Author: Ibukun D. Alegbeleye

Open Teaching

I really like the topic this week about open critical pedagogy. A quick confession: at the beginning of this course, having previewed the blogging opportunities that lie ahead in the course, I had planned to blog on this topic – I should have a lot to write about open pedagogy, I thought to myself ;)…Well, fast forward to this week, I realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew about open pedagogy. I had thought open pedagogy was all about open educational resources; alas! it was more than that. I have learned from the readings this week that open educational resources (e.g., open access, open science) is just a subset of open education, however, when people think about open education, they think more about open educational resources and less about open pedagogy.

Ironically, I have always appreciated open pedagogy; I just didn’t know what it was called.  I took a course last year and the professor practiced, to some degree, open pedagogy. At the beginning of the course, he asked us to edit the syllabus as we saw fit. Specifically, he asked that we assign grade weights. We worked in groups and we eventually decided on how we wanted our grades weighed and distributed. This was the first time I would be in a class where the professor would invite the students to share some power. I really liked this practice and I decided to adopt it in my future classes. The semester after that, I was the instructor for a recitation class and I tried it out in my class, and the feedback from my students was great – they loved it.

Well, I straight up included it in my teaching philosophy. Here’s an excerpt from my teaching philosophy:

“I believe that instruction should be learner-centered and engaged as much as possible. I consider my role as that of a facilitator rather than a teacher – in fact, I learn from all my students. I endeavor to provide a conducive learning environment that provides psychological safety to students, and such that encourages them to actively participate physically, mentally, and socially in class discussions. One of the ways I do this is to decenter power (as much as possible) and allow my students to regulate some aspects of their learning. For example, I sometimes allow my students to suggest how they want their grades distributed and weighted.”

Although I had made a decision to be open in my pedagogy about a year ago, I just really understood what it means this week. Here’s my definition: Open pedagogy is freedom; it is about inviting students to be free in the classroom. Freedom may take many forms. Examples include:

  • Freedom to ask questions freely
  • Freedom to think critically and innovatively (which may include disagreement with the professor’s perspective)
  • Freedom to co-create their learning experience (e.g., setting learning objectives, participating in grade weighing, etc.).
  • Freedom to self-construct their own knowledge.
  • Related imageImage: © Bronwyn Hegarty, 2015

Well, this power decentralization makes many professors uneasy. Moreover, it takes hard work on the part of the professors. For example, allowing the students to adjust the syllabus to fit their learning needs is extra work for the professor, and it may not be very rewarding after all. In fact, many professors have said that working in a big research university like Virginia Tech does not help with investing effort into teaching, since the tenure process places more emphasis on research than teaching. I think it is high time universities (including research universities) start making teaching a big part of the tenure application packet. This should help the cause of open pedagogy on a larger scale.

As for me, I have made a decision to continue to practice open pedagogy and I will keep learning more ways to be more open with my teaching.

 

 

Inclusive Pedagogy: Noticing the Subtle Differences in the Classroom

For me, the article on inclusive pedagogy resonated the most with me. As recent as last year, when I hear of inclusiveness in the classroom, I think primarily of race and gender. However, sometimes last year (I think April, 2018), I attended a Networked Learning Initiatives (NLI) on differentiation in the classroom that changed my perspective on differences in the classroom. This was an interesting 2-hour session that was worth every second. I learned many things and I will share some of them in the paragraphs that follow.

To start with, I learned what differentiation in the classroom is. Simply put, differentiation in the classroom is being aware of the differences in our students. Differences could range from almost imperceptible challenges such as learning disability to more blatant ones such as race and gender. When I registered for this NLI session, I had the later in mind. However, I soon found out that the term ‘differences’ was more nuanced than I had imagined. In fact, during the session, one of the participants shared an example of a student in her class who was always having bad grades. She thought it was due to lack of efforts, only for her to later realize that the student had a learning disability, which made comprehending course content difficult. Unfortunately, the student was not even aware of their disability. This really made me reflect and I thought to myself: “In what ways could I have been insensitive to such minuscule differences in my classroom?” “could there have been someone in my classes with challenges such as learning disability that I failed to notice?” How many times have we tagged students as lazy while they may have been suffering from a learning disability?

Needless to say, after this NLI session, I decided to be intentional about looking out for such subtle differences in my classroom going forward. However, it is not enough to be aware of differences but we need to take necessary steps to accommodate students with challenges that we might not even be conscious of. The way we design our instructional materials is crucial. For example, when preparing lecture slides, we should ask ourselves if it is legible enough for students who might have difficulty with reading. Or if we want to play a video, we should make sure it is subtitled, in case there are students who might have hearing difficulties. There are several other examples of how to be intentional about inclusivity in the classroom, however, I will stop this blog post here.

I think my eureka moment about inclusivity in the classroom was this NLI session, and since then I have strived to be a more inclusive teacher, and I am still striving. This diagram below presents a good summary of inclusivity in the classroom.

Image result for inclusiveness in the classroom

Alternatives to Grading: New wine in Old Bottles?

Critics of grading have offered arguments (some compelling, and others not so compelling) to discredit the system of grading that we have grown accustomed to. While some have advocated for a complete overhaul of the grading system, others have been less daring in their recommendations, and have only recommended we do away with letter grades. Common to all, however, is the sentiment that grading is fraught with problems that need addressing.

A major problem of grading is what I call the “subjectivity of the grader”. Elbow (1993) referred to this as the unreliability of graders, highlighting it as one of the problems facing the traditional grading system. From a personal standpoint, I can attest to this. For example, last semester, I taught a leadership course titled, “The Dynamics of Leadership,” which required me to grade my students’ assignments and project. Over the course of the semester, my students were asked to write an essay about a current event happening in the society that had to do with leadership dynamics. The assignment follows a “what?” “so what?” and “now what?” format. The grading rubric looks like this:

10 points for the “what?”

10 points for “so what?”

10 points for “now what?”

10 points for “connection to course concepts” and

10 points for what we call “overall impression.”

While grading each criterion had some element of subjectivity, I would say the last criterion – overall impression – was the most subjective.  ‘What is overall impression?’ I thought to myself. How do I have a  metric for the overall impression that is consistent across the board?  This is not due to a lack of metrics – in fact, there were metrics like grammar, writing style etc. that I was supposed to look for in their essay. However, this was quite difficult to implement – Sometimes, I would spend several minutes on an essay trying to decide what score is appropriate.

While I agree that this traditional grading system is insufficient, I am yet to be convinced on the practicability of the alternatives. As an alternative, Elbow (1993) and Alfie Kohn suggested we use a system of testimonials or portfolios, where teachers write extensively on the proficiency of students. Then I began to wonder how that would look like for a high school graduate, how many pages of testimonials they would have accumulated throughout high school and how much of work it would be for college admission committee to review such documents. Moreover, can the teachers who write such testimonials be completely objective in their assessment of the student? What about the admission personnel reviewing it? Can we say with utmost certainty that they would be perfectly objective in their assessment of such testimonials?

At the end of the day, I think this whole debate begs the question, “can we as humans completely eliminate subjectivity in our assessment?” If the answer to the question is yes, then great, I would like to learn about such systems of assessment. If the answer is No (which I suppose), then it adds a whole level of complexity to this already complex issue. If alternatives are still liable to subjectivity, then this may well be new wine in old bottles.