What that means is that if you prefer not to be captured on the recording, you'll just want to mute your audio and video now I'm going to hit record.
Okay, well thanks for coming from near and far everybody feel free to pop your info into the chat if you want to introduce yourself. I'll also try to keep an eye on the chat as our presenters are going today but they are going to stop a couple of different
times for questions but you should feel absolutely fine about chit chatting there, if that is helpful to you. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to the Associate Director of the Open Learning and Teaching collaborative here at Plymouth state my colleague,
Martha Broadus thanks Robin Hi everybody, thanks for joining us today I'm going to go ahead and share my slides.
And let's see can you see those are good. Yes.
So yeah, the title of today's presentation workshop program is meaningful self assessment.
And I had a lot of fun putting this together I cared really deeply about self assessment as a, as a teacher, so it was, you know, a topic that's kind of near and dear to my heart and I have been wanting to do something around it for a while, and by no
means an expert in this topic though and so I just wanted to share that. When I was researching putting together resources I learned some interesting things, which is that if you google self assessment, almost everything you find has to do with workplace
self assessment, which I actually found super interesting, because so many of us have to do some kind of self evaluation or self assessment as part of the workplace.
And so I think it's actually kind of interesting to talk about that continuum of how teaching students to reflect upon themselves in the classroom may actually be a valuable work skill that they draw on someday.
The other thing that I learned is that in England, self assessment is something you do thats related to taxes. I don't know what I can't explain it.
It got it really got in the way though of my research so kind of angry that that's what they call whatever that is self assessment.
But to dive right in.
I wanted to talk about why we would even be considering self assessment and a lot of my practice in this area comes at is situated around the concept of been grading, or alternative assessment, some of you have attended co lab events, about upgrading
and there's lots of buzz on the internet teaching and learning circles about alternative assessment and upgrading and certainly self assessment is situated within that practice, but it isn't necessarily all about upgrading.
Other reasons why you might be interested in incorporating some kind of self assessment activities into your courses into your teaching might be because you are really interested in focusing on learner agency and and giving your students agency in the
class in terms of their own learning that the choices that make they make, and and their ability to reflect upon those choices and talk coherently about, about what they've achieved or where they've stumbled.
The other is an interest in process, focused teaching and learning, which really is about seeing learning less as about final product and final grades.
In some cases, but where you're really you're really interested in letting students explore kind of the meta cognitive stuff that goes on in learning.
I always find that I I learn a whole lot more about my students when they talk to me about their process than I do when I look at their product. And so for me as a as an instructor as a teacher process based learning is something that's is really kind
of near and dear in my dear to my heart. So these are just three reasons why self assessment, may be on your radar. They are obviously related and can overlap, but not necessarily you can have self assessment is something you do in your class and not
be an underwriter.
You can do upgrading and not really focused so much on process in your class, but I wanted to just kind of introduce those as as guiding concepts or principles behind this.
So why is this titled meaningful self assessment because obviously that was a deliberate choice on our part.
I think we've probably all experienced times in our lives, where we've been asked to self assess and there's no consequence to it. Right. I know that for years in my previous job I did self evaluations.
When there was no money, so like there were no raises there was no there was no.
There was no.
There was no merit, or reward for whatever came out of that evaluation process.
It's really hard when you're in a situation like that to see self assessment as being meaningful right it can just feel like a hoop that you're jumping through jumping through in order to kind of get something done.
But it isn't even just about reward it's also about meaningful feedback. When you do self assessment and it feels like it's just going into the void.
And I would posit that a lot of our students have probably had that kind of experience with self assessment.
Maybe in K 12, maybe another college classes where they've asked to do self evaluation, but it doesn't really feel like it goes anywhere.
Not just that it doesn't, it's not reflected in their grade but they don't feel like anybody's listening, and it's not coming back to them in any way that, that feels very important.
So while I don't necessarily think that everything we asked our students to do should be responded to individually.
And with the same kind of intensity, I do think we have to situate self assessment within some kind of understanding of feedback, whether it's sometimes that feedback might be a student providing feedback to themselves right sometimes that self assessment
maybe a more of an internal tool that you're having students use.
So the other thing I want to talk about is at the very nature of self assessment so asking someone to truthfully talk about how they're doing what their goals are, what they have learned what grade they think they've achieved asks for a really specific
kind of vulnerability.
And that acknowledging that vulnerable vulnerability. One of the ways we acknowledge it is through feedback and conversation right if we're going to ask people to be vulnerable and honest with us about what they have done well and what they haven't done
well.
It not only feels meaningless when we don't respond to that it just feels kind of rude and not terribly kind, which I think is something that we, you know, kindness is something that I think we should try and foster in our relationships with our students,
but you should not just take my word for this.
Let's see if I can actually get slides to work.
This is from a presentation by Jonathan Blizzard a few years ago at a conference.
