Greetings reader,
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2044 - Labor Based Grading and the contract
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2114 - Labor Based Grading - is it working?
Labor Based Grading (LBG) is a derivation of "Mastery Grading" and "Contract Grading." Though these methods all share commonalities, they are not the same.
The goal of the pedagogy is to emphasize learning over grade-chasing and grubbing for points.
Instead of this situation...
FROM: https://medium.com/edmodoblog/i-stopped-grading-you-can-too-33f155911f4e
If there's no grade to look at, then maybe... just maybe, students focus on the feedback, engage in the process, and LEARN rather than just watching their points total and percentage.
Maybe.
Recently, some people have confused the LBG method my colleagues and I are currently using with "mastery grading," which is a different yet similar method that another colleague uses in her class rooms.
If this post's subject interests you, enjoy.
GUEST POST: “LABOR-BASED GRADING: THE EXPERIMENT”
Editor’s Note: My colleague Kara Synhorst is trying something very interesting this school year, and agreed to write a guest post about it.
Kara Synhorst teaches IB Language and Literature and IB Theory of Knowledge at Luther Burbank High in Sacramento, CA.
For several years, I’ve been doing reading to educate myself on anti-racist work. When our English department read about labor-based grading and the rationale behind it (I think we read an excerpt by Asao Inoue), I remember thinking that it sounded like a great way to make grading less subjective, and therefore less prone to being affected by my own implicit biases. It also sounded like a lot of work.
As an IB (International Baccalaureate) teacher, I attended two trainings recently in which the workshop leaders talked about IB “approaches to teaching.” In part, the ATL asks that the work be focused on conceptual understanding, differentiated, and based on inquiry. IB also encourages students to become risk-takers, something I struggle with. Because our students are so driven, they often worry too much about getting things “right,” and they stay within very safe boundaries, rarely challenging themselves.
And then the pandemic hit! Distance learning felt disjointed and chaotic, and the kids were stressed out.
I spent the summer trying to knit all these ideas and challenges into something cohesive. I decided that there was no better time to try labor-based grading than when I most needed to give kids a guarantee (a good grade if they just tried) and a boost. But labor-based grading still looked really hard, and it was only summer and I was already working full-time! I decided that for it to work, I would also have to really streamline the assignments I was asking for.
I decided to assign just one piece of homework each week. In my Language and Literature classes, they had to do the assigned reading, then demonstrate their understanding of a concept I’d taught in class. The homework always looks the same: Demonstrate your understanding of ________ in any format you choose.
Among the things I’ve asked them to demonstrate are the development of themes, tone, symbolism, archetypes, and the use of sound (in poetry).
I told the students that there are four qualities each assignment should meet:
It should have taken them between 30 minutes and two hours.
It should be the best quality they are capable of.
It should be clear to someone not in the class what they are trying to communicate.
They should understand their own purpose and be able to communicate it in a sentence or two.
Beyond that, they had nearly free reign: I encouraged them to write blog posts, letters, poems and song lyrics, to create slide shows and posters and comics, and to record podcasts and TikToks. I gave twenty-two choices but made it clear that if they could think of a way to communicate that wasn’t on there, it was probably okay, too.
Over the first three weeks or so, the kids were tentative. I got mostly writing pieces, and some slideshows. I answered a lot of questions, and showed examples of student work (with permission) that was risk-taking, but also received full credit.
I’m happy to say that in the 13th week of the experiment, I now have podcasts, artwork, short films, songs, dances, art, and creative writing coming in each week with no additional prompting. I’ve even had students submit assignments in embroidery!
One of the greatest benefits has been to me — I love seeing their creative endeavors and hearing their voices (some of the podcasts have begun to be quite lengthy!) and seeing their faces, when so often in class, their cameras are off.
Within that framework, I implemented labor-based grading. If they turned in the assignment and it met my four criteria, they earned 100%. There were some students who didn’t demonstrate understanding (perhaps they painted something, but it was unclear how it addressed the topic), so I would ask them in the comments on the assignment to explain their understanding, and most followed up. In fact, I found myself having conversations with the students in the comments section frequently. I also committed to giving them thoughtful, prompt feedback.
That’s not to say everything worked perfectly! Initially, I wrote out the grading contract based on Inoue’s (I found a sample online), but adjusted to meet my students’ (and our schedule’s) needs better. But at the end of the first quarter, some students were doing worse under the contract than I thought was fair: a single “ignored” assignment would have given them a D, and 2 an F. The language was also an issue: Inoue called late work “missing” and called missing work “ignored.” It was complicated and didn’t feel as aligned with their learning and effort as I’d like it to.
I held a brief discussion on one of our short Mondays about the grading policy to get the students’ feedback, and I took notes on what they told me. Many thought attendance shouldn’t count in their grade — part of the original policy I borrowed from Inoue — and I thought they made a good point! Like me, they thought the contract was overly complicated. But most wanted to be held accountable, and most liked the weekly assignments. A few who weren’t doing well even admitted that it seemed fair and they knew they could be doing better if they were turning in work.
I made some changes and shared them with the students. Now, their grades are based on percentage, but each assignment still earns them 100%. Only assignments they do not attempt (or that do not meet the requirements at all) count against them.
It does mean that sometimes things feel unfair to me: a student who produced a 15 minute video podcast complete with special effects and music earns the same score as a student who wrote a paragraph without capitalization. But I keep coming back to what it is I want for the students. I want them to be able to take intellectual risks. I want them to be able to make choices about their own education and how they express themselves. I want them to reach higher levels of understanding of the material we engage with (and many of the assignments they’re doing, like writing songs using the poetic devices we’ve studied, are much higher on the Bloom’s taxonomy scale than some of the writing they were doing previously). I want each student working to their own strengths and challenging themselves. And for the most part, that’s what I’m seeing.
