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Why would students use AI/cheat? Because they have procrastinated (harsh due dates) and because they fear failure. Ungrading moves away from both issues: flexible due dates & redos.

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mistakes with penalties and mistakes with feedback

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"Ungrading removes the pressure of grades, thus making the use of AI and other services including paper writing and test answer sharing less enticing."

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PUSHING BACK AGAINST AI: USING UNGRADING TO PROMOTE CRITICAL THINKING AND INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

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Ungrading is an innovative pedagogical practice in which instructors give frequent, detailed feedback on students’ work and/or encourage self-evaluation rather than assigning them points or letter grades. Ungrading has been shown to increase…

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Grading papers doesn’t help students learn.

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Grading papers doesn’t help students learn.

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When homework is meaningful and contributes to their learning, students are more likely to complete it.

Daniel de la Hoz / iStock

As a middle school teacher, I sometimes spot students huddled up in the school hallway before class frantically copying homework. A teacher can stop to intervene, as I have done dozens of times, but we all know that they'll just find a new place to copy the work away from the observant eyes of the adults at school. This is clearly academic dishonesty, and it's easy to point the finger at the students. But what is the root cause of this dishonest behavior?

The student who is copying their homework either didn't have time to complete it, forgot to do it, or doesn't care to do it. They are copying the work so they can earn, most likely, a completion grade on the assignment. Students know the drill-if it looks like they did the assignment, then that's good enough for a completion check mark in the grade book.

Is the student concerned that it's imperative to review and practice this material in order to do well on the subsequent assessments in class? Is the student concerned that they will be found out during a rich conversation about the exercises in class? Probably not, or else the student would not resort to simply copying the work.

What are we doing as teachers to make homework worthwhile for the students beyond the typical completion grade?

3 Ways to Motivate Students to Do Ungraded Homework

1. Make assignments meaningful. Teachers and students alike know that practice is necessary to perform well. It would be hard to argue with an athletic coach that going to practice is not necessary, and instead, it's fine to just show up to the game and wing it.

"Practice > scrimmage > game" is a helpful metaphor that the educators at Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, use to describe their school's homework/assessment grading structure. Like team practice, homework is assigned for the purpose of practicing and reviewing-and to further the metaphor, practices are not graded, of course. Scrimmages can be compared to quizzes or other lower-stakes assessments. Lastly, the game is the culminating summative assessment such as a project or test.

Using this metaphor borrowed from athletics, it's clear that students must practice and review to perform their best for the big game.

Beyond sharing this metaphor with your students, sometimes it takes explicit explanation from the teacher for the students to see this connection. "Tonight you are assigned 15 various conjugation exercises to help you prepare for your mock job interview project. Both partners will need to be proficient with simple past tense to conduct the interview." If a student wants to engage appropriately in their upcoming French interview project, they will be motivated to review their ​​passé simple conjugations.

2. Feedback doesn't have to be a grade. A sixth-grade student once told me that she completed all her math homework, but she never knew if she did it right. If I were in her math class, I would be unmotivated to do any of my homework.

Beyond providing an answer key so that students can self-check that they are on the right track with their work, teachers can also engage in meaningful feedback on homework. This might look like students randomly posting problems and their work on the board, students discussing problems in small groups, or providing time in class for students to ask about any questions they were unsure about. (Read more about how to create a mistake-friendly classroom here.)

I find that when I follow homework with a rich discussion the next day, students are more likely to complete their assignments. They know they cannot fully participate in the discussion unless they have their work with them at that moment. When homework is followed with feedback, students can close the loop on how they are performing with a concept, without having to be assigned a grade.

3. Students are still held accountable even if homework isn't graded. Cathy Vatterott, author of Rethinking Homework, writes for the Association of Middle Level Education, "Teachers who don't grade homework still monitor completion of assignments and communicate with parents about missing work. They just don't count it as part of the student's grade." Teachers can keep a record of homework completion to inform conversations with parents and caregivers.

A teacher might share this information with a parent: "Emma struggled with simplifying fractions on her recent quiz. She was assigned two practice assignments on this topic last week, but she only brought one to class. It is important that she keep up with the daily practice to improve with this concept."