The presentation titled student perceptions of self assessment in higher education. And in his research he found that students generally did not value in formal opportunities for self assessment.
They saw little value in assessing their own work, and they saw assessment as the responsibility of the lecturer of the teacher and not of themselves.
So a lot of this is about how we position the self assessment activity within our course, so that we kind of D center ourselves as the final arbiters of what's good and what's not good, of what success and what what looks like success and what doesn't
look like success, and instead we start to take students through a process where they really can can take some ownership for their own successes and their own failures as well.
But if you don't like research you also should just trust the means, because those are where real truth lies.
And this probably is what a lot of us worry about when we talk about self assessment which students will be like, Oh great, you're going to do a self assessment sure I'm going to be really truthful about this.
And then what they're basically going to say is that they've done everything perfectly and they've done a great job and you should if you're doing on grading you should give them an A.
Or this one, which is, you know, you ask them to self assess and they're like, I don't really know what that means, or how I'm doing but I'm sure whatever I'm doing I'm doing it really really well.
And so, you know, there's this fear that when we, when we go through this kind of activity or process with our students, it's not only going to feel like hoop jumping for them.
But what we're going to get out of it isn't even going to be meaningful. Right. It's just going to be kind of an act that they go through.
Um, it's also kind of interesting to unpack this idea of like how good we are people actually are at assessing themselves. Is this a skill that we actually like innately or have some have some, you know, skill at at being able to objectively, look at
our work, and and explore how how well we've done our haven't done.
This is from an interview with David Dunning he's at Cornell University psychology professor who really studies this area, a lot, particularly in in the employment sector right like looking at self assessment that happens in the job the job.
And he says, on average, and employee does tend to think that they're well above average and they have more expertise they have more leadership skills they're more idealistic.
They're more sophisticated.
But it says Dunning it's important to be able to correct our tendency is towards unrealistic optimism and the best way to do that is by regularly soliciting honest feedback Dunning says successful organizations usually institutionalize a process that
encourages vigorous critique.
So again this is about the situation of self assessment about not letting it just stand on its own, but thinking about it as part of this conversation that we are in with our students, and how we can, how we can position this work so that it feels meaningful
to them.
So what are the there a couple of words that have been thrown out here meaningful which is the title of this in, in that original study from Blizzard he talks about how students didn't value in formal self assessment opportunities and Dunning talks about
the need for vigorous critique so what do we mean by meaningful.
If we're trying to be meaningful we're trying to be formal we're trying to be bigger us.
So a couple of things that come to mind for me, that I would like to throw out there. The first is about signaling importance to students. So how do we do that how do we signal to students that this work that that we're asking them to do with self assessment
actually matters.
So I would say the signal to it to students by centering it in our classroom in really important ways and incorporating it into the formal structure of our course.
So it's not a throwaway it's not an afterthought. It's not something that comes up unexpectedly, to students it's something that we talked about from day one, if it's something we're going to be asking them to engage in calling it out on our syllabus
providing information about how it will work and why it matters having a meta conversation with students about self assessment and why it's important to us as teachers and why we asked them to do it.
And really introducing it in class as a topic of conversation and discussion and from there I think revisiting and reiterating so it's not you introduce it on the syllabus day one and then you never talk about it again until week six when they do their
first self assessment.
And then again until the end of the semester or maybe you only talk about it one more time. So we don't do, we shouldn't do self assessment just one time but come back to it repeat it repeatedly mention it when introducing other work in the class right,
talk to them about the fact that they are going to be assessing themselves at some point on the work that they're about to do.
Remember to think about how you'll talk about your work on this assignment in your next self assessment right having a conversation with them about what that might look like.
And also be open to read discussing it during the semester if students are struggling with it. Right, so if you go through your first to self self assessment and what you get back isn't really where you want it to be.
conversation into the class about what how that worked and white maybe didn't work as well as you had hoped. Using formal tools to structure self assessment so not just having an open ended.
You know single question and students submit a document, but thinking critically about what are the questions that you want them to respond to. How do you want them to respond to them in what form, and what kind of how much length Are you looking for
in those responses.
Not leaving that really open ended.
and not just you know, give me two paragraphs about how you're doing.
But instead, consider really structuring that experience for them, especially when they're first starting out, in my experience what I've seen is that students very often will start using that structure and by the end of the semester, what I get is more
like a letter.
Because what's happened what's emerged is really a conversation and they've started to glean that feedback which we've always talked already talked about.
So always providing feedback, and that can take lots of different forms, and we can talk about those in greater detail but consider the self assessment I like to consider it as the kind of opening parlay in a, in a conversation and an ongoing conversation
with my students so I always tell students when I introduce self assessment that if I have concerns about anything that they've shared I will ask them to come talk to me right that this is not the end of this activity.
