Pedagogy and Activism in Fall 2020

Hello AC readers! Though I’ve been playing a behind the scenes role all summer, its been a while since I (Kelsey) have posted.

In the time since my last post for the AC, spring and summer crumbled into fall, I moved (back) to Montreal, and I got hired for a limited term teaching appointment. So. I’m teaching full time again. Which is great! I’m thrilled to be back in a classroom. Even a virtual one. And also ….

I need advice. So, I thought I’d mix up format and address this advice to Kim. You’ll find my post first and Kim’s ever-helpful response below!

A picture of The Beatle’s singing “Help I need somebody” because it represents my emotional state: peppy but underpinned by something ominous (Kelsey)

Kim, I need help.

As we all know, COVID-19 has fundamentally and indeterminately altered the post-secondary teaching landscape. The scope of these changes vary by location. Some institutions remain predominantly in-person; others combine in-person and online activities; others are totally online. The mix is unprecedented. As is the volume of online courses. As is the experience of our students, who are suddenly navigating full-time online learning. As is our workload which now incorporates any possible combination of synchronous, asynchronous, side-ways synchronous teaching methods.

And I’m having a hard time locating pedagogical activism in the muddle.

The online learning technologies are all … fine. They work. (Except, you know, when they don’t). But they’re hard to pedagogically-activist-hack. Zoom, for example, can accommodate lots of users but it also curates and curtails polyvocality: the mechanics are explicitly designed to highlight the loudest speaker. And, the truth is, meetings breakdown if multiple people speak at the same time.

Also, I weighed my workload, and it came out to an actual tonne. I’m currently teaching three brand new (to me) undergraduate courses. I’m also still researching and publishing, doing community-based work, being a friend and family member, and generally living. This would be a lot in a regular year. I know that. But, the online piece is like the ghost from The Haunting of Bly Manor (which you should totally watch by the way): invisible, constantly hovering, threatening to pull me under at any moment

A computer screen filled with numbers and failure.

Then, there are my students: cameras-on (sigh of relief), cameras-off, sound accidentally on – partner/mother/roommate yelling about dinner in background.

They’re (mostly) really trying. And also, many of my students are obviously struggling. Which, of course, they are.

And, I keep walking out of live sessions, asking myself, “What are we doing here?”

I want to be clear: I’m not anti-online teaching. That would be like opposing the invention of the wheel. Like it or not, online teaching is going to be part of the post-secondary landscape moving forward. And it has plenty of advantages for both students and teachers.

But, I am struggling to locate the activism in this new environment.

And so I turn to you, Kim Solga, creator of the Activist Classroom: How are you doing it? Where is the activism in your classroom in fall 2020?

***

Dear Kelsey,

I find your thoughts above so… familiar. I’m with you. Not literally, but for sure:

we. are. in. this. all. together.

(Does it help to know that I’m drinking a martini on a Thursday evening while writing this? Well I am.)

Right now, for me, it’s all about surviving. The learning curve is so steep – and for some of us, out of university for 20 or so years or more, the memory of having to learn under the gun is so steep!!! – that the win feels like making it to Friday.

I’m very much unlike you right now in that I’m teaching only one course, and it’s a course I know well—even though it’s C-E-L (ha! Rhymes help with COVID – Trump assures us). But the reason I’m teaching only 0.5 is that I have a course release to support my research… which…

Is. Not. Happening.

But the “free time” I’ve lucked into means the class I’m teaching under these wacky new circumstances is manageable. And it means I’m actively learning from it. Over the last six weeks I’ve started to notice some silver linings, and your thoughts above have prompted me to think about these in the context of our space’s operative adjective, “activist”.

SO: here are thought on a few of my recent “activations”.

Our students see us. They usually see us as flawed human beings messing up the Zoom, and that is actually ace. The thing about all being in this together is that we really are; this is hard for them, it’s hard for us, and the more visible we make the labour, the easier it is to have a frank (and relieving, usually) conversation about what’s going on, and how much work it takes, and who is doing that work.

The class I’m teaching is about theatre beyond theatre: it features an introduction to performance studies, applied theatre, and performance activism for undergraduate students. This term we are partnered with the City of London (Ontario), the CityStudio initiative, and a course in Community Psychology, investigating ways to combat anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism in our city.

To say this is weird over Zoom is an understatement, but the big benefit of the Pandemic-as-usual is that we talk regularly about what happens which the poop hits the fan.

This was driven home for me last Tuesday, when our Zoom Room, joint with our fellow stakeholders AND hosting guests to speak to Black Lives Matter, went apocalyptically dumpster fire. My colleague in psychology and my TA desperately tried to save the day while I jumped into the fray to “teach” the class that… I hadn’t prepared because GUESTS were coming to speak. It was so tiring and, I thought, wretched—until one of my students came to office hours to tell me she thought it was a terrific class, and that I had done a very good job under really hard circumstances.

That made me recognize that, just as I see her struggling through the quagmire, she sees me too, and sees the work we are all doing. Best of all, that class turned out to be great after all because, in the wake of #techmeltdown, we managed to have a great conversation about who was included, and who excluded, as a result of the adjustments we’re all having to make because of COVID.

