Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 217 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Jesse Stommel shares about how to ungrade.

Production Credit: [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:48] It’s been a long time since I’ve got to have a conversation, at least one that took place in the audio form with today’s guest Jesse Stommel. It’s been too long in fact. I’m excited to say that not only will he be joining me for today’s episode, but there are many episodes in the coming months where he’ll be either directly part of an episode or some of the people that he has collaborated with through the digital pedagogy lab will be joining us as well so I’m grateful for that.

Bonni: [00:01:20] Let me start out by telling you a little bit about Jesse. Jesse Stommel is Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington. Jesse is also the Co-Founder of Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy and Open Access Journal of Learning, Teaching, and Technology. Jesse is a documentary filmmaker and teaches courses about pedagogy, film, and new media. Jesse experiment’s relentlessly with learning interfaces, both digital and analog, and his research focuses on higher education pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, and assessment. He’s got a rascal pup, Emily, two clever cat’s Loki and Odin and a bad ass daughter. He is online at jessestommel.com and on Twitter @jessifer.

Bonni: [00:02:17] Jesse, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jesse: [00:02:20] It’s good to be with you again.

Bonni: [00:02:22] Today we are going to tackle the ever so easy topic of grading. And you are going to clear up all the questions we have and all the challenges. [laughing]

Jesse: [00:02:31] I feel like when you say the word grading that either you should have kind of a “DUN DUN DUN.” There needs to be a musical cue every time in higher education that the word grades or assessment is mentioned. Or it could even be the Darth Vader march…

Bonni: [00:02:47] Yeah. What are some of the challenges with the way that we think about an approach grading in higher education?

Jesse: [00:02:54] Well it actually connects to that last comment that I made about the Darth Vader march, which in some ways I say cheekily but there is almost a way in which over as many years as I’ve been talking about teaching, talking about pedagogy, it feels like almost every conversation grades end up being the elephant in the room of the conversation. And a couple different things here. You’re almost certain that grades are going to come up. So if you’re talking about experimental assignment design, you’re certain to get the question but how would I grade that?

Jesse: [00:03:25] So two features. One is that it’s constantly a kind of elephant in the room. But I think it often kind of kills the conversation because it ends up not allowing us to move forward in our thinking about how we approach the work of teaching. It ends up being almost a wall that we crash up against when we’re talking about innovative pedagogy, when we’re talking about our experience as teachers, or even talking about the feelings that we associate with the work of teaching. Almost any conversation, grades are almost certainly going to come up.

Bonni: [00:04:02] When I had asked Asao Inoue on this show one of the examples he- he didn’t describe it this way but in my head I took it this way- of just bad grading was writing “AWK” on someone’s paper and I thought oh I did that. I did that for years. For years I did that I thought it was helpful maybe because the sentence TO ME, he kept emphasizing “TO ME it wasn’t clear, TO ME” and that’s not actually helpful at all. Not not at all when I think about it from the students perspective. I think that one of the challenges is we make a lot of assumptions about our learners. In that particular case for me, well you didn’t do the work. You were doing this at the last minute and you didn’t care and you purposely and there’s air quotes about it and you purposely wrote an awkward sentence. Right.

Bonni: [00:04:58] Can you talk about some of the challenges just with how the way that we grade is so loaded with assumptions about our students and therefore is not helpful to them in most cases?

Jesse: [00:05:12] Yeah. I was going to start a sentence with the problem of grades… And I feel like I’ve I’ve used that sentence a lot in my career and that it always has something else at the second half because there are quite a lot of problems with grades. But I think in this instance, the problem of grades is the way that they become a shorthand. And the way that we rely on them as a shorthand, as a way of talking about complex things in the learning environment, complex things in a student paper, a way that we kind of reduce the complexity of learning and the complexity of the relationship between a student and teacher into a shorthand.

Jesse: [00:05:53] But what’s interesting about that shorthand is it’s usually a shorthand that that teacher is extraordinarily well skilled in. Teachers are almost stenographers in the shorthand of grades, grading, marking. And the student on the other end, it doesn’t really have any power in that economy. They don’t really have any facility with that language necessarily. And they also don’t have any control or command over that language.

Jesse: [00:06:19] So when we reduce these complex interactions and discussions about what it is to learn? Or did you learn? Or what is it that you’re learning? Or how are you learning? When we reduce those to things like AWK or A/A- or A-/B+ or upper third. All of these strange demarcations that really don’t facilitate the communication the feedback that we’re trying to have.

