Last week was our first week of class and despite an unexpected cancellation of class for a snow day (which eastern NC rarely gets), it went well. In fact, I think it was the smoothest first week I've had here yet. Which of course led to me thinking my email was broken because I wasn't fielding a ton of questions (it couldn't be that I designed good classes, and set things up so students had all the answers they needed). I also had anxiety all week that it only went smoothly because I had somehow forgotten to do like a million things.
So far none of these things have proven to be true.
This past week I also ended up having a few disparate conversations that nevertheless led me to write this post. First, there was a conversation on Twitter about class size recommendations, especially for writing classes, with most folks agreeing that 20-25 should be the limit. I shared my class sizes. My online Advanced Composition has 40. My online Composition II has 30. Those are pretty standard. Our GE classes tend to have caps of 30-40 and Advanced Composition is a class that serves our Criminal Justice and Interdisciplinary Studies majors, with the latter being an all-online degree, so there are always folks to take them, and I frequently override the cap, and in fact had this cap raised from 30-40.
Our English major classes tend to be smaller. My Shakespeare class has 15, my Capstone class has 6, and I have a History of the English Language independent study with two students. I would say all my classes are writing intensive, although maybe not in the way you think. They write a lot, small assignments for feedback, research on their own, reading scholarly work for models. It's not one big midterm and one big final paper and done.
When I shared my class sizes there was the comment that it was a lot, and shared experiences that it must be a lot of work, that often smaller classes of 20-25 are a struggle. And it got me thinking, I struggle with a lot in my job but I do not struggle about the teaching. But I think a lot of it is because I'm not grading 40 10 page papers twice a semster in one fell swoop. I never feel overwhelmed, when I read posts on Twitter about the "grading cave" and being buried in assignments, I have no idea what they are talking about. I never have that. My class is not designed that way. In all my classes, there is a final portfolio that students submit with a reflection letter and the portfolio is their reflections on changes made to pieces and then their revised pieces in class. The pieces differ depending on the class, different skills I think they need. The HEL class revises their responses to weekly readings that reflect our conversations. The Shakespeare class focuses on argument, both identifying and interacting with scholarly arguments and building their own. The Advanced Composition class explores what writing is in their field. The Composition II class focuses on genre- narrative, informative/argumentative, literary analysis. The Capstone class builds up to conference style paper and presentation, but their portfolio includes a lot of different steps and genres based on their interests.
In everything but my GE classes there are no grades. Students reflect on and present work at midterms, telling me what grade they think should be posted and why. At the end of the semester they do a similar reflection for their portfolio. At my school midterm and final grades are the only ones I'm required to submit through Banner, although we do progress reports through E4U and Census to report if students are working in the course. For my online classes the gradebook just has things marked incomplete/complete. The learning happens in the gradebook. My upper level English classes just email me assignments and I email back thoughts and feedback. Each week I tell students what we're working on, and the consequences of falling behind (need feedback to improve, assignments build on each other) but there are no due dates in my class and no deadlines except one hard deadline at the end of the semester that I explain- I need time to read and provide feedback to report final grades, and there is no penalty for latework. I tell them that I trust they understand the work is important and if something comes up that they'll complete it as soon as they can. They don't have to ask for extensions, or perform their personal issues with me. This works in part because I show them it works. They can "see" how the assignments work, how my feedback helps, so they know it's true.
Whenever someone shares an approach like this invariably the response is that students will somehow use this to "take advantage" or that professors will end up buried with 500 assignments two days before grades are due. This does not happen. I've been doing this for years, at both the high school and college level and not once with hundreds of students has that ever happened. In fact, just the opposite. Each morning I get up, have my coffee, watch the news, go for my walk, shower, eat my Cheerios, log into work email for office hours. I answer questions first. I set aside the emailed work. I log into Blackboard and I clear the gradebook in both classes, reading and grading everything submitted since yesterday. I do this every day during office hours 10a-12p this semester. I rarely have more than ten items to grade in each class. I then return to my email and answer the graded work students emailed me. There are no grades here, just feedback. Often these are just written holistic responses, general overview of things, both strengths and weaknesses. Since their work is personal I often make suggestions for future research or things they might want to think about. I love this bit the best because it is a conversation between people about the work. Again, any given day, maybe I have ten emails to answer. I am almost always done way before my hours are over. Students get responses within 24 hours, and always know where they stand.