How often do we see one another’s work, call it out, recognize its contours for real? How often do we really recognize, really see, the work done by the invisible majority who keep our world running “smoothly”? That sounds like activism to me.

Grades don’t matter. Support matters. I’ve become a less and less stringent marker over the last 15 or so years of full time teaching. The reason is simple: I see the work students are putting in (see above!) and I want to reward it.

Why can’t you get 100% on an English Lit essay when you can on a Physics test, if you’re really good? Why indeed. I began just scaling up to compensate a while back, knowing my students were competing with kids judged under very different frameworks for university-wide prizes.

Recently I’ve begun crafting ways to give students real marks for genuine effort. In the class I’m teaching right now, for ages there has been an assignment that asks students to weigh in on a weekly “prompt” with a paragraph or so of thoughts, links, images, videos, etc, representing serious engagement with the problems at hand. Sometimes these prompts come from our weekly readings, and sometimes from a real-world application of those readings; after students do five of these (out of about 10 or so opportunities), they get an extra 10% “free” (it’s like getting 100% on an assignment worth 10% of their grade).

I’ve been worried about this in the past, because it “inflates” final course grades, but now I am not worried at all. Getting up, dressing self, feeding self, making it to the asynchronous lesson, doing the asynchronous lesson, and then responding to the prompt is real-ass work right now! I want my students to get these “free” marks for actual retail effort! I want them to know that the trying, if the response isn’t perfect or even all that correct, is still worth something proper. So much so, in fact, that I upped the “free” to 15%, plus bonus opportunities.

We are half way through the term right now, and my spreadsheet reveals that the majority of my students are on track to grab all 15% “free”. This means students who might otherwise read as “mediocre” because they’ve not yet learned the ins and outs of critical nuance, or aren’t that great with a semicolon, are going to end up looking pretty darn good at the end of this thing. It’s a leg up that might not otherwise have been supported to reach the next tier.

That also feels like activism to me.

Prep also doesn’t matter. If you have to pitch it, or wing it, just effing go for it. My biggest revelation so far thanks to #COVIDtimes and #Zoompocalypse has been this. If the poop does actually hit the thingy, who cares? We are screwing up like talented home handyfolx and that’s fine because there’s no playbook for this; we’re making it up.

I’ve had a few occasions where carefully crafted class exercises have gone super sideways thanks to tech screw-ups, and I just decided, let’s laugh about it. And you know what? The students laughed with me, not at me. (Learning how to laugh when shit goes wrong and then coping and carrying on with the work anyway seems to me a terrific lesson to take away from university and into life.)

I suspect there are a few of us right now who are working really hard to make the video lectures perfect, the tech in the synchronous lectures perfect, the impossible perfect. That’s a natural inclination for folks like us, who went to grad school because university looked like a “real world” we could super handle.

I once knew how to make a perfect video lecture but I’ve long forgotten, and my copy of the software I used to make it is majorly out of date. I decided in August I wasn’t up for re-learning.

Instead, I chose to put my usual “flipped classroom” prep (lots of 2-minutes free writes and “watch this video then think about it for 5 minutes” stuff) online as the asynchronous hour of our three hours together, and then to follow up only on that prep during our synchronous time together. So far, it’s worked. Students are engaged, whether in the live room or in the Zoom room (I’m teaching hybrid). This means prep takes me minimal time, and the two hours we have *actually* together each week can be spent talking about what we’ve all been previously exposed to and had time to think about. It’s not as much as I’d normally “teach”, but I think it’s more valuable, and as the term progresses I’m putting less and less into these lessons, knowing the students are feeling more and more overwhelmed.

We’re prioritizing talking about how we are doing, and what it means to be just “good enough” sometimes, rather than the perfect we’ve been taught to strive for. I suspect that, if I’d had the chance to have such a conversation in a class when I was an undergrad, I would have called that #activism of a kind, too.

COURAGE!

Kim

Grading Participation

By Signy Lynch

When I checked my inbox early this December and saw a notification for the latest Activist Classroom blog post, entitled ‘OMG CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO GRADE PARTICIPATION???,’ it felt like a sign. As I came across this post, I was just finalizing the syllabus for the first course I would ever teach, Perspectives on Contemporary Theatre, a fourth-year seminar at York University.

I had great fun designing the syllabus, but had been hesitating over the participation section—I, like Kim, had been preoccupied with how best to grade my students on participation, and how to do so in a way that might motivate and elicit meaningful engagement from them. There were a number of factors to consider. While a seminar class, the course I was teaching was quite large, with 37 students. In order to fairly evaluate participation, I felt I needed some way to increase my engagement with them on a individual level. I also knew I wanted students to be given credit for and incentive to engage with the readings, as an important focus for class discussion.

Image: Some people raising their hands. Participation?

After deliberation, and inspired by some of the resources that Kim posted, (particularly the first point in this post, on grading participation through written assignments) I settled on a participation grade made up of the following three components:

1. In-class participation and attendance (the “typical” way)
2. Commenting at least once per week on another student’s Instagram response post
3. Written reflections on participation, conducted in class three times throughout the semester.

