Three teaching things: week of April 11
This week: re-thinking participation, grading work using screencasting software and a bonus tool for accessible videos.
Issue #42
1. The paper
Reconceptualizing Participation Grading as Skill Building.
Participation marks. OK, I’ll admit it: grading participation was once the place I went to find the wiggle room to adjust a final grade. I know that during my early years in the classroom, I really didn’t assess participation, but saw it more of a transaction around counting the number of times a student spoke. And, with more opportunity to read and reflect, I know that counting posts in an online discussion forum often privileges a certain kind of participation and certain kind of student.
So, if you’re interested in re-thinking participation…this week’s paper helps provide a rationale and framework to do so for undergrad courses. Certainly the approach is disciplinary, but I think the idea that this category of course assessment is thought of “…as opportunities to incentivize and reward skill building” (p. 13) could be applied across a variety of disciplines.
How? “Instead of assuming that students have sufficient skills to participate equally, instructors can incentivize and assess how well students improve their participation skill set over the course of the semester” (p. 13).
Gillis goes on to articulate the five dimensions (p. 14) they believed were important, and the system used to collect the self-assessments. In describing the impact of the approach, Gills reports that: “While not every student met every single goal they set, these figures clearly indicate that this participation system is effective in helping all students improve their participation, regardless of background” (p. 16).
Gillis, A. (2018). Reconceptualizing Participation Grading as Skill Building. Teaching Sociology, 47(1), 10–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055x18798006
2. The resource
An approach for participation and professionalism self-assessment.
My colleague at Western University (London, Canada), Dr. Beth Hundey, has also given student participation some thought and has summarized her approach to assessing participation in an upper-year undergraduate course. I appreciate that she has including links to the online artifacts (forms, surveys) created to facilitate whole process.
The approach appears to broadly echo Gillis’ philosophy to self-assessment and skill building: so, synergy!
3. The tool
Screencasting tools for grading*
We’re in grading season, so I want to point to a class (pun intended) of tools and offer that they can be used as a way to improve the quality of feedback you provide to students, and (once you’re over the speed bump of time it takes to orient yourself to the tool) can speed up your assessment work: Screencasting.
I would encourage you to see if your institution provides instructor access to a tool that falls into this category; at my institution we are provide access to licenses to Screencast-o-matic during remote teaching. Other tools include Camtasia ($$$) and OBS Studio (Free).
Regardless of what tool you choose, the approach is (hopefully) straightforward: open the assignment to grade, and rather than typing your feedback, hit record and then talk and annotate your way through the work. Save the video, and upload to your LMS of choice.
* you will want to give consideration to captioning any video you create for accessibility; everyone should know that Chrome now allows for live-captioning in-browser:
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Bonus tweet of the week
Last Friday marked the end of instruction for our Winter semester; I hope you will take time once all your grades are submitted to reflect on the year that passed. With many Universities planning a return to in-person teaching this Fall (and do I think I hear COVID variants cackling at the idea of disrupting this plan), there likely are things you never want to do again in the classroom. I, however, do hope there are ideas and approaches that you want to continue. What are they, and what do they look like translated to the in-person classroom?
Thanks for reading!