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Kimberly Tanner is a good overview of the history of grading: https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054

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Kimberly Tanner is a good overview of the history of grading: https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054

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How does UDL interact with equity-focused teaching frameworks? At first glance seems potentially contradictory.

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I have designed the pages of this website to offer a revised and updated take on the original article outlining White Supremacy characteristics, written in 1999 when I was working in collaboration with my late colleague and mentor Kenneth Jones. While I wrote the words on the pages that became the White Supremacy Culture article all those years ago in 1999, I do not consider the original article or this website my work. I feel a sense of stewardship rather than ownership. The article was informed by my decade of experience facilitating racial equity workshops and work, starting with my original colleague the inestimable James Williams and followed by a 12-year partnership with Kenneth. I was deeply steeped in my own learning curve over the course of that decade as a result of my work with these two as well as many other colleagues who are named on the About page. In addition, I was fortunate to be mentored by Sharon Martinas, who was organizing the Challenging White Supremacy workshop at that time; Sharon was the one who advised me to include antidotes. I also attended a Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond workshop (one of many I was lucky to attend). This workshop was co-facilitated by Daniel Buford, a lead trainer at PISAB at the time the original article was written. You will see asterisks next to the sections of the original article (and here as well) informed by his teaching.

I did not know at the time I wrote the article that it would have such relevance over so many years. I never saw it as a free-standing piece; Kenneth and I included it as part of a much longer workbook that we designed and created to support our workshop curriculum and facilitation. People who came to our workshops then copied it and distributed it and put it on this new phenomenon called the internet. The article began to develop its own legs. I feel the power of the article has nothing to do with me as the author (and you will see why I say that on the Characteristics page) and everything to do with our shared desire to both understand and transgress white supremacy culture.
I want to be clear that this website is offering
one way of understanding white supremacy culture, not the way. May this be a small contribution to a larger understanding.
Many other people have been and are writing about white supremacy culture; you will find links to many of them on this website. You will also find a list of some of those resources on the
What Is It? page.

My hope is that this website offers something useful and that you, the reader, take what you find and develop it further. Please take whatever wisdom you find here and make it grow, correct whatever mistakes you find, create something deeper, wiser, better, and put it out in the world to help us all.
My goal in offering this website is to contribute to our shared anti-racist racial justice commitment. My hope is that this website is an organizing and justice building tool, one that helps us live into a collective vision of nourishment, resourcing, and cherishing ourselves and each other as we dream, build, stumble, get back up again, and cultivate compassion on our way together.

White supremacy culture is a devastating force in all our lives, used by ruling class power brokers to maintain vast and violent structural inequality (thank you Chris Crass). I will also say, with deep regret, that even those of us who are movement builders get confused about the difference between a tool and a weapon. I ask that we avoid weaponizing this information on the Characteristics page.
If you click on the buttons below or on the Characteristics Page, you will find individual pages that take an in-depth look at some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture, including a few additional characteristics to those named in the original article. I have revised and updated the characteristics to incorporate more of an intersectional lens. I have added stories, poems, art, as well as links to other resources, all in service of a deeper dive and multiple ways to interact with and explore the characteristics' nuances and complexities.

While I describe these characteristics separately or in groups, they never stand alone. I have pulled them apart to help us understand them better and they reinforce each other rather than act in isolation.

I also include a page of Racial Equity Principles developed by
DismantlingRacismWorks, along with the And... page that houses many of the different and ingenious ways that people have taken the original article, adapted it to a particular field, illustrated it, added to and revised it. I am so grateful for the creativity and brilliance that so many people and organizations have brought to this project. I close the website with a Joy page, where I include, with your help, all the ways we foster joy with and for each other as we resist, transgress, transform, liberate, and thrive.

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This website is a long-time dream finally bearing fruit, a needed remix of the widely circulated article ​​ WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE originally written and published in 1999.

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Everyone in higher education has had the experience of hearing a college leader expound about the values of diversity or equity, or condemn a racist incident on campus. The statements are often eloquent and moving. The follow-up? Not so much.

This is the subject of From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education (Wiley). In the book, the authors focus on how to turn the talk into walk. The authors are Tia Brown McNair, vice president for diversity, equity and student success at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and executive director of the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Centers, also of AAC&U; Estela Mara Bensimon, University Professor and Dean's Professor in Educational Equity at the Rossier School of Education of the University of Southern California; and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux, chief institutional research officer of the California Institute of Technology.

They responded via email to questions about the book.
Q: Many colleges and college leaders seem to have mastered the first part of your book's title, equity talk. The Black Lives Matter movement has prompted numerous statements, but not the real changes being sought on many campuses. Why is it so difficult for many leaders to walk the equity walk?
A: Leaders often invoke equity, diversity and inclusion as values they hold dear; however, their espoused embrace for equity often fails to turn into action and transformation because many leaders lack the knowledge to enable them to "see" the production of racialized consequences through everyday practices they take for granted. They have not acquired the habit of considering who is advantaged/disadvantaged when a new policy or a practice is introduced and have difficulty recognizing and acknowledging when institutionalized racism runs through the arteries of their institutions' practices, policies and structures. Doing racial equity work requires that leaders admit to not always knowing how to address racism.

To "walk the equity talk" leaders need to examine their own perceptions of equity and to develop new language; they need to learn to frame racial inequality in educational outcomes as a problem of institutional underperformance; they need to stop skirting around race talk by only using terms like "underrepresented," "vulnerable" and "first-generation" when they are actually speaking about Blacks, Latinx, Indigenous peoples and other racially minoritized students. They have to be specific about which groups are experiencing inequities. They have to be willing to acknowledge that when the term "all" is used, it typically privileges the experiences of white students as the norm and undermines efforts for racial equity.

They have to elevate antiracism as an institutional priority by calling out institutionalized racism, whiteness as the accepted norm and white supremacism. They have to develop an agenda to repair for past exclusionary practices. A good example is the University of Chicago's English department decision to only admit Ph.D. candidates in Black studies during the next academic term. In our book we describe 10 obstacles to equity talk and the strategies to overcome them.
Q: Many elements of campus culture are criticized for promoting racism and not equity. How can colleges change their campus culture?
A: Building on the answer to the previous question, we believe that cultural change requires a collective effort among leaders, faculty, staff and students to take on the role of "anthropologists" and identify how their familiar routines, practices, policies, documents, language, values, etc. reproduce racial inequality and privilege. Campus leaders need to understand and examine the narrative about race at their institutions and be honest about what needs to change. Needless to say, if this was as straightforward as it sounds, it would have already happened. Through our work, we have learned that cultural change requires facilitated approaches and tools that help individuals decipher, from a racial standpoint, the assumptions, implicit theories and values underlying their ways of doing things. There are no best practices for cultural change nor technological solutions.
Q: A chapter in your book is about communicating data. Why is that important?
A: It is sometimes said that you can't fix what you can't see. Typically, institutions present student outcomes data in the aggregate, obscuring whether and where inequities exist. Institutional data, disaggregated by race, is essential to making the equity gaps commonly experienced by Black, Latinx, Indigenous peoples and other racially minoritized students visible. However, as we explain in the book, shining a light on racial inequities is the starting point in the pursuit of equity -- not the end goal. Examining disaggregated data is intended to spur equity-minded sense-making among practitioners -- a process of critical reflection and meaning-making through which practitioners come to interpret equity gaps as a sign that their practices aren't working as intended and need to be altered to redress these racial inequities.

Through our work, we have developed tools for communicating data in a manner that will promote equity-minded sense-making and inspire practitioners to continue inquiring into the causes of racial inequities within the institutional environment. For example, communicating data using simple visualizations of descriptive measures increases the likelihood that practitioners will find the data accessible. Similarly, presenting data that are "close to practice" ensures that practitioners see a connection between the quantitative measures that they are observing and how they engage with students on a daily basis.

We realize that the approaches to communicating data outlined in the book run somewhat counter to many data-related trends in higher education. Within institutional research, for example, increasing emphasis is placed on techniques that aim to estimate causal relationships between student characteristics, behaviors and outcomes (e.g., predictive analytics, propensity score analysis). While these methods have value in certain contexts, they can, by their very nature, spark deficit-minded thinking where students of certain backgrounds may be viewed as "at risk." Similarly, including race as just another control variable in a statistical model minimizes the systemic racism that minoritized populations have experienced since this nation's inception.

When communicated effectively, data disaggregated by race can serve as an impetus for the critical examination of institutional practices through practitioner inquiry and the identification of specific actions needed to realize equity.
Q: Are there some colleges you would identify that are doing a particularly good job at the equity walk? What makes those efforts successful?
A: AAC&U and the Center for Urban Education have worked with several hundred colleges, in varying ways, to advance their equity walk. Specifically, the Center for Urban Education has introduced racial equity tools that support practitioner inquiry into their practices. AAC&U's signature initiatives Inclusive Excellence, and more recently, the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers, focus on identifying and being responsive to patterns of inequity that stratify students and communities and perpetuate educational and systemic disparities that are a result of racialized practices.

There are institutions that are making progress on the equity walk in certain areas, but none have fully dismantled institutional racism. This transformation is ongoing and requires higher levels of intentionality and full engagement of educators, accountability, honesty and healing.

For example, progress has been made at Fresno City College; San Diego Mesa College; Pasadena City College; Mendocino College; California State University, Los Angeles; Santa Monica College; Long Beach City College; Tulsa Community College; Community College of Denver; Aurora Community College; University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and several campuses within the Pennsylvania state higher education system. In some of these colleges, in particular Mesa, Fresno, Sacramento, Community College of Denver, and Community College of Aurora, changes in practices to be more race conscious were made possible by presidents and other leaders who were committed to racial equity and were willing to learn.

In addition, the campuses that are hosting TRHT Campus Centers are examining the narrative on race at their institutions to identify key leverage points for change and engaging in racial healing and relationship building to prepare the next generation of leaders to build just and equitable communities. Of course, this progress is not possible without institutional leaders who have an equity talk and an equity walk. For example, some presidents have formed leadership teams that include vice presidents, faculty leaders, staff, students and trustees to study their curricula, syllabi, hiring, data, transfer services, assessment practices, advising, etc. The teams are engaged with in-depth inquiry to identify the many ways in which their practices and language do not prioritize racial equity. They are making changes because the president is invested in racial equity. Presidents must be willing to participate in the inquiry processes and get their hands dirty (i.e., participate in a structured observation of what goes on in the transfer center) in the work and be open to coaching when made aware of language that undermines equity aspirations.
Q: How do you answer the question posed in your book of "Equity for whom?"
A: One of the ways in which we define racial equity is as "corrective justice" for the educational debt owed to racially minoritized groups who have suffered deprivation from enslavement, Jim Crow, colonization, genocide and theft of territory. Racial inequity -- unlike income inequity -- was born from slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation and mitigated opportunity for African Americans. It was born from genocide and land grabbing that diminished the population and territories of Indigenous peoples, as well as out of the colonization and assimilation projects that sought to "civilize" the "savage natives." It was born from waves of Asian, Latinx and Pacific Islander migration, some of which was sanctioned by the American government (e.g., through the Immigration Act of 1965 and asylum seeking) and some of which was not. For all people of color, racial inequity was born from policies and practices that were not designed for their benefit but for the dominant population of whites. Racial inequity was also born from policies and practices that actively sought to exclude, marginalize and oppress people of color. Our focus for this book is on addressing racial inequity as an act of justice that demands system-changing responses and explicit attention to structural inequality and institutionalized racism. This focus does not diminish the need to address equity for others with differing identities.

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Authors discuss new book on equity in higher education

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Everyone in higher education has had the experience of hearing a college leader expound about the values of diversity or equity, or condemn a racist incident on campus. The statements are often eloquent and moving. The follow-up? Not so much.

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Transforming Courses Using a Gameful Approach

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Transforming Courses Using a Gameful Approach

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How do I officially join this group?  A colleague forwarded the webinar info to me.

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How do I officially join this group?  A colleague forwarded the webinar info to me.

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1. Home

2. Catalog

3. All Books & Products

4. Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success

Author(s)

Andratesha Fritzgerald

Date

2020

About the Book

In Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success, Andratesha Fritzgerald reveals Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as an effective framework to teach Black and Brown students. Drawing vivid portraits of classroom instruction, Fritzgerald shows how teachers open new roads of communication, engagement, and skill-building for students who feel honored and loved.

Fritzgerald offers very practical suggestions for making inclusion, antiracism, and the acceptance of differences the first and most important step in lesson planning. ... This book gives me hope that in education we can begin to eliminate the violence of academic and social prejudice that kills the spirit of our babies and belittles the needs and experiences of people of color.

from the Foreword by Samaria Rice

Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning by Andratesha Fritzgerald is available in paperback ($29.99, 192 pages, ISBN: 9781930583702) and accessible EPUB ($29.99, ISBN: 9781930583719) format.
Table of Contents

Leadership Implementation Guide for Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning

The free Leadership Implementation Guide supports school leaders in putting universally designed antiracist practices into effect across their organizations.

