In May 2025, I was part of a delightful plenary session at UM’s Provost’s Seminar on Teaching. The Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Angela Dillard, had sent potential questions out in advance. For good-sense reasons of timing, she ended up omitting my favorite question. (The whole event was superbly orchestrated by excellent pedagogues.) But Vice Provost Dillard and Matthew Kaplan, executive director of UM’s legendary CRLT, offered to publish my thoughts about the question. They published it here.
“If I gave you a magic wand, what opportunities would you wish for all of us to take advantage of?”
I love this question! It is not a tinkering-around-the-edges question, but a dream-big question.
Our educational missions promise the moon.
My ideal is that the experiences are all meaningful, joyful, and authentic, resulting in deep, lasting, transformative, and transferable learning (and knowledge creation), and the environment is healthy in all ways for everyone involved.
Students emerge eager, confident, independent, and cooperative learners, ready for a lifetime of ongoing learning in an ever-changing society.
But most people reading this would probably agree that school, whether K12 or higher ed, is not entirely producing this.
To approach the ideal, we need to get rid of the game of school and the grading game, and instead make time and space for discovery, wonder, and even mistakes.
Some of it is possible, right now, right here, and some would require deep transformation in classes, schools, and society itself.
So I would like to emphasize the idealistic. I know it’s tempting to be cynical. But the more I try to nurture my own students’ idealistic side, and nurture their long-buried-in-school curiosity, the happier I am, the more stress-free-but-engaged they report themselves, and the more successful their learning has been.
My ideal is that the experiences are all meaningful, joyful, and authentic, resulting in deep, lasting, transformative, and transferable learning (and knowledge creation), and the environment is healthy in all ways for everyone involved.
Students emerge eager, confident, independent, and cooperative learners, ready for a lifetime of ongoing learning in an ever-changing society.
Students who enter highly selective universities arrive already shaped by their prior experiences, from the pressured situation middle-class students have experienced all their lives, in addition to the more generalized exam and test pressure that is a feature of the contemporary world with a zero-sum approach to economic success, under the name of both “democracy” and “meritocracy.”
One of the factors influencing this is the limitation on spots in highly coveted, high-prestige guarantee-a-successful-life universities. In the US the most prestigious institutions tend to be older private universities and the Ivy-like comprehensive public universities such as the University of Michigan. How perfect does a student have to be to be accepted into Cal Tech, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, or Stanford, all with 4 percent acceptance rates in 2025?
This scarcity has shaped our students even before we meet them, and they are generally excellent at the game of school and the grading game, which they expect to continue.
But we can do things differently.
It is in the academic realm of higher education where I am focusing my magic wand today, creating entirely different types of curriculum, motivation, pedagogy, activities, assessment, and relationships, not a game of school or grades.
It is essential to think about four interrelated dimensions, all of which have been extensively written about and have deep research and many practical suggestions going back a hundred years at least, to well-known education thinkers such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and fifty years, to Ivan Illich, John Holt, and Paulo Freire, and in the last thirty years to people like Alfie Kohn: 1) the curriculum and content, 2) motivation, 3) pedagogy, activities, and relationships, and 4) assessment.
Curriculum and Content
Paulo Freire described the “banking” method of stuffing students’ heads full of uninteresting information. It might have made sense to do this in medieval times when books and knowledge were scarce, where lecturing as the default method was reasonable. Of course, students still need some information without looking it up, but all the research shows that we should not begin there. One thing we know which is very doable now, at least in some situations, is that “covering the content” is not the optimal approach, but rather beginning with desired results or “backward design” [and place the hotlink here], which ideally include not only understanding the specific material but also developing wonder and questions and curiosity.
When we race through a long list of material that is largely factual and easily forgotten, the educational gains are often fleeting. It is far better to go in depth into fewer topics.
Flipping the motivation
The contrast between “extrinsic” motivation and “intrinsic” motivation is often drawn starkly, but to the extent that extrinsic motives are seen as ends in themselves—grades, points, credits, credentials—they at the least distract from a focus on learning, or what Deci and Ryan so helpfully point out as the three pillars of self-determination: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
All classes can include and draw more attention to meaningful learning, to authentic curiosity, to the fascination and importance of learning in the world, though not by lecturing about it, but rather by creating experiences in which students can themselves experience it, for example, by having students experience the practice of the discipline. Following the model of Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative, instructors can begin with hands-on work that mirrors what scientists actually do.
Pedagogy, Activities, and Relationships
Active learning, inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, and cooperative relationships have all been shown to contribute enormously to both greater learning and a sense of authentic engagement than do conventional lecture courses. At the heart of these approaches is the principle that all learners engage in the activities of learning. This is well studied, and models are available everywhere: encouraging students to engage with curiosity, “flipping the classroom,” rethinking “time for telling,” rejecting the “banking model,” and instead focusing on constructivism. In this model, teachers are mentors, coaches, and facilitators.
