My wife, who teaches kindergarten, just started using a new web service called ClassDojo. On their website, ClassDojo claims to be a service for real-time behavior management: teachers input their roster, structure what kind of behaviors they want to measure, and then start using the service in the classroom by logging student behavior through a one-click action. The service catalogues the inputted behavior and creates reports for the teacher so that she can see how individual students or the class as a whole are performing in the various categories. To make it really easy for teachers, ClassDojo also has a mobile application that allows for quick and on-the-go recording of student behavior. This service is designed for K-12 educators and so it may not be all that interesting or useful for literature teachers in higher education. At least, I initially thought so. But when my wife was telling me how she used the service in her class of wild 5- to 6-year-olds to track behaviors such as class participation, I started to think differently. And, in that moment of contemplation, my wife turned to me and asked, “If the literature classroom is all about participation in discussion, how do you guys really keep track of it?” Good question.
My wife was right, the literature classroom is often structured around the discussion of a text—and class participation, either graded or un-graded, is important to the whole enterprise. Yet, the way we structure participation varies from class to class and tends to be potentially more assumptive than quantitative. Some teachers may reward students with daily participation points (which are generally somewhat nebulously defined); others may base student participation on the completion of daily assignments; and still others may encourage participation but may not worry about measuring it or keeping track of it in their grade books. However we assess participation in the classroom, there are often a few things that are easy to identify: namely, who participates the most and who participates the least. Students who fall on either end of the participation spectrum generally, for better or worse, tend to stick out. But what about the students in the middle? How do we understand their levels of participation? And further, can our current methods of assessing participation generate enough actionable data that can help us better understand our students and courses? Of course, participation data should not drive our literature classrooms, but it could help to enhance them. Continue reading “Can Class Participation Data Help Us Teach Literature?”