This is the beginning of this activity is, is what they decided to share with me and their self assessment. And then following up with comments on whatever they've written, asking questions in my comments to get them to think more deeply and following
up with face to face student meetings whenever I feel like that's necessarily.
And then keep our eye on the prize. So I think this is really really important which is that ultimately the point of self assessment isn't about reading students.
It is not about teaching students how to rate themselves.
Some. Unfortunately, the way we teach.
We care about ratings and grades that's part of the structure of our institutions, but really what this is about is about developing a culture of metacognition and self reflection in our institutions and in our classes and as I said, maybe even something
that they take with them into the workplace when they're asked to do this kind of work in other areas of their lives. The real goal of teaching here is to help students develop into self regulated self aware and adaptive learners and self assessment should
be about getting them to articulate that learning, so that they understand themselves as being capable of self regulation self awareness and adaptive learning.
So I think with that, we are going to turn this over to Liz, who's going to talk about self assessment in the wild with classes that she teaches here at Plymouth state is would you like to unmute introduce yourself and get started you know I would probably
prefer to stay muted but for the group I will unmute myself.
Hi, I'm Liz, I have been here at Plymouth faculty for about going on 20 years, and I teach in English departments and I teach primarily writing courses, primarily creative writing courses but also composition and other sort of expository writing classes.
I preface always when I whenever I'm like trying to write or talk or like present as an authority on some sort of pedagogical thing I always want to give this caveat like everything I think almost everything I do as a teacher I stole from somebody else
I don't remember who, but I did, sorry, like I'm not. I didn't invent any of this.
And any building I've done on it like anything I have done like that I, you know, might be newer thing is just on the backs of other people and I liked that about pedagogy, but also makes me very nervous when I'm like, Here's my brilliant idea about pets
like nom I have no ideas I just copy other people's stuff.
So authors notes or something I've used in writing classes and again that's like 97% of what I teach is writing classes, but I think you can use them in all different kinds of classes.
And I already don't remember whether it was grad school part one or grad school part two, there were two sort of intensive comp and read programs and kind of different comp and read programs that I encountered in grad school, and and one of them I'm pretty
sure it was at Nebraska, that I was that the practice involved. This use of authors notes. There were other, there are other places that have history and this is like been for decades now.
There are other places that sometimes call them learning letters, which I think is interesting.
And
what I mean by authors notes is a paragraph or many accompanying a writing assignment draft.
In general, the authors notes, ask the writer to describe what they're handing in. Tell me what you've got, like, and, you know, is it brand spanking new Is it the 57th draft and you're so done with it because you know both of those extremes can impact
like the kind of response you might find most useful and want to direct a reader towards
and sort of your goals a check in on your goals and purposes in the writing, so I set out to try to x, and here's what I think here's how I think that's going here the new questions are I set out to, you know, write about x and now I'm not doing that
at all.
So also they asked writers to describe what kind of feedback, they'd find particularly helpful in this particular draft or piece.
I require most writing assignments I give to be accompanied by an author's note in order to be considered complete in my sort of green light grade system like you do it you get a check 100% however you need to describe that to yourself I like the green
light metaphor. And in terms of meaningfulness. I think the regular the regularity of these helps them become meaningful and I think what Martha was saying earlier about, like, starting a conversation.
So at the beginning of the semester I have I have written up I think I have it linked in a later slide is just a Google Doc, with my sort of standard most recent standard.
Here's how you write an author's note, and it's got a bullet list.
And when I talk with students about this document and when we sometimes we talk about in the authors notes themselves.
I imagine that those bullets are the sort of starting scaffold. And then once we start the conversation as I said in the chat because authors notes are among other things a conversation between the writer and herself between the writer and the readers
responders, that conversation starts to take on a life of its own.
And so, you know, you can take those those training wheels I guess you can definitely sort of take off later because now you've now you've got something else propelling you besides bullet secure having hopefully a conversation that is meaningful.
So, next slide please.
So when I first learned to use authors notes, I just want to sort of describe kind of an evolution in my thinking about authors notes because I think there's a lot of different ways you can use them and try them and see how they work and like have your
own evolution about how they might work.
Initially, I use them and I think we, you know, I don't know if this is my failure of imagination or how I was taught. It's just a supportive or a service text, the author of the real text is the poem draft the author's note is to like serve the poem
draft which I don't want to say is entirely untrue but that was, that was sort of the limit of its function like it's it ranked second a distant second in importance to the poem itself.
The product.
it's where it's where the learning.
The learning is in both places the learning is in the poem draft and the learning is in the writing about the poem draft but that the metacognition is happening in the author's note and.
and if if a sort of a basic sort of not controversial tentative writing pedagogy holds true right that it's not about the writing it's about the writer.
And in that sense, each piece in each author's note is sort of really about the piece that hasn't been written yet like the writer of the future and how they how they, you know, keep becoming that person that writer.
So I think that authors notes really serve that that future. And, like, because of that.
