Lower the stakes 2.0: some anecdotal evidence to end the semester

A while back I wrote about the pedagogical, and ethical, value of lowering the stakes for students in routine assignments such as essays. My discussion in that case was relatively theoretical; primarily, it focused on the research of José Antonio Bowen. Yesterday, however, I gathered some terrific anecdotal evidence about how the small gestures we make in the classroom to “raise the bar” by “lowering the stakes” really do have qualitatively significant outcomes for students.

This week marks the end of the teaching year at Queen Mary Drama. To cap the semester, my final-year students in “Shakespeare After Shakespeare” presented work toward their final essays; their presentations are a formal assessment, and are worth 20% of their grade in the class. From the beginning of the semester I emphasised to them that these presentations were designed to share initial work on those essays, and that the best presentations would not provide fully thought-through work, but rather initial claims, initial research questions, and good questions for the class to prompt both discussion and helpful feedback. (In other words, I aimed to make the presentations part of a surreptitious “do-over” exercise, not unlike the one I discuss in the post I link to above). Two weeks ago, we did practice group presentations in class; these were created in just fifteen minutes and were not marked. I billed them as a chance to get some feedback on presentation style, and I talked about how many undergraduate students present their work poorly because they haven’t thought much about, or had much direct feedback on, the importance of clarity, pacing, and confidence in oral presentations. (I’ve written about this issue on the blog in the past too; check out this post.) Then, last week, the first wave of students presented; yesterday, we ended our work together with a marathon session of twelve (twelve!) presentations.

Do-over or not, practice or none, I knew the students would be nervous sharing their work, and I knew they’d also be apprehensive yet excited about the arrival of the semester’s end (for quite a few, this was to be their last undergraduate class ever). I also knew we’d be rushed to fit in all the remaining presenters in a two-hour class. In response to this mixed context, I set to work on lowering the stakes further, and upping the enjoyment quotient as far as possible. I moved us out of our usual, rather oppressively institutional room in a nearby mixed-use humanities building, and into one of our department’s familiar spaces, Rehearsal Room One. I booked an extra half hour in the space, knowing we were likely going to need it, and I warned the students in advance that we’d probably run overtime (and that they were free to leave at the regular end of lesson if necessary). I baked a cake (which actually turned out quite well!) and arrived early to make two caffetieres of coffee, laying everything out at a dedicated refreshment table in the space. We started with a few very brief announcements, and with my encouragement to get up and get coffee, cake, or go to the bathroom as needed, because the race to the finish was about to begin.

The students each presented for only five minutes. (As my colleague [and excellent teacher] Catherine Silverstone told me when I began at QM, five minutes is more than enough time for an undergraduate presentation: any longer and the students over-prepare and over-fret, with outcomes diminishing proportionally.) Following their formal talk, they conducted a five-minute feedback chat with their peers and me, based on questions they had prepared for us in advance. I timed everyone rigorously, but very few ran over; similarly, I participated in the feedback discussions, but tried my best to let the students lead them. Overall, I worked to foster a low-key, low-stress environment in which everyone would feel comfortable sharing their half-formed ideas, knowing that half-formed was exactly what was expected – along, of course, with openness to moving in new directions based on feedback.

My subjective impression is that my strategies, taken together, had the desired effect: the students gave some really strong performances. Compared to past presentations of this kind, these were generally really well paced, and many students spoke with impressive confidence. A few whom I feared would cower did not; in fact, their work was among the best in the bunch! Everyone seemed a bit nervous, but most seemed quite comfortable on balance in front of me and their peers. And, to my great glee, a few included hilarious yet pertinent Keynotes and Prezis, making their serious subject matter both interesting and fun.

