Michael Marchione is an educator in a Grade 6/7 class at Tiger Jeet Singh PS in Milton, ON. Michael strives to support a community of care, reduce the stigma around mental health, and reimagine education.
Starting off Ungrading
The biggest reason I decided to use ungrading in my classes is because I always found grades to be a huge barrier for myself in my own educational experience. I found that I was forming a lot of my identity as a student around the grades that I was getting, and at one point, they hindered me from programs that I wanted to get into. I have always really grappled with the idea of minimizing or reducing learning to a number or a letter. I wanted to explore the idea of how we can capture learning in authentic and genuine ways, without reducing all of the work that goes into learning to a number. I remember reading an article by Alfie Kohn that was all about how subjective and harmful grades could be and so much of it resonated with me. So while my ungrading journey started with my own personal struggle, once I started getting feedback and listening to the students that were in front of me, I found that they were also struggling with the same issues I had with grading. It just seemed like a natural next step in our journey as a community. Ungrading is more than just the removal of grades – we must have a fundamental belief that learning is multifaceted. We must reexamine the systems and structures in place that perpetuate graded systems, and that is scary but necessary. Starting an ungrading journey was daunting, but I found the more I tinkered and listened and learned the stronger my belief in it became.
Ungrading in Our Class
I remember as a young student sitting at my desk waiting for a test or to be handed back the anxiety and fear I felt. Even now as an adult, those feelings creep up at times when getting feedback. Therefore, from the beginning of the school year, it begins with building that sense of community and that sense of trust. I’m very forthcoming about what ungrading means and how we as a learning community can take a stance that we are going to focus on the learning journey and not on the grade itself. Some buy in right away, most are weary or unsure. It’s important to meet your learners where they are at while gently guiding them into an ungraded environment. It is equally as important to communicate with families and guardians to engage them in the discussion and learning too.
Ungrading in our classroom looks like many different things. It is often a series of ongoing conversations, continuous conferencing with students about their goals, strengths, and areas of growth. . All the students in our learning community also have learning portfolios – a digital folder in their Google Drive where they’re encouraged to document and curate both their successes and their failures, things they’re proud of, things they’ve struggled with. We intentionally carve out time throughout the week or month for them to revisit those portfolios and actually select something they’ve curated and build those metacognitive skills through reflection.
I aim to use a variety of methods to bring in student voice, some really quick, and some involve a longer, deeper process. For example, I’ll use a quick scale rating of the end of an assessment of how they feel about their learning and why. Additionally, right before each reporting season I conference with each of the students in our learning community and we determine their final grades together and this is the best time to hear the student’s voice in their learning journey. I aim to keep constructive feedback succinct and clear, rather than creating massive rubrics or long lists of criteria. Co-creating a few specific goals as a class or even individually with the students can go a long way. I try to use phrases like, “Here is what I noticed” or “I have a wondering about the next step…” to try and focus on what is seen rather than criticizing the learner or subjectively quantifying the worth of their work.
There is a common understanding that we unfortunately have to put a grade on the report card at the end of term, but I want to give them an opportunity to be able to use the evidence in their learning journey and their portfolio to justify where they see themselves and making the big ideas explicit that we have been working on. As we uncover things in the curriculum, we review our learning goals for the term and students choose which learning goals they are focusing on at any one time, and those don’t need to be the same as the rest of the class.
Reflections on Ungrading
While I have seen success in ungrading, it is also an ongoing learning journey. I am constantly reflecting on what works and what I can change by engaging with colleagues, and importantly the students and their families. One challenge I am reflecting on is building metacognitive skills in their portfolios. I’ve been using portfolio conferences for report cards for the last three years and I’m noticing some recurring patterns. Students either often feel like they don’t have enough evidence to support their learning, or their reflections tend to stray away from what they learned. For example, I see reflections like, “I should get an A in writing because I love writing” – and while that is awesome information to have, metacognition would ask us to focus on our growth and how we learn. It is a process, and my students continue to give feedback that I try to implement. This year, I’ve had several students make voice recordings or videos of them explaining their growth over time which I think is pretty cool!
Reflecting on this journey, there is a lot that surprises me. I think that one exciting moment is when students self-assess their strengths and next steps in a way that is similar to my own observations and feedback. It shows that they are accepting and applying feedback and have really thought about it. It can be a huge unlearning opportunity for educators not to have a predetermined grade for a student before conferencing, but I try not to and to just listen and talk about the journey as we decide a grade together. Secondly, I also am always surprised how invested some students get in having that ownership over their learning. It creates a safe space to set high expectations while honouring and acknowledging the fullness of each individual. The portfolio allows students to pick and choose what is part of their journey and in doing so, gives me a clearer picture of how they view their own growth. More often than not, students have been very honest about their level of interest, effort, and challenges when they know that a grade can’t possibly communicate months of mistakes and learning.
Student Response
I would honestly say that the majority of the responses that I get are very positive. Most often, students share a sense of relief where they can focus on what they’re trying to learn rather than a grade. However, because we are working in a system where grading is so entrenched, I also see a tension that exists where the students themselves are really excited about that learning journey, but they recognize that not all of the people in their life feel that way. That is why it is important to communicate with families and have them be involved in the learning journey as best they can. I’ve had a handful of instances of pushback from parents and guardians, where they’ve expressed their thoughts and opinions and viewpoints on those, and I have to understand that because it is systemic, it’s embedded into our systems all the way from Kindergarten up into Post-Secondary. As a result, something that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years is to try to collect and curate some of the more tangible pieces of research, articles or books on ungrading, and actually sharing that with the parent community. Until our systems of education change, this will continue to be a challenge yet it is one I am committed to discussing and pushing back against.
Managing Student Conferencing
Student conferencing is such an integral part of the discussion in our learning community, yet I fully admit and recognize that conferencing with an entire class, or multiple classes, takes time! Even to do 10-minute conferences for each student, it takes about a week. In elementary, sometimes we are responsible for reporting on over 8 subject areas or have multiple classes like secondary educators. Finding what works for you and your learning community is key, and while some might argue that the conferencing takes up too much time, I just see so much of value in it and believe in it wholeheartedly that I make the time for it because that seems more valuable than rushing through a curriculum.
Suggested starting points
- I think one great starting point would be a resource, which is Starr Sackstein’s Hacking Assessment from the Hack Learning series. There’s actually a second edition that’s coming out shortly that I contributed a piece to, so I’m super excited about that! There are some really great tips and strategies in that book.
- The biggest thing that I would suggest for somebody who wanted to try it out, is definitely to try and connect with somebody else like minded, no matter where they are in their journey. One of the things I think that I struggled with when I started my first LTO, is that I didn’t feel that I had people around me that I could approach to talk things out with, or to experiment with, and so that would definitely be a really benefit.
- The other piece of advice I would give is to reduce the amount of feedback we feel that we need to give! Ask yourself – what are the one or two things that you really were after in an assignment and how could you provide feedback JUST on those things. If it’s a writing piece, do you really have to go after the punctuation, the spelling, the grammar, the sentence structure, are the ideas strong, is there enough evidence? Focusing in on those one or two points only will keep your workload down and make more meaningful feedback for students.