CETL in the News: Summer Edition
The CETL team was busy this summer, and our semi-regular news roundup has a little something for everyone--grading, hot takes on higher ed, accessible conferences, and time management.
While campus has been (relatively) quieter the last three months, the CETL team has been busy this summer! Our team stayed busy with, among other things, planning for the upcoming academic year, reflecting on last year’s work, and engaging in our own research and writing projects.
Books
The biggest news out of CETL this summer is undoubtedly the contract Emily Pitts Donahoe signed with the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series with the University of Oklahoma Press. Her forthcoming book, Collaborative Grading: A Practical Guide, will equip readers with a step-by-step guide to designing and teaching a collaboratively graded course. Alert readers will no doubt recognize this as the same series publishing Liz’s forthcoming book, The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching and the series for which Joshua Eyler (CETL director) and Derek Bruff (our deeply missed former colleague) serve on the advisory board. We are excited to see Emily sharing her deeply thoughtful and practical advice to other instructors. While you’re waiting to read the book, be sure you’re following her Substack, Unmaking the Grade.
Speaking of books, CETL Director Josh Eyler’s new book, Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It, was highlighted in Johanna Alonso’s Inside Higher Ed article, “Is There Harm in Grading?,” in early August. We’re excited about Josh’s publication date next week (August 27), but some lucky pre-orderers have already received their copy in the mail (including Liz!) We love highlighting this point Josh shared with Alonso: “But what we know from a host of research, at this point, is that grades have never been objective measurements of learning or of achievements. They are at most a reflection of student progress on the individual goals set by one instructor for a particular course; they’re not a universal declaration of knowledge gained in a particular field.”
Podcasts
Josh appeared on two podcasts to talk about his book. Tea For Teaching, hosted by friends of UM CETL John Kane and Rebecca Mushtare, invited Josh to talk about the “research on problems associated with traditional grading systems and possible solutions at different scales and in different educational contexts.” UM instructor of writing and rhetoric Eliot Parker interviewed Josh for the Now, Appalachia podcast, where the two UM colleagues discussed the unexpected career turns that landed Josh—a scholar with a PhD in medieval studies—into roles in centers for teaching and learning and writing books about learning and grading.
Inspired by an episode of the American Birding Podcast, former CETL associate director Derek Bruff invited three guests—Emily, Stacey Johnson, and Lance Eaton—to experiment with a new-to-him “Take It or Leave It” podcast discussion of hot takes in higher education for his podcast, Intentional Teaching. There’s no question that the panel Derek assembled was the right mix of strong opinions, higher education experience, and willingness to be a teensy bit contrarian when needed. It was a fun conversation that’s worth a listen.
Given Emily’s interests in alternative grading models (see above), it’s no surprise that she was invited to join the organizing committee for the 2024 Grading Conference, which took place June 13-15 online. Two of her fellow organizers, Sharona Krinsky and Robert “Boz” Bosley, host the Grading Podcast, on which Emily appeared as a guest in June (for episode 49). Their conversation covered a lot of territory, but Sharona and Boz definitely took advantage of Emily’s thinking about and experience with teaching writing in an era of generative AI. Emily mentions an assignment in this conversation that she called “Love, Hate, Refute.” As she describes: students “had to pick something that they loved, something that they hated, or something that they wanted to refute…And then [they had] to make a research-based case, trying to convince somebody else why they should also love that thing, why they should hate that thing, or why they should agree with somebody’s opinion.”
Alongside colleague and friend Cait Kirby, Liz appeared on Lillian Nave’s podcast, Think UDL, to discuss their work conceptualizing, organizing, and facilitating the late-June Making Change, Taking Space virtual gathering. After being told that planning and holding a fully virtual conference in less than a year’s time was not feasible, the motley group of mostly disabled educational developers adopted the theme of, “What, like it’s hard?” (from Legally Blonde) and set about to try. The result was three days of community-centered, accessible-by-design, radically inclusive, and generative conversations among educational developers and educators from a diverse set of institutions across the United States, Canada, Europe, and beyond!
And more…!
In her August 8 Teaching newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Beckie Supiano included a vignette Liz sent her about how powerfully her relationship to work has shifted since she began tracking her time upon joining the UM CETL team. It’s now a suggestion Liz makes to anyone who asks her about finding work/life balance. Just keeping a running log of your time—a timesheet just for you. Liz doesn’t get more granular than time in/time out/breaks, but if she ends up working more than 40 hours in a given week, she right-sizes her schedule in the subsequent weeks to ensure she’s not letting work become her entire identity. If you’d like to download a template and make your own, access a ready-to-use Google Sheet here (you’ll want to make a copy for yourself).
Josh’s latest piece for the Saturday Evening Post just came out yesterday—“Grade Inflation Is a Myth. Here’s Why.” This paragraph captures Josh’s arguments about the perils of relying on grades alone as evidence of quality (or quantity) of student learning, the quality of their work, or the alleged rigor of our academic programs:
“The idea of grade inflation is tied directly to the perceived quality of academic work, the standards used by instructors to evaluate this work, and the belief that these standards are more lenient now than they were in the past. To prove grade inflation exists, we would first need to see objective benchmarks for learning in a given course in every context where that course is taught and agreement across vast numbers of faculty and educational institutions as to the criteria for evaluating those benchmarks. I probably don’t need to tell you that this is not happening anywhere.”