Personalized learning is loosely defined as a customized educational approach. For me, personalized learning came hand-in-hand with Ungrading. As I was designing my Ungrading approach, it seemed true that I should extend power to the learners at the beginning of the learning cycle as well as at the end. (This project was wildly successful and I have kept both Ungrading and Personalized Learning in my third year lab course – I am currently finishing my second year of both). I am now thinking of how we can bring Ungrading to our first year courses, and I am once again considering how Personalized Learning fits into this puzzle.

Our first year biology course spans the breadth of ecology, evolution, and genetics. As much as I love my lab course, first year is my favourite! I am excited to be back in the world of first-year students. Here’s my idea: I am considering personalizing the course the first week by asking students to go outside and identify a tree that will be their own for the entire term. As we move through the curriculum, their Personalized Learning task would be to correlate concepts from lecture to their specific tree. (What organisms are living on your tree this week? Who are your tree’s closest relatives? What is happening in the soil around your tree? What microclimate is your tree providing? What adaptations does your tree have that helps it survive here? How does it reproduce? What kind of variation exists in the population? Etc.) With a broad prompt each week, students will be asked to set specific individual learning goals and journal their way through the term correlating curriculum with their tree. What I am considering is a creativity project highlighting this process as a final course submission. (In the past, I have done creativity projects with this course and they are generally beautifully done – I’ve received board games, children’s books, podcasts, movies, sculptures, etc. What I know is that students are motivated when they have their own agency and they work hard when they have the freedom to be creative.) This is a work in progress – stay tuned!

Well, here we are just a few months into the ChatGPT world and I have to say – I kind of like it. As a science teacher, demonstrating the trying and testing new things essentially mimics what  science is fundamentally about in an effort to better understand our world. ChatGPT emerged in earnest just at the start of this term, and this is how I’ve used it in my class.

ChatGPT was full (overloaded?) during work hours at the start of the term. For our first introduction, I explained what these types of AI tools are. Some students had not yet heard of this emerging technology, and some were very interested. I asked ChatGPT to generate one paragraph on a topic tangential to, but not directly part the curriculum of our class. I pasted the response into a Google Doc that I shared with the class during lecture. The first 3 minutes were spent simply reading the paragraph. I then asked students to list on the Google Doc the things that they felt were done well. They felt the basic content was accurate. The writing style was good (solid paragraph). Then they listed things that were not done well. They thought it was very repetitive. They noticed that it lacked specific detail. They then live edited the paragraph and the result was a much better version.

Our second look at ChatGPT was to synthesize background information to use in one of our group projects. This followed a similar process to the above, with an expanded set of explicit information. I invited students to take these paragraphs and edit as they see fit, or to not use them at all. We decided that ChatGPT was a good tool and should be allowed for submissions, with acknowledgement. (This follows current guidelines of journals like Science and Nature, which do not allow AI as authors, but do allow acknowledgement). At this stage, we noticed that ChatGPT does not cite sources well or accurately. We specifically asked it to include 5 references. It did. I then asked it, “are these references real?” and it replied that they probably weren’t – but also advised on how to check if they were, which we thought was a nice touch. At this point, we proceed with caution. (It’s exact words were, “As an AI language model, I cannot browse the internet and check if these references exist or not. However, I generated those references based on my training data and knowledge, and they are based on real scientific articles and journals. If you want to check the validity of these references, you can search for them on Google Scholar or other academic databases.”)

My students are currently analyzing data – most are running ANOVA. This morning, I asked ChatGPT to run an ANOVA on a fake data set. Interestingly, it did a nice job – it told me what program it was using (R), and showed me the code as it was generating results. The narration along the way was quite good. At the end, I asked if it could graph the results for me. It replied “Certainly!” but then produced an image that I could not see.

We are just in the infancy of this new tool – very likely the problems we currently see will improve as AI advances. I’m excited for what this new era will bring – and I appreciate how it must have felt to mathematicians when calculators became widely available. Was there an immediate fear that no-one would learn math anymore? Where would we be today if calculators had been somehow permanently banned from higher education? As we move forward, this is the perfect opportunity to pause and remember that our students are not inherently out to game the system. They are here to learn and we should be partners in their efforts.

