The playlist embedded below contains my student presentations on deviance and social control. This is the first graded team sociological presentation of the semester. They will complete five of these presentations this term, all designed to teach a core sociological concept from the curriculum.
The thinking behind having student teams create and publish these presentations aligns with constructivist and active learning theory. By engaging the curriculum in a manner that is meaningful to their lives, by teaching the material, and by sharing with peers then we are setting up conditions for significant and authentic learning.
I hope you enjoy the videos - I think the students are doing amazing work.
Grading becomes a serious challenge when we set-up our courses around students completing and sharing their creative work. The goal is to have students step-out of their comfort zones and be willing to explore new ideas and methods for communicating their thinking. Grading encourages students to play it safe, to produce work that has resulted in good grades for them in the past. To produce work that they think conforms to what the professor wants, rather then that plays to their strengths, passions and curiosity.
I've tried to address this challenge by instituting peer grading (as a portion of the feedback), as well as to simply engage the students in a discussion about the uses and misuses of grading. We've talked about how grades are meant to incent students to work harder, and tried to figure out why grades often act as disincentives to creative and brave work.
I don't have an answer to this challenge besides to be willing to take class time and energy to discuss grades. We can try to help students navigate grades by providing rubrics, peer grading, and extensive written feedback.
However, it should be acknowledged that for many subjects and courses (including sociology courses) grading is something that most often we need to work against and overcome. We would be much better off with a grading scheme that put less weight and pressure on grades - perhaps distinguishing only between a "high pass" (which would be reserved to only 20% of the students) - a "pass: (for students who were engaged and did the work) and an "unsatisfactory".
Perhaps this is how the "A", "B", "C" grade was originally set-up - but the reality is that at institutions such as the one I teach students see anything less then an "A" grade as a major problem and a failure. They got into college getting "A"s, they know how to get "A's" - and any class that sets things up differently where an "A" is not the standard grade is a class that they will not be happy with.
Since I've been teaching around creative team projects - working to play to my student's strengths - I've found that my average grades for the semester have gone up. I end up giving more "A's" - as I want to find a way to reward and encourage students creativity and passions.
We need to address and deal with the mismatch of our traditional methods of giving final grades and
our new thinking on setting our classes up for authentic learning.
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