To emphasize the importance of engagement, particularly in a seminar course, I made participation worth 20% of students’ final grade; though I didn’t assign a strict proportion of that 20% to each section to allow myself (and the students) some flexibility.

One key theoretical influence on this formula for participation was the principle of universal design. Universal design provides students multiple ways to engage in the course, shows them multiple representations of material, and allows them multiple avenues through which to express their learning (here’s a great primer on universal design in higher education, for those unfamiliar). Incorporating universal design into course design is a more inclusive way to teach that respects students’ differences as learners, both in ability and interest.

Image: a variety of coloured pencils. Universal design design appeals to a variety of learners. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Since the first component of my participation grade breakdown—in-class participation—is fairly traditional, I’ll spend a little more time elaborating on components two and three.

Component Two – Instagram Comments

Component two asked students to leave at least one comment per week on a classmate’s Instagram post, in connection to an existing Instagram response journal assignment. For a total of 30% of the final grade, I asked students to post weekly short (200-250 words) responses on Instagram to a passage of their selection from one of that week’s readings.

The posts were due the Friday before each Monday class, and the comments due right before class, ensuring that students had ample time to review each other’s posts and select one to which to respond.

Screenshot of a post from the course Instagram account, describing the journal assignment

In the past (despite teaching theatre!) I’ve heard from many students that speaking up in class is a real barrier to their participation. Thus in asking students to contribute through written comments I offered them alternate mode of communication (inclusive design!), while at the same time generating content that could be drawn on to round-out in-class discussion. Unlike the Instagram journal posts themselves, these comments were graded for completion rather than substance, to further reduce barriers to participation.

This component turned out fairly well overall. One student wrote to me in their response that posting on Instagram, “feels less formal than posts on Moodle, and I’ve noticed myself and my peers feel more comfortable responding to each other.” Through this component some great conversations happened on Instagram; however, I do wish there had been a bit more consistency in students’ comments and a slightly higher level of involvement—for some students the exercise often felt quite cursory.

Component Three – Writing Exercises

The third part of my students’ participation mark was derived from short written reflections (taking around ten minutes each) conducted at three different times during the term. I had students respond to some questions on a piece of paper, which was then placed in in an unsealed envelope. The idea was that students would review their own writing as the semester went on and base their subsequent responses on their earlier goals and thoughts.

A central goal of this component of participation was to give individual students a chance to reflect on and define what meaningful participation meant to them. In so doing, I hoped to activate students’ intrinsic motivation by asking them to find meaning in the work they were doing for the course.

Importantly, these writing exercises were framed as reflective exercises. I told students that for this component they would be evaluated primarily on their reflection on participation and not on the participation itself, encouraging honesty.

Image: a stack of envelopes as used in this exercise. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Another key part of this was that students shouldn’t be concerned about writing answers they thought would please me, but should examine their own feelings and preferences. Perspectives on Contemporary Theatre was not a required course. Despite this, I discovered from the first participation exercise I conducted that while many students were interested in the course content, some were primarily taking it because they needed a fourth-year credit that fit their schedule. I wanted to recognize and honour the fact that students were taking the course for many different reasons and may have had different priorities or assigned value differently than me. Thus through this component, I could give students points for effort, while also recognizing different types of effort and rewarding students for thinking on their own terms.

The questions I asked in each exercise are below:

Participation Exercise #1 – (near beginning of term)

1. Why are you taking this course?
2. What are your expectations from the course/what do you hope to get from it?
3. Has this course aligned with your expectations/diverged from them so far? In what way(s)?
4. What does meaningful participation in this course mean to you? (This response should consider your above answers. One example could be: ‘I don’t like to talk in class, but I want to really engage with the readings by taking detailed notes’)
5. What two specific goals will you set for yourself regarding your participation in this course?

Participation Exercise #2 – (at midterm)

1. How have you done with your goals so far? (Remember, I’m not evaluating you on whether you meet them but on your ability to reflect on them, so please answer honestly.)
2. What factors have affected your participation?
3. Review your goals. Are they specific and measurable? Are they still useful/in line with what you consider to be meaningful participation? If necessary, rewrite them and say what you’ve changed and why.
4. What steps will you take going forwards to ensure you meet these goals?

Finally, as an optional part 5, you can weigh in with me and let me know how the course is going for you. This is your chance to give me feedback about your experience so far–whether it’s, ‘I wish we would watch more videos,’ or ‘I’m confused!’ etc.

Participation Exercise #3 – (end of term)

1. How have you done with both general participation and your specific goals in this course?
2. What factors have affected your participation?
3. Are you okay with your level of participation? Why/why not?
4. What would you change about your participation in this course if you could?
5. If you were grading yourself on participation in this course, what grade would you give yourself and why?

