Yes! I’m hard-pressed to think of a more intellectually and socially invigorating activity masquerading as a professional development opportunity than a good conference!

Thanks for this, Vibhav! I’m wondering if Dan Ariely’s insights about trust and motivation prompted you to re-calibrate any of this? I thought the case he cited about Intel (where the rewards were $, a text from the boss, or a voucher for pizza) was pretty interesting. But I got the most out of his last story – the one about “Lemonade Insurance” and trust.

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Hi Sara,

Thank you for your comment — I always love reading what you have to say and look forward to it 🙂 and I agree with you.

But I also think that everyone believes that they are doing exceptional work (with minimal effort) and need to be recognized (I think that is an internal want of humans, means/methods might differ). Additionally I also believe that recognition doesn’t have any negative consequences where as rewards does (punishment and shame).

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Hi,

Thank you for your comment. I think you made an excellent point — real life is extremely interlinked and separation between intrinsic and extrinsic can become messy sometimes.

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Interesting experience! Sounds like a very enjoyable class. So you think such a class can have applications in all fields? I personally think a long-term project with evaluation would be more useful to critique student learning than traditional grading, especially if trying to groom students for graduate programs.

Agreed and not in the slightest. Educators have instituted that form of tracking before (in my own education, actually) and in doing so, they only succeed in reinforcing the idea in students’ minds that “this is what I’m good at, this is what I’m not, and I should only stick with what I’m good at”, which is not conducive at all to learning.

That’s really awesome!!! You must definitely be grateful for your background. That is really a blessing! Yet that sometimes might be challenging to face with students who have been trained in this competitive system and a system which puts everyone in benchmarks, a bit different from yours. If you don’t mind, I kindly ask you that, – I am really curious – don’t you think that being compared with grades will badly affect students’ learning process, even sometimes discourage them?

Hi Japsimran, this is a great post and really good food for thought. While learning should be the main objective and focus, grades are seen as the indicators of the students for themselves, unfortunately. Living in a neoliberal competitive world, unfortunately, I think it is really hard to make students think more about the importance of learning. Even if we improve the current grading system to make it more learning-centric, I doubt that students appreciate that. In the class this semester, I told my students that they are really more than their scores and the result when they lost 0.75 from their quiz, most of them came to my office hours and implicitly or many times explicitly saying that they need to do an internship or their grades will have an impact their positions in military at VT. I am really struggling to find an answer to that… but appreciated your post!

Aislinn, I really enjoyed reading your post and your thinking in grading. I am in the same boat. This semester I have been experiencing teaching for the first time and thinking very parallel with you. However, one thing confuses me in grading. When sharing your experience, you said it went well as you were flexible with you considered ‘good’ work from the students and grading more based on creativity and engagement. While we ask our students to be creative and engaged, I find hard to grade fair enough. Although I acknowledge that every student has s/he unique character, it is too hard to be “fair,” to be stuck in “certain” measurement. I was wondering whether you thought about that…

Thank you, Cindy, for your informative comment. I agree and believe the American education system is great and in the graduate level is the 1st top-ranked country. And thank you for your note about poetry.