Making the Grading Process Fair - Full Video

♪ [music playing-- no dialogue]. ♪♪
We are going to go this morning until 11:30.
We will have a break.
You can also feel free to go out to the next room to refill your
coffee cups as you need to.
The goal is that by the end of this session at eleven thirty
you will have some very practical ideas about working
with grading and responding to student work in your classroom.
I'd like to hear from you who you are to start.
So it would be helpful to me if we would go around the room and
each person would stand up, say your name, your discipline, and
then if you wish one question that you would like to have
answered during this morning's session.
So your name, your discipline, and if you wish, a question that
you would most like to have answered
about the grading process.
A sort of a why are you here kind of a thing.
Will you start?
I'm Barbara Lawrence, I'm in the Chemistry Department and I often
feel like I'm spending a lot of time grading but it doesn't
further the students' learning in any way.
(Dr. Walvoord). Grading for learning.
Barry White, I'm School of Business teaching Operations
Management and I have a similar question kind of how to spend
less time grading and make it more
effective for student learning.
(Dr. Walvoord). Okay.
(male speaker). I'm [unclear audio]
in Philosophy and the courses I teach it would
be a crime for me not to require them to do a lot
of writing which means I have to read it.
[audience laughter].
(male speaker). Anything that is
more time efficient that's still requires
students to write would be a welcomed hint.
(Dr. Walvoord). Okay, good.
I'm Kent [unclear audio] in Biological Sciences.
Time efficiency is one of the reasons that I'm here.
Another reason is that often my students ask me exactly what
I'm expecting of them on a written report for example and
I'm not very clear on that.
I'd like to be clear.
(Dr. Walvoord). Okay, good thank you.
I'm Mary [unclear audio] in the English
Department and I don't have time efficiency
but as I grade compositions for freshman
what kinds of things can I convey to them that they will
actually learn and then how I may justify
the grade I give them.
I know its a C paper but how do I justify that [unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Good question.
Thank you.
I'm Barry Hudek.
I'm also an English instructor and my questions are also very
similar to Mary's, justiying the grade and getting
students to actually respond to the comments
and to internalize the comments so they can
employ them in the next paper.
I'm Christie [unclear audio] I'm the
grad student in English and I guess
right now what I'm struggling with is [unclear audio].
I'm Danielle [unclear audio].
I'm a graduate student with the Student Success Center and I
just want my students to learn from the mistakes they're making
[unclear audio].
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). How large is large?
A couple hundred?
(female speaker). 140.
(female speaker). [unclear dialogue]
I want to know how we can make the grading process enjoyable.
(Dr. Walvoord). Enjoyable she wants.
[audience laughter].
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
I'm head of Instructional Development over at
the Center of Teaching Excellence also at the
University of Illinois in Champaign, so just an hour
down the road.
I don't know if you're going to tap into this area, but one
of the things we wrestle with is to get faculty to think about
when they're going to bat before the grading process to
see how they're capturing the big questions and not
the low level kind of areas that they really don't need to be
spending their time grading on.
(Dr. Walvoord). Thank you.
(male speaker). [unclear audio].
I'm also from the Teaching Center of U of I.
You said large classes, and we work with faculty who teach
400 or 500 students at a time with a lot of
TAs, so consistency in grading across
like in a Physics class or an English class.
I'm Peter [unclear audio].
I'm in the Mathematics Department.
I've been really rethinking the way
I approach assessment and grading.
So really I've been thinking about grading
in the past is something I do to my students I want to think
how I can make it something I do for my
students as a learning tool.
I'm Gary Jensen.
I'm in Music Education.
I teach a variety of majors and non-majors.
Some skilled based as well as knowledge.
[unclear audio].
I'm Kiran Padmaraju, I teach in the College of Education.
I'm looking for efficiency as well
as increasing the student outcomes
through the grading process.
(male speaker). [unclear audio].
[audience laughter].
My name is Joe Wheeler and I'm just a senior
communications major.
I'm going to be a TA next semester so
I'm just here to listen.
That's all.
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Which is?
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
My name is Patrick [unclear audio].
I'm from the School of Business, the Department of Finance.
A couple of questions I would like to have answered is how to
address grade infllation and grade orientation.
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Good.
Did I skip anybody?
Alright, wonderful.
That gives us a good idea.
It tells us that there is a wide scope of disciplines represented
here and that some themes that come
up in the questions are efficiency.
How can I respond and work with my students
in such a way that they learn?
Connected to that how can I make grading something
I do for them instead of to them?
Issues of the quality of response.
How do they use the response?
Do they really benefit?
And issues of what do we do with large classes?
What do we do with other kinds of difficulties?
I would say some of the kinds of difficulties that have
come up that interfere with the sort of the ideal
grading process that we envision.
Students grade orientation, students' attitudes and previous
experiences with grades that they bring into our classroom.
Those are some of the themes.
That's exactly where the workshop is going to head.
So I have provided a handout that is a collection of
resources which we will use to direct towards your questions.
So does anybody not have a handout?
Its in the purple or the wine colored folder there.
For some reason the page numbering system--my fault--did
not get turned on in there.
So if you want to you can go ahead and number the pages.
Just take a pen right now and number the
pages and we'll start.
[unclear audio].
Starting, oh good question.
Let's start with the very cover page.
No I'm sorry.
Start with the first page in which says strategy one.
Start with that as one.
That's how I have mine done.
So first page in is page one.
[unclear audio].
The person who asked might want to explain
or els I'll take a crack at it.
[unclear audio].
There's a literature about what students
focus on and what motivates them.
The word term-grade orientation has been used
in that literature in opposition to learning orientation.
So the idea is that students--most of them
of course have a mixture of orientations, its not
pure one way or the other.
Students who focus on grading are primarily interested in I've
got to get the grade.
If you say to them what do you want to get out of this course
they say I want to get at least a B versus students who are
focused on here's what I want to learn.
We're going to talk a little bit about those things.
We will especially talk about those things in this afternoon's
workshop on motivation.
I don't know if any of you are coming this afternoon as well.
Alright.
Alright.
I want to begin by in what might seem to you as a kind of
surprising place.
I want to begin with a way of looking at the structure of your
course because I think that you cannot be
time efficient with your grading.
If you make some early fundamental mistakes
in setting up the course.
So I'm going to propose that we use a kind of paradigm to look
at the way in which your course is organized and try to get that
right from the very start.
So I want to propose that--this is at the top of page one--I
want to propose that we look at the way the ordinary course is
conducted in terms of these categories.
First, first exposure.
Where is it and when is it that students are first exposed to
new information, new concepts, new laboratory techniques.
Second, process.
What are they expected to do with it.
Memorize it merely?
Compare it, contrast it, apply it, synthesize it, evaluated it,
whatever you're asking them to do with the stuff.
The third component is response.
Either from their peers or from you or from somebody.
So if we divide the process in your class into those three
aspects and then we ask where?
Where does each of these things take place?
In what time and in what space?
I have a diagram here but I'm also going to draw it on the
board because I find that it makers more sense to people when
I actually draw it.
So here we go.
I'm going to do it in circles.
This is the class.
Are any of you teaching online?
Totally online?
One person.
This is the class or if you're teaching online whatever time
the students, all of the students and the faculty
member are all together either virtually or in
some room someplace.
This is the students' own time that they spend studying,
preparing, writing papers, whatever they're doing
and this is the teacher's own time.
Now being online muddies these boundaries a little bit but I
want to keep them separate for now so that we can use it as a
framework for thinking.
Further I want to propose that the teaching process has those
three pieces that we mentioned.
First exposure, process, and response.
Now the normal, usual, traditional way of conducting a
class in the United States is often to lecture first exposure
material in the class time, to use the class for first
exposure.
Why do we do that?
We do that because mostly that's how we were brought up.
We use it because our students have
experienced it and expect it.
We do it because no matter how many students they add to our
class we can still give the same lecture.
We do it because its easier for some academic types to stand up
and talk about the subject matter than to do anything else.
So we kind of slide into it.
Furthermore if students don't prepare, if we can't solve the
preparation problem, we're going to do first exposure no matter
if we wanted to or not.
I may want to have a rousing intellectual discussion of
Hamlet in my class today but if more than half of my students
have not read the play, I'm going to do first exposure
whether I want to or not.
So for many reasons then we tend to use
the class for first exposure.
I'm going to mark first exposure like this.
Now what that means is that process and response have to
take place in other sites.
That's where the difficulties come because your students' own
time is where you expect them to synthesize the class and the
reading material, prepare for the test, write the paper, do
the math homework, whatever it is and often that's the place
where the rubber hits the road.
That maybe the most difficult part of the learning process.
The student is home alone.
So I'm going to do process this way.
Now the student now produces a paper, math homework, a
spreadsheet, a whatever you want them to do--this is their
product here--they may write it in class or they may write it at
home but there's no place for this written product to go
except to the teacher's own time because the class is full
because you have to lecture everything you want them to know
because they expect it, you expect it and you're racing to
coverage, to cover everything.
So the written product of the student has to go to you and in
your own time, you are doing response.
Now in that traditional paradigm there are huge costs.
There are some benefits but there are also some huge costs.
One of the costs is that when you grade or comment on student
papers you do them one by one.
You call them up to the screen or pick them up off the pile and
you write something on them and you determine the grade.
What you write on them you maybe writing the same thing
essentially for a third of the papers or half of the papers
because so many of the students took the same sad road to
destruction but your going to write it
over and over and over again.
Further every time they add one student to your class or every
time you add one assignment or homework you've enormously
increased your load because your doing it one by one in your own
time outside of class.
What you're actually running economically
is a cottage industry.
You're running a cottage industry.
Like most cottage industries the craft and work that emerges can
be very high quality, very satisfying and very effective
for learning but for how many students can you do it.
At what point do you begin to get weary.
Also another price we pay is that this communicative avenue
the student completes a piece of paper, a piece of work rather,
hands it to the student to the teacher, the teacher makes a
grade and comments and hands it back, that
communicative avenue has a lot of faults.
