Packing your fears
How backpacking can help us think about alternative grading
In our recent Memorial Day post I mentioned that I was off on a backpacking trip. At least once per year, I like to pile everything I need to live into a big backpack, pick up some hiking poles, and disappear into the woods for a week.
Something I love about backpacking is that it clears away the distractions of everyday life and gives my brain a lot of time to wander. That kind of unstructured thinking time is important to me, and it often leads to helpful and unexpected ideas.
On my May trip, my daydreaming turned towards a connection between backpacking and alternative grading. I’m always willing to stretch an analogy to the breaking point, so let’s talk about packing your fears, alternative grading-style.
A core issue in backpacking is: What things will you pack? Even more to the point, How much does it all weigh? When you’re hiking 8 or 12 or 20 miles per day with a heavy pack on your back, the amount of stuff in that pack is really important. Hiking forums are filled with horror stories of people whose first backpacking trip saw them walking 15 miles with a 60 pound pack, leaving them barely able to crawl into camp at night – and also permanently scaring them away from an otherwise enjoyable activity. Like many backpackers, I have a spreadsheet where I record every item in my backpack along with its weight in grams1, and use it to look for ways to turn a 35 pound pack into a 30 pound pack, and maybe even 25 pounds.
Backpackers often talk about “packing your fears”. Simply put, people tend to overpack based on what they fear most. I fear getting too cold, so I have to watch out for packing more warm clothing than I can actually use – plus convincing myself that I don’t really need to bring a 30 degree sleeping bag in the middle of summer. Someone who fears being hungry is likely packing too much food. Those are just some of the most common ones. Identifying your fears helps you identify where you’re overpacking.
This is a blog about alternative grading, so let’s turn to that for a moment. Our refrain is “keep it simple”. One of the main ways that an alternative grading system can be too complex is because the creator “packed their fears”. So what does packing your fears look like in alternative grading?
Too many standards: Probably the most common way to “pack your fears” is to create a standards-based grading system with way, way, way too many standards. Many people have written about ridiculous initial attempts at alternative grading with 40, 60, or 90 standards, requiring an overwhelming assessment schedule. This is a form of packing your fears: Why do we end up with so many standards? Because we’re afraid of leaving something important out. We look at each tiny topic, or each favorite kind of problem, and say “I couldn’t do without that”, and so another standard gets added. The same can be true for specifications grading, in which a list of specifications becomes enormously long and detailed. I think this tends to come from a fear that, if we leave something out, a student could “get away” with something we didn’t intend, or we could suffer criticism from a colleague.
Overly detailed final grades requirements: Many alternative grading systems use a “grade table” or list that spells out the requirements for each letter grade. A feature of this approach is that a student must satisfy every requirement in order to earn a grade: If they leave one thing out, they haven’t earned that grade. This is a way of saying “these items matter so much that they are essential to pass/excel in this class.” But much like with standards or specifications, it’s easy for a final grade table to become overly full: Do you really need students to complete X standards and Y homework sets and Z practice problems and project A and presentation B all in order to earn a C? Again, this can happen because we’re packing our fears: We add final grade requirements for fear that we might be missing something, or that a colleague or chair or dean could raise an eyebrow at the fact that a student could earn a high grade without doing something they view as important. It’s essential to think carefully about what the absolute requirements are for a student to earn a given grade, but it’s also easy to over-pack those requirements with too many items.
Gnarly policies: Due dates, late work, attendance, reassessments – our syllabi likely have some detailed policies for each of these. These policies can easily expand, often based on one-time bad experiences. Perhaps a student finds a way to abuse a generous late-work policy, you’re afraid it will happen again, and then you add a special case in your policy for next time. Repeat a few times, and suddenly the policy is a mess of details that’s hard for students to navigate. This turns the syllabus into a complicated legal document, rather than a clear statement of what your class is about. We’re packing our fears by adding special cases, details, exclusions, and caveats to an otherwise perfectly good policy.
As with backpacking, an alternative grading system that is too big, too detailed, too complex, can lead to a bad experience. That can scare an instructor away from alternative grading, even if it otherwise fits with their own beliefs and desires.
So, it’s important to avoid packing your fears, both in backpacking and in alternative grading. Being realistic about what needs to be packed – not giving in to fears, but also not ignoring real and important considerations – is a difficult balancing act. So how do you avoid packing your fears? In backpacking, there’s some standard advice:
Practice in a safe setting or do a trial run: Pitch your tent in your back yard for a night, or go on a one-night trial camping trip. In my case, I see if my gear keeps me warm enough. If not, I can get up and go inside. A person worried about food learns if they really needed the amount of food they brought. If they really didn’t bring enough, it’s easy enough to pack up and leave.
