219. Rigor

Shownotes

• Jack, Jordynn and Viji Sathy (2021). “It’s Time to Cancel the Word ‘Rigor.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education. September 24.
• Nilson, L. B. (2015). Specifications grading: Restoring rigor, motivating students, and saving faculty time. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
• Object Lessons – The Atlantic
• Hogan, Kelly A, and Sathy, Viji (2020). “Optimizing Student Learning and Inclusion in Quantitative Courses.” in Rodgers, Joseph Lee, ed. (2020). Teaching Statistics and Quantitative Methods in the 21st Century. Routledge.

Transcript

John: In academia, the term “rigor” is often code for gatekeeping and exclusion. In this episode, we examine ways of creating challenging courses while providing the support and structure necessary for student success.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners..

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Jordynn Jack and Viji Sathy. Jordynn is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of three books and numerous articles that focus on the rhetorics of science, technology, and gender in a variety of contexts. She is also the Director of the Health and Humanities Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill. Viji is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, the Director of the Townsend Program for Education Research, and the Director of the Academic Leadership Program at the Institute for Arts & Humanities, also at UNC-Chapel Hill. Viji is a national expert on inclusive teaching and is a co-author (with Kelly Hogan) of a forthcoming book on inclusive teaching which will be part of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller.Welcome Jordynn, and welcome back Viji.

Viji: Thank you.

Jordynn: Thanks. Nice to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Jordynn, are you drinking tea?

Jordynn: I’m drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Ah coffee… rebel. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s one of the most popular teas on this podcast. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Viji?

Viji: Well in honor of the podcast, I decided to actually make tea. I had a birthday recently, and someone gave me a thing called “Chai Box” and it had teas that you can actually boil and strain and all of that. So I thought I would go through that process and have a nice hot cup of tea with you.

Rebecca: Sounds wonderful.

John: It does.

Rebecca: I wish we were in the same space so I could try some. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking Tea Forté Black Currant tea.

Rebecca: And I have a black blend called East Frisian.

John: One of your new favorites.

Rebecca: It is, yeah.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about an article you co-authored earlier this semester in the Chronicle entitled “It’s Time to Cancel the Word ‘Rigor.’” And you raise a number of arguments about the common use of that term rigor in academics. Why is a focus on rigor so harmful?

Jordynn: Well if I can speak, I guess, to the humanities side of the question, I think the term rigor often appears when we have conversations that also entail curriculum, how to uphold a standard of mythical proportions, I guess I would say, of what students used to learn and how they used to write and how they used to perform in class that goes back centuries, honestly. So the complaints about students not meeting some standard are the reason why first-year writing exists. The idea that incoming students at Harvard weren’t writing well enough is why we have first-year writing. And that goes back over a century. But I think in my discipline particularly, there tends to be a concern, mostly about the range of students that now attend university. And I think that’s one of the root causes of this discourse. The idea that… I don’t think anyone wants to say it explicitly, but people seem to think that by admitting more students that have a wider range of backgrounds, we’ve somehow lost some standard that used to be there. And even though we know that this is a myth, it still persists. Often it’s coded language for: “some students don’t belong and others do.”

Viji: Yeah, and I guess I would add, it’s a similar idea in the sciences, I think. In our case, and as we wrote about, I think of this as… these are obstacles for students. And that’s not what we want to be as educators: obstacles. And so I’m really trying to help people see that this kind of language isn’t helpful to students, it isn’t helpful to faculty. It is code, like Jordan talks about, that really privileges a traditional view of education. And that’s not where we need to be right now. We need to be in a place where we support our students, the students we have in our classroom, not the ones that we aspire to have or think we have or any of those kinds of things. It’s actually: Who’s in our classroom, and how do we best serve them? And I think for a lot of people, they just haven’t really examined the notion of rigor and where that comes from.

Rebecca: One of the things that I was thinking about when I was reading your article was also how much this language also appears before they’re our students—when they’re prospective students or are part of the admissions process as well—that their application doesn’t show enough “rigor” or their prior education isn’t “rigorous” enough, to almost prevent certain kinds of students from being our students in the first place, which is really disturbing on so many levels. And we often hear faculty using this language of rigor when they’re complaining to one another about the scaffolding or the support that different students may need in their classes. How do we respond to our colleagues across the university, faculty as well as administrators and staff, who may be using this language?

