Episode 6

Ungrading: Renaissance Humanism and the Challenges of Assessment with Susan Blum

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STEVEN ROBINOW: Welcome to Teaching for Student Success, a podcast devoted to student-centered, evidence-based teaching practices to improve student success, equity, and inclusivity in your courses. I'm your host, Steven Robinow. I am very excited to welcome Dr. Susan Blum to talk about Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), a recently published book edited by Susan with contributions from herself and 13 others.

If you have never heard of the concept of ungrading, this interview is likely to be disturbing, raising issues about our educational system that may challenge educators who have not questioned our model of student evaluations. If you have some familiarity with ungrading but have yet to incorporate some of these principles in your courses, we hope that this discussion might provide the support you need to dip your toes metaphorically in the ungrading waters. Lastly, if you're an expert in ungrading, please sit back and enjoy the discussion. Perhaps you can pass this episode on to colleagues that might be ready to take the plunge.

Dr. Susan Blum is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana. Dr. Blum serves as a fellow of the following institutes: the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Institute for Educational Initiatives, and the Eck Institute for Global Health. Dr. Blum also serves as affiliate faculty in the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families at the University of Notre Dame.

Susan is a prodigious author and speaker in both traditional academic forms, such as peer-reviewed journals, and in a wide range of media, including written, video, radio, and podcasts. The podcast aspect concerns me a bit because you've done more podcasts than I have. Dr. Blum's research interests are vast and cross-cultural, involving identity culture, ethics, and morality, the use of language and identity, and learning and education.

As I was reading your CV and thinking about this, it occurred to me, you're really sort of a Renaissance person. And I was thinking about what you do, and I sort of came up with this term—I want to call you a Renaissance humanist. I then became concerned that "Renaissance humanist" was actually a term, so I searched for that and I learned this, here's a definition of a Renaissance humanist, "proponents or practitioners of humanism during the Renaissance believed that humans could be dramatically changed by education.”

SUSAN BLUM: Oh!

STEVEN ROBINOW: "The humanists of the Renaissance created schools to teach their ideas and wrote books all about education."

SUSAN BLUM: Well then I think it fits.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I think it fits. It's a fitting description, I thought. Very much so. So I'm going to refer to you as a Renaissance humanist.

SUSAN BLUM: Hey.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Dr. Blum has published [CHUCKLES] five monographs including her 2016 book entitled I Love Learning; I Hate School: An Anthropology of College. Her upcoming book, Schoolishness, has an estimated publication date of spring 2022. Again, today we're here to discuss her 2020 publication, an edited volume titled Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Welcome, Susan. Thank you so much for joining us on Teaching for Student Success.

SUSAN BLUM: Thank you so much, Steve, for that fun introduction. I'm very excited to keep talking to you.

STEVEN ROBINOW: [CHUCKLES] That's great. First, congratulations on your work and your passions. They really come through. And thank you for making the time for us today.

I'd like to start by asking about your motivations for writing this book.

SUSAN BLUM: As someone who always loved school, I—like so many faculty—had often found myself frustrated that students didn't seem to love the stuff I loved. I love reading hard books. I love sitting still by myself, or at least I did. Like most everybody, my attention is much less easily managed than it used to be. But I decided I really wanted to understand what was happening in college, why these students who worked so hard to get here often didn't get as much fulfillment from the classes as they did from the social life and from a lot of other activities. So that led to the book that you mentioned called I Love Learning; I Hate School.

And that's a title that a student uttered here. This student wanted to become a teacher because she, like me, loved learning, she just thought that somehow the way school is isn't working, but she thought she could make it better. So in these years, these—it's now been almost two decades since I started this research—I've been led to really interrogate the structures of schooling and the pedagogical practices that we have so completely taken for granted. That led me to this ungrading project that has struck a nerve in the country for sure. There are tens of thousands of educators who are questioning what we used to take for granted as kind of the central function of teachers. And once you question that, a lot of other things can also be questioned.

