The Antiracist Assessment Leadership Group explored ungrading scholarship to expand our knowledge of alternative, antiracist assessments beyond labor-based grading. The group included Kayleen Kondrack-Caranto of Shoreline Community College, Helen Lovejoy of Peninsula College, and Tim Roe of Spokane Community Colleges.

Our ACI Leadership Group project began with the goal of learning about different grading and assessment methods that strive to be more equitable and align with anti-racist practices. We began our project with several questions, including:

• What are more equitable methods of grading and assessing students?
• How do we account for faculty workload in the assessment process?
• How can we utilize our feedback to accomplish the most good?
• How can we utilize Canvas to make assessment easy?
• How do we make sure that grades are transparent for students?
• How can we give students choice and power in terms of how they are assessed?
• How do we keep making our assessment practices more antiracist?

Over the course of three months, we read scholarship with these questions in mind, considering how we could expand our knowledge of anti-racist assessment practices. The most fulfilling and enriching experiences during this time were the conversations about the books we had with one another. We discussed ideas we hoped to apply to our own teaching, ideas with which we disagreed, and ideas we wanted to question and explore further. Through these discussions, our work became truly collaborative.

By the end of our work, we had read seven books (some together, some individually) and had summarized them for all ACI participants to access. Along with summarizing the texts, we also shared key quotes from the texts, the relationship between the texts and our ACI work, and potential applications to ACI assessment practices. Finally, we curated from the texts and created our own artifacts that offered practical applications of the work. Please find one example below.

As we move forward in this work, we’ll continue to develop more practical applications from our readings and explore further scholars; we realized that the conversation on anti-racist teaching is broad, and we have a lot to learn! We will also look for opportunities to connect with other ACI participants, including with the members who are developing a website and Pressbook.

Sample artifact: Student Self-Reflections Curated from Three Texts

Example One: Guiding Questions for Student Self-Reflection

“Big Three” main root questions from Hacking Assessment by Starr Sackstein:

What am I learning?

Why am I learning it?

How will I use what I learn?

Guiding Questions for Student Self-Reflection:

-What have you realized about yourself as a learner?

-What are your learning needs?

-How do you learn best?

-Where do you struggle?

-How did the teacher and your classmates help or hinder your learning?

-How did you come to understand your learning process?

-How do you connect with your learning?

-Has it inspired you?

-Has it created passionate responses in you?

-Has it made you question your beliefs?

-Does it connect with your prior knowledge or learning experiences?

-How have you deepened your thinking?

-What pieces are you most proud of?

-What did you enjoy working on the most? Why?

-Where did you feel most engaged? Why?

-Where did you struggle the most? Why?

-How did you work (or how are you working) to overcome that biggest struggle?

-Is there anything you wish you were learning about?

-Is there anything you’ve learned that you found surprising?

-Did you ever procrastinate? Why?

-What strategies did you use to work through procrastination?

-Have you made a conference appointment with the teacher? If so, was it helpful or not? Why or why not? If not, why haven’t you made one?

-Have you ever conferred with a classmate?

-How are peer conferences effective for you?

-Do you use outlines, checklists, or other graphic organizers to assist you in improving your work? How do they help?

-What environment is best for you to learn? How did you come to this realization? How did you use this understanding to make you a better learner?

-Is there anything your teacher has done that you found helpful or detrimental to your learning? What are those things?

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Sackstein, Starr. Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School. Times 10 Publications, 2022.

Example Two: Self-Reflection Sentence Starters

In The Anti-Racist Teacher: Reading Instruction Workbook, author Lorena Germán offers multiple sentence starters for students’ self-reflection.

These include:

-“Something that makes me uncomfortable when I’m reading is . . .” (14)

-“Reading causes me to feel . . .” (14)

-“I read because . . .” (15)

-“I write because . . .” (15)

-“I’m the kind of writer who . . .” (15)

-“I’m feeling . . . . Is anyone else having similar thoughts?” (17).

-This text is connecting to my history because . . .

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Germán, Lorena. The Anti-Racist Teacher: Reading Instruction Workbook. The Multicultural Classroom, 2020.

Example Three: Self-Regulated Learning Wrappers

In Specifications Grading, Linda B. Nilson talks about “self-regulated learning wrappers” (see Ch. 6).

Self-regulated learning wrappers often involve students reflecting on why work was deemed incorrect or on what they missed. This reflection is required as part of the revision process, woven into that process–in other words, in order to revise work, students need to also reflect on work. For Nilson this kind of self-reflection is always geared toward improving on the task and “self-regulating” one’s performance (77).

Nilson also gives the example of “How I Earned an A in This Course”: Students write a letter to their future selves that describes how they earned an A / high score in the class; they write as if it had already happened, thus setting a goal for themselves (Nilson 76 – 77).

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Nilson, Linda. Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time. Stylus, 2015.