Teaching is Intellectual

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Each course taken for credit requires a grade.  That’s the system we work in.  There is very little direction, in higher ed at least, about how to come to the determination of a grade but a final grade is always required.  And grades matter a lot.  So much that suicide attempts and completions surge during finals and/or end of quarter reporting.  Do we really feel so confident in capturing learning in a letter grade?

I’ve developed a nimble and ever-evolving  process for determining a final grade for my face-to-face courses.  In this post, I’ll talk about that process and answer the pervasive question, “What about the students who take advantage?”

Ungrading begins on (before) the first day of classes.  I’m constantly working to refine my syllabi language and my orientation for students on the first day.  I use Jesse Stommel’s language in my syllabus.

This course will focus on qualitative not quantitative assessment, something we’ll discuss during the class, both with reference to your own work and the works we’re studying. While you will get a final grade at the end of the term, I will not be grading individual assignments, but rather asking questions and making comments that engage your work rather than simply evaluate it. You will also be reflecting carefully on your own work and the work of your peers. The intention here is to help you focus on working in a more organic way, as opposed to working as you think you’re expected to. If this process causes more anxiety than it alleviates, see me at any point to confer about your progress in the course to date. If you are worried about your grade, your best strategy should be to join the discussions, do the reading, and complete the assignments. You should consider this course a “busy-work-free zone.” If an assignment does not feel productive, we can find ways to modify, remix, or repurpose the instructions. 

I also really like this language from Chelsea Morris @ecrising_ga about revise/resubmit procedures. I include peer review in this process as well as our knowledge is socially constructed in an active learning community.

Writing is a personal process that is ever evolving. I want you to know that I strongly believe that we all (and by all, I mean myself, too) can improve our writing. Therefore, on specific assignments in this class that involve submission of a written product, I will allow you to revise and resubmit your paper in order to develop the best final version that meets the goal of mastering course objectives. For each assignment, I will provide specific suggestions on how to improve your submission that you should implement with each new submission.

I build as much self and peer reflection and assessment into the semester as possible.  As the semester nears an end, I compile all of the work for the course (e.g., commitment logs, passion projects, book club, peer feedback) and ask students to complete a final feedback form.  This form asks for a proposed final grade for the course and then student rationale for that grade based on each of the tasks in the course.  This fall was the first time I completed the form – in the past, I have conferenced face to face.  The form provided students with a more targeted opportunity to consider their learning and their growth prior to our conferences.  It also provides tangible evidence of the process for my annual evaluation documentation.  I will move that form to google forms this spring and put it in their online commitment logs.  See?  Always evolving and, I think, improving.

The minute I begin speaking about ungrading, someone ALWAYS says, “yeah I agree mostly but what about for the student who does the minimum, who takes advantage, who doesn’t take it seriously because you’ve already told them they have an A?”  So, let’s unpack that.

Grades should be communication about progress toward mastery and mastery is the expectation.  So, just below the surface of this question, is the belief that grades are reflective of behavior and/or compliance, not learning.  And I get it.  We have all had learning experiences where the grade we were given was contingent on factors other than our demonstration of content mastery.  I got an A in a course because I did a book review in addition to the required course content (completing the required course content guaranteed a B).  I got a C in Movies of the 30s because I missed two classes, each resulting in a dropped letter grade.  I could go on.  So could you.  So, first we have to uncouple grading with policies around attendance, participation, effort, due dates, etc.  This is the hardest step for many.  Trust your students.  Invest in them.  Be trustworthy and safe so that they know they can be honest about what they need to be successful in mastering the content of your course.

Next, I would ask, “who cares?”  I know that sounds a little flippant but grades are made up.  If a student does not submit any work, does not attend class, does not engage or participate in any way, I have to assume there is something much more important going on in their lives.  I reach out, I try to build understanding, and I accept the difficult decisions many college students have to make about where to direct their resources.  Focusing on the points or the tasks or the deadlines does not promote trust and our shared priority of the student’s mastery.  And they are not that important in the bigger picture of what is preventing the student from being present in the work.

Finally, I have only had one instance in 9 years of this process where a student and I disagreed about the proposed final grade.  We both presented evidence and we came to the consensus that the student’s assessment would prevail.  The student felt strongly that they presented their best work and demonstrated an alignment with their product and mastery of course objectives.  I don’t give students grades, they do.

I’m always going to err on the side of students.  I don’t use grades to manipulate, coerce, or “gotcha” students.  The relationships I establish with students and the growth I see in their ability to talk about and reflect on their own learning is enough for me.  If one or two students leaves my course with a grade they didn’t “earn,” I’m okay with that.  The door remains open for us to continue the dialogue, continue learning together, continuing pushing each other.