And if you make student learning the measure and you add a little dose of enjoyment in there, then using control, and punishment, and threats doesn't seem like it has a place anymore. And so there are a lot of us doing practices that kind of go under this big umbrella of ungrading. We do it in lots of different ways in lots of different subjects, including STEM. And we do it in high school and college. They do it in med school. It's an idea whose time has come, even though also there's resistance.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK, that's great. Thank you. Great introduction. The title of one of your books, I Love Learning; I Hate School, comes from a remark a student made to you. I find that interesting and wonderful that a student who has succeeded in the educational system, one in which they've spent most of their life, recognized that, hmm, I love learning, but I hate school.

SUSAN BLUM: They did not say it to me. They said it to one of my undergraduate research assistants, which is actually, I think, an important point, is that students will tell each other this honest version of their experience. They might not tell it to us because we have so much authority over them. So one of the things that has troubled me my entire life and my entire career is this idea that we are shaping students to be duplicitous in the sense that they have to perform as if they like school so that they can get the grades that will get them to the next level of what they want.

I have students who love the subject, they love the class, they do undergraduate research. It's not that they don't like school, but school is so stressful and it feels to them as if everything they do is being judged every moment of every day. That's a lot of pressure. The pressure that our students have experienced during their childhoods is almost unimaginable. They can't make a mistake. Everything has consequences. The high-achieving students have been declared an at-risk group for mental health because there is so much pressure and so much stress. They don't mind having fun, as long as they get a good grade out of it.

I'm going to speak more nationally. In some fields, in some schools, there's a mandatory curve, which means students are required to be in competition with one another, which sets up a truly terrible condition for learning. Many, many people have written about the—one author has called it the "malpractice" of grading on a curve. To me, it seems—and I'm going to be very blunt here—it seems to me immoral to bring students into an educational institution and then make some of them fail. That is not what we're promising and that is not what most of us are here for. It is not something that will help students flourish and learn well. It will help them cheat or sabotage each other.

Is that what we're training our future college graduates to do? I don't think so. We can't tell them, be honest, and be compassionate, and be generous, and then also, only a quarter of you are going to get A's in this class. That seems to me a contradiction and we need to grapple with that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So we're sort of walking all over this now. So let's get right to ungrading, let's talk about ungrading. Unlike many of the topics we have discussed on this podcast or will discuss, this proposal of ungrading is really posing a challenge to the entire educational system to reconsider how institutions operate regarding student motivation and assessment. At the levels of departments, courses, and individual faculty, this book and many of your related articles are really a call to arms for faculty to rebuild the foundations of assessment and evaluations, to upend the existing grading paradigm that's been part of the US educational system since at least since the 1930s, that it's been well-adopted, introduced maybe in 1898 and maybe even at Yale in the 1700s.

And replace it with one that, you argue, puts students and their intrinsic motivations about learning front and center in the classroom. So this argument begins with a discussion of the problems with the current and longstanding system of assessment, of grades and gradings. So could you please begin by laying out the argument against grades and against grading, and when possible, maybe you could refer to some studies or some data that exists about that.

SUSAN BLUM: Sure. There are many, many, many studies in educational psychology, for instance, looking at the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. These studies go back 60 years and they show consistently that a focus on extrinsic motivation, like grades, reduces and in some cases destroys intrinsic motivation. So if you give people a reward for something, that signals to them that they shouldn't like it in and of itself, that they need to get rewarded for it. That is what we've often done with schooling because we are measuring more and more and more things, students are getting the message that almost everything they do is like medicine. They have to do it.

I'll give you an example, and this has been shown at all different levels of education, but it's very clear. Ryan and Deci and others have talked a lot about this. If you take two groups of children and you ask them, do you like to draw? Some percentage will like to draw in each group. You let one group draw. The other group, the treatment group, you give rewards for their drawings. You say, oh, that's a good drawing. Here's a point, or here's a quarter, or here's a prize.

You come back months later and you reask the children, do you like drawing? And the group that just kept drawing—the control group—likes drawing about the same amount as they did before. The other group likes drawing much less. You have basically told them, obviously you can't just like drawing in and of itself, have to do it for rewards. And that kind of comparison has been done over, and over, and over again. It's been done with college students writing headlines for newspapers. It's done in a lot of different settings, in a lot of different subjects.

People like to do things well. They like to do things that they care about. There's a subset of this research called self-determination theory where, if students get to choose what they're working on, and they get to do it in their own way, and they feel pleased with the results, they are much more likely to do well and be happy and to learn robustly.