Mr. Ferlazzo asked how many students have failing grades under my current system. It’s not zero, unfortunately. I have students who never attend class and whom I can’t reach by phone or email. I have students who attend every day and don’t submit work. I’m doing my best to reach out and offer help to them, including inviting them to stay during asynchronous time and demonstrate their understanding in a brief conversation in a breakout room.
Before the school year began, knowing that taking on distance learning, a new grading contract, and a new kind of structure for class work was a lot, I told myself that it was a weird year: if it didn’t work, I’d call a mulligan. So far, I’m pretty happy with the results, though I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak it and talk with the students about how it’s working for them. Will it translate to in-person learning? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, I feel good about having tried something new with an eye towards equity, and I’m enjoying the way I’m getting to know students through their creative and self-driven work.
ADDENDUM:
Several readers asked if Kara would mind sharing the student hand-out she used explaining the system and including the twenty-three choices students have to demonstrate understanding.
Kara has graciously shared it here in a downloadable format.
PhD Candidate in English, Case Western Reserve University
My First Experiment with Labor-Based Contract Grading
You might have heard about labor-based or contract-based grading practices as part of a larger movement against traditional grading practices (for example: this piece and this piece by Prof. Jennifer Hurley, this piece by Alfie Kohn, and this piece by Jesse Stommel). At the heart of these debates about grading as an assessment of learning is often questions about what is being measured, how it is being measured, and whether such an assessment contributes to student learning. Other teacher-scholars, such as Asao Inoue have pointed out the ways racism can be inadvertently perpetuated through traditional assessment methods.
Labor-based and contract-based grading have been introduced as an alternative form of assessment. As the name implies, labor-based grading focuses on the time and effort a student invests in an assignment rather than the outcome. This method of grading is often (but not always) communicated to students in the form of grading contracts. (If this is all brand-new to you, it might be helpful to read Traci Gardner’s infographic on labor-based grading geared towards students.) These contracts vary in degree of “contractual” language employed, but they are essentially a document that outlines what the students need to complete in a given semester to earn a particular letter grade. The labor asked of students therefore varies based on the grade they choose to work for.
I experimented with labor-based grading methods this past semester (Spring 2020) in my Introduction to Creative Writing course. I felt labor-based grading would be particularly well-suited to my teaching philosophy for introductory creative writing: to motivate students to experiment and push themselves out of their comfort zones as they learn basic craft elements of poetry and fiction.
In the remainder of this post, I will first describe my past experience with teaching introductory creative writing using traditional grading methods. I think this previous experience is a useful backdrop for understanding my desire to change my assessment methods (but if you don’t think so, feel free to skip it). I will then compare that experience to my experiment with contract grading in Spring 2020. Finally, I will conclude with a list of resources for those who might wish to delve more deeply into this assessment methodology (including sample grading contracts I have found online).
My Experience Using Traditional Grading Methods in the Creative Writing Classroom
When I first taught introductory creative writing in Fall 2018, I used traditional grading methods despite the fact that I did not feel comfortable grading students on the “quality” of their writing when many of them were writing poetry and fiction for the first time. Furthermore, at the STEM-oriented institution where I currently teach, many of the students who enroll in introductory creative writing are not English majors or minors–they are coming to the course as a pure elective. At such a beginner stage, I don’t want students to get hung up on whether or not they are “good” writers; rather, I want them to focus on their writing choices and the effect of these choices on potential readers.
For better or worse, students* have been trained to view traditional grading practices (A-F or point-based grading scales) as measuring the quality of what they produce. While some teachers might have found a way to get students to take risks while using traditional grading practices, I found such practices constrained even my thinking about student assessment. Here is the grading policy in my 2018 syllabus:
“When grading the writing you produce in this course, I will focus on your timely completion of assignments and the way that you navigate the revision process in particular. Your thoughtful participation in discussions and workshops and your commitment to mindfully developing your work over the course of the semester will also be considered. The percentage breakdown for the course grade is as follows:
Participation 5%
Collection Journal 5%
Daily Writing Exercises 10%
Workshop Drafts 25%
Workshop Feedback 25%
Short Story/Creative Nonfiction/Poetry Collection Paper 10%
Final Portfolio 20%”
This sort of breakdown probably looks pretty familiar. I don’t necessarily think the process of weighing activities/tasks differently was the problem, but this given that I am also a product of the American education system, framing evaluation in this way made it difficult for me to deviate from the rubrics and standards with which I was familiar.
Despite regularly encouraging students to revise their work if they were not happy with the original grade, I found that when faced with a choice between a risky move or a “safe” one, they nearly always opted for the latter. They did not want anything less than an A on their initial submissions, even with the opportunity to revise. We might be tempted here to blame the students themselves (or their parents) for seeming so risk-averse. But considering that students have spent their entire educational lives up to this point being rewarded for conformity (whether through standardized testing or trying to guess a particular instructor’s taste), is it any wonder that they continue to play it safe in college?
I also noted this semester that students tended to ignore the feedback on their stories and poems from their peers during workshops unless it coincided with my own. I again attribute this move to the assessment methods I was using: why bother listening to their classmates when in the end it was the instructor’s opinion that mattered? (This observation led me to change my workshop and feedback methods during Spring 2020, which I describe in a previous post.)
My Experience Using Labor-Based Contract Grading in the Creative Writing Classroom
Before I describe my experience this semester, I should note that the conditions for this experiment were not ideal: due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all courses at my institution were moved online following Spring Break in mid-March, and I revised my expectations of students to reflect the extraordinary circumstances (a decision I plan to discuss in a future post). This mean that for all intents and purposes, I essentially disregarded the grading contracts my students signed after mid-semester. My students, however, did not necessarily do the same (but I’ll get to that later).
