“The most important thing I did was to learn how to be me in front of my students.” I couldn’t agree more! I nodded all the way through this, and your experiences resonate with mine in many ways. I also began teaching without any formal training in pedagogy. I taught piano lessons in college to help make ends meet, and when it came time to teach history when I was in grad school, I started with the same approach you describe here — I’d been “in school” my whole life, so surely I would know how this thing worked?

For me, one of the main epiphanies came that first semester, when I realized that while my assumptions about “how to teach” might help me survive, my assumptions that I knew “what students were about” because I’d always been one, needed a major adjustment. Just because I knew what kind of student I had been did not mean I had a clue about what motivated different kinds of learners.

Hello Dr. Nelson,

Thank you for your comment! Interestingly enough I had heard most of Dan Ariely’s studies from his various videos on youtube, before the event yesterday. His videos did challenge my thinking in some ways, but I have always had an intuition (from personal experience) that compliments are better motivators than money — results from his studies/experiments corroborated my intuition. My take away from his talk was that emotions are cardinal drivers of human behavior — how they are elicited matters the most.

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Exactly! exams should only be a diagnosed technique. If you get wrong answers, you should worry about what you understood wrong and try to learn more. You should not worry about how can I get better grades only for the sake of the grades.

I really like the system in Brazil! I didn’t know about it before. That is really cool. What matters in Tunisia to get a good job is that you have a degree from a recognized school AND you are among the top students of your school. I hope one day we can change this system in Tunisia; and even in US.

Yes, only few teachers change their assessment strategy. Most of them just go with the strategy they are used to. It is hard to change, but possible.

Students in the middle of the curve have only one objective is to move up to the next grade with at least 10/20 GPA. But you know; these numbers are not necessarily reflecting the learning progress of the students. While top students are focusing on how to do well in exams, the students in the middle of the curve, if they are interested enough in the class, they could understand the material better than the top students. Since they are interested in learning more than having good grades.

Projects are really cool; the student can learn and be assessed at the same time. However, practical exams are not always possible. I feel that for some theoretical subjects (like algebra or real analysis), we can only have theoretical tests.

You are right. Students learn more from projects and presentations rather than tests and exams.

In Tunisia, in order to move up to the next grade, the student has to have an overall GPA of at least 10/20 (all the subjects counted). The ranking does not decide if you move or not. If you are the 5th of the class with a GPA of 9.5/20, you don’t move up to the next grade.

I also prefer projects rather than tests. The student can be assessed while he/she is learning.