Tuesday Teaching Tips #13 04/30/24

Welcome to the Tuesday Teaching Tip

Each week, the Faculty Collaborative for Teaching will bring you an easy-to-implement tool that you can use immediately in your classroom teaching. The goals of these tips will be to add to your teaching toolbox, share resources on teaching, and alert you to upcoming teaching and learning opportunities from the Faculty Collaborative.

TUESDAY TEACHING TIP: Ungrading

Labor-based grading, and the related practice of ungrading, involves providing students with assessment and feedback, but not grades, on individual assignments. Ungrading can be an inclusive and anti-racist practice that supports all students, but is particularly beneficial to first-generation and low-income students, and students of color (Inoue, 2019). The benefits are grounded in the fact that it allows students and teachers to value effort and persistence towards learning, to operationalize effective learning behaviors, and to emphasize learning over grades. But it can be intimidating to imagine taking on a whole new grading system all at once.

Today’s tip focuses on ways you can emphasize feedback, name successful actions you’d like students in your class to take, and assess student learning outside of grades.

This week, we invite you to try out one of these strategies in order to see how labor based grading might work for you and your class. We invite you to operationalize and name the actions effective students might be rewarded for taking in your class and put the emphasis on feedback and learning through assessment rather than just assigning grades. We suspect that students will benefit from the clarity and feedback and you might find you benefit from the shift in energy towards supporting learning processes over the effort of judging learning outcomes. Anyone, regardless of topic or course, can try out at least one of these strategies with your assignments.

Here’s one way to do it

Operationalize “participation.” While “participation” is a valuable form of effort and engagement in many of our classes, it often goes unspecified. Labor-based grading encourages us to specify what “participation” might look like, and to imagine the potentially diverse ways students might “participate” or “engage” with your course materials productively. Examples might include taking notes and submitting them after class, submitting more than the required number of reading responses, creating a resource to support their classmates’ learning, or asking a generative question during class discussion. Providing students with a list of alternative ways to engage in class or to engage with class material outside of class helps students understand what kinds of behaviors are valued in the classroom, and gives you something more concrete to “count” towards this aspect of their grade.
Choose one assignment or assignment sequence that you might assess, but not grade. That is, where might you change the grading system in Camino to complete/incomplete, or provide a rubric with required criteria for completion (such as parts of an answer you’re looking for, or actions that you want to see them take). You can provide feedback in the comments box, but then you would assign credit based simply on whether students meet the expectations of the assignment, not the relative extent to which they do so.
Provide an opportunity for revision on a writing assignment or examination. This isn’t quite labor-based grading, but it connects to the value of providing feedback and then valuing the effort students put into their learning processes. By revising, students are able to apply what they learned via your feedback, and they show their commitment to learning by returning to their work to try again.
Build in peer feedback on an assignment. You aren’t the only one who can provide feedback on student learning or writing. By setting up opportunities for peer feedback, students learn by assessing one another. This is valuable learning work, which you can show you value by providing credit to it. If you want to review the feedback students give to one another, this is a great opportunity to teach them how to give good feedback, outside of grading.
Allow students to do an open-notes exam. This prioritizes preparation, and shifts the emphasis to application of knowledge over memorization.

Additional Resources

If you eventually want to incorporate peer feedback more robustly into your course assignment designs, consider adopting Eli Review as a course resource. This is a peer feedback system that structures feedback opportunities for students, with a diverse range of feedback types available, from comments to likert scales to criteria checklists. It also features the opportunity for the instructor to provide feedback on the feedback by “endorsing” comments. Eli Review is available by subscription for a small fee to students.

DID YOU DO IT?

Let us know how it went. We would love to hear your feedback about how you implemented today’s Tuesday Teaching Tip in your classroom. Click here to fill out our 3-question survey.

WANT TO READ A LITTLE MORE?

This week’s Tuesday Teaching Tip was prepared by Amy Lueck on behalf of the Faculty Collaborative.

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