What do we grade when we grade participation?

Finally, my long-awaited post on participation. I know you’ve been waiting with bated breath.

Let me start with this. Here are two contradictory statements, both of which I believe:

1) Students who do not speak in class are often contemplative learners who have difficulty speaking on the fly and therefore should be graded only on their written work.

2) Shy students who do not speak in class should be expected to contribute verbally in class, because they often fall back on their shyness as an excuse not to push themselves out of their comfort zones.

Part of the reason why I believe both of these statements is because I am a shy person myself and feel both of these things about myself. It’s slightly amusing that I am in a teaching position, because of the obvious fact that it requires speaking in public, but usually when my position is clear (i.e. when I am the one in charge), I don’t have a particular problem. However, leading discussion has been the hardest part of my teaching performance and something I’ve only recently felt I’ve become good at. This is because it’s not exactly speaking in front of people that’s the problem; it’s having that spontaneous conversation part. I tend to be contemplative rather than spontaneous, so inserting myself into conversations is hard for me (though, as I say, in the teaching environment I have improved on this).

I mention all this because I completely understand what my quiet students are experiencing. Ok, there are always quiet students who are quiet because they didn’t do the reading. But many of them are contemplative; they prefer listening to speaking, and then writing once they’ve thought about it some more.

I don’t know if I’m just forgetting something, but I do not remember being graded on participation when I was an undergraduate. Now, it could be that some of my B grades were a result of my never, NEVER speaking in class and I just somehow wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I didn’t read the syllabus closely, or maybe we were being judged by some professors on our participation but weren’t being told. (Or, you know, maybe my papers weren’t A quality. I’m not proud.) The thing is, I really don’t know, and I really don’t remember being told either overtly or covertly that verbal contributions were expected or required for our grade (even though we did have discussions), and I don’t remember ever speaking in class (though maybe I said something once in a great while by the time I was a junior or senior).

So is it hypocritical that I often get frustrated with the students in my classes who just will not speak, no matter what I do? That sometimes I secretly think of them as stubborn or even lazy because they don’t seem to even try to speak up? Or is it me recognizing something about myself?

I have this one student, M. She is one of the ones who has really been making me think about this. She never speaks in class, not even in small groups. I can’t remember her ever talking to me after class. She made an impression on me at the beginning of the semester because, for the first (ungraded, short, personal) essay, she wrote about a particular cult TV show I happen to love, and I gushed in her paper about how she could write her research paper on it. Now, this must have made some sort of impression, because she did end up writing her research paper on this. But when I read and responded to that first short essay, I thought, “oh, I’m going to have some connection with this girl.” You know? But then she fell off the radar. Honestly, I kinda forgot about her. Until her first formal essay, which knocked my socks off. Then I looked at her in class one day while she was doing some freewriting I asked everyone to do, and I knew watching her that she was freewriting about this TV show we both like (since this was a freewrite about the research paper), and I thought, “This girl is me. This is who I was at 18.” She never talks. She doesn’t seem to socialize with the others in the class. She is clearly engaged, does all of the reading, is consistently attentive, has never missed or even been late to a single class, has worked really hard on her research, and is a thoughtful and articulate writer. And yet, despite the fact that I honestly think of her as “me at 18,” I have failed to forge a relationship with her (beyond any kind of influence I may have had on her that I don’t know about). And honestly, it’s because I have 59 other students to think about, many who are openly demanding of my attention. This makes me sad, and yet I know my own limitations.

Wow, this has turned into something I didn’t mean it to be, and yet I don’t feel like editing or changing it.

What I really meant to address here is: what do we grade when we grade participation? Why do we have a participation grade? What does it really mean?

Despite the fact that I do not remember ever saying a word in my undergraduate classes, when I starting teaching and creating syllabi, I didn’t really question the idea of making participation part of the grade. The idea is to encourage verbal participation and reward students for contributing in class. Sounds good, right?