In addition to the prompts for self-reflection, these exercises offered students some opportunities to provide feedback to me. Specifically questions 2 and 3 in exercise one and the optional number 5 in exercise two serve this goal. (For the final reflection I asked students to provide feedback through the course evaluations.) Collecting this feedback allowed me to address student concerns, and adjust in-class activities to student preferences, which I hope made students feel they had some some say in the course and that I valued their opinions and and experiences. At the same time my asking for feedback demonstrated to students that I was trying to be reflexive about my teaching practice in the same way I was asking them to reflect on their participation.

These written reflections also gave me some useful insight into students’ attitudes and feelings about participation in the course, so that I could then try to better it. When I heard from a number that the fear of being wrong was a major factor in their hesitance to contribute to in-class discussions, I was able to bring up this point in seminar, and talk it through with my students, and also to critically examine my own behaviour to see how it might be contributing to those feelings. I think one influencing factor was the difficulty of some of the readings, so I made sure to re-articulate that the material was meant to be challenging, that I was in no way expecting them to understand it all, and that they shouldn’t feel stupid if they were struggling with it.

Image: Hand holding a pen and writing in a journal. Creating opportunities for students to engage in reflection was important to me. Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Another student wrote, “I’m a little confused on how else to participate other than agreeing or disagreeing on the subjects at hand,” which served as a launching point for a productive group discussion on what forms participation could take. Some of students’ suggestions on this subject, both in class and in their journals, really impressed me. One student who admitted they avoided class discussions for fear of being wrong suggested that a way to get around this could be asking questions rather than trying to answer them. In an ideal world, they would feel comfortable with both actions, but here came up with a productive middle ground.

Finally, students’ discussion of meaningful participation not only guided their self-reflection, but also aided in my evaluation of them. Students’ observations on what meaningful participation meant to them, played a large factor in my assessment of the first participation component, their in-class participation. For example, if a student expressed difficulty with speaking up in class and didn’t include it in their definition of participation, I paid more attention to what their stated goals were, their in-class attentiveness and group work, and weighted their Instagram comments a little more heavily in determining their grade.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I found this three-part system very useful. It helped me to connect with my students and to understand them a lot better as individuals. Through the third component in particular, I learned a lot about their individual goals and the struggles they were facing, which put me in a much better position to evaluate their participation.

This experiment confirmed to me that relying solely on my own perceptions of students to grade participation is not enough, and I will continue to experiment with this model going forwards. While this iteration of it worked out fairly well for this particular course, variations or other approaches entirely might be better suited for courses with different formats.

Thanks to Kim for inviting me to reflect through this blog post. I hope this reflection is of use to some of you, and feel free to share your thoughts or own experiences with me in the comments!

Image: a chalkboard reading ‘thank you’. Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Signy Lynch is a SSHRC-funded PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. Her research interests include political performance, diversity in theatre, spectatorship, affect, and theatre criticism. Her dissertation investigates how direct audience address in contemporary performance in Canada can help audience members and performers to negotiate the complexities of twenty-first century life. She has published work in Canadian Theatre Review, alt.theatre, and CdnTimes and is a member of the board of directors of Cahoots Theatre.

 

Decolonizing the classroom: end of term edition (Pt 1)

(Or: What if they all get As?)

Back in January, I wrote about my particular winter term in-class challenge: to begin the process of transforming my History of Performance Theory undergraduate class into something less knee-jerk colonial, and more respectful and supportive of students’ diverse needs. As I noted then, this process necessarily had to be a process; despite my best intentions, the in-the-way-getting of life had meant I’d not spent anywhere near enough time in the fall term planning course renovations. Thus, we’d make a beginning, and see how it goes.

It’s now April, finally the trees are budding, and all over campus the billboards are telling me it’s end of term.

And me? I’m already missing my performance theory students – what an incredible, talented, thoughtful bunch. And I’m questioning whether or not we’d have had half as much fun, or learned half as much about the politics of theatrical representation, if I’d managed to spend all fall term fussing over the syllabus.

These 15 humans didn’t just make the term fun, compelling, surprising, a learning experience for one another and for me; they also all earned As. Yup, that’s right.

They. All. Got. As.

I realized this last Tuesday, when I hit the “course grade” button in our online learning system, and saw that the lowest mark in the class was 82%. The highest mark was 97%.

I had a brief minute of panic. I imagined my Undergraduate Chair rolling his eyes at the average. I heard my Dean’s voice reminding faculty to “always use the whole range” of marks available to us in the 0-100% system.

And then I thought about the work that the students and I had accomplished together, and about their powerful feedback on the experience of the class (one of the subjects of my next post – watch this space).

And I thought,

Why, exactly, shouldn’t they all get As?

I have a number of thoughts about this. I’ll get to them in a minute. But first, let’s back up a few weeks.

Back in my January post, I listed four things that I had decided I wanted the class to do as I/we attempted to craft a decolonized version of the “History of Performance Theory”:

1. Empower the students;
2. Not hierarchize the readings (White/Other);
3. Not follow a normative temporal chronology;
4. Be above all about learning to read theory, and to use it in fun and relevant ways.