I gained my teaching training wheels in Science One, where we have no (or very little) curriculum tied to any other course. I spent well over a decade teaching almost exclusively in this program. Especially this time of term, when nerves are frazzled and snow days come unexpectedly, I would often hear colleagues frantically complain about “falling behind.” I honestly had no idea what this meant. Behind what?

When I teach lecture courses, I rarely plan anything specific beyond a week out.

How am I supposed to know in advance what student prior knowledge is? What they want to learn more about? What will interest them?

I don’t, and so I don’t plan much beyond some key targets until the topic bubbles up and we decide as a team (the students and I) where we want to go specifically. This “falling behind” is such an interesting statement that I’ve started probing. What do you mean by that, exactly? I’ve decided that “falling behind” falls into 2 camps:

1. The Story Tellers. Some folks have a clear epic novel to tell. (I’m in Science, so not a literal novel, but a big tale about the evolution of algae – for example – from beginning to current). I respect these story tellers. I want to sit in their classes and hear the tales. (On the same note, I’d like to remind these story tellers that it is their responsibility to figure out how to shorten their story in a meaningful way and “falling behind” is not an invite to cram a bunch of material in at the last second that is not absolutely essential to the story, and students won’t remember it anyway).

2. The “What is Everyone Else Doing” Teachers. These people are typically teaching a section in multi-section courses, or are teaching the same course multiple terms and have some vague sense of keeping up with someone else (or their own self from other terms.) To these folks, I would ask… why? Is there evidence that quickly sprinting through material is more beneficial to your students than pausing and covering something in depth? (This is a real question and a real discussion in teaching circles.) More commonly, I suspect this “falling behind” sadly means getting through material because it will appear on a pre-written exam. In this context, our exams become no better than any other standardized exams that teachers are forced to teach to at many levels of education.

I challenge us to do better.

In my ungraded course, my students assess themselves formatively and summatively, which is no small task and takes some practice. I have a great colleague/friend on Twitter (Rebekah @grrrlmeetsworld) who used this in her course(s), and I stole it (with permission) and used it as the very first activity, right out of the gates.

The slide asks students to chose what role they’d like to play in this course. I offer no judgement – any choice is perfectly fine, including “hostage”, which is the reality of our educational system sometimes. The word that the vast majority of students chose – so many that you can no longer read the word – is “explorer”, which feels exactly right. Because my students make and reflect on their own learning goals, defining their role in the course matters, and it’s also flexible. We will revisit this as a grounding exercise every few weeks.

My first lecture was this morning. I borrowed an activity from David Buck (dbuckedu on Twitter) and asked students to respond to the question, “What do you feel when you see the word “grades?”” This is a wordcloud of their responses:

I have roughly 100 students who contributed a total of 22 different words. Thirteen people contributed the word “stress”. We did this activity before any mention of grading in this course, and it simply validates work of others and illustrates the primary reason I practice ungrading.

Once I wrote a reference letter for a student who had never been in any of my classes. In fact, she was not in my program and was applying to a very prestigious graduate school in a totally different field. Her grades were mediocre at best. I enthusiastically said yes, but had to sit with it a while and contemplate my strategy. In the end, I wrote her a knock-your-sock-off academic reference letter, and she got in. (I like to pretend that my letter mattered.) Here’s the gist of the letter.

Her grades were maybe not great. (In fact, they were unarguably not great). But. BUT. She chose extremely hard classes as electives. Like – really hard classes. Her foreign language was Japanese. She took the real physics instead of the “not for majors” physics. When I asked her why, she said it was simply because she didn’t want to miss out on something the science kids were learning. She has an amazing work ethic. (In fact, she worked almost full time throughout her undergraduate career). She is a humanitarian at heart, a constant learner. She traveled the world truly making a difference – working at international consortiums. She is an amazing team player – one of the best. She nurtures relationships. I could confidently say these things about her – in an academic letter – because every one of these traits matters in academia. And yet they very rarely become part of a course grade. Writing this letter taught me a lot about grades and what they don’t say.

