10 Ways to Give Your Students the Gift of Slack

I'm guessing there are a lot of people who can connect with this genius cartoon I saw and shared at G+ this morning via Paul Thomas. I wish I could just give my needy students heaps of cash... but I'm a member of the precariate myself, not a professor. Luckily, though, I have a lot of freedom in my teaching, so what I can do is give my students the gift of SLACK. On the importance of slack, see Paul Thomas - The Poverty Trap: Slack, Not Grit, Creates Achievement.

Some of the options below are very specific to the types of classes I teach (and teaching online creates a great space for slack, thank goodness), but hopefully there are some ideas here that can be useful to all kinds of teachers of all kinds of classes.

1. Eliminate punitive grading. This, in my opinion, is the best way to help reduce students' fear of making mistakes and increase their sense of freedom and confidence to experiment with their own learning. I do no grading of any kind; instead, the students do their own grading, and it is not punitive grading — it's just full credit for work completed. Details about grading here.

2. Celebrate mistakes. Instead of penalizing mistakes, build on them as opportunities for learning. Making "growth mindset" an explicit part of my classes is one of the best decisions I ever made. As a teacher, I never saw mistakes as a failure... but I realized that my students might not share that perspective. By making growth mindset an explicit part of the class, I can help students see mistakes as the road that leads to learning, rather than something to be ashamed of. More about growth mindset here.

3. Build revision into the writing. Instead of just asking students to turn in a paper at the end of the semester (leaving no room for error), I use a writing process that has lots of slack built in. Every piece of writing for the class project gets revised at least once, maybe twice, maybe even three times: it's all good! There are no negative consequences or penalties for the students who, for whatever reason, are doing a lot of revisions to their writing. More about writing projects here.

4. Eliminate quizzes and tests. Quizzes and tests are, by their nature, pretty unforgiving. Plus, they're usually not a lot of fun and not very creative. So, I've gotten rid of quizzes and tests. If you feel like you do want/need quizzes and tests, let students retake quizzes and tests after they have gotten feedback from you and had the opportunity to practice whatever they are being tested on.

5. Let students plan their own schedule. My students' lives are extremely complicated, so I make sure they can plan my class 100% around their schedule. I do ask for 6 hours per week of their time total, but if that happens to be from 1AM-4AM two nights a week, that's fine (and some students do work a schedule like that, especially if they are working an evening shift at their job). This time flexibility is one of the best aspects of teaching online, in my opinion: you can let the asynchronous model be a source of slack for your students. More about self-scheduling here.

6. Offer lots of make-up. I offer extra credit both in order to allow students to pursue their own interests, but also so that it is easy to make up any work that they miss in a given week. The extra credit is all relevant to the class and represents good learning; basically, the extra credit is a kind of "shadow class" that I would love to be teaching if the students and I had all the time in the world. Since time is limited, there is an abundance of activities classified as extra credit each week. That way, if students ever miss deadlines (as they often do), it's easy to make up the work later at their convenience. They can also use the extra credit to work ahead and finish early, which is great: that gives them some slack as they face final exams in their other classes.

7. Let students choose their reading. Each week, students choose what they are going to read, based on their own personal preferences with regard to the topic, the type of reading, the delivery format, etc. Hopefully they will make a good choice, but if they discover they don't like the reading they chose, then they should be able to do a better job the next week of choosing what to read. In addition, they can do all the reading for free online; they don't need to buy any books. Since my school already charges a $120 online course fee (penalty), I feel it is my obligation to make sure that there are no books to buy.

8. Allow for "half" reading. In my classes, I've been able to divide the reading up into two parts each week. Sure, I'd like for students to read both parts, but it's okay if they only read one part: they will be able to carry on so long as they've done half of the reading, and I definitely for them to really read just half rather than to bluff their way through the whole thing or skim without taking anything away from the experience. I'm able to offer the half-reading option because of the types of content that I teach and the highly modular nature of my course design; you can see what I mean by content divided into two halves if you look at a typical two-part unit in the MythFolklore UnTextbook.