I found the biggest difference of grading contracts versus traditional grading methods to be in the amount of up-front work required. I spent several hours over several days writing and revising my grading contract (this was on-top of all the research I had done on contract grading). The benefit to this up-front time investment is that it left me free to focus on providing feedback and support to students during the course of the semester, rather than measuring their work against a rubric and assigning points or letter grades to their writing. I found that this dramatically shifted how I approached student writing: I was no longer looking at it through the mindset of whether it “merited” an A, B, C, etc, but rather reading it for what it was–an experiment or work-in-progress. This shift to contract grading revealed to me how so much of the “feedback” I typically provide students is really a justification of the grade I’m assigning. Without having to give each piece a grade, I approached their work with a generous spirit (the mindset I always want to have but find difficult to maintain with traditional assessment methods).
I opted to distribute the grading contracts separately from my syllabus, so as not to overwhelm students on the first day of classes and give me the opportunity to discuss this assessment method with them in class in advance. Here is the language I used in my syllabus to introduce labor-based, contract grading to students:
“I do not believe traditional grading practices are conducive to the spirit and goals of this course. In my experience, it is difficult for students to take risks, experiment, and try something new when they fear being graded on the outcome. Additionally, this is a purely elective course, and I assume you would not be taking it if you didn’t want to take risks, experiment, and try something new! However, the university still requires grades, so we will be using a contract grading method this semester. More information on contract grading will be provided during the first week of the semester.”
The actual contract I distributed to students is linked below.
Because of it’s length, I will just share a preview of what constituted “A-level” work in this course:
- Attend class regularly (missing no more than 2 classes)
- Missing more than 2 classes will result in a .5 grade reduction for each additional absence.
- Fulfill participation/engagement expectations (as outlined in syllabus)
- Submit drafts of 5 poems
- Significant reimagining of 3 poems
- Submit 3 revised and polished poems in your Final Portfolio. NOTE: These should be the same poems as the ones you “significantly reimagined”; final versions of poems should be substantially different from original drafts and significant reimaginings of poems!
- One of the following fiction options:
- Microfiction Option
- Submit 2 microfiction drafts (500 words or fewer)
- Submit a significant reimagining of 1 of your microfiction drafts (500 words or fewer)
- Submit 2 revised and polished microfiction stories (500 words or fewer) in your Final Portfolio. NOTE: final versions should be substantially different from both original drafts and your significant reimagining (i.e. not just cleaning up grammar and calling it a revision)
- Short Story Option
- Submit 1 short story draft (full story; 1000-3500 words)
- Submit 1 significant reimagining of your short story draft (full story; 1000-3500 words)
- Submit 1 revised and polished short story (full story; 1000-3500 words) in your Final Portfolio. NOTE: final version should be substantially different from both original draft and your significant reimagining (i.e. not just cleaning up grammar and calling it a revision)
- Satisfactory completion of Author’s Note reflections accompanying each draft of poetry, microfiction, and short story pieces
- Timely submission of feedback on ALL of your writing group’s drafts (as defined by guidelines)
- Satisfactory and timely completion of short story/poetry collection essay (as defined by assignment sheet)
- Satisfactory and timely completion of final reflection (as defined by assignment sheet) in your Final Portfolio.”
While students certainly had questions after I distributed the contracts and they had a chance to look them over, they were mostly clarification questions, and I did not meet any overt resistance to the idea of labor-based assessment methods. If anything, they appeared excited at knowing exactly what they were expected to produce during the semester and the ability to “control their own destiny,” as it were, by agreeing to the terms in advance. As the semester progressed, I did not run into the usual barrage of questions about what a student’s grade was in that exact moment, since they knew that if they were completing what was on their contract, they were receiving the grade they had contracted for. I was also never approached to justify a particular grade, since students knew that if they had not satisfactorily completed an assignment, I would email them and let them know it needed further work to be counted (this actually didn’t happen much at all, though).
The biggest hiccup (other than the pandemic), was that I had a couple of students with disability accommodations for flexible attendance–something I hadn’t anticipated, but certainly should have. (I have somehow not had students with relevant disability accommodations in my classes up until this point–it was previously accommodations for things like testing which I don’t do in a writing class.) Initially, I was concerned that attendance accommodations would throw off the contract system, but after meeting with a representative from the Disability Resource Office, I understood how I could meet these specific students’ needs within my contract system. (The compromise, for those who are curious, was to allow these students up to 6 absences without penalty, but more than that would result in failing the course.) So in the end, this turned out to be a non-problem.
But as I mentioned at the beginning of this section, I cannot consider this first experiment with labor-based contract grading a true representation of the method, as the pandemic caused me to radically re-evaluate what I would require from students for the second-half of the semester. The short version here is, I basically threw the contracts out the window and allowed students to self-grade for the period of the course affected by the pandemic. Many of the students, however, continued to work towards the grade they had contracted for and explicitly referred to their contract in email communication and in their final reflection papers.
Despite the fact that I did not maintain focus on the grading contracts through the end of the semester, a couple students referred to them in their course evaluations. Here are some comments:
“Grading procedures fit very well with the class – less pressure to “write well,” so I could focus on being creative.“
“I liked the grading structure of this course, and felt that it encouraged growth and creativity better than traditional grading.”
“The grading policy was very clear.”
“Super easy to understand what was expected from a student, and it was extremely pleasant to have a professor so committed to my growth as a creative writer.”
This positive student response to the grading contracts, coupled with my experience (as the instructor) in deploying them, has convinced me to return to this assessment method again in the future, both for creative writing and other writing classes. While I do not believe labor-based contract grading is necessarily suitable for all courses (and obviously contracts will look different for each course in which they are used), I think it’s worth considering this assessment method in your own classroom–especially if traditional grading practices have never sat well with you.
Additional Resources**
In addition to my own grading contract posted above, I’m linking some additional resources on the topic of labor-based contract grading (including other sample grading contracts). If you are interested in employing this assessment method in your own classroom–or are just interested in the topic–I recommend checking out some of these pieces.
