The Case for Compliance vs. Just Knowing the Material

Should grades reflect compliance or learning or some combination?

There's a big move toward mastery-based grading and this comment says grades should reflect conceptual understanding of the material which is not related to compliance of work turned in.

And I think at the college level and at the more advanced high school level, especially in subjects like math, where really understanding the material is almost your entire focus, that's pretty much everything you do, then maybe that makes some sense.

But I think for the most part, we're going to include more compliance in our grades, and that's a good thing.

I'm going to make the case for compliance, even though most people would probably think I'm crazy to do that.

I think a lot of what we end up teaching that is valuable to students is under the banner of compliance.

We might not want to call it compliance, and we certainly don't mean compliance in an authoritarian or arbitrary or manipulative way, where we're engaged in some sort of power struggle or game with students.

We don't mean compliance in that way.

But I do mean that it is valuable to learn how to be part of a class.

It is valuable to learn how to be part of a team.

It is valuable to learn how to follow directions from someone else.

unless you want to be completely on your own, never have a job, never work as a team, never be part of a committee, never do anything with any other people, if you're gonna go be completely self-employed from day one, maybe just knowing the stuff might be okay.

But I think most young adults need some experience and some practice following directions, being part of a team, and doing something that they don't necessarily want to do.

Compliance has become a bad word because obviously it's different from learning, And we don't want students to only know how to be compliant.

We want students to know when it's appropriate to resist authority and to fight back and to advocate for themselves and to advocate for other people.

So I don't want to defend compliance in a kind of like a totalitarian way or across the board.

But I think as part of what students learn from school, the experience of learning how to follow directions, complete a project, be a part of a team, contribute alongside other people, be a part of a class and participate in a discussion.

I think those are all really valuable aspects of becoming educated, of learning, of being a student.

And if we have a lot of students who basically have the attitude, I don't have to do anything in this class because I already know this stuff, Well, on the one hand, they probably don't.

Like, A, they probably don't.

B, I'm going to run out of hands here in a second.

A, they probably don't know it.

B, we don't want them to just sit in class and be a behavior problem if they happen to have a fair amount of knowledge on the subject anyway.

C, they might not even need to be in the class if they do already know it.

So I think there may be a fair point there that the student may be inappropriately placed.

But D, we're always going to have students who know a lot about a particular subject.

We're going to get to a unit where they have a lot of knowledge.

Maybe it's a passion of theirs.

And compliance in those cases is still valuable.

Like doing your work is still valuable in ways that the knowledgeable student may not be able to fully anticipate and, you know, like.

The idea that you should just be off the hook for doing the work if you know the content, I think doesn't really hold up because school is not just about knowing content.

It's also about becoming a certain kind of person who is capable of existing in society and participating in a democracy and working alongside other people.

And certainly we don't want to waste kids' time with stuff they already know.

We want to push them forward if they do have a great deal of knowledge on a particular topic, if they have already mastered something, maybe we can encourage them to go above and beyond.

But I think this just dismissal of compliance is misguided.

And I say that as someone who got out of a lot of work in a couple of different ways.

Like I got out of, I think at least one, I got out of all of pre-calc by doing an independent study.

And I got out of at least one, maybe two freshman or sophomore literature classes by doing an honors contract in college where I had to do the reading and write some papers, but I didn't have to go to class or participate in discussions.

And frankly, that was not a good experience.

I did fine on it.

I got all A's and learned the material, but it would have been a much better learning experience to actually have good discussions with my classmates around that material.

So this idea that you should just be off the hook and not have to worry about it if you know the material, I think leads to not great educational experiences and doesn't give us the opportunity to teach a lot of those skills and dispositions that students really need for adulthood.

Let me know what you think.