education – Stumbling with Confidence

Lessons from the Garden

There’s a corner of our garden where I keep a number of pots and containers that have nothing in them except some earth or compost and the occasional weed. It’s a sort of limbo for plants that once bloomed but have now have departed this horticultural coil. Some have been there since we moved into our new home a couple of years ago. Others have been emptied, cleaned, re-potted and moved to another area of the garden.

When out in the garden during the spring, I’d wander over to this somewhat desolate corner to see if, by chance, there might be a sign of some growth that is not a weed (though I always bear in mind that weeds are simply plants in their natural environment!). I’d even water the barren earth, just in case. The particular pot I am thinking about was a relatively small terracotta pot, full of earth, that had shown no sign of life for nearly two years. The only reason I hadn’t repotted it is that it is a bit too small for the plants I have bought or acquired.

I had got to the point where I thought I’d just empty, clean it and repot it and plant something small that would fit. But when I went to pick it up, lo and behold, I saw a tiny shoot that had broken through the surface. I had no idea what it might be, so I left it. As is the way with plants, it grew slowly and eventually began to form leaves. It was then that I was able to identify that it was a begonia….so I left it to carry on.

Now, several weeks later here it is, gracing our garden with beautiful yellow flowers.

And the lesson?

You know that student who you have sort of ‘written off’. They appear to be in educational limbo, they don’t seem engaged, they don’t contribute much, their work is just passable…or not even that. Well, don’t write them off too soon. They may well be, like my begonia, a very late developer with a lot going on under the surface, needing only the right conditions – and a bit a ‘watering’/nurturing to break through to the surface and bloom.

Separate grading from learning!

One of our engrooved or deep-seated beliefs in higher education is that grades are important because they motivate students to do the work. Take them away, and students won’t do anything.

But oddly, for a discipline that says it relies on evidence-based research, there is little to no evidence or research that demonstrates that grades make students learn more or work harder. In fact, there is ample evidence that grades actually do the opposite: They hurt academic motivation and inhibit learning.

We’ve known for a long time, well before Covid, that the way we do assessment is damaged and creaking at the seams. Perhaps Covid and now GenerativeAI can finally provide the impetus we need to let go of outdated, obsolete practices that are well past their sell-by date, and embrace those that are fit for purpose to meet the challenges we and our students face.

What we do know is that students – and we are all students, lifelong learners – work harder, learn more and are much more likely to thrive and achieve when we are intrinsically motivated. When we have some real autonomy, real choices. When we feel we are in control of our learning. It means being given meaningful choices and engaging, authentic tasks to choose from. It means feeling empowered to choose, as students, where to invest our time and energy. It also means feeling encouraged and supported even if that means, receiving feedback that is uncomfortable but honest and that comes from a good place.

Autonomy also means that our own autonomy, our own academic identity has to shift, from the keepers and transmitters of knowledge to facilitators of learning.

Also, as students we like to feel we’re continually growing, improving, developing new skills and understandings. Our own students are no different, so the question for us as teachers and assessors is how best can we focus both our and our students skills, time and energy on helping them build the skills they are motivated to learn?

A sense of relatedness, a sense of genuine belonging is also critical. Somehow we need to find ways of enabling our students to understand they are not just a number, not just cogs in a vast machine but valued as individuals and as part of a larger community… that they matter more than their grades. And they will respond and realise they don’t need the carrot and stick of grades to care about their learning.

So…let’s leave grading to recede in the rear-view mirror, and focus on the road ahead and where that might lead.

F-AI-L: forget about assessment?

You can’t move these days in Higher Education without reading about how AI has completely compromised most, if not all, the approaches to assessment that require a student to produce an artefact e.g. an essay, a poster, a portfolio, etc. It would appear that the only way to ensure ‘assessment security’ is to, first, thoroughly body scan and search each student for any devices – external or internal – that might be used to ‘assist’ them to pass the exam and then lock them in a Shielded Room or Faraday Cage under very strict and tight surveillance.

Not exactly an enlightened or constructive educational experience.

Having focused on assessment for much of my career, I’m beginning to wonder whether we should give up on assessment altogether. But there is one secure form assessment, one that we have practiced for centuries, that goes back to assessment’s Latin root ‘assidere (to sit together or beside)’: the viva. Simply sitting down with a student and asking them or observing them rigorously and systematically in regard to what they know, what they understand, what they have learned, and what they can do.

There are, essentially, two questions that a university has to answer in regard to their graduates: 1) does the student possess sufficient knowledge, understanding and skills in their particular discipline in order to be awarded a qualification? and 2) does the student possess sufficient knowledge, understanding and skills to stand a good chance of successfully navigating their way through an uncertain and complex world?

Given that many graduates (an old figure in the UK was c. 48% but I suspect it hasn’t changed much) end up working in a field unrelated to their course of study or discipline, the efficacy of the first question is…..questionable (except in the case of professional qualifications e.g. doctors, engineers etc.). As to the second question there’s an assumption they are ready to go out into the ‘real’ world, but that remains an assumption in many cases.

So…..what if we scrap assessment as we know it?

One thing we do know about assessment is that the inter-rater reliability of a group of experts observing, discussing and assessing a student’s work tends to be higher than when those same experts assess against a set of criteria or rubrics.

I’m suggesting we scrap the inordinate amount of time and energy spent on marking and grading assessments that are now insecure and unsafe and replace them with regular ‘assessment tutorials or mentoring’ with at least two members of staff.

