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Contract grading experiment
I don't like giving grades, especially in creative writing classes. Giving feedback and letting students know how to improve their work is not a problem, even though it's time consuming. Sometimes grades feel like a nuisance and in a creative writing class, I just assume it was simply pass/fail. With that in mind, I decided to finally try out contract grading in my poetry workshop. I came up with a simple set of criteria to earn a B or a C and told students they needed to create their own contract for an A (it seemed that a D or an F would simply follow a lack of C criteria). It seemed like a brilliant plan in theory; students would have ownership in determining what measured "excellence" and thus define their own set of criteria for meeting that.
Similar to my text choosing, I did not fully think this through prior to execution and as I am looking through initial contract proposals, I now have a whole new set of thoughts of how to do this better in the future. Many students seem to be taking my simple B criteria and just upping it a notch (instead of responding to 80% of the work they'll respond to 100% of the work). That in itself works as a piece, but what I had envisioned (and clearly not communicated effectively) was that the contract should move beyond my criteria and come up with a minimal set of their own criteria that marked excellence. I might have attached this to the course objectives (for exhibiting excellence in mastering them might deem an A) or given them some possibilities to consider for an A (which I wanted to avoid because I truly wanted them to design things that belonged to their own individual expectations and goals).
On the plus side, many of the contracts do speak about personal things they wish to get out of the course and thus their criteria addresses that. Like all grand experiments, the first time through will be less than perfect in terms of what I imagined contracts might look like. I can live with that imperfection since it is one grand learning experience and that's the juice of the job.
