“Meaningful diversity”, writes Anna Lowenhaupt Sing in The Mushroom at the End of the World, is “diversity that might change things.” (p38)
The difference between a transaction and an encounter is the creation of a relationship and therefore a change in those who’ve encountered each other. A transaction ends. A meeting is only a start.
Is education – teaching a course – a transaction or an encounter?
I’m reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Illich argues against the institution of compulsory schooling. Quite persuasively.
Schooling teaches that learning is the result of instruction. And thus, Illich argues, the mere existence of schools creates an ever increasing demand for schools. Society and students come to believe that (important) learning only happens through professional instruction. Even after the age at which attending school is no longer legally obligatory, it continues to be what you need to do if you have a desire to learn. The process of education (according to a curriculum set by others) becomes the important thing, not what a person actually learns.
The “convivial” alternative is “an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner”. It should be made illegal for employers to ask about someone’s educational history. People should be judged only on their knowledge and ability, not on how that was acquired. The process of completing an educational programme does not actually guarantee that a student has learned what they were supposed to learn, precisely because the process is compulsory, predefined, and imposed from without.
The idea of students seeking out their own education is an attractive one. And not new, of course. This is how the schools of ancient Greece worked, how students came to sages like Confucius, or the master-apprentice model. I also agree with Illich that it is an interesting question how modern technological tools and cognitive science could support a contemporary version of that model.
In fact, this is a little bit how certain YouTube channels, newsletters, and other online communities work. They gather a community of people interested to learn about a topic, and can engage in activities that look a lot like coursework, but in a free and voluntary way. That model is hampered by its commercial underpinning, although funding through Patreon and other subscriptions is highly similar to the direct payment of professors by students in early European universities.
What Illich (and those educational YouTube communities) miss, however, is the fact that students do often need to do stuff of which they can only see the value after they’ve done it a few times. In my own field – design education – it really takes (being forced through) a few projects before you can effectively start to reflect on the process and the required skills to build expertise. It may be difficult to learn anything meaningful when you’re only there because you have to be, but that does not invalidated the concept of a predesigned course and teacher-directed instruction (?).
I find this idea of deschooling and putting learning under “the personal control of the learner” interesting. But education also sometimes requires committing to a programme or submitting to instruction for an extended period – voluntarily entering into a series of obligations. It is a good question, however, how long you can productively sustain such a suspension of disinterest – and when you can expect it from aspiring students in the first place.
It’s easy – and common, I think – to think of education as the teacher giving a gift to their students. You have something valuable – knowledge, or a skill – and you give (something of) that to your students. Or you try to, in any case. You give back. Or you hand on what you yourself received when you were a student, or a novice.
This looks like a very positive view of education. And I don’t know whether I think that there is always something wrong with it. But it is not how I want to view and do education.
In Freire’s terms, education as gift-giving is humanitarian, not humanist. In terms of Sadie’s grandmother (in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin), it’s charity, not friendship.
Even though the image of giving a gift is positive and full of good intentions, it is hierarchical. Authoritarian, even. It’s a variation on the ‘banking’ model of education.
Is education an act of friendship? Of love? Perhaps, in a general fellow-feeling-with-other-humans kind of way. We could say it’s an act of fellowship. Or solidarity? In any case, education should be a collaboration, a dialogue, an encounter. For this, it needs to not be hierarchical. Or as non-hierarchical as you can manage.
I just ran my first ungraded course. Obviously, I did it all wrong. Nonetheless, it was wonderful. I’ve never had better conversations with students about what they take away from a course.
In this post, I want to write down some first rough thoughts before the experience fades, also in preparation for the Ungrading as Emancipation track at MYFest.
KT2700 ‘Designing Medical Technology’ is an introductory design course in the 2nd year of the ‘Clinical Technology’ BSc programme at Delft University of Technology. It’s a group project, with 90 students in 18 groups of 5. There’s clinical and technical experts that come by for one-time meetings with each group, but I mostly teach this course by myself. The course runs for 7 weeks, with three 4-hour afternoons of class time each week.
Students choose a problem to work on, do problem analysis, develop concepts, practice drawing, and conduct a simple empirical validation of their design.
