These are great posts! For what it's worth, I provide the structure of the grade expectations as the course learning goals in three tiers - these goals become the meat of our end-of-semester conferences, which results in them proposing a grade based on what they demonstrated they learned. For an example, here's the syllabus for my recent first-year writing-intensive seminar: https://courses.middlebury.edu/hub/mcug/202290/fyse/1015a/syllabus
Jason, thank you for sharing this! What a fantastic class. I would love to take it myself. This is very helpful, and similar to what I'm doing this semester. I'm curious about how adept you find students are at assessing themselves on these metrics, since, as you know, student self-assessment is something I struggled with. For example, do you find students are well-equipped to evaluate whether or not they have succeeded at "Analyzing television with original insights" or "writing with engaging prose"?
Yeah, that was part of the process of both the ongoing feedback and the final conferences (especially since they were first-years). Whenever possible, I tried to reference the vocabulary from the learning goals in my feedback ("rephrase this to make it more engaging") so they were thinking along those lines. And then when we met, I highlighted the specific ways they met or fell short of goals to help guide them to a reasonable self-assessment. I had few students who were totally off-base (in both directions), but in each case it prompted a meaningful conversation that hopefully they learned from! (I usually did...)
This is really helpful; thanks! I’m wondering how we do this work within the context of secondary education that has such radically different aims and approaches. And, how do we scale this when we teach 3, 4, 5 classes a semester with enrollments of 60-125.
Big questions! I am totally unqualified to speak about secondary education, but I know the folks at Teachers Going Gradeless (https://www.teachersgoinggradeless.com/) and some of the contributors to Susan Blum's book Ungrading address those concerns. While I don't have personal experience of ungrading at scale, I have seen it done by others. This typically involves only meeting individually with students whose grade expectations are not necessarily in line with the instructor's. And then, of course, there are all kinds of alternative grading schemes that may or may not be what folks think of when they think of "ungrading." I've seen two recent conversations about mastery assessment in large STEM courses for example (https://gradingforgrowth.com/p/case-study-mastery-testing-at-scale and https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13498658-mastery-assessment-with-eden-tanner).
These are great posts! For what it's worth, I provide the structure of the grade expectations as the course learning goals in three tiers - these goals become the meat of our end-of-semester conferences, which results in them proposing a grade based on what they demonstrated they learned. For an example, here's the syllabus for my recent first-year writing-intensive seminar: https://courses.middlebury.edu/hub/mcug/202290/fyse/1015a/syllabus
Jason, thank you for sharing this! What a fantastic class. I would love to take it myself. This is very helpful, and similar to what I'm doing this semester. I'm curious about how adept you find students are at assessing themselves on these metrics, since, as you know, student self-assessment is something I struggled with. For example, do you find students are well-equipped to evaluate whether or not they have succeeded at "Analyzing television with original insights" or "writing with engaging prose"?
Yeah, that was part of the process of both the ongoing feedback and the final conferences (especially since they were first-years). Whenever possible, I tried to reference the vocabulary from the learning goals in my feedback ("rephrase this to make it more engaging") so they were thinking along those lines. And then when we met, I highlighted the specific ways they met or fell short of goals to help guide them to a reasonable self-assessment. I had few students who were totally off-base (in both directions), but in each case it prompted a meaningful conversation that hopefully they learned from! (I usually did...)
This is really helpful; thanks! I’m wondering how we do this work within the context of secondary education that has such radically different aims and approaches. And, how do we scale this when we teach 3, 4, 5 classes a semester with enrollments of 60-125.
Big questions! I am totally unqualified to speak about secondary education, but I know the folks at Teachers Going Gradeless (https://www.teachersgoinggradeless.com/) and some of the contributors to Susan Blum's book Ungrading address those concerns. While I don't have personal experience of ungrading at scale, I have seen it done by others. This typically involves only meeting individually with students whose grade expectations are not necessarily in line with the instructor's. And then, of course, there are all kinds of alternative grading schemes that may or may not be what folks think of when they think of "ungrading." I've seen two recent conversations about mastery assessment in large STEM courses for example (https://gradingforgrowth.com/p/case-study-mastery-testing-at-scale and https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13498658-mastery-assessment-with-eden-tanner).