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Patrick Hillberg's avatar

In my opening lecture I tell students (grad engineering managers) "nearly everyone gets an A in this class", and "100% of your grade is based on enabling others to learn from you". It's a Systems Thinking class, where a core message is the value of collective learning.

There are two short essays per week, posted to a Moodle forum, then a response to what others have written, and then we discuss all that was posted in a synchronous class session, either in-person or Zoom, though they tend to prefer Zoom.

By and large, this works quite well, but 2/3's of the way through one semester (the COVID year of 2021) ~20 essays had been assigned, 12 of the students were up to date, but four of the students were behind by 2-3 essays each. So I showed this info (without names) in a chart, and said "12 of you have 20 assignments done, and four of you do not... now, you tell me, how many completed assignments are required to get an A in this class?" I posted the question as a survey to be done over the weekend.

No one completed the survey, but the four students who were behind, caught up on unfinished assignments that weekend. By the next class, everyone was caught up.

I am _not_ the arbiter of truth in my classroom. Social norms and collective learning are much more powerful motivators than any assessment I could provide. They will learn more from each other than they ever will from me... but I get to pick the topics of conversation 😊.

My students want to impress their classmates more than me, and in-turn they accomplish more than I ever would have imagined.

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Neva Knott's avatar

I had this same experience with a group of high school in college students and it was really hard and then they all blamed me when they failed.

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