– Hi everyone, I’m Niya Bond. I am the Faculty Developer here at OneHE and I’m thrilled to be talking with Laura Gibbs today and sharing out this chat with you all on the intersection of ungrading and The Meaningful Writing Project. Laura, thanks so much for being here with us today.

– Thank you. This is great opportunity.

– I’m hoping you can tell our community a little bit about yourself before we start talking about these two topics.

– Well, I recently retired, actually, from the University of Oklahoma where I taught online courses for over 20 years. So, I was teaching online long before the pandemic. I love teaching online and I taught writing classes in the humanities and so, I stopped putting grades on student papers back in 2002, so I’m a long-time ungrader and then University of Oklahoma participated in The Meaningful Writing Project so that’s what I think we’re gonna be talking about today.

– All right, perfect. So for any of our community members who aren’t familiar with that project or the work of ungrading, can you provide us with a little history and background?

– Sure. Ungrading means a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts. For me, ungrading meant a system that I called all feedback, no grades. So, my students got lots of feedback from me on their writing, they got feedback from other students in the class, all focused on revision, and there was a grade at the end of the semester that the students receive based on their level of participation in the course. So that’s also sometimes known as contract grading. Got a chapter about my ungrading work in a wonderful book edited by Susan Bloom called “Ungrading.” And my chapter, along with other chapters in the book, are available online for people to read.

So if people go to lauragibbs.net, you’ll be able to find my ungrading chapter there. And I have lots of details about how specifically it worked in my classes. And then what happened, which was really exciting, is the University of Oklahoma, along with two other schools, participated in something called The Meaningful Writing Project. Now this is a book that came out called “The Meaningful Writing Project.” What they did, which is something I think we should all be doing, they asked students what their most meaningful writing had been in college. So, these were graduating seniors in a large public university, that’s my school, a small liberal arts school, and then smaller, also private school, that was Catholic affiliated.

So they had three very different kinds of schools and they asked the students in these three schools what their most meaningful writing experience was. And then they looked at what the students said in response to those open-ended questions. And it is just the most inspiring book ever because, except for… I wanna say maybe 2 or 3% of the students who said they had no meaningful writing experience in college, which was kind of scary, kind of sad, but it’s a smaller number than I think they expected, everyone else had a meaningful writing experience that they wanted to talk about. And the diversity of these meaningful writing experiences, it’s just wonderful. They were courses in every department you can imagine, taking all kinds of shapes and forms, taught by all kinds of faculty, courses for majors that were required, gen-ed courses like mine, electives that were not required, courses taught by traditional tenure-track faculty, courses taught by adjuncts like me. It was just this wonderful portrait of meaningful writing that emerged in the student’s own words.

The reason I wanted to talk about ungrading and meaningful writing together is because ungrading is an unthing, right? You get rid of the grades. Well then, what do you do? Right? And for me, ungrading is about creating a space where meaningful writing can happen. And it was just so affirming for my students to say that my class was the most meaningful writing experience they’d had in college. And that’s how I found out about that project. They followed up with students doing interviews, and then they followed up with faculty, also interviewing us, and then setting the students’ comments and the faculty comments side by side and just trying to get a sense of how does this look from the student point of view? How does it look from the faculty point of view? How do you design a class so that the students can walk away saying, “This was meaningful writing to me.”

– That’s amazing. And so I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that intersection and how taking away the grade makes space for those meaningful writing moments.

– Right. Grading, you know… I’ll just say a little bit about my take on that. The perils of grading. You know, grading is really good at one thing, and it’s a thing that has nothing to do with learning in the classroom. It’s this administrative need to rate and rank students. We’re never gonna get universities, I’m afraid, to stop doing that. But, in the classroom, grades are trying to fill functions that they don’t fulfill very well. We try to use grades for assessment. And, I think we all know that a letter or a number at the end of a semester’s worth of learning doesn’t really convey to anybody exactly what a student learned. We try to use grades as feedback.

Well, grades are terrible feedback because it’s this very limited vocabulary, A, B, C, D, F, whatever. Then it also comes at the end of the learning process. Whereas feedback you need to have along the way, not at the end when it’s too late to actually apply it and use it. We also use grades as motivation. Grades are a terrible motivator because they aren’t connected to anything real. You end up with the grade, but what have you really got? You’ve got nothing, even though that’s the thing you work for, the thing that motivated you. And so, since grades aren’t working very well as assessment or as feedback or as motivation, you really need to get rid of them to create the space for something meaningful to happen.

And in “The Meaningful Writing Project” book, what they do is look at the idea of motivation for writing. They don’t specifically talk about the hazards of grades and grading. And I think that’s because most faculty grade. But for me, the way I was able to create that space for highly-motivated, highly-engaged, learning-rich meaningful writing was indeed by just getting grades off the table so students were then looking for something else to motivate them, looking for something else to reflect on their learning and to connect with me and with other students in the class.

– Wonderful. And you mentioned how feedback was kind of the way that you enhanced those meaningful moments in your teaching and learning environments. And I’m hoping you can talk just a little bit about the way that you use feedback or see its place and value in the classroom.

