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Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices that Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education

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Are you satisfied with your current and traditional grading system? Does it accurately reflect your students’ learning and progress? Can it be gamed? Does it lead to grade-grubbing and friction with your students?The authors of this book – two professors of mathematics with input from colleagues acr…

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Grading for Growth - Spring 2024 - Learning Community

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Robert Talbert (author of GRADING FOR GROWTH) : Substack

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Robert Talbert (author of GRADING FOR GROWTH) : Substack

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Grading for Growth | Robert Talbert | Substack

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Research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond. Click to read Grading for Growth, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

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David Clark on TIHE : Arbitrary Limits (more about flexibility in the classroom but so good)

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David Clark on TIHE : Arbitrary Limits (more about flexibility in the classroom but so good)

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 443 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, arbitrary limits in our classes with David Clark.

[music]

Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am so excited about getting to finally talk to today's guest. I read his blog voraciously, and every time I've hopped on his website, I just devour what I see there. I actually get to talk to David Clark today. David Clark is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University.

He earned his PhD in 2012 at Michigan Technological University. David is a leading proponent of alternative grading in higher education and spreads the word about progressing assessment by co-organizing the annual online grading conference. His book, Grading for Growth, which is co-authored with Robert Talbert, whose side note has been on Teaching in Higher Ed many times, who wrote the forward for my book, and who I also treasure in terms of all that he gives to higher education. I can't wait for that book to come out. It's not out yet as of this recording. David, who's online with me now as I share these words has already agreed to come back and speak about the book.

I'm so excited about that. We all won't have to wait too much longer as of this recording, it's coming out in early 2023. Beyond assessment, David studies discrete mathematics, especially via undergraduate projects and serves on the senior staff for MathPath, a month-long residential enrichment program for middle school students. He's also an avid backpacker and board gamer. David Clark, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:13] David Clark: Thank you. It's great to finally be on here.

[00:02:15] Bonni: I went back to your website, which I have gone to many times before. Every time you have something new to give me, and this time I got fascinated by- I think it's maybe the first thing I see on your about page where it says, "I study combinatorics," and I think I may have said it wrong when we spoke earlier. Do you want to pronounce it for us correctly?

[00:02:35] David: You got it. Yes, you got it. Combinatorics. It's combinations almost.

[00:02:39] Bonni: You have a subtitle here on your about page, "The art and science of counting interesting things." David, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, if I were to go get my PhD in this thing, does it come out of the box this simple, or did you have to do some work as a communicator to make it that simple?

[00:03:00] David: Yes, that's something I've worked on is finding a really short way to describe it. I've leaned into the I count things. People will sometimes look at that and say, "Counting? I can count, right?" "Yes," and then that opens a conversation at least because that's where it begins with counting, and that gets more complex from there.

[00:03:18] Bonni: Yes. What I love about it, though, it's not just counting things, but it's counting interesting things. Then the next thing down on your website are some of the interesting things that you've counted, and you also do that in combination with undergraduate research. Would you talk about some of the interesting things we could learn about what you and students have counted together?

[00:03:38] David: Oh, yes, absolutely. I really do all of my disciplinary research nowadays with students. I'm at an institution that really values that, and I just love working with students and introducing them to that. The main type of things I do, I like to use games. You mentioned I'm a board gamer. I like games, I like studying games. I will study things like guessing games. I'm thinking of a number from one to a million, and you can ask me yes or no questions about it. Can you figure out my number? Then here's the counting part. Can you figure out my number in fewer guesses? What's the smallest number of guesses you need?

What if I'm allowed to lie sometimes? What if I'm thinking of two numbers, and I only tell you how many of mine fit your question? All these variations, they're about counting, they're about how numbers work and how they're arranged, and they're really easy to introduce. I think your readers right now can be imagining questions they would ask me, but we can really dig really quite deep during the course of a summer-long project or something.

[00:04:36] Bonni: One of my favorite classes if I combine my masters and my doctorate was actually a prerequisite, not even in the curriculum for those things. I had to go back and take an undergraduate statistics class, never having taken it way back when I first did that. It literally was the best class, again, if I combine all of that, and it was because he made it interesting. So many times I think we fall in love with our disciplines and then forgot maybe why we fell in love with them in the first place, and then realize that other people might fall in love with disciplines for different reasons and might be curious about different things.

Are you finding that you are able to have them curious from the beginning, or do you have to start with something in common, like games? By the way, this guy, he brought in lots of games when he started teaching probabilities that you might play if you went to gamble, and I don't really play those games. I had to learn how the game worked before I could even start to look at the probability, but he did capture just my curiosity, even though I'm not really terribly interested in gambling. You start with something general before students can get curious about something specific or how does that work?

[00:05:49] David: Yes. I think people naturally engage with games. Yes, I think that a general idea like that, I'm thinking of a number from one to a million game. People can engage with that immediately. We begin with that. Then the variations and digging into the, "Let's look at the math about this." It's almost naturally motivated because people care already like, "Oh, yes, I want to be able to solve this. I want to be able to do this." It's the thing that I think is lucky that combinatorics can be expressed that way, but I think it's something that I really value as being able to engage people quickly with these ideas.

It's fantastic that you had a good experience with the statistics class. Because so often, I say I'm a mathematician and people's first reactions is, "Oh, yes, I hate math." "Oh, man, come on. I bet I can make you be interested in something, but you might not know it's math."

[00:06:42] Bonni: Yes, that's the thing. I don't know much about math, [laughs] but I know a decent amount about technology. It seems similar to when people say, "Oh, I'm just not good at technology," and it's like, "It's such a broad field. You couldn't possibly be bad at all of it." To think of it that way as a binary thing, you either are good at math or are not, that's the danger, right?

[00:07:07] David: Some people almost like define math as the things they think they're not good at, and if they're good at it, that's not math or any technology, too. Oh, I can use this, but that's not what I mean. That's not the technology I'm talking about. I think people having positive experiences with math is a good thing, and we all know some math, it is a thing.

[00:07:28] Bonni: I mentioned as I was reading your bio and started to go off script, as we will, how excited I am about your book coming out, and you've already said that you'll come back and share a lot about alternative grading. Today's conversation is actually a little bit- I don't know, is it a cousin of the topic? It's just a tiny slice where we'll touch on that, but I hope we are going to be getting people really curious about the topics, so they'll be really excited about your book when it does come out and our future conversations. Today, we're going to be looking at something called artificial scarcity. First, what is that, David?

[00:08:06] David: When I'm talking about artificial scarcity, we're looking at something that is limited in some way, and it's an arbitrary limit. When I say arbitrary, I don't mean random. I don't mean capricious. Just it's limited in some way that's not inherent to what it is. A non-example of that would be seats in a classroom. There's a hard limit to the number of students you can have seating in a classroom. That's a hard limit, and it's not arbitrary.

[00:08:33] Bonni: Then what is the danger in artificial scarcity and how might we be more intentional in how we choose to embrace it or avoid it in certain cases and in certain classes?

[00:08:49] David: Yes, I think the danger of artificial scarcity is if something is limited- I think a good example of this is thinking of grades as a limited resource. If you think of

There should only be so many As available in a class, or that the class average needs to be within a certain range. That's an artificial limit. There's artificial scarcity of grades. The danger there is then that by enforcing this artificial limit, you are leaving out people who are doing genuinely good work, or you are cutting out something with this limit that is valuable and is worth knowing or seeing or engaging with. Because we're focusing on complying with a limit, it's out, it's gone.

I think that's a really common thing in higher education, and artificial scarcity often shows up. This is really the point of thinking about it. It shows up in things that we don't even think about in considering because they're just here, or they're in the air as automatic things we do in a class or in our teaching or in our grading or something like that. Leaving people out, they risk not showing us the brilliance of our students when they're showing us what they know because we have limited them in an arbitrary way.

[00:10:05] Bonni: Yes. That so much of what I've gleaned from your writing and your work in this area has to do with that intentionality and asking questions. When I first came into teaching in the context of higher education, I get disappointed in myself sometimes because I don't think I asked a lot of questions. It was, "This is how it works. This is what we do." Some of that in a very intentional way, I think the most, I would call it egregious, way that this shows up is what we call grading on a curve. You just described it, but in case anyone hasn't made that connection, and I didn't necessarily think of it because it was like, "Oh, no we have to fight against,-" Oh my gosh, I'm forgetting the expression.

[00:10:51] David: Against grade inflation.

[00:10:52] Bonni: Yes.

[00:10:53] David: Yes. That's a phrase.

[00:10:55] Bonni: Now, I'm more bold. Where I'll say, "That's not really a thing." I'll try not to sound dripping with sarcasm, but you probably have more practice at this than I do. How do you describe that's not really a thing that we need to be concerned about when you're talking to colleagues and probably do it better than I sometimes do?

[00:11:13] David: Yes. I want to start by saying intentionality is a great word right there, just intentionally think about our practice. Thinking about about grades, grading on a curve and grade inflation is a critical one here. The way that I like to think about grade inflation is if I ask someone to say, "What is grade inflation? What do you mean?" Usually the response is, "It's grades getting higher," or, "My average grade getting higher," or something. That's not wrong, but I would say, "I think I would add something to it." Basically, nobody objects to this, which is it's grades getting higher when they don't represent more learning. Because grades getting higher and more learning, cool. That's what we want grades to represent.

When you put it that way, I think it really undercuts what people are thinking about with grade inflation, which is they're thinking that just grades getting higher is somehow letting kids get away with stuff. It's letting our students get away with things that they shouldn't. One of my core beliefs is that if we're going to have grades, then grades need to represent learning. They should represent what students know. As soon as you start thinking of grades that way, that opens the door to the possibility that maybe all of my students really know and understand this or maybe a lot of them do. If they're going to get a grade for that, it should be a high grade.

That would look like grade inflation. If all you're thinking of is just higher grades. As soon as you say, "It's linked to actual learning," and I can point to the things that they've done to demonstrate that learning, it's not grade inflation. It's just awesome. I've got a bunch of students who really understand this well. I think grade inflation is a topic that is not at the front of my mind because the way that I think about what grades mean, they're inherently linked to learning. Inflation is not the question that matters there.

[00:13:04] Bonni: Something I'm going to be changing about myself moving forward is I'm going to start with that question, what do you mean? That's really helpful. I think sometimes the conversations I've had, they want to be protective of the reputation of the school as it comes to employers or to graduate schools. I attempt to, I'm sure, clumsily break down those arguments. Back to what you talked about, if this represented actual more learning, then we wouldn't really have anything to protect. Because what would be students who would be going into these graduate programs or who would be going to work for these employers would be better equipped with more learning. Then it would never come down to, "My goodness gracious. Do you ever give a lot of A in your classes."

[00:13:53] David: I don't want to pretend that grade inflation isn't a thing. I've interviewed a number of instructors usually from really high powered institutions like Ivy Leagues, who are genuinely afraid of not giving high enough grades to their students. That's like the students come in expecting this. There is such a thing as grade inflation there if the reason they're going higher isn't related to what they actually have learned.

[00:14:19] Bonni: Yes. When I have said it, I don't say it quite that way in the sense of I say of all the problems that we have as an institution, this particular- First of all, we should create a shared definition so that what you mentioned is going to be really helpful for me going forward. Also, if it is a problem in the way that someone might be posing that it's a problem, it's going to be so low on the list as opposed to seeing if grades match learning. I know this is a conversation for the future, if we could put grades way over here and just focus on learning, there we go, then now we're really talking at that point.

I want to actually go back just for a moment because I took us on a path right away of artificial scarcity as a bad thing. You point out to us that it's not always a bad thing. Could you talk a little bit about libraries and how libraries have made use of artificial scarcity?

[00:15:11] David: Yes, absolutely. This is really important. Talking about artificial scarcity, it can sound like I'm saying, "Throw out all the limits. Get rid of all the limits." I think libraries are a useful thing to think about because it's something most of us have experience with. A common experience is a due date for a book, or you have to return the book by a certain date. That's a form of artificial scarcity because it arbitrarily limits your access to a book. I can only keep it for so long. It's not like the book burst into flames if I keep it longer than that. It's not this inherent limit. It's just something we've decided, three weeks or whatever.

There's some questions I like to think about here. It's not just thinking, "This is arbitrarily limited, but why? Why is it arbitrarily limited?" I think there's some really good reasons for that. A library, I'm thinking public libraries, their mission is to have access to this information to all of their patrons, not just to one person. Having a deadline, a return date for a book means that more people have access to it. More people can have access to these things. If the date isn't really, really short, then you'll all have a reasonable chance to read and learn from it. It makes sure that the mission of the library can actually be achieved. This is maybe me, I love my library.

I will go there, and I'll start looking around and, "Oh, I'd like to check this one and this one and this one," and just end up with this huge pile of books that is not reasonable for me to actually all read in the next three weeks. Knowing that there's a due date actually makes me a little more careful with the genuinely scarce resource of the number of books that are in the library and the number that people could check out. I'm a little more intentional about, "This is what I actually want to do and read for the next few weeks." Then when I have them at home, knowing that they're due means I don't tend to keep them just sitting on the floor and ignored.

I'll actually engage with them a little more. Those are all useful things. I also want to point out anyone who's ever checked a book out of a library knows that the deadline for returning that book is not a hard deadline. This is not totally a, "You return it now or else." We can renew books. Most libraries will work with you to get the books back in. They'll send you some emails or give you a call or whatever. Different books might have different amounts of time you can check them out for, like newer books that are more popular. They have a shorter date so that more people can see them. Older ones have a longer date.

Those are all ways you add in flexibility that respect why there's a limit in the first place. Like, "Oh, yes, we want people to be able to read our books, but we also want more people to be able to read our books. Let's be flexible in a way that respects that."

[00:17:47] Bonni: We talked about intentionality, the person who leads our library, we have the course reserves. I suspect that lots of places do this where a professor might put their textbook on reserve in the library if a student is unable to purchase that book, at least they can use it for two hours. Those are arbitrary limits where we really should be asking the questions with intentionality because what if we were to break through that barrier and more classes were using open educational resources so that artificial limit could just be released. Anyone, whether you attend our university or anywhere in the world, are just interested in this topic. We really should be asking those questions.

I know librarians have been for some time now asking questions around the ethics of late fees for books and how that may or may not drive the best outcomes and behaviors or arbitrarily affect in a disproportional way the people who you'd most want to be making use of your library. Then I also think about the studies. I've read about late fees for people who pick up their kids from school or daycare or something like that. How they started where they said there was this social contract that said, "Pick up your kids by 5:00," I'm making this up, of course. Then, "Oh, If you're going to be late, then we're going to need to charge you."

Then it just became a- That makes sense. The dollars that I would pay, and then I could not have to get there. They actually made their problems worse by setting up arbitrary fees. I don't know if this is fitting, is this fitting with arbitrary limits in terms of that?

[00:19:24] David: It is. Yes, sometimes limits have unexpected consequences. Actually, I like your mention of open educational resources because it brings up a few things. One of which is it's not always an easier or immediate thing to change these arbitrary limits. Textbook availability is an arbitrary limit. It's definitely something that prohibits or can stop a lot of students from taking a full part in higher education. It does, "I'm going to go make a free textbook," is not an easy, immediate thing to do. I think that's an excellent way to go, but that's a big job to reduce this artificial scarcity, these limitations.

[00:20:04] Bonni: We've been talking about due dates as it relates to library books. Would you talk about due dates as it relates to assignments?

[00:20:13] David: Yes. This is a place where once I started thinking in the language of artificial scarcity that I really started to see a lot of it in my own practice. Due dates for assignments are a totally standard part of education where you say, "Hand this in by such and such a date." That's artificial scarcity. It's limiting the opportunity for the student to show you what you've learned, especially if that's a hard deadline. I'm not going to accept anything after this deadline. The student can still learn things. Students can still know things. They can still complete the assignment successfully, but I'm not going to look at it, and so they're going to get a zero in my grade book.

That's artificial scarcity. I have always been a sucker for, "Sure I'll extend that deadline, whatever." When I start thinking about the artificial scarcity of deadlines, I realized it's the same as with grades. I care about what students have learned. I really want to see what a student knows rather than focusing and doubling down on compliance and saying, "You got to comply with my deadline or else," because that's not about learning. On the other hand, deadlines are there for a reason. Why is there artificial scarcity? Because I got great stuff sometime, and it's a lot easier if I grade it all at once. I'm not trying to say that's not a real thing.

That's the life of educators, thinking about how to organize our time and make it efficient or just doable. For me, thinking about, "I've got this artificial scarcity, but I also have this need to just be able to manage my own time when it comes to grading." Thinking in these terms, I started to use what I called grace day. I got the name from a colleague. You get a little bit of grace. A grace day is just every student has maybe three of them during the course of a semester. It's just an automatic, no questions asked extension on a deadline. I usually said it would be to the next class day because I have things due on class days, and then they can just hand it in.

The result of that would be I knew some students would always be using a grace day, but I knew that they'd be coming in in a certain amount of time. I could plan my schedule around that. I'll grade a bunch of them this day and a bunch of them one class day later. It adds flexibility, and it shows me what students have learned without just forcing them to comply with my arbitrary deadline. That was a way of ameliorate the artificial scarcity a little bit in a way that students could. They didn't need my permission to do it. They didn't need to worry about complying with my rules. They just could say, "Yes, I need the time, and here it goes."

I've gone further than that recently because as soon as there are rules, there's a game to play, if that makes sense. Then it's almost like you're saying with the fees for picking up your kids too late. It's like, "if I'm limiting the number of grace days, then students start playing around with, 'Am I going to use one now, or am I just going to not going to do this assignment? Do I want to save it for later?'" That kind of thing. I have gone not deadline free. I have deadlines on everything still, but I have gone total flexibility on deadlines. I actually just have a form. I got all of these ideas from other people. Nothing here is original to me. I have a form, a student can fill out this Google form, and it just says, "What do you want the new deadline to be for which assignment?"

Then there's a couple questions about, "Do you need any support or help from me or others." I have really been amazed at what comes out of that, that giving students that responsibility and that freedom to say, "I want to set my own limits. I don't want the artificial scarcity of your hard deadline." They use it really responsibly almost for the most part, put it that way. They suggest shorter deadlines than I would have suggested that I would've given them. I have been really happy with the result of that. I see better work. I get to see what students do. I get to see better work if they have just a family emergency, or they didn't sleep well, or they're feeling sick or whatever.

They make smart choices, and I get to see what they did as a result of it. I have about the same amount of difficulty of cases where students are consistently missing deadlines as I would even if I had the hardest deadlines in the world. It's no worse than it has ever been.

[00:24:30] Bonni: That is such an important point. I think we forget about sometimes. To factor into thinking about how we might want to make these kinds of choices with intentionality. I wanted to share way back when I had Annemarie Perez on the show. Because part of the problem that we haven't discussed yet is when you do have rules, there are going to be some portion of students who don't know that they can ask. Just like you, I used to really have super hard- It's got to be in by that time or it's a go, no go kind of thing. Then, yes, of course, if someone comes to you and explains something that has happened, she had a story, I'm not going to tell it again, just such a heavy story to share.

A student experienced such a tragedy, and she only found out way after the fact what it was and thought, "My gosh, if I had known, of course." Talk about grace, all the grace in the world, and the student just didn't know that it was okay to ask. By making these things more open and transparent, we're minimizing the incentive to be dishonest. We're minimizing the incentive, and you talk about this, too, of just turning in shoddy work. It's not really great work. It's just like, "Just throw it in there, so I can see anything I can get out of this game that this is. Let me see if 5% effort might get me 5% of the points," or something like that.

There's so many positives to it. The second thing I wanted to share is that you didn't say this explicitly, but you implied having no deadlines, not such a good thing. You're not saying just free for all entire flexibility, just get to it when you can. Would you talk a little bit more about the benefits of that structure?

[00:26:21] David: Yes. I'm a big believer in structure with flexibility. Yes, you're absolutely right. I very deliberately have deadlines but flexibility within those deadlines. I think when people hear I am flexible with deadlines, they immediately go to thinking there's just no deadlines. It's just a free for all. Humans work well with structure. That's a fundamental human trait is that it helps if we know what expectations are and what we can do and where we can push and where we can't push. For students in particular, in higher education, a lot of our students are coming in, and they are just learning how to structure their own lives outside of a more controlled family environment.

