A look back at our guest posts (and a call for more)

We want to hear your voice

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

We’re taking a break for Memorial Day today, to spend time off of computer screens as much as possible. (David was last seen entering the hinterlands of northern Michigan with a backpack. Robert will be on the backroads near Lake Michigan on a bicycle.) As we near the publication of the Grading For Growth book in July, we’ll be giving updates and new posts here in the coming weeks.

One thing that readers have really enjoyed, and which we hope to feature more often moving forward, is guest posts. We’ve had some really good ones, and we’d like to have more, so we can use this blog to elevate the work and voices of others who are doing innovative things with grading.

At the end of this post is a call for guest posts, with a process for getting in touch with us about your ideas. We hope you’ll take us up on this! For inspiration, and to highlight what’s been done already, here’s a review of our past guest posts.

Last week, Spencer Bagley shared about how his students responded to his use of alternative grading:

Student perceptions of alternative grading systems

In March, Sharona Krinsky wrote about why she hands back assessments to her students, even though some might say this encourages cheating and reduces “rigor”:

Why I give (almost) all of my assessments back to my students

Also in March, Abigail Noice and David Largent wrote about an in-demand topic: How to make your LMS (Canvas, in this case) play nicely with specs grading:

Using the Canvas Gradebook with Specifications Grading

Chris Creighton gave us this article focusing on the assessment process itself and how this could be hacked to make it more pro-growth:

Assessment for Growth

Last summer, Drew Lewis summarized important research on goal orientation and how this fits with alternative grading:

Achievement goal orientations and alternative grading

Katie Mattaini gave us this article about communication, alternative grading, and student-centered pedagogy:

Building meaningful student-instructor relationships

Sharona Krinsky’s first guest post for us was about normed grading:

What is Normed Grading and Why is it Necessary?

And finally, our very first guest post was from Kate Owens, about the return to face-to-face teaching:

Reflections before Re-Entry

Call for guest posts

So we’ve had some great guest posts in the past, and we’ve learned a lot (and we hope you have too) about grading and growth through the eyes of other instructors. If you’re doing something interesting with grading, or you have an idea you want to share about grading, we invite you to submit your ideas for a guest post. We have a form set up to make this easy. Just click the link, provide your name and institution and your idea, and we’ll take it from there.

We can’t guarantee that if you submit your idea, it will be posted here. But we’ll take a look and try to respond to every serious proposal.

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Thanks again for reading! We’ll return next week.