I then wrote about three ways I’d developed for us to attempt to do these things. The class selected readings together, including a significant number from our fairly standard textbook, and opted for a pretty diverse range of voices; we worked through three central research questions, framed around the primary who or what is allowed to be represented, and why?; and I expanded my “Explain/Apply/Extend” framework from previous years to organize each week’s lessons and to prioritize, in the “apply” portion of weekly events, student responses to the theory, and in particular creative responses.

I’m very pleased to report that the momentum of the early weeks, which fuelled my optimism in that January post, held strongly throughout the term – even in those weeks when midterms were nigh and assignments were due and I had the stomach flu.

In fact, possibly my favourite class of the term coincided with the latter, though I admit it’s possible I was hallucinating slightly from dehydration at that point. We were set to talk about Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s introduction to her phenomenal The Problem of the Color(blind), a book about race and representation in the mythical land that styles itself as “post-race America”. Lots of students hadn’t read the full chapter, because March/assignments/fatigue/long and challenging stuff. So we read chunks together and peer-taught key ideas to each other, using the tools our fabulous new active-learning classroom put at our disposal. (More about the role that space played in the term, for me and the students, in my next post as well.)

By the end of that class, as we looked through some of the videos students had linked to online in response to the weekly, low-stakes “apply” task, we shared comments about race, history, and representation with a nuance I very rarely hear from undergraduates.

(Two of the “applies” students posted in response to Catanese’s work. Note that the first is a satire remarking on Barack Obama’s handling of the trope of black rage, while the second is a montage of historical images of blackface from the end of Spike Lee’s incredible 2000 film Bamboozled. The latter needs some context for naive viewers, although as an example of Brechtian montage it is unparalleled.)

That week on Catanese is representative of our term together for a number of reasons.

It was late March; it was a cold day; students were buried in assignments; many of them hadn’t done the reading, or done that much of it.

Yet fully half of them had read enough of the chapter to be able to apply at least one issue raised by it to a strong example online.

And all of them – every single one of them – showed up to class.

HOLY COW!!!

By that point, we’d become a committed class community, and the students (who were already working toward their final group performances at this point) felt strong obligations to one another. Many students also reported in their final participation reflections that finding ways to make *some* time for the readings ahead of class had become a priority for them, because the weekly apply tasks held them to account, and dangled the important carrot of “free” marks. (More on this in a moment.)

Further, once a student had an “apply” up on the website, they clearly felt a certain ownership over the reading and/or a commitment to the emerging discussion about it, making coming to class and participating in the discussion actively that much more important. In only one instance did a student miss class on a day when they had also written an apply post for that day’s reading.

Which brings me, finally, back to the problem of all the As.

The arse-kicking Siobhan McSweeney in Derry Girls. Another “bad teacher” who is by no means actually a bad teacher.

There are a number of reasons that this batch of students all received A-level grades. (And I should stress here that I have never had this happen before, in nearly 20 years of teaching. I always aim to use, if not the whole range of grades, then at least a good, broad range. I am an excellent subject of power.)

First of all, I’m a fairly generous marker. This is because I’m getting older, and see potential more than I see error. (I’m guessing here, but I think this is a common trajectory. My grad student assistants tend on average to mark harder than me, for example, and I know I marked hard as a TA. Over time you loosen up, and feel more empathy for the struggling ones. For another educated guess about this trajectory, click here.)

Secondly, this class featured a good range of assignments that tried as much as possible to set students up for success. For example, “Explain,” “Apply,” and “Extend” were each their own essay task for proper marks, as well as a framework I used consistently each week to organize lessons, so students had ample time to work out what good iterations of the task could look like.

The final group performance project was worth a lot, but the rubric I used to grade it we developed together in class, agreeing on which aspects of the work we wanted to emphasize (thought work, connections between play text and chosen theoretical model, creative ingenuity), and which we wanted to downplay (professional polish, exceptional acting, things less likely to emerge from a non-studio scene study). The students had a full month to work in groups on their projects; they self-selected into those groups based on their chosen play texts, and they benefited from an early workshop week that was designed to get them going at a time when ideas weren’t yet fixed and plans were still emergent.

Ultimately, the students excelled in their tripartite essays, and knocked it out of the park with their performances – which featured one of the genuinely best scene studies I have ever seen in the classroom, including those I’ve witnessed in studio-based practicum classes.

Thirdly – and I think this is the kicker – the low-stakes, online, weekly “apply” tasks were a not-complicated way for students to earn 100% on a task worth 10% of the term’s work. All students needed to do was read the week’s work in advance of our Thursday class, post a link to a video or article or other piece of robust interweb chatter that might constitute an application of the theory in question, and include a short paragraph about why they made their particular choice.

By the end of the term, 11 students had completed all five posts; two had completed four of five. (Two students, with health challenges, had accommodation for the task.) Most of them didn’t just post a video and write a short para, either; several crafted detailed, essay-like responses to their applications, which I then permitted them to hone and expand for the formal “apply” essay task. Students’ investment in the readings was visible in their thoughtful engagement with the theory-in-application online, and in the willingness many showed to take a stab, even if they might be wrong.

