In this blog we discuss the development and implementation of organizational and classroom strategies around fostering participation.

Broadly, Compass is a place where we work on improving undergraduate education in the physical sciences.  We work on challenging organizational and physics problems together.  One of our design goals for our classrooms and organizational meetings is participation.  Underlying this goal is the value that the more people who participate, the better and richer are our conversations, decisions, and creations.  We believe that every member of a discussion can contribute something unique from their individual experiences.  For instance, one of Compass’ strengths is the role of undergraduates and graduate students as co-leaders.  Although Compass was founded by graduate students, the undergraduate leadership’s perspective has been central in continuously improving Compass to better meet the needs of students in our classrooms and programs.

Discussions and group problem solving are central to the Compass classroom and organizational structure. Compass classes are modeled after best practices in scientific research.  In small and large groups, students focus on open-ended scientific questions about physics models and measurement (such as exploring the ray model of light or measuring thermal expansion).  We also explore important questions related to college life, study habits, and how to measure learning and growth. More details about this can be found on our website or in this 2012 paper.

As an organization we operate on consensus decision-making.  Because Compass is in a process of continual refinement and progress, it’s important that our members have a say in major decisions affecting how the organization operates.   The day-to-day functioning of the organization is done in small groups of undergraduate and graduate students, while major decisions for the organization (such as “should we apply for an NSF grant?”) are decided by consensus at our monthly meetings.  After a proposal for a major decision, the proposal is amended and discussed until everyone agrees.

In trying to create a space that is friendly and open, we have employed many types of strategies over the years to encourage participation.  Core to Compass is building community through spending time together outside of a physics classroom setting.  We’ll get more specific about what happens during community building time and how we see direct implications for participation in more formal contexts like our classrooms.  We will also discuss jargon buzzers, a classroom tool that we’ve found to be particularly impactful.

We see these strategies as important strands in the fabric of a larger classroom and organizational culture that was cultivated by the undergraduate and graduate students involved.  We’re not sure how they would stand alone when added to a new environment, but if you also share our values, we hope they help you in generating related strategies that work in your own context.

The Story of the Jargon Buzzers

A buzzer from the game of taboo that we currently use in our classrooms. Photo from link here.  

In our first experiences teaching for Compass, our students often tossed around a lot of science jargon terms that they had picked up from high school that their classmates (or often they themselves) didn’t really understand.  As instructors, we would frequently challenge students to unpack jargon, but wanted the students themselves to become more self-aware of their jargon use and to hold each other accountable to explaining ideas.  We also wanted to make sure they felt comfortable asking instructors for clarification.  To put the power in the hands of the students as well as to make more of a fun game of challenging each other, we introduced something called a “jargon buzzer” to the classroom in 2010.

Jargon buzzers are, simply, any object that makes a buzzing noise that can be placed at every table of 3-4 students (for instance, a buzzer from the game Taboo, as show in the photo).  Our first jargon buzzers were simple, made of cheap parts from the local Radioshack, and housed in altoids tins.

We started using jargon buzzers consistently during the entire Fall 2010 Compass course. Instructors put a jargon buzzer at each student’s table and told everyone the idea at the beginning of class:  if any person in the class used a word that you didn’t understand, you could press the buzzer and “buzz them.”  Instructors were no exception; in fact, co-instructors would often buzz one another to support the students in feeling more comfortable doing it.  The first day that we used the buzzers we tried to do a lot of buzzing to get everyone comfortable.  Students laughed at the silly noise it made .  Refraction? *buzz* Snell’s Law? *buzz*  Big words were no longer things that you had to feel bad that you didn’t understand.  Students could buzz a classmate and the classmate would often realize that they didn’t really understand it either.  Once students began realizing that other students didn’t fully understand these words or were at least willing to explain them, big words weren’t such a big deal.  Now, I don’t mean to say that we were able to completely erase the scary feelings that can happen when you feel like someone in your class knows a whole lot more than you, but it seemed to help students feel much more comfortable.

Ana Aceves, a student who took the class and is now a junior astrophysics and media studies major and Compass leader, reflected on the jargon buzzers:  ”It became more of a ‘we’re learning together’ attitude instead of a competition to see who knew more. If I remember correctly, there was a big sense of competition at the beginning as well; people wanted to show off how much they actually knew. The jargon buzzers seemed to solve that a bit. It made it more clear that not everyone knew what others were talking about.”

