Schools Needn’t Fail

When I originally started this blog, I started with a pretty self-important diatribe against the systemization of education, especially in the form of standardized testing, rubrics, and the like. I find myself wanting to return to that discussion again, especially in the wake of the ongoing debate fueled by a post on Clay Burell’s Beyond School blog. On the other hand, I feel the urge to exactly ignore that discussion, because ultimately it leads to an us-against-the-administration discussion, or a persistent feeling of hopelessness, futility, and desperation. Because I did not get into teaching to feel desperate, nor to feel oppressed by or to battle the administration (hey, I am the administration), I hesitate to the point of intentional inertia to enter that discussion.

In my misty-eyed freshman forays into postmodern theory, I wandered across this theory about how power works. I believe both Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are contributors, though I could not for the life of me trace the exact place or documents from which my understanding of the theory arises. (Does that make me a plagiarist, or a scholar?) The idea is this one: that any center of power (the government, the media, the Internet, the school, etc.) is always already oppressive insofar as you are always in relationship with it. Power occurs within a kind of matrix, with the object of power being near the center or at the center of the matrix. Everyone within that matrix (citizens : government, consumers : media, users : Internet, teachers/students : schools), the subject of power, is always either drawn toward that center or is pushing against it. Regardless of a subject’s posture, though, the center is reaffirmed: slide toward it and you acknowledge its power, rebel against it and you do the same thing. Protesting the government reaffirms the power of the federal administration; leaving in frustration a teaching post does nothing to dismantle the school.

I really hated this realization when I had it, or when it was handed me. I felt suddenly existential: why bother to do anything then? The only solution against what most certainly was an entropic system, then, was to ignore it altogether. Pretend the power doesn’t exist. Don’t try to change it, just don’t participate. If I want to teach (and I do), and I leave a school because the policies and the way those policies batter the living happiness out of students and teachers alike are too much for me to bear, I don’t get to teach and the school doesn’t change. The students continue to be beaten senseless, and the only teachers left in school are those who are willing to participate in the madness, or who simply (horrifyingly) agree with it.

So, how does one ignore the power of the school?

Jonathan Kozol: “The first thing I did was to rip down from the walls and blackboards all of these materials – “obedience” quotations and the rest – and to stash the social studies textbooks in a box and seal it shut and stuff it in the closet … I introduced a few familiar poems of Robert Frost, some early lyrical poems of William Butler Yeats, and some beautiful posters of the streets of Paris and its skyline…” (from Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 13).

One of my favorite high school teachers was a certain Mrs. Meyerle, who taught me the five-paragraph essay. She used a couple of class days to explain the reasoning behind the form, told us we’d rarely actually write in it, and then moved quickly on to helping us discover what it was we wanted to write about. She fulfilled the expectations of the curriculum in as little time as possible, trusting entirely in our ability to master it quickly, and then, almost without missing a beat, kept the actual learning happening.

Do these exemplify behaviors that ignore the power of the school? I’m not sure.

When I enter the composition classroom, one of the first messages I send to students – either specifically or more palatially – is that some of them are entering a classroom for the first time where English is not only actually interesting, but where they have power over their own language. I refuse to give tests (and now, as chair of my program, have removed them from all our online templates), and deny fervently and repeatedly that there is a correct way to write. Instead, I lead students through a process of ideation, creation, and revision. I let them explore their own authorities (both over their ideas and their words), and give them lots and lots of room to make mistakes.

When I first introduced this approach to composition people balked. “Um, you’re not going to teach them grammar? You’re not going to teach them spelling? You’re not going to enforce plagiarism rules?” To which I responded, both in word and deed, “I don’t need to. Grammar is useful only insofar as it is common sense; so, I’ll teach common sense. Spelling is overrated; many of the world’s geniuses can’t spell. And I’ll teach them authorship, not plagiarism.” I take this approach to composition because I’m interested in genius, not conformity. The world’s writers break rules, bend them, make new ones. Why shouldn’t my students be allowed the confidence to set the standard rather than wonder if the standard applies to them?

The result, in the first semester of a test-run of this approach, was explosively successful. Attrition rates in composition classes this past semester bottomed out; where in the past a class of 25 would narrow to about 12, now they winnowed down to only about 20. Faculty came to me laughing and complaining that the course required them to really teach rather than just grade. Students reported that they finally understood the ideas behind plagiarism, while at the same time feeling incredibly confident in their own voices and ideas. Some even chose to submit their semester’s work for publishing online; and more than one, allergic at the start of the semester to writing, started blogging.

