Resources

I had planned to use this blog post to grumble about (antiquated, exclusionary, misguided) notions of “rigor” and how many of my colleagues seem to assume that if your students all get good grades, or if the average class GPA is “too high,” you must be too easy of a teacher, there must be grade inflation, you must be giving out easy A’s. I assigned a movie review paper in my upper-level Religion and Film course. I took many steps to help students prepare for writing a successful movie review, which is worth 10 percent of their final grade:Read the movie review assignment I created (which includes a detailed rubric of my criteria for evaluation) in class and ask any questions. Read a chapter on writing about movies for homework, which includes a description of movie reviews; discuss this genre in class.Watch a short YouTube video by a professional movie critic about movie reviews for homework; discuss this video in class.Read Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” essay and discuss in class the importance of drafting and revising – and starting a paper early enough to provide time for that process.Find their own three examples of online movie reviews in class, take notes on what those reviews seem to have in common and what makes a strong movie review; discuss findings in class.Practice writing a short movie review in class; get feedback on it from the instructor.Listen to their peers read examples of those in-class movie reviews and note what they thought was good.Be constantly reminded about the purpose and content of a movie review by their instructor.I was all ready to write about how students did so well on this assignment … and then to wonder how anyone could label the process I put students through as NOT rigorous? There was so much scaffolding! So much prep! So much required just for this one paper – more than I think most people ask of their students, especially for a relatively short paper (2 pages minimum).Except the thing is: students didn’t do all that well on this assignment.The grade average was an 87 percent or B+. Now, this is a far cry, certainly, from averages in some classes that are, even when curved, still in the D-range. A B+ is a solidly respectable individual grade. But I would have expected most of these papers to be A’s, given all of the above. A few were, but not most.The movie reviews contained errors that the above activities should have (I would have assumed) prevented. For instance, many of the papers were more like critical analyses (another genre we discussed) rather than reviews. Their appraisal wasn’t obvious or consistent. They didn’t include details from the films to back up their assertions. They reviewed films that didn’t really relate to religion. They wrote about movies that were too old. They included tracked changes, misspellings, typos, and incomplete sentences.So my anticipated blog post went a bit sideways. What did student performance on this assignment, instead, teach me? I’m considering several possible (definitely not exclusive) lessons:It’s not enough to teach students the importance of, for instance, not turning in their shitty first drafts; I’ve got to actually build it in/require it as a part of the process – or it may not happen.It’s probably a good idea (ok, it is a good idea) to provide students with annotated examples, so they get exposed to a range of quality and the reasons for it.I could spend more time explicitly identifying common mistakes or pitfalls of movie reviews (e.g., too much analysis, not enough review) and either demonstrating or leading students in an activity where we explore how to fix those issues.I could give them class time for peer review and/or revision.I could build in an actual revision process, where they take my feedback and fix the issues for a new deadline (and a potentially better grade).I could assign multiple movie reviews, so they can take what they learned from this assignment and apply it to the next; my guess is that those grades would improve (this has happened in other classes when I gave the same type of assignment multiple times).There will always be a range of effort and performance on any given task?Instructor efforts cannot guarantee student success; there are limits to how much instructors can do to affect positive student outcomes.What else?Mostly, I think I should actually talk to my students to try to find out what went awry. Why or where were they confused? What got lost in translating the rubric to an actual paper? What roadblocks did they encounter? Where was I unclear? What, if anything, could I have done to help them better prepare? Maybe I’ll learn something to make the above prep list even better for next time.