When I became a teacher after a decade as a project manager I could feel the inefficiency within HE teaching and felt that my contribution to L&T scholarship would be associated with productivity. However, I became so interested in pedagogy that I forgot about this. In hindsight, I didn’t know enough about why certain parts of teaching did or did not work to be able to optimise their efficiency. Now that I have developed a sufficient understanding of L&T I’d like to look again at where teaching can be streamlined to make workloads more manageable with at least a neutral impact on learning.
Here is a skim over the areas where teachers can become more productive without reducing their effectiveness. I hope to dive more deeply into each topic, and provide evidence and references, rather than the slightly “shooting from the hip” treatment I’ve given the topics here.
Assessment and Feedback
Teachers spend a lot of the time creating, supporting and grading assessments. Here are ways to reduce this.
Reduce Summative Assessment
Once assessment “counts”, the effort required from teachers explodes. We have to follow administrative processes, and student concerns about fairness creates work. Most of the benefit of assessment comes from the learning students achieve while completing it. The effort spent marking, moderating etc has relatively little value. Most summative assessment could be replaced by formative assessment, and the only consequence would be to reduce our workload. Certainly there are students that take formative coursework less seriously. However there are a range of ways to address this. Making assessment summative, with the consequent student anxiety and teacher workload should be our last option. Ways to increase student engagement in formative assessment include:
- Streamline it. Make it as small and simple as possible while still getting students to practice what we want them to. Make instructions simple and accessible.
- Make it interesting. There are characteristics of tasks that make people want to complete them. For example, if you allow students to choose a topic that matters to them, they will be more motivated to complete it.
- Reward the effort not the achievement. If our goals is to encourage students to seriously attempt coursework, we shouldn’t be grading their performance. Assessment of learning is important, but not for every piece of coursework.
Reduce the volume of feedback
Feedback is only valuable if it is read/heard, understood and changes students’ future behaviour. How much of our feedback achieves this high bar? Brief, simple feedback that gives students something to do differently next time is more valuable than copious feedback that, at best, dilutes the most valuable points and probably stops the student from reading any of it. Three well-crafted bullet points that guide the student’s future work can be excellent feedback, even for an assessment that took a student 20 hours to complete. Teachers understand the relative priority of our feedback, but students won’t. We help students by eliminating the “nice-to-haves” and only giving them the “must-haves”.
Will this not be considered as poor value for money by students? Possibly. To ensure that students feel they are getting enough feedback:
- Provide brief, high-priority feedback to each student
- Provide broader feedback on common mistakes or successes for all students should they want to read more, now or in the future.
- Sincerely invite students to ask for more feedback if they want it. Most will not.
If you are thinking, “if I don’t provide detailed feedback, how will students understand how I derived their grade?”, I would respond, “the purpose of feedback is not to explain how you derived a grade”. Clear marking criteria that is understood by students should answer this point. Rubrics, through which you indicate the level of achievement earned by students in various facets of their work are a great way to do this too. If we require written justification of our grading, this is a sign of low trust between staff and students that needs to be addressed in other ways.
Simplify grading
Looking at students’ work and determining, based on our internal mental models, a score between zero and one hundred is a high-effort way of grading. Unless you have proven using something like Inter-rater reliability that most others would assign the same score, then it’s also of questionable validity. The problem is both a lack of objectivity on what is required for certain grades and a false trust in the precision with which we can judge work.
Stepped Marking in which markers grade within coarse boundaries reduces the precision of grading and thus the effort. As long as we explain to students how this works, it also will reduce the likelihood that students will ask for slight increases in grades, which is another time-sink.
The extreme version of Stepped Marking is to Pass/Fail a submission, or components of a submission. For example, instead of awarding a grade for the formatting of submissions, I specify exactly what I expect (1 side of PDF, with a table with certain columns). If a student delivers this they get the 10% of the assessment grade awarded with “formatting”. If not, they earn nothing for that element. I don’t spend time deciding whether 1 missing column should cost 2% or 3% of the grade. The impact is that students take my formatting instructions seriously. Many will understandably shudder at making assignments pass/fail, for risk of failing a lot of students. However there is rich body of research on ways we can enforce high standards through pass/fail grading while treating students in a fair and supportive way. Check out Specifications Grading and Mastery Grading. I plan to eliminate grading on a scale from my teaching in the next 2-4 years.
Use templates to make submissions less chaotic
Unless you are teaching and assessing student’s ability to create the structure and layout of their work, providing a template will result in more consistent and predictable submissions. These are easier to grade. In general don’t ask students to do things that are not the precise outcome you want them to demonstrate.
Preparation
Preparing slides
There are many ways in which we should spend time when preparing for a lecture or other classroom activity. Fiddling with Powerpoint is the least valuable of these. If we are concerned that students will not like the aesthetic appearance of our slides then we should question our priorities. I use a tool called DeckSet that takes text in a certain format:
# Roles in Scrum
- Scrum Master
- Product Owner
- Team Member
and generates slides like this:
There are other tools that do this too: MARP, Remark.
If you are not geeky enough to want to write your presentations in text format, you should ask yourself if you spend a lot of time preparing slides. Does each image, colour, transition and animation contribute to students’ learning? If not, explain to students why your slides are boring, and focus your effort on other activities. Demonstrating to students that you care more about their learning than being popular is powerful. If the appearance of slides plays a significant part in the quality of a lecture, the lecture is too much about what the teacher is saying and not enough on what the students are doing.
Focus on depth of understanding, not breadth of content
There is a difference between “covering content” and a student finishing your course with knowledge and skills that will support their future. Presenting a slide on a topic is a long way from knowing that students understand and can apply it. The more content that we “cover” the less opportunity we have to ask students to practice and explore the topics. It’s a statement that some will argue with, but here it is: It’s better to cover fewer topics but allow students to explore and engage with them more deeply. It would be a very rare course in which 100% of the students needed to understand 100% of the content, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for teaching that course.
This is good news for the busy teacher. A 1 hour lecture in which we cover 5 topics, requires us to prepare a lot of material and assessment. Covering 3 topics, and getting students to discuss the topics or perform activities on each of them requires less preparation. It will also increase learning. Surely something that promised to increase student learning, while reducing teacher preparation time is worth a shot?
Stop re-writing your course
Each year I promise myself that I won’t re-write my module the following year. However, as I learn more about L&T, I can’t help myself. While it may be fun to update your course and try out new techniques, it take time that I could be spending on other things. I’m not confident that each re-write is sufficiently better than the last to justify the effort. Incremental changes each time would have led me to the same place, but required far less effort. The idea of small incremental improvements in prevalent in business from Marginal Gains that led to the GB’s Olympic cycling success, Scrum Retrospectives and Intel’s Tick Tock approach to releasing new processors.
Big changes come with big risks. Re-writing courses or significant parts of them may improve them, but it may also break things that worked in the past. It’s a truism in software development that while it’s tempting to re-write software that is becoming old-fashioned or hard to maintain, doing so can lead to disaster. Old software has many year’s of wisdom built into it. Its quirks were added to fix problems that new developers aren’t aware exist. Don’t re-write your course. Improve a small part of it each year. It’s less risky and much less effort. This is especially important for someone taking over another’s course. Let it run for a year with minor tweaks. Then you’ll know where more major surgery is required.