Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to episode 111 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Speaker: Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Joelle Ostrich, Jordan Bacca, and Timothy Fox.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Speaker: On today's podcast, we are joined by David Buck.
Speaker: David is an English professor at Howard Community College in Maryland, who is actively involved in the ungrading movement, as well as focusing on open access resources, open pedagogy, and the UN sustainable development goals.
Speaker: To foster and grow the practice of ungrading,
Speaker: David is actively involved in utilizing social and other online media for discussion, including but not limited to his Let's Talk Ungrading Twitter Spaces, which is also an edited podcast, the Ungrading Twitter Community, the Ungrading Book Club, the Ungrading Discord Community, and crowdsourcing ungrading an open access book on Pressbooks.
Speaker: So thank you so much for coming on, David.
Speaker: This is very exciting.
Speaker: Thanks, Chris.
Speaker: Happy to be here.
Speaker: So we invited you here to talk about growing the movement because we know that you're an avid believer in the principles of ungrading.
Speaker: And I think there's so many different spaces, many of which that are provided by you, to learn about how to do that.
Speaker: And we'll link in the show notes places that you can go learning about ungrading as a practice.
Speaker: But today, we'd really like to focus on expanding the practice of ungrading and progressive education at a more meta community level, getting more people involved.
Speaker: I just started listing many of the spaces that you're hosting or co-hosting or involved in.
Speaker: Before we dive into those specifics, I'm just curious to start off with what drives you to do this, because that's a lot of unpaid labor, a lot of just time.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Why are you doing all this?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: Part of the idea for me is that my involvement, especially on Twitter in these digital spaces, is the, it's basically one intrinsic goal, which is joy.
Speaker: I get joy from connecting with others.
Speaker: I get joy from sharing from others, learning from others.
Speaker: And I think I'm the perfect guy to do this, Chris, because I'm no expert in anything.
Speaker: I'm just the guy.
Speaker: And so I don't write books.
Speaker: I don't have anything published.
Speaker: I'm just a practitioner that's trying to get better at his craft.
Speaker: And so I think that helps me a little bit in the sense that I am no threat to anyone in the educational space.
Speaker: And so that to me helps me kind of grow that connectivism that is happening around ungrading.
Speaker: And I think there's a, when you look back at everything that's been happening, especially with ungrading and what you just listed, they all kind of seem to fall in place.
Speaker: extemporaneously, like there were extrinsic forces, intrinsic forces, but it was like the perfect storm to get this growing online community around ungrading and progressive education, unschooling, all this good stuff that we're all involved in.
Speaker: So I'm not going to take credit for any of that other than I think sometimes I was at the right place at the right time
Speaker: to bring the voices kind of just together and curate.
Speaker: I think curating the voices is an important thing.
Speaker: But what I've learned from, and your question is why, I've always been interested in social learning.
Speaker: Learning as a social construct where we co-create, collaborate, co-participate in these communities of practice, if you want to call them that.
Speaker: And I got that start from e-learning, believe it or not.
Speaker: From 2010 to 2014, I was the e-learning director at our institution, which I couldn't believe they even gave me that position.
Speaker: But anyway, in that four year span, we migrated from Blackboard to Canvas.
Speaker: We were one of the first institutions to go with Canvas east of the Mississippi.
Speaker: We migrated to Canvas in 2012.
Speaker: It was a brand new, Instructure was a brand new company.
Speaker: Having said that, I had to train faculty to migrate to Canvas within like three months.
Speaker: And so I had to build like a training mechanism or like a social learning construct.
Speaker: And that got me into this idea of,
Speaker: Oh, professional development, getting together with other teachers, talking about pedagogy and assessment and these types of things.
Speaker: So I always had that in my blood.
Speaker: When I got back to the English division, thank God I walked out of administration back to teaching.
Speaker: I did a ed camp for our English division and we did a Saturday where we just came in.
Speaker: So I've always been involved with those types of activities.
Speaker: Learning communities of practice, that type of thing.
Speaker: So when I got onto Twitter in like 2012, I think, or 2014, I got onto Twitter, I started getting involved with these teachers that were talking about assessment in different ways.
Speaker: And then that kind of just led to...
Speaker: Throwing out ideas, Chris, and seeing if they stick to the wall.
Speaker: That's basically my approach.
Speaker: And so when I got into teachers throwing out grades, that hashtag with Star, Saxton, and Mark Barnes, and I started following and jumping into these assessment chats.
Speaker: So I actually reached out to, I think it was two people, Jesse Stommel and Laura Gibbs.
Speaker: And I tweeted at them and said, why don't we have like a Twitter chat with the ungrading hashtag so we can kind of get together?
Speaker: And Laura Gibbs responded back to me.
Speaker: And that birthed the ungrading slow chats that we had.
Speaker: And Laura and I, and she's awesome.
Speaker: So she built a website for it and we had that.
Speaker: And then Susan Bloom comes out with the ungrading book.
Speaker: So I tweeted out, hey, is anyone interested in having a virtual book club?
Speaker: And that day, I think I got 50 people that said I'd be interested.
Speaker: That weekend, I built the website, got all the stuff together.
Speaker: And then I invited the authors to come to our book club.
Speaker: And here's the thing, Chris.
Speaker: We don't have digital communities of practice without generosity of spirit.
Speaker: And that is the key with around at least the people that I know with it.
Speaker: I've met you around it.
Speaker: I think we all have a common purpose.
Speaker: And that is to inject our teaching and learning with humanity and care, compassion.
Speaker: And that really is kind of the broad umbrella that we all operate under.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a very powerful movement because when you bring all those folks to the table, you are creating that learning community where everyone can learn from each other.
Speaker: in a very authentic way.
Speaker: I remember when I was like in teacher training, teacher Twitter was like just becoming a thing.
Speaker: They would say you should go on Twitter and get involved.