Bonni: [00:06:48] We’ve looked at why you don’t grade. What are some of the inherent challenges of it. And one of the things then that has to happen is we have to unlearn a lot of things. And that I mean we have to do this individually. And then our institutions also have to go through this discovery process- I mean we can only hope that our institutions start to question the ways in which we’re approaching this.

Bonni: [00:07:15] I was thinking about when Cathy Davidson was on and she shared about her book A New Education that the meat graders did not even find that grades of meat, ABCD were useful enough to them in grading what we might eat. So what we need to unlearn in order to rethink this? And you’ve called this ungrading.

Jesse: [00:07:42] So I recently wrote a couple of blog posts. One is Why I Don’t Grade and then the follow up was How to Ungrade. And I very specifically waited quite a while before I wrote the how to ungrade piece even though it was all in my brain. I waited because I almost feel like we move too quickly to best practices. We move too quickly to how do I do it? Rather than really sitting and thinking about why do we do this? Why do we grade it? When I lead workshops on grading I usually spent a good hour just talking about how does it feel grade? Why do we do it? When did it first happen for us?

Jesse: [00:08:17] So in some ways I kind of want a delay gratification of just jumping in to the how to. But I would say that the biggest how to, and this is both for individuals and institutions, is recognizing that our pedagogic approaches are idiosyncratic and that they should be. We have to recognize that there aren’t best practices around grades and assessment and giving feedback to students. That ourwork with students as idiosyncratic. Our work as teachers is idiosyncratic.

Jesse: [00:08:45] And it’s also subjective. We try and imagine that we can have some objective measure of learning but something as complicated as learning can’t be reduced to an algorithm. It can’t be reduced to rows in a spreadsheet. We actually even need the subjective ability of humans to recognize that we are all different. Every teacher is different. All students are different. Which means we have to approach the student as themselves not just as a series of rows and columns and spreadsheets.

Bonni: [00:09:15] What have you found was the reaction to these two posts- maybe the reaction to the first post. I have found that you don’t always have a lot of super happy agreeable people on Twitter when I venture over to your tweets.

Jesse: [00:09:28] Well actually what’s interesting is that I find that the response to my work on grading and my pushback against grading is usually a lot of people sharing stories with me about the way that grades and that our institutional systems negatively affect the work that they do. So I tend to get a lot of people telling stories and a lot of people agreeing.

Jesse: [00:10:00] I think at this stage of moving to taking action that people have difficulty. And it’s in part because our institutions feel like they’re on lockdown around issues like learning objectives, around issues of the particular bureaucratic structure that grades live within. And it means that I get a lot of responses like but how could I even do that? But I can’t do that at my institution. But I’m an adjunct. But I’m at a community college.

Jesse: [00:10:29] And I get a lot of that. And my response to it is to say well I did it at a community college. I did it as an adjunct. But that isn’t a sufficient answer because my experience is very different from other teachers. And so but my response is not to say “I did it, so you could do it too.” My response to it is to say this is possible. What we need to do is figure out what is actually possible within our specific circumstances at our specific institution and then go from there.

Jesse: [00:10:59] I don’t think it’s easy to push back on grading as a system. It is easy though I think to open the conversation about what grades are, how they work, how we can move away from them, how we can work within a system that requires them, open that conversation to students and include students in sort of medalevel dialogue about what grades mean. And that helps a lot.

Jesse: [00:11:24] So I guess my best practice that I would say, the thing that I would recommend for anyone interested in pushing on grading is you don’t even actually start with ungrading or removing grades from your classroom. Start by just talking to students about how grades work, what they mean, who they affect, how they affect different students differently. Because in a way they’re a power code which means that they are power code that more privileged students have access to more of the control and agency that they need around grades than students who are less privileged.

Jesse: [00:12:00] And also to some degree because of that if you take grades off the table that can also be damaging because sometimes if you take grades off the table, you don’t really take off the internalized tacit intrinsic stuff that is lying underneath grades. The grade as a symbol of a way that we engage with students and the way that education thinks about students and teachers. Just taking the grade off the table doesn’t do the harder work of demystifying that culture that we’ve created within education.

Bonni: [00:12:32] I can remember when I was early in teaching in a doctoral program that I had a flight to catch and I needed to get on the road with the rental car and didn’t set my boundaries very well and wound up speaking with a student who is very upset about the grade on her paper and we went through it and printed it down and going through it all in excruciating detail. And I should have set better boundaries, I didn’t.

