for 15 years, and who now works as a consultant in education, training teachers and helping school leaders implement innovation. One of her main areas of interest is “reinventing playground” spaces, considering the ways these supposedly neutral spaces can be made more equitable. Her writing can be found on the international platform of Práctica Reflexiva.

Topics include:

• The landscape of grading and testing in Spain
  
• Personalization vs. humanization in schools
  
• What teachers going gradeless can learn from playground reform
  
• Why playgrounds are not automatically neutral or equitable spaces
  
• How schools can create more equitable spaces and involve the voices of children
  

This episode features an interview with Alfie Kohn, author of the books Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve, The Homework Myth, and his latest, Schooling Beyond Measure.

Topics include:

• The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
  
• How teachers can leverage extrinsic motivation
  
• Rethinking reluctant learners
  
• "Doing with" rather than "doing to"
  

This episode features an interview with Benjamin Doxtdator, a middle school language arts teacher at an international school in Brussels, Belgium. Benjamin is probably best known for his essays on his blog Longview on Education at longviewoneducation.org.

Topics include:

• How deemphasizing grades reflects Benjamin's commitments as a teacher
  
• The potential pitfalls of a more gradeless future
  
• The rhetoric of education reform, educational technology, and futurism
  
• How tapping into and cultivating community can help us our voice as educators
  

This episode features an interview with Starr Sackstein, author of the book Peer Feedback in the Classroom and Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School.

Topics include:

• What are peer experts?
  
• Why use peer experts?
  
• How to implement peer experts in the classroom
  
• How to maximize the effectiveness of peer experts
  

This episode features an interview with Joy Kirr, author of the book Shift This! How to Implement Gradual Changes for MASSIVE Impact in Your Classroom.

Topics include:

• Why Joy decided to write the book
  
• How to create a positive classroom culture
  
• Dilemmas of grading and reporting learning
  
• How to implement Genius Hour
  
• Other shifts Joy is making after publishing the book
  

This episode features an interview with Jesse Stommel, Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington. He is Co-founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy: a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology. In addition to his focus on digital and critical pedagogy, Jesse has been a gradeless educator for his entire career, as he recounts in his blog post "Why I Don't Grade."

Topics include:

• Why grades are "the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education”
  
• How de-emphasizing grades coincides with a pedagogy of equity and social justice
  
• Why a gradeless space will not automatically be an equitable one
  
• How seemingly neutral platforms can flatten differences and influence pedagogies
  
• How we need to think about going gradeless in order it to be liberatory, transformative, an act of resistance
  

This episode features an interview with Patty McGee, author of the book Feedback That Moves Writers Forward.

Topics include:

• How to use the "Power of Three" in feedback.
  
• Strategies to help the stuck and reluctant writers
  
• The importance of setting writing goals
  
• How and when to introduce grammar
  
• How feedback works at the middle, secondary, and college levels