Rewarding Students for Process: a Low-key Reading Portfolio

Like so many of us, I’ve watched my standard assessments crumble under the assault of AI.

I’d been doing a low-stakes writing assignment for years, asking students to very informally summarize and reflect on the reading.  It’s been a great assignment, helping me ensure that most students work through the reading before class and come in to class prepared with ideas and questions, and students have generally liked it.  But I’m starting to see AI-generated summaries (duh) and I’m sure more are coming.  I’m also noticing that my more anxious students treat the assignment as something high stakes, obsessing about the end product in an assignment designed to focus on process.  Bad for their stress levels, plus it tempts them to turn to AI which is bad for my stress levels.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do instead.  I tried just dropping the assignment, but then my students didn’t do the reading.  I don’t want in-class quizzes because they shift the focus to memorization and performance under pressure.  I don’t want online quizzes because they seem even less AI-resistant than my current assignment.  Some of my colleagues are switching to cold-calling, interrogating students in ways that remind me of law school pedagogy from the movies.  I don’t want to cold-call because I have equity concerns and because I don’t want to put my students on the spot.  I don’t particularly like it when it’s done to me, and I’m much less anxious than they are. And I don’t care for the atmosphere it creates in the classroom.

Instead, I decided to come up with an assignment that supports what I do want:

• I want my students to read deeply, slowly and carefully, listening to the text as though it was a person they respected but had trouble understanding.

• I want my students to feel safe in my class, willing to speak honestly and to listen and think deeply.

• I want the assignment to be a tool that helps them do the reading, not an extra hoop for them to jump through.

To get started, I had a long conversation with my first-year honors students early this semester, asking them to describe how they read.  The conversation made me very happy.  They responded with a wealth of detail.  They annotate the book, underlining and writing in the margins (or on sticky notes or in a separate notebook).  They mark key passages and put things in their own words.  Several had elabrate, and personalized, systems. Some color code with highlighters and different color tabs, others insist on pencil only.  

In other words, my stronger students already know how to read actively in the way I want them to.  And at least some of the time, they read that way for class.  Knowing that, I decided to develop an assignment that has them read that way in a more intentional, structured, and consistent way.  What I came up with is much like the “show the work” journal that Emily Gravett describes in her blog about teaching Religion and Film.

My writing assignment is entirely analog.  My students use a paper book, a notebook, and a pen.  And the assignment takes them through the process that we know works: marking up the text, taking notes, jotting down questions, turning pages.

Here are the instructions:

• You’ll submit pics of your work on Canvas for every reading assignment.  These will be graded credit/no credit.

• Twice a semester, you’ll submit all the materials as a portfolio and that will be graded.  This means you’ll hand in 

  • Your book (which will have your notes in it)

  • Your notebook (the notes/reflections that didn’t fit in the margins of the book)

I prefer that you write notes directly in the book and that you write by hand in the notebook.  If you want to type or don’t want to write in the book, let’s talk about it and make a plan, OK?  

I’m interested in the process here (seeing your mind and heart at work!) and not in a clean and neat end product.  That means that it is ok if your materials look messy.  You’re allowed and encouraged to go back and add or revise materials after class.  If you do that, don’t erase the original, just cross it out and add the new ideas afterwards.

Feel free to use different colors, draw diagrams, cross things out, draw arrows, and so on.  Make it work for you!

This does not need to be formal writing.  Play with it, swear if you need to, and feel free to complain about annoying ideas and confusing writing.  Don’t worry about 

• Writing complete sentences – bulleted lists are fine!

• Writing neatly (but I do need to be able to read most of it)

• Being right

When I grade the portfolio, I’ll be looking for evidence of strong engagement with the text.  You should be 

• Summarizing: Mark important points and put them in your own words, identify the thesis, draw diagrams if they help, note confusing areas

• Reflecting: ask questions, articulate issues for the class to discuss, reflect on how the reading connects to your life or to other readings

We’re 7 weeks in now and it’s going very well.  We had to set aside some time for figuring out how to submit pics on Canvas.  And some of them still don’t believe me when I say it doesn’t have to be neat.  But they are doing good work.  They come to class with their books and plenty of notes, they can find the passages that defeated them, and they ask about them.  And – oh glory! – they have done the reading and thought about it and as a result they have interesting things to say.

I’ll try it with my regular classes in the spring.  Fingers crossed!

For more visit: “Is This the End of the Take-Home Essay?”