Collateral learning

An interesting question is posed over at Do You SoTL – how do you structure courses to encourage atudents to take responsibilty for their own learning? I think there is no quick fix, and given the pavlovian response of many students to grades, I think one of our tutorial programmes this term (in HI2001) goes some way towards answering the question.

Our plan is based on discussions between the four tutors and myself, and is mainly aimed to improve the quality of student essay writing. I have been trying to move away from the practice where students simply go away with a title, turn in a paper and get a grade and some feedback after the event, towards getting them to write and get feedback on drafts. After exchanging emails over the break ,we decided to break down the process for this term’s essay into a series of steps, all of which carry a portion of the grade.

What we laid out is the following process in which students, over the 12 weeks, bring into tutorials the following:

• Bibliography
• A Mind Map of one article from their bibliography
• 3 one page Essay plans
• Draft (at least 1,000 words, may print double sided, 2 copies to
• bring in plus email to tutor) These draft copies will be handed round and discussed in a ‘critical friend’ manner in the following tutorial
• The Final Essay, which will be submitted at the end of term with all the prior stages attached.

Of the 10% of the coursemark going for they essay, they get 1% for completing each of the 5 steps in the process, and the other 5% for final essay mark.  It isn’t a lot, but we are tied to an existing modular description.

The aim is get them thinking about the process of getting an essay together, and getting them to structure that over the course of the term rather than knocking it off the night before it is due in.  By making them discuss the products of each step in the tutorials, we are working to foster a greater sense not only of how the humanities have become more and more collaborative, but also how debate has traditionally been part of history, and how in the real world after college they will need to be able to form communities in which people can helpfully critique each others contributions to a team effort.

So far, that seems to be going well – very well in some groups. At no point in planning this did we think it might help to encourage students to take more responsibilty for their own learning, and yet,  when I look at the question posed on Do You SoTL, I come to feel that part of meeting that challenge is creating the good learning habits over time, so that they become the norm. It now seems to be that properly planning and organising your own work is a key part of ‘taking responsbility’. Indeed, when in assessing people we describe them as a ‘self-starter’ one of the things we associate with that is an ability to break work down into stages, create a plan and get on with it. I think it is poosible that one reason so much student work is done late, and poorly, is because while we tell them to prepare, plan and manage their work, we rarely create a formal framework in which they can develope these good habits.

It may be that by accident, while looking at the issue of improving writing and collaboration, we may have defined as a formal course structure something which we used to leave to chance. If  one of your learning goals is to get students to manage their own writing better, then you need to have an authentic assessment that measures that process. The good students don’t really need this – they already plan their work and take responsibilty for it, but the majority don’t, and many of them often respond only to grades.  We can either be  victims of this, or we can use it to structure student work so they are rewarded for doing the things we have always felt they should. If we really mean they should plan essays, then we should give them marks for it, and this essentially is what we are now doing.

I think many of the points in the post on Do You SoTL address students’ inabilty to manage parts of the process, and I guess my answer to that is that you need to make those grade-bearing parts of the process of doing assignments. Now, of course, this means that assignments broken down like this will take more staff time to grade, and therefore the trade-off must be fewer assignments (or more staff, but we won’t get that for a while).  But what this also shows is that when you redesign an assessment to achieve one aim, better writing and more collaboration, you may also achieve, by accident, other collateral learning outcomes.