Writers first, then students
For teachers who feel the sting of grading, when no grades fit. For students who may study with me or have spent time in class with me.
Read time: about 6 minutes. This week: A review of how writing assignments worked in my “ungraded” 2021 fall seminar, following up the topic of my “Learning and ‘sorting’ ” post in January. I’m using the approach again this fall, with some modifications. Next week: A consideration of the white shirt, not exactly for fashionistas but a consideration of garb in the present day.
For the most part, the so-called college term paper fits one circumstance — its own. As a writing skill, proficiency in academic writing is rather limited — a rhetorical echo chamber in some ways — though the term paper can help some students develop more generalized writing skill. Academic prose is, for some students’ purposes, a skill that’s necessary to get through college, and for many it’s a skill not frequently called upon in their college careers (think some engineering and science majors) or that has fairly low requirements.
But writing can also be a boon to learning, calling upon mindful engagement, intellectual probing and searching, and re-expression and application of ideas. It’s far too valuable a tool to leave unsharpened and ill-used in education. Ranking and “grading” work against using writing for learning, or for that matter conducting an interesting class.
Writing connects in many ways
My 2021 fall class was a seminar, and that kind of course places demands on students that lecture-format classes don’t. Seminars require interaction and exchange, prepared and thoughtfully digested readings and other “texts” like videos, podcasts, or even music. Students accept a completely different role in a seminar than they do in a large lecture course. Though a seminar may include debate, its lifeblood is discussion — and there is a difference between debate and discussion — even though passions flare in both kinds of interaction.
I’ve used writing within the seminar context to support the preparation, interactions, and discussion. The course has been writing intensive, and it isn’t unusual for the first-year undergraduates in the class to write about 10,000 words in the assignments that run through the semester. That’s about thirty-five to forty double-spaced pages of prose.
It doesn’t happen all at once, of course. There are two types of writing assignments I used in the course.
The term paper and its “scaffolded” predecessors. Students did write a paper with all the “scholarly apparatus” and explored a topic relating to the course in depth. The paper was “scaffolded” — progressively linked with other assignments — making the “final” product a result of an incremental, ever deepening exploration. Early in the semester, students trial-ballooned their topics in brief oral presentations and Q&A sessions. They could redefine their topic based on response, some chose to change topics entirely. They completed drafts for peer review and could opt for a draft review by me. Unlike many term papers in college that are rushed efforts cooked up at the last minute, this one progressed from the first weeks of the semester. The advantages, of course, are matters of pressure for students, but also the pace allows for more accommodation of students who may have special needs to succeed. In their first semester in college, many students need some time to orient and become productive in their new environment.
The “Almost Weekly Letter.” I have not been happy to settle for training prose muscles with a single term-paper-ish exercise. Writing well means discerning and responding to new rhetorical situations, and that takes practice that many students don’t get in high school. We don’t write formulaic term papers to our friends in, say, the traditional “Christmas letter” or the friendly email. We explore other voices and modes of expression, and some of us even resort to verse! Odd as it may feel to us today, this flexibility and spirit of exploration in expression historically was close to the heart of the “essay,” but the formulaic term-paper and “five-paragraph essay” have squeezed the life out of the form, or at least the modern definition of the essay.
I opted for a type of “unessay”: weekly “letters.” Well, not exactly weekly, since I avoided assigning letters when I knew that students would have pressing commitments or other worries (like calculus or chemistry mid-terms) or when I thought it would be best for them to focus on other projects for the course. Hence, the assignment became “almost weekly.” As unessays, they were actually quite literally prosaic. Some teachers have much broader, though also very rigorous, boundaries for unessay work.
Of course, Almost Weekly Letter also implies a time frame for completion. I released topics for letters on Sundays around midnight, and students turned them in by Friday at midnight the same week. The targeted length was “about 500 words” — one single-spaced page — though many students regularly exceeded the word count. The schedule was necessary, since I read and responded to each letter individually over the weekend. Writers had a reader’s response in hand by the time they saw the next prompt for an “Almost Weekly Letter.” This schedule may offend others who practice “ungrading,” but I did include some flexibility. Students could opt out and make the letter up at the end of the semester with an optional assignment.
