Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

This post is part two in a three-part series that responds to Erik Armstrong's (@mr_e_armstrong) Tweet. Thank you, Erik, for asking these questions. If you haven't, read part one .  How well do SLOs, or Student Learning Outcomes, work with labor-based grading systems? Most college writing programs and high school English courses have SLOs of some kind. They are often used to do a number of things: identify key competencies that students are supposed to learn; help determine curricula; and provide the specific things that programs can assess in order to understand how effective their courses or program is. Do labor-based grading systems in writing classrooms contradict or ignore SLOs? Can you use a labor-based grading system in a course that has SLOs already determining much of what goes on in the course? Photo by CZ , "Spring" The short answer is, yes. A much longer answer is in chapter seven of my book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Incl...

This post is a three-part series that responds to Erik Armstrong's (@mr_e_armstrong) Tweet. Thank you, Erik, for asking these questions.  Many folks often ask me about ways to account for the busy and often unpredictable lives that many students must face while going to college. How can one use labor-based grading contracts in a writing class, one that uses attendance, or the presence of students, to help calculate course grades? I'm appreciative of Erik's thumbs, since they raise three great questions, ones often asked in various ways when I do workshops on contracts. To honor the spirit of his tweet, I'll try to address all three of his questions (in three separate blog posts), since I also get versions of all of them all the time. If you are not familiar with labor-based grading contracts, you may want to check out a past post of mine that has lots of other resources on the practice, "How Do You Do Labor-Based Grading in Pre-Existing Curricula." Pr...