(The point of this task, as I reinforced at mid-term when I made some changes to the format to coax more participation, was just to give it a fair try; total failure was unlikely, but more importantly total failure could not preclude the reward for giving it a shot. What’s to lose?)

In the past, when I’ve used low-stakes prompts-for-points tools, I’ve folded the online cookie into the grade for participation: do so many online posts, earn 100% for participation, so long as you don’t miss more than three classes without accommodation for medical or compassionate reasons. This time around, the apply responses online constituted a separate grade point – but students still had the capacity to do really well in participation alongside, especially because, in our student-centred space-and-learning format, participation is the course’s bread and butter, and this crew really stepped up. (Their thoughtful and honest participation reflection papers were also key to many doing well on this separate grade point.)

As I pondered my sea of As Tuesday last, I thought hard about my decision to separate “online applies” from “participation”, giving each their own shot at perfection. Had it been a mistake to hand that much of the term’s grade over to, essentially, effort? Did I need to fold these markers of success back together, in order to prevent another tsunami of high-fives next year?

I thought maybe yes. Probably yes.

Of course, Homer is rarely correct.

And then I remembered that I’m in the middle of the decolonization process with this class. How are the grading rubrics we use now a marker of the colonial scaffolds organizing our classroom practices? How do we shift these, decolonize our grading in a holistic way?

Of course, there are plenty of examples of pass/fail classes designed to level the field and remove grades entirely from the picture, though research continues to accumulate on the risks and benefits of this strategy. (Two of the major benefits emergent from this research are a) a focus on transparency alongside rigour in the classroom; b) a fresh or renewed focus by faculty on thinking carefully about criteria, assessment practices, and feedback – something we do not do nearly enough, in my experience. Read more here, and here.)

But most of us work inside a fairly rigid, large-ship university structure; we could try to drive systemic change around grading, but that sounds like a lot of work to me, and work that will take a lot of time and many hands.

In the meantime, perhaps we could learn from that strong second benefit of the pass/fail system: clear-eyed, focused, group and individual reflection on assessment practices, and on how the marks we give map onto student learning, instead of just student achievement.

When I think carefully about my students in HPT this past term, I remember that what they marked, time and again – with their in-class practice, their online practice, and their reflection practice (in the papers they produced for their participation grades) – was fulsome, strong, broad engagement. Across the board.

They told me on our last day together that they had learned “how to learn”; that they had found themselves surprised and excited to apply old, seemingly stuffy theories to contemporary, real-world situations and examples; that they had discovered the power of learning in teams, and of committing to each other as a team of learners; and that they had discovered the power that space (in our case, literal classroom space) holds to shape interaction and engagement among students and teachers on a learning journey.

I know the donuts I brought as a last-class treat were not the only reason the gang turned up to reflect on our term together. I know because they voted 14-1 in favour of holding class when I gave them the option to cancel. Also, #donutmonster #hamont

They honoured me with these words, truly they did. And they honoured me over and over again with their excellent in-term work, for real, proper marks.

So why should they not all get As, then?

Did they not do – did we not do, as a team – exactly what undergraduates are supposed to do in a third-year class: advance their learning practice with concrete take-aways for the future? Build strong collaborative skills? Investigate, and invest in, some truly complex theoretical ideas?

Maybe it seems intimidating, to some, to think that all the students could hit the top achievement marker. Maybe it seems dishonest, to others.

To me, though, it seems like the exact right way to end a really remarkable term.

See you next week! (…For more, on what space has to do with participation),

Kim

OMG CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO GRADE PARTICIPATION???

This is a cry for help.

It’s the end of term. I’m absolutely thrilled: welcome back, weekday drinking! And I’m really tired. Where’s my pillow at, again?

But I’m also staring at my computer screen. Because I’ve got 40 students in my terrific Toronto: Culture and Performance class, and they’ve all been superb and committed and present, and now I have to give them “participation” grades.

Ah, participation. What exactly is it “testing” for? If you’re like me you’ve probably not spent enough time thinking about that question, or considering what we are trying to measure and reward with the inevitable “10% participation” line in the syllabus – the one that carries over from year to year with hardly a thought or a tweak.

That laziness comes home to roost this time of year. Because they can’t all get 100%, now, can they?

So I’m being a touch disingenuous here. I’ve actually thought about participation a fair bit. In most of my classes it is a category pegged to real work and effort, not a nebulous thing that lets me quietly reward students I appreciate more than others, or unconsciously punish those who have pissed me off. (Yes, we all do this. No, we don’t mean to. Think about it.)

For example: in my OTHER fall term class, my second-year performance studies seminar, participation works like this.

We have a class blog. (All the class prep and para-discussion goes on the blog.) Every Monday I post a “prompt” related to the week’s reading, viewing, or topic in general. I ask the students to engage with an aspect of the work under consideration, and to do so in writing or by posting video or other media. I emphasize that this work should demonstrate a fulsome (not just passing) engagement with the topic or material – IE: that it should take more than a minute or two to do. But I also emphasize it is not “graded”; students should feel free to experiment, write as much or as little as they wish without fear of making grammatical errors, and take a risk if they wish (there are no wrong answers!). I place a deadline on the responses – they must be completed an hour before class – and I always incorporate them into my class prep, so it’s clear they’re not just make-work things.