If students do things only for the extrinsic motivation—for the grade—they are much more likely to cut corners, to not care about it, to not remember, to not learn it very well, but to do whatever the minimum is to get the reward that they've been told they have to get. When we study humans, we know humans, like other mammals, are intensely curious. And some other classes are also curious, like birds are very curious. If you give people puzzles, they want to solve them. Not too hard and not too easy, but some medium amount of difficulty. Everybody likes to solve puzzles.

There are apps and there are games and people like to play these things, not because they're getting money for the jigsaw puzzle or they're getting money for "Dungeons and Dragons." People like challenges. So why is it they don't like challenges in school? Well, we know why. It's because they're being evaluated. So that's one set of problems—the motivation set.

There's another set which has to do with the complete inconsistency and arbitrariness of what is included in most of our grading systems. Some faculty measure only the final outcome. Sometimes we call it mastery-based grading, or standards-based grading, or outcomes-based grading. Some people average in everything all along the way. So if you learn 100% of it by the end, but you only learn 50% of it in the middle, you get a 75%, even if, by the end, you've got 100%.

Some people include attendance, so even if you learned 100% of it—whatever "it" is, and I'm assuming we can actually agree on what "it" is—but you were absent more than the maximum number of times, your grade will be lowered. Or some people take points off for tardiness of submission. Or some people take points off for failing to follow directions. And some people give extra points for participation, which advantages native speakers, and extroverts, and people who have learned how to speak up in a classroom setting.

There is really nothing consistent about what grades provide. So when we look at grades, we have a kind of false precision, even though there are numbers and you can crunch the numbers. You can do all kinds of things with the numbers. They aren't actually very meaningful. If you have a student who's got a 3.72 average and another student who has a 3.79 average, can you be sure that the second one is a better student? It might be that the first one lost a grandparent to COVID and was bereft and couldn't come to class for three weeks. And so they got docked for something. We don't know what these numbers mean.

So the way to know is to say in words what that means. And that's true for communicating beyond the course, and it's true for communicating within the course to the students as well. So there might be a student who's really enthusiastic and they had a really great idea, but their mechanics weren't so good. And another one might have great mechanics, probably because they had a very high-quality education going into the course, but maybe they didn't actually put themselves into it and they don't really have any ideas. They didn't draw connections. But because it'll kind of look more polished, they might do better than the first one.

So why don't we just tell those students in the first case, wow, this is fantastic. Let's clean it up so you can revise it. In the second case, we can say, this looks really great. Let's push a little harder. Let's really see what you're trying to say. Can you think of a connection? Or something. So those are some of the reasons. There are lots more reasons. But those are some.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Great, thank you. So in that description of the things that grading maybe impacts very negatively, let's focus on equity for a second. What does it do to equity?

SUSAN BLUM: I think people who really think about this know that sameness, and uniformity, and equality are not the same as equity. So if for instance you have two students, and one of them went to fancy high schools and learned all the mechanics of writing very well when they were young. And another came from a less advantaged background, it's possible that they didn't have the attention from a lot of teachers and it's possible that they didn't grow up speaking what is sometimes called—and we should interrogate this to standard American English—the first student is going to look better on paper almost all the time.

We have students from all different backgrounds. There are students who are shy. There are students who have severe social anxiety. There are students who are English language learners whose English, let's say, isn't quick on the draw. There are students who are traumatized even beyond what we all are right now from the pandemic. There are students who have care responsibilities. There are students who don't have the money for transportation. And so if we measure all of them by the same rubric, the ones with the fewest challenges are always going to be coming out on top. That doesn't mean they know the most. It doesn't mean they've learned the most. It means that they've had the fewest impediments.

There are occasional exceptions. Somebody can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do really, really well. But is it the case that we want to continue to perpetuate these inequalities that students begin with, because that's, in fact, what usually happens. It's much better, in my view, although it's not always easy or practical given teaching loads, but it's much better to help each student move toward goals that matter to them much more than some arbitrary uniform goal that we have picked out of the air in advance.

So I encourage you to get on your program somebody who works in universal design for learning so that they can talk a little bit about this. And it's not to say that there are no standards. Everybody recognizes that doctors need to learn something about physiology and that engineers need to really learn about material science. But if somebody needs a little extra time to do something new for them, when one of their classmates did an internship this past summer, that shouldn't disadvantage the person who needs a little more time.