I've been in a place the last couple of years of trying to rethink how I how I communicate that importance.
Without while dealing with sort of my concerns about the diminishment of the importance of the poem say right because like the poem is really important to like, it's false, it's a false choice of course.
I also started out thinking about authors notes as a conversation between you, the author of your draft and me, the reader of your draft the central primary reader of your draft, who's going to evaluate it, as, as evolving more into sort of the beginning
of an ongoing conversation about yourself, or sorry, a conversation with yourself about your work and your writerly habits, and that it's also part of a larger ongoing conversation about like what is poetry.
What is a poet.
And then another evolution here authors notes as being about the texts evolving into authors notes as being about the writer, like that. So all of these movements that are not discrete they're all kind of overlapping I just basically use this slide to
sort of try and work out in an abbreviated sense, the different tendrils of my evolution.
Again largely fueled by the way students have been using authors notes the last few years.
So phase one was like author's note is just this individual discrete conversation starter functional service text phase two.
Well gosh at the end of the semester you handed a final portfolio of revised work and you write a narrative in which you say, here's the poems I handed in here's what I did with them and here's how it's learning like here's what I learned authors notes
in my face to became this source of evidence, kind of, I would tell the language I often use to explain it to English majors was like imagine you're writing an essay about an author, and you're looking at the primary the primary texts which are the things
the author wrote, and you're looking at the secondary texts which are the authors and it's like you're writing an essay about an author and the author is you.
So, you have not only the poems to look back on but also this this hopefully this thread. You know what is it that you kept saying over and over again in your authors notes like what question did you keep returning to what new thing did you start noticing
or are spending time with in your authors notes and how might you use that end of semester reflection to kind of gather some of that.
And I'm where I am right now is I'm really wanting to do more with reflection on learning like i and i don't know i don't know what this is going to mean exactly I'm still very much in process about it like, I think, I don't know if it was Martha or me
when I was talking about this dilemma.
And like wanting to make the author's note sort of more central and the end the final course narrative where they talk about their own work like more central, it's like well how what percentage of the final grade is given to that right.
And the way I had historically been grading these pieces, still made that sort of the primary text primary, right, because of that percentage and it's, it's, I felt a lot of resistance and myself to to shifting too much right I, but that it all of it
of reveals to me my own existing and enduring assumptions and investments in like grades percentages as being the communicator of meaningfulness, which it has to be something else.
Yeah. So, final slide and I think I should be able to finish up I have so many things that I just want to think about and talk about based on just the beginning of this presentation but I will move on.
So my current goals like this where I am right now kind of with authors notes and self assessment. I need I wanted me to spend more time teaching the form the genre, the potentials of the author's note.
Like, I've never we've never workshopped authors notes, which itself seems sort of like why would you do that but well, if it's if we have an idea about why you you know workshop any text.
Like why wouldn't you workshop.
Right.
So I'm interested in how and other ways not just workshopping I might teach and reinforce this idea that this is an input it's important, it's meaningful and and it's not something that you automatically are able to do it takes practice, it takes, you
know, time, and I and so I wanted to, I don't want it to just be a sort of attack on or a PS, that that always exists to serve the quote unquote real work.
And I think this will involve revisiting and reiterating authors notes importance and function over the course of the semester and various ways to the workshopping is just sort of the low hanging fruit because like we're doing that anyway so that might
be a familiar space in which to kind of legitimize the author's note is real important.
I have a link in this slide to and it's my spring 2021 authors notes syllabus language for my competent advanced comp courses it's slightly different for my creative writing course just because of the genre differences.
I mentioned earlier that learning letters if you're googling around on this and you Google authors notes, you'll find a bunch of stuff and I think learning letters is a is a thing that you'll find a lot on as well and this is so old like this, none of
this is new.
I hope that some of my thinking about it is new though.
Authors notes can be tailored to specific assignments or learning goals, and can be wrote be very specific or very general For example, when I asked students to use accidents and consonants I asked them to write poems that have big audible sound effects,
but do not use full and rhyme that's a one thing they're not allowed to use for this one poem.
Right, I have a reason for doing this I want them to see that their options, too full and rhyme when you want to like make your poem sound cool. So I asked in the, in the assignment prompt I'll say in your authors note, please describe, which of the sound
sound effects techniques that we discussed that you used and how you found that to be like, you know, how did it compare to using full and Ryan, whatever.
And you can certainly do this with all kinds of writing assignments like what was what was difficult to you about the primary source research for this.
You know sa.
Describe your experience using.
I don't know using hypothesis to comment on us.
And then one last note and I'll get out of here. I have in the past and i and i i want to sort of think more about how I might reincorporate this not necessarily into daily authors notes but the idea of creating acknowledgments of having an opportunity.
Maybe more toward the later iterations of a draft or a project to thank people to acknowledge like here's, not just like here's my writing process which is important but also, here's who helped me.