There are several ways to keep a record of student work without assigning a grade. Laila I. McCloud, director of the MEd in Higher Education Program at Grand Valley State University, writes in the article " Keeping Receipts: Thoughts on Ungrading from a Black Woman Professor," "I keep receipts in the following ways: having students engage in peer review of their work, providing detailed feedback, and using course engagement reflections."

Instructional coach Tyler Rablin suggests a team-style game to get students engaged with the previous night's homework or allow the students to use their homework (with feedback) as an aid on a future assessment. "Accountability doesn't just have to mean an added consequence, but it can be a much more authentic and natural consequence (both positive or negative) for the homework."

There will always be pushback from teachers, administrators, and parents who claim that students will not complete the assignment if it's not graded. To counter this argument, there will always be students who won't do the assignment whether it's graded or not. When homework isn't graded, a student's average in the class reflects only what they know and can do in class-a more equitable reflection of a student's progress.
A lot of teachers are working on new approaches to homework in an attempt to guide students to focus on their learning rather than grades. If you have strategies you've had some success with, or if you have questions that other educators might be able to help with, please share them in the comments.
With meaningful assignments and robust feedback, students may be more motivated to engage with practice and review. Reflect on ways you can shift your students' perspective on homework. If students are regularly not completing the work you're assigning, ask for feedback on how the assignments can become more meaningful and beneficial to their learning.

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If homework is meaningful and kids see how it ties into academic achievement, motivating students to do ungraded homework is much easier.

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In his book Drive, Daniel Pink suggests that we operate today with a misguided understanding of what really motivates us. Often, we assume that the only way to get people to perform is to incentivize them through external rewards and punishments, or extrinsic motivation, rather than focusing people on a desired behavior, or intrinsic motivation.

As a seasoned educator who has taught in the classroom for nearly 40 years, I see this paradigm consistently. Students have become more focused on the rewards and punishments, namely grades (an extrinsic motivator), and less on the desired behavior, learning (an intrinsic motivator). Students often refer to themselves as "A" students, "B" students, or "C" students in conversations with each other and feel a sense of shame when they get failing grades. When they refer to their classes, they say things like, "That class is an easy A," or, "It's hard to get a good grade in that class," or, "Don't take that class because it will ruin your GPA." When students ask questions about assignments, quizzes, exams, or absences, it's almost always in reference to points and grades. A favorite question is, "Can I get any extra credit to raise my grade?"

What's apparent in all this focus on grades is that there's no real emphasis on learning-the true purpose of education. It is a rare occurrence that students come to talk with me about concepts or new material presented, and even in learning-focused discussions, the topic of grades almost always arises. When I encounter students after they have graduated, they almost always remember what grade they received in my class; yet when I ask about what concepts they learned, they hesitate before answering.

"What's apparent in all this focus on grades is that there's no real emphasis on learning-the true purpose of education."

What can we as educators do to refocus students on the learning and get away from this emphasis on grades? I've found Montessori educational principles can provide us with some useful ways to rethink our current grading system and get students interested in what matters most-the learning.

Emphasizing Learning Over Grades

Maria Montessori, who opened the first Montessori school in 1907, believed in fostering children's enthusiasm for learning. She felt students should love everything that they learn, and that this love of learning nurtures mental and emotional growth.

Let's imagine a fully engaged classroom where, instead of learning and education being viewed as a chore, our students follow their innate tendency to explore their environment, i.e., their intrinsic desire to grow and learn. A key ingredient in this vision is autonomy-which is a principle of Montessori education. It puts emphasis on students' freedom, within limits, to control their own educational process and goal setting, which links both success and failure with their actions and the consequences of their decisions. In other words, students are encouraged to be creative, imaginative, and free to make mistakes. Learning from those mistakes and failures is normalized as part of the process.

As such, Montessori teachers are viewed as guides, rather than people who impart knowledge. One important focus for these teachers is to design, organize, and prepare an appropriate learning environment for students, where they can freely take responsibility and self-direction for the ways they choose to learn.

Following the intrinsic motivation model, Montessori principles believe that students will be guided by their interests. They are led to those things that are valuable and meaningful to them personally. The result of this process is the development of competence, self-confidence, and mastery. Competence fosters confidence, which in turn inspires students to tackle subsequent challenges. This cycle builds on itself and leads to a lifelong quest for learning.

Rethinking the Grading Paradigm

From my experience in the classroom, our current paradigm based on grades creates an environment in which students fear the possibility of failure rather than focusing on the possibility of learning. Students are afraid to speak up, ask questions, and make mistakes for fear that it will impact their grade.

