Episode 46 - Telling the Whole Story w/Nate Bowling

Grow Beyond Grades

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 on the Channel 253 Podcast Network. He writes a weekly newsletter called Takes & Typos on Substack and you can find him on Mastodon’s Scholar.Social as @natebowling.

Topics include:

• Nate’s changing perspective, from urging equitable access to AP classes to calling for an end to schools’ partnership with the College Board

• Why Nate thinks states and state universities can serve the same purposes of—and do a better job than—the College Board

• How the pandemic changed some of Nate’s thoughts and practices around grading

• How Nate’s narrative transcript from Evergreen State College in Washington informed his thinking about assessment and evaluation

• The best and worst things that Disney has done with the Star Wars franchise

Other resources:

• On Teachers Going Gradeless:

  • We Don’t Need the College Board

  • Taking Unneeded Anxiety Out of Assessment

  • Testing, COVID-19, and the College Board (TG2Chat LIVE! Episode 17, April 20, 2020)

• An open letter to the College Board about online, at-home AP tests (April 22, 2020)