 Let me welcome everybody and welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today We have a terrific guest on a really really important subject and I'm very much looking forward to our conversation We've been talking about Grading and assessment since the beginning of the Future Trends Forum We've talked about in all kinds of ways in terms of assessment in terms of academic labor pedagogy in terms of technology and we've also talked about the possibility of going beyond Grading as we know it now and questioning the entire apparatus the bureaucracy the mental habits the politics labor and vault Now nobody for my money nobody on earth has done more to lead the charge on grading than Jesse Stamble Jesse has had an illustrious career all kinds of great things that you can learn about Among other things I'm amazed to learn that Jesse his partner and their little girl have just launched a gaming store out in Colorado Which is what I really want to hear about but instead let me bring Jesse Stamble to the stage And then we can learn more about what it is to question the entire edifice of Grading Jesse welcome. Hey, how are you doing? It's good to see you. It's really good to see you welcome And where are you coming from today? Is this in Denver? I am in Littleton, Colorado. Yes Excellent excellent excellent so you can you can torment us all by telling us what the weather is like first of all Absolutely phenomenal. I live in Colorado because of the weather although this year's been a little strange Yesterday, I think it was we had 75 degrees and sunny and I just went inside and it was absolute heaven. Oh That's fantastic. I'm so glad. I'm so glad Jesse the way we get people to introduce themselves on the program is a little different Academists usually prefer a kind of obituary style You know describing their past But what we'd like to do is ask people to talk about what they're planning on doing for the future and so I'm curious What is the next year hold for you? What are you going to be working on? What are the big ideas that are going to be top of line for you? Well, so I have spent the last well, it depends on how you count 23 years 12 years 5 years working on a book about assessment which just came out Which is I know what we're gonna be talking about and the amazing thing about publishing a book is not that I'm gonna Be thinking about the book for the next year Although I'll certainly be thinking about it with you for the next hour It's that I get to move on and start thinking about other stuff Thing about a big project like this that you've been working on for a long time Is that the second that you put it to bed to a certain degree and by put it to bed I mean kind of put it out to the world and then the world gets to do with it What they want to do with it? Ideally in conversation with me, but it means I get to think about other things So I'm at this moment where I've just literally released it seven weeks ago And I'm trying not to decide exactly what I'm gonna be thinking about for the next year because I'm on all of these Different things to percolate in my head, but I will tell you the one thing I wrote an Article for academe, which was called the human work of higher education pedagogy and Peace if people want to go find it is sort of the next thing I'm thinking about when I wrote that piece It was the stuff that I was wanting to spend the next five years Wondering at it. How do we actually take all these conversations that we're having like the conversation? We're having on this, you know in this program and make this a much bigger national international Set of questions. How do we get into? Really seriously about what education is for about how to best support teaching and learning How to deal with things like the problem of grades with which ultimately is a whole mess of Other problems that get attached to grades as a thing. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about But I'll tell you more than anything else. I want to spend the next year hanging out with my daughter Well in the year after that in the year after that in the year after that So ideally finding any ways in my work that I can bring her into it. Well, I'd be glad to help out I'm starting you know in any way and just a quick a quick question is Is is my audio coming up, okay, I just got a question about that. Can you hear me all right? Yeah, I can hear you good good in the chat. Let me know if there are any if there are any issues Joseph, let me know if these issues persist That sounds like a splendid way forward that sounds like a wonderful wonderful way forward If anyone in the chat has a link to the academe article, just please throw it in so that everybody else can read it We can spread it around Jesse in your most recent book you proclaim that you haven't given a grade in 20 years Which which sounds to me like an act of political extremism It's a it's an extraordinary it's an extraordinary thing And by the way friends to take a look at Jesse's book look in the very bottom left corner of the screen You'll find a little kind of mausoleum color shape there and click that and they'll take you to a page They'll take you to ways you can grab a copy of the book but you you you have this Fantastically radical way of thinking about great. I just want to I just want to read it if I could You have these four questions that you that you put to people and I think this this this opens things up rather than saying Okay, why on grading or but you begin by saying who is assessment for? Which is a deeper question that it sounds at first. What's the difference between grading and feedback? Then you ask why do we grade and then the practical question of what would happen if we didn't grade and I'm I'm curious in all of your work. How do how do people respond to these questions? Did they just throw up their hands and say, ah, I don't know what you're talking about or what kind of what kind of thoughts? Come out of their heads once they start working through them. Yeah I think I mean each of the questions that brings us down a whole other set of rabbit holes Depending on the group that I'm with depending on their context depending on where they're at in their careers Or where they're at in the semester or the quarter for that matter Why do we grade ends up usually being a kind of deeply emotional? Conversation a conversation that's really about how it feels to be graded and how it feels to do the work of grading and The last question, which is what would happen if we didn't grade? I sort of mean that question to mean two things It both means what would happen as in what kind of education we could could we create if It's weren't at the center of our systems and so to me in some ways It's a it's a question that wonders at a Future that doesn't yet exist, but I think there's also a bit in that question Which is what would happen if we didn't grade who would punish us? How would we be negatively affected as teachers? So there's a way in which when we're talking about grades as teachers We've been graded and so we've had the experience of being graded But we also are continuing to be graded by each other