Created by Andratesha Fritzgerald, Kristan Rodriguez, and Sue Miller Wiltz.

Learn more & download

About the Author

Andratesha Fritzgerald, EdS, serves as Director of Teaching, Learning, and Innovation for the East Cleveland (OH) City School Districts and has been a teacher and leader in urban schools for nearly 20 years.

You can find her on Twitter at @FritzTesha.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Samaria Rice

Prologue: Invitation to Trouble

Chapter 1: UDL: Honor and Transformation

Chapter 2: Just Teach

Chapter 3: Safety Checks on the UDL Expressway

Chapter 4: The UDL Expressway

Chapter 5: Engagement as License to Learn

Chapter 6: Representation: Honoring by Invitation

Chapter 7: Action and Expression: Honoring by Releasing

Chapter 8: Failure as Feedback for Excellence

Chapter 9: Constructing a Universally Designed, Antiracist Classroom

Chapter 10: Conclusions and Invitations

References

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

More from CAST Publishing

An implementation and study guide to help school leaders put universally designed antiracist practices into effect across their organizations.

Ralabate and Nelson braid two "hot" frameworks, Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) and UDL, to help teachers address the needs of English Learners in today's classrooms.

P. K. Ralabate & L. L. Nelson
2017

In this lively and fun book, UDL experts Allison Posey and Katie Novak identify elements of what they call "The Unlearning Cycle" and challenge educators to think again about what, how, and why they teach.

A. Posey & K. Novak
2020

Top of Page

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Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success - CAST Professional Publishing

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Home Catalog All Books & Products Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success Author(s) Andratesha Fritzgerald Date 2020 In Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning: Building Expressways to Success, Andratesha Fritzgerald reveals Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as an effective framework to teach Black and Brown students.

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Virtual Conference Wed, Jul 28 –

Fri, Jul 30

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Dates
Wednesday, July 28 - Friday, July 30, 2021

2020 was a year for the history books, challenging us to make unexpected changes quickly. We also confirmed that dramatic change in teaching and learning is possible. But 2020 also illuminated barriers to learning like never before. How do we ensure that the future is intentionally planned in a way that achieves the outcomes we hope for?

The 7th Annual CAST UDL Symposium will highlight promising work taking place in the field and will also serve as a forum to think about how we can begin to intentionally design for a better future right now. This year's event is not about UDL as it has always been. It is about the dramatic changes that we hope to see in the future and the innovations that can lead us there. Join us for a virtual learning and networking experience filled with connected conversations that elevate our thinking around UDL and the future designed.

By engaging in remote sessions that encourage innovative ideas, systemic thinking, and application of theory to practice, participants will:

imagine new ways to improve the future of learning

be inspired to lead innovative change in our unique settings

examine how we unconsciously support systems that enable and reinforce barriers to equitable learning opportunities, along with strategies to minimize those barriers

challenge assumptions about schooling and learning for all

Planning your week of learning? Make sure to check out our Live Event Schedule and listing of Pre-recorded Sessions.

Follow and join the ongoing conversation using our hashtag #UDLfuture on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

On Demand registration coming soon!

Ticket Purchase Information

Paying with a Purchase Order: If you are paying for your Symposium ticket with an invoice,Purchase Orders must be submitted at the time of registration to submit your order successfully. All Purchase Orders should be uploaded to the Purchase Order Submission Form at the time of registration.

Tuition Refund Policy: Cancellations made 30 days or more in advance of the event date will not be charged. Cancellations made within 30 days - 7 days in advance of the event date will be charged $100. There will be no refund issued for cancellations made within 7 days of the event.

Schedule

All times listed are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4).

Wednesday, July 28

10:45 - 11:00 am ET: Opening Welcome

11:00 - 11:30 am ET: Keynote
On Pedagogy As Protest
Christopher Emdin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Science Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

11:30 am - 12:00 pm ET: Optional Breakout Session (Reflect & Connect on Keynote)

12:00 - 12:50 pm ET: Break

1:50 - 2:10 pm ET: Break

3:10 - 4:00 pm ET: Break

5:00 - 6:00 pm ET: Choose from multiple pre-recorded sessions

Thursday, July 29

10:45 - 11:00 am ET: Welcome

11:00 am - 12:00 pm ET: Keynote
Designing to Make the Heart Sing: How Inclusion Can Promote Innovation
Luis Pérez
Technical Assistance Specialist, CAST

12:00 - 12:50 pm ET: Break

1:50 - 2:10 pm ET: Break

3:10 - 4:00 pm ET: Break

5:00 - 6:00 pm ET: Choose from multiple pre-recorded sessions

Friday, July 30

10:45 - 11:00 am ET: Welcome

11:00 am - 12:00 pm ET: Keynote Panel
What Education Could Be: Envisioning & Living into a Learner-Centered Future
Peter McWalters, Senior Advisor, Education Reimagined
Alin Bennett, Vice President of Practice and Field Advancement, Education Reimagined
Izzy Fitzgerald, Student Advocate
Mason Power, D39 Learner + Speaker
Victoria Able, Full-time Student at McDaniel College

12:00 - 12:50 pm ET: Break

1:50 - 2:10 pm ET: Break

3:10 - 4:00 pm ET: Break

4:00 - 5:00 pm ET: Closing Keynote
Design for the Future: Prefrontal Cortex, Unconscious Bias, and the Hope of the UDL Guidelines
David Rose, co-founder of CAST & Chief Education Officer, Emeritus
Jenna Gravel, Director of Research & Curriculum for CAST Professional Learning
Nicole Tucker-Smith, Founder and CEO, Lessoncast

CAST is not responsible for the content of Symposium presentations. Views of the presenters are their own.
Pre-recorded Sessions

UDL Partners: A K-12 Higher Education Partnership Committed to Equity
Erin Barry, Lauren Benfield, Mary Budzilowicz, Amber Gentile, Jesse Gluckman, Sarah Misner & Ronald. W. Whitaker II

Investigación: atención a la diversidad en contextos bi/multilingües
Marisol Patricia Saucedo Revollo Lage & Silvia Vinocur Kocinas

Are We Prepared to Support Executive Functions Online?
Liz Berquist, Lisa Beth Carey & Alison Pritchard

Removing Literacy Barriers with Visual Tools
Rachel Conover & Laura Galindo Sanz

Using Mathematical Routines that Honor and Develop Expert Learners
Mark Alcorn & Audrey Mendivil

The Future is Flexible: Future Directions for UDL Directed Systems Change
Matthew Love & Margaret Marschner

Minding Their Minds: Adapting UDL to Support Learner Mental Health
Lawrence White

Innovating for Equity: A Design Approach to an Anti-Racist Future
Kia Britt & Jo Ann Hanrahan

Applying Universal Design as a Pathway to Inclusive Career Education
Tricia Berry

Pandemic Silver Linings: What Educators Have Gained
Rebecca Blahus & Lorrie Hrycek

Innovations and Pedagogical Approaches for Inclusive Online Instruction
Robline Davey & Natalie Frandsen

Breathing Life, Variability, and Access into Instructional Coaching with UDL
Lizzie Fortin, Magdalena Ganias & Timmary Leary

One Change at a Time; How improvement Science can support UDL Implementation
Bethany Tipton Gillingham

Vulnerable conversations, a complex text, and online teaching: A triumphant trifecta
Loui Lord Nelson & Jennifer L Lord

What UDL Believes about Workplace Learning
James McKenna

Integrating Disability Rights into Professional Development to Shift Deficit Beliefs
Kara Imm & Rachel Lambert

There's no 'I" in Inclusion: Centering Learner Voice for Justness during the UDL Implementation Process
Frances (Hope) Ratcliff

Developing Systems of Support to Encourage Staff to Implement and Sustain UDL Practices in Secondary Schools
Hank Bohanon, Lisa Caputo Love & Kelly Morrissey

The Digital Learning UDL Playbook
Paul Swanson

Techquity: Checking Our Bias & Expanding Expert Learning to ALL
Joni Degner

Calling All Educators: Explore & pilot new edtech tool focused on UDL framework!
Sarah Schwartz & Hal Schwartz
CAST is not responsible for the content of Symposium presentations. Views of the presenters are their own.

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The 7th Annual CAST UDL Symposium: The Future Designed

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Dates Wednesday, July 28 - Friday, July 30, 2021 2020 was a year for the history books, challenging us to make unexpected changes quickly. We also confirmed that dramatic change in teaching and learning is possible. But 2020 also illuminated barriers to learning like never before.

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Universal Design for Learning Implementation and Research Network

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UDL Resources - Universal Design for Learning Implementation and Research Network

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There are hundreds of UDL-focused resources on Learning Designed for you to explore! Here are aÂ few high profile, UDL-IRN created resources to kick off your resource exploration. A Blueprint for UDL Based on our experiences, we lay out some specific...

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Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: : Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education

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Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: : Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education

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Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 227 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Thomas Tobin speaks about his new book, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in higher education. Also coauthored by Kristen Behling.

Production Credit: [00:00:22] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:30] Hello and welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives can be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:58] Welcome to today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest, Thomas J. Tobin is the Faculty Associate Conference Programming Chair for the Distance Education Professional Development Department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. As well as an internationally recognized speaker and author on topics related to quality in teaching, enhanced education, especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practice, academic integrity, and accessibility universal design for learning. Thomas Tobin holds aPh.D. in English literature, a second master's degree in information science, a professional project management certification, a master online teacher certification, Quality Matters certification, and the recently completed his Certified Professional in Accessability Core Competencies, CPACC certification. He tells his nieces and nephews that he is an 41st grade. Tom serves on the editorial boards of E-Learn Magazine Insight, a journal of scholarly teaching, the Journal of Interactive Online Learning, and the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration.

Bonni: [00:02:20] Tom, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Thomas: [00:02:22] Thanks a lot Bonni. I'm glad to be here.

Bonni: [00:02:25] It is great to finally be getting to have a two way conversation. I sat in one of your sessions- It must have been two or three years ago at my first online learning Consortium Conference. And you lit the room on fire and had just completely engaged in a way that was very distinct and different from most conference presentations. So it's so fun now to have the back and forth now- we had back and forth but it was just a very large room so I didn't get as great a percentage of your time.

Thomas: [00:02:53] Well I'm really grateful and that's one of the things that I hope will come out of this conversation is I specialize in things that tend to scare the heck out of faculty members and designers at OLC, for example, we were talking about copyright- something that could be a really dry, boring kind of thing. It's really essential for all of us to have a back of the envelope understanding about that. And maybe not turn ourselves into case citing mini lawyers, but definitely want to make those kinds of things fun for people and engaging, help people to take a first step. And that's what my work is all about in areas like accessibility, copyright, evaluating higher education teaching online, and academic integrity. So I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to share a little bit with you and your listeners.

Bonni: [00:03:41] One of the patterns I am now seeing through those threads is that it isn't just about making the material, the resources, the presentations, the workshops not boring. Yes that's important. And certainly you are incredibly gifted at that. But it's about making these topics practical- it's not a fear based thing. That's one of the things I really remember from that copyright thing and certainly resonates throughout your entire book is just the idea that we don't have to build everything out of fear or legalism, but there's actually more of a service mindset and really coming back full circle to learning.

Thomas: [00:04:22] Very much so. And one of the challenges for a lot of us who have faculty roles or we're faculty developers, instructional designers, students support people, we get into our roles and then suddenly we're confronted with some thing that we think we should already know about. Somebody should have taught me about accessibility when I was in graduate school. Shouldn't I have learned about academic integrity and how to discourage cheating?

Thomas: [00:04:52] And one of the challenges for us is that we are experts in our fields. We are chemists. We are art historians. We are nursing professors. And so we are in a position as experts. And it can be embarrassing. And it can be a fear inducing kind of realization to know oh wait I should know about this, but I don't.

Thomas: [00:05:14] So one of the big things that I like to do is to give people permission to be in that beginners mindset and give people permission not to have known about these kinds of topics before hand. You want to be open, you want to be welcoming, yes give people the information. But really my role as an author, as a speaker, as a facilitator is to help people to get their brains around big weighty topics. And then give them permission to take it one small piece at a time and learn how to take that first step. And that's actually why Kirsten and I wrote the book. Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone on Universal Design for Learning in Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:05:57] I am so glad to have had you start this way because I felt like today might be an episode of True Confessions and I actually do want to share a little bit with you and I know I'm not alone in this. But I did have a certain degree of guilt- and I'd like to kind of talk about this because really what it was was just a lot of misnomers that I had and the first part of the book looks at where we are now with Universal Design for Learning with accessibility.