I got I got some really helpful peer response on this section from so and so, You know, the librarians helped me figure out this my mom and I had a great conversation about this like acknowledgments like you'd read in a book, as a way of.
I mean it's not unrelated to cite your sources right but it's a way of emphasizing the sociality and commute communality communism.
That's a way of emphasizing the communism of learning.
So, love talking about authors notes love talking about all of these sort of impossible delicious wonderful things thanks for asking me.
I will now take a breath.
I'm going to go ahead and invite Matt to
join us now.
Hello.
Hi everybody I'm not cine I'm director of Interdisciplinary Studies here at Plymouth state.
And I'm in my third year of doing that previously Robin de Rosa had that position which I mentioned just because some of the things I'm going to share with you are deep three iterations of things that I think Robin first created in the end, some of which
she admittedly also borrowed from elsewhere. So there's, there's a long lineage to some of this stuff.
I have been teaching for a while and and taught them a variety of different circumstances, including 10 years teaching high school, mostly English and theater.
And I mentioned that because I was thinking about where did I start doing self assessments and it came from a very practical need, which was when I was a young teacher I was taken aback by some students who were shocked by their grades, not in the sense
of like failing anything but rather the student who got a B plus and was crushed because they expected in a.
And I didn't really as a young teacher know what to do with that and so what I decided to do was create some self assessment so at least I'd have a warning beforehand, for those students to see what their expectations of grades were.
So things have evolved a lot since then and my practices have changed very significantly.
But the thing that I keep coming back to is the what I really learned once I tried to use self assessments as a real tool within the class beyond just information was that it takes practice because one students don't get a lot of practice with it but
also there are skepticism is within students that are well justified by their experiences of teachers, not valuing or turning self assessments actually against them it at times so there is a good strong reason for students skepticism of these things I'm
early self assessments, what we're doing is sort of suffering each other out there trying to figure out what I want and what I'm like as a teacher I'm trying to figure out what their experiences and background assumptions are as students.
So if we move to the next slide. I'm going to share some stuff here, and I'll try to put the link in the chat while that's coming up. Yeah. So, all of the materials in much more detail and context are available on the website for the course.
And as I was thinking about this presentation, I wanted to grounded within one specific course because I think that for me at least, self assessment practices are different, of course by course, because the different courses have different needs that
pose some challenges. First is I had trouble identifying what was self assessment and what was just the work we do in class, my classes have lots of reflection within them.
So I've, I've pulled out some things that may or may not fit what you think about self assessment as we go forward but hopefully they're useful.
Also there's one big challenge which is that I no longer teach classes graded A through F, all of the courses I teach are graded pass or no pass that opens up all sorts of freedoms.
Four Freedoms for and freedoms from grading.
So the self assessments may be a little different than I would use them in, when teaching in A through F class.
So, first off, as I was thinking about what are self assessments in my courses. The first is actually a fairly common practice which is the survey in the first week to find out what students like for their names, what their experiences in the past where
etc.
And this isn't something we would typically think of as self assessment, but as I was thinking about it I thought that the decision to make choices about how you present yourself to effectively a stranger.
That is your new teacher involves some self assessment, you have to make some choices about what you're going to share and and what is important to you and share in that sharing.
This is also great because, like many of the best self assessment practices, it's super low stakes there is there, virtually zero stakes for this. Students can put whatever they want it has no effect whatsoever on their grades.
We can move to the next slide.
So here's, here's just an image of what mine looks like I use Microsoft forms now just because it integrates pretty well with some of our different systems, I've used the Google Forms, plenty of times as well.
You could do it as a quiz or a survey within your learning management system you use Survey Monkey there a billion different ways to do that. It's all very simple.
Next slide.
So throughout the term.
We do various sorts of reflection activities starting small and starting as Liz said as, as, as Martha said starting with things that are very focused and structured, because my assumption going in is that most of my students are probably don't have a
lot of experience with self assessment and perhaps are wary of it.
So I try to, to make them really focused really structured at the beginning, working toward what is ultimately a very open, self assessment, at the very end.
So all of these initial assignments are short reflective writing.
And usually the first ones you get are not very good by you know by what I would call good self assessment. They're thin, they're tentative the students are testing the waters, and they're they're learning sometimes a whole new way to think it's like
what should I be saying here.
So my feedback then is always super supportive. I will even if they hand in, like, three words I will say this is great. Okay, could you perhaps maybe in the in the future.
Let's think about how some of this works for you. This is great. Keep up keep doing it.
Because I don't want to discourage them from this work I don't want them to feel that oh no self assessment I have to monitor myself.
And I also want to encourage them to dig deeper. So always what I'm asking them, are questions of why and how, why, why is it this for you. How did you do this, etc.
I'm not because that's really going to even help they're great again minor pass no pass courses they could do terribly on all of these and they, as long as they did the work they'd still pass, but I'm actually interested in what they have to say I care
about these assignments I care about their work.
