OpenEd19 – Roundtable on Ungrading

Roundtable submission for #OpenEd19

Update: Roundtable accepted.

Following review by the Program Committee, I am pleased to inform you that your submission entitled ‘Roundtable on #Ungrading‘ has been accepted for presentation as a Roundtable (25 minutes).

Now to get to work on this. I require help here colleagues!

Work in Progress

Please feel free to contribute, suggest planning for this, let me know if you would like to participate onsite or remotely. This is not my roundtable, I’m just providing a space to have this discussion during the #OpenEd19 conference if this roundtable is accepted.

Context

I have personally been working in an #Ungrading (or #AbolishGrading) environment in my classes since January 2016. I’ve written some about this after my initial inspiration of the late Joe Bower and the “Abolish Grading” section of his still active website “for the love of learning”. My practice at this has evolved during these three years and I have documented a little of my practice on my personal blog. Links to those provided in the references section.

There is an active community on Twitter of educators practicing #Ungrading and a recent article on April 1st in “Inside Higher Ed” titled “When Grading Less is More” gave more visibility to the teachers actively working on this in their classrooms and their research.  I was invited to submit a last minute contribution to that “Insider Higher Ed” article along with educators with much more experience than myself writing about this topic. Dr. Susan Blum is currently editing a book on this subject which includes a chapter contributed by Laura Gibbs. Laura shared her chapter with me and I did a critical reading of that chapter with my current semester students.

There are varied definitions of the term #ungrading (or as Joe Bower preferred to call this #AbolishGrading) and a varied mix of practices across teachers practicing this.  The day after the publication of the “Insider Higher Ed” article, Yishay Mor sent a call out on Twitter to create an “Ungrading Manifesto” which is the early stages. There is much work to be done and I believe that a roundtable to work on this topic would be relevant to the OpenEd19 community.

Goals

I prefer to leave the planning of details of the roundtable to the participants and hope to gather a group before the event to contribute to framing the discussion. The roundtable is really a central location to give visibility to the topic and the educators working in this. A short 25 minute session gives us time to share where we are and where we plan to go individually and as a group. Working on the “Ungrading Manifesto” could be a goal.

I also plan to involve remote participants. I have experience doing this with my work over the years on Virtually Connecting and plan to put those skills into practice during this session.

References

• Joe Bower‘s blog and the section on “Abolish Grading“.
• “Inside Higher Ed” article “When Grading Less is More“.
• Yishay Mor’s call for an “Ungrading Manifesto“.
• The “Ungrading Manifesto” shared Google Document.
• Virtually Connected website.
• Ken’s blog post “Teaching Evaluation Comments: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly“.
• Ken’s blog post for his CIIE 2016 conference presentation, “Giving Students an Authentic Voice“.
• Ken’s blog post on plans for creating “A Critical Gradebook” WordPress plugin.
• Ken’s full blog post contribution to the “Inside Higher Ed” article: “#Ungrading, Rest and Reboot“.

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