Tekla Hawkins's blog

A Case for Portfolio-Based Assessment

Tekla Hawkins — Sat, 11 Jan 2014 17:33:31 +0000

Author:

Tekla Hawkins

Image Credit:

Bill Watterson

As far as I know I’m the only instructor at UT-Austin using portfolio grading in a Literature course this term; I know for certain that future graduate-student instructors have been told they are not allowed to use portfolio grading in even their self-designed Literature courses going forward. I’ve heard various reasons why instructors aren’t allowed to choose their own assessment methods, but portfolio-based grading makes the most sense for my teaching style and philosophy, and so I’m taking this opportunity to explain just three of the reasons it makes teaching the course easier: reduced class preparation time, easier grading, and more appropriate and equitable assessment.

The reduced teaching preparation for each class may seem counter-intuitive given the portfolio system that I use--the Online Learning Record, developed by Peg Syverson. This system requires the students to make twitter-length observations about their own learning processes throughout the semester, and write self-evaluations at the middle and end of term. The instructor provides feedback on the self-evaluation at the midterm in addition to feedback on all work in the course. The reduction in class preparation time comes from reading the observations on an ongoing basis. I’ve set up our course wiki to notify me of changes, so each day I receive a digest of information that tells me exactly how the class is going. From an instructor’s perspective, this reduces almost all of the guesswork involved in teaching a class, and so is especially useful for teaching a new-to-them course. Instead of preparing for multiple class discussions that might emerge, ten minutes of reading allows me to focus on whatever the students have said they are struggling with or find especially engaging.

Providing good feedback and evaluations for each assignment becomes easier as well; through the introductory portions of the Learning Record, I have some idea of where the students are at the beginning of the term. Through their observations I know what they’re working on and struggling with, and so (again with just a few moments of review) I can provide focused feedback on particular issues for each individual student. Because the Learning Record is written, I don’t have to remember or look through multiple files to remind myself what the issues at hand are. Because the feedback isn’t grade-based, the students feel less pressured and criticized, and in my experience are more likely to do thorough revisions of their written work.

Assessment for the final grades via a portfolio system is more equitable than relying on an A-F assessment. At a foundational level, humanities are not the same as basic maths. It is nearly always impossible and inappropriate to assess reading and writing skills as if they could be judged via scantron, as multiple ongoing arguments have proved. The struggle against universal education and teaching has been ongoing for years, and the detrimental effects of “teaching to the test” are well-known.

And yet, for many classes and schools, a “traditional” ABC version of grading remains standard. There are many reasons for this, but one is considered to be the ease of grading. If you have hundreds of students, you can design tests and reading and writing assignments that can be easily graded via a rubric. Points per section of the rubric = points toward an A. It’s easy enough right up until you are able to get to know your students. Then it gets harder.

Like most students in my program, I was a TA for a large lecture section during my MA. Our E316ks are typically taught by experienced professors to classes of 200-300 students. The several TAs for these classes typically each lead two discussion sections, help design test questions, and grade all of the exams. UT-Austin has about 40,000 undergraduate students, and E316k is a general requirement, so about 4,000 students take the course each year. Inevitably, we have a very diverse student population, and they give us very different responses to instruction. Most teachers are familiar with the struggle of giving a student who has made a tremendous effort and huge progress a really poor grade because they are not performing in the same manner as their peers. Because I teach in digital classrooms, the variety of student experiences and abilities with technology – in addition to literature and rhetoric – is amplified even further. In addition to traditional essays my students use mind maps, wordles, Google Earth, and blogs. Each of these resist a cut and dry assessment, as DH scholars trying to get tenure are repeatedly reminded. Good instructors have many ways of supporting their students despite an A-F assessment system, but it becomes radically more difficult. The Learning Record ensures that each student meets a minimum standard, but can be evaluated on progress and development in multiple areas instead of just one.