So I'm really curious and often the these sorts of reflection activities are some of the most interesting things I get an attorney.
Okay, could we move forward.
I really want to be like old filmstrips Do you remember filmstrips.
We are some of you are probably not as old as I am like, like old audio like old kids books with pages and the fee, and you know, the page, you can do that, I will.
Okay, so here's just an example. So by mid term.
My goal by mid term is that they can do a pretty good, self assessment by mid term not great but pretty good, they're ready to think this way.
So here I'm just giving you what my mid term self evaluation is it's simple it's five questions.
And it's really just asking them about where they are with stuff in the course it's a lot of it's informational for me in move to the next slide.
So you can see it starts from just, you know, have you gotten some Have you got some of the important work done or not.
But then it gets into things like talk about your overall performance. This is where we're moving toward that more general thinking.
And I don't just say you know talk about the overall performance I give them some ideas Have you completed the assignment, have you attended class, but then also try to avoid going, that in a judgmental way but then what's preventing you what are the
obstacles, because this is mid term we can fix things still and that's how I often pitch it to the students as hey we've got half a term left.
Even if things are blowing up in your face, we can we can clean up.
And then finally, it ends with a very open question of Is there anything that I can do to support them as we continue in this class. All right. Next slide.
Then we do, there are some individual self assessments on assignments and stuff as we move forward but the that we're really working toward and essentially the whole class is building toward the final exam which is nothing but self evaluation.
So, and again, this comes from the luxury of pass no pass. I've done a similar thing in A through F courses in the past because again I always wanted to know what students expected or thought they should have for their grade.
But here.
I'm really just asking them, you know, to think back on what they've done and to because the term is long, and they're able to, there's a lot of stuff from particularly the beginning of the term that they have completely forgotten, they've been in the
weeds of their recent projects and things so to really think about the course is a full term. Next slide.
I think it's a big ugly one yes this is the big ugly one.
So you'll have a link to this presentation so even if this is too small to read right now, or you don't want to read through it all, that's totally fine the text is in the slides.
the slide notes. If you access this this presentation.
So this is the final exam, it's kind of an essay. It gives them some things to do because I don't want them just you know roaming around completely free range stream of consciousness.
So there are some things that I want them to do, but it gives them a lot of openness for how they do this in mice, my surprise, the first time I did this, it was really an experiment, I had never done an entire final exam, as just self evaluation before.
I thought it could be a real disaster.
And I was wonderfully surprised, because the students. I thought they would you know sit down there write a few, few words and be done in 10 minutes, occasionally one or two are, but in general this exam usually takes them in an hour to an hour and a
half. And that is, to me, the the sign of something going right here, because for students to take the time to write an exam that clearly actually has no bearing on their grade, and to write this and reflect so deeply on their work and, most importantly,
at this point, not just what they've done, but how they're going to carry it forward because that transfers so important.
Next slide.
So this is tells you that this shows you how irrelevant to their grade it is, it's all about whether they want feedback or not, they just need to do it.
So they can turn this essay in in one of two ways if they want a response, they can put it in a way that I can can get to it. And because we do this online, and then I will leave a comment for them.
If they don't care about a response then all I need is proof that they did it, and they're good to go. And it usually is about half and half, the students who want feedback from the students who don't, but that puts it all in all in their court.
They can decide whether they want feedback, and it works really well for me because it gives me the time to not have to give feedback on every single one.
But to prioritize the students who actually want it.
Or say they can move to the next one.
Is there an excellent.
Yes. Okay, so here's a summing up
Um, lots of opportunity for almost no stakes practice even when I'm playing, even when I'm teaching A through F courses, especially starting out, it's got to have virtually no stakes so that they can that feel the freedom to play around the self assessment
is integrated into the course assignments it's never really an extra it's just how we work, it's what we do.
It's why I had so much trouble sort of pulling out. What is self assessment within this course because almost anything that we do has a component of self assessment to it.
They also aren't just about the sub This isn't about creating a bunch of narcissists. This is about the course, what's going well so that I get feedback to.
It's designed for to the informational for me and for them it's, it's not just self assessment, it's also kind of self regulation, both for the student in the course.
And then small assessments work toward larger. Similarly, specific and directed assessments then work toward the more general and the open such as that final exam.
All right, I think that's what I've got for you.
Thank you so much, much.
That was fantastic. I'm going to suggest we break here just for a minute and see if there any questions from folks in the Zoom Room, I have a couple other slides in case there's nothing to talk about.
But I have a very so we'll have things to say.
Yeah, people may want to unmute and jump in, but there are two things that I've been keeping track of in the chat that you three might want to speak to.
The first was a comment. Early on, I believe from Nathan about actually so you guys were talking about, you know, sometimes people overestimate their, the quality of their work or engagement.
