My biggest challenges when I first began thinking about how to move away from grades, though, was that my students and I were so steeped in what Susan Blum calls the “ineffectiveness and inhumanity” of “an industrial model of pre-determined, teacher-centered curriculum, measured by time-in-seat and assessed by high-stakes testing, with sorting (evident in grades and scores) as the principal goal” (Blum, 2016, p 4). Thinking, rather than a judge who passed sentence on the work they created. Reader of their work (Stommel, 2018): a knowledgeable friend who would offerĪdvice and ideas to help my students to strengthen their practices and Instead of being a grader of their outputs, I wanted to become a Goal with course assessments of all kinds was to re-frame my relationship with I removed grades entirely from my courses. To find the gems, I had to cart away the useless rock. How did I go from feeling like a dragon to feeling like a king? I took a metaphorical lesson from the dwarves in Tolkien’s book. Happier about how we approach learning and assessment. No longer buried under a mountain of grading. And nothing says “measurement” like a steady flow of grades. Most of us have been trained to make sure that we are providing a meaningfulĪnd challenging experience for our learners, while we are also asked by ourĪdministrators and institutions to show measurable evidence of student
I was definitely under the mountain, but I felt less like a king and more like a dragon-grouchy, tired, and ready to spit fire.ĭo we do this to ourselves as instructors, creating mountains of grading? Well, Every little discussion post, short-response essay, lab report, knowledge check, exam, annotated bibliography, course project, capstone report, and quiz answer had to be weighed, ranked, and assigned a numerical grade. More than 80 years later, I found myself buried beneath a mountain of grading that I myself had created by asking my students to demonstrate their skills often, at length, and in detail. “As like as not it is the marauding fire of the Dragon, the only king under the Mountain we have ever known.” Tolkien, 1937, Ch. “Which king?” said another with a grim voice. It is time the songs began to prove themselves again.”
“Perhaps the King under the Mountain is forging gold,” said another. “The lights again! Last night the watchmen saw them start and fade from midnight until dawn. Suddenly it flickered back to view a brief glow touched it and faded. Now it was lost and gone, blotted in the dark. Only its high peak could they see in clear weather, and they looked seldom at it, for it was ominous and drear even in the light of morning. In the time when the book takes place, a dragon has chased away the dwarves and claimed their halls as its own, occasionally flying out to terrify the inhabitants of the lake town of Esgaroth.įrom their town the Lonely Mountain was mostly screened by the low hills at the far end of the lake, through a gap in which the Running River came down from the North. Tolkien’s famous 1937 fantasy book, The Hobbit, introduces among its heroes a fierce group of dwarves who are descended from noble stock: ancestors who ruled a community that lived and thrived in tunnels and halls they had hewn inside the mountain called Erebor. Afghanistan, Africa, Albania, American Samoa, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Aruba, Austria, Azerbaijan Republic, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, British Virgin Islands, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, China, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Republic of, Cyprus, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Georgia, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Jamaica, Jersey, Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Maldives, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Montserrat, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niue, North America, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Romania, Russian Federation, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South America, Sri Lanka, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vatican City State, Virgin Islands (U.S.J.
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