Number one, most of the time when we comment we do so in
writing either by scribbling in the margins or by typing
something back to the student.
Somebody did a really nasty piece of research.
They took a microphone around to students at the moment when they
first got back they're paper from they're teacher with the
teacher's comments on it.
At that moment they asked the student, first of all if the
comments are hand-written can you understand, can you read
what your teacher said?
That eliminates a lot of them.
Then do you think you can grasp what your teacher
meant and make the improvements.
That eliminates a whole bunch of them.
Do you think you can use what your teacher said in future work
in the field eliminates a whole bunch of them.
Its a very narrow, very flawed communicative channel when we
try to write stuff on students' paper that's actually going to
improve student learning and that's why we have these numbers
of questions coming up today.
How can I actually make the grading process and the
commenting process effective for student learning.
We have this sense right, that we're just throwing these
comments out to some black hole and we
don't know what the good of it is.
That makes it a very discouraging task indeed.
Furthermore, the more responsible you are the more
assignments you give.
The behinder you get.
[audience laughter].
So the longer the student has to wait between the time that he or
she finishes the paper of the spreadsheet or the assignment
and the time she gets her comments back.
That too interferes with the effectiveness of the
communication.
So friends there is a lot.
We pay a huge price for this traditional paradigm.
Now I expect that there are lots of you
here that have already to some extent at least broken this
paradigm and are doing other things.
So let's put it into the new paradigm form.
Let's draw three other circles.
Is there anybody that can't see this lower circle?
Have I got it too low or is it okay?
Do you see it?
Okay.
So here again is class.
Here's the student.
Here's the teacher.
Now suppose that you were to be so clever, so ingenious that you
could move first exposure to the students' own time.
That's the key.
That's really the key to everything.
The student preparation, students doing the first
exposure in their own time.
That's the key.
If you could move first exposure to the students' own time then
one of the things that you are likely to do is to increase
student time on task.
Now I don't know if you've done a study here specifically at EIU
about your own students but the national research would indicate
that your students are spending an average, an average, of five
to eight hours per week on all outside work for all of their
classes given a full time load.
Five to eight hours on all of their classes.
If we follow the normal rule of thumb that we academics
use to explain the kind of work we expect we
say okay you're in class 15 hours.
You spend 2 hours out for every hour in that you should be
spending 30 hours a week.
We're not getting anything, anything, close to that.
Given the large body of research that links and this is one of
these duh bodies of research that links time
on task with learning.
One of the most effective things that we can do
is increase students' time on task.
It turns out that the more they study the more they learn.
Who would of thought?
Now there's not a perfect correlation because they can
study in ineffective ways and as a teacher you may want to try to
guide that process.
Nonetheless there is that correlation and if you
could...you could put first exposure into the class.
This is what that second row in the diagram of page one.
This is that second yeah that second row that says using class
for process and response that's what that row is all about.
If you could use the class for first exposure,
sorry I'm doing this wrong.
If you could use the students' time for first exposure then it
would be possible to do process and some response in class
leaving only some response for the teacher's own time.
That may be the single most efficient thing that you can do
in your class is to make this move from this paradigm to at
least partly into this paradigm.
It depends upon your being able to get students to do meaningful
preparation first exposure and then having them produce
something that reflects their work and bringing it not to you
one by one but to the class.
That's how you do it.
You reduce the number of full time full finished assignments
and exams that are grading intensive at home for you.
You reduce the number of those because you don't need to use
them any longer to enforce daily reading or
to give numbers of grades.
Instead you use daily preparation assignments for that
which you managed in class.
Then you give a small number of really focused, really intensive
finished assignments with which you work intensively and which
you then will give the whole grading-commenting business.
So how does this work out?
On the third, on page two of the handout,
I have some case studies.
They come from three different disciplines and I want to talk
about how each of them works out.
These are faculty members that I have known and worked with who
actually made the change from one
paradigm to another paradigm.
So here we have a history class.
There are 40 students in it.
What does western civ or history or gen ed courses run at EIU,
what's the usual class size?
If a student is taking a gen ed history or western civ class
what would be the usual class size?
Are you still at 40, 45 or are you up to 100, 200.
No?
[unclear audio].
Max 40?
Would that be true in history, literature, gen ed psych?
Would those intro classes be 40, 45 like that?
[unclear audio].
Larger?
So it would be 90 to 140.
Okay, so that would be, so you're teaching some of your
intro courses at that level?
Of course UI, you've got bigger ones than that.
Yeah with many TAs.
So its a different system there.
Its a different system.
What I'm talking about here for EIU is primarily the system
where the teacher has perhaps some undergraduate or masters
level assistance but not the army of PhD TAs that you would
have in a large research oriented university.
So this is a history class for 40 students and I'm going to
talk about how it would go if you had 140.
Let's talk about 40 first.
What the faculty member does is to
assign students readings every day.
Every class day you have something to read.
Now that's entirely ordinary isn't it?
Most of the time students do not think that they
have to read the material before they come to class.
Most of them will in fact not read it.
In fact, I had a friend whose daughter was an honor student at
Brown and the relationship between the
mother and daughter was good.
The mother went to freshman orientation, parents' weekend.
Spent some time in the residence hall with her daughter and her
friends and she came home and said to me you know I was amazed
because my daughter is an honor student at Brown and so are
most of her friends and they don't read the material before
they go to class.
I talked to my daughter about this and she said but mom it
would be silly to read the material before you went to
class because the teacher tells you what's important.
Then you read your class notes and the book
just before the test.
Well that may seem to be working out for her.
She is after all pretty smart but it is not a good way for
long term learning.
Its not the kind of education that we really
want for our students.
So that pattern has to be broken.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Yes, exactly.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Yeah, you know what I have
sometimes suggested for faculty members is that they plan their
course as an entirely online course even if they're going to
teach it face to face.
Plan it as an online course so that you see what you
would do and what you would expect
from your students if you didn't have
that class quote unquote lecture time.
Then put the class time back in but only for the things for
which it can be most advantageous over whatever you
would do online which is of course discussion, interaction.
So this history teacher then asks his students to write for
class virtually every class period.
Now he didn't start out doing it virtually every class period he
started out doing it three times a semester.
It worked so well that he began to increase and
increase and increase and now this is how he teaches.
Its how I teach.
Its how lots of other faculty teachers.
How I'm sure some of you teach.
More to a greater or lesser extent.
But you know what you do.
You have an assignment for your students that requires them to
read the material or do the math homework or the whatever it is
that you want and you count it into the grade so heavily that
they cannot survive if they are not prepared on a daily basis.
[unclear audio].
I want to share something.
I teach Education and Psychology for [unclear dialogue] teachers.
There is so much material that has to be taught in because we
only teach for nine weeks and 6 weeks of material.
There is so much material to cover.
Okay, so I started off by doing what I call DQ
or my daily quizzes.
That is students have to well I think, they have to
read the material that we are going to be covering
in the next class.
And do a quiz in WebCT on that material and about
two hours before, and I probably have to change that.
I go into WebCT look at the responses that they have
and I focus on the questions that
[unclear dialogue] and that's what we focus on in class.
And for the quiz, I choose the materials and the concept
that I think are important to me [unclear dialogue].
That's what I focus on in the quiz [unclear dialogue].
But what I am finding is that [unclear dialogue]
However, I'll have students who spend days on it, so still
get complaints from the students, "Hey why do I have
to do this everyday?"
I say well you're supposed to be prepared for class every
day aren't you?
It's a struggle.
Its a struggle.
[unclear audio].
There is a book called "Just in Time Teaching" by a guy called
Norton and somebody else.
Its about ten years old now but there's another book coming out
called Using Just in Time Teaching or something like that
and one of the co-editors of that book is Joan Middendorf,
M-i-d-d-e-n-d-o-r-f.
Look for that book when it comes out.
Its not quite out yet but I've talked with Joan about it and
seen some of her stuff.
The Just in Time Teaching book the original one by Norton
somebody talks about it in physics, chemistry, science
classes, but its equally applicable across the board.
Its just exactly what you said.
Its giving some quiz or some exercise or some task to the
students ahead of time.
They have to post it or hand it in.
Then you frame what you're going to do in the upcoming class
based on what they didn't get.
That system can work beautifully and there's lots of evidence
that it works beautifully but it can also have some drawbacks.
One of them is and this is what Joan--Joan has already published
some case study material around this idea--is that it really
depends how you guide the students' work.
It really depends because she tells a story of a class in
which the students were preparing for this quiz so
ineffectively that they actually weren't learning the material in
the way that they should of.
What they did was to take the quiz questions and then leaf
through the book looking for the answers
through the quiz questions.
They were spending an average of six minutes
on it or something like that.
So what they did was to change the quiz so that it absolutely
required a deeper understanding of the material so they could
not use that technique.
They had considerable success in doing that, she and the two
teachers that she worked with.
Joan is the Director of the Teaching/Learning Center and
these other two are the teachers in this class.
They managed to turn that around to increase the amount of time
that students were spending preparing for the quiz and to
increase student performance and to reduce
student anger at the same time.
What drove them into it was student resentment and anger.
They were getting a lot of negative feedback on the student
evaluations but they made some substantial
gains in all of those.
So that's going to be in that forthcoming
book how they did that.
[unclear audio].
(female speaker). But the problem that I
find with that is that students would line
up in front of my office and say well you know
we have a question.
We don't know how to do this.
How do you tell them just go and read the book.
Its really a problem I think because then there was a well
you're not here to answer our questions.
We have to talk to one another.
Yes that's exactly what you should be doing.
(Dr. Walvoord). Yes, so there are
two ways to do this.
One is to ask for the material to come in to you ahead of time
and then you do something to it.
You look it over, you prepare whatever and then you shape what
happens in the class based on that.
There's a second way and thats what
this history faculty member does.
Each way has its benefits and its difficulties.
The second way is to have students bring something to
class that represents their best work up
to that point on their own.
Then in class you manage their questions.
You just do it right on the spot.
Now that may be better for some teachers than others.
Better for some disciplines than others.
Better for some types of students than others.
You kind of have to choose or maybe some combination.