Another reason we believe that the jargon buzzers had a big impact was that they made calling out jargon use feel more like a game, more playful.  A colleague who studies play in education mentioned that the jargon buzzers reminded him a lot of tools from improv that he had used in his own classroom to help students feel more comfortable messing up around one another. Aceves noted that, “for me, it was also like ‘I want to be the first to buzz that word!’ or ‘How many words can I buzz today?’ It was a lot of fun, and you learn a lot in the process.”

Hikes, Shared Meals, and Road Trips Together: The Impact on the Classroom and Organization

 In Compass we aim to bring more personal connections to the classroom and organization.  Working on hard problems requires vulnerability and in doing something hard, people inevitably mess up and won’t have all the answers.  Yet, many spaces feel intimidating difficult to participate.  We encourage participation by doing both life and physics things together and by practicing problem solving more informally outside of the classroom.  We don’t expect everyone to become best friends with one another, but we seek to expand our perceptions of people past simply “physics knower” to be more multi-dimensional.

When people ask what sorts of things are important to Compass, Angie likes to use the phrase that we “brush our teeth together.”   Compass starts with freshman students staying in Berkeley’s dorms for two weeks together.  In addition to learning about physics, they do in fact get to brush their teeth together, take windy road trips up mountains to observatories, sing silly songs under the stars, get lost on hikes, and generally live life together.  Similarly, Compass tries to have at least one retreat each year where people in the organization stay at a hostel a few hours away, cook and share meals, share life as well as organizational development, and yes, brush their teeth together.

Figuring out how to climb walls together was one way that our community grew during the summer program.

When people know each other outside of the classroom, it can be easier to ask, “hey, I don’t get what you mean by that,” or to choose to help someone out if they don’t understand something.  This casual time also supports opportunities for low-stakes informal problems to solve together.  Gina reflected that some of her earliest Compass bonding was while learning how to climb up the hallways of the dorms, which is safer than it sounds:  “I remember Geoff and Alex figuring it out and then teaching the rest of us. Getting the rest of us up the walls was certainly a challenge, and those who had figured it out coached us through the process.  By the end, we had developed several different ways to climb up the walls and invented our own game of wall wrestling.” Spending free time with people can grow a community.  These small activities, no matter how mundane or ridiculous, give us a sense that we create together, we laugh together and we figure things out together.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve outlined some concrete strategies to create spaces where everyone feels comfortable participating.  This directly follows from our values: in the classroom and the organization, we’re working on interesting, hard problems together, and everyone’s diverse experiences and skills can offer a unique and important contribution.  We hope that this discussion will support you in developing strategies appropriate to your values and contexts.

A big thanks to folks who gave us editing feedback in writing this blog: Lauren Barth-Cohen, Dimitri Dounas-Frazer, Jon Bender, and Bruce Birkett, as well as many students from the 2010 Compass course who gave thoughtful reflections about their experiences with the jargon buzzers.

The last couple of years I’ve been working to help raise funds to support all of the programs Compass runs. This has proceeded along a few fronts. First, we have applied for several grants. Some of these grants have been to national or local charitable organizations who fit in with our mission of supporting innovative science education and diversity in the sciences. Others were to various “in-house” programs at Berkeley that have funds to support student groups, new classes, etc.

Writing grants is a long and detail-oriented process. Aside from the obvious — potential funding for Compass — the main benefit for me personally has been that each grant application forces you to crystalize in writing exactly why Compass exists and how it is beneficial for the various populations it serves. Compass is amorphous and a bit of a moving target, and so these thought exercises provide valuable clarification.

Another important source of funds has been our summer fundraiser, in which we’ve asked friends and family of Compass to chip in a little bit to keep our summer program running. Josh Shiode and Nicole Carlson organized the original fundraiser in 2011, and I helped to carry on the work last year. Initially, I was not at all comfortable directly asking — or begging, some might say — for money. But once I mentally reframed the fundraiser as merely describing the merits of Compass to potential donors, I became much more comfortable with the work. The fundraising process has also been useful for the organization, as we now have a scalable system for keeping track of our contacts and donations, largely thanks to Josiah.

All in all, I’m proud to have done my bit to help keep Compass moving, and the main reason I’m involved is because I think Compass is valuable and important. But it’s also personally rewarding, and developing these kinds of skills is one of the reasons why.