Finally, I find the portfolio system most supports my teaching philosophy. My students are very smart. My job is to facilitate their learning; and the longer I teach the more I realize one of my primary goals is to find methods of teaching that celebrate and prioritize learning over knowing. The Learning Record is one of the ways I can ground each class in that methodology while still being transparent about my own authority over the group. Giving and receiving constant feedback builds community and ensures that a student’s performance and production over the a term is collaborative – between each student, myself, and the rest of the classroom. Prioritizing this idea is especially important when working with digital materials, which are designed to foster collaboration.

I frequently hear two objections to this kind of portfolio system; that students can more easily cheat, and that the classes we teach are supposed to be designed to introduce students to the English major, and so different assessment types will be confusing for the students. Regarding cheating, I can only say that my experience has been that it is very difficult to cheat on the Learning Record, and that as far as I know none of my students have tried. And while I think most courses should move away from an A-F assessment, I don’t think students are confused by having one or two courses use alternate grading methods. Below are quotes from Learning Record evaluations from students all over the grade spectrum:

At first, every time something new rolled around, I grew anxious because I was afraid of getting something wrong...throughout the couse, I have grown just to try...I don't let this fear of failure keep me from getting my work done anymore.

"I feel as though I am learning how to learn. This skill is ultimately better than anything any professor could teach me. I could forget [topic...] but it wouldn't be an issue because the learning record and this class have given me the tools to learn it again by myself."

"I started out literally AFRAID of going to class. Now I actually look forward to it and enjoy hearing everyone's insights on the readings. This course has allowed me to take on entirely new perspectives on learning."

I don’t mind being erased from the student’s evaluation; if I’ve helped them think critically about their own thinking, I’ve done my job. The portfolio-based system makes this easier.

Plain Text = Persuasion

Tekla Hawkins — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Tekla Hawkins (@tekla_h on Twitter)

Image Credit:

Tekla Hawkins

After two years out of the classroom on fellowship, I've just finished the first full week of teaching. Because of the long break, I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to get out of the classroom, and what I hoped my students would get out of it. At UT-Austin we have a large and diverse student population, but the common factor in mine has been that they're driven and want to do well.

And because I'm lucky enough to teach small classes they seem to like having the opportunity to get to know each other and build a little community. What this means is that they are bright and generous and willing to give us their time.

One of my primary goals this term was to take as much advantage as I could of that attention, and try to make sure the class deserved it. As part of this practice, I've started writing down and summarizing almost everything they say. It was a bit of a happy accident at first. I think better when I'm writing (which is why I tweet so much at conferences), and I wanted to make sure I was understanding what they were saying. I was a little nervous, being up front again after such a long time.

So I opened up a text edit window on our class computer, which is projected to the front of the room, and started typing as they were talking. The class was a little surprised at first - they obviously weren't sure what they were supposed to be doing with what I was writing down - but they quickly started looking up at the screen, referring to what other people had said and picking up themes and questions in the discussion that I'm not sure would have emerged otherwise. It also served the intended purposes for me; I was able to remember and summarize what they had said; to check in with them as we went and make sure I was understanding their points, and because I'm used to doing it at conferences on twitter, I could also offer written commentary on their points as we went along (they're pretty funny sometimes, and a lol on the screen goes a long way).

After that first discussion section, I asked the rest of the class why they weren't writing down the things they thought were important or interesting about the conversation, and they looked at me in surprise. I explained that these were just *my* notes -the great thing about a class our size is that we can have interesting and ongoing conversations. Of course their own notes would be more relevant to their interests. Maybe I was persuasive, or maybe they were just waiting for permission, but either way a good number of them were taking notes throughout the discussion in the next classes. Some of them are being posted to their Learning Records, and some of them are being kept privately, but either way, they're being really attentive to each other. They're present. And they talk a lot. Using the screen like this makes it even easier for me to be a facilitator of discussion; someone who listens and helps rather than someone who speaks to.

Using the plain text edit screen means I can easily pull up examples and the different software we're using that day right alongside the text window, or drop one element in front of another, without the two elements competing with each other. For example, I can copy/paste the course notes for the day directly into a wordle and show the class what they've prioritized in their own conversations about the text.

"Be present" is mentioned in my course policies five different times. My guess is that the simple text edit screen acknowledges and makes physically present the public/private divide that occurs in classrooms, and helps ensure that we stay where we are; with the texts and with each other.

