My concern was that the D would send him from the front row to the back row, where he would turn his baseball cap backward and scowl at me for the rest of the semester.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. That D motivated him to come see me about his next paper, and the one after that, and just about every other one in the four subsequent courses he took with me over the next three years…..
That same semester, in that very same class, I had a student who made her home in the back row, along with a friend or two who apparently shared her lack of interest in the course. With this student — who spoke rarely and eyed me with a look of bemused indifference — I had little hesitation about stamping a D on her second assignment.
What she needs, I thought to myself as I dropped her paper grimly on her desk, was an intellectual kick in the rear, in the form of a grade that would scare her into better behavior in class and more effort on her written work.
She was absent the next class. When she showed up for the one after that, her attitude seemed — if possible — worse than before. She didn’t come to see me about her next assignment, as I had suggested she do, and it was as poor as the previous one.
In both of those D narratives, I had my pedagogical expectations overturned. —Failing to Motivate (Chronicle)
These anecdotes are a prelude to an argument against using grades for motivation. Lang isn’t suggesting that we abolish grading; rather, that the grades always be “transparent” — that is, “Convey clearly to the students the criteria for your grades, and ensure that they have the tools and opportunity to meet your criteria.”
Students often say “thank you” when I hand them a paper with a good grade on it. I always respond, “You’re the one who did the work, you earned it. Thank you.”
It’s always pleasant to hear those magic words, but I don’t want to foster the attitude that I am responsible for what they choose to do with the opportunities I set up for them in the classroom.
Great headline, by the way.
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Thanks again for fueling some thinking. I continue exploring the above comments in Pedablogue (permalinked below).
Great article! I've felt the same way as the author and I think that there's a degree to which his case supports the notion that classes should be pass/fail rather than ABC graded. However, I think there's a degree to which the author's anecdotes point to the level which he might be disengaged from (or alienated by) his own students and there are many assumptions about his grading method built into the piece. When he argues that "we don't know our students well enough to make the kinds of judgments about their self-confidence and circumstances that would enable us to calibrate their grades to achieve the desired level of motivation we want" Lang is both right and wrong. While we're not psychologists who are specialists in behavior modification, researching student motives by spending hours and hours learning each "client's" case history, we do have an opportunity as a teacher to better know our students through conferencing, informal chats, journaling and other personalizing strategies. Moreover, when grading is approached as progressive assessment (as it ostensibly is in any portfolio-based course) then grading the "process" along the way is a part of student motivation. If we assess the "product" by evaluating the "outcome" alone, this could lead to the disenfranchisement of the student -- and the desire to judge the end product could be a symptom of the teacher's unwillingness to engage with the students' process in the first place, working as "inspector" at the paper factory rather than "coach."