Viji: I think a big part of it is to not shy away from saying, “We absolutely want to have a challenging course, high standards.” There’s other versions of language that indicate that you want to really push your students, in a healthy way, towards understanding the material with support from you, not as their adversary. And so I think that’s really what we want to encourage people to think about… that this isn’t an obstacle course to build for our students and see who makes it to the other side, it really is a coaching process. It’s a process where, when they succeed, we’ve succeeded, or vice versa. Really, we’re thinking about this as a shared endeavor. And the more students who succeed, the better that reflects our ability, or our perception of how we’re teaching. I never want to be seen as somebody who keeps students out, and if only a small number of students actually meet the learning objectives, that’s a poor reflection on me, not on them. And so I think that’s really what we want to do… is really flip the idea that this is not about you putting up obstacles, but rather you constructing devices, assignments, grading, all of those kinds of things that actually support your students in their learning.

Jordynn: I think to the admissions question, at least in our institution, we’re a state university, we have a mission to serve the state. And I think that’s kind of a persuasive resource we have at our disposal is that we admit students from every county, in our case in North Carolina. We have programs that encourage and provide support for students who are first-gen, we have programs in place to allow all students to succeed or to encourage all students to succeed. And I think sometimes people perhaps assume that we’re in a different role than that, like somehow, our mission is instead to be this super elite institution where we’re only admitting the best and only the best will survive the obstacle course. We’re not Hogwarts. [LAUGHTER] We’re a state institution that’s here to serve the population of students that we have. And I think, for a lot of us, appealing to that mission can be an effective way to counter the idea that we’re instead trying to uphold this elite standard.

Viji: Jordynn’s point is really a poignant one in that this is a source of pride for our campus that we admit a large number of in-state students, and our university is the flagship university in our state. So for both students and faculty, we do think of ourselves as top, we’ve got top students and top instruction happening. That’s why I think we come from this perspective of…  How do we serve these top students who are very diverse in their needs and in their experiences as they come to us? And that we take that on as a challenge, because that’s our job, is to serve these students.

John: One of the challenges that many new faculty have when they come in is they do want to use more inclusive teaching techniques. But some of the people who are evaluating them critique them because they are using inclusive-teaching practices, and they are having more students being successful, which tends to be reflected in higher grades. What can we do to help those colleagues when they’re faced with barriers in those who evaluate them?

Viji: Well, I can take a stab at it, and Jordynn you want to add if you’d like. I think one thing is that we could better educate everyone about the process and what we mean to have an inclusive classroom, to have high standards but help your students meet those standards. And I think the proof is in the pudding. I jokingly tell my students every semester, “If 100% of you make A s, I will be so happy, I will be so happy. If you meet all of the requirements and you do well in the course, that makes me really happy and I’ll retire,” that’s what I tell them, “I’ll retire when that day comes.” But I think just thinking through… How do we show our colleagues that we are asking our students to do really difficult things, and they’re meeting that challenge? That’s what we want to educate our peers about, not the grade distribution, but rather… What did the students do to earn that grade? And how did you scaffold the learning experience so that they were able to do that? And I think when we showed those
learning outcomes and the actual student work, that’s when I think we can really have very meaningful and productive conversations about how to make this happen in more classes, or how to actually highlight this kind of instruction which should be rewarded, not punished.

Jordynn: Yeah. One thing that we learned in our department when we did an assessment of student learning outcomes, was that in courses where there’s more structure, students produced better writing. And those courses happen to be first-year writing classes where each project is introduced, scaffolded with various milestones that students complete. There’s a clear sense of what the assignment parameters are beyond, “Write an essay about this topic.” And we found that students actually produced stronger arguments in those assignments and were better able to marshal evidence to support their arguments. And it wasn’t surprising to me, but it made an argument to the department that this approach is effective. And ultimately, in the report that we wrote up based on this required assessment cycle, we argued that the literature courses needed to adopt some of the pedagogy from the writing classes that was producing these effects. And so I think teaching evaluations might be another way to show that, although that’s more subjective. But for better or for worse, departments are required to have some kind of assessment of student learning outcomes. And I think that’s one place where some of these innovations in teaching can be demonstrated in terms of their usefulness.

Rebecca: We started talking a little bit about what these inclusive practices might be to move in this direction. Can we talk a little bit about expectations and what that might look like, maybe from the start of a syllabus or the course structure, and then maybe move into a couple of details?

Jordynn: I think in the article we kind of took a humanities/science perspective and that’s not a clear split. But I think overall, I’m attracted to approaches that make clear the expectations for students, such as specs grading, which is something I’ve gotten interested in lately, where you lay out, “Here’s what you need to do to get an A in this class.” And there’s different approaches to that, but basically for each unit or for each component of the class, “Here’s what the expectations are.” And then to model, in my case, “Here’s what an effective example of this writing assignment looks like.” And we look at them in class and discuss them so that it’s not this abstract idea, like, “Oh, there was an A paper that exists out there, but I have no idea what it is.” So for each component of the class to be really intentional about making the expectations clear, and then providing structure to support students meeting those expectations.

