Join us for the final Fourth Monday Colloquium of the Spring 2022 semester as Dr. Jim Bowers presents “Let’s Talk about Grading” in Powers Recital Hall on March 28, 2022, at 3:00 p.m.

Over a century of pedagogical research reveals that grades not only undermine learning and a genuine education, but many of our most valued goals as educators. We are therefore faced with the question of how we might best help students “be rewarded with deep, meaningful, and joyful learning,” to quote Susan D. Blum, an anthropologist and author of several works on higher education. Please join an open conversation on grading. In addition to reviewing Alfie Kohn’s scholarly summation of the harmful effects of grades in “From Degrading to De-Grading,” and discussing some of our own observations and struggles, we will examine the distinctions among training, schooling, and an education in the humanistic tradition. Finally, we will share pedagogical methods, strategies, and the resources we have adopted (or hope to adopt), along with those that other educators have found successful, to begin decentering or even replacing grades with more authentic, instructive, and meaningful forms of feedback and assessment.