Author: Ray Thomas

Making the Grade

The reflections on assessment and grading presented by Kohn and Lui/Noppe-Brandon provide for a different evaluation of potential teaching/learning atmospheres, but I feel like some of the solutions miss the point.

I agree with the primary assertions that grading is often about controlling students and can be detrimental to student development and creativity, but some of the proposed solutions create new problems. How, for instance, is one supposed to discuss student evaluation in “conferences” if a class is 100-300 students large? Additionally, doesn’t the creation of a “negotiation” of asking students to offer up an evaluation on their own grade and decide it in conjuction with a professor open to even more charges of biases, confrontation, and potential backlash? There are some students out there who feel like they are doing tremendous work when they’re really missing the bar, or feel like they should be getting an A no matter what.

I’m certainly not against reforming the way that grading is done. I think there would be a lot of value in a much more feedback driven, iterative assessment environment where a student’s grade is not based on a one-off test or single paper. I’ve always found comments on papers to be extremely helpful and have not “stymied” creativity or pushed me to do something “easy.” Ultimately, I don’t think a lot of students write about “boring” issues just to get things done with, almost all students seem to have something they care about that fits into the various different classes they take. Good teaching could involve giving leeway for that rather than just packing in traditional grading.

However, this also doesn’t address the issue that some professors/teachers simply do not care about teaching as their primary focus. I once had a professor who literally turned his class over to a non-affiliated local businessman who knew the subject so that the professor could “focus on what the University hired him to do: research.” Even professors who do engage in creating “imaginative spaces” for students still face the issue that even non-traditional pedagogy doesn’t reach everyone.

It seems clear that there are a lot more institutional obstacles to over come on this issue than just changing individual classrooms and methods. I think that the idea of grading coming from a different perspective than just pure assessment/ordering/standardizing is important and there are many potential ways to tie that into courses, but ultimately someone is going to have to submit some type of letter grade to the bureaucracy.

Mind Your Own Basics

This week, the topic of mindfulness/mindless behavior in teaching provides an interesting, if somewhat obscured, understanding of how teaching can be developed. I say obscured, in this context, because in the critique of things like “basics” and knowledge transference, the text seems to be devoid of a mindful approach to understanding different disciplines. While I appreciate the critique that we shouldn’t be presenting everything as the right way or wrong way of looking a problem, most fields do recognize the openness for alternative ways of thinking. In my own subfield of international relations, professors often have a particular worldview or conception of how the world operates, but every class at the undergraduate and graduate level includes basics on the different approaches to IR scholarship and opens the path to alternative ways of viewing. In fact, in recent years large segments of professional conferences and journals have been given over to discussing how to further evolve beyond “-isms” and innovate.

However, this also obscures the fact that there is basic information that needs to be understood. Perhaps this could be called “the basics of IR” or in the case of one of Langer’s examples “the basics” of tennis or baseball. There exist key components of disciplines or activities that need to be understood in order to be able to excel. You can’t become a tennis champion, for instance, if you don’t know the basic rules of the game. In IR, you need to understand basics such as theories of statehood, concepts of power, even if you want to innovate beyond them – mostly because to be successful in any field you need to have a basic understanding of the common knowledge in the field if only to critique it. The same is true for other fields like History: even if you want to come up with competing theories of, for instance, the French Revolution you still need to know that it took place at a certain time, a certain place, and involved certain people and outcomes. Those are ultimately unavoidable.

This also leads me to a discussion of one of Langer’s potential solutions (side-ways learning) and its interaction with student multi-tasking and technology in the classroom. Just this week, in a class I was TAing for, the professor instructed the students to complete their own intelligence briefing on the subject of North Korean nuclear weapons. He set no guidelines, he set no standard method of delivery or information collection. Just that the students needed to address what they found most compelling and interesting. This would allow the students to engage in their own process and use their own methods, something that is supposed to help learning. Yet, even when put into groups and given leeway on the way to do things beyond simple lectures or being taught the basics, some students merely scrolled Facebook or texted friends all class.

My point is to say that a lot of this literature, on multi-tasking, on mindfulness, on technology, misses the point that students often have vastly different priorities than instructors can possibly perceive and for which they can compensate or adjust. IF students are fundamentally uninterested, they are going to struggle. It may not matter to them if they learn “basics” or have the opportunity to find things out for themselves. Ultimately, I feel like a lot of this discussion denies agency to students, or to instructors. Perhaps mindfulness does increase student’s ability to do well at tests, but this denies the potential idea that people already do this and still people are failing even if the average increases. Perhaps some students simply do not want to learn particular subjects (even when given a choice of what major or what classes to take). Ultimately, I don’t think pedagogy is going to present us with blanket improvements for university courses, because even in discussing potential “bottom-up” solutions to learning we are instituting a “top-down” approach to “fixing” teaching, with limited input from students, who have agency of their own and responsibilities of their own.

Sources:

Gaming the System

Laptops in the classroom are clearly a divisive issue as demonstrated by the NPR article on the different approaches to technology in the classroom. The conversation does seem to be very polarizing, but often times the different sides seem to be talking past each other. Of course laptops, much like other tools available in the classroom, have helpful applications in the classroom under the right circumstances, but I think when people discuss banning laptops they aren’t teaching a class that uses laptops as a tool or teaching aid. It seems strange then to take extremists positions when the use of technology in the classroom is self-evidently situational.

This gets at a larger issue that I’ve found intriguing during my professional development: Is it the job of the student to pay attention or the job of the professor to keep the attention of students? Should professors aim to reach only those that demonstrate interest and engage with the material, or is it necessary to make sure that every last student is engaged in the class?

I struggled academically during my undergraduate career, often times because I was on my laptop not paying attention. I eventually had to come to my own realization that doing such things wasn’t in my best interests and take responsibility for what was going on. Isn’t putting the onus on professors to be entertaining or to strive to keep the attention of all students merely absolving the responsibility of the student to take control of their own education? Students have always gazed off into the distance or daydreamed since time immemorial, why put the pressure or responsibility entirely on the professors?

Additionally, the exploration of the different methods of learning developed from video games or other types of problem-solving is an intriguing idea. As a “gamer” I recognize that there is an inherent drive to learn to master the mechanics of a game, to be able to adapt to different challenges to reach an ultimate goal. This can also be accomplished in board games or interactive/physical games, not just video games (if conferences in my particular academic concentration are anything to go by “simulations” and other game-like teaching methods are clearly becoming more popular and publishers/academic-focused companies are creating more and more products to meet that demand).

Ultimately, I do think that laptops could create better learning environments if used correctly, For instance, the introduction of games (both video and traditional) in the classrooms could create better outcomes than the traditional lectures. As a teenager, I developed an interest in history and politics through the video games I was exposed to and has led in many ways to a deeper understanding of certain historical events than I might otherwise have had if I had only learned about history through books or academic lectures. There would be some cool ways to incorporate games into courses to promote that type of active learning, but there will still always be students who aren’t interested in whatever form of teaching is being offered.

In the final analysis, some students like lectures and others hate it, the same goes for video games or other methods of learning. It’s unclear how this tension could be resolved or how any clear cut distinction about what teaching method is “better” could be made given these issues.

Please let me know your thoughts on this issue, I’m legitimately curious to hear what other people think about the different approaches to learning and class management.