Having clear deadlines, having a clear structure in organization is really helpful. Just like I was talking about, I don't want to focus on students complying with my rules arbitrary or not. That's also something, structure is great until it becomes rigidity and that there's no flexibility, that it's just about complying with my rules and not about why they're there. If I have clear structure and deadlines, that helps people understand what they need to do to help make their own time, work out the way it should to get it done. Then the flexibility recognizes that we're all humans, and just like you were saying about that story, things happen to humans, big and small, and we need to have a little bit of grace to just allow that to work.

Yes, have deadlines. I know people who go totally deadline free, but I think it's more useful to have that structure and have the flexibility around it. Actually, I want to say one more thing, too. You began mentioning making expectations clear but also making the hidden curriculum clear. Knowing what you can ask for and what you can't, that's a huge thing. If a student knows they can ask me for free to extend a deadline, then they're more likely to use that than if I don't say anything. Only the students who have the background or the experience, they're like, "Oh, Yes, I can ask for this. I can request it."

Then the only people who I'm allowing to show me what they've learned beyond the deadline are the ones who already have some advantage and know that they can do that. Making it really clear and explicit, this is my policy, and this is how it's flexible. That's incredibly valuable. If they ask, I'll let them extend however much they want. It's asking for only certain students to benefit from it.

[00:28:52] Bonni: One of the ways that people such as yourself, and I know you give credit where you've learned so much of this from other individuals, whether it is a grace day or some type of a token for resubmitting assignments to get feedback and do those again, you talked about having students fill out some kind of online form. I'm curious then, what does that logistically look like when it comes to the learning management system? Because every recommendation I've ever seen, these forms are filled out, whether it's Microsoft forms or Google forms, it's not something inside of a learning management system. What's the system then to track what that looks like inside of a learning management system?

[00:29:33] David: That's a good question. I am not a huge fan of a lot of learning management systems. We have one that we use. The form I'm talking about, everything I've ever used has been separate from a learning management system, like you say. I set it up, so whenever a student fills it out, it comes to me in an email. Then the way that I track this, I'm recording things in a spreadsheet, so I'm not recording them directly in an LMS. That spreadsheet, wherever the assignment's recorded, I just type a note, "Okay by Thursday night," or whatever. That's recorded for me, and students get a receipt from the form that reminds them that they filled it out and when they said it was going to happen.

In terms of recording it on an LMS, this is an internal problem for how do you do anything that isn't just enter a number in an LMS. I don't think I have a good answer to that, unfortunately. For myself, recording it in my own spreadsheet works pretty well.

[00:30:25] Bonni: Do you keep track of, in that spreadsheet, that they've only used there however many you're allowing at this point? Do you just figure that it's not worth tracking or checking?

[00:30:37] David: Yes. If I have a limited number of, say, grace days, so there's artificial scarcity again, I've artificially limited the number of times that a student can do this. I usually track it. I highlight perhaps with a special color or something. Again, instead of holding them to a hard limit, if a student uses up their grace days really quickly right off the bat, then that's a conversation, "Let's talk about this." This is even true with the unlimited flexibility where I don't limit students to how many times they can request an extension. If I see that they're using it all the time, that's a conversation, too, and interesting stuff comes out of it.

I have a number of students this semester where they're like, "Oh, yes, I work until midnight, and these deadlines are midnight, can I just always hand them in the next morning?"

"Oh yes, totally." You don't need to use this limited resource for something that's a systemic issue. You always are going to have this happen. That's how that conversation often goes. Sometimes it's just, "Oh no, I'm really terrible at managing my time. Even when I know the deadline, I just keep missing this." That's a different conversation. I think the important thing to think about there is that when a student is butting up against these limits, it's important to talk about why. To ask why.

I'm in the job of helping students figure out how to learn things and how to make their own life work the way they want to and figuring out how to organize your time and ask for what you need as part of that.

[00:32:03] Bonni: Something else that comes to mind as you're talking about this, whether it's with deadlines or things like people showing up on time. I used to be pretty punitive about people showing up on time to things. Speaking of those conversations, it was out of that in a conversation with a student many years ago that I recognized my own cultural incompetence at the time of not really fully recognizing, or I certainly knew, but I didn't necessarily have it showing up in this context about the different ways that different cultures look at time. It was a great conversation because she could hold me to count from the family that she is from, from the culture she is from.

This is just not part of that culture. Yet I could say quite candidly and truthfully that in a business context, which is the discipline that I teach in, yes, there are differences in different parts of the world, but, yes, you are going to need to shape yourself a little bit more if you're planning on working here, at least in the United States and the region in which we work, to be able to be more disciplined about showing up on time and fulfilling those commitments. It was fun, though, in the sense that she's educating me and pushing back, I think, in a very healthy way. I'm also educating her, pushing back in a healthy way.

It opens up the opportunity for both parties to learn more about one another and meet in a different place than if you just had this hard cold deadline or rule or that kind of thing, a limit. Then you're not ever able to be able to learn in that two-way, both about what the individual might be experiencing, let alone just the kinds of skills, habits, character that you're trying to build up over time that doesn't happen from a pass or fail experience.

[00:33:48] David: Yes to all of that. I think that having those conversations and actually just listening to what a student tells you is such a valuable thing. I do think often, especially when it comes to due dates and getting in homework, for example, it's just really easy or at least it's easy for me to ascribe to a student what I think is going on. I think they're being lazy about this. I think they should just try harder and start earlier. When you talk with a student, and you believe them, you learn a lot. It's basically never what I think. I've learned that lesson over and over, and it's a thing that I keep learning over and over.

Also related to that is examining I have all of these artificial limits, due dates. Thinking about attendance coming to class. There's all these things that are built into higher education. The thinking about which of them are based on something that matters, it's just always been that way. I'm just doing it the way it's always been. Which of those do I actually want to keep and which ones am I willing to get rid of out of my own practice?

[00:34:54] Bonni: I could keep talking to you for hours and just be getting started. Thank you once again for already agreeing to come back on the podcast. [laughs] I didn't mention this in the beginning, but I invited you to come specifically for an article that you posted on your Grading for Growth blog that you co-author with Robert Talbert, and the title, it'll be in the show notes, Artificial Scarcity. We really only touched on just a few components. It's a very brilliant piece. My first recommendation to people who are listening today is to go read that piece, and sit down and talk about it with colleagues, and start asking questions and wrestling, and really hone in on that intentionality.

Are your intentions showing up in healthy ways for how you have structured things? In what way might you benefit by asking more critical questions of yourself and of other colleagues for how you might be able to facilitate learning and growth over time? The second recommendation I have is that back on Episode 399, that was an episode where I read a piece of satire from McSweeney's. In the recommendations segment, I talked about my nephew, who, at the time, was pursuing a PhD in chemistry. He had given me permission to take a co-authored journal article that he had written and put it into this website that at the time was called Too Long, Didn't Read, as in TLDR. Then I was able to ask him because I, of course, could not understand [laughs] the journal article. The abstract I could, but it was pretty heady for me.

I was, "Is this actually what your journal article was about?" He definitely said, "Yes, that really makes sense." This idea of simplifying our research into easy-to-digest information is one of the reasons David I mentioned early in our conversation today just how much I love your website and how you've made your work of counting interesting things. That's just instantly something that captures my imagination. I was very fascinated by this website, and as I was looking at your website, I was trying to think, "Now what was the name of that website?" It's funny how our brains were because I tried to find it, I couldn't do it.

Then I thought, "You talked about it with Nick and his research, so just go look for his name on your own website because it's got to be linked in there." Sure enough. The name of it has changed. It is no longer called TLDR, it's now called Elicit as an E-L-I-C-I-T. I'll put a link to this in the recommendations elicit.org. It also seems to have evolved, and I didn't have time before David and I started talking today to go and see what happened because I was able to earlier just paste in all of Nick's journal article verbiage, and then get this plain text, plain spoken type of explanation. Then now, it seems it's gone in a different direction, and now I'm just that much more fascinated.

The other day we had been having some conversations as colleagues as to the many reasons that go into why women tend to be paid less than men with the same experience, et cetera. You can go into this website now and just type that, "Why do women make less than men?" You're basically getting, using natural language, a pretty fascinating literature review. I did see in there that of course there's going to be limitations to using artificial intelligence in this way, but rather than just never using artificial intelligence because there might be limitations or by the way, thinking our students won't use artificial intelligence for things like this and writing to go explore more.

I have so much more that I need to get into here. I'm so excited to have something. I am so curious now. I want to learn more about this website and that kind of thing. I'd encourage anybody else who's curious about this to head on over to elicit.org and just see what happens maybe in your field or a field you're curious about, a discipline you're curious about and start to see what happens when you start to type into it. I'm curious about that and recommend that people go check it out.

[00:39:03] David: I need to go check that out myself. I had never heard of that before.

[00:39:07] Bonni: So funny. I was so glad I was able to just pick apart where on earth I had heard about that and find it again, only to see it's really entirely been redesigned. I'm curious about that now. I know you have some things to recommend for us as well, David.

[00:39:23] David: I do. I'm going to do these in decreasing order of relevance to the topic of this episode. Most directly, anybody who heard us talking about grading on a curve, and they wanted to know more, or they're very skeptical, there is a very recent article in the Journal of Chemistry Education by Bowen and Cooper. It's called Grading on a Curve as a Systemic Issue of Equity in Chemistry Education. Almost nothing they say is specific to chemistry, though. They do this fantastic job of looking through the history of grades and where did grading on a curve come from. They list 12 different issues that are all really important that have to do with grading on a curve. Check that out if you possibly can.

It's good, and it also provides good arguments against grading on a curve that you could use with people. That's number one, is this article about grading on a curve. Slightly farther out, I'm going to recommend a book. The book is Grading for Equity. It's by Joe Feldman. It is a book that has really influenced my thinking and has gotten me considering, like, "What is it I do in my own practice?" Especially grading, but in terms of thinking about compliance and enforcing compliance versus flexibility, or focusing on learning versus compliance. Grading for Equity is a book. It's focused on K12, but the lessons from it directly apply to higher education. It has wonderful case studies.

It is very clear and illustrates well the issues with so many types of policies that we have. It gives really good concrete ways to fix them up and to change them in ways that are more equitable. Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman is a book that has influenced me a lot. Then furthest the field, I know that you have had a lot of guests who have recommended board games, and I said I was a board gamer, so I'm going to recommend a board game. One that I just played for the first time recently, and that is called Calico, a board game. Actually, I should have checked out the publisher. Calico, it's this very cute little game. The idea is you're building a quilt. There's little tiles that make a quilt.

They're very colorful. They have lots of patterns, and you have goals about the shapes or the arrangement of patterns or the arrangements of colors or things that you're trying to do, and that's how you score points. Visually, t's just really beautiful. You're making a beautiful pattern on your board. The part that I think is best is that the way you score points in this game or the way you record points, once you've put together one of these shapes or arrangements that fits the goal, a cat shows up and sits on that part of the board. There's a little cat token, and they're all worth different numbers of points, and they all have names, and they're all really cute.

It's exactly what cats do. If you love cats, or if you love quilts, or if you love board games, it's also a game that is, it can be as think-y or as casual as you want it to be. It can be as competitive or as everyone's on their own as you'd like it to be. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It has cats, the points.

[00:42:18] Bonni: You are blowing my mind right now. You probably know Derek Bruff.

[00:42:23] David: Yes, absolutely.

[00:42:24] Bonni: Derek Bruff, when he was on most recently, recommended the board game Wingspan. My parents don't listen to this show, so I can tell you. You and I are having a conversation in the middle of November, and they're getting it for Christmas. Don't tell them, David. I'm always looking for ideas for them. My mom has been a quilter for as long as long as I've known that my mom was a quilter. It's just like that's been her life. It sounds amazing for her, but it's fun to sometimes have things be intergenerational. Our daughter loves cats, just loves cats. I'm picturing, would this be the game that someone would be able to play who was 8 and someone who's in their 70s?

[00:43:10] David: Absolutely. It is very quick to learn the rules. The rules are pretty intuitive. You put a piece on the board, and you're looking for those pictures of the shapes you're trying to make. Like I said, as casual or as hardcore as you want to be with strategy. If you just want to sit and make a board that looks really nice and see how many points it's worth, then you can do that.

[00:43:30] Bonni: Oh, it sounds perfect. It sounds amazing. You've just made my holiday. Is there anything else you want to recommend that will fit perfectly with my family?

[laughter]

[00:43:37] David: Let me, let me re-up Derek's recommendation of Wingspan. That is another favorite, and it's another one that's just visually beautiful, but it's also really fun, and again, as serious or as casual as you want it to be. The problem with recommending board games is there's no end to doing it.

[00:43:55] Bonni: Oh, it looks amazing. As we close down our time together, I'm realizing that I did have another recommendation. I implied it earlier, but I wanted to be explicit. Go look at David Clark's website. Go look at his website and just think about for yourself, how might you make what it is that you explore in your discipline a little bit more able to peak people's curiosity. There's so much there. You have an entire thing where, speaking of grading resources where you can go entire Google Drive folders full of resource, you got to have some time on your hands to do it.

Because you're going to be so curious about wanting to go- I feel like I'm still not done, David. I haven't gone through everything that's there. There's so much there. That's a recommendation I neglected to say explicitly, but I'll be including in my list as well.

[00:44:43] David: I think it's important to say this relates to my website but also a lot of the things I've talked about today, flexible due date policies, so many of these are taken from other people with their permission, of course. I don't know that I've had a truly original thought here at all. A repository of sample materials is managed by somebody else. My grading ideas are coming from other people, and there's a really friendly community of people out there who think about higher education and especially about assessments and want to help each other improve. I'm honored to be a part of that. I'm just one piece of it.

[00:45:20] Bonni: I appreciate you saying that there was a lot of, let's say, heated debate or a flurry of things on social media, specifically Twitter in recent weeks over someone who wrote a piece that was implying- maybe not implying, maybe I'm being too soft here, had explicitly said there's one way to do this alternative grading thing. A lot of people, "No, there's not one way to do this.: There's this danger to thinking that it's my way, and it's the right way. I appreciate your generosity with saying these are threads. I appreciate today's conversation, David.

These are threads that we're able to engage with each other and, yes, define some terms but to the extent that it's helpful then to build our practice, but not to the extent that it's helpful to build legalism into what we do. Because there's so much that context matters in this, people's own strengths and that matter and the course that you're teaching and how important is scaffolding for whatever it is you're trying to prepare. I appreciate the way that you come with your research and your communication that is so credible while also leaving room for diversity of thought and practice. Thank you for that

[00:46:38] David: Absolutely. I'm glad you brought up that particular tizzy on Twitter because, yes, it's true. Any of these things we talk about, if someone looks at them and says, "Actually, that will not work for me in my situation because of this thing." Perfect. What matters is you're thinking about it. You're thinking carefully and thinking about where those limits are, or why you're doing things the way you are and not just letting them go on uninspected.

[00:47:02] Bonni: I think some of the dangers, too, of conversations like the one we're having today or your book when it comes out, is thinking then that that means your thinking or my thinking has then ended on the topic. I don't know about you, but I never want to stop changing my mind about things. Because I want to keep learning and growing, and students are going to change, and our contexts are going to change. It's really important.

[00:47:23] David: Absolutely, yes. Teaching is not a static thing at all.

[00:47:28] Bonni: Yes. David Clark, thank you so much for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed today. Thank you for coming on it next year. Thank you. [laughs] I'm so grateful for just getting to have a two-way conversation with you today and look forward to those future conversations as well.

[00:47:42] David: It has been great talking with you as well. Thanks for having me on here.

[00:47:45] Bonni: Absolutely.

[music]

Bonni: David Clark, thank you once again for being a guest on today's Teaching in Higher Ed episode. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonnie Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger podcast. Production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. Thanks to each one of you for listening. If you have yet to subscribe to my weekly Teaching in Higher Ed update, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You'll get the show notes from the most recent episode. You'll also receive some other nuggets that do not show up in the regular podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time on teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:48:48] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Arbitrary limits in our classes, with David Clark - Teaching in Higher Ed

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David Clark discusses arbitrary limits in our classes on episode 443 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

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Talbert's digital resources page for GFG

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Talbert's digital resources page for GFG

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Talbert Grading For Growth resource page

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Work = done once, no reattempts
Work is given a point value or percentage
Numerical scores --> weighted average formula and translated into letter grade
HELPFUL FEEDBACK : not always / rarely included

NOT ALL BAD : standard communication about a student's work, "where they are in class," it's the default, points are "fungible" - you can make them up somewhere else

But also bad : misrepresents learning - misuses statistics - inequitable (not accurate, not bias-resistant, not motivational) - bad for student / faculty relationships

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I'm a professor in the School of CSD at Pacific University - a small, private, liberal arts college just outside of Portland, OR. I LOVE to talk about holistic review for admissions (won't shut up about it) but I also LOVE to talk about teaching and how we can do things in our classrooms to a) get our students to learn deeply about the stuff we care so much about (i.e. being great SLPs) but also b) have our students feel welcome, NOT anxious, and excited to learn the stuff! I have ADHD and I've learned to lean into the strengths and work on the areas of growth that it affords me. Collaboration is one of my core values, as well as enthusiasm, so I AM SO GLAD YOU ARE HERE.

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mandulak@pacificu.edu

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I would LOVE to do a collaborative research project with y'all and get the conversation about alternative grading and other inclusive teaching methods out into the CSD world. We need more people talking about it! AND DOING IT!

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Jesse Stommel on Teaching in Higher Ed : Just released!

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Jesse Stommel on Teaching in Higher Ed : Just released!

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Podcast (tihe_podcast):

Jesse Stommel shares about Undoing the Grade on episode 483 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

For us to be talking about something like unlearning or ungrading, there's an irony in that because we are the people who need to do that work the most and the people for whom that work is probably the hardest.
-Jesse Stommel

The only wrong way to do something is to do it unintentionally, to do it in a way that isn't carefully thinking through what we're doing.
-Jesse Stommel

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Undoing the Grade, with Jesse Stommel - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Jesse Stommel shares about Undoing the Grade on episode 483 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

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Susan Blum on TIHE : Author of UNGRADING

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Susan Blum on TIHE : Author of UNGRADING

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 350 of The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Ungrading with Susan Blum.

[music]

[00:00:09] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:18] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students. Joining me for today's episode is Susan D. Blum. She's a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, currently fixated on education and pedagogical praxis. She's the author of "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College, and the editor of their recent volume, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Susan, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:18] Susan Blum: Thanks, it's so great to be here on this illustrious program.

[00:01:22] Bonni: Oh, I'm so glad to just get this chance to talk with you. Not only have I, of course, read your book, but also followed you for quite some time on Twitter. This is such an important series of conversations that are happening right now. I'm excited for us to explore them, but I want to start out way back when to our childhoods and hear as you talk a little bit about what do you remember about grades as either a little girl, or when you got to junior high, high school? What do you remember about grades, and what they did or didn't do for you?

[00:01:55] Susan: I loved grades. I got good grades. I was this perfect good girl student. The grades were affirmation that I was good and smart, and following the rules, which I didn't always do completely. I was a procrastinator. Sometimes I didn't know exactly, I had these recollections of like, history class. I didn't really understand what was happening in there. I was really good at test taking, and I love taking tests, and school was a perfect fit for me. Where I've ended up is kind of funny, because I kind of reject all of that right now. I've had quite a journey over my many decades of living with school as a student and a teacher, and also a parent. Whatever that's worth.

[00:02:50] Bonni: When I think back to my own childhood, I think back to having a growth mindset, but not utilizing this feeling that I got good. I don't even remember grades, kindergarten, third grade, I don't remember them. When I start to remember something about grades, and also academics would be around high school. I felt like I could have continued on that, they call it gate, the gifted program. I know that that's a whole, lots of challenges with that area of our education here at least in the United States. I remember, like I felt like I could have done that. That seemed really hard, and didn't have a big payoff for me.

