Challenges, Successes, and Tensions Piloting a Feedback-Reflection Assessment Model: Katie and Brittany's Perspectives

• In Event: Stories of Humanizing Assessment: Disrupting, Dismantling, and Reimagining Assessment in Teacher Education and Beyond

Abstract

Author-X is a U.S. born, white, straight-passing/queer, physically-able, ciswoman who has been teaching literacy courses in teacher education programs for eight years. Author-Y is a U.S. born, white, able, cishet woman who has been teaching literacy courses in teacher education programs for six years. We live, learn, and teach on the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, including the Tuscarora and Onondaga Nations. Our research interests and motivations converge through our commitment to anti-oppressive literacy pedagogies.
We have been teaching together at a northeastern U.S. comprehensive teaching college for the last three years. Since 2020, we have collaborated on a shared course on theoretical foundations of literacy instruction for students working toward a literacy education master’s degree. The course often represents a challenge for students new to reading theory and empirical research. During the first semester co-planning this course, we commiserated over tensions we felt grading students for accuracy in their theoretical understanding when doing so often left students unrewarded for growth and effort in their learning. Leading up to the subsequent semester, [Author-X] proposed testing out a mostly gradless feedback-reflection model to mitigate our frustrations and [Author-Y] agreed.
We were motivated to eradicate grading from our assessment processes for several reasons. First, we believe letter/numerical grades require taking up a narrow, dehumanizing view of student learning by relying on highly specific metrics related to performed knowledge, disregarding all other aspects of students relating to their socioemotional, physical, and financial well-being. Grading also innately disregards harm caused by educational (and other) institutions relating to race and ethnicity, gender identity expression, languages used, political and religious affiliations, and more (Blum, 2020; Reibel, 2021). Secondly, while we assert our relative expertise on topics we teach, we recognize our assessment of students’ knowledge is inherently subjective. Every educator prioritizes different facets of performed knowledge (e.g., writing convention, formatting, participation), sending inconsistent messages to learners about purposes of schooling (Blackwelder, 2020; Zerwin, 2020). Finally, we found that student concerns about getting a “good” grade discouraged them from taking risks in learning, a necessity in a literacy theories course covering complex concepts (Stommel, 2020).
Drawing on Blum’s (2020) approach to ungrading, we developed strategies (Figure 1) supporting our students’ assessment and evaluation as they engaged with our courses, many of them experiencing an ungrading model for the first time along with us. Throughout the semester, we individually journaled and then shared our experiences. Sharings were fruitful for identifying emerging patterns related to challenges, successes, tensions, and overall student perceptions supported by personal and student reflections (Table 1).
We seek dialogue with session participants to unpack the above tensions and generate strategies for working within those tensions in our institutional contexts. We also strive to uncover intersectional tensions and critiques of efforts made to dismantle oppressive teaching practices (e.g., ungrading and institutionalized racism, Craig, 2021).

Authors

• Katarina N. Silvestri, SUNY - College at Cortland
  Presenting Author

• Brittany M. Adams, University of Alabama
  Presenting Author