Supporting preservice teachers to become lifelong learners must involve teaching them to identify their learning gaps and evaluate their own learning.  Traditional grading practices work in opposition with my teaching and learning goals.

The work of teacher educators and higher education faculty has long been quantified by number of published peer-reviewed articles.  That’s really the only metric by which we are evaluated.  And we do that work because it’s our job security and because it’s critical that the evidence base in education, specifically inclusive education, continues to grow.  We have always felt that that work is relatively meaningless, though, if our intentions are to influence teachers and kids’ experiences at school.  Published articles are paywalled, for starters.  Access to the research is costly in both money and time, both precious commodities for teachers.

Enter social media.

In a group text exactly two years ago, in expressing our frustrations about practices that persist despite all the piles of evidence (i.e. clip charts), we began to brainstorm ways of making the evidence visible.  Teachers do not have direct access to the research, to the leading experts, to the conferences, but we do.  So let’s take that privilege and package it so it is accessible.  We built a website, created a Facebook page, and started spreading the word.

We didn’t know what we were doing.

We are not graphic designers, marketers, communications people, influencers in any way.  We are assistant professors, teacher educators, teachers, researchers, writers and we do not have any training at all on building a social media presence.  So, we fumbled a lot.  We learned a lot.  And now, in celebration of two years of Teaching Is Intellectual, I share with you what little I know about making our work visible using social media.

1.  There is a whole world of #teachergram on Instagram.  This was brand new to me.  There are major teacher influencers there, a robust community with all the inner workings of community, friendships, bullying, leaders, organizing, agendas, movements.  It’s all there.
   1. If you want to get started, set up a new, public Instagram account.  I recommend making it separate from your personal account.
   2. Start with hashtags.  #teachersofinstagram #teachersfollowteachers #teachergram will provide a good introduction.
   3. Follow a ton of accounts and then curate your feed.  Find your people, the ones who speak to you, who resonate with you.  Pay less attention to the number of followers and more attention to the content provided.  Not all big accounts will speak to you.
   4. Listen first.  One mistake I made was jumping in without understanding all the dynamics at work there.  I learned the hard way.  Scroll around and get a feel for the place over time.
   5. Determine how you can contribute, what your expertise and knowledge can bring.  Everyone brings something unique so know your voice is needed!
2. Instagram and Facebook have very different styles and audiences.  We curate both in different ways but you can select just one platform to get started.  Twitter has a huge teacher community as well!
3. Captions are everything.  Spend time developing your thoughts so your caption can stand alone.  This took practice for me.
4. It’s not easy.  I regularly get messages asking me about how to set up a social media presence and as soon as I start talking, people are like whoa whoa whoa that’s a lot.  It is.  It’s a huge commitment and really does require consistent attention.  Followers do not just come, you have to build that community and nurture it.  I can get very bummed about the fact that we “only” have about 3500 followers on Instagram and 1700 on Facebook in two years time. That’s not great.  But then I remind myself that that’s a LOT of people we wouldn’t otherwise get to interact with!
5. People will come and go.  You cannot live and die by your follower count.
6. Know what you want to do with your little space on social media.  Stay true to what brought you there.  It can be easy to get distracted but know who you are and what you know.

And, yes, we’re writing about this work for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals.  Because I need tenure and because bridging the “research to practice gap” means researchers need to change too.  We cannot keep doing the same things and wondering why we’re mostly irrelevant to teachers doing the work every day.  We are committed to teachers and kids and families so we want to be where they are, seeking answers to the questions they’re asking, providing access in whatever ways we can.  We haven’t cracked the code, by any means – we are trying, though.  We are learning.  We are visible.

Learning tends to stop when grades are assigned.  Part of learning how to navigate school effectively is to master the art of learning what will be on the test or what the teacher wants from you and then clearing that brain space for the next assessment.  I’ve always been pretty good at that and it’s served me well in the short term.

Yet, I’m hopeless at helping my 9th grader with her math or science homework.

When I look at my college transcripts now, it’s clear to me that the grades recorded do not correlate at all with my own learning, my ownership over the knowledge I demonstrated in exchange for those letter grades.  I did what I had to do to get the A.  But my B in biology doesn’t mean the same thing as yours and that is inherently the problem.  We have no consensus, no way to compare.  We just assume that all Bs are created the same and they absolutely are not.

In my doctoral program, I took a course where the standard was you could do all the coursework for a B and add a book review for an A.  So, an A = willingness or ability to do an additional task.  An A did not = mastery of content.

So, if we agree that traditional grading lacks reliability and validity, what do we do instead?  I’ve been working to reframe grading for myself and my students the last few years and am continuing to grow in the process.  I firmly believe in meaningful feedback, self and peer assessment, and conferencing as the basis for course grades.  (We live in a graded system, we have to assign a grade so we need to determine a mechanism for doing so.) I’ve incorporated more and more self and peer assessment into my courses, in class group work, and then my own assessment of progress toward mastery.  Ideally, at least twice in the semester, we meet individually for conferencing.  This allows for us to share our perceptions of progress toward mastery and what supports or feedback I can offer to support the student’s growth.