Those were my impressions; imagine my delight, then, when two of the students approached me after class to let me know how much they appreciated my efforts to “lower the stakes” (their own words!) for the presentation assignment. They commented on how my change in the tone of the task allowed them to see its real point: to talk with peers about what they were working on, share ideas, and get feedback they could chew on, work out, and then maybe (or perhaps not) use, as they saw fit. They mentioned that they had had other presentation experiences where the atmosphere was different and these outcomes did not result; while they didn’t elaborate, I can guess that they were referring to presentations that felt more like “test” than “test-out-your-ideas”. While of course there’s an important place for the former in university – after all, performing under pressure is a very big part of professional labour in the so-called “real world”, including in the world of professional theatre – I think the latter needs to predominate in most learning environments. For one thing, it’s an important precursor to the higher-stakes presentation: it’s where you learn to find your voice, own your space, and present your ideas with confidence. For another, it’s simply more collegial: why teach students that great ideas emerge from our brains fully formed, when the truth is the best intellectual work is always collaborative, and always evolving? I hope this is exactly what our presentation task taught my great group of finalists; I certainly learned more about the benefits of lowering the stakes from watching them present their work over these past two weeks.

Plus, we ate some pretty damn nice cake!

(Parsnip cinnamon cake, from Abel&Cole. Click here for the recipe.)

Happy spring break, everyone!

Kim

On trying to be a “public intellectual”

While many elected officials would rather sloganeer and posture than collaborate, the country languishes in the residual effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression: inequalities persist in pay, social advantage, and education; the gap between the few who have and the many who have not grows ever wider; the possible apocalyptic effects of global climate change increasingly appear inevitable. The public pleads for compromise, solutions, and leadership only to witness political theater. However, the leadership vacuum that exists in this era of corrosive cynicism and partisanship creates an opening for the hard work of civic engagement. Academics must seize the moment to assert higher education’s primary role in the democratic work of the country and collaborate with the public to address society’s core challenges. We must lead by assuming roles as public intellectuals. We must fill the leadership vacuum created by political intransigence and obstruction.

So write Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen in a recent article in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). I read their provocative and timely piece last Wednesday on the Tube to work, crushed in an overstuffed Northern Line carriage, feeling (as all too often during my commute) like It Just Isn’t Worth It. Needless to say, Behm et al appeared in my inbox at just the right moment.

“Public Intellectuals” are everywhere these days: they trail around like “creative economy” indicators (as in the case of the ever-present “creative city” guru Richard Florida), debate politicians at marquee events (I’m looking at you, Niall Ferguson), or ARE politicians at marquee events (Michael Ignatieff! Condoleeza Rice!), and of course appear ubiquitously on radio current-affairs programs and TV chat shows. But what is a public intellectual, honestly? And should we, on reflection, aspire so to be?

I am both completely invested in public intellectualism as a model of twenty-first-century academic engagement – it is, after all, part of why I started writing this blog almost a year ago – and yet also profoundly skeptical of it. Many “public intellectuals” strike me as opportunists, brand-building ideological entrepreneurs of the most cynical order; rightly or wrongly, I get the impression that the Floridas and Fergusons of our world are simply chasing a kind of elitist public fame, rather than aiming to make their research part of a true community discussion – by bringing the wealth of what they study and have learned to a constituency that can then put it (with or without them) to further use. So while I’m very much on board with the call to public intellectual action, I find myself nevertheless urged to ask this question: when professors seek to make their knowledge “public”, who exactly benefits, and how?

According to Behm, Rankins-Robertson, and Roen, the talking heads we see on TV or read in high-profile features in the newspaper may only partly qualify as public intellectuals, for a substantial part of public intellectual practice involves thinking carefully and critically about whom one seeks to reach, what one hopes to share with that community, and what one hopes to learn in turn from that community, acting as both a collaborator and a fellow citizen rather than an “expert” sharer. For Behm et al, true public intellectualism is nothing less than an extension of democracy: “a way of being in and acting on the world” in a fashion that bridges the perennial gap between college and community by moving both college and community toward one another in an act of mutual (and sometimes uneasy) encounter:

