In a June 2023 Chronicle Newsletter from Beckie Supiano, Robert Talbert "…offered a challenge to the champions of ungrading: 'Take your colleagues behind the scenes and demonstrate how it works. Give us the details,' Talbert wrote. 'Get unapologetically into the weeds through longer-form approaches of communicating your practice.' A good way to do this, Talbert recommended, would be writing a blog." OK, Robert, I accept your challenge, and I want to take it up a notch. What if I chronicle not only my ungrading practice but everything I champion?
So, what do I champion, and what will I report on?
You might be wondering, "Haven’t you always followed all the advice from your book and your workshops?" Well, to some extent, yes. I make it a point never to recommend anything that I haven't personally tried. Yet, I find myself grappling with the challenge of consistently and diligently following my own advice at the highest level. I tend to focus intensively on some aspects of my teaching and neglect others. There have been instances where I've cut corners or initially implemented great ideas only to let them slide as the semester progressed. When you’ve taught and studied teaching intensively for 30 years, you can pull off a pretty good course without going for broke. I’m glad for that, because none of us can go all-out all the time, but what if every once in a while, I did? And what if I invited others to follow my adventures, including all the highs, lows, unforeseen surprises, and inevitable weirdness? In Learning That Matters, we encourage faculty to design transformative courses through specific steps and strategies, but what does it look like when one does that? And since the book was published, I’ve become obsessed with three newer arrivals: ungrading, the Art of Gathering, and artificial intelligence; what happens when I add those to the mix? Robert Talbert reached through my computer and told me to get in the weeds, and into the weeds we shall go! I’m going to invite my students to post to the blog alongside me so you can see what all this looks like through their eyes. Furthermore, I will often include links to examples so that when you want more and deeper weeds, you’ll have that. And I’ll see how my students feel about the possibility of video recording sometimes. If I can, I will. Welcome to "The Year of Teaching Dangerously"! Be a supporter: spread the word, follow us on Facebook @icbgers, and join the list to get an update when I post
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AuthorI am Cynthia Alby and I am a full-time professor specializing in secondary and higher education at Georgia College, but I also write and present extensively on course design. I am co-author of Learning That Matters, and for more than 20 years I have taught faculty from across Georgia in a year-long program on teaching through UGA’s Louise McBee Institute for Higher Education. ArchivesCategories |