I didn't understand really, I think the choices I was making. I went what I considered to be the easier route and didn't care a lot about grades. I didn't really care a lot about grades even by the time I got to college, but boy, oh boy do I remember in my master's program, I don't know what happened to me, but I was going to get perfect A's. I'm here to tell you today that I got perfect A's except for one A minus, and I'm still mad about it.

It's interesting how it kind of evolves like that. I don't think I really thought as critically. I shouldn't say I don't think I'm sure I did not think as critically about grades as I should have once I was in a position to "give them to people", which the way I'm phrasing that, of course has its challenges too. What do you remember about- because at some point you have to realize, wait, everyone doesn't have the same relationship I do with grades. Everyone's not the perfect test taker. It's not always because they don't want to be.

I think a lot of times we ascribe merit to these things, that you've got that bad grade because you're a bad person or you're bad at whatever, like it's a choice thing. Where do you remember in your career starting to go, "Wait, there's a big difference here."

[00:04:49] Susan: Well, I certainly knew people who I knew were very capable, and thoughtful, and interesting, and creative people who didn't get good grades or perfect grades in school. I always thought there was some- I'm sort of humiliated to be saying this, but I'm saying it out loud, because I think it's important for your listeners to understand that there's a journey, and that if they have not questioned grades at all, they're in really good company. I didn't question the objectivity and value of grades until well into my teaching career, which is shocking to me right now. It's like I had this complete epiphany and revelation and transformation.

Now, I know that I used to think that but I think so completely differently that it's hard to feel like the same person feeling those things. My real transformation in terms of how I think about grades came when I was doing my book on plagiarism. I wrote a book called My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture. I really began by thinking that grade inflation was a problem and that students' cheating was a problem. I ended up thinking that grades were the problem, and not the students, and not their production, and not their work ethic. The whole way we framed everything because, by that point, I was reading about learning in a really serious way.

I discovered Alfie Kohn, who literally changed my life. When I started to read about motivation, and I started to see how the rewards themselves were as he says punishment, I completely flipped the way I thought about all of it. Now here I am, like 15 years later, and I have a completely different attitude toward all of it. Grades are, in some way, that kind of linchpin in the whole transformation I personally have had in how I think about learning school, what we're doing here in higher ed, my role as a teacher, what the students are supposed to be doing. All of it is connected, but you have to really question grades or you're not going to get to what I see as the right outcome.

[00:07:25] Bonni: Alfie's name comes up quite a bit in the literature and of course in other people's discourse around this. I just hear his name in many aspects. Tell us more about what he means when he says rewards are the punishments. Tell us more about that.

[00:07:43] Susan: If you think that you have to give people extrinsic rewards for behavior that would otherwise be meaningful, then you are basically telling people that they shouldn't trust themselves, they should always be waiting for external validation, external control. The end of his book has a whole detailed analysis of behaviorism and why that is not the right model we should have for the relationship between students and teachers. Even if you are getting good grades, you're always threatened by the next bad grade, and you're always missing an opportunity to focus on what you're learning for its own sake.

[00:08:34] Bonni: Do you have a recollection of a time in your life, your education, where you saw yourself doing that performance, or the behaviorism?

[00:08:44] Susan: No, because I was made for school. School was made for me. I loved everything about it. I loved math, and I loved science, and I loved foreign languages, and I loved literature, and I loved everything except gym class. I felt great joy in learning everything. If it was hard, that was okay. For me, it was fun. I understand that not everybody's like me. I've watched students over the years, and in some ways the more highly achieving students do this more, do things for performance for achievement, for pleasing the teacher. If you say three responses, I'll give three responses. If you say one response, I'll give one response.

All of that is simply a matter of keeping an eye on the points and making sure you get the points. To my mind, genuine education isn't simply this kind of points game.

[00:09:55] Bonni: I started doing this. I've done it many times, but I'm just recreating it for virtual environment, there's a company called Human Synergistics. They've been publishing for decades a very simple case that's built around the way that institutional review boards make their decisions about medical research, what would be more permissible versus less permissible with their three guiding principles. We do it in a non-medical, non-research class. It's a business ethics class, but it helps to introduce some vocabulary around ethics.

As I was introducing it, I was having to explain to them that you're going to get points for doing this. Like there's a place in the gradebook for points. Just by doing it, you're going to get the points. There's this tension where we're just trained, we're ingrained that there's a right answer here, and what she's looking for is this right answer. I'm going, no, actually, this whole experience of you just saying, what do you think? I don't need you to be a medical researcher and practice probably better if you're not, because then you'd be able to come into it with more of a beginner's mind and thinking about ethics from more of a beginner's mind.

I really had to spend a lot of time helping because this is a new class, and we're all just getting to know each other here. Why would they trust me that there's not something about the performance that they're about to do that I'm going to trick them and be like, two points off, or whatever? I am one who is not fully embraced ungrading. I'm so glad to learn from people like you, you used the word journey a few moments ago. This isn't something that I think would be wise to just jump wholeheartedly. We don't have to be perfect in terms of that you can incorporate many aspects of it.

Then it does, of course, require transparency, this is how this is structured, then this will be rated using the following criteria. I tried to get a little bit closer to maybe specifications grading, although I don't know if that's the best representation, but we can start to hear from people like you. Then that's where I'd like to head next with what were grades designed to do, versus what they are actually doing.

Could you talk a little bit about what many of us, myself included, just learned without realizing we were learning like this, this is it. This is why we do this. This is why it's so important. Then that tires screeching moment where you go, but it's not doing that. Here's all the other stuff that it's doing, that is really detrimental?

[00:12:36] Susan: I just want to piggyback on something you said a moment ago about students thinking you're tricking them. Because when I first began ungrading, I had the sense that students thought I was tricking them. I had to learn how to really explain what I'm doing and build trust in the class, in each other, in what we're doing in the enterprise, so that they can see that I really know what I'm doing in removing this thing that everybody thinks is actually the central part of the enterprise.

I wrote this other book called, I Love Learning; I Hate School. There was a chapter in there about grades. It's based on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews done with undergraduates. You ask them what the point is of college, and they say, "To get good grades." People believe that grades are important. I think people think they're important for three reasons. One is for sorting, so we can tell who's good and who's bad, or who's most good, and who's least good, for communicating, for feedback, or whatever, and for motivating. It falls flat on all three points, and then it also has bad effects, in addition to not producing the good effects that we hope.

We know that when you focus on extrinsic motivation, you reduce or even sometimes destroy intrinsic motivation. If you have to bribe somebody to do something, then it must be because they don't want to do it for itself. If you tell somebody, "Eat this peach, it's really delicious." Eating the peach is its own reward. If you say to somebody, "Eat this peach and you get five points," they'll think, "I guess there's something wrong with the peach so that they have to give me the points." There's research for decades and decades, a hundred years, showing that extrinsic motives don't really work. They're not necessary if you have meaningful activities.

If the learning is interesting, people will do it. Some of my happiest teaching moments are when a student says, "Wow, this was so interesting, I forgot it was for school." I think, "Okay, that's all I need." I could die happy. We think that grades are necessary for communicating or feedback. For a hundred years, people have shown that grades are completely inconsistent, different faculty, teachers, K through 12, in higher ed, include different dimensions in their grading schemes.

Some include participation, some don't. Some include attendance, some don't. Some include all the quizzes, some let you drop some. Some include improvement, some don't. Some include engagement, some fuzzy sense of that. Faculty are completely inconsistent. We also know that when students get a grade on an assignment, they only pay attention to the grade, even if there's feedback, written feedback, they tend to disregard that feedback, because they see it and faculty see it as only there to justify the grade. We're not actually producing much feedback anyway, we believe that grades are necessary for sorting in a kind of myth of meritocracy.

We know from all kinds of research in terms of equity, in terms of how advantaged people are going into things, that grades basically track with advantage at every level of school, everywhere. I don't see my own role as reproducing prior sorts, I see my role as trying to help every student get somewhere, and they may be going to different places. Those are the three things that grades are supposed to do that they don't do very well. Then we know, there's so much research showing that grades lead to things like cheating and plagiarizing, because the incentive structure is there.

Grades lead to gaming the system, they lead to doing the minimum, to doing superficial work, to dependence on a teacher, dependence on the judge, what do you want? Is this right? They lead to a false sense of completion, now you're done. As a writer, am I a perfect writer? When do I get to be the perfect writer? I don't know. Then finally, all I'll say for today is that, grades also lead to a huge amount of anxiety. In some cases, anxiety, so severe that people are depressed, and it leads to suicide. That, to me, is the most impossible and unthinkable outcome of this whole system.

[00:18:01] Bonni: I think sometimes it's hard for people to take this in, because sometimes there's just so much cognitive dissonance. It can feel like, "Wow, all of this is true, but this has been true forever." Or, "Maybe I don't buy into everything, but some of this is true," to start to wrestle with some of this stuff. I know you've collaborated with, shared with so many people around this. Do you have a guide for us as we start to go, "Wow, some of what she's saying might be true. Oh, I'm recognizing some of that in myself and also, in students that I have had in classes."

To what extent do we need more information reading a book on? It would be great, which is why you're here today. To what extent could we start small? Again, I don't want to give you a binary choice. I just love your thoughts on, as you've seen people begin to be confronted with the same things that you and I have been confronted with in our teaching, and so many others. Start small experiment, or go out and get more information or give me a third choice? I'm not thinking, blend the two.

[00:19:12] Susan: I think starting small, is probably necessary. You can't just do everything you've always done and get rid of grades through and through. You have to really think about your goals, and not only your goals, but the students' goals. Think about your students as actual people and people who are learning things for purposes. If they're not learning for a grade, why else are they learning? What are they getting out of this particular thing? The more fascinating you can make it, the more you can appeal to students' innate curiosity, which we all have. It is part of our nature. It's part of our being as mammals, not just humans.

All humans, all animals are curious, and we all love our subjects, and we are deeply passionate and curious about them. Why can't we join our students on these kinds of adventures, to discover, "Wow, anthropology, it's everywhere." If you show students that their life can be more fascinating by learning what you're doing together, you don't have to grade everything. You can also have authentic outcomes so that the students do something with what they're learning, they tell their classmate whom they like, or they tell their partner, or they tell their roommate, or they apply it to something.

Those are genuine outcomes, and when you do that, they can be small things, "Go interview your grandmother and ask her this." You don't have to grade that because your student will be so inspired, and the grandmother's feedback will be reward. Then, grades aren't necessary. It does mean rethinking assignments, it does mean you're not going to necessarily get people to read something really boring, so maybe don't assign something really boring, unless you help students find a reason for their own purposes, for that to be useful.

It does mean rethinking a lot of things, but you can rethink small things, and then get your confidence, and then see that it actually has good outcomes. Talk to your students, ask them what they think. Ask them what they feel. Once you actually have an honest conversation with your students, I don't think it's hard to get rid of grades all the way.

[00:22:04] Bonni: I'd like to share one other example from my class and then get your response to it because I have been so inspired by your work and it's so rewarding to just know I'm not done but to have already felt really good about the progress. You were mentioning about thinking about your goals. What's the purpose for why someone would learn this? I decided in this business ethics class, one thing I wanted to change pretty dramatically, at least it felt dramatic to me. Picture this, 2020 spring, I was teaching a business ethics class, and I always would do this business ethics in the news.

I'd give this sticky note to everybody as they came in, they would write down what's the story they saw in the news that came up since we last met. We put them all on the back wall and then we sort them. As you already know, well, the story is going because there would be the first week one business news story about some economic effects of something potential, coronavirus, whatever, and then the next week, and the next week, and before you know it, every sticky note was about the coronavirus. Of course, we didn't meet together after that, but I started to see some real misinformation that they were coming into contact with.

I had spent so much time thinking, "I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough about this if I can't do it," and I was like, "Get over yourself. You cannot have students bring news stories if you're not going to at least attempt to equip them with this stuff." You might be familiar with Mike Caulfield's work. He is an expert in misinformation. He has a framework called the SIFT model, and the whole thing about it is any of us can do this stuff. I did have that feeling like, "Wow. Well, this is something I'm feeling increasingly passionate about, but how do I get them to be interested in it?" I had a couple of exercises that were just you did it or you didn't do it?

That was all I was looking for. I had them answer some questions like where do you get your news from? How do you feel about that? What would you change, if anything, about the way that you get your news and all of that? All of them, except one of them, had something they'd like to change? I thought, "Well, here we go," because I couldn't have and they all felt very different. I haven't done even a simple analysis of them yet, but it's all still fresh, but everyone coming in with some innate desire to change something about their current methodology. I suspect that as we go, they might even feel even more of an increase, I hope. I definitely feel it.

I have an increasing desire to learn more about this. I pictured this potentially being something they'll carry with them for many, many years to come until it all changes again. Anyway, I wanted to share that with you in terms of the kind of reflection that you're talking about, that curiosity. I'm sure you've run across times where people really struggle with, "I don't know how to get people curious about this," or that perhaps are not self-aware enough to know that in their discipline because they're just so steeped in it that it's hard for them to think with that beginner's mind?

Do you have any guidance for us in terms of thinking about the goals to get outside of ourselves and back into our students potentially?

[00:25:20] Susan: Well, I now begin most all my courses asking students to generate their own goals, and to see how this class might fit into their lives. It might even be a required course. In addition to checking the box for the major or something, what else can you do from this? I have a lot of student voices and I asked students to do a lot of connecting between what we're doing in class and what they are living. Even if students take five courses a year, that's 40 courses over four years of college, they can't learn everything. We can't teach them everything in 1 semester, in 20 semesters, in 30 semesters.

What we have to figure out is, what are the dispositions that will help them learn going forward once school is over? I don't just mean for their first job because their first job will not be their last job in almost every case. What kinds of experiences are students going to have in our classes, whether it's critical information literacy, or whether it's ethnographic observation, or whether it's asking questions about ethics, or whatever it is? Having that experience of the power of this insight is something that I think we can help foster if we have interesting enough activities.

It might mean rethinking textbooks, and tests, and quizzes, and things like that, you can get to the same outcomes in a lot of different ways. I think trying to imagine what the students are actually engaged in, what does this feel like for the student to be doing, what are they reading, what are they hearing, what are they writing, what are they studying, what are they learning, what are they talking to other people about, and really trying to figure out ways that this could be meaningful in a multiplicity of ways.

Universal Design for Learning is something that has so many facets, and that can include people having different goals. Some of your students might end up going into business, and others might end up being teachers. How can all of these different future paths be enriched by whatever they're doing in your class?

[00:28:03] Bonni: It's so true. I got such a kick out of some of the less traditional disciplines that might sign up for ungrading showing up in your book, including I really enjoyed that, I need to go reread it again, the chapter with someone who teaches computer programming. I suspect you probably just got so tickled reading this chapter when you first started in because I'm thinking about your work in plagiarism, and cheating, and all of that, and programming, there's a lot of challenges that would show up that just how easy it would be to copy-paste in all of those things.

You could think about fighting that with fire or you could think about that's what we create with our system of grading, and if it doesn't go away, then you're not going to be able to tap into that. Then, the other one, of course, I got which I've had a chance to interview a couple of times for this podcast, but who teaches in STEM fields biology, I believe, forgive me if I'm getting it wrong. Just before we close this portion of the show, would you give any advice to people who are feeling a little resistance like, "This is all well and fine, but it doesn't work with my discipline because it is so test-oriented or it is so traditionally-minded when it comes to measures?"

[00:29:19] Susan: Right. You're talking about Rissa Sorensen-Unruh who teaches organic chemistry-

[00:29:25] Bonni: Yes. Thank you.

[00:29:27] Susan: -and Chris Riesbeck. They teach it very different institutions in very different disciplines, but many people have done versions of ungrading in all different disciplines. I don't have time to talk about all the research on physics education, and chemistry education, and math education, but a lot of people have really tried to capitalize on active learning techniques, on involvement, on curiosity. Derek Bruff talks about, time for telling. You don't lecture, lecture, lecture until the students are stupefied and then ask them to do something meaningful, you give them some puzzle or something that makes them curious, and then they have to work it through. At which point they might end up having to take a test, but the way they get there is a very different model.

[00:30:23] Bonni: Yes, and even when you're talking about taking a test because that is some of the challenges that some colleagues of mine will share, we can give lots and lots of low stakes, no stakes practice tests because we've agreed that wouldn't it be great if you could get into medical school or wouldn't it be great if you could achieve, so there are still going to be boxes that our students need to check in order to attain some goal. Is it a master's program, whatever? It's not like that's going to go away, but that's true.

[00:30:54] Susan: Sadly, that's true.

[00:30:56] Bonni: Well, maybe I shouldn't even say that because I am pretty amazed at how quickly so much has changed around standardized testing. I'm embarrassed to admit, I have no idea if this is happening in other places, but almost as soon as the words are out of my mouth, of course, it has to be recharged sometimes behind on these things, but that happened pretty quick.

It took a pandemic to really dislodge it, but so maybe I shouldn't be so confident at that, but at any rate, if that's what your job is to prepare someone to take some type of a standardized test, that doesn't mean you have to create the same conditions of that to help foster the learning and can we lessen that anxiety now?

[00:31:41] Susan: Well, and we know that when students learn for a test, they often forget it really fast. If we can deepen their learning, then they're much more likely to have good outcomes on tests and I don't want to take too long because I know we have some time limit. Like in Finland, they don't take a lot of tests in school at all. They don't have homework, they don't have tests, they play outside, they don't teach reading until they're older and they do really, really well on international tests.

There are lots of reasons Finland is small, is wealthy, is homogeneous. There are lots of other factors, but just because someday there's going to be some big standardized test doesn't mean all of life up to that moment has to be fixated on these inhumane and ineffective learning experiences.

[00:32:35] Bonni: Yes, and what I know, you're not saying, but just because I have another episode, that'll be right around the time that this one airs and where neither of us is saying that memorization is an important, in fact, it can really deepen learning. In many of our disciplines, that's a critical thing, but does the memorization have to come with that? Does it have to be coupled with these high anxiety, high stakes things? I think in terms of plagiarism and cheating and all of that, I had an opportunity to speak with James Lang who's also written a book about cheating and that's one of the things I take away from that conversation, which was five or six years ago, as wild as that is.

I think I was under the impression of like, "Well, we throw that out too, and no, no, no, we don't throw that out." That stays in here as a very important aspect of learning. It's just how we're trying to get people to memorize things, that's the problem.

[00:33:26] Susan: Yes, we could keep going about that.

[00:33:29] Bonni: No, please, please just respond because I'd love to hear it, and then we can get ourselves over to that recommendation.

[00:33:33] Susan: Well, I think the main thing I would like to encourage everybody to remember is that the goal is learning and learning can be for the purpose of use or interest. Those are really good motivating reasons. If you have to memorize the abbreviations for the elements or something like that. When students really understand that it's so that you can do these other things and we can make it fun and it might be hard, but we can do it, then it's much more likely that it will stick.

We know a lot about how people learn about retrieval effects and memorization and practice and all of that, but also it's true that you can learn a random string of facts more easily when they're embedded in meaningful context. Rather than just have a stack of flashcards, it's what you might also need to do. I studied Chinese and so Chinese characters, I had to learn with flashcards, but reading, writing, using, speaking, flipping them up and remembering, all of that is necessary, but also seeing them in context, not just having one very simple quiz after another is I think important to remember.

[00:35:03] Bonni: I'm so glad that I asked you to expound on that and also that you were willing to because you just gave me the perfect segue into what I didn't realize I'd be recommending today. I want to extend actually something that you just said, and I've shared on prior episodes that Alzheimer's runs in my family and so I have a close relative who we both worry together about that is that going to happen. Anyway, we were talking on the phone the other day and she was mentioning that she read, there was a book someone came out with recently about keeping your brain healthy.

She's learned a number of languages in her life so she was picking up another one and I can't even remember what the new one was that she was picking up, but I had this realization and that was as I was speaking with her because I have always wished that I had learned another language, specifically, Spanish is one that I really regret. I took a class in high school and just never got very far with and I kept always thinking like, "Well, I could never learn it fluently unless I immersed myself and so it's not worth doing."