Publicly active scholarship is inherently messy, involving intensive, reciprocal partnerships with communities whose members hold diverse values and beliefs. It requires that research be situated within a local community’s social and power dynamics. It frames society’s core challenges as interrelated with rather than distinct from social and cultural factors like race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. As Lorilee Sandmann, a professor of education at the University of Georgia, has argued, publicly active scholarship is embedded within and negotiates these social and cultural realities, requiring academics to reconceptualize their traditional roles. (Behm et al 2014)

As a keen observer of “applied” theatre practice in my professional life as a performance scholar, I find myself tremendously drawn to the authors’ thick description of what public intellectualism as mutual public engagement might actually look like on the ground. This “messy” practice sounds a lot, in truth, like the kind of work some of my (amazing) colleagues in applied theatre at Queen Mary (and elsewhere – check out new examples here and here) are already doing. Yet, many of them are relatively “unsung” as public intellectuals, partly because, even as we hear more and more about the importance of making our academic work “public”, I fear that what the clamour really wants is more talking heads, in service of the voracious “impact show”.

I’ve written before in this space about the tyranny of “impact”, especially as it pervades the UK government’s “REF” exercise for university researchers. In the “accountability” language of contemporary Britain’s neoliberal government, “impact” means being able to show that your academic work is “relevant” to people outside of the university where you work (aka, not your students, weirdly and perversely). But: the relative value ascribed to different kinds of impact often seems arbitrary or even illogical, and rarely seems to be contiguous with a true interest in community goods (which are, as Behm and colleagues note, inherently messy, nuanced, and sometimes very hard to measure). My university wants me to count the number of times I’ve been impactful and provide evidence: so, if I’ve been on TV, or if I’ve written an op-ed, or if I’ve published 45 blog posts, that “impact” is measurable – even if nobody is really reading or watching or paying attention. Yes, of course, somebody is paying attention, and I don’t want to suggest that my exchange with that person is without value; my point, though, is that any such value matters less, for the ends of the accountability exercise, than the fact that my gesture of “engagement” in itself is measurable. The tick-box matters, not the person encountered or engaged. On the other side of the coin, if I’ve been labouring alongside community groups in the trenches for several years (as a number of my colleagues working on applied performance projects routinely do), but I haven’t generated easily measurable “outcomes” (IE: a book, article, or DVD that “proves” we’ve been working together for some kind of mutual benefit), then I might as well never have been “public” in my engagement at all. No measurement equals zero “impact” for accountability purposes.

While I was trying to gather my thoughts on Behm, Rankins-Robertson and Roen’s article, I read two other things that seem relevant to my growing anxiety over how we define public intellectualism right now, and what we seem to want it to do. The first was a startlingly cynical article by Leah Eichler (in the 14 March 2014 edition of the Globe and Mail) on why university degrees are approaching irrelevancy; the second was a series of reflections by Jen Harvie on the artist as entrepreneur in the “creative economy” (in her 2013 book Fair Play). Eichler’s article rehearses the predictable argument that students ought not to waste time at university if they want to be “trained” for a “job”; though short and in many ways unhelpfully redundant, the piece nevertheless reminds me that academics still have a lot of urgent work to do in order to explain to the people around us what university does in fact “train” its constituents to do – namely, to be thoughtful and engaged citizen-collaborators in a politically troubled and often seductively oversimplified world. Meanwhile, Harvie examines what is gained and what is lost when government policy tries to re-cast artists as independent businesses; in the process, she helps to re-cast the discussion about where and how we should publicise our intellectual and “creative” labour squarely in terms of the money market. Becoming a “public intellectual”, like becoming an artist, in this place and time means deciding if that work is to be for the benefit of a powerful financial elite (including the powerful elites that run our universities and arts councils and decide how these institutions are to be funded), for the benefit of a larger and more diverse community (or communities), or for the benefit of me, as individual academician-entrepreneur, alone.