by our institutions by peer review processes by all kinds of structures Within education that continue to grade us as teachers So what would happen if we didn't great grade is kind of a what am I gonna get an F on the test? If I don't I'm gonna get an F in this course am I gonna get an F for my career Am I gonna be perceived as not doing my job? So that we go right back to the questions of labor and politics and also the sense of if I'm an instructor of record And I don't create in a sense. Will I be graded? Will I be graded down by authorities? Have you have you experienced any? institutional Support at any level for this kind of thing and what does institutional support? What might that look like? Yeah, I mean I think I think earlier in my career I experienced institutional support kind of Because I was mostly left alone But I was mostly left alone because I was adjunct for 11 years of my career So I don't even know if people noticed what I was doing in my classroom I though because I was an adjunct trying to you know, trying to scrape together whatever work I could I wasn't nearly as public about my pedagogy as I am now I still was really open with that. I would talk to my colleagues and I would talk to my students But interestingly, I didn't start publishing a blog until I had a full-time gig And that isn't to say that I haven't continued to be precarious because most of my gigs over my career Have been and I call them gigs because they have all been itinerant. They've all been precarious I'm aside from probably three years of my career where I had a a longer term longer term secure contract and So I guess I would say that I have experience support Very recently mostly because this conversation has gotten a lot larger. I've been having this conversation since 2001 that's when I started teaching 2003 I started doing faculty development I would say right around 2016 2017, which is when I decided to start working on this book is when All of a sudden the conversation was large enough that I felt like we were starting to have structural impacts Where I was starting to see institutions wanting to have the conversation and not just individual teachers or individual groups of teachers Well, this is fascinating And I love the way that you can you can get away with ungrading by kind of benign neglect or maybe even malign neglect But you have that option neglect because honestly Teachers across the country at all levels of education across the world at all levels of education Don't get the necessary support. They need to do the work for teaching But adjuncts and precarious faculty and staff members in particular In many cases get zero support or zero preparation at all Which is true And sadly true and I think well known inside the academy and little known beyond that Friends I'm gonna ask one more question of our guests And by the way, you'll notice that this this week we continue our excellent tradition of having bearded guests But what what I would like to do is after my next question to give up the mic to you all I would love to hear what thoughts you have what questions what comments This is your time. This is the this is what the forum is all about So as we keep talking, please reflect and think what you would like to know might be something as practical as Well, how often do you give grades or can I reduce grades or maybe something more conceptual or strategic? The the question I had was that I want to ask now is a little bit a little bit in between I guess Since 2000 there are some sorry since 2020 There's been really the sense of wanting to improve the quality of higher education and this has occurred across multiple registers Sometimes it's deferred referred to as caring for the whole student So you may have wrap around services try to increase services for students including supporting them for their basic needs Their mental health as well And then sometimes we've seen this determine the sense of trying to improve the quality of teaching Well, that's always difficult to do I find for colleges and universities and that appears in some ways as increased faculty support or at least talking about that or more and more better staffed teaching and learning centers and So I guess I'm curious. How do you how do you fit? Rethinking grading into that whole notion of improving the student experience Is is ungrading a major way forward for that? Yeah, you know, I was just with you last week when you were talking with Sarah Goldrick-Rabb and Sarah Goldrick-Rabb And I have known each other quite a quite a while and since I started engaging with her work around food and housing and security I've asked myself from the start the ways in which Talking about basic needs and security is both a policy issue, but it's also a pedagogical issue Changes the kinds of relationships we have with students in classrooms changes what students are capable of When they're when we should we assess students? How should we assess students when they're experiencing something like needs and security So one of the things I would say is that basic needs Basic needs are pedagogical needs so we can't necessarily deal talk about pedagogy without talking about basic needs and ideally what are pedagogical conversations about they're about Helping students succeed helping students learn and we don't do that unless we're also engaging with bigger questions about equity Bigger questions about basic needs my colleague Shawn Michael Morris talks about how ungrading has to come from somewhere and So it doesn't just it's not just a set of practices It's not just set a set of plug-and-pay practices it has to come from somewhere and where does my ungrading my Desire to talk about these subjects come from it comes from years of work Engaging with the work of critical pedagogy folks like Bell Hooks, Paulo Freire, Maxine Green, Henry Giroux and Thinking about education spaces as political spaces and so when we're talking about something about like assessment we're talking about one of the one of the Basic foundational Structural supports of the institutions that we've created I argue about the LMS that all roads in the LMS lead back to the gradebook The gradebook is the defining principle of the learning management system But I think increasingly most of our educational institutions are Structured around grades as a system grades as a system are at the fabric of how we shape those institutions So we can't really talk about what education is for unless we talk about grades And when we're talking about what education is for and this is why I wrote a book about grades because every Conversation that I've been in about what education is for who do we want to be as teachers? What kinds of relationships do we want to develop with students all of those conversations? Grades have come up in those conversations. You talk with teachers about ways forward Pedagogical practices that they want to experiment with and inevitably you hear something like but how would we grade that? Which means how would we fit that into the structure at our institutions? And then you'll often hear something like well, what will the scores be on my course