Nathan writes:

I’m a graduate student in the Berkeley physics department, and I’ve been part of Compass since the summer of 2010. One aspect of Compass that all of us are very proud of is the fact that our organization is run almost entirely by students. This includes not just our classroom activities and social events, but all of the administrative and logistical tasks to keep a community with hundreds of members organized. This is the first in a series of blog posts in which Compass volunteers will talk about some of the skills they have learned outside of the classroom and the lab as they have worked behind the scenes to keep Compass awesome.

For example, Compass maintains its own web server to handle tasks such as hosting the website and managing the organization’s mailing lists. The most valuable non-pedagogical skills I have learned during my time in Compass have been related to web server administration.

During the Fall of 2011, the Compass technology team made a decision to rebuild the server installation from scratch to improve its sustainability. This was no small task, and at the time, I had virtually no experience in anything like it. For instance, I barely knew what Apache was, the core software at the heart of many servers including our own. Fortunately, I was in the company of talented volunteers such as Allen Rabinovich, Joel Corbo, Josiah Schwab, and Abhimat Gautam; I learned a great deal through their example.

Over the course of several weekends, the five of us huddled together with our laptops and plugged the software together piece by piece. Allen, Joel and Josiah showed me how Apache is configured and how to debug common some common problems that might arise. Josiah took the lead on installing the program Mailman to manage our email lists, a task that was far more intricate than I had imagined. Abhimat spearheaded the wordpress installation that powers our website, using a theme that Allen worked hard to optimize for us. I was tasked with re-assembling our organization’s wiki (powered by FOSwiki, www.foswiki.org). All of these tasks were inter-related to varying degrees, and in the true Compass spirit, we worked together, learning by doing.

Josiah writes:

I’m also a graduate student in the Berkeley physics department, and I’ve been part of Compass since 2010. As Compass has grown, we have had to deal with new data in new ways. One of the major changes has been our transition to a funding model that has a large donor base. A big part of fundraising is making sure that we have thanked our donors and that we are able to keep them up-to-date with the activities of Compass (for example, by mailing them our newsletter). During the 2012 summer fundraising campaign, we decided that we needed a better way to keep track of those who have donated to Compass.

We wanted to move to a centralized donation-tracking system that we could use for many years to come. I constructed a simple web-based application that helps us to manage this information. This gave me a chance to try out the Python-based web framework Django. This was my first time seriously using Django and not only did I learn a lot, but I had a lot of fun. Nathan helped out by writing a python function that would parse the automated emails we receive when donations are received and would pass this information along to the database. The second generation of this system is currently under development and will allow us to keep better contact with our alumni.

We started off with a tradition, called “Story time with string”. When I read this on the agenda, I’m thinking to myself “Great, a corny community building activity.” But shame on me for doubting Joel and Josiah’s planning, because story time was fun and relevant to the goals of the weekend. We created the compass lineage using a ball of yarn, where people were passed the ball of yarn by the order which they had joined Compass. I learned about everyone’s histories as the yarn unraveled, and the connections which people had to one another, and the places where people had opportunities to work with one another made the history of Compass a much more coherent thing. It also made the story of Compass into a story of people. When we were done, the web of yarn was fun to play with, but it also doubled as a metaphor, partly for the breadth of our impact (when we move our yarn, everyone feels it), but also for the continuity of an idea that brings us all together.

That night, we got a chance to walk around Sacramento in the rain. It was some quality time with people who I rarely get to see in a context wich is not work related. Part of why I like Compass is because I like the people in Compass. Getting social time was really great. Dimitri gave us an awfully tricky puzzle with forks and cups that we failed to solve. I shook salt on many things. A good time was had by all.

The next day was packed with purposeful activities, and everyone was totally on board the whole time. If you’re a Compasseer, you can read about what went down on the wiki! What inspired me about the retreat was how many great, clever people are able to get together in one place and actually work to solve some really abstract problems. Diversity of opinion is really what makes this group wonderful to work with. I can be sure that there will be some level of disagreement about anything which comes up, and there will also be miscommunications when people who have very different conversational and mental types try to come to agreement. But through this, everyone gains a broader view on the issue or solution being proposed. No one owns the floor. No one gets left out. Somehow, sensibility trickles up from the chaos, and I attribute that to the cooperativity and sharpness of the people who are attracted to Compass.

Some of the things I’m most excited about which came to my attention that weekend are emerging collaborations with programs which are similar to Compass at other institutions, kick starting publication of a whole range of useful documents, and trying out a new team structure to help with internal organization. Being a part of Compass is a real pleasure!