Has this course changed the system? No. The community college system in Colorado still requires the same outcomes, still requires the same standards. Does this course resist the system? Maybe a little. Primarily, though, it ignores the system by examining on its own an approach to composition. Students meet the state requirements demanded of them, but without ever really knowing they’re doing so. Plus, they leave the class enjoying writing, trusting themselves, and feeling (maybe most importantly) that school hasn’t failed them.

Johnathan Kozol again: “Establishing a chemistry of trust between the children and ourselves is a great deal more important than to charge into the next three chapters of the social studies text … Entrap them first in fascination. Entrap them in a sense of merriment and hopeful expectations” (from Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 15).

There is no standardization around merriment and hopeful expectations. There is no rubric for fascination. But these are human things, removed from the power struggle of “schooliness” (thank you, Clay), and they are more important than measurable skills to a life spent learning.

(An interesting perspective on teachers’ role: Teacher as Daemon and Jester)

Authorship 2.0

Twitter, huh? If you aren’t already familiar with Twitter, you might want to check it out. According to the front page of the Web site, Twitter “is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Essentially, it allows users to post as often as they like these tiny little blogs that keep any followers of the posts updated on the minutiae of someone’s day. Posts like “Just landed in L.A.” and “Slept in until 10″ are common, as are posts that describe other activities: “Reading an article in the New York Times about the writers’ strike” or “Wishing I hadn’t had so much to drink last night, even though it was fun.” Some people Twitter their thoughts about politics, religion, relationships, etc. There is no matter too insignificant or significant for a Twitter post. If you think it, do it, say it, hear it, you can Twitter it.

I had a long conversation yesterday with my partner about the moral nature of blogging. I had questions about a blogger’s accountability to his audience. In particular, I wondered if there was some necessity, simply because I’d set the expectation, that I follow my last post on Slam Teaching with a continuing discussion of plagiarism. I wondered if I am somehow accountable to you, my readership, and if I could let you down – not just in an emotional sense, but in a very real way concerning my responsibility to you as a fellow instructor or human being – by not posting the promised follow-up to my previous discussion. In a very real way, this communication via blog is limited: it is asynchronous, primarily one-way (like a lecture, if you will), and how the discussion progresses is entirely in my court. Because I must approve any replies to my posts, and because I can edit those replies at will, this blog is, despite appearances, actually generated by one author (me) who determines for himself the rules by which he wields his authority.

Rather than go into a long discussion about the question of accountability in blogging, I’ll segue: Americans are very attached to their own authorship. Is this a safe statement? When I author something, I feel I own it, that it must belong to me because I created it. This is, in fact, one of the sources of the plagiarism problem: the notion of intellectual property. Once I put my words on paper, they are mine; if you use them, you need to let others know that I came up with them first.

But equal to ownership of a text, experiences, thoughts, ideas all tend to be made more real when put into words, videotaped, or saved to a hard drive. Our lives are confirmed when they are textualized. I’d wager this is one reason why we see such a huge move toward blogging. We want to let people know our ideas, and we want our ideas cemented and actualized through the text they create (whether that text is written, digitized audio, or film). We author, and when we do, we create something we own, something we alone are responsible for, and something that confirms us as the authority of our own experiences.

As a teacher of writing, I am ecstatic at this return to written communication. It is as though it’s suddenly cool again to keep a journal, to know how to write well, and to write often.

According to Perseus’ The Blogging Iceberg, “ Teenagers have created the majority of blogs. Blogs are currently the province of the young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30. Half of bloggers are between the ages of 13 and 19. Following this age group, 39.6% of bloggers are between the ages of 20 and 29.” While the vast majority of blogs generated are abandoned almost immediately, the remaining blogs are nonetheless primarily those of a younger set, particularly teenagers. They use these blogs to provide updates on their lives (to author their experiences) for their friends and families.

In other words, middle school, high school, and college students all have a propensity for authorship. They want to say what they think. While that alone is not particularly revelatory, what might surprise some is that what these young people think is important, relevant, circumspect, and insightful. Take a look at Clay Burrell’s experimental Students 2.0 blog, an excellent example of how students can thrive and succeed when given the opportunity to author for themselves.

