Category Archives: Equity, Justice, & Social Change

What is Ungrading? An Interview on Contracts and Peer Evaluation

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For anyone interested in ungrading, contract grading, and peer-to-peer evaluation, Aaron Blackwelder of “Beyond the Curriculum” has done a great job interviewing Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis about their chapter in Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What To Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum (West Virginia University Press, 2020). We discuss such things as Carol Dweck’s idea of “growth mindset” and how ungrading focuses on the learning process not just learning as a product. We talk about how, by having a contract based on all assignments in a course, a student can plan in advance. Not every student, we’ve found, wants an A; in a busy semester, they might not be able to do all the workload in a course and be happy to contract to do enough of the work to earn a B. (That kind of mature, careful planning allows the student to be in control, to not simply “flake out” of assignments and look irresponsible when they are simply not able to do the A-level workload during a time when, for example, they are juggling jobs or family responsibilities.) Continue reading →

What is Participatory Learning or Active Learning?

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The verbs in the names of these two typically interchangeable terms say a lot about them: this kind of learning is meant to engage students, to put them in the driver’s seat of their own education, to make learning active and participation-based, and to make education more equitable. Some of the core elements of participatory learning include community, collaboration, and social justice (Alfie Kohn). Participatory learning descends from genealogies in progressive education that go back to Montessori and Dewey, radical pedagogy (think Paulo Freire‘s dialogic methods and bell hooks‘ emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual growth of students), and a variety of contemporary, engaged pedagogies, including those inflected by social science (such as the work of Carol Dweck on fixed versus growth mindset). Continue reading →

Open TLH Event Recap

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On November 20, 2020, TLH hosted a peer-to-peer workshop, “Open TLH: Sharing Tips for Getting to the Finish Line,” with over 30 attendees. TLH staff kicked off the meeting by introducing themselves as well as sharing their own tips for surviving this grueling semester.

Annemarie Nicols-Grinenko, Director of TLH, talked about running an effective Zoom meeting and her work to try to limit how many meetings she put on colleagues’ calendars. Shelly Eversley, Faculty Co-Director of TLH, shared her strategy for using Zoom’s whiteboard feature with her Baruch students (a strategy we used later in the event, as shown above). Faculty Co-Director Cathy N. Davidson shared a tip she took from Professor Jonathan Sterne to have students use study sheets for final exams (learn more here and here). Assistant Director Khanh Le shared his strategies for co-creating a syllabus with students: he allows students to help create the course syllabus by choosing some of the readings. Finally, Executive Director Christina Katopodis shared her strategy for planning final exams: students help create and refine questions for the final exam. Continue reading →