Michelle Cottrell-Williams interviews Dr. Carissa McCray on how teachers can better create equitable, inclusive learning environment that assess learners holistically. Dr. McCray explains why a culturally competent education is important for everyone in our globalized world, and the all-important role assessment plays in reaching all students.

Arthur Chiaravalli interviews Fabiola Torres, an online Ethnic Studies professor and Certified Faculty Developer at Glendale Community College. During the pandemic, she's led nationwide workshops and courses on applying equity-minded methods such as culturally responsive teaching in the online environment, humanizing online teaching and learning and ungrading practices.

Vanessa Ellis interviews Jesse Stommel, author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop. Originally aired as part of a special Community Gathering, the interview explores Jesse’s experiences as an ungrading teacher and how his stance is informed by larger questions of equity, care, and the humanity of both teachers and learners.

Lisa Wennerth interviews Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), a growing group of high schools creating a digital high school transcript that opens up opportunity for each and every student—from all backgrounds, locations, and types of schools—to have their unique strengths, abilities, interests, and histories fostered, understood, and celebrated.

Lisa Wennerth interviews Alex Shevrin Venet, author Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education. Venet explains how schools can become more truly trauma-informed when they center equity and employ “proactive priorities” in planning and decision making. A long time ungrader, Alex examines how the same principles can be used to make ungrading more inclusive and equitable.

Nate Bowling teaches Social Studies at a US Embassy School in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. He is a past Washington State Teacher of the Year and National Teacher of the Year Finalist. He and his wife blog about living and teaching overseas at BowlingsAbroad.com and he is the host of the Nerd Farmer Podcast.

Lisa Wennerth interviews Juuso Nieminen, whose research focuses on the student perspective in assessment, and particularly how assessment shapes students’ identities in higher education and beyond. By entering into assessment partnerships with students, can teachers disrupt the usual power relations of grading and foster student empowerment?

Vanessa is an 8th-grade social studies teacher at Veterans Memorial Middle School in Columbus, Georgia. In 2017, Vanessa was named a Georgia Economics Teacher of the Year. This year, she officially joined our team here at TG2 and is currently one of ten finalists for Georgia Teacher of the Year. She resides in Midland, Georgia, with her husband and three children.

Jan McArthur is Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK. In her conversation with Michelle Cottrell-Williams, Dr. McArthur draws our attention to the all-important ‘why’ behind assessment, questions the value and meaning of grades, and examines how we might follow Maxine Greene’s exhortation to “imagine otherwise” about assessment.

How can we make classrooms more inclusive, engaging, exciting, relevant, and welcoming spaces for learning? Political science professor, Liz Norell, shows how, by embracing pedagogies of equity and care, we can create environments in which all students can flourish.

Student learning lives in the back and forth interactions between students and teachers. Mike Rutherford designed gotLearning to better capture these stories in his own classroom, providing one place communicate and document student learning.

Lisa Wennerth, welcomes four trailblazing educators, whose article “Why There Isn’t One ‘Right Way’ to Practice Ungrading” posits ungrading as a fundamentally open, welcoming, and responsive practice for all—not just the elite few.