How alternative grading and flipped learning work together

Mutually supporting approaches for student growth and success

Photo by KaLisa Veer on Unsplash

Before I started thinking about alternative grading, I was thinking -- a lot -- about another teaching innovation: flipped learning. I started using the "flipped classroom" back around 2008, roughly a full decade before setting out on my journey in alternative grading and way before it entered the common vocabulary of higher education. I even wrote a book about it.

I still use flipped learning design in my courses, alongside specifications grading. But despite this coexistence, I had never really thought about the connections between these two ideas until someone asked me about it in a recent Q&A session. It was fun and revealing to explore how these two concepts mutually support each other, and today I wanted to share my thoughts about this.

Flipped learning review

First, what is flipped learning? It's best understood by contrasting it with traditional course structures.

Traditionally, as most of us have experienced, when students encounter new ideas in a course, it's during the class meeting through the instructor (typically via lecture). Most, if not all of that class meeting is devoted to laying out basic ideas and perhaps giving some initial exercises to help understand them. Then class ends, and at this point the higher-level work of applications, analysis, evaluation, and creativity begin. And, importantly, all of those higher-level functions take place outside of class, on the students' time.

One main problem with this approach is that class time is extremely valuable: It is the one time and place on everyone's calendar where both students and the professor can work together on the subject material. But it's spent on the most basic tasks like stating definitions and working extremely simple examples, which can just as effectively be done through a recorded medium such as a video or even simply a well-written text. That time could more effectively be spent delving into higher-level tasks, the ones that are instead shunted to students' time and space. When those tasks are done outside of class, it’s often a train wreck: Students are encountering the steepest climb toward understanding at precisely the moment when assistance from their friends and instructor are least available.

Flipped learning proposes that first contact with new ideas should happen before a class session, in the form of structured activity. Often (but not always and not necessarily) this happens by recreating the in-class lecture in a recorded video, which students can access online, as well as rewatch or slow down or speed up as needed. This is accompanied by exercises that have students process that information. Then, because we're not doing in-class introductory lectures or entry-level examples, a lot of time is now freed up during the class meetings. And we spend that time in active learning mode, working on higher-level tasks.

In this post at my main blog, I described the approach in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy. Traditional course structure typically focuses class time on the lower one-third of the taxonomy, and the upper two-thirds are relegated to students' time and space (where it often fails to gain traction):

On the other hand, the flipped approach literally flips the assignment of tasks in Bloom's Taxonomy, or at least it flips when and where the bottom third and middle third of Bloom's Taxonomy take place: The bottom third (Remember/Understand) is now done before class, and the middle (Apply/Analyze) is now done in class:

To bring this discussion back to grading: You can absolutely do flipped learning without having an alternative grading structure in place (I did, for an entire decade!), and conversely. But I think the two ideas are mutually supportive in some useful ways. And if you engage in one approach then it's worth considering engaging in the other.

If you do flipped learning

If you are currently practicing flipped learning but not using an alternative grading approach (unlikely in this crowd, but just go with it for now), then as I described above, you have a course design right now that focuses class time on the middle third of Bloom's Taxonomy. This sets you up for a successful transition to alternative grading based on one simple fact: You can assess something without grading it.

If you had a non-flipped structure, for example, your students would be encountering new material for the first time in your class as a result of a lecture. You could very easily assess whether they "remember" or "understand" something from that lecture by having them do something simple, like answer a clicker question or do a one-minute paper. (In fact, both of those tactics are great ways to inject some active learning into an otherwise passive lecture.) Neither of those activities needs to be graded; in fact research on low-stakes testing suggests that they shouldn't be graded, or else graded extremely lightly.

But in a flipped structure, what students are doing in class instead of "remember" or "understand" tasks is "application" and "analysis" tasks, and these can be assessed without grades too. For example in my Discrete Structures class, when we're studying set theory, I might give each student group 6-8 different sets written in set-builder notation and I ask them to sort them in order of size, then put their work on the board and explain to the rest of the class. I don't have to grade this middle-of-Bloom task; I can just check in with students as they work and look at the board when they're done, and that's really all the "assessment" I need for now.