The rule for this fall’s seminar was: respond to 5 prompts over 13 weeks and earn 100% in participation. That’s 20% per prompt. Come to class every day, prepared and on time, and keep your grade. Miss class without accommodation? Each miss takes 5% off your running total. Miss more than three classes without accommodation, and lose all your participation grades for the class.

My logic for this structure was as follows. Coming to class matters a lot: seminars thrive on group discussion. Being prepared matters for the quality of discussion we have, and being on time is simply respectful. But the quality of in-class discussion is profoundly enhanced by thinking carefully and richly in advance about the work we’re going to do there – that’s the spirit of the flipped classroom in action. So the prompts were my way of saying: here’s something we’re really going to talk about. And the students’ responses were a way of saying: this is where we think we want to go with this. We’re into it!

And that, really, is what I am “testing” with participation: the willingness to have a real, considered, respectful conversation about a syllabus topic – to put something real into it, and get something real out of it.

Versions of this participation rubric have worked well for me over the past few years: sometimes the pre-prepped action relates to a prompt response; sometimes it takes the form of a performance. I’ve been learning and tweaking as I go, but I’ve been trying hard to eliminate the guesswork. Participation grades function best when they are pegged to rubrics, and when they reward heartfelt effort and genuine engagement with as much of the subjective stuff on my end either eliminated or curbed by the hard evidence of a student’s work on behalf of the course.

Flash forward to TOCAP, the big class on the screen in front of me. I didn’t do what I describe above for this class: too big; too much work. UGH! So what did I say about participation? I checked the outline just now. It says this:

To earn 100% for participation – and you really truly can (it happens all the time) – do the following things:

• Come to class. Every day. If you have to miss, ensure you have accommodation from your academic counsellors (see below).
• Read the stuff we’re reading. Think carefully as you’re reading. Maybe read it twice if it’s a challenge. Take some notes! Bear in mind that the reading load for this class is not heavy; readings have been scheduled to give you lots of opportunities to make time for them, and there are built in re-reading opportunities if you want to take them.
• Contribute to class. This doesn’t mean talking a lot; talking a lot usually means you’re not paying attention to how much space you’re taking up. It also doesn’t mean nevertalking, though: lots of us are shy, but there will be many different ways in this class to share thoughts – including via silent writing, group chats, peer-to-peer conversations, and more. If you’re a shy person and you’re working hard to contribute, we will notice.
• Take some risks! Falling on your arse doesn’t mean failing the course: it means you have to get up and try again. A risk is worth it if you learn something valuable about yourself in the process. And risks can be small: like speaking up when normally you don’t, or keeping mum when normally you talk over others. Risks can also mean trying to create a video when normally you wouldn’t, or writing your essay well in advance and bringing it to Kim or Courtney to talk about, when normally you’re a last-minute person. Taking a risk means actively taking up an invitation made by our class to push yourself a bit, rather than just showing up for the sake of it. Give it a try.

This all sounds great, and I’m sure it was reassuring. But it’s also not a rubric; it says NOTHING about how I’m going to measure these things. And that’s a problem – because right now I have to measure them.

Staring at the screen in low-level panic, I’m reminded that I need to figure out how to scale up my participation rubric experiments and fast.

There are best practices out there of course: here’s a good one from Faculty Focus this past May; here are four collated in a short article published by the Teaching Commons at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, ON. (I’m fond of the first one here, but click the second link in that bullet in order to read both the first noted article by Weimer, and the response by Slapcoff.) But the problem of scale still arises: in large classes, grading participation is significant extra work – or can be perceived that way (certainly at this time of the term, and certainly right now by me!).

This is why Slapcoff and Weimer’s linked reflections (in the first item above, as mentioned) make great sense to me: as writing assignments about participation, they offer excellent ways for students to reflect meta-cognitively on their classroom practice in a format we A&H professors are used to grading, and grading quickly. Better still, if these are (as Weimer suggests) papers written primarily for completion and reflection (like my students’ blog prompt responses), they need not be long, and they need not be marked for grammar. Feedback can happen in a peer-to-peer structure, or at strategic points in the term when life’s not too busy. It might be most fruitful, in fact, to schedule mid-term check-in meetings with students, where they bring a participation reflection with them, and talk them through in office hours. If the class is big, perhaps setting one or two sessions aside for this reflection work makes sense, too.

Options, for sure, if not solutions. What think you, dear readers? What do you do in larger-class scenarios to measure participation? What works, what’s too much work? What’s definitely not worth doing? Thoughts very welcome.

Kim

Feed back to me (part 2)

Last week I offered some thoughts on marking with the rubric as a close guide and feedback framework; today I want to share some nifty feedback advice from Lynn Nygaard, the author of Writing for Scholars: A Practical Guide to Making Sense & Being Heard (Sage, 2015). Just as I was contemplating the difference using the rubric is making for me as a grader, her ideas about one-to-one feedback crossed my desk via the ever-reliable Tomorrow’s Professor listserv, to which I’ve belonged since 2001 (thanks, Jenn Stephenson!).