Now, I can hardly pretend to be some kind of saintly exception to the trends I worry over above; I like getting attention for my research and I enjoy being asked to do “public engagement” stuff (like writing program notes for theatre companies, or speaking at elite venues like Shakespeare’s Globe). I want all of my colleagues to be more forcefully connected to the worlds around us, and I want that connectivity to result in more thoughtful, happier, stronger communities in turn. But I’m also beginning to realise that far more important than advocating for me and my colleagues simply to become more “public” in our labour is the altogether harder (and messier) work of advocating for us to make firm and deliberate choices about what exactly we want “being a public intellectual” to mean for ourselves, as individual scholars and as groups of scholars with shared ideals.

So how might we do this groundwork?

First and foremost, I think we need to talk openly to one another as department, faculty, and disciplinary colleagues in order to rethink existing practices of public engagement, take stock of best practices around us, and redefine our shared terms, especially as they affect us in things like workload and accountability documents. I could be dreaming, but I sense that we may be at a crucial crossroads in both the UK and North America when, post-REF 2014 and post-“crash”, we might have some small leeway to affect university-level policy over how terms like “public engagement” are understood by the powerful decision-makers who hold us to measure. Whether or not this is true, we always have the power to rally one another in local-area meetings within our schools and among our community stakeholders in order to have a real conversation about what different forms of engagement we already model, what kinds of models fit our specific disciplinary needs best, and what kinds of models we would like to see supported and formally encouraged by our peers and by our superiors.

I’d also really love to see universities take “crossover” and “teaching” books more seriously as “research”. I recall the story of a respected colleague and friend who had written a book classified as “for students” and was told it simply didn’t “count” for the REF. Why on earth not? Because it did not uphold the mystified standards of the “expert” researcher talking to his or her “expert” peers. But is this not exactly what contemporary language around impact and accountability presses us to avoid? Such Catches-22 need to be opened to wider debate; in the process I would like to see more of us advocate for the kinds of books that advance knowledge, take political stances, and yet are written in cogent language free enough of jargon and clear enough of syntax to communicate effectively to a large readership, including students and (gasp!) students’ family members and friends. Similarly, I’d like to see more academic publishers identify the potential for those kinds of books, encourage them, and then take a risk publishing them at a much friendlier price point and in much larger numbers while seeking the kinds of press and exposure for them that can attract a diverse audience. Finally, I’d like us all to encourage one another to write with greater clarity, and to seek out venues for publication that will expose us to new constituencies. This might mean publishing in popular or mainstream venues more; it might just as well mean publishing in journals not in our area of specialisation for a change. Exposing ourselves to different academic communities might be just as “public” an act of engagement as the other thing; after all, we are one another’s publics and communities too, and we are all potential collaborators in the making of new and unexpected knowledge.

I want to end this post with a call to community of my own. When I began this blog almost one year ago, I hoped it would eventually grow into a forum space, with multiple regular contributors. It’s not quite there yet, but the one-year anniversary seems a good time to begin the campaign for change in earnest. You’ll have noticed a couple of guest posts recently; I’ve commissioned a few more, which you’ll see in the coming weeks. I’d also, however, like to invite guest contributions from all of you reading: if you have something to say about the issues that broadly and eclectically constitute “activist” teaching and learning, and you think you might like to say them out loud, please get in touch. Use the comment form on my “about” page, or reply to this post, or email me at my Queen Mary address (k.solga@qmul.ac.uk). I’d love to hear from you.

Kim

PS: if you have examples of exceptional public academics who you consider to be models of the practice, please hit “comment” and let us know about them. You’ll find one of my favourite examples here:

