specifications grading: initial articulation of semester goals

After much thinking and researching, I’ve decided to adopt a new grading system for my two courses this semester: Linda Nilson’s specifications grading system. My friend Mackenzie, a digital humanities librarian and professor, has used it in several classes now and bought me Nilson’s book a couple years back. Specs grading seems like it will help me achieve a number of my personal teaching/organizational goals for the semester. Those goals are, briefly:

• I want to reduce the amount of time/cognitive energy I spend on grading without lowering expectations or significantly reducing the number of assignments I give. I value giving students a range of assignments that let them practice/explore different skills, and I’ve gotten MUCH better in recent years at designing major assignments that are actually fun to read. Still, there are certain assignments I don’t want to sacrifice (like weekly reading posts) but that become an increasing drag on my time/energy as the semester wears on, and I find myself dreading them or putting off grading them until the last minute.
• I want to reorient the way I approach grading and writing feedback. I want to stop thinking about feedback as a way of justifying my decision to take two versus five points off,  and I want to spend less time hemming and hawing over the difference between an 89% and a 93%. I want to better understand how students engage with the feedback I spend so much time writing and how I can make that feedback more useful for them. (A slightly related side note: when my cohort first taught our university’s intro composition course a few years back, a friend realized halfway through the semester that the majority of his students didn’t even know that it was possible to view comments on their submissions through our school’s learning management site. Most had been writing revisions of their papers without even reading the feedback he’d spent hours writing.)
• I want to continue exploring creative forms of assignment design, offering a rich range of interpretive activities that give students agency and flexibility in how they engage with course concepts. I want to offer them assignments that help them learn/grow (developing new skills, engaging substantively with course content, and/or cultivating certain habits of mind), but that also acknowledge how different “good” thinking or writing can look. (By “good,” I mean creative, empathetic, open-minded, exploratory, and ethically responsible — writing/thinking that strives for “intelligent confusion” rather than “ignorant certainty,” to quote the excellent Patrick Sullivan book I’m reading.) BUT I want to be maintain flexibility and variety without creating a huge amount of extra work for myself. I want a system where flexibility/variety is more built into the structure itself, in other words, instead of those things being something I have to try building in on the fly.
• I want to shift more responsibility to my students for tracking their progress, pacing themselves through the semester, and meeting deadlines, which I’m hoping to do by instituting a “semester plan” component to the specs grading system. A related goal is that I want to stop spending so much time dealing with requests for project extensions and excuses for late work. I have always been very flexible re: pacing and deadlines, partly because I like not being rigid about that kind of thing and partly because I’ve come to realize how many of my students students work, have significant familial or childcare responsibilities outside of the classroom, and/or  experience significant issues around stress and mental health during their time in college. In the past I’ve been very free with extensions when students approach me to ask for them, and I haven’t had many issues with students abusing that trust.BUT I also am starting to realize that some students may not feel comfortable disclosing the need for extra time, or they may not even realize that asking for extensions is something they can do, or, or, or. I am starting to realize that having a relaxed, “just ask me and I’ll say yes” policy on extensions might be creating/maintaining certain barriers for some student populations that are not readily visible to me. I like the tokens system because it signals to students that those extensions are available and that there’s no penalty or stigma attached to using one when you need to. Also it will help decrease that feeling of “this is a favor that I, your benevolent teacher, am bestowing upon you,” which I hope will make it the whole process of granting extensions or revisions more above-board, transparent, and equitable.

Okay, that wasn’t so brief, sorry (I AM WHO I AM). I am going to post in a separate entry some of the freewriting I’ve done today to think through what specs grading will look like in practice in my classroom.