– Well, in a writing context, in writing classes, feedback is essential, right? Because the best writing happens during the revision process. That’s just the nature of writing. But what happens in a grade-based situation is students tend to see revision as a kind of like punishment. It’s like, somehow I failed in some way, and if the teacher gives you an opportunity to revise for a better grade, it’s kind of like

. Raw, right? Something that you should have avoided if you could have. Whereas when you get grades off the table and everyone is getting feedback and everyone is revising, you realize that’s what the real writing process is about. So in my classes, everybody revised, everybody got feedback and you just iterated like that all the way to the end of the semester. We spent a few weeks at the beginning of the semester with the students, learning how to give feedback, because they hadn’t necessarily received very good feedback from instructors in the past. And the kind of feedback that peers give to each other is gonna be different from instructor feedback anyway.

So we had something I called feedback boot camp, and my materials are online if people wanna hijack any of that for their own purposes. And the students were so excited to learn about feedback, to be honest. Many of my students’ gen-ed courses, they weren’t honestly that interested in learning how to write because writing skills, they didn’t necessarily see as something of immediate value to them. But feedback skills? Oh yeah. Because pretty much all my students worked and feedback is an enormously important part of how workplaces work because they’re not relying on grades in the workplace, right? They’re relying on feedback.

And funnily enough, one of the most valuable sources for me in learning how to improve my own feedback, was the Harvard Business Review because they have all kinds of great articles in there about using feedback in the workplace. I became very interested in that and my students did too, because either being supervised or themselves being supervisors, understanding more about how to both give and receive feedback was a super valuable skill for them.

– Wonderful. I’m also an English professor and English major, and that’s one of my favorite things when you can talk about the value of skilled communication and using all the tools and strategies we learn about writing in our lived experiences like in the workplace and even our personal lives and how it goes beyond the classroom.

– Right, and that’s why I love teaching online because I taught fully asynchronous online courses, no Zoom, I’m not very good at Zoom, where, both the products that the students were creating were written, they had blogs and they had websites, and then we did our feedback process in writing too. And, of course, there’s value in learning how to do face-to-face oral feedback as well. And that goes back to the diversity that I mentioned with regard to The Meaningful Writing Project. You know, there’s so much that students can learn, so much that students need to learn. And so they need a variety of different kinds of course designs in their classes. And I was glad that I had a course design where they could learn how to write, learn how to revise, learn how to provide written feedback.

And in some kind of ideal world, they’d also be taking another course where they’d be doing all kinds of oral face-to-face feedback and learning about what transfers and what doesn’t. To me, that’s the ideal world. A big variety of students taking a big variety of classes and grades really kill that variety, right? There’s nothing varied about grades. They’re all about making things the same. I think we need to be making things different.

– It sounds like you’ve had so many wonderful positive experiences with this approach in the classroom. And for our educators who might be considering implementing something like this, but fear resistance from students and learners, do you have any tips for how to kind of go in and make things enthusiastic?

– Well, if I had any negative experiences to report, I would report them, I promise. Amazingly enough, from when I first started doing the ungrading all the way through those two decades of teaching like that, I didn’t get anything negative back from the students. And, I think that’s because I conceived of the ungrading as a way to create a space for them of autonomy and engagement, offering them lots of choices and really pulling back, so that I trusted in the choices that they made. And I would say, to me, that’s the fundamental thing is you need to trust your students for this to work and you will be so happy if you do.

And every time that I ceded more control to students and just sort of took that leap and said, “Okay, I’m gonna let go of trying to control this and I’m gonna trust the students to figure out the best way to do this,” the students never let me down. So, that is my message to everybody is that if your fear is that that things won’t go perfectly, letting go of perfectionism is always a good thing to do. And really, the more you trust your students, the more that inspires them to live up to that trust.

– Well, you’ve provided us with so much interesting information to consider and to take and try in our own educational environments. We always like to leave the last word to our experts. So I’m wondering if you have a final tip, thought, or interesting bit of information that you’d like to share with the community.

– Well, I have some good news, which is there’s going to be a follow-up volume to “The Meaningful Writing Project” book. So I highly recommend everyone read the book, which is about the study itself. The authors are now preparing a book that takes those ideas and explains them in ways that you can apply more directly in your classroom. So rather than results of research, it’s more implications for teaching. And that book is, I believe, under contract with West Virginia University Press, which also published Susan Bloom’s “Ungrading” book. So keep an eye out for that book coming out. Even though I’m retired, I’m gonna be really excited when that book comes out because I really wanna read it.

– Perfect. And I’d love to remind our community one more time of your website, ’cause I know you have awesome resources and ideas to share there. Did you say it was lauragibbs.net?

– Lauragibbs.net and there’s a whole list of links down the left hand side that I try to keep up to date. But if you’re looking for something that I mention, contact me by email. I’m retired, I’m lonely, send me emails and I’ll be glad to, you know, brainstorm about creative writing projects, about ungrading. It’s just my pleasure to help people figure out which way they wanna go.

– Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here with us today. We really appreciate it.

– Thank you.