Tilting against Grades

I feel as if I am tilting against windmills. It's a little late in life to be attacking these sort of things, but I can't stop. I didn't mean to get into a WPA-list conversation about grades again, but when a friend told me about Quinnipiac's first-year writing policy of no-grade/final portfolio, I wondered how many other schools had managed to reimagine education.

Here are the colleges that have responded to my question of whether they have a no-grade/pass-fail/final portfolio option: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Kingsborough CC, CUNY; New College of Florida; Evergreen College; University of Maine. 

The general response that I get when I suggest going to non-graded writing instruction is 1. we can't do it because the students are so grade conscious; 2. we are in an institution governed by grades; 3. students will slack off if we don't motivate them by grades.

I am not convinced by the argument that because everyone else is doing it, that’s what we have to do. For academics who prioritize critical thinking, I should think that argument would fall flat on its face. 

I think many teachers know: teachers like to respond to student writing if they are seriously responding, talking back to the students. This is writing as communication. But they do not like/even hate grading. That's why teachers procrastinate with that stack of papers.

Teachers know (and research is clear about this): students look at the grade. If it's an A, they'll read the comments; otherwise, they either ignore the comments or read them in order to fight back. These are not productive learning discussions.

Teachers complain about students who come to them and ask, but what can I do to get an A--the what-do-you-want syndrome. Like who's at fault here?

And finally, we have the argument about motivation--that if we don't motivate them by grades (presumably with high standards, leading to raising-the-bar rhetoric), they won't work on their writing. 

Left out of the grade-motivation argument is how are we teaching writing? Let me assume (and my experience and research confirms this) that most students really like to write--and they want to improve their writing. But some of the ways in which we try to teach writing (the we-know-what’s-good-for-you-strategy); well, if I were a student in a pass/fail course, I would also try to skate as close to the nether edge as I could (a response to Ed's and Val's post). Some of the stuff we try to teach students is pure junk and they know it.

Our research at Drexel is very clear: half of the students enter our first-year classes disliking, sometimes hating writing. Nearly all of them began pre-school and kindergarten enjoying scribbling/writing. As teachers, we have killed that pleasure in writing--the early death usually beginning around 5th grade often in the form of the five-paragraph essay. Our challenge is to bring back their early pleasure in writing. If you're not doing that, what are you doing? 

Anyone interested in this conversation should consider Tagg’s (the learning paradigm) distinction between surface and deep learning, intrinsic or extrinsic motivation or perhaps view Ken Robinson’s TED talk on creativity. Also Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds—which might explain our profession’s inability to unhook itself from grades, even though some teachers know the pleasure of responding to student writing without reducing their responses to a GRADE.

Naturalizing Writing—The Happiest Place on Earth

Wonderful CWPA 2015 conference at Boise. Thanks to all who worked to bring this off in the beautiful town of Boise. I want to come back. To live.

I thought about many issues while attending sessions, listening to the speakers, and talking with old and new friends. I will try to focus on one.

I wandered into a session entitled “The Wonderful World of Administration: Improving Our Programs Using Tools from the Happiest Place on Earth.” I’m slow, but after a while, I caught on. I leaned over to whisper to my friend  sitting next to me, “Do you think I’m the only person in this room who didn’t know where the happiest place on earth is?”

Beth nodded and said, “Probably.”

Since I am neither a Writing Center person nor a Disneyphile, I was misplaced in this session—as I may be displaced in life; nevertheless, I got something out of this session. In her presentation, Nicole Caswell said an instruction to Disney hosts is “Make sure each visitor leaves Disney World happy. How can we make sure that every student leaves the Writing Center happy?” she asked. She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t respond, but I thought: Write their papers for them.

I also thought, the happiness exit would be a good credo for our writing classes. We should as writing teachers have as one of our primary objectives students should leave our class happy—our class, not our course.

There was a lot of talk in the conference about transfer. Underneath the question of transfer lie the overt and covert purposes of required writing courses (the convert ones are complicated, involving money and the maintenance of social categories).

Purposes invite objectives. In several sessions, I listened to what teachers hoped would be the take-away for students; and here’s what I took away from these discussions: as a field, we may be going over a cliff by complicating the natural act of writing, of letting words flow from our fingers because we have something we want to say about something we care about to people we hope are listening and may have something to say back--the way I am writing here, on a plane heading out of Boise, and thinking about what kind of student writing I love to read, the kind that makes them and me happy when they leave the class.

Walking Through the Door

Below is an essay assignment I am posting for my class next week. It's a prelude to the next writing task, which will be to write an essay to teachers, telling them what does and doesn't seem to work with teaching/learning writing.
============================

Walking through the Door

This essay will be in part a preparation for our last essay, which will be directed to teachers at Drexel (and really, a wider audience, because with your permission, I may link teachers around the country to what you tell them—I have a blog about teaching writing, and I’ll put your essays up there).

Here’s my thesis--and I don’t think it’s a half-bad one: education works when students enjoy learning about something. It doesn’t work when students don’t enjoy learning. Actually, these claims seem obvious—but I’ll bet there are many professors who would argue with me on this. But one of the things we want to do as educators is encourage students to be self-directed learners such that learning is a life-long project.  Self-Directed learning is in fact one of the twelve Drexel Student Learning Priorities  (aside—one wonders why 12?).  It’s one of the two we have adopted for our writing program.  In general, one might suspect that each of you has decided on a major because you have learned how to enjoy the activities associated with that major. (I know there might be other reasons as well.)

Since I am very interested in writing and would like writing to be a part of your lives, I’m going to make another claim—which I know I have already made in class: if any writing task assigned to you in any course (including mine) makes you have an uncomfortable experience with writing, then you will be inclined to have a bad association with writing; consequently, you will have learned the wrong thing about writing. This is just me. As I said, a lot of people disagree with me. But they’re wrong (joke--maybe).

Ok, let’s get to a topic we can write about. I would be very interested in your experience so far at Drexel. But I’m interested in a bit more than your experiences in courses. I’m interested in how this part of your life is different (I’m thinking of Annelise’s essay here, the essence of which that the childhood part of her is over and now there is that “adult” (and her use of scare quotes was appropriate, given how many of us act as “adults”) life stretching in front of her—and this year might be thought of as walking through the door.

So maybe you can spend a couple of hours telling us (in writing) what it’s been like, walking through the door. It will be fun for the rest of us to read if you can give us some specific issues and maybe scenes, things that happened and made you think about things, about life, about who you are, about what you’re doing (again, Annelise’s essay is a great start in this kind of thinking because she has described for us her changing beliefs—I know I really didn’t do it justice in class today).

As you describe your journey in this first year, it would be great if you would include something about your experiences in your various classes.  I (and a lot of other people) would really like to know about the kind of learning experiences you are enjoying and the ones you’re not. I’m good friends with an associate vice provost here who is very interested in retention issues. I know that I would like to share your essays about walking through the door with her—I’ll bet she’ll learn something by what you write.