Heather Mitchell-Buck

teaching, technology, & medieval stuff

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a dubious anniversary

photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

There are many days that we could claim as a milestone to acknowledge the change that COVID has brought to our lives and to our world. But today, March 17, is the one that’s most meaningful to me. On this day a year ago, I worked my last full day on campus, running workshops for my Hood colleagues as we all worked like mad trying to move our courses online. When we first started planning those workshops a week beforehand, we thought, “oh, we’ll order lunch for everyone – surely most folx will want to meet in-person.” We reconsidered and rethought that decision (and dozens, hundreds more in both the short- and long-term) and in the end, I saw only a small handful of my fellow teachers on campus that day.

When I came home to get dinner before my evening workshop, there was a flyer in our mail slot from the local Irish pub just a couple of blocks from our house, advertising a special takeout menu for St Pat’s in lieu of the usual wall-to-wall celebration that usually happens there every year. We called in an order that was the first of many takeout meals over the past year (and many more to come as we continue to support our favorite local restaurants in downtown Frederick!).

The scale of grief and loss over the past year is hard to process. None of us would have ever, ever wanted this to happen. There’s precious little to celebrate about this pandemic.

But to all of my fellow educators who are still working like mad trying to give your students the best possible education in spite of everything, I see you. I thank you. I celebrate you.

To all of the students out there doing your best to learn and grow and be stronger than this pandemic, I see you. I thank you. I celebrate you.

To everyone out there who’s still struggling to navigate everything that COVID has brought into your life, I see you. I thank you. I celebrate you.

Keep wearing your masks and washing your hands. Find a few minutes today and every day to care for others and for yourself. Get vaccinated when you can. Do all you can do so that we can all gather safely again together SOON: to be in classrooms where we can learn and laugh and move the desks around to do some group work; to have that lunch meeting that has been on hold for the past year; to hug our friends and family both near and far.

Hang in there, friends. We can do this.

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continued adventures in ungrading

The past academic year has been a challenge for all of us!

COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on our world and on our learning communities, which is not something ANY of us would have wanted. But as it has forced us to rethink the ways that we teach and learn, I’ve been getting more questions from colleagues and friends about my ungrading process. So I thought I would share this video of a talk I gave on my home campus, Hood College, last fall (back when we could all safely get together for an in-person conversation, which now seems like another lifetime, doesn’t it?).

And yes, I am still happily ungrading!

Adventures in Ungrading

Why do we grade? Why shouldn’t we rethink this whole system and make it better for students AND teachers?

Slides

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adventures in ungrading

In the 2018-2019 academic year, I did not grade a single assignment or project.

No, I was not on sabbatical. I was ungrading.

a woman sits on a bed. her hair and books fly all around her. she looks free.
image by Pexels from Pixabay

what is ungrading?

I’ve struggled to come up with a pithy and accurate definition for myself. Here’s my best shot (for now, at least):

“Ungrading” is an attempt to focus our (both teachers’ and students’) attention on learning, rather than schooling:

  • to make process and progress as important as products…
  • and to actively involve students in the important task of reflecting on and evaluating their own work…
  • so that we can rethink the power hierarchies of the classroom…
  • in order to help our learning spaces become more open and equitable.

There are lots of folks out there who have more experience with this process than I do. If you’re not familiar with the basic idea of ungrading, please pause here and go read two blog posts by Jesse Stommel: “Why I Don’t Grade,” and “How to Ungrade.” (You can also check out the resources at the end of this post.)

OK, now that all that wisdom is tucked away inside your head, you’re ready to hear a bit about my experience. It’s a long post, so thanks in advance for your patience and interest! 😉

why did I do it?

There are so many reasons why I decided to make the switch to ungrading. I started my own undergraduate career at Hampshire College and I still believe in their system. Ultimately, it really boils down to this truth:

grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education … [they] are currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction. Grading is a massive co-ordinated effort to take humans out of the educational process.

— Jesse Stommel

In many ways, it wasn’t THAT big of a change for me. I’ve been practicing a lot of the philosophy behind ungrading in my classes for a long time now. I ask everyone to be a full human person in my classroom. I trust my students. I see myself as their co-learner. I encourage them to take as much agency in their learning as they can. I try to make the projects in my classes relevant and useful, rather than just disposable busywork that has no relation to the rest of their life. I don’t take attendance or police their screens or think of my class as the most important space they inhabit. I give lots of written comments on student work and I try to make those comments encouraging, conversational, and growth-oriented, rather than just corrective.