Bonni: [00:06:26] And I know for myself, I think I'm afraid to admit this because it seems like I didn't care about the people who would be in my classes but my thinking was off. It is a myth. But I thought that I would both be following the law and also serving my students well if when I came across someone with hearing loss or I came across someone who was visually impaired. Well I thought that was the time then to respond both again legally and also just ethically because I cared. And so I would get to know enough about it that when I would come across it, I would feel like I was equipped.

Bonni: [00:07:04] And that is not the way to go but I don't have to feel guilty. You can talk me through where are we today both legally and then also ethically. How are things evolving?

Thomas: [00:07:15] The really nice part about that concern of I'm just going to wait until I have a student who needs an accommodation. And when we talk about accommodations that's making one change. One time. For one person. This is a familiar conversation to many faculty members and staff members in colleges and universities.

Thomas: [00:07:38] So you have a student with a hearing impairment or a visual disability or any other kind of physical barrier or perhaps a learning disability. That student comes to you, Professor Bonni, with a piece of paper that says I need time and a half on my tests or I need to take my tests in a quiet room away from everybody else. And how should you respond?

Thomas: [00:08:01] The answer is... Yes OK I'll help you. And so that honors your desire to be forward thinking, to be following the law, and also to be an ethical instructor because you're doing what you are supposed to be doing. And that's what the law says the law says that we should provide reasonable accommodations. And we'll come back around to what reasonable means which is where a lot of this fear comes in. We should provide reasonable accommodations for people who need to have barriers lowered so that they can have the same opportunity for learning as any of our other learners who are in our courses.

Thomas: [00:08:43] So. For a student with a hearing disability, perhaps the student needs to have captions on video resources that you're using for your class. Here's where the law is evolving. And here my co-author Kirsten Behling and I are indebted to Andrew Lessman from Temple University in Philadelphia. Andrew is a disability studies lawyer. He's also part of the Temple University team who advises everyone at the university about law and accessibility.

Thomas: [00:09:14] Andrew gave a really excellent keynote a couple of years ago at a disability studies conference that I attended and he made the point that accessibility is a civil right. And instead of just here's the law and let's level the playing field, which is where a lot of people start out. He noted that over the past decade, judgments in legal cases have been moving toward not only leveling the playing field, but also having to do with equality of access and time. Time is one of the factors that is now part of how judges are actually deciding cases. In other words, let's just say Professor Bonni you have some videos in your course. You have a student with a hearing disability. The student comes to you at the end of week 2 out of 15 weeks because of course that paperwork is never ever done on time. And then you say OK great I'll make sure that this happens. Well maybe it takes you and your media services team three weeks to get all of those videos that you're using captioned or there's transcripts created that you have some kind of alternative access for this one student. That's actually now being seen as still discriminatory practice because that student didn't have access in time to catch up and keep up with the rest of his or her classmates.

Thomas: [00:10:44] And so what we're doing in the book is we're saying OK. If we're going to follow that accessability response mindset of doing one change, one time, for one person, making individual accommodations. We need to have institutions that are flexible and fast enough to actually make those accommodations so that the students don't lose time when they make those reasonable accommodation requests.

Thomas: [00:11:14] Now. Universal Design for Learning, as we're talking about it now, this is a concept that was created by neuroscientists at the Center for Applied Special Technology or cCAST in Boston. Back in the 1990s they figured out that when they were trying to help students with disabilities, they discovered that there are three different brain networks that get involved whenever anybody, at any level learns anything. We have to have a why for the thing that we're learning. Why do we want to know it? Now as adult learners, all of us, we are on YouTube or we're asking Siri or Google all these questions. Hey where can I find a plumber who's near me? Or how do I fix a broken pipe? You have a definite need. Oh yeah my garbage disposal is making a funny sound in the kitchen sink. That's a why. That's a really immediate why. But that expands back into OK I'm learning differential calculus. Why am I ever gonna need that?

Thomas: [00:12:24] And so having that why. The neuroscientist discovered if you gave students more than one way to stay engaged, more than one way to keep answering that why question then they were much more likely to set the stage in their minds for retaining that information, interrogating it, making it part of long term memory, and keeping it.

Thomas: [00:12:48] The second part of that is the WHAT of learning. This is just the information. This is the kind of stuff that as a faculty member or a course designer, this is our bread and butter. These are PowerPoint decks. These are lecture notes. These are videos we want our students to watch. These are Journal articles that we'd like them to read. And the what of learning. Here's a here's a little myth busting for everybody. You know about the VAK theory of learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic. That's a myth, it doesn't exist. Learning styles don't actually exist.

Thomas: [00:13:31] What I mean by that is that if I say I'm a visual learner does that mean that I can never learn by listening to something? Of course not. So learning styles are not fixed characteristics of people in the way that they learn. We tend to talk now about learning preferences and those change from moment to moment. Sometimes it's because we prefer to read something over listening to it. But sometimes those learning preferences are dictated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Thomas: [00:14:02] So imagine you have a single mother who has to put her kids to bed at night but still wants to study for her chemistry professors lab for the next day. She can't put a pair of headphones on because she wants to listen and see if the kids are crying at night. She can't just keep the sound on. But if she were able to turn the sound down and put the captions on and watch the lab prep, then she's just found 20 more minutes for study that she didn't have before. Thats the what of learning. And that is the second brain network. Once you understand why you need something, and then you can have some choices about how you get that information, then that allows our students to exercise those learning preferences either because that's what they want or that's what circumstances dictate they've got to do this time.

Thomas: [00:14:52] And the third part of that is the HOW of learning. We have to practice what we learn. We have to do things over and over again. We have to fail at stuff until we get it right. And being able to iterate, being able to practice over and over again, that's what really cements learning whether we're talking about K12 learners, a third grader writing a one paragraph essay or we're talking about graduate students who are doing in-depth analysis and research. It's that iterative practice that allows students to cement things from short term learning into long term memory and practice.

Thomas: [00:15:29] And here's the fun part. If we make sure that we give students options for how they demonstrate those skills, then they are less likely to have to say oh wait I have a barrier that prevents me from doing it the one way you said to do Professor So-and-So. And that way we're actually making it so that fewer people have to put a hand up and say treat me differently or do something, one change, one time for just me. And that's where we go back to what Andrew was talking about, accessibility as a civil right. He's talking about making sure that we're as open, as diverse, and as welcoming as we can be in the way that we have designed the learning interactions for our courses and for our students services.

Bonni: [00:16:16] As we think about adopting Universal Design for Learning, I wonder if it might be fair to frame this as both easy and difficult all at the same time. So I wanted to see how that fits with you because that's one of the things that is one of my takeaways. On one hand, I'm teaching a class right now Personal Leadership and Productivity. And right now they're reading and I wanted to have there be some accountability for finishing that reading. And it's really reflective work that I'm asking them to do. So I want them to identify five takeaways that they had from doing the reading. It could be a quote. It could be just a concept. And then three ways they could apply that or have applied it in their lives. And then one question that they have for other students who are in the class. And this is something that they'll be doing throughout the two books that we're reading in the class. And as I set up that assignment in my learning management system, we happen to use Canvas, but if you use another one you can also do this and every one that I've ever taught on. Set up the assignment. They could submit text. Actual typed copy paste text. They could submit a picture which a number of them did for this first reading, we're recording this fairly early in my semester so they actually drew what is often referred to as sketch notes. And I loved it because this gal, she knew how to draw the ear and she's got the brain, it is so fun to see. And then I also said that they could record a video of themselves sharing their reflections that way.

Bonni: [00:17:50] And I don't remember what else I had, but basically I'm not testing writing skills. It's not a writing class, although certainly writing as a form of reflection can be helpful but it did not matter the way in which they conducted that reflection. It was not important. So choice. But literally all I did was check check check check check the boxes and have in the instructions that they can make that choice. So I see UDL, if I want to get into this as both easy. But also if you're going to be good at it, you talked earlier about the why, the what, and the how. Tom, it haunts me because every class that I teach I want to be better at all of that. And I'm never where I want to be. So you reflect back? Does that sit well with you? This idea that I can get better incrementally but I also always strive to do this work better.

Thomas: [00:18:44] Absolutely. And Bonni I have to congratulate you because you don't get a prize for knowing the answer to a question, but you definitely get a prize for being able to apply it. This is where we really want to focus with all of our readers of the book. And your example is perfect. So in the assignment that you have put together, you want your learners to read a piece of content and then respond to it in some fashion. And you also told me what your grading rubric looks like. Now granted, you said you're just checking boxes to make sure that people are performing the assignment. But what's your criterion for checking that box or not checking that box? What's your mastery level criteria? Well you want to have five of these kinds of takeaways. You want to have a question for somebody else. You listed all of the things. So you are doing specifications grading here. Now that is a key to being able to do UDL in the first place.

Thomas: [00:19:45] And we should say right off the bat, UDL is not a set of specific teaching practices. It's not a thing that makes you change from a flipped classroom model or an active learning model or a PBL problem based learning model. No it's a framework. It's a way of thinking about the interactions that we have so that they are more inclusive. And you can do UDL with any of those models, any of those teaching approaches. So let's unpack that assignment that you just talked about and then let's talk about why this is scary. And how to make it not so scary.

Bonni: [00:20:23] And I still want it to be a little scary because I want to keep getting better. Scary, but not terrifying.

Thomas: [00:20:30] And I want to replace the scary with encouragement and ways that you can find resources. In the example that you've provided, let's do it in a single stream way according to the way that we might do that if we were just traditional professors and had never heard of the Universal Design for Learning stuff. We might ask our students to read a journal article or a chapter in a textbook. First off. Second, here are the criteria that I would like you to follow in your response to this reading. Give me five of these, two of these, and one of these. And then type that up in a word processing file and send it in through the learning management system.

Thomas: [00:21:15] What that does is it allows students to have one way to take in the information. One-Way to give their response. And it allows only one way for them to stay engaged or involved. Now when we wrote the book what we figured out was if we then go to a professor who has the all that sort of single stream design. And say oh yes multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representing information, multiple means of action and expression and we talk about neuroscience, sometimes people's eyes glaze over a little bit because it's a lot. And it can sound like oh I put in 50 2 minute videos into my course. Are you telling me I'm going to caption those like yesterday? And people get into seeing the scope of what they could do which is the scary part, they see how much work or how much effort it would take to do an entire course fully UDL. And they suffer from analysis paralysis and they just don't start.

Thomas: [00:22:21] So. I love the fact that you started with just one assignment. And what we say is take all of the sort of three brain networks and the what, the how, and the why. All of that stuff, set that aside. Don't talk like that to your colleagues. Let that be secret knowledge for you people who read the book for, you people who have these responsibilities. When you are sharing these kinds of tips with others, just think about Universal Design for Learning as Plus. 1 Thinking.

Thomas: [00:22:57] What I mean by that is, think of all the interactions that you have in your course. How do students interact with the materials like reading something? But how do they interact with one another? In conversations, in small groups, in studying. How do they interact with you as the instructor? And how do they interact with the wider world? Perhaps you ask them to go out and interview someone who's doing the job that they're preparing for. So think of all those interactions. And if there is one way to have that interaction now, plus one. Give them one more way to have that interaction. So your example is absolutely. Bonni gets the prize because you wanted your students to read a chapter or a journal article. If you provide them that information in a way that is in inaccedable, they only have one way that they could get that information in.

Thomas: [00:23:54] But if you give them aMicrosoft Word document that is this journal article. Or you give them a PDF where you can actually take your mouse and click and drag and it will select the words. That's something that anybody can turn into an audio of the text. And it's not just people with disabilities if you go out onto the Google Play Store or onto the iTunes Store you can find free read out loud applications. And it'll take any PTF or any Microsoft Word document. And there's literally hundreds of these many of them are graduate student projects that will take any piece of text and read it out loud to you. This is not just for somebody who has a visual challenge. This is for somebody who can study only for your course on their way into work in the car in the traffic jam in the morning. So if it takes you 45 minutes to get into work and you've got nothing better to do than sit in traffic, why not listen to the reading you're supposed to be doing for class. So that's one plus one in the assignment you're talking about.

Thomas: [00:25:03] The other plus one you've already designed into it. You say OK give this back to me as text but also post a picture, do a drawing, do sketch notes, do an audio. Now here's a scary part. The plus one means instead of giving it to me as text, maybe offer them not the chance to do any other format which is kind of frightening. But just the format Plus one. One more. So maybe do a drawing or something by hand and take the picture or give me text and don't even bother with audio at this point. That allows you as the instructor to set a few boundaries around what you're going to receive and how you're going to look at it.