Cordell, Ryan. “How I Contract Grade.” (includes two sample syllabi)
Elbow, Peter. “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching [co-written with Jane Danielewicz].”
Hurley, Jennifer. Grading Contract.
Inuoe, Asao. Grading Contract for ENGL 160W.
—. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom.
Litterio, Lisa M. “Contract grading in the technical writing classroom: Blending community-based assessment and self-assessment.”
Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “Labor Contract.”
SUNY Cortland. “Grading Contracts 101.”
Warner, John. Discussion of Contract Grading from Inside Higher Ed (Part I and Part II)
* I am primarily describing American students, or students who study in the United States and have therefore adapted to our grading practices. These are the students I have taught, and I do not wish to unfairly conflate other countries’ approaches to grading and assessment in this piece.
**I want to thank my colleague Joe Spieles for sharing many of these resources with me.
Writers have a unique relationship to failure. They understand and even embrace the fact that, before finally publishing a draft, there will be copious amounts of revision, tinkering, and mistakes. Lots and lots of it. Most student writers, however, don’t welcome failure and mistakes so easily. Why?
Grades and traditional assessment methods seem to be at the heart of the problem. Alfie Kohn notes that “grades (whether or not accompanied by comments) promote a fear of failure even in high-achieving students.” Indeed, it’s quite easy to see how this happens. Those evaluative marks insist, shout, and declare that failure is undesirable in the classroom. Perhaps early on in their education, students tried something new—they attempted to grow and learn—and, as often happens when getting out of one’s comfort zone, they came up short. What followed next was a harsh grade, one that signaled that they were inadequate at whatever it is they attempted.
One bad grade isn’t such a big deal, but being repeatedly labeled deficient or a failure can have serious adverse effects on one’s academic identity and abilities. Students of color and multilingual students are often the one’s more negatively affected by these harsh judgments, even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And, of course, grades also impact a person’s chances at scholarships, entrance into schools, and even employment. Thus, for students, mistakes and failure should be avoided at all costs in the graded classroom. But this is a big problem because, as Alina Tugend writes, “If students are afraid of mistakes, they’re afraid of trying something new, of being creative, of thinking in a different way.”
If students don’t embrace mistakes, they won’t be able to embrace learning.
We can try to tell our students that mistakes and failure are okay and a natural part of the writing process, a natural part of learning. Doing that alone, though, won’t be enough to reframe students’ ideas about productively failing. I’ve written elsewhere about modeling my struggles with writing for my students, but I still used traditional assessment methods in my class. There was a contradiction between what I said I valued and what my assessment methods valued. My grading policy conflicted with an important message I was trying to send to my students about failure.
So, while I was successful in showing my students how most writers struggle, I still didn’t provide the right conditions for students to actually embrace that struggle, to fail and make mistakes.
This realization led me to use labor-based grading contracts (one of many ways to go gradeless!) for my “Rhetoric of Written Argument” course. With this methodology, only measurable labor is used to calculate a student’s grades, no letters or numbers are placed on any student writing or other work, and quality isn’t used to determine grades.
Students are also able to try labor that’s different and unique to them, a chance for variety in the writing classroom. This sounds messy, and it is at times. Labor is accepted with an understanding that there might be faults. If failure is an essential part of writing, I had to give my students the opportunity to fail—and not punish them for it.
It was time for me to walk the talk, as the saying goes.
Feedback from Students
In an end-of-semester survey, I asked students about their thoughts and feelings about labor-based grading contracts. Not only did this different assessment method shift their thinking about mistakes, students actually started to embrace failure during the writing process. To speak about this change, here are two student responses from my class (used with permission).
First, Mayela. Mayela came into the class with “negative thoughts and feelings about writing,” saying she “always dread[ed] working on essays.” She felt that she “wasn’t a good writer.” These feelings towards writing are fairly typical for most students. For many young writers, English classes conjure up traumatic memories—papers soaked in red ink usually followed by low grades in large font. We can’t erase past memories, but we can help students shift their thinking. For Mayela, her thoughts had changed for the better: she left the class with a “positive relationship towards writing.”
Her first essay submission, which had already gone through a few revisions, still needed some improvement, and I gave her lots of feedback. With this assessment method, there’s an understanding that submissions, even final products, are not going to be perfect. And that’s okay. A “final” submission is not really final in terms of learning; rather, it’s an opportunity to reflect and grow for the future.
Knowing this, Mayela was able to exclusively focus on the feedback I gave “without having to worry about the grade.” Even though there were some areas that weren’t as strong, this wasn’t a stopping point. Instead, it was a starting point, an area for moving forward to improve and revise. Mayela saw that making a mistake only helped her get better at writing. These small failures in her writing now coincided with learning.
She confidently took the feedback on paper one and moved forward to the next essay in the hopes of doing better. And she did. Much better, in fact. By the end of the semester, she had improved her writing and forged a new identity, one that sees failure as okay—even desirable—for growing as a writer.
Next, Casey: “Before coming into class, I had a pretty positive relationship with writing.” Casey also thought that he “knew most of what there was to learn about writing.” I’m fairly certain that Casey had gotten good grades in his English classes throughout middle and high school. But, despite this fact, I know that he had suffered negative consequences within traditional grading systems, where a single standard is taught. Any deviation from that standard—being creative or trying new things—gets penalized.
So Casey thought that to be a good writer meant to demonstrate that singular standard. And year after year, he used the same structure (probably a five-paragraph essay), same tone, same format, same everything. While this might produce good grades academically, it’s not very stimulating—for the reader or the writer. At best, he would’ve continued to do the same thing over and over again in college and just gotten bored with writing. At worst, his love of writing would have been killed.