Bonni: [00:12:55] And I got home and of course I’m going to follow up and I’m looking through it and I realize actually- because the highest grade you can earn in this program is an A. We had a 45 minute conversation and this woman was still clearly in the clear for a very very high A, even though there’s no such thing as a high A. But it was like what you’re describing to me is all the things that had come before for her in her educational life that reduced this grade to something so punitive and we’re talking just a few points off. But just that we just we are part of a greater system we’re also a part of a past of what these students have experienced in grades. And I’ve been speaking about grades a lot as feedback because that is how I tend to think about them. But of course a lot of people want to use grades for different reasons too. They want to use grades to differentiate the quality- it’s meat, it’s all back to the meat and the quality of the meat. Oh wait sorry the quality of the papers, the quality of the students. And yeah that’s another.

Jesse: [00:13:57] Well I think that the grades get used as a motivator. Grades get used as a sort of punishment. Grades also get used as a way to rank students against one another as a ranking system. And they also get used as a way to communicate to the board or to the accredidation rating board that stuff is happening. So grades are used in so many different ways and I think it’s pretty rare that they’re only used as feedback.

Jesse: [00:14:29] And I think if we think about grades as feedback immediately I think well is there a better way to give feedback? And what is the better way? So Peter Elbo who has inspired a lot of my kind of practice my day to day practice around grading, he has several different pieces that I really like. One piece he talks about minimal grading and essentially he talks about a system that has a hundred points. So there’s a hundred different demarcations. If you give one student and 89 and you give another student an 88. What does that mean to them? What does an 88 intrinsically mean? What does an 89 intrinsically mean? They actually don’t communicate anything different to those two students except that one was better than the other. That’s the only thing that really gets communicated because what does an 87 mean? I’m an 87. My paper is an 87. It really doesn’t convey very much. And so that’s a lot, 100 demarcations.

Jesse: [00:15:25] If you go to a grading system where it’s A+, A, A-, B, B+, B-. You’re still looking at- I think I can’t do the math in my head. 15 demarcations. If I tell you you’re a 13. Your work is a 13 or your work is a 14.

Jesse: [00:15:43] Does that really convey- does that really give feedback except that if you’re 14 you’re better than 13? So again and then he kind of goes even- So he argues for there being fewer and fewer demarcations. So a system where you have exemplary, meets expectations, does not meet expectations, a three level system is extraordinarily clear. Each of those levels is extraordinarily clear. And there is very little room to compare students to one another within that system.

Jesse: [00:16:12] And then he goes even further to say you could have a 2 point or a one point or zero point scale. So you could have an assignment where students either turn it in or they don’t. And you could also have a zero point scale where students are asked to do the work but then their work is never actually checked. So in a sense they are asked to do the work. But you’re not policing whether they do or do not do the work.

Jesse: [00:16:36] And so his argument is that we think about the different assignments we’re offering and we think about what kind of scale is actually going to communicate best to the student. So a journal for example, oftentimes people will check journals if the students are asked to journal. They’ll look at the Journal. Does that really create the kind of skills that we want to create when we ask students to journal? Journals are about self reflection. It’s about intrinsic motivation. It’s about touching base with yourself. The idea that a teacher would check your journal for whether or not you did it seems to remove a lot of what a journal is for. And so that might be a perfectly appropriate thing to use a zero point scale. So if students didn’t do it, they just didn’t do it.

Jesse: [00:17:19] And something like participating in a conversation. Did you show up for the conversation? How do you how do you measure that? And oftentimes we’re measuring the wrong things because. Did you show up for the conversation? Usually we measure did you speak within the conversation? Which really does harm to introverts for example or people from different cultures where there are different cultural norms where participating in a conversation doesn’t always mean speaking. And in fact, we need people in conversations who are listening, who are summarizing, we need people to play different roles and conversation. So in that sense ranking students against one another doesn’t end up being a very good mechanism for creating community. Because you actually don’t want every student to be the same. You want students to be different from one another and to succeed in different ways.

Bonni: [00:18:09] I know that you have some real criticisms of the use of rubrics. I did want to mention that I have used rubrics to try to avoid something which is-

Jesse: [00:18:25] [both laughing] DUN-DUN-DUN. The Darth Vader music comes in. Bonni Uses rubrics!

Bonni: [00:18:25] I know. I’m trying to less and less, I promise. But one of the things I used to do was allow poor- what I construed as poor writing skills to have what is called the halo effect or the opposite of the Halo Effect where because that wasn’t good, then the whole entire evaluation of the paper came down. They could have had some really good insights. So That has been helpful I wonder if Peter Elbow’s work or your thoughts on this if there are ways in which we cannot allow one aspect of what we’re evaluating to become overemphasized in our evaluation.