One student symbolized their growth with a hummingbird for three reasons. (1) According to the student, the hummingbird is “special in its ability to hover” which “embodies the moments over the course in which I felt . . . ‘stuck’ in my studies, unable to propel myself forward.” (2) The hummingbird can also “fly in any direction, including backwards. . . . The second midterm, for example, was my fall backward.” (3) On a more positive note, the student compared their growth to a hummingbird that “elevates and flies over ground, ascending over obstacles and any problems.”

Introduction

This post is the second part of a two-part story about how Compass encourages students to measure their growth according to a rubric of qualitative skills. The rubric that Compass uses is an adaptation of two rubrics developed by Jon Bender. How Jon developed his rubrics is the subject of the first part of this story, and can be found here. Compass’s rubric is very similar to those created by Jon, and a helpful description was given in Part 1:

These rubrics include a bunch of qualitative behaviors and skills, e.g., persistence, communication, skepticism, and self-compassion. They can be used in two ways: (1) by teachers to provide feedback to students, and (2) by students to evaluate themselves. Jon has taken both approaches, whereas Compass uses the rubrics primarily in the context of student self-evaluation.

In order for students to gain a rough understanding of the skills, each skill is accompanied by a list of defining questions. For example, one of the questions that accompanies “persistence” is: what do you do when you’re frustrated? A particular student’s proficiency can be ranked as either beginning, developing, or succeeding according to the rubric. The stages of proficiency are described through qualitative statements. For instance, the rubric characterizes the beginning stages of persistence by the following statements: I tend to try one or two things; and, I give up more easily than I should. On the other hand, succeeding at persistence is characterized by look[ing] for new ways to think about a problem.

In this post, I discuss how and why Compass started using Jon’s self-evaluation rubrics in our courses and I describe how we adapted the rubrics to serve our needs.

Getting frustrated with students’ frustration with failure

As an experimental atomic physicist, I know that the things I build won’t work on the first try. Or on the second try. Or the third. And so on, ad infinitum (or so it seems).

Failure is definitely frustrating. I can’t even count how many times I’ve fixed the “last” problem with a piece of electronics and plugged it in only for it to start smoking about two minutes later. All I can say is that closing my eyes for a few seconds, drawing a deep breath, and deciding that it’s time to take a break and go for a walk around Memorial Glade has become part of my weekly (maybe even daily) routine as an experimentalist.

But despite my frustration, I know that each failure is a learning experience. After troubleshooting faulty equipment, I’ve learned something practical (e.g., don’t use arbitrary colors of wire when building electronics), and after each failed experiment, I gain new insight into atomic physics (e.g., how the intensity of a laser affects the width of spectral lines). To me, frustration is an essential part of learning, and I know that it can take days, weeks, or months of tedious tinkering before I get my equipment or code working properly.

So why the heck are my students giving up on physics because their problem sets are frustrating?

(Note: With only 38% of freshmen who are interested in science going on to complete degree in science, attrition is indeed an ongoing problem in science. I don’t want to over-simplify the reasons people leave physics, which include a lack of positive role models, harsh grading practices, unapproachable faculty, overpacked curricula, and frustration with conceptual difficulties. See here and here for in-depth discussions by Elaine Seymour.)

It was only after lots of long conversations with my colleagues in Compass that I came to understand a perverse truth about our culture: there seems to be a pervasive belief that “smart” people “just get it” without even trying, and therefore people who struggle or spend a lot of time trying to learn something new must be “stupid.” I started to better understand what many of my students are likely experiencing: they probably think that their frustration is evidence of their stupidity. No wonder students give up in the face of frustration–why bother struggling with physics if you think you’re too stupid to be a physicist?

In the education community, this pattern of thought is related to Dweck’s “fixed mindset,” which Jon discussed in Part 1 of this story. Like Jon, I wanted to know how to get students to abandon the fixed mindset. I wanted them to interpret failure as integral to the learning process and to believe that trying hard and persevering through frustration results in deeper understanding. Essentially, I wanted students to adopt a worldview similar to Dweck’s “growth mindset.” (You can read more about these mindsets here.)

Fortunately, the Compass community was on board with trying to change students’ beliefs about failure, and Jon gave us some tools to help make that happen.