Guest post: Assessing Assessment

By Michelle Liu Carriger

Full disclosure: I think grades are dumb. I love teaching in the humanities and I think my work is important, but I hate grading: it makes me feel sad and stressed, it makes students sad and stressed, I find myself resenting them for not doing better work and “making me” deduct points and all that undercuts what I try to do as an educator. But that said, I also recognise that it’s a bit lofty to think my students are going to be totally on board with pie in the sky learning-for-learning’s-sake and being a better human and all that. I understand that for them university is also a means to ends which will not value searingly insightful articulations of gender and race in MTV’s reality show 16 and Pregnant or promising nascent playscripts the way I do. So grades are one way of translating the work that students do as university students into a currency that is supposed to “buy” them something else later, like a job. The part that bothers me about grades, though, is what exactly goes into making that grade in the first place: it often doesn’t feel to me at all that the things I actually wanted to instill in the students constituted the substance of the grade. That is, as an educator, I think of the grade as but an index of the real course material, but for many students it’s the grade itself, something I think of as only a label or indicator, which takes on the value that I attribute to the material. (Now that I’ve ventured into the realm of money theory, it seems a short step to suggest that this is a sort of commodity fetishism of the grade, and the gold standard is NOT in effect here: too often, I feel that the grade conferred is “empty”. It’s not guaranteed by a substance of “real” value.)

Now, because of a grade’s exchange value, I don’t think that students are entirely wrong to value grades, even though I’ve often bemoaned their obsessions as misplaced. But for we educators who believe that critical reasoning skills, writing skills, and the other educational aims of our classes are just as transferable and valuable as grades (and preferably more so), then we need to find ways of hauling our goals into line with grading practices. One of the goals I often have trouble achieving under the aegis of letter grades is that of valuing student process and effort over virtuosity. While of course I appreciate students with native (or well-honed) abilities in critical thinking, discussion, and writing, I believe that it’s more important, even amongst students with strong abilities, to cultivate methods of engagement, on the understanding that while the “content” of any given humanities module may be more or less relevant to students, the skills of critical thinking, reading, and writing are definitely transferable.

Recently my convictions about the importance of emphasising process and effort have been underscored while reading the work of psychologist Carol Dweck. Dweck’s primary psychological theory is on “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. As summarised by Maria Popova in a blog post on Dweck’s mass market book, Mindset:

A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness.

Dweck’s research provides additional reasoning for why we should encourage process over achievement: because summative assessments do not provide impetus toward more effort, they tend to function as endpoints instead of stepping stones to improved effort. As teachers, we can help to encourage growth mindsets in our students by emphasising the ways in which assessment serves as a diagnostic for what they can continue working on, rather than as an indication of their intelligence or talent. We should encourage students to think of assessment as diagnostic in part of an ongoing process of learning and skill acquisition, not as a final declaration of an area completed or a box to tick with a rating of quality like a cut of meat.

(The author, amidst the marking)

My position at Queen Mary University of London as a Lecturer in Drama is my first full time academic position post-PhD and the first time I’ve worked within the UK educational system; I was born and bred to the US system, where I’ve been through small liberal arts schools, a big land grant university, and elite private theatre and humanities departments. At first, things seem pretty similar at QM to what I’ve known in the US – it was just that everything had a different name: students take modules (courses) appropriate to their course (major); they get marks (grades) on an A to F scale, except that Britain leaves a full 20+ points for mythical geniuses who surely never appear at the undergraduate level. By which I mean: the American A of 90-to-100 is equivalent to the UK 70-to-100, the reality being that apparently until recently virtually no one ever got more than 72, maybe 75 at the outside.

One thing that the culture shock of a new system has revealed to me is how I might have been using the “grade inflation” I experienced at Brown and CU Boulder as a means of secretly moving toward a credit/no credit type of grading. At Brown I loved the courses that were deemed credit/not credit, like playwriting and speech. However, I also recognise that my own grade inflation probably only assuages my own marking discomfort and does not actually help students value the skills and content I want them to value.

Last semester at QM I convened a practical module on playwriting and I found that my students were just as nonplussed and anxious as I was about how their plays would be graded. Although I would expect my third year students to be more comfortable with the QM/UK system than I was at that point, I soon discovered that many were still trying to figure out the school’s “formula”, like a good grade recipe to follow in order to come out with a “first” (an A) instead of a good play. They read the assignment guidelines for loopholes like lawyers. When we discussed Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” in class, the first comment posed was: “But now I’m wondering, how are you going to mark our plays?” The class’s endless fretting and the insufficiency of my constant reply to “write the best play you can” pushed me to desperation as I tried to figure out how to embolden them to experiment and write their most creative, brave, and best work.