It started with e-mail, moved to text messaging, migrated to MySpace and YouTube, proliferated across hundreds of thousands of blogs, and now comes with the insistence of a radio signal via Twitter: young Americans, our students, are creating more text than ever before. (And watch out, because services like Ning are going to help them organize text-centered social networks according to their own design.) They are authorities over their own thoughts, and they’re broadcasting.

Though it may not seem so, this post is exactly a follow-up to my previous post on plagiarism. I think the primary problem with the way plagiarism is handled in the academy has to do with the fact that we are asking authors capable of flooding us with their own ideas and reflections to reauthor the ideas of others. Why not think about a pedagogy where we engage our students in their own authorship, their own expertise (with their lives, with the curriculum, with the class material) before we ask them to bow to (and cite) some other expert? The practice of learning from those who come before, of relying on the experts of a given field for information, is time-honored… but may be out-dated. Knowledge and information moves faster now than ever before; authorship is more profuse. Assuming that “the experts” are those who publish written texts and who have been practicing in their field for decades may now be an incorrect assumption. You have a classroom full of burgeoning experts.

In the latest issue of the Phi Delta Kappan, Dennis Sparks, emeritus executive director of the National Staff Development Council, writes about the power of authentic voices from leaders. He says, “By voice, I mean the clear and genuine expression of the intentions, ideas, beliefs, values, and emotions that inform their work… Effective leaders, I believe, bring their authentic voice into every conversation”. (The irony of a citation at this point in my post is not lost on me.)

I really think the solution to the problem of plagiarism can only be gotten at by looking at a single question: What is teaching meant to do? In my own practice, teaching serves the important purpose (not unlike parenting) of creating successful adults, where success is measured by the ability to express “intentions, beliefs, values, and emotions” within a chosen field, occupation, profession, vocation, etc. All the other tools of learning lead to this one result. For me, plagiarism is best handled not by creating assignments that make it difficult to plagiarize, and not by penalizing infractions of the academic policy, but by focusing on the importance of student authorship – an authorship our students are more and more ready to take on.

Brave Tailors All

At the end of the semester, I hear everything. During the semester, I’ve operated the department with relative naivete, believing all classes are sailing smoothly across the weeks. I have time to design classes, to indulge faculty in a little professional development and pedagogical discussion. At the end of the semester, though, the story changes. Students call me at home to tell me how poorly they believe their teachers performed; teachers warn me that I might be getting calls from students who claim mistreatment. I work with each one as I go, trying to give whoever has contacted me the benefit of the doubt, always keeping in mind that it isn’t teachers or students – one or the other – that I must support; instead, I must support successful learning. Teachers, as much as students, can sometimes get in the way of good learning, so when I get the call, I look for where the learning has broken down.

Always at the end of the term, I can count on a new chapter in the chronicles of plagiarism. Instructors in particular want to let me know when a student has plagiarized. Even instructors who are generous enough to offer a second chance make me aware that plagiarism has nonetheless taken place; and those instructors who are less forgiving, or who have seen too many repeat instances in a given term, they let me know so that I can be prepared to stand firm against any student outcry. I think, too, instructors just want me to know they’re being watchful.

At times, these accounts of plagiarism feel more like a head count – you know, the kind where you count the heads you’re lopping off. Or like the brave little tailor who killed seven with one blow. To hear teachers talk about it, the biggest concern with plagiarism is how to catch it more often; how not to be duped by lazy (though subversively competent) students. At conferences and faculty meetings, addressing the issue of plagiarism in the academy most often centers around what new software or virtual-ware is available to catch the evildoers in the act. In these discussions, prevention is conflated with enforcement. This is like preventing traffic violations with cameras and hidden police cars.

I can’t think of any issue academicians face larger than plagiarism. It comes up in almost every meeting; it is always topical. And no other issue seems to create as much of a divide between teacher and student… by which I mean that teachers feel pretty darn justified condemning plagiarists as Untouchables. It’s one area where we are really allowed to be unapologetically rankled; it’s one offense where punishment of the severest kind – the removal of the right to education – is warranted.

So, as educators, what do we really want? I daresay not one of us is waiting grinning in the underbrush for a plagiarist to act (please confirm, though; as I’ve implied, naivete is a weakness of mine). Instead, don’t we want students to succeed?