As this was my first real course-wide ungrading attempt, I wanted to play it semi-safe and use a common, tried and tested model. In essence, this meant I replaced my assessment of the final report with a self-assessment by each group, that we discussed in a final 20 minute meeting. I did what Jesse Stommel does and told my students that although I reserve the right to change a grade, I fully intended to follow their proposals. (And in the end, I really did not change anyone’s self-determined grade.)
This course already contained a number of rounds of peer feedback on intermediate results. This year I added a kick-off workshop in which I asked students what they hoped to get out of the course, and what their personal challenges and goals were. I also added a (very light-weight and informal) mid-course reflection that asked students to think about how the course was going and what they were learning.
So, what did I learn?
I expected revolution from day one. I was super excited to blow my students’ minds in the introductory lecture with how they’d determine their own grades. Education as the practice of freedom! Equity! Rainbows and unicorns!
Yeah, not so much. The first few weeks, nothing changed. The course felt very similar to previous years. At week 5 or so, I was feeling decidedly disappointed.
Looking back, my expectations were pretty naïeve, of course. These students are so used to just doing what they’re told, getting the grade, and moving on. It was foolish to think that students can go from paint-by-numbers to full autonomy in a few short weeks.
I also realized that teacher-assigned grades are not the only thing that determines the overall character of a course. (No shit, Sherlock.) The structure I set up, with frequent peer-review assignments and deadlines, including review questions that gave the impression that there were ‘right’ or ‘correct’ ways of doing things, worked against a culture of freedom, exploration, and self-direction. I also have a lot to learn in how I respond to student questions that assume or look for a single right answer. I’m not yet so good at responding to those in a way that ignores or challenges those assumptions.
In other words, students just did the work as usual. And they still asked a lot of questions in the category ‘How do you want us to do it?’ instead of feeling free to decide for themselves. They asked to be told what to do and they did what they were told. Just like in previous years.
Ungrading really is transformative. Even though the students were behaving as usual in those first weeks of the course, for me my relationship with them felt completely different from the get-go. And the way the course ended transformed the experience for students as well.
Throughout the course, I felt a lot better about the way I was coaching students. Previously, I was pushing them to take risks, knowing that it might lead to output that I had to rank lower than it could have been ranked if they took the safe approach. That felt massively unfair. As betrayal, almost. And that feeling was completely gone. Even if the students were still a bit too focused on doing it right, and according to my standards, I was much more free and able to direct their attention to what they were actually learning, and to prioritize learning experiences over polished results in how I advised them.
And then I sat down to read the group self-assessments and individual reflections. Oh, boy. So much good stuff. Responding to a very general prompt, many students pointed out the exact things I would list as the core lessons for this course. And many students described learning experiences that started with apprehension, worry, or expecting not to be interested, moving through initial surprises and a growing sense of skill and comprehension, to outright enthusiasm, pride, and consequences for how they saw their future after graduating from the programme.
And then, I sat down to talk with them about all this. Those two afternoons of final meetings were some of the best conversations I’ve ever had with students. A lot of students mentioned how they rarely think about what they’d learned so effectively either. “Usually, when you hand in a report you hope to never have to see it again,” one student said. “But the way we discussed our end-results with other groups this time, and looking back at what we delivered together, was really fun and valuable.”
I’ve had final meetings after the end of a project in other courses. But those were mostly me explaining and justifying a grade. Those did not feel like conversations between equals. But these were real, open discussions.
In those final meetings I had with student groups about their reflection and self-assessment, many students explained their grade in comparative terms. They were still ranking. A few also asked me – after I’d written down their self-determined grade – whether it matched what I would have given them. They wanted to know wheter the grade was ‘correct’. I told them I have no clue what a ‘correct’ grade is anymore.
Most students didn”t really know how to translate their assessment of what they’d learned and accomplished (or not) into a single number. At the time, I felt a bit guilty for not giving them more guidance. Later I realized that this was the whole reason for not wanting to grade them in the first place: it’s impossible to distill a multidimensional set of qualitative judgements into one unidimensional number.
I don’t know yet whether my conclusion from this is that next time I want to go with a pass/fail model, or that I should accept this cognitive dissonance because the attempt to come up with the ‘right’ grade does seem to serve as an effective means of stimulating evaluative reflection and in-depth comparison with others’ work.