Measuring success, failure, and growth

In Fall 2011, the Compass community decided to address issues related to failure and growth by pioneering a new course in the freshman sequence: a two-unit spring semester course analogous to the one that already existed in the fall. This new course, ultimately called Intro to Measurement but often referred to as “Spring 98”, was taught for the first time in 2012 by Geoff Iwata (who was a senior undergraduate at the time) and me. I’ll focus on the growth aspect of the course in this post, although its other major goal was learning how to collect, analyze, and interpret scientific data.

Although Geoff and I taught the inaugural Spring 98, we were definitely not the only people who contributed to its design. For instance, Angie Little helped shape its learning goals and student projects. She also introduced me to Jon, whose contributions to the course (e.g., the rubrics) have since taken on a bigger role within Compass. Angie, Jon, and I talked a lot about the role of failure and the importance of compassion in the learning process, conversations which had a profound impact on the character of Spring 98. In its early stages, Angie referred to our discussions as the “Grades-Are-Whack Collaboration.”

Why did Geoff and I name the Spring 98 course Intro to Measurement and why did Angie call our collaboration “Grades-Are-Whack”? What do measurement and grades have to do with failure and growth? The answer is pretty simple: teachers routinely use grades as measurements of failure (F’s) and success (A’s) and some teachers, like Jon and many people in Compass, use qualitative rubrics to measure growth as a complement to grades.

One of our goals for Spring 98 was to get students to view failure as part of learning. To do that, we had students use the rubrics as a tool for monitoring their growth. The hope was that they would start to view the concept of “growth” as a framework to interpret their grades. For example, a “C” on a physics exam may indicate any number of things, including a gap in conceptual understanding, difficulty with mathematical procedures, or a lack of proficiency with skills like organization and communication. By using the rubrics as a complement to grades, students can move away from an overly-simple interpretation of a “C” as an indicator that they are “bad at physics” and that they need to “study better.” The rubrics empower students to say, “I need a better understanding of the concepts covered on this exam, and to make that happen, I need to get organized and work on my communication skills.” (Of course, this type of response requires skill with self-compassion, i.e., the ability to act kindly towards oneself and view failure as a learning experience.)

The evolving role of the Self-Evaluation Rubric in Compass

Geoff and I introduced Jon’s rubrics to Spring 98 making very few modifications to the documents themselves in the process. For homework, we asked students to use the rubrics to evaluate their growth in a math or science class of their choosing. Each week, students submitted a written self-evaluation where they discussed their proficiency with various skills from the rubrics, like persistence, courage, collaboration, self-compassion, etc., using specific examples from class as appropriate.

It’s worth mentioning that Geoff and I also used the rubrics to evaluate ourselves. Geoff was monitoring his growth as a student in an upper-division physics laboratory course, and I was evaluating myself in the context of my PhD research. We made our weekly self-evaluations available to the whole class, the idea being that our evaluations could model for students what a “good” evaluation looked like. Personally, I found this experience challenging because I wasn’t always excited about admitting my shortcomings either to myself or my students. However, I also found it incredibly helpful to be able to give a name to those shortcomings (e.g., I often needed to work on persistence and self-compassion because, as I said earlier in this post, research can be frustrating and I sometimes feel “stupid” and want to give up).

Students’ self-evaluations were never graded; full credit was given for turning something in, even if it was off topic. Instead of assigning a letter grade or other score, Geoff and I provided students with qualitative feedback on their self-evaluations. Sometimes this meant pointing students to additional campus resources (like tutoring services at the Student Learning Center), while other times it meant congratulating them on their growth. Most often, though, our feedback took the form of a series of follow-up questions aimed at encouraging students’ self-awareness and helping guide them towards monitoring (and working on) a few specific traits or skills.

At the end of the semester, we had students reread their self-evaluations and look over their grades. We asked them to describe their growth according to these two measures (evaluations and grades) and to discuss whether they told the same story. Following Angie’s suggestion, we also asked students to create a visual representation of their growth. The resulting projects were incredibly creative: one student visualized their growth as a hummingbird (see figure above). Other visualizations included a seed growing into a budding flower that was supported by stilts, a person walking up a staircase where each stair represented a stage of growth, a tumblr full of animated gifs symbolizing different emotional responses to the phases of growth, and more. Geoff and I were quite impressed by the level of introspection, honesty, and thoughtfulness in our students’ final projects.

Both Geoff and I were also mentors for Compass’s mentoring program. Coincidentally, some of our mentees were also our students. We found that the weekly self-evaluations made us better mentors because the rubrics gave us (and our mentees) a shared vocabulary that we could use to talk about growth. Geoff and I felt that all mentor/mentee pairs could benefit from using Jon’s rubrics in this way, and spent a lot of time talking and thinking about how this might work.