Viji: Yeah, I think that transparency part is key. You don’t want students to have to guess what is the ideal outcome. And that’s when we know people will make assumptions that are incorrect, and may be hard to come back from. So Jordynn’s example of providing a model is ideal because students can see that model. I’m guessing it’s actually an anonymized student paper, that’s something that is actually like a student product that they can critique, to see examples of that kind of peer work that happens. But it’s really helpful to students to see an example. The criticism I hear sometimes about those kinds of approaches is that it takes the creativity out of what a student might produce, because they may be trying to tailor it to the model that they’ve been provided. And in that case, I think… Only in the examples you provide, right? So you could provide a range of examples that meet the criteria, and students can see the leeway that exists, and encourage them to be creative in those endeavors. But not providing anything… I don’t know if you’ve been watching The Great British Baking Show, but there’s a thing called a “technical challenge” in the show. And it’s a piece where they have some instructions for the bakers and the ingredients, and they’re required to produce this thing. And it’s often something they’ve never even laid eyes on. But the instructions, if you see them, sometimes they show you and it’s like two steps, like, “Make the dough. Decorate it.” [LAUGHTER] And you see them really struggle, because they’ve never even laid eyes on this. They don’t even know, they have to guess based on the materials that are available, “Is this something that I should roll up?” But there’s all kinds of things that they have to guess. And remarkably, because they’re who they are, they figure it out. But why are we making our students do this kind of exercise where they have to guess what the right thing is when we actually have in our mind examples of what the right thing is and that we can provide to them, that gives that structure that Jordynn’s talking about? Structure is so important for inclusive teaching, that we don’t let people try to figure it out, that we actually give them some guidance about how to do things so that they feel confident that they can go into an assignment, understanding what might be required of them, that they have expectations about, say, the time commitment involved in an assignment, how they’re going to be evaluated in that assignment. There should be very little guesswork on the student’s part. Yes, they may not exactly know how you have applied the rubric to their paper, but they have a rubric to look at to sort of check off, “Did I do this, did I include these things, do I feel like I’ve sufficiently provided evidence for certain things…” These are kinds of waypoints that students really benefit from. And I think it produces a higher-quality product from the get-go when you give this kind of structure to students, and then it keeps your grumpiness to a minimum. And I’ve done this and I speak from experience when I’ve given students very minimal structure. And I see the variety of interpretation for an assignment and I think, “Oh, gosh, I should have been more specific about what I wanted.” And then it just keeps everybody happier. You can provide those kinds of guidelines without hampering their creativity. And, in fact, really producing something that is more along the lines of the learning experience you hope for them to have out of that assignment.

Jordynn: I would just also add, at least in my courses, I try to design a realistic problem situation that students are in so that it’s not just me dictating what the expectations are but discovering them together. So for instance, the course I have coming up is a History of Writing class. And there’s a series of essays published in The Atlantic called Object Lessons where people take a commonplace item and write about its history, and often they’re writing technologies. So their assignment in that class might be, “You’re going to write one of these object lessons essays.” So we look at some examples. There’s a history of these writing desks that women used in the 19th century where they would compose their correspondence, for instance. So, we read a few examples, and then we generate the criteria together. So what makes a good object lessons essay in The Atlantic? What’s goi ng to be likely to get published in this series? So then we develop the rubric together, we develop the specifications for what a good essay will look like, and then they’ll see, “Okay, well, this author approached it in this way, this author approached it in a different way.” So there’s leeway there. They all kind of fit a general sub-genre of writing. But it’s not like I’m developing these arbitrary requirements, like, “It has to be this long, and it has to use this citation format.” But together, we’re developing a sense of how to effectively address this situation. And so I think that addresses some of the concerns sometimes that highly structured approaches are too one-way, like, the instructor is just determining what could be still relatively arbitrary set of criteria and making them clear to students. That’s better than nothing. But it can still be ineffective for students if you’re arbitrarily deciding, like, “It has to be exactly 500 words. And I’m going to make it clear that every citation has to be exactly correct. And you can’t have any misspelled words or you’ll get a zero.” That approach is transparent, but it still might not be inclusive.

Viji: What’s nice about that is that it conveys the ambiguity sometimes of the work and how it isn’t always cut and dried, even from the perspective of the evaluator. And so it’s really helpful to students to kind of peel back what’s happening and seeing, “Oh yeah, this example resonates so much with an example I use in my class where students have to craft an interpretation around the standard deviation.” And we talk through different examples, and they see why some are more limiting than others. And it really does open up this discussion of what makes a better interpretation of a standard deviation and why.