The tone, form, and style of the letter, as the name implies, was informal though not “friendly.” (I am not my students’ friend, after all.) Each week’s prompt usually related to the week’s topics, though other prompts qualified or even countered topics and views that we discussed in class. In a sense, the letters formed a “scaffold” for the discussion in the seminar, and I often heard echoes of the letters in class. One letter asked for a personal report about what students felt they had excelled at or had trouble with. Every letter included a brief consideration of the student’s own progress in the course and asked students to offer a question that might have arisen in mind but that wasn’t raised in class.
Whaddabout grades?
None of these writing assignments got as “A-F” grade; feedback was oral or written and came from fellow students as well as from me. If an assignment was unsatisfactory, students could redo; I set the guideposts and I invited many students to redo. Students often got resources and references from each other, too.
I hope that “assessment” ended up being formative rather than summative, to use terms that distinguish between assessment designed to help people learn (formative) and assessment that judges an outcome, a “summing up,” often with criteria that forms the basis of the judgment (summative).
Course grades, like them or not, come in the end. Attaching final grades to the course is actually no one’s favorite thing, but it’s an institutional requirement. I’ve adapted other’s frameworks and present grades not as something that I assign but that students choose and earn. Grades relate to effort, and I am indebted to Paul Fyfe (NC State) and others in framing my final grading approach. In a nutshell, effort is greater than grades (as they are traditionally assigned by teachers). Although there were certain assignments and activities that were required to successfully complete the course, students could do enough to choose a “B” as final grade (or a “C”).
Using writing formatively increases the depth of engagement in the seminar, too, since seminar discussion often defies summation or final attainment of a specific end. In our thinking, we are a certain kind of ruminant, and the churn of prose — drafting, reading, evaluating, discarding, reviewing — strengthens our thought. That personal activity fits with shared seminar discussion, too, where everyone engages and provides views that may accord with others’ or not. Discussion builds, qualifies, elaborates, and creates an intellectual intimacy with ideas and with other people in the class.
Writing can do the same, when its products assume a true relationship between reader and writer — not the kind of “relationship” that a graded assessment can support. By their nature, graded, summative assessments tend to impose a relationship of writer to a set of criteria, imagined or not. Not to another mind, linked by words, exploring ideas together.
When writers engage readers and vice versa, they also become students. That is the proper progression: engagement with thinking leads to attentive eagerness, which after all is a root of the word student.
Tags: ungrading, writing, essay, term-paper, thinking, seminar, teaching, learning
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Feedback is ignored, especially if you use grades: Mensink, Paul J., and Karen King. “Student Access of Online Feedback Is Modified by the Availability of Assessment Marks, Gender and Academic Performance.” British Journal of Educational Technology 51, no. 1 (2020): 10–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12752. Interesting use of data mining to tease out the ways that people interact with assessment.
A related tweet with interesting thread:
Getting around modern limitations of the “essay”: Cordell, Ryan. “The Unessay.” Course syllabus. Technologies of Text, Spring 2018. https://s18tot.ryancordell.org/assignments/unessay/. Cordell is quite an inventive and energetic teacher.
Fyfe, Paul. “Data and the Human.” Humanities Commons [Repository], 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/0h18-5p41.
What I’ve felt for a long, long time — academics need to speak to the public: Moi, Toril, and Jessica Swoboda. “Criticism in Public: An Interview with Toril Moi.” The Point Magazine, February 8, 2022. https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/the-speaking-subject/. Moi is on the faculty at Duke.
I liked this essay on Montaigne’s Essays: Sharpe, Matthew. “Guide to the Classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays.” The Conversation. Accessed April 13, 2022. http://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-michel-de-montaignes-essays-63508.
Aristotelean v. Platonic drink mixing? Lots on mixing, not so much on philosophy, but that’s what happens when you walk into a bar, even with ancient philosophers. H/T my friend @dmlond. Wondrich, David. “Plato & Aristotle Walk into a Bar.” The Daily Beast, August 24, 2019, sec. Half-full. https://www.thedailybeast.com/plato-and-aristotle-walk-into-a-bar-a-meditation-on-the-daiquiri.
H/T to @MichaelCrouser whose dad devised this thirty-second spot and enlisted young Crouser to polish up the flakes. A hidden tribute to family and long-ago friendship: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Commercial (1972), 1972.
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