Don't Let Students Off the Hook for Doing Their Work
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why holding students accountable for completing their work is an essential part of education, not optional.
Key Takeaways
- Work completion is non-negotiable - Students can't learn from work they never do
- Letting students off the hook is the opposite of helping - Excusing non-completion teaches students that effort is optional
- Accountability is caring - Teachers who insist on work completion are the ones who actually believe in their students' potential
Transcript
If we want students to learn, we have to care about students doing their work.
And I don't really understand this insistence that students doing their work is just a matter of compliance or that students can learn without doing their work.
Like, we have all these calls to overlook the importance of students doing their work.
And that doesn't really make sense to me, right?
This idea that there's this, you know, misunderstood genius student who is doing nothing maybe not even coming to class but is going to pass all the tests with flying colors like this is a hypothetical non-existent student and for most students like 99.9 percent of our students they need to come to class and do their work in order to learn and that's not to discount the value of out of school learning of course students can learn things on their own things they're interested in things their parents teach them things they learn through books and podcasts or whatever.
But when it comes to the learning that students are supposed to do in school, that learning happens pretty much entirely through their assignments, right?
Through the classwork that they do, the practice problems that they do, the papers they write.
the tests they take, and this idea that we can get students to learn in some other way and that we can assess learning in some other way.
Especially as I read articles about grading reform and not giving zeros when students don't do their work, there's always this supposed other way that you can assess student learning.
holistically or through some other means like observation or what, I don't know.
Like, why are we looking for all of these ways to let students off the hook for doing their work?
That is how they learn.
That is how we know that they learn.
That is how we can assess our own practice as educators to look at the student work and see if it lines up with our expectations and what we're teaching.
Why would we want students not to do that?
This makes no sense to me at all.
All of these calls for downplaying the importance of student work.
Like if you want students to learn, you've got to get them to do things, right?
And we've for decades been pushing against things like lecture, right?
Or just reading the book and doing the questions or things that don't really result in students doing a lot.
We want students to do, to learn by doing.
And I think just this idea that report cards and grades should be less connected to what students actually do just makes no sense to me.
So I don't know what you think about this.
Let me know.
Do you see a role for kind of unmeasured, unassigned things in school-based learning?
Do you see other ways of assessing that we're not thinking of here?
But to me, I think one of the most important things we can hold students accountable for is their actual schoolwork, right?
If a student has a zero, Instead of giving them points for that zero so it doesn't hurt their grade, make them do the assignment.
And if they don't do the assignment, it should probably still be a zero.
Let me know what you think.