ZingerLearns @ZingerLearns@social.cleverlibre.org

As an educator who loves to teach but hates to grade, I'm curious to hear others' experiences with #ungrading.

Via @TheConversationUS

#Academia

https://theconversation.com/i-no-longer-grade-my-students-work-and-i-wish-i-had-stopped-sooner-179617?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jan%201%20%20Weekly%20Highlights&utm_content=Jan%201%20%20Weekly%20Highlights+CID_ae97cb58f1fb798c2c5ba7560f74b97f&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=I%20no%20longer%20grade%20my%20students%20work%20%20and%20I%20wish%20I%20had%20stopped%20sooner

@cadida @TheConversationUS I prefer feedback to grading. Feedback to me consists of choosing something that moves the students’ development in each assignment. Of course as a literacy specialist I work with students in small groups, which makes this kind of instruction easier. #ungrading

Equally empowering and disastrous is how I see it after three years (500 students, 60 semesters worth of total course load) of ungrading. I am going to modify the ungrading or flipped grading with a more flexible system. For many students and fellow educators, ungrading is unnatural, confusing and even bad practice that challenges institutional norms. Many students complain that they have now to do more work, ie, reading the lecturer’s response and then think for themselves, where they could ‘just’ get a grade and ‘done with’. It’s a risky practice with students with inflated ego and who think university is same as high school. Works well with motivated, good students (who are A students anyway) and mature students.

On the plus side, it’s an emancipation and perhaps the most robust system one can think of. Teaching is enjoyable and students, when they realise that the grading is flexible and negotiated between the teacher and then, focus on the learning aspect. Most students tend to be harsh on themselves, so teaching them to assess themselves is a plus.

In summary, I will make some compromises. Make the grading system a whole lot flexible, and instead of entirely ditching rubrics (as Stommel et.al. suggests), introduce a mastery rubric. I think there are merits of old grading system that can be combined with ungrading practices. I am still figuring out that compromise.

There you go. What is your experience?

#Ungrading

Hey #ungrading folk, every semester doing this is a bit different. Last semester at the end I had a really hard time with comparing students. Like, thinking to myself “you don’t deserve that grade, especially if x said they deserve a lower grade.” In the end I deferred to the student.

How do you help students develop the metacognition necessary to grade themselves?

@drbixby I remind myself that I’m not supposed to rank and sort them; I remind myself that learning looks different to everyone. It sounds like you want their assessment of themselves to match your assessment of them, and it probably won’t. I’ve had to remind myself of this, too. #ungrading

1. The Bills' Damar Hamlin is reportedly showing "signs of improvement" after collapsing on the field Monday night.

Hopefully, he makes a full recovery.

And no, the NFL will never be safe.

But hopefully, the NFL takes this opportunity to make it safer.

🧵

I'm doing #ungrading again.

Because I can't realistically keep a sense of the progress of each of 50+ students in my head, I give a number for each assignment:

0: Turned in nothing or a blank document.
1: Significantly incomplete.
2: Basically complete. For programming assignments, passes all unit tests.
3: Above and beyond -- perhaps tackled an optional challenge problem.

Several 0s and 1s indicate a problem to be addressed. 2 is by far the most common result. If a student wants to argue for an A, they should have a few 3s.

**The question: should I show these numbers to the students?**

Pro: It give them a sense of how they're doing, and therefore how much energy they need to allocate to this class.

Con: They will look at the number, think of it as a "grade", and pay no attention to written feedback.

Thoughts?

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Professors tend to have been high-performing students or loved learning or both. They self-select into the pool, even as others select them for PhD slots or jobs.

The students who interact the most with profs are also self-selected, or other-selected (e.g., as in competitive RA-ships), to be good students or to love learning or both.

These selection and self-selection processes mean that professors are likely to be pretty terrible judges of what motivates most of our students.

Just saying.

Good: accomplishing with clean electricity what we used to do with fossil fuels

Even better: reimagining how we live together so that the most well being is created by the least amount of (clean, obviously) energy

Eg: you can swap an EV for a gasoline vehicle on congested roads without reimagining transportation and housing. Or you can have just the right amount of EVs for a walkable, bikable dense, multi-use, public transit rich community

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Community colleges suffer from employee shortages

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/04/community-colleges-suffer-employee-shortages

#HigherEd

NEW: Sunil Singh writes about how mastery education is not compatible with the current time-gated, test-based structure of school. #restorehumanity #edchat #tg2chat @Mathgarden

https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/writing/the-myth-of-mastery-learning-in-education

California police more than twice as likely to use force against Black people

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/03/california-police-force-against-black-people-report

FROM noozhawk.com - NWS Issues Flood Watch for Santa Barbara County Ahead of Rainstorm
Montecito Fire Protection District urges residents to monitor the weather, check storm impact map for potential debris flow risk, and have an evacuation plan by Giana Magnoli, Noozhawk Managing Editor
January 3, 2023 | 1:03 pm
https://www.noozhawk.com/
#SBA #SantaBarbara #CAwx

California caregivers are worried about the safety and academic success of their children as public health orders are rolled back and students return to schools, according to survey findings released by PRB’s KidsData program.
https://www.kidsdata.org/blog/?p=10522
#California #Education #COVID19 #CSHCN #CYSHCN #Data #Survey @edutooters @publichealth

As a scholar of dystopia, allow me to say this makes no sense at all.

Remember when right wing speakers were being "canceled" because students didn't want those guest speakers to show up on their study activity fees?

It was a threat to intellectual freedom!

Where is that energy for COURSES and RESEARCH that's being canceled over this CRT panic?

Also, instructors unions should be meeting and planning actions to back these profs up. Everyone should pull all the courses.

@ZingerLearns @DrAnneCarpenter @academicchatter

agree - and was surprised at how manageable my inbox was as I started working again today. Seems like people really took a break.

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