Imagine a moment in your life when you learned something deeply. Did it end with someone giving you a grade? If you answered “no,” how would that moment be different if it was graded?
In my own life, I can’t think of a single time that a grade led to me learning more deeply or helped me internalize feedback from someone. The intellectual experiences that have altered my life the most have been forms of mentoring and relational pedagogy, and grades would have gotten in the way of those experiences.
I taught a completely ungraded class this past summer that I’ve written about here: Learning Cultural Criticism through Smoking Literature. In the place of grades, this class focused on feedback and student-driven reflection. The format of this class liberated my feedback for the students and led to me learning so much more about how they view their own work and the nature of effort and quality.
This post comes from a tip I wrote for the Teaching Tips Consortium based on that class.
[P]ointing is the fundamental operation of education. . . pointing is ultimately about calling someone—or even more precisely some one—to attend to the world, which means that it also calls for attention to one’s own attention, so to speak.
– Gert Biesta, World-Centred Education
If we prefer dialogue, we have to do more asking than telling.
– Alfie Kohn, Forward to Ungrading
Introduction
Want to try ungrading, but not sure where to start? Worried that students won’t engage projects without a traditional graded experience? Consider including an interactive rubric that prompts students to showcase and evaluate their own work. As an invitation to dialogue, an interactive rubric offers opportunities to both clarify communication about pathways for success and discover how students interpret rubrics and what they value in their own work. As an invitation for students to attend to their own attention, it can also promote metacognition along with student agency and ownership of their own work and learning process.
Making an Interactive Rubric
Using the presentation template provided by H5P, you can create an interactive rubric in which students can evaluate and reflect on their own work or offer feedback to one another. After students evaluate their own work or that of a peer, they can export their reflection as a document and submit it through your learning management system.
Examples
Feel free to click the “Reuse” button and adapt these examples to your own course.
Digital Storytelling Project Rubric
Teaching Portfolio Peer Review Rubric
References
Biesta, G. (2022). World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge.
Kohn, A. (2020). Forward to Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum. West Virginia University Press.
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