Speaker: And it was like this very mythical place.
Speaker: And there wasn't really a lot of direction on what that meant.
Speaker: And I think for a lot of folks, there still isn't.
Speaker: It's not really clear what exactly that means to get involved in teacher Twitter.
Speaker: And the work that you all are doing is making that more real.
Speaker: It's much different to attempt to follow a hashtag, which is sometimes not easy to do.
Speaker: And oftentimes it's pretty banal versus getting involved in like an extensive conversation over a Twitter space or having an hour long conversation in a book club.
Speaker: They're very, very different.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You linked me beforehand.
Speaker: I can't wait to put this in the show notes to share it with people, that dissertation by Christina Moore that studies ostensibly the work that you're doing, the spaces that folks are working in, specifically book clubs to learn from each other and grow movements such as ungrading.
Speaker: So we covered at the beginning there a few places that you're involved.
Speaker: So you're on Twitter, you're on Discord.
Speaker: Why are you using these spaces versus more traditional spaces?
Speaker: Like you could easily be meeting at Howard Community College with other teachers and talking about your craft.
Speaker: That's kind of part one of the question.
Speaker: But then if you want, you can dive into why newer media stuff like Discord?
Speaker: Because when I think of Discord, I think of gaming, video game stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, we're part of the cool kids on Discord.
Speaker: Well, it's a good point, and I think you kind of touched on the answer, which is these digital tools have at their core autonomy and agency.
Speaker: I can choose with whom I want to learn, when I want to learn, and I can jump in and jump out.
Speaker: Two, there are many other tools that have beautiful learning, thriving communities of practice.
Speaker: For me, I never got on Facebook.
Speaker: I don't know why.
Speaker: I just never felt comfortable giving away my digital information to a big company.
Speaker: But I got on Twitter.
Speaker: But I use Twitter, Chris, not to post what I had for breakfast.
Speaker: I use it essentially for professional learning and building those professional learning networks.
Speaker: So again, it's based on where people come and congregate and how they feel when they're there.
Speaker: So if they feel heard, valued, engaged, they're going to stay there.
Speaker: Because the biggest thing I think is right now, the challenge for any building of a learning community that thrives is sustainability.
Speaker: How do you sustain it?
Speaker: How do you keep it relevant?
Speaker: So I think these digital tools help us in the sense that we remain relevant, right?
Speaker: I'm not on Twitch or TikTok.
Speaker: That's a little too relevant for my taste, but hey, whatever fits.
Speaker: But I've chosen Twitter Discord as almost a sidebar, meaning our Discord presence came out of our ungrading EdCamp when a bunch of the planners and I, which Christina was one of, of
Speaker: There was about four or five people that helped me plan that.
Speaker: And we said, we want some place that is for asynchronous jump in, jump out at a slow pace.
Speaker: What could we do?
Speaker: Slack, Discord, Telegram.
Speaker: We chose Discord simply because it had that immediacy of the voice channels.
Speaker: And we looked at accessibility and all that.
Speaker: all those concerns, which we should.
Speaker: So that's how we came out with Discord.
Speaker: After the EdCamp, Chris, Discord was sitting there.
Speaker: So I just said, I'm going to rebrand it the Ungrading Hub and just throw it out there.
Speaker: Right now we have 250 people on that thing.
Speaker: So is it going every day?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: But every once in a while, people will jump into that.
Speaker: And I have to use Twitter to kind of remind people, hey, we got this thing.
Speaker: So I think my weakness is I've created too many areas where there's too much going on.
Speaker: So –
Speaker: Right now, I'm focusing on three areas, Twitter and Twitter spaces.
Speaker: That's always going to be there.
Speaker: Discord and then, of course, Twitter with the Twitter spaces and then Pressbook, that crowdsourcing on grading.
Speaker: That book has been building and building as it goes.
Speaker: And again,
Speaker: It takes someone to kind of keep the ball in front of everyone's eyes.
Speaker: So, for instance, if I see a really cool thread from someone on Twitter, I might reach out and DM them and say, could you kind of put that into a blog post and put it on our crowdsourcing?
Speaker: It's that kind of thing where sustainability and relevancy are there.
Speaker: The main thing, the tools that I use, Chris, it's all about marketing.
Speaker: I call it a pulsating web of engagement.
Speaker: It contracts and expands based on intrinsic factors and extrinsic factors.
Speaker: For instance, the pandemic, that was an extrinsic factor that brought all of us kind of to these digital spaces because we couldn't go physically to our campuses.
Speaker: And then the intrinsic pulsating is at the end of the semester, I've got all of this stuff I'm trying to close up on my courses.
Speaker: I might not be active in Twitter, so I'll see the drop off in engagement.
Speaker: around these kind of, you know, the academic calendar per se.
Speaker: So, you know, it's one of those things where it contracts and expands based on all of these factors.
Speaker: I guess my point is I want to be there when it expands and contracts.
Speaker: I want to make sure I'm in the right place at the right time.
Speaker: Let's talk about growing those communities and what it means to do platform adoption.
Speaker: Because that's something that both of us do.
Speaker: We also have a Discord.
Speaker: Ours is not nearly as successful as yours.
Speaker: It's very difficult to get folks to engage in spaces they're not familiar with, especially when the way that you're recruiting them to get there is already from kind of a subsect of the population.
Speaker: The community on Twitter, despite being very active, is still a very, very small percentage of overall teachers.
Speaker: So if we want to grow a movement such as Ungrading,
Speaker: How do we go about getting one folks from the I want to refer to them as like normies, like people that like don't that don't engage like on Twitter.
Speaker: How do we get them to get more involved on social media as teachers and not just for personal use?
Speaker: But then how do we then take them into being the even more active users that are engaged in all these other spaces like open access books and discord?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: I don't have an answer for that, Chris, other than creating a need for it.