This Just in Time Teaching can work and there's lots of
evidence that it can be made to work well but you have to think
about how the students are doing.
What are they doing home in their own time?
Are they really preparing effectively?
Do they have the paradigm of learning that say to them well
if I don't know the answer I can find it in the book.
If they don't you may have to teach it.
You may have to teach it.
You may have to teach it.
You may actually have to take a class session and walk them
through okay now you're home alone,
you're getting ready for this next class.
This next class is going to be based on
exactly what you would do at home.
Something like that.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). B-a-i-n Ken.
Its called "What the Best College Teachers Do".
There we go "What the Best College Teachers Do".
Its based on his, its actually based on his study of I think a
couple hundred college teachers who were identified as really
outstanding on a number of criteria.
Then he talks about what's common to their practices.
Its a wonderful book.
That's Harvard University Press I think did that one.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). One of the things that you
can do is to set up a grading system where by I call it a
non-compensatory grading system where by excellence in
one area does not compensate for not-so excellent
in another area.
One of the ways you can do that and
this is what I do in my classes.
Here's how my grading scheme goes.
Its a non-compensitory system.
If you're going to get a course grade of A you have to do two
things that do not compensate for each other.
You have to do them both.
For your regular graded work that is your formal papers,
your exams and so on whatever that is you have
to get that grade at least an A.
For your class what I call class preparation writing you have to
have at least 90 percent of the ones that were assigned at least
90 percent of them have to have come in to me before the class
as what I call a good faith effort.
Now I handle these daily assignments really fast.
Really fast and here's how it works.
When my students or when this history faculty member's
students come in because Jack does the same thing.
I learned a lot about it from him.
He was doing it a long time ago.
Students come in, let's take Jack's example, let's say that
today we're in Western Civilization and let's say today
the topic is Louis XIV.
You remember him?
Sun-King built Versailles and all of that alright.
So Louis XIV and the question that Jack has posed is was this
man a good king for his time or not?
How would we judge?
It's a very interesting and challenging question for first
year students most of whom think history is the memorized
recitation of true facts.
Instead he is asking them to argue.
One of his chief goals for them is to learn to argue with
historical evidence.
So was Louis a good king or not?
So he assigns them to read excerpts from several primary
texts on this particular day.
The questions they are to answer go something like this.
Bishop Basawe was the author of one of the primary texts.
Who was he?
When did he write?
The answer is at the time of Louis.
He was actually attached to Louis' court.
Okay so he was attached to Louis' court.
He wrote at that time.
He kept a journal.
We have an excerpt that we're reading today.
Next question.
What was his judgement of Louis?
Did he think Louis was a good king?
Then the question.
How can this material be used as evidence about the issue?
Challenging for first year students.
It counters everything they think about
history most of them.
So the students write maybe a page
in response to that question.
They come into class, they don't have to send
it ahead of time in this scheme.
They come into class with two copies.
One on paper to be set on Jack's desk and you can do this
electronically and one to work on at their seats.
So now instead of beginning does anybody have
questions about the reading for today?
Just flop.
Or starting today the topic is Louis XIV and whether he was a
good king and then you're launched on your lecture.
Instead of that Jack will begin the class
by asking Alex did you think.
The first question the students answer
is what is the issue at stake?
Alex, what do you think is the issue?
He says well whether Louis was a good king or not.
Would you please write that on the board.
Now you're sharing the board space which is usually
controlled by the teacher to transmit something that the
students take down in their notes.
You're now establishing a common community workspace.
Would you write that on the board?
Good.
He does it.
Does everybody have that?
If not, correct your own assignment.
Now next question.
Bishop Basawe.
Who was he?
When did he live?
Anne, do you have that?
If she can't turn to somebody else.
If everybody is silent turn to your neighbor.
Tell your neighbor what you wrote.
Now let's hear somebody.
So the whole class is interactive around this
assignment that has been made.
Students get their questions answered.
They do not suffer as they would on a quiz
for a low grade in this system.
So there's not quite that anxiety around it but rather
they must bring in and leave the professor a copy of something
that represents in his view a good faith effort.
That means you wrote a reasonable amount and it looks
on just glancing as though you've spent some time on it.
That's really all that its judged by and do we
get some sloppy work?
Oh absolutely but the thing is that can show up in class.
It will certainly show up on the tests.
There's a day of reckoning on that and
on the papers that he asks them to do.
So the students have a, any student who has gets an A for
the course has to have both an A on the graded work, test and
papers, and 90 percent good faith effort on however many
days were assigned to bring in one of these assignments.
Now if you're going to get a B for the course you have to have
a B here and 80 percent here.
A C you have to have a C here and 70 percent.
Alright?
Now its like basketball.
This is what I tell my students.
Its like basketball.
If you're going to get any points you have to both drop the
ball through the hoop and follow the foul and dribbling rules.
If you mess up on either one of those, no points.
So you get the grade for which you meet or
exceed both of the criteria.
Alright now here's a little quiz for you.
Are you ready?
Maria gets and A on her graded work and she turns in 70 percent
of her good faith efforts.
What course grade does she get?
She gets a C.
I do not average the grades.
This is a non-compensatory grading system.
She gets a C because that is the first level at which she
has met or exceeded both of the criteria.
Okay?
Now let's take Juan.
He gets a C on his graded work but he has a
100 percent good faith effort.
What course grade does he get?
A C.
Its a non-compensatory grading system.
[unclear audio].
(male speaker). But if I did that
it seems there's going to be a lot of
student push back.
(Dr. Walvoord). There is some student
push back and here's what you can do.
One is not to try the system and in the discipline of philosophy
where scholars tend to work not in isolation, no scholars work
in isolation, but where the work of the disciplined are mostly an
individual work not a team effort as it would be in a
biology lab or something like that or a social agency.
I might be tempted to say well these students don't really need
to work in a community and so lone rangers are okay in my
class and my grading system reflects that.
One philosopher I know sets it one way but not the other way.
That is her says you can compensate for low class
participation by high grades here, but you cannot compensate
for low grade by high class participation.
So you can run it one way or the other.
Here's another thing to say though.
If you want and here's what I say unlike my philosophy friend
what I say is this is a learning community.
You paid your tuition to be apart of a learning community
not to sit in a room by yourself and read stuff and write papers.
The success of the class because it is interactive depends on the
contribution of every member.
I don't care if you think some day your going to be the lonely
scholar sitting in your tower just reading and writing.
You probably are still you're going to have to take English
degree out there into the world and at some point you're going
to have to be part of a learning community, part of a working
community, part of a doing business community and you're
going to have to learn how to be part of an enterprise.
This class is an enterprise.
If you don't come and participate and use your brains
to contribute to what we're creating here
then your not an A student.
My definition of an A student is someone who does excellent work
on papers and tests and also makes excellent contributions to
class as a part of a learning community.
That's just my definition.
Now when students push back on that first of all I am in charge
of setting the criteria for the grade.
That is my perogative as the teacher.
There are lots of things that are good for
students that they don't like.
So they push back including reading everyday.
I get a lot of push back on that.
When I run this grading system if I'm in a new place I have
always across my career checked my grading system with the
Director of Undergraduate Studies and a chair and
perhaps some senior faculty.
So it's no secret, so if any student wants to go to the chair
over my head or to the DG that's okay.
They know what I'm doing.
They know what I'm doing.
I do have that right as long as I make very clear to students
what the criteria are and I bend over backwards to make it clear.
This is in my syllabus.
There's an explanation.
We go over it the first day of class.
We go over it again after a week.
It goes like that.
I give them the same little quiz I did with you.
What if Maria you know dah dah dah.
So there's no excuse for them not to know what the criteria
are and I tell you since I started doing this guess what?
I have marvelous class attendance.
Marvelous class preparation and marvelous class discussions.
It just changed the whole world of teaching for me.
It just changed everything.
I've done it in classes of 20.
I've done it in classes of 45 to 50.
I've not done it myself but I have seen
it done in classes of 100 to 140.
Now let's talk about how we would do it there.
I think that if you were going to do it there you would be
using a lot of small group interaction and if the seats are
bolted to the floor in a lecture hall turn
to your neighbor kind of interaction.
You might be using clickers.
You might be using call on for students that where you know
what did this group get, what did this group get?
Sometimes what you can do in classes like that if you have an
overhead projector is to take blank overhead transparencies
and a pen and go to your different groups in your
classroom and say write your answer.
This group you write your answer.
This group you write your answer.
This group you write your answer.
The rest of you write your answer on paper.
Now you have five minutes to write two arguments in one
argument against let's say we're doing Hamlet.
The question that I have posed for students is do you think
that Hamlet ever in the play is truly crazy?
Truly mad or is he faking it all of the way?
Its a very interesting question about the play.
So I ask my students to come in with a piece
of writing about that.
Now I can use transparencies if I my
class online I can use online.
If I can be online I can ask them to
send it to me ahead of time.
I can show it up on the screen.
In other words, in a class of a 140 I can show some sample
student responses, go over it for the whole class.
I could ask if I had a way to amplify the voice of student
question askers like if I had a handout microphone I could
actually pass the microphone to students and have them respond.
So what I am saying, there are ways to do this kind of
interaction in a large class.
It can be done.
Its harder, but it can be done.
You can make your large class interactive.
You will have some students push back because in a
large class like that they're even more likely to want
you to just lecture.
Is that good for them?
Are you getting good results that way?
Are they really learning in the way that you want them to?
Questions?
Go ahead.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord) What do other people do?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). What do people think?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). There you go.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Yes.
Yes, yes.
(male speaker). I sometimes get
comments students don't like for them to
rely on voluntary response because [unclear audio] and I
think its fair to call on somebody and
expect them to be prepared.
If they're humiliated because they're not prepared, they
should be prepared.
(Dr. Walvoord). They can prepare.
[audience laughter].
(male speaker). One question about
the history class.
One kind of discussion does the teacher then say okay Alex then
what is your answer to was Louis a good king and Alex just sort
of gives off his answer and then he
okay then he asks the next student.
Then the next student gives that answer does he then interact
with those answers or just kind of each student kind of goes off
and gives their answer.