John: One of the things you point out is that a lack of structure is not terribly equitable, because our students come in with very different preparations, depending on whether they’re a first-generation or a continuing-generation student and the type of preparation they had in their local school districts, which varies a lot based on the average income within their community. So adding structure will not only help all students, but it will particularly help those students, I think, who come in less prepared to play that game of higher ed, who come in with less clear expectations about what we expect of our students. What are some other examples of ways in which we can build in more support for those students who come in with less preparation for the hidden curriculum of higher education?

Viji: I’m going to start by… something I’m heavily involved in that I love both the idea and the implementation of it at this stage. We are in the process of incorporating a new general education curriculum on our campus. And I was part of the coordinating committee that helped think through how this curriculum might look. And now we’re in this phase of rolling out a course that does exactly this. It’s a first-year thriving course, and it’s about thriving in college. And the goal is for students to take this course in their first year, it could be spring or fall, but to really unhide that hidden curriculum of college, and particularly at a research university like ours, where students may not be familiar with the kinds of resources that are available to them, how to navigate the research university, what exists for them to really seize as part of their experiences in college. And a big portion of this is the science of learning. Because many of our students have been through many different types of classes, but don’t actually have a lot of knowledge about effective study strategies, good note taking… there’s all kinds of things that people have just been winging it. And because they are top students in our state, their method has worked for them up to this point. But oftentimes, it falters in college because it is a bit different. And some students are better equipped to handle the kinds of things we’re asking them to do in college, because of their preparation, or the methods that they’ve chosen have really served them well. So we don’t want people to bump into good practices, we would like to be able to educate them about this from the start. And that’s one thing that I’m so excited to see our students be able to take advantage of, and it will be for all first-year students, it’s a required course. And it will really help, I think, our students not only see good practices, but also point them to places they can go in the future, like using our Learning Center to get ongoing academic coaching, to really think about all of the libraries that we have and the services they offer, to really serve them well throughout their time at UNC.

Jordynn: Yeah, this makes me think about also the research on transfer, which suggests that it’s often really difficult for students to apply something abstract to a new situation. So let’s say they take this course, they learn about study techniques, then they’re in your history class, for whatever reason, they might not necessarily think back to that first-year course and say, “Oh yeah, I learned this technique.” So we have to prime them and cue them to draw on what they’ve learned previously, in order for it to transfer. So I was just working on my course design for next semester. And we’re doing a pilot of Canvas, the learning system. And I noticed that the modules that have been pre-designed have these troubleshooting sections that are for technology. But listening to this makes me think I need to repurpose those for troubleshooting the assignment. Like, I was reading through one of the readings that I assigned and it uses terms like “autochthonous.” And reading it, I was like, “I don’t know if my students are going to know this.” But will they know, “Oh, you can look up terms in a dictionary?” Which seems
obvious, but it’s not something you remember to do when you’re reading a difficult text. So troubleshooting, like, “If you’re having trouble understanding this text, here’s a good reference dictionary that might have terms related to our class.” Or, “How should you study for this test that’s coming up? Here’s a reminder about this study technique that you probably learned about in your first-year thrive class, and here’s the link to the Learning Center handout about it.” Like building in those kinds of supports the way we would for technology support. So the metaphor of troubleshooting, I think, is really helpful and something instructors should be conscious of. The same thing happens in writing all the time, like, “Well, they obviously learned how to cite sources in first-year writing.” Well they did, but you’re asking students to cite in Chicago, and they haven’t seen Chicago before. They’re not going to recognize that what they learned about MLA or APA transfers to learning about Chicago. And they won’t know how to do it unless you give them some resources and some support. You can’t just have this expectation that something they’ve learned before will automatically pop into their brain when they’re in the moment of working on something.

Rebecca: Jordynn, what you’re saying is reminding me of different experiences I’ve had with students when they get panicky about something they’ve not seen before, like, “Ah! I don’t know what this is, I’ve never seen it before!” And then as soon as you start panicking, all the things you know somehow have disappeared out of your brain, they’re no longer accessible. [LAUGHTER] So having those little reminders about those basic things is really helpful. Because when you are really under a high-stress situation, which you might have self-imposed, potentially [LAUGHTER], you still have that place to go back and re-center and go, “Oh right, right. I know that.” But those little cues can be useful. I know that in conversations I’ve had with students who hit that moment of like, “But I don’t know how to do this!” Yes you do, let’s walk through things that you do know how to do. And all of a sudden, you can just see it on their face like, “Oh right, okay.”