It's also the case that a lot of what we think of as science is not quite as clear-cut as people often make it out to be, at least the interesting part of it. Yes, of course, you have to know how to do calculations and you need to understand about chemical reactions, but what are you going to do with that? What questions are you going to ask? How are you going to actually figure out what formula you need to use when you see a real-world problem, not just how are you going to use the algorithm to complete the problem that somebody submits to you? And we need people who can do that kind of thing, but it's harder to assess in a mechanical kind of way.

I'm delighted that you had Carl Weiman on because he understands a lot that science is not just a bunch of recipes. Equity is really involved in allowing a lot of different kinds of people to do a lot of different kinds of work at different speeds and in different ways, because our society needs them all. And so the more we reject people's differences and only celebrate one particular kind of person and thinking, the more impoverished it is for us as a society, and the more harm it does to those individuals who are not seen as good enough by some arbitrary measure.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And great harm. People leave the institution. It impacts their lives forever. So ungrading is one proposal for fixing a broken system or a misaligned system, all within a structure—an infrastructure that, currently anyway, still demands final reporting of some sort.

If I understand the proposal for ungrading, it could and does take many forms, from baby steps like decreasing high-stakes tests and providing more assessment opportunities throughout a course, or a baby step could involve changing the language one uses with students around issues of assessment and grading. This book lays out five models, five implementations, and three reflections about ungrading the ungrading movement. Perhaps you could talk about how you have implemented ungrading in your courses, please, if you could describe the sorts of courses you use this in and enrollment numbers, things like that. Thank you.

SUSAN BLUM: Ungrading is kind of an umbrella, as I said earlier, and there are a lot of different versions of it. The one that people find the most comfortable, I think, is labor-based grading and contract grading because they're quantitative. A student contracts at the beginning and says, I will do this much and that will earn me this grade. It takes away the pressure and the surprise, because students know what they're in for. In my own courses, I teach a variety of courses in linguistic anthropology, in childhood and education, in food and culture, usually between 15 and 30-some students per course. So they're not usually five, but they're also not 50, or 100, or 200 students.

I basically never talk about grades except at the beginning I tell people, we are practicing ungrading. I'm happy to talk to you about it if you want. Midsemester, I have portfolio conferences with every student, very brief conferences preceded by their filling out a reflection on what they have learned, and how they feel about it, and what they think will stick, and what's important, and what the evidence is, and then they propose a grade based on the portfolio of work that they've amassed. They tell me about it and I can either accept or modify the grade that they suggest. And we do that midsemester and then we do it semester final.

I used to be a very different kind of teacher. I used to be a much more conventional teacher with points, and rubrics, and tests, and quizzes, and all kinds of things. At one point, I had a final exam and I remember I put together a review sheet and then the students were working together on the review sheet, and then we had a review session, and I realized—this is what I care about is the review. I don't care if they remember this word or anything, but it's the review that's so important. These portfolio conferences build in review and reflection and what people call metacognition, but without the threat of a test. It's just, let's look where we started. Let's look how far we've come.

I have a lot of reflection built in all along the way, so in every class, pretty much, I have students begin by writing what they are there for, what they want to get out of the course, what they know about the subject. A lot of people don't know anything about the subject when they begin. For instance, I'm teaching Linguistic Anthropology right now. Most people don't even have a clue what that is. So midsemester, they go back and they look and they say, wow! I didn't know this, and I didn't know this, and now I know this. And then we do it again at the end.

The difference between the middle and the end is also usually quite powerful. I ask them to go back and reread some of their writing, sometimes twice. And they say, wow, I should have done x and I should have included y, which basically shows that they've learned it. Sometimes I do quizzes. I did a midsemester check-in the other day in one of my classes. And I asked them how they are, and I asked them how they feel about the upcoming semester, I asked them if they have a winter coat and I was happy to hear that they all did because winter is coming.

Then I also included some things to gauge the knowledge of what's coming up, to see what they know about that. And then a few review questions, like, what is indexicality? It was an anonymous Google form. Just to review, because not every term has to be mastered using flashcards. We use the term, we talked about the term, but this is one that's going to be relevant going forward, I wanted to remind them of that, I wanted to see for myself do we need to review it again.