I'm not a unicorn. I teach at a small college, so we're all on a lot of committees, the service committment as well as the teaching load (4/4, often with 5/5 overloads), so it's not like I have a lot of time others don't. This works because I have designed it to. When I DO get student papers, and their portfolio, I've already looked at and responded to drafts, the research steps, we've talked through the thesis, the argument, and so it goes more smoothly, and again, students reflect and present the grade their work earns and why. I rarely have to push back and even more rarely flat out disagree. I do miss face to face grade conferences, where students bring up the work, present it, and we have more like a Q & A about their work, but post-Covid I hope to return to that.
I only grade Monday through Friday, and only when I'm on the computer, and I never feel overwhelmed and I never leave things for days.
This week I got to thinking that maybe the reason the response to these types of approaches was it couldn't be done, or "*I* couldn't do that because..." or whatever list of reasons always gets brought up is because folks are trying to imagine how just this one thing would fit into their pedagogy. The answer is probably that it wouldn't. This works because I have moved almost completely to ungrading. I have moved to the focus on student reflection and grade conferences. I have gotten rid of deadlines, due dates, and late work penalties. I have designed classes where students have choice and agency. I have designed classes where assignments, readings, discussions are building blocks. So my grading approach works because it is just one piece of all of this. But again, I'm not magic, these are all really easy things to do and honestly, I work less and better than I used to. I don't have antagonistic relationships with students, because I'm not butting heads with them about compliance. They know they have choices, but understand choices have consequences. They know I am happy to support, teach, help, but the work is on them. I teach better with things this way. Some students struggle at first, with our culture of "My goal is to get an A" but you'd be surprised how quickly they like it, even students from other majors.
But the idea that all of this was carefully thought out, how each piece fit and served a purpose, and was not based on compliance also got me thinking about another conversation I had this week. Instead of talking about students though I was talking about faculty and pedagogy. One of my best known lines (that students will now use...) is "what is the pedagogical reason for doing..." whatever it is. *I* can answer this for every single thing I do in my classes. And I often explain it to students. But this type of reflection is still all too rare in teaching, and even rarer in faculty who are content experts but do not have a background or foundation in pedagogy. It got me thinking about how "best practices" in higher ed are too often about compliance. "Give this assignment," "build this content," "follow this model." But how often do faculty stop and ask "WHY am I doing this?" "What purpose does this serve?" Providing a checklist of items for faculty to include in their course is intended to provide a model of "good teaching" for them to follow in case they're not a teacher by training. But the problem is they replicate the thing withouth understanding the WHY and so if they teach in a different way (like I do) there can be a disconnect between the compliance and the pedagogical design and decisions in a class. Maybe there's a small disconnect, but maybe there are actual contradictions. Maybe the list is not a good fit for content or approach. What do we do with this? Are our faculty and students really served by this approach?
I would argue that a better approach is to create the time and space for faculty to learn to ask "what is the pedagogical reason for..." Why do they assign that reading? Why did they create that assignment that way? Assess knowledge using that format? In many cases faculty without a teaching background are just replicating the syllabus they learned with. This presents many issues. First, scholarship, research, content changes, and so should our syllabi. Second, few of our faculty went to schools like they now teach in, so why would their syllabi be the same? Could this perhaps be part of the reason their students are struggling? If faculty teach one way, because they're replicating what and how they were taught, and a student or students don't get it, and the faculty member can't teach it a different way because perhaps they don't understand the mechanics of how that assignment works, then we end up with compounded issues.
If you tell me I "have" to do something the first thing I'm going to ask is why.
You have to have a gradebook.
Why?
So records can be accessed.
Okay, but I report midterm and final grades, like everyone else from our 70 year old professors who use no tech to our 30 year old professors who use Blackboard.
You have to protect student privacy having students submit work.
Okay, but the students email me work, so that is private. And the email me work and I provide feedback there are no grades, but again, email is private.
See, once you start asking compliance questions, and I respond with pedagogy, it all breaks down. I know that a lot of schools with Covid have made to make reactionary decisions and make large scale changes. It is not a job I would wish on anyone and I think many administrations are doing the best they can. But some things I read about worry me. The stories about the increased use of surveillance software is troubling because it's used to punish students which is not conducive to learning, it tends to punish disproportionately people in shared spaces, who are neurodivergent, need to pause tests to go to work, pretty much anyone not able to sit in a private, quiet space, with nothing else to do. I am concerned about the policing of student clothes, living spaces, presence of kids, cats, dogs, lizards. I am mostly worried that these policing/compliance moves will stop being "this is what we did during Covid" and become "this is just what we do." Yet if you ask the pedagogical reason for any of this, the whole system breaks down because these things actively work against good pedagogy.
