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In my first blog on this topic I tackled the question of how to create attendance policies that are suitable for the class content and context. But all this focus on the students neglects one more important factor – what about an attendance policy for the instructor?This was not a major concern of mine when I began teaching, but in the years since, I have had children and communicable illnesses have become a substantially more regular part of my life. I also began my current role in Fall of 2019, just before the pandemic began, which changed much of our larger discourse about “pushing through” illnesses and being present no matter what. But the same issues arise for any instructor who discovers they have to cancel a class unexpectedly – anyone who needs to do more complicated travel to get to a conference than expected, who is invited for a guest lecture with limited lead time, who is on the job market and might get a coveted on-campus interview. How do we cancel classes well?Now that I have a preschooler and a kindergartener, I cannot get through a semester without a cancellation due to their illnesses (which invariably become my illnesses). This term, I finally wrote an attendance policy for myself that I included in my syllabi. Here are a few things I considered while creating my expectations:As with any job, advance notice is best. I have promised my students that I will let them know class is cancelled as soon as I possibly can – which sometimes means I need to make a decision the night before rather than the morning of. When in doubt, I err on the side of cancelling if I’m sick – nobody needs my lecture enough that it’s worth them getting ill.I will not require my students to do any “makeup” work that takes more time than a normal class would have; whenever possible, I will keep makeup assignments significantly shorter than class time. Piling on unexpected work just feels unfair to me, but this standard is also key since I may not have an alternative assignment available by their usual class time. I need to respect that the hours students carve out for my course might be all the time they have, and additional work may cost them time they have to allocate elsewhere. I can show respect for my students’ complex lives by keeping things concise.When alternate assignments are needed, I use methods that students are already familiar with so that they are not wasting time trying to explore a new technology when I want them to be focused on course content. If I don’t use discussion boards in a class, I don’t ask students to use a discussion board for a cancelled day. Typically, I record my classes and rely on the video to create a shortened lecture.Sometimes, just skipping the day is fine. This won’t be possible for all sorts of courses – when classes are composed so that prior concepts need to be fully understood before moving on, skipping may never be an option – but my own course design is more iterative and removing any one day isn’t going to collapse the structure. I always mourn when I have to pull out a day of content that I love, but sometimes it’s better for my students and myself to move on without stressing about covering every single idea and story that I hoped for.We don’t plan our syllabi with last-minute changes in mind, but having a few priorities when imagining cancellations – and taking a moment to craft your own instructor attendance policy – can save you time and headaches when things don’t go as planned.

Like so many of us, I’ve spent the past two years in a paralyzed panic over artificial intelligence’s effects on my classroom. I teach undergraduates, mainly gen ed philosophy courses, and writing has been a key component of all my courses. When ChatGPT hit the mainstream, it became a constantly looming presence, threatening to devour every part of teaching that I care about. I didn’t “wrestle” with it. Nothing so active and dignified. I went on an emotional roller coaster of ignoring it, freaking out, wishing it away, catastrophizing, and then ignoring it again.It didn’t work. AI was still there. I tried writing about it, but that just made me feel worse. And my writing was awful, page upon page of “Oh my god, the sky is falling.” Depressing, unhelpful – and bad writing. I trashed every single page.Some of my colleagues argue that we must incorporate this wonderful new tool into our teaching. We should encourage students to use AI for “basic” tasks like summarizing texts and outlining arguments, freeing them up for more advanced work. Others point out that summarizing and outlining are advanced tasks for many of our students since they don’t know how to do either, and that students need to first acquire skills like summarizing in order to later acquire more advanced skills. To make that learning possible, they argue, we need to build protective walls to keep AI out of our classes. Several want our Writing Center to ban Grammarly and its ilk.I agree with the second group that our students usually don’t summarize or outline well. And I agree that allowing students to outsource tasks they haven’t yet mastered to AI will make it harder for them to learn to read, write and, most importantly, to think critically. I’d love to operate in a sheltered space behind protective walls. But I don’t think the walls will hold.Hence my freaking out. But after two years, I have finally managed a few moment of calm thought, aided by James Lang’s wonderful blog post. I’ve come to the following key conclusions:AI-assisted writing isn’t going away. Damn it.We aren’t reliable AI detectors and we don’t have reliable automated AI detectors (although we can catch blatant and unskilled uses).If we continue to assign take-home essays, some of our students will use AI to write them. We won’t know how many or how much they will use it, and we won’t catch many of them.Take-home essays are important pedagogical tools, and I don’t as yet have any promising substitutes.My immediate task is to figure out how to navigate my classroom spaces with all this and my own teaching goals in mind. What do I want to prioritize, and what am I willing to sacrifice?It is tempting to prioritize not being duped. And making not being duped the priority has the clear advantage of producing simple action steps: No more