Over the summer, the Compass community addressed two issues: (1) how to turn the fall/spring semester courses into a true sequence where students in the spring build on what they learned in the fall, and (2) how to introduce structure into the mentoring program in order to better support mentor/mentee pairs. One common thread in both these endeavors was Jon’s rubrics. We decided that the rubrics should become a staple of both the fall/spring sequence and the mentoring program, and we devised a way for students in the courses to be able to share their weekly self-evaluations with their mentors. John Haberstroh and Joel Corbo, the current teachers of the fall course, are piloting that sharing system now. This practice is similar–but not identical–to Jon’s implementation of peer-to-peer collaboration where his students “help one another draw conclusions about the development of their scientific habits.” The main difference between our approaches is that, because mentors are often graduate students, they are not necessarily the students’ direct peers.

The road ahead: Future use of the rubrics

Next spring, Jesse Livezey and Punit Gandhi are going to continue the practices established by John and Joel this fall. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the future holds.

I think it would be awesome if we established a tradition of teachers and mentors evaluating themselves, too, and sharing their evaluations with their students and mentees. This would show students that growth never really ends and that we are all in a perpetual struggle to improve ourselves.

To end this post, I’ll frame the rubrics in the context of Compass’s broader mission. The skills and character traits articulated in Jon’s rubrics are about more than succeeding on a particular assignment or in a particular course. Indeed, the larger arc of college is itself a project whose completion requires persistence, courage, self-compassion, and many other skills. In this sense, I see the rubrics as tools to help Compass achieve its mission of making sure that nobody who is interested in science leaves the field because they feel “stupid” and want to give up.

Growth is change, and change is never easy. Compass has always placed an emphasis on supporting students as they grow into professionals, and self-evaluation is an essential ingredient for success. The most important support for any learner comes from within.

Edit: As is true of all Compass endeavors, a lage number of people helped shape the use of self-evaluation in the Compass classroom. One of those people is Daniel Reinholz, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley who studies student assessment and self-assessment in mathematics. I am grateful to him for his invaluable input, which was often offered over Indian food at Biryani House.

This is one of the early documents that later evolved into the status rubric. Character traits (top level) are developed by practicing skills (middle level) in the context of developing ideas and using scientific processes (bottom level). Major learning goals include developing traits and skills useful for scientific thinking. This happens in a classroom characterized by respect for individuals and ideas.

Introduction by Dimitri Dounas-Frazer

This post is the first part of a two-part story about how Compass encourages students to measure their growth using tools developed by Jon Bender, a former Oakland middle school teacher who has since moved away from the Bay Area. Jon’s training is at the high school level, as is most of his teaching experience. His background also includes teaching courses at the University of Alaska Anchorage and through CalTEACH.

In Fall 2011, Jon shared with Compass two rubrics that he developed for measuring his students’ growth: the status and progress rubrics. These rubrics include a bunch of qualitative behaviors and skills, e.g., persistence, communication, skepticism, and self-compassion. They can be used in two ways: (1) by teachers to provide feedback to students, and (2) by students to evaluate themselves. Jon has taken both approaches, whereas Compass uses the rubrics primarily in the context of student self-evaluation.

In order for students to gain a rough understanding of the skills, each skill is accompanied by a list of defining questions. For example, one of the questions that accompanies persistence is: what do you do when you’re frustrated? A particular student’s proficiency can be ranked as either beginning, developing, or succeeding according to the rubric. The stages of proficiency are described through qualitative statements. For instance, the rubric characterizes the beginning stages of persistence by the following statements: I tend to try one or two things; and, I give up more easily than I should. On the other hand, succeeding at persistence is characterized by look[ing] for new ways to think about a problem.

In this post, Jon shares with us the rubrics’ origin story by outlining the history of their development. In a following post, I’ll talk about how the rubrics have been adapted for use in the Compass classroom.

Without further ado, here is Jon’s post.

Origin of the Self-Evaluation Rubrics by Jon Bender

The status and progress rubrics were part of an ongoing attempt to remove layers of abstraction inherent to traditional grading, thus bringing students more directly into contact with the learning experience. I wanted to focus more on what makes good science and effective learning than on what makes traditional “A” students.