Speaker: So for me, it's that outreach, that evangelism per se.
Speaker: That's a word I'm used to.
Speaker: My father was a minister for 42 years.
Speaker: And so he died when I didn't go into theology, but I went into English.
Speaker: But anyway, I'm part of that idea of spreading the good word type of thing.
Speaker: That's in my DNA as a pastor's kid or minister's kid.
Speaker: So part of that spreading the word is one, create a need.
Speaker: Instead of saying, you should do this.
Speaker: It's, oh, would you like to come in into this space?
Speaker: I think you could contribute some really cool stuff.
Speaker: Like we got a lot of STEM and math, you know, math science people that way.
Speaker: Because most of my stuff on grading, Chris, is really humanities driven, English driven.
Speaker: I teach online composition.
Speaker: But, you know, these other disciplines and diverse fields work.
Speaker: we have to create a need for those people to come in as well and not just be a humanities driven type of movement.
Speaker: So that's the first thing is getting into the diversity and also inviting them as far as getting them used to these other platforms.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I, I try my best to do a lot of the, um,
Speaker: work the lead-in time.
Speaker: It's actually lead-in heavy, which is I'll make a quick little tutorial on the best way to navigate spaces, and I'll throw that out in a Google Doc or the Discord.
Speaker: Basically, we never really came up with a kind of user guide for that.
Speaker: We just threw them on there and said, here's where it is.
Speaker: But what I found is
Speaker: When they get there, there has to be an organized, clear pathway for engagement.
Speaker: So when we did Discord, I made sure we had four channels based on the four themes of our ed camp, anti-racism and equity, creating communities of discourse, ask me anything, how to's about ungrading.
Speaker: So we had all these different channels so that the participants could
Speaker: could jump in whenever they wanted and where they wanted to.
Speaker: So that's the other thing.
Speaker: There are folks, Chris, I know that we're leaving by the wayside simply because of the choices of the digital tools we've chosen.
Speaker: I'm hoping that when people come into this Twitter community, they leave and go back to their campuses because I'm hearing a lot of people actually being invited by their divisions and deans to give presentations about ungrading face-to-face to their colleagues.
Speaker: Beautiful.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: And, you know, I've been in some of those as well.
Speaker: So there is that, you know, the community just isn't on Twitter.
Speaker: It'll filter out into the world, into the globe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Conference to Restore Humanity is an invitation for K-12 and college educators to engage in a human-centered system reboot, centering the needs of students and educators toward a praxis of social justice.
Speaker: The traditional conference format doesn't work for everyone.
Speaker: It's costly to attend, environmentally unfriendly, and it doesn't allow everyone to engage or have a voice in the learning community.
Speaker: Our conference is designed around the accessibility and sustainability of virtual learning, while engaging participants in a classroom environment that models the same progressive pedagogy we value with students.
Speaker: Instead of long Zoom presentations with a brief Q&A, keynotes are flipped.
Speaker: and attendees will have the opportunity for extended conversation with our speakers, Dr. Henry Giroux, the founding theorist of critical pedagogy, Dr. Denisha Jones, educator, activist, and co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School, and the Circle Keepers from Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, a student collective focused on social justice.
Speaker: And instead of back-to-back online workshops, we are offering asynchronous learning tracks.
Speaker: You can engage with the content and the community at any time on topics like anti-carceral pedagogy, disrupting linguistic discrimination, designing for neurodivergence, promoting childism in the classroom, and supporting feedback over grades.
Speaker: The Conference to Restore Humanity runs July 25th through the 28th.
Speaker: And as of recording, early bird tickets are still available.
Speaker: It's $150 for four days with discounts available for individuals from historically marginalized communities as well as group rates.
Speaker: Plus, we'll award certificates for teacher training and continuing education credits.
Speaker: See our website humanrestorationproject.org for more information and let's restore humanity together.
Speaker: Yeah, it seems like it's been ultra successful specifically in ungrading, in part because of the work that you're doing.
Speaker: I feel like that has become more and more mainstream.
Speaker: Like there's at least one person at every school that we visit who is actively involved in some kind of ungrading movement that you don't necessarily see in perhaps like restorative justice or experiential learning.
Speaker: Not that people aren't doing that work.
Speaker: It just doesn't seem like it has the same online presence as the ungrading camp.
Speaker: And perhaps that's because the...
Speaker: type of people that would be interested in ungrading are also the type of people that are more interested in being involved in these types of online communities.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: No, I think you're right, Chris.
Speaker: I agree with that.
Speaker: It's fascinating to me because it seems like we're at a point now.
Speaker: in the history of education, where because we have access to these communities, we can spur a movement that doesn't die out.
Speaker: Because obviously, over time, there has been an ungrading movement back to like the 60s, even like there's text back to like the 1910s of teachers talking about how report cards aren't accurate.
Speaker: But over time, that just kind of fizzled out because folks would just talk to each other and then they'd resign or retire and people just stopped talking about it or various political forces shut it down.
Speaker: Something happened that would get rid of it.
Speaker: But now you have this movement where you constantly have people coming in and maybe a few people coming out, but that information is always there.
Speaker: And it's easy to connect with other humans and not just books to engage in that and feel like you're doing the right thing, that you're not just like kind of living in your head.
Speaker: It's not just all pure imagination.
Speaker: It's a very powerful tool to have all those things.
Speaker: And I would imagine that especially perhaps as even younger teachers enter the fold, you'll see adaptations on Twitch or on TikTok or on whatever the new thing is, maybe Snapchat or something.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: But whatever that might be.
Speaker: What are your upcoming goals?
Speaker: You have all these spaces.
Speaker: Are there other places that you're exploring?
Speaker: Are there specific metrics or like ideas that you have in the back of your head?
Speaker: Like, man, I really wish that we could do this that you're doing right now.