Viji: Yeah. And the reminders, they’re more than reminders, it’s actually reinforcing the learning, which we know is really helpful. We know things like recalling previous information is helpful for really storing it long-term. So you’re really just actively producing that retrieval over and over again, by bringing it back in other classes. But it also conveys who you are as an instructor and how you’re supporting your students. And they read between the lines sometimes when you provide these kinds of things. They come to you, and they ask about other things that you could offer advice about. It really opens the door, and it gives them permission to say, “Oh yeah, I don’t actually have to know all the words, I can look them up. That is something that they’re not assuming that I know all of these words, because they’ve told me how to use a dictionary when I’m reading the text.” So it really does give students permission to say, “It’s okay if I don’t feel 100% confident in doing this, my instructor expects that not all of us are going to know the terms.” So these are the ways in which we support our students in our communications that really help them see that we want them to succeed.

Rebecca: Another example of that is also modeling that, as a faculty member, when things come up. I teach a lot of classes where we’re doing code stuff, and I obviously am not a walking code dictionary, I can’t just recall everything. And so I often get asked questions that I can’t quite remember, I know enough to be able to look it up. And so I’ll demonstrate, “Here’s how I’m going to look this up, these are the search terms I would use.” And I have found that students are shocked the first time I do that, like “Wait, she doesn’t know everything?” But also I think they find it helpful, because they’ve said things like, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought to look like that, or I wouldn’t have gone there.” And then by the end of the semester, I had students this semester who’ve been telling me, “Oh, I have that open all the time while I’m working on my projects now.” Good, good.

Viji: Rebecca, that’s a great point, and I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t just say that not all faculty members can  do that. We have colleagues who, if they falter in what they know or don’t know, that students will really judge them harshly for that. And so I think it’s amazing when we can do it, but realizing that some faculty members are not going to have the ability to do that very comfortably in the classroom.

Rebecca: Definitely, definitely.

Jordynn: Yeah, I’ve been called wishy-washy on evaluations before for what I felt was being inclusive in terms of negotiating with students… What are the parameters of this assignment? What should be the length for this? Or when do you want it to be due? I think sometimes students want more authoritativeness than sometimes I feel is suitable or appropriate. And so that’s something I’m constantly negotiating. And I think if I were in a different body, you know, maybe as a senior male professor in my department, maybe that wouldn’t read the same way. But it has happened on occasion, where I think some students also just feel comfortable with, “Here’s what you need to do.” If you’re used to the obstacle course, you just want to know what the hoops are. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” And so taking a step back from that approach is uncomfortable for some students and also can reflect on how the instructor is evaluated by those students.

John: To create this inclusive environment, what are some things faculty should avoid doing in their classes?

Jordynn: Well, I think for me, assuming students should know X is, to me, a problem. So of course, there’s prerequisites for some classes and things that you would assume students already know. But, at least in my department, students don’t proceed through the curriculum the way we think they do. So we have this idealized path, but because of the difficulties they have in scheduling courses, or just the different paths students take, like, maybe they decide later on to become an English major, and they have to go back and take some of the earlier courses. We can’t just assume, “Oh, they must have learned this in X class.” So that’s for one, something that can really alienate students, when you think, like, “Well, they must have read X,” or, “They must understand this concept,” or, “They must know how to do this thing.” And to me, my principle is that I don’t evaluate anything I haven’t taught. So sometimes I have to be reflective about that, like… Am I trying to evaluate something that I haven’t taught them implicitly, because I have these kinds of assumptions? But for me, that’s a big one. It comes across in the attitude of the instructor sometimes too, like, “Well, obviously, you all know this,” like, “If you don’t know this, why are you even in this class?” I’ve been in situations like that, too. [LAUGHTER] It’s like when you go into a fitness class and you need to get back in shape. And they’re like, “Drop and give me 20 push-ups.” And I’m like, “Well, I can’t do a push-up right now. So I guess I’ll just walk out the door.” So having these rigid expectations about what they already know, before you’ve even taught them anything.

John: Now in some classes, particularly in STEM disciplines, there is some assumption of prior knowledge, but students don’t always have that knowledge when they come in. Are there ways we can support those students, while still allowing those students and the rest of the class to advance to the higher-level materials?

