What happens when we decenter our authority in the classroom? How does such decentering facilitate communicating with our students about their learning? These and other questions led us to try a radical experiment. 

Learning is perhaps one of the most vulnerable tasks we ask young people to engage in. Every day, we tell students to walk into our classroom, sit down, listen, engage, follow rules, take risks, and be judged by someone who may not be justly judging.

Now, in my 24th year of teaching, I am the teacher I always wanted to be. I have strong relationships, my learners are engaged in the curriculum, and I feel I am making a lasting impact on their lives.

Arthur Chiaravalli interviews Natalie Vardabasso, an instructional design and assessment specialist at Calgary Academy, a special education private school in Alberta, Canada. She is the host of the #EduCrush podcast and is a passionate advocate learning spaces that are inclusive of all students.

“Our grading practices haven’t changed much from when I was graded, to when my son was graded, to now,” writes Patti Forster. “Grades are still used as rewards and consequences to compare students, and the lowest grades leave scars of feeling not good enough that last a lifetime.”

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.

Everything in Mike McAteer’s class begins with the end in mind. But instead of focusing on the endpoint of a summative assessment, he asks the question: What do I want to read in my students’ reflections?

Aaron Blackwelder interviews Starr Sackstein, author of the book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, and her latest book Assessing with Respect: Everyday Practices That Meet Students' Social and Emotional Needs.

After a school-wide discussion on assessment practices, Rhonda Higgins found herself wondering: could this be an opportunity to shift the mindset of students from getting a good grade to learning the Spanish language?

In her transition to a gradeless math class, Lauren Thurber wondered: Were my eleven and twelve-year-old students ready for this responsibility?

Arthur Chiaravalli interviews Barry Fishman, professor of Learning Technologies in the University of Michigan School of Information and School of Education. Barry pens the new introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get, one of the earliest critical examinations of the effects of grading on student attitudes toward learning.

Although most gradeless teachers engage in “subtraction,” removing traditional grading from our classrooms, we also need “addition” in the form of new infrastructure that connects our individual efforts to the larger systems students must navigate.