Jesse: [00:19:07] What’s interesting is that I talk about the minimal grading and I talk about how using fewer demarcations can create and offer better feedback. There’s another extreme that we could go to in a positive way which is to recognize that humans are really high resolution. By that I mean that we are millions of pixels. That our work as millions of pixels. That our work has millions of different variables happening within it. So to try and reduce that to a number like 87, your work is an 87 reduces the complexity of human creativity, human conversation, human dialogue. And so to recognize that sometimes we just need to talk to students about what they’re learning and talk to them about their learning and not have expectations about what shape that conversation might take. Be open for surprise. Great books don’t create much space in them for surprise. I think often the worst rubrics don’t create space for surprise. They don’t create space for discovery or epiphanies, things you wouldn’t expect. They try to anticipate learning.

Jesse: [00:20:16] And so my pushback against rubrics is twofold. One is that they try and imagine that we can know what students should and could learn before they do. The other thing that I would pushback on is that making a rubric is a really really great way of thinking through what the goals of an assignment are. It’s a great way to think through what learning looks like, what success looks like. And so I ask why wouldn’t we have students do that? Why are we taking from students the most important kind of activity, the most important metacognitive work that they could do? So that’s why if if people want to use rubrics I say well have students build them. Or at least have students build them with you. Or talk to students about them so that they’re doing that work. And it’s the same reason why when I talk about not grading people ask well what is it that you do do? Don’t institutions require you to submit a final grade at the end? Of course they do. I know. They all have. And I submit a final grade at the end. And what I do in my teaching is self evaluations and I have students doing a lot of self evaluating, some peer evaluating as well. But the self-evaluation sort of reflective letters, process letters, process essays, and artist statements depending on the class.

Jesse: [00:21:41] One of the things I would say about that is that students often know better whether they’re learning than I could because I’m not inside their brain. They are. And so why not rely on them?

Jesse: [00:21:52] The other thing I would say is that evaluating is a way that we learn. And so asking them to evaluate themselves ends up being a really important learning experience for them. And it wouldn’t work the same way if they were asked to do a self evaluation but at the end of the day I was just going to be the one evaluating them because it wouldn’t seem real. And so having it be actually real. Ninety five percent of the time I take the grade they gave themselves and I bubble it in on the bubble sheet at the end of the term.

Jesse: [00:22:25] I do change sometimes and that’s mostly when someone- when it’s clear that they’re either not fully engaged in the process of self evaluating or and this is more often when they are belittling themselves when they’re not. When they say something like I did everything but I just I’m not an A person, so I’m going to give myself an A minus. That’s the other thing that I’m not willing to accept. I’m not willing to accept modesty I guess in self-evaluation. Honesty is what I’m looking for.

Bonni: [00:22:59] In your role of faculty development you are not only coaching and advising those that teach in the humanities. What inspiration have you taken from people doing some work on rethinking grading in the sciences?

Jesse: [00:23:15] Well one thing I would say about that is that when I talk about grading I often get pushback. While this wouldn’t work in my discipline or this wouldn’t work in the sciences, this wouldn’t work in my statistics class. And I always find that strange because I think I don’t necessarily think of disciplines as discrete containers. They’re complex. And so to lump the entirety of a discipline into one container that way has never made sense to me. It’s a very humanity’s way of thinking though I recognize that that sort of disciplines don’t exist. Everything’s fuzzy.

[00:23:50] Interestingly the first pedagogy book I ever read was a book called How Children Fail by John Holt. It’s a book about elementary math education. Some of my most basic fundamental pedagogy and approaches to grading are inspired by this book by John Holt who is talking about teaching math and really talking about the need for in the sciences and math and the social sciences to push even harder on systems that would imagine that there are discrete truths or that there are discrete measures for success. So essentially he’s arguing that math is actually extraordinarily complex. So to reduce the measure of success within a discipline like math is to confuse the complexity of that discipline.

Jesse: [00:24:41] So I find that that the people who I’m really inspired by are not necessarily the people who are grading like I do or teaching like I do. But the people who are thinking really critically about what their work in their particular classroom looks like and how they can push upon it.