Reflections on Blogging

Tekla Hawkins — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:15:01 +0000

Author:

Tekla Hawkins

Image Credit:

Andrew

Like many of the instructors here in the DWRL, I ask my students to write blog posts throughout the semester, which means in the last year and a half, I’ve read about 180 thoughtful, carefully constructed responses to my own work. Although I added blogging to my rhetoric courses to benefit the students (after all, they meet so many rhetorical and composition questions: public & private writing, community building, visual rhetoric, low-stakes writing environments, etc.), I’ve decided this term that they might be more beneficial for me than for them.

In part, this idea is prompted by the wide divergence of the types of responses I received in my two classes.

For my RHE 306 courses last year, I asked the students to write about their research and/or their own research processes. Graded only on completion, the students had to include a minimum number of words, an image or video, and a title. More importantly, they had to comment in a substantive manner on the other blogs that were posted that day. Some students invested a lot into their blog in obvious ways, spending a lot of time finding just the right image, creating perfect transition sentences and so on.

Almost all of the students, though, found it a good outlet to talk about their worries and concerns about the course generally, and to think about some of the issues they were struggling with in class – how to do better research, how to re-organize their papers, and how to deal with issues like procrastination and anxiety. As the instructor, I rarely commented on these blogs online, but I talked about them frequently in class, and at least twice I scrapped our original plan for the day and we worked through some of the issues that were literally writ large on the screen, because I brought them up on the projector. As a group, the students for that course said they found the blogs valuable, and an important part of their development as writers.

In my RHE 309K class this term, the blog prompt was very slightly different, but the posts were dramatically different, and I’m still thinking through why this might be the case. The prompt for this course was to write six blog posts throughout the semester, which had to include a title, image, and a minimum word count, as well as responding to a certain number of other posts in a substantive way throughout the semester. The posts were to address either the readings for the week, or their own research (note: not the research process, but simply “research”). Like the 306 course, they were graded only on completion.

While some of the posts have been about the reading, most of the posts were a kind of preview or rough draft piece of something they planned on incorporating into one of their larger papers. A very few posts were about writing generally, or a kind of written response to a meeting with me about their work.

In the posts that are a re-hash of the meetings with me, or about writing, the responses tend to offer both sympathy and very concrete advice on how to address the issue. In these responses, I have the opportunity to see some of my own teaching techniques and even exact phrases echoed directly back at me. Sometimes this comes through in, “Well, Tekla said in class the other day…,” but sometimes the citation (iteration?) seems to be completely unintentional.

For the “preview” posts, however, although the students frequently asked directly for feedback, the responding students tended not to give the kind of feedback the original poster asked for, going off on questions of their own inspired by the question the OP worked from, or simply saying “good job,” even though this kind of response being explicitly forbidden in the prompt, and I know that they are very good peer reviewers.

Why is this? Since the students mimicked my own work in the process-based posts, why didn’t they in the “preview” posts? Why were they so reluctant to give the kind of feedback that would be invaluable to the other student?

Is it something about my teaching or the way I give comments on papers? Is it simply the fear of being critical in public? Is it because of the class dynamic? My 306 students were freshman, and had more obvious anxiety in general than my 309 group, who were sophomores and juniors. Was it something about the way I handled the course? The 309 group was less cohesive, a bit less friendly with each other than the 306 classes. Or was it simply, and perhaps most obviously, the prompt? Did the phrase “post about your own research,” indicate that the student’s own work was to be on display, a mini-performance? If my peer were “performing,” I would be reluctant to offer public, critical feedback, even if they asked me to.

In retrospect, I think it was probably a combination of all of these, and as I put together my syllabus for next semester, I’m thinking hard about how I can adjust the parameters of the prompt, and therefore the parameters of how my students think about the course, their classmates, and writing.

I love my student’s blog posts not only because they are smart, and funny, and show me things I would’ve never found otherwise, but because they show me my own teaching, and give me a chance to think critically about how and why I say/write/show/perform/demonstrate every action that has to do with them. They’re the best kind of mirror I could ask for.