evaluations if I do that? So two things like if I do that how will I grade it and how will it grade me? Grade not lest you be graded It's a That's a wonderful answer Jesse, thank you friends You can tell that Jesse is definitely a wonderful person to think with and speak with so this is a great time for you to share Your questions and your thoughts and as I say that two more just popped up And I want to start with one. This is from Naomi toughness. Hello, Naomi who asks how do you address student motivation without grades? I think motivation is I mean we could have a whole other session But in fact Brian, let's have a whole other session on motivation, but let's talk about that here Because motivation is extremely complicated oftentimes in my work I'm advocating for a increased emphasis on intrinsic motivation particularly in education and and part of the reason that I advocate for that is because I feel like extrinsic motivators are put at the center of How we structure the work we do at institution so when we're talking about things like quantitative assessment standardized assessments when we're students are asking things like well, what do you expect from me when I do this work so In so many different ways extrinsic motivators are what we put at the forefront We sort of imagine that students won't do the work if they're not being graded for the work And so I advocate for intrinsic motivation because there's tons of res out research out there that shows that not only is Extrinsic motivation not as effective as intrinsic motivation. It actually short circuits intrinsic motivation So if you give some someone 10 Opportunities and at every one you're using extrinsic motivators They will actually will decrease their intrinsic motivation to do the same task So give someone a reward for something five times they're much less likely to produce that task in the future without a reward and Ultimately, that's a problem with something like learning you want students to want to be there you want students to To have reasons to be there beyond just getting a grade So the thing I'd say about motivation is that motivation is incredibly complicated and it and we need multiple different ways of engaging folks And we need to recognize that different people are motivated in different ways at different times So there isn't one set of five guidelines I could give you on how to motivate students Well Naomi, thank you for that great question by the way And Jesse, thank you for that superb answer. We had a couple of quick comments in the chat. I wanted to just mention John Hollenbeck our friend in Madison, Wisconsin has a great line motivation. Are you there for a credential or to learn something? Nice nicely put and then our dear friend Greg Britton the hardest-working editor in Academic publishing has linked to one of his books report cards a cultural history. So definitely definitely check that out More questions have come in and so I want to give people a chance to to Put these up and to talk about them. Let me bring up this first one here for a little more And a lot I hope I got your name correctly. Please let me know if I if I've mangled it From a colleague of my campus, how do you issue midterm or final grades for a course? What do you do if students won't do the work or late work? And Aila is at Fort Lewis College. Thank you, Aila What do you think Jesse? There's a bunch there. I mean, it's it's a bit of a It's it's not entirely true that I haven't given a grade in I've been teaching 23 years And I say I haven't given a grade over the course of three years It's not entirely true because almost all of the institutions where I've worked require me to give a grade at the end of the term I've never worked at an institution where I was able to forgo final grades I would love to have worked at an institution that gave narrative feedback and lieu of grades Although I think that there's still ways that we could push on what that kind of end of term narrative feedback and the role It plays. Um, I don't necessarily think feedback a question about feedback versus grades I don't think feedback is benign and grades are evil. I think these are complicated things that we can suss out The the thing I would say is that I still have to give grades at the end And it's really about figuring out how I give those grades and give those grades in a way that's meaningful Meaningful both to whoever will be looking at those grades in the future And also meaningful to the students and so that the main change that I've made in my pedagogical approach Is to bring students in as full partners in determining what those grades are So my students grade themselves and they grade themselves in conversation with me and ideally at the end of a term At the midterm I give them the grade that they give themselves and I would say at this point 99% of the time I'm giving students the grades they give themselves And at the midterm it's interesting because when students grade themselves at the midterm It it isn't about me looking at their grade and I really have to I have to fight this urge in myself So a student gives themselves a b and I look at that grade and I look at it And I think is that the right grade and I spent you know many years of my career kind of Struggling with that thinking. Well, I think a might be more appropriate in this situation Or c might be more appropriate in this situation And I've had to fight that back in myself to really give that over to students and to kind of step back And not attempt to do that work myself But instead when I see a grade that that surprises me on a midterm So if a student gives themselves a grade and I'm surprised by the grade What it ends up being is an entry point to conversation because it means me and that student aren't necessarily On the same page and it's not I'm right and they're wrong. It's about this is an opening to conversation And so ideally we have those conversations enough throughout the term That they that by the point that they're giving themselves a grade at the end of the term I don't I don't worry about whether or not they're right and I'm wrong Because I've had those that dialogue with them and built trust with them So at the end I trust that the grade they give themselves Is the grade that they should get for that course I will say that there is one caveat to that which is that Students in marginalized populations will often undergrade themselves And there's a lot of research about self-assessment and students from marginalized populations Underrepresenting their abilities and their capabilities that also needs to be something that we talk about either me with the student Or me with the entire class But at the end if I do change grades the one to five percent to upgrade that I might change in a term It is usually because I'm trying to account for some sort of conscious or unconscious bias that's reflected in the assessment process So it's usually to raise grades Oh, that's excellent. That's excellent Well, thank you. Thank you. Again. Thank you Eila for the terrific question And let me just thank you Jesse for that really really detailed And thoughtful answer. I love