Friday Fragments, February 12
Late work penalties, High-Impact Practices, and sources for "long reads" pleasure reading.
What I’m reading…
Michelle Miller writes about how one thing that she’ll take from pandemic teaching is no penalties for late work. Instead, she’s using a system of “negotiable deadlines” where students may get a deadline adjustment with advance notice to the instructor. I suspect that many of us have a similar practice, if not policy, and this might not sound like a big change. Obviously there are pitfalls to not penalizing late work, not to mention challenges to our own workload should we accept assignments for grading on a more flexible, rolling basis. To that point, Dr. Miller asks:
Should we faculty be looking at other enforcement mechanisms that don’t involve grades? Are there other creative ways we could be incentivizing on-time work, rather than just making all deadlines flexible?
One practice I’ve heard from colleagues across disciplines and institutions is separating grades from feedback - not only the practice of providing feedback ahead of assigning a grade, in the hopes that students will take the time to read the feedback and not just skip to the grade, but also the practice of not providing feedback on assignments turned in late. I haven’t tried this, but I see the potential merits.
Capstone courses at the community college level is an intriguing idea. There’s an increasing interest in using High Impact Practices (HIPs), of which capstone courses are one. The tricky piece is that many of the HIPs have been implemented, and researched, in 4-year institutions. What they look like in community college contexts is a very interesting question…
The myth of Westernisation, by Jon Davidann, is a really interesting piece about modern Japanese history and the idea of “westernization". I’m almost a complete novice in reading Japanese history, so I can’t provide any critical response to the author’s arguments, but I found the essay very accessible to a non-expert audience. I always enjoy the essays published by Aeon.
If you’re looking for other sources of engaging mid-length reading, I love getting the weekly Longreads curated list of articles. Their weekly “top 5” list comes with source information, a short quote or synopsis, and both a word count and an estimated reading time - small additions, but incredibly helpful.