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I recently participated in the panel discussion, “Assessment Practices that Support Student Well-being,” organized by the Provost's Working Group on Innovation in Assessment. Panelists were asked the question “how can our assessment practices support student well-being?” and invited to “discuss current threats to students’ well-being and mental health, and discuss assessment-related strategies to communicate care, create a community of learners, and develop resilience.”
I am sharing here my responses to four questions posed at the event and invite other FWS instructors will share their own experiences, classroom strategies, course policies, as well as advice and recommendations for those of us teaching writing and/or that can scale to larger teaching contexts. I will update this post to include these responses.
Here are the stated intended Learning Outcomes for this inspiring and generative event:
- Raise awareness of the negative impact of harmful assessment practices on students’ learning and well-being
- Discuss how to support students well-being through our assessment practices
Q1: Before we explore how assessment practices can support student wellbeing, can you please tell us what challenges you see in this area?
The biggest challenge for me is differentiating instruction within a small seminar classroom among students who bring with them wildly diverse high school experiences, linguistic and cultural backgrounds, learning styles and needs, and attitudes toward my subject matter of writing.
I have been increasingly uncomfortable and dissatisfied with my go-to strategies that primarily offer resources and support and grace with the goal of helping students catch up. Doesn’t that put even more weight on the shoulders of students who already feel a few steps behind their peers and classmates as writers or learners more broadly?
My biggest challenge recently, then, has been redesigning early assignments and assessments that:
- provide multiple and varied on roads and access points for students. I want them to find familiar and comfortable touch points -- within the first weeks of the semester -- as well as identify the authentic strengths they bring with them. If they can see clear pathways to success in the course, they may be better able to navigate learning curves and chart a smooth rest of the semester, and
- enable me to locate pressure points that can guide the ways that I adapt this gateway course to teach the students in the room (not the students I think they should be). On paper, that is, my syllabus for the last several years looks the same. In reality, it plays out very differently each semester.
Q2: Regarding student wellbeing, please tell us about the assessments you use in your classes?
I use a primarily labor-based grading contract in my writing courses. I could talk about what I see as the relationship between this grading practice’s logistics and student wellbeing, but instead, I’ll consider how, in evolving my grading contract from semester to semester, I have changed the ways I think about teaching and learning, perhaps best captured with the phrase -- slow learning.
Following my spirit animal, the slow and steady turtle who wins the race (for good or bad, many students associate education, college, a semester with a race), I have significantly edited my FWS – at first cutting out one module/unit and eventually also cutting at least one element from each remaining module/unit – so as to create ample time and space to more fully execute the following types of process-based activities and assessments before students submit final, polished products:
- Practice discrete skills
- In Collaboration with peers
- With Feedback from me and tutors
- And with opportunities for informal and formal Reflection
Q3: What changes would you like to see in practice, climate, or policy in the context of assessment and student wellbeing?
I’ve got my eyes on low stakes work. I’d like to see more faculty incorporate low stakes work, whatever that looks like in the context of a particular course or discipline, and more importantly, I’d like them to consider assigning more value to that low stakes, process-based work when designing grading policies and calculating course grades.
What I have learned by slowing down my FWS is that students and I are practicing and experiencing rigor differently in ways that:
- Deepen learning → When I isolate discrete skills and engage students in constant practice, they can develop control over both what and how they are learning. And when they perform this process work in front of me, they teach me how to build out stronger and more beautiful scaffolding.
- Find the fault lines → This practice-driven approach creates opportunities for students to flounder and flail. Yes! In my FWS, we look for these moments! I call them LOLs (laugh out loud moments), and, in the embedded reflections typical in my classroom workshops, we share and celebrate our LOLs. And then we get to examining and working through them together. Importantly, if we do not have any LOLs, we know that we did not reach high enough…we laugh a lot.
Q4: What is one assessment-related change you recommend to everyone here to improve the well-being of their students?
Find your turtle teacher or turtle teaching moments!
- SLOW DOWN to consider how to balance coverage and depth.
- LOWER STAKES and consider how you value process and products.
- LAUGH OUT LOUD to seek rigor and levity.
To add to this conversation, contact me, Dr. Tracy Carrick, tracyhcarrick@cornell.edu.
To learn more about assessment, consider attending these upcoming events also hosted by the Provost's Working Group on Innovation in Assessment:
- “Implementing Authentic Assessment in your Classroom” (March 27)
- “Alternative Approaches to Assessment at Scale (May 8)
