 Let's just try this. All right, welcome everybody. So we are on the final leg of our nine-chapter journey here. So this is the first chapter of the final section and Jeff's gonna lead us through the synopsis of this one. This one is actually pretty exciting for me. There's some stuff I'm really looking forward to chat about with people because not 100% sure I'm convinced by it but it definitely got me thinking, it went, huh, maybe I should do that. So Jeff, why don't you start us off with a quick summary here and then we'll jump into the meat of the discussion. Sure, so I've tried to distill down the underlying ideas and so in the chapter, they identify this overall concept of agency as central and that students are gonna tend to learn more if they feel ownership of their own learning and are given the opportunity to pursue their own interests which just makes sense, right? People will pay more attention to things that interest them and so if you can harness that by allowing them to do so. And this is sort of my own connection that I make here but if you're giving them additionally choices about what to do, what to read, what to think about, what to discuss, then you're actually giving them judgment level tasks on Bloom's taxonomy. And so here's another strategy for just pushing students up high on Bloom's taxonomy which is often a good goal in terms of challenging them intellectually. Now, the flip side is that too much agency would be throwing them straight into the deep end of the pool. They still need support and so now there is careful thought needed about how much autonomy they're ready for and that's going to differ from course to course and group of students to group of students. So I think that's where the real difficulty comes in here. So quickly some recommendations in the chapter is in discussions, give multiple topics and let them choose what they're going to talk about. That does mean there's a little more work front loaded in terms of coming up with those topics. Although I'll skip to the end and say if you're co-designing your syllabus maybe you can farm some of that work out to the students and they're going to benefit from it. I love things that allow us to be lazy and simultaneously teach better. That's like the ideal, right? And so sort of connected with that is this idea of self enrollment groups. That's another, if you're getting them to discuss in groups, let them self enroll in them to make their choices and LMSs can often support that or do this at the level of some sort of a course project that's collaborative, which is like the hardest thing you can design for a course in my opinion. And then there's this really interesting discussion of specifications grading and Jason I don't know whether that's the part you are maybe dubious about. And I'll say, I look at it and I say, oh boy, does that ever feel like it could go off the rails? But, you know, it- Or go really right. Yeah, I, looking forward to chatting with you. It looks fascinating. Why don't you take us quickly through what does that mean? What is specifications grading? What is it getting? So the idea is set your, set what the specifications are for what they're submitting and they either get a hundred percent for meeting all the specifications or zero for naught. And the analogy she draws is in the software industry if the client gives you a set of requirements for a piece of software and you code up the software and give it to them. And they say, oh, well that, that meets three quarters of the requirement. Well, that means they reject it, right? That it doesn't meet their needs. And so part of the idea here is to get students used to the idea that, yeah, there are things you have to get done. And if you don't get them done, then that's not a success. And so it can get them to invest more effort once they see that they actually, that they can't half-ass their way through things. And simultaneously it can speed up the marking because you can just very quickly look and say, well, did it meet all the specifications or not instead of having to hem and hove or whether this is a C or a B? Fair enough. The, yeah, I think that's a good summary. I think maybe the only thing I'd add is just, just, and this wasn't necessarily even something she made super explicit, but it was kind of a theme that went through is looking at autonomy for sort of two different aspects of something that's been a theme in this book in general. As one is the practical aspect of how do you make them learn the material, whatever. But then the other is that broader kind of coaching things of going beyond communicating technical information and instead crafting citizens helping them learn. So it seemed to be, the goals seem to be a mixture and these are not mutually exclusive, obviously, of getting them to be engaged with the material and therefore do the material, but also teaching them life lessons about responsibility. And those are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but also depending on the design of the application, right? Could potentially undermine each other, I think. The hard lesson might actually undermine your ultimate goal of getting them to deal with the materials. That's a little bit of color commentary. So to me, that's sort of at the heart of agency, right? Students are going to take, or if you're giving students ownership of their learning, they have to take it, right? And if they don't actually step up and take ownership, then they're not gonna do well at all. And so, yeah, there is a responsibility piece here. Now, I'll say, I in general, a big believer overall in what often gets called student-centered learning, but the basic idea being that students are responsible for doing their own learning. And so, you're holding them responsible for going out and doing these things to do the learning and to demonstrate to you that they've done it. Now, that's different from autonomy over what they're learning, right? And a lot of this chapter is more about giving autonomy over what they are learning, presumably within a framework where you're setting some set of parameters. Yeah, fair enough. Jeff, would you mind stopping sharing your screen? Oh, sure. I think that'll just big a fire heads then, because I think teams defaults to the screen. Maybe I'm wrong. I always get started on something before I move on to maybe the more controversial stuff. The second bullet point you had in the list there on the second