I wish more of higher education created a time and space for teachers to reflect and ask these questions. Exposure to professional development can be helpful, new things to try, exposure to new ideas. But these things too often become three hours of lecturing at faculty, with no conversations about how it fits into how they already run their classes.
There's the old parable about NASA spending millions in the 1960s to develop a pen to write in space while the Russians just used a pencil. Occam's Razor.
UPDATE:
I meant to put this in the original post.
Here's a perfect example of intention failing our faculty and students. When schools moved classes online there were a variety of changes made that were tech heavy and created a ridiculous amount of issues. Recording lectures, upload times, loading audio to PowerPoints. I know a lot of faculty were told they had to take classes so they could "count" as online teachers. The end results were not great. Faculty who did not want to teach online, had no experience doing it, totally unsurprisingly, did it badly. The faculty was overworked, the students did not have a good experience.
Know what would have been a better, easier answer? Schedule online classes like face to face for inexperienced professors. MWF 10a, or TR 2p. Hold class just like you regularly would, but on Zoom. Record it. Post recording to students. Post audio and video. If students could not attend they can listen/watch. Then take all that extra time you spent forcing faculty to attend classes to learn things they didn't care about and instead have conversations about lessening the work load, paring down syllabi, ways to support students through all this, building in self-care for faculty so they don't burn out. The faculty would have done better because this was just a small learning curve, and let them do what they do best. Students would have done better because most did not sign up for online classes and this would have also been a small learning curve for them.
Instead, I heard a lot of focusing on the wrong thing. Faculty should not have been expected to become experts in online learning overnight. Students should not have been expected to become online learners. We ALL should have explicitly recognized the extreme uniqueness of the moment we're in, an acknowledgement of what we're all dealing with.
Instead, it seems the majority just kept trucking with the same approach, and the same complaints.
My students cheat.
So figure out why they do, ask them. Then change assignments to address this.
I don't trust my students.
Get out of teaching.
They don't do the reading.
Why not? Have you asked?
Students don't do the work.
Why not? Have you asked?
The latest online tool, technology, approach, is never going to do anything if there are not sound pedagogical reasons behind it. As much as I love tech, use it in my class, have live Google Doc syllabi, a Google Site, been teaching online for eleven years, when I teach it's pretty low tech. In face to face classes it's me, an annotated book, and a lesson written on a legal pad. Some bad stick figure drawings on the board. In my online classes it's four module folders, simple module pages and assignments in them. I can tell you why I do everything, why I've changed things. In fact, I've often changed things during a semester if I see it's not working, and I explain to students why. In the twenty years I've been teaching that is perhaps the most surprising- the more I do this, the less I need. The less rules, the less bells and whistles, the less noise and nonsense.
One of the biggest issues facing education today whether you're talking about K-12 or higher education whether it's a community college, research university, small liberal arts college, HBCU, is that the quality of the education that a student gets is still a total crap shoot. It depends entirely too much on the luck of the draw. Maybe a student gets a teacher/professor that cares about them, knows their content and how to teach it, sees them, and makes sure they succeed. Or maybe they get someone that talks at them for 50 minutes three times a week, never answers emails, sees them as the enemy, and just the thing they have to put up with to do this other thing.
There is no magic bullet answer to the varied issues and problems we face in education. It was true before it's exponentially true now with Covid. There is no checklist of "best practices" that if you just mark them off your list everything gets fixed.
Instead, education as a whole needs to start asking all the time, about everything, every little aspect, why they do what they do. Institutions need to prioritize pedagogy, center their students. They need to then SHOW they're doing this by building in time to ask students what they need, and figure out how to give it to them. They need to build in time for faculty to reflect, give them the resources (people, time, less on their plate) so they can think about what they're doing, why, and have conversations with other faculty and students about what they could be doing. Every faculty member should be able to explain the pedagogical reasons behind their readings, assignments, policies. Every students should know why they're learning the content they are, in that format, why, how each assignment is designed and assessed.
If we want students to learn then we need to create a space where that is what they do. Not compliance.
If we want faculty to teach, then we also need to create a space where that is what THEY do. Not compliance. If a faculty member can tell you what they're doing and why, and it is successful, and best serves their students, then requiring them to do something else just because "that's what we do" and potentially actively harms students and counters their pedagogy, then you are doing the opposite of what education is supposed to do.
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