David Frangiosa interviews Paul Emerich France, founder of the Sustainable Teaching Project, exploring shifts that teachers can make to avoid burnout, including assessment practices that invite and empower student participation in their own learning.

When teachers make incremental changes to their habits around providing feedback over time, the result is that students are able to focus more on growth than on grades. Building habits that show students how they can be successful paves the way for a feedback cycle that does not become overwhelming.

Author and consultant Lee Ann Jung explains why most rubrics need a “renovation,” shifting them from a focus on what's wrong to a growth-oriented conversation about what’s next. By scaffolding self-directed learning in this way, we encourage students to take ownership of their learning and engage in the learning process.

Feedback is a key component of learning. Feedback can also evoke emotional responses from students, enhancing or undermining relationality and motivation. Unfortunately, the design and delivery of assessment feedback frequently does not consciously address this socio-emotional dimension. Ameena L. Payne shares how teachers are using video feedback to build trust and humanize the feedback process.

Scholars Ameena L. Payne and Jan McArthur propose womanist thought as a praxis that re-positions feedback as a care-full process embracing the emotional, moral, and political as well as one that leans into accountability, compassion, confidence, courage, joy, and vulnerability.

Prior to going gradeless, math teacher Andrew Burnett felt like a “data entry clerk posing as a teacher.” Now, he has ditched the data entry in favor of meaningful and timely feedback. This shift has led to greater personal satisfaction and a marked improvement in his students’ ability to understand concepts as well as to retain that understanding.

Feedback is teaching—an opportunity to foster student growth. Whether we are looking to prevent mistakes from becoming ingrained or to build on skills students already have, feedback provides the learner an opportunity to grow in their awareness of learning standards.

Student learning lives in the back and forth interactions between students and teachers. Mike Rutherford designed gotLearning to better capture these stories in his own classroom, providing one place communicate and document student learning.

When we focus on assessment as a means of communication with and alongside our learners, it leaves space for their inner stories to be told and included. We are building the foundation for student-to-self and student-to-material relationships that can serve well beyond the confines of curricula and classrooms.

To counteract the anxiety caused by high-stakes assessments and grades, Nate Bowling invites students to focus on feedback and learning. Life is hard enough for students; assessment practices should not add to that stress.

In my nitpicking, I spent far too much time bogged down in reiterating past teaching. In my marginal notes and technology-enhanced comments, I was giving a low-quality version of the lesson I’d given weeks earlier. I needed to notch up my nitpicking.

Teachers are often concerned about going gradeless in an AP classroom because the classroom context is inherently tied to content more than learning skills. My lived experience says otherwise.