take-home essays. Switch to lockdown browsers or old-school blue book exams.Following James Lang, I am not switching, at least not yet. This is because I think there are more important things at stake than minimizing the risk of cheating.As I listen to colleagues who are switching to in-class exams, I am thinking about why I’ve been avoiding them for my entire teaching career: They do not test what I want to teach.Switching from essay-writing to in-class exams requires moving from messy and open-ended discussion towards lectures. I don’t want to make that move. My students have enough lecture classes. They don’t need another one from me. But they do need what I am good at teaching. My students need a class that focuses on discussion and self-reflection, inviting them to engage each other and the materials and think through their own lives, actions, and values. I want to teach those classes, and then I want my assessments to provide opportunities for students to chew over things we’ve talked about and the views they’ve encountered in class, developing arguments, reflecting on their experience, pursuing thoughts and objections, and seeing where it all takes them. Take home essays do that.But assigning those essays leaves me wide open to cheating. So what do I do in my classes to reduce the risk?I include more low-stakes writing.I make the papers worth less and include plenty of scaffolding and in-class work on them.I grade a little differently, rewarding bland, generic, but correct writing less and messy and creative writing more.I add some quizzes – and I am experimenting with using AI to draft multiple choice questions.I keep an eye out for obvious AI misuse and I use the built-in detection software. But I try not to obsess about it, and I try to be OK with knowing that some students will get away with things they shouldn’t (this part is definitely a work in progress).Most importantly, I try to connect with my students and I try to convince them that I want to hear what they think, and that their opinions matter to me and to the world. I encourage them to draw on class discussions and their own experiences when they write, and I encourage them to say what AI cannot say because AI is not them.I’m also looking around for guidance from others. Reading a Chronicle of Higher Education newsletter, I just came across Kimberly Kirner’s writing assessments. She sets out to help her students develop their own voices, and she grades based on the students’ progress towards goals that they develop together. I plan to learn from Kirner and others like her over the summer and experiment with her assignments next semester.AI is here to stay and our students have access to it. It’s not the situation I would have chosen but it is what is in front of us. It will be on us as educators to guide students so that they can still develop as critical thinkers and writers. That work has many parts, and thankfully we don’t all have to do all of it. Despite the peptalks from the AI-optimists on my campus, I don’t see myself working with students to help them write better AI prompts, and I don’t yet see a good role for AI in my courses. But reading Kirner and Lang reminds me that there is important work here that I am suited for and that I care about: I can help students see that they and their voice matters and I can help them develop their voices and become better informed so that they can speak and write more effectively. Notes & BibliographyKimberly Kirner is Professor of Anthropology at California State University at Northridge.James Lang is Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame.

My last blog was about assessment in immersive classes and outdoor or wild learning. As much as assessment is about how I assess my students in those classes, assessment is also for me. How do I know if my outdoor classes and lessons are working?“Assessment” often feels like a dirty word. Generally, I dread it when I see the word in an email subject or agenda line. At the end of the semester, after I get my grades in, I still have one more set of forms to fill out to “assess” the effectiveness of my courses in order to appease the accrediting gods. I hate that paperwork. It is the opposite of everything wild I am trying to do. But the intent is not wrong. I ought to be assessing the effectiveness of my classes, my assignments, and my learning activities so that I know if they’re helping my students learn. Perhaps I need to make adjustments so students can thrive. The paperwork I fill out for assessment does not usually lead to this thoughtfulness, but it is important that I continually assess throughout the semester. What seems to be helping or hindering student learning?At this point I need to articulate to myself why I take students outdoors. Is it just because I prefer being outdoors, or is there a particular point of learning that is facilitated better outdoors? Just as I assess how well students are meeting the goals I have for them, I have to assess how well my activities and locations meet the goals I have for them. Then I can assess how successful the activity is. Even if the answer is simply, “It’s a beautiful day and I’d rather be outdoors than in a stuffy classroom,” I can assess whether students learn what I hope they will learn that day or if being outdoors hinders their learning in some way. For instance, Was I harder to hear? Do I need to stand closer to them or project better? Do I need to be clearer about what they should be taking notes on? And if I make those changes the next time, do they help, or do I need to take us back inside?In general, though, the question is what outdoor learning is about. As I’ve said before, I hope being outdoors makes students feel more playful and therefore more curious and open to learning. I want being outdoors to ground them more in the present, in their world, with each other. That is, I want being outdoors to make them more human in our AI world. I want it to make them more open to conversation with each other. I want them to feel less anxious because they feel the sun on their skin and the sun makes life feel more possible, especially after a long winter, and being less anxious helps them learn. Or I want them outdoors because a walking role-play is best done outdoors or an art scavenger hunt between multiple buildings. Could