(this is the handout/notes page for a peer workshop session on alternative assessments)
- Shielding learning from assessment: An orienting framework.
- Every learning activity doesn’t have to be an opportunity for assessment: opportunities to practice are also important, especially given the current teaching environment.
- Asking ourselves and communicating to students: what is the point of what we are doing here? Answer: developing our capacities for critical judgment! How do we do that? Not by deferring to authorities’ assessment, but by cultivating competencies through practice.
- Designing course-level assessment strategies that do not rely on instructor overwork and burnout
- Perception that the way to do alternative grading well is to martyr oneself as a teacher – that it is impossible to do this without massive overwork on the part of the teaching team.
- The dramatic existential shift that comes from de-alienating our relation with our students whenever we can. Grades as the site of fungibility and alienation in the university – instead of feeling like we’re in a conversation with and alongside students about material we care about, we can come to feel that we are in a perpetual defensive posture. Let’s not do that!
Examples of course-level structures that include alternative grading:
- Course-level competencies/Specifications grading – Tiered competencies: assessing success based on whether students have grasped core concepts or skills; everyone who passes the class will have engaged a full range of course material and demonstrate some core competencies. (And the goal is 100% success rate!) Subsequent tiers demonstrate more complex/advanced skills, levels of engagement with texts/concepts.
- “Menu of options,” where students choose which assignments they want to do, determining their activities in the course based on their own objectives
- Labor-based contract grading, where quantity of work correlates to final grade
- Mixed-assessment, with some assignments required and conventionally graded and others either not assessed or marked success/revise
- Ungrading
- Why alternative assessments can minimize interference-patterns that come along with giving every activity in class a letter grade
- Working to a rubric can discourage risk-taking (for us and for students)
- Rather than telling students what competencies we want them to have, giving them practices that produce competencies. (Peter Elbow: I don’t always trust my own capacity as a teacher to discern the difference between an A and an A-, but I have great confidence that if you do these activities, you will become a better writer).
- Changes relationship between instructor and student – not an exercise in “pleasing” the teacher, guessing what we want; positions student as motivator and judge of their own work, which is critical to developing as a writer. [“the memo” exercise, metacognitive capacities]
- Low-stakes, high-stakes, and practice-focused activities
- Not going to the highest-stretch/scared you’re going to fall in bouldering place, training in the range of competence.
- Bi-directional: addressing both perfectionist students who want to go to the limit and also students who are perceived to simply not be interested in trying.
- Rather than the idea that profs know what will work for students, giving experiences so that students can figure out what works for their specific life, needs, experiences, etc.
- Centring formative rather than summative writing play as a thinking practice
Leave a Reply