In that moment, I thought, "You know what? What would be wrong with learning a little bit more Spanish than you can remember from college? What would be wrong with you using the same app that she's been using and you could talk about it and you could ask how she's doing with hers," but I don't know why I decided with language that it's an all or nothing thing and I haven't quite figured out and I'd be interested if you have any thoughts on this, but there has to be benefits that would come without me learning all Spanish to be able to speak and write fluently.

[00:36:38] Susan: Okay. Well, one of my other hats as a linguistic anthropologist and so yes, there isn't an all or nothing mastery, but I know why you think that it's because of school. It's because you either get an A in Spanish and are perfect or you might as well give up and real life isn't like that. Many people can communicate really well with what might not be seen as perfect standard Spanish and what is the harm in trying? What is the harm in demonstrating goodwill to Spanish speakers by trying to meet them partway?

I'm not even talking about the cognitive benefits of learning something new, but you should try to learn Spanish imperfectly. Learning imperfectly is a very good human goal for a lot of what we do in our lives.

[00:37:36] Bonni: That's what I'm going to put for my recommendation. Try to learn something new imperfectly. The other thing I'd like to share, I know that there are a lot of apps and that any app or service, they're all going to have their limitations in that, so I have not done extensive review. I did decide to use the same one that she's using, so I'm having a ball with it. That was called Duolingo. Again, for example, it asks me to speak a phrase and I'm sure it's not perfectly capturing if I'm saying it right, but it's better than nothing. I've been enjoying it, so I'll share that too if anyone wants to just dip it.

It's been free so far that they do regularly try to get me to subscribe, but I just click no, thanks and I've just been having fun for about it takes five minutes a day, and I've been doing that most days and it's been great. I'm going to pass it over to you now for your recommendations and, Susan, thank you so much for that encouragement. I just love the way you framed that.

[00:38:31] Susan: Great. Well, I've been using Duolingo for Spanish also, but I love languages. I've learned a number of them over my years, and I have reservations about Duolingo, but I'm using it anyway and I have actually paid for the premium version because I'm susceptible to that kind of pressure.

[00:38:50] Bonni: I may be too.

[00:38:51] Susan: My first recommendation-

[00:38:52] Bonni: We'll see what happens to me in a few weeks.

[00:38:55] Susan: I've been doing it for years. My first recommendation is Jill Biden's coat. Dr. Jill Biden at the presidential inauguration was wearing a spectacularly beautiful coat and in it, there was embroidery and the embroidery was of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin in which he said, "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." I think that's right and I think it's amazing that Jill Biden is so committed to her role as an educator, that she had that embroidered into this historic quote. I have another recommendation. I don't know how many I get.

[00:39:45] Bonni: I'm riveted.

[laughter]

[00:39:48] Susan: Okay, I'm going to limit it to four.

[00:39:50] Bonni: I love it.

[00:39:52] Susan: One is a book called Insomnia which is by Marina Benjamin and it's got a really beautiful purple cover. I read it when I had insomnia. It's a beautiful book. It's beautifully written. It's got some research and some personal experience. The third thing I want to recommend is a book called Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, it's by Kirschenbaum, Napier, and Simon. The 50th-anniversary edition is being published next month with the effort of Barry Fishman, who is at the University of Michigan. He says the astonishing thing is that basically everything they wrote 50 years ago is still true, and we need to read this.

Then the fourth recommendation, and I will stop with this one is Peter Elbows book, Writing Without Teachers, which was recommended to me by my dear colleague, Kate Pantelides, and I am so inspired by Peter Elbow's book and a lot of the other people writing about writing.

[00:41:07] Bonni: I've heard great things about Peter Elbows over the years. That sounds like so good. All these are so great. How did you know about the embroidery?

[00:41:16] Susan: I don't have any idea. It was somewhere.

[00:41:20] Bonni: I'm going to have to go back and check out what she was wearing and see if I can find that quote in there. That's great. This is so fun. It's been such a joy to get to talk to you. I know we worked on scheduling this together for a while. I've been looking forward to the moment. It was nice to be able to have more of a relaxed read with the book and just soak it in. I read it a little slower than I do some of them, and it just what a treasure you've given us.

[00:41:45] Susan: Thank you for inviting me. Obviously, we could keep going for a reason all the time. [laughing] It's really very thought-provoking to commit to talk with you. I look forward to listening to the next episodes on your podcasts.

[00:41:59] Bonni: Oh, great. Thank you so much.

[00:42:01] Susan: Thanks.

[music]

[00:42:05] Bonni: Thanks once again to Susan Blum for being a guest on today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks to all of you for listening. I recently updated the way that I do my now weekly I can say it now weekly updates. If you haven't subscribed yet, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, you'll always get an overview of the most recent episode, and you'll also receive a look at some resources and other relevant episodes. Lots of people are giving me good feedback that the new format works. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and thanks once again for listening. I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.
[00:43:05] [END OF AUDIO] The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Ungrading, with Susan Blum - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Susan Blum shares about ungrading on episode 350 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Category/tags: Assessment + grading

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annmarie.knight@okbu.edu

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I'm new to Padlet so I posted this response as "anonymous" before I realized you needed to set up an account :)

I am also interested in a research collaboration. I think we need a more extensive body of research literature that is specific to teaching in CSD. I am also interested in competency-based education and I think alternative grading frameworks will be important to making CBE a reality in CSD programs. Excited to meet all of you!

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I am currently Assistant Professor at Columbia College, a small, private, liberal arts college in Columbia SC. In June I will transition to a remote position with Oklahoma Baptist University as Program Director of a new SLP master's program. I am also a wife and mom. I also have 1 girl, my dog Mia (not pictured). We love to travel and have friends over.

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Hi there! I'm an clinical assistant professor (hopefully soon to be associate) and the founding program director at Indiana University South Bend. I teach multicultural diversity and counseling, dysphagia, capstone and medical speech-language pathology, as well as an intro to CSD course for the undergraduates. I am obsessed with ungrading and helping my students get through the rigors of graduate school with less stress and anxiety than I had back in the day. We love to road trip to national parks, hike, check out museums, and see new things. When we cannot be outdoors, we are total board game geeks. Favorites include Wingspan, Everdell, and Architects of the West Kingdom. I am excited to learn more from all of you.

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jessig@iu.edu

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hisaacso@nmu.edu

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My favorite spot in Marquette, sunset point!

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Hello! I'm an assistant professor at Northern Michigan University, which is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I teach undergraduate classes: Anatomy and Physiology, Phonetics, Speech Sound Disorders, and Aural Rehabilitation. I defended my dissertation on March 8, and I am soon to be the program director of our graduate speech-language pathology program. We will submit our application this summer.

We love the outdoors and enjoy all the seasons Marquette, Michigan, has to offer. We ski, run, bike, hike, swim, and do anything else that gets us outside to enjoy the beauty Marquette has to offer.

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Traditional Grading : 3 points (David Clark)

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Traditional Grading : 3 points (David Clark)

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reinforces systemic inequity
setting perverse incentives
encouraging bad habits

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"grades built on growth over game-playing"
"LEARNING over letters and numbers"
"productive relationships over adversarial ones"

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1. do something
2. get feedback
3. think about the feedback
4. make changes

(EXAMPLE from stuttering midterm)

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FOUR PILLARS OF ALTERNATIVE GRADING (from Grading for Growth - Talbert & Clark)

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FOUR PILLARS OF ALTERNATIVE GRADING (from Grading for Growth - Talbert & Clark)

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1. Student work is evaluated using clearly defined and context-appropriate content standards for what constitutes acceptable evidence of learning.

2. Students are given helpful, actionable feedback that the student can and should use to improve their learning.

3. Student work doesn't have to receive a mark, but if it does, the mark is a progress indicator toward meeting a standard and not an arbitrary number.

4. Students can reassess work without penalty, using the feedback they receive, until the standards are met or exceeded.

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laura.chapman@scranton.edu

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I am Laura Chapman. I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Scranton in Scranton, PA. The University has a new undergraduate program (3 years in) and graduate distance program (candidacy program, started our first cohort this year). We love food and beer and wine and being outside. We just moved into our first house so I am having fun thrifting great house things :)

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sscripture@worcester.edu

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allsaue@siue.edu

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ASHA Proposal! I am pretty much a learning-new-things addict. I also have a line of research exploring ways to promote student mental health and wellness, I am learning about SoTL research, and am interested in doing faculty development and training. So....I think this book club is related to ALL of those things

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Students revising work

Ungrading / alternative grading

Relationships within the classroom (power differentials / contentious)

Specs grading (Alli)

Having students going back and trying again (not a once & done)

Competency based education

We are badass women who are doing a lot of things and are going to make it happen

Research studies - let's figure it out

I want to do at least a survey of practices across the country

ALSO, correlation between inclusive practices and student mental health in classroom

ASHA PROPOSAL! Manuscripts! Tutorials!

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Spring in St. Louis means you can find us on our bikes, at the park or watching Cardinals baseball. I'm an assistant professor (but shoudl hear back about P&T in the next few weeks) and undergraduate program director at Southern Illlinois University Edwardsville. I'm using specifications grading in 2 of 3 grad classes taht I teach, but reallywa nt to try it out in grad AAC and also consider how to incorporate it at the undergraduate level. I'm excited to get to know you and learn from you all!

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Hi everyone! I am an Assistant Professor at Indiana University South Bend, located in... wait for it... South Bend, Indiana. I teach a variety of subjects including neuroanatomy, aphasia, cognitive-communication disorders, research methods, and voice disorders. In addition, I supervise capstone research and diagnostic practicum. As an educator with a focus on practical training, I am dedicated to ensuring that we do not lose talented clinicians in the graduate education process. I love to travel, read, and be near the water. Looking forward to learning with and from all of you!

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What stood out to you about this chapter?

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What about the authors origin stories stands out to you about how you want your classes to look / feel - how do you want students to experience your classes?

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Feedback loops - what do you think? Do you use them? Why or why not?

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What's your impressions about grade inflation? (Pg 16 - high stakes)

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Misrepresents learning

Misuses Statistics

Is inequitable (sometimes reflects behaviors / ability to "fall in line," demotivating also)

Promotes unhealthy student-faculty relationships (arguments about grades)

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Hi All! I am an assistant professor at Worcester State University in central Massachusetts. We have an undergrad and graduate program and I am in my 2nd year. Love teaching in higher ed, interested in pedagogy, and am starting to dig into grading for growth. I am in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program and am a Big Sister to a 13 year-old girl. We just recently crafted and made a Taylor Swift fan themed Christmas tree - just for fun! I also love on my cousin-nieces and-nephews, all 6 of them, ranging from 2 years old to 16!

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What went well?

What could have been improved?

What will students say in their evaluations?

Who am I and what can I become as a teacher in the classroom?

WHY DO I DO THIS?!?!

If I were to teach this course again, how would I change it? Why?

What might keep me from making these changes?

How is my thinking about teaching changing?

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There's also a book about this

From Sam : PAPER TOPIC : Deriving self-worth from the one bad comment or grade. Focusing on constructive feedback, growth mindset

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This piece was revised and expanded for a book from Hybrid Pedagogy, Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, available now in paperback and Kindle editions.

In the past two years, when I've been asked to sum up my approach to pedagogy, I've said "kindness."

I didn't always think this way. My graduate education encouraged me to think of students as antagonists, always trying to get one over on their instructors. I was urged to be on the lookout for plagiarism, to be vigilant for cheaters, to assume that the students wouldn't do the reading, and to expect to be treated as a cog in a consumerist machine by students who would challenge their grades on a whim. I was once advised by a senior graduate student to "be a bitch" on the first day of class so that my students never wanted that version of myself to show up again, advice that I dutifully repeated to several of the graduate students who came after me. I was a stickler for deadlines, and memorably once refused to excuse the absence of a student who was battling a burst pipe in his house when class was in session. I look back on that now and wince.

I gradually learned, through a great deal of trial and error, that this combative way of approaching teaching was counterproductive at best, destructive at worst. Students didn't communicate with me easily, since many of them didn't see the point. They knew (I realize now) that I approached them with suspicion, and so returned that sentiment in kind. It quickly became clear to me that I needed to build relationships, not defensively prevent them from forming, and that trust was a vital part of creating the circumstances under which learning could happen. There was no space for trust to grow in the learning spaces I'd been trying to create, and so I learned to ease up, to let go of rigid control I'd tried to impose upon the classroom, and to make room for the unpredictable and unexpected. I thought, twenty-three years into my teaching career, that I was doing a pretty good job. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington in the summer of 2017.

The entire Institute was predicated upon the concept of kindness. From the pronoun buttons available at the registration desk, to the probing questions of the session leaders, to the time people took, one-on-one, to talk about syllabi and assignments, there was an ethos of care running through the whole four days of my residency. I had signed up for the Intro track, and had expected to spend my time evaluating digital tools to bring into my classroom. I did do that, but first I was asked to think about why I needed those tools at all, whom they would serve, and how I would build in accommodations for students with disabilities. My fellow attendees and I were constantly asked to consider why we were doing things the way we were, and what subtextual messages we were sending to our students about who they were. I took a good long look at my syllabus, and realized I had communicated everything in it from a position of absolute authority. The language I used to describe the college's Honor Code, for example, expressed the suspicion that everyone was going to commit some awful academic offense at some point, and my attendance policy made no room for the idea that my students were adults with complicated lives who would need to miss a class now and again.

Why? Why did I posit my students as passive novices who couldn't contribute to their own learning? Why did I require students to jump through hoops to prove that they deserved an extension on a paper? Why did I dock points if my students missed three classes in a term? No one had ever asked me to defend my pedagogical choices before, and once they did, I found much of my pedagogy indefensible. I felt regret and no small amount of embarrassment. My teaching was undone by the presence of a question that was never articulated quite this directly but was everywhere around me:

Why not be kind?

And so I chose kindness as my pedagogical practice. Telling people this has often elicited a baffled response. Kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching. In part this is an effect of the pressures that are brought to bear on our classrooms from outside them, symptomatic of a nationwide clamoring (in some circles, at least) for standardization, testing, and rote assessment. Instead of kindness, we're more likely to hear about standards and rigor. (The national professional organization to which I belong says that " good teaching entails accuracy and rigor," but never mentions compassion, for example.) And when we are urged to be kind within an educational setting, it's too often to make up for a lack of institutional support for students and faculty in need, asking a particular service of women and non-binary individuals of all races, and men of color. Kindness can be a band aid we're urged to plaster over deep fissures in our institutions, wielded as a weapon instead of as a balm. And too often people confuse kindness with simply "being nice."

But, to me, kindness as pedagogical practice is not about sacrificing myself, or about taking on more emotional labor. It has simplified my teaching, not complicated it, and it's not about niceness. Direct, honest conversations, for instance, are often tough, not nice. But the kindness offered by honesty challenges both myself and my students to grow. As bell hooks memorably wrote in Teaching to Transgress, "there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches."

Yet in practice, I've found that kindness as pedagogical practice distills down to two simple things: believing people, and believing in people.

When a student comes to me to say that their grandparent died, I believe them. When they email me to say they have the flu, I believe them. When they tell me they didn't have time to read, I believe them. When they tell me their printer failed, I believe them.

There's an obvious chance that I could be taken advantage of in this scenario, that someone could straight-up lie and get away with it. But I've learned that I would rather take that risk than make life more difficult for my students struggling with grief and illness, or even an over-packed schedule or faulty electronics. It costs me nothing to be kind. My students have not, en masse, started refusing to meet deadlines, but the students who are struggling have had time to finish their work. My students have not, en masse, started skipping class, but they're not required to undergo the invasive act of telling me personal details about their lives when they can't show up. My students have not, en masse, started doubting my abilities or my expertise, but they have stepped forward to direct their own education in meaningful and exciting ways that I could not have thought of.

That's believing students. But what about believing in students?

Believing in students means seeing them as collaborators - believing they have valuable contributions to make to the way in which syllabi, assignments, and assessments are designed, and life experiences that should be respected in the classroom.

In Fall 2017, I asked both classes to give me questions about the topics we'd be covering - American Indian history in one class, and the history of gender and sexuality in the U.S. in the other. I was then able to craft a syllabus for each class that wove together my own sense of important historical context together with answers to the questions they had posed. The students were offered a sense of ownership in the course, and I was alerted to things I might not otherwise have considered - basic terminology around which there was confusion, for example, or, say, a strong interest in understanding changing concepts of masculinity over time.

I drew on the wisdom of teachers who had gone into this 'kind space' before me, and made significant changes to the way in which I graded work in those classes. Rather than distributing a finished list of grade requirements, I shared some suggestions, and refined those with my students' input until we'd reached a consensus about meaningful assessment. When my students turned in a paper, they also filled out a self-evaluation of their work that asked them what they'd do differently next time, how pleased they were with what they produced, and what they learned about themselves. These adjustments are possible in any class, be it one like mine, with twenty-five students, or a much larger lecture course at a different kind of institution. Both approaches give students greater ownership over their grade and the way that it's awarded; grading becomes, to whatever degree possible, a collaborative venture. In smaller classes it's possible to go further; my students and I sat together and talked over the answers on their self-evaluation, and I asked my students to give themselves a grade. Together, we entered into a conversation about why that grade felt right to them, and why it did or didn't feel right to me, before reaching a consensus on what grade they'd earned.

I've also begun to think of my classes in terms of universal design. For many years I taught with the idea that there was a well-established, academic norm that was fair and impartial, and my job was to make accommodations available for those students who had particular disabilities, or faced particular challenges in meeting that norm. I no longer believe in such a practice. My job, as I see it now, is to make my classroom accessible to everyone. I've begun the long work of redesigning my lessons and assignments so that everyone is a full participant, and no one needs ask for extra time or a note-taker, because those needs have already been addressed. Because I don't believe students with disabilities should have to out themselves, I no longer ban laptops in my classroom, or have quizzes that some students have to take across the hall to get their necessary time-and-a-half. Instead I've experimented with take-home quizzes, options for students to record videos as well as write papers, and final project guidelines that allow students to create anything that will demonstrate to me what they've learned over the term. This, too, is about belief in my students, and believing that by designing my class to accommodate all types of learning I'm demonstrating something important about the ways in which we should be creating a more just world.

I feel more comfortable as a teacher now than I ever have. The subconscious sense that students were antagonists lingered inside me for a long time - long enough that it has been a marvel to teach these past two academic years and experience a teacher-student relationship without that default expectation. I was less stressed; I didn't have reservations about walking into the classroom. My students rose up to meet every new challenge I presented to them, and vocally affirmed that they appreciated the new approach to grading. Crucially, they articulated that when I looked them in the eye and told them what they had done well in a paper, they believed me, whereas when the same info was written at the end of a paper, they didn't. They saw it as pablum - something that I had to write before I delivered the bad news of what they could still work at (which they interpreted as "what I did wrong.") I see that shift, from their exasperation and disappointment to them becoming partners in the assessment of their work, was emblematic of the fruits of a pedagogy of kindness. It was, and is, transformational for all involved.

A pedagogy of kindness asks us to apply compassion in every situation we can, and not to default to suspicion or anger. When suspicion or anger is our first response, a pedagogy of kindness asks us to step back and do the reflective work of asking why we're reacting in that manner and what other instances of disappointment or mistrust are coming to bear on a particular moment in a particular student-teacher interaction. This can transform the student-teacher relationship - but it's not only on an individual-to-individual level that it can alter our working world. To extend kindness means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave. Transactional models of education identify students as consumers and teachers as retail workers who must please their customers (an inhumane model for retail sales as well as the world of learning). Administrators become managers in this model, looking for cents they can save rather than people they can support. This drains the entire system of its humanity, and leads to decisions at every level where the personhood of a student, teacher, or administrator is diminished.