I do that lesson as effectively indoors? For my immersive courses, the goal is for students to be more present to one another with fewer distractions.As I consider these goals through a semester, I ask questions like, “Have I introduced or nourished any distractions I didn’t intend to?” “What did location add to the lesson and to their learning?” “Are students engaging with each other and material more or less than they would indoors?” One method to assess this is through my own observations, but answering my own questions, especially when I love being outside, is prone to biased answers. Observations in immersive classes are more reliable because of the sheer amount contact I have with students, but even then I am human and have blind spots.So I ask questions of students on mid-semester written evaluations. I listen when students are in my office hours talking about what’s hard for them. Sometimes when students come early to class I just ask them explicit questions about something I’m curious about: “Can you hear your classmates well enough outside?” “Do you have any suggestions to make this activity more engaging?” I ask colleagues to come observe me teach and give me feedback. And in the end, I look again at student work to see if they are learning what I hope they are learning. A final reflection assignment I give is especially helpful for understanding whether they are being drawn more into themselves, their community, and their world. In immersive classes this is especially true of their final reflection assignment as well as closing rituals for the community of the class.Are any of these assessments scientific? Not really. I’m looking at far too many variables at once. We always are. A classroom is a certain kind of laboratory, but not the kind where we can isolate a single variable to experiment on. So we do our best. We stay open to the wildness of our classroom in all its wild ways and hope to be attentive enough to keep our students learning wildly.

There is nothing simple about creating attendance policies. Instructors, rightly, find themselves all over a spectrum of expectations and philosophies, informed by their own experiences as students, their departmental standards, their student population, and their own interest in monitoring learners. I myself have ranged from no attendance policy whatsoever, to point loss for absences, all the way to my current policy, which I’ll discuss below. Regardless, I would suggest that teachers think about two major questions when they have the freedom to craft their own attendance standards. 1. What is the likelihood that an invested student will have to miss class at least once or twice during the semester?This involves analyzing factors like the prevalence of communicable illness (do most of your students live in residence halls where norovirus could sweep through hundreds of them within a month?), the socioeconomic realities (do many students balance school with jobs they need for living expenses? Do they have access to reliable public transit, and if not, how does the need for carpools/rides or the reliability of their personal vehicles factor in?), and family obligations (are many learners parents who would be required to stay home with their sick children?). There’s no simple calculus here, but in general, if it’s likely that even the most earnest students will have to miss class sometimes, one’s attendance policy might need to be more generous. 2. How have I constructed the course and assessments?For courses where each day of class depends heavily on comprehending the materials of the previous day, attendance policies may be a way to incentivize that necessary regular attendance. For courses that circle more than build, an occasional absence may not significantly impact a learner’s ability to meet the larger course goals, and a looser attendance policy might give students a “release valve” to take care of their larger needs every now and then. One semester I found myself stuck after my loosey-goosey attendance policy meant that I regularly had half-full classrooms. I knew something had to change, so I reflected.First, in my context at a small women’s college where we focus on first-generation students, single moms, and undocumented students, I knew that missing class was part of life for my learners. Sick kiddos, broken-down cars, and demanding jobs – some of them full-time – meant that perfect attendance would be rare. It also seemed that my students, who have the incredibly high stress levels that come with all those considerations, get sick more often and more severely. I didn’t want a policy that added more strain on them.Second, my courses are designed to be spirals rather than building blocks; we come back to the same major themes frequently throughout the term, each time from a new angle. I don’t need my students to fully comprehend a concept before we can move on because I know it will come back around and they might latch on better then. This means I can afford some leniency because a student can still perform very well on assessments even if they miss a day here or there.All of this meant that my first instinct wasn’t too far off – a gentler attendance policy works with my content and for my students. But how could I avoid those half-empty rooms? In the end, I did something radical – I asked my students what they thought I should do. I told them that I wanted to incentivize being in class, because a robust learning community makes the content more interesting and memorable, but that I couldn’t countenance a policy that would punish someone for being seriously ill or dealing with a major life event. Within the space of ten minutes, we had come up with a policy that made sense to them and me, and which I currently use. At the start of the term, each student gets a set number of attendance points. If they miss, I take away points… until they prove to me that they’ve caught up on the material. (I record all my classes, so my students watch the video and then show me their notes to get their points back). It’s easier for students to just show up than it is to do the makeup work, but no one’s grade is ever permanently impacted if they have to miss classes. It might not work for everyone, but it makes sense for my courses and context.How have you crafted your attendance policies?