how this just unpicks more and more of higher education Grades are kind of route into the heart of higher education as we know it We have a now that was a by the way if you knew the form that was a text question and answer Question now, let me show you a video question because we have one from kim debaco who is Oh, you see la. Hello kim. Yes. Hello. Thank you very much brian and hello jesse um I was going to ask that last question first of all that was you know, what is that kind of expectation the the When you're an instructor of record when you're a faculty member teaching you are expected it It's required that you do give grades and so I was interested in that one but then I think my question opens out further to Just your interaction in the institution in the role that you currently have I believe you're a director of the center for teaching and learning or something like that How do you kind of What kind of institutional response do you have around you to knowing that you're a proponent of this approach? You're working across all many different disciplines too. Um I think we might share some kind of a humanities background or or whatever, but you've we've also got colleagues, you know in stem who must be kind of challenged by some of this How do you actually actively promote this in your institution? Or what kind of curiosity what kind of response push back from senate What kind of is the institutional response to sort of in your own context? Yeah, I think you were kind of implying that I'm a little touchy-feely kim with that comment about us being in humanities backgrounds I'm all right with that Languages yourself here. I'm not sure but yeah I'm the director of a center for teaching and learning in my previous role currently I'm just a faculty member at university of denver But I and so I interestingly can and I've moved back and forth between these kinds of roles direct program director faculty member Director of a center faculty member kind of moved back and forth throughout my career So I kind of can see both sides and I would say I negotiate them a little bit differently For me one of the things I often say is that I don't proselytize about pedagogy I don't I'm not trying to get other teachers to teach like I am I'm trying to get teachers to think To think of their own practice and their own philosophies and develop for themselves an approach that feels organic to them And and that really means that teachers in different disciplines at different institutions will teach differently and should teach differently When I'm a director of a center for teaching or a program director I would say that I lean in even more to that agnosticism because I really want to help Faculty members develop their own capabilities because we get so little support and so little preparation at least in higher education for this work That I see it as this is a moment This is a moment for us to sit down and figure out what kind of teacher we want to be And ideally we can figure that out together So I definitely I don't keep my own practice as a secret But I think of them as we're workshopping this together Um in my own as a faculty member I feel like I I might play a slightly different role, which is I think that there's something provocative About how I present my approaches and that's on purpose It's on purpose not to say hey, you should do this just like me. It's on purpose to say I mean Brian kind of alluded to it look at this weird radical thing That this person is doing and having success doing with hopefully the goal of not having someone mimic what I did But having them feel emboldened Especially since I've been precarious through so much of my career and talk about that precarity I know how hard it is to be honest and to be brave in our approaches when we're working precariously So my goal is hopefully to do two things to help encourage that bravery and others And then also to let them know that I've got their back um And hopefully that lots of others of people have their back Yeah, and you do and thank you for your courageous writing really appreciate it Well, thank you kim for the great question. Good to see you. Good to see you Friends, that's an example of a video question. We're gonna have another one of those right now So if you'd like to do that, um, please just just click the raised hand button and we can beam you up Isla more I wanted to follow up with her question and she wanted to do that on video So let me bring her up on stage Hello Isla Oh, uh, you're muted You should be able to turn that off right on your on your desktop there It's okay. We'll bring you back. I'll bring you back You go find that out and we'll bring you back. No problem Uh, we have a whole bunch of other questions that are coming in. Um, I mean, this is clearly a topic Which has all kinds of interest for people um, so let me uh, uh, bring up one from uh, joseph Robert Shaw, uh, this is a question about, um, a kind of particular Social behavior, I think Uh, how can a teacher better handle the honor students distress that lose their minds in the face of ungrading and grading contracts? Yeah, I mean, I think that people often ask me about student anxiety And the students that I've experienced the most anxiety with are the students who have performed best within systems of of grades where they've been graded regularly and often, uh, and It's a struggle. I think also for some of us as teachers because I often joke that I'm a 23rd year senior or something like that Um, that I like I never left education because I love school so much And that's partly because I learned to perform really well within traditional systems So a lot of us our teachers are also that student who performed really well with the traditional system Not all of us and not all of us in the same way And I'm even realizing you know looking back at my own education part of the reason I do this work is because there were moments when I really fell into a crack and Um, I ended up experiencing what I would describe as educational trauma, which a lot of us have That's part of the reason that's sort of that that emotional character of grades is so salient for a lot of us But I would say that, um Lost the thread was there a part of that question? I think I think you're doing I think you're doing fine And I I mean the question, you know, how do you deal with that kind of student anxiety? I think you're quite right to point out It's often the students who are the most invested also the most successful man Yeah, and I would say the way that we deal with them is we talk to the students about it We talk to them in a really personal way because we can often talk about from our own perspective That kind of anxiety that the kind of anxiety we feel and that we have felt throughout our educational career And I usually find that they surmount that anxiety relatively quickly and that those students Ultimately while they might feel the anxiety at first They end up being really grateful for an opportunity to push themselves in ways that graded systems wouldn't So oftentimes if I tell us And and I really think it's important that we just be honest with students