Thomas: [00:25:49] The last piece of the puzzle for UDL is plus one in how you respond to it. Or plus one in how students understand that they're on the right track. And you also did that very well. You have in your assignment the idea of here are the things in the rubric that I'm going to be looking for. And you can grade those no matter the format that the students are sending stuff in. So if you're using the same criteria, you can grade a text based response the same way that you can grade the sketch notes that a student would submit.

Thomas: [00:26:33] Now there is an asterisk to this last part and it gets us into a wider conversation. The asterisk is if your assignment is the format, don't offer choice. So for example I teach English composition courses. My Ph.D. is in Victorian literature. Believe it or not. And in my English composition courses, I do want to make sure that students know how to use a word processor, know how to do APA formatting, know how to use fonts, how to use formatting, margins, spacing, all that kind of stuff. And if I gave my students the option to do a quick two minute video response as their essay, could I tell how well they were doing with formatting requirements? No. Now, if the format is the assignment, don't offer choice. But when my students are drafting pieces of it ,like a few paragraphs here or a few paragraphs there. I allow them choice there. I open up that plus one as much as I possibly can. Full well knowing that yeah when the rubber meets the road you do have to do this thing. This particular thing.

Thomas: [00:27:43] And so when you talk about being a little afraid that UDL can be so big that we don't know where to start, here are three questions for your listeners to ask themselves and their colleagues to take some of that fear away because we've just worked through an assignment that you give and you've done plus one in it already. And so when you want to strengthen, when you want to build on your foundation, but you don't know where to start. Start here.

Thomas: [00:28:12] First question. Where do your students always send you the same question by e-mail 700 times? Now if you're like me, I've been teaching my courses for 20 something years. But even if you've been teaching for five years or you're just starting out. You've taught for at least a few times the same course over and over. And you know that in week two, in your intro to biology course that your students are going to have questions about the difference between meiosis and mitosis in the cell energy transfer process. They always muck it up. They always ask a million questions about it. That is an excellent place to START with a little plus one design. If you give that information in one way. Hey read this in the textbook and just take a look at that. Give it to them in more than one way. Just one more. And by doing that, by creating that one minute quick video where you do a screencast and show hey this is a concept that people always get questions about and always get it wrong. Then giving that explanation is actually saving you time and effort on the back end of things and it's making it easier for your students to approach a difficult concept.

Thomas: [00:29:30] Notice what we're not doing here. We are not making it easier to understand the concept. We're not dumbing it down. We're not spoon feeding anybody. What we're doing is we're lowering the barrier to access. But we're not lowering the rigor of the content itself. So, question one where do students send you the same question by email 700 times?

Thomas: [00:29:54] Question 2. Where do your students always get a concept wrong on the tests and the quizzes and causes you to have to reteach? You have to spend valuable class time to go over something again because students typically just don't get it. That's an excellent place to employ a little plus one design thinking as well. So this is where you create a study guide. This is where you ask your students to create little quick videos. Ask them to take their cell phones and turn on the camera and put that selfie camera to good use. Hey my name's Tom I'm a student in professor Bonni's class and here's my explanation of this difficult concept. And ask for their permission to share it with future classes. You don't even have to do the UDL stuff yourself all the time. Giving students that agency, giving students that plus one really helps them with difficult and challenging concepts and it helps reduce the number of things that you have to go back and reteach. That was question 2.

Thomas: [00:30:56] Question 3. Where did your students always ask for alternative explanation? Professor Bonni I really liked what you said but I still don't kind of get it. That's an excellent place to start doing some plus one design as well. Here's where you can really outsource it. Talk to your colleagues who teach the same courses that you do and ask them to create a study guide, a pamphlet, a quick video, an audio podcast about that particular difficult or challenging concept. Just having more than one way of explaining something or more than one perspective on it is something that helps to lower the barrier to entry for that concept and keeps the rigor high and reduces the number of questions, confusions, and problems that you're going to have as an instructor.

Thomas: [00:31:46] So those three questions that make it less scary. Let's figure out where to start. Where do your students always ask the same question over and over again? Where do your students get things wrong on the tests and quizzes causing you to reteach? And where do your students always ask for alternative explanations? Those are great places to start. And it sounds like in the example that you provided, you're already doing some of that so excellent, excellent Bonni.

Bonni: [00:32:10] Tom has given us today so much to think about in terms of UDL. Where are we now? How is our approach to UDL evolving so that we can better serve our students? And then how do we adopt it so we can start or continue to use it on our campuses. And I wish we could talk more but all I can say is go get the book. It's a great book and is just well worth the investment in terms of the time and also the expense. It's not that expensive. And we should get our hands on a copy. How's that?

Thomas: [00:32:43] That's great. And I can add to that just for your listeners, if you go to WVUpress.com And you search for our book, there is a discount code that your listeners can put in to save 25% on the book if you're so inclined. That code is all capital letters REACHTEACH. And that for your listeners will get you 25% off our book and our undying gratitude for purchasing it.

Bonni: [00:33:14] And that is the same publisher, West Virginia University Press, that has been sponsoring the transcripts. So making Teaching in Higher Ed even more accessible to pople who want to learn more about these topics.

Bonni: [00:33:30] This is the time in this show where we each get to give recommendations and this is where I get to get a little bit geeky. I am both a Mac user and also a user of iOS devices and there is a wonderful new podcast out by David Sparks who is probably better known at this point, although maybe not for long, as the cohost of Mac power users. He now cohosts this show with Rose Orchard who is absolutely just a wonderful addition to the team, the Automators podcast, automation for the people.

Bonni: [00:34:03] And it is one of those things where I do sometimes get a little bit challenge because they really give- they will give an example like, how can you automate your calendars? How can you automate project templates.? How can you even automate things having to do with your email? And it is not one of those things where I just listen and absorb everything. It's one of those where I listen, I get my curiosity peaked and then I got to do a little homework to automate some of these things. But boy does it ever pay off. I mean it's amazing.

Bonni: [00:34:34] So if you like that kind of geeking out and you are either aMac user or an iOS user, I think it's worth a listen appear interested in that topic. And now is when I get to pass it over to Tom for his recommendations.

Thomas: [00:34:47] Thank you Bonni. And to play off of your recommendations I'd like to recommend one technology that's really changing the game in terms of accessibility for web based and learning management system based content. It's a tool called Ally. Their web site is Ally.ac and they started out as an individual company. They were just bought by the Learning Management System company, Blackboard last year.

Thomas: [00:35:14] And Blackboard has done something that they don't typically do. Typically when a learning management system company buys a tool or another company, they fold it into their own universe and they allow it to be used only with their tools. Well blackboard thinks that Ally, which is an accessibility tool that creates multiple versions of content automatically behind the scenes, they think that it is so important that they are putting together ways that Ally can be used in Canvas in Desire to Learn, in Sakai, in Moodle, all the big learning management systems.

Thomas: [00:35:52] So they're making sure that this tool is available to everybody to use. And it's kind of a game changer. In terms of making things accessible, it used to be that we would ask only faculty members or instructional designers to create the plus 1 versions of all their materials and that can be a daunting task. Imagine if all the materials in your learning management system right now today- if you apply this ally tool, and yes it is an additional cost to your institution. But if you apply that Ally tool it will create a text transcript for your videos, put automatic captions on the videos, create a visual braille version of that, create a number of different other alternative formats automatically. It takes Microsoft Word documents and make sure that they've got the right headings structure that a screen reader can use. It does a lot of cool things and I'd encourage people to go take a look at that Ally web site.

Thomas: [00:36:51] I also need to recommend a person and that person is Kirsetn Behling. She is my co-author on this book and you'd love to look Kirsten up. She is the Director of Student Accessibility Services at [00:37:02] Tufts [0.4] University. And Kirsten Behling, she's fantastic. I do not have a disability services background. Kirsten does. And so with the two of us writing this book we were really able to play off of each other's strengths and build on solid foundations, mine from faculty development Kirsten from the disability services area and it really turned into a wonderful collaboration. Both of us are available for anything from a 20 minute phone call, to a consultation with your college or university, to coming to work with you and your colleagues. So we'd love to hear the rest of your story. Please reach out.

Bonni: [00:37:44] Thoma Tobin, thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. And may I say, I hope this is just the beginning of an even more extended conversation because I know you have so many things you could come back and talk to us more about.

Thomas: [00:37:59] Thank you very much Bonni for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk with you and your listeners. And I'm looking forward to the rest of the conversation where ever that leads us. Thanks.

Bonni: [00:38:10] It was so energising to get to talk to Thomas Tobin today for Teaching in Higher Ed episode 227. If you'd like to go to the show notes to see so many of the resources that he provided and talked about during the episode, go to teachinginhighered.com/227. You can also if you'd like make a comment on the episode there and let Tom know some of your takeaways from listening. I'd also encourage you to check out the book which is linked to at that same website. And the discount code that he referenced is mentioned there.

Bonni: [00:38:42] And if you have been listening for a while but don't want to have to remember to go grab that the information that comes through via the show notes just subscribe to that e-mail it's teaching in higher ed dot com slash subscribe it comes once a week has an article by me.

Bonni: [00:38:58] And also follow up with the show notes. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Thomas Tobin talks about his book Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education on episode 227 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

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How can we implement seemingly subjective feedback-focused assessment in ways that decrease bias?

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Student responses to various modes of delivery and interaction in the online classroom environment over the past year

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Nguyen, T., et al. (2021). Insights Into Students’ Experiences and Perceptions of Remote Learning Methods: From the COVID-19 Pandemic to Best Practice for the Future

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How do we rid ourselves of the ingrained biased grading practices? Or the practices many of these techniques are trying to help us move away from?

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Written for K-12 educators, but is gaining ground in higher ed, i.e. NILOA

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Start Your Journey: Grading for Equity Online Course

Discover how to transform your school and classroom with equitable grading practices that are accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational!

Now Introducing: Grading for Equity Community Book Study

The Grading for Equity Book Study is a new program for schools and districts that provides a structured approach to collectively engage teachers and administrators (and even caregivers and students!) in meaningful discussions about the why, the what, and the how of equitable grading.

Book Study sessions are 90 minutes in length and can be scheduled based on your school or district's calendar. Each session will be led by a Crescendo Education Group Facilitator and will be held remotely.

Quiz:
How Equitable Is Your Grading?

We all want equity in our districts, schools and classrooms. Teachers and school leaders: Find out how equitable your grading is, and ways to improve.

Bring Equitable Grading to Your PLC, School, or District

Students need equitable grading in every classroom in every school. Find resources to help others understand the urgency, ideas, and strategies of equitable grading.

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Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms. A powerful and growing movement among professional educators.

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What are some inclusive grading practices that grad student TAs have power to implement in a typical TA setting (e.g., lab section or discussion section in a larger class)?

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How do we encourage faculty/staff/educators to use a UDL approach in their courses?

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How can we support structural changes at our institutions that would create more space/possibility for these practices?

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What methods can we use to increase buy-in for the use of ungrading/contract grading when faculty perceive it as being more time consuming?

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15 min. ungrading presentation from recent MSU Spring Conference on Teaching Learning and Student Success

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15 min. ungrading presentation from recent MSU Spring Conference on Teaching Learning and Student Success

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https://iteach.msu.edu/iteachmsu/groups/iteachmsu/stories/1753

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Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, Raechel N. Soicher, and Kathryn A. Becker-Blease. "Four empirically based reasons not to administer time-limited tests." Translational issues in psychological science 6.2 (2020): 175.

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Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, Raechel N. Soicher, and Kathryn A. Becker-Blease. "Four empirically based reasons not to administer time-limited tests." Translational issues in psychological science 6.2 (2020): 175.

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Pulfrey Caroline, Céline Buchs, and Fabrizio Butera. (2011). “Why grades engender performance-avoidance goals: the mediating role of autonomous motivation.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(3): 683-700.

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Pulfrey Caroline, Céline Buchs, and Fabrizio Butera. (2011). “Why grades engender performance-avoidance goals: the mediating role of autonomous motivation.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(3): 683-700.

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Quinn, David M. (2020). “Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3): 375-392.

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Quinn, David M. (2020). “Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3): 375-392.

