Learning to Ungrade, or Taking Steps to Fairness and Feedback
Bryan Glover
Using design thinking to reimagine the learner experience @bryangedu.bsky.social
I have been learning and collecting ideas for ungrading, and I’m still not done yet.
As I added final grades to the report card system, I used to get squirmy in my seat. Was I fair to everyone? Did each kid get the same opportunity for reconsideration of work for a better grade? Did I forget anyone? How much of the number I added was subjective?
I used to struggle with grades. Was I doing the right thing? The easy thing? Were they being used to coerce or oppress? Was this system truly an objective way to communicate progress to students and families?
My questions drove me to find answers. And I was surprised at how many others had already considered these curiosities and made practical changes to their grading. I’m going to share the spectrum of possibilities for shifting away from numbers and letters that do more harm than good for intrinsic motivation.
TLDR: Scroll to the section below on Tools & Resources for information and tools that support my case for Ungrading.
What is Ungrading?
Ungrading is the term that has always felt best to me. I use it to encompass all practices that ask teachers to step back from conventional numeric and letter grades. The focus shifts to more effective feedback for learners, standards- and mastery-based learning, conferring practices, project-based learning, performance-based assessments, and portfolios.
Ideally, it will lead to discussions to enact learner agency and provide opportunities for self-directed learning.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways teachers make the change to ungrading practices.
One of my early shifts in grading practices inspired by Rick Wormeli’s Fair Isn’t Always Equal was shifting to fewer numeric grades and more feedback about learning. I was also keenly aware of the mathematical impact of zero grades in overall averages, even in weighted categories. I worked with students to remove zero grades to reduce the damage to the final average. This all felt closer to “fair” for me at the time.
As a Principal, I led my school toward Mastery-based grading. The teachers that embraced this new way of thinking about grades and performance pressed their practice further. They focused on identifying skills that were developing in our young learners. They used feedback to develop skills like questioning, project management, voice in writing, collaboration with peers, and audience engagement.
Other teachers struggled with the new format, and fell back to more conventional standards-based grading. While it wasn’t as far as I’d hoped they would grow, it was farther along than that had been before. I chose to lead from the teacher’s starting point, and then push and develop their ungrading over time, in small steps.
If I could start over as a teacher knowing what I know now, I would step away from conventional grades all together. I would focus on feedback for learning. This could happen using written feedback (like with a single-point rubric or the SE2R method) and in conferring with students in mini-conferences or longer student-led conferences. It can happen with end of project presentations, portfolio defense, and performance-based assessments. Should the system require a numeric grade, I would create that numeric grade collaboratively with the student and based on their portfolio of learning artifacts.
How is it being used in schools?
There are schools using ungrading practices at all levels. Elementary schools across my city use narrative reporting systems for sharing progress reports with families. This week, a more conventional elementary school applied for some innovative programming flexibilities in service to narrative reporting of progress to families - and with the families supporting the change too!
My teaching experience above was as a middle school Science Teacher. Middle school years are a great place to use ungrading. This will remove the pressure of grades as reward/punishment at a time when the adolescent brain is in a state of intense growth and development
I often hear the most pushback from high school teachers and communities. What about their GPA? Doesn’t that matter to get into college? And I typically respond with, does GPA actually matter? For some colleges, perhaps. But definitely not all. Most colleges have a myriad of ways to present your learning during the application process including, but not limited to interviews, portfolios, letters of accomplishment and recommendation. Home and unschooled youth often have no traditional GPA or credit-bearing experience, and they regularly enter colleges and universities. Check out the Mastery Transcript Consortium. They are a group of mostly private and independent high schools that are starting the movement away from numeric reporting progress. Public schools have started to take note and are joining this group too.
Even college and university teachers are adopting ungrading practices. You can read about the progress Jesse Stommel has made in the use of ungrading practices for his courses in the Resources section below. He was an inspiration for me to rethink my practice, and I love the options he shares to bring ungrading practices to your own work.
The Case for Ungrading
Why should we adopt ungrading practices? Why does it matter? Don’t conventional numeric grades already serve as a tool for communicating progress to students and families?
Mark Barnes made a solid case for why we shouldn’t use conventional, numeric grades in his book Assessment 3.0. His book not only provides the reasons why (with citations), he also provides the SE2R system for providing authentic, actionable feedback to support students’ learning. Some of the whys that spoke to me are:
Alfie Kohn has been writing about grades as reward/punishment for a long time. He references decades of research about the impact of grades on learning and about intrinsic motivation being impacted by reward systems. More reasons not to grade that I found compelling were:
Check out the resource links below, and think about what reasons to ungrade speak most directly to you.
AJ and the Struggle to Stay in Class
Excerpt from Medium article, “AJ and the Endangered Bacon”:
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I first met AJ when I was his 7th grade Science teacher. He definitely brought a unique energy to my classroom. Other teachers expressed a lot of frustration with him.
I get it. I was his teacher too. He was a lot, all the time. He was also funny. And if you watched him and paid attention to when he got involved in learning, you could learn about things that motivate him. I learned that AJ appreciated personal connections to his teachers. He also enjoyed the experimental part of science, and he liked to build things.
