Rogers has a lot to say about the role of evaluation in schooling.
In therapy, the examinations are set by life. The client meets them, sometimes passing, sometimes failing. He finds that he can use the resources of the therapeutic relationship and his experience in it to organize himself so that he can meet life’s tests more satisfyingly next time.
In [an education modeled on the therapeutic paradigm], the requirements for many life situations would be part of the resources the teacher provides. The student would have available the knowledge that he cannot enter engineering school without so much math; that he cannot get a job in X corporation without a college diploma; that he cannot become a psychologist without doing independent doctoral research; that he cannot be a doctor without knowledge of chemistry; that he cannot even drive a car without passing an examination on rules of the road. These are requirements set, not by the teacher, but by life. The teacher is there to provide the resources which the student can use to learn so as to be able to meet these tests.
There would be other in-school evaluations of a similar sort. The student might well be faced with the fact that he cannot join the Math Club until he makes a certain score on a standardized mathematics test; that he cannot develop his camera film until he has shown an adequate knowledge of chemistry and lab techniques; that he cannot join the special literature section until he has shown evidence of both wide reading and creative writing. The natural place of evaluation in life is as a ticket of entrance, not a club over the recalcitrant. Our experience in therapy would suggest that it should be the same way in school. It would leave the student as a self-respecting, self-motivated person, free to choose whether he wished to put forth the effort to gain these tickets of entrance.
I think the Energy Project has an advantage shared by a lot of teacher professional development programs, which is that the teachers are mostly not recalcitrant (and do not need clubbing). I think they mostly have the attitude that the measure of their success will be their improved performance as teachers. So, while we do give them an exam at the end of the summer course, I think it is understood as informative for them and for us, rather than being for the purpose of judgment.
I'm going to react to this with my pragmatic in-the-classroom-16-hours-a-week lens (less helpful for you energy project folks!, but it's interesting to me). In the examples of "ticket[s] of entrance" that Rogers provides, they are all *relevant* to the activity into which you enter.
ReplyDeleteI was just talking with my students (the big intro class in physics for elementary teachers) about my own frustration grading midterms. Do I really think whether or not they can successfully trace the path of energy in a pushed block is going to determine whether or not they will be a good 2nd grade teacher? I don't. And yet there I am, docking a point for thinking friction is a transfer of heat rather than a transfer of mechanical energy.
And they KNOW it isn't relevant -- they just need the ticket of entrance -- at which point cheating becomes a quite reasonable way of getting the ticket.
I think I *do* know of better ways to teach (I'm not that happy with PSET) but I can't manage it with a class of 96.
loving all this Rogers talk, by the way... but this morning it's just making me feel like I have SO much personal and professional growth to go in order to truly achieve what I want to achieve in the classroom. I'll resign myself to being happy that I'm on that track and aware! I'm finding it easier every year to be open to the students emotional responses - even in lecture (not just when talking to groups in studio), and when it works, it really shifts the learning environment in a positive way. When I can attend to their frustration or stress, I can help them move past it. When I see their frustration as a failure on my part and I let myself get frustrated, things remain flat. Oh so far to go... I hear you Leslie, about the teaching frustrations - sometimes I wish we could have portfolios and oral exams on what _really_ matters and even no formal 'grades' - but with 160 students - ha!
ReplyDeleteApologies if this comment does not fit in; I had an idea and looked for a place to put it. Last night I taught LA pedagogy and focused on how to make sure that the interviewee does not feel that they are being evaluated. And this morning it occurred to me (though it's not a new idea, but it seemed clearer to me than ever) that, according to Rogers, evaluation and learning are exclusive. That is, learning only happens when the threat of evaluation is removed or at least obscured.
ReplyDeletePerhaps my logic is too cheap. But it seemed to me that if what I was teaching the LAs is true, that students will think productively iff you seduce them into feeling un-evaluated, then school is wrong. Which I know Rogers thought. I am just having some end-of-quarter philosophical crises about learning and grading, which is probably to be expected.
No need for an apology.
ReplyDelete1. I feel better and better about only ever teaching courses for teachers, where there is less evaluation built into the structure of the experience.
2. I have experienced some evaluative environments that felt less awful than others. For example, at Evergreen, narrative evaluations gave the opportunity to specify a student's strengths and areas for growth, instead of just violently ranking everyone. No grades, which is radical; but it was still school, and recognizable to society as such.
Waiting to hear what Leslie thinks of this.
I think it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that grades are detrimental to learning. But we still manage to teach students in spite of this and all sorts of other negative aspects of the educational systems we work in.
ReplyDeleteMelissa Dancy once gave a really nice talk about how to minimize the negative impacts of grading without losing your job. One thing I remember from this talk was the idea of focusing on the overall whole of an exam or homework and deciding whether it’s an A, B, or C exam or homework as a whole, rather than determining points for every part of every subquestion and calculating a grade to a high degree of precision. She said that when she graded exams in the old way, she found herself getting angry with the students for everything they got wrong, and when she switched to this form of grading, she found that she stopped being angry with the students and felt more empathy towards them. She also stopped using plusses and minuses and just gave A’s, B’s and C’s. I think I’ve heard somewhere else (but I can’t remember where) that it’s detrimental to have too high a degree of precision in grading, such that the precision of the grade is greater than the precision to which knowledge can actually be determined. I found it interesting at the time that UW has gone in exactly the opposite direction, allowing course grades to be given in 0.1 intervals. But Melissa pointed out that just because you’re working in a system that allows for these fine gradations of distinction doesn’t mean you have to use them.
Abstract of Melissa's talk:
http://www.aapt.org/AbstractSearch/FullAbstract.cfm?KeyID=3102
Hunter, I like your comment, and I like the responses so far, and I also am curious what Leslie will say. I've become far more loose in my grading, over the years, because I don't know what I'm grading for, most of the time...
ReplyDeleteI am having a personal and parenting reaction to this topic, I find. There's something that happened to those who are like us (nerds...) in which evaluation was effective in goading us to learn more. It played the role of "ticket of entrance," for example when we worked our asses off in some damn physics class (or many), just to make it to our degree. There was huge motivation involved, and we got a lot out of it. This thought is pretty personal as a parent, too. My 4th grade daughter has shifted to a school in which numerical grades and a 7 point grading scale are used - her inclinations toward perfectionism and competitiveness push her toward not wanting to miss a single question on a 10 questions multiple choice test - that's a B, agh! So she is working much, much harder on her school work, and learning a ton in the process. It's just a game. She loves learning. The grading is pushing her to learn more. She's fine with that. I would guess that we were like that, in some fashion or other, too.
My point is that evaluation itself isn't necessarily the issue. It's how we frame it. Rogers nicely talks about entrance tickets and clubs. The right kind of evaluation - like Melissa talks about, or Rachel - frames it well. The wrong kind ("weeder course" mentality...) probably doesn't.
I agree that evaluation itself is not necessarily the issue. According to Rogers, the issue is threat. So, threatening evaluation, non-threatening evaluation. But evaluation seems to be the main source of threat in school. I suppose there are others, like losing your lunch money, or getting punched. Those aren't necessarily judgmental acts. But in classrooms, the main vehicle for threat seems to be various sorts of judgment of inadequacy.
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