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I recognize my privilege in teaching only two medium-sized classes.
I just finished nearly 45 meetings with my undergraduate students and as always this was the most enlightening part of the semester.
It’s part of my ungrading, active learning, reflection, portfolio, learning community, lots-of-learning-and-not-too-much-stress focus-on-threshold-concepts system. I’ve written about it here and here and here, and in my books Schoolishness and Ungrading.
It’s not ABOUT assessment, but I do assess, and so do the learners.
Following a method that I’ve been using for over a decade, I have a lot of activities and students reflect on the activities—they liked musical chairs and Conversation Analysis, which is really hard and time-consuming—about their overall learning and what grade they suggest they have earned. We meet midsemester for five minutes (we’ll do it again at the end) and they write responses to questions I pose to them, asking them to review what we have learned as well as their own work (projects, questions, class leading, etc).
It’s a holistic grade because in my courses there are not specific tiny little gotcha pieces of information that I’m concerned about them having, but rather global threshold concepts. If they have those, then they have learned. I know it sounds fuzzy to some of you, but it is truly the meaningful part of the semester. It’s an exhausting stretch and also exhilarating.
They talk about their insights, changed ways of seeing the world, activities we’ve done, things they want to improve on, now that they know more. They give me suggestions, and tell me things I wouldn’t otherwise have learned: One person had made a puzzle for her UnEssay and her boyfriend framed it. Several people shared the transcript of a conversation with the participants whose permission they had obtained, once they analyzed it.
Sometimes they say things like “I love this class!”
Sometimes I asked them about the ungraded nature of the course, and sometimes they spontaneously brought it up.
They inevitably contrasted it with the majority of their other courses which are conventional, where every single thing is evaluated and rewarded, everything is threatened, and in many students’ experiences there are also curves, so they are in competition with their classmates.
One of the words I’ve become completely obsessed about is the word actually. Actually introduces information that contradicts what the speaker assumes of your expectations. It’s often very cute when toddlers start to use the word actually, to correct something that someone has erroneously said, as they’ve heard others around them do.
When my college students in our meetings use it, it often sounds like this (most are verbatim; I wrote them as we spoke):
“Actually I’m learning a lot.”
“Actually I’m enjoying coming to class.”
“‘Actually I’m more motivated for this than I am for my classes with tests.”
“Actually I can understand the reading because the examples are actually helpful.”
“I can actually try to learn.”
“I actually try to take something from the work to apply to everyday life.”
The actually is as if to say you don’t expect to learn in a class without strict grading policies, but actually you learn more. Or I am actually learning for the first time. Or I am actually remembering the material.
Listen for it.
One student told me they usually post their work in our LMS, Canvas, and pray for a good grade, but never see it again, nor do they want to.
In my classes students help each other brainstorm, revise, workshop their projects. They look at each other’s when they’re done, and give appreciative feedback plus suggestions.
One of my students this semester wrote that the class is so cooperative that it feels more like a club than a class, a place you would choose to go and learn with others.
I could do worse than that, couldn’t I?
One student and I talked at some length about AI (some of the meetings got a little elongated; I do schedule some breaks between them, so I can catch up), and why I was making some of the pedagogical choices I was, such as having them write in class rather than producing essays at home. I explained that it was partially to prevent students feeling the need to resort to AI.
And we started to talk about the fact that AI is now being used in all kinds of ways, such as glasses that can serve as transmitters for information that is being conveyed by a bot, even if you are taking a test in a locked down room on a computer.
He was aware of the pitfalls, such as cognitive offloading, which he mentioned, and other loss of real learning.
And he raised the issue of “intelligent” pens where you can essentially scan the material while writing and it can give you the answers.
He also told me of students who keep Claude or Chat open in class, so they can listen to the class and then suggest something that you can say for your participation points.
He said to me, “I feel like we’ve lost the plot.” (I asked his permission to quote directly.)
The moral of the story is that it is really hard to create structures that invite students to develop confidence in their learning, to create conditions that help them find motivation that matters to them, to create communities of cooperative learning (though not all the time).
But it is possible.
As I head off into our welcome Fall Break, I feel that learning has happened; students have reflected; we have had fun; and more is to come!