So if you have that student come up to you there's no reason you can't say to that student some version of Okay, I understand that you're feeling anxious. I know where that comes from. I also feel a similar anxiety in situations like this I'm going to say one thing that hopefully will alleviate some of that anxiety Which is that you're going to get an a in this class I have no concerns about that and I don't want you to have concerns about that because I think that that will get in our way If we take that off the table, what can we do? What can you do? You've written and I this is now a specific example of an interaction. I've had with a student you've written 50 Amazing traditional academic essays in your career. I don't need to read another one of those from you I know you can do that And so what I would invite you to do is do something that takes you out of your comfort zone So it's interesting. So when we're talking about anxiety a small amount of anxiety is really productive when it comes to learning The problem is when we have too much anxiety And also the problem is when we have ultimately no anxiety at all a little a small amount of anxiety is productive As long as we can work through and we know that there are people who can work through it together with us The other thing I tell students is I'm not going to pull a rug out from under you because that's what students are worried about They're worried that there is something there's an invisible goalpost and they can't see it I'm going to take grace off the table, but then there's something else mysterious lurking in the background So just telling students there isn't something else mysteriously lurking in the background We really are moving in a different direction and I'm not going to pull a rug out from under you Talk to me. If you experience anxiety, we'll work through it together Well, first of all, I admire that answer so much Um, I have thoughts, but there are more questions coming and I want to make sure that people get developed I think we've got a working microphone now for Ila Hello, I can hear you already. Hello Hi, Jesse, you and I have met before when you came to Fort Lewis College and you spoke to my class and you got them so excited about learning So just nice to see you again. And thank you so much I have a question sort of based on what you just said and I do think for a lot of students Higher it seems like a system rigged to do them harm and I think you're right about those moving the goalpost But here's my question. So I'm always trying to find everyone's looking for the magic bullet What's the one thing I can do tomorrow that's going to just make all the issues and challenges go away And I'm not sure if you're familiar with this 2007 no 17 research that came out. It's called variables. It's a meta analysis of both instructor and student variables that lead to academic achievement and they looked at like Almost 2 million students 190 studies And the number one number one thing that is the greatest Indicator of student achievement is social interaction faculty to student It blew everything else away I want to know how you see this idea of undoing the grade As elevating that idea of social interaction one way they framed it was the use of open-ended questions Not closed-ended not recall, but open-ended questions. So how do you see what you're Advocating for here aligning with that research on over almost 2 million students Yeah Well, the one thing I'll say first is that spending time with your students was one of the highlights of my last five Honestly, I still think about that group of students Me too I will say talking about talking about that experience with that group is I think a way of answering your question Because a couple things happened one I sat down on the edge of the counter. I even remember I very Made a decision to say I'm just a guy. I'm just hanging out with you for the next hour I'm not an authority. I'm not coming to lecture to you I just want to talk to you all and I think I tried to make that clear from the beginning But they were so incredibly receptive to that and honestly, that's a credit to you You create an environment in that classroom where they felt like they could talk about anything And they also felt like they weren't being surveilled by you So I asked them open-ended questions and they answered and it was some of the Most amazing answers to these questions that I've ever gotten So I'm so grateful that you're here and that I get to gush about that group Please say hello to them if you I um and bring me back I want to talk to them again and talk to your groups the um that I guess the thing that I would say is that what Students want to feel like they have agency. Um, they want to feel like they have power over their education They want to feel like they're under the hood of their own education that they can make critical decisions about their education I think the problem of grades and this is why I often say I didn't wake up one day and decide I wanted to be a researcher about grades and assessment. I I hate grades So why am I spending so much of my career talking and thinking about grades? Um, and it's partly because I feel like grades as a system are the thing The the sort of most salient thing that strips students of that agency strips students of that feeling like they have power over their education They are the most also the most hierarchical piece of the student-teacher interaction They're a constant reminder that the teacher has power and the student is powerless to the grade And if there's a way that we can unseat that I think then we get to the place where we can have those real open dialogues with each other And and that isn't by saying throwing up your hands and saying grades are terrible. I'm never going to grade It's by sitting with the students and saying what are grades? How are grades impacting us? How are how is the fact of grades changing the relationship that we're having in this room? And your students were also eager to ask those questions and that was really exciting to see They were blown away by the way by you and this approach. They're like, I'm gonna love college if this is what college is I'm not sure that's panned out, but thank you so much Well, I don't actually and interestingly I don't necessarily think that's what is what college is And I often say I mean students are going to go on to be graded in their other classes But ideally if we can take moments like the one I had with your students the one I had with you And also the moment you had with the students over that that really intensive term where you were working with them You have this moment to kind of help them become paul affair talks about helping students become readers of their world Able to make effective change in their social political Cultural environment. I think also we want students to be readers of their education Able to feel like they have power over that education So even if they left and never had another teacher like you never had a weird guest teacher like me coming to their class They still hopefully left with some tools that they could use to succeed in their