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A recent collection on Ungrading (with pieces on contract and specifications grading as well): https://wvupressonline.com/ungrading

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A recent collection on Ungrading (with pieces on contract and specifications grading as well): https://wvupressonline.com/ungrading

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https://wvupressonline.com/ungrading

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Contents

Introduction: Why Ungrade? Why Grade?
Susan D. Blum

Part I: Foundations and Models

1. How to Ungrade
Jesse Stommel

2. What Going Gradeless Taught Me about Doing the "Actual Work"
Aaron Blackwelder

3. Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments
Susan D. Blum

4. Shifting the Grading Mindset
Starr Sackstein

5. Grades Stifle Student Learning. Can We Learn to Teach without Grades?
Arthur Chiaravalli

Part II: Practices

6. Let's Talk about Grading
Laura Gibbs

7. Contract Grading and Peer Review
Christina Katopodis and Cathy N. Davidson

8. Critique-Driven Learning and Assessment
Christopher Riesbeck

9. A STEM Ungrading Case Study: A Reflection on First-Time Implementation in Organic Chemistry II
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh

10. The Point-less Classroom: A Math Teacher's Ironic Choice in Not Calculating Grades
Gary Chu

Part III: Reflections

11. Grade Anarchy in the Philosophy Classroom
Marcus Schultz-Bergin

12. Conference Musings and The G Word
Joy Kirr

13. Wile E. Coyote, the Hero of Ungrading
John Warner

Conclusion: Not Simple but Essential
Susan D. Blum

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

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Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

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Introduction: Why Ungrade? Why Grade? Susan D. Blum Part I: Foundations and Models 1. How to Ungrade Jesse Stommel 2. What Going Gradeless Taught Me about Doing the "Actual Work" Aaron Blackwelder 3. Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments Susan D. Blum 4.

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What is Universal Design for Learning (UDL)?

UDL is a set of principles for curriculum development and delivery that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn.

It provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone; not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs. (CAST, 2014.)

"Venn Diagram" by University of Denver is licensed under CC BY 4.0/ Design modified from original

UDL at a Glance

RDC Learner Centeredness Connection

UDL incorporates and supports many current research-based approaches to teaching and learning including, learner centered practice. The Principles of UID, can help to provide a learner-centered reference point for adapting curriculum and instruction.

Principles of Universal Design for Learning

The three primary principles of Universal Design are:

"The What of Learning"
Presents information and content in different ways

"The How of Learning"
Differentiate the ways that students can express what they know

"The Why of Learning"
Stimulate interest and motivation for learning

Provide options for:

Perception

Language and symbols

Comprehension

Provide options for:

Physical action

Expressive skills and fluency

Executive functions

Provide options for:

Recruiting interest

Sustaining effort and persistence

Self-regulation

Getting Started With UDL

Universal Instructional Design (UID)

Universal Instructional Design is a process that involves considering the potential needs of all learners when designing and delivering instruction.

UID means identifying and eliminating unnecessary barriers to teaching and learning while maintaining academic rigor.

UID is about truly universal thinking - it goes beyond mere accessibility to reflecting on how to maximize learning for students of all backgrounds and learner preferences while minimizing the need for special accommodations.

Seven Universal Instructional Design Principles

1. Accessible - be accessible and fair

2. Flexible - provide flexibility in use, participation, and presentation

3. Consistent - be straightforward and consistent

4. Explicit - be explicitly presented and readily perceived

5. Supportive - provide a supportive learning environment

6. Minimize Effort - minimize unnecessary physical effort or requirements

7. Learning Space - ensure a learning space that accommodates both students and instructional methods

UDL for Online Development and Teaching

Implementing UDL principles when designing and developing for online material is important to help meet the diverse learning needs of students.

Achieving UDL for online learning environments often begins with the UDL principle Multiple Means of Representation, however, actively seeking to incorporate all three UDL principles is important as well.

Learn more about UDL and Online Learning:
Accessibility to E-Learning for Persons With Disabilities: Strategies, Guidelines, and Standards. (An eCampus Alberta and NorQuest College resource)

References

Burghstaler, S. (2012). Universal design in postsecondary education: Process, principles, and applications. Retrieved Feb 4, 2013 from http://www.washington.edu/doit/Brochures/Academics/ud_post.html

CAST. (2014). Transforming education through universal design for learning. Retrieved Feb 4, 2015 from http://www.cast.org

eCampusAlberta and NorQuest College, (2008). Accessibility to e-Learning for persons with disabilities: Strategies, guidelines, and standards. Retrieved February 21, 2015 from https://www.norquest.ca/NorquestCollege/media/pdf/centres/learning/Accessibility-to-E-Learning-for-Persons-With-Disabilities-Strategies,-Guidelines-and-Standards.pdf

Roberts, K., Park, H., Brown, S. & Cook, B. (2011). Universal design for Instruction in postsecondary education systematic review of empirically based articles. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 24(1), p.5-15.

ctl@rdc.ab.ca | 403.356.4989 | Teaching Common - 913C | Find us on theLoop | Find us on Twitter and Facebook @ctlrdc

Updated September 20, 2019

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UDL is a set of principles for curriculum development and delivery that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. It provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone; not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.

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"I have seen the glories of the grading contract..."

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"I have seen the glories of the grading contract..."

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I have seen the glories of using a grading contract in my first-year writing course and I am never going back to my previous ways.

Hallelujah! Amen! Pass the beans.

My motives for giving the grading contract a try were multi-fold.

1. When utilizing numerical grades, I've grown more and more dismayed over how much of my evaluation time is spent justifying that number. In analyzing my own comments, nearly 80% of my words were spent explaining what was "wrong" with the student's work. Even when I would consciously try to focus on "process" and provide forward-looking comments, I just ended up writing more and longer commentary that seemed even less useful to students who are thoroughly conditioned to only care about that number anyway.

When I transitioned to an exclusive teaching diet of first-year writing last year and grading became an even larger portion of my work, I couldn't ignore this problem any longer. What I was doing was not sustainable either in terms of time or spirit.

2. Contract grading seemed like a potentially useful tool in combating student anxiety over grades by putting control of the grade firmly in students' hands.

3. I like to fiddle with my teaching, particularly when I'm limited to a single course. Without experimenting, I'd get bored, and a bored instructor is a sure-fire recipe for unengaged students, which results in an unhappy instructor, and then we watch the vicious circle turn.

The results...

It worked.

Or rather...it's working.

The most immediate and striking change was in my comments. Because I've reduced my grading scale to "Proficient," "Above Proficient," and "Below Proficient"[1] much more of my commentary can go to diagnosing the problem in the student's writing process and focusing the commentary where it might be most helpful.

For example, in an early assignment that involves summarizing an article's argument, many of the "Below Proficient" efforts evidence more problems with effective reading, rather than effective writing. Sure, summaries lacked focus, were poorly organized, and had messy sentences, but the roots of these problems were clearly found in insufficient engagement with and understanding of the source text. Rather than explaining all those problems, I could zero in on that flawed reading process, and direct the student to our earlier work with understanding and breaking down arguments.

When it comes to reducing anxiety, the anecdotal reports from students were promising as well. While there was an adjustment period, students seemed to appreciate that the contract privileges their labor as much (or more than) the discrete grade at the end of each assignment. This seemed particularly true for students who considered themselves marginal writers and expected low grades on the assignments themselves. While they often still rated "Below Proficient," (at least early in the semester), the grading contract provided a path to achievement - by doing additional writing - that many were willing to follow. This also had the not inconsequential effect of having students write more, and with more enthusiasm[2] throughout the semester.[3]

I discovered some additional, hidden benefits to using a grading contract.

1. This sounds obvious, but for each assignment, it forced me to decide what matters. With writing, it's tempting to say everything, and when I have the full range of numerical grades to consider, to some degree everything does matter, but when it comes to helping student writers develop, I've long known that limiting what they're focusing on at any given time is a more effective approach. By establishing a level of "proficiency," I was forced to define the two or three most important criteria to that determination. By defining that criteria, I gave students a clearer target to aim for.

2. The grading contract brought my teaching practice into better alignment with my values.

At the top of my teaching philosophy is to help foster the practice of student choice and agency. Writing is exactly that, making choices, and I believe students write better when they have the maximum latitude to make these choices.

I also believe that one of the chief sources of student anxiety is the lack of freedom of choice they perceive when it comes to their own educations. For the current generation of students, school has been a gauntlet with a series of challenges overseen by a "Big Boss," video game style. There is either failure or success, with little room in between, success is largely a function of conforming to the values of the system (many of which are opaque and approached tactically), and each success is unrelated to whatever comes next.

By largely removing the grade from my judgment, I'm forcing students to make choices about what matters to them and why. For their entire lives they've been told that grades "matter." Each of those little choices - doing the draft, coming to class, etc... - requires students to confront and put into practice their own values.

With the contract, they get to decide to what extent this is true for them. If one of the things that students learn from using the grading contract is that they value sleeping in several times a semester rather than attending class (and earning a higher grade), I'm happy to help them achieve that self-knowledge.

3. I've moved myself further from the center of the course.

In preparing for this experiment, I wrote about how this change was forcing me to confront my ego and how much control I perceived myself having over student learning. To a large degree, I've bought into the myth that my students' grades were largely a reflection of how effective I am as an instructor.

But in the context of my main goals for students - leaving the course armed with a flexible, constantly developing writing process adaptable to audience and occasion - the discrete grades on individual assignments, or even aggregated into and end-of-semester grade, are pretty lousy proxies.

I've always told students that they will continue to develop as writers throughout their entire lives, which means their growth as writers shouldn't be centered around me as the instructor, but writing as a practice and a discipline.

Ultimately, if students learn something, it has to be on their own initiatives, rather than with me acting as a kind of academic "Sherpa." I believe using a grading contract helps put them in charge of that journey.

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I Have Seen the Glories of the Grading Contract... | Just Visiting

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I have seen the glories of using a grading contract in my first-year writing course and I am never going back to my previous ways. Hallelujah! Amen! Pass the beans. My motives for giving the grading contract a try were multi-fold. 1.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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When it comes to grading, less is more. So say a number of scholars who have shared their recent experiments with "ungrading" in blog posts and on other social media, sparking renewed discussions about the practice.

"My core hypothesis was that student learning would actually be improved by eliminating instructor grading from the course," Marcus Schultz-Bergin, assistant lecturer of philosophy at Cleveland State University, wrote of going gradeless this semester in a personal blog post that has since been shared on the popular philosophy site Daily Nous.

"My hope" for students, Schultz-Bergin continued, "is that the reflection they engaged in, and the discussions we had, will lead to a significant commitment in the second half of the course to really achieve what they set out for themselves so that when they tell me they earned an A they can really mean it."

Thus far, he added, the experiment in his undergraduate philosophy of law course "has had its ups and downs. There are definitely some things I will change going forward, but I do think the gradeless approach can work well in a course like this."

Experts in ungrading say it's still relatively rare in higher education, due in part to inertia with respect to pedagogical innovation, the culture of assessment and professors' anxieties about going gradeless. How will students respond? What will colleagues say? What will administrators think?

Still, ungrading is more common than one might think. And there are sound pedagogical reasons to do it, given the litany of research finding that grades play to extrinsic (not intrinsic) motivation, decrease enjoyment of learning and increase fears of failure. More than that, grades aren't necessarily a good measure of student learning. And, based on additional research, we know they're subject to rampant inflation.

"There are a surprising number of faculty questioning grades in productive ways, and experimenting with alternative modes of assessment," said Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington, and an early evangelist of ungrading. "If, as teachers, we just ask students why, when and how they learn, what we can get back is way more valuable than any standardized assessment mechanism can reveal."

Ungrading "creates space for that kind of honest reflection and dialogue," he said.

As Schultz-Bergin's post indicates, going gradeless doesn't mean that students won't end up with a final grade. Most institutions require that students receive formal marks, after all. But the process typically means that students semiregularly reflect independently, with their peers and with their professors on their learning and performance in a given a course. Those reflections -- which experts say are important to metacognition -- all help students to eventually grade themselves.

Professors who have gone gradeless say that students sometimes give themselves higher grades than they deserve. But they report that it's uncommon, and that they talk with the student about it when it does happen.

Maha Bali, associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, shared her experience with ungrading for the fourth time on her blog last month. An ongoing challenge is making sure that her grades aren't inflated. While most students are "honest" and give themselves grades commensurate with their effort, she said, "there are always a few who give themselves A and don't deserve it and we need to negotiate."

Elaborating on that process in an email interview, Bali said that midsemester grades are "easy to negotiate via email with specific suggestions for improvement." By the end of the semester, she said, it's harder, as one final reflection is due only a few days before grades are filed.

Even so, Bali said, "I only ever had one student argue back and forth with me demanding a numerical breakdown of their grade."

In general, Bali talks to students about grades being a combination of three things: a single standard -- which she describes as unfair because students arrive with different readiness levels, interests and strengths -- and against a curve or class norm and by growth or effort.

Bali wrote that she started talking about her ungrading approach with students early on in the semester. Unlike Schultz-Bergin, who is doing away with all numeric and letter grades all semester long, Bali gives students numeric and verbal feedback on small assignments. The numbers are "very insignificant in the large scheme of things," she wrote in her post, "but I don't want to ignore them completely, so students don't get a huge cultural shock."

Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame who hasn't given grades in several years and doesn't plan to again, is currently editing a book on ungrading. Stommel has contributed, as has Cathy Davidson, Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, whose reflection on her own ungrading experiment at Duke University, her former institution, caught much attention in 2009. ("I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning a grade," Davidson said at the time.)