To value and practice kindness is to resist such models. Even where institutions are leaning away from investment in personhood in favor of hedge funds, we as teachers have the ability to insist that individuals matter. We have the means to hold a line, to see the student without shelter - or food, or safety, or a laptop, or an internet connection, or health, or confidence, or a support network - as someone who matters exactly as they are and even because of the challenges they face. We can refuse to dehumanize our students and presume an adversarial stance. We can prioritize kindness.

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Kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching.

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Check it out! :)

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Section 3 of this book includes the reflection questions for reviewing student evaluations of teaching that we talked about during our discussion of Chapters 1 & 2.

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The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (FREE e-Book)

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The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (FREE e-Book)

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Mays Imad is an assistant professor of biology and equity pedagogy at Connecticut College. Prior to that, she founded the teaching and learning center at Pima Community College in Tucscon, Arizona. A Gardner Institute Fellow and an AAC&U Senior Fellow, Imad's research focuses on stress, self-awareness, advocacy, and classroom community, and how these impact student learning and success. A nationally-recognized expert on trauma-informed teaching and learning, Imad works to promote inclusive, equitable, and contextual education-all rooted in the latest research on the neurobiology of learning.

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The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching

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Mays Imad is an assistant professor of biology and equity pedagogy at Connecticut College. Prior to that, she founded the teaching and learning center at Pima Community College in Tucscon, Arizona. A Gardner Institute Fellow and an AAC&U Senior Fellow, Imad's research focuses on stress, self-awareness, advocacy, and classroom community, and how these impact student learning and success.

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Faculty- survey and/or focus groups. Challenges, strategies, solutions for using LMS w/ alternative grading 

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Faculty- survey and/or focus groups. Challenges, strategies, solutions for using LMS w/ alternative grading 

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Paper for SIG 10 Perspectives (Viewpoint)- how to and benefits of faculty learning communities

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Paper for SIG 10 Perspectives (Viewpoint)- how to and benefits of faculty learning communities

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Was there anything that stood out to you about this chapter?

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The Four Pillars - thoughts about these? Which are the most impactful? Which are the most difficult to implement? Which can be implemented as a "baby step" towards a total course revision?

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Success stories - anyone who has used alternative grading practices, do you have any stories or anecdotes that validate some of the evidence here? Stories about improved academic performance? Improved motivation? Decreased stress / increased well-being? Improved equity?

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Was there anything that stood out to you about this chapter?

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https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/using-alternative-grading-practices-to-foster-student-learning/

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Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 511 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, using alternative grading practices to foster growth with David Clark.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:21]:

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. David Clark is back to Teaching in Higher Ed. He's an associate professor in the department of mathematics at Grand Valley State University. David earned his PhD in 2012 at Michigan Technological University. He shares research, advice, and stories about alternative grading through his blog and book, both named grading for growth, along with his coauthor, Robert Talbert. Beyond assessment, David studies discrete mathematics, especially via undergraduate research projects.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:26]:

He serves on the senior staff for Math Path, a month long residential enrichment program for middle school students. He is also an avid backpacker and board gamer. David Clark, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

David Clark [00:01:42]:

Thank you for having me again.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:44]:

When Robert Talbert was on the show recently, he helped us with 4 pillars that you and your coauthor Robert used in grading for growth and really keeps you grounded and rooted. And I'm gonna ask you some follow-up questions that we didn't have time to delve into as much with him, starting with the first one, clearly defined standards. How do you, David, over time iterate on these standards? Because it's not like they're clear and then we are done and our work work here is finished, and we can finish the laundry or something like that.

David Clark [00:02:20]:

Absolutely. Yeah. That's an important thing to remember in general is that us as faculty, we're engaging in our own feedback loops. Right? We're iterating through teaching and learning and understanding what our students need. And so, yeah, I'm constantly reevaluating what my clearly defined standards are. And I think the the most important thing I can say for that is as you're teaching a class and using alternative grading, for the first time or for the the nth time, however big n is, take notes, right, about was that did that work? Did these standards make sense? Did something feel out of order? Was something too broad or too narrow? Anything that you notice in the moment and you think, oh, I'll remember that, then take a note about that and just adjust those standards. And that can lead to little changes or big changes. But that, as part of the reflective practice, can also lead to even bigger things.

David Clark [00:03:16]:

So when I'm looking at from year to year or from semester to semester, like, what standards am I using and am I happy with this list in a certain class, I'm often thinking about things like, okay. Does does this represent what I really care about? Or am I getting comfortable with it, but comfort is not necessarily the same as what really matters? Right? Have things shifted in my teaching or in where I could what I care to emphasize? Do I really wanna teach that one standard, or is that just a thing that maybe we do in class, and I'm happy with it? So those are the types of questions that you can ask yourself. Right? How important is this? Do I wanna keep doing this? Is it too specific, too broad? Any of those types of things. But and and just never stop thinking about that. Never think that your list of standards is perfect because you change, your students change, the class changes, the world around us changes, and that makes a difference.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:08]:

Can you talk about what might prompt you to take notes? Is it because something didn't go as expected? Or is this a discipline that you have on a on a regular basis that's instilled in your habits?

David Clark [00:04:19]:

Right. So it is absolutely part of my habits to just take notes about each each class. And sometimes it's it's a single phrase. Right? And sometimes the phrase is great. And but an example of a note that I took really recently on my own list of standards from one class that I teach is it was just said, flip l 2 and l 3. So l 2 and l 3 are the names of 2 standards. And I realized as we were working on something and I was writing a quiz that we encounter those in the opposite order from what I had put them on the list. And it's a really minor thing, but when a student is looking at my list of standards, they're kinda going from top to bottom.

David Clark [00:04:55]:

This is the order that things happen in and, oh, that was out of order. So a very minor thing. A bigger one I've done recently is I a couple of semesters ago, I just drew a big x through an entire category of my standards and said, you know what? I don't want to be assessing these. It's a thing we're gonna do in class, and I care about it, but it's not something I'm gonna assess. And that's often true for things that are sort of habits of mind and, things that would maybe fall under the, what's the phrase I'm looking for here? The unspoken curriculum, the hidden curriculum, where, like, I want to help my students understand these things, and I am not gonna assess them at all. I want them just to engage and experience and be aware.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:35]:

And the second pillar that that Robert reintroduced us to recently is helpful feedback. And I get so much joy out of when I experience those feedback loops, and I'm I'm fascinated by them. I also get so much frustration. So I know my own failures are often related to some aspect of feedback loops, but what are you hearing from faculty that you get a chance to work with? And in your own work, where do we sometimes struggle with feedback loops? What what are some of the patterns that you notice there?

David Clark [00:06:06]:

Right. So we call it helpful feedback. Right? And that's, it's it's kinda easy. Most of us are used to giving feedback in some way, but making it helpful is the tough part. And something that I find a lot, and I see this in myself as well, is that there's we've built up these muscles in giving feedback that is sort of justification for why you lost a point or you you know, something didn't work out or whatever. And so it's it's backwards looking. Right? It's saying, well, you know, I I took off this point because this thing had to happen or whatever, as opposed to, okay, this is what happened, and now I'm gonna give you feedback to help you engage with and understand the thing I want you to. And it's kind of a subtle shift, but a lot a lot of us, myself included, are so used to giving that backwards looking feedback that it's not as helpful then.

David Clark [00:06:58]:

And so to think, okay, I'm gonna give this feedback with the understanding the student needs to be able to use it. So it can be fairly direct about what needs to happen as opposed to what already happened. And so helpful in that way, helpful knowing that it's meant to be used, helpful knowing that students will have an opportunity to use it so that they actually can act on it, and helpful being specific. Students are still learning even if they're in the midst of the assessment process. And they often need more specificity about what is it that needs to be done as opposed to a general, well, your writing needs to be clearer. Right? That's that's not in terms of the standards that we care about. It's not specific in them. So all of those are they require a lot of practice and feedback loops on the faculty member's part as well, and I'm still working on that, and hopefully getting better.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:48]:

I had lunch yesterday with my mom and Dave, my husband, and she was chatting about that my brother recently showed her in the Duolingo language learning app how to add an additional language. I guess she had been learning along with my brother German, and he had showed her how easy it is to add a new thing. So she added Ukrainian, which I thought was fascinating because that's not a language that anyone in our family's ever spoken. And talking to her about, you know, what was it that intrigued you about that language and such. And she mentioned just really being wanting to learn a language where the the it was so different because she learned the romance languages when she was in college, etcetera. And as she's talking, she was just sort of in a self deprecating way, feeling I I don't wanna I don't wanna ascribe a feeling, but just just, like, how how silly is it or how frivolous is it that, you know, here's this little thing, and I get these little indicators that I've done something well. And then she was also talking about when she doesn't, and and sometimes struggling with not wanting to wanting to fail and and and just what that experience is like to fail even though it's just this just this little app. It's not like someone out there is keeping score on her, you know, beyond the app.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:01]:

But it got me thinking so much because I Dave been asking for about two and a half, three years now. I'll I'll sort of do a supplemental 75% of the way through a class feedback with from the students to what extent did you feel like I cared about you as a student, and what was something specific that I did that that caused that perception. And a lot of times what they'll tell me, if early Bonni, it was early on in COVID, it was flexibility on deadlines. And then in the more recent years, it has been feedback. And, David, I'm telling you, my feedback, it's not that it's that uniquely helpful. It's really, to me, I would characterize more than half of what I do is just that they know there's somebody there on the other side that isn't a bot, isn't AI, isn't, you know, Duolingo, that that's not an actual person giving that feedback. So to what extent have you come across feedback that's helpful because it's coming from a human being?

David Clark [00:10:02]:

That that's a really good question. And I have to say it's not something I've thought too much about because most of the time, I'm working with people who are going to be giving feedback. Right? So by default, it's gonna

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:11]:

be a Who's a human being?

David Clark [00:10:13]:

But there is a lot of, you know, there's a lot of discussion about things like auto grading and, like, what kind of feedback can we give through auto grading. And, like, there's no question that students understand that that feedback is different. Right? Like, they they put less stock in it. They understand it can go awry. Or even if it doesn't, they they may think it does. But I I think what you're getting at is, like, a fundamental important thing about teaching is that human connection. Right? So, obviously, I think alternative grading is this great idea. It's really important.

David Clark [00:10:41]:

But, like, it can't be ahead of just establishing relationships with students and letting them know that you care and that your feedback that you're giving, like, it's because you really do genuinely want them to learn this stuff and improve and and stuff like that. Like, it's not a mechanical process. And if students see that you have that empathy and that that sort of connection, that goes so far to, like, taking care of of the types of of concerns that people have about alternative grading or active learning or or anything in a classroom.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:16]:

Last semester, I had a student I was fairly sure was using AI. And I say that somewhat sarcastically because when it comes with, I can't perform this function for you, you kinda can pretty much guess that's who you're dealing with here. But I really worked hard on thinking about what is what are the clearly defined standards that I'm assessing in those assignments and attempting not to have the opposite of the halo effect happen where I get triggered somehow because how dare you not treat the person on the other side of the screen as, you know, as well as you should be, etcetera, and would provide feedback of of it appears to me that this is not giving the context. I asked about the context for you specific to your life. I care about your life, and that's what I'm looking for here is to hear about your specific life and and would attempt to, in advance, have decided how much would it matter if I didn't get the context that I asked for, etcetera, versus trying to be really judgmental. There's, lots of game show like quizzes that we can take these days that will help us see how bad we are as professors at large at really assessing whether or not something was written by a I I AI. By the way, we are not particularly good at it for those of you those of you listening.

David Clark [00:12:29]:

I Dave failed a few of those recently, in fact. Yes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:32]:

Yeah. Yeah. So I I think one thing that your work and Robert's work has helped me with so much is through that feedback, I got to have the experience at the end of using not only alternative grading approaches, but also an alternative assignment where they were in a team project. And then in this particular case, it wasn't a written response. They were recording a presentation, to culminate their group project, and it was so fun to go. I actually think the feedback loops that I have there, I think I managed to keep my bias somewhat at bay, and I got to see what happens when it works right. So I'd love to have you share, David, if you can think of a story where you just go, it doesn't didn't feel like it was working at the time, but you got to have that happy ending even if it was just for a moment. Maybe another example of feedback loops that work well.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:23]:

What what do they look like when they're designed well?

David Clark [00:13:25]:

Okay. So so this is where my brain went right away. It's it's maybe it's an answer to your question, but I think it's it's an important thing. I don't remember how long ago. I I had this idea in a certain class I teach where students put together a portfolio at the end that I was gonna ask them a couple of, like, really short questions. Just tell me a little bit about these things at with your view looking back across the whole semester. And one of them was fill in the blank. I really appreciated blank because blank.

David Clark [00:13:55]:

And I think I was specific, like, the it needed to be a person's name in the class, like a student's name in the class. I really appreciated this person because and I am I I keep using this because I'm just amazed at the things that I learned about my class that I never knew. Like, even with all the feedback, all the time that I talk with students and try to really understand what's going Bonni, There's just all these things going on behind the scenes, right, when students are meeting with each other and talking or whatever. And so I've learned that, like, these students who I did not realize even knew each other are, like, supporting each other and were helping each other meaningfully and understanding assignments and and really digging deeply into what was going on in the class. And I just never knew it. Right? And it for me, a big thing that that question has done is it just adds more humanity to this final assessment process. Where, you know, at the end of the semester, there are final grades, and it can feel like even in the most wonderful class, it can actually, to me, feel kind of depressing to assign those final grades and do that final summative. Well, here's a one letter for the entire semester.

David Clark [00:15:05]:

And knowing that even students where I might have looked and said, I think they're really struggling or maybe I, I don't know if you're getting this, buddy. That, like, they were trying and they were doing such real, genuine work that I couldn't see. I I just there was no way for me to see it. That has happened actually several times. And it it's sort of heartwarming. It also makes me realize just how arbitrary so much of, like, the final grade process is. So which is a whole another topic. Right?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:35]:

Yeah. I have this sign that hangs in my office, which is a it's it's in reference to an author who sadly has passed away, but the sign reads show up for the work, and Rachel Held Evans used to have that above her writing desk. And show up for the work to me means it says a lot about vulnerability and also about that we're not always gonna show up. If if I, like, if I tried to do this podcast for almost 10 years as of talking with you today, like, if I had tried to always show up given the best podcast I could imagine, I I could Dave never shown up to the sit in front of and and and do that. So but, anyway, another big thing that that could be another sign I would hang maybe is make the work visible. And I kinda got happy recently because I'd start hearing more people say it besides me. And I'm like, yay. It's it's actually catching on, you know, when you have that thing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:23]:

But your story is so emblematic of what happens when instead of us trying to just fall into the temptation of telling, telling, showing, showing, you know, that it's coming from us and how much pressure we can put on ourselves. And you've invited them to share about the part that we might not be able to see as well, You know, make the work visible. Let let's see that same kind of humanity you shared about, the same kind of vulnerability, but you're getting to see those glimpses of the student to student in a new way. That's such a powerful story.

David Clark [00:16:56]:

And there's some other ways to get glimpses of that too because thinking about it, I started trying to figure that out more because I'm like, you know, this this matters. It tells me things about the students and what they know and and what's working and what isn't. And part of that actually is something I always recommend for reassessments without penalty, which is that a reassessment always needs some reflective parts, some metacognition, because that's part of the feedback loop. Right? It's stopping to think about what you're doing and then using that to improve what you've done, not just trying again blindly. But when you ask students for reflection, like, it can go a number of ways and sometimes you sort of get this mechanical, this is what I changed and this is how it went. And if if you're successful, and sometimes I am, in convincing them, like, really no. I really wanna know, like, what was your process or what were you thinking about as you were doing this? And they're honest about it. I really get an insight into a student's thought process and just like what their world is.

David Clark [00:17:55]:

Why are they working this way and what do they care about and what matters and all those little glimpses add up and and there are real people. Right? We're real people. Humans are are students are real people.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:06]:

Yeah. So another you just brought up another of your 4 pillars, the reassessment without penalty. And I try not to make this all rating myself. I don't wanna berate myself. I don't think that's that interesting for other people to listen to, but I've got reassessment without penalty down with the huge exception that you just talked about. So speaking of it being mechanical, what I typically have been doing is allowing for reassessment without penalty. I say clumsily only because I don't track it very well, so I'm not I'm not super strict about feeling like people will take advantage of that. In my experience, they just haven't because of the types of ways I structure things.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:41]:

But I find myself I have to go I should say, I choose to go. I inadvertently set myself up to need to go back and see what changed. Did did they make that correction to have it meet the standards that as outlined? And that just seems so silly because that's both a waste of time, but I'm also missing this huge opportunity that you just described to learn about what that process was. So not only could I hear from them what changes did they make, which I imagine is probably an important piece that I am missing, But then also this this reflection that you're talking about, and I'm glad that you're sharing because I definitely could have made it feel mechanical. So tell us more about how we cannot have it feel mechanical. So in terms of what I just described for you, I think I've got the part reassessment without penalty, but what else do I need to know about making it that much more effective for the learning process?

David Clark [00:19:38]:

Yeah. It so the the reflective part is really critical, but there's so many ways you can do it. And I guess I'll say I don't recommend asking the question of what did you change? Because often you'll get a bullet point list of here's all the changes I made. Okay. Actually, I didn't wanna know that. Yeah. Like Yeah. You know, it matters what changed.

David Clark [00:19:56]:

So I sometimes ask a question like, what is the one major change you made? Like, stop and actually think about in the big picture, you did a bunch of things. What was the main thing? And another question I like asking is, what is something important that you learned from this? And the thing that's amazing to me is how often a student they're not telling me because I'm a mathematician. They're not saying, here's a mathematical thing that I learned from this process. They're saying, I learned that I need to reread my work. I I learned that I need to read this thing out loud. I need learned that I need to be careful about reading an instruction or But the, yeah, the reflection or doing something that isn't assessed, but is somehow helping the students use the feedback along the way. So sometimes in in intro level classes, I've had students have access to, like, online homework because we were talking about auto grading and automatic feedback. And that kinda makes me a little uncomfortable.

David Clark [00:20:56]:

Like, yes, practice matters, but how do I count this? And I came to the realization that, oh, actually, that sort of auto graded homework is perfect as an intermediate step between 2 different things that I want to assess carefully. They try it. They don't succeed in whatever way. I give them feedback. And then I say, okay. Before you can try again, I need you to go try some of this online homework as just practice. Right? Just try the thing and try to use the feedback I had. And then when you need to reassess, then that'll give you a better sense of where you need to be focusing.

David Clark [00:21:31]:

And so it unlocks the door to reassessment by just giving them that little extra time to think and process and try and see if it worked before they do the one that counts. Right? And those are those are all, like, different processes I've used. Right? You know, the written reassessment or the written reflection process or the online homework process or the, like, come talk with me and just convince me that there's something that needs to be changed to your process. And all of them can take time, which is a big thing, and so you can get buried under this avalanche of reassessments. I don't know if you've run into that yet where, like, a bunch of them all come at the same time and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of extra work. So also thinking carefully just about the timing of that. Like, students need time to think about what they're doing when they're going to reassess and reflect on it. But you need time to be able to do the to grade the reassessment, to understand and think about it.

David Clark [00:22:21]:

And so having that gap of time where we can't just try again right away but gotta think about it, It saves you time. It saves the students' efforts. It it's useful all around.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:31]:

Boy, your example to me is compelling because it I'm going all the way back to my mother learning new languages with Duolingo that that that tool there I I tend to sometimes bristle at their use, but it's because it's so often used of like, oh, look. We have to work less or, you know, like that. It feels like it's it's cheating a student out of an experience with a relationship with someone who cares about them and about their academic success and and thriving. And and but yet, if I were taking your math class and I was struggling and by the way, David, I probably would be struggling because this is an area I have I have struggled with so many of the stereotypes of people growing up and all that and bought into some of that and had to work on my growth mindset in this area. But if if it came to me as in the way you just described it, I wouldn't perceive it as you're trying to distance yourself from me as an educator, but I would still see, oh, here's a helpful thing I could do because I need a little bit more practice. And assuming that that we have selected tools that are effective at doing that and really spend the time there to find the right tool that will help people fail, try again, and and and all of that. Like like, she talked about so much at that lunch yesterday, I would mention that.