Recently, I finished a book called Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom: Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work (Hurney et al. 2021). It’s about a program on college campuses in which faculty members invite a colleague to come to their class at the mid-semester point to find out how the course is going from the students’ perspectives. This is a program offered at my institution, and many others, usually through a professional development or teaching and learning center. The book, and such programs, got me thinking about soliciting feedback from students, beyond simply what most of us are required to do in the form of final course evaluations. Think about it: course evaluations, if we even read them (and so many of my friends don’t, because it’s such a stressful experience), only let us know how the course was, how we did, what a group of students that is no longer enrolled with us thought about our teaching and their learning. Notice the past tense. Certainly this information can be useful for future courses (I am—usually—the same person teaching Religions of the World this time as I will be next time, after all), but it doesn’t exactly help those particular students in that particular course. (And I won’t even dive into the controversy around the utility and validity of student course evaluations here; suffice it to say, those evaluations are one of the only times that we actually ask students, the primary recipients of our teaching efforts, what they think about those efforts.) The point of a program like the one profiled in the book is that we can ask for feedback from students before the end of the semester, before the experience is over, when there is actually time to make changes or reroute. The small group instructional diagnoses occur at the mid-semester point. (You can check out the book to learn more about the process; it’s pretty cool!) Typical questions asked of students are: “What has helped your learning in this course so far? What has hindered your learning in this course so far?” and “What suggestions do you have for improvement?” The focus is on learning, not what they like/dislike or the instructors’ performance. At JMU a few years back, we also added companion questions focused on the students’ own behaviors, for example, “What are YOU doing that has helped your learning in this course so far?” as a way of conveying that they are also, and I would argue, ultimately, responsible for their own learning.) Then, with this information, instructors can decide what, if any, changes or clarifications they’d like to make during a follow-up conversation with the students and for the rest of the semester. In the absence of such a program, or colleague support, you can always ask these questions yourself (e.g., through anonymous paper forms in class, an anonymous ungraded survey on your LMS, etc.). But there are lots of other ways to check in with students and get actionable, important feedback. You might have students fill out a weekly online “how’s my driving?” Google form, as one of my friends does, or you might lead an in-class discussion every so often about how everyone is doing, or you might ask students to fill out a word cloud of how they’re feeling at the beginning of class on a particular day. There are lots of things we can ask about: students’ moods, feelings, and stress level; whether they understood a particular concept, lesson, or reading; how that recent test or lecture went; what study strategies seem to be working well for them; and so on. I use a variety of ways to check in with my own students and get their feedback in all of my courses. Last semester, for example, I had experimented with a great deal of flexibility around the exams (e.g., they were take-home and not timed), to try to ease the anxiety and overwhelm that I knew students were experiencing, and I wanted to know how this approach was working for them. I spent time in class after the midterm on a debrief. It turned out that many students were taking hours to complete their work, even though I had intended the whole thing to be over in 75 minutes. This was stressing them out more—the opposite of the effect I was trying to achieve! I took their feedback, which I would have never realized if I hadn’t simply asked, and made some changes to the final exam (e.g., reduced the number of questions). Students noted in my course evaluations (as they do every semester) that they appreciated how I asked them for feedback and how I adjusted parts of the course as a result. Indeed, research on mid-semester feedback programs demonstrates that students appreciate being asked. And, of course, this kind of feedback process can benefit us too, as we open up lines of communication with students, convey care, and possibly learn which adjustments to the course will better facilitate their learning. After all, who wants to be teaching a course that’s not going well? Who wants to dread going to class every day? Who wants to be giving failing grades on projects? Who wants to be meeting resistance, but not knowing why? It often doesn’t occur to us to just ask students when we want to know more. But we can. What do you want to ask?