page of, it was something along, oh my gosh, what was it? What was the second? Self-enrollment groups? Yeah, the self-enrollment. I was thinking about, we did this in the, oh my gosh, what's the teaching program? University teaching program this summer. There was one of the sessions where we had to read a series of papers on inclusivity and then we got to self-enroll into groups after the fact. And I actually found that, I really enjoyed the conversation. We also used speaking circles within there, which I thought were gonna crash and burn, but actually worked really well in our group. I found that really interesting, but one of the things I think that to make that work, that an adaptation you'd have to make is a philosophical one of what the goal, the ultimate outcome of the course is going to be. And Deanne and I made this as a, way of staying afloat this semester, or last semester, we went, look, the reality is we're gonna be making so much content, we can't kill ourselves. The students are so stressed, they're gonna be underperforming relative to normal years. So let's just, instead of making sure that all students learn everything or as much as possible, let's just go with the goal of inspiring some interest in the discipline and ensuring that every student learns something and allow the students essentially to decide what they wanna learn, right? So the end goal, instead of that, they have 80% mastery of the whole thing, try to ensure that they know something about something at the end of the course. Cause realistically, they're gonna forget 90% of it anyways, and the stuff that they actually are interested in, they're more likely to take with them for the rest of their life. So let's just work at cultivating interest and mastery of some particular subsection of the course. And if that's your philosophy, this works great, right? But even if you do the kind of things you were suggesting where you're going to have them, you're gonna have them co-teach their peers on something after the fact, the reality is they're not learning that material. They're gonna learn the group that they were in and they're gonna have, you know, really superficial understanding of this stuff and they're gonna forget it. I think that's my take from you. I think you're absolutely right that when you have students prepare something to present to the other students, and you know, we often sell that as you're going to teach this part. Well, it's the student who got that assigned to them to teach who actually learns it. The rest probably don't unless you're also getting them to do something else with that material, right? And so as long as you're conscious of that and as long as that's okay, then great. Yeah, I mean, now, and I said in my little quick presentation, right, that she talks about collaborative projects. And I think that is the hardest thing that can possibly be done in a course. And I've done some courses where I had collaborative projects. And I mean, we all know what the immediate problem is with collaborative projects, right? What's the big problem? This is one area where I think actually, and she wasn't super explicit about this, but when we were talking about these, you know, learning contracts and even the specs grading there as well, especially if you go back to one of the previous chapters where the idea that the students create some of their own contractual points, I think that that might actually work. And maybe you're already doing this, might work really well in group projects. If you actually have the students create a really clear set of responsibilities that each single student is gonna do X, Y, and Z and hand that into you. And then at the end, they can go through the checklist. I think that would really help them stay on task potentially, right? Just clearly delineate responsibilities down to a picky level, you know? Rather than just, you're responsible for this corner of the project, you know? But specifically I will do X, Y, and Z. And that's a promise not just to you, but more importantly to your fellow group members, I think. But I think the challenge there is coming up with a project where, yeah, they can divide up the responsibility like that. Part of the point here is so that it's clear if one of them hasn't done their parts, it's clear which one it was, right? And hopefully it doesn't so much effect the ability of the other students to do their part of the project, right? But that's really difficult because in a real, that then doesn't look so collaborative, right? If what they're doing is so independent of each other, where's the collaboration, right? And so striking that balance where there are well delineated responsibilities and yet they can all complete everything even if one of them perhaps shirks their responsibility, you know, that would be the ideal. But that's, I find it hard to even imagine what such a project could look like. Yeah, I suppose there's a difference between, say, a collaboration and a division of labor, you know, an assembly line where everyone has it. Which I guess is how we often do group projects, right? It's a full division and then the pieces come back together and often ill fit, rather than working together. But Patrick, we're speaking too much. I'm giving you the floor to throw whatever you want to do. You take the lead on the next part of the discussion. No, no, this is great. It touches on, you know, some of the bigger issues around approaches, you know, and their great ideas. They would come up really well in a kind of a pass-fail model. Like you said, the idea that this either meets the criteria or it doesn't. But when you hit up against, you know, I have to come up with a grade at the end of this and I've got 12 weeks to do this stuff, that shifts things, right? So the ideas can work. But generally speaking, yeah, like we just finished talking about the group work, to make it really effective, it takes a lot of upfront thought as to how do I lay out for this group, specific tasks, who's gonna do what, who's gonna, and then they can choose that, you know, idea of autonomy. Well, I'm gonna take this role in the group and I'm gonna do this. Yeah, how do you make that work? What kind of a project? It can be done. But once again, you know, sometimes group work is a great way to say, okay, choose your topic, three weeks from now, this group is gonna present and we'll all sit and listen and I'm done here, you know? So it can be either