Teaching through trauma
How Grading for Growth Helped Save my Sanity
Acacia Ackles is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college and conservatory in Appleton, Wisconsin. She has been using alternative grading practices in her classroom since starting at Lawrence in 2022. She’s passionate about computer science pedagogy, theoretical computer science, ethics in computing, and a bit of evolutionary computing, as a treat. You can reach her at acacia.ackles@lawrence.edu.
It is likely that every student in your classroom has experienced trauma in some form.
Not every student has experienced the same trauma, but they all arrive in your classroom with baggage that they cannot simply set down at the door. Some may have experienced what psychologists sometimes call “big-T Trauma”, which are events we might typically think of as traumatic: Car accidents, war, natural disasters, or other direct threats to life. But many more have experienced “small-t trauma”, or the everyday stressors that pile up to create similar effects to those larger, singular events: long-term financial stress, marginalization and discrimination, or perhaps academic troubles or struggles.
For this reason, I have always strongly believed in trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP) practices. The previous link provides a good overview, but in brief, trauma-informed pedagogy asks instructors to recognize that the students in their classroom may have experienced trauma in the past, and respond by creating teaching practices and classroom relationships which actively foster a sense of safety and healing for students.
Here’s a concrete example. Cold-calling students in class is a common pedagogical practice, the purpose of which is often to solicit ideas that students may not immediately volunteer, or to check whether students are actively engaged. However, it can also provoke anxiety in students. For some students, this anxiety may be brief and quickly moved past; they get nervous when called upon, but they stumble their way through a response. For a student who has experienced trauma, the anxiety they feel getting cold-called may overload their nervous system, because it reminds their body of the anxiety and fear that they felt during that trauma. Now rather than experiencing a little anxiety, they’re in full-blown panic. They can’t answer your question, nor can they really even remember your question; they may not be able to regulate and refocus for the rest of class.
In this example, Trauma-informed pedagogy recognizes that some students may have an outsized reaction to the small anxieties that cold-calling can produce, and as a result, tries to lower the overall anxiety for all students by rethinking cold-calling as a teaching tool. Maybe instead of direct cold-calling, you ask a question, then tell students to think about it for a few moments. Then, you say that in a minute, you’ll call on someone randomly. This allows students to think and prepare themselves for the question, hopefully lowering the overall surprise and anxiety.
We can see with this example that TIP doesn’t just help students with trauma; it can help all students feel better and produce higher quality responses.
TIP practices dovetail nicely with the practice of grading for growth. In fact, the growth in grading for growth often means growing out of old neural pathways like those forged by traumatic experiences (both “big-T” and small-t”) that tell our students that failure or even the threat of failure is dangerous to their health and safety, for one reason or another.
As a new professor in 2022, I wanted to be conscious of TIP principles as I was developing a new course: Introduction to Programming with Python, a 100-level class for non-majors which fulfills a general education requirement in quantitative reasoning. I knew a lot of my students were coming to me scared of math and hoping they’d see less of it in a programming class. I also knew that many of them were only a year or two removed from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, coming from homes that were unsafe for them, or coming into a world that felt unsafe for them.
I made a few deliberate choices when designing the course, influenced by both TIP and Grading for Growth practices. The three most salient were:
Flexible Deadlines, to allow for growth over the course of the term and an opportunity to make mistakes and try again. My approach to flexible deadlines has changed over the years for a number of reasons, but it was a guiding principle at the time and one that seemed pretty simple to implement.
Explicit Identification of “Failure” as a Learning Objective, to encourage students’ understanding that I might push them beyond their comfort zone when it came to academic work, and that I expected things to be difficult, so it was not their fault if they encountered difficulty. I used the word failure in my syllabus, but in hindsight I really meant faltering, or not immediately succeeding. (Maybe it’s a good time to reflect on my own assumption that those things were equivalent to failure.)
Language in the syllabus which acknowledged their humanity–recognizing that, at times, my class may not be the most important thing going on in their lives, and that I knew that, expected that, and would not hold that against them. An example, pulled from my sick policy: Your health and wellbeing as a human are more important than any university course, including mine.
Then, when I was slated to teach Intro to Python for the fourth time, I experienced a sudden and intense mental health crisis. And it all suddenly became a lot less abstract.
There’s not a good cohesive narrative to share here about point A to point B–I really did sort of wake up one day a lot less stable than I’d gone to sleep the day before. After muddling through a few strange weeks, I was pretty quickly diagnosed with a significant dissociative disorder which had reared its head only upon getting into the stability of a tenure-track job. Ironically, the reason I’d put so many TIP practices into my teaching was that I knew many of our students might experience a similar shift upon entering the new environment of undergraduate life–which brings us around to why these practices ended up helping me, the instructor.
I learned a lot about myself and my teaching practice that term (which included an extended hospitalization, a good deal of crying at work, and a lot of support from colleagues), but there are two things I want to highlight as it relates to alternative grading:
I had really underestimated how difficult it was to teach, and to learn, through trauma and even trauma recovery. I thought I knew, but I didn’t know. It is nearly impossible to retain any kind of information while your brain is in active fight-or-flight mode. I could not name for you a single student I taught that term. I’m not even sure where my notes are for that iteration of the course. However hard you imagine it may be for your students in this situation, it’s probably harder.
But crucially, because I had created a classroom culture of revision, mistakes, and trying again, I did not have to be perfect. I did not always have to return work on a strict timeline; late penalties were not as severe on the student, so I felt less pressure in the classroom to maintain rigidity. I was able to tell my students that sometimes (for example) I had forgotten to set up an assignment correctly, and that we needed to try it again, and that was okay. I had set up a culture where my students were allowed to make mistakes, so I was too.
I point this out because I really believe giving myself grace as an instructor like this was only possible because I was already implementing such grace for my students. Academia is so rarely forgiving–not just for our students, but for us as instructors.
It is a terribly difficult time to be a higher ed instructor right now. I imagine, as time goes on, we will all need some flexibility, grace, and patience. Doing the work of building a classroom culture of growth is deeply worth it not just for our students, but for ourselves.
I’ll leave you with only one piece of advice, one that I have difficulty implementing in my classes out of fear that it will seem out-of-place in a computer science classroom. However, as I gear up to teach Intro to Python one more time, I am challenging myself to implement this advice this term. It is not an original thought, but one I want to try here.
Take a deep breath together. Yes, even if you’re teaching math. Yes, even if you have a giant lecture hall (maybe especially if you have a giant lecture hall). There is something very powerful about all arriving mentally to the room at the same time.
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