A summer holiday break
Some updates on the book, guest posts, and what happens when people blog
We’re taking this week off at the blog for the US Independence Day holiday. Robert is hiking in Maine with family, and David is working with a middle school math camp. In the meanwhile, we’re eagerly anticipating the long-awaited release of our Grading for Growth book, which will happen at some point this month!
Here’s the link for (pre-)ordering the book.
Last week was busy here at the blog. Thanks to a writeup in the Chronicle of Higher Education, we gained 65 new subscribers on June 28. That’s the second-largest one-day jump in subscribers in the two years that we’ve been blogging here.
To all the new readers: Welcome, and thank you.
We also want to say thank you to all those who have expressed interest in guest posts. As we wrote in an earlier article, we are actively recruiting guest posts about whatever you’re thinking about in alternative grading: descriptions of your process/systems, your thoughts on general or specific grading related topics, failure narratives, you name it. We would like to get to a point where we have one guest post every month. We featured Kevin Sun last week, and we’re grateful to share that we currently have guests posts planned through the rest of 2023. If you’re interested, click here to fill out the interest form and one of us will get back to you about it.
These two topics — the bump in new subscribers and the call for guest posts — are two different expressions of the same idea: Freely sharing what you are thinking about and building with alternative grading. Robert posted this article at his blog (reposted here) at the start of the year that included a challenge to the ungrading community to start blogging about the details of their implementations. Emily Pitts Donahoe at the University of Mississippi took up this challenge and started a Substack on her implementation of ungrading:
Beckie Supiano did a feature on Emily’s blog at the Chronicle this week, giving it broad exposure to potentially thousands of readers. That was the day we saw the big bump in subscribers here.
So we encourage you (1) to subscribe to and read Emily’s Substack, (2) to follow suit and do the same, if you are using alternative grading, and a way to get started is maybe (3) by contributing a guest post here.
Here’s what’s in store at this blog when we return next week:
On July 10, Robert will have a post about earning buy-in from students and others using the “SAFE” approach (which is a silly acronym for four serious ideas).
David will have an article on July 17.
We’ll feature a guest post from Timothy Budde of Vanier College in Montreal, Québec on July 24 about the use of ungrading in philosophy and humanities courses.
On July 31 we plan to feature a celebratory post about the release of the Grading For Growth book. (This is assuming it’s actually published by then. We know it says July 3 on the website but this is not a guarantee!)
Thank you again for your readership and support! See you next week.