(Dr. Walvoord). No he interacts
because what's happening is the class is building something.
So what the class is building is an outline of the possible
arguments for and against Louis as a good king.
So if Alex says well Bishop Bosawe said that Louis was a
good king which he did.
Bishop Bosawe thought that Louis was fine king and that's what he
wrote in his journal.
So then Jack will say okay the bishop thought
that Louis was a fine king.
Now the next question.
How can that material be used as evidence.
Randy.
So maybe Randy says well he thought that the--usually what
will happen right--Randy will repeat what the bishop
said in some form or another.
He'll say well he thought that Louis did well thus and such or
he thought Louis was a good king.
No no no says Jack.
You correct students not meanly but you it's your job here.
No says Jack.
You're not telling me how that can be used
as evidence, as evidence.
Is it strong as evidence or is it weak as evidence?
Maybe Randy looks I don't know.
So Jack can say okay stop.
Everybody turn to your neighbor.
Share with your neighbor what you think.
How can this be used as evidence.
Now Randy.
Now Joan.
Now can we go forward.
So without you trying not to single out a person who
is going to be embarrassed but again if they're
embarrassed they could have been prepared.
At the same time you try to give your slower speakers a chance to
write something down or think for a minute.
You can declare a minute of silence for thinking and writing
and then call on somebody but you are insistent that we're
going to get beyond just repeating what the bishop said.
We are going to start evaluating his material as evidence.
So I sat in Jack's class and what I see is pretty soon
somebody will say well he was a member of Louis' court.
We have just read about the intensive and extensive spy
system Louis operated.
There was no such thing as a secret journal
in the court of Louis.
You knew.
Everybody knew.
You were not safe.
So why would this bishop whose life and livelihood depended on
this absolute monarch why would he write anything bad?
Why would he commit anything bad to paper?
Why would he do that?
So its good evidence because he was there and because in his
position he could see many things
that others might not see.
So some of the details he gives are wonderful.
Things he knows about Louis but his judgement that Louis is a
wonderful king, the gift of God to the country.
Well maybe not such good evidence.
So what would be good evidence?
So by the end of the class Jack has usually the board full by
himself and by students who come up and I do this too.
So my board is full of my and the students arguments.
Pro arguments.
Con arguments.
Evidence.
[unclear audio].
We go back and forth like this and at the same time and here's
where the response part comes in.
Whoops, my little circles, my diagram back on page
one, that second row there.
How you get the response going in class is that you have to
insist and make time for students to record what they're
learning right on the sheet of paper they
brought to work with them.
So what I do and what Jack does and a number of others is that I
make the students bring with them a copy of the assignment
for them to work on at their seats, different from the copy
they hand me at the beginning of the class.
They're supposed to write all over it because
what they are going to do in class is to make the
responses to their own preliminary work that I
otherwise would have had to make one by one home in my cottage.
So I am figuring out how to bring not the industrial
revolution to my class because we're going to skip that.
The industrial revolution I guess is what happens when you
give your class a multiple choice test and the machine
grades it but what I'm after is the kind of industrialization or
the kind of mechanization of the response process
that is called individuation.
Mass Individuation is what I'm doing in my classroom.
Its what Amazon does when they send you a little e-mail saying
you liked Terrors of the Night now we have a new book called
Terrors of the Day.
Would you like to buy it?
[audience laughter].
Why can they do that?
They can do mass individuation because
they have the technology to do it.
Well I do mass individuation because I have my class all
together under my reign if you will at a single
time at a single place.
I can do mass individuation.
I can create a discussion in my class from which my students
learn how their own early on-their-own responses were
inadequate or faulty.
They can correct them but you have to work at this because
they don't want to write on their own sheets.
They don't want to write anything that
any other student says.
They only want to write what the teachers says and then usually
they only want to write what the teacher puts on the board or the
overhead or on the Powerpoint.
They don't really want to write what's on the Powerpoint they
want you to make it available to them online which is fine.
I have nothing against that, but what happens in my class is that
I'll stop and I'll say okay take two minutes.
Everybody now turn to your neighbor and tell your neighbor
one thing that you've learned from this discussion that you
didn't have on your own assignment.
Then make sure you have it written down in your own notes.
So constantly you're working at making sure that students are
taking down what they have learned so that they have what
amounts to good class notes for the test.
That's one of the complaints you get of course from class
discussion is well we didn't know what
was going to be on the test.
We didn't have good notes.
Well, you've given them good class notes.
Another thing you can do is to ask two
students each day to be scribes.
Take down notes about the class discussion in an especially
careful way and post them so that all students
can get a hold of them.
Now I've seen faculty members do that then that represents--of
course nowadays you could also this probably too complicated
technology but at some point you will record everything and it
will be online streaming video.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). The way he determines
the final course grade is to take these daily
good faith efforts in not the ones the students have
written on, they go home with their own corrections.
So now if we turn back to the circles to the diagram on page
one, Jack takes home the pieces of writing the students handed
to him at the beginning of class representing their pre-class
work and he spends literally a couple of seconds on each one.
You just glance over them.
Crawford, good.
Jenga, good.
Louise, good.
And mark in your grade book.
Good faith effort, check.
Not good faith effort or missing, no check.
So its really quick.
You can do it for a 150 students in not very much time.
Did they have it or didn't they have it?
Then the graded part, the way I do it is this way.
Ninety percent good faith effort and so on.
The way Jack does it is a little different.
He counts it as a percentage of the grade.
So the possible well here's what he does.
He's one of these people that likes to
give points to everything.
So he has a totally compensatory system actually.
If you give points to everything you have a compensatory system.
So a perfect essay would get a certain number
of points, let's say 100 points.
A perfect, one of these little exercises would be worth two
points and a map quiz would be worth five points or four points
if it wasn't done so well or one point if it was kind
of shabby like that it goes.
So you know students accumulate points.
So at the end a million points is an A.
You see?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). I see what you mean.
How does he hold students accountable on the
content of the exam, alright.
The exam is essay only.
He gives factual quizzes in addition to these daily.
So there's factual stuff and on the exams there'll be some facts
and fill in the blanks, terms, and that sort of stuff.
Every exam also has an essay portion to it.
A typical exam question would be was Louis a good king or not?
So students would be expected to bring all
that classroom argument to bear.
Sorry it took me a long time to listen to your question.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Just count those reading
quizzes heavy enough so they have to do them.
If they're not doing them and still getting good grades in the
course then up the value.
If you really believe that class preparation is critical then
your grade has to reflect it because a grade is a message
among other things to your students
about what's most important.
It's a message.
(male speaker) I use a version of this,
my classes meet Tuesday, Thursday.
So once a week they have a written 350 words.
They have to do 90% of them to get credit for the course.
Two things go on, one is the result is
they do better on tests
So, I have grade inflation and I tell them all in advance that
if they all do A level work they all get As.
I don't grade on a curve.
And my chair hasn't given me any grief about that.
The other side of that that is killing me though is
these damn essays, formal written essays.
Can I simply score those and not comment if I'm
doing all this other stuff so well?
If you have 40 students write essays and 30 minutes
reading them carefully, that's 20 hours.
If you have several course going, you can't do it.
(Dr. Walvoord). You can't do it.
There's several ways around it.
One is to reduce the number of 350 word essays that you
actually collect and grade and instead
do some of this in class prep.
(male speaker). The 350 word things
just get a check or not.
(Dr. Walvoord). Okay, I'm sorry.
(male speaker). I'm talking about a thematic
essay where they've got a topic and they have
to work with the readings or the research.
(Dr. Walvoord). Okay.
(male speaker). [unclear dialogue].
(Dr. Walvoord). Okay, two a semester.
Would be my advice.
(male speaker). Two a semester,
but it does add up.
(Dr. Walvoord). It does add up.
[audience laughter].
(Dr. Walvoord). So one of the next things we're
going to do is to talk about what do you do when you have a
class of 40 students while writing rather
significant essays twice a semester.
You also have two, three other classes which are
making some of the same demands.
But friends one of the reasons for doing this daily class
preparation and the reason I'm starting with it is that it
helps you keep the finished formal stuff that you have to
intensively grade.
It helps you keep that to a minimum and still have the
students writing and talking and interacting and getting the
stuff and being held accountable for daily
reading and daily response.
Okay, now I want to go to a physics class.
Different discipline.
It will be a little like Kinesiology maybe
or anatomy or courses like that.
Although it may be somewhat different as well and we'll come
back to those other kinds of stuff in a minute.
This physics teacher was in a workshop
in which I was talking about Jack's system in history
and he said this first row across
the diagram here that's me.
So I spent my time in class lecturing to students doing
problems on the board, demonstrating physics principles
and they're taking down notes or not
they're sleeping or they're whatever.
There are a few students who ask questions or I'll turn around
and say okay did everybody get this, this step of the problem,
everybody understand what I'm saying here.
Okay, so then I assign homework.
They go home and they open up the homework at two A.M.
page 47, problem one and guess what they didn't understand it
all that well anyway and so they either mess up or they give up.
Then they bring that flawed homework that either I have to
grade or my TAs have to grade it.
This is a large research university where he was.
Or else it has to be ungraded which is what a lot of these
courses do in these big universities and you know what
happens then.
Then they do poorly on the test and
they're really not getting it.
Its just not effective except for a few students who are
really present and paying attention and asking questions.
So he said how can I change this?
How could I switch first exposure to students own time.
The people in the workshop said to him well why couldn't you
just have them read the physics book and answer questions about
it for class and he said there's not a physics book written that
my students can read and then solve problems.
They need to see me solving the problems and talking
my way through it and they need to see me
demonstrating physics principles.
I watched him in his class subsequently how he did that.
One day he was talking about momentum.
So he takes a beach ball and a tennis ball and holds them the
tennis ball on top of the beach ball like this and he let's go.
The balls bounce.
They hit each other and he catches them again.
He turns to the class and he says was momentum conserved?
Its hard for a book to recreate that kind of drama in the hands
of a really good teacher.
He was also one of the pioneers of clickers at the
University of Cincinnati.