Viji: Yeah, I think you’re bringing up a great point, John. And Jordynn has mentioned this now a number of ways and times, that just because you do something once, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned it. And that’s what we keep saying, it’s true of learning. There are very few things where you do it one time, and you’ve figured it out for the rest of your life. And I think we need to remember that as educators. And the way that I remind myself of this is every year or two years or whatever, I pick up something that I’ve never done before, that is hard for me. Right now, it’s playing the guitar. And I take a break from it, and then I come back and I’m like, “I don’t remember how to do that chord, again, I have to re-remember the fingering.” And then it’s just important to remember that they’re doing this not just for your class, but they’re doing this across multiple classes across multiple terms. They may have had that course three semesters ago, rather than just last semester. So of course, they’re going to have differing levels of recall about the information. Plus they’re not walking encyclopedias, they don’t remember every fact that was ever told to them. Neither would we. I mean, if I think back to my college days, and you tell me to recite a fact I learned about a particular course, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with some ideas. And I hate to say this, but I barely remember some of the instructors’ names, and I saw them every day, or every other day, for a whole semester. So we have to have realistic expectations about what can be recalled, versus… what can we give them so that they can go back and reflect on, pull back that information, to remind them of it over and over again, so that it does become a bit more cemented. And a big part of that is just recognizing the unrealistic expectation, that just because they saw it once before, that they will be able to hit the ground running with it in your course. And that you do need to provide some of these ramps on to the material. And that can include sometimes a period of time at the beginning of the semester where everybody’s just practicing some of the foundational skills that you might presume that they’ve had, but again, might be rusty, and they all need some practice with it. And I think peer instruction is a great example of where you can ask people who feel less rusty to help those in the classroom, or have students who’ve recently completed the course come back and help students. And that is another way to sort of keep that recurring practice going beyond the semester of learning that content.

Jordynn: Yeah, I agree. My difficult thing that I picked up recently was I took a weaving class. And it was a six-week class where I learned from start to finish how to make this sampler of different weaving techniques. And from the very beginning where you have to warp the loom, to using the shuttle, I don’t think I could do any of it now. But I think if I went back to the class and retook it and the instructor showed me again, “Here’s how we did the warp.” I’d be like, “Oh yeah, okay, I remember.” Some of it would come back to me, some of the techniques are embodied almost, and I would be able to pick it up again. So it’s the same thing. It’s like the baking example, like, “Make the dough.” Well that’s really difficult, but if you reminded me of the steps, I’d be able to make the dough if I’m a baker. So I think, similarly, it goes back to providing scaffolding and supports for whatever the assignments are, so that we can practice and then we can go through the steps again. And over time, if you do repeat that type of task, eventually there’s going to be some development. But you can’t just put the task out there and expect people to remember how to do it.

Viji: John, you started with a question about, “What should we stop doing?” And I have to say this just to get it out there, people should stop grading on a curve. People should stop assuming that a certain percentage of students earn an A, earn a B, C, D… whatever it is, however you’ve designed your course, that is not the way to, quote/unquote, “sort” your students, to have some predetermined thresholds for grades. There are a lot of really poor reasons for doing that, aside from the sort of quantitative side of things. Like people vary from semester to semester, and you could potentially have a really outstanding group one semester and still force people to earn bad grades. To the more principled ideas that you should actually have standards that you want students to meet, and evaluate students on those standards, and then decide, “Is this A-level work, B-level work?” And if you’re doing this collaboratively with students, that they really think through what that looks like for them, too, rather than just saying, “I already know what my grade distribution will look like, because I’ve designed it that way at the
start.”

Jordynn: I would say to stop nitpicking, too, at least in my field. I had a student in my class say, “Well, I got a B on this paper because I didn’t put the date in the right format that the instructor wanted.” [LAUGHTER] I was like, “Okay, she took a letter grade off for a date format?” Like, I get that maybe there’s some cases where really specific things are really, really important. But when it kind of seems arbitrary I think that’s another way of just saying, like, “Well, I can’t have all As. So I’m going to find relatively minor things to critique students on that will help me to distribute the grades differently. And if it has to be the format of the date, or a period in a citation, or something like that.” Personally, that’s not what I want to be spending my time on, and I don’t think that’s the most productive use of my feedback to students. And it also ends up having an effect that’s pretty uninclusive.

Viji: Yeah. And your comment reminds me, too, of some discussions we’ve been having about flexibility and offering more flexibility to students, particularly now. And we have some resistance. And I’m speaking “we” collectively as educators, about, like, upholding deadlines for things. And when I say, “But where in your syllabus is this one of your outcomes, to hold people to deadlines?” Because that’s often the underlying rationale is, “When are they going to learn how to turn things in on time? [LAUGHTER] In the real world, you have to turn things in on time.” And I want to say, “Really? I mean have you never asked for an extension on something and been given grace on it and felt so relieved about it?” And then secondly, that doesn’t sound like a learning outcome. That sounds like maybe a skill, you’re trying to help them with professionalism, and maybe part of professionalism is completing work in a timely manner. But I think a lot of times, it’s really just a matter of convenience for all involved to turn something in by a date. And so really examining… What are the things you think you’re really asking or upholding for your students? And why that is. And if it truly is, like, “I really want to help students stay on task and get things turned in in a timely way to get feedback,” then explain to your students why deadlines exist and why you have those kinds of approaches in your class.