And it felt SO GOOD not to have to put that letter at the end of all of that feedback. I know that students are busy, and I get why they skip over the commentary and just look for the letter that they have been told determines their future and measures their worth. And for the students who do read my comments (oh so carefully!), it was a relief not to field the questions that arise when it seems the comments don’t align with the grade: “But you said all of these great things about my paper – why did it only get a B?” or “If I got an A, why did you have so many suggestions for how I could improve? Wasn’t my paper good?”

Y’all, this is one of the best things I have ever done as a teacher.

a woman with a brown umbrella jumps in front of a yellow plank wall
image by Edu Lauton on Unsplash

how did I do it?

The biggest question people have asked me about all of this (some with real interest, and some with a liberal helping of snark) is how did it work?

setup

Once I made the decision to ungrade, I jumped in with both feet. I implemented this in all four classes I taught last year (because I have administrative responsibilities, I am currently on a reduced teaching load; full-time faculty at Hood teach 21 credits per year, aka a 4-3 load). n.b. This may not be the wisest way to begin ungrading, especially if you are nervous about how it will go or face any kind of precarity in your employment situation. You can always start with a single class or even a single project and scale up from there.

My courses last year were a first-year seminar on fairy tales, an upper-level course primarily for English majors on the history and basic linguistics of the English language, a gen-ed course on medieval romance, and an upper-level English and honors seminar that explores utopia from Plato through the 21st century. So about as diverse a group of students as I ever teach.

On my syllabi, I’ve always had a section called “How do I earn my final grade?” that lists the projects and the grade breakdown and so forth. I added the following caveat at the top of this section:

This course is going to work a little differently than most of the others you’ve taken; you will receive extensive feedback from me on all of your projects, but—because much of the work we do in college (and in life) is invisible to the teachers (and bosses, and coworkers and so on) who only get to see your final product—YOU will be responsible for helping me evaluate your progress before any grades are recorded.

I know that this may feel weird or even a little anxiety-inducing for some of you. That’s OK. We’ll work through it together. As a start, here’s the work you’ll be responsible for completing this semester, and the extent to which each aspect will contribute to your final grade.

I also talked a lot with students about this in the early days of the class (and throughout the semester) and made sure that everyone had all the info they needed to know about how this was going to work before the end of the add/drop period.

projects & evaluations

In my four classes, I had a wide variety of different kinds of projects (I really don’t like the word “assignments,” but that’s a convo for another day) – everything from blog posts to videos, from Old English translations to sentence diagram homework, from essays to exams.

I accept (nearly) all student work electronically through our LMS. I set up every project to be graded “complete/incomplete” (though in Blackboard you are still required to associate point values with each assignment, so I still had to choose a number of points to associate with each project, which feels disingenuous to me).

I read and commented on projects as per usual, but with perhaps a greater freedom and a more conversational tone, as I knew that students would be providing their own commentary on the projects too. I marked all projects “complete” in Blackboard and uploaded my feedback as a PDF as I’ve always done.

At midterm and again at the end of the semester, I asked every student to write a self-evaluation by answering a series of questions. These varied a bit from class to class, but I always asked students to reflect on their greatest strengths and their biggest struggles ,as well as to share a bit about how they were making progress in their own learning and/or had made a contribution to others’ learning. I also asked for them to reflect briefly on their work on each project as well as on their engagement in the class. The questions were more directive for first-year students than for upper-level students, and if anyone would like to see examples of my self-eval questions, I’m very happy to share.

At midterm, I read and responded to their self-evaluations. This response included a note about where I thought they stood in terms of their overall project grade as well as their engagement grade (which is a key component of all of my classes), based on our shared reflections on their work. There was also quite a bit of one-on-one conferencing at this time of the semester, required in the FYS; highly encouraged in the other classes.

At the end of the semester, I asked each student at the end of their self-evaluation what grade they felt their work and engagement had earned in the course overall. These were largely honest and direct, sometimes raw, and occasionally much too self-deprecatory, especially among women and students of color, who are often accustomed to having their work and their voices undervalued. I, like others who practice ungrading, always reserve the privilege of recording an appropriate grade if a student’s self-grading is not spot-on, and that was done more often than when a student had been too harsh with herself and deserved a higher grade than she thought.

a woman's hair and red scarf blow in the breeze at sunset
image by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

what were the results?

