Teaching Inquiry

As someone who has enjoyed psychologist Adam Grant’s writing on themes including epistemological humility and the benefits of generosity over selfishness, I was taken aback by his New York Times opinion piece “No, You Don’t Get an A for Effort.” In this essay, Grant resorts to tired kids these days complaints like, “In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient; an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge.” Grant argues instead that assessment should focus on demonstrating “mastery.”

I do not suggest that assessment should never focus on the quality of what students produce, but Grant leaves no room for students to fumble their way toward knowledge and experience without a predefined endpoint. This exploratory process, what I call generative failure, might involve a high quantity of effort that does not lead to mastery.

There is in fact a whole literature on labor-based grading. In other words, many teachers believe that rewarding students for quality is nowhere near as simple or straightforward as Grant implies. Alternatives to traditional assessment like labor-based grading or (my preferred) ungrading create their own challenges, of course, but nevertheless sometimes—perhaps mostof the time—students should get an A for effort.

As this series moves toward imagining productive tensions between tame and wicked assessment, I want to examine various formulations of what these productive tensions might look like. Grant’s essay is a good place to start, both in terms of where I (partially) agree with him and where I disagree.

Grant’s basic argument is that educators have become infatuated with grit and mindset, or the idea that perseverance and hard work are at least as (and maybe more) impactful on student success as natural ability. He contends that effort is increasingly “an end in itself,” adding that “We’ve failed to remind [students] that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person).” Grant stresses that he is not a gatekeeper of A grades—that he wants as many students to obtain an A as possible—but that As are “not granted for effort itself.” He concludes, “The true measure of learning is not the time and energy you put in. It’s the knowledge and skills you take out.”

I think Grant is right on a few points. First, in principle, the true measure of learning is largely the acquisition of knowledge and skills. However, as I hope this series on wicked assessment has made clear, I do not believe teachers can directly measure such learning, and Grant doesn’t address the inherent challenges of determining whether a student has “mastered” the material. Moreover, knowledge and skills can be acquired in the service of all kinds of ends, good and bad—in other words, the acquisition of knowledge and skills also should not be an end in itself. For me, the larger purpose of acquiring knowledge and skills is to cultivate authority.

Second, I agree that valuing “perseverance above all else” can potentially “motivate people to stick with bad strategies instead of developing better ones.” Indeed, the capacity to recognize and move on from a dead-end idea or strategy is really important. But Grant overlooks the challenge of cultivating such discernment (in students and the rest of us). Questions like, “when is it time to quit this and try something else?” can be very difficult to answer, and formal education usually does little to help students here.

Third, as appealing as concepts like grit and mindset can be, their impact on student motivation and growth may be overstated, as follow-up studies of both grit and (especially) mindset have shown. These terms have also been coopted by those who portray school success as entirely a function of personal responsibility.

But I strongly disagree that high grades should always reflect “great work” rather than “hard work,” which implies that students should only be evaluated through the lens of how well they have met (generally) rigid and predefined performance standards. Undoubtedly, in some contexts, students should strive to master course material (even though I don’t believe teachers can measure mastery with confidence). But aside from the fact that what mastery looks like will depend on many factors, mastery should not be the expectation of all educational contexts, perhaps not even the majority.

This is why I think we need to distinguish between performance zones and exploration zones. I’m adapting these terms from Manu Kapur, who calls them performance and learning zones. I changed the latter to “exploration” because of my ambivalence about that word “learning” and because Kapur’s performance and learning zones are tied narrowly to productive failure. This is Kapur’s term for when students work on problems they are not yet equipped to solve and, in struggling unsuccessfully to find effective strategies, end up understanding and retaining more when subsequently introduced to the correct strategies. (Productive failure is a cool and compelling but nevertheless restricted example of generative failure, which represents a more capacious approach to learning as play, experimentation, and exploration.)

Activities and assignments associated with exploration zones are most easily linked with alternative assessment practices like ungrading, whereas the assessment of student performances against a defined set of criteria is most conducive to performance zones. (As ungraders would undoubtedly note, however, even when a performance is assessed for quality or mastery, the assessment could take the form of feedback and not a grade.)

Assignments in the performance zone typically have higher stakes and are thus more stressful. Given the concerns I have raised about how contemporary higher education (and to a large extent K-12 education) often feels like a relentless pressure cooker, readers might assume that I think performance zones are inherently bad. In fact, I believe students should experience high-stakes performance expectations some of the time, as they will regularly face these situations in their careers.

But students also need opportunities to play around and experiment as a structured and normalized part of what it means to pursue their coursework. Unfortunately, the idea that low-stakes, playful, intrinsically motivated learning might be encouraged by design at least some of the time is totally unfamiliar to many students. Given the pressure cooker vibe they have endured, many understandably believe they are always in performance zones by default. This is why educators who believe exploration zones matter must make clear what the distinctions between performance and exploration are and be transparent about which zone students are in at which time. In other words, it is difficult for approaches like productive and generative failure to have positive impacts unless students genuinely believe they are in an exploration zone.

I do not propose a golden ratio for how much time should be spent in which zone; such ratios will depend on all kinds of factors including the course, the major, the college, etc. Arguably, the ratio should lean toward exploration in introductory and lower-division courses and toward performance in upper-division and capstone courses, but I’m not sure this would be true in all cases.

My point is, deciding which ratio makes sense within a given context is part of what it means to cultivate productive tension between tame and wicked assessment. I want to see communities of educators deliberating these ratios and explaining their decisions (and regularly revisiting these decisions over time, guided by student feedback). This would already put us miles ahead of having assessment protocols driven by bureaucratic inertia. In other words, providing resources for the ongoing intellectual work of thinking through these decisions is more important to me than the specific determinations made.

This framework of exploration zones and performance zones is meant to be a heuristic; some assignments might reflect a combination of exploration and performance, especially scaffolded assignments that unfold over several weeks or, as is often the case with project-based learning, an entire semester. For example, having students undertake an extended and iterative process of discovery, research, writing, revising, remixing, and reflecting that leads to a final portfolio submission—which is how many college writing courses function—is one way to operationalize a productive tension between exploration and performance.

(Here I want to acknowledge a tendency to propose pedagogical ideas and then saying something along the lines of, “Hey folks, let’s see what writing teachers are doing!”, and then casually suggesting that many writing teachers are already pursuing approaches conceptually aligned with my proposal. As a college writing teacher myself, I am obviously biased, but I spend a lot of time with other writing teachers, and I will gladly swear by the conscientiousness most direct toward cultivating vibrant and engaging learning environments. And I firmly believe that paying more attention to what writing teachers do in general would go a long way toward higher education revitalizing its teaching and learning mission, which is what this blog is all about.)

Cultivating tension between exploration and performance is one component of cultivating tension between tame and wicked assessment more broadly. When students spend little to no time in exploration zones, they are likely enduring a very tame assessment protocol: predefined and rigid learning outcomes; generic rubrics with language about exceeding expectations, meeting expectations, or not meeting expectations; and a lot of talk about how students should be rewarded for the “quality of their knowledge.”

In the next posts, I will explore (my blog posts tend to emerge from exploration zones) other components of this tension, including the role of student reflection and the extent to which it is possible to make learning “visible.”