Note, I am not suggesting that nobody should grade middle-of-Bloom tasks. I am saying that many of those tasks can be assessed without grading; and you can save graded work on those tasks for something like periodic quizzes, like I do with Checkpoints. Checkpoints are weekly/biweekly quizzes with one problem per learning objective in the course, aimed at lower-middle Bloom tasks. We do active learning activities in class to practice on these sorts of problems; but I only grade the Checkpoints rather than having both these and some kind of additional assessment like hour-long exams.

So flipped learning allows you to reduce, or stop altogether, the grading of tasks that are in the middle of Bloom's Taxonomy. What's left over to assess are the lower and upper thirds of the pyramid: Remember/Understand tasks, and Evaluate/Create tasks. And both of those are particularly well suited for alternative approaches. The lowest-level tasks can be done through assignments that are more formative, carrying either no grade at all or graded solely on completeness and effort. The highest-level tasks are like proofs, essays, and projects that benefit from multiple rounds of feedback, and they are easily graded on a simple 2- to 4-level system like EMRN or just ungraded.

If you are in this situation (flipping, but not alternatively grading) then there are at least a couple of ways you could get started with alternative grading. First, you might start putting those upper-third tasks into a feedback loop: Give helpful feedback on attempts, assign a mark that indicates progress (or no mark, if that's your thing) and then allow reattempts without penalty. Second, on the other end of the spectrum, take a look at the lower-third tasks that you are having students complete before class and either stop grading those altogether, or grade them only on completeness and effort. The latter isn't exactly an "alternative grading" approach, but minimizing the dominance of points and averages, and refocusing the assignment on growth and understanding, is the underlying goal.

If you do alternative grading

If you are currently using an alternative approach to grading but not practicing flipped learning, then your grading system is likely organized around the Four Pillars framework of clear standards, helpful feedback, marks that indicate progress, and reattempts without penalty (or some nonempty subset of those). If you wanted, you could boil all four of those pillars down to one idea: We want our grading systems to promote growth, as determined by observations of student work, where that work is done through a feedback loop focused on iteration and practice.

Iteration and practice (guided by feedback) are important to learning, no matter what flavor of alternative grading you choose, or even if you don't choose this at all. No matter the subject, if it's of any significance, students will need to iterate on something at some point (multiple drafts of an essay, multiple revisions of a project, multiple attempts at demonstrating a basic skill, etc.) and they will also need to engage in deliberate practice of something (usually some part of the thing they are iterating).

And you know what's really good for making sure students engage in high-quality iterations and practice, and not just wasting time on mindless activity? Devoting class time to iteration and practice. In class, you can guide student engagement, observe misunderstandings in real time, and intervene to help. Students can freely access help from their peers and from you. And it's already on their schedules -- you don't have to browbeat students to set aside time for practice.

But where will you find the time in class to devote to iteration and practice? You can surely see where I am going with this. If you use a flipped structure, the time is right there. Set up the class using a flipped approach, and whatever time you had previously needed for lecture and basic examples is now open, to be repurposed for deliberate practice and iteration on more complex topics, in a social environment that promotes the feedback that you already want to give, but can now give verbally in the moment rather than grading more things.

If you are in this situation (alternatively grading, but not flipping) then there are at least a couple of ways you could get started. First, you might already have clear standards for your course (that's the first of the Four Pillars), so decide which of these standards could be attained by students before class time through a structured activity. Then create a pre-class assignment that provides an overview of those standards, say a pre-recorded video presentation followed with a low-stakes online quiz on your LMS. You no longer have to fully cover this material in class, which gives you time for mid-level items. Second, along the same lines, take a look at your standards and decide which ones are the most critical to be mastered, or which ones are most important for accelerating mastery of the upper third of Bloom's taxonomy. Find those, and then make those the focus of class time (again, iteration and practice with feedback). And then work backwards: If there's a more basic learning objective that won't fit in the plan for your class time, give it as a pre-class activity.

Conclusion

I find that many teaching innovations have a force multiplier effect: They are good for students individually but significantly more so when paired. Alternative grading and flipped learning are in that category. Flipped learning is, at this point, sort of an old-school idea without the current cachet of ungrading and the like. But I think in many cases putting the two together, like pairing peanut butter with chocolate, leads to something greater than the sum of its parts.

---