The Skillful Teacher

Assess Learning Incrementally
If their resisting learning means that students will incur a low grade,
they need to know this as early as possible. Students have a right to
resist, but they also have a right to know what the consequences of
this resistance are for them. If you assess students’ progress only by
administering a mid-term and then final exam, resistant learners
have no way of knowing (until it’s too late to do anything about it)
that their lack of commitment means they will not achieve the
grade they may feel entitled to. I like to break up the assessed work
that students have to do into as many incremental tasks as the
course structure allows. If I had a ten-week course I would ideally
have ten homework or class assignments, each of which carried ten
points, with the first of these being the test on the syllabus I men-
tioned earlier. By the third or fourth week it would then be clear to
resistant students that—with 30 or 40 percent of the assigned points
now gone—their chance to receive the kind of grade they wished
was rapidly disappearing. Of course, many subjects do not break
down neatly into ten or so assignments, but the principle of con-
tinuous assessment holds true; if students learn as early as possible
the negative consequences of not taking learning seriously, it may
help decrease their resistance. At the very least it gives them full
knowledge of the consequences of their actions—a crucial compo-
nent of an ethical pedagogy.
Responding to Resistance
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