My return to full-time teaching after 12 years as a dean has been a joyous, invigorating, and yes, sometimes challenging experience. One of my favorite parts of the experience has been the opportunity to rethink my practices. This week’s post will examine a practice, awarding grade bumps for class participation, that I have chosen to abandon and explains my reasons for doing so. Next week’s post will share how I have overhauled my approach to reviewing student practices exams. Both changes stem from my assessment that my past practices, which I once thought were good ones because I made them available to all students equally, actually produced inequitable results and failed to advance my most important goals as a teacher.
When I first adopted grade bumps, I did so on a recommendation from a respected colleague. He pitched it as a way to encourage more class participation. While it is still possible that a few students might participate more with such an incentive, I believe the downside of the practice make its abandonment a certainty, at least for me. I have concerns in four areas, each of which is detailed below.
First, in my contracts and remedies classes, grade bumps are poor assessment. They are not tied to any course level outcome I have articulated. In addition, I do not provide any teaching or formative assessment to help students build skills related to class participation (aside from having them experience being called on in class). As I previously have explained, sound course design requires that we start with our course level outcomes, plan our assessments, and then design our teaching and formative assessment to help our students achieve our outcomes. My practice started with something I wanted, class participation, and pretty much stopped there.
Second, I certainly was not measuring class preparation, although I may have once thought I was. My students are incredibly diverse in terms of gender, race, class, anxiety, disability, and familiarity with law school expectations. I now fear I was measuring privilege or, at least self confidence. I certainly have observed this year that many of the students who most frequently volunteer to speak in class are students who do not mind being wrong sometimes; their confidence allows them to understand that the learning process for learning anything and, particularly, for learning challenging skills, inherently requires missteps. It is heartbreaking and true that some of my students experience each error they make and every correction from me as a referendum on their intelligence. Students have described their experience as involving shame. The fact that I do not see student errors as anything more than an opportunity for my students to grow doesn’t mean my students feel that way. Grade bumps force students to feel like they must choose between pain and grades.
Third, for me at least, teaching is an engrossing experience. In any given moment during every class I teach, I am tracking student understanding, striving to share my excitement about the subject and student learning, evaluating my success, making tradeoffs between additional clarification and coverage, looking for ways to help individual students to grow while also making sure I am saying things that will benefit most students, and managing my classroom time so that I devote the most classroom time to the most important facets of I am teaching that day. I therefore do not belief I also can accurately track who is participating and the quality of each student’s contributions to ensure that my conclusions at the end of the semester are more than just impressions. The danger of relying on impressions, of course, is that my biases will creep into my thinking and distort my conclusions.
Finally, grade bumps are almost a form of double counting. I genuinely believe that students who speak in class get an educational benefit from doing so; they get to practice the skills I will be assessing on my exams (especially when they are responding to hypotheticals). and they get my immediate feedback on their performance in real time. If I also give the most frequent contributors a grade bump, I am giving them a second benefit.
So grade bumps are out for me. I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to keep trying to become a better version of my teaching self.