So a very active teacher with interactive kinds of lectures
and demonstrations but he still feels that its not working.
He's spending too much of his time lecturing first exposure
material and what to do about that.
Well got any suggestions for him.
What would he do?
[unclear audio].
Bingo.
Yeah she got it first off.
That's exactly what he did.
You can use high tech, you can use low tech but he video taped
his lectures one semester and thereafter students were asked
to watch the lectures in their own time, take notes as they
would have in class, read the textbook,
and then what does he do in class?
The homework, yes.
The homework.
So when they walk into class, a class of about 140 students,
Intro to Physics, he has a couple of TAs.
They walk into class they are assigned in groups.
So groups of three students work together and when they walk into
class they are to have with them the notes they took from
watching the videotape and then their textbooks.
They walk in, it says up on the board page 47,
problems one, three, and four.
So they sit down and they start.
The rule is they can leave when two things have happened.
The group gets the problems right and either Howard or his
TA comes over and checks and first they get the problem right
and then in the group he can ask any member of the group to
explain any step that the group took and and the person can.
So if he says Jane can you explain what the
group did right here to get this step.
If she can they're out of here.
If she can't they have to keep working until any member of the
group can answer any question.
That keeps the smartest person in the group or the best
prepared from dragging all the rest who don't understand.
Question.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). There you go.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). That's a wonderful thing.
Of course there are also commercial products now more and
more or stuff that's just free, available.
Lectures and demonstrations software products some of them
are self-checking so they give you a little bit of instruction
and they give you a little quiz and if you miss part of it then
they circle you back through what you missed and so on.
You can never do that in class.
In class you just stuck with lecturing the whole thing to
everybody those who already had this in high school
and those who are totally clueless.
So in a way its mass individuation again.
It's better.
If you want to get online to see how some course have been
re-constructed especially courses in technical and
scientific disciplines have been reconstructed
with this kind of thing in mind.
I think I put it in my bibliography here.
Yes in the bibliography on the very last page the National
Center for Academic Transformation about a third a
way down the page.
National Center for Academic Transformation.
That's a wonderful website because they had a lot of money
from [unclear audio] and they've had it for quite a long time and
they take institutions.
I don't know if your institution has been apart of the National
Center of Process or not but they take teams from
institutions who want to figure out how to save faculty time and
resources and achieve as good or better student learning in big
introductory courses like Intro Chem and so on, Statistics.
They've also done some Humanities courses like big
Intro to Lit or stuff like that Intro to Pysch.
They have figured out how to reconfigure these courses using
online resources, using student, undergraduate student mentors or
preceptors and ending up with less faculty time has been often
their goal since faculty time has been of the most expensive
components of a course.
So that's a very interesting website.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Learner.org.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Thank you.
I'm going to take that down for myself and go take a look.
[unclear audio].
Twist it a little bit.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Well and when you are dealing
with technical material there's a way to understand and explain
technical material and some of the verbage will be the same.
You're going to explain to me the difference between
procaryotic and eucaryotic cells or how to
plot a certain line on a graph.
The most important thing is they learn it.
[unclear audio].
So these videos and these software products and these You
Tube things become in a sense textbooks don't they?
They function as texbooks function.
That is they help the student to do first exposure outside of
class on his or her own and they take over some of the function
that traditionally has been fulfilled since the middle ages
by faculty members before there were books.
The professor was the one who had the knowledge and who
transmitted it orally.
I mean right?
You can say, yeah?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Now I want to do another
two minute thing and then we're going to take a break because
after break I want to go to another time saving
and effectiveness learning effectiveness strategy.
I want to go to this third case on page two, the one about pysch
because it leads to those of you who teach highly technical
material like anatomy like Kinesiology like a lot of if not
your whole course at least portions of your course
that students just simply have to learn.
What this teacher did was to find herself lecturing this
material out of the Intro to Psych book.
The parts of the brain, the stages of development of the
fetus, the childhood development stuff.
You know pysch textbooks they cost
$150 and they're this thick.
So she's racing to get through it all because in her class she
has some students who are taking this to be pysch majors and
they'll need it and some are taking it because they're
nursing or social service majors who are going to have to pass a
certifying exam in which some of this stuff will occur.
So she and her students feel like she's got to lecture all of
this stuff that anybody may ever need.
So she just stopped that game and what she did was to
move all the stuff into students' own time.
She said to them this is your textbook, costs $150
and you're going to read it.
[audience laughter].
Now half her class were non-native speakers of English,
mostly Hispanic some Asian and because this was a comprehensive
institution it was a wide range of reading abilities which was
one of the reasons why students were so eager for her to lecture
this stuff because some of them could get it better that way.
She said to them if you can't read you're not going to succeed
anyway so this is going to be a way for you to
move forward in your reading skills.
So here's your textbook.
Now here is some material, you can give it as a handout you can
put it on the web on the course website, this is some material
about this textbook.
It tells you whats most important.
It gives you some sample quizzes and the answers are in the back
and now you are going to take a series
of eight quizzes over this material.
The first one you must attempt by a such and such date, not
quizzes, tests, eight tests over this material.
The first one you must attempt by September 15, next one by
September 30 and so on.
If you pass it at the 80 percent level or
above you're fine on that.
You go on start studying for the next one.
You've got to read the book.
You've got to take the test.
Its multiple choice, short answer, true or false.
She got the test off the textbook test bank.
So you got to attempt it, if you pass it you're fine go on start
studying for the next one.
If you don't pass it you have one
chance to take it over again.
It will be a different version of the test because on the test
bank you could get a different selection,
different version of the test.
If you take it the second time you can pass it and get credit
so you have two tries after that you didn't do it.
So she turned this into what she called the little engine that
could meaning it just ran on its own little track.
They read the book, they took the tests.
That portion counted for a large portion of the grade.
So if you got 80 percent on eight of the tests, all eight of
the tests and had taken the first version on time you got an
A for that portion of your grade.
If you completed seven tests B, six tests C.
So she had this engine that ran.
Now students were having trouble because they were not all very
skillful readers or not skillful readers of English.
So what she did in class was to devote the first 20 minutes of
each class period to any questions that students had
about the text material or about stuff they missed on the test.
If they didn't have any questions then she went on.
She did not take responsibility for lecturing
to them stuff that was in the textbook.
They had to get it from the text and if
they couldn't they had to ask questions.
What did she do with the other 35 minutes of class, 30 or 35
minutes of class.
She turned it into a lab.
Its a class of 140 students.
She's turning it into a lab.
Here's what they did.
She guided them in these class sessions through a semester long
eensy-weensy little novice psych project in which they actually
investigated something because she said you know I think that
psychology is inquiry into human behavior and my students think
its reading a textbook and putting down the
right answers on the tests.
So I'm going to move all this lecture test business outside of
my class and in class what we're going to do mostly is inquiry.
So she had them do a little bit, she had them pick a topic, do a
little bit of reading, she took them to the library, showed them
how to use the psych indexes then had them pick a topic that
they were interested in, read a little bit about it.
She taught them about hypothesis and how hypotheses get formed
and how they get tested and so on.
Then she had them design some little
experiment of their own.
So for example maybe they would go to three restaurants
and watch how parents disciplined their children.
Or maybe they would ask 20 of their friends some, administer
some questionnaire about anorexia.
So each of them constructed some little novice experiment.
She worked with them in class through the semester and then at
the end of the semester that came in and that was graded.
So that's how she created a class in which inquiry into
human behavior took the kind of center piece that she really
wanted it to take.
So those are three case histories.
The point so far in this workshop has been if you don't
have an appropriate structure about where first
exposure and process and response takes place.
Then you've got a house of straw in a way that whatever else you
do to save time and grading isn't going to
do you a whole lot of good.
After the break, we're going to talk about alright what happens
when you actually do have twice a semester 40 student papers on
your desk or if you have all of your classes doing it at the
same time or close together what happens if you have 140 student
papers on your desk.
How do you respond effectively, keep your own time to a minimum
and manage this grading load.
That's what we're going to talk about after the break.
Let's take about a ten minute break and come back at 20 after.
Start again at 20 after.
For this crowd and because of the themes of the questions that
you've asked I'm going to do next to strategies three, the
second strategy three.
I see I repeated three twice.
Did I in your copies?
Yes okay.
Strategy four and strategy five.
So in another words I'm skipping two for now.
There's some examples in the appendix of grading sheets that
explain criteria and standards to students but
I want to move now to three.
The first thing to do when you expect an influx of papers that
you are going to respond to and or grade is to try to make sure
that what ever you spend your time on merits that time.
Merits that time.
So one of the things that you can do is to ask students for a
cover page in which they check off and assert.
They could lie but in which they check off and assert certain
things that you wanted and you can put anything on here.
Let's see the kinds of things--I'm on page three now,
the first strategy three and that student check sheet--let's
see the kinds of things that are on here.
Some of the kinds of things that are on this check sheet are the
things that the student did to prepare the piece of work.
Read the short story at least twice.
Revise the essay at least once.
Spend at least five hours on it.
Start at least three days ago.
If you haven't done those four things I'm not interested in
spending my time on your work.
Now they could have finished it two hours the night before after
one reading and then lie.
If they do then at least the check sheet forms
a basis for discussion.
Why if you spend five hours, read the essay twice, and
started three days ago, why is this work so bad?
Let's talk about how you can work more effectively.
Then a second kind of thing is their own judgement.
That occurs in the item that says I've tried hard to do my
best work on this essay and the very last.
If I were to revise this paper again I would.
You know, its surprising, if any of you do this how often the
student will just nail it.
Why am I going to spend my time writing what they should do to
improve this essay when they already know it?
There's a big gap isn't there between what the student knows
at the moment they hand in the essay.
They know how much time they spent on it.
They know what they did to prepare it.
They probably have some idea of how good it is.
If you take this work in without learning all of that you've
created a great gap which you then have to make
up for with your own time.
You're likely to spend your time writing as though they didn't
know any of that and wasting all of that time.
So you need to find out what the student knows and you need to
make them responsible for having prepared this work for you to
spend time on it.