Jordynn: Yeah, the number of professors who write their conference papers on the plane or the night before in the hotel room. Or if you’ve ever done an edited collection, you’re lucky if 30% of people turn in a draft on time. How often are deadlines extended because no one’s submitted the paper or the abstract for the CFP? Like, we’re the worst at upholding our own deadlines, but then we try to turn around and enforce them on students. And it’s really nonsensical.

John: There are cases, though, where deadlines could be useful. That if students are going to be doing things later in the class that depends on the development of skills that they need to have first. How do you deal with cases where it’s important that students master skills to be able to move on to higher levels with the class? Or they’re working in group activities where all the students need to have developed skills to move forward, and some of the students are lagging behind?

Jordynn: Well, I give the grace period for all of my assignments where there’s a window where the assignment is open and that’s the suggested deadline. Like, “We do have to move on to the next unit, so here’s a five-day window, and it opens this day.” And then I have a clause like, “Okay, if you’re really struggling, you’re having something going on, just come meet with me and we’ll work something out.” So there’s two layers, like, there’s flexibility that applies to everyone and then there’s, “Okay, something major is going on in my life.” And increasingly, that’s happening a lot. And one of the benefits, I think, of our remote learning switch is that it’s kind of changed my whole pedagogy where I have more things built into the course management system, whereas I used to just use it in a really minimal way. So now I have modules that you can work through on a more self-paced way. And it’s better if you’re doing it in the same timeline as the rest of the class, because we are using class time to talk about elements of that. But I think, in the long run, having built those materials will allow students to proceed in those extreme cases where there was something else going on in their life, and they just can’t be in class. I think it’s not ideal for students to take an incomplete and then try to finish a course later or make up the work in some way. So anything you can do to avoid that outcome, even if it means creating an alternative pathway, I think is worth doing.

John: That can work really well in smaller classes, but how does that scale when you have hundreds of students in the class? Just as an example, one thing I used to allow students to do, this was way back when I first started teaching large classes, I had weekly exams and so forth and let students replace those by submitting a video project. And I let them do that up through the end of the semester. And then there was one semester where I had about 120 videos to watch [LAUGHTER] in the last week or so of the semester, and that became a little bit overwhelming. Now, perhaps there were some ways of doing that differently, but it’s a lot easier to do that in smaller classes. How can you maintain that sort of flexibility in a larger class?

Viji: I think that is the million dollar question a lot of people are asking themselves. It’s almost like a universal design-for-learning type of question, where it’s like… How do we do this so that it’s accessible to lots of people? And I don’t necessarily need to know rationale, reasons for why something might need to be late. I think the grace period is a great example where just everybody gets it. Like, I don’t need to know why you need the grace period this time, you just get it. I’ve also heard of the notion of “oops tokens.” Life comes up, and you just can’t turn in the assignment or take the quiz, and that’s okay. I’ve got a few of those built into the semester. And the way that I implement that in my learning management system is to have a column that is just those passes that we give to students. And so we know we’ve kept track of the passes that they need, like, they contacted me to say they can’t turn in assignment two, great, that’s out of, let’s say there’s five oops tokens, that’s a one for them in that column for that semester. And then we just keep track of it that way. I think there are some ways, but unfortunately, I don’t think our learning management systems, our technology, has really incorporated flexibility in its approaches. And that’s where I think I’m personally very interested in how technology can help us be more flexible in keeping track of things like this. I mean, it is helpful to say, like, “Okay, best due by a due date, that is the ideal timeline to get good feedback to be able to move forward.” But then there’s also the, “It is not going to be late, you can absolutely turn it in, here’s another deadline. And then maybe there’s just one that’s a wide open, like, “By the end of the semester, I just need to see something from you.” And so then students aren’t panicking, that they’ve got a “late” marked by their paper because it got turned in anyway. So really just thinking through how to leverage some of our technology to do that. But I say that saying, I don’t think our technology is ready for flexibility yet, it isn’t where it needs to be. It can do things like drop a grade in a grade set or something like that that can also be helpful. But I would love for it to be more flexible in the way that it can calculate grades, like even offering different grading schemas that students can choose. And then it actually projects those grades for students so they’re not having to do the calculations themselves and second guessing where they need to be on something to be able to earn a certain grade. So I think if anybody out there works at any of these learning management sites, I want to talk to you about how we need to be better about really using good pedagogical approaches, and baking them into the systems that we have. I think this is the biggest challenge for faculty. Their heart is in the right place, oftentimes they want to do these kinds of things, but they can’t figure out how to do it at scale. So if we can get technology to help us, then I think we could actually capture a lot of this challenge.