Start small: Don’t make your first backpacking trip a 7-day, 20-mile-per-day grind, or a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Instead, begin with a shorter trip – maybe 2 or 3 nights with shorter mileage – where even if you vastly overpack, at least it won’t last too long. Then you can quickly go on to the next item…
Iterate and gain confidence: Nothing beats experience. Pack the best you can, and head off on a trip. When you’re back, write notes and reflect on what you actually used, what you needed, and what you didn’t. Did I actually use all of my warm clothing, or could I have left that extra fleece at home? Did you have a bunch of food left over? Maybe you’ve discovered that you don’t really like oatmeal for breakfast every single day. Then use those notes to improve things next time. As you do this, you’ll gain confidence and experience, helping you know what you really need, and what can be left behind – and also how to manage a tricky situation with what you actually have on hand, should you encounter it.
Combine and simplify: This is a corollary of iteration. “Ultralight” backpackers have an axiom that every item they pack should serve multiple purposes. A rain coat can also provide a layer of insulation, a hiking pole can be a tent pole, etc. This lets you cut out extra items by combining and simplifying your packing list. But this can also be dangerous: Every time you remove an item, you’re making a trade-off between weight, comfort, and safety, and this is where having experience and confidence really matters.
Let’s translate each of those items into alternative grading. How can you avoid “packing your fears” in alternative grading?
Practice in a safe setting or do a trial run: Once you have drafted a list of standards, go find an old quiz, homework, etc. and align it with your standards. Do the standards fit? Are there standards that you don’t need, or that are well covered by other ones? If you can, pull up previous student work: Does your rubric fit the types of issues encountered there? Is anything missing? Are there standards, specifications, or rubric items that just aren’t needed? Our alternative grading workbook (Chapter 11 In our book) is built around this idea of a feedback loop for faculty: You should always “ground truth” your plans with real assessments, real student work, whatever you have available. This process can help you identify places where your fears don’t align with reality.
Start small: You don’t need to blow up your entire grading and assessment system and start everything fresh. Instead, try a small start that aligns with one or more of the four pillars of alternative grading. Write out standards for one lesson or module, and share them with students. Offer a reassessment on one key assignment. Fit Standards-Based Testing into an existing assessment system. Then use what you learn to…
Iterate and gain confidence: Gain experience to help you improve. Make some plans, then go ahead and teach your class – don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough! Keep careful notes about what works and what doesn’t. Especially note what parts of your standards, grades, or policies felt unnecessary, and identify anything that you wished you’d included (if really needed, feel free to make changes during the semester if they are really needed – and tell your students about why you’re doing so). Then next time around, trust your notes and make changes based on them. That will help you pack better. And just like in backpacking, you’ll gain confidence, experience, and identify some solid principles that help you address tricky situations in the moment.
Combine and simplify: Many new alternative graders create fine-grained standards that could instead be combined into broader assessment-level objectives. Or perhaps you have too many policies covering overly-specific situations. Find ways to simplify, reduce, and combine those. Do you really need participation, pre-class prep, and practice homework as separate categories in your final grade table – or could they be combined into a single “engagement” item that is also more flexible? There are risks in over-simplifying, just as in backpacking: Combining standards risks creating “double-barreled” standards that cover too much ground and are hard to assess. Cutting out important policies that are actually based in reality – not on fears – means you won’t cover that situation. But as a new alternative grader, it’s far more likely that you have things to cut, rather than things that you’re missing. If you need a bit of level-setting, see my recent reflection on how it took me nearly 12 years of simplifying one class before I finally over-simplified it.
I hope you enjoyed this tour of my brain-on-backpacking. Certainly, packing your fears is not the only issue to think about, either in backpacking or in alternative grading. But I do believe that it’s an excellent lens with which you can consider your decisions: Am I making this addition or change because it really matters, or is it based on a fear that may never be realized?2
Reminder: We’re always interested in hearing about your experiences! If you’d like to write a guest post for Grading for Growth, just fill out our Guest post author interest form.
OK, ok, mass, but I’m not planning on backpacking on the moon any time soon.
Time for some disclaimers and details that didn’t fit into the main post. I don’t want to give the impression that anxieties and fears for your own health and safety aren’t valid – they very much are! – but I do want to point out that they can lead to unhelpful results, such as a 60 pound pack or a list of 60 standards. I also want to acknowledge that the fears that lead to “packing your fears” are sometimes rooted in very real experiences and should be respected. For example, my own fear of being too cold began long ago on a thankfully short hammock-based camping trip. I ended up packing up and hiking out to my car at 2 am, a process that involved wading across a small river in the dark. But in more recent years, I discovered that the actual source of my ongoing trouble with “sleeping cold” was related to not eating enough calories on a camping trip. I upped my calorie intake, and haven’t had problems since. The point of this last story is that sometimes the source of a problem lies in an unexpected direction, and so it’s worth experimenting, talking with colleagues, and generally keeping at it until you can find a solution. And of course, all of this advice is situational. In grading, as in hiking, you should know and trust your instincts and hike your own hike.