Brian Lamb begins this post on student assessment with “I hate grading” — a common enough sentiment among teachers who are required to assign grades. He claims this attitude as his own shortcoming, but I think that claim itself is the shortcoming; I agree with Alfie Kohn that grading fundamentally sabatoges learning.
The larger point of Lamb’s post is to discuss alternatives to requiring students to hand in work concurrently, a fascinating subject for institutional teaching. In the comments section is this thought-provoking suggestion by Barbara Ganley:
What if students could complete a certain percentage of assignments as first-wave writers (without taking into account their peers’ work) and a certain percentage as reviewers (responding to the ideas of their peers) and a certain percentage as second-wave writers (putting forth their own ideas as well as synthesizing and building on their peers).
In other words, what if every student had to complete some assignments early and some later, to gain experience with both kinds of writing? Students would be able to plan ahead by signing up for Option A or Option B at the beginning of the semester, weaving a realistic workload for themselves.
I like this approach of “first-wave”, “reviewers” and “second-wave,” and wonder how it might be usefully applied to non-writing teaching. It leads directly to questions of how students handle such public peer review when they are not accustomed to it. It is hard to teach students to understand their self-worth as distinct from open review of their work, but such understanding is an essential part of this approach.
[...] Asher at The Guru Handbook on grading and concurrency — I’m more interested in the grading model Asher cites as applied to writers, both in a workshop environment and as a critical tool in the published world. There certainly are books and stories which can be identified as “first wave” and “second wave” — I’m not so sure if the reviewer step is better reflected in the critical/critiquing apparatus or in another layer of writing. [...]
I really enjoyed the links you provided. The practice of using the waves seems like realistic practice for the way life works once you get out of school. More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where the starting line is staggered and we might be expected to analyze the work which came before us and then build on it. Or we might be the starter who is first out of the door and whose efforts are critiqued by peers.