A Sense of Doubt blog post #2114 - Labor Based Grading - is it working?
THE LBG SPIEL
you can do this!
You are all quality humans with good skills and devote yourself
to hard work and learning.
you can do this!
GROWTH and LEARNING in THE
LABOR BASED GRADING UNIVERSE
I am concerned that the way I have interpreted the grading contract has just set up another type of grading system with only two grades rather than eleven.
THE HOME STUDIO AND THE CAKE
Think back to the original metaphor of the home studio. We compared LBG method to taking a cake baking workshop in someone’s home kitchen. You wouldn’t be graded on your cake. If you made a cake, then it’s a cake: complete and met requirements. A cake is a cake. Though cakes are never perfect, are they? So, to learn the baking arts, you would be given advice for improvement, and you would strive to make a better cake next time. You learn, you grow...It’s like that Alanis Morissette song (“You Learn”).
But when is a cake, not a cake?
LABOR INSTRUCTIONS
In discussing with my colleagues and reading over the contract
language, I found a “must meet labor instructions” item, which seemed to cover
how to handle assessment. Of course, the thing being made has to be made by
following the instructions, just like in a recipe. And so, I applied that
concept to awarding complete and met requirements as opposed to incomplete and
does not meet.
I LIKE PIZZA MORE THAN CAKE
In most cases, my belief is that if you give me a cake that is
missing an essential element that makes it a cake, then it’s not a complete
cake. Pizza works better for me in this analogy. I like pizza better. Not that
I don’t like cake. I LOVE cake. Though maybe I like pie better than cake. FRUIT
pie. But that’s a story for another time.
It’s like if you make a thing and call it pizza, but it has no
sauce or it has no crust. Those things are not pizzas. But can you have a pizza
with no cheese? Some people think not. Yet I grew up with a mother with a milk
allergy – before medical science discovered lactose intolerance – and all our
pizzas had no cheese. Can you have pizza without mushrooms? My kids think so as
they hate mushrooms, which makes no sense to me. No Onion? Pepperoni?
Anchovies? Certainly we can have pizzas with or without these ingredients. I am
one of the few people I know who likes anchovies on pizza. But what makes a
pizza something we call pizza and what is just extra stuff that is nice to have
but not required?
WHAT IS ESSENCE?
And so, I tried to make these essential ingredients simple and
easy to achieve. The goal should be that if you READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, if you
track what the instructions ask of you, and if do the work, then you earn the
complete easily. The next issue is whether you will heed all the advice
provided to improve this essay and then the next one and the next and so on.
SO WHAT’S WITH THE THIRD DRAFT?
You all may have forgotten that me, Abbie, J, all of us were
students once, too. This idea may seem UNBELIEVABLE. I know this is a stretch
of imagination. When a college prof tried to tell me that she had JUST been in
college a few years ago, I didn’t believe her. SHE WAS OLD. Maybe thirty-three.
But we were all students at some point. Had to be. Part of the job. We all did
this same stuff. And we have not forgotten what challenged you may face to get
work done to do it right (sort of but exactly like one of my favorite songs,
“Do It Right” by Anne Marie.)
Thus, when we (as a class) got to the third drafts of essay three, and knowing how difficult it is to motivate students (because, see previous comment), and knowing how often students do the minimum with feedback they are given, just “fixing” or “correcting” a few little things, rewording some sentences, and ignoring all the bigger issues of content and structure, I decided to handle the third draft differently. I increased the requirement load, the ingredients that defined the cake or the pizza as essentials.
I did so to motivate and to prepare everyone for the final
assessment for the final grade. I did so to motivate students to REALLY
REVISE and not just surface edit. I did so to help you to grow, learn, and
improve.
However, in so doing, I may have created a new grade anxiety,
the very grade anxiety we were trying to avoid with the LBG method. And worse,
the new grade anxiety looked like passing or failing for a lot of people, just
two possibilities, a simple binary with no apparent rating of effort, growth,
or learning.
MEETING THE OUTCOMES
And yet, given my experiences as an instructor, I feared that just
giving everything complete if it’s submitted and looks like a cake or a pizza
would not motivate students to make substantial revisions to create a
“capstone” piece of work that meets the outcomes of the Lang & Lit
department of LCC expressed in that list of six outcomes and the rubric
provided for the third essay.
After all, this is our end goal. It’s what we’re working toward.
It’s what the final assessment is all about.
This assessment dilemma is waking me up at night in a cold sweat
with my heart hammering, and it’s affecting my colleagues much the same way. We
have an obligation to teach this course to the English department outcomes. We
have a sworn duty to evaluate whether or not you have gained the skills
expressed in the outcomes sufficiently by the end of the quarter or whether you
would benefit from repeating the course, whether or not you NEED to
repeat the course.
IT’S OFTEN EASY
Often this assessment is easy. Students who have put in the time and effort and worked hard, usually know that they will pass, that they excel, and if they don’t, then my feedback should tell them so. Likewise, students who cannot complete and submit work also know that they have not done the work and thus should not expect to pass. It’s the students in between these two situations that are the ones best served by LBG and perhaps ill-served by a binary assessment system that seems to “punish” them even when they complete and submit their work.
As I have said before, it’s impossible to assess effort. A
student could invest 40 hours and another could invest four. But sometimes the
one who did just four hours of work has a better product than the student who
labored for 40 hours.
All we can assess is product. But if I am assessing product
still based on a rubric, even a simplified one, am I not still giving “grades?”
I don’t know. I am trying to figure this out as much as for what
to do this time as much as what to do next quarter.
My good friend and colleague Abbie Leavens is trying to prepare
her students in much the same way I am trying to prepare you.
I liked her quote.
She said to remember that...
“It’s very true that you might have done all of the things we have asked of you and still not have met the outcomes as determined by the L&L department. This doesn’t mean you’re a terrible human. It just means you are not yet ready to move on. Here is okay if here is where you still need to be. Here is familiar now. Stay awhile longer. We can bake another cake and see how it goes…it’s usually better!”
So, for you, know these things:
I see the hard work.
I see the learning.
I see the growth.
All of the third essays are better than the Essay Two
assignments.
And it’s growth that we care about.
It’s growth that matters.
Did you learn, improve, and grow?
And you get a chance to tell me the answer to that question in
the last draft of essay one in the portfolio.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2012.01 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1978 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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