Speaker: It's a great question.
Speaker: So as far as metrics go, I've learned not to pour so much meaning into the metrics.
Speaker: For instance, the virtual book club, we ended up with 628 registered users.
Speaker: Now, those 600, all 600 aren't.
Speaker: You know, participating.
Speaker: So a lot of folks will register for something just because they want to get the communications.
Speaker: And that's fine.
Speaker: I do that, too, sometimes.
Speaker: So our Twitter community right now, we have a Twitter ungrading community that has about 278 members are.
Speaker: Our ungrading hub has 250 members.
Speaker: So we're all interspersed out into these things.
Speaker: And that doesn't mean that's how many people are actively engaging.
Speaker: So I've learned that there is a core of us, kind of that pulsating heart of the community that will always be there, that people I can always reach out to and say, hey, do you want to come on a Twitter space and have a 30-minute conversation?
Speaker: And they'll be like, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, fine.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I know that those are there.
Speaker: Then we've got these kind of like on the outer rim, these folks that are maybe curious about ungrading.
Speaker: So they're jumping in a little bit and then jumping out.
Speaker: So there's that kind of levels of engagement outside of that pulsating web that I that I talked about.
Speaker: So I always focus on that core.
Speaker: What can we do with the core that will push some of this going forward?
Speaker: And we'll always get those outer rings of people coming in and out.
Speaker: So we've done an EdCamp.
Speaker: We've done a virtual book club.
Speaker: We're doing spaces.
Speaker: We have a press book with crowdsourcing and grading.
Speaker: There's all of these things I would love if you ask me what I would like to do in the future is, first of all, keep the conversations going on Twitter spaces.
Speaker: Because, Chris, what I'm finding is –
Speaker: Ungrading is just a threshold, a doorway to walk through to talk about teaching and learning, progressive education, restorative justice, all that.
Speaker: So that's kind of my Trojan horse to get in the door.
Speaker: Oh, it's about let's talk ungrading, but we're really talking about unschooling, oppressive systems, all that cool stuff.
Speaker: So keep that going.
Speaker: But I would love to do a Twitter conference.
Speaker: I saw an institution that did this.
Speaker: And what a Twitter conference is, it's not an ed camp where kind of like that's totally participant driven.
Speaker: This Twitter conference has a little bit more structure to it.
Speaker: And it's where people actually propose to give a presentation at a specific time on a specific topic through Twitter.
Speaker: So at that hour, that person will live tweet their presentation for maybe 30 minutes.
Speaker: And then the remaining 30 minutes of the hour, we all who are listening or watching this live Twitter presentation, we can start to interact and it will always become a chat in a sense.
Speaker: I would love to do that.
Speaker: We could have a keynote where a keynote person at the top of the hour, that person starts tweeting out their keynote presentation and then we all jump into a quick chat afterwards.
Speaker: So I love to do something like that.
Speaker: That is a little bit heavy for me to, so I have to get my brain around organizing it.
Speaker: Chris, a lot of the stuff that I organize is at about 20 minutes or maybe an hour after I get the idea.
Speaker: I'm a quick person to create something.
Speaker: I like to fail fast and I fail furiously, which is great because some of the stuff I throw out there does not stick to the wall.
Speaker: And I just go, okay, because I have a tolerance for failure because that basically characterizes most of my professional life is failure.
Speaker: So I'm good with that.
Speaker: So yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So you throw things out and then when they go and you start to see some movement, then you start to really massage it, start to think about making it better, putting on some bells and whistles to it because you know that it has roots into the community.
Speaker: So I think I would like to keep doing something like a conference type thing.
Speaker: where we all, I would love to do, I mean, if someone had the money to have an ungrading conference where we go somewhere, you know, and meet and that would just be wonderful depending on, you know, the pandemic and all that.
Speaker: But in the meantime, just growing this Twitter space.
Speaker: The other thing I like to do, Chris, in the future is make it practical.
Speaker: I think what you were saying before I thought was really good, which is people get involved constantly.
Speaker: at their level of comfort, but you get them involved when there's a lot more, a ton of praxis rather than theory.
Speaker: I think the key to ungrading and why it's gotten more roots than maybe things like restorative justice and progressive education is that there's a very concrete problem
Speaker: part of ungrading that I could do in my class tomorrow if I wanted to.
Speaker: So there's that praxis.
Speaker: And I'm a big praxis guy.
Speaker: I'm not a big theory guy.
Speaker: I like just to give me something I can do right now and see if it works.
Speaker: That's what I like to do.
Speaker: So I think that praxis part of ungrading will always be there.
Speaker: And we still have good discussions about how to best introduce it to students.
Speaker: How do you make your prompts with the language you speak?
Speaker: So there's always good praxis going on.
Speaker: So the other, that's the one thing I really want to keep going.
Speaker: And the other thing is, is I would like to try to kind of copy what you guys do.
Speaker: I'm working on a ungrading children's book in Pressbook.
Speaker: And I was trying to work with people who could animate it and illustrate it.
Speaker: And it kind of dropped off.
Speaker: So I'm actually asking my daughter, she's 11, to maybe draw something.
Speaker: I was searching for this thing.
Speaker: And this is one of those things that didn't fly.
Speaker: I had about seven to eight people saying, I'm with you.
Speaker: I'll help you build that.
Speaker: And it just died.
Speaker: Probably because of me, I didn't keep it in front of people's faces.
Speaker: But anyway, so I love to build this book and steal from you guys and have an accompanying teacher's manual.
Speaker: to go along with it if a teacher wants to use this ungrading book in their course.
Speaker: I would love to do that.
Speaker: That is, I might be pushing the envelope of my capabilities though, Chris, because I don't know if I can actually come up with that content, but that's the kind of stuff
Speaker: I would love to do is get ungrading in front of students.