In general the level of grades was half a point higher than in previous years (the average rose from 7.8 to 8.3). That effect was less strong than I’d expected. And in any case, I really don’t care. The students did great work and learned lots. Who cares about the numbers?
But I also got the strong sense that there had been a reversal at the top end. Many of the self-given 8/10s would have been 9/10s if I had done the grading, and most 9/10s would have been 8/10s.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.
Wikipedia
So yeah. That seems to be relevant for self-grading . At least in the context of projects, where it’s not a question of self-assessing correctness on something like exam questions, but an overall, holistic judgement of open-ended work.
One of the bigger ‘Oh, crap!’-moments in this course was when I realized that I was putting students in a difficult situation with self-grading as a group. I don’t think I ever read anything ungrading in group projects, where students have to come up with a grade proposal together as a team. In groups that didn’t get along so well, this led to issues. And even in groups that worked well together, it could lead to friction.
In one case, this led (almost) to a tragic situation with a student who’d had some issues with the group work because of his autism, but also learned a ton by working through those issues (and taught me something in the process, which I wrote about elsewhere), that still wanted to grade himself lower than the other group members because he had ‘contributed less’. Luckily I didn’t need to step in. Another member of his team would’t let him be that unfair to himself. (Students are awesome.)
Earlier, I wrote:
We want our students to learn to evaluate their own work critically. The best way to do this is by practising evaluating their own work. But it is difficult to have students do this honestly when it is ultimately our evaluation that counts.
Me, in a column on ungrading for the Delta, TU Delft’s ‘journalistic platform’, informed by the work of D Royce Sadler.
When we grade our students, we take one of the most important acts of learning away from our students by doing it for them: practicing judgement. Even in its most basic, mistake-laden form (i.e. what I did in this course), ungrading makes students actually responsible for their own learning by putting the final say in their hands.
If, whatever happens during a course, in the end it’s our decisions that count, then what reason do students have to really think about the quality of their work? Why reflect seriously if the outcome of that reflection doesn’t matter, and it’s someone else’s judgement and only that other’s judgement that matters? If someone else is going to tell you what the conclusion of your own reflection should have been?
Ungrading breaks that power structure. It breaks that adversarial relationship. It emancipates. Education as the practice of freedom. Rainbows and unicorns, after all.
Recently I was interviewed – kinda – about what changes I made to my teaching during the whole Covid mess. It was fun (I like to talk), but I left with a nagging feeling that I didn’t really answer properly, that I gave bad advice, and that I had described and discussed my practice dishonestly somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
The questions were about learning activities, tools, student engagement, and social aspects. For each of these four, I was asked the same things: what did you change? What do you intend to keep going forward? What advice would you give other teachers about this?
Thinking back, I realize these questions framed the conversation completely in terms of what I as the teacher did to shape the course. It appears the assumption – mine and/or the interviewers’ – was that I was the sole designer and actor in the situation. As the teacher, I am assumed to have all the power, to set the tasks, to organize the social aspects around the course, and to engage students.
Especially the conversation about ‘student engagement’ bugs me more and more, because it casts students in such a passive role. OK, they might be ‘engaged’ by questions, activities, and a lively teacher, but fundamentally they are talked about as the object of a teacher’s actions, not as subjects themselves.
Whereas one of the things I think I do to ‘engage’ students is to actually be interested in what they have to say and contribute, and to let that guide the session and shape the course. With a course of any size, that can be super difficult, and it can be as small as changing the background music for breaks based on what they say would be nice, but still. Even putting a student-made sticker on the wall behind you when you’re on-camera during lectures is a way of making the space a little bit theirs, instead of just mine.
That feels more like inclusion than it does ‘engagement’.
Teaching is not something you do to students, or with them in the same sense as you draw things with a pencil, but it’s a situation, a relationship you enter into together.
I feel that this way of framing it would have led me to discuss things differently than questions based on a more hierarchical, directive model.
Since the switch to online education 18 months ago, it’s become clear that on-campus lectures used to serve a whole range of functions – not all of which can be served by online classes. We designed around that for our online and half-half courses.
Now that we’re expecting to be able to get back to fully on-campus for all our courses again, if we want to, people are asking: do we want to?
I’m not so sure. At least not for large scale lectures – as I wrote in my Delta column at the start of this year.
In any case, it seems good to explicitly think about what physical lectures do, so that we can think critically about how we want to achieve those things going forward.