So then there are some prepared the work kinds of questions.
I proofread the essay.
I sent it through the spell check.
I asked at least one other person to proofread
it and then the middle one.
I have used the grading criteria to check and revise my work.
That has to do with the quality, have they
checked the quality of the work?
Those grading criteria would day something like has a clear
thesis about a debatable topic or in some other disciplines
identifies the problem clearly, [unclear audio] evidence, sites
sources properly, et cetera et cetera.
I could even put some of those right on this sheet
if I wanted to.
So this essay has a clear thesis which is either stated or
deducible by the reader after the end of the introduction, by
the end of the introduction.
This paper, whatever it is that you require, that this math
homework, or this problem set that I wanted you
to do has at least this.
So that's one step that I suggest.
Now let's take, let me stop for questions and contributions.
Do any of you use anything like this?
Have you had experience with this kind of?
How does it work?
[unclear audio].
(female speaker). You know I just had
an a-ha moment maybe having this to their lines.
I do have a checklist.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Then don't accept the
work without it.
That's what I do unless the checklist is there and checked
off don't show it to me.
I'm not accepting it.
(female speaker). I don't have
a checklist but I use book report
everything that I do.
[unclear audio].
(male speaker). What do you do
if someone doesn't check half of these.
Now how do you deal with that?
(Dr. Walvoord). Sorry, I'm not spending
my time on the paper.
Its an F or a zero.
(male speaker). What if the student's
argument for example on this he spent
five hours on the essay is I think I wrote a great essay and
I only spent an hour on it.
(Dr. Walvoord). What would other
people do about that?
(male speaker). Besides that I could
have lied and checked it but I didn't I was [unclear audio].
[audience laughter].
(Dr. Walvoord). I think my response
would be if you could write this good an
essay in an hour, imagine what you could do in five hours.
Go back and revise it.
Revise your work, revise your work.
Is what I would say.
I'm not interested in--some of the students I want most to help
are my most talented students who do really good work just
kind of off the seat of their pants and slide through.
I want to push these students to be really really really really
really good would be my response.
Its possible that you have gifted students whose best work
is their--I mean there are occasionally people like
this--whose best work is their first draft and if they mess
with it they only mess it up.
So let the student then write an explanation.
Let the student say I believe that my work is excellent.
The way I work is to write and not revise and then
you know you might say well okay.
Make an exception.
Take a look at it.
If you have a student like that who works like that, let them
explain how they work.
So in other words what you might accept is either everything
checked off or if its not checked there's an explanation.
Or [unclear audio].
The rationale from the student has to say even though I
couldn't check this its still worth your time to look at it
teacher because I have been careful and I
have been attentive.
When I'm trying to keep off my desk work that is careless,
inattentive, not checked.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Sure.
That's a nice idea.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). There's another strategy.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). People say that.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). The next suggestion is do
not spend the most time on the worst papers.
Isn't that what we're tempted to do.
We see a paper that is a total disaster and we spend all of our
time marking it, marking it, marking it, marking it.
Not only is that a large expenditure of our time but its
pedagogically indefensible because usually that student is
not in a position to learn from all of that
stuff that you wrote.
Usually the worst paper is the worst paper either because its
careless in which case it has already been eliminated here or
because a student although she spent time on it and tried hard
to make it good has made some fundamental mistake.
Either misunderstanding the readings, misunderstanding the
assignment, taking in a direction that can't be
supported or that wasn't really what you wanted.
Sometimes the sad part of this is sometimes you realize that if
you had just stated the assignment
a little more clearly.
So when it seems to be your fault then you can you know
there are ways to deal with that.
We all have done it but when the student has made some basic
mistake that makes the paper really bad news you should spend
only a little amount of time there because all you have to do
is comment on the basic flaw.
If the building is built crooked its
no sense commenting on the wallpaper.
No sense because what needs to happen is that the building
needs to be reconstructed.
So you just say that.
Don't mark grammar, punctuation.
Don't mark sentence level stuff.
We'll talk in a minute about why that's counter-productive.
Just say in this assignment you went off on the wrong track.
Here's what it is or whatever it was.
You misunderstood the work of Brown, whatever it was.
So that is the basic thing.
Questions or comments there?
(male speaker). I feel that when the
worst papers often times they have
misunderstood the assignment.
They haven't researched it well.
They haven't expressed themselves well.
They don't use [unclear audio] and to simply say.
I feel like I have to defend why this is a disaster and its not
university level work and that's what ends up taking time.
I sent a lot people over to the English Department the Writing
Skills center and say its not my job to teach you how to write.
They'll do it but I just have a hard time [unclear audio].
The worst papers do take the most of my time.
I'm having a hard time accepting that I can just say this is a
disaster without sort of saying why.
(Dr. Walvoord). Without saying why.
(male speaker). How do you balance
the subjective and the objective?
I find myself as a human being not able to just objectively see
look at papers and look at them.
I see the kid's name on the paper and I know that kid
everyday and I want that kid to succeed.
So I read their paper and I think this is a total disaster
but I again its hard to flunk the papers I think sometimes
[unclear audio].
Its hard for me, it would be hard for me to say okay you
didn't spend five hours on this.
Take a hike.
I have trouble with that.
How do you--do you have experience with that?
What do you do with it?
(Dr. Walvoord). The student whose
paper, the student who hasn't spent the
right amount of time I personally have no trouble
saying I'm not going to spend my time if
you're not going to spend yours.
You're not going to succeed in life if that's your attitude.
If you think you can hand in sloppy work
and get results, you can't.
The student who has gone astray in some fundamental way, ask
yourself now what is that student ready to learn?
What can that student learn from me at this point?
They're going to have to learn that the paper got a low grade.
In that high emotion moment when they learn that the paper got
the low grade what else can they learn?
Well the answer is not a lot and only the most important things.
So what you are going to try to do is to make some
comment not too long to the student that identifies
what the chief problems are.
You're not going to mark every paragraph
or every sentence of the page.
You're going to say something like I can't tell what
the main point of your paper is.
It would be enough to say that I think.
Let the grammar and punctuation go because
some of the stuff is derivative.
If they really knew what they were saying research suggests
that their grammar and punctuation would improve.
It might not still be very good.
It would improve if they really knew what they were saying.
So look at what they're saying first and then if its off base
for some reason that is what you should say so they focus on the
most important problem that they're having.
What is the most important problem that students are having
is often that they do not clearly know what they're trying
to say or they haven't deduced evidence for
some position, right?
So I'm trying to find a way here to mostly hold to that principle
which is do not spend the most time on the lowest papers.
Now the rubric will help you here as several people have
suggested and there are some rubrics in the back of the
handout in the Appendix A and you know you
can take a look at them.
People, those are different rubrics and grading sheets but
it helps to explain to the student what a
highly successful paper is.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). What is to say about a
paper that has no clear point?
What positive could you say about that.
[unclear audio].
Yes for those papers its important to
say positive things.
A rubric can help you because making a check next to a rubric,
a rubric if its well-written identifies what is there, what
is present, what is positive, what's happening thats good as
well as what's bad.
Then a couple of marginal comments that say here's one
place where your evidence is superb.
A little will go a long way.
It really is worth while.
All the literature on the learning says
positive feedback is powerful.
Its powerful.
So if you could make even one or two comments on a paper that
point out things that have been done well.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Its very time consuming
but it may be a good strategy in terms
of learning that's going to happen because a concern that
several of you have expressed is well what about this student?
What about this human being?
If I had the time I would ask myself
what else is going on here?
It wouldn't change the fact that the paper fails or that I will
not spend my time on the paper but talking to the student
might be a really good idea in terms of what is going on here?
Is this student struggling with some life condition that is
keeping her from doing good academic work?
Does this student need tutoring?
What's going on here?
The most important thing you can do is to
have guided the process.
In the best of all possible worlds there would be no total
disaster papers coming in that would be a surprise.
Either to you or the student because you would have been
spending your time in class like the historian talking about what
makes Louis a good king or not and how we form those judgements
or you would have looked at drafts.
I'm a great believer in looking at drafts because that way I can
catch the disasters before its too late.
Other teachers do other things.
You can look at the first two paragraphs.
You can look at the prospectus.
You can look at the materials and methods section of a forth
coming lab report or scientific report.
You can look at whatever it is.
Just on an early basis to say whoops you're going astray here.
That is the point at which peers, its difficult
to use peer response.
Its a hard thing.
Peer response is hard to use well and its hard to use in a
timely way because peers will tend to pick at small stuff and
not get the really fundamental problems done.
Now in the Appendix is an example, not in the Appendix but
on page four actually, the bottom of three and four is a
peer response and we'll take a look at it in a minute.
(male speaker). I can't collect drafts
from everybody and look at them
because I get trapped into them giving a response and then I
have to read the finished product.
I do let students submit drafts electronically 48 hours in
advance and I will give them general comments.
I won't edit it.
The one thing that I have done that addresses sort of the five
hour problem is on a research paper two weeks in advance
submitted annotated bibliography with six entries on it and I
don't take responsibility for looking at them
other than six entries.
I'm not going to tell them if they're good or not.
Then a week in advanced the class session
has to submit an outline.
Again I don't give them response.
They either did an outline or they didn't.
Just the mere fact that those things are there makes them
start working prior than the day before.
(Dr. Walvoord). That's very effective.
The other thing you can do is have the final papers come in.
Hold them for a week.
Don't look at them.
Give them back.
So you now revise this paper one more time.
Its due in four days.
You force them to finish that paper, lay it aside which is
what every good writer should do, lay it aside, get some
distance, get some sleep.
Come down off all those no dose pills the night you were writing
the paper and actually give yourself a chance
to look at it again.
Helps with grammar and punctuation too because then
they see more of that stuff the second time around.
Alright so if we look at this peer checklist
which begins at the bottom of page three.
This is for first draft of term papers in Sociology.
Its very hard to have peers give good response on a first draft
but I like this one because and I'm starting at the top of page
four now, it starts off not what do you think is wrong what do
you think is right, but what is the overall situation of this
paper or this draft?