other classes. Thank you Well, thank you. I love you. I envy your students the experience of being with you And friends we have a whole bunch of questions coming up and and just see a bunch of these are are pretty specific kind of you know consulting questions for you And I just want to bring up a couple of these in a row Because these are very very effective very practical questions. So here's one for example This is for Elizabeth Fagan. Thanks for the conversation I'm curious about how many students you're able to have these creating conversations with in a single semester And if it's a good about how do you manage the time? Yeah, I would say all of them and I would say all of them because we have large group conversations And and I think that it's possible to I mean brian is a wonderful example of this of being able to facilitate an open dialogue with 103 people right now And so it is possible for these kinds of conversations to scale And ultimately it's a matter of how do you facilitate that conversation? So that it isn't just brian and I up on a stage talking to each other and all of you listening We have so many channels here. We have the the channel in the chat We have side conversations probably happening that we don't see And then we also have these questions and people coming on stage. So this isn't just brian and I There's a there's a two to many and also a many to many engagement happening here So ideally I structure these conversations with grades in a similar way I talk to the whole group get them talking to each other and then also get them having side conversations And then they have individual conversations with me very much like this where one person comes up on stage And and then if we imagine what's going to happen after this shindig I might get an email from one of you in my email saying there's one thing that was nagging at me And I didn't feel like I could talk about it in front of the large group because my provost was in the room or something You know, whatever it is And so they send me that email and that's similar to these conversations with a great about grades So I might have the individual one to one conversations with a handful of students But I don't have to have that with every single student as long as I help them feel Like they can reach out to me at any at any point nice Well, that I really like the way you make that more complex multimodal and thank you for the kind words I'm glad you you see what we're trying to do here With future transform. I have to say what makes it all work are so many wonderful people We have a Couple of questions as well Further along those lines. Here's uh, here's one. I really am I from brent presley How do you introduce the grading strategy to students on day one? Oh, I love this question I love this question because my answer is that Increasingly, I don't introduce it on day one and I don't put on day one for a very specific reason And for me, it's because I feel like we have to do more grades or something that um that Students have difficulty trusting teachers And the reason they have difficulty trusting teachers is a couple things one teachers often don't trust them And also the structure of the institution and the way that our educational institutions are built Creates a frustrates the relationship between teachers and students and grades as a system certainly do that as well So to some degree if you say this thing that has so much power over your life grades This thing that's a currency in our institution will affect your entire future this thing I have power over i'm going to put a little Tick in a box at the end of the term and that's going to impact your future if you say Let's talk about that on the first day before you even know me I don't necessarily think that's the best time to have that conversation. It might be in some classes Depending on you know Lots of different factors, but ideally I actually shift the conversation later I try and have the conversation of courage when the students need to have it So that's about listening to the hum of the room trying to figure out exactly when we need to have the conversation So don't plan it at first and listen for the hum of the room Watch students see how they're engaging with each other Find the moment sometimes they bring it up with me It's always a better conversation if they bring it up rather than me posing it because it means it's coming from them And it also gets framed by them instead of being framed by me So that's ideal and then usually what happens is if if I haven't had that conversation the first time I have students writing a self reflection or doing a process letter or doing peer evaluation Or doing self grading I used that as the to have the conversation So we have it in context rather than having it at the beginning That isn't to say that they they can't figure out what my grading policy is. It's in my syllabus. I talk about it in my syllabus I also link to my personal blog. So, you know, any of the students go to my personal blog They're going to see nothing but me talking about grading. So if someone will wait, well, how's grading going to happen in this class? There's a bunch of they can ask me of course But there's also a bunch of places where they can quickly find the answer I just a quick question for me. Do you mostly teach online and mostly teach in person right now? Mostly and mostly in person. I mean, obviously in the last three years mostly online But uh, increasingly back to being mostly in person. I've taught online my entire career since about 2005 A mixture of online and face-to-face, but I'd say it's been about 20 percent online 80 percent face-to-face Thank you. Thank you. We have a follow-up question about the scaling question. This is from our friend Keenan And she asks how have you ever used uh liberating structures for process and scaling? Um, I you say more you want to come on and talk a little bit more about liberating structures Yeah, can please please feel free to um, we we'd love to just just raise your hand so I can bring you on stage I know a bit about that but I want to always see Uh, what she has and and man, she quickly raised her hand. Oh my gosh And I have to say is it Kenan or Kenan? It's Kenan Kenan. Sorry Kenan. Welcome glad you're here. It's my first time on stage all these times. I've been on here All right. Welcome. Good to see you. Good to see you So yeah, so liberating structures. Yeah, I'll just say a little bit about it So Keith McCandless and Henri Le Manowitz started liberating structures years ago with Plexus Institute around complexity and systems thinking And Keith worked in the healthcare system industry and they're both consultants with large corporations, etc But they have quite an army of people bad use of terms. I'm sure but um, there are a lot of people that use liberating structures In lots of different industries including social justice and lots of and I've been a very shy liberating structures user Have known about it for years went to their first world conference. Um, I know Keith and Henri But this year I've been leaning into it and it's a it's somewhere between 33 and 36 practices