TaxProf Blog

In this wonderful and very short video from a Duke University “Learning to Fail” Class, the professor, identified as “Professor Becky” in the short video, beautifully explains something I wish all our law students understood: their frustration when they are stuck between not knowing and knowing how to perform a skill means they are in the learning space. It may be painful and messy as the professor explains, but our students passage through that space gives them resilience if they can learn to see it that way.

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.