Workshops and a community of practice in Quebec for knowledge transfer

Making alternative grading practices known in post-secondary francophone Quebec

Today’s guest post is from François Arseneault-Hubert and Caroline Cormier of CEGEP André-Laurendeau, a francophone post-secondary public college in Montréal, Québec, which welcomes about 4,000 students, a good number of which are first-generation students with varied backgrounds. Both technical and pre-university programs are offered. I (Robert) met both authors at a recent symposium on higher education in Quebec and was fascinated by the unique “CEGEP” system found in that province and how alternative grading can serve students in that environment. As part of our ongoing interest in international perspectives on alt-grading, I asked them to contribute an article to the blog. Enjoy!

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From research to transfer

You certainly know the enthusiasm we felt when we started using alternative grading practices (AGP) in our courses. That feeling that it so perfectly fits our values, engages our students and, at last, fulfills the true purpose of assessment! That feeling is as satisfying as scratching that itch you’ve had for decades, without even realizing it anymore.

Starting in the winter semester of 2022, a few colleagues in our chemistry department started experimenting with specifications grading and standards-based grading. We felt delighted by how it changed our classroom and our students’ reactions to receiving our feedback, and by how it helped with giving a course grade that validly represents the status of learning at the end of the semester. Thus, to keep experimenting, in August 2023, we officially launched a research project with our colleagues Bruno Voisard and Véronique Turcotte. Our aims were as follows:

1. to document the planning and implementation of AGP by teachers who have minimal experience with it, across several disciplines at post-secondary level ;

2. to measure its effect, if any, on classroom motivational climate ;

3. to measure its effect, if any, on learning.

In this project, we find ourselves at the same time applying AGPs to our classes, coaching new teachers how to do it, recording all of that via journaling and interviews (objective 1), while also creating, adapting and administering questionnaires to students (objectives 2 and 3).

This blogpost is not, however, the story of that research project¹. Rather, it is the story of its necessary offshoot: knowledge transfer about AGP through workshops and a community of practice (CoP) in francophone Quebec.

The urge to share

We teach chemistry at the CEGEP level, in the province of Quebec. This post from Prof. Timothy Budge describes the basic idea of CEGEP, which is unique to Quebec. CEGEP combines the last year of high school and the first year of four-year college instruction into pre-university (2-year) programs, and also offers technical training programs (3-year, including the last year of high-school) for different professions such as nurses, architectural technicians, and early childhood educators.

In the same institution, future university students learn alongside technical training students in their general education courses (French as a first language and literature, English as a second language, philosophy, and physical education). Finally, CEGEPs are constituted in a network, with each institution providing government-mandated curricula. This network is a great strength: close to 20,000 teachers are connected this way, and share a similar reality.

We believe that alternative grading supports the CEGEPs fundamental mission: democratizing higher education for Quebecers. Since their inception nearly 60 years ago, CEGEPs have been instrumental in bringing Quebec’s population access to technical and higher education at the level of or above that of other Canadian provinces. However, it still fails to equitably award diplomas across the socio-economical spectrum. We believe that traditional grading practices are at least partially responsible for that fact. Switching to alternative grading practices (with a focus on equity) seems like the obvious fix. The main obstacles then become the sheer lack of shared knowledge about these alternatives, and the understandable suspicion of teachers who perceive this new knowledge as a threat to their professional identity. The question of “how to bring them to the hobby” is crucial.

Thus, our interest in sharing our enthusiasm towards alternative grading with most of these thousands of CEGEP teachers was met with a how-to challenge. On one hand, French is the primary language of instruction in Quebec: three-quarters of CEGEP students attend a French-language institution, and one-quarter attend an English-language institution. On the other hand, the knowledge we wished to share was in equal parts made up of rigorous research-based data mostly coming from the USA in English, and of our own observations and experiences. Some alternative grading enthusiasts write books, some publish blog posts, and some do both! But not many write or otherwise communicate in French. We decided to fill that void. We opted for a more direct, albeit narrower in scope, two-pronged method: workshops, and a community of practice.

This approach takes advantage of two key facts about CEGEPs. First, each CEGEP holds professional development days for its teachers: perfect opportunities for workshops. Usually, pedagogical advisors (PAs) plan these days with some teacher input and may invite external instructors to tackle issues of local relevance. Second, all of us CEGEP teachers and PAs are now working with Microsoft Teams: we are literally (though virtually) connected. This allows for fluid post-workshop follow-up, while also providing a logistical basis for an ongoing community of practice about alternative grading for those interested in sharing and learning beyond the conferences and workshops.

Workshops

After having written an article published in our main CEGEP teachers' journal about our first experiences with AGP and having presented in a few provincial conferences, we have been invited to these development days in a growing number of CEGEPs. Considering that most people attending have no prior knowledge of alternative grading and present varied degrees of intrinsic motivation towards its subject (in some CEGEPs, these days are mandatory activities), we planned bottom-up, hands-on workshops.

