Each year I have done a little more to end this power struggle thing. this fall I had Ruth Gilmore’s words in mind, that we need to get the cop in our minds out of teaching. https://twitter.com/jessifer/status/1340473874492895237

So many things I used to do when I started teaching, l now do the opposite. All the things in your syllabus you could say with a snarl. No PowerPoints will be shared! Don’t use tech in class! Points off for lateness!

One thing that has been helpful was teaching elem school first. I had zero experience so the transformation of myself into “teacher” mode was immediate, and I was surprised by the things I was saying and doing and commanding within days. It wasn’t good.

There’s a crowd control pattern you can fall into, which is part of what I call the user illusion of parenting, which is that a kid won’t do anything unless you personally get them to do it.

So I started experimenting, cutting away the snarling things from my rules and pedagogy. When it was just “less of the bad,” students still tried to plug it into their experience of being subjugated in a power relationship. “You say you don’t care about X and Y so what about Z?”

Making the partial moves was an important step to get comfortable with new things. And with my smaller higher level classes I had already mostly made the switch (I can measure this by how nobody ever asked me questions about grades in those classes, they were just doing the work)

But my big push was figuring out how to make this happen in intro level classes, big ones and gen eds like I’ve been doing this year. What about when it’s not a subject they already care about? How do you “get” (intimidate) them to do the work?

When I was 1/2way there, I described it to a friend as renovating a kitchen like a living room and encouraging students to make themselves comfortable sitting on the stove. “I never turn it on any more!” I had to rethink how the structure and content of the class fit the message.

This semester I switched rooms, so to speak, and worked on making it coherent. I think the keys were regular self assessment (so they could learn how to do it and measure progress), assignments they found meaningful, lots of informal low stakes writing, and a predictable rhythm.

I finally removed the last exams from my class and we were not in the kitchen any more. I have said this before, it freed ME and my teaching also: I didn’t have to spend the whole lecture signaling “this will be on the exam.”

I was not scaring them into doing the work. But they were thinking more and writing more than when I had exams. In self assessments students would say things like “I wasn’t satisfied with the time we spent on this book, so I finished it.” One person read it 2x.

In the final assignment they were supposed to annotate the syllabus but had the option to do more and represent the semester curriculum as a whole, whether that’s as a ppt or as a game or story whatever they could think of. Most of them did more.

it was the first time I had asked students to explain back to me what it all built up to and how pieces fit together, at least without short essay questions. I hope they find it helpful, esp in a semester where we all felt things blur together, to do this retrospective stuff.

And in summary, this is how I ended up getting to read a version of my own class retold as a dungeon crawl featuring @shamuskhan and also a statue of @tmshapiro wearing an Amulet of Wealth. The world is in color now and not binary.

Thanks to the #ungrading world