How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers

But while the goal of rewarding good teachers is laudable, the awards can sap the morale and productivity of faculty members who try too hard to receive them. For young professors in particular, paying too much attention to teaching awards is dangerous. […] A professor whose goal is to win a teaching award can be tempted to focus on using varied and creative teaching styles, rather than on student learning and its assessment. The abundance of recent literature on teaching styles, with its endless debate about the effectiveness of different strategies, exacerbates the problem. Adopting different teaching strategies is terribly time-consuming. Junior faculty members must decide if it is worth it. —David G. EvansHow Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers (Chronicle)

It is very tempting to teach everything the same way I taught it last time, shooting for polish and refinement rather than radical re-vision.

This year in my American Lit class, in response to the unusually high stress signals the students were giving off, I turned what had been on the syllabus as the final date for the term paper into the due date for a rough draft. I pulled an all-nighter marking those drafts and turned them back to students within a few days. In a class of about 25, only four students took advantage of the opportunity to revise.

It takes about a half hour for me to read and comment on a term paper, if I assume the paper is a draft and that the student will use my comments to revise. If, on the other hand, I am simply assigning a grade, I can easily sort the papers holistically — Susie’s paper is better than Billy’s, which is not quite as good as Frankie’s — and then go back and assign grades based on whether each paper meets the assignment criteria.

A handful of others did benefit from the extension, in that they didn’t bother to turn in the rough draft, and only turned in the final draft — but that means I had to mark their papers closer to the end-of-term crunch. And some students didn’t need to revise because they were happy with the As or Bs their draft earned them. But a significant chunk — including most of the ones whose papers took the most time for me to evaluate — decided they would rather live with their C or D.

Was the benefit to those four students worth the extra effort I put into the assignment? One one level, yes. On another level, I’m not so sure. I knew I couldn’t force the students to take advantage of the opportunity, but I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply writing a letter grade on the draft, and then simply let those students who were unhappy with their grade make an appointment with me to discuss it.

4 thoughts on “How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers

  1. I actually had two such sessions in the syllabus. The first, for the midterm paper, was a bust — few students had put serious efforts into it. The second scheduled session was mostly a thesis workshop, but several students had excellent drafts. It was at that second session — when I saw a few people realize with horror that they had produced a plot summary or a research paper on gender or race (that had little to do with the work they were supposed to be studying) that I announced the extension.

    In EL150, “Intro to Literary Study,” the students read peer drafts aloud to the author, then took drafts home and e-mailed two-page responses to each other, then we took another class period in which students discussed how they changed their paper based on the comments they received from their peers. Since that class is stacked with students who like literature and who are actively trying to improve their writing, that exercise was a smashing success — though many students at first disliked having to listen to someone else read their drafts aloud (that is, in pairs, student A reads student B’s paper aloud, and student B can’t interrupt to explain confusing passages).

  2. I did a similar “last minute extension” at the end of the literary criticism course this past term — only I had them do “peer editing” in class on the deadline (instead of Arnzen commenting or conferencing) and it helped a bit when they revised and turned papers in a few days later for a grade. Sometimes a peer workshop can help motivate them and it’s useful to see what other students are working on. I like to integrate such sessions into my syllabus from day one, actually; although the students aren’t always the best critics, it’s always paid off. Ideally, it gets around the old “writing for the teacher” problem, too, as students will come to see themselves as part of a discourse community rather than just as “students.”

  3. I like you last sentence about how you could have graded them, then let the students who wanted a better grade to come talk to you.

    But the real information you’re leaving out is – when did you tell them about the change in schedule?

    A student with a couple of hard classes doesn’t benefit from what you suggested when they’re told about it in the middle of finals. They’re already trying to juggle several other finals and projects at the same time, then when they’re done with that they have to immediately move everything they own (in Eau Claire, I believe you’re supposed to be out of the dorm within 24 hours of your last final) – plus they’ve already made arrangements for their parents or moving van which can’t be changed. Add to that the pressure of trying to see your friends before everyone completely moves for the summer and the burn-out stress of finals week…and saying “oh, you have a couple of days to revise your paper” isn’t real helpful.

    The be fair though, you might have told them a month before finals and students still didn’t take advantage of it because students procrastinate.

    It’s just my two cents, but what I *do* like about what you wrote is how you do have a solution that would both save you time and have the same effect for the students. That’s pretyt cool. :-)

  4. It was a multiply staged assignment, and the extension I gave them didn’t extend past the last day of classes.

    One week they were supposed to show me a bibliography, then the next week have a rough draft ready to peer review, then the next week the final draft was supposed to be due. A few students had nothing significant accomplished even after the first two components were due, so you’re right Will — giving those students a few extra days probably did more to enable their procrastination than to help them work on the paper, but perhaps they put the time to good use elsewhere.

    The extension wouldn’t have conflicted with exams or move-out pressures. They had about two weeks from the announcement I made to turn in the paper on the last day of classes (and I was flexible for students who said they had to work or travel all that weekend, and gave them some extra time). Of course, I needed time to mark the papers, but I did get them back pretty quickly (they were ready overnight, in most cases… some students didn’t actually come by my office to pick them up, but I gave others e-mail feedback that night). If I had given everyone a month notice about the extension, then nobody would have taken the original due date seriously. My goal is to give them extra time when they need it.

    Perhaps I could do something like give a short-term reward to the students who’ve done well on the pre-writing exercises. I might hold a mandatory paper workshop for the slackers, and make it optional for those who have started working on their own. Of course that means I’d have to take even more time away from literature to devote to writing, but next term this survey class is being flagged as “Writing Intensive,” which means the classes will be capped at a smaller number, and we’ll have more time to workshop individual papers.

    Perhaps next time I’ll work office consultations into the syllabus… it’s exhausting to have back-to-back discussions with students, but it’s an efficient use of time (in that I don’t have to first read a draft, then write down everything I want to say, then discuss it all with the student).

    I had a whole list of pre-submission exercises and some rather detailed drafting requirements that I developed while teaching freshman comp at UW-EC, but I deliberately left all that behind when I came to SHU, since I was worried those techniques were overly complex (they made more sense for technical writers, who needed the extra structure).

    Well, back to the grind…

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