Today we have a guest post from Dr Terry Hathaway who (un?)justly blames me for his recent excellent work!
Terry works at the University of York, teaching Norwegians about the wonders of British culture, politics, and pubs. His primary research focus is the power of corporations, which he is currently writing a book on. You can find Terry on Bluesky at @terryhathaway.bsky.social or contact him at terry.hathaway -at- york.ac.uk
I did something rather stupid recently. I listened to a paper at the PSA Teaching and Learning Network conference and, unfortunately, was inspired
The misfortune with this inspiration is that it meant much more work, and it meant much more work just before term started when I had roughly zero time on my hands. The lesson of the story is, clearly, don’t be inspired (and certainly don’t go to the PSA TLN conference or you too could be inspired by great teachers).
My inspiration was Cathy Elliott and Chris Holmes’s talk on “Ungrading in a Graded World” which in turn drew inspiration from the book Ungrading, edited by Susan Blum. I have to admit, at the start I was sceptical because ungrading is a terrible name. But the point that really sold me in their talk was when they said that “Ungrading only happens in a graded world”. That is, at least as I understood it, ungrading is part of swimming against the flow of the tyranny of metrics that has undermined the learning process by focusing teachers and students alike on outputs, which are then authoritatively judged and lined up on a scale in an effort to make education and students, as James C. Scott would say, legible. Or something like that, at least.
Getting back from the conference with a week to spare before term, I convinced my (very small) department that we should change our assessment practice to de-emphasise the judgemental nature of final output grading and to instead emphasise student self-reflection and self-assessment.
A week of scrambling around (and looking at university policy) produced our new practices of dialogic assessment and negotiated graded. To be fair, this sounds like more change than it was. We have a small number of students and have long assessed them by way of research essay on a topic of their choosing, and with multiple rounds of drafts and feedback – we already had a lot of dialogue going on.
What we’ve added is dialogue in the final submission process. Now, at the end of term students will still submit final essays, but a week after the final essay they will also submit a form reflecting on how they thought they did, things they thought they could improve on, and that suggests a final grade. My great hope is that the grades they give themselves will be defensible and reasonable, and that they genuinely reflect on their own work.
Student self-reflection and self-assessment, though, will take support. I started this process by beginning my module (which is on power in society) by getting my students to stand up, balance on one leg, and put a hand on their head. All of them complied, and when asked why (they were still balancing with hands on their heads at this point) the first response was “Because you’re the one who grades us”. I couldn’t have hit the nail more squarely on the head as to the power dynamics of the classroom, and of the education system as a whole, that I was trying to highlight – that grades are a mechanism of power and control of teachers over students, and that’s what I want to dismantle in my classroom.
Plans are afoot for further investigations with my students into the power of evaluative frameworks, how grading works emotionally, and how it can shape our identities. My aim is also to start moving towards a shared framework of what “good work” is to aid their own evaluation of their work.
So, in our ungrading we haven’t gone gradeless. There are so many systems, both internal and external, into which grades fit and that are beyond our power to reform. We also haven’t entirely abandoned the power structure of grading, since we ultimately reserve the right to change the final grade that students get. But, we have tried to reshape the relationship of the classroom to deemphasise the power of the teacher and the disciplinary nature of grading. How successful we are, well, we’ll have to wait and see.
Super post, Terry. For too long, people have only spoken about the benefits of learning from others’ good practice. I am glad someone has finally been brave enough to talk about the dangers of pedagogic inspiration.
But really – best of luck with this great innovation. Looking forward to hearing more about how it goes and about this framework for understand “good work”.
My co-author, Chris Holmes (who weirdly seems to have escaped all the blame here?!), actually has a paper coming out with Jayne Pearson from KCL about student self-evaluation. They conclude that students are really good at self-evaluation when given appropriate scaffolding BUT once you introduce self-grading into the process, they get bad at it! Writing this comment has made me think that I must get them to write an ALPS blog about this….
I’m surprised the editor didn’t catch the problem with the title, actually. As they possibly say, a writer is only as good as their editor.
I think the editor might have thought you were paying me a compliment (in a very English way….) and decided to let it stand! 😀 (I don’t know if you have to explain this to your Norwegian students? I once had a Czech friend who said, ‘I think I have definitely got it now! Everything you say is either an understatement or an overstatement. Or you mean the opposite. Or sometimes you actually mean what you say. Now I just have to learn to distinguish between the four.’)
“getting my students to stand up, balance on one leg, and put a hand on their head. All of them complied”
Love this, was just talking to a class about Weber’s three types of authority on Monday. I’ll run this experiment later this week and find out if I’m charismatic, traditional, or rational-legal.
Nice. I’ve increasingly found abusing power in a small way is a good way to demonstrate it. How did it work for you?