In order to do that properly those tutorials must be built into the teaching/contact hours. Teaching is no longer about ‘delivery’ i. e. a teacher-centred and content-oriented paradigm, and shifts to a student-centred, learning-oriented paradigm in which assessment is about sitting down with a student and discovering the answers to those two questions.

^{About me:}

^{I am an independent higher education consultant and co-founder of the educational consultancy Ciel Associates specialising in organisational and transformational change and enhancing learning, teaching and assessment. I have over thirty years experience in a wide range of higher education providers both as a consultant and, before that, in a number of management, leadership and strategic roles. My work is informed by my belief in the transformational power of education and a commitment to enabling institutions to create meaningful and sustainable change. Contact me at Ciel Associates} .

Adventures in HE: time for a Skunk Works?

A few years ago, a UK university established a new initiative with funding from central government. The initiative was one of about 70 such initiatives across the HE sector which were established in the hope that, within the five years of the funding, the universities involved would have taken risks and pioneered innovative learning approaches that could be adopted and/or adapted across the sector.

The university in question established a project with the aim of developing more practice-based arts provision within the university, establishing more links between the university and external artists and arts organisations, and to increase the links between the subject areas within the creative and performing arts programmes within the university. The project rapidly established a reputation within the university for taking risks and for having a different way of looking at things. It was also known for having a different way of talking about things and even a different way of naming things, for example, modules. A critical factor in the project’s ability to forge an innovative path was that its director had been brought in from outside academia, and was relatively and refreshingly unencumbered by things like history and precedence and the engrooved customs, practices and discourses of the institution.

The director had created a Skunk Works.

Skunk Works are, typically, small and loosely structured groups of people who research and develop a project for the sake of innovation. There are several important and essential features of a Skunk Works: one is that it operates independently of the normal research and development operations of the company or organisation; another is that, in order to achieve unusual results, the people working on the project work in ways that are outside the normal ways of working.

One of the major projects initiated by the director was the development of a pilot MA in interdisciplinary arts practice. The aims of the course were to explore and extend the boundaries of various arts disciplines, and all aspects of the course were designed to be innovative and radical – the curriculum, the delivery, and the assessment. As with all courses, the proposal had to go through the university’s validation process and there were intense discussions about what might or might not be acceptable, especially given the relatively traditional academic culture of the university. The director stuck to her guns and, much to the surprise and, indeed, chagrin of some colleagues, the university validated a course that included modules called ‘Adventures in Interdisciplinarity’ and ‘Further Adventures in Interdisciplinarity’ in which the course participants– a mixture of recent graduates and mature, part-time students– gathered on a Friday and worked intensively through the weekend on various experimental projects and exploratory assignments with artists, directors, film-makers and composers.

These ‘Adventures’ were designed to provide unusual, typically hazardous (creatively, intellectually, etc.), experiences or activities. Calling the modules ‘Adventures’ was a very deliberate move and was highly resonant of Ronald Barnett’s call to educators to ‘hang onto a language of delight, wonder, care, excitement, fun, engagement and love– the language in which a student is caught and even entranced’ (Barnett, 2008).

At a time of particularly rapid change with a host of serious challenges facing higher education, perhaps establishing a Skunk Works and investing in the space to breathe, to invent, to imagine, to innovate, and to create something that is different, exciting, and genuinely transformational might be a very good and beneficial move.

^{Barnett, R. 2008. A will to learn. London: Open University Press.}

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Assessment: paradigm shift required?

There has been a slew of recent journal articles, blogs, podcasts etc. on the challenges posed by Generative AI in higher education and, particularly, the threat GenAI poses to assessment integrity and security along with possible approaches to mitigate the threat.

The picture that emerges is one in which none (perhaps bar one: the viva?) of the traditional forms of assessment are secure – were they ever? It seems clear that not only does a new assessment paradigm need to emerge but also a new paradigm for learning and teaching. As Gramsci wrote in the 1930s: ‘The old is dying and the new is yet to born: in the interregnum, all kinds of morbid symptoms appear’.

The challenge we face in regard to somehow ensuring or at least maximising assessment integrity and security in the face of GenAI is that, essentially, assessment – in the age of mass higher education – has become an economic and logistical issue, not a pedagogical one. An industrialised process of mass production that relies on the production-line workers (lecturers) doing much of the quality control i.e. assessment and marking, in their spare time in order to meet the production deadlines

What has largely disappeared from the way we assess students is the idea of assessment, inherent in its Latin root ’assidere’ (to sit together or sit beside), as a dialogic process. What hasn’t disappeared, though somewhat diminished, is the dominance of the teacher-centred, curriculum-focused paradigm rather than a student-centred, learning-focused paradigm.

In a recent and worth reading GenAI and assessment-focused journal article by Guy J. Curtis*, he wrote: ‘Students can reasonably expect to have their learning assessed on what they have been taught.’ He’s right but, just as important, students should also expect to be assessed on, or at least have an intensive discussion about, what they have learned. This may well (and should) extend beyond disciplinary specificity as they head towards an increasingly complex and uncertain future in which, whether we like it or not, AI will play an integral role.

So, while we struggle to find ways to make assessment secure without resorting to unacceptable and detrimental levels of surveillance, we might usefully attempt to answer the question: how might we best assess students in ways that reveal what they actually know, what they have learned and what they can do? The pedagogical answer may well be by sitting beside them and questioning them rigorously and systemically. But that begs another question: is higher education willing and able to shift to a new assessment paradigm?

* Guy J. Curtis article

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