It was easier for Blum to solicit chapters from those in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, technology, engineering and math, as the former broad fields more obviously lend themselves to ungrading (in Schultz-Bergin's case, for example, a philosopher is doing what is arguably a philosophical exercise). But Blum's book includes contributions from those in STEM and she believes that ungrading lends itself to any environment.

"It certainly fits well with writing, where revision is one of the primary techniques people use and all of the feedback tends to be formative, not summative -- writing and rhetoric people have done a lot of work on this," she said. "And I know there are people who are working in, let's say, a science course with a common syllabus [across sections], and that would be an obstacle."

But, in general, Blum said, in any context or discipline, the process is "so much more information than a simple grade could ever be."
Reflections Across Classrooms
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, a chemistry instructor at Central New Mexico Community College, has written about her current ungrading effort in her organic chemistry class. Like many other professors who forgo grading students, Sorensen-Unruh offered students a sense of how they should assess themselves and their learning in her syllabus. Most ungrading processes are highly structured. And in Sorensen-Unruh's case, she wanted to make sure that her classes would be counted as prerequisites for students continuing their studies.

So far, she said last week, things are going well. Students are sometimes "thrown off" by being told to lead their own assessment processes, she said, since they're not used to it. But they "seem to realize that the agency I'm trying to encourage them to use regarding their grades is an opportunity to think about their assessment differently."

As for teaching chemistry in particular, Sorensen-Unruh said she was "required to be a bit more creative when integrating this strategy." Her classroom already centers on active learning, she said, so making time to address individual student concerns in class isn't an issue. But her class is small -- 28 students. Doing this in class of 300 would be impossible without help, she said.

In STEM, she added, "I think ungrading requires a willingness to treat our classrooms as an experimental space where things might not go completely according to plan." So mentoring, especially for newer professors, would be ideal.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, has previously gone gradeless in a graduate seminar. But she said that she's currently ungrading with undergraduates because her research demonstrates that "a culture of caring matters" to student success, "and it's time to apply my research to my teaching."

In her current general education course on caring about college, Goldrick-Rab has 70 students and three teaching assistants. The TAs had to learn the process and the class was "frankly shocked I wasn't grading. It took them awhile to trust it."

Then, she said, students "started to come to me, and write to me in self-reflections, things like 'I am so glad I can finally focus on learning rather than wondering if I'm hitting some specific mark. This is what I had hoped college would be.' Others have said it's 'the first time I felt like a professor really cared about her class.'"

Students still get anxiety surrounding tests, which are scored but not graded, Goldrick-Rab said. "Some can't quite let go of the idea that there will eventually be a final grade. And there will be -- I have to give one -- but it will be based on their review of their performance across the term, and unless we see something terribly off about their assessment we will use their recommendation."

Another key concern among professors about ungrading is attendance, though many professors report it doesn't make much of a difference, either way. Goldrick-Rab said that attendance remains a challenge, but that attendance lags as the term goes on "in every undergrad class every year."

The key difference now, she said, is that "I know more about why they aren't there. I get info from the reflections about their serious struggles to juggle the time required for heavy course loads, their work schedules, and their honest struggles to remain focused and committed when they are still sorting out why they are in college."

Goldrick-Rab, who attributed her teaching shift to Stommel, has no plans to return to grading. "This has been the best semester I've had since I started teaching in 2004," she said. "I feel more connected to and motivated by my students, and am convinced I am finally becoming an effective teacher."

Ungrading isn't for everyone, however. Ken Bauer, associate professor of computing science at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, recently tweeted that he was returning to something like traditional grading.

In a blog post Bauer wrote in response to questions about that tweet, he said he believes that he "perhaps went 'too far' in giving the freedom and putting my role as 99.9 percent 'the guide and mentor.'" Bauer said he gave his students some direct guidance and a list of topics to research" with the "intent to give them the freedom to explore."

But during the first partial grading period, "I simply asked students on the exam to write about a selection of topics in the course so far and to give themselves a numeric grade on a scale of 1-100 (our official grading system)." And they "freaked out. Well, most of them."

Bauer worked with his students after that to create a loose rubric, which he said seemed to relieve their stress. The results were great.

"But then came pushback," he said. "Some students expressed that 'Hey, you can just do pretty much "nothing" and pass the course,' or, 'We students can't be trusted, we need to be monitored and graded.'" Subsequent discussions with students ended in Bauer adopting what he described as a more traditional class structure with ongoing deadlines.

Bauer said he's still flexible with students who want to resubmit work and that it's all part of his learning process. But he's still searching for what feels "right," he said.

Schultz-Bergin said last week that he's received a good amount of feedback about his post -- most of it "positive but with a healthy and reasonable dose of skepticism." And "lots of good questions about execution."

Students have responded positively, too, he said, "but of course some more than others." A few have had issues with the "lack of assignment structure, but most have used it as an opportunity to practice important skills a lot without fear of poor grades."

Schultz-Bergin made three main changes to his course for his experiment. He offered students what he called a "buffet" of learning opportunities which they could complete at their discretion, but required only three reflection essays on their learning, progress and goals. Students also meet with him for two learning conferences, to discuss their portfolio of work and, ultimately, report their grade for the course.

"For me, this is really just a further evolution of various ways I've been working to improve the teaching and learning experience," he said. "Before, I've used alternative grade systems that aim to be responsive to similar concerns that the gradeless classroom responds to. In all these cases it helps me better help students learn and help them reflect on their own learning."

Blum said that ungrading has been part of the K-12 conversation for some time, in part because these educators tend to talk more with each other about their teaching. By contrast, college and university professors are doing ungrading -- and in similar ways -- but all tend to think they're on their own, she said.

If ungraders need better networks and professional development opportunities, Stommel also said that for ungrading and other novel assessment practices to "flourish, we need to push hard on the culture of assessment -- the reduction of students and their work to data points -- that has taken root across so much of education."

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Professors' reflections on their experiences with 'ungrading' spark renewed interest in the student-centered assessment practice

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When it comes to grading, less is more. So say a number of scholars who have shared their recent experiments with "ungrading" in blog posts and on other social media, sparking renewed discussions about the practice.

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"Being culturally responsive is a critical and necessary feature of our interactions with one another. It is also vitally important in the context of education," writes educators Meena Singhal and Sudeepa Gulati in a recent Faculty Focus post. Culturally responsive teaching "empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (Ladson-Billings, 2014). The pair outline different strategies for embracing this approach in the classroom.

Strategies include getting to know students individually; being aware of one's personal biases; transforming pedagogy and curriculum by including material that reflects the diversity of the students in the classroom, using inclusive pedagogy, and utilizing multiple assessments; respecting and reinforcing student culture; and involving family and the community in the academic lives of students.

Read more about the different techniques here.

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Strategies for Embracing Culturally Responsive Teaching - Center for Teaching and Learning

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"Being culturally responsive is a critical and necessary feature of our interactions with one another. It is also vitally important in the context of education," writes educators Meena Singhal and Sudeepa Gulati in a recent Faculty Focus post. Culturally responsive teaching "empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural [...]

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges. Its mission was to enhance learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students and focused on district and school improvement with special attention to underperformance and issues of equity and diversity. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/7eez-dz04

The Education Alliance archived website can be found here

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Brown Digital Repository | Collection | The Education ...

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Reenvisioning the UDL Guidelines

Because the UDL Guidelines are meant to be informed by feedback from the field as well as new research, they have been updated several times in the past. We are in the process of updating the Guidelines once again in our UDL Rising to Equity initiative.

This update will focus specifically on addressing systemic barriers that result in inequitable learning opportunities and outcomes. CAST aims to develop a transparent, inclusive, and community-driven process. If you are interested in collaborating and staying updated on our progress, we invite you to complete a brief survey.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

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"Improved Grading Makes Classrooms More Equitable"

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"Improved Grading Makes Classrooms More Equitable"

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Ask any faculty member about how they grade their students, and they will probably explain the precise weights they give quizzes, tests, papers, labs and other factors -- as well as how they average student results over the term to determine a final grade.

Even though the scholarship, technology and pedagogy of postsecondary courses have significantly evolved in the last century, the ways students are graded has remained unchanged. This should come as no surprise, considering that most college and university faculty members receive no training in how to grade, either in graduate school or professional development on the job, and so most typically grade as they were graded. Plus, because faculty members rarely receive support to examine and learn about grading, each professor's grading policies are filtered through their own individual beliefs about how students learn, how to motivate them and how best to describe student achievement.

As a result, grades often vary within a department and even within a course taught by different instructors. That is particularly true at community colleges, which depend heavily on part-time faculty who are rarely involved in any deep way with the department in which they teach, but it is also often the case in research institutions, where grading is often the responsibility of teaching assistants, who rarely discuss grading practice with faculty members or department chairs.

While faculty members believe that their grading practices are fair and objective, a closer look reveals that they are anything but. And while employers and other institutions rely on those grades as a reliable marker of student achievement, it might shock them to know how much grading practices reflect the idiosyncratic preferences of individual faculty members.

Two examples:

Frequently, faculty members incorporate into a student's grade many highly subjective criteria -- such as a student's "effort," "participation" and "engagement" -- behaviors which the professor subjectively witnesses, interprets and judges through a culturally specific and biased lens.

Many faculty members grade on a curve, which makes grades dependent on the particular students in that particular classroom in that particular term. It unhelpfully describes student achievement not based on what the student learned but rather on how well they did relative to others in the class. Plus, this method translates learning into a competition, which adds stress that undermines collaboration and has been found to inhibit learning.

But beyond the fact that a grade can be more reflective of how a professor grades than what a student learned, many common grading practices have a more profound consequence. As colleges and universities become more committed to enrolling and retaining historically underserved students, they rarely recognize how traditional approaches to grading frequently result in perpetuating achievement disparities -- advantaging higher-income and privileged students with inflated grades, while lowering grades for underserved students and painting a misleading picture of performance. For example, professors typically calculate grades by averaging a student's performance over time, which actually punishes those who enter the class with less prior knowledge, even if they ultimately master the content, and hides their growth.

In advising faculty members at a variety of institutions -- including the College of Marin, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Cobleskill and the University of California, Berkeley -- I have found that educators at all levels of schooling, including college faculty, are motivated to try alternative, more equitable grading practices once they learn about the harms caused by our century-old approaches to grading.

These improved grading practices:

Are mathematically accurate to validly describe a student's level of mastery. They apply a more proportionately structured 0-4 scale instead of the 0-100 scale, which is mathematically oriented toward failure. They also use sound mathematical principles that reflect recent performance and growth instead of averaging performance over time.

Evaluate students based on their knowledge, not their environment, history or behavior. They exclude subjectively interpreted behaviors, such as a student's "effort" or "participation." They determine grades based on a student's demonstration of course content and not homework completion, and they don't use grades to reward compliance.

Support hope and a growth mind-set. They allow test/project retakes to emphasize and reward learning rather than penalize it, and they override previous scores with current scores that build learning persistence.

"Lift the veil" on how to succeed. They create explicit descriptions of what constitutes demonstration of content mastery through rubrics or proficiency scales. In addition, they simplify grade books and expand the methods of assessments to generate more accurate feedback and reporting about each student's learning relative to the expected outcomes.

Faculty members, rightly so, need to own their grading, so colleges that want to explore new approaches must support learning communities where professors can critically examine current practices and try more equitable approaches. One model of this type of learning incorporates a research cycle in which faculty members try new practices in their own classes, examine changes in their students' performance and motivation, share results with colleagues, repeat the cycle to continue integrate new approaches over time, and ultimately build a body of evidence that supports common and coherent grading practices.

Professors who have gone through this kind of process become comfortable and confident with equitable grading, and they report that it provides them an opportunity to uncover and reimagine what effective learning could look like. They find that their students experience less stress in learning and shift their focus from earning scores and behaving in ways that appeal to the teacher's cultural expectations of a "good student" to learning and achieving demonstrations of course content mastery.

Independent researchers have also found that, in secondary schools, such practices result in fewer D's and F's, particularly for underserved students, and lower costs for remediation. They also improve engagement and student-teacher collaboration, reduce grade inflation, and more closely align grades with test scores. As increasing numbers of colleges and universities pursue this work, researchers are also conducting similar investigations at the postsecondary level. In their preliminary feedback, faculty report similar results in their own classrooms with their own students.

If we are serious about eliminating achievement disparities, we have to be willing to tackle grading, an important but largely unaddressed aspect of higher education teaching and student success. With college faculty leading this work, postsecondary institutions can grade in ways that more consistently and accurately reflect student learning and counteract long-standing inequities. We can foster a conversation about why grades are important, what we want to measure and not measure, and how to ensure that our grading practices reinforce -- rather than undermine -- our commitment to excellence and equity.