9. Let students choose their own grade. Admittedly, most of my students want to get an A, and that's fine — but they don't "need" an A in order to learn something, and they don't "need" an A in order to make progress towards their degree. I teach Gen. Ed., and all they need to do is pass the class to get credit that counts towards graduation. So I emphasize that whether they want an A or B or C is up to them; my only goal is that they should pass the class while learning something of value to them. The A-B-C grade is just a result of the number of weeks they actively participate in the class. If for whatever reason they decide to participate less and take a grade other than A, that is fine, no questions asked... and it's really not a big deal. Plus, they can check on their progress at any given moment to know exactly where they stand.

10. Practice empathy. As someone who loves to read and write, I have to remind myself that this is not true for all my students. I also know that while I enjoy a lot of slack in my life, they might have no slack at all (some of my students work full-time, are raising young children, are managing serious medical conditions, etc.). By practicing empathy, I can try to learn about what my students need and respond to those needs if I can — but most of all I need to take the time to listen without judging, and then to help if I can. I've also made empathy part of the class; you can see how that works here: Empathy Challenges.

And on that subject, here's a lovely video to watch: Brené Brown on Empathy.

10 Reasons Why Growth Mindset Works For Me

I just finished writing up the last of the Fall 2015 reports on the growth mindset experiment, and I am so happy with how things turned out. In fact, the growth mindset project went so well that I will expand it in the Spring semester, carrying on with the growth mindset while also adding a new set of self-challenges for students to work on if they want:

(1) There will be the Growth Mindset Challenges as before, and I'll be updating/expanding those based on what I learned this semester.

(2) I am calling the new set of challenges Learning by H.E.A.R.T. and I'll have lots more to say about that in a separate post! I'm just now starting on that.

But now, back to Fall 2015... I wanted to use the list approach here to try to organize my thoughts about how growth mindset contributed to the class overall. My guess is that this could work in so many types of classes! Here are the important observations I want to take away from this semester:

1. Growth mindset is new to students. Only a few students had heard of growth mindset before! That surprised me, given the number of K-12 teachers who work with this model. I feel even more motivated to develop this dimension of my class now that I know it is something students may never have even encountered before. I teach mostly college seniors... so, better late than never!

2. Students are quick to embrace growth mindset. Now, that doesn't mean they have a deep or full understanding of it right away, but there is not any initial resistance to the idea. Some students worked on growth mindset challenges every single week, and quite a few remarked that it was one of their most valuable take-aways from the class. Now that I see which elements of growth mindset are immediately obvious and which concepts are less obvious, I'll be able to do a better job of deciding what information and resources to emphasize next semester.

3. Growth mindset is relevant to all students. The courses I teach are part of the Humanities Gen. Ed. program at my school, and the students come from all the colleges/majors — accounting, biochemistry, public relations, petroleum engineering, you name it. That variety is really exciting, but also daunting for me as a teacher because I have to design the class in a way that it can benefit every single student. I am really happy that growth mindset is something that has the potential to benefit every single student, putting the "general" back in "General Education" as it were.

4. Growth mindset is relevant to students' whole lives. I really loved the ways students found to use growth mindset in their other classes, on the job, with their own children, etc. I learned so much from reading the blog posts where they wrote about connecting growth mindset to other parts of their lives and also the posts where they wrote about sharing growth mindset with friends, roommates, family, etc.

5. Growth mindset can permeate the whole class. This was one of the nicest surprises for me: even students who were not doing challenges still got into the growth mindset way of looking at things and would remark about growth mindset in their blog posts. Even without doing the challenges themselves, they were learning about them from the daily announcements and from other students' blogs that they visited. Students doing assignments in class that had no direct connection to the Growth Mindset Challenges often included growth mindset references and ideas in those other blog posts. That was really cool to see!

6. Growth mindset reduces fear and anxiety. Although this is a writing class, many of the students are reluctant writers; likewise, even though this is an online class, plenty of students have technology anxiety. Being able to couch my feedback to them in terms of growth mindset was really wonderful. I had always used the mindset strategy in sharing feedback with students, but making growth mindset an explicit part of the class is even better: now students can do their own growth "self-talk" in addition to the growth talk they hear from me. I could also see that it was helping students give each other better feedback too as they commented on each other's work.

