Integrating Academic Standards with Support
Successful programs for non-traditional learners are those that commit to creating learning environments that ensure trust, transparency, and reflection, and that define clear learning goals and objectives. Just as importantly, they create classroom cultures that take student scholarship seriously and invite students to co-create these spaces and bring their own goals and life experiences into the classroom. This shared responsibility and mutual accountability diffuses the tension between maintaining academic standards and offering support and creates an alliance among students, faculty, and sponsoring institutions to seek and uphold mutually beneficial outcomes.
Students thrive when challenged to meet high standards and given the support to do so
- Lowering academic standards for nontraditional students can be experienced as patronizing and interpreted as indicating low expectations of the students’ abilities.
- Nontraditional students may require support in executive functioning and other skills that facilitators may not be prepared to teach.
- The values of maintaining academic standards and offering support are based on respect and accountability:
- Respect for the potential of every student to achieve at a high level
- Accountability to each participant and to each other, creating a classroom that moves forward together
“I was afraid that it was going to be a sort of feel-good experience. You know, pat you on the back and make everybody feel good, but not really challenge you. But it was completely the opposite. It was a real college class and it was hard and I loved it.”
– Abbie Navarrete, Free Minds Austin Graduate
Guiding Principles
Principle 1: Ignoring Academic Standards is Unfair and Ineffective
For many nontraditional students, enrolling in formal education is incredibly risky. Nonrigorous, “feel good” grading and evaluations can set these students up for failure in subsequent educational programs. This can lead students to reject formal education altogether and can cause them to feel that they once again have been betrayed by institutions and people in whom they have put their faith and trust.
Anecdote: Appreciation for standards
I clearly remember an early moment in my teaching career, being nervous about handing back papers, including one to a bright student whose writing was terrible. I made sure to hand the papers back at the end of the night because I was afraid of her reaction. I got a call from this student before she even left the parking lot. Surprisingly, she called to thank me. She told me she appreciated that I was being honest about her work and helping her see what she needed to do to produce college-level work. Her disappointment from previous educational experiences had stemmed from a lack of clear academic standards.
Principle 2: Withholding Support Undermines Student Success
The education system has not been kind to many nontraditional students. Students have entered our classrooms with all kinds of discouraging experiences. For example:
- One of our students was told by a teacher when he was a child that he would never amount to anything because his reading level was too low for his age.
- Another student was discouraged from applying to college at all, after being told she wasn’t college material.
- Still another student was pushed out of high school because his test scores were too low, and the principal did not want to jeopardize the school’s federal funding, which was tied to student test scores. He sat home for 3 months until finding a second-chance high school.
These are experiences where standards were set but no support systems were in place to help each student meet those standards, or situations where an authority figure gave up on an individual in pursuit of a group statistic.
A principle that unites the nontraditional education programs where we teach is that each individual has the potential for high achievement and should be given individual supports that help them reach their educational goals.
REFLECTION
We had a student who was hard of hearing. Captioning in videos and live transcript on Zoom made it possible for him to access the course and contribute to class discussions. The class as a whole benefited from his participation—and from the captions. Some students mentioned that captions helped them focus. Others described how captions helped with language learning.
Principle 3: Being Clear About Academic Standards Is a Form of Support
When the same courses are offered year after year, academic standards and course outcomes should remain consistent, while at the same time being flexible enough to accommodate changing landscapes in higher education. When designing a syllabus, it is important to ensure that standards will match those at other institutions of higher education so that our students can pursue their education with confidence.
In the context of Clemente Courses, which are free of tuition, we are particularly sensitive to making sure students are prepared for programs for which they will have to pay or take out a loan. If we don’t do all we can to prepare students to succeed in other settings—either by being cavalier about enforcing academic standards or raising false expectations—we risk doing more harm than good.
Practices
Practice 1: Provide Rubrics for Each Assignment
While rubrics can sometimes feel mechanistic for teachers, a rubric that is thoughtfully designed by the instructor can be a valuable tool in communicating what might otherwise be unspoken academic standards. A rubric describing expectations and varying levels of accomplishment for an assignment can help guide students in working or reworking their assignment to meet those standards. A rubric may also prompt critical discussions about academic standards—for example, a conversation about what college-level means.
Rubrics have become anathema to many faculty because they seem rigid and may cause teachers to focus on the tool at the expense of overall learning. That may be the case, but rubrics were originally developed to help people stay accountable, be transparent in how they were assessing work, and give students clarity in what they are working towards. In other words, rubrics can be a useful way to be transparent in your teaching goals and set clear expectations in the classroom.
Providing rubrics ahead of time helps make grading more transparent and connects the evaluated skills to the course materials.
Practice 2: Be Thoughtful in Providing Feedback
Here are some general suggestions to guide your feedback to students:
- Write comments that are specific, actionable, and positively framed. Clear, practical feedback allows students to apply your recommendations.
- Provide opportunities for students to revise work that does not yet meet your learning objectives.
- Provide both formative assessments (low-stakes, in-process feedback designed to challenge students to develop learning further) and summative assessments (end-of-term feedback designed to evaluate student learning or performance). Formative assessments early in the term allow students to use feedback to develop their thinking and improve their skills.
- When introducing an assignment, describe what students can expect from your comments. (For example, “I will always give you one or two suggestions to use for future assignments.”)
- In narrative feedback, be concise. Start with a strength, then one area for development, then an approach to try next time. In general, people are only able to absorb three points of feedback at a time.