Today is Thursday, and classes start Monday morning. That gives me four days, theoretically, but I have a family obligation this weekend, so really I have today. I have been thinking about my classes for a while, of course, and in the past several weeks, I have recorded podcasts with quite a number of colleagues throughout the country, and I have given several talks in person and virtually, and with each one I say something about the semester.
Can I do everything I recommend?
Substack reminded me that a year ago I wrote a kind of manifesto about preparing for teaching, “A Manifesto for Teaching in 2025: A Human-Centered World That Could Be.”
Did I live up to those lofty goals?
Do I have the same ones a year later?
I thought it would be helpful for me, and perhaps for some of you, if I returned to that manifesto and updated it with thoughts about this coming semester. This year, 2026, seems to be the year of reckoning with higher education, in terms of grading, reading, writing, and generative AI. Politics are, of course, the eternal substratum, and they rise and fall to consciousness, hourly or daily, but this post will not primarily concern politics or economics.
I seem to be known for my work on grading and alternative assessment and what I have tended to call ungrading, and cannot summarize everything here. But just in the last several months, national and indeed international attention has focused on two specific prominent universities contrasting plans for how to address desperate problems in grading, and their role in education. I’ve written about both of them: “Oh Harvard. Limiting A’s Is Not It: Grade Inflation, Deflation, and Obsession” in May 2026 and “The Audacity of Piloting a ‘Grade Covering’ Process: Hail to the University of Michigan” just last week.
Harvard University has decided to double down on limiting high grades, emphasizing their need for sorting students at all times, and assuming that a scarcity of high grades, meaning A’s, will motivate their already high achieving students to become excellent. This in turn, they assume, will ensure the value of the brand of a Harvard A. They have not really addressed the possibility that this will lead to an increase in cheating and sabotage of classmates.
In contrast, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), at the University of Michigan, has announced their plan to implement a pilot program in fall of 2026 that will allow students and teachers to proceed as usual with assessment in the classes, but in their transcripts, for that one semester, the students will see only a “pass” or a “no credit” grade recorded. They argue that this will free students who have spent their entire childhood obsessing about grades to take risks and to explore some of the riches of their abundant course offerings, perhaps to try something difficult without fear of failure. And failure, in the context of a selective university like this, means anything lower than perfection.
Both of these experiments have attracted inordinate attention, including an editorial in the Dallas Morning News, applauding the attention paid to experiments with regard to assessment, and even mentioning ungrading as one of the options linked in some Texas universities, but in the end, they come down to the fact that they believe that grades must certify excellence, and that there is some objective meaning to precise grades, which will remain.
I will not rehash everything that I have written and said everywhere, except to say that this semester, like all semesters for the last decade, I will emphasize to my students that I am here to help them discover motivation, and that we will emphasize feedback, and that risks will not be penalized, and that I will have conversations with them about their learning that will result in their suggesting grade for the course, accompanied by their reasoning. Essentially, my grading approach has not changed.
In contrast, my approach to reading is being modified. I was concerned last year about the use of generative AI for writing, but this year I have become concerned about it for reading as well. Many students use it constantly to summarize everything they read, which suggests a certain approach to reading, an extractive approach, which is not generally what I want students to experience. I am still grappling with this even four days before the semester begins.
Last year in all of my classes, there were times that we read aloud from a text that I really wanted them to experience. Sometimes they had the text on their own, whether in print or digitally, and sometimes I passed a physical book around the room. For the first few minutes, everybody paid attention, but if it got to be too long, everybody zoned out, especially when the readers were not compelling.
I know colleagues who complain that students are not skilled at reading aloud, but my firm belief is that this means we should do more of it if it’s something we value. If students appear in our courses without skills that we want them to have, then it is up to us, the teachers, to help them develop the skills, not merely to blame them for prior deficits nor to complain about “kids these days.” If they have not been asked to read long passages aloud, nor to pay attention to their classmates, and if this is something that we find essential, then we must make time for this. That of course means that there will be less time for other things.
Students report to me that in many classes there are no books and there’s little assigned reading, merely case studies and lecture notes. This is not a skill that some have exercised since perhaps their first general-education courses.
I have learned that it is helpful for me to scaffold what is to be done with the reading, which may include drawing conclusions from sections of a long piece and then abstracting up a level to draw more general conclusions. For many years already, I have had students take notes in class about certain key readings, for instance, the important but long and detailed article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The weirdest people in the world?” about the dangers of generalizing about humans from research conducted on subjects in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Lately some students have used AI to summarize it and they have not actually learned anything in the process.
So this is something that I need to puzzle through. Producing a summary of something you haven’t read defeats the purpose. This is where my grading policy should reassure students, but they come already trained to focus on producing whatever product is asked of them. Many colleagues around the country have spoken about the need to focus on process rather than product, but this is a too-blunt distinction.
