Have you or your students been frustrated by grading structures in class? Have you ever felt that education has become too much about grading and ranking, rather than exploration and learning? The need to reshape the conventional means of assessing student work has become more pressing with the prevalent (mis)use of AI. The recent movement to “ungrade” education offers many tactics for instructors to provide meaningful feedback and nurture students’ intrinsic motivation, while decentering or doing without grades and the challenges they pose to deep learning. This workshop introduces a few common ungrading practices and explores how they can be adapted for use for graduate instructors and TAs, who often face greater institutional constraints when designing assessment plans. By the end of this workshop, participants will be prepared to:

• Understand the definition and purpose of ungrading
• Select ungrading practices on the basis of your teaching philosophy, course objectives, and external constraints
• Apply ungrading principles to design an assessment scheme for an assignment

Instructors

Ruilin Fan, Columbia University

Workshop Schedule

This one-session online workshop meets in Zoom on Monday, March 2nd at 8-10pm Gulf / 11am-1pm Eastern / 10am-12pm Central / 9-11am Arizona / 8-10am Pacific.

Audience

This session is designed for future faculty or instructors who may have limited power to change the overall course setup and class policies but who want to decenter grades in some way. Participants should have some experience with assessing student work.

Registration and Enrollment

Cap: 30. Registration opens Monday, February 16th at 10am CT and closes once capacity is reached. Registration will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis and registrants from CIRTL member institutions or alumni of CIRTL member institutions will receive priority. Once registration closes, all registrants will be notified of their enrollment status.

Accessibility

If you have access needs, please let us know what they are. Contact Zoe Zuleger (zmzuleger@wisc.edu) who is supporting this workshop, to let us know how we can help you have a successful experience. In addition to meeting individualized needs, we will also take measures throughout the workshop to support accessibility for all our students:

• Sending pre-session reminders with upcoming assignments to all students
• Sharing materials for synchronous sessions with students (slides, activity instructions, etc.)
• Enabling live captioning in synchronous sessions
• Incorporating multiple modes of interaction into synchronous sessions

About CIRTL Programming

CIRTL Network programming is designed to develop future faculty committed to implementing and advancing evidence-based teaching practices to create undergraduate educational experiences that are accessible to all learners. Participants can explore our programming in any order, and to whatever extent supports your own teaching development needs and interests. To help participants understand what they can expect across all our programming, all CIRTL programming aligns with four broad learning goals; within those goals, programming might provide participants with an introductory, intermediate, or advanced learning experience.

This course supports the following CIRTL learning goals at an intermediate level:

• Goal 1: Develop evidence-based teaching knowledge. See more Goal 1 programming.
• Goal 2: Connect with community to enhance teaching. See more Goal 2 programming.
• Goal 3: Cultivate teaching skills through reflective improvement. See more Goal 3 programming.