Different students need different things to move toward mastery and individualizing my feedback helps me support their processes.  It is a time commitment though and I will admit that this semester, I thought we had one more week in the semester than we did, so our meetings didn’t happen.  I was able to connect individually with the students whose self assessment differed from my assessment so that we could talk it through and come to consensus.

Yes, consensus.  Because I do not give grades, students earn them as a result of engaging in the messiness of learning.  But, for me, they are a requirement, an afterthought, they are not at all important to me and I try to diminish their value for my students in the context of my course.

In my final feedback form this semester, one student noted that taking grades out of the equation allowed them to open their headspace for learning.  Which feels like a win to me.

Are you preparing the next generation of early childhood educators and leaders? How long has it been since you critically examined your syllabi and teaching practices? Did you know you may be widening the research to practice gap by making higher education – a place of evidence-based professional development – a hostile and unwelcoming environment?

Existing literature suggests that power relations and issues of expertise limit the extent to which faculty engage students in the design of their own learning and listen or respond to their needs (e.g. Mihans, Long, & Felton, 2008). In your work, examine and challenge the culture of higher education and the role of student-faculty interactions within and beyond the classroom. These interactions are crucial to the development of higher education students’ self-concept, motivation, and achievement (Komarraju, Musulkin, & Bhattacharya, 2010).

You can engage in critical conversations about the expectations placed upon pre-service practitioners. Through ambitious teaching, taking risks pedagogically and reconceptualizing teaching and learning for teachers and learners, you can facilitate dialogue around the extent to which the traditional “status-quo” of educator preparation truly teaches the behaviors we want to see.

Presume competence, rethink relationships, and trust the students you are preparing for the workforce.

Let’s Get Started

1.  Evaluate your beliefs.  I’m talking, back to the basics.   What do you believe about your learners themselves?  Do you believe they are generally committed and hard working or do you believe they are aloof, uncaring, lazy?  What do you know and believe about how people learn?  About how learning is assessed?  About how we can make learning visible?  This step takes work and time and reflection!  You can use this to get started.

If attendance and compliance count toward their grade, ask yourself what your grades reflect.  Do they reflect progress toward content mastery?  If students can demonstrate mastery on your assessments without attending class, what does that tell you about your course content, your assessments, your pedagogy?  These are just a few thoughts to get you started in unpacking your pedagogy

2.  Deconstruct your syllabus.  Take a good look at your policies, procedures,expectations, and language.  Does your syllabus invite and welcome learning?  Does it provide choice and flexibility?  What values does it communicate?  We compiled some tired and wired syllabus language for a poster presentation at the Division of Early Childhood conference.  The “wired” language prioritizes feedback and social learning theory.  Ask yourself if the beliefs you identified in Step 1 are reflected in your syllabus and if not, how can they be?  Jesse Stommel (jessestommel.com) has provided so much thought provoking content and syllabi language that helped us get started.  Also, we understand many universities and programs have required syllabus language.  We have both created an “official” syllabus for those purposes while providing a infographic syllabus to guide our work with students.

3.  Be transparent.  When I began on my journey toward a more ambitious and authentic pedagogy, I failed to include my students in my process.  Because I wasn’t as transparent with them about the how and the why of my approach, it was an unnecessarily difficult code switch for them.  I now introduce my expectations for participating in your own learning, for engaging in self and peer reflection, in revision and resubmission, etc on the first day of class.  We talk about it every course meeting.  I acknowledge it can be very uncomfortable as they’ve become so accustomed to working for points and providing work directly aligned with rubrics.  This kind of engagement requires trust and transparency.

4.  Trust your students.  Which leads us back to number 1.  We have to trust our students.  We have to encourage them to trust themselves.  They often feel so insecure in their own learning and their own knowledge, asking “is this what you want?”  We must consistently remind them that their work, their learning, isn’t for us, it’s for them!  And we trust them to learn it, know it, own it.

5.  Find your people.  This work is isolating, pushed back on, and quite honestly, harder.  Meaningful, intentional feedback, coming up with an individualized response including behavior and academic specific praise and constructive critique is exhausting.  So, find your people.  The ones that let you say, “I tried this new thing, here’s how it made me/my students feel, help me process this” and “I’m trying this and I’m getting this push back.”  It’s such deeply vulnerable work and we don’t know if it’s the right or best way.  But we do know that the traditional approaches do not work for us so we have to trust our gut and start here.  We have to talk about it, keep tabs on the evidence of what is effective, contribute to the research, and grow our practice.  That takes everyone working on it together.