David Clark [00:23:50]:

Mhmm. And that type of assessment, I mean, it it actually is something that I think that things like Duolingo do very well is it's targeted reassessment. Right? It's not everybody in this class, all of you go do the same online homework assignments all at once. It's, oh, you've demonstrated that you need to practice this, and you know it and I know it. So okay. Go do it. And then then let's check out where you're at. Like, it's not the end of the story yet either.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:13]:

Yeah. Alright. So the one that we didn't talk about, the pillar we haven't talked about yet is the one that talks about that the marks indicate progress. What are some of the common mistakes that we might make with this particular pillar?

David Clark [00:24:27]:

So marks what marks Dave sense for you is such a personal thing. Like, I've gone through many different variations on this. Nowadays, I'm mainly using something that goes, successful, revisable, needs new, attempt, or needs new, whatever we're doing. So partly finding just what makes sense for you in terms of the verbs you're using or the description you're using. But, actually, where I see sort of the biggest trouble that people run into is when you're assigning a mark to indicate progress, like, there's sort of a top level. There's a you've met the requirements level. And this also connects to your clearly defined standards. What are those requirements, and have you met them? And if that standard, if the if the successful mark basically means perfection, it means, like, okay, there's nothing I could comment on.

David Clark [00:25:19]:

There's no feedback I could give. That's actually harmful because insisting on perfection is basically saying everything matters equally. Like, if there is any kind of error, any kind of issue, too bad. You're out. Right? You have not succeeded. And students understand just as well as faculty if you're saying successful, it doesn't mean perfect. It doesn't mean flawless. It doesn't mean there's nothing more you could do.

David Clark [00:25:51]:

A way I like to think about it is this tells me that you understand at a level where when you inevitably need to think about it again in the future, you'll be able to pick it up again. Because people aren't going to remember everything that they've learned in our classes for all time. Like, that's none of us understand things in that way. But do you understand it well enough that you're gonna be able to be okay with it in the future when you need to with some review? Cool. That works. Or, you know, there's no significant issues that I see. So, yeah, don't aim for perfection, which means you have to think really carefully about then, okay, what are errors that can be fine up at that level of successful still? That's probably the biggest individual thing I see. And then there's many, many, many details of how you use marks and how we are accounting for them.

David Clark [00:26:36]:

And are you really sort of using points secretly without telling the students that they're points? Because students will know that if you are. But are you really treating it as, yeah, you've you've succeeded or you haven't? So it's sort of an all or nothing, not partial credit type thing. That does make a big difference in how alternative grading plays out with students.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:54]:

I'm laughing so hard because people can't see us because it's not a video podcast. But you

David Clark [00:26:58]:

I talk with my hands all the time. Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:00]:

You said, are you secretly using points? And I was like, yeah, David. Actually, I am I would like to ask you before we get to the recommendation segment about this, because I can't be the only person who who has made some progress on alternative grading and yet has some identifiable things I know could be better. So one is that I have avoided learning about our learning management system that we use

David Clark [00:27:27]:

Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:28]:

To use something besides points. I believe that I for 98 point percent sure that it can, but I I haven't spent the time to really dig in and and change that. My gosh. It took me so long just to even figure out the right way to set up a grade book to there's all this customization that needs to happen, etcetera, etcetera. So I'm I'm feeling I'm making excuses. Please forgive me, podcast listeners, that I haven't been, you know, excelling in this area like I want to. But what I so how I've translated it to it is my successful is 100% of whatever the points were for that. Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:01]:

And my revisable tends to be that you get points, but then you could just revise and get those points back, but there's a lot of full credit. You know, 90% of people, 95% of people get that full credit. And then the next one would be, like, your revisable. And then I I think this needs new attempt is newer for me because Robert talked about sort of like, the model I'm used to of you you did it or you need to resubmit, but that's an interesting one for me. So I guess I have 2 questions now. First question is, how how much do you wanna push back to say, boy, points are really messing you up more than you realize, Bonni, and you really should spend the time during your break in the summer, which is to say, I'm an administrator, so we don't really have breaks. But you know, it's really worth the the time to use your learning management system to indicate these things versus having points displayed to students? How worth it do you think? I realize it's completely arbitrary.

David Clark [00:28:57]:

Yeah. So so I wanna, yeah, I wanna answer that right away. I think, in my opinion, if you can do it, it's worth making a clean break with points. And I realized a lot of LMSs, they're always there under the hood. So, like, the one that what I use, it ends up being essentially one point for successful and or maybe it's 2 points for successful, one for revisable, 0 for not yet or need to attempt. But I've discovered that I can convince my LMS to display those as actual words. There's a rubric setup that can show those. And so as long as that's happening, that students understand that the points are not in any way actually points.

David Clark [00:29:33]:

They're not averaging or totaling. I think that's okay. And it's it's important to make a break with the points in the sense of averaging them or using them in that sense and change over entirely to the there's a meaning to this. And I happen to be communicating it maybe under the hood through a number, but it's really a a word or a feedback meeting.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:53]:

Yeah.

David Clark [00:29:53]:

So I think that's worth I think that's worth it, and there are ways to do it. But, yeah, LMS is our pain in as soon as you go anywhere off script with not averaging your your totals or anything. Right?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:04]:

And can you tell us then about your needs new attempt and how that that gets factored into grades?

David Clark [00:30:11]:

Sure. So, fundamentally, for me, there's only 2 things. There's successful, it's counted, or it hasn't yet, And the difference between the two levels of not yet that I have, which are revisable and needs new attempt, is what the student can do. So when I say something's revisable, what that actually means is, this is, I think, a small issue. It's probably not worth you needing to try a whole new assignment or a whole new attempt at whatever we're doing. But I need to talk with you, and you need to convince me. Right? And that can become either, okay. Yeah.

David Clark [00:30:42]:

You've convinced me it was just a silly blip or it was a minor thing that you've understood now. And that becomes successful, so it counts fully. Or it doesn't, and I realize, oh, we need to, sort of, pivot into, a little bit of a coaching session or something to understand what's going on. And then that revisable turns into a needs to attempt. And what that means is I wanna see a full from from scratch, you can do this attempt. Right? So a new problem, a new assessment on the same topic in the future. But because they tried it before, I can have that coaching session to say, here's the sorts of stuff that you need to work on. Let's talk about that before you make the new attempt.

David Clark [00:31:23]:

As opposed to, oh, the thing you did, actually, that was fine. Now it counts

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:28]:

fully. Can you give us an example from one of your classes of, assignment that would be revisable and an assignment for or a submission from a student that would need a new attempt?

David Clark [00:31:37]:

Yeah. Absolutely. So I I'm using this exact setup in one of my classes right now where we have some I use the setup for, like, mathematical skills that are the foundation for mathematical writing up at a higher level. Right? And so we're using this sort of thing on, like, quizzes where students work on mathematical skills. So I have one thing I often use revisable for is where I'm asking a student about a definition because we care so much about definitions in math. So, like, the definition of one number is a multiple of another. Like, we need to be certain what we mean by that. And this definition will have several elements.

David Clark [00:32:10]:

So there's a central, there's an equation that needs to happen, and then there's a couple other details or phrases that that we need to acknowledge along the way. And maybe a student left one of those things out. So everything else is great, but they just didn't say one thing. And I know from experience that that thing they didn't say is something that students tend to go, Yeah, yeah, of course. Right? We all know that then that thing has to be an integer. That has to be a certain kind of number or whatever. So I might say, you know, this is revisable. Are you sure you addressed everything thoroughly? Right? So it's my little hint of you might have missed something there.

David Clark [00:32:41]:

And if they can come into my office and basically say, I completely forgot to say that k was an integer. Yep. Okay. You convinced me. I don't need to see you write this whole thing from scratch again. I just needed you to realize that, oh, that was an important part of it and now I've got it. On the other hand, if I'm asking them about a definition of, you know, m is a multiple of n or something like that, and they are, like, using division, they're writing something that isn't involved in this at all, but they're maybe falling back to a an earlier, more general level of understanding that doesn't show that they've got the mathematical precision we need in the definitions, then I'm saying, okay. Yeah.

David Clark [00:33:16]:

You're you're actually not using the important things here. You're not using what we've learned from these definitions. So you need to show me again on a new attempt that you can actually use our specific definition, not, you know, something that you learned in grade school that is functional but is not mathematically precise.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:33]:

And in this class, how many, total assessments are they experiencing?

David Clark [00:33:39]:

So I do weekly quizzes and each week, there's usually 2 different I call them learning targets standards. And that's maybe a couple of questions on one side of a piece of paper, and then the next learning target is a couple questions on the other side. So that's 14 weeks times 2 ish, 28 different assessments of my list of standards and then occasionally a few larger ones where students have, so friend Kate Owens calls these, like, reassessment carnivals, right, or celebration of learning, right, where we say, okay. Let's look at all the different things you've learned recently. And if you need to show me you've learned one of them, now is your chance as opposed to just a couple focus things.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:19]:

I want an assessment carnival. That just sounds like fun. Is there the popcorn to

David Clark [00:34:25]:

look at and many different places to go, and you pick the ones that are best that you need to do the most or whatever.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:30]:

Oh my gosh. I'm thinking fried Oreos, the fried Twinkies, the oh, that sounds amazing. Alright. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. And since I have already recommended the book grading for growth, I'm going to recommend from David's website a page he has put together called alternative grading resources. And, specifically, although the whole page is wonderful, but, specifically, at the bottom, there were 3 scholar scholarship of teaching and learning oriented articles that I think would be particularly helpful for people. What I appreciate about what David has put together is it's not an overwhelming list of resources to do some follow-up and additional learning on. And, David, I had I normally don't tell the guest what I'm gonna recommend, but in this case, I did.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:20]:

And, David, I'm wondering if you would maybe want to share a little bit since you know these studies more than me. I can even share my screen for for David if he wants me to.

David Clark [00:35:31]:

Sure. Yeah. Remind me of which things I'm

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:32]:

looking for. Front of me. Yes. Do you wanna just share briefly what the listeners could learn more about if they come visit these studies?

David Clark [00:35:41]:

Absolutely. So the first of these, I used to call it Butler and Nissan for the authors, is this classic study about what happens when students get feedback, what on, some sort of work they did versus what happens when they get a grade, and what happens when they get both? And it turns out that that as soon as there's a grade assigned, they tend to lose the intrinsic motivation they might have to learn these things and focus entirely on that extrinsic grade aspect. So this is classic. It's been replicated all over the place. It says a lot about the effect that grades have on our brains and our motivation. Another one, so Enderman and Konka, the relation between academic motivation and cheating is this fantastic study that just summarizes years of work from motivation theory Bonni, like, why is it that students cheat? Right? What is the motivation for cheating? And research grounded advice about how to not set up a system where students are encouraged or are are willing to cheat. And the advice is essentially follow the 4 pillars. Right? Allow students reassessments, show that there's clear standards you're following, give helpful feedback, and give use a course rubric, they say.

David Clark [00:36:50]:

So we would say marks that indicate progress. And this helps show students that you're in a situation where you care about their learning as opposed to care about their performance And that discourages cheating. And then the last one was one really interesting thing. Students tell us all the time that they feel less stress in alternatively graded systems. And, a friend of mine, Drew Lewis, did a study on this. And you can you use validated survey instruments to decide how much test anxiety students are feeling. And what he discovered was that, yes, students do in fact feel less test anxiety over the course of the semester in an alternatively graded class, and they feel more in their other classes. So we can actually see that happen.

David Clark [00:37:29]:

And there's a standard, a very common gender gap that shows up in students on their expression of test anxiety, which also disappeared in the class if you were to survey. So there's all sorts of interesting things happening with stress and anxiety.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:45]:

Oh, thank you so much, David. I appreciate today's conversation, the last time we got to talk, all the times we talked while I was reading your book, but you didn't know we were talking because it was a one way conversation. Although in my mind, sometimes we talked, but that was just in my imagination. So and now we get to hear from you whatever you would like to recommend today to close us out.

David Clark [00:38:04]:

Alright. So I'll start by recommending that your readers read those articles.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:08]:

Yeah. To get those. Yes. Yay.

David Clark [00:38:10]:

Okay. I'm gonna give it a totally different kind of recommendation. Last time I was on your podcast, I recommended a Dave, which was about, like, cats hanging out on quilts and it was fuzzy and it was cozy and it was so cute. K. So I'm gonna recommend a completely different game this time, which is called Watergate, the board game. So Watergate, Nixon, the press, all of that. This is a 2 player only game I've been playing against my wife a whole lot recently. It is cutthroat.

David Clark [00:38:39]:

It is I know that you know that I know that I could do, you know, that kind

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:44]:

of thinking. Oh my goodness. It is

David Clark [00:38:46]:

sounds crazy. Nixon trying to survive versus the press trying to tie him to the things that happened. It is a fascinating game. It makes me sweat. Like like, can I get away with this or not? That is so funny. If that sounds if that sounds good to you, you should get this game.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:02]:

I feel like you are in cahoots with the board game industry because we bought our dot last time you were on, you did recommend that game. We bought our daughter that game. And then now I am a big history slash political geek, and so, I mean, you literally are describing a game I wanna just pause the conversation and go purchase immediately. This sounds amazing. And I kinda like that it's 2 players only because sometimes when Dave and I, we do enjoy playing games with the kids, but it is also fun to just sometimes have a game that's just the 2 of us. It sounds amazing. Alright. So, you have something else maybe for us to do?

David Clark [00:39:35]:

I have one other thing. Good. This is a just a book I read recently. So now we're we're totally off the alternative grading category.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:41]:

But And the game category, sadly.

David Clark [00:39:43]:

Yes. So so the recommendation is a a sort of sci fi ish classic called the doomsday book by Connie Willis. When I so I only learned about this recently. I enjoy a lot of sci fi. I read a lot. Somehow, it was totally off my radar. And I learned about it and started reading it. And number 1, I thought it was written 2 years ago.

David Clark [00:40:04]:

It was written in, like, 1990, but it just was so relevant, the things it was describing. And it is slow paced, it is a lot of character building and a lot of relationship building, and there were points when I read it where I thought, is this going somewhere? Like, what's happening here? It pays off. It absolutely pays off. So if you if that sounds good, it's worth the read. It is 5 stars for me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:31]:

Oh, that's a big endorsement for you.

David Clark [00:40:33]:

I don't give 5 stars to many books.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:35]:

It's so funny. That's awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for coming back on the show, for helping us continue to learn. Thank you for your book, for your newsletter, and all the ways that you help speak into so many people from around the world and into really ultimately serving our students better. It's such always such a joy to talk to you. Every time we talk, I'm always thinking for weeks after or months afterward what we what we chatted about. So thank you again for today.

David Clark [00:41:00]:

But likewise, you you make me think about what I'm saying. So thank you for having me, and it's always good to talk with you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:08]:

Thanks once again to David Clark for returning to Teaching in Higher Ed. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. Thanks to each one of you for listening. And if you've been listening for a while and have yet to rate the show on your preferred podcast listening tool of choice, I'd love to have you do that so that other people can more easily discover the show. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Using Alternative Grading Practices to Foster Student Learning, with David Clark - Teaching in Higher Ed

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David Clark discusses using alternative grading practices to foster student learning on episode 511 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

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Example of how to translate competency-based grading to letter-based grading

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https://rtalbert.org/emrn/

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The EMRN rubric is a four-level rubric for evaluating student work. It uses a simple flowchart to categorize student work into one of four bins:

The rubric was created by Rodney Stutzman and Kim Race, where it originated as the "EMRF" rubric in a 2004 article in Mathematics Teacher magazine. The only modification I've done other than upgrading the graphic, is to replace "F" ("Fragmentary") with "N" ("Not Assessable"), because in practice, students' association of the letter "F" with "failing" was hard to overcome.

I'm making this page available so people can easily copy and reuse the above image. To copy or save the image, just right click on the image and select the appropriate menu option.

If you use this image in your course materials or other public-facing work, please abide by the terms of the Creative Commons license found on the image:

You are free to copy and redistribute this image in any medium or format; and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

But you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Further, if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Finally, you may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The EMRN rubric is a four-level rubric for evaluating student work. It uses a simple flowchart to categorize student work into one of four bins: The rubric was created by Rodney Stutzman and Kim Race, where it originated as the "EMRF" rubric in a 2004 article in Mathematics Teacher magazine.

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Peer review guidelines for students for the first part of the clinical case study assignment (when they write the case history of a report)

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Rubric they use for each other with peer review (with other info)

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Rubric they use for each other with peer review (with other info)

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Keep it simple - Kerry (how I don't do it, and how you should do it)

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Keep it simple - Kerry (how I don't do it, and how you should do it)

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feelings of relief (from students) = student wellness

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feelings of relief (from students) = student wellness

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sorry it's such a weird format - the photos are enormous!

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Student Motivation, Anxiety and Pass/Fail Grading: A SoTL Project (Walden; TLCSD)

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Student Motivation, Anxiety and Pass/Fail Grading: A SoTL Project (Walden; TLCSD)

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Abstract

This SoTL project explored sources of student anxiety and motivation across student assessment conditions of traditional numerical grading and pass/fail grading and sought to determine if pass/fail grading was helpful in lowering student anxiety while increasing student motivation to learn. Results indicated that students scored equally well on a test of student learning across pass/fail and numerical grading groups, indicating that pass/fail grading did not lead to poorer course objective mastery. Students were similar in terms of sources of anxiety and levels of anxiety. Motivation across groups was also similar, largely extrinsic in nature, and consistent pre- to post-course. Results coupled with subjective instructor reflection provide some, yet weak, support for the use of pass/fail grading in helping to ease course-related anxiety (at least for some) while still facilitating student development toward course learning goal mastery.

DOWNLOADS

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Student Motivation, Anxiety and Pass/Fail Grading: A SoTL Project

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This SoTL project explored sources of student anxiety and motivation across student assessment conditions of traditional numerical grading and pass/fail grading and sought to determine if pass/fail grading was helpful in lowering student anxiety while increasing student motivation to learn.

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Another CSD Example (Leslie & Lundblom; Seminars in Speech & Language)

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Another CSD Example (Leslie & Lundblom; Seminars in Speech & Language)

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Alli's School Age Language Disorders Syllabus (Specs Grading on p. 4)

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Alli's School Age Language Disorders Syllabus (Specs Grading on p. 4)

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Chapter 6 focuses on Competency-Based Education

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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Communication Sciences and Disorders: Past, Present, and Future

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By Sarah M. Ginsberg, Colleen F. Visconti, and Jennifer C. Friberg, Published on 01/01/24

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https://senate.ucsc.edu/committees/cot-committee-on-teaching/index.html

https://tlc.ucsc.edu/resources/demonstrating-teaching-effectiveness/student-feedback-sets/

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Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on Teaching in Higher Ed episode number 515, faculty's role in student success with Jody Greene. Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Jody Greene serves as the University of California, Santa Cruz's 1st associate campus provost for academic success. Their background is so fascinating to me that today we start the interview learning more about them right away. Jody Greene, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jody Greene [00:01:04]:

Thanks so much, Bonni. It's delightful to be here.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:07]:

In June of 2024, I will celebrate 10 years of airing an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed every single week. I share this with you not to brag, Jody, but to say I read a lot of higher ed bios. And as I read your higher ed bio, I just wanted to say, let's just talk about these things and not even talk about anything else. You are a fascinating person, and you have agreed to share a little bit about yourself and your background. Because if I try, I am never gonna do it justice in addition to very clumsily pronouncing some of these names. So, Jody, I'm gonna open up the floor to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jody Greene [00:01:49]:

Well, thank you. And and first, of course, congratulations on the 10 years. I mean, it is truly an institution and a place that so many of the people that I've collaborated with go to hear what's happening in higher ed teaching and learning. So it's a it's a real honor to be here with you. So I have been at UC Santa Cruz for my entire academic career. I came here in 1998 as a literature professor. I was hired to teach a 17th and 18th century British literature and some French literature, but my work is actually more in kind of legal studies and the history of institutions, literary institutions. So my first book was on copyright and the relationship between copyrights and responsibilities.