But when classes are structured as learning laboratories-like they are at Montessori schools-and students aren't penalized for exploring new methods, making mistakes, asking questions, or admitting failure, they become more creative and self-directed. They seem to open up and thrive when asked to write one-page reflections and implication papers about what the concepts or materials mean to them. In many such classes, students appear to be having fun while they are working on class exercises and engaging in active discussions related to the topic presented.

Since I have incorporated these Montessori-based intrinsic motivation principles into my current classes, I have begun to recognize that these principles are incongruent with a grade-based extrinsic motivation system, which takes away from students' natural desire to learn. Therefore, I would prefer to use a pass or fail (P/F) grading system, which allows me to focus on what an individual student is learning as opposed to an external standard of what a grade of A, B, C, D, or F represents.

I believe that if more educators used this grading structure, student cheating would be diminished, grade inflation would be eliminated, and students would be much more inclined to discuss what they are learning because the classroom would become more creative, self-directed, and meaningful to them. By becoming learning labs, these classrooms would nurture a love of learning. What's more, perhaps implementing these changes would make achieving excellence more attainable for all student groups.

Restoring Students' Love of Learning

Why do we educators hang on to the current extrinsically motivated grading paradigm? I think at a gut level many of us feel that it is not working well, yet the whole educational system is built around it. And trying to imagine how the whole educational system would function without grades can seem monumental.

Reimagining how this would change our roles as educators can be threatening to both individuals and their institutions. Yet, if there is one thing that we have all learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that both people and organizations can adapt to change very quickly and creatively when necessity dictates.

It is time for the entire educational system to start re-examining our current grading paradigm. With the help of other educators, students, parents, and interested groups, we can take steps to improve this grading system and restore students' love of learning. Change starts with conversation, and I hope that all of you will join me in this one.

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Why Focusing on Grades Is a Barrier to Learning

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Students have become so focused on grades that they are missing out on the true purpose of education-learning. Educators can reverse this trend by turning to Montessori educational principles and rethinking the current grading system.

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Your students will not change; but you can.

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Your students will not change; but you can.

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I had my own epiphany in 2019 regarding all of this...

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An “A” paper in my class is not an “A” paper in someone else’s. Why?

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Which projects made an impact on you?

Did you like due dates?

Did you like tests or projects?

How did you demonstrate your learning?

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How do YOU want to feel responding to a student email?

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How do YOU want to feel responding to a student email?

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Do you want THEM to feel in getting your response?

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How do you want to feel responding to a student email?

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Imagine you are a student walking into your class…

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Imagine you are a student walking into your class…

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What do you want them to feel?

What do you want them to learn?

What do you want them to experience? Why?

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Do we want good writing and bad writing to exist because then we can easily defend our ranking and sorting of students?

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good student vs bad student holly hassel 4Cs TYCA

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When I began teaching, I focused on content and rigor. I made the rookie mistake of designing my first course in ways that would have worked perfectly for me as a student. The problem was that prep school had made me into a different kind of college student than the ones in front of me who mostly came from underfunded public schools, returned after years away, worked full time, and supported families.

When my initial approach didn't go so well, I was annoyed that students were not respecting my authority. I was exasperated by students who plagiarized, came to class unprepared, or showed up late. I was constantly frustrated by the few students in the back row every semester who talked over me or over other students who were contributing to a discussion or nervously giving a formal presentation. I was especially bothered by being mistaken for a student or addressed as "Miss."

I responded with more rules, harsher penalties, weekly reading quizzes, and detailed rubrics. This basically worked because I was using grades as leverage to get the results I wanted. The students learned a lot, but I was frustrated with the feeling that my job was becoming more about explaining and enforcing rules than about teaching and learning.

When I started teaching online, I took a similar approach. I needed a way to ensure they'd do the work even though there was no lecture or class to attend, so each week students were required to take quizzes, answer an ever-growing list of study questions, and post notes about the readings. Each of these things needed to be graded individually.

What that meant is that I spent most of my time on student feedback for that course explaining to students where they'd lost points on each assignment. But I noticed that students who misunderstood a concept in the study questions often hadn't improved when it came up again on the final exam. Turns out, when we give students feedback and a grade, they often pay more attention to the grade, and may not even read our carefully written comments.