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Advice for how to make grading more equitable (opinion)

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Ask any faculty member about how they grade their students, and they will probably explain the precise weights they give quizzes, tests, papers, labs and other factors -- as well as how they average student results over the term to determine a final grade.

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"Yes Virginia, there's a better way to grade"

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"Yes Virginia, there's a better way to grade"

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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Pause a moment to consider the way we've been grading our students' work since time immemorial. The way we allocate points on the basis of apparent quality. The way we struggle to be fair in giving the same number of points to works of comparable quality, even though they differ a great deal -- and the time it takes us to make these hairsplitting decisions. The way students stress over the points their work does or doesn't get. The way they challenge our grading decisions in the hope of squeezing more points out of us -- despite the agonizing care and attention to detail we give to their work. For students, it's all about maximizing partial credit.

Consider, too, the value that external stakeholders attach to our grading. Most employers of our graduates give grades little heed in hiring. They want experience. At the program and university level, accreditors eschew grades and demand independent evidence of student achievement of learning outcomes.

Our grading system is broken, yet we educators keep using it. You may think you have no alternative. But you do. And you can comfortably make the change in your own classes and not confront your administration.

Imagine another grading system, one where you grade all assignments and tests satisfactory/unsatisfactory, pass/fail. Students earn all of the points associated with the work, or none of them, depending on whether their work meets the particular specifications you laid out for it. This is why I call this grading system specifications, or specs, grading. Think of the specs as a one-level, uni-dimensional rubric. But don't think of them as defining D or even C minus work. Rather, imagine that they define truly "satisfactory" as at least B work -- maybe even A minus work. This assures rigor.

The specs may be as simple as "completeness": for instance, all the questions are answered, all the problems attempted in good faith or all the directions followed (that is, the work satisfies the assignment), plus the work meets a required length. Or the specs may be more complex: for instance, the work fulfills the criteria you set out for a good literature review, research proposal or substantial reflection.

You must write the specs for a complex assignment very carefully, clearly and thoroughly. They must describe exactly what features in the work you want and will look for. This may mean specifying the organization as well as contents of each section of the work, perhaps even paragraph by paragraph.

Too formulaic? Let's be real: most of our assignments follow a formula. All you have to do is lay out that formula or whatever part of the formula is important for your students to learn and follow. If you're bothered by late work, you can include on-time submission among the specs, too.

If your objective for an assignment is creativity, simply provide loose specs of the various ways that students can demonstrate their ability to explain and apply the material -- such as a 20-minute informational video or dramatic performance, a four-minute original musical performance, a 15-page short story or an eight-minute persuasive speech. You can specify basic parameters for creative assignments and not worry about "grading" them.

In sum, complete, satisfactory work receives full credit (full value), and incomplete, unsatisfactory receives no credit/value. For students, it's all or nothing. No skipping the directions and no sliding by on partial credit for sloppy, last-minute work.

In fact, research reveals that this kind of assignment grading increases student motivation and produces higher-quality work than traditional grading systems do. And the 2015 National Survey of Student Engagement has found that only 54 percent of freshmen and 61 percent of seniors believe that they have been "highly challenged to do their best work" in college. Clearly, our students have room to meet higher and more rigorous academic standards. Maybe we've gone too far with lowering the stakes of our assignments and tests. Now, nothing students do matters much to them.

But what about second chances, redemption and flexibility? Consider this second element of specs grading: a virtual-token economy, which buffers the riskiness of no partial credit and allows the opportunity for redemption.

At the beginning of the term, you give your students one, two or three virtual tokens that give them the chance to revise an unsatisfactory assignment, hand in an assignment 24 hours late without penalty or to take a makeup exam. (It's easier to keep track of three tokens than points docked.) Of course, students who consistently submit satisfactory work on time will keep their tokens. If you choose, you can even let students earn tokens by submitting satisfactory work early, successfully completing additional assignments or doing whatever you'd like to reward. Then, at the end of the course, you can give the student(s) with the most tokens something desirable -- perhaps the chance to skip the final exam or a gift certificate for a pizza.

Actually, you can import this token economy into any grading system. Many students regard it as a game and want to hoard their tokens.
Bundles of Assignments
Specs grading has one more exotic feature: course grades are based on the bundles of assignments and tests that students complete at a pass/satisfactory level. Bundles that require more work, more challenging work or both earn students higher grades. No more points to painstakingly allocate and haggle over with students. By choosing the bundle they want to complete, students select the final grade they want to earn, taking into account their motivation, time available, grade point needs and commitment. If a student chooses a C because that's all he or she needs in your course, you can respect that. Under such conditions, students are often more motivated to learn because they have a sense of choice, volition, self-determination and responsibility for their grade, as well as less grade anxiety.

Another benefit is the option to associate each bundle with one or more student learning outcomes, so completing a given bundle indicates that the student has achieved certain of those outcomes. Why shouldn't our grades reflect the outcomes students have and have not achieved? Then our grades may actually mean something.

Let's admit that, right now, our grades have little connection to outcomes. Students earning an A may have achieved all the outcomes of a course, but what about those getting a B, a C or a D? Did they achieve some outcomes and not others? If so, which ones? Or did they achieve few or none at an acceptable level? Even so, they passed the course.

The idea of bundles can be hard to grasp without examples. Let's say you set up 10 assignments and tests. These may be papers, essays, objective items, problem sets, programs, designs or some combination of these. Each assignment and test has a companion assignment that enhances its learning value, such as a self-regulated learning exercise, a self-assessment, a paraphrase of your feedback or a plan for doing better next time. Together, they form a bundle.

Then, number each bundle according to the challenge level so that the lower numbers designate relatively easy and lower-level thinking assignments and tests and the higher numbers indicate increasingly demanding and higher-level thinking assignments and tests. Therefore, your course offers 10 bundles.

For a D, students have to complete bundles 1 through 5, which require achieving only knowledge/recall outcomes, plus the ability to write brief reflections.

For a C, they have to complete bundles 1 through 6, where bundle 6 also requires comprehension, plus the ability to correct their errors.

For a B, they have to complete bundles 1 through 8, where bundles 7 and 8 also require application, plus the ability to plan improvement strategies.

For an A, they have to complete all 10 bundles, where bundles 9 and 10 also require evaluation and creation, plus the ability to assess their work.

Here is an even simpler system with only four bundles of assignments and tests, ranging from relatively easy/basic to very challenging/advanced. The more challenging bundles will require students to achieve more learning outcomes, including higher levels of thinking about broader and more complex knowledge.

For a D, students have to complete only the easiest and most basic bundle.

For a C, they have to complete that basic bundle and a somewhat more challenging one.

For a B, they have to complete these two bundles and a third one that is even more challenging.

For an A, they have to complete all four bundles, the fourth of which is the most challenging.

Again, to complete a bundle, a student must finish all the assignments and tests within it at a satisfactory level -- which means at least a B level. That is, each piece of work within a bundle must meet all your specs for satisfactory completion.

Specs grading is flexible. You can adopt one or two of the three elements, or apply an element in some cases and not others. For instance, you can integrate pass/fail grading and tokens into a course but retain your current point system. Or you may choose to grade only some assignments and tests pass/fail. Or you may institute bundles only for grades C and D, or only for grades A and B.

Some faculty members already use specs grading in their courses, in whole or in part, and they get better results than they did grading the traditional way. Most of them claim that their students produce higher-quality work, pay more attention to feedback, feel more responsible for their grades and are less grade anxious and less likely to protest their grades.

In addition, these instructors find the grading process simpler and less stressful and time-consuming. More of their time goes more toward figuring out what they want their students to show they can do and at what level.

So take heart. If you don't like the impact that our grading system has on you and your students, you don't have to tolerate it anymore.

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New ways to grade more effectively (essay)

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While we in higher education keep using it, our grading system is broken, argues Linda B. Nilson, and she offers some concrete ways to fix it.

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To teach effectively, you have to reach your students, students who come to the classroom with varied backgrounds, expectations, abilities, and learning styles. This understanding is at the heart of the philosophy of practice known as universal design for learning (UDL). UDL is part of a larger movement of universal design, which works to increase access for all through designs that-from the beginning-consider needs of diverse people, not just adapting when a situation requires it. For instructors, UDL means designing your course with accessibility in mind-regardless of whether you've been approached by a student who may "require" such adjustments.

Why Consider UDL?

According to the Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability Winter 2011 edition, eleven percent of undergraduates report some type of disability - and the proportions have swapped such that the majority of disabilities are now non-apparent (e.g., mental, emotional, psychiatric condition/depression, ADHD, specific learning disabilities/dyslexia), compared to more apparent disabilities (e.g. mobility impairment). Meanwhile, between sixty and eighty percent of students with disabilities don't actually contact campus university services for "official" accommodation requests/reporting - which means many students in your classrooms may fall in this category without your knowledge.

This is also an issue of social justice. By putting disability and access considerations at the center of our teaching, we join efforts to make higher education accessible to all of our students.

Key Principles of UDL UDL in Your Course Additional Resources

Key Principles of UDL

Many of you have heard about the increase in classroom technologies, but in their publication Universal Design for Learning in Postsecondary Education (PDF) Rose, et al. remind us that it's important to distinguish UDL from use of "assistive technologies" that are available (from "low-tech" wheelchairs, eyeglasses, or ASL interpreters to more "high tech" computerized support-spell-check, text-to-speech). UDL is about making material that is physically accessible to all, but also about accessible pedagogies.

Based in neuroscientific research and primary brain networks, UDL is grounded in three key principles that are core to learning:

Provide Multiple Means of Representation

Provide Multiple Means of Action and Expression

Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

Principle #1: Provide multiple means of representation

Principle #2: Provide multiple means of action and expression

Principle #3: Provide multiple means of engagement

Brain Networks Activated: Recognition

Brain Networks Activated: Strategic

Brain Networks Activated: Affective

Key word: what. The what of learning

Key word: how. The how of learning

Key word: why. The why of learning

Description: How we gather facts and categorize what we see, hear, and read. Identifying letters, words, or an author's style are recognition tasks.

Description: Planning and performing tasks. How we organize and express our ideas. Writing an essay or solving a math problem are strategic tasks.

Description: How learners get engaged and stay motivated. How they are challenged, excited, or interested. These are affective dimensions.

The principle put another way: Principle #1: Present information and content in different ways.

The principle put another way: Principle #2: Differentiate the ways that students can express what they know.

The principle put another way: Principle #3: Stimulate interest and motivation for learning.

Adapted from the National UDL Center
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UDL In Your Course

While several starters and tips for incorporating UDL into your course(s) are listed below, an especially helpful resource for checklists and recommendations on UDL is the Access Project, a project of Colorado State University's Department of Occupational Therapy. On their website, the Project hosts many UDL materials, including A Concise Introduction to UDL, How Do You Teach? (a UDL Checklist for professors), and a more in-depth UDL Quick Tips chart.

Your Syllabus-Consider how you address principles of UDL and access in your syllabus:

Do you include a disability or accessibility statement (your approach to disability and accommodations in the classroom)? Do you point this out to students in your in-class syllabus review?

Consider what tone you are setting with including such a statement. Since it is your classroom, perhaps create your own, tailored statement. Even if it's an addition to your institution's existing statement, this can help you to set the tone of your course.
For Georgetown's recommended statement and other examples, see the Teaching Commons Georgetown Policies page, and select "Disabilities Accommodations." Consider the placement of such statement(s) on the syllabus, and how you might highlight these during class.

Additional suggested practices for UDL & syllabus design

Assessment - Consider how UDL might impact your class assessment approach(es):

How can you best assess students' mastery? Have you considered combinations of assessments that are balanced to provide opportunities for students to use their different strengths (e.g., written assignments, creative submissions, electronic portfolios, real-time data)?

Within each assignment, are instructions clear? Are the layout and format of the assignment easy to navigate?

Check out our Designing Assessment page for more ideas and suggestions.

And if you'd like help with some self-assessment of how well you're doing with these ideas and issues, feel free to email CNDLS to set up a conversation or a Mid-Semester Teaching Feedback session.

Course Materials-Consider the accessibility of your course content and information:

Providing "multiple means of representation" involves preparing your course materials (whether print, digital, etc.) to be accessible to all students.

Creation of accessible materials:
The Access Project (also referenced earlier) has many guides that provide information on how to design materials that are in line with universal design principles for Microsoft products (Word, PowerPoint) and other applications (e.g., Adobe).

Class Time-Consider how you vary your approaches within the classroom, from methods of content delivery to student participation:

Present information in multiple formats, including text, graphics, audio, and video.

Try having your lectures supported by handouts or a few PowerPoint slides.

Davies et al. of Colorado State University, in Measuring the Effectiveness of Universal Design for Learning Intervention in Postsecondary Education, recommend the use of video clips, as long as you are sure to both introduce the video and summarize/debrief main points with the class.