7. Growth mindset is a powerful basis for colearning. It has always been my goal to be a colearner with my students, but the hierarchy of the university is a big obstacle for that. With growth mindset, I could share with my students the different ways I am trying to challenge myself and grow, just as they are. Lifelong learning: it's not just a slogan!

8. Growth mindset puts learning over grades. Even though I don't do any grading in my classes, students are (understandably) still very grade-oriented, and some of them even miss getting grades from me. Growth mindset fills that gap and has finally given me a vocabulary to use in talking with my students about learning in a way that has nothing at all to do with grades. Learning IS growth, and the growth IS learning. Grades have nothing to do with it, and mindset lets us focus on process rather than product.

9. Growth mindset is fun! I love the way that growth mindset embraces creativity and fun, imagination and excitement, all the things that I value both as a learner and as a teacher. Unlike the grit approach (which is such a turn-off for me), growth mindset is something that is both challenging and encouraging at the same time, and I was so glad to see that students perceived it in a very positive and energizing way also.

10. Growth mindset goes well with memes. The "growth mindset cats" added an element of growth mindset to the announcements every single day in a very eye-catching way. Some of the students were themselves really into cats, but even the students who were not into cats could appreciate the humor and messages of the memes. Students eagerly shared lots of humorous and motivational memes in their blogs, and some of them also made memes of their own. Learning that can happen by means of memes is very useful in a fully online class!

As I saw which cat memes students shared and reshared in their blogs, I became aware of which memes they really connected with; below are some of the most popular cats, and you can see all the growth cats at my Growth Mindset Memes blog.

10 Reasons Why I Use a Blog for Class Announcements

I've been having trouble getting back into the swing of things at this blog, so I'm going to try the "10 Reasons Why" approach. The post can more or less write itself this way! I'm starting with this particular list in celebration of Blogger https allowing me to make even better use of my announcements blog (more about that here).

First, you might take a look at my Class Announcements blog. There's a new announcement every day, including Saturday and Sunday (Saturday is a slow day, admittedly, but Sunday is probably the busiest day in terms of students who are doing work for class).

1. Modeling a blog for my students. Given that my students are also blogging for class, I appreciate being able to model the usefulness of blogging for my students, along with good practices in formatting, linking, etc. There is no particular value in modeling my use of D2L BS for them. Real school requires real tools, in my opinion, not faux tools like the LMS.

2. Blogs are open, not trapped in the LMS. I believe in open education and, when I publish something on the open Internet, it becomes an OER. There are people who subscribe to my class announcements blog who are not in my class because they find the content fun to read, and I also sometimes share my class announcements with the social networks I am part of at Google+ and Twitter. There is no way to make anything inside D2L open to anybody anywhere; it is completely closed.

3. One blog, two classes. Although this might not be relevant to others, it is very relevant to me: I have two different classes, but I use the same class announcements blog for both. If I were to do the announcements inside the LMS, I would have to do separate announcements for the two classes (even if the content were identical!), and if I have to edit or update the announcements, I'd have to do that twice. Nightmare! With a blog, I can update one blog and have it appear as the LMS homepage for both of my classes.

4. Blogs are great for quick publishing. I use blogs as the publishing platform for pretty much everything I do. For me, it is much more congenial than trying to create content inside the LMS. In Blogger, for example, links are easy by design: highlight link text, Control-K, Control-V. In contrast, just try creating a link with the editor in D2L: it assumes you want to create a link to a tool in the course, so the task of creating a link to something on the real Internet is a long and convoluted process. Look how you have to scroll down to create a link to a URL; the list is alphabetical and URL just happens to be the very last item on the list. D2L may call it "quicklink" ... but there is nothing quick about it!

5. Blog posts are linkable. I can include links to specific announcements in emails that I send to students. This is most useful when I need to remind them about something that was highlighted in the announcements a few days ago. Plus, students can click on the link and see the announcement without having to log in to the LMS. So, for example, if a student is working on Dante and I want to share with them a Dante video that was in the class announcements last week, I just provide a link to that announcements post. And, yes, there's an advantage to linking that way rather than to the video directly: I like to get students to pay attention to the announcements; you never know when they might find something else in there that is useful to them.