Speaker: And so that is probably my third goal.
Speaker: Get more of the student voice.
Speaker: We do a lot of PD with each other.
Speaker: We all get together.
Speaker: We talk about teaching learning.
Speaker: And a lot of the stuff I get involved in, I never think about, well, what do the students think?
Speaker: Let's bring them into the conversation.
Speaker: So one of the sessions of our ed camp, we had a student panel.
Speaker: It was awesome, Chris.
Speaker: It was the best
Speaker: Zoom part of that ed camp, having about four students talk about what ungrading has meant to them and their education.
Speaker: So that children's book is kind of like my little baby that I want to really, you know, grow to get ungrading in front of students because, you know, ungrading.
Speaker: It doesn't mean everything for everybody.
Speaker: It's a huge umbrella.
Speaker: We have arguments about where that term even comes from or what it actually means because at the end of the day, I still have to give a grade in my course.
Speaker: My institution requires it.
Speaker: So I'm not 100% on grading, but it's that concept of looking at process and experience over outcomes and production, right?
Speaker: Because that's what traditional grades force us to focus on, that production.
Speaker: Instead, we're looking at owning one's labor, owning one's agency.
Speaker: If we can get to the students early, we can kind of maybe eliminate some of that trauma that traditional grading has done.
Speaker: That's actually a really fascinating point that I'd like to dive into a little bit further because –
Speaker: At least for me, the most powerful discussions in PD I've had about specifically on grading has been in those conversations with kids.
Speaker: I would spend, God, I don't know, four or five extended conversations at the beginning of every school year talking about why the course is set up the way it's set up, where students are.
Speaker: allowed to remediate work, revise things.
Speaker: There's basically, there's deadlines, but they're very soft deadlines.
Speaker: And at the end of the day, like you go, I call them best by dates.
Speaker: So I mean, it's designed in a way that no one should hypothetically fail, because I'm not comfortable doing that.
Speaker: Despite some like Ohio Department of Education rules.
Speaker: That's a whole other story.
Speaker: But we do whatever we can.
Speaker: Students who are very open about sharing their anxieties around grading, I find more issues with students that are, quote unquote, like all A students who really struggle if they get a B or a C, because I always want to push people to do more.
Speaker: I don't give them a low grade, but I give them feedback and say, hey, you should do more with this.
Speaker: I'm not saying it's bad.
Speaker: I'm just saying you just need to make it a little bit better because that's what my job is.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's difficult to have those conversations with folks that are used to always just doing the rubric.
Speaker: That's the end of it.
Speaker: Put it away.
Speaker: Versus having students in that conversation who don't do well academically, that really struggle, who have a lot of different things going on.
Speaker: Maybe they just don't like the subject.
Speaker: And I relate to that.
Speaker: I was not a huge fan of school when I was in school either.
Speaker: And that's
Speaker: Those conversations really drive us to do better because when you hear from the people in the room and have that emotional connection to them, you understand why the things in your classroom happen the way that they do.
Speaker: And so much of that is attached to assessment and ranking and filing and judgment.
Speaker: So pulling students into that conversation is
Speaker: about changing education online, I think is a huge missed opportunity that we can find ways to do because obviously, like every kit is on social media and online.
Speaker: And I know it might be a little, I guess, lame to be associated with like teachers and doing that kind of work.
Speaker: However, it's the thing that you're doing every single day.
Speaker: And I feel like there has to be a way to reach out and get folks involved and taking charge of that.
Speaker: It's kind of an awkward conversation to have because many students are very powerless in what they can do.
Speaker: They can band together and attempt to change things, but at the end of the day, it's very difficult to do so.
Speaker: There's organizations like Student Voice who are doing some really cool work surrounding that and publishing student thoughts.
Speaker: But I think there's also more room on social media.
Speaker: I think of, what's the guy who does like slam poetry on YouTube?
Speaker: He's pretty popular.
Speaker: Oh, a Taylor Molly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Taylor Molly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who like talks about like the issues with school and trying to solve those things.
Speaker: And kids like really resonate with that work.
Speaker: We h ave a board member, Madeline Jester, who's on our board, who talks about ungrading and publishes their thoughts.
Speaker: So, yeah, I don't I don't know where I'm going with this outside of saying like, do you have ideas on how we can pull more students actually into these discussions?
Speaker: Yeah, I think the invitation to speak, like you said, some of them are powerless and voiceless.
Speaker: So inviting them into our divisional meetings when we're doing PD on ungrading, inviting them to share their thoughts.
Speaker: And I do a lot of anonymous.
Speaker: I ask them, could I use, because I think I say to them, the student voice to me is the most powerful method of convincing other professors to
Speaker: to adopt some of the principles and guidelines of ungrading.
Speaker: Could I use your voice?
Speaker: And I'll make it anonymous and I'll make sure there's no identifying.
Speaker: And they gave me their permission.
Speaker: Once I get their permission, then I can post it on Twitter or send it to someone.
Speaker: Like I just did a, in our institution, we're not, we're merit-based.
Speaker: So I have to do a merit achievement plan at the end of the year.
Speaker: I put in my student comments.
Speaker: in there, because that to me is a reflection of my teaching excellence, is that I am hopefully changing these people's lives.
Speaker: And it's not about me being a great teacher.
Speaker: It's about removing the trauma and removing those things that rank, sort them, put them into scarcity positions and positions of competition, all of that.
Speaker: So yeah, I think there's more ways that we can get the students involved.
Speaker: And one thing I think is the way we position our courses.
Speaker: giving them more say into how they want to learn.
Speaker: So I've got outcomes that I have to put into my course syllabus based on the institution, but that doesn't mean I don't divergently re-articulate those with my students into learning targets.
Speaker: So we say we're going to take this institution speak and put it into learning targets that you and I can talk about and how we're going to
Speaker: which target that you want to really own this semester and really grapple with.