With the grading contract, he was able to “try out new methods of writing: new strategies, new formats, different analyses, and so on.” He seized the opportunity to attempt something new and different for the second essay assignment in the class, deciding to go with a different analytical approach, one that seemed interesting to him.
As a result, he struggled. A lot.
Casey says that he “made this essay extra hard” on himself because he tried a “different writing style than normal which proved to be rather difficult.” He found out that he, in fact, didn’t know everything about writing, and he had much to learn. This realization didn’t ruin his relationship with writing. Quite the opposite: it improved his relationship with writing and made him “care more about the work.”
This makes sense. Casey wasn’t doing the same thing over and over, staying stagnant. Now, he was progressing as a writer, and that was exciting. It’s something he hadn’t been able to do in a long time.
Reflecting on the semester, I can clearly see that labor-based grading allowed me to accept students’ labor with an understanding that mistakes are okay and even an essential part of learning. More importantly, it allowed my students to productively experience failure with their writing and to see that as normal. Labor-based grading helped our class “avoid the damaging psychological effects…that grading by quality can cause many students, most notably students of color, working-class students, and multilingual students,” as Asao Inoue notes (Theorizing Failure, 345).
My students, especially the ones who have been the most hurt by traditional grading systems, embraced coming up short and learning from their experiences without being penalized for not succeeding the first time. And I’m not alone in my success, as many other educators have also experienced similar results in their classrooms when they used contract-grading (see this Google Drive folder for a comprehensive review of contract grading scholarship from the last 50 years).
As Donald Murray says, “language will not be a tool for thinking unless our students are able to allow language to run free and stumble and fall.” In the writing classroom, labor-based grading allows students to experience the messy process of writing. This method provides the conditions for students to embrace failure—an essential part of the writing process.
Anthony Lince is a writer, Latinx scholar, husband, and father. Currently, he’s pursuing a master’s degree in English with an emphasis in rhetoric, and he’s also teaching first-year-writing at SDSU. His research centers around antiracist assessment practices. You can find him on Twitter @LinceAnthony. His writing can be found at https://teachingrwt.wordpress.com
Arthur’s note:
Although I personally never practiced anything like Labor-based Grading, in the last year, I noticed a growing number of gradeless teachers expressing interest in the practice. Some simply wanted to find out more; others were already using it in their own classrooms, especially in college composition courses. Coming from an entirely different tradition of grading reform (one that in many ways seeks to deemphasize labor in grading) I admit I was skeptical. I retained that skepticism as I read his book in preparation for my interview with him.
In those first interactions, I was immediately won over by what a thoughtful, compassionate, and generous person and educator Asao is. And as he generously answered my questions, I began to better understand the problem he was addressing, and how he had hit on a unique solution. I realized it was a problem that I and many other instructors of writing had discovered: that standardizing writing instruction and assessment in order to reliably measure it does violence both to the writer and the act of writing.
Along with this, Asao overlaid the question of White language supremacy and how we can interrogate and dismantle it. My own gradeless approach never fully addressed or answered that question. At the end of the day, it was still me guarding the “inner dikes” of White language supremacy, often making little or no space for any linguistic difference. Some of that was driven by the classes I taught (I’m looking at you, AP English Literature and Composition), but often it was my own sense of what was good, true, and beautiful, which flowed out of an unquestioned commitment to the White racial habitus.
As a way of helping our Teachers Going Gradeless community better understand Professor Inoue’s rationale and approach, we asked him to respond to some questions, objections, challenges, and reservations that came from our members—LBG practitioners and non-practitioners alike. And as usual, he has generously obliged.
The following post is cross posted on Inoue’s own blog, Asao B. Inoue’s Infrequent Words.
Most of the questions below are answered in detail in my book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, particularly in Chapter 6, but I'll offer some responses here. If you are interested, you might look in that book for deeper answers.
If you don't know what labor-based grading contracts are, I'll point you to my previously mentioned book and to an April 11, 2020 post of mine that explains them in brief. In short, they are a set of social agreements among everyone in a classroom that determine how much labor (time and work) it will take for any student to get an agreed upon grade (usually a B grade in my courses), with no attention to judgements of quality of writing; however, quality and how various readers understand and respond to writing is central to all of the work in the course.
My contracts have a default grade of B in the course—that is, we negotiated the B grade primarily, with an A final graded determined by more work, which is also negotiated. I negotiate these contracts in the first week and at midpoint. Then they are firm. There is only one contract for the entire class.
Now, to the questions.
How will I get buy-in from students? Will they be confused or anxious? Will some students want grades on papers? What are some possible ways to introduce this system to students?
What I hear in all these questions is a kernel question about getting student buy-in and introducing them to the contract system. Buy-in of course is vital, but I also feel that tending the system with students each week is important to overall success. This tending can be simple reminders about the contract and what turning things in means, or what a late assignment means, or it could be how you frame feedback on drafts and other work. That is, you (as teacher) stop trying to correct the language and start responding like a reader, talking to a writer about how you experienced their text, not how to change it.
Now introducing the contract to students in the first week is also important, and I like to do a few activities, some individual and outside of class, and some in class, which are usually group activities. Mostly, I find activities that ask them to do a couple of things really helpful with buy-in. First, my activities ask students to read and reread the first two pages of my contract (the preamble that explains the philosophy and reasons for using it), usually pausing to write their responses or summaries of what they hear in the paragraphs.
Second, I find helpful group activities that ask students to explain the contract and its details to each other, as well as what benefits those elements have in a grading system for students like them. These activities can also get them to articulate the questions and confusions they have about the contract. In short, we are often articulated to ourselves during our contract negotiations responses to questions like: How is the labor-based contract in our course going to help me learn better or in more meaningful ways?
Will students stop trying to write well and game the system?