Jesse: [00:24:56] I have a colleague at University of Mary Washington, Parrish Waters who is currently using a tool called Blue Pulse. And he’s using Blue Pulse to have students to give feedback. And they both give feedback on the class and the tool kind of allows for real- I haven’t used it extensively myself- but it allows for real time either anonymous or not anonymous feedback. And so he has it so that the students can kind of give- it’s almost like a real high resolution version of a clicker. So it’s not just A, B, or C but it’s that students can actually offer feedback about what they’re learning, what they’re stumbling blocks are. They can give feedback on the class as it’s happening and it’s not really feedback to him. This is working, this isn’t working. But it’s also like almost like a check and it’s like a constant real time way that they’re checking in. And he uses that tool in order to get the pulse of the room, to sort of feel what the hum of the room is. But I think it also could be used for a kind of self reflective metacognitive here’s where I’m at right now check in.

Bonni: [00:25:59] Jesse, what else should we be thinking about in terms of how to ungrade?

Jesse: [00:26:05] I think we should be thinking about not necessarily jumping full on into the pool, thinking about how we can start to dip our toes in and how we can let our legs dangle in the water. So if you can’t just eliminate grades from your classroom, think about what you can do. What subtle changes can you make? And actually I find that that works better because then if you change only one thing, one small thing you end up getting a lot of feedback about whether it was successful or not. If you change everything in your teaching and you have a very different experience in the classroom, you can’t always know what thing that you changed made a difference.

Jesse: [00:26:37] So one of the things I would recommend is don’t think about removing grading from your entire class. Can you remove it from one piece of your class? Can you create grade free zones? So for example, what if there were no grades for the first third of the term? And then grades start. And so in a sense, you could talk about that first third of the class as a developmental space. It’s like the playground, the sandbox. And then we’re going to get sort of prepped for the other work that we’re going to do in the last two thirds of the class.

Jesse: [00:27:08] Now one thing to mention is that you could create grade free zones. You have to be really careful about how you do it because if you create a grade free zone for the last third of the class and there’s grades for the first two thirds but then you remove them from the last third. It’s not going to work quite as well because we’re so easy to fall into the trap of grading ourselves, grading each other, thinking about our work as graded that it’s a little harder to pull people out of it at the end. But if you are creating a grade free zone at the beginning, it’s a really nice space for students to just do the work at the class.

Jesse: [00:27:44] So oftentimes I just don’t- even with self-evaluations, I don’t have students self evaluating until at least a third of the way through the class because I just want to just let’s not worry about that yet. We can worry about that later. In fact we’re all going to worry about that. So let’s take a break.

Bonni: [00:27:59] One of the things you talked about is not just thinking about grades in terms of evaluating but also in terms of motivation. And one of the ways I continue to just be inspired is thinking about open education because you want to really get motivation for your students. And as you pointed out, this is something you can actually do in relatively small ways that don’t require drastic changes in your teaching but open up the classroom a little bit. Invite people in to give students feedback on their work. Send students out to get feedback on their work.

Bonni: [00:28:31] I will never forget just in terms of having what are traditionally called Poster sessions. But to me, it was like building a fair. I mean I had students build a Barbie Dream House. It was three dimensional. I mean just incredible the work they did. But I also had a young man whose dad died a couple of weeks before that event. And what was important to me was that he didn’t feel like people took pity on him to get his education, so he did fulfill the assignment. But it was done. And it met the expectations. So I had it sort of for that not a huge grade you know rigor around it. But to see the extent with which the creativity flourished and a lot of that was because of these this extra presence and the value that that might bring to some of them not to all of them.

Jesse: [00:29:21] Yeah. I actually try and have all of the work that my students do, I would call that authentic assessment. That there is there is actually something not bureaucratic in the structure of the class that is giving them feedback, whether they’re getting feedback from each other, or doing something like putting on a film festival and getting authentic feedback from the community, from a community of peers that they really respect.

Jesse: [00:29:48] And so I actually don’t have probably even more radical than me not grading is I don’t have any of my students turn in their work to me. I don’t receive any work throughout the term. I talk about this as me going to the work rather than the work coming to me. I’m not an inbox for student work. Instead what I am is I’m a curious listener and a sort of expert feedback giver of student work. I’m an expert reader of their work but I’m still a reader. I’m still someone who’s curious and interested in them. And so I have them either put put their work on a blog, put their work in a museum gallery, and then I go to the work.

Jesse: [00:30:31] And I think that’s an important shift. You know we’re not receptacles. So when you start to push on the notion of grading what you start to realize is that we’ve built a whole system that’s designed- Why do we receive work as though we’re in boxes? So that we can efficiently grade it and give it back to students. But the problem there is not as much the the grades. The problem is that symptom that it creates this transactional relationship between us and students.