I was struck in particular by two pieces of intel in Nygaard’s piece: the importance of asking questions during the feedback process, and the value of offering feedback face-to-face (as opposed to solely in written form).

The context for the chunk of Nygaard’s book that was excerpted on the TP listserv is “peer reviewing” – the process through which scholars offer one another comments and assessment during the publishing process. (When you read that something is “peer reviewed”, it means experts in the field have read the material, assessed it based on a range of criteria from quality of research to quality of argumentation, and deemed it valuable enough to be shared with other experts in the field as well as the broader public.) For Nygaard, this context includes both graduate students (IE: feeding back to supervisees who are completing dissertation work) as well as peers whose work we might be asked to comment on for publication.

So undergraduate students aren’t the explicit focus here, but as I mentioned last week I think we can extrapolate easily for undergraduate constituencies – after all, good marking practices are good marking practices, full stop.

The first insight in Nygaard’s excerpt that grabbed me was:

Do not underestimate the importance of asking questions.

We hector students about this all the time, right? ASK QUESTIONS. THERE ARE NO BAD OR WRONG QUESTIONS! Questions are the route to a good paper, a strong experiment; research questions are more important than thesis statements. (Or, to nuance that a bit: good research questions yield better thesis statements.)

But how many of us have thought to ask questions in our comments for students on their written work? It’s not atypical for me to pepper students with questions after an in-class presentation, but those questions rarely make it into the typed feedback. In fact, I tend to focus on declarative statements (“your paper/presentation would have been stronger had you X”) when I write up my comments – asserting my knowledgeable opinion rather than keeping the feedback student-centred. So Nygaard is suggesting something provocative here, I think, when she encourages the asking of questions as feedback.

Now, Nygaard stresses that these need not be complex questions, or even content-driven ones. When we respond to student work, remember, we’re offering, usually, feedback on practice as much as (or even more than) content: how well students ask questions themselves, identify the parameters of their study, structure their articulation of the data or their reading of the text they are presenting. At their best, then, feedback questions might drive back to basics, focusing on the sorts of things students tend to skip past in an effort to get to the finished product. Nygaard offers the following samples for questions to ask a (student) writer:

What is the most interesting thing you have found so far?
What are you finding most difficult to write about?
What is it you want people to remember when they are finished reading this?
What interested you in this topic to begin with?

Now, if these questions sound chatty, it’s because they are. And here’s Nygaard’s other key insight (for me): what if feedback were offered orally more often?

When we speak to colleagues and graduate students, often we do so in our offices, face to face. Undergrads, by contrast, get sheets of paper or pop-up windows on their computer screens with some typed stuff and a grade. Easy to distance, easy to dismiss.

But, as Nygaard notes, the value of feeding back in person is significant. It gives the feedback (and not just the grade itself) real stakes. And, more important, it offers an opportunity for dialogue that is integral to the producing of stronger, future work:

…if you deny the other person a chance to explain, you rob them of an opportunity to achieve greater clarity for themselves – because there is no better way to understand something than to explain it to someone else.

Reading this reminded me, ironically, not of supervisions with my own grad-school advisers, but of encounters with a dear and influential undergraduate instructor, the feminist and queer theorist Dianne Chisholm. Dianne is an Oxbridge graduate, and every time a paper was due she had us all into her office, one by one, Oxbridge-style to read our essays aloud to her and receive our feedback in person.

We were, of course, TERRIFIED of this entire process (and kinda terrified of Dianne, too). But we also adored her, because she offered us the opportunity to learn, grow, and get better – she proved that to us time and again, by giving us her time and her attention.

Now, I’m not saying that we should all take every undergraduate assignment in like this; it’s time consuming and really only works in seminar-sized groups. But it does have key benefits that we ought not to dismiss. For one thing, it places the onus squarely on the student to absorb and respond to feedback – to do something with it, even if only for a few minutes. To imagine the better version of the paper in front of them, maybe.

Nygaard goes on to write:

…remember that your job is to help the author, not to make yourself look good.  Your ultimate measure of success is the degree to which the author walks away knowing what to do next, not the degree to which you have made your expertise apparent.

Declarative comments on written work (like the one I offer as an example above) tend toward the “me expert, you not so much” end of the spectrum; they demonstrate that I know stuff and that you don’t yet know quite enough of it. But guess what? We’re in the scholarship business, with the hierarchy professor//student more or less entrenched; the “knowing//knowing less” binary is sort of a given. So what if we took it as that given and moved on, instead asking questions and offering meaningful advice to students that could drive their work forward and upward? This might happen on paper, or in an office-hour debrief, or – maybe best of all? – in a mix of the two.

At minimum, what if we aimed to provide more feedback to undergraduates that simply indicated that this particular assignment, even returned, graded, to them, is *not* the end after all? Nygaard offers the final, following thought:

Even if you are meeting informally with a colleague, try to end the session by asking, “So, what is your next step?”

The perfect question for us all, really.

Kim