On a recent episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, Bonni Stachowiak invokes the “free like a free puppy” simile. I know this phrase from the open source community, which for a long time drew the distinction between “free like beer” (having no monetary cost) and “free like speech” (referring to having the right to change, hack, express yourself, with a tool or platform). This was eventually expanded to include “free like a puppy” to point out that open resources do require investment to get and keep them working, and a higher level of investment to develop them and keep them healthy and relevant as time goes on.

Bonni says that people she works with have started talking about sending some of their metaphorical “puppies” to go “live on a farm upstate,” and she encourages us to evaluate our “puppy” projects and ask if they’re really bringing us the joy that they should.

Which was a funny thing to hear as I was giving the dog her morning walk.

Bella is our pandemic puppy. She was a big shaggy older dog at the pound, who looked up at me and said “Sir, I’d really just like to go home please, I’m old and arthritic and I’ll lie on the couch and be no trouble at all.”

Then after about 3 days, she looked up at me and said “hey, it turns out I was just stiff because no one was exercising me. Let’s walk more. In fact, let’s run. Omigod is that a deer come on let’s CATCH A DEER…”

(She did not catch a deer, or a squirrel, or a raccoon, not for lack of trying. She did get the drop on a skunk once… bad for us, worse for the skunk.)

I was also assured that the dog would be my son’s and wife’s responsibility, and all I had to do was tolerate it. I have been informed by the law offices of BigSadEyes and PerkyEars that Bella was not a signatory to that agreement and will not be bound by it. Even when they do walk the dog, she comes home and gives me the “OK, I’m warmed up now, let’s go back out” look.

So it’s kind of funny to hear Bonni talking about projects which consume resources you hadn’t planned on, at the same time I’m trying to convince the dog to stop sniffing everything so I could get home and get changed and go to work.

(She did not stop sniffing everything. I got to work, eventually.)

So while the “send some puppies to the farm” metaphor sat a little heavy with me, I do like the idea of “evaluating” your puppy-projects. What do they need, and what do you need from them? Do you need to give some of your commitments more attention, and are there others which do need to go away? What’s worth doing better, and what’s worth not doing yourself.

I can’t help but think that I have a dog who adores me precisely because someone else said they couldn’t keep up with 80 pounds of running, barking, shedding dog. My colleagues will rightfully roll their eyes and point out that handing off projects is one of my real weak spots, so I’m not saying it’s easy, but not unlike an animal, it’s fairer and easier to find a project its “forever home” before I let it get neglected or in the way of my other commitments.

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(Tangent: this reminds me of the terrific episodes of All The Things ADHD in which Lee Skallerup Bessette and Aimée Morrison discuss Marie Kondo and the way things and arrangements of things can “spark joy” or not. Maybe someone can build out that connection in the comments because what would really spark joy for me is hitting that Publish button…)

I was listening to Brenna Clarke Gray’s terrific podcast You Got This Sunday night, in which she talks about the amount and kinds of labor which go into making accommodations for students’ individual situations, and the way this work can be front-loaded or dispensed with entirely through Universal Design for Learning.

And a whole bunch of things clicked – Brenna Clarke Gray talking about distribution of labor, Aimée Morrison and Lee Skallerup Bessette talking about work rules and norms on their podcast, Josh Eyler’s talk on grief and loss, and my colleague Alex’s question when he was just starting at Kenyon about who handled accommodations needed by faculty.

We talk about universal design for learning, when we’re thinking about the things we create for others. But what about the things we create for ourselves?

What would it mean to pursue universal design for teaching? Or let’s say universal design for educating (so we can include all the folks on campus who are engaged in education but don’t ourselves teach in classrooms)? How do we build schools where multiple pathways to doing the work well are equally accessible to all?

It’s a complicated question for lots of reasons, not least being the wide variety of jobs happening on campus and even the variety of tasks handled by individual people. In part, that’s why I think we need a new metaphor. We need to shift from policies which are essentially focused on the needs and desires of the institution, to a suite of options which focus on the needs of the individuals who do the work.

(I’d like to draw a parallel here with teacher-centered vs. student-centered pedagogy, but I can’t quite bring it home. I can even use “guide on the side” to describe the work relationship I want to get to but nothing rhymes with “Administration”. Leave your suggestions in the comments.)

Following some design thinking, I think it would mean really examining whether mission and values, policies, and practices are in alignment. Given that our institutional missions tend to be about the things we do for and with students, we might even need some new level between mission and policy. Shouldn’t there be a map connecting our goals for the environment we create for and with students, to our goals for the departmental environments in which we do the work?

Maybe we need to annotate our faculty handbook and employee handbook, like an annotated syllabus. OK, there are a lot of practical reasons that this is a terrible idea. But take it as a thought experiment – what would be a good way to reflect the community’s knowledge of its own practices? If we replace one-size-fits-all policies with menus of choices, how will we make it understandable? Are there reasonable ways to connect the policies as written to the stories of how they’re implemented?

Sharing stories gets us back to the big question of an inclusive community. Who gets heard and why? Who gets supported in making the best choices for their situation? Are there differences between material support (access to resources) and social support?

I never said this universal design for educating idea was going to be easy.

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(Many thanks to Maha Bali, who nudged me to dust off the blog and write this instead of just talking about it.)

The wonderful Rissa Sorensen-Unruh put a good question on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/RissaChem/status/1300860557214457858

And she and some other folks were nice enough to entertain my ideas, and then she pointed out that I’d basically started a blog post and I should go finish it so she could refer to it without counting on Twitter.

The first thing I noticed was that there are 2 questions there. Should we be using automated proctoring, and should we be proctoring at all?