All of these things that frustrated me about teaching led me to look for alternatives, and what I found was critical pedagogy and learner-centered teaching. I was fascinated by studies showing that grades are often ineffective, arbitrary, and demotivating to students. I was convinced by Stuart Tannock's arguments that grading might undermine one of public education's key goals of fostering "critical, reflexive, independent and democratically minded thinkers." And I was persuaded by Alfie Kohn's and Jesse Stommel's arguments against grading and Vicky Reitenauer 's work on the benefits of self-grading.

So I started experimenting.

With my first attempt, I asked students to reflect on their work and calculate their own points each week, including figuring out late penalties for themselves. I gave them very detailed and complex guidelines for these weekly self-assessments that ran four pages long. When they made mistakes applying the policies to themselves, I corrected them.

Around halfway through the semester, I realized that I hadn't fundamentally shifted my mindset about grades or power. I'd just outsourced the process of applying my strict rules to the students themselves. While most of them really enjoyed having even this small amount of power, I was still spending a lot of time explaining and enforcing policies for the students who hadn't understood my system. Why had I set it up this way?

I remembered a statement I heard Jesse Stommel make at Digital Pedagogy Lab in Vancouver last summer. As one of my track leaders, he began by introducing himself and describing his approach to teaching:

Start by trusting students. #4wordpedagogy

- Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) April 30, 2016

That was my problem: I didn't feel like I could trust my students. Instead of having empathy for them, I realized I'd been holding a bit of a grudge against students. I'd been entering classrooms anticipating all the problems and incivilities I've seen before. I found it even harder to trust students in my online courses, where I usually can't read tone or body language, and there's little opportunity for the casual interactions before or after class that help build a relationship over time.

I also felt like I couldn't trust students when it seemed like they didn't trust me and my authority in the classroom. For example, in my first semester teaching online, I created weekly short quizzes which added up to a total of less than 5% of their final grade. Because the purpose was to help students check whether they'd understood the course materials, I chose the "unlimited attempts" setting for the quizzes. A number of weeks into the semester, I looked at the data and saw that a couple students were making 10 or even 20 attempts on the quizzes in rapid succession until they got to 100%. While I didn't have a policy against this, I had explained the purpose of the quizzes so I felt like these students were gaming the system and disrespecting the learning environment I tried to create. At the time, instead of approaching those few students individually, I figured that none of them could be trusted, and I changed my policy to limit each quiz to 2 attempts.

The more I learn about critical pedagogy, the more I realize that starting with trust is vital. Stommel describes the importance and value of trust in education in a 2014 interview:

Learning is always a risk. It means, quite literally, opening ourselves to new ideas, new ways of thinking. It means challenging ourselves to engage the world differently. It means taking a leap, which is always done better from a sturdy foundation. This foundation depends on trust - trust that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust for teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community.

I think bureaucracy is the enemy of learning. In college syllabi, for example, we too often drown students and teachers in policies. Some of these policies are ethical at their core, but every single one becomes an obstacle, if we (teachers, administrators, accreditors, lawmakers) don't trust students to help shape their learning environments.

When I first started teaching, I would have scoffed at these ideas. Rules and harsh policies seemed like a bulwark against the vulnerability I felt as a young female professor. Bureaucracy felt like a safety net. Rubrics and grades seemed to provide fairness, clarity, and control. This is why my first experiment with self-assessment still included a lot of rules.

Next semester, I'm going to change the way students do weekly self-assessments in my online course. Instead of calculating their points each week or grading themselves, students are going to set their own goals at the start of the semester and then reflect each week on whether and how they've met those goals. I'll respond to them with comments and suggestions. Then, only halfway through the semester and at the end, students will propose a letter grade for themselves and provide evidence to justify it.

But what if I disagree with a student? Will I just trust them to determine their own grade?

In Hacking Assessment, Starr Sackstein suggests that students conference with instructors to resolve disagreements about their self-assessed grades, and argues that it's important to let students have the final say. For small discrepancies, I think it'll be easy for me to allow the student to decide - if it seems to me like they've earned a B and the student is certain it's a B+, honestly, what's the difference? Tons of research shows that grades can be pretty arbitrary anyways.