We’ve all been whacked on the hand at some point in our educations. Whether we accidentally or intentionally plagiarized, or whether we posited some thesis that flew in the face of our professor’s teaching, or by some other academic crime, we have felt the sting of a lesson learned the hard way. Perhaps we feel that is part of any educational experience – we must all traverse the rock and the hard place in order to qualify as learned adults.

I tend to wonder, though, if as teachers we’re not punishing ourselves more than we need to by implementing policies of punishment. Okay, so imagine you walk into your class and you genuinely believe each and every one of your students won’t plagiarize, won’t cross that horrible line. What does it feel like to teach then? The vast majority of the instructors who work in my department don’t know. Each paper handed in to them is subject first and foremost to an internet search; some English teachers – and teachers from other departments – consider it routine to push papers through TurnItIn.com before even starting to read them. Find out if the student did the work before reading for the student’s thoughts… Is this a pedagogical best practice?

I’m being transparent, I’m sure. You know already by my tone that I don’t believe in this sort of hunt. Like catching speeding drivers, to me this is nothing like prevention. This is administration, enforcement. But, I’ll go one step further: neither is the teaching of proper citation a prophylactic for plagiarism. That tried and true method, that always-the-solution solution has, over the years, done nothing to stanch the wound to the academy, our sensibilities, or authorship.

And now I’ve gone on long enough for the time being. I fear the tailors are becoming restless. I invite reactions from everyone (swat if you must), and will follow this post with another to discuss what a few instructors and myself are starting to do about plagiarism that does not necessitate citation, enforcement, or punishment…

How Teachers Talk

This evening I have been part of a round robin of e-mails. Technically, I’ve only been copied on the e-mails since the matter of the discussion involved one of my instructors; nonetheless, I’ve followed with rapt attention. Not just as a supervisor, but also as someone who rarely sees instructors from different departments, all of whom have different philosophies, interact and communicate to try to solve a problem.

The problem is this: a student who “arrived” in class late in the semester (recall that I teach entirely online, and so arrival is a relative term), and who has had various complications during the last weeks – I gather she was sick, and that a nephew was killed in a car accident – is now asking for an Incomplete so she might have a good chance at passing her classes. Three separate classes, three different instructors. Each of the classes, of course, places unique demands on its students; likewise, each of the instructors has his or her own requirements for satisfactory performance.

Apparently, the student has not done well in either her social sciences or her physical sciences class; however, she’s done satisfactorily in her English class. During the flurry of e-mails this evening, some of which half-accused the student of indolence and dishonesty (the student was “confused” – not my quotation marks – and the nephew’s death was apparently convenient to missing a make-up test), the English instructor has contributed very little, saying that the student is welcome to her Incomplete if she really can see no other alternative. The Social Science and Physical Science instructors have been less accommodating, primarily – and not unreasonably – based on the student’s performance in their respective classes.

As much as I’d like to ask the questions that burn in my brain about whether or not the sciences courses are designed truly with the student in mind, or whether there might be reason for confusion and poor performance, I’m much more interested in this other question that’s picking at me: When we have to, how do teachers talk to each other?

In my experience, teachers like to be more autonomous even than artists. In fact, I can only think of one other group who enjoys more self-authority than teachers, and that’s parents. Generally, we don’t like to be told what to do with our “kids,” and I’ve heard seniority, philosophy, even wages thrown around the room in order to defend an instructor’s authority when that authority is threatened. I have been at peaceful conference breakfasts and confronted by an instructor who believes she is the only one who knows how to teach that cornerstone of composition, the research paper. What’s more, she insists, “if you ask me to teach it any other way, I just don’t think I’ll be able to.”

Not that I can’t sympathize. I absolutely can. Please, please never tell me I have to teach Intro to Creative Writing based on someone else’s syllabus! Please never ask me to use quizzes in my composition classes! And rubrics (with a nod to Mr. Burrell)… You may as well ask me to clean toilets for a living (which, by the way, I’ve done). The point here is not whether or not I can sympathize with instructors who don’t want to teach in any way besides their own. The point here is that I don’t know what happens when these folks who are so used to being autonomous suddenly have to cohere.

It’s been almost painful this evening, watching the two sciences instructors verbally wrestle the student to the ground while the English teacher vanished into the e-mail background (perhaps feeling a bit verbally wrestled himself). When the dean finally stepped in, hours after the volley began, it was to recommend a solution; but until she made this recommendation, the fusillade showed no signs of letting up.