One of the driving motivations behind creating the rubrics was to foster a growth mindset in my students, rather than a fixed mindset. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, recently described these mindsets as follows:

In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it. (source)

My hope was that monitoring the development of skills according to the status and progress rubrics would help students adopt a growth mindset.

Framing the problem: Promoting growth and assigning grades

In my teaching experience, the most inspiring moments were when students discovered something, either about the world or about themselves. To encourage more of this, it seemed like it would be best to remove myself (the default central authority) from my students’ learning process as much as possible.

As a first step towards creating a more student-driven, growth-oriented classroom, I refused to provide direct answers to most questions. Instead of giving students information, I asked them to create information themselves. By “creating information” I mean applying scientific thinking and processes to problems in order to generate conclusions. Thus students inform themselves, as opposed to being informed by someone else. Most of the time when students asked me questions, my default reply was, “What do you think?”  If they were uncertain in their conclusions, I would ask them to do some testing to increase their confidence. Information, after all, is in a perpetual state of development. Based on my experience, understanding tends to be much more complete and enduring when it’s achieved through this type of constructive process.

But there were still two problems. First, I needed more of a clear guide for myself, something that would articulate the values and skills that I hoped students would develop through discovery. Second, as a teacher, I needed to assign grades. I wanted to do so in a way that didn’t feel arbitrary or reductionistic and that avoided the generally harmful psychological impact that grades typically have on students. Basically, I wanted to create a grading scheme that supported the growth mindset rather than the fixed mindset.

Developing the rubrics

With help and consultation from a few colleagues, I drafted several documents to try to distill the key principles that would guide my instruction. These early iterations, like the one above, eventually evolved into the status rubric, which I feel is a more complete description of what I want students and teachers to work on during investigations.

Virtually any education puts some emphasis on things like organization and communication–though not always multiple modes of communication–and these skills also ended up in the rubrics. However, my first priority was helping students be more intellectually adventurous.

I found most students lacked a willingness to take risks. They were trained to pursue righteousness over truth. As righteousness is immediate and certain while truth is merely approachable, the scientific process can be intimidating if you’re accustomed to the security of the concrete and unchanging. So I included the skills of courage and persistence in my rubrics.

Similar deficits exist in training for effective collaboration, particularly as students approach the end of high school. But if I were to choose one skill that is the “no brainer” to include, it would be self-assessment, or reflection. Extracting the most out of each opportunity for learning is one byproduct of good reflection. But more importantly, the primary difference between those who grow and learn their whole lives and those who get stuck living in a time long-gone is whether or not they have developed an appreciation for, and skill with, reflection. Thus reflection is a key ingredient of growth.

Assigning grades

There was still the issue of grades. In an ideal world, grades are not needed. They are a contrived motivational tool, used to drive certain behaviors when intrinsic motivation is lacking. Grades are born out of the sense that whole groups of students are in need of specific sets of information and skills, regardless of personal relevance or interest. While they can be functional in the short term and with simpler tasks, grades ultimately seem (to me) to undermine our inherent, biologically driven desire to explore and understand. Perhaps more importantly, grades seem to work against our collaborative nature, and to impact our confidence, as they are often interpreted as a ranking.

The other unfortunate aspect of grades is that as a feedback system, they offer little information, leaving it up to students to independently construct a practice of reflection that supports growth. And this development is further inhibited by the traditional authoritarian relationship between teacher and subordinate student.

The extreme opposite to occasional, impersonal grades is perpetual, highly detailed and individualized feedback. In most cases, this presents a logistical impossibility. Thus, the most effective methods of assessment are also the most complicated and time-consuming, employing sophisticated algorithms to account, as much as possible, for students’ complex attributes as learners and individuals. But with traditional grading, a balance must be struck between the authenticity of assessments and the time constraints inherent to instruction.

My attempt at resolving this challenge was to adopt a twofold approach. First, because I still ultimately had to assign grades, I worked out a point system with variable emphasis on status and progress depending on where students were in their development of each category. Needless to say, my Excel spreadsheet was rather complex!

Second, I wanted to provide a common structure within which to apply subjective assessment and to instruct students in the practice of self-assessment, thereby giving them the equipment to generate feedback as needed. As you can imagine, there is a weaning process with this that involved moving students from dependence on external feedback toward independence and empowerment. I also endeavored to capitalize on peer-to-peer collaboration to support this transition, working from the model of peer review: students would help one another draw conclusions about the development of their scientific habits. The biggest challenge with this is that soliciting peer opinions about one’s own personal development is a highly vulnerable activity, one that requires careful community building.