Of course we always want the results – did it pay off? I can, of course, compare my grade distribution reports to those from previous semesters, but this is neither the most helpful nor most revealing way of answering this question. Here are some qualitative, anecdotal results that I hope convince you that this was, in fact, super-duper worth it.

  • For the first time ever in a gen-ed class, I had not one single “low grade” at midterm – our collective agency and engagement in the process ensured that no one got left behind.
  • I saw no more and no fewer late or missing projects in my FYS than in previous semesters. However, the students who struggled with chronic deadline aversion were SO MUCH MORE AWARE of why this was a problem. They understood what opportunities they missed, and reflected on how important it was for them to turn things around in future semesters.
  • Students in my History of the English language class were much more confident in their Old English translations, phonetic transcriptions, and other activities that have previously been difficult for the highly-motivated and extremely risk-averse students who tend to enroll in this course. Because there was no risk of failure, they were more willing to tackle the unfamiliar.
  • Reading self-evaluations gave me a glimpse into my students’ lives and taught me about the barriers so many of our students face. I learned how to better honor what it means to be a student with a disability, a student who is a non-native English speaker, a first-generation college student, a student who has been told by her teachers that she can’t write, a student with too many family responsibilities, a student who can’t afford to put gas in her car to commute to school if she buys all of her textbooks, and so on. For these students especially, learning about and understanding their process was ESSENTIAL in evaluating their work – these are the students I believe are best-served by ungrading.
  • I had amazing conversations with students about the way that school and grades affect their physical and mental health – and was elated to see many of them recognize how much unnecessary power they had allowed grades to hold over their own self-worth and future hopes and dreams.

I could go on, but I’ve been sitting here writing this post for much too long and I need to do some concrete course planning for this fall before I’m allowed to call it a day!

tl;dr

My adventure in ungrading has been phenomenal for me thus far and I can also say with certainty that it has been eye-opening for my students. I absolutely plan to continue the experiment, and to do so with a critical mindset (e.g., I’m not convinced that “ungrading” is actually the best name for this process – I would prefer a positive term to a negative one, for a start!). I expect my process to change. I want my students to help me make it better. I look forward to sharing more with my colleagues and friends and to learning from their questions – both the positive and the skeptical.

To that end, if you’d like to chat about ungrading or teaching in general, please do reach out via email or social media or, if you’re local, over a glass of wine or cup of tea.

resources

Want to keep thinking about the whys of ungrading? Here are the recommended readings from Jesse Stommel’s DPL Toronto track:

And here are some great essays and blog posts where folks talk about their experience ungrading:

And of course you can always check out #ungrading on Twitter.

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thoughts on a new academic year

I gave Hood’s Convocation address this year. Here are my thoughts on beginning the new academic year…

It’s very tempting, standing up here on this podium in my fancy robes, to follow the example of Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore. His idea of how to kick off the academic year was to say: “a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!”

But lest you all think I’m just as mad as Harry thought Dumbledore was when he encountered him for the first time, I do feel like I ought to say just a bit more than that.

It’s hard to give advice, and maybe even harder to take it. So I’m going to ease us into it by starting with a little trivia.

My favorite form of wordplay is what we word nerds call “portmanteaux.” If you’ve ever been hangry, worn jeggings, taken a staycation, petted a labradoodle, done any cosplay, watched a sitcom, or read a blog about Brexit (or Brangelina), then you know what a portmanteau is: it’s when you take two words and smoosh them together to make a new one, and the results are usually pretty darn satisfying.

We humans are always making up new words; our language is always changing, and that’s exactly as it should be. Things would get pretty boring otherwise. As someone who studies the long history of the English Language, I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is in no way a new phenomenon. Languages are living entities – they have to change to meet the needs of the people who speak them, and the world that they inhabit. If languages don’t change, they die.

Language change works because it happens within an established pattern and within a set of known parameters. You can’t just make up a random set of syllables and expect people to know what you’re trying to say. If I were to say to you: “yulika, shedagit, mifesush, urorasu” … then what? (If nothing else, you’d probably be thinking that “nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak” was making a heck of a lot more sense than it did a couple of minutes ago!). Or even if I took two words that you know – for example, “minimize” and “conclude” – and just stuck them together with no context or reason, it still wouldn’t work (Conclize? Miniclude? NOPE).

But what does any of this — fascinating though it may be—have to do with y’all sitting out there, about to begin a new year at Hood College?

