Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:
- Steven tells you about a professor who experimented with giving his students a single deadline for all their assignments, and how it seemed to affect their learning.
- A reader pushes back on the idea that any single moment can really transform someone’s teaching.
- Our colleague Ruth Hammond tells you about some new books on teaching in higher education that you might want to check out.
No Deadlines, No Problem
Tobias Rush started teaching in 1997. His music students were busy flitting from one performance to another, from practice sessions to lessons to one-credit courses — such that they kept missing his deadlines for assignments. He spent too much energy weighing their excuses as “judge and jury,” he says, instead of teaching.
His solution? Drop the deadlines.
Rush, now an associate professor of music theory and technology at the University of Dayton, starts each semester by telling his students that each assignment’s due date is more of a suggestion. They can turn in homework late and redo it as many times as needed for a better grade. Every assignment is ultimately due by 5 p.m. on the Friday before finals — no exceptions.
The benefits of the approach, as he laid out in a Reddit post featuring “professor lifehacks,” are straightforward: “I never have to spend time and effort judging whether or not a homework assignment is excusably late,” he wrote, and “I don’t have to deal with students asking for leniency with homework deadlines; they recognize that they already have it very good.”
Rush told me his students, all in their first and second year, appreciate having the space to better understand their time-management skills, or lack thereof. Maybe 10 to 20 percent hit every suggested due date, a similar portion turn in everything at the last minute, and the rest fall somewhere in between.
Rush is clear: A consequence of his policy is many, many more assignments to grade. He thinks the trade-off probably makes sense only for disciplines like his, in which lower-level assignments have only a “finite number of errors” and little room for interpretation. But he says the workload is more predictable — he can shut himself away during finals week to grade, assured of no interruptions or pleading over deadlines — and, in most cases, the approach is actually better for students’ understanding.
In his old system, a struggling student might fall behind early, misunderstanding key concepts that lead to F’s, and get stuck there. Under the new way, that student can catch up with iterative learning. In the first round of grading, students get little more than cryptic marks indicating where they went astray. They have to figure out their errors for themselves. Often that means learning from other students in the class, Rush says. Otherwise, repeat strugglers can meet with him, during office hours, for deep dives into a lesson.
Some students will probably fail, or get an A, under any system, Rush says. His method allows the procrastinators at the margins to understand the material rather than give up. He’s done no serious study of the results, he says, but has noticed that the average grades in his courses have gone up, with maybe one or two fewer F’s per class.
The procrastinators, Rush says, remind him a bit of his father’s experience in an engineering course. According to an old family story, “he slept through the final, or something like that,” Rush recalls, “and went, tail between his legs, to the professor after the fact, saying, ‘Is there anything I can do? I realize I made a real bad mistake.’” The professor gave him a piece of chalk and told him to sketch a diagram from memory on the board. He did, and passed the course.
Rush likes to think that his approach helps people like his father. The point of his course isn’t to enforce deadlines but to cultivate knowledge.
It’s not the grade that’s important, Rush says. It’s the comprehension the grade is supposed to reflect. For years, he says, his students have appreciated being treated “like adults,” with gripes few and far between.
Have you abandoned some tried-and-true feature of a course to see what would happen? How did it work out? Email me, at steve.johnson@chronicle.com, and we might include it in a future newsletter.
Clarification (1/31/2019, 3:37 p.m.): This article has been updated to clarify that Rush’s approach is tailored to certain kinds of lower-level assignments, not all assignments.
