What no rubric can measure
Last week, I ended my belly dance classes with the same final exam instructions that have been in place since I started teaching at Ateneo in 2012: perform in front of your classmates using your own choreography, where you will be graded on technique, posture, musicality, and stage presence.
My basic students can go in groups or solo, using Lebanese and Turkish-based steps. My intermediates must do tribal fusion solos, merging newer steps with those of another style.
Every semester, I am the most nervous person in the room. I taught these students all semester long: I corrected their posture, made them isolate muscles to strengthen their technique, gave them lessons on Middle-Eastern culture, musicality, and stage presence.
Will my beginners be able to dance well? Will my intermediates be better than when they first started as beginners? In other words, my fears are the same as those of any instructor in any field: will my students show that they’ve learned what I taught them?
I’ve had to work through this for years, whether as a laboratory instructor in molecular biology or a professor in qualitative research, whether pushing students to think in creativity class or to move in belly dance class. There are ways to design assessments to measure learning.
In recent years, however, regulation has become increasingly tight on academics. Our classes have been taken over by rubrics and outcomes-based syllabi: all class activities must lead to outcomes that are connected to well-defined course objectives. Participation in class must be quantifiable. Use Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs.
A fellow professor once complained that even his students were so focused on grade-based expectations, they didn’t seem to be happy to learn anymore. “They take out the joy from teaching,” he said.
Our students, however, are merely trying to survive in a system that has been pushed upon them since childhood, and that is taking away their chance to form their own identity.
Because really, how could numbers capture my student who didn’t do well in her laboratory reports, but is a respected cardiologist today? How could grades quantify the brightness in my students’ eyes as they uncovered surprises in their data because they could call upon years of lessons to aid their analysis? How could I attach numbers to students who still couldn’t move well at the end of the semester, but who glowed as they danced, as they realized that their bodies are their own, that they are unique, imperfect, but so happily human?
I’m all for precise grading and defining expectations early—but sometimes, in our focus on what we believe is evidence of learning, we might miss evidence of deeper emotional growth, of maturity, of empathy.
As universities operate under tighter regulations, they, too, might be forced to compromise on their mission of producing knowledge, all because some national mandate wants students to think in interdisciplinary ways without first providing them the tools to do so, and that wants students to merely survive and react rather than think and thrive.
In pushing for tighter regulations, it’s as though government bodies do not trust the expertise of academics. And in pushing the same tight regulations on our students, it appears that we, too, can’t trust them to be learners, to be scholars, to be adults.
Last week, I sat through two hours of performances. I watched as students who had once been stiff and unsure of themselves execute fluid moves effortlessly. I watched sophisticated formation changes, moves so well defined they matched the long notes of a Persian violin, posture so strong my students looked like proud queens rather than the slouching kids who walked in on their first day. My intermediates knew how to fuse genres; they clapped, cheered for each other, glowed as performers.
After every class, students came to me for hugs and selfies. Many said they would miss PE because it was the one class where they felt safe, seen, and free.
A pedestrian observer might credit me with their triumph. But after over a decade of teaching dance and close to two decades as an academic, I’ve found that much of the work comes from the students. Students will perform only if you treat them like adults.
Good students will emerge if you trust that they can do a good job without you having to overload them with rubrics. Academics will deliver if you trust them to do a good job instead of micromanaging them at every step of the work they’ve been trained to do, for which they have experience and authority, where they are enacting a school’s mission rather than running a factory to churn out brainless, burned-out workers for an imagined workplace.
In those two hours last week, I laughed and cheered. I nearly cried in happiness after my intermediates finished their performances. No grade could have quantified that. No rubric could have defined the end of a wonderful semester.
Because really, the precise statement is: Excessive regulation is taking out the joy from education.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