We start by asking questions about the aims of assessment. With the audience, we usually agree on those aims suggested by a reliable source, the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation.² Those aims are to support and to accurately measure learning³.

Then, we briefly introduce the audience to the core concepts of AGP, as a practical framework to align assessment and grading with those aims, with the help of a series of slides we call News Flash AGP. This short presentation demonstrates that, to satisfy both aims, we must allow students to make mistakes, and we must not include those errors made during the learning process in the course grade.

With aims clarified and this framework, we jump into case studies of teachers dissatisfied with the way assessment or grading are conducted. Six cases were carefully written by our team to reflect our experiences as teachers before we even considered the possibility of alternative grading. They were also inspired by the questions which arose during the conferences and after the publication of the article. We find them to cover a satisfying breadth of issues alternative grading can address:

• Sustaining student motivation in the face of high standards;

• Getting students to use the feedback we provide through assessments;

• Resolving discrepancies between the course grade traditionally obtained and the teacher’s judgment about learning;

• Integrating self- and peer-assessment in the course grade;

• Confirming individual learning when a task is carried out in teams;

• Reducing student’s anxiety through reduced competition for the grade;

• and more.

We are positive that these issues arise naturally. A teacher may have no prior interest in alternative grading, but they surely have encountered and given thought to at least one of these issues. The seeds of alternative grading are to be found in each teacher; they need some light shone on them to help those seeds grow.

We usually choose three cases, among the six we have written, based on our appraisal of the people in the audience and the classes they teach. We then split the participants into small teams. Participants analyze each case and devise solutions, calling upon their burgeoning understanding of AGP, to the grading problems described. Later, all teams discuss their solutions with the whole group.

[Excerpt] An example of a case study: Sylvain, math teacher

I've been teaching math for three years, and never taught the same course twice. I'm looking forward to a time when I can finally reuse material I prepared in a previous semester!

In fact, this week I reused some old material, but to help a student. I'm teaching Calculus II, and I realized that my student hadn't mastered the basics of Calculus I. I gave her some problems from the Calculus I course I taught last year (I wasn't her teacher, so she hadn't already seen them).

She came back to see me shortly afterwards, and I was very surprised: she hadn't even been able to start the problems I'd given her. She said she didn't know the subject, or didn't remember it. Yet she had taken the course and received a passing grade last semester. I understand that students can forget a little, but to that extent?

Calculus I is, quite rightly, a prerequisite to Calculus II. Even if this student has got the course credits, does she really have the necessary level to take my course this session? And I really wonder how she managed to get a passing grade in Calculus I...

We used to provide the cases as soon as we had clarified the aims. The hope was for solutions, in line with AGP core concepts, to emerge spontaneously. Those did emerge. However, other ideas could also swamp the discussion and cause confusion. For instance, for Sylvain's case study, naïve solutions might have been around active learning (supposing that the previous teacher was more of a lecturer). This is conjecture, and not in line with what we wanted participants to discuss, which was that grades should accurately describe students’ level of knowledge. This is why we now follow the aims with the short News Flash AGP, which the audience reacts mostly favorably to, having been primed with the aims, and only then proceed with the cases. We find the ensuing discussions to be more on-topic.

When the participants ask for it (and they often do), we also narrate our own implementation and iterations of standards-based grading in introductory chemistry.

We have found that, beyond the specifics of standards based-grading, specifications grading or ungrading, the common ground of alternative grading that we want our audience to take home at this introductory level is that it

1. allows for retakes and reattempts, and

2. it awards course grades that are not (at least not entirely) a sum of points.

This second takeaway is important in our CEGEPs context: most of our institutional assessment policies⁴, while not always explicitly demanding it, imply that course grades are a sum of points. Thus, most CEGEP teachers would not dare to grade differently – or do not even know that another paradigm in grading practices exists. One recurring question we hear from participants hearing about AGP for the first time is: “Are we even allowed to do that?”

Adopting alternative grading practices is akin to a paradigm shift. We believe that to facilitate this shift, sufficient attention must be given to the why (issues), the what (core concepts) and the how (concrete steps taken to implement AGP, accounts of it). We have found that the available literature and pedagogical development opportunities in francophone Quebec sometimes provide with the why and a basic understanding of the what. It is utterly lacking in the how. Our participants are, unsurprisingly, eager to hear more about it. We gladly comply. And when they crave for more, we welcome them into the community of practice.

Community of practice

We conclude workshops, articles and conferences with an invitation to join the community of practice (CoP) about alternative grading. Those who wish to keep sharing and learning about AG can participate in our monthly online meeting. Attendance has been in progress since October 2023, when our first meeting gathered 10 people, up to 40 at the start of this Fall semester. Most participants are CEGEP teachers and PAs, but also high school and university faculty from Quebec.