On the other hand, what if I think they've earned a C and they think they deserve an A? I've heard from a number of other instructors who use self-assessment that they have simply never come across this issue. But if it happens, and if I'm really going to "start by trusting students," that means I won't just unilaterally decide to record a C on their transcript. Instead, I'll have a conversation with the student and figure out where they're coming from and why our perceptions of the work differ so much. As long as we're both acting in good faith, we should be able to hash it out and agree on a final letter grade.

And that good faith depends on a relationship of trust with the student built over the course of the semester. Without trust and an understanding of the rationale, self-assessment is more likely to feel uncomfortable, awkward, and like it's useless busy work. One student wrote last semester: "I think it is somewhat pointless to self-assess if ultimately the teacher is giving the grades." This was indeed a good point, because in my first version of self-assessment, I sometimes overruled students who had misunderstood my complicated self-grading guidelines.

But they're also right in a larger sense - no matter what structures we set up to try to give students freedom, they may still experience the classroom as a site of control and domination. After all, the instructor still determines the student's final grade on their transcript.

When I first read Teaching to Transgress my initial reaction echoed my student's skepticism: Given the fundamental power relationship between students and instructors within the university, what's the point of any of this? One student wrote last semester, when I was using points and strict rules for self-assessments: "[It's] easier to learn when the instructor grades my work because they are experts on the course material ... I didn't learn anything about setting goals and assessing myself." This student saw self-assessment as yet another meaningless bureaucratic task they needed to complete to graduate.

Self-assessment isn't perfect, but it does seem to help some students feel more ownership and investment in their education. Instead of slacking off and inflating their own grades, students in my courses have consistently reported that self-assessing makes them work harder. A student who completed the points-based self-assessments last semester wrote: "I feel more responsible to do well, and I have to meet my personal expectations now rather than a professor's, so in some ways, it's a little harder."

In this way, self-assessment may be far less radical than it appears at first glance - it can encourage students to internalize the values and expectations of educational institutions rather than challenging them. But even if the freedom and power that self-assessment provides to students is an illusion, my classroom can at least be a space where students are practicing self-determination rather than training to be authoritarian subjects.

In any case, moving away from grades seems to create more space for learning. A student wrote this response to my first version of self-assessment: "It makes me realize, for the first time in my academic career, that grades should be a secondary concern to actually learning something and growing from a course."

It hasn't always been easy for me to start by trusting students, but I've realized that it's something I need to work towards if I want to help them focus more on "actually learning" than on grades.

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When I began teaching, I focused on content and rigor. I made the rookie mistake of designing my first course in ways that would have worked perfectly for me as a student.

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One person's definition of "good writing" or "academic writing" will differ from another person's definition. So, what are we assessing when we grade student writing?

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Teachers are not cops; why do we act as such?

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Thesis: abolish cop shit in the classroom.

For the purposes of this post, I define "cop shit" as "any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers." Here are some examples:

ed-tech that tracks our students' every move

plagiarism detection software

militant tardy or absence policies, particularly ones that involve embarassing our students, e.g. locking them out of the classroom after class has begun

assignments that require copying out honor code statements

"rigor," "grit," and "discipline"

any interface with actual cops, such as reporting students' immigration status to ICE and calling cops on students sitting in classrooms.

While I am most familiar with higher ed, cop shit undoubtedly reaches its sine qua non in the K-12 classroom, particularly given how such classrooms are even more militarized (actual cops, metal detectors, education premised on compliance, etc.) than higher ed. While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, my stylist told me about her daughter's math teacher, who is currently punishing her daughter for falling behind on work due to a broken arm by assigning her upwards of fifteen pages of homework a night. The child is seven. This is pure, uncut cop shit.

Now I am a graduate student, which means that I am simultaneously an inexperienced teacher as well as one who teaches many front-line, entry-level classes. I admit that I am perhaps missing part of a larger picture that encourages or even requires the use of cop shit in the classroom. Yet when my students come to me with reams of documentation for a simple cold, or fearful that I will dole out unexcused absences for them taking job interviews, I have to wonder what that larger picture could be. I've only taught for a few semesters and I don't pretend that my experiences are generalizable to the level of empirical data, but my students seem to do perfectly well in the absence-as much as I can make-of cop shit.

So why do we have cop shit in our classrooms?