Self-assessment: Nothing is constant except change

The rubrics were instrumental in getting students to evaluate their own growth. Each quarter, they began by identifying one area that they wanted to work on. They then constructed a plan with specific benchmarks, dates for check-ins, and signatures from peers to ensure that their community support system was on board for their growth. I also required them to write a flattering statement about themselves to accompany every self-criticism. Finally, I accompanied reflection days with discussions about growth, brain development, and so on, to further emphasize the idea that their habits and nature are not fixed.

The fundamental idea behind all this is that science is a particular framework for exploration, and that good science is good process. That is, meaningful results necessarily emerge from good process. Therefore, it is much more important for student scientists to focus on their process. The keys to this are: (1) identify essential elements of the process, (2) assess your aptitude with these elements, and (3) construct an organized plan to develop as a learner.

The progress rubric is an attempt to lay out a structure for habit modification. As most of the status elements are, to some extent, ingrained and habitual, many students find developing these habits challenging. In order to formalize this aspect of student self-assessments and reflection, I tried to incorporate the best research I could find on habit formation. Much of it came from the Greater Good Science Center at Cal, where Christine Carter has compiled some outstanding work on the science of habit formation and modification.

I am glad that folks at Compass are finding this resource valuable, and welcome any thoughts or ideas that might help to further improve it. In particular, modifications that would support more specific applications would be wonderful, as would examples of how you are using the rubrics effectively.

Thanks to Angie Little (PhD student at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Compass), Brad Moore (physics/math teacher in Bellevue, WA), and Stamatis Vokos (physics professor at Seattle Pacific University) for their continued inspiration and their contributions to this project. Also thanks to Christine Carter at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley for compiling research on habit formation and development.

While I continue to work in Professor Zettl’s lab during the school year, I also participated in research opportunities at other universities during the summer. The Cal Energy Corps took me to Hong Kong to research plastic solar cells, and as a National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network REU student, I worked at UT Austin making a tiny microphone. These experiences were eye-opening, both inside the lab and out. Not only did I get to throw myself into research projects and learn about topics I had never even heard of before, I also got to interact with an amazing cohort of mentors and peers and explore some fabulous cities. I would highly recommend applying to summer research programs if you’re interested in: seeing what grad school is like, experiencing the research environment at another university, traveling and summer-vacationing and cool-people-meeting and cutting-edge-science-learning all at once. Many programs offer paid summer internships (the ones I participated in covered transportation and housing in addition to providing a stipend), and they often hold a capstone conference or poster session at the end where you can gain valuable experience in presenting your research.

Being an undergraduate researcher has been and still is a rewarding adventure. I feel so lucky to have incredible mentors and intriguing projects that inspire me to continue doing research in the future. I think if you’re open to different projects and patient with yourself in the lab, undergraduate research can be a really neat experience.

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a physics student is doing physics research. Oftentimes, crazy stuff that you learn in classes only makes sense for the first time when encountered in the lab. Participating in research can help you decide if you want to go to grad school, and if you do, the research experience will help you to have a stronger application. In order to find research projects as an undergrad, however, you will have to be comfortable being a self advocate.

The best way of starting the process of finding a research position is to talk to as many professors and grad students as you can. Go to your professors’ and GSIs’ office hours, and after getting your homework questions answered, ask about their research. If you know any other grad students, start conversations with them about research. You can also go talk to professors you don’t have a class with- most will make an appointment to talk with you and will be happy to talk about the research in their labs. Experimentalists in particular often need students to help out on small projects, but if you have coding skills then you might also have luck approaching the theorists. Don’t be discouraged if you email professors and don’t get a response- there could be many reasons why you don’t get an email reply. Talking with professors in person is often more productive.

Have an open mind about the kind of research projects you’d be willing to take on, since it can be hard to know what kind of research you like until you have a bit more experience.

Expect that when you’re working on your projects in the lab that you will work most closely with a grad student, but don’t be afraid to talk to the research group professor, and participate in group meetings. Building a good relationship with your research professor is important. Another important skill for undergraduate researchers to have is the willingness to ask questions. Grad students expect that their undergrad students will have questions, and the only way to grow as a researcher is to ask those questions. And if you make mistakes, remember that it’s ok. Everybody does. Sometimes good science can come from “mistakes”.

Finally, like Compass