Fig. 1 Number of participants to each CoP meeting (online)

We have dedicated a Microsoft Teams team to that CoP, where documentation, meeting details and discussions in the form of asynchronous chat are gathered. The frequency of synchronous meetings is constant, but the exact time varies each month to allow for different people to participate.

The first meetings were mainly led by our team, with introductory topics to AGP such as the four pillars and the four steps course design for AGP. As we progressed, the meetings became more free-form, with more numerous members asking specific questions that sparked valuable discussions. Teachers who are already doing alternative grading share their experience, their successes and difficulties. Often, critically important questions emerge at the end of a meeting, thus constituting the agenda of the next one.

Topics discussed in these meetings thus cover a wide range of the participants’ preoccupations: the pros and cons of binary vs multiple-level rubrics, the possibility for pass-fail course grades (a radical idea considering CEGEPs’ administrations require a 0-100% course grade), the differences and similarities between standards-based and specifications grading, the importance of quality qualitative feedback. At the invitation of members, we have dared to touch on more political issues, like the equity drive towards alternative grading. We also shared tips on ­­how to broach the subject with the academic deans, who often are not aware of alternative grading and might be hesitant in supporting its implementation. Since CEGEP level is considered higher education in Quebec, the teachers are responsible for the educational settings of their classes, and have the academic freedom to do so. A dean can not outright block a teacher from implementing AGP, but they can hinder it. Therefore, their support is valuable.

One recurring topic of note, particularly meaningful to the existence of the CoP, is the unease of adopting AGP or just experimenting with it when coworkers (who are perhaps teaching the same class) stick to traditional grading. Having a space to meet with like-minded teachers and PAs is a major incentive to persevere.

Some members are very active, supplying their own accounts and questions, while others are more reserved and seem to meet only to listen to others. As one member puts it, being the “tofu in the sauce” is an important step towards alternative grading for some. For those, this CoP might be the only time and (virtual) space they can consider alternative grading, because none of it happens in their more immediate work environment. We rest assured that even the quieter members gain something useful from the CoP.

Closing comments: research and transfer in a mutually beneficial relationship

What started for our team as a research project about AGP, with typical scholarly ambitions about the diffusion of its results, necessarily pivoted to include the workshops and the CoP. The knowledge transfer those activities support is, as previously mentioned, necessary to the research. To implement the AGP that we want to research about, we need an environment that allows it. We need teachers and PAs around us to believe AGP is possible. To believe that it is possible, they first must know of its existence.

As more teachers and PAs in CEGEPs (but also high schools) across Quebec learn about AGP, we are starting to see others publishing their accounts of it. Even some deans are starting to show interest.

Maintaining close relationships with our peers as potential users of AGP is also beneficial to our research project in surprising ways. We have notably devised a supplemental research aim based on the most pressing questions of members of the CoP: to describe the ways in which the institutional assessment policies support or hinder the adoption of AGP in CEGEPs.

This research aim is currently under study. Preliminary results show that indeed, AGP is feasible within CEGEPs. As stated previously, it contributes to CEGEPs’ mission. However, because AGPs are not widely known, policies do not foresee their application, and their writing does not invite nor inspire AGP. At least, most policies do not directly obstruct them. As you can imagine, this knowledge is valuable to our members.

Indeed, the CoP generates essential interactions between researchers and end-users of the results. It stimulates our target audience : they are awaiting answers to questions that they formulate. Essentially, it is also a learning space, where we mutually train ourselves to use AGP and to discuss it in a way that is welcoming to new users.

If you want to know more about it, we extend our CoP invitation to you. Write to us, and we will add you to the team!

About the authors

François Arseneault-Hubert (francois.arseneault-hubert@claurendeau.qc.ca) has been teaching chemistry at CEGEP André-Laurendeau since 2013. The great online pivot of 2020 has provided him with the opportunity to jolt his assessment and grading methods to better satisfy his keen sense of justice. He certainly owes this latter sensitivity to his two young kids, who, everyday, are a source of sleep deprivation and a reminder that all people deserve respect, no matter their age.

Caroline Cormier (caroline.cormier@claurendeau.qc.ca) has been teaching chemistry at CEGEP André-Laurendeau since 2008. She led many education research projects about varied topics: inverted classroom, oral scientific communication and laboratory autonomy to name but a few. One of her priorities is to apply research results to professional practice. Beyond her teaching and research duties, she is also a scientific commentator on the radio show Moteur de recherche on ICI Première (a French-language radio network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).

1. At the time of writing this post, we are still collecting data. We have few research results to share.

2. “Superior council for education”. It is a provincial government mandated but independent council producing bi-yearly extensive reports on the state and needs of education at all levels in the Province.

3. Our translation is slightly simpler than the original statement : soutenir l’apprentissage et témoigner des acquis.

4. They are called Politique institutionnelle d’évaluation des apprentissages (PIEA) in French.