that You can engage and they're very specifically made for scaling and forgetting the voice of everyone to be heard So that's why I asked about it. Yeah, I haven't actually used them directly. I'm glad for a little bit more information on them I was kind of vaguely aware of what they are and how they how they work But I haven't used them or even have them used in the group that I was present on to have just read some of some of them To me, it seems one of the keys is instead of trying to navigate the group dynamics by just saying Oh, we're going to do all these things as a group. It's about breaking that down into smaller tasks that help build a social group Does that kind of is that similar? Yeah, it's similar. Um Each each of them they come from different Domain some Keith and Henri have developed themselves, but they come from different practices in group work basically And they can be very different. Each one can be a very different kind of instrument or process Um So, yeah, there's a lot of diversity within them I think I'll just add a little more to a question. You didn't ask me just now But in terms of my shyness about using them I I use three different ones just this summer with there's a national youth science camp that is has delegates from each state and a few countries in the americas And these are 17 and 18 year olds that are, you know, the top science students in those states And um, it was amazing even At such a youthful age What they're called liberating structures for a reason because they seem to tap into bypassing our Structured logical thinking about what we're supposed to say and they tap into authentic thinking Um, I think I'll talk a little bit just say a little bit about where some of my practice individual classroom practices happen That'd be great. My um, my my mom is my all my family Are all social workers and psychologists. My dad is uh, he was a drug and alcohol treatment administrator for the state of colorado Building all the drug and alcohol treatment programs. My brother is a social worker My mom was a group therapist specifically focusing on domestic violence groups And so I kind of grew up Around that kind of work and I think back to being invited to sit in on some of my mom's group therapy Um, and specifically working with she worked with victims groups and she worked with offenders groups domestic around domestic violence And watching her do her work. It was extraordinarily influential for me So that had that definitely had an impact And the other thing that I the other thing that I do in my classroom in a really practical way is I have my students play games Uh, I do teach game. I teach a writing class where I have students writing indie rpgs indie role-playing games little short chat book style role-playing games and um But in a lot of my classes I have students play games on the first day and then have them play games regularly Because it gets students to engage each other in vulnerable ways Without actually having to front their vulnerability if that makes sense And that that seems a really powerful thing for me. So I'm going to recommend one game which has worked brilliantly for me It's a game that's written by a friend of mine. It's a game called wing it Uh, it has a penguin on the front. It's a super charming game So if someone can pop just google real quick the game, but a card game wing it Uh, pop it in the chat. I'd be grateful Well, first of all, I mean Ken and if that's a question that that uh, jesse didn't ask it was a great question And uh, and jesse would have a fantastic answer Ken and if you know the founders of liberating structures, can you can you introduce me? I would love to host them in the program. Sure Be happy. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you and welcome to the stage. Thank you Now, uh, we have uh, we're coming close to the end of the hour And I want to make sure everybody gets a chance to ask their questions The chat box is on fire with tons and tons of comments Jesse here's another practical question And I think you you address this in a couple of ways and this is from john dron And john asks whoops, can I put this up? Or pass fail or maybe distinction marks or approaches that describe skills developing proficient, etc Better than grading if so, why are why not? um, hi john first um the So pass fail is interesting and I have a chapter in my book about compassionate grading And I particularly use the phrase compassionate grading is because that was a phrase that was kind of buzzing around in 2020 One of my problems with the conversations about compassionate grading in the midst of a pandemic is well Why weren't we always doing compassionate grading and why if we figure out ways to do compassionate grading? Why wouldn't we just continue to have grading be compassionate? So I took linguistic umbridge with this phrase um But one of the things that was being advocated at the time was that we should move to pass fail systems because pass fail systems are more Compassionate and I I thought to myself. Whoa, let's slow down and let's talk about first What would compassionate grading look like? But let's also look at pass fail and talk about what the different benefits and drawbacks of pass fail is One if you think about like what causes anxiety around grades one Is if the if the grade feels arbitrary and that's most of our systems a b c d f. What does that b mean? What does a c mean? 93 absolutely arbitrary signifiers. They don't actually mean anything uh, they They're arbitrary and so that's one of the problems of grades One of the other problems of grades is that the stakes are often too high If you raise the stakes too high you increase anxiety levels and then you could increase anxiety levels Beyond a point where you can actually get a reasonable assessment of someone's performance So we could also have a whole other conversation about what kind of performance we're assessing and at what moment we're assessing it What are all the different variables that are playing into the student's? Ability to be adequately assessed at that moment, but certainly raising the stakes isn't necessarily good And the problem of pass fail is that it raises the stakes incredibly all of a sudden They they either pass or they fail. There's only two gradations and so Oftentimes pass fail can actually feel less compassionate. It can feel harder. It can feel more difficult It can feel like the stakes are incredibly high. I advocated in 2020 for us to use a system that was pass no record So basically they pass and get credit or there's just no evidence at all of them having taken the course And so that that changed the way that those stakes were operating at that particular moment The one thing that's nice about pass fail is it isn't nearly as arbitrary It's either you succeeded or mastered the what you needed to do in this course or you didn't so that that does convey something clear to people what one of the problems are is that that the um The negative impact of failing is too high at our institutions There are so many things that I try and fail and try and fail and try and fail And that's the way that I get to