“...it’s easy if you try.” In fact, it is not easy for me to imagine no grading. But I’m trying, colleagues. I’m trying really hard. I’m not talking about being finished with this spring term’s grading, though that would be nice, too. When I say, “Imagine there’s no grading,” I mean imagine learning without grades. Okay, wait—don’t go anywhere! How about, imagine learning with fewer grades. Or finally: imagine a learning environment that is designed to encourage learners (and instructors) to focus more on learning, and less on grades. When we put this imagination into practice, we are Ungrading. I’m not doing away with grades and grading. I have invested decades into discovering and sharing grading practices that are more equitable, more just, less biased, and more accurate than many of the grading practices I learned from my own instructors. However, these very discoveries have led me into practices that many describe as ungrading: more formative evaluation and less summative evaluation; peer learning via peer review; more narrative and collaborative evaluation processes; and more openness to surprising demonstrations of learning. This unpredictability of learning is one of two experiences that, today, urgently persuade me to consider more committal practices in Ungrading. Put simply: Learners come from everywhere and are going everywhere. Learners come from everywhere, and therefore, I have very little idea what prior experiences and insights they are pouring into the learning that they mix. (“Constructivism” is a theory of learning holding that learners construct understanding by integrating new information with prior knowledge.) If learners come from everywhere (and bring anything), then how can I be confident in one-size-fits-all grading strategies that presuppose that I already know what “learning” will look like? What is more, learners are going everywhere, and therefore, I have very little idea what an application of learning might look like in their imagined present or future contexts. If learners are going everywhere (and might need anything), then how can I be confident that I already know what a successful application of learning should look like? This is to say: do my evaluation processes have ears? Are they open to challenge? Do they invite surprise? The second experience that today urgently persuades me to evaluate grading more critically is my experience of trustworthiness in learners. This is not a new experience of course, but is fresh on my mind, in part because of a new experience, and in part because of fresh reflection on a frequent experience. This spring, I taught a class that my institution designates as Pass/Fail. Learners responded weekly to a pair of prompts calling on them to engage the readings of the week in particular ways. The rubric for these weekly prompts was unchanging through the semester, and learners got the hang of it all quite early. At that point, I wondered whether student submissions would become minimum-effort, “paint by numbers” exercises in tedium, but things proved otherwise: overwhelmingly, learners engaged the course materials in authentic, often risk-taking ways that showed more than the necessary commitment of time and attention. This was true not only for the habitual overachievers, but also for those learners who had had the most trouble getting the hang of things early in the term. The prior semester, I taught my usual Intro course in my subject matter (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament). This was where I encountered a by-now-familiar phenomenon: the learners became more enthusiastically engaged with the material in the last weeks of the term, once (as an intentional result of course design) most student’s final grades were more or less established. Learners would go on to take low-stakes, short assignments and stretch their creativity, taking provisional ideas out for a spin and testing their own limits freely. Countless times I have reflected, “It’s amazing what’s possible once they feel like their grades are more or less set...” without considering what an indictment that is against the basic presupposition that grading is necessary to coerce performance. Why in the world am I not doing all I can to create those liberating conditions as early in the term as possible? Why am I not doing more to get grades out of the way of learning? This summer, I am once again taking my aspirations as an instructor to the notion of Ungrading. Discover more about Ungrading by reading Susan D. Blum (ed.), Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University (2020). Find active, up-to-date, practice-based discussions about Ungrading by searching Twitter for the hashtag #ungrading.

Recently a colleague shared with me the concept of “ungrading,” written about eloquently in a couple of blog posts by writing instructor Jesse Strommel. You can find Strommel’s posts here and here. (I highly recommend his blog, in general, as well as his @jessifer twitter account.) Strommel asks us to consider why we grade, what we want grading to do, what letter grades really mean, how grades and feedback relate (if they do), and what would happen if we didn’t grade. As the name “ungrading” suggests, this approach can encourage or empower instructors to grade less or even not at all. Here are some complaints about grading that I’ve heard (from colleagues, students, and the literature) and shared over the years, which make the idea of ungrading appealing to me: We get so easily behind on grading We don’t grade fast enough for students’ taste Grading takes up so much of our time Grading feels like a joyless, soul-sucking burden Grading has nothing to do with why we became teachers The burdens of grading limit us in the kinds of assignments we think we can give, especially in large classes (and especially without TAs) Grading often pits students against each other (e.g., when they are graded on a curve) Grading is used to gatekeep Grading is a measurement, which is subject to error, and can have a huge impact on students Grading does not always measure what we intend (e.g., we intend to measure learning, but we instead measure test-taking skills, which students may or may not have acquired from our course) Students disagree with and complain about our grades Grade grubbing The standards or criteria are not always clear, which then makes it difficult to know what grade to assign Students don’t know how to understand or interpret our grades Some students don’t seem to care when they get a low grade; others care too much about a slightly-less-than-perfect grade The grades, and any accompanying feedback, aren’t always reviewed by students Grading doesn’t necessarily yield improvement from one assignment to the next Grades can be arbitrary, discriminatory, and unfair Grades become an extrinsic motivation that detracts from the real focus of the course experience—learning So, Strommel says, “If you’re a teacher and you hate grading, stop doing it.” What a freeing idea! Strommel has stopped grading entirely in his classes (though obviously he still has to submit a final grade for each student at the end of the semester, as he, and I bet most of us, are required to do by our institutions). It took him many years to arrive at this point, a