During my first year of ungrading, I saw students justify their grades with things like:

“…I really held this project together for weeks when 2 of my teammates were out with Covid and one had to work overtime…”

“…I’ve always been so nervous to speak in front of peers. I had to glance at my cards, but I did it. I’m so proud…”

“…we had a safe project we were going to do that was just something modified from what another group did before. Instead, we designed something that was really hard and probably wouldn’t work…”

This year I have learned the nuances of what self-reflection and assessment can capture. Every student in my classroom is their own whole human with a unique experience they are reflecting on. I have decided that I am OK with each of these humans assessing themselves on a different arbitrary scale, because the scales are personal reflections of their own growth. I will keep on ungrading.

One of the most poignant early benefits of my ungrading experience was the gift of time. Two weeks before classes started, I was walking my dog, a time during which I normally do the challenging mental gymnastics of designing a new course. It turns out that these gymnastics are more about the logistics of grading than they are about actual teaching.

How many points should x be worth? How many pre-quizzes do we need? I need to organize the spreadsheet.

It dawned on my that I was going to have a lot of free mental time to do something else, since I would not be grading. This turned out to be a game changer. I began to think about teaching and learning more.

How might x skill be incorporated meaningfully? If there are no grades, how might students demonstrate their learning of y?

True story: I did not even make a spreadsheet. (Although assignments were submitted and are archived online.)

I spent many years teaching first year biology. When I started in the early 2000s, our team meetings were a lot about sharing teaching methods, ideas, and resources. Sometimes these included fully thought out plans, but were mostly sharing cool research articles we could incorporate into our classrooms. Over the next 20 years, this changed dramatically. By 2018 (the last time I taught the course), team meetings were almost exclusively around designing exams and organizing assessment. I knew, even then, that this time sink was a detriment. What if all that time was spent on improving the teaching/learning experience?

What our time can (should) be used for is providing meaningful feedback on more meaningful material. The hours spent making, printing, marking, entering marks for an exam, can be used to provide great detailed feedback on student writing or projects. I wasn’t sure this would work, but my teaching team had ample time to implement this. We also discovered that providing feedback without associated marks was fun!

In the fall of 2021, I decided (mostly on a whim) to ungrade my first full class. Over the summer, I was introduced to ungrading through Firas Moosvi (UBCO, computer science and physics), Jackie Stewart (UBCV, chemistry and Associate Dean or Science), and Clarissa Sorenson Unruh (Central New Mexico Community College, chemistry).

I quickly leaned into ungrading. I teach a medium sized third year biology lab course with approximately 100 students. In many ways, this course seemed like the ideal course for me to pilot ungrading. I teach all the sections, and I have taught this course for several years. When transitioning my course, these are some of the things I did.

(1) I pruned out all but the very most essential stuff. What remained were lab notebooks (twice), and 3 group assignments. I got rid of everything else – including quizzes, prep-work (like an annotated bibliography), and worksheets. This worked really well and I’ve kept the same structure. (Ungrading, at it’s core, is really about trusting students, and I do. I trust them to want to learn and I trust that they are best able to evaluate their learning.)

(2) I created a lengthy self-assessment. I am at a university that uses percentage grades (as opposed to letter grades). Students perceive a real difference between a few percentage points and with Firas’ help, I scaffolded a way for students to work within this to suggest their own thoughtful grade at the end of the term. I did not have them evaluate their progress at any other point during the term. Mostly because I desperately and truly did not want them to worry about grades. It became really clear to me within the first few weeks that my students are traumatized by their prior experience with grades. I decided on the spot to move forward without even mentioning grades until the work of the term was over.

(3) I worked with my TAs to give a lot of feedback. This ended up actually being kind of fun – as opposed to the not fun task of assigning marks. We gave quick feedback on notebooks almost weekly, and lots of feedback on the things the students produced throughout the term.

I have a lot of very thoughtful feedback from my students that I am currently processing. Sometimes I’ll read a comment from a single student and think about it for days. I’ll write more on this in upcoming posts, but student comments overwhelming follow two themes: they felt less anxious and more brave in their learning choices, and they worked harder and learned more than in courses where they are graded.