So it's not that anything goes and it's all just soft fluff, but we can do it in a nonthreatening, nonstressful way. We can do it where we all learn together and it's fun. When I have students doing assignments, they always include a reflection: What was hard? What was easy? What did you learn? What do you think people should know about this? Those are really interesting. People sometimes talk about them as cover letters or artist statements. Rissa Sorensen-Unruh in our book, who teaches Organic Chemistry, has her students submit questions for re-evaluation, but they have to explain how they came to their calculation. And that's where she actually learns what they're thinking, not did they get seven instead of six, but how are they thinking about what they were supposed to be doing?

So that's where we can actually help our students learn. And if you believe, as all of us in this movement do, that our task is to help all students, then we have to really have open and honest conversations with them.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So in talking about your midsemester discussions with your students, how often does their assessment of their work match your assessment of their work? Are they harder on themselves than you are?

SUSAN BLUM: There is a range. Some are harder, some are easier. Well, I don't have any faith that there is an objective meaning of something like an A or a B, so I don't actually know what those numbers mean and I would be much happier without them.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Oh, I don't mean for grades. I don't mean grading. I mean, just their wording, their language that they use of their evaluation, how does it match your language that you would use for their strengths and weaknesses in their work to that point? I don't mean the grading at all.

SUSAN BLUM: Oh, good. Most of them speak about their strengths and I would also speak about their strengths. I've had students, certainly in the last 18 months, who have had a lot of health problems and they've had a lot of family distractions, let's say.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Sure.

SUSAN BLUM: I'm talking about a largely but not 100% advantaged group. So sometimes they didn't do work on time. Sometimes they didn't really get something for a while, but if they get it by the end and they're honest about that, then I absolutely agree with their assessment. They don't really have a reason to game the system.

STEVEN ROBINOW: No, it's not that. It's not that they're gaming anything. It's just their perspective, their view. You do this all the time. You have a measure against which—the other students. You've been doing this for years, you've taught these courses, and so year after year you get a feel for what different aspects of the work look like.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: The mechanical versus the intellectual for example, right there. And so you know what really strong work looks like.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: You know what work that's—maybe they're not there yet, they haven't quite gotten it, whatever's going on in their lives, whatever. You've seen the spectrum. They haven't seen the spectrum. They've only seen their own work. So they're, for the most part, except you do do probably some peer work so they start to see, get some comparisons. I see, OK. So you're nodding your head there. No one can see that.

SUSAN BLUM: Right, I am nodding my head really [LAUGHS]. I think it's important for them to see each other's work. They don't have to. I do ask students to post their work in a Google folder and they workshop it. We do this in class time. So they read each other's projects, sometimes we workshop them so they can improve them and revise them. Sometimes we do it—depending on the size of the project—we talk about them.

That's very scary at first. That's true for academics, that's true for grad students. Having anybody see your work before it gets the A on it is really frightening. But I have taught some writing classes and I've written quite a lot. It's really important for people to see drafts and it's really important for people to see imperfections. One of the things that my students really struggle with is perfectionism. So if I can help them be OK with showing someone something imperfect, then there's room for feedback. Students can redo things any time they want in my class, because it's all about the learning. And sometimes they care enough and sometimes they don't care enough.

Our students are very busy. Getting things done and off the list is often the primary motivation, which is something we need to think about in a systemic kind of way too. But, no, they have seen each other's work in my class. That's important. Although, if you're writing something very personal, you can feel free just to send it to me so nobody else has to see it.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I see, so they start to see the spectrum of work that's done so then they can start to understand where their work—where they feel their work fits in among that spectrum.

SUSAN BLUM: Right.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Which gives them some perspective on their work, on the quality of their product.

SUSAN BLUM: Exactly.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Yeah, OK. Very cool. Now your students are taking other classes. I suspect many of their other classes are more traditional in terms of assessment. So they're getting grades, and they're getting points, and they're playing that game. So what do you say to students who push back? Because some students must come in your class and it must make them uncomfortable. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't.