It’s simple: like our language, if we want to survive and succeed, we have to evolve. We can’t stay in our comfort zone. We can’t limit ourselves to what we’re already good at, whether that’s math or writing or soccer or drawing or binge-watching The Office or eating a whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s in one sitting. We have to try new stuff. If you’re generally a quiet person, you still need to find ways to make your voice heard – maybe you should think about taking a theatre class (that’s what helped me!). If you’re usually the first one to raise your hand in class, you have to also learn how to make space for others in a discussion and listen to what they have to say. Otherwise, you’re just treading water.

For most of us, change is difficult. It feels risky, and it makes us uncomfortable. But even Latin, which arguably hasn’t had a native speaker in hundreds of years, is getting new vocabulary for the 21st century. And if someone can figure out how to say jelly doughnut in Latin (in case you’re curious, it’s libum transatlanticum baccarum conditura confertum), then yes, you can change, too.

The good news is that a liberal-arts college like Hood is an ideal place to take those risks and work through that discomfort—not just because you’re part of a community here at Hood, and we’re all growing and changing together—but also because that’s exactly what a liberal arts education is for. If you’ll allow me one more teensy bit of Latin, the artes liberales are the skills we need to be free people, able to think independently and contribute to our society. A liberal arts education isn’t so much about the content of what you’re learning; it’s more about the skills (the artes) that you develop as part of the learning process. To riff off of Peter Abelard (who was an amazing teacher and scholar from the 12th century), a liberal-arts education teaches us how to develop the skills of inquiry and critical thinking that allow us to push beyond the boundaries of what we already know in order to create new ways of understanding the world

Today’s employers sound a lot like Peter Abelard – they’re looking for folks who can think critically and creativity, who can work with a team, who can solve problems, and who can deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. That last one is super important because none of us knows what the future holds. We don’t know what the career landscape is going to look like 10 or 25 years from now. So we have to be ready for change.

But if we want these changes and evolutions in our lives to succeed, they need to have a strong foundation. Just as with languages, we need a set of parameters to work within. You can’t just decide to run a marathon tomorrow if you’ve never run a mile (don’t forget that the original dude who tried that back in Greece in 490 BCE collapsed and died at the end of the run). So I’m going to conclude my comments today with one last portmanteau that I think can help you establish those parameters and make a space in your life for productive, lasting, and slightly-less-scary change.

That portmanteau is habitude, which is (as it sounds) a combo of habit and attitude. Credit here goes to Angela Maiers; she points to a set of habitudes that make the difference between a person who’s content to be “good enough” and one who’s determined to push for excellence. So what are they?

adaptability, courage, perseverance, self-awareness,
curiosity, passion, and imagination

These aren’t just qualities that you’re born with. They require practice, discipline, and cultivation.

So my challenge to each of you here today is to look inside yourself and decide which of these habitudes might be your foundation for change. Here’s the list again in case you missed it the first time: adaptability, courage, perseverance, self-awareness, curiosity, passion, and imagination. You’re probably already good at practicing some of them, so that means it’s time to start cultivating the others. (For example, I’m not necessarily the bravest person out there, so I’m cultivating the habitude of courage by standing up here today and talking to all y’all!)

These habitudes are kind of like a superpower for achieving long-term success, rather than just winning at short-term goals.

Because success is all about the long game, y’all. You can’t just focus on what’s next. I know it’s tempting in college to move from one class to the next, from studying for this test to writing that essay, from meeting to work on this group project to driving across town to that internship. It makes the long march from your first day of college to your first “real” job after graduation feel a little less daunting. But it will all be way more meaningful if you don’t just move automatically from one thing to the another. If you want to make the most of every opportunity that you have, then you have to find the points of connection among all of your different experiences, and to allow those connections to take you down a detour if that’s what’s needed. College is about more than just that first job: it’s about building a life that is productive, and thoughtful, and engaged with the world we live in. You can’t be so focused on the next step that you lose sight of your real destination. And that means that you have to be open to change, whether that’s changing your course schedule, changing your major, changing what you usually do on Friday nights, or even changing your worldview if that’s what you need to do when the time comes.

But just remember that change doesn’t have to be scary (well, not JUST scary). Cultivate your habitudes by allowing yourself to make time for curiosity and imagination, by being brave, by resolving to keep going when things get tough, and by knowing what drives you. The habitudes will ground you and remind you of who you are, even in new situations. They will be your tether when everything around you seems to be shifting. In fact, they can actually help to make you into your own kind of portmanteau, bringing together the Pre-Change You and the Post-Change You. And as with other portmanteaux, the results will probably be pretty darn satisfying.