OK, here goes:
I’ve been thinking and reading about ‘ungrading’.
I first encountered the argument against numerical grading of students’ performance in Sanjoy Mahajan’s course Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering, which links to Alfie Kohn’s The Case Against Grades. The term ‘ungrading’ was introduced by Jesse Stommel, who comes at the idea informed by the much broader notion of ‘critical pedagogy’. In a recent online presentation, Stommel mentioned the work of Peter Elbow, which led me to Elbow’s essay Ranking, evaluating, and liking: Sorting out three forms of judgment.
Now, I’ve read many arguments against grading — that it decreases intrinsic motivation, that grades are not effective feedback, that they do not express how much was learned, etc. — but Elbow states the case in a way I found striking:
Differences between student work are multi-dimensional.
Grades are one-dimensional.
Therefore, grades are mostly meaningless.
Peter Elbow, paraphrased.
When you put it like that, it’s so obvious! Of course grades feel like bullshit.
In the first part of his essay, Elbow argues that we should rank as little as possible. In the second part, he argues that we should try, instead, to evaluate — to provide feedback on multiple criteria. And he argues that teaching should include ‘evaluation-free-zones’, where students are free to follow their own judgement without worrying about what the teacher wants to see. I think Elbow is correct here, but this second part of the essay was hardly surprising, novel, or uncommonly insightful to me.
But then on to the last part, the part on liking. Elbow writes:
It’s not improvement that leads to liking, but rather liking that leads to improvement.
Elbow, P. (1993). Ranking, evaluating, and liking: Sorting out three forms of judgment. College English, 55(2), 187-206.
I found his discussion of the need for teachers to like their students’ work in order to be able to give good feedback spot-on. He’s talking about teaching and evaluating writing assignments, but the same goes for design projects, in my experience:
If I like a piece, I don’t have to pussyfoot around with my criticism. It’s when I don’t like their writing that I find myself tiptoeing: trying to soften my criticism, trying to find something nice to say–and usually sounding fake, often unclear. I see the same thing with my own writing. If I like it, I can criticize it better. I have faith that there’ll still be something good left, even if I train my full critical guns on it.
This!
I find it easy and natural to be excited and enthusiastic about student work. And I’ve always known that this was a big part of being able to teach well. But I had never quite put it together with my equally great eagerness to critique, to point out problems and possible improvements.
Good teachers see what is only potentially good, they get a kick out of mere possibility–and they encourage it. When I manage to do this, I teach well.
Yes!
Although I think I might need to make this more explicit to students, and to become better at pointing out what exactly I see that is potentially wonderful.
Using a ‘cover sheet’ is a simple and effective tool to enhance feedback on student work, this study claims.
Giving teachers a form to fill out instead of just having them make notes in the margines of the work, makes sure feedback is not limited to comments on what was handed in (feed-back), but includes an appraisal of how it matches up to the final criteria or end-goals (feed-up) and practical advice on how to proceed (feed-forward).
Sadly, the study didn’t test using only this form against the more traditional way of giving feedback. The experimental condition was adding this form to notes on the work, while the control was just those notes alone.
So yeah, extra feedback is better. No shit, Sherlock.
Nonetheless, a form like this seems like a good idea to use as a form of checklist. Because I do think i often forget one or two out of the three kinds of feedback.
(Via ScienceGuide)
It is taken for granted that students taking a course will receive grades. But when we give a course or workshop to colleagues, or when we follow professional training as part of our jobs, nobody even thinks of handing out grades. We’d actively protest, I believe. This would be silly. We’re adults, thank you very much!
We don’t mind being assessed. In fact, many participants in courses, workshops, and training programs welcome feedback, positive and negative (constructive). And we expect to be tested. But we expect the result to simply be pass/fail. Why on Earth should we get grades on a scale of 1-10?
But then, what’s so different with students?!
Some teachers seem to feel that students who don’t pay attention in class, or that don’t show up, are wasting our time.
But it’s we who are spending their time. And if they don’t show up, or do something else, they apparently feel they can get more value out of that time than they see us to be offering.
Now, they might be wrong about this, but odds are that at least they’re acting rationally in according with their current judgement. If they don’t see that they’re wrong, you can’t blame them for acting against their own interests.