But it has led to a lot of questions for me. How do we truly gauge participation? What do we do about students who are so excited about the material that they inadvertently dominate the conversation? (I’m not talking about blowhards who won’t shut up — those present their own problems — but rather good, excited students.) What about the students who are excellent, thoughtful writers who are clearly paying attention but can’t find it in themselves to speak up?

Before people start giving me ideas about how to encourage participation, please know that I do A LOT of activities designed to encourage participation, and I also give students plenty of opportunities to explore their ideas in small groups instead of having to speak in front of the whole class (even though the class itself, at 20 students, is already a fairly small group). I often explain that quiet students should take the opportunity to report small-group activities, to give them a chance to speak in class. But the real truth is that these activities rarely carry over into the whole-group experience. Plus, to be honest, if the extent of a student’s whole-group participation is to report on their small-group activity, I’m not all that likely to remember that as participation.

I have also done lots of activities where we all go around the room and everyone is forced to say at least one thing (that is, they report on something they just wrote about, or they have to pick out a passage they find important, etc). I believe in this as an important activity. But if someone speaks in a situation where she’s being forced to speak, is that really participating? (I suppose she could refuse, but usually even students who haven’t done the reading scramble to find something to say in order to avoid embarrassment.) This mild forcing is good for getting voices out there, but again, in my experience it has rarely translated into any change in an individual student’s behavior. Is this really “participating”?

Look, I know I’m a very encouraging and pretty unintimidating teacher who thinks a LOT about changing things up and doing pretty much everything I can do to get conversation going. And I achieve that — it’s just that usually, it’s the same students conversing.

In my experience, student behavior in this regard rarely changes over the course of the semester. Unlike writing — which, let’s be honest, also rarely undergoes a significant transformation over the course of a single semester, but in which I can often see some improvements — I have very rarely seen a student really come out of her shell and speak more in a full-group situation (although I’m willing to admit that this could be a failure of my own observation skills).

So what are we grading when we grade participation? Some students just find speaking in class to be easier than others do — should they automatically be rewarded for doing something that comes easily to them? Yet what would our classes be without the ones who are always willing to rescue a flailing conversation, the ones we rely on to at least attempt articulating a half-formed thought? If those students are better at oral than written communication, then shouldn’t they get some reward for that? I have a colleague that takes what he calls “active listening” into consideration in the participation grade, and part of “active listening” is thoughtful writing in a journal. But I have response papers — which is a separate grade. Should I be assessing the student before AND after class discussion? And really, isn’t pretty much everyone earning an A at that point (unless they’re really just messing up — in which case, they’ll be getting a lower grade anyway)?

Plus the actual grading is pretty bogus. Most instructors admit that they don’t grade participation harshly. I have a clear outline in my syllabus about what constitutes each grade in terms of participation, yet the truth is that I usually am softer on it than what I outline. If a student never speaks in class, shouldn’t they get an F? Isn’t that the equivalent of not turning in a paper? And yet, I’ve only once given below a C in participation (it was a very special case), and a C is itself a rare occurrance. If I don’t see it as something that should be judged on the criteria I myself have laid out, then why am I grading it?

I suppose one potential reason to have a participation grade is that you can have some way of reacting to students who are openly disruptive in the class, but if I’m going to be honest about it, I have a hard time using that as well. What grade do you get for being an asshole? B because at least you were engaged in some way? C because you weren’t engaged in a meaningful way? D because you disrupted the learning of others? And if you get a C or a D, will you be banging down my door demanding that I prove or justify this grade? I always feel like I’m being vindictive if I assign lower than a B for a pain-in-the-butt student.

Part of me wants to stop grading participation in writing classes (literature classes might be different?). Verbal contributions should simply be expected as a requirement of the course. After all, the students who find it easy to talk in class aren’t going to stop doing it because it’s not graded, and it wouldn’t change anything about how I conduct the class. But I hesitate — maybe those students who are better at oral than written communication should get some kind of reward, and maybe students who can’t or won’t stretch themselves in this regard should feel negative consequences. I really can’t decide.

Any thoughts?

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