By Samah Sabra
As I close the door to the bathroom stall and hang up my jacket, I am struck by the words someone has scrawled across the wall. I and other users of this stall are reminded, or perhaps admonished since it is written in all-caps, to STOP FEARING FAILURE. Perhaps the person who wrote these words used capital letters to ensure nobody would miss their message. Perhaps the writer is wise enough to realize that these words often need to be driven home with a sense of urgency and that many of us need to be reminded and encouraged to overcome such fears time and again. As an instructor, I often have to remind myself that when students don’t take risks in class discussions or writing assignments, it may be out of a fear of failure; they may stick to the same “tried and true” arguments or methods of writing because they are worried about attempting something new and being ridiculed for it. Perhaps some of these students have been ridiculed in the past when they attempted to be creative in their approaches to academic work.
I also remember, as a student, being in classrooms where my professors took risks and asked us to do the same. It was definitely scary, but also exhilarating and memorable. I did my undergraduate degree in a program where I could almost guarantee, before seeing the course outline on the first day of class, that my grade would be calculated according to the same formula: 10% participation, 45% term paper, 45% essay-style final exam. In a Women and Religion class I took as an undergraduate student, the professor (a contract instructor at the time) veered from this formula – a formula with which I had grown comfortable over several semesters.
It is only as an instructor that I understand the risk she took in framing the entire class, including content, in a way that was different from what others in the department tended to do. We did not read primary religious texts and secondary analyses of these texts. Instead, she asked us to read four novels over the course of the term that were written by women from within specific religious traditions about some of the ways in which gendered expectations shaped their life experiences. Two of those books (Tamarind Mem and The River Midnight) have made their rounds among my friends and I would consider them among my favourite novels. Our midterm test in this class was no less risky for her as an instructor: she asked us to imagine and write a conversation between characters from these novels about a topic we chose out of a list. Discussing this mid-term after class with other students, we were all shocked by this request and, to be totally honest, worried that we had failed miserably at the task we were asked to undertake. Yet, we did ok.
Our professor had taken a risk in the way she constructed this class and she had asked us to do the same, but she also trusted us to succeed. Some of the students in the class wrote the conversation as an essay, others set it up as a creative story, still others wrote it as a straightforward dialogue. All of these approaches were equally accepted. The point was not to write our answer in a specific way, but to illustrate that we understood the complexity of the issues, could apply what we had learned, and could offer explanations for what we wrote. Once I got over the initial fear, I found this exercise both fun and challenging. I had to articulate what I learned in a format that seemed new to me – although I do engage in conversations every day of my life – and this allowed me to realize two things about myself: (1) I had learned more than I realized in reading and discussing these novels and (2) my years as a university student had not, as I was convinced, erased every last shred of my creativity. Indeed, I was so inspired by it that I adapted a version of it as an instructor two years ago – and received very positive feedback from students about the experience.
This summer, as I begin to redesign a First Year Seminar I have taught three times before, I find that I too easily slip back into the same methods of assessment I have used time and again. There are assignments that I assumed I would use every time I teach a first year seminar as a way of helping students develop specific skills that will help them in their years at Carleton. Yet I wonder why I am attached to the same assignment format to assess their having learned these skills. The point of the assignments we design is not always in the format, but rather in the skills we aim to assess. Is there a way, I wonder, of redesigning the citation assignment I use in first year seminars whereby I could still measure students’ learning how to quote, paraphrase, and cite a source? Perhaps I could ask students to explain the university’s policy on academic integrity in their own words and use examples from their reading to illustrate that they understand the policy? Would this still measure the same learning outcome? Would it add something new? Is this change in the design of this course worth pursuing?
As I try to answer these questions, I realize that in my role as an instructor I often make such decisions in isolation from others who are making very similar ones about their courses. I also realize that I am lucky enough to work in an office where if I need to discuss an element of course design, there is someone a door or two down from me who is willing and excited to listen and give me feedback. Perhaps you have taken part in one of the EDC’s Certificate Programs or Assessment Workshops. If so, you likely found it useful to have access to such discussions as you design a new assessment tool, to be asked questions you may not have otherwise considered, to feel less isolated in your teaching. For me, such support makes it easier to take the risk of trying something new without fear of failure. If you feel the same way, you might want to join the EDC’s Faculty Learning Community on Grounding Ourselves and Our Classrooms in the Assessment Process. The goal of this Learning Community is to give instructors the necessary background knowledge to design, or redesign, and implement an assessment tool in one of their classes while offering support and feedback as they put this knowledge into practice. I look forward to meeting those of you who sign up for the fall semester in October. If the fall term doesn’t work for you, we will be running this Learning Community again in the winter term.