A little more about your class:

I’m planning the innovation for the section of LIBR 100 that I co-teach. This is a research skills class of 25 students. We teach our section online and asynchronously.

The issue you’re addressing:

I did not come into this group with a clear picture of an issue to address. That said, the two places that I’ve landed are in trying to build more engagement with students, and trying to clarify our purpose/s with grades/grading/feedback.

Tell us a bit more about your teaching innovation:

This semester, we’ve made some small changes. We began to focus on the specific skills we wanted our students to develop. We initially presented our Research Questions lesson on Week 3. This semester, we decided to revisit the work in Weeks 10 and 11, with students revising based on self and peer evaluations, and reflecting on their changes. We (instructors) only weighed in after two revisions. This success opened the door to revamping our final exam. We had students repeat key activities from earlier in the semester, reminding them to build on the feedback that we had initially provided.

Having made these small but significant changes, we are more confident in engaging in a larger revamping for the fall. We plan to more intentionally link learning outcomes to activities, to provide targeted feedback (feed-forward) that will better prepare students to revisit those exercises and direct students to revise as needed. This tactic will also better model the recursive nature of research.

We believe this will allow us to “deconstruct” our final. If we give students a few opportunities to revise their work on a particular activity, perhaps the last iteration can be their final grade for that learning outcome. The final doesn’t necessarily have to come at the end of the semester. We will continue to require some deeper reflection at the end of the semester to encourage students to connect the dots, and also to allow them to celebrate their achievements in our course.

Your initial takeaways: 

My co-teacher and I are pleased with the changes we’ve made so far. The Research Questions were much, much better with the extra attention. The final feels closer connected to our learning outcomes, which is good. Not sure whether the students did better than in past semesters, but they certainly did not do worse — and it helped that so many of them came to office hours so that we could discuss the final with them. Our directions can be clearer in the future.

Suggested “podcast pairing”:

I’ve liked MANY of the podcasts that we’ve listened to. However, as we are revamping lessons and considering ungrading, I will recommend these to my co-teacher:

Joe Hirsch on “Moving from Feedback to Feedforward” (The Cult of Pedagogy podcast)

Emily Dosmar on “Ungrading: The Misconceptions, the Research, and the Strategies” (Faculty Focus Live podcast)