I picked this up through Twitter – a NY Times article on student expectations and grading.
If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.
The concerns raised in this article rings true with me – when students ask How many pages does it have to be? How many references? – I am not assuming that by providing an answer I am explaining what it should take to earn an A.
I do understand the potential of rubrics and accept some responsibility for identifying standards. However, what ever happened to doing the best job I can in the hopes I might learn something.
Why is this framed as an issue regarding how teachers establish expectations?
There are several issues here:
1) The student is paying for an education. Would you rather spend $5 and get a hamburger or a steak? I guess it depends on whether you consider the steak an A or the mastery of skills and content.
2) Do students really see their performance as the equivalent of that demonstrated by others? Are they unable to see the differences or do they think such differences are inconsequential? Do they understand that it is possible that we are all good at different things and it is helpful to understand our strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps an important aspect of an education is to find realistic answers to these questions.
In our concern for students, there is one category of student i have grown to feel is being ignored. What do we have to offer to the student who knows more, does better, etc.? We belittle their accomplishments by awarding the same grade to everyone. Differentiating levels of quality is a major responsibility of accepting the role of educator and it is so easy to make it easy on yourself by ignoring quality performances.