Yet another July break
Also: News about guest authors, reminder about the book, and blasts from Julys past
We do like our breaks around here, and we’re taking another one this week for the Independence Day holiday and other reasons, not that we need a reason. We hope you are enjoying your summer, and are getting some breaks too!
Starting in August, you’ll be seeing a lot of new faces here as we will start featuring guest authors twice a month, all the way through September 2025. We have an incredible lineup of alternative grading practitioners ready to share their practices and their thoughts, on interesting and useful topics that will greatly expand on the case studies in our book. There will be something for everybody, and we’re really excited to make this Substack much more of a community forum.
Speaking of the Grading For Growth book, it’s been a little over a year since it was published, and we couldn’t be happier with the reception it’s gotten.
From its 4.7-star rating on Amazon to the many faculty reading groups that have sprung up around it, the book is having the sort of impact that we hoped it would have during the writing process. If you’re thinking about stepping out into the world of alternative grading this fall, or setting up a reading group with others, this would be a great time to grab a copy of the book and start reading.
Finally, here is some reading material to get you through to next week. For fun, these are a few “greatest hits” from the month of July in past years.
This one from last year (on my birthday!) treats a common question about how to get “buy-in” from students and others with alternative grading systems.
Also from July 2023, this article from David deals with how to balance structure and flexibility in a grading system:
Going back to July 2022, David wrote a popular two-part series on equity in alternative grading. Here’s part 1:
And by the time you make it to July 2021, we were publishing the first two articles at this Substack, on our origin stories1:
Thanks again for reading, and we’ll see you next week.
Not sure why David’s origin story article doesn’t have a feature image! I think we were still figuring out how to work the platform at that point.