Thanks Rita - really interesting!

Yes, feedback is not just great but central to all learning: given by others in a generous spirit, it can be motivating, empowering, affirming, and demonstrative of caring. Grades, however, are judgements, and (though we can soften the bad effects through finer granularity, constructive alignment, and learner involvement in establishing the criteria) are fundamentally extrinsic, controlling, and disempowering. Grades are an assertion of teacher power that actually have much less than no value to learners, because they diminish or destroy the love of learning something for its own sake. Teaching should be about lighting fires, not quenching them.

I largely share the opinions expressed here - https://bullshit.ist/why-i-threw-away-my-rubrics-323e51a7aa49?gi=fe3c2845e1fe -both in getting rid of grades and in losing the rubrics. There's no harm in rubric-like advice for helping learners figure out what kind of things are normal and expected in a new subject: that can be useful scaffolding. It's even OK to use rubrics as a frame to help guide feedback, as long as it is recognized that learners can and do go far beyond whatever is written in them, and they do not serve to constrain feedback. When I mention this, many teachers follow through with the question 'but how can we be fair?' or 'how can learners know what to do to be successful?'. Such questions reveal the fundamental problem in sharp relief: that's just another way of reiterating that the point of learning is to get points and comply with teacher expectations. If teachers believe that, what hope is there for students?

Thank you!

I will have to ask administration at my work not to rely so much on rubrics (after I am able to convince them that the mandatory paper-based portfolios are obsolete and not conducive to learning...).

Thank you!

Excellent! The word 'mandatory' has a tendency to raise my hackles whenever it is mentioned in the context of learning, though I have nothing against paper-based portfolios per se. For some kinds of learning, for some learners, in some contexts, they make good sense. Like most things in learning, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.

I'll be interested in Jennifer Hurley's follow-up to her 'no rubrics' article because the one thing she leaves unsaid is how she deals with the (still mandated) final grading. That's my problem too, and it's quite tricky to solve fairly.