One provisional answer is that the people who sell cop shit are very good at selling cop shit, whether that cop shit takes the form of a learning management system or a new pedagogical technique. Like any product, cop shit claims to solve a problem. We might express that problem like this: the work of managing a classroom, at all its levels, is increasingly complex and fraught, full of poorly defined standards, distractions to our students' attentions, and new opportunities for grift. Cop shit, so cop shit argues, solves these problems by bringing order to the classroom. Cop shit defines parameters. Cop shit ensures compliance. Cop shit gives students and teachers alike instant feedback in the form of legible metrics.

In short, cop shit operates according the the logic of datafication. Indeed, the rise of ed tech has seen the multiplication and proliferation of unprecedented forms of cop shit. See, for instance, this illuminating post on the "The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade," published at the end of last year. It's a murderer's row of cop shit.

Cop shit is seductive. It makes metrics transparent. It allows for the clear progress toward learning objectives. ("Badges" are cop shit, by the way.) It also subsumes education within a market logic. "Here," cop shit says, "you will learn how to do this thing. We will know you learned it by the acquisition of this gold star. But in order for me to award you this gold star, I must parse you, sense you, track you, collect you, and-" here's the key, " I will presume that you will attempt to flout me at every turn. We are both scamming each other, you and I, and I intend to win." When a classroom becomes adversarial, of course, as cop shit presumes, then there must be a clear winner and loser. The student's education then becomes not a victory for their own self-improvement or -enrichment, but rather that the teacher conquered the student's presumed inherent laziness, shiftiness, etc. to instill some kernel of a lesson.

No wonder the traditional humanities classroom of "read things, come together and talk about them, and write papers about them" has disappeared in the age of cop shit. There's no game to fix, no battle to win.

And I want to fend this one off at the pass: if a classroom is so large that it requires cop shit in order to effectively run, then the answer is not actually to use cop shit. The answer is hiring more instructors. There are enough to go around.

In conclusion: expel cop shit from your classrooms; expel cop shit from your hearts. We are educators. We are not cops. If you want to be a cop, I recommend you go be a cop. At least then you'll wear a nice uniform that lets us know that you are not on our side.

Edit: one more point that I thought about a few moments after I posted this. Cop shit also flies in the face of, indeed disallows, developing real solidarity between students and teachers. This solidarity is particularly important when those teachers are themselves (graduate) students. As the wildcat strikes at UCSC teach us, we need to develop lines of solidarity not only within our preformed categories (students, grad students, TT faculty, adjuncts, etc.), but also across those categories, in ways that reveal the insufficiency of those categories. Our students are powerful resources in this regard, particularly given how higher ed increasingly conforms to a market model of those students as consumers. Students standing alongside teachers in strike actions, for instance, can be a very powerful thing.

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Thesis: abolish cop shit in the classroom. For the purposes of this post, I define "cop shit" as "any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers." Here are some examples: ed-tech that tracks our students' every move plagiarism detection software militant tardy or absence policies, particularly ones that involve embarassing our students, e.g.

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Teachers are guilty of doing what their students do.

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What if we walked into the classroom and weren’t adversarial with them from Day 1?

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You don’t have to engage in "war stories."

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You don’t have to engage in "war stories."

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Race and the Whitewashing of History in our Textbooks

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Note: this article contains some graphic images.

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Original Slidedeck: I'm Going to Say Some Blasphemous Things

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Original Slidedeck: I'm Going to Say Some Blasphemous Things

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Here is where I try to house all things OER and Ungrading for use by others.

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*LOTS OF OTHER OPEN THINGS (not created by NDSCS)

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It takes nothing to be kind. Extend some grace to students and yourself.

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This piece was revised and expanded for a book from Hybrid Pedagogy, Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, available now in paperback and Kindle editions.

In the past two years, when I've been asked to sum up my approach to pedagogy, I've said "kindness."

I didn't always think this way. My graduate education encouraged me to think of students as antagonists, always trying to get one over on their instructors. I was urged to be on the lookout for plagiarism, to be vigilant for cheaters, to assume that the students wouldn't do the reading, and to expect to be treated as a cog in a consumerist machine by students who would challenge their grades on a whim. I was once advised by a senior graduate student to "be a bitch" on the first day of class so that my students never wanted that version of myself to show up again, advice that I dutifully repeated to several of the graduate students who came after me. I was a stickler for deadlines, and memorably once refused to excuse the absence of a student who was battling a burst pipe in his house when class was in session. I look back on that now and wince.