journey he describes in his blog, and it’s a change I wouldn’t recommend anyone making all at once. There are ways, however, that we can dip our toes into the ungrading waters and find out how it goes, both for us and our students. Strommel offers several suggestions in his blog, including self-assessment, portfolios, authentic assessment, and peer assessment. I am trying the self-assessment route this semester in my Religion and Pop Culture class, with students’ attendance and engagement grade. This is a small, upper-level course (enrolling majors and nonmajors) and I always lead it like a seminar, expecting students to learn just as much from each other as they may from me. If they’re not there, prepared, and ready to engage, a heck of a lot of learning is just not going to happen. This is why it’s always felt important to me to attach some kind of percentage to this part of the course. Yet grading attendance and engagement has also always felt problematic to me, given its reliance on attendance, which, especially during the pandemic, has seemed inflexible and even inhumane. I also hate getting into the business of having to decide what an excused vs. unexcused absence is (e.g., I don’t want to be looking at doctor’s notes or deciding whether going to your brother’s wedding is excusable). Ungrading has the potential to accomplish my goals while alleviating my problems with this part of the course. Here is how I am describing, excerpted, the expectations for “Attendance and Engagement” this semester on my syllabus (which will be worth 10% of their grade): Reliable attendance and active engagement will be crucial to our learning community. Students can learn just as much from each other as they can from any professor, in a well-designed class. We will decide together what we expect from one another in terms of attendance and engagement by co-creating a set of “community norms” that will guide our time together; it won’t just mean talking a lot! You will then use these community-created expectations to give yourself an attendance and engagement grade at the end of the semester, justified by a reflection letter you will write to me. This is an experiment for me. I think it’s really important to question, experiment, reflect, and iterate as teachers (this is the heart of the scholarship of teaching and learning or “SoTL”). So I do have some questions that I will be looking to answer at the end of the semester: Will there be any patterned differences in the grades among the students (e.g., will the male students grade themselves higher)? If so, what am I going to do about that, for this class and in the future, if I continue to ungrade? Will I need to change any grades, up or down? If so, how many? If so, will this defeat the purpose of ungrading? Will attendance be different (worse, I’m assuming) in this class than my others? This may be difficult to tell, because we’re still in the pandemic and a lot of students are out right now for health reasons. I also typically experience absences throughout the semester anyway. Will the reflections that students write be any good? (What do I mean by “good” anyway?) Will I need to have taught them how to write good reflections? I’m not planning on devoting class time to doing so—and also not intending to grade (!) the reflections—but this is how they are going to justify their grade, so this may matter to me. Instead of alleviating anxiety for students, will ungrading provoke or exacerbate it? (Students often don’t handle such open-ended assignments or responsibilities well.) This is certainly not what they need right now! What did I and my students think about this approach? Were there other unintended benefits or drawbacks, for them or for me? How will I decide whether to continue this kind of assessment? I’m looking forward to finding out how this experiment in ungrading unfolds.

One of our most time-consuming and dreaded tasks as humanities faculty is grading student papers. We’re making it worse by writing too many comments. Some of my colleagues correct every single grammatical error. Others fill the margins with thoughtful suggestions, noting all the misunderstandings of the text, the lapses in logic, and the awkward expressions. Of course, extensive feedback is sometimes appropriate, for instance, in commenting on a draft of a strong students’ capstone thesis. But over the years, I’ve come to think that for a lot of undergraduate papers, especially in gen ed courses, it’s counterproductive. I understand the temptation to write a lot of comments because I used to do it myself. I fell into it while I was a teaching assistant at a big university. I was just a few years older than my students, and they kept challenging my grading. My extensive comments were armor, intended to prove to my more obnoxious students that their papers were ridden with errors and deserved an even lower grade than I had assigned. I continued writing extensive comments for many years afterwards. The colleagues that I admired the most did, so I assumed that it was good practice. If I don’t show the students their errors and to explain how to correct those errors, how will they ever learn? I wrote and I wrote. It took forever. And my students’ writing didn’t improve much. They kept making the same mistakes even though I had corrected them in previous papers. Judging from my colleagues’ complaints, they didn’t have better luck. I started understanding why extensive feedback doesn’t work at my Taekwondo dojang. I was watching two intermediate students show a beginner how to turn and do a low block. The beginner’s block was wobbly and weak, and the intermediate students kept shaking their heads and offering lots of helpful suggestions. The beginner kept trying, they gave more feedback, and he tried again. He was looking increasingly confused and his technique started getting worse. After a few minutes, Grandmaster Kim walked over. He quietly watched and then said: “When you turn, step 3 inches wider.” The student tried again and it worked. He wasn’t wobbling, and his block was much more powerful. The move suddenly looked OK. I laughed at the two student-teachers until I realized that as I was acting just like them. What usually happens when we write a lot on student papers? Most students don’t read the marginal comments, especially not in gen ed classes. At best, they read the end comment. If they do read extensive comments, they become overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. They focus on the wrong things. My students frequently focus their revisions on minor issues, ignoring the larger and more important ones. They do this even when I write that comment #1 is very important and that #2-5 are less important. Reflecting on the taekwondo experience made me realize that I was focusing on the wrong task. My job isn’t to provide a thorough critique of the paper; it is to help the students write better next time. A long list of errors won’t help them do that, but brief and simple feedback might. “When you turn, step 3 inches wider.” Focusing on helping the student and not on critiquing the paper is a fundamental shift. I’m no longer assessing an objective product. Instead, I’m interacting with a fellow human being who can get hurt, flattered, or