Thread by @biblioracle

This article is almost perfectly designed to inflame, rather than illuminate discussions around pedagogical practices vis a vis attendance and participation, but maybe I can add something helpful by sharing my own journey through these issues in a thread. insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/0…

First, students attending class is good, participation is good. Both are benefits to student learning. I don't think many would dispute this. The question is how structure and assessments impact them, and what practices create the best conditions for attendance and participation.

After reading Ken Bain's 'What the Best College Teacher's Do" I was convinced that grading attendance was a mistake. I already hated doing it, feeling like a cop more than a teacher, so one semester I just dumped it. The result: increased attendance.

Attendance increased for a few reasons. One was what I was signaling about class. When I "allowed" 4 absences students would take tat to mean that they not only could but even SHOULD miss four classes. I had students say that they would save up their absences for the end of...

...the semester! Removing the attendance grade put the burden on students to choose, affirmatively, on whether or not to go to class. It increased both their agency and responsibility. The result was fewer absences as their was no instructor pre-indulgence for an absence.

The other reason attendance went up is because I put more effort into making class not just worth coming to, but vital for doing the work of the class. It helped me focus much more on the full process of learning, and less on the final products. It improved my instruction.

Having success eliminating attendance, I next got rid of my participation grade. It was another practice that never really made sense to me in a writing course, as students could make their learning visible in other ways. Classes were already highly interactive...

...most students participated, so why bother grading something that was already a natural consequence of the atmosphere we'd created? I didn't miss it.

Given that most of us agree that attendance and participation are good, the ? is: how do we foster attendance and participation? For me, doing so through student compliance with instructor demands is less effective that putting the onus on students to control their own learning.

The danger of putting the onus on students is that they will indeed drift away and fail to attend and engage. To some degree this is inevitable regardless, but by removing tools of compliance, I believe the risk is increased. It requires some purposeful work to counteract.

If you reject the tools of compliance (e.g., grading attendance and participation), I think you have to really concentrate on providing students guidance and structure regarding the course, what success looks like, how they should be considering themselves and their work, etc...

With teaching writing, structure and guidance comes pretty naturally because it's part of building what I call the writer's practice - the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and habits of mind of writers.

Part of the work of building a writing practice is figuring out how you're going to get your work done, emphasis on YOUR WORK. I do not police my students' behavior, but I do observe and assess their process. They also reflect on their own work and processes.

In my experience, giving students agency inside of a clear and coherent structure results in not just more attendance and engagement, but better engagement, engagement that's predicated on students' desires to learn, rather than complying with a policy for a grade.

Students who are struggling with issues during a semester often need more support and accommodation, but if we have the structure, there's a foundation from which to work to manage those issues. It's not about compliance or non-compliance, but figuring out how to get things done.

These things are hard. There's no definite right approach that works across every context. It's a process. That said, I highly recommend instructors examine how much of their pedagogy rests on compliance, and whether or not student compliance is actually linked to learning.

I stopped grading attendance and participation because the questions of whether or not students were attending and participating were largely irrelevant. We had the structure. We had the work of the course. We focused on that core, rather than peripheral behaviors.

I'll admit, some students struggled when I removed the tools of compliance. They'd gotten used to following instructions in order to get a good grade. In the end, I think this is an important lesson. At some point, they must choose to engage. The teacher/cop isn't always there.

As I realized that dropping attendance and participation grades helped with student agency and engagement, next up was dropping traditional grading practices altogether, given that I was using those as a tool of compliance as well, but this is perhaps best left for another thread

Here's the core question about what and how to grade, I guess: Am I rewarding compliance or am I measuring learning? The key to navigating that divide is to make sure you have a course structure that actually rewards learning, rather than compliance. That took me years to achieve