You cannot stop a student who is looking to game a course grading system, no matter the system. The reasons for gaming any assessment ecology has to do with a range of factors both inside and outside of the course in the students' lives. We teachers do not control all of those factors. What I think I can do is create a system that offers a richer experience when you do not game it, or one that doesn't make a lot of sense to game the system. Does it happen? Probably. Again, this is not a unique feature of labor-based grading contracts. It happens in all systems.
Now, one kind of gaming could be that a student doesn't try very hard to do the writing and work assigned in labor instructions. For instance, they just turn in the 300 words, but they don't address the two questions about the reading asked of them in the labor instructions, or they don't revise much a draft, etc. In these kinds of cases, I record them as incomplete/late, so it does hurt students' meeting our contract, and I suppose that is a deterrent of sorts. But I don't find many of my students doing this.
Maybe it's because I'm asking them about how they are feeling and experiencing the course all the time, every week. So they know I care about their laboring and am crafting those labor instructions in ways that are trying to respond to them and their material conditions. I think this helps with those students who could take a shortcut. But I could also be seeing things with rose-colored glasses.
Bottom line: I feel my contract system, when wedded with my antiracist orientation to the course and labor, helps most students find all kinds of reasons to do the labors of course. When they know that we have built a self-consciously antiracist and fairer grading system, then more students tend to work harder, longer, more. All I can ask is time, and usually most students give that to me, and I'm grateful for the gift.
Most importantly, I'd rather work from assumptions of trust with my students, not ones that assume if given the chance, they'll game the system. I believe most the time students will respond in compassionate and meaningful ways when teachers build with students structures of trust and mutual care and respect. I think, that's what the labor-based grading contract is, a structure of trust and mutual care.
Does the labor-based grading system increase the workload for teachers?
This depends, really. I mean, if you are a micromanager and like to be over the shoulder of every student in every activity, then perhaps it could. I have found it to be less book keeping. I only mark things when a student doesn't do something or is absent/non-participatory (if I'm in a face-to-face course). I suppose there is an up front increase in labor in order to create more detailed labor instructions on all assignments, but I have streamlined that process by making template labor instructions, so it's just the details that change. It's less time now, for me.
Now, let me give you some details, and you can decide. I keep track of my own labor in my labor log for all my courses. Currently I teach a 7.5 week course called "The Art of the Personal Essay." It's a 300-level course and is worth 3 credit hours. It's a condensed course, taught online only (asynchronous). It should be about twice the amount of work each week as a normal 15-week semester course for both the teacher and students. I'm starting week five and my average hours of labor for the course is 4.71 hours per week. This means if the course were a regular 15 week course, I should average about 2.35 hours of labor on the course each week in that 15 week setting.
These labors include my reading and commenting on drafts of papers. This is a smaller enrolled course, so to be fair, I'd double the hours I've recorded currently if it were a fully enrolled course. This means in the 15 week semester, I'd likely be spending 4.71 hours of labor on the course each week on average. This feels about right to me. I suppose each teacher will have to decide how much time they can spend on each course they teach.
What if this means we’re not preparing students for future professors who will grade their papers for “quality”?
I think this question assumes an okay-ness with White language supremacy in our world. It accepts it as simply how things are by assuming that the better goals for a writing course is to prepare students for a racist tomorrow dominated by White language supremacy. It also assumes that what we do in our writing classrooms (or any classroom) will not have pedagogical and ideological consequences to other courses later and professions in the lives of our students.
I think how we assess can change the White language supremacy that is accepted as the norm by neutering it in our own classrooms. This reveals to students a better way. It shows them that shit don't have to be the way it has been. We all just gotta be brave enough to do it. And of course, accept the consequences, whatever they may be. As a teacher, I'm brave enough to do that, and I ask that question to my students.
Eventually, how I assess matters to how others in other courses assess. And the White standard of language doesn't disappear from my classroom because I stop using it as a standard. It's still there. We still engage with it. Some still work hard at learning it. But we don't JUST try to mimic it. We try to understand it as a political choice with political consequences—we try to understand that our language choices have politics with racial and other dimensions.
I don't deny that this is a real problem for our students. We should be talking about this with them, asking our students: How can we prepare best for that tomorrow when others will judge us unfairly on our languaging? That's a political question, not a pedagogical one—if we are thinking about what is ethical and socially just—and it's also a question about fighting White language supremacy.
But this argument also assumes that without grades and the standards that go with them, students don't learn a dominant White standard. Learning and grading ain't the same things, nor are they necessarily related to one another. Your judgements as the teacher are not inherently magical. They do not confer to students the language standard you may be using to judge. What grades and singular standards will do is punish and harm students unnecessarily, mostly for things they have very little control over, as well as habits that are dear to them, gifts from family and others.
I'd rather invite students to language with me, to think about how their languaging is judged next to standardized Englishes, to play with what we have in our words, to consider the racial politics of languaging and how its judged in the world. I cannot—will not—force them to langauge in one, narrow way, making them feel bad about their languaging and themselves when they don't match up, and use the whip and gun of standards and grades to coerce them and force their tongues, shoving ill-fitting and sharp words into their mouths, down their throats, choking them because its allegedly "good for them." Bullshit.
Learning the White habits of language that oppress so many BIPOC students may be good for them if they want to succeed in our world. But then we must accept the nature of what "success" means, which is mostly about financial success in global Capitalist markets that continue to engage in destroying our environment, killing communities of color all over the globe, consolidating wealth into smaller pockets of White men, waging war on each other, and engaging in genocidal, economic, Capitalistic colonialism everywhere that strip-mines the land and its people of everything.
So I ask, why would I want to prepare students to succeed in that world? At what cost to us and our communities is that kind of success made? What cost do we pay for losing linguistic and logical diversity, language diversity, or compassionate dissent to really bad ideas, like "the profit motive"? That's a White idea, by the way. We can find it in Hobbes famous theory about the "state of nature" of humankind, in which he says we are all in a "war of everyone against everyone."