How near is it to completion?
So in other words the responder has the start out in a way by
interviewing the writer.
That's a really good place to start.
Then it says is this draft organized?
So you can't tell that, the reader can't tell that if she
just starts reading word by word and commenting on things that
she sees that are wrong.
Should this comma be here?
That's how student readers go astray.
Instead what you want that reader to do is to flip through
the paper and see how its organized by reading the
headings and the first sentences of the paragraphs and the
conclusion and say well how was it organized?
Is that organization standard or not and is it working?
So you get the big picture issues first then this sheet
leads the student reader through the introductory section and
some questions about it.
The body of the paper.
Some questions about it.
I'm at number four right now.
Then over the page the conclusions and
then features the writing.
So features the writing on page five including the problems in
grammar, spelling, punctuation.
and so on comes last as it should, as it should.
Then the general impression of the paper so you
don't let, you don't even let him start with the
general impression of the paper.
You know what they'll say, oh its fine.
Midwest niceness takes over.
Their eagerness to be supportive to each other in an environment
where lots and lots of negative feedback comes their way and
they all feel it and they all know it and they're all
struggling and they all have this frightened little kid down
inside them somewhere even if they're a
sixty year old student.
So they want to help each other.
They want to encourage each other but in actual fact this
kind of detailed response that Mark Kercheck leads them through
is the most helpful kind of response not oh its fine.
So I like this sheet because he helps them to read in a
responsive way not to get derailed in the
way that many students do.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Nice.
Yeah, that's nice.
That's nice.
That's nice.
You could.
I've done fish bowl.
So I'll ask some good students, I've asked graduate students to
do this or I've asked good students from the past to come
into my class and do a little response to
someone's draft of a paper.
One of their own not one of my student, my current students,
but one of their own.
They function as an expert writing group and then the rest
of my students are arranged around watching them and then
when they see this expert performance of I do the same
thing with discussions of literature.
I have some graduate students come in and just sit there for
twenty minutes or so and discuss a short story that everybody has
read and then they see how people who really know how to do
this go about this discussion and then the class has a
checklist and they critique or ask questions about the
performance works slick.
It works very nicely.
Any kind of group interaction can be fish bowled like that.
Alright, lets go back to page three.
Now I want to talk about strategy four.
Do not extensively mark grammar and punctuation.
Is there anybody who wants me to go forward with
this or are we all not doing it?
Anybody want to hear about that?
You want to hear about it.
Alright.
(male speaker). I don't do it actually.
I'm glad to see it there and I'm glad I didn't do it there and
I've never done it and that makes me feel good.
(Dr. Walvoord). Alright, woo hoo.
[audience laughter].
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). This strategy says do not
extensively mark.
It doesn't say don't count.
So we need to talk about the difference between counting it,
insisting on it, insisting on control of edited standard
written English.
I'm going to use that term now.
Its probably not a totally nonjudgmental term
but its intended to be.
Edited standard written English, ESWE,
E-S-W-E is the technical term.
I don't use the term good English or bad English or
incorrect because in actual fact there are
different varieties of English.
They are all rule bound.
Each is appropriate to it's setting.
I do not want those of my students who grew up hearing and
speaking a version of the English language that is not
considered standard to feel like their language is bad or
incorrect or less good than anybody else's language.
Its not.
Its just different.
Those are just linguistic basics about the nature of language.
My students don't necessarily know that because even in homes
where a variety of English that is not considered standard is
spoken and often spoken with great verb and skill.
Parents will often [unclear audio].
[unclear audio].
So counting and marking are two different things.
Now let's talk about counting first because on finished form,
I don't mean counting one, two, three, four, but insisting on
okay, in finished form work not the daily writings that come in
to class for discussion like a historian does.
If we can read it its fine.
Don't worry about it there.
You don't want them to obsess about grammar and punctuation
and those little things.
You can distinguish in your course between
informal and formal writing.
It's perfectly legitimate to do.
Good writers make that distinction
in their own writing.
I don't go and check--if I don't know how to spell carrot on my
grocery list I don't go and look in the dictionary
or look it up online I don't.
Its informal writing.
Same if I want to send a quick note to my son on the e-mail I
don't necessarily nor does he although.
In both of our professional writing he works for a bank and
runs a loan division there.
We both know how to do cleaned as we for professional work.
So you can make that distinction in your class but on finished
formal work where students have not written, had to write it in
class but they have had a chance and been expected to finish it
up and its going to be like the finished formal work that they
will have to do in the outside world, virtually all of them.
Then I think you should insist on a reasonable standard of
[unclear audio].
Here are some ways that faculty members do that.
Let's take a look first at the what the history professor does
here on page six.
Page six.
This is a history professor teaching first year students
argumentative essays.
We've talked about his class before.
This is the grading sheet that he uses.
The letters on the left are grade equivalents for vague
ideas--they're not necessarily tied exactly to one number.
You notice that the boundary between each grade is not a
clear line but this is about where your going to be.
I see that the margins got a little
messed up in sending this paper electronically.
So you just have to see that the five would be at the left margin
along after four and so on.
Now tell me, how does grammar and punctuation
enter into this grading sheet?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). At the F level,
number three, the paper is incomprehensible.
At the C level, 8-8-E, the argument is all or partly
obscured by errors and language or usage.
That's it.
Its not mentioned again.
What do you think about that?
Is that kind of what you do even if you don't state it?
No?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Too many obvious errors.
Let's compare what that teacher did with page 22.
Page 22.
This is the end of a rubric for literary critical essays in a
literature class.
[unclear audio].
These are not points, five, four,
three, two, one.
These are just numerical indicators of levels of
performance.
So top level of performance would be there are no
discernible departures from edited standard written English.
Four is there are a few.
Three puts a number on it there.
No more than two, no more than an average of two departures
from [unclear audio] in the critical areas.
Then the critical areas are listed.
So you notice not every little interior sentence comma counts
the same as end of sentence punctuation, apostrophe,
pronouns, verbs.
This list is based on some research about what bothers
readers the most in the business world as well
as in the academic world.
[unclear audio].
I think as long as you explain it clearly I could think of a
rational for that.
Especially I could think of a rational for grammar and
punctuation for treating grammar and punctuation that way.
In fact what I do in my own classes I say if there are more
than two average per page and you know I just look through the
first two pages to see what the rate is.
If there's more than an average of two per page [unclear audio]
in these critical areas the paper's an F.
End of story.
I don't read it farther.
The first thing I do when I get a stack of papers on my desk I
pick up a paper and I look on my screen and I just read I glance
actually through or as I'm reading the paper as I'm
starting to read the paper.
If I begin to say whoa I think there's more than two average
errors per page here [unclear audio] in these critical areas
not every little comma.
Then the paper's an F.
I stop reading and I hand it back.
Its an F.
The end.
I will not spend more of my time.
I'm protecting my time.
I want to spend my time on the paper of the student who has
done a B job and who if I really responded well could become an
even better writer or the student whose done and A
job and who will probably read my critique
and really benefit from it.
I can do lovely critiques on A papers that really push the
student towards excellent and many of the students will
actually listen.
They're capable of going farther.
That's a wonderful thing.
I don't want to spend my time on somebody who hasn't figured out
how to produce papers that are reasonably consistent with ESWE.
There are online programs.
There are handbooks.
There's a writing center.
There's a ESL center.
There's ESL courses at the nearby community colleges
and in the high schools.
If I talk to the student I can suggest these things but you've
got to figure out how to ESWE.
When you come to college you've got to figure out
how to do ESWE.
If you don't you're going to suffer.
If this were a paper that departed from ESWE in these
regards more than twice a page and the student handed it in as
a proposal to a boss or sent it as a letter to a client you can
lose your job for that.
You're out of here.
So I need to prepare them for the real world
and how important all of this stuff is.
At the same time I say to them and this goes back to what I
said before and I think its really important.
I also explain to my students about language and I try to
establish a language policy in my class that acknowledges the
ways in which language is used in many cultures including ours
as a barrier to fully equality.
So forms of language differ.
What people of certain classes or ethnic backgrounds or
geographic regions the kind of English that they speak is
equally good, equally rule-bound, equally appropriate
for its situation as any other form of English but what has
happened in our society is what happens in many societies which
is that the language with the most powerful class has come to
be called standard.
Anybody who writes or speaks for that matter anything except the
standard is at a disadvantages, is looked down upon and
judgements are made.
So language is one of the ways in which we sort people in this
country by they're ethnic background, by their
socioeconomic class and by their geographic
region and its not fair.
Its not fair.
Its a discriminatory system but it is.
It is.
So my students have to learn to deal in an imperfect world but I
want them to know that it is an imperfect world and I want them
to know that I know its an imperfect world.
So now that we understand that that helps us.
Now we can figure out how to deal with it.
The answer to deal with it is this is one of those educational
environments that is preparing you to participate in the
American middle class and you've got to learn ESWE.
The penalties for not doing so are harsh
and you will learn that.
If you don't learn it here in this class
you'll learn it elsewhere.
So I want you to learn it right here in this class.
You have to master ESWE.
Now people who are speaking English as non-natives you can
do a couple of things about that.
One is you can figure alright I'm cutting my non-native
speakers some slack because the society
will cut them some slack.
There are certain characteristic errors in English usage that
speakers of English is a non-native language make that
native speakers almost never make.
So people sort of unconsciously classify these and they say in
their heads they say perhaps unconsciously oh this is a
non-native speaker or writer so there's a little give there.
There might be more or less give depending on the area of the
economy or in the area of the country you're in.
The nature of the deviations.
Are they typically Asian?
Are they typically Hispanic?
Are they typically Native American?
All of this you know its a highly racialized and classist
nation we have here.
You can cut some slack or you can apply the same standard and
you can say you are trying to function in English and you need
to do it at a professional level and so you have to get a tutor
or you have to get a proofreader or you have to get a system
somehow of producing as we have to figure that out.
Another thing that you can do is to make a
deal and this can do with any student whether a
native speaker or a non-native speaker.
You can say alright what are the things that you are going to
work on in this class?