Under this same principle, we might also include the kinds of activities expected of students to demonstrate—or as we often expect, to “prove”—their learning. There are countless examples of alternatives to tests and conventional essays: projects, unessays, presentations, and even actual work in the world. These sorts of activities are not only far more engaging for students, but they also lead to less “gaming the system,” they are more interesting for faculty, and—most importantly—they are themselves learning experiences rather than merely after-the-fact proofs of learning. We can do this; in fact, people are doing it everywhere all the time. It may be slightly less convenient to aggregate and to produce metrics, but if our goal is authentic evidence, then a portfolio would be far more useful than a reduced metric.
Assessment and Feedback
The final necessary but not sufficient dimension of the magical world created by my wand involves assessment.
On its own, high-stakes testing has harmful effects such as reducing time for more enriching but less educative activities, creating anxiety among students, teachers, parents, and administrators. They also largely replicate the amount of prior advantage. Even the New York Regents’ Exam, standard for all students since the mid-1800s, is being phased out and replaced by Portrait of a Graduate
Further, these foci also shape learning. Textbooks contain only excerpts of longer works, which students are trained to extract for tests. Reading becomes misery—boring, stressful, consequential work with purely extrinsic rewards. (Many college faculty have been complaining that “students can’t read anymore.” I’m writing a longer piece on that.) What is often lost in this model is curiosity: the focus on open exploration and the luxury of time, rather than scrambling for quick answers to alienated questions. In settings where testing looms so large, it is no surprise that genuine curiosity is neither cultivated nor rewarded.
Obviously I would get rid of oversimplification of metrics and assessment of learning, which lead inexorably to the grading game. Learning must be assessed to make sure it continues and is done well, but there are countless ways to assess it, from watching students’ faces to talking with them to having them do collective anonymous surveys.
I would shift the focus instead to assessment-for-learning, in other words, to assessment in the service of learning. For assessment to matter, learning must be meaningful, and that in turn makes students motivated to seek and use feedback. This kind of approach embraces revision, learning from mistakes, and trying again, all parts of the natural learning process that should not be penalized.
Another major change, then, lies in alternative assessment: indicating student learning not by a simplistic metric such as a number or a letter, but through a portfolio that demonstrates what students can do. Models already exist, such as the Mastery Transcript or the kinds of portfolios common in the arts, where evidence of growth and accomplishment is collected over time. For technical fields, this might also include skill-specific markers like digital badges. Portfolios and similar approaches do more than certify achievement; they provide authentic, holistic evidence of what students have learned to and are able to do.
Within that shift, one principle is clear: no grading on a curve. Curved grading is illogical and demotivating, and science educators have gone so far as to call it “malpractice.” If everyone learns well, they should all be recognized for their learning. If that makes it more difficult to sort them, then so be it.
Focus on assessment-for-learning rather than on sorting would also require a shift in responsibility, moving away from universities functioning primarily to provide sorting for the next gatekeepers—employers, graduate schools—and toward separating the educative and ranking functions. The good news is that in many settings, assessment is being reconsidered at a scale beyond that of the single instructor or single course.
I have been, in small ways, trying to use my privilege to aim for this magical world, both through my own courses and through my writing and speaking, where I also bear witness to magnificent examples of great learning.
As a white tenured professor at a well-resourced university, I am more able to take risks than many colleagues elsewhere. I push pretty far to use my freedom and privilege: no grades until the end, projects, public-facing writing, self-directed learning, teams, responsibility, self-assessment, and reflection. My students report that they love learning in my classes, and indeed learn for themselves for the first time.
But for such approaches to become widespread, certain prior conditions must be met. First, faculty employment itself must be structured in ways that treat all faculty with dignity, ensuring manageable workloads along with livable wages and benefits. Without these conditions, the risk-taking and experimentation that meaningful teaching requires remain out of reach for many instructors.
Second, faculty evaluation must also be rethought. Simplistic Student Evaluations of Teaching should be abandoned, since they are known to contain biases related to gender, disability, race, nationality, and more. Moreover, they tend to reward faculty who teach in conventional, schoolish ways, because those approaches feel more aligned with the familiar game of school and therefore more likely to guarantee students a good grade. Truly supporting authentic learning requires evaluating faculty in ways that recognize support for diverse student growth rather than compliance with outdated norms.
Clearly this is not a set of practical improvements that could be implemented overnight. But each of these dreams exists somewhere. Sometimes in smaller pockets, several of them may be found together.
Dreams may not get us to where we’re going, but without even imagining a better version, we will certainly not get anywhere different.
I invite you to share your dream of what you would do with a magic wand. It might be helpful to begin with these questions:
1) What is the ideal situation you would wish for?
2) What are the problems we are trying to solve?
3) What are the solutions others have already discovered?
4) What might you give a try, even without that wand?