zero instructor effort or it can take a lot of upfront thought and to do it well, I think is really important. On the idea of responsibility, it's a student responsibility, I could ties in and she didn't make it real explicit but it ties into, you know, the feedback, the formative assessment, giving students clear directions on how to improve sharing the rubrics and the criteria with them and then have them go away and say, well, you know, what can you do to improve? And that way they're taking responsibility for their learning, rather than just a bunch of red marks on a paper, they look at the grade and they say, okay, whatever and move on, right? So they are responsible to be able to incorporate the feedback and then come around again for another try. But like you said, it takes a kind of a different approach and a shifting and sometimes our structures kind of bump up against that, right? And it's not an easy fit. But the ideas have legs and I think students really appreciate. Matter of fact, some students have never had this kind of an approach and just, you know, some thrive and say, this is awesome and other people are like, no, you just give me the grade, tell me what I need to study, I'll regurgitate it, we're all happy, right? Some students really chafe against that. So there's a little bit of work to be done just to flesh out the approach that we're going for. But I like your point and to finish with this, Jason around, what is our end goal? If it is to have students become interested in the field, I touched Shakespeare and romantic poetry to every grade 11 kid that walks through my door. And that was my, for most of them, if I can not make them hate Shakespeare by the time they leave, I've been successful. So lots of choice, lots of fun, lots of opportunities to play with the stories. And that was my goal. So yeah, I just finished with that. So let's shift down to specs grading because I think that's certainly I had some interesting thoughts on that. One of those things where you read about it and it gets you excited because you're like, like the syllabus thing, by the way, the annotated syllabus thing, I love that idea. I do a similar thing I've done where I do workshops where they'll workshop the grading scheme for the class or even the content for the class. I did that one with a course that I just had full agency to do whatever I wanted with. The engineering department just said, I just teach whatever you want. And I was like, what do you mean? It was just like, the car is called selected topics and they're like, just whatever you want, right? And I was like, I really need some direction here guys, right? So I just came up with a list. But they were trying to give you a tour of me. Well, I was, and the chair is just like that, the chair of the department was just like, oh yeah, it looks good. And I'm like, yeah, but give me feedback. I just made this up. So then I went to the students and we kind of went through a thing, right? And I've done anonymous surveys, but I really liked the idea of actually having them interact with the document, which is suggested there and actually annotate it. So they're making comments, they're giving little asides, all that. I love that. I think that's probably uncontroversial, but it was, I'm gonna steal that and use that for sure. The specs grading though is probably a bit more controversial. So why don't you start us off and some thoughts on this, Jeff? What do you think? What did you take away? In some sense, some of the things I'm doing. So I mean, for example, in my first year course, I would never do it. Because I think it would be cruel and unusual punishment in that first year course. Although there's a sense in which my mastery tasks are kind of specs-based grading, right? Because they do the tasks successfully or they don't. The difference is that it's a constant rinse and repeat until they do it successfully, that is part of the expectation. But in my other course that I'm running this semester, and this is the first time it's ever run, and it's a very project-based course. And so I wanted a lot of check-ins all along the way to keep them on track with their projects. And some of that is just I have a bi-weekly, we're working with, we've got a wikiversity set of pages going and they're every two weeks supposed to just submit something on wikiversity. Make a page with basically something they've come across in their reading for their project that they wanna share with everyone. And it has this super simple rubric that is almost specs-grading because it is literally say something that is sort of a presentation of a useful scientific or engineering-related fact to do with energy. And site two sources. There, that's it. That's the, and so the rubric is a two-by-two grid, right? Say something useful, yes, no. Site two sources, yes, no. Bang, that's it, right? Now, in practice though, a lot of the students are not meeting that. And I'm not just marking them as zero, I'm giving them feedback and saying resubmit, right? But, you know, this is a tiny class and I'm trying to use this to push them towards better writing by the time they get to submitting their final projects. And so I don't think it makes sense to just give them the zero and send them out the door, right? Yeah, I think maybe one of the, and I don't think Derby said this, but she talked about the OOPS token, you know? So he just don't do it. And that obviously is required. But another way you could do it is you could do it as a multiple submission kind of draft process where you fire in your draft and if your first draft passes muster, even though if you could make it better, good enough. I actually saw someone on Twitter put this up the other day where they were like, I think my students are all gonna hate me, but I realized I don't have time. So I just sent out an email and said that if you're happy with what you've done on the draft stage, you can just stop right there. And everyone in the comment thread was like, no, your students are gonna love you, right? Your evaluations are gonna be great because I know you're doing this out of time-wise for yourself, but they have the same time crunch, right? And they're gonna be great. They're gonna be happy if they can walk away, but they also have the option of continuing if they wanted to try another go. So if you did it kind of like that where you said, here's a series of criteria and I think importantly, the criteria have