The problem with using letter grades at all is that clarity of standards is necessary in making the assessment practice useful for the student; without knowledge of what will constitute a “good” grade, the student has no idea what to work toward. While this is difficult to explain when we’re dealing with the qualitative work (such as critical writing and reasoning) typical of the humanities, the standards become even more vague when venturing into the subjective territory of art and creative expression. By no means did I want plays calculated toward what students believed I would like, nor actually do I believe that all good plays are written to the same standards in a few short weeks (the time allotted for the assignment at the end of the term). For all these reasons, I sought to shift the class’s understanding of the assessment goals away from “quality” and toward “effort” and method. I believe that solid and steady effort, thoroughness, and thoughtfulness first of all are the proper goals of growth-mindset based pedagogy, are easier to mark, and, finally and by no means least, I believe that they lead to higher quality work in the end.

All along I encouraged the students to attend to these goals and reminded them to use the 2000-word accompanying rationale to explain the kinds of labor and method that went into their creative work. But near the end of the semester, when we were still having long discussions in class in which I attempted to instill the confidence they continued to lack, I finally came to terms with the fact that in this case I was not going to turn out to be the teacher who magically inspires her class to forget about grades and just do what they love. So I came up with a new idea. I decided to add a requirement to their final projects in which they would write their own criteria for the marking of their individual assignments, in order to provide concrete goals for their work without me having to dictate what “a good play” consisted of. I implemented this plan by first holding a discussion in which I asked the class to name the things by which they judged a performance text “good.” These included features like “cohesive worlds of the play,” “strong, distinctive dialogue,” “arresting images.” Then I asked what they thought appropriate outcomes of the module would be. Their answers included “engagement with the assigned texts” and “establishment of a personal methodology.” At the conclusion of this discussion, I assigned them each to write their own set of 5 to 7 criteria for their final projects, with at least three pertaining to writing a script and at least two demonstrating mastery of the module goals; they could then choose to adapt any of the things we had discussed or come up with their own criteria for the final document, which they had to send to me by the end of the semester. I in turn replied to each student with feedback, sometimes asking them to edit a criterium if it was not concrete enough for me to use.

What did I hope this change achieved? I hope it brought into line the highly individual circumstances of writing a play and the motivating effects of letter grades while alleviating the uncertainties of what makes good work and of what students were “allowed” to do. More importantly, I hope that this experiment helped give the students a greater sense of autonomy in their work in general, pushing them to define for themselves what it is they wanted to achieve and therefore investing the grades they ultimately did achieve with a little more substance. In general, the criteria assignment was received well, although I think if it had come earlier in the semester it could have headed off much more of the lingering anxiety that remained visible on my module evaluations, filed in the last week of class. More than one student told me, when I met with them individually about their projects in the last week before they were due, that they had grown to appreciate some of the changes I had implemented over the Christmas break, once they had had the chance to get really deeply into their individual projects. I’m eager to try this strategy again in a more systematic way, integrating it from the beginning of the module, and perhaps in more “traditional” classes, too, to see if such a procedure can improve students’ agency and engagement with learning. It’s not a big change; it feels more like a hack or a patch slapped onto the typical mode of grading. But I hope that I’ve managed to sneak a little more worthwhile learning gold into the grade commodity.

I’d love to hear from others about strategies you’ve used for focusing on process in class, or about strategies for making grades feel more substantial.

***

Michelle Liu Carriger is Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London where she is at work on a book project tentatively entitled “Theatricality of the Closet” on the historiography of the performance of everyday, through looking at clothing controversies in 19th century Britain and Japan. Meanwhile, she’s contemplating book two, on performance and the Japanese Way of Tea (tea ceremony) which she has been practicing for the last fifteen years, including one year in Kyoto Japan in a traditional arts training program. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University where she taught fashion and performance, speech, and devised collaborative work with Elise Morrison and Molly Flynn under the moniker Cabaret Murderess.