The example here is a hard one, because there has been no real resolution; there’s been only a confused flow, staunched by a verdict from on high. Not unlike a playground tussle nipped in the bud by the playground monitor (that pesky adult you have to obey no matter who you think is right or wrong).

It’s only gratitude I have for Clay Burrell (and now Mr. Watson, too) for letting so many people know I was out here in the ether writing my little fingers off; but to be frank, I find myself wondering now that I’m out in the public sphere talking about teaching: how do teachers talk? When I wasn’t a supervisor of them (of us?), I tended not to talk to many of my colleagues – that is, until I found those colleagues whose philosophies agreed with mine. As a supervisor, I find that expressing my philosophies in an attempt to get dialogue going only results in murmurs of agreement or online silence.

I’m like any teacher I know. I want to talk about teaching – how would I not want to? – and I also don’t want my mind changed. Beginner’s mind? Sure, no problem, in the isolation of my own classroom. In a crowd full of otherwise-opinioned teachers? Hm.

Any thoughts from the ether?

Some Resources:

Corporate thoughts?

Cooperation

How Can Kids Do It?

Teachers Teaching Teachers

The Kindness Factor

Am I being too obviously a softy to wonder why we cannot approach our students with some measure of kindness? I would wager that most teachers, when cornered about it, believe teaching to be at least partially an act of nurture. Teachers nurture the growth of the mind, they nurture people into new understanding, out of the shells of not-knowing, and more. Recently, I hired a new instructor who, a tad nervous about taking on 40 students this semester (previously, she’d only taught to a classroom of five), asked me for advice. I looked at her and said: “You’ll be fine. Just be a parent. To forty children. Love them, and let them know you want them to succeed.”

I am too much a softy, I suppose. I mean, listen to me. Love your students? What, buy them toys, dry their tears, bandage their boo-boos? I can hear teachers groaning restlessly, bringing out their vegetables and grumbling for me to get off the stage. Yet, I sort of want to insist: why wouldn’t we start out each new semester thinking first of our students’ delightful potentials, their own (albeit now and then latent) excitement for new knowledge? And how much they need us to coach them toward those things?

Starting in the Spring, I’m offering a total of three redesigned courses. In the world of online education, this means that three whole classes needed to be designed from top to bottom: all the lectures and assignments must be written, the syllabus must be arranged, a schedule put in place, the grade book set up. In addition, there’s a significant amount of navigational content that must be written and encoded. This navigational content takes the place of that moment when a classroom full of students rustle papers and get ready to leave and you shout out above the growing clamor: “Don’t forget, on Tuesday you need to bring your notebooks! And there’s a quiz on Friday! And remember that we have a guest speaker, so show up early on Monday!” The navigational content is pretty much the heart of the course insofar as it tells students what needs to be done, and how to do it.

Each time I have designed or supervised the design of a course, I follow one guiding principle: keep it simple. It should be easy for a student to get from one assignment to the next, or to go from a lecture to the reading material (most of my courses use online – or open – content instead of text books). Learning online can be challenging enough without a student getting muddled in the variety of accidents that can take place on the Internet. Many of the instructors who teach these courses come to enjoy the simplicity of a well-constructed online course, primarily because it saves them from answering dozens of e-mails asking how to submit an assignment, or where the reading is, or how to find the discussion board. But it really isn’t for the instructors that I follow that guiding principle; it’s out of kindness and consideration for the students.

In a course I recently supervised, the instructor presented a grading schema for my approval. He’d assigned various point values to discussions (from five to 50 points), various point values to assignments (anywhere from 30 to 150, with a 75 thrown in for good measure); and the total points possible in the course came to 920. Essentially, the grading schema was indecipherable to his students, and would leave them pretty much at his mercy all semester long. I was reminded of a mechanic telling me my whosits was broken and there would need to be a new valve and pad put in place or else I’d crash my car before I got home. I stared at the grading schema with the same bewilderment and consternation as I might the mechanic. I pictured shrugging and saying, “I guess he must be right,” powerless, surrendering.