SUSAN BLUM: I probably have one student a year or maybe two who push back. Certainly less in the pandemic, also less as I've gotten better at explaining what's happening. But they're usually quite grateful for the lack of stress that this class allows them. I am quite aware that sometimes, because the stakes in my class are lower than the stakes in other classes, sometimes they put more time into the Organic Chemistry because they're going to med school. If they still are learning about linguistic anthropology then, OK. It used to really hurt my feelings because I want to be the most important just like all of us. But when I really try to understand the whole picture, I can see that this is the reality of their life. They don't have to pretend that my class is the most important thing. I really don't want them to be pretending anything. It's OK.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. I suspect you have students come back to you years later who maybe don't appreciate what they've gone through in your course, and then come back and comment to you about that experience.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah. Also students often in their final reflections say, this is the first time I learned for myself and not for the grade. Semester after semester I have many, many, many students say that in exactly those words.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Wow.

SUSAN BLUM: Learning for myself instead of for the grade.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Very powerful. That must make you feel great.

SUSAN BLUM: It does, Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: It helps you reinforce what you're doing and you know you're going down a great road. Let's talk about the supports faculty need to go down this road of ungrading and to start to adopt some of the practices.

SUSAN BLUM: For me, frankly, Twitter has been a real source of support because there's a whole community there. There are now ungrading groups put together by David Buck and others. There are podcasts about ungrading. There are whole communities, K through 12 as well as higher ed, who write about ungrading in various forms. So they are not alone at all.

I recognize the precarity of many people in higher ed—grad students, adjuncts, untenured faculty, international students, LGBTQ students, people of color. There are a lot of reasons why people might be reluctant to try it. I encourage people to find a buddy in their institution that they can think things through with. Even after all these years I sometimes struggle, like what do I do about this student who did x? It can be helpful for someone who knows that particular setting to think it through with people. I also highly encourage people to find somebody who's got a more secure position to help champion them, to protect them if it comes to that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So what we'll do on our website is if you can share some of those resources with me—Twitter and other groups—I'll put them on our website so people can easily find resources that might help them enter the world of ungrading.

So some people play the short game, others are in things for the long game. I'm sort of a short-gain person, although I'm not a golfer. The point of this podcast, for instance, is to help students and faculty now. I'm really not interested in what goes on in a decade, because I know if we don't do it now, what happens in a decade is not so good. Where are you on this continuum? What do you think is possible and practical within ungrading in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years?

SUSAN BLUM: I'm not in the futurology field, so I don't know. But I have been shocked at how positive the reception has been to our ungrading book. As of now, we've sold almost 10,000 copies, which for a book like this is kind of a lot. All these reading groups—every time I turn around there's somebody I haven't heard of who's giving another talk about ungrading. So it's spreading quickly. I don't know what that means exactly. I am actually interested in the long game more than in the short game, and I don't play golf either, so I didn't even know that was a golf reference, but, um, anyway.

STEVEN ROBINOW: [CHUCKLING]

SUSAN BLUM: I think that systematic change has to start with people trying. There's a lot of concern about evidence and there's concern about proof that people are still learning even without grades. There are a number of people trying to do research on that right now, trying to come up with the kind of evidence that will be convincing and persuasive. I think students who are experiencing ungrading like it. I don't exactly know how much power students have, but they should have some, there are a lot of things happening. There's something called the Mastery Transcript Consortium that is trying to change the way grades are reported in high school, and they're working with college admissions departments so that they can read these transcripts.

The Washington Post just did a piece on that. There are a lot of things happening all over the place, at all different levels, in all different institutions. A lot of them are at mainstream, large, state universities and community colleges, where most of our students are educated. I don't know what's happening, but I think it's going to be very hard to maintain the claim that grading is necessary if we can keep showing that it isn't necessary and that it's harmful. But there are a lot of things that are intertwined. Financial aid, athletic eligibility, med school applications and internships. A lot of things depend on GPAs, but they don't have to. They have relied on us to do their work for them. We don't have to keep doing it.

STEVEN ROBINOW: How do most administrators react to discussions about ungrading, although administrators are not a monolith and I know that.

