A new call for guest authors
An opportunity to make your ideas and experience visible
This week is Spring Break for David and me, so we are taking a week off from writing and producing new content for the blog. Instead, we want to take this week to give a new call for guest authors here at Grading For Growth.
When we first invited guest posts here last May, the response was overwhelming. Within days, we had enough guest authors lined up to last through June 2024. So far, the guests posts have included:
A look at ungrading in a crop ecology course (from Victoria Bhavsar)
A tribute to alt-grading pioneer George McNulty (from Kate Owens)
A study of alternative grading in an international context (from Keith Graham)
…and more! Each month, sometimes twice a month, we’ve been fortunate to feature faculty members from all corners of higher education sharing their practices, lessons learned, and ideas. The guest posts, along with the case studies in the Grading For Growth book, are the first things I recommend faculty read if they are curious about alternative grading, are wanting to get started and need some inspiration, or are trying it but have gotten stuck. Uniformly engaging and useful, these guest posts have driven home to David and me that the beating heart of alternative grading is you.
And now, June 2024 is just around the corner, and we’re looking for more awesome insights from all of you. So, to renew the call we made last year: 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 leave this purposefully wide open. For example, you might consider:
Giving a rundown of the grading system you are currently using, if it’s an “alternative” one. We really like details of implementation around here.
Or if that’s too much, then go into the details on some part of your system that is interesting.
Make a “how-to” tutorial on some practical aspect of alternative grading (like this guest post on doing alternative grading in Canvas, or this post from David on grade trackers)
Sharing a failure narrative – something you tried that didn’t work, and what you learned from it and what you might do differently next time. We really like failure narratives around here, too.
Giving perspective on alternative grading from your particular point of view, especially if you are in an unusual position – for example, if you teach a large class, or you’re team teaching, or you’re a department chair.
If you have an idea, just click here and submit your “pitch”. On this form, you’ll find some overall guidelines for posts, and some places to fill in your information and the content of your idea. David and I will look over each submission and get back to you.
I hope you’ll consider writing a post for us. By publishing your article, you’ll reach over 4000 (so far!) subscribers to this blog, which means you’ll be helping hundreds of faculty improve their grading practices, which in turn can help thousands of students have a better experience in their college classes.
Thanks again for reading! See you next week.