This week, we are talking all about how to build buy-in for ungrading in your school community. We'll discuss ungrading buy-in strategies for various different stakeholders such as teachers, admin, parents, and most importantly, students. Let's start talking about ungrading!
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**For detailed show notes, please visit our website at https://edugals.com/97**
Teachers/Admin:
- Start with conversations about grading and grading practices
- Why aren't traditional grading practices working?
- Leverage opportunities informally in your workroom, more formally in department meetings
- Keep in mind - slow and deliberate changes towards ungrading (it's a spectrum)
- Many ways to ungrade (mastery, standards-based, feedback, etc)
- Focus on the feedback and learning over grades
- Look at printouts of marks for students, rubrics we're using (single point vs 4-level), success criteria, moderated marking
- Try to find common ground, team dynamics matter
- Rethinking Letter Grades - Conversation Cards
- Grades are very personal - Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman
- Share your own vulnerability
- Open your classroom space, share your ungrading practices
- Honour professional judgement
- Invite colleagues and admin into your classroom
- Keep your admin in the loop - let them know what you are doing with ungrading and be prepared with a plan
Parents:
- Parents are allies - need transparency, clear communication of grading practices
- Pitch/justify your why of ungrading - send out a newsletter early in the school year
- Mastery can start a strong parent-teacher relationship
- Start an FAQ document to share with parents, teachers, admin, etc - post on website, LMS, etc
Students:
- This is the trickiest group to build buy-in!
- Consider the language you use to talk about grading, assessment, and feedback
- Expect pushback - this takes a bit of time to learn
- Involve students in the grading practices
- Start with having a conversation in general about grading
- Have them track their progress with a portfolio
- Build in reflection opportunities
- Know that emotions can be high - some students might feel anxiety and stress
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