Oh, and he loved to work with our classroom’s hissing cockroach colony! He would stop by class to help clean cages and feed the various critters (we also had a tarantula, a snake, and a rat).
Once we had an established connection, it wasn’t long before AJ made his way to my room on my Prep periods. “Hey, AJ. It’s good to see you, but I’m not teaching this period. I’m trying to catch up on grades and planning. What brings you by?”
“I didn’t want to stay in class,” he would say, eyes big and begging not to go back to class.
“Which class? Humanities? Let me call Ms. Dee and check in for you. Sit down there for a minute.”
Ms. Dee explained that AJ was being particularly loud and was refusing to write his 2 paragraph response to a text they were using in class. He got mad and walked out. I told her he was in my room. I asked if she would allow him a 5-minute breather before he came back.
She wanted him back, but she wanted him to write. AJ made it clear he was not going to write. I asked if I could keep him and have him write in my room, and then we would share his writing with her to review and offer feedback. Ms. Dee agreed.
I asked AJ, “If you could write anything you wanted, what would you write? The sky's the limit.”
“I’d write my memoirs. Starting with dating Diana.” (In my head, I was giggling and asking, ”Your memoirs?!? You’re in 7th grade!”) I let him get started on a Chromebook where he could write in a Google Doc and keep updating when he had time. And he wrote, and wrote, and wrote…
AJ wrote more in the periods that he spent interrupting my prep than he did in class. I began reading his work, with his permission, to push him to add more detail and elaborate on some points. He wanted to write a chapter about his grandfather who had recently passed, someone to whom AJ was very close.
AJ had writing goals, was developing stories, and his voice was coming through. He was given a chance to make an active choice, a self-determined choice, about his topic. He was given some agency in his learning path. AJ took that agency and flew!
AJ would return to my classroom for quiet moments when he couldn’t sustain focus in another class. He took on a challenge to build a bridge from popsicle sticks that would allow a toy truck to cross desks. He researched various types of bridges and how they were supported. He filled a notebook with bridge design information, ideas, and sketches.
His builds were messy, but functional. In his 8th grade year, AJ worked on designing wind turbine fan blades. He couldn’t finish his ideas in time during Science class. So he chose to spend time after school with me. He created 3 different iterations of turbine blades to test, And we talked, and laughed, and got to know each other even more. I was proud to see him step up to High School.
AJ is why I believe in ungrading. He was also a great example of student-directed learning -- and how to have patience. Lots of patience. Had I made the learning about points or a grade for class, he would not have been so eager to show up time and again to create and design.
Students are the reasons we take risks in our practice to innovate. And when we see them in a flow state of learning, experiencing joyful learning, it changes us. My experience with AJ is the reason that I more formally adopted practices that can be seen across the The (Un)Grading Spectrum pictured above. He is one of the reasons why, even as a leader, I continue to push myself and the practice of others toward ungrading.
Sometimes it helps to take small steps, to practice new ideas before fully rolling out. In my work of reimagining schools and classrooms, we create pilots of core student learning experiences. These pilots are tested with students to allow us time to see a new practice in action, in a smaller way, with lower stakes, so we can learn from it. We observe, collect data, and iterate until we have a system or practice ready to implement with the larger group.
Did one of the steps toward ungrading feel right when you looked at The (Un)Grading Spectrum pictured above? Would you make the jump to a high level of gradeless experience for your students? Would you prefer smaller steps to acclimate yourself, your students, and/or your families? If you could make one change, what would it be?
Map out a change process for yourself. Set benchmark goals. Talk to your students about possibilities. What do they think is the next best level to try? Do they have ideas about implementation, practice, and iteration?
Reminder: It will never be perfect. Sometimes you just have to get moving. Remember not to let one bad moment stop progress. Learn, iterate, and try again.
And What Else?
Another good reminder I hold close is “What works for many doesn’t necessarily work for all.” I read a great Twitter thread from one of my favorite Twit Educators, Tyler Rablin. There are some students that want grades. There are some students who might be responsive to rewards to help them stay focused. Sometimes delaying gratification doesn’t work for every student - sometimes they can’t delay gratification. We need to be flexible enough in all of our systems, including ungrading, so support different students in different ways.
Those that need the motivation of a grade will be the students that I spend time discussing options. Supports and scaffolds are great, until they aren’t. In other words, provide support for a student with grades when they are needed, not because we assume they need them. Part of ungrading is the understanding that students are capable of leading their learning more than they are often given credit for. They know themselves better than we do. Are we willing to ask and listen?
We need to learn to ask more about their need for support and scaffolds rather than always assuming we know. Otherwise, the scaffolds never go away. This is exactly what I saw with AJ. He was being over-scaffolded in his writing class. He just wanted to write for himself and without interruption.
Please stay connected as you try out new ideas and processes. Share what works. Share what doesn’t. Share how it is received by students and families. And Admin.
Know that ungrading is new for a lot of teachers, and there are lots of supports out there. Even after my first drafts of this article, I found more resources and new ideas. Get connected and try new things. Share your story on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TG2 (see below), and in other communities.
As Alfie Kohn says in “The Case Against Grades”, “... the absence of grades is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for promoting deep thinking and a desire to engage in it.” This can be a starting place for reimagining classrooms and centering students as leaders of their learning.
Tools & Resources