I was talking to Jesse Stommel, a superb instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder (whose Queer Literature course made national headlines), about this idea of powerlessness in the classroom. He said what he enjoyed most was sitting on the desk in front of his classroom, swinging his feet back and forth, and asking his students how their days were going, what they thought of the reading, and whether or not they’d seen any good films lately. He said his students should never feel powerless in his classroom because he is only there for them. Students in fact have all the power in the classroom because only they will chose to learn or not to learn; Jesse teaches because he enjoys it, not because he wants to coerce learning. Learning’s never coercive, it’s necessarily cooperative (anyone who’s ever had a teenage learner understands that).

I sometimes hear from instructors in my department with complaints about their students, about how they refuse to learn, how they are argumentative, or sullen, or inattentive, or confused. I know how they feel, of course. Work is work is work, and always there’s going to be something that’s less than happy about it. But then I remember my daughter, whom I home school, and the moments when she’s sullen or upset. I think about how I deal with her when that happens (lovingly, patiently), and wonder if maybe we shouldn’t, indeed, treat each of our students as we might our offspring.

When we open a class to students, we invite them to take chances, to make mistakes (even to fail). Hopefully, we give them an environment where they can stumble safely. Like learning to walk on soft rubber floors. Couldn’t our classrooms be like soft rubber floors? A place where we can tumble and roll and jump and fall together, never worrying about breaking an ankle or striking the wrong pose?

Other Resources:

Jesse Stommel

Create a Caring Classroom

Beginning

One false start down, I’m taking a second try here to get this blog rolling. The fact is, there is so much to talk about with regards to teaching that I never really know where to start.

So, I’ll start here, with the idea of “beginner’s mind.” This concept, brought to us through Buddhism (and proliferated through self-help books, writing workshops, and couple’s seminars), reminds us to come at every old task as though we’d never undertaken it before. Simply put, it means to pretend you haven’t done this one thing – giving a lecture, grading a paper, monitoring a group activity – time and time again, and are instead approaching it for the first, very exciting time.

Beginner’s mind allows for a few different things. As beginners, we generally have more open-minded expectations of ourselves and others. We don’t necessarily know how a thing will work out, whether or not it will go according to our decidedly amateur plan. Also, beginner’s mind frees us from thinking about a task as monotonous; if we sink into beginner’s mind each time we approach an exercise or an assignment, the task looks new, original, and it invites more engagement.

This is, by nature of the fact that I’m covering it in a blog, a summary description of a pretty complicated idea. You can put on beginner’s mind when you cook, when you approach your in-laws, when you kiss. You can consider yourself a beginner when you sit down to write, enter the classroom to teach, or decide what to wear each morning. In the classroom, or in the less visceral world of pedagogy, beginner’s mind can (I hope) free us to rethink ideas we pretty much assume to be truth.

I’m the chair of an online English department. I have something like 25 or 30 adjunct faculty I work with, several folks I report to in various ways, and on average between 75 and 100 students in a given term. Each day I report to “work” (also known as my downstairs office), I am tasked with any number of unsurprising jobs for the day: reading and responding to e-mail from students; reading and responding to discussion threads; planning course design; answering questions from faculty; corresponding about any number of bureaucratic issues and decisions with the directors of the college; and more.

I could, and sometimes try to, dust off my teacherly mantle and sink into beginner’s mind each morning when I approach my downstairs desk. Sometimes, I don’t succeed, and I spend what could be very good, productive time tied up in knots about why these tasks I have to do are so relentlessly redundant. Sometimes, it works, and I find that those days, I am much more interested in my students, much more interested in running my department, much more interested in this whole endeavor of higher education.

I bring up beginner’s mind, though, not as a perky tip for helping teachers manage their daily stress; I bring it up because of its broader applications. Think about how beginner’s mind might affect our attitudes toward persistent issues like plagiarism and academic integrity. As a beginner, can we back away from our assumptions – so many of them deeply ingrained from years of training – thereby getting a good look at them? How might beginner’s mind affect the popular concept that teaching both is and is not rewarding work? How might a beginner look at online learning? Standards? Rubrics? Would a beginner be inclined to issue grades without first at least thinking about what grades are, how they’re used, and what they represent to folks on either side of the chalk?

I would like to start this blog, as much as I am able, with a beginner’s mind. No assumptions, no prejudices. Just the excitement of the new – the same excitement, really, that brought me to teaching in the first place.

Some links to consider:

Learner as Beginner

Beginner’s Mind