SUSAN BLUM: I'm not sure yet. I know that there have been some at my talks this year. Some have been deans, some have been in charge of teaching centers, some have been vice provosts. They have a lot of constituencies and they have a lot of different kinds of responsibilities that they have to juggle, so they can't by fiat one day say, OK, presto, nobody's grading anymore. But I think as more and more faculty are talking about it, they are being led to at least learn more about it.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So like many others, they're becoming aware of it and they're curious and learning about it, as many people are.

I'd like to spend the rest of our time today talking about you, your students, your motivation, and perhaps a few interesting stories. So about your teaching, how has your work on ungrading impacted how you view and interact with the world outside of academia?

SUSAN BLUM: That's a fascinating question.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Thank you.

SUSAN BLUM: [CHUCKLES] Within academia, it has made—it's given me kind of a new lease on life in my classroom, and that has made me much more excited about the possibilities of higher ed. It's also made me very frustrated with the dominance of the grade and test conversation outside academia. And I can see evidence every day, everywhere about how well people learn without grades. It just seems so clear that we don't need this part of the system.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So what about if you're out to dinner with friends and you look around you, how does that ungrading lens impact your interactions, or does it?

SUSAN BLUM: It has changed me for sure. It's made me much less judgmental about the ways people do things. I probably bring with me maybe a little bit more of a compassionate outlook. I used to be part of these conversations, and this is academic again, where people would complain. You know, kids these days! And the students don't read.

STEVEN ROBINOW: [LAUGHS]

SUSAN BLUM: I really can't stand that kind of discourse. But there's a lot of similar discourse that isn't school-related where people are judged for one thing or another. And I don't like any of that. As I've gotten deeper and deeper into this, I now try to bite my tongue a little bit and not preach to people who haven't requested it, which is a little bit hard.

In the woods, I don't think about ungrading, I am very happy to just be in the woods. The other thing is, I don't bring with me the dread of grading, so that's a good thing.

STEVEN ROBINOW: The dread of grading, that's a good title. I think we have time for one final question. I wonder if you could talk about your sweetest or most poignant moment teaching.

SUSAN BLUM: I treat my classes kind of like dinner parties and when students leave every day, they thank me. It's like I'm the host and they're coming to dinner, and that happens like every class. I love that. I just think that's great.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So students spontaneously on the way out say thank you?

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Wow.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's a normal thing for you.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah, now. Mm-hmm.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Boy, how many faculty out there would like that? Even just to have one student come up and say, hey, thanks, I really enjoyed our time together today.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah, well, I like it and they like it. All is right with the world when we are happy to be together.

STEVEN ROBINOW: It's great and obviously they're walking out in a very good mood and they want to let you know that. That's a wonderful moment of sharing and humanity on your students' part to share with you.

SUSAN BLUM: Yeah, well, we are human together. I have a lot of privilege to not be afraid of being vulnerable in the classroom. I'm quite aware that not everybody has all that security and all that privilege. I do try to be honest, and open, and vulnerable, and students appreciate that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Well, on that note, Susan, I'd like to thank you so much for your time that you've spent with me today. I look forward to your future work on ungrading. In addition to this podcast, our website will provide a link to Dr. Blum's website where you can learn more about Susan and if you're interested in purchasing her book, there will be links for that. We'll also have other links to ungrading that will be helpful to people.

Susan, thank you again for your time. This has really been a fascinating discussion. I really enjoyed our time together. Thank you.

SUSAN BLUM: Thank you so much, Steve. And I wish you well in your podcasting adventure and I wish all of your listeners well as they think about how to make their teaching work better for them and their students.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I encourage everybody to pick up a copy of your book, and I'll also say that Ungrading is a fairly concise book, 227 pages of text. And the nice thing is you can read it in chapters. Each chapter is independent, each chapter is its own story. It's actually nice. It's like reading a book of short stories almost. For more information about Susan Blum, her research, and her favorite books and papers, please go to our website TeachingForStudentSuccess.org.

Thank you for spending time with us today. I hope you have found this discussion interesting and helpful. Please share our podcast and website with your friends. Those of us at Teaching for Student Success would love to get your feedback. Please contact us through our website at TeachingForStudentSuccess.org. Teaching for Student Success is a production of Teaching for Student Success Media.

Let's end this podcast as I always do with some music by JuliusH. Some of Julius's music can be found on Pixabay.

[EASY LISTENING MUSIC]