to be reasonably vague. If they're overly specific, you're gonna get these monstrosities, right? Where like Darby gave the example, if you say something arbitrary on like 250 words, they're just gonna start putting rain and words in there. But you can imagine a similar thing where you said like, instead of saying you need to demonstrate mastery of the vocab for the chapter, if you said instead like, you must use three of the following words, you're just gonna get people making these horrible sentences, right? Whereas it's like that game where you have to try to figure out a way of dropping something in conversation and you make nonsense sentences, right? So I think you'd have to be pretty vague. Otherwise they're simply gonna write the assignment to your very specified things. And that might work for computer code, right? But it's not gonna work for an assignment if you want something which is actually good. But if you said, essentially what it is, is just an incredibly rigorous rubric, right? Where instead of giving people the option of going through and being like, you kind of meant that and therefore I'm gonna give you 50%. You're like, nope, give it back to me or until you actually meet that criteria. But that doesn't mean you can't surpass the criteria. So you're still gonna get, you're still gonna get differentials in terms of what's coming in. But you just have a minimum threshold. I came up with the computer engineering analogy. It's kind of like if you gave a bunch of programmers, depending on their skill, right? Some of the code is gonna come back incredibly elegant, right? Really simple solution. And others might be clunky, but they both meet the specification that do what they're supposed to do. But depending on the skill of the programmer, and that's the same thing for all of your students. You're gonna have some, they're gonna come back and they're gonna be clunky. And other ones that are gonna be, I mean, they're exceptional. The kind of thing where you go, huh, that's better than I could have done. You know, you get assignments every once in a while. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I thought this is, I think maybe combined with a resubmission kind of draft thing, this might actually be a useful thing to adopt. But I do worry about, so I just had a student, for example, yesterday I was marking a series of virtual field trip reports and it stopped literally mid-sentence. And I assumed that the student just cut and pasted it wrong in there. And so I wrote her and said, was this supposed to stop mid-sentence? And the student said, yeah, yeah, I just ran at a time. And that's what I, like literally, she just like had to submit at 12 o'clock or whatever, right? And I said, just have an extra day, obviously complete it. But there is a situation where that student might have sat down and gone, I can't get this done at mastery level, therefore I will do nothing. And it's obviously beneficial that that student went to the process of half completing the assignment because they got something out of it. And that's one thing I worry about is whether students are just gonna look at it and go, it's impossible for me to meet this in a timely manner, therefore I will do nothing rather than get some benefit, right? Thoughts? Yeah, no, I was gonna say the software, we often they're preparing them for the real world. And if you put your product on the table, the client doesn't like it. Well, that doesn't really fit. We hear that all the time. But most often you can say, okay, we'll go back and tweak it and we'll come back again. And people say, yeah, sure, okay. Or I just need another week and I can get this to you. Yes, so that doesn't fly that we're preparing you for the whole cold, hard reality of the real world. Because the real world doesn't work like that either most times. So yeah, and it is and good rubrics are, to use your word, Jason, elegant. They can have those performance indicators that give students a real clear indication of where they are, but they also define the criteria and they can tease out the difference between the levels of performance. Really tough to do well. But when students, you share that upfront with students and they know the criteria, they can work towards that. So yeah, it can be done. It can be done well. But like you said, oftentimes it bumps up against our structures, which, you know, time is one and all those other things. But yeah, it can work, but it has to be given a lot of thought. I started thinking as well about the possibility of doing the kind of combining with that contract kind of base thing. And having the students come up potentially with their own, that's okay, with their own set of criteria. So like you give it vague, then they say, this is the model that I'm gonna deliver. I'm gonna deliver X, Y, and Z. So they come up with their own specs and then you can mark them on whether or not they actually delivered the product. It's like, if you're bringing a contractor in and they come through and they say I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z, this is how I'm gonna do it. And then you walk through and did you in fact do it or not, you know? So I mean, this is a form of contract grading, right? And the person we want in the meeting to talk about that is Kate Krug, because she does, I think, quite sophisticated, interesting contract grading in her courses and has a lot to say about it. I have been wanting to do contract grading for years, but I don't think it works in my first year courses and my upper year courses, I think I wanna iterate them another once or twice before I try and introduce the contract grading. All right, well, maybe we'll cut her off on that note since Pat, we lost Patrick to the telephone, which that was the, that's his way of sneaking away. There's no one on the other line. That's right, that's right, that's right. He called himself. He sent the alarm for exactly to run away. But that's a good idea to follow up. Maybe we can get a seminar going on contract grading or something. I'd love to explore this idea a little bit more. I'm pretty fascinated by it. I can see serious pitfalls, but also kind of got me excited of how it, if it could work, how it could work and what it could do in terms of transforming the experience. All right, well, thank you once again for coming and any comments you've got, please throw them down in the thing. Otherwise, I will see you on Friday. Bye-bye.