White language supremacy got us all in this shit-hole we are in now. Why would I want any of my students to be successful at replicating that shit-hole? I'd rather they be agents of revolutionary change for a more socially just and sustainable world, one based on love and compassion and living in harmony with each other and our environment.
Let me alter this question a bit because there is a good center to it. Maybe we should be asking: What is the nature of "preparation" in language for school and how might that nature be racialized, classed, gendered, etc.? What are the racialized and intersectional politics of preparation in your classroom? These are better questions, I think.
If the purpose of grades is to communicate learning, why does labor-based grading choose to highlight student labor?
For some, the purpose of grades may be to communicate learning, but that is not what they primarily do, and they don't communicate learning very well in a language classroom. Again, grades are not learning. Say you are a student. You get an A in my First-year Writing course at ASU. What does that tell you about your writing? I mean, what does it really communicate to you? How do you use it to help you do your languaging tomorrow?
At best, assuming you trust that I've taken enough of your future into account (as if I can know your future in any detail), it say that you are more than ready to do well in the next course that asks writing of you. It says by my standard and judgements you have done very, very well at accomplishing our course's goals. But exactly what have you learned about those goals, whatever they are? That grade cannon tell you that.
So grades are a very poor way to communicate learning about language and literacy learning. A better way is to use words only. When you put words and grades together in a writing classroom, students mostly just look at the grades. There is a lot of seductive power in rankings. The words become less impactful. And students start to care less about learning and more about getting the highest grade.
Labor is used in my contract systems because labor is the closest measurable thing to learning. Much of our actual labor—the experience of laboring in a course—is our learning. This is why it's central. We stop using surrogates for learning in the grading system, in the assessment ecology, and use the actual learning to produce the final course grades. So I see labor-based grading contracts as a more accurate way to communicate learning through an imprecise symbol, the grade.
How, if at all, would labor-based grading be applicable to science or mathematics? How would it be acceptable for airplane pilots, brain surgeons, electricians, and engineers?
I wish I could solve the White language supremacy and racism in every discipline and field, but I cannot. And it's pretty unfair to ask one system to solve the complicated racist issues in every field. I can speak to Humanities and Social Sciences mostly. I can speak to writing-to-learn activities in writing intensive courses in other fields. But let's not suggest that because there are discrete things to learn about flying planes, building bridges, or operating on brains that labor-based grading is not an appropriate system for language and literacy classrooms. That's the criticism I hear underneath this question. Somehow a grading system, if it is to be useful, is supposed to be useful universally, useful for all kinds of courses—that's a White habit of language and in this case it’s wrong. Things like assessment ecologies are not universally good or bad, they are contextually so. These subjects and disciplines are to some degree dissimilar learning activities.
I've never claimed that labor-based grading can work in a physics class or a chemistry course, but I know elements of it likely can be used in all courses, regardless of the field. Labor is learning. But you have to trust students. I'd probably look to someone like Linda Nilson's "specifications grading" for fields like these, but this could be a good case for hybrid contracts too.
Why wouldn’t we expect white supremacy culture to insinuate itself into labor-based ecologies too? I think of the Puritan work ethic, Jones & Okun (2001) quantity over quality, progress is bigger/more, objectivity.
Yes, it can. This is why I emphasize that any assessment ecology, any labor-based grading contract system can be racist and reproduce White language supremacy if the teacher's orientation isn't also antiracist. You have to have an antiracist orientation to make antiracist structures and grading practices. Once you have that, then you can counter things like the Puritan work ethic.
And it should be noted that Jones and Okun's characteristics of White supremacist cultures are directly countered in my labor-based grading contract ecologies. But we should get at least those three mentioned straight. They apply more directly to conventional grading systems, not labor-based ones. I'm drawing on their good work (found here), and I'll translate their descriptions of each to the writing classroom. Here those three defined. I think you'll see how labor-based systems counter each:
Quantity over quality (producing measurable goals, anti-process): all resources of the course and students are directed toward producing measurable goals or learning outcomes; measurable cognitive outcomes are more highly valued than noncognitive traits in students, such as labor, persistence, reflection, compassion, etc.; little or no value attached to process or laboring in learning activities; if it can't be measured, it has no value; discomfort with emotion and feelings
Progress is bigger, more: progress, success, and rigor in the course is defined only as more, as covering a lot of materials and content, as well as having more students in the course; the course gives little value, not even negative value, to the cost of scaling up lessons, content, and number of students in the course.
Objectivity: the belief, or working assumption, that there is such a thing as being objective— grades operate as objective markers of value on student languaging, even when teachers understand them as subjectively produced; the course assumes mostly that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not play a role in decision-making or responses to students work or grading; the course invalidates students who show emotion, or ignores those contributions; most assignments ask students to think or work in a linear fashion and ignoring or invalidating those who think or work in other ways; impatience with any thinking or working that does not appear logical to the teacher.
Couldn’t labor-based grading invite teachers to embrace “technocratic” solutions (trending toward panopticism) to measure time on task or engagement?
Yes, this is why I say I feel it is more important to trust students. For instance, I don't use our labor logs that account for labor in a number of ways, as a way to keep track of labor in the course. It's a mindful reflective tool, not an accounting tool for grading. It's not technocratic and panoptic, in the sense that it is not used to enforce polices or labor expectations. I don't use them against students to punish, rather we use our labor logs to understand how the ecology is functioning. And I use them to reach out to students who may be struggling.
From my view, to be panoptic, a device or structure must function as a coercive device in the way that Foucault discusses the panopticon in his book, Discipline and Punish. Just because a teacher, like me, can have a view of all students' labor in minutes per week or total minutes, does not mean it is panoptic because it may not be functioning to produce more labor, assuming that's what I (the teacher) wants. I use it to ask about labor and understand my own expectations of labor in a course. This is far from technocratic, and definitely not panoptic.
