The teaching style I had at the beginning of my career was probably like many new teachers. I was teaching the way I remembered how my teachers ran their classes back in the '80s. Essentially, I was lecturing, giving homework, quizzes, testing, guided notes, and hands-on projects, etc. Welcome to Dullsville! I did not have a lot of educational technology in 2007, nor did I know much it being new to the career. The class was only equipped with a projector at first to show my lessons on the screen. The students were learning but not really engaged the way I had hoped and the class did not seem as an exciting learning environment that I was hoping for. I began researching new trends in teaching for each year and tried to implement what I thought would reach my students and their learning styles.
Educational technology and my teaching began to evolve. I was using SMART boards, clickers and using a very early version of gamified learning with review games in 2008. Later in my career, I would find out that those review games are really not "gamified" learning. The students were becoming more engaged but their motivation for class success was still not where it needed to be. The course became a flipped classroom in 2010 with Schoology as the LMS and then I gamified my entire course based on my research and the book, "The Multiplayer Classroom," by Lee Sheldon.
The class was improving but the grades were not. Discussions with colleagues each marking period focused on the students and their grades. Then one day, a colleague said in a joking way "I'm not going to grade anything anymore." We all laughed a bit about the idea and then I wondered if you really could do this. Could you really have a class without grades? I did some research and discovered that yes you can. I started researching how to become a gradeless classroom during the summer of 2017.
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