The first question is easy for me to answer today. I simply haven’t seen a single lockdown browser or AI proctoring software option which I think delivers more value than it causes in harm. Look at the student experiences collected at https://twitter.com/Procteario – these are products which crash student computers, which distract and distress and insult students, which introduce the cover of “algorithms” where humans should be responsible for their judgment. And they visit these consequences worst on our most vulnerable students. So as of right now, I think colleges and universities shouldn’t be paying for these services.

(Do I believe that forever? Probably not. I can imagine a world where an AI proctor is closer to a teacher than a prison guard. But the language these systems use to sell themselves doesn’t convince me their designers can imagine it.)

The second question is actually really complicated. Should we proctor? Well, I think having a proctor for a driving test is probably a good idea, yes. When where we’re actually evaluating process, not just outcome, we have to have an observer. We’re not really talking about those when we talk about the kind of proctoring you can outsource, of course, but I think it’s useful to consider the kind of test where the observer adds value.

Similarly, I think it’s possible to agree that there are a set of examinations where the consequences of cheating would be really, really high, and it’s appropriate to impose barriers to success to make sure cheaters don’t get through. Medical boards come to mind; I think it’s pretty important that we not license doctors who cheat. For me, this line is somewhere around “matters of public safety” but more nuanced thought about the definition of “consequences” would be worthwhile.

We’ve started with a troubling assumption: “assume a cheater.” When we start with the assumption that every class includes a student who is, in essence, trying to steal their degree, then all sorts of choices become justifiable, and not only justifiable but necessary. Prioritizing catching cheaters also send the message that cheating is common, which can’t be a good message to send students.

I’m reminded that a long time ago I did some research into honor codes. One of the findings which stuck with me (though I can’t find it at the moment) was that the presence of an “honor code” per se wasn’t nearly as important as the presence of an active discussion about academic integrity on campus. This is the approach which starts by questioning the assumption – what can we do to have fewer cheaters? How do we inculcate a positive value for academic integrity, instead of a fear of being caught cheating? Could we just make the amount of cheating go down?

This is related to the question of how you build assessments and courses which students don’t want to cheat on, which you’ll notice, is at the heart of the original debate. There are lots of approaches to these, using language like “authentic assessments” and “nondisposable assignments.” And they’re all really good ideas, since they get at moving students toward practicing more complex skills, hopefully in more motivating environments. That’s what we’re all looking for, right?

Well, sort of. Every discipline does have some body of knowledge which you just need to have in your head to be successful. An “authentic assessment” might be an indirect way to test that knowledge, while a more direct test might be a better measure of exactly what’s known and what isn’t. If you’re looking to identify the specific areas where a student and a teacher need to focus their efforts, less “authentic” measures might make sense.

We’ve shifted into the zone of formative assessment, though. If the point is less to take a measurement than to use that measurement to further learning, then suddenly we’re in the zone of retrieval practice and spaced repetition and automatic re-takes on quizzes… in other words, strategies which don’t particularly require proctors. (At least not if the students actually understand why we’re using these approaches.)

I’m reminded of Jim Lang’s fantastic Cheating Lessons, which looks at the ways in which course and assignment design can incentivize or remove the incentives to cheat. One of the things I really like about this book is the way Lang offers both an extreme example of a course which has been radically redesigned to address a reason students cheat, and some less extreme examples of courses which make smaller changes.

Because these things are more work, right? Even the more liberal approaches to quizzing imply spending more time writing good quiz questions. Authentic assessments might mean searching out authentic but appropriate data sets; they mean spending more time coaching students and eventually more time grading more complicated assignments. This is the work of good teaching, but it is labor that has to come from somewhere. It can’t be by accident that I see lots of good teaching innovations which return in a year, scaled back a little. Faculty members find out which parts work best and trim the less valuable parts away. Much the way their students do.

And more complex assessments are also labor for our students. Many of our students are already stretched to their max between commitments inside and outside the classroom. The “opportunity” to work harder, learn more, demonstrate their accomplishments more meaningfully may be a double-edged sword, for those students who need to learn about prioritization and letting some things be “good enough”. I don’t in any way mean that classes should be dumbed down, but scale is important, and it needs to be considered across the whole student experience.

Speaking of “good enough”, it’s time to not write my cool closing paragraph and just hit publish…

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If you read that far, you deserve something, so here’s the clip where I learned that some people call proctors “invigilators”.

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The original thread is really good and I encourage you to check it out. Lots of folks had good points which fed into any good points I made.

I extemporized something in yesterday’s faculty meeting which I thought maybe I should write down. Use it if it’s useful.

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For the last 3 years or so, most of my professional engagement has been in the form of online meetings. I am, if I do say so myself, pretty good at them. (Not great, but I know who the greats are and I learn from them.)

By Friday afternoon, I’ll have co-hosted (with my invaluable colleagues) 15 online workshops over 2 weeks for my faculty about moving to remote learning. I’m writing this between workshops 8 and 9.

I’d say the last one was pretty OK, and the one the morning before that was almost pretty OK. None have been up to my high standards.

And yet faculty members are coming back to workshop after workshop, and thanking me and telling me the workshops were helpful. At a time when they need connection and support, they’re getting it. What I’m giving is good enough.

And that’s what I want you to remember. You don’t have to be that good to be good enough. You’ll want to get better, and you’ll get a lot of practice and you will get better, and you’ll learn some tips and tricks which, in future when you actually get to plan in advance, will make you better still.

It’s gonna be frustrating, because you’re exceptionally good teachers and you’re going to see all the flaws. But give yourself – and your students – permission to be good enough.

Because it’s actually pretty good.

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Photo: “Bent Pillar” by Bryan Alexander, CC-BY at https://flic.kr/p/2gVGyD7. I tried a couple of different searches on Flickr – “lean” and “good enough” first, and then “support”, and I decided this fits.