angry, somebody who can listen or tune out. I aim to write so that they will hear, understand, and then choose to act on what I’m saying. It’s a delicate balance. My comments need to be brief and focused because if I overwhelm them with too much information, they’ll get confused and tune out. But if I say too little, they don’t get enough guidance. If I’m too harsh, they get defensive and they’ll stop hearing me altogether. But if I offer empty praise, they won’t understand that their writing needs work. After years of experimenting, I’ve landed on the following approach: I read the whole paper without writing any comments. Sometimes I sit on my hands to keep from writing. (Yes. Seriously. It helps!) I think: What is this person already doing well? What is the next thing they need to learn? And then I comment accordingly: I use their name I mention one specific thing they did well. I give them one or two specific things to work on, and I mark examples of those in the body of the paper. I offer my criticisms clearly but gently, favoring phrases like “I lost you here!” over “this is incoherent,” and “cool, say more about this!” over “poorly developed.” I offer encouragement. I ignore all the other problems in the paper. (Yes. Really.) Commenting on papers is still time consuming, but it takes less time and it’s more rewarding because I sometimes see that my comments help students improve their writing. They’re less likely to repeat the same mistakes in the next paper. And when they revise, they’re working on the more significant problems.

Teachers are people who plan. We cross classroom thresholds with worn briefcases bulging with written lectures clearly forecasted in thick, detailed, syllabi. Entire curriculums are planned three, four, five years into the future. Course learning outcomes are carefully aligned with degree programs and degree programs are carefully align with budgets – all well in advance of students’ enrollment or matriculation. Planning insures a cast iron tradition. Long-range planning, predicated upon long-ago decisions and forgotten needs, makes institutional change challenging, or even impossible. It is ironic; the very attribute which lends stability is also the albatross around our necks. The need to rethink our reliance upon long-range planning and strict adherence to hollow tradition has been exposed during this moment of pandemics. The year 2020 has been a year when plans have gone awry. In this moment, I have a proposition. While this proposition might feel like reckless abandon for those who depend upon the established traditions, reputable standards, and conventional methods of the used-to-be academy, in this protracted moment of pandemics, I want to suggest that this might be a moment to resist the impulse to plan, reflect and analyze. Consider waiting. Resist the impulse to presume how the end will be. Resist the impulse to attempt to go back to business as usual, business as normal, business that no longer serves the students in our care. If we can move past our panic, we will remember we needed to overhaul our educational system before the pandemics snatched us, halted us. If we dare risk surrendering romanticized views of our educational standards, we may recall that many of our traditions, while noble, were often begun arbitrarily. And, given the slowness of institutional change, consider that adult pedagogies have advanced while so many yet cling to outmoded, outdated, and uninformed pedagogies for adult learners in a digital age. Perhaps in this moment the courageous response is, rather than plan, to wait. Just like it is ill-advised to pause and reflect in the middle of a hurricane or surgery or any life-threatening catastrophe, so it is ill-advised, during the 2020 pandemics, to rush to meaning making and gestures of clarity; to rush to return to how it was; to rush to assuming where we will be and how we will be when the pandemics subside. In this moment, if we were the biblical character Noah, the bird we sent out to search for dry land would return having found no place to land. We are not yet close to shore. The waiting is not meant to be idle. In the waiting, carefully ponder, contemplate, imagine - what of the current change will you keep? A colleague who heads an IT department at a liberal arts college said that by his faculty going to online courses (albeit crisis pedagogy) in spring of 2020, he estimates that this sped up the faculty moving to online teaching by ten years. Ten years was gained for a desired change! Perhaps our moments of quick and dramatic shifts to online teaching showed us that our educational institutions are not as calcified as previously reported. If that is the case, what will it take to lean into the new found limberness? What is at stake if we choose to re-calcify? Like you, I am getting pressure to plan for summer 2021, and all of 2022 & 2023. I simply cannot. I do not have a crystal ball.  And I do not want to pretend that even when the vaccine is distributed (2021?2022?) that we will return to how it used to be. I do not want to squander this moment of waiting with worry, anxiety and stress for a future I cannot predict nor control. I tell people that I am waiting. Once we can return to face-to-face work, I want, then, time to reflect.  Then, I will want time to take stock and study.  Once we are no longer in the midst of multiple waves of quarantines, I will want to assess where we are, and learn the new/needed ways to move forward. I will need time to be creative. The waiting that I need right now is the mustering of courage for new visions.  In my not-idle waiting I am looking to what historians have said comes after a social upheaval. Historians tell us that after this kind of societal phenomena there is typically a renaissance. Oh – I cannot wait! There will be newly designed everything! There will be new architecture, different clothing styles, and new music and poetry. There will be new academic disciplines and reimagined ways to be school, to do school, and to get an education. There will be new painting, new sculptures, and new modes of transportation. If we truly engage in the reflection warranted by the moment of 2020 and 2021 (hopefully not into 2022), then our renaissance will be spectacular with new technology accessible by those who are impoverished, will bring end to global hunger and provide language translation fitted for everyday interactions. The post-pandemics renaissance will be marvelous! I want to participate in the renaissance with my own new thinking, renewed imagination and creativity. I want to reserve my energies to participate in the renaissance and not pour myself into reestablishing what needed to be changed. So, I wait. What would it mean to allow our innovation to be a primary mode of meaning making – rather than our traditions being the only mode of meaning making? What would it mean to shift to reliance upon creativity rather than dependance upon tradition? In what ways can we create real innovation rather than simply settling for imitations of change meant for other people in other times or places? What is the toll to the institution should there be a call to attempt to return to normal? What is the price of going back? What changes will we maintain, expand, and normalize?