But we also find students doing the opposite pretty often like being too harsh or harsher on themselves we're wondering if you have had that experience and if so, what you think that's about to sort of counteracts the other thing that they might do which
is you know overestimate how well they're doing.
So there's that question. The other one was more about faculty self assessment and how you may or may not use these tools in your own work as a teacher, whether they're related.
So I don't know if anyone wants to speak to either of those things.
Well I think Liz to talk about what she shared in the chat about faculty self assessment, I had a couple of questions about that too is because I, I, it's not a common thing I've never heard of that before has only been to three places.
My master's program we didn't do it a PhD program we did here when I first got here. They were like, it was a little looser around evaluations you designed your own course evaluation, right, great.
And, you know, sometimes a little frustrating because like if you were trying to look at sort of programmatically stuff it was a little idiosyncratic but
it so I only I don't know if this is popular or not or common, But I loved it, I loved it, like it was. And part of what I loved about it I don't think it was clear about this and so we do these paper evaluations and you know I wasn't allowed to touch
them because that would keep them safe for me my undue influence or whatever. So a student would pass them out I would leave the room, and I would take my little sheet with me and I would fill that out well they were filling this out and I loved the tandem
ness of that and that they saw me doing that, like, I'm going to fill up my evaluation now.
And you had to do it out you had to leave, so you weren't like staring at them while they're doing evaluations, which seems fine. And so then I would give my evaluation to the student who was collecting all the evaluations once I'd been given permission
to reenter the room.
And then I didn't like. And then it was like a month and a half later, that I'll get that back and that time, like, rather than waiting, like so.
The other the opposite practice or the different practices like okay the students through the course evaluations, you're just trying to get your finals week, and like I stopped thinking about the.
And then a month and a half later, I get these course evaluations and I'm like that.
I miss, I should just do it like there's nothing stopping me from doing it like I miss having that snapshot of what I was thinking. On the last day of the semester.
Right, which is different, sometimes and what I'm thinking or feeling a month and a half later after I've done grades after I've whatever so yeah really liked it I my memory is that all faculty did it, and it was not.
It was not a piece of like it like a formal evaluation, it was it was an expectation, it was a cultural thing.
And it was super helpful.
That's really interesting. It makes me think about like what it would be like if, when you got to those.
If you're doing self evaluation in a class with sort of formal stopping points when you do it if you like turn over to the class and said okay now you come up with a set of questions to me, to evaluate my work in this class, and then you fill that out
and they could read and comment on your evaluation.
I mean, talk about democratizing,
but super cool, not to do something else you're gonna say, No, I was just going to say in terms of the students who are highly negative toward themselves I would say that is me.
Yes. As Martha was talking about employment self evaluations I, I'm in the midst of doing pre tenure review right now.
And so I always have to overcome my innate tendency for self flagellation that and shock it anything ever going even marginally well, so I was that person in the few times as a student when I had to do self evaluations.
I was always you know one I would sort of meta approach it and say I don't know how I would, how I would judge myself again so students not having that information etc etc.
But for the most part I would then really pitch it low because of innate personal brain things I suppose, but I have not seen a lot of that in my own students typically because of how we start which isn't really assessment stuff it's informational allows
me to give them feedback and then because we're taking small steps and I'm giving feedback along the way.
The feedback is typically to try to keep them thinking about the things that and questions that matter and giving them a context. So I think when it's contextual when it's not just, you know, how do you compare to other students.
You can sometimes work against some of those, those innate tendencies but inevitably there are students who definitely way underrate themselves and so the joy of feedback that and saying, you know, be nice to yourself.
Yeah, definitely. I would say that in my experience with self evaluation I have a lot. I either have students who underrate themselves, or I have students who just don't say anything terribly substantive in their evaluation I very rarely have students
who like try to trick me.
Like it's hard, you can't do that you know like because I've seen what you've done. And I will say that like, there's nothing more joyful to me, then reading self evaluations from students who've been too hard on themselves and being able to say, no,
you know, you're being too hard on yourself right like it just it feels like such a gift to be able to say no, I'm an, I'm an observer of your work and I can tell you that you've been doing great things and this is what I really enjoyed, because I just
don't think they had that experience necessarily in my way.
It looks like there's a question from Lisa. Yeah, that she says can you speak to self evaluations that are as Matt was talking about comparative, I worked harder than other people, or the other really common one just based on effort, right I worked so
hard. So Liz, what do you think about that. I think that I've been although I find it kind of pissy mouthful than really leaning on the word assessment rather than evaluation and and that's partly in line with, like the last one of the larger projects
of the writing classes I teach which has to do with critique both of your own work and someone else's work which is I think students need lots of help and writers need lots of help.
Practicing description like have many students who are ready to be like, this is a great piece, even students who are ready to be like this is a great piece and, and because of this one, because I really like you know this really reminds me of whatever.