Speaker: So there are ways to kind of to do that.
Speaker: But I do agree with you.
Speaker: The more people that we get hearing student voices, and there's a lot of talk about the research behind ungrading.
Speaker: There needs to be more quantitative research.
Speaker: I totally agree with that because people some people won't be convinced unless there's actual documented research.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: I always say, just ask the students.
Speaker: That's enough research for me that this stuff is working and that it has that powerful impact on their lives.
Speaker: And for even what you guys are thinking about, the humanity involved in being a student who's heard and who's seen rather than judged or critiqued or evaluated all the time.
Speaker: So that to me is important.
Speaker: So I do a lot of that through, Chris, reflection.
Speaker: So in my students' reflections and self-assessments, I'm always asking them to characterize their labor.
Speaker: And I use labor, and that raises a red light for some people about the trend.
Speaker: What do we – it's that transactional relationship of labor.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: To me, learning is labor.
Speaker: So if I recognize their labor, I recognize themselves, the students.
Speaker: So I ask them.
Speaker: How much were you able to labor?
Speaker: Because I know some of my students, I have single mothers with two kids and ailing parents, and then I have a kid that's working 40 hours to pay for his apartment.
Speaker: There's all kinds of challenges.
Speaker: So I say, what labor did you do?
Speaker: What learning did you derive from it?
Speaker: And then how engaged were you?
Speaker: Because I found, Chris, that I have students that can only devote two hours to my course in a week.
Speaker: But those two hours are big time engaged hours.
Speaker: And I'm like, OK, I'm going to recognize that instead of saying, oh, you didn't get it in by this due date.
Speaker: You're losing 10 points, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: So I think there's a way to give these students more agency and voice.
Speaker: And how do we do that?
Speaker: I think we have to harvest those comments and get them in front of people like our deans, our chairs, our principals, and get that in front so that they can see that there is actually something going on here.
Speaker: Because I remember when I first was into ungrading, I remember we had a slow chat and someone got on there.
Speaker: God bless this person.
Speaker: But the person said,
Speaker: I think on grading is just – it sounds like a bunch of hippie bullshit.
Speaker: I'm like, yes, that's right.
Speaker: I mean it's all this – because there are these major anchors that are being dislodged from people because the anchor is grading.
Speaker: academic rigor.
Speaker: This is why we have our certificates or our diplomas have meaning behind them because of the beautiful academic rigor that we can ensure.
Speaker: And you start ripping those anchors out, man, people start to get a little disrupted.
Speaker: And so for us, I think it's that, and I go back to what I said before, is to appear non-threatening.
Speaker: I don't want to disrupt your pedagogical approach.
Speaker: I'm not making any characterizations of you if you
Speaker: have due dates and penalties for students.
Speaker: It doesn't make you a bad person.
Speaker: But could you maybe think about this?
Speaker: And just asking the question of, is there a potential that you could do this?
Speaker: So instead of focusing on what is and what's bad, focus on the possibilities and potential.
Speaker: That's...
Speaker: And that's like learning anyway, right?
Speaker: When you meet students, you want to say, what's the potential for you?
Speaker: Not let me identify all the errors that you're making.
Speaker: I mean, when you're collecting that feedback and soliciting it, you're taking a step in the direction of eliminating that barrier between teacher and student, that authoritarian barrier where it feels like,
Speaker: perhaps your feedback isn't being heard or doesn't matter.
Speaker: I remember, especially in college, filling out like the end of your evaluation.
Speaker: And I don't know, I felt like it was kind of pointless.
Speaker: I never really saw anything out of it.
Speaker: I was already done with the class, so who cares?
Speaker: So I wonder if inviting students into online spaces, perhaps that aren't even your own students, has a lot of validity in disestablishing that authoritarian mindset.
Speaker: I've been very fortunate in my position at HRP that I get to talk to a lot of students who are not students in my own classroom.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I found it a lot more powerful in some regards to hear from students across the country because, one, it reflects the exact same thing that's going on in my classroom here in Ohio.
Speaker: which is fascinating by itself, but also because those students, I think, have less of a filter.
Speaker: I try my best to establish a classroom where students are open and honest with me, but I know at the end of the day, I'm going to be perceived as an authoritarian figure.
Speaker: I'm the one giving the grades.
Speaker: I'm the one enforcing the discipline, despite all the things I try to say otherwise.
Speaker: Students are very unfiltered if you ask them about ungrading and they know that there's nothing they could do to stop you.
Speaker: And I wonder if getting those students in online spaces, not necessarily as like
Speaker: aggressive people, but as folks who are willing to have those unfiltered conversations would do more to change the movement.
Speaker: I think about a parallel in the political world, for better or for worse, there are a lot of new political Twitch streamers or political discords.
Speaker: I've noticed a lot of third parties are starting to operate Discord channels that are very subversive and radical.
Speaker: And I don't necessarily want to associate ungrading and some school things with that because they can be a little questionable and suspect at times.
Speaker: But there are people that are deeply involved in those spaces that are very young, like 18, 19, 20 years old, who want to change the world and do what is perceived in their opinion, good things.
Speaker: So I wonder if by using these new media spaces, if there isn't a way that Discord could, for example, be advertised and say, hey, like you're in your, I don't know, your League of Legends channel.
Speaker: That's like super dated Elden Ring channel or whatever.
Speaker: Why don't you also join your ungrading channel and talk about how grades impact you and like have this open network of talking to teachers because it's...
Speaker: I don't want to compare it to someone's job because I don't think that's the purpose of education.
Speaker: But in terms of time invested, it's very similar.
Speaker: It's something that you're doing every single day and having that space where you can talk about that.
Speaker: And instead of trying to just escape from school, you try to make it better.
Speaker: There's just so much power in that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I think there's a good – there's a way to do that without stripping them of their humanity, their privacy, all of that.