I ask students to present their section to their classmates; at least during the moments of presentation, they are necessarily thinking about it.
(Annotation has been presented as a solution, but agentic AI can do the annotation, I believe.)
Last year I worked hard to reassure my students that their own work would be welcome, and that informal writing—for instance, jotting notes in a journal or writing thoughts with bullet points—would be fine. I often ask students to reflect on their own learning. Last year one student had clearly asked one of the chatbots to write or edit for them.
This year I am including a statement against the use of Generative AI. Last year I had such a statement available, with links and resources, and hoped to persuade the students. This year I’m being a little more heavy-handed. I am going to process this with them, using all the analogies I can find about the goal being “building muscles” and the counterproductive use of machines to do the lifting for them. What I hope to produce is a change in thought; writing is only evidence of that, and it contributes to it.
I have purchased cheap notebooks for all the students in my classes and will encourage them to use them for ethnographic observations, entrance and exit tickets, notes, and more. Students with accommodations are free to let me know. I am torn between what we know about Universal Design for Learning and keeping things as analog as possible. It probably helps that in no classes are there primarily lectures on which students have to take notes, and there are no exams. The notes are about what strikes them as useful and interesting.
My campus is an almost fully residential campus, and in fact in the last several years, the campus implemented a policy requiring on-campus residence for at least three years. A cynic might argue that finances have something to do with this, but the reason given is that the administration wants students to benefit from interacting regularly. Few of my students are older than conventional, college age, and almost none have responsibility, caring for children or parents or others. Financial aid is generous. This contrasts with many campuses everywhere, so let me preface this section by acknowledging my students’ privilege.
I am aware that at many campuses attendance is a huge challenge, and it is an equity issue as well, in the sense that students with real obligations should not be punished for their inability to attend class.
At my campus, in the last several years, many colleagues have become frustrated with the increased number of excused absences that our students present to us. It has been a topic in the Faculty Senate. One year, I had three golfers who missed seven Mondays in a row, all excused. I spoke with one and I asked about this. He said that most of the golfers that they played against over the weekend were taking classes online, so they didn’t have to attend class. I had fencers who were qualifying for the Olympics and traveled internationally many times during the semester. I applaud their incredible commitment. I lament their frequent absences.
There are many conventional classes, classes that I would call particularly schoolish, which are traditional lecture-and-test, and the lecture notes or slides may be posted, and attendance in courses like this is often seen as optional. Some faculty try to motivate students’ attendance through fear and policies, threatening punishment or lowered grades.
The challenge is that we know that active learning promotes better learning, and this is enhanced by physical co-presence in a community of learners. I work extremely hard to establish such a sense of community in my classes. So when athletes miss up to eight or ten class periods, excused or not, they miss a lot of the learning. Other students may miss class for interviews, which are often excused, or conferences or other more academic or professional opportunities.
I have students who have health problems and, whether physical or mental health, and they too have many excused absences.
In accordance with my own philosophy of treating students as adults who make decisions and who are full human beings, I have not in the last few years demanded proof of excused absences, but students usually provide them anyway because this is standard practice.
But this year, I am going to begin the first day by stating that if they know that they will be missing a lot of class, perhaps a different course would be more appropriate for them. It has become increasingly difficult to teach with so many absent students, who may have a role in a small group.
Like everybody, I am easily distracted by all of the options in our devices. In one class last semester, in addition to bringing in physical notebooks for the students, and in all classes, I asked for a no-device policy, unless we were using devices for specific reasons, which was actually very common as well. (I actually love tech and use a lot of interactive activities such as polls and collective writing and collective slide production.) This semester, I put it on my syllabi.
This challenges my desire to co-create norms with the students. But I don’t have time to do everything I want and still get to some of the course content, reduced though it may be.
I know that if we begin the first day and establish norms of phone checking, and the like, it will be harder to break the habit later. One thing that has become common is that students say that they are in other courses that are device-free, so they are not resistant. Last semester in one class I had a student who kept checking their phone anyway, but they had not been there the first few days of class and they were absent much of the time, so the community norms never really shaped their activity.
As much as possible I hope to find ways for students to move around the room and the campus, to switch tables and notice the classroom from a different perspective, to pay attention to their interactions. It helps that my classes focus on communication and on education. We will become meta-analysts.
But even more than last fall, I am aware of all the ways that education—that beautiful endeavor to which I have devoted my life—is imperilled and every small classroom decision may make a tiny difference in furthering our humanity, which is to say our curiosity and commitment to understanding the great mysteries of the universe. Or we can throw up our hands and give it over to the bots.
The choice is easy for me. The enacting is hard.