success or mastery. Although I don't love the word mastery That's the way that I reach a goal or point myself in a trajectory But the problem is that we don't have that opportunity at institutions to try something and then not succeed And then try it again without having huge It having a huge impact on our future in multiple different ways and f Affects your grade point which affects your ability to get a scholarship Often affects your ability to stay in the institution at all and f also becomes something very difficult to remove from a transcript The other thing is getting no credit at all for something if I try something and I don't succeed And I try it again and succeed Why wouldn't I get credit? Both of those attempts. So why wouldn't I get my three credits for the first attempt and three credits for the second attempt? Learning as it actually and the process of learning is what we're trying to reward Why do we build credits up as some sort of chip that we give out? As it again feels super hierarchical rather than actually representing learning that's happening Oh, that's that's a great way of putting it Jesse we have time for one more question And I have so many thoughts, but I want to give way to tyler row Who's coming to us from emerson college? Where it's probably a beautiful fall there is what I'm guessing Yes, very beautiful today. Um, thank you so much for having us and thanks for all the questions before my question is more Um on the faculty development side So my colleague and I have led a few faculty reading groups on ungrading and this semester We're actually using your new book and it's being received very well by our faculty And for the most part faculty are on board But a question or point of tension that we often come up against Is how labor intensive some of these ungrading systems may be specifically this kind of Dialogic aspect and the increased feedback that comes along with a lot of these systems So how do you respond to faculty apprehension around increased labor on their part? I think honestly My attempt is to help people Get to a place where they're not increasing their labor oftentimes whenever we make changes in our pedagogy We're necessarily going to increase the labor for a while because just dealing with the change And navigating it ourselves is an increase in our labor emotional labor as well And maybe even more emotional labor than physical labor at that particular moment of change or transition But ideally we would develop systems and structures that decrease the amount of time that we're spending on grading rather than increase it An example being that when I'm talking about dialogic One thing is I want to create that one-to-one relationship between me and students But I also want to teach students how to Get feedback from their peers and I also want to teach students when I'm teaching something like metacognition or self-assessment My goal is to get the student to be able to be giving themselves some of that feedback that they would normally get from their teacher So it isn't that they write a self-assessment and then I carefully evaluate their self-assessment Ideally I want the students to get to a place where they write their self-assessment and it doesn't need me to read it at all Because it's for them because it's generative informative for them And so that notion I think one of the problems that we have is There's an expectation that we're not doing our jobs if we don't grade I think there's also an expectation that we're not doing our jobs if we don't read every bit of student work And I don't I find that really bizarre because that suggests that somehow our desk Is into a value of structure that every bit of student work has a pass to pass across that desk Why are students not writing for other audiences? And we're sometimes not even included in that audience at all Why are students writing self-assessments that they don't even turn into us because they were formative and generative for them And not necessarily for us to read but in one of the things that I've Really been influenced by is Peter Elbow's notion of minimal grading He specifically talks about zero point assignments where you give students an assignment that you don't look at at all And so and ultimately Finding more ways to ask students to do work that doesn't need us as the evaluator or the critic or the grader of it Hope that helps a little bit That's great. Thank you Thank you, Tyler And uh, Jesse, I have to say thank you for being a great guest because we are at the end of our time You've just given us so many thoughts so many ideas And uh, and you've I think excited so many people to to start answering your questions and start looking at ungraded seriously What's the what's the best way to keep up with you in the next year to try to understand? What that next book project might be now that your mind is cleared off or or what else you're going to be teaching Yeah, a couple things I would say that my blog is a great place to follow Follow me jesse stommel.com, which I think you already shared at the beginning I am on various social medias although social media is a bit in flux at the moment So but I'm usually jessefer or jessefer js or jesse stommel on linkedin So feel free to find me there and engage with me. I also love it when folks send me emails Even if you don't have a question Feel free to send me an email jesse at hybrid pedagogy.org is my email address And then the last thing I'll talk about is I'm doing something called open offline open online office hours ungrading addition Which is Conversations Off like office hours. I don't I won't have anything planned people show up and we talk about whatever folks who show up in the room Want to talk about with the theme of ungrading or grades, but again great when we're talking about grades We're talking about power. We're talking about almost everything So the next one of those is on um Friday october 13th at noon eastern and I'll put a link in the chat friday the 13th Yep, so it'll be a special edition. It will be it will be. Thank you. Thank you so much Um, we'll all follow over this follow up with you on on whichever channels are most convenient for us And please keep up with uh with those uh office hours and thank you keep up with this great work Thank you all Friends, thank you for this fantastic set of questions For making a really really great conversation Let me just wrap this up by saying if you want to keep talking about this on social media Just use the hashtag ftt Here are my contact points on twitter and mastodon who are available elsewhere as well If you'd like to go into our previous sessions including our previous hosting of jesse Just take a look at our archive tiny url.com slash fdf archive If you'd like to look at our sessions coming up Take a look at forum that future of education that us the first one coming up actually is about What's next for academic twitter? Thank you all again for so many great questions. Thank you for thinking together I hope the semester is going very well for all of you above all. I hope you're all safe and sound Until next time. We'll see you online Take care. Bye. Bye