Jordynn: Yeah, I think the course management system has a baked-in pedagogy that’s not always the most progressive. And it’s often content delivery, a term that I hate, with some kind of quiz, and then they add assignments in. But sometimes the default settings revert to this kind of model. So I noticed in this Canvas pilot that we’re doing, the collaborate tool is, for whatever reason, either disabled or really opaque in terms of how to use it. But that’s the number one reason why I wanted to try something different, was to be able to offer built-in ways for students to collaborate in a Google Doc or to use Google Drive without sending them to some totally different site, which gets really confusing to students. And the built-in assumption is that that’s not the primary thing that instructor wants to use this for. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know to what extent they actually talk to instructors who are trying to build in different approaches to teaching, but it seems instead there’s this kind of default, like, you’re just going to be uploading notes and videos for students to watch and then answer questions about and that’s your pedagogy. So yeah, it’s pretty problematic in that way. Figuring out contract grading, also, which is an approach that I often use, has been really difficult for me, which is a totally different approach where I’m not marking each thing and giving students grades but that they’re trying to meet specifications for what it means to earn an A in that class. And so something more holistic like that is just really hard to enact.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking the really big question, “What’s next?”

Viji: I want to bring it back to this conversation of rigor and say—and you all know this—my colleague, Kelly Hogan, and I have been talking about inclusive teaching for years now. And while we do receive some critical remarks about it, nothing like this article about rigor has actually produced. Somehow we pushed a button that some people really, really didn’t want us to push. And it’s been eye opening to me because it’s very much the idea of inclusive practices. But with this explicit idea that rigor should not be attached, like, we should actually not use that word. So it almost feels like there’s some people out there with an alert for the word rigor. And then when that pops up, they get right into it. It’s been interesting for me to see. This is definitely a hot button issue. And although I think inclusive teaching approaches can help ameliorate some of them, it opens my eyes to the ideas that we have a lot of different people who have different ideas about education, some of them are actually educators, and some of them are not. So thinking about, holistically… What other things are we not challenging that we should be because the underlying assumptions are gatekeeping in the very worst ways by turning people away, which is not what we want to do. And really helping people to see that these practices, these terms, are perpetuating privilege that really, as educators, we should absolutely challenge. I think this is something that we don’t stand for, to say that only those who have could continue to have, and that we really want to level the playing field and help all students succeed. So those are the kinds of things I’m thinking about… What else is out there? I’ve said rigor. What else can I say to make sure that people know that these are not what we want to be doing in our classrooms today?

Jordynn: I guess for me, the elephant in the room is the effects of COVID on generations of students. I have elementary-age kids, and it’s affected them in certain ways. And then obviously, kids who are in high school right now, the students that we have in college who are coming in with two years, three years of disrupted learning. That’s a huge opportunity, I think, as well as a challenge for thinking about inclusivity because the range of effects for different students is so vast. And I think, relatedly, the experience with COVID has brought up questions about standardized testing. And I think that’s another important place to think about inclusivity and to think about the rigor assumptions that shape who gets into college. And the kind of temporary moratorium for some places on using those scores, opens up an opportunity to question how the emphasis on standardized testing has shaped our students’ education, because it starts in kindergarten now. And, you know, we’re holding students to one very specific, relatively narrow standard about what constitutes learning. And I think especially with the effects of COVID, it should become apparent that it’s just unfair to keep doing that when students have been out of class, they’ve been learning virtually, students have lost parents and loved ones. And just sticking to this old model where everyone has to meet this one really narrow standard… we can’t keep going that way with everything that’s happened.

Rebecca: You’ve both brought so many really important topics to the table today. And thank you for writing your article and bringing up the word “rigor.” And I hope you find more [LAUGHTER] that we can start to tackle as a community.

John: In terms of the response you’ve received, this response is really bringing up some critical debates, I think, on a lot of campuses. And, again, as Rebecca said, thank you for writing this. I hope it spurs a lot of productive debates on many campuses.

Jordynn: Thanks for having us.

John: Thanks for joining us.

Viji: Thank you

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle.

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