I gradually learned, through a great deal of trial and error, that this combative way of approaching teaching was counterproductive at best, destructive at worst. Students didn't communicate with me easily, since many of them didn't see the point. They knew (I realize now) that I approached them with suspicion, and so returned that sentiment in kind. It quickly became clear to me that I needed to build relationships, not defensively prevent them from forming, and that trust was a vital part of creating the circumstances under which learning could happen. There was no space for trust to grow in the learning spaces I'd been trying to create, and so I learned to ease up, to let go of rigid control I'd tried to impose upon the classroom, and to make room for the unpredictable and unexpected. I thought, twenty-three years into my teaching career, that I was doing a pretty good job. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington in the summer of 2017.

The entire Institute was predicated upon the concept of kindness. From the pronoun buttons available at the registration desk, to the probing questions of the session leaders, to the time people took, one-on-one, to talk about syllabi and assignments, there was an ethos of care running through the whole four days of my residency. I had signed up for the Intro track, and had expected to spend my time evaluating digital tools to bring into my classroom. I did do that, but first I was asked to think about why I needed those tools at all, whom they would serve, and how I would build in accommodations for students with disabilities. My fellow attendees and I were constantly asked to consider why we were doing things the way we were, and what subtextual messages we were sending to our students about who they were. I took a good long look at my syllabus, and realized I had communicated everything in it from a position of absolute authority. The language I used to describe the college's Honor Code, for example, expressed the suspicion that everyone was going to commit some awful academic offense at some point, and my attendance policy made no room for the idea that my students were adults with complicated lives who would need to miss a class now and again.

Why? Why did I posit my students as passive novices who couldn't contribute to their own learning? Why did I require students to jump through hoops to prove that they deserved an extension on a paper? Why did I dock points if my students missed three classes in a term? No one had ever asked me to defend my pedagogical choices before, and once they did, I found much of my pedagogy indefensible. I felt regret and no small amount of embarrassment. My teaching was undone by the presence of a question that was never articulated quite this directly but was everywhere around me:

Why not be kind?

And so I chose kindness as my pedagogical practice. Telling people this has often elicited a baffled response. Kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching. In part this is an effect of the pressures that are brought to bear on our classrooms from outside them, symptomatic of a nationwide clamoring (in some circles, at least) for standardization, testing, and rote assessment. Instead of kindness, we're more likely to hear about standards and rigor. (The national professional organization to which I belong says that " good teaching entails accuracy and rigor," but never mentions compassion, for example.) And when we are urged to be kind within an educational setting, it's too often to make up for a lack of institutional support for students and faculty in need, asking a particular service of women and non-binary individuals of all races, and men of color. Kindness can be a band aid we're urged to plaster over deep fissures in our institutions, wielded as a weapon instead of as a balm. And too often people confuse kindness with simply "being nice."

But, to me, kindness as pedagogical practice is not about sacrificing myself, or about taking on more emotional labor. It has simplified my teaching, not complicated it, and it's not about niceness. Direct, honest conversations, for instance, are often tough, not nice. But the kindness offered by honesty challenges both myself and my students to grow. As bell hooks memorably wrote in Teaching to Transgress, "there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches."

Yet in practice, I've found that kindness as pedagogical practice distills down to two simple things: believing people, and believing in people.

When a student comes to me to say that their grandparent died, I believe them. When they email me to say they have the flu, I believe them. When they tell me they didn't have time to read, I believe them. When they tell me their printer failed, I believe them.

There's an obvious chance that I could be taken advantage of in this scenario, that someone could straight-up lie and get away with it. But I've learned that I would rather take that risk than make life more difficult for my students struggling with grief and illness, or even an over-packed schedule or faulty electronics. It costs me nothing to be kind. My students have not, en masse, started refusing to meet deadlines, but the students who are struggling have had time to finish their work. My students have not, en masse, started skipping class, but they're not required to undergo the invasive act of telling me personal details about their lives when they can't show up. My students have not, en masse, started doubting my abilities or my expertise, but they have stepped forward to direct their own education in meaningful and exciting ways that I could not have thought of.

That's believing students. But what about believing in students?

Believing in students means seeing them as collaborators - believing they have valuable contributions to make to the way in which syllabi, assignments, and assessments are designed, and life experiences that should be respected in the classroom.