Speaker: And I think that's an interesting idea of getting students and professors and teachers and administrators into the same room having the same discussion.
Speaker: Because one thing I fear is that in ungrading – and I don't see it so much, Chris – is that a lot of times a hashtag can become an echo chamber.
Speaker: where everybody's saying the same thing.
Speaker: And it's good to have speech and counter speech.
Speaker: I think that's healthy for a community to have the people that come in to say, yeah, but what about, or did you think about this?
Speaker: You know, that type of thing.
Speaker: And what I like about the ungrading community is that there's so many overlapping groups
Speaker: Ideas, diversity of experience.
Speaker: We have people, I think from our ed camp, we had, I think I put it in a statement.
Speaker: We had people from Pittsburgh to Poland, Florida to Finland.
Speaker: And these people all have different educational experiences, and it would be awesome if we could have students from those locations also get into – because everyone's experience isn't the same, and that would help avoid that echo chamber of where everyone's saying the same thing and agreeing and saying – and just nodding your head to everything.
Speaker: So I think we do need that that counter speech.
Speaker: And there is there are challenges of ungrading.
Speaker: We're crazy not to say that there aren't.
Speaker: And we are up against institutions that are based on transactional relationships and and extrinsic motivators and all that GPA and all that stuff.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think there I think the health of the environment has to have.
Speaker: speech, counter speech, but also all voices heard.
Speaker: So I agree with you.
Speaker: There is.
Speaker: And I, you know, I use discord in my course, Chris, and it is funny because when I see who's available, I see who's gaming and who's doing it.
Speaker: And then my teacher mind goes, well, they should be working on my course.
Speaker: I go, no, no, no.
Speaker: You know, trust the student.
Speaker: They need all of that for all of their health and all that.
Speaker: But it's finding those tools that will work because I agree going back to your point.
Speaker: We do leave a lot of educators on the side of the road because they're just not comfortable getting into Twitter or setting up an account or whatever.
Speaker: are doing things like that.
Speaker: I like spaces because you can just go and listen.
Speaker: You don't have to be seen.
Speaker: You don't have to tweet.
Speaker: You just listen.
Speaker: So there are some things that I think can encourage people to get more involved, but it's a tough sell when the toll is not one of comfort.
Speaker: Yeah, there's three things, and then we'll kind of lead into, I guess, a wrap-up question.
Speaker: that you just said that I think are very powerful.
Speaker: The first being the power of using these spaces specifically just in the classroom, let alone trying to grow a movement with them.
Speaker: I also use Discord in my class as well as I have an esports coach.
Speaker: So we use it for that.
Speaker: And we also use it organizationally.
Speaker: All of our staff communication.
Speaker: Ah, cool, cool.
Speaker: I've found that that is by far the most intriguing and perhaps best way to connect with many kids.
Speaker: A lot of kids that I would perceive as being very quiet or socially awkward are just so open and funny and charismatic in online text-driven spaces.
Speaker: And when it comes to accessibility, I just think about all the different ways that you can communicate via a chat app like that, whether it's voice or text, et cetera.
Speaker: that you perhaps might not be able to in a traditional environment and you're able to speak up.
Speaker: Probably one of the proudest moments I think I've ever had was
Speaker: Last year, when we were in kind of still a COVID learning space, I had a Q&A channel on our class Discord.
Speaker: And kids would be messaging each other at like one o'clock in the morning, like way, way later than I was up, helping each other on projects for my course.
Speaker: They would like create things like in Photoshop and kids and say like, oh, you just need to do this, this and this.
Speaker: They'll be talking to each other and have like this extended conversation.
Speaker: And like congratulate each other's work and building that learning space where I'm sure, at least hypothetically, I hope that those conversations happen in my classroom, at least sometimes having a record of that and be able to read it and go through it and having it asynchronous is just really cool.
Speaker: That's the first thing.
Speaker: The second thing deals with getting educators involved and students for that matter who maybe don't participate in these conversations but are there.
Speaker: The lurkers, if you will, folks that just read everything, that do things.
Speaker: That's what I am.
Speaker: Even though I get super involved in conversations, most online computers, I just read through stuff.
Speaker: I listen to things.
Speaker: I like just being on the sidelines and taking a second and digesting it.
Speaker: And I think that we forget that when we build these movements, even though we might not hear anything, there is a lot of work that's happening.
Speaker: I'm always shocked.
Speaker: Like we went to a school and they were like, hey, like we know who you are.
Speaker: We listen to your podcast.
Speaker: It's like, I don't like who are you?
Speaker: Like that's that's shocking.
Speaker: Like it kind of freaks me out a little bit because I think that a lot of times we think we build these online commuters is like 15 people because it's the exact same 15 people that come back over and over again.
Speaker: But there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people who are also listening, who are there and sharing that with other people and they're having conversations about it.
Speaker: You have to kind of keep a perspective there and kind of keep yourself honed that, no, my work is not with those 20 people.
Speaker: It's with all of these people.
Speaker: And finally, that builds into the idea of, let's say that you're going about building one of these spaces, you want to become David Bach, and you want to spread information as well, not just about ungrading or whatever it is that you're passionate about.
Speaker: Maybe it is restorative justice that keeps coming up.
Speaker: What suggestions or concepts would you offer to folks who are just getting started with this that want to start growing their own online communities?
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: That's a great question.
Speaker: I, you know, like I say, a lot of it to me, I don't know, Chris, it's a, it's a mystery to me how things grow.
Speaker: But I guess if I, if I, if I look at, you know, I tried to write down some things that, because I knew you were going to ask me this.
Speaker: So, uh, I tried to think about what are the common threads with learning communities, uh,
Speaker: and professional learning communities or even just communities of practice that really thrive.
Speaker: I would say this.