Giving constructive feedback to students is one of the most powerful pedagogical functions a teacher can provide for learners. Yet, teachers often are reluctant to provide feedback for various reasons, like the fear of coming across as critical or the risk of hurting someone’s feelings. But the fact is that good learners crave teacher feedback—even in the form of challenge for deeper thinking. Constructive instructor feedback in an online course helps promote and maintain student engagement. The following four-step approach to effective feedback can make for an efficient “formula” for providing feedback without getting overwhelmed. Additionally, instructors can offer this four-step approach as the standard practice for students’ own feedback responses in discussion forums. Here is a four-step process for giving constructive feedback in an online class (this works just as well in a classroom context). A Four-Step Approach to Constructive Feedback Step 1: Clarify The first step in this feedback procedure is the question of clarification. These are questions that can be answered with very brief responses. They do not raise substantive or philosophical issues, and they are not judgmental. They are merely a way to establish that you heard and understood what was said and/or meant and get clear on important details that affect understanding. Asking students to clarify their responses helps them take responsibility for their thinking and for their answers. It also helps them correct vagueness and to clarify their own initial thinking and “go deeper.” Examples: “Did you mean to say…?” “How are you using the term ___. Can you provide a definition?” “When you said x, did you mean y?” “Was it a sophomore class?” “Were you the only teacher?” “Was this at the start of the year?” “How long was this unit?” “Can you give an example?” Step 2: Value Next, state what you value in the student’s effort or response. Too often, we skip this step and go right onto points of contention, assuming people know we appreciate their engagement and effort in responding. But it’s amazing how much everyone needs affirmation that their efforts are heard and appreciated. Tell the student what makes sense, what seems inspired, what aligns with your own perceptions and experience, what informs your own thinking. Or simply acknowledge a good effort. This sets up a great foundation from which to deal with the (often minor, but sometimes large) points of disagreement or challenges to deeper or more responsible thinking. Step 3: Challenge At the third step, get into those ideas that you want your students to wonder about or wrestle with. This is a good time to use techniques like using “I-messages” (“When you talk about doing x, I think about…” or “When I’ve done x in the past, students have…”) or raising questions by wondering rather than pronouncing judgments (“I wonder if x would happen when I did y,” or “When you suggested x, I wondered if it might…” or “What do you think would happen if…”). This is the phase for honest, constructive concerns, and, at the same time, for delicacy. If we establish a culture of respectful questioning and a challenge for learning that makes it clear that reasonable people can disagree and differences in contexts really do make different solutions effective, such a climate can keep conversation going. Staying in conversation means we help students learn how be able to understand each other better over time. Step 4: Suggestions for Deeper Thinking/Exploration Finally, after exploring the questions that arise in response to someone’s work, we can offer suggestions for deeper engagement. For example: “From our perspective, and the limited view we have of the complexity of the situation, I wonder if [suggestion] would make a difference?” “Once I tried [some suggested solution] in a similar situation, and z happened.” “I’ve heard of someone doing [a suggestion] in the face of such challenges, and I was so inspired by that idea!” “What if you [a suggestion]?” “I wonder if you’ve tried [a suggestion]?” Adding “...what do you think?” to these types of questions invites a response for deeper engagement. The key here is staying genuinely open to the possibility that you don’t know what’s best for this situation, but that you hope you’ll be able to offer something helpful, some bit of insight that might make sense in the complexity of the question or dilemma the person is managing or attempting to address. Adapted from an online course from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, WIDE Program.