Any student who completes my class earns the right and responsibility to assign their own grade. Moreover, I tell my students: “if your are able to finish the work you commit to in our class, I recommend but do not require that you give yourself an A letter grade.”
I am very proud to say that, at this point in my career, almost all students who finish my class earn an A. Moreover, I never assign a non-passing grade (D, F, Incomplete, Withdraw) without explicit coordination with any student who falls behind. If I notice that a specific student is not able to stick to the arbitrary timeline suggested by my school’s 12-week quarter system, I work with that particular student to come up with alternative options for passing the class at a later date. My goal is to provide support so that every single student under my care continues to make progress towards their academic degree. In other words, the vast majority of my students pass my 12-week class with an A and, for those that don’t, I create a myriad of support structures to ensure that they stay engaged with their degree and can pass the class at a later date.
In my mind, a much more interesting question than “what are your current grading policies?” is “what do students have to do to complete a course that you teach?” We explore my current answers to this question in this post.
To complete our class, my students must create and iteratively improve a customized learning portfolio that shows ample evidence of deep learning. As my students build these portfolios, I ask them to include two types of work.
The first type of work my students include in their learning portfolio is concrete evidence to demonstrates their mastery of the mathematical ideas they study in our class. Towards this goal, I challenge my students to write their own textbook on our course content. In their textbook, I ask students to show me their creative attempts to build deep understanding of core mathematical definitions, theorems, techniques, and ideas that are central to the class.
Over the years I’ve done this work, I’ve noticed that many of my students do not know how to learn math at deep levels. This is mostly because the majority my students have been traumatized by years of high-stakes testing and a letter grading system that focuses on exam performance rather than deep intuition. The perverse nature of traditional grading systems robs students of the type of autonomy they need to learn for themselves and instead incentivizes students to maximize their grades independent of the strength of their learning.
To help my students learn how to learn mathematics at the highest levels, I guide them to strive to study each mathematical idea in our course using many different types of thinking. In fact, for each mathematical idea a student captures in their portfolio, I ask them to fill in as much detail as they can afford to create within the time they allocate for studying. I coach my students to use multiple categories of thought to study each mathematical idea in our course and to capture their explorations in their textbook. Below are a list of the types of thinking I ask my students to demonstrate for each idea they study:
- Verbal descriptions
- Abuelita language
- Nerdy language
- Visual representation(s)
- Curiosity and questions
- Interest and intrigue
- Notation and symbolic representation(s)
- Algorithmic descriptions and calculations for pen-and-paper analysis
- Capture systems and organization
- Heuristics and problem solving
- Logical foundations
- Transfer to life and to modeling applications
- Algorithmic descriptions and calculations for digital computation
In addition to creating and documenting their multidimensional understanding of the core content of each course using multiple categories of thought as highlighted above, I encourage my students to write solutions to any practice problems they find helpful. I work hard to provide answers and, if possible, full solutions to students so that they can check their work at home. I tell my students that one of the best ways to learn is to attempt to solve a problem, fail, look at the solution, and then do an after-action review to improve their approach.
I also welcome students to include any other learning resources they believe will deepen their understanding for the course material. I challenge students to create a rich external memory bank that documents their mastery of the core content of our class. As they create their learning portfolio, I pose the following challenge to my students: “imagine you spend the next three months of this class creating your learning portfolio to document your understanding of the core content of this class. Then, as soon as this class ends, you move onto other subjects in other classes. Ten years from now, you realize that you need the work you did in our class for a professional project you are working on. At that time, you go back to your portfolio and you can easily access everything you produced. In other words, I challenge you to write your work so clearly that you can remember all the glorious details almost instantaneously just by reading your own words. Make this portfolio valuable for yourself so that you can return to your work for years to come. Focus on creating learning skills that you can transfer to the next stage of your education. As you work in this class, think about how you can build your resume. Dedicate energy towards growing your career capital so that you can create a career that you love while doing work that makes you happy. Treat your portfolio as part of your process of growing expertise that you can use in your future to create a life you love.”
To help students better understand more about the learning portfolio process, I ask my students to watch my Math 2B Interview with Maria Mihaela video (24 min, 37 sec):
In that video, I interview my previous student Maria Mihaela to highlight how her learning process played out as well as what her portfolio looked like by the end of our time together. One exciting feature of this interview is that Maria highlights her success in continuing to build and use the learning skills she used in my class years after we finished our formal work together.
The second type of work my students include in their learning portfolio is a collection of meta-learning activities designed to help my students become more sophisticated learners. While in my class, I ask my students to finish a sequence of conquering college learning activities, including each of the following:
- Conquering College Activity 1: Schedule to succeed
- Conquering College Activity 2: Prepare for deep learning
- Conquering College Activity 3: Prepare for flipped learning
- Conquering College Activity 4: Create your dream binder
In addition to these conquering college activities, I also ask my students to develop their reading systems. One of the challenges I pose in my class is that I ask my students to finish reading the book Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills, and Outsmart the Competition by Scott Young. That book highlights learning principles students can use to learn deeply and create transferable skills in their education.
I tell my students that this type of reading is dessert while our formal mathematical course work are vegetables. Like anyone who cares deeply about them, I ask each learner to eat their veggies before they enjoy dessert. Still, I set the expectation that all students read that book before our class ends. To help students read this book for no out-of-pocket cost, I coach students to get a library card at their local city or county library. Of the years, I have built a small collection of pictures of my students with their newly activated library cards in hand. This is one of the many ways I help my students deepen their education for as little out-of-pocket cost as possible.
Of course, there are some students who look at the book Ultralearning and indicate that they have no interest in reading that book. I listen carefully to that feedback and empower those learners to make a different choice for their reading. In fact, I provide a list of 40+ books they might consider reading to propel their work in our class and in college. I also encourage them to find books that are not on my list.
I do challenge my students to read nonfiction work on topics directly related to their learning processes, career development, and identity formation using the five learning objectives I pose for my work with them (see the blog article on 40+ books for more details about those learning objectives). In this effort to encourage my students to read, I care less about the specific book(s) they choose and a lot more about their efforts to design reading systems to propel their learning skills.
One of the really fun features of asking students to do my conquering college activities and to read nonfiction books on learning science is that my students demonstrate impressive growth as learners. I routinely have students tell me that they learn to get better grades in all their classes, learn at much deeper levels, have more time for exercise and leisure, feel less stressed, and feel much more productive. Moreover, it is quite common for my students to coach each other and to bring into their daily group work meta-learning conversations. I design these conquering college activities and the reading challenge with this exact type of peer-to-peer mentorship in mind.
For more information about how I structure my classes to support deep learning in mathematics and meta-learning, take a look at the following links:
Jeff Anderson 
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