21 Letter on Course Grading

Dear Class,

I also send out this letter as an email, and I hope you see it before we start. As a teacher, researcher, and administrator, I have become convinced that college composers and their teachers are not very well served by doing more schooling in writing. To try to break out of schooling as usual in our course, I have changed the heart of schooling: grading. We are using a grading contract in this class. You are probably used to a very different approach to grading, so it feels to me like my approach to grading needs some justification and explanation before the course even begins. This brief letter is just that.

First, a justification. I have designed this course as an opportunity to learn (OTL) college composition for you. That’s a big claim, and I try to stay aware of what my claim means. You see, I am a college insider. I have lots of degrees, and my identities–I identify as a straight, white male–have added to my power in school throughout my career as a student, teacher, and administrator. When I say I’m designing an OTL, I mean this: I’m holding space for people with diverse identities to find room to make use of some tools and some time to learn to do things that they want to do. OsTL are all over the place if you look for them. Over the past years, I’ve taken many swimming and yoga classes, done an amazing amount of professional development for work, and spent many hours scouring the web for videos and discussion posts on bicycle repair. OsTL.

In my experience, grades seem almost to undermine OsTL. In my own learning outside of “school,” I don’t really get grades. I have received lots of certificates of completion when I have met the requirements for some training. I’ve received a lot of feedback on my performance from “teachers” and from peers and from myself. Not many grades. Maybe more importantly, my students have told me that they don’t really connect grades with learning that they value. It’s not that grades don’t matter to them. It’s that they don’t use grades to support their learning. They use grades to see where they stand in school and whether they meeting the requirements set by teachers like me. Many admit that they use grades to decide whether their teachers like them or whether what they write or think or say matches with what their teacher thinks they should have written, thought, or said. For many students and especially for students who don’t look like me, grades seem mostly to mark how well they fit in to school culture.

My experience and a lot of research on how students use grades raises for me some questions with which I want us to grapple. Why do college students get grades? Why do grades seem so important to students and teachers? In what ways do grades affect learning for individuals? What impacts do grades have on relationships in a class like ours? Researchers have learned a bit about the impact of grades by talking to student writers. Grades tend to take students’ focus away from writing and place it on earning . . . grades. Grades cause many students to worry about pleasing or fooling a teacher rather than learning other stuff. Grades make many students unwilling to take risks. Maybe most important in our class, grades make it hard to write first drafts that don’t really do what you want them to, something that seems to me to be important.

For these reasons, I follow along with Asao Inoue (a good bit of his language is in this letter and my contract) and other folks and use a grading contract in this class. The contract values the quality and quantity of your efforts, your labor, instead of the quality of the writing that you produce. This approach is based on some basic assumptions. I assume that you will work on learning and becoming  a more effective composer. I assume you will take risks as an individual and a member of our classroom community. I assume that you will do your best and be honest about what you have done and what you have not done. If our class agrees that everyone will put in one hour of reading on a text we are working with, I will trust that someone with one page of notes and someone with six pages of notes put in at least their hour. I will ask us all to trust.

In fact, trust is actually going to be important in this class. If you are hoping to game the course and get the highest possible grade for the least effort, you may find this class frustrating. You may even feel that it is unfair because grades will be determined by the quantity and quality of your effort rather than by the quality of your writing. I am going to ask you to trust that doing the work assigned will support your development as a college composer. If you trust this class, you may come to value our trust in one another and the course design. You may find our class a place in which you can take risks, try new strategies, fail, and try again. That is, it may become a place where you can learn not only how to write for college but also how to assess your own writing and understand how well it accomplishes the goals you have for it. You may learn how to use feedback from me and your peers to improve your writing rather than simply seeking out the approval of a teacher like me.

Check out the contract, and start thinking about whether you can trust it. I’m looking forward to talking about it with you and the rest of class.

Sincerely,

Todd