by Christina Crespo

Will this be on the exam? Is there partial credit? What do I need to do to get an ‘A’? I’ve often heard these questions from students (and I certainly remember thinking them as a student myself). The stress placed on grades can be intense in undergraduate courses, an understandable phenomenon given concerns such as maintaining scholarships or applying for graduate programs. However, what happens to learning when the grade is the ultimate goal? Or, a potentially more productive question to ask might be—how can we encourage students to think beyond the grade and to more deeply engage in the writing process? In working to find answers to that question, I threw out my red pens and broke out the WIP principles this semester.

How can we encourage students to think beyond the grade and to more deeply engage in the writing process?

Change was uncomfortable for both students and me. I spent a good deal of time with my students building a classroom community in which failure was not only tolerated but encouraged. I may have lost some of you at this point. Encouraging students to fail, that sounds like academic blasphemy! However, by failure, I don’t mean receiving an ‘F,’ rather I mean treating learning as a process in which mistakes are actually opportunities and in which students can take risks in their writing as they work to find their style and voice. It also meant trying out a range of different assignments and pedagogical approaches. Some were successful, some were absolute failures, all of which were opportunities for learning. I was transparent with my students about this, though, and found that some of my own missteps became powerful teachable moments for students.

In a culture where the grade is everything, it was difficult to secure student buy-in at first. However, I did find answering the simple question of “why” went a long way. By explaining my rationale behind the decisions that I made in the classroom, including the assignments and other activities I selected, students were not only more willing to try new things, they also began delving into the realm of metacognition (though they likely wouldn’t have named it as such).

In order to support this type of thinking, I also had students frequently engage in reflective writing activities, both alongside and interwoven with other forms of writing. I think one of the most successful applications was with their final project, creating an individual zine (a self-published magazine) in which students engaged course materials and concepts through a topic or theme that they were personally invested in. The format of a zine also allowed students to select the genre(s) of writing that they thought best suited their project and to create imagery alongside text to communicate their ideas. By breaking the assignment into multiple steps over the course of the semester it seemed to reinforce the idea that writing is a process, not an endpoint.

This semester was not without its growing pains, however. Given that as instructors we are still required by the university to assign students a final grade, the constraints as a TA became quite tangible at points. The greatest constraint I encountered was time. Changing my mentality from grading to providing feedback required a greater time investment in reading student work, and the emphasis on writing as a process also meant that there was more work to provide feedback on. I’m excited to work on this next semester in my classes by changing my approach to grading to better match my philosophy toward grades. I’m planning on students completing self-evaluations and peer evaluations more often. I’m also curious to experiment with contract grading and its impact on the learning process.

Throughout this semester, it became clear that shifting the focus away from the grade can also mean shifting the classroom dynamic so that students are not only consumers of knowledge, but producers of it as well. Treating students as writers, as knowledge creators, can encourage students to become agents in their own learning process.