Jody Greene [00:02:38]:

Some people have called it a paranoid view of copyright that says we only got copyright so they could show who was responsible for writing things that the authorities didn't like being written. And and my work since then has really stayed in the realm of the relationship between rights and responsibilities. So I work on the history of human rights, how the history of categories like the pirate and the terrorist have been used to draw boundaries around the human. I've worked on nonhuman rights, so what are called rights of nature or more than human rights. I've written about animals. I've written about war. I've written about lots of places where the question of our our rights to each other come into play. And, you know, I've been very influenced by the work of Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and and other thinkers who have asked us to think about these categories like the human and and the rights.

Jody Greene [00:03:36]:

Most recently, I actually worked on a book on teaching environmental justice, which brought still some of these questions around ethics and rights and interdependence into play. But in 2016, I made a little bit of a swerve and founded the campus teaching center at UC Santa Cruz, originally working by myself and and over the years, accumulating wonderful colleagues who built the center, not so much with me as around me, I think sometimes. And I became a full time administrator in 2018, working on how we balance faculty success and student success. So we have this huge movement nationally for student success, research universities trying to figure out how to keep the undergraduate experience at the center of their mission while also being research institutions. My own institution is a double minority serving research university. So trying to think really structurally about how the faculty role might need to change so as to make all of these institutional priorities possible for the faculty, meeting those priorities possible for the faculty.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:50]:

If someone could see the bubble above my head of all of my thoughts, there are approximately 42,987 questions I'd like to ask you, but I'm gonna revisit your bio just briefly, and then we will speak much more about about the issues for today's interview. I'm curious about how you become curious about things. What do you remember about some of your early origins, about the things that you've researched and written about, about just what made you curious? What sort of ignited that kind of curiosity in your mind both as an individual? Although I'm going to potentially guess that, your curiosity did not originate as an individual and probably in community based on your sense of that common good and and collective work.

Jody Greene [00:05:36]:

Yeah. I mean, I'm in the second half of my fifties now, and I I think I'm only just beginning to be able to understand why or how I'm interested in the things that I'm interested in, but I am very interested in things that don't conform to rules that are supposed to be universal rules. So one way of understanding a kind of through line of my of my work, but also my life is is carrying with the non dual or the non binary. So when we set up a situation in which some things are deemed human and worthy of rights and other things are deemed not human and not worthy of rights, we immediately start to see those kinds of binaries troubled. And, of course, the institution of literature is the place where the supposedly hard line between fact and fiction is muddled and worried. And the special power of literature comes from that capacity to have one one foot in the factual or the real and one foot in the imagination or the fictional. International law, which is the kind of law that I have mostly worked on, some people would say is a fictional kind of law. Right? There is no such thing as international law.

Jody Greene [00:06:52]:

It's not binding. So we agree to conform to these rules that are not actually binding rules. So I also have, you know, another life in Zen Buddhism that runs alongside my my scholarly and professional life. And that is a philosophy that is also deeply rooted in the non dual. So I would say the 2 things that really draw me to to a problem are the fact that someone's trying to solve it in a binary way, and it's not working, and they're not seeming to be able to drop the binary. And then this this matter of the relationship between rights and responsibilities, which is very central to the work that I do for the university.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:35]:

I only know a very, very tiny amount about nondualistic thinking. One thinker who I've read a decent amount and heard him on a number of podcasts is Richard Rohr, and he is a Franciscan friar and and is known for really asking us as we think about our beliefs to the dangers of really thinking in dualistic ways. And I I'm curious as you consider you you were talking about faculty success. I I think even just that word success being used in conjunction with faculty, I see a lot of dualistic thinking around what does it mean to be successful as a faculty member. And we'd love to have you share a a bit about where you see dualistic thinking with regard to faculty success and how we might nuance that a bit.

Jody Greene [00:08:26]:

Yeah. I mean, I I now have a title that is the associate campus provost for academic success, and that term academic success was was coined by our provost to describe the place where faculty success and student success meet on our campus. And I think in some ways, that is the binary, the binary between faculty success and student success that I'm trying to trouble because I don't believe that a university set up the way the University of California is set up. You can have one without the other. Right? You have to figure out how to keep these things in balance. As far as the notion of of success itself goes, you know, certainly, I can say on the student side, there are a set of standard metrics. The the HSI scholar, Gina Garcia, calls them white people metrics that we often use for success that have to do with time to degree, graduation rates, retention rates, and so on.

Jody Greene [00:09:24]:

And we know that there are so many other important elements to students' success, their well-being, their thriving, their career pathways, their ability to pursue interests and curiosities, their engagement, their activism, and all of these multiple measures. But as I often point out to my colleagues, if we don't retain the students, then that that expanded or more holistic view of success isn't going to really have an opportunity to to blossom or flourish. So I think, you know, I think of those more constrained notions of success as necessary, but not sufficient to have this thing called student success. And on the faculty side, you know, we need to be research productive. We need to teach well. But in the same way, people who are research productive and and do well in their teaching are not necessarily successful in the sense of feeling that they're doing work that matters to them, that they're fulfilled, that they're able to have some measure of work life balance, and that when their interests take them in a new direction, and this is one reason that I feel so fortunate to be at Santa Cruz, when their interests take them in a new direction, they're able to follow those interests, and they're able to keep that kind of energy of new thinking and teaching new things that we have as faculty members when we're kind of on a new trail. You know?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:44]:

You mentioned that you had been teaching for about 20 years before then taking on these different roles, and I have also been teaching for around 20 years. And I think about all the things that I have changed my mind about in the time that I try to be more gentle with myself, because I can I can be pretty hard on myself, and then also gentle with wanting to remember what it was like in some of those earlier years so that I might be more effective at at in in my own role? I'm curious as you think about those 2 decades of teaching, what's one thing that that once you were in different types of roles that looking back on that time was maybe missing in your own flourishing or your own learning until you moved into that other role and had a a slightly different perspective?

Jody Greene [00:11:33]:

That's such a great question. I I had a lot of structure in my courses, especially compared to some folks at a place like Santa Cruz. I had attendance requirements, and I had pretty strict deadlines, and I had a very considered reason for having those things. And I told the students, for instance, I have an attendance policy because I would like to try to correct for prior educational privilege. I don't want some of you to be able to phone this in while some of you have to, you know, come to class. And I think 2 things I was I was interested later in studying what works in for for university students. I was interested to find that that intuition, that structure was important and would ultimately be appreciated by my students, which it was, that that was correct. But the thing that I would change is how I communicated about that structure and the way in which you kind of walked into my room and were met by a hailstorm of rules associated with the course.

Jody Greene [00:12:36]:

But I think I chose a very labor intensive way of dealing with those rules, which is that I only taught lecture courses for my whole teaching career. I liked to teach lecture courses, not seminars. And anyone who wanted an excused absence or or not to turn something in on deadline had to speak with me directly about it. And and I see how, even though it was incredibly labor intensive, I see why that was effective because it allowed the students to feel seen. So I think I did intuit that relationship between structure and responsiveness. I don't like the word flexibility at all, but I do like the word responsiveness. So I could respond to students' needs and I was teaching them about how to advocate for themselves. But I think the way I came out of the gate in the syllabus is a little cringey now.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:28]:

And since you do have this background in in literature, I'm now curious about tell me more about not liking the word flexibility and why responsiveness is more precise for you or or closer to your values?

Jody Greene [00:13:43]:

I think we've had an outpouring since the pandemic of calls for faculty to be flexible with students in ways that are really important and come out of the recognition that so many of us received during the pandemic of, you know, it's like our students became three-dimensional to us. We understood them in the context quite literally that they come to us from. And so we got that sense that we couldn't have a cookie cutter or one size fits all set of expectations of students that were not aware of all of the difficulties that students may be facing in their lives. But I feel like the pendulum went so far in the other direction, particularly from people who don't really understand how teaching works, especially at a university like mine, where there's lots of large lecture courses. You can't just give a test on a different day from the day that the test was scheduled without writing a new test. And so are you really supposed to do that for every student? Some people would say, well, why are you still having tests? Right? And so for me, the flexibility, it got caught up a little bit in a kind of a neoliberal or market based, the customer is always right philosophy. And what I like about responsiveness is that it means I am in communication with students. I've set up communication as a two way street so that they can tell me what they need and I can make accommodations for them within the capacity of the course as a whole so that I'm not I'm not throwing these complex systems off.

Jody Greene [00:15:22]:

To give a really obvious example, I taught a course for many years that was a writing intensive course and had writing every week and a lot of revision and many TAs. So if students were handing in work whenever they felt like it, the teaching assistants would have their workload kind of all over the place, and we couldn't stay on track with the revisions. And so flexibility in that context, responsiveness in that context might sometimes mean actually just excusing somebody an assignment rather than saying, yes, you can hand it in 10 days later whenever you feel like it, which throws off both the labor conditions of the teaching assistants and the ability to keep the course moving forward in a way that is workable for the whole.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:05]:

Whenever I do speaking engagements with other universities, I'll ask them for a list of words that in their culture, in their organization would be considered curse words. And

Jody Greene [00:16:17]:

I love that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:17]:

To get the best the best responses. But for as you might imagine, it will not surprise you at all. On the list often is HyFlex courses. And, of course, HyFlex is one of those words that means so many different things to so many different people. And I I'm seeing from what you've said that oftentimes in my university, we will talk about build build designing a course for flexibility, but teaching the course for context. Yep. And I'm seeing in your use of this word responsiveness that for myself as a communicator, that might be closer to a word that wouldn't bring on the immediate visceral reaction. And and part of this reaction gets to the next thing I'd like to talk to you about where we just get to where we just feel like we're just piling more and more things on.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:08]:

And I know that's certainly a concern when we start seeing where I I love that intersection that you talked about, that academic success being where student success and faculty success meets. So what what's your response when we think about if we're gonna try to shift a culture, shift systems and structures to better support students as faculty to that feeling of just, oh, it's one more thing and it's being piled Bonni, and and do do we not understand how much is already on our proverbial plates?

Jody Greene [00:17:42]:

Yeah. I mean, I I have said many times that I think we have an additive model of student success in the research university context. So it's it can feel a lot of the time like research universities just woke up to their responsibilities to undergraduates in a very profound way. And in particular, ask the faculty to think very differently about our role in student success. You know, if you'd asked me 25 years ago I mean, I I love this phrase that the the Scandinavian professional developer, Bonni Roksha, uses all the time about opening his shame briefcase. If you'd asked me 20 or 25 years ago whose responsibility student success was, I would have said the students. Right? That that that they're responsible for their success. And obviously, now we have this much more kind of shared notion of student success.

Jody Greene [00:18:32]:

But I think we have to realize that sometimes these are design problems, and we can put time into redesigning our courses and curricula. And those redesigned courses and curricula will not create infinitely more work. But our desire for much more responsiveness to students is going to take more time. Our desire for more detailed forms of mentoring are going to take more time and energy. And so I think a lot about the the virtue of sustainability. So what if we were building our approach to student success with the notion of its sustainability, both in terms of institutional resources and in terms of faculty workload. And faculty members tend to think of their work as an they don't we don't think about our work as a limited quotient. Right? We don't think in terms of how many hours a week we work.

Jody Greene [00:19:29]:

We kind of have an expand to fit notion of our of our workload. And I think that's been really damaging because it's allowed people to get into this state where we're talking now so much about faculty burnout. The one other thing that I would say about this additive model of student success is that when we when we talk about student success in the university, we have a tendency, the national conversation and even the institutional conversation tends to be very much a moral conversation. Why don't the faculty care more about teaching, right? That's the question that gets asked over and over and over again. Why don't they value teaching? Why don't they care about teaching? And I try to really remove that language as much as I can from the way I try to frame what's happening in research universities right now, because I think these are structural and systemic challenges, not primarily moral and ethical ones. I think people care about what the institution has told them that they need to care about, and that is winning grants, producing research, and, you know, doing well with your teaching, but that's not the thing that we are primarily hired for, retained for, tenured for, for those of us who are fortunate enough to be in a tenure situation. So we can't be surprised when people are not caring more about something that in fact the institution has not made a priority for them and hasn't allowed them to make a priority in many cases.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:55]:

The other day, people were making jokes on social media, which I definitely participated in about the chili peppers that show up on the rate my professor. Jody, I used to have I think I may have even had more than 1 chili pepper at some point in my life, but I am in my early fifties, and at some point, I don't know when it happened. I can't tell you the decade, but it definitely went away when you talk about the idea of caring. It is something, by the way, that I do ask students for feedback Bonni. Did they feel like I cared about them during the class? And if so, how? What was it that I did? And if not, what was missing? As of today, a 100% have felt like I cared, and and I've I've received some very edifying comments about what specifically it was I did to convey that care. I will say that as you were sharing those words, I'm thinking about how gendered that is.

Jody Greene [00:21:50]:

That's right.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:51]:

And I'm thinking about all the books that I've read and my own personal experience from starting at a relatively as sort of whatever whatever it is that you're having tend someone told me once that that I reminded them of their mother, and that's why they felt so angry. Which I mean, I'm like, well, this is an interesting thing that probably is best, you know, with a therapist or that kind of thing, but thinking about the way that women of color are are often subjugated to needing to demonstrate that care in a very gendered and a very cultured way, and we don't always do that for all members. So talk more about the ways in which care can also be gendered and and the ways in which it might be structured. Tell us more about the the tension and about what that might look like if it doesn't look like me showing up as a-

Jody Greene [00:22:53]:

Yeah. That's another word that is on my is on my list if you said to me what are words that set your teeth on edge.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:59]:

The k the care or the gender?

Jody Greene [00:23:02]:

Hair. Yeah. Gender it's gender is complicated for me. I I identify as a nonbinary person, and I know that some of the responses that I got from students over the years had to do with their confusions about my presentation. And what I mean by that is their confusions about what their expectations ought to be of me based on my presentation, which I thought was strange because I don't think we should have expectations based on people's gender in a classroom. I'm not saying that we can get away from them, but I I think it would be great if we didn't. So one way I'm gonna answer your question is to say, you know, I had the opportunity a few years ago to be part of a small team that rewrote our student experience of teaching surveys or evals at UC Santa Cruz. And we spent a lot of time thinking about how the way we ask questions really contributes to racialized and gendered expectations and worked very hard to try to ask questions, first of all, that mitigated that gender and racial bias.

Jody Greene [00:24:07]:

You can't eliminate it, but you can mitigate it. And second of all, that really asked students to think about what they could speak to, right? So I don't know how helpful it is for me and how it would change my practice to answers to ask students, you know, did it seem like I care? Mhmm. What I do ask them, for instance, on a mid quarter survey is always, is there anything I could do to better support your learning? And is there anything you could do to better support your learning? Right? Because I think what we're really saying about care is Dave I created a context in which you feel supported to learn, both in the kind of specifics of the course and in the environment in which that learning's taken place. Do you feel like you can show up with as much of your personhood as is necessary? Do you feel that this is an environment where you can where it's safe to not know? You know, those kinds of pieces. Right? And those are all things that might be part of what they're thinking of when they think about whether you care. But I think also, do I care about your learning is a better if you're gonna talk about care, let's talk about do did I did I seem to care about your learning and not did I seem to care about you? Because then we really are in a context that is so marked by gendered expectations.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:35]:

Yeah. That is so helpful, and thank you for that. I don't usually use this phrase, but that's seriously the most constructive feedback I've had in such a wonderful such a long time. Because part of what I realized is I do I do what you described as far as saying we do the stop, start, continue. Uh-huh. And and I do it for what I do it for 3 3 groups. What could I do to better support your learning? Start, stop, continue. And then what could you do as an individual? And then I'll ask the question, what could we do as a community of learning? And, yeah, I'm realizing that what I was looking to get from my question of care is probably sufficiently and and more properly held up in that exercise.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:23]:

So it's like the whole less is more thing. I don't need to be doing that. That is sort of me potentially falling into a a set of gendered expectations I do not wish to perpetuate, even though, as you said, seems to I think we're we're gonna be navigating that one for quite some time for the foreseeable future. The other thing that you just did for me is solved a mystery because the moment that I was introduced to you and as soon as I saw your face, I said, I know this person. Why do I know this person? And it turned out you gave a workshop that I attended, or you gave a speaking engagement about course evaluations, and you've been swimming around in my head. You do you were with an somebody it was a panel of some sort, and somebody was interviewing 2 of you. And you were talking, and and I would love to ask you a little bit more about this, the ways in which course evaluations can or cannot give us information and and the specific thing that's been floating around in my head and I've shared with colleagues is that you wouldn't wanna ask, you know, how qualified was this person to teach my class? Because students aren't in a position to judge that. And I wanna go back to what you said earlier about neoliberalism and and, specifically, students as customers, not the greatest paradigm, but us perpetuating inequality is also not great either.

Jody Greene [00:27:50]:

Correct.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:51]:

How do how do you get away from students as customers to what's a better paradigm there?

Jody Greene [00:27:57]:

Yeah. So that was a lot of questions.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:00]:

Oh, yes. 40 too.

Jody Greene [00:28:01]:

To not get into that you just snuck in there. So so let me say, you know, the the the thing that you said about what students are and are not qualified to comment on, that's really important. Yeah. I mean, if you ask knowledge of the subject matter, how does a student know what your knowledge of the subject matter is? I mean, unless you really don't have any knowledge of the subject matter such that it was obvious that the vast majority of people that they're taught by have knowledge of the subject matter, but I don't really know what that question is supposed to elicit. And so we really think about SCTs as developmental. I am interested in what your experience has been, and I can learn from what your experience has been as a student in one of my courses. And I want to ask you very specific questions about that experience. And so for me, changing from student evaluations of teaching to student experience of teaching surveys is a really critical dimension of that because I don't know that students can evaluate my teaching.

Jody Greene [00:29:03]:

I do know that they've had an experience and that it's important to me to know what that experience is. Do I explain concepts clearly for the majority of my students is, you know, one that we ask, you know, did my feedback help you improve? Right? We don't use numbers at Santa Cruz either. We use frequency scales. So explain concepts clearly frequently. Right? And that in and of itself, you know, and we learned that trick from our survey specialists, that in and of itself takes the students a little bit out of the Yelpification of teaching and and and really asks them to think about what they observed. So it puts you in a slightly different it takes you out of the position of judge and puts you in the position of witness. And I think that's elicited much more helpful feedback. Do we still get really mean feedback? Absolutely.

Jody Greene [00:30:00]:

Right? From time to time, we do. But for the most part, it it's been really helpful that way. In the in the, you know, the best I think I can do with the question of the customer is that they are students are, among other things, customers of these educational institutions, but the classroom relationship is distinct from that. K? So it, of course, has a role to play in the overall experience, but I think you really have to talk to students about what a learning environment is and what learning is and what we do in college classrooms. Right? And I think that is something that I was always doing even before I started thinking about this stuff for a living. I spent a lot of time talking with students about what I think a classroom is for, what kinds of questions I think we should ask in classrooms, how much we have to, you know, have structure, but also allow for unanticipated forays into things that we didn't plan to talk about today, which is also a kind of responsiveness. So keeping that aliveness in the classroom, I think the more you can do that, the more the students feel like co creators of a learning experience. And when you're co creating something, you're not a customer.

Jody Greene [00:31:22]:

Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:22]:

You know? It's beautiful. That's so beautiful. Thank you so much, and thank you for helping me solve that mystery. It was really driving me.