Speaker: One is they're there where those people are.
Speaker: You meet them where they are, wherever they are.
Speaker: So that means, like you've said, if it's discord, it's discord.
Speaker: If it's sitting in a division meeting and making a presentation face to face, it's there.
Speaker: So it's actually trying to be available to
Speaker: to meet people where you are.
Speaker: So if I'm trying to grow a community, I got to be really ears to the ground where the conversations are happening and get into those conversations.
Speaker: That's the first thing.
Speaker: Two would be provide multiple levels of engagement.
Speaker: Again, going back to what you said, some people want to lurk.
Speaker: Beautiful.
Speaker: I love lurkers because they're thoughtful processors of information.
Speaker: When they choose to engage, you're going to get something good.
Speaker: Because those lurkers aren't talking like I do off the top of my head and just throw stuff out there.
Speaker: They're really thoughtful.
Speaker: So multiple levels of engagement.
Speaker: We tried to do that in the EdCamp with Zoom synchronous Zoom meetings, Discord for the asynchronous, and then Twitter spaces for that little, hey, I just want to listen stuff.
Speaker: A bunch of grace, empathy, kindness, and compassion.
Speaker: That's the key to me.
Speaker: If people feel that empathy coming through that keyboard or whatever screen they're looking at, they're going to be more tied into, hey, I want to come back to that.
Speaker: That made me feel good.
Speaker: And we always talk about, oh, social emotional learning.
Speaker: It happens for us too.
Speaker: I'm not going to be in a space where I feel like I'm dumb or I'm evaluated or judged.
Speaker: So for me, I'm the most non-threatening person I can be.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I call myself a hack.
Speaker: I'm just a hack.
Speaker: I'm just throwing stuff out there.
Speaker: So that's the thing.
Speaker: The energy and passion has to be there.
Speaker: And Chris, this is where you mentioned, why are you doing this?
Speaker: There's a lot of unpaid labor.
Speaker: And you are right.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: But what I found is a bunch of energy and passion covers a multitude of deficiencies.
Speaker: And this is my theory of why I'm doing what I do is that I don't know a lot.
Speaker: I'm not an expert in anything big.
Speaker: I seriously, I don't have anything that I'm really good at, but I do have some passion and some energy and people, uh, that's, um, they mirror that.
Speaker: So that's almost contagious for some people.
Speaker: If you're passionate about it, Hey, I want to grow this community.
Speaker: You will get those folks that say, man, I want to,
Speaker: I want to hook up with this guy and get into more conversations with him or her.
Speaker: So that's the – and then the last one is creating learning that's agile.
Speaker: That kind of – it's like the philosophy of be like water.
Speaker: You come and you just form around what's there.
Speaker: And so for me, it was the pandemic.
Speaker: Everybody in front of their screens, why not seize that moment?
Speaker: And then when that runs out, then you've got to be agile and say, okay, maybe we'll do more structured things like a Twitter conference or something.
Speaker: So I'm always looking for it to be agile and to kind of like be like water and form to the extrinsic factors that I find.
Speaker: A ton of praxis, not a bunch of theory.
Speaker: I need – when I build this community, it's like I want to build a community that says here's what you can do tomorrow.
Speaker: Here's a bunch of junk you can walk away with.
Speaker: And if you want to process that and read it, here it is.
Speaker: So that's the other thing.
Speaker: And this is what I've said way back when about –
Speaker: Twitter, that PD that I get in Twitter, Chris, is so much, it's almost like I'm in a practice and theory class every day because I'm learning from other professors, other teachers, other administrators, and that's good.
Speaker: The other thing is to provide support, be generous with suggestions and sharing, and then you have to deal with that final challenge of staying sustainable and relevant because, as you've mentioned,
Speaker: There are a lot of good communities that are out there, but they wither at the roots.
Speaker: And I don't know what it is, but there has to be, I think we talk about this with learning.
Speaker: You build the space, you tend to the soil, you create the conditions for learning to grow.
Speaker: Plants don't grow themselves, but you've got to provide the soil, the fertile area for that plant to grow.
Speaker: So I think it's a lot of tending to the garden when you're building a learning community.
Speaker: But Chris, I have no ownership over – the ungrading hashtag was out there way before – and like you said, it's –
Speaker: From the 1900s, people talk about that.
Speaker: I don't own anything.
Speaker: All I'm doing is carving out a little space in that big umbrella of ungrading that I can kind of mess around with.
Speaker: And it just happened to be that there are some people interested.
Speaker: So that's kind of like my theory is like I have no clue.
Speaker: It's a mystery to me.
Speaker: But I think learning is mysterious too.
Speaker: And that is cool to me, Chris, if I don't know the answers because –
Speaker: I then say to myself, there's so many other possibilities and potentialities that I can investigate and see if they work too.
Speaker: If everything worked the first time, it would be like, okay, been there, done that.
Speaker: But since it doesn't work right all the time, I'm always thinking, should I do more with Pressbook?
Speaker: Should I do, you know, so I'm always thinking to be agile.
Speaker: So those are some of the things I wrote down.
Speaker: I don't know if they help you, but those are kind of like my keys.
Speaker: No, that's awesome.
Speaker: I mean, I think in many ways to build a progressive education movement, you ostensibly are operating a progressive education classroom just with adults, because that's the exact same thing that you do
Speaker: Anyways, you're always constantly mobile and changing and listening and nothing ever like appears right because the second that it's standardized and right, then it's no longer progressive education.
Speaker: So it all feeds into itself.
Speaker: And I can't help but think too about the late Michael Brooks, who said, be ruthless with systems, be kind to people.
Speaker: And that the power and just like
Speaker: It's not that we're upset with anyone or trying to like harm anyone.
Speaker: We just recognize that the system is not working and we're trying to change that thing.
Speaker: And that's about as basic as it is.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