Bonni: [00:30:57] This is the time and the show in which we each get to give recommendations. And I have two. One is just off of what Dessie just said about becoming curious and interested in our students. And it’s an exercise that I’d like to do that in some context is called Examen, but it’s this idea of asking two questions. You can do this with yourself when you’re journaling, or you could do with a group of people like in the class. And ask since the last time we met, what brought you life? And since the last time we we met, what took life away from you?

Bonni: [00:31:29] I find when I do it I often get “what does this life thing mean? What are you talking about?” So sometimes I’ll use the word joy and what’s brought you joy since we last got together? And what has taken that joy away from you? And not forcing everyone to respond. Everyone can pass and I try not to go ever in a particular order so it’s not a forced response.

Bonni: [00:31:50] But I really work to be curious and interested in my students on everything from what that process brings up is really some of the deeper things that are going on in their lives all the way to sometimes texting back and forth, music, songs that they think I’ll like or songs I think they’ll like. I mean that’s just fun to know what music they’re into, what are they watching, what are they reading, and what are they experiencing? And especially if it’s something new and different that I’m not accustomed to, really hearing more about that and they get a kick out of it. So that’s my first recommendation is a couple of questions you can ask to really bring a sense of community.

Bonni: [00:32:24] And then the second one is a documentary on HBO called The Final Year. And it’s really well done documentary looking at the final year of Obama’s presidency. These are some tremendous leaders that are profiled in this documentary that, to me, just exude the values of our country. And it’s just a really well done piece of work. So it’s The Final Year and it looks at the last year of Obama’s presidency. And Jesse, I’m going to pass it over to you to recommend.

Jesse: [00:32:55] Actually I have two. One has a book that I haven’t recommended to people in a long time, but somehow our conversation reminded me of it. And it is the book the Deep Play by Diane Ackerman. She starts by talking about different animal species that play regularly and about how play is used as a sort of a learning mechanism. For most animals, like think of kittens playing in order to learn how to be kittens. But then she also talks about animal species where play as intrinsic and where they continue to do it as adults. In particular she talks about whales and she talks about ravens and magpies. And it reminds me how important that that space of play is for learning and about how grading ends up frustrating that play.

Jesse: [00:33:46] And it connects to my other recommendation which is the documentary because you said a documentary. This one popped into my mind. It is a nailbiter. It’s like a suspenseful documentary, I teach documentary film and there’s not a lot of documentaries that are like end of your seat thrillers. This one is called Icarus. It’s a Netflix documentary and it’s about doping in sports. And it’s about essentially the large network of cheating within sports. And it’s interesting to me that I think about like sports, games, play, cheating like why is that that there exists within within the sports community this large network of doping in order to cheat or win. It feels like almost the ranking of people against one another within sports creates an environment that not only makes cheating thrive but almost makes cheating necessary and that’s what this documentary interestingly explores. But I think in some ways, if we’re worried about students cheating, the answer is not to punish them for the cheating, the answer is to find out what that’s a symptom of. Like what’s the deeper problem?

Bonni: [00:34:53] Thank you so much for those recommendations and for this conversation about ungrading. I’m looking forward to our future conversations because we have an opportunity to bring some of the people that you have been involved with with the digital pedagogy lab into future episodes. I’m just looking forward to those airing and how those stories all get woven together. I just treasure the opportunity to continue to learn from you. You’re my faculty development professional. I don’t know if you know it or not. You don’t get paid very well for that job. It’s just so fun being connected with you.

Jesse: [00:35:26] Yeah great. I would love to live on this podcast if I could.

Bonni: [00:35:29] Oh and I’d love to have you do it. Thanks so much for being back.

Jesse: [00:35:34] Thanks.

Bonni: [00:35:36] It’s been great getting to have another conversation with Jesse Stommel today and I look forward to the ones I mentioned earlier are going to be coming in the next few months. And thanks for your collaboration Jesse and bringing in some of your participants in the digital pedagogy lab to future episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:35:56] Thanks to all of you for listening and for your continued ideas for who might be a good guest for the show. There’s a way to submit a potential guest on the Teaching in Higher Ed website if you’d like to do that or you’re always welcome to send me a tweet. I’m on Twitter @Bonni208. Thanks for listening. We’ve got some great guests coming up and excited. Look for a new academic year and all the possibilities they’re in. Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.