Agreed on both accounts. The real-world process of knowledge making is more often a collaborative process rather than an individual (although there are exceptions) and, it is often a multi-faceted truth with many good answers instead of one truly correct one.

Hi Setareh,

Interesting facts about ADHD and I think the connection you make with grading is spot-on. We need assessment strategies that are more nuanced and respects individuals better. I might have known what ADHD is before, but it is only in the last few years that I learned about other disorders related to learning such as dyslexia and memory deficiency. I wonder how many students in my generation were dealing with these disabilities but were never diagnosed or helped and just dismissed as “not smart enough.”

A problem with the rank system is that it motivates students unevenly based on their expectations and self-confidence. The top tiers are highly compelling and motivated (maybe for the wrong reasons) but the ones in the middle might not see enough incentives to improve their position. It’s true that there might be less competition in the middle-of-the-curve crowd but I’m not sure if that is compelling enough.

Having graded zillion assignments from engineering students, I Always get the feeling that the rubric is not precise enough, somehow not detailed enough to cover all the strange cases that students produce on their papers. I don’t see why we can not just simply point out what they might have missed or where they might have strayed into a new (wrong or right) path. Honestly things like “take one point if they get the sign of the equation wrong” is absurd.

Ah! History is always the most innocent victim of mindless learning. I think we take “preserving history” as literal as possible, hence the senseless memorization. I think my mindset was the same until I came across “history of ideas” as a field and I realized there can be so many intellectual stimuli in understanding how ideas have evolved through time.

I think the comfort zone actually extends to students too. Being a passive listener is a great prelude to tuning out 🙂

It’s so great that your advisor is asking for your involvement in creating the course. Besides the mentoring benefits, I think the structure of a course designed by a team is always more learner-centered. Especially as grad students, we can relate better to students than professors.

Indeed. 🙂

I appreciate all the ideas, tricks and suggestions for keeping students engaged. What I would like to add to the bag of tricks is that I would Listen to the anti-learners. They might actually have a compelling reason. So, if a student in one of those 100+ big auditoriums classes told me she is going to drop the class because she doesn’t feel she is being treated as a person in the class, I would not blame her. I guess before doing something for our learners we have to have a fairly good understanding of how they are experiencing the environment.

These are all practical and really good strategies! Thanks for that.

Oh, I remember watching the teacher in the magic school bus with feelings of awe and admiration and wondering how hip and cool she looked, maybe unjustly comparing her to my teachers at school. It looks like enough people think differently about what is socially constructed as cool, then the public judgment about being intelligent or informed or curious can radically change.