Jody Greene [00:31:29]:

There you go.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:32]:

Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I just have a couple of them. Earlier in the conversation, you said something about showing up, and I thought you were gonna say in the fullness of ourselves, but you said to the degree that I believe you said the word necessary to the degree that it's necessary, and that maybe I'll have to leave that question for another day since we're running out of time here, but your your thoughts on these are so intriguing to me. I had a chance to watch a video by Alicia Keys, and it's a live recording. I'm not usually a big fan of live recordings except for when I am, and then when I am, I feel like there's no better way but to listen to that particular song live. This is a song called new day, and it's a live performance she gave at, VH one storytelling. And she introduces the song, which is generally one of the reasons I enjoy the live performances that I do because you get a little bit of the background, and she talked about how the song helped her find her center. And she used the phrase being the whole me. And I love the idea whenever we can be some part of helping other people be the whole them in conversations and in communities and in classrooms, and it's a beautiful song, and it gets stuck in my head.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:48]:

And, of course, it repeats itself. It's a new day. It's a new day, and I think sometimes when I recently had a chance to interview Laura and Catherine about their coedited Higher Education for Good, one of the comments was how mean higher education can be, and that keeps floating around because it so much can be. And so sometimes when higher education can be mean, it's just fun to just be reminded it's a new day. It's a new day, and that song of hers just keeps floating around. And since, I guess, YouTube is gonna serve me up more of its algorithm, then I got recommended the NPR Music Tiny Desk Conference of Alicia Keys, and the song at the end that she does is her song falling. And it I have in my notes here let me check my notes. It was chef's Kiss.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:38]:

And I would sing a bar if I weren't suffering a bit from a cold, but I keep falling in and out of love with you. And all of the musicians that are there just have so much fun with that. I keep falling in and out of with you, and they're just so fun to watch them. And then I don't see this in very many tiny desk concerts, but at some point, she interacts with the audience, And then they pan out to the audience, and you see them collect because she's invited them to sing along with her. And you see them just so much having so much fun with those lyrics. So those are my 2 recommendations for today. And, Jody, I'm gonna pass it over to you for whatever you'd like to share.

Jody Greene [00:34:17]:

I mean, I'm still stuck on the on the meanness of higher ed. Oh, yes. And it's a topic that I that I think about a lot and experience an enormous amount of of pain from because I don't really understand why we're so mean.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:30]:

Yes.

Jody Greene [00:34:31]:

The longer I'm in practice, the more mystified I am by this feature. So I guess one of my recommendations is try a little kindness.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:38]:

Mhmm.

Jody Greene [00:34:38]:

You know, and see what happens. Just imagine in in in a moment, particularly if it's with someone or a group of people that you almost reflexively feel antagonistic towards, just ask yourself if maybe even as an experiment, you could imagine dropping that antagonism for one interaction and see what the result is because I just feel it's it's unnecessary much of the time, not all of it, but much of the time. And I think my other recommendation is I'm I'm a walker. I walk a lot. I sometimes go on pilgrimages of many months where I walk, and that's not available to everyone. But what I love about walking is the relationship between time and noticing. And so it's a it's an opportunity to notice. And even if you're unable to walk, even if you have a physical limitation, just stepping outside and seeing all the things that you can notice with your, you know, however many senses you have, that I think is something that can change your view really quickly to just notice how how kind of wondrous it is.

Jody Greene [00:35:58]:

I I was once walking through the monastery where I practice, and a teacher was walking towards me, one of the abbots, and he he I greeted him and I said, hey, Abbot Ed, what's happening? And he looked at me with these huge eyes and he said so many things. And he didn't mean I'm so busy. He meant out here in this mountain valley with the wind and the leaves and the creek and the critters so many things are happening. You know? And it just changed my view to think so many things are happening. And so that's my other recommendation is go outside and notice.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:38]:

I I don't know if you plan this, and, of course, I don't know that you plan the first recommendation to begin with, but I love how these can go together, how we might notice how we're feeling about another person. Yeah. And then I'm thinking as you were sharing about the stories that we tell ourselves. And then could we try on a different story?

Jody Greene [00:36:57]:

Absolutely.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:58]:

And I just got off before we we hopped on today. I just got off with just administrative meanness that I don't think probably people meant to be mean in this situation, but people are it's triggering old hurts and old wounds, and let's just try another story on and see if we can be kinder to each other and and and assume that this upset is actually coming from a real hurt. And and let's go with that, and let's try to figure out ways to heal the hurt. But but also from what you said earlier, some of that hurt is gonna get healed through individual kindness, but a lot of it's gonna need to come to a collective kind of kindness as well.

Jody Greene [00:37:36]:

Yeah. That's right. And I think, you know, one of the practices that I have is what is the best possible what is the most generous possible reading I can have of what's happening right here? And one of the things that I see in higher ed, the particular form of meanness is the attribution of stupidity and or malice to others a lot of the time. And I think there's actually almost always, at least at my institution, there's almost always a good and principled reason why someone is making the decisions that they're making. So at least I should try to see what those reasons are, even if I don't agree with them. But fundamentally, most people are making decisions not because they're jurors, but because they are constrained by a set of conditions that are I can't see. So I try to find out what those conditions are that I can't see before I assume that they are being stupid or malicious.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:30]:

Such wise words to end Hassan. Jody Greene, I'm so glad to have been introduced to you and to have gotten to have this conversation, and just thank you so much for your generosity and wisdom.

Jody Greene [00:38:41]:

Thank you and congratulations again on that 10 years. I mean, how wonderful that you've brought so many voices talking about these matters to so many listeners.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:53]:

Thanks to Kim Saichai for introducing me to Jody Greene and making today's conversation possible. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. Thanks to each one of you for listening today and being a part of the Teaching and Higher Ed community. If you've been listening for a while and Dave yet to sign up for the weekly update, head over to teaching and higher ed dot com slash subscribe. You'll receive the most recent episodes, show notes, along with some other resources. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Faculty's Role in Student Success, with Jody Greene - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Jody Green discusses faculty's role in student success on episode 515 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

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Padlet + YouTube about Getting Student Feedback

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Padlet + YouTube about Getting Student Feedback

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlWdlS8t6ng

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Sam's example of self-reflection of grading

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Sam's example of self-reflection of grading

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Chapters 9 and 10: Lab Classes and Partial Conversions

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Chapters 9 and 10: Lab Classes and Partial Conversions

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Discussion Points:

1. In Lab Classes chapter, students can earn tokens for completing an assignment. What are some examples of special assignments that you might incorporate for students to earn tokens?

2. On that same theme, what are some suggestions for how students can use those tokens? from the book, examples included extending time to resubmit an assignment, reopening an assignment for 48 hours, missing a lab.

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LMS are not great at incorporating tokens. Google forms are a good way.

Phase out tokens as students progress through the program.

Earn tokens by attending a lab related to a class.

Use of a column in LMS to track tokens.

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Perhaps the biggest problem facing instructors today is how to get students engaged in their class work. What does "engagement" mean, and how might we elicit it?

The term "engagement" is often used as a combination certain behaviors; of feelings, beliefs, and emotions; and things we do to elicit all these. It's a bit amorphous, which makes it hard to say or do anything meaningful about "engagement". It's helpful to look at the etymology of the word: "Engage" derives from an older word meaning "pledge", as when a couple gets engaged to be married. Other words that derive from the same root are mortgage and wage, pointing toward toward "a state of committed involvement, in an activity into which we have entered willingly and with the intention to complete" .

What many have been seeing lately with increasing frequency, is disengagement, which manifests as absenteeism, being intellectually "checked out" even if physically present, opting out of required readings, and more. You can sometimes see disengagement on the faces of students, and you know there's more going on than meets the eye.

We can't make students be engaged; we can only create an environment where engagement is a more compelling choice than disengagement. Teachers have been trying to do this for over a century using a predictable model: Attaching points to things like attendance and participation, and make it part of the course grade. This approach is problematic for various reasons which I'll discuss below. In this post, I want to describe a simple alternative I've been using for the last few years that seems to work well, but avoids the various traps of points-based approaches. It uses a notion I call engagement credits.

The traditional approach to eliciting any sort of behavior from students in a class is to place a numerical value on it and make it a variable in the course grade formula. Engagement is no exception: Typical policies intended to promote engagement boil down to tallying attendances and making the number a percentage of the course grade; or taking a purely punitive approach by stating that students with a certain number of absences will have their grades lowered, or possibly even automatically fail the course .

This approach is problematic for at least three reasons:

It introduces potential inequities into the course. As David wrote here, channeling Joe Feldman, participation and attendance can be considered "non-academic factors" and their assessment is susceptible to instructor bias. They often reflect a student's freedom from personal constraints such as family, health, and financial issues which would make attendance and participation difficult, and some students -- through no fault of their own -- have more such constraints than others.

It conflates attendance and class participation with "engagement". Attending and participating in class are two forms of engagement, but not the only two. A student who fills out a survey, interacts on a discussion board (above and beyond, perhaps without, a requirement to do so), or works through an optional online practice problem set is also engaged with the class and the learning process. And yet, attendance and participation often have pride of place in course syllabi. I suspect this is because they are easy to quantify and therefore instructors will tend to optimize the notion of "engagement" around them.

Goodhart's Law. This states that when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart's Law haunts traditional grading generally speaking, but when applied to "engagement" - when we attach points to it and make it part of a grade - we actually get disengagement. Students will go through the motions and appear to be engaged but actually they're just grinding (in the video game sense) and are not really present with their work.

One response to the problems of traditionally graded engagement is to completely exclude it: To have attendance, participation, or other related forms of engagement have no place in the course grade and focus only on evidence of learning. I used to take this approach. I would record attendance but not grade it or include it in the course grade. Instead I used the data it as a means of keeping tabs on students and checking in with those who had numerous absences.

But recently, I ran a simple correlation between my students' attendance rates and their final exam scores and found a very strong positive correlation (the p-value was on the order of 10 ⁻⁵). Correlation is not causation, but this result confirmed my belief that engagement, including attendance and participation, are not "non-academic" factors at all but in fact play an important role in the evidence of learning students produce. So it has a place in the grade students get in my classes. The main question is how to handle engagement, in a way that avoids traditional traps.

Back in the day, I played Dungeons and Dragons. In that game, and most other role playing games, you have the concept of experience points: Points that you earn by doing relevant and useful stuff like killing dragons, casting spells, and completing quests. As you accumulate points, you eventually earn enough to level up and become a more powerful character.

One day not long ago, I thought: Students should earn experience points for doing successful "quests" in my classes. I even drafted an entire grading system based on nothing but accumulation of "experience points" which could be done in a wide variety of ways, including the usual stuff like taking exams and coming to class but also alternative activities like oral quizzes in office hours, creating a poster presentation, etc. These all carried experience point values, and the results all went into a single pool of points that you could use to level up through different grades.

I never fully fleshed that system out; others ( example, example) have done so, and probably better than I would have. But a vestige of the idea made it into my courses, namely the idea of earning credit for doing any relevant, useful instance of "engagement" as defined earlier. I called them engagement credits.

It's almost embarrassingly simple how this works:

In the course design process, I picked out some standard "acts of engagement" such as attending a class meeting, doing satisfactory work on a pre-class assignment, and working through an optional online homework set. In the syllabus I attach a point value to each thing. The standard is 1 point for class attendance and 2 points for completing a class prep . Other items were more valuable. For example, completing the "startup assignment" ( described here) was worth a whopping 30 engagement credits. Overall, I scaled the point values so that earning 100 engagement credits would be easy if you just came to class and did the pre-class work.

But importantly: Other opportunities to earn engagement credits constantly came available. For example, completing a Five Question Summary survey earned 5 points. Last semester I found this article on deliberate practice, and I really wanted students to read it, so I made a Google Form for responses and awarded 10 engagement credits for good faith responses. Students were welcome -- encouraged, even -- to create their own engagement credit opportunities. So, if you had issues making it to class or completing pre-class work, or if you just didn't want to do a particular task, you could just engage in some other way.

In my syllabus, a total of 90 engagement credits was needed for a grade of A; 80 for a B; 70 for a C; and 50 for a D. For perspective, the class had about 30 regular meetings; sp doing the class prep work and then attending the class would therefore get you to 90 credits automatically. But we also had the rule that if you met all the requirements for a course grade except engagement credits, you earned that grade but with a "minus" penalty; having major issues with engagement wouldn't hurt the course grade badly as long as the "academic factors" of the grade were going well.

My students have found engagement credits useful: They provide a light pressure to complete "quests" that get and keep them engaged, without turning it into a stressor or a mindless game of point-grubbing. The fact that there are many ways to earn the credits, including activities of their own design if they want, makes the engagement more real than if we limited it to just attendance and "participation".

In day-to-day practice, I have to do a fair amount of daily accounting work since engagement credits tend to happen through small but frequent activities. Much like tracking your checking account transactions, if you don't take time every day to record engagement credits, it's easy to fall behind and hard to catch up. This semester I set a goal of consistently recording attendance each day and used a habit tracker to help. It took some discipline, but in practice this took no more than 10 minutes a day and produced a lot of valuable data (see below).

The course LMS, for a change, can be really useful here. In Blackboard and probably in other platforms, gradebook items can be given a tag or category. I created one for engagement credit-bearing items and then a separate column that kept a running total of all gradebook items with that tag. This way, all I had to do was stay consistent with entering the individual items, and students could check their totals at any time.

I have no formal data on how well the engagement credit approach has worked, but it passes the eye test in my view. Compared to classes where engagement wasn't a part of the course grade at all, the classes that use engagement credits seem to have levels of participation and attendance that are, if not perfect, then consistently reasonably OK. (I don't have the experience many of my colleagues have, of week after week of rampant absenteeism for example; my attendance rates this semester hovered between 75% and 85%. Again not outstanding, but consistently reasonably OK.)

Using engagement credits has forced me into better habits as an instructor, especially the habit of tracking attendance. Attendance data are extremely valuable, especially if you as an instructor are concerned about absenteeism. They can alert you to students who have missed several days in a row, for example. And I was able to use attendance data after the course was over to do useful statistical analyses, for example the aforementioned correlation between attendance and final exam scores .

Overall, I find engagement credits to be a good compromise between heavy-handed points-based approaches to engagement, and not including engagement in the course grade at all. They are easy to implement and cost nothing. They could even be implemented partially in a course currently underway or in a course that uses traditional points-based grading. Most importantly, they encourage the engagement we seek and open the door for conversations about why this is so important for learning.

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Promoting student growth with engagement credits

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Possibly a better way to handle attendance, participation, and other forms of engagement.

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Book recommendation

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Student demotivation is experienced as pain―for students, for us, for everyone.

But here′s the good news: student demotivation is not inevitable. It′s not "a sign of the times"; it′s not "kids these days;" it′s not "because of COVID."

Instead, it′s a symptom of the fact that modern education has lost touch with several key realities:

Every one of our students wants to want to learn

Every school in the world can be both productive and humane―achievement and wellness aren't opposed to one another but instead are friends

As teachers, you and I have an outlandish (though not omnipotent) influence on the degree to which students in our classrooms experience the will to learn, and

The most powerful strategies for cultivating student motivation are far from complicated

In this book, acclaimed teacher-writer Dave Stuart Jr. brings a new theory of student motivation to the educational conversation. Along the way, he shares

The five key beliefs beneath all motivated student learning

Ten high-yield, low-effort methods for cultivating student motivation in all kinds of classrooms for all kinds of students, all year long

Tactics for overcoming over fifty common hang-ups that teachers and students experience with student motivation

Let′s do the work, colleague. And: let′s do it with care.

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The Will to Learn: Cultivating Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own (Corwin Teaching Essentials)

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The Will to Learn: Cultivating Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own (Corwin Teaching Essentials) [Stuart, Dave] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Will to Learn: Cultivating Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own (Corwin Teaching Essentials)

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What's the magic number of tokens? - No real consensus on that. With a limited number of tokens, you can have students revise much earlier work in the semester. It allows them to reflect back on their work and apply what they learned. Or you can set time limits on use of tokens.

Ideas for earning tokens: 1. assigned reading of REALLY important stuff and then have them do a reflection. 2. Attending a lab, but have a firm maximum. 3. Reading quizzes 4. Metacognitive activities: Exam wrappers for example. 5. Earn for on-time submissions-would have to spend to submit something late. 6. Watching a flipped lecture.

What to use your token for?

1. Reopen an assignment for a set period of time.

2. Extended time for an assignment.

3. Repeat a quiz

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It's hard to implement these strategies unless you have other faculty in your program willing to also go out on that limb.

It's also challenging when students pit faculty against each other regarding grading practices and late policies. Even more challenging when your colleagues throw you under the bus.

Need more consistency within a program to lessen the mental health swings that come with varying deadlines and workloads. The majority of people need to be on the bus with the practices.

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High structure: How we are going to learn. How you are going to communicate with me. How will you be successful.

Relationship: Why we are learning.

"fun comfortable" Dan Stevens quote

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Award-winning teachers offer practical tips for addressing inequities in the college classroom and for making all students feel welcome and included.

In a book written by and for college teachers, Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy provide tips and advice on how to make all students feel welcome and included. They begin with a framework describing why explicit attention to structure enhances inclusiveness in both course design and interactions with and between students. Inclusive Teaching then provides practical ways to include more voices in a series of contexts: when giving instructions for group work and class activities, holding office hours, communicating with students, and more. The authors finish with an opportunity for the reader to reflect on what evidence to include in a teaching dossier that demonstrates inclusive practices.

The work of two highly regarded specialists who have delivered over a hundred workshops on inclusive pedagogy and who contribute frequently to public conversations on the topic, Inclusive Teaching distills state-of-the-art guidance on addressing privilege and implicit bias in the college classroom. It seeks to provide a framework for individuals and communities to ask, Who is being left behind and what can teachers do to add more structure?

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Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

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Amazon.com: Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education): 9781952271632: Hogan, Kelly A., Sathy, Viji: Books

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There are philosophical discussions about the episodes of The Good Place. Here is just one example.

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Mother Forkin' Morals with Dr. Todd May - Part 3: Psychological Egoism - The Good Place (Exclusive)

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Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity

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A host of simple teaching strategies—referred to as “equitable teaching strategies” and rooted in research on learning—can support biology instructors in striving for classroom equity and in teaching all their students,…

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Chapter 11 - Workbook for Alternative Grading (Steps 1-4) 

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Chapter 11 - Workbook for Alternative Grading (Steps 1-4) 

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This chapter outlines the process of building a prototype of an alternative grading system in a course and the various practical strategies for implementing alternative grading methods.

Discussion questions:

1. Considering the context of your courses, what are the most significant challenges you anticipate or have encountered in using these grading methods? How will you or have you addressed these challenges to ensure a successful implementation?

2. Student learning and motivation are key aspects of alternative grading. Based on your experiences or examples presented in the chapter, how do alternative grading systems affect students' engagement and academic outcomes compared to traditional grading?

3. Are there specific methods to assess these effects?

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1. How do your institution's policies facilitate or hinder your ability to adopt alternative grading practices (e.g., LMS, course grading schemes)? What can we do to adapt to the systems chosen for us? (Step 7)

2. How do you hope to balance giving students enough opportunities to demonstrate their learning without sending yourself to "grading jail" over the course of the semester? (Step 8)

3. What is the value of working through the process in advance and iteratively? How could rest facilitate creativity and joy for you as an instructor? (Step 9)

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7:30 - 8:00PST (10:30 - 11:00am EST) :

HELLO and plan for day / set goals

8:00 - 10 (11 - 1) :

WORK SESSION

10 - 10:30 (1 - 1:30) :

CHECK IN and share out

10:30 - 12 (1:30 - 3) :

WORK SESSION

12 - 12:30 (3 - 3:30) :

CHECK IN and share out - bye!

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1. FOCUS : Voice Disorders class

2. Organization of assignments

3. Description of alt grading for each

4. Working in tokens somehow!

5. Think through additional opportunities for learning (above and beyond)

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1. Finish grading schema for undergrad course.

2. Finish up Canvas course for publishing.

3. Revisit Grad level course grading scheme to think about adding tokens.

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1. Outline grading for growth syllabus for undergrad hearing science course.

2. Problem solve how to grade my weekly open response question in my graduate class.

3. Token system - brainstorming assignments for students to earn tokens (undergrad and grad)

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1. Revamp grading plan for AAC grad course; I like the assignments, but want to incorporate alt grading

2. Design a "foundational skills" assessment for Speech Sound Disorders (phonetic transcription, naming distinctive features, phonological processes, creating minimal pairs, etc.)

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Clinical Phonetics

1. Revamp course objectives

2. Create assignments, quizzes, exams, and final assignment to meet objectives

3. Rework alt. grading scale and grade book

4. Work through participation in class and lab attendance