Negotiating the contract on a case-by-case basis can be a little exhausting. I also worry that it might not be fair to negotiate just with a few students and not the whole class. What are some possible ways of working through this?
I'm gonna leave this one to my book. It goes into detail about this. I never negotiate individual contracts. It's always a corporate or class contract.
How do you negotiate partner or group work if one partner falls through?
Also a very complex one that requires a lot of understanding about everything else in the course. My answer will always be inadequate here, since everyone's courses are different. What I can say is that I do not punish a student for the lack of work done by another.
Group work is a more difficult matter.
Asao B. Inoue is a professor and the associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Coming soon: Above The Well: An Antiracist Literacy Argument From A Boy Of Color. All royalties for the book will go directly to the Asao and Kelly Inoue Antiracist Teaching Endowment at Oregon State University. Read more about the endowment on his endowment page.
Also, check out the follow-up #TG2Chat on labor-based grading, which was co-moderated by Asao and NYU teacher educator, Karis Jones.
Mastery-based grading: from minimum mindset to a growth mindset
What is mastery-based grading?
Mastery-based grading is an innovative system for assessing learners that promotes deeper learning. The idea behind this fresh grading concept is to structure your courses in a way that allows learners the time and flexibility to focus on mastering a standard rather than achieving a certain number or letter grade.
Mastery-based grading encourages student agency
How many times have your learners asked what is the “minimum grade” I need to achieve to pass? This question makes teachers cringe because we know that it means their goal is to invest the least possible effort into their success.
Good news, mastery-based grading encourages learners to transition from a minimum mindset to a growth mindset.
In this system, student choice reigns giving learners the flexibility to choose how they demonstrate mastery and gives them the chance to attempt mastery as many times as necessary. Now, having more choice in their learning, learners can take the reins and drive their learning journey through student agency. It is time to convert to mastery-based grading to provide learners a path to deeper learning, and greater transparency into their learning using Hapara Workspace and Student Dashboard.
How to implement mastery-based grading
Break down learning targets
It is crucial to know your destination to effectively approach your plan of action. Good luck getting in your car and driving to a brand new destination without typing the address in Google Maps! The same concept applies to the path learners take to achieve success. It all starts with understanding what it means to achieve mastery, so breaking down the standards into learning targets makes the goal clearer and more attainable for learners. Often, learners will grab on to broad concepts from a unit without knowing the standards associated with these concepts or what it means to successfully demonstrate mastery. This can lead to frustration and increased remediation time as learners fall further behind in their learning journey. At the beginning of each unit, have learners work in groups to put standards into their own words, and then have a share session with the entire class. Developing these shared understandings is the first crucial step in transforming your grading system.
Single-point rubrics
One way to support learner understanding is to spend the time to create a single-point rubric for each standard. This means providing them with a rubric that explains all of the elements that learners must demonstrate to accomplish mastery and label it “meets expectations.” This makes creating a rubric for learner mastery easier and simpler to understand because any work that does not meet that criteria is considered “below expectations,” and anything that goes above and beyond what is outlined in the rubric “exceeds expectations.” To avoid confusion, make sure that your rubric only includes the elements from the standard, and not extras like “grammar” or “spelling” if that is not explicitly outlined in the standard. In your Workspace’s Rubric column, have the outline of your single point rubric for learners to access 24/7. Not only does it provide clarity for learners, but it also saves a teacher’s most precious resource . . . time!
What is mastery-based grading?
Mastery-based grading is an innovative system for assessing learners that promotes deeper learning. The idea behind this fresh grading concept is to structure your courses in a way that allows learners the time and flexibility to focus on mastering a standard rather than achieving a certain number or letter grade.
Mastery-based grading encourages student agency
How many times have your learners asked what is the “minimum grade” I need to achieve to pass? This question makes teachers cringe because we know that it means their goal is to invest the least possible effort into their success.
Good news, mastery-based grading encourages learners to transition from a minimum mindset to a growth mindset.
In this system, student choice reigns giving learners the flexibility to choose how they demonstrate mastery and gives them the chance to attempt mastery as many times as necessary. Now, having more choice in their learning, learners can take the reins and drive their learning journey through student agency. It is time to convert to mastery-based grading to provide learners a path to deeper learning, and greater transparency into their learning using Hapara Workspace and Student Dashboard.
How to implement mastery-based grading
Break down learning targets
It is crucial to know your destination to effectively approach your plan of action. Good luck getting in your car and driving to a brand new destination without typing the address in Google Maps! The same concept applies to the path learners take to achieve success. It all starts with understanding what it means to achieve mastery, so breaking down the standards into learning targets makes the goal clearer and more attainable for learners. Often, learners will grab on to broad concepts from a unit without knowing the standards associated with these concepts or what it means to successfully demonstrate mastery. This can lead to frustration and increased remediation time as learners fall further behind in their learning journey. At the beginning of each unit, have learners work in groups to put standards into their own words, and then have a share session with the entire class. Developing these shared understandings is the first crucial step in transforming your grading system.
Single-point rubrics
One way to support learner understanding is to spend the time to create a single-point rubric for each standard. This means providing them with a rubric that explains all of the elements that learners must demonstrate to accomplish mastery and label it “meets expectations.” This makes creating a rubric for learner mastery easier and simpler to understand because any work that does not meet that criteria is considered “below expectations,” and anything that goes above and beyond what is outlined in the rubric “exceeds expectations.” To avoid confusion, make sure that your rubric only includes the elements from the standard, and not extras like “grammar” or “spelling” if that is not explicitly outlined in the standard. In your Workspace’s Rubric column, have the outline of your single point rubric for learners to access 24/7. Not only does it provide clarity for learners, but it also saves a teacher’s most precious resource . . . time!
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2106.05 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2164 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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