Group discussions: There are many ways to use and tailor discussion activities to increase student engagement:

Providing time for individual reflection and writing prior to the group discussion may allow more students to be involved and gather their thoughts.

Using small groups: a "Think-Pair-Share" exercise with many pairs or small groups discussing ideas can also encourage more low-stakes participation.

Offering online formats: a forum for online discussion or blogging provides another space for students to participate and demonstrate comprehension.

Use classroom technologies such as clickers (Clickers - CNDLS technology page) and Poll Everywhere (Poll Everywhere - CNDLS technology page) for engagement and/or real-time interaction and feedback.

Use classroom technologies such as clickers and Poll Everywhere for engagement and/or real-time interaction and feedback.

Provide a bit of structure at the beginning of each class: outline key points, connect them to course objectives, and give a preview of the material to be covered in that day.

Check out our Planning and Leading Class, Teaching with Technologies, and Active Learning pages for more ideas.

Remember, key principles of UDL include providing multiple means of expression and of engagement-offer students a variety of ways to express themselves and to interact with course material.
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Additional Resources

SoTL Note: These resources are helpful for learning more about UDL, but much of the current literature focuses on K-12 education, so there's a need for additional empirical, peer-reviewed research. If you're considering Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), learn more at our SoTL Teaching Commons page.
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Please reach out to us at cndls@georgetown.edu if you'd like to have a conversation with someone at CNDLS about these or other teaching issues.

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To teach effectively, you have to reach your students, students who come to the classroom with varied backgrounds, expectations, abilities, and learning styles. This understanding is at the heart of the philosophy of practice known as universal design for learning (UDL).

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Montenegro & Jankowski 2020

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Rudnick 2019

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Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment

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Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment

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Montenegro & Jankowski 2017

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Learning cannot happen without feedback, and that means learners need a clear picture of the progress that are (or are not) making. When assessments and feedback do not inform instruction or when they are not given to the students in a timely manner, learning cannot change because students do not know what to do differently. This lack of knowledge about what to improve can make some learners seem "perseverative," careless, or unmotivated. For these learners all of the time, and for most learners some of the time, it is important to ensure that options can be customized to provide feedback that is more explicit, timely, informative, and accessible. Especially important is providing "formative" feedback that allows learners to monitor their own progress effectively and to use that information to guide their own effort and practice.

Ask questions to guide self-monitoring and reflection

Show representations of progress (e.g., before and after photos, graphs and charts showing progress over time, process portfolios)

Prompt learners to identify the type of feedback or advice that they are seeking

Use templates that guide self-reflection on quality and completeness

Provide differentiated models of self-assessment strategies (e.g., role-playing, video reviews, peer feedback)

Use of assessment checklists, scoring rubrics, and multiple examples of annotated student work/performance examples

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UDL: Enhance capacity for monitoring progress

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Learning cannot happen without feedback, and that means learners need a clear picture of the progress that are (or are not) making. When assessments and feedback do not inform instruction or when they are not given to the students in a timely manner, learning cannot change because students do not kn…

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Contract grading in the technical writing classroom (Litterio 2018)

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Contract grading in the technical writing classroom (Litterio 2018)

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Contract grading in the technical writing classroom_ Blending community-based assessment and self-assessment Elsevier Enhanced Reader

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A great intro to ungrading

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This piece was revised and expanded for my new book, Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop, available now in paperback and Kindle editions.
This presentation was offered in collaboration with the Big Questions Institute. A full transcript of the slides is below. And a video of the live presentation is also available.
"Ungrading" means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply "not grading." The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices.

Pivot /ˈpivət/
: to turn on or as if on a pivot

If your institution just continued grading during the pandemic, "business as usual," here's what all those grades were measuring:

how well students and teachers "pivoted" to online

whether students had necessary access and support at home

the ability of students to "perform" in a crisis

What all those grades mostly weren't measuring: student learning and/or content knowledge.

"Deciding to ungrade has to come from somewhere, has to do more than ring a bell, it has to have pedagogical purpose, and to be part of a larger picture of how and why we teach." ~ Sean Michael Morris, "When We Talk About Grades, We Are Talking About People"

Some foundational questions about assessment:

Who is assessment for? How does this question force us to rethink how institutions structure their systems for evaluation?

What's the difference between grading and feedback? To what extent should teachers be readers of student work (as opposed to evaluators)?

Why do we grade? How does it feel to be graded? What do we want grading to do (or not do) in our classes (for students or teachers)?

What would happen if we didn't grade? What would be the benefits? What issues would this raise for students and/or teachers?

"Assessment tends so much to drive and control teaching. Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the assessment structures we work under." ~ Peter Elbow, "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment"

Ranking. Metrics. Norming. Objectivity. Uniformity. Accreditation. Measurement. Rubrics. Outcomes. Quality. Data. Performance. Averages. Excellence. Curves. Inflation. Mastery. Standardization. Rigor.

I would argue grading, by any of our conventional academic metrics, undermines the work:

Grades are not good incentive.

Grades are not good feedback.

Grades encourage competitiveness over collaboration.

Grades are not good markers of learning.

Grades don't reflect the idiosyncratic, subjective, emotional character of learning.

Grades aren't "fair."

Historically, grades are more of an anomaly than anything else. They are very recent technology.

Prior to the late 1700s, performance and feedback systems in Education were incredibly idiosyncratic. The first "official record" of a grading system was from Yale in 1785. Throughout the 19th Century, they became increasingly comparative, numerical, and standardized.

The A-F system appears to have emerged in 1898 (with the "E" not disappearing until the 1930s) and the 100-point or percentage scale became common in the early 1900s. Letter grades were not widely used until the 1940s. Even by 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the U.S. were using letter grades. (Schinske and Tanner)

An "objective" system for grading was created so systematized schooling could scale. And we've designed technological tools in the 20th and 21st Centuries that have allowed us to scale further. Toward standardization and away from subjectivity, human relationships, and care.

The grade takes the complexity of human interaction within a learning environment and makes it machine-readable: [A/A-] [A-/B+] [F+] [97%] [59%] [18/20] [10/20] [high first] [low 2:1]

"Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in learning itself." ~ Alfie Kohn, "The Trouble with Rubrics"

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the banking model of education, "an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor."

In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for "problem-posing education," in which a classroom or learning environment becomes a space for asking questions -- a space of cognition not information.

Start by Trusting Students.

A Google search for, "is cheating on the rise?," finds a half-dozen articles like one from The Washington Post, which cites data about the rise of online cheating reported by ProctorU, whose revenue model hinges upon culture of suspicion in education.

In 1963, Bowers surveyed roughly 100 institutions and found that "75 percent of the surveyed students admitted to cheating at least once in their college careers. ... The numbers have not changed much since then." McCabe, et. al.'s 2012 Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do About It includes findings from 150,000 students recently surveyed, showing that "between 60 to 70 percent of respondents admitted cheating." (Lang, Cheating Lessons)

The remote proctoring industry "is expected to grow from being a $4 billion market in 2019 to a nearly $21 billion market in 2023." ()

Honorlock, one of these proctoring technologies, markets itself by saying, "Our patented online test proctoring software maintains program integrity while providing extensive learner flexibility." Meanwhile, their patented approach to "ensuring integrity" lacks integrity itself, going further than assuming students cheat by actually baiting them into doing it. They have patented the use of honeypot websites, which offer answers to exams, tracking students accessing these pages and giving them incorrect answers.

Conventional grading is often at odds with our institutional missions. So far, I haven't seen a school mission statement with any of these:

We pit students and teachers against one another

We rank students in competitive ways

We measure output with little concern for the learning process

We value extrinsic over intrinsic motivation

We start from a place of deep suspicion of students

We assess in ways that reinforce bias against marginalized students

Data About Bias in Education (as reported by Soraya Chemaly, "All Teachers Should Be Trained to Overcome Their Hidden Biases"):

Black girls are twelve times more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended.

While Black children make up less than 20% of preschoolers, they make up more than half of out-of-school suspensions.

Teachers spend up to two thirds of their time talking to male students; they also are more likely to interrupt girls. When teachers ask questions they direct their gaze towards boys more often, especially when questions are open-ended.

A meta-analysis from Malouff and Thorsteinsson includes data from 20 studies of 1935 graders finds that "bias can occur in subjective grading when graders are aware of irrelevant information about the students." The authors ultimately suggest "blind grading." But I'd argue race, gender, and ability do not constitute "irrelevant information." We can't counter bias by ignoring it. Who our students are is exactly relevant, and their specific challenges need to be accounted for in our approach to assessment.

"Food insecurity is a significant factor in determining the average math-SAT score. An increase in food insecurity lowers the students' Math-SAT scores." ~ Sharma and Carr, "Food Insecurity and Standardized Test Scores"

Ozturk, et. al. found that students perform more poorly on exams when they are several weeks removed from receiving food-stamp benefits.

"Children displayed a statistically significant increase in cortisol level in anticipation of high-stakes testing. Large decreases and large increases in cortisol were associated with underperformance on the high-stakes test." ~ Heissel, et. al., "Testing, Stress, and Performance: How Students Respond Physiologically to High-Stakes Testing"

Grades are anathema to the presumption of the humanity of students, support for their basic needs, and engaging them as full participants in their own education. Invigilated exams won't ensure integrity. Plagiarism detection tech won't unseat online paper mills. Incessant surveillance won't help us listen better for the voices of students asking for help.

Taking grades at least partly off the table means I have a whole different set of conversations with students I work with. My goal isn't to create a learning environment entirely free of grades (they still get graded in other classes), but to create a safe space for students to ask critical questions about grades, about how school works, and about their own learning.

Ungrading starts with teachers just talking to students about grades. Demystifying grades (and the culture around them) gives students a sense of ownership over their own education.

Minimal Grading: Using scales with fewer gradations to make grading "simpler, fairer, clearer" (Elbow)

Contract Grading: Grading contracts convey expectations about what is required for each potential grade. Students work toward the grade they want to achieve, and goalposts don't unexpectedly shift.

Authentic Assessment: Having students write for real-world audiences, focusing on intrinsic motivations, and drawing students into the design of assignments / assessments.

Process Letters: Asking students to reflect on their work and offer feedback on those reflections. Students help guide the grading of their own work.

Alternative Forms of Assessment:

The statement about assessment from my own syllabi:

This course will focus on qualitative not quantitative assessment, something we'll discuss during the class, both with reference to your own work and the works we're studying. While you will get a final grade at the end of the term, I will not be grading individual assignments, but rather asking questions and making comments that engage your work rather than simply evaluate it. You will also be reflecting carefully on your own work and the work of your peers. The intention here is to help you focus on working in a more organic way, as opposed to working as you think you're expected to. If this process causes more anxiety than it alleviates, see me at any point to confer about your progress in the course to date. If you are worried about your grade, your best strategy should be to join the discussions, do the reading, and complete the assignments. You should consider this course a "busy-work-free zone." If an assignment does not feel productive, we can find ways to modify, remix, or repurpose the instructions.

I've foregone grades on individual assignments for over 20 years. My goal in questioning grades has been to more honestly engage student work rather than simply evaluate it. This practice continues to feel like an act of personal, professional, and political resistance.

While I've experimented with many alternatives to traditional assessment, I have primarily relied on self-assessment. I turn in final grades for the course, but those grades usually match the grades students have given themselves.

My view of students as complex and deeply committed to their education is fueled by the thousands of self-reflection letters I've read throughout my career. What happens with almost every single student is that any assumption I might make about them is squashed by what they write about themselves and their work.

"We need more, not fewer, ways to listen for the voices of students reflecting on education. We need more, not fewer, ways to include students in conversations about the future of teaching and learning in college. These conversations cannot begin by sending a signal to students that their voices don't matter." ~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, "Teaching the Students We Have Not the Students We Wish We Had"

Change how you talk about assessment: Ungrading works best as part of a holistic pedagogical practice. Use words like "ask" or "invite," rather than "submit" or "required." Ask students about their expectations for their work, rather than centering yours.

Invite students to a conversation about grades: Ask students how being graded makes them feel, how it affects their motivation. As a group, read and discuss a piece like Alfie Kohn's "The Case Against Grades."

Grade less stuff, grade less often, grade more simply: Create space in your course for discovery and experimentation. Use a grading scale that feels less arbitrary and communicates more clearly to students. Ask students to do work that you don't "collect."

Ask students to reflect on their own learning: Even if you change nothing else about how you grade, ask students when and how they learn. Ask what barriers they face. Listen. Believe the answers.

Small things you can do tomorrow to start ungrading:

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Ungrading means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply "not grading." The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices.

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Jesse Stommel's talk with Big Questions Institute (June 2021)

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Jesse Stommel's talk with Big Questions Institute (June 2021)

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Ungrading and Alternative Assessment: a Workshop