In Fall 2017, I asked both classes to give me questions about the topics we'd be covering - American Indian history in one class, and the history of gender and sexuality in the U.S. in the other. I was then able to craft a syllabus for each class that wove together my own sense of important historical context together with answers to the questions they had posed. The students were offered a sense of ownership in the course, and I was alerted to things I might not otherwise have considered - basic terminology around which there was confusion, for example, or, say, a strong interest in understanding changing concepts of masculinity over time.

I drew on the wisdom of teachers who had gone into this 'kind space' before me, and made significant changes to the way in which I graded work in those classes. Rather than distributing a finished list of grade requirements, I shared some suggestions, and refined those with my students' input until we'd reached a consensus about meaningful assessment. When my students turned in a paper, they also filled out a self-evaluation of their work that asked them what they'd do differently next time, how pleased they were with what they produced, and what they learned about themselves. These adjustments are possible in any class, be it one like mine, with twenty-five students, or a much larger lecture course at a different kind of institution. Both approaches give students greater ownership over their grade and the way that it's awarded; grading becomes, to whatever degree possible, a collaborative venture. In smaller classes it's possible to go further; my students and I sat together and talked over the answers on their self-evaluation, and I asked my students to give themselves a grade. Together, we entered into a conversation about why that grade felt right to them, and why it did or didn't feel right to me, before reaching a consensus on what grade they'd earned.

I've also begun to think of my classes in terms of universal design. For many years I taught with the idea that there was a well-established, academic norm that was fair and impartial, and my job was to make accommodations available for those students who had particular disabilities, or faced particular challenges in meeting that norm. I no longer believe in such a practice. My job, as I see it now, is to make my classroom accessible to everyone. I've begun the long work of redesigning my lessons and assignments so that everyone is a full participant, and no one needs ask for extra time or a note-taker, because those needs have already been addressed. Because I don't believe students with disabilities should have to out themselves, I no longer ban laptops in my classroom, or have quizzes that some students have to take across the hall to get their necessary time-and-a-half. Instead I've experimented with take-home quizzes, options for students to record videos as well as write papers, and final project guidelines that allow students to create anything that will demonstrate to me what they've learned over the term. This, too, is about belief in my students, and believing that by designing my class to accommodate all types of learning I'm demonstrating something important about the ways in which we should be creating a more just world.

I feel more comfortable as a teacher now than I ever have. The subconscious sense that students were antagonists lingered inside me for a long time - long enough that it has been a marvel to teach these past two academic years and experience a teacher-student relationship without that default expectation. I was less stressed; I didn't have reservations about walking into the classroom. My students rose up to meet every new challenge I presented to them, and vocally affirmed that they appreciated the new approach to grading. Crucially, they articulated that when I looked them in the eye and told them what they had done well in a paper, they believed me, whereas when the same info was written at the end of a paper, they didn't. They saw it as pablum - something that I had to write before I delivered the bad news of what they could still work at (which they interpreted as "what I did wrong.") I see that shift, from their exasperation and disappointment to them becoming partners in the assessment of their work, was emblematic of the fruits of a pedagogy of kindness. It was, and is, transformational for all involved.

A pedagogy of kindness asks us to apply compassion in every situation we can, and not to default to suspicion or anger. When suspicion or anger is our first response, a pedagogy of kindness asks us to step back and do the reflective work of asking why we're reacting in that manner and what other instances of disappointment or mistrust are coming to bear on a particular moment in a particular student-teacher interaction. This can transform the student-teacher relationship - but it's not only on an individual-to-individual level that it can alter our working world. To extend kindness means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave. Transactional models of education identify students as consumers and teachers as retail workers who must please their customers (an inhumane model for retail sales as well as the world of learning). Administrators become managers in this model, looking for cents they can save rather than people they can support. This drains the entire system of its humanity, and leads to decisions at every level where the personhood of a student, teacher, or administrator is diminished.

To value and practice kindness is to resist such models. Even where institutions are leaning away from investment in personhood in favor of hedge funds, we as teachers have the ability to insist that individuals matter. We have the means to hold a line, to see the student without shelter - or food, or safety, or a laptop, or an internet connection, or health, or confidence, or a support network - as someone who matters exactly as they are and even because of the challenges they face. We can refuse to dehumanize our students and presume an adversarial stance. We can prioritize kindness.

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Kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching.