Cultivating faculty community around alternative grading

Sharing the journey through cross-disciplinary Faculty Learning Communities

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Today’s guest article is from Dr. Kristina Reardon. Dr. Reardon is a Senior Lecturer in English and Education Studies at Amherst College in Amherst, MA, where she is also the director of Intensive Writing and the director of humanities and social science in the Summer Bridge Program. She has been a faculty fellow with the Center for Teaching at Amherst since 2022.

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I can still remember the first time I used an alternative grading framework.

I was tasked with teaching a three-week, credit-bearing writing course in the summer bridge program in 2016 at the College of the Holy Cross. Many of those enrolled were students of color or first-generation college students¹. Like most first-years, these summer bridge students were invested in doing well in their coursework. But I had concerns about equity and wondered: How do I fairly grade students who are opting into a voluntary program that nonetheless has the power to impact their first-semester GPA? 

Enter Peter Elbow and Jane Danielwicz’s contract for a B. Discovering their work and reading about others who used grading contracts felt like a revelation at the time. But while working with a modified version of the Elbow and Danielwicz contract felt freeing to me as an instructor, I later came to understand it did not always feel that way to my students². Feedback from students pushed me to research alternative grading more thoroughly. 

Growth through conversation and collaboration 

In the years since my first foray into alternative grading, I’ve implemented new forms of contract grading in my quest to make my grading more equitable, including versions of Asao Inoue’s labor-based grading, as well as a version of Linda Nilson’s specifications grading, and more. I eventually settled on a home-brew version of grading, which involved pieces of what felt like at least a dozen ideas. Students now mostly speak favorably about my grading system on end-of-semester evaluations, if they mention it.

But I didn’t get to this more successful adaptation of alternative grading alone. I developed it through conversations–both with students and other practitioners.

In the past several years, I have given presentations about methods of alternative grading at conferences and to faculty at both my former institution and my current one, Amherst College³. Through this work, I began to learn more about how colleagues outside the field of Composition and even English were grappling with assigning grades that accurately reflected student learning and incentivized student engagement with course goals. 

I felt like my greatest growth as an educator came in conversation with faculty, and cultivating space to have pedagogical conversations about grading on an ongoing basis became a goal for me when I moved to Amherst in 2021. I found a group of like-minded folks and tried to schedule semi-regular meetings to talk about grading. Without a formal structure or institutional support, though, the group waned after a few meetings. Yet I knew that cross-disciplinary conversations were important and looked for more formal venues to pursue them.

Planning and organizing an alternative grading FLC

The first steps in developing my FLCs involved deciding when and how often to meet, as well as who would participate. Each of my FLCs were planned to be one semester long, and I worried that faculty schedules might make coordinating difficult, so I set my sights on recruiting four to six faculty members to meet twice per month during the fall of 2022. Amherst CTL director Riley Caldwell-O’Keefe and then-associate director Sarah Bunnell supported me in writing a call for participants to, as I wrote, “discuss and provide feedback on their own and group members’ equity-minded alternative grading practices.” My call was in part inspired by my participation in fall 2021 in a pedagogy circle on anti-racism facilitated at Amherst by Ashlie Sandoval-Lee. 

This sample form provides an example of the type of questions I asked in fall 2022 to gauge faculty interest (and the language and ideas therein are indebted to Riley, Sarah, and Ashlie). I anticipated forming a group based either on alternative grading methods (e.g., focusing on specs grading, labor-based grading, mastery or competency-based grading, etc.), or on broad disciplinary areas (e.g., humanities, social sciences, etc.) and aimed to provide participants with, as I wrote in the call, “a network of faculty who are thinking through alternative grading across departments and fields.”

What I found, however, was that faculty availability was a greater determinant of group composition than any other sort of other affinity. The fall 2022 group ended up with the only combination of four members who could meet at the same time: a computer scientist, a statistician, a literature scholar, and a postdoctoral fellow teaching a class in the arts. 

I learned from Ashlie that a best practice in facilitating pedagogy circles was to ask participants about their preferred modes of engagement, such as: completing weekly readings and discussing them, having participants bring in artifacts from their classes for critique or discussion, or other modes the group might come up with on its own. All the participants in my fall group were, at the time, new to alternative grading, and they were eager to learn about the various possibilities for alternative grading as well as how and why one might consider using them. They chose to complete and discuss weekly readings, and they looked to me to come up with topics for discussion each week, and related readings. 

FLC meeting structures

Were Grading for Growth available at the time, I would have suggested that the CTL purchase each group member a copy, but alas: this was before it was published. Thus, in our first meeting, I asked questions about participants’ goals, interests, and experiences: 

• What do you want to learn about alternative grading? 

• In what ways has traditional grading worked and not worked for your classes?

• What do you believe the function of grades is, or should be, in student learning?

• How would you ideally measure learning in your classes?

After a wide-ranging discussion on these topics and others, I thought: why don’t I try to find bite-sized readings that we could all do each week, on a range of topics? I sought to include blogs, short videos, podcasts, articles, and book chapters (to provide a range of modes of engagement). Participants asked for practical examples of alternative grading implementations, so I looked for freely-available samples of a range of practices from fields outside my own. I ended up assembling this syllabus, which provided fodder for discussion during each of our fall 2022 meetings, and we focused on ungrading (generally speaking), contract/labor-based grading, specifications grading, mastery/standards-based grading, and scalability of alternative grading systems.

Each time we met, we began by talking about our impressions of the readings in a popcorn style discussion. I became the default moderator as conversation moved, over the course of an hour, from first reactions to discussions of:

• How we could imagine applying the approaches in the readings to our classrooms.

• How reading about a given alternative grading model impacted how we thought about our courses, if it did. (This included assessment, but also course pacing and learning goals, among other considerations.)

• What we would change about the models we read about to match our evolving course goals.

• How we could combine the model we were reading about with elements of other models we had read about, or how we would bring our own creativity to the table to customize the ideas in each model.

While I did find myself answering logistical questions about some grading models because I had experimented with them before, I worked hard not to position myself as an authority in the group. I shared my experiences as one example, but always tried to turn to other examples as well, as each week’s readings contained both an explainer article/chapter/podcast/video and other faculty grading resources that I’d found applying that week’s grading method online.

End-of-semester FLC conversations and applications

At the end of the fall 2022 semester, each group member brought in an artifact of an alternative grading model (or their own home brew) from a class they were teaching or for a future class. Examples could include: a syllabus statement, a grading explanation or chart, an assignment that fit into a new grading method, a rubric, or another pedagogical tool. This gave us a way to discuss the application of grading methods to each faculty member’s specific circumstances. 

During our end-of-semester conversations, we evaluated the work in front of us by considering, among other questions:

• Where does this artifact make sense to us, and where are we confused?

• How does this artifact link to the faculty member’s course goals?

• In what ways does this artifact encourage learning and growth? How could it do so more thoroughly? 

As in discussion of readings, group members shared their initial impressions first before moving on to more substantive comments. We made sure to identify the pieces of the artifact that felt useful, important, or well-crafted as well as areas for confusion. We assumed best intentions of the writers and sought to respond in kind; we aimed to accompanied criticism with suggestions and open-ended questions to ensure that the faculty member had time and space to think through their pedagogy.

The fall 2022 group requested that we continue meeting twice monthly for another semester, so that we could support one another as group members applied the ideas they had developed in the fall to their spring 2023 classes. I also used the fall 2022 syllabus to host a second pedagogy circle that spring, this time with a creative writer, a mathematician, and a music scholar. I hope that my colleagues in these FLCs benefited from these discussions; I know that they challenged me to see grading in new ways. 

Lasting benefits of alternative grading FLCs

Thinking about the many impacts of FLCs cited in research literature and elsewhere, I wondered how faculty felt about their work in the FLC after the groups ended. I worked with Prof. Kristy Gardner of the Department of Computer Science at Amherst, in a 2023 study approved by the College’s IRB.

We found that of the seven who responded (a 100% response rate for the pedagogy circles in 2022-2023), five indicated that they changed all or a part of a class to incorporate alternative grading after participating in their pedagogy circle. Compare that to the 90-minute workshop that Kristy and I offered in August 2023 at the College’s annual teaching retreat: while there were more attendees, a smaller proportion  (nine of the fifteen who responded) said they were likely or very likely to try an alternative grading technique in the future. Of those, seven out of the nine reported that they were already using alternative grading methods. That is, only two out of the fifteen who responded to the 90-minute workshop survey seemed inclined to significantly change their grading methods after our short presentation. It is probably not surprising that both the percentage and the number of faculty willing to change their practices was greater after longer interventions.

But numbers don’t always tell the whole story. I also noticed the following additional benefits, beyond changes to grading practices:

• A connection with faculty across disciplines to discuss not only grading pedagogy, but to form future pedagogical partnerships. For example, I will now be co-teaching a course called “Writing in STEM” in spring 2025 with members of the FLC. 

• Collaboration on research and presentations. As I noted, Kristy and I collaborated on offering a workshop during a campus-wide teaching retreat; she brought STEM expertise and credibility and made our work interdisciplinary. We collaborated on an IRB-approved survey and presented a poster about it at the 2023 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference in Utrecht. 

• Free-ranging discussions in safe environments. Seven out of the nine faculty who participated in the long-term pedagogy circles were either pre-tenure or in untenured roles; several reported, anecdotally, that having space to discuss pedagogies outside the department that would evaluate them in the future allowed for more imaginative thinking. 

Forming your own FLC

If you are interested in facilitating an FLC, here are some things you might consider: 

1. Institutional support. The Amherst CTL provided a stipend of $500 for each faculty member, per semester, to participate, thus incentivizing their commitment to the group and recognizing the effort that goes into seriously rethinking one’s pedagogy. The CTL also provided me with support in constructing the FLCs and gave me feedback about my role as a convener along the way.

2. Cross-disciplinary participation. The CTL publicized my call for members in its newsletter, which reaches faculty in many departments across campus, and I worked to spread the word to folks outside my usual circle of peers to create disciplinarily diverse groups.

3. Community building. While reading and discussing articles was important, moments when members baked cookies or paused to talk about how their days were going created a sense of warmth that helped foster community. 

4. Space for failure. Many of my first alternative grading attempts did not turn out as well as I’d hoped. Many group members’ first efforts might not, either. Having realistic conversations about how to adjust and recover as one tries a new grading system for the first time felt important, especially in the second semester of a year-long FLC.

5. Space for strategizing. Many new to alternative grading worry about what their departments might say about their courses. Finding ways to talk deeply about how and why new methods of grading connect to departmental learning goals and how they support student growth and learning using the language and values of the campus group members share can be very helpful as folks learn how to talk and write about their new pedagogies.

The connections I cultivated with the FLCs I had the privilege of coordinating are enduring, and perhaps most importantly: many of us now feel like we have community beyond our own departments as we continue our work to make our classrooms more inclusive and equitable, knowing that alternative grading is just a part–albeit an important one–of that process.

1. Holy Cross is an otherwise predominantly white institution where the majority of students’ parents had attended college.

2. A previous student-turned-writing-fellow, Vanessa Guardado-Menjivar, collaborated with me in a 2021 publication to explain just why that was the case in my early attempts at alternative grading.

3. Amherst College is a highly selective small liberal arts college in a small town in Western Massachusetts with an acceptance rate of ~10% and a student body of ~1,900 students, all undergraduate. 51% of the student body self-identifies as dometic students of color. The graduation rate is 93% within six years.