This is a pedagogical journey.  We are on this journey together.  Each semester, we learn from our students and from each other.  We get just a little bit better, a little bit clearer, a little bit more trustworthy, a little bit more confident that what we’re doing is creating a community of lifelong learners, nurturing curiosity, and valuing knowing.

We are consistently advocating for the mental health needs of our students.  We attempt to be as supportive as possible to the complex lived experiences of our students and to acknowledge that they have full lives outside of our course/program.  That’s not to diminish the value of the learning experiences we are providing but to develop self care skills in our learners now that they can carry with them into their work as educators.

We’re also often met with resistance.  “You can’t just call in sick over a break up when you’re an employed teacher.”  But, the thing is, you can.  And you should if that’s what you need to get yourself together.  This burnout culture is unhealthy and we all perpetuate it in one way or another.  Glorifying busy.  Shaming absence.  Self care isn’t always convenient or well scheduled.  Sometimes it must be addressed regardless of other obligations.

Which leads me to question why or how we came to dismiss the traumas invoked or perpetuated at school.  Why do we persist the myth that “middle school is the worst” instead of implementing the many evidence-based practices (intentional social skills curriculum, active preventative teaching, for example) with consistency and fidelity.  Middle school does not HAVE to be “the worst” – we allow it to be.

Tropes like “mean girls” persist because we allow them to persist.  Intervene.  Teach.  Relentlessly.  Kids need our guidance in learning how to navigate the world – socially, online, in all spaces.  We must take responsibility for teaching.

If kids are experiencing trauma at school or their trauma is exacerbated at school, that is on us. If we believe in self care for ourselves, we must model it and teach it to our learners.  Self care is for everyone.

Dr. Chelsea T. Morris and I presented a (what we thought was) cool poster at the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division of Early Childhood’s annual conference.

The first panel asked the participants to indicate how they evaluate student learning, if participation should be included for a grade, if attendance should be included in a grade, if and which social media accounts they use in their teaching, and how they handle late work.  Overwhelmingly, participants indicated they do include “participation” in grades.  There was more variability in if the participants include attendance in student grades although the majority indicated that yes they do include attendance for a grade.

There was interesting conversation around the “How do you evaluate student learning” boxes as many said they’re required to use letter grades but they incorporate a lot of ongoing, formative feedback.

Our second panel was the first one layered over the next one with the doors cut open to show the examples of “tired” and “wired” syllabus language underneath.  The literature provided in the middle provides some evidence for instructors moving toward learner-centered syllabi and more humanized course design.  Many participants reflected on the “tired” syllabus language as similar to the language in their own syllabus and noted that they had not really considered what their syllabi were communicating to their learners.  Which makes sense!  We also heard from many faculty and instructors who said their syllabi are inflexible due to requirements by their department, college, and university.  We, of course, considered a syllabus with all the required components (aligned professional preparations standards, state standards, university policies, etc) posted to the learning management system and then a learner-centered and/or co-created learning plan to direct the specific content for the course itself.  It also raises questions of academic freedom – particularly for tenured faculty but that’s for another post.

 The final panel invited participants to make note of what Ambitious Teaching means to them.  The words on the left say:

Dear faculty,

Are you preparing the next generation of early childhood educators and leaders? How long has it been since you critically examined your syllabi and teaching practices? Did you know, in contradiction to DEC leadership recommendations (L1, L4, L6, L8, L11), you may be widening the research to practice gap by making higher education – a place of evidence-based professional development – a hostile and unwelcoming environment?

Existing literature suggests that power relations and issues of expertise limit the extent to which faculty engage students in the design of their own learning and listen or respond to their needs (e.g. Mihans, Long, & Felton, 2008). In your work, examine and challenge the culture of higher education and the role of student-faculty interactions within and beyond the classroom. These interactions are crucial to the development of higher education students’ self-concept, motivation, and achievement (Komarraju, Musulkin, & Bhattacharya, 2010).

You can engage in critical conversations about the expectations placed upon pre-service practitioners. Through ambitious teaching, taking risks pedagogically and reconceptualizing teaching and learning for teachers and learners, you can facilitate dialogue around the extent to which the traditional “status-quo” of educator preparation truly teaches the behaviors we want to see.

Presume competence, rethink relationships, and trust the students you are preparing for the workforce.

Constructing a Learner-Centered Syllabus: One Professor’s Journey

Can a Learner-Centered Syllabus Change Students’ Perceptions of Student–Professor Rapport and Master Teacher Behaviors?

How are making your teaching ambitious?  We want Teaching Is Intellectual to be a space for ambitious teacher education.  For rethinking, reimagining, and redoing traditional (and largely ineffective) teaching and learning paradigms.  Tell us.  Let’s revolutionize teacher education together.