This past October, we hosted an event in the Open Colab on ungrading. It was clear from the number of people who attended in person, watched online, or followed-up with us afterwards that there is growing interest in these alternative assessment techniques at PSU and beyond.This coming February, the CoLab will be participating in an online Webinar on ungrading for our colleagues across the state. As we prepare for that event and look back on this fall’s workshop, we see an opportunity to gather voices and resources around this topic that we can then share back out with our wider PSU, New Hampshire, and virtual audiences.
We invite anyone to participate in helping us to create and curate a collection around the vitally important question of how assessment impacts teaching and learning in our classrooms.
Share Your Voice
We believe that one of the most powerful ways of supporting each other’s work, particularly when tackling new techniques or challenging old paradigms, is through sharing our stories and experiences. Share your story about ungrading on Twitter with the #colabungrading hashtag. (If you’re not on Twitter, feel free to leave your contribution as a comment below.)
Not sure where to start? Consider one of these provocations:
Tell us Your Story
Tell us about your own experience with ungrading.
Answer a Question
Consider some common questions that we get asked about ungrading, and offer your own answer.
- How do you introduce your students to the concept of ungrading?
- How do you tackle ungrading in larger classrooms (greater than 30-40 students)?
- How do you approach ungrading in "content-rich" disciplines?
- How do you let go of your own traditional mindset about grading?
- How do you maintain "fairness" in an ungraded classroom?
Share a Resource
Do you have a perfect article that introduced you to ungrading? Have you created a great model for a self-assessment tool? Are you particularly proud of the language you've included in your own syllabus about ungrading?
Share a link to your favorite resource and we'll share it further.
We will be collecting and curating all of the stories and resources you contribute into a resource which will be available by the February event. Please note that this resource will be released with a CC-BY license and that by contributing (via Twitter or in a comment below), you agree to let us use your work this way.
One Comment
Hello, I am not 100% that what I have to share is right in line with what you need for this event, but I thought I might share anyway. A few years ago, I took an IDEO course on Storytelling for Influence, and I produced this audio piece about unteaching and ungrading, mostly about finding a way to disappear at the right moment to cultivate student autonomy. Most of this audio piece is the voices of former students, who were, at the time, 4 years or so out of school. They talk quite a bit about their challenges with these approaches but their ultimate growth. I am on Twitter, but I prefer sharing here first because of the student voices. I have their permission to use their recordings, but I didn’t want to launch them onto the open internet.
http://www.toddpetersen.org/ideo-storytelling-for-influence