Often while reading articles about effective teaching practices, I frown to myself because the information seems to assume that professors have a low teaching load. As I’ve noted in another post, I’ve always had a heavy teaching load. The advice presented in typical teaching articles, therefore, is sometimes untenable for professors like me.

For example, this recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the “controversial but useful practice of ‘ungrading’ in teaching writing.” To be very brief, in this case ungrading is to focus on writing to learn vs writing for a grade. Interviewing the editor of a recent book on the topic, the article discusses both the “essentially limitless” benefits of ungrading as well as describes how professors put it into practice.

As usual, though, the practices described do not seem compatible with sleep for folks who teach hundreds of students each semester. For example, one professor explained that she spends a lot of time “essentially doing group therapy” about all the trauma (she means that literally) that “school has imposed on [students] as writers.” Later in the article, it talks about having individual discussions with students about their writing, for example, what they think about a draft, and teaching them how to critique their own work. At the end of the article, getting to the fact that universities still require a course grade, it mentions individual conferences with students to reflect on their portfolio of work and have them suggest their own grade.

None of that is tenable for someone like me who, with the exception of just two semesters when I had 80 students, have always had 100-220 students (and only had TAs for the two of the last nine years). Nevertheless, I agree with the effectiveness of ungrading for teaching writing and so I have developed ways to implement it on a smaller scale in one of my courses: Research Methods.

The first thing I did to implement some ungrading into my Research Methods course actually has to do with the other courses I teach. To make time for the time-intensity of ungrading, I standardized the assignments in all of my other courses. They all have three short papers that I grade for content not writing, two multiple choice exams, and a grade for attendance / participation. With only three short papers to read for all of my other courses, I then do not need to cut in to my sleep or other work to spend more time writing detailed, learning vs grade oriented comments on Research Methods students' work or meeting with them to discuss it.

Second, as the article explained, ungrading is beneficial because “[students] have been so terrorized by the idea that anything less than ‘excellent’ at all times will harm their grades, that they’re paralyzed.” In acknowledgment that writing is intimidating for some students, I make one of the writing assignments optional for extra credit. As that assignments offers points for simply practicing writing, it allows students who may be anxious about the quality of their writing a chance to practice without fear of penalty for less than perfect performance. On the professor side, since not all students need or want to do an extra assignment, this keeps our grading load manageable by allowing us to focus on those students who need the most help or are the most interested in improving their writing.

Finally, the article said that a benefit of ungrading is that it “allows students to take risks without being afraid that their imperfections will be averaged in with their final drafts.” In line with this, one of the writing assignments in my Research Methods course is not graded at all; but its completion is required to do another “easier” assignment that is graded. The final paper in the course is a Research Proposal, and a Rough Draft is required before hand. The Draft is not graded, but it is necessary because I do grade the Peer Review Letters that students write each other after exchanging Drafts. By not grading their Draft, and indeed by me not even seeing it, students can write it without fear for their final grade or my "opinion of them." I do still traditionally grade their Peer Review Letters; but a one to two page letter to a friend is a much lower stakes graded writing assignment than a 7-10 page paper to the professor. But also, grading a large stack of short letters is drastically more manageable for a professor with a heavy teaching load than grading a large stack of full length papers.

In sum, by streamlining the grading in other classes, offering writing assignments for extra credit vs a grade, and having a high stress writing assignment only be graded insofar as it facilitates completion of a lower stress writing assignment that receives a grade, I have implemented elements of ungrading in one of my courses despite having a heavy teaching load. I love to read about the innovations in teaching that professors are developing around the country. Many of us just have to plan to tweak it to implement with our teaching load.