And I spend so much time worthy time Central Time pushing back and be like, No, no, my students make fun of me for it actually.
I don't know if Hannah Dutch remembers this at all but like I would, in workshopping sort of be like, Look, don't say I like say I notice, like, say, I notice.
We cannot talk we literally cannot have a conversation about this like, like, dislike good, bad, and like, you know, and so my students, you know sometimes getting tired and in a loving way of making fun of me would be like, I noticed that I really like
this.
this, um you know it's fine it's all part of the classroom culture but I guess what I want to say in terms of the evaluation is like, I don't want students comparing themselves to each other like it to me it's the assessment is like appreciative.
It's descriptive, which is not to say there's no evaluation because you know, damn it there's a great at the end of this, but I definitely don't want them, comparing themselves to other students and effort is slippery effort is good I mean I welcome that
like that I'm a little more interested in hearing about, but I mostly I want to hear them. describe what they did.
And what that looks like and what it felt like and how it helped them or didn't help them learn what.
Um, so I guess I just wanted to respond by saying like, maybe it matters maybe it doesn't the difference between the word assessment and the word evaluation.
Abigail question or comment.
Yeah, so I got a little bit of both. I was, thank you so much for everyone who spoke by the way it's been really helpful I'm upgrading as I said in my intro for the first time this semester.
But I have been, I come from a public a public historian and public history has self reflection is a critical part of our practice, and we teach it like there's whole books about it and we talked about it all the time.
And so I've done a lot of that particularly my public history classes and I usually frame it around. I give students kind of a definitional question, where they have to write an essay basically about like what is public history and they have to tell me
and they have to cite a certain number of things that we've read so it's it's the goal here of making it not, it's not meant to be like about your feelings right that like I like this I don't like this aspect of it, but it's meant to be about like how
would you explain how would you define this. How has your understanding changed over the course of the semester how the things that we've read, you know, reading all the things we've looked at how does that change what you think this is what you thought
it was at the beginning and what you think it is now. And that focus kind of on growth and shift and and so it's been really helpful to.
I think particularly what what Matthew was saying about how like framing out these questions and what I've been what's been really helpful for me is sort of getting a sense of how to do that with things that aren't a public history class and how to do
that with students taking research methods or students who were in senior seminar where I want them to evaluate their own growth.
But they don't have like a blanket question they can ask and so I just want to say I thought I thought that was really helpful and constructive and I didn't know it's like that version of self assessment might be helpful to think about for other folks
see a raised hand from Jennifer, you want to go next. Yes, hello. Thank you, Robin and thank you to Matt and Liz and Martha for your presentations.
My question is so like Abigail I'm also doing on grading for the first time this semester and I just kind of jumped into the deep end of the pool with it and just decided I was going to go for it.
And so it's in research methods in the criminal justice.
Major, and one of the things that I've asked the students to do is a weekly Journal of, you know, what sort of problems they encounter during the week in finding articles to write about.
They have to find articles related to a particular research topic which they can choose, but just any difficulties they encountered with doing their research that week what went well, kind of also to just document what they actually did that week for
the class. And so that's kind of a form of self assessment, but my question really is, are Do any of you have some suggestions for,
like, just starting points because I think students are going to need some direction for their weekly journals I've tried to give them a list, I gave them a list of about 10 questions that they could think about and respond to in their journal but in
terms of trying to increase their capability over time and doing their self assessment.
Are there some good kind of basic questions that could be a good starting points for students.
I mean I think they're there are there are lots of really good basic questions and some of the maybe ones that you've already landed upon with, with the list that you said that you've, you've identified the thing that comes to mind as I listened to you
talk that's such a great opportunity is because you're asking them to do this weekly, you really, I wouldn't actually obsess at all about how good they are in week one, you are because they're probably not going to be great.
Yeah, they're just, they're just getting their legs under them in terms of the assignment in terms of the course and in terms of understanding what it is you're looking for what you have such a great opportunity for though is to establish sort of a feedback
loop in a conversation with them on a weekly basis, it would be really interesting as like some people have talked about and other practices of maybe having them at some point have to go back and look at some of their an early entry and reflect upon how
they feel about the research process now compared to how they felt about it in week one or week two, but I think anything that you can do to kind of respond to these early weeks to guide them to where you're hoping they can get to is really what's going
to benefit them long term and if you think about as a process and the journey that they're on again I think you've had a really nice opportunity because of a weekly nature of that list, did you have something else to work on.
Yeah, I just, um, I want to very quickly. So we finish on time, say that maybe later in the journals, you could have like you said you want to ask them like what struggles or what problems they were having.
Maybe a little later on, it'll be time to ask.
So what did you figure out this week that you think might help other people in this class like what quick work around what cool source what like awesome database, and how might.
Those workplaces, not just be about sort of addressing like struggles are failures, but also like victories and like being able to help each other through those.