You're working on subject-verb agreement, you have subject-verb
agreement, you have pronoun problems, you have apostrophe
problems and you have end of sentence punctuation problems.
Pick one.
Pick one.
Let's work on that.
So I'll hold you to that.
Also you're going to be working in the writing center and the
writing tutors and I will be communicating a lot.
So you can set up systems.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Like really?
[audience laughter].
(Dr. Walvoord). Oh yeah.
[unclear audio].
(male speaker). We also have a problem
because of the range of students we get
here its not as competitive as Notre Dame we have more
students who struggle with that and sometimes
they're very bright.
So I struggle with how do I keep them engaged [unclear audio]
rather than in the first or second year simply saying the
cards are stacked against me.
So my policy is most of my D and F papers that's the big issue
[unclear audio].
I only allow those students who have a D or an F to do a rewrite
and then their final grade is some combination
of your first submission.
Otherwise I don't let everyone just sort of keep submitting
[unclear audio].
That always gives me an opportunity to sit down with the
student, talk to them, and insist they get
over to the English departmentj.
I think there is a big issue here in some students that's got
such a big challenge in learning as [unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). I know what
that looks like.
I taught continuing education classes four credit.
I taught four credit undergraduate classes to adult
students in Wilmington, Delaware mostly working class folks.
I taught military folks at Dover Airforce Base.
I taught students across a very wide range at the University of
Cincinnati a big urban state university.
So I always didn't have Notre Dame and believe me not every
student had Notre Dame [unclear audio].
You'd be surprised but still they are substantially better
than students in those other settings.
You may run somewhere in between or actually what you probably
have is a very wide range.
So what is the best thing for students?
What is the best thing for students?
To find a rather soft policy in a learning environment or to
find a policy in a learning environment that mirrors the
rigors and the prejudices that you're going to
find in the outside.
Its hard.
The latter?
[unclear audio].
(male speaker) That's just my policy.
That's my policy.
The truth of the matter is that most student if they're really
that bad even if they go and work really hard in improving it
they're not going to get an A paper.
They're not going to go from F to A in one.
They're going to end up with a C if they worked really hard.
So I feel you just make compromises.
I haven't had anyone get on my case about it.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Other people who have
other policies?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). That is the problem.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Well what that shows is
the basic situation that a lot of research
also shows which is that when you have a paper in
front of you that significantly departs from ESWE a lot, a lot,
you have to ask yourself what happened to produce this?
Its not always or even perhaps most of the time that the
student didn't know or couldn't have produced a paper that
adhered to ESWE.
They could've but they didn't care, they didn't think you
cared, they didn't take the time, they finished the paper
too late, they were drunk, they were hungover, they were
whatever they were and so its just comes in like that.
So what is the remedy for that?
The remedy for that is a very stern reality check.
This matters.
You have to figure out how to do this and how to do it right or
you will not succeed.
That is the message they will get in the outside world.
Its fact in fact a message they know.
I recently read a survey of high school students and something
like 86 percent of them said that they felt that the mastery
of grammar and punctuation was quote unquote very important for
them to succeed in their later life.
They know it, they're just hoping that its not true or that
they can just slide through their science courses or even
their literature courses right without really having to do it.
They're just being human.
I don't like doing hard things either.
So you know, but the thing is so what will they respond to?
They will respond to a very sharp and clear message that
this is in fact very important.
So how can you get that message?
Well an early exercise, in-class exercise, where normally you
don't I mean a preparatory exercise this is what I
sometimes do.
Like about in the first or second week I'll say okay,
mostly these in-class exercises are informal writing and as long
as I can read it I don't care.
This one on Bishop Bosewe, do the
best you can to get ESWE.
I explained it about what it is and I explained my thinking
about language but on this one you're going to try your best
for ESWE and I'm going to look at ESWE.
If I see that there are more departures I'm going to give it
back to you so that you will know that you are in trouble.
You failed to do ESWE and there's no penalty right now
because this is a dry run, but if you do the same thing
on one of the finished formal essays you'll flunk.
So that's a look up for them.
Another policy that I use and that some other teachers
use is alright here's the policy on ESWE.
If you have more than two departures in these critical
areas per page average in your paper you will flunk.
Up to 48 hours, not sooner than that, not closer to that but up
to 48 hours before the papers due you can submit it to me.
I will just look at it for ESWE and see if you passed the line.
If you passed the line then in other words I'll
do it real quick.
I try to the several days before the 48 hour timeline is up or at
the 48 hour timeline I try to be reall fast about just looking at
it and saying would this pass [unclear audio] for ESWE?
Yes it would or no it wouldn't.
That message goes back to the student.
So by that time, by the time the final paper comes in if its not
in ESWE they have no excuse.
They'd have every chance to.
[unclear audio].
(Dr.Walvoord). I could just say go someplace
and get some help but I will sometimes say your
biggest problems are apostrophes and
sentence boundary punctuation.
I do not mark.
I do not mark because the process of achieving ESWE has at
least two pieces.
One is to know the rule and the other is to catch it in your own
writing, to proofread.
A huge percentage of the difficulties come in the
proofreading process.
Why would I proofread my students' work for them?
That's their job.
If they can't do it and many writers can't they
need to get a proofreader.
So hey, you know, some of your fellow students out there,
somebody from the writing center, your mother, your child,
your cousin, get it.
Do it.
Get it done.
You're going to have to do it after you get
it after your in college.
So get it done.
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). Numbers of departures.
In other words if you make two sentence boundary errors per
page and you have no other kinds of errors you still fail.
Anything in my policy anything that falls in that camp.
Now if I had students who despite my best efforts and all
my warnings and my dry run papers and so on were still
unable to meet that level of ESWE I would drop the standard.
I would not fail large numbers of my students just if I knew
that they were making use of all of the available help and they
were working ahead and they were using my offer of help.
Turn it in at least 48 hours ahead and I will tell you.
If I still were in a situation and there are learning
situations where still a number of my students will be
struggling I would have to figure out something else to do.
It is not my purpose to fail my students on this basis and have
them go away with an F unless that serves
a one time wakeup call.
I don't want to do that and my actual fact is even at the
University of Delaware and even at the University of Cincinnati
it was very rare that a student failed.
Very rare.
Its not that it didn't happen but it was rare.
If it became more than rare I would think
okay what's going on here?
I would talk to some of my students.
I would try to figure out, see if I couldn't create a classroom
in which students could succeed.
Alright let's go back to...strategy five.
Soup comments to student use.
This came up in the very first part of the
workshop as we went around.
How much commenting?
How do I make the comments really serve their purpose?
The first thing I think you can think about is
the timing of the comment.
If you don't comment in a teachable
moment your comments will not be read.
I did some research on this.
It was a beautiful spring day towards the end of semester at
the University of Cincinnati and I was in the women's restroom.
There were two students in there and one of them had evidently
just gotten her paper back and her friend said to her what did
you get on the paper?
She replied I only got a B.
She said I was really disappointed.
That goes to what somebody said here about inflation.
I was really disappointed then she went on
to say he wrote all over it.
She said he must have wrote a book and I never even read it.
Isn't that sad.
Here's this guy probably should've been walking in the
woods or playing with his kids right?
Instead he's writing all over this paper.
She never even reads it.
What a waste.
So what is the teachable moment and how can we be sure that we
are only spending our commenting time on the teachable moment.
Well in the first place this was towards the end of the semester.
I think that if you write all over papers that students are
going to get back at the very end of the semester or maybe
they're not going to even come pick them
up don't waste your time.
The only thing you need to do is decide on a fair grade, record
the grade, and maybe what I do is I make a few hand written
notes about this paper so that if the student ever comes back
to me or if there is ever any problem with it I kind of know
what the especially if its a low grade I know what the problem
was that I saw at that time.
Other than that, no.
What are the other teachable moments?
Well generally its a more teachable moment when the
student can do something about the grade than when they can't.
Let's talk about draft response.
What if instead of assigning two different papers you assign one
paper and a revision of that paper?
Same amount of work.
Would you get more learning?
Not sure.
Its a balance isn't it between the topic they would learn or
the things they would learn by writing twice in two different
areas versus what they would learn by.
Can you substitute for the second paper?
Can you [unclear audio] can you substitute inclass writing,
informal writing, something really short that you could
grade in a short amount of time?
Talk to a faculty member who was asking, get this, he's a
business faculty member.
He was teaching seniors in finance and he was asking them
for eight case studies across the semester.
That's a lot.
The people in the workshop said to him well Dan couldn't you
just cut it down to one or two.
He said no, I need them to write on everyone of the eight units
of the course because if they don't write
about that unit they don't learn it.
What he worked out was much much shorter writing for each of the
eight units that he could handle in class and then one draft of a
case study and one revision of that case study.
So that they produced one really, really good case study.
They learned what it was like to follow a writing process that
was careful that included revision and where he could
teach them some things in a teachable moment because it was
worth quite a bit then in the grade that one case study.
So a draft and then comments on the draft and then a final.
What do you think about that?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). I know biologists who
do this with lab reports, series of lab
reports across the semester instead of [unclear audio].
They do the first part of lab report on the first experiment
then the first two parts not of that same experiment but then
the three parts and so on.
So they build it up cumulatively like that.
Other people have stories?
[unclear audio].
(Dr. Walvoord). So what you've done
and this is maybe a good principle to wrap
up on, you're trying to leverage a lot of learning work, good
learning work on the students' part into a small a final
product as you can so that you can really respond to it
effectively without having pages and pages and pages of stuff.
There's a leveraging strategy there that works in
a number of environments.
So what we've done this morning is talk about these various
strategies of making the grading process fair, time efficient,
and conducive to learning.
I hope you'll feel free to use or adapt any of these rubrics or
any other kinds of things, grading sheets, whatever for
your own use or for that of colleagues.
Don't be afraid to do that.
Its been a real pleasure working with you.
Before you finish please fill out the green sheet that's in
your packet and I guess you can just leave it on
the back table there.
Thank you folks.
Its been a pleasure.
[audience applause].
♪ [music playing-- no dialogue]. ♪♪