6. Blogs look good on mobile. For students who might be reading the class announcements on a mobile phone, they look great! Blogger has good mobile-detection, and it switches to a nice mobile-friendly display automatically. So, if a student gets an email reminder from me that contains a link to the class announcements, they will see the mobile version of the announcements automatically if they are reading that email on their phone. Just add ?m=1 to a Blogger blog post URL to see the mobile view. This is actually very handy for creating print-friendly versions of other content I publish with Blogger (like the UnTextbook materials); you can always bring up the mobile version in your browser window and print that, which is much more efficient than printing the standard view.

7. Blogs offer multiple distribution channels. Students can look at the blog in their browser without even logging in to the LMS (I urge them to bookmark the link), they can subscribe by email (a surprisingly large number of students choose that option, and they can use whatever email address they want), they can get an RSS feed (a few of my students use blog aggregators), and, glory hallelujah, the blog serves as the landing page in D2L, so students see the announcements whenever they log in. Screenshot (note the very nifty graphic from the Norse Mythology Twitter stream which just happens to be at the top of the widget at this moment):

8. Blogs have sidebars! Admittedly, I am never sure if students will look at the sidebar of the blog, but I can put some useful information and eye-catching content there on the optimistic assumption that it might get noticed. So, for example, I currently have a class Twitter feed in the sidebar, along with a random growth mindset cat, plus some other basic information and links relevant to the classes. If students are looking at the blog on a mobile device, they don't see the sidebar, but they do see the sidebar if they are looking at the blog in their browser or in the LMS. I love the way the Twitter sidebar lets me keep the content "lively," so that for students who log in more than once in a day, there is the possibility that they will see different images there in the sidebar each time (and, of course, they can click and go to the Twitter stream directly from that widget display). Just for fun, I've embedded that Twitter widget down at the bottom of this blog post too.

9. Blogs are useful content repositories. Almost all the content in my announcements is recycled; I add a little bit of new material every semester, but I rely heavily on past semesters. By labeling the blog posts week by week and using weekday titles, I can quickly access past posts, reminding myself what I might need to be telling students on, say, Tuesday of Week 7. Here, for example, is a label that shows you all the Week 7 posts over time. I would never trust an LMS as a real content repository because, sooner or later, we are going to move to a different LMS; it's inevitable. With blogs, I can download and back up my blog and even move it to another platform if I want, although I've been happily using Blogger far longer than we have had D2L at my school, and I expect I will be using Blogger long after D2L has been replaced by something else.

10. And when the LMS is down.... my blog is up! Pretty much every semester, the LMS is down for some reason or another, and sometimes it is part of a wider campus outage. By having my class announcements outside the LMS, I can let students know about the outage and provide them with regular updates.

Okay, thanks to the rule of 10 I can stop there. I'm wondering if anybody from D2L BS will chime in to let me know why I really should be using their "news tool" instead...

And here's that widget from the sidebar embedded here this post:

Tweets by @OnlineMythIndia

Syllabuses: The Old-Fashioned Kind

Due to some red tape tangles at my school, I had to do up a brief c.v. and submit traditional syllabuses for my courses. I actually don't even give my students a traditional syllabus because we have a full Orientation Week instead. So, these one-page syllabuses are intended not so much for my students (I doubt I will even show it to them), but they are need to be on file in the department that offers them. Here they are:

Myth-Folklore Syllabus | Indian Epics Syllabus

It was cool to see how the classes, which were always pretty similar, have grown more and more similar over time, so that basically only two sentences are different between the two syllabuses: the learning objective related to the reading, and the weekly assignment related to the reading. Everything else between the two courses is the same. That is the result of years of convergence, and I am really happy about that. I've taken the best of both classes and applied them to both. Now that I have a solid model that I feel really good about, it makes me realize how easy it would be to create more classes: it would just require building a new UnTextbook on the topic of the new course and sliding it into place.

I also created a new page at my domain with this simple URL: Syllabus.MythFolklore.net. This seemed useful so that I was able to put that URL in the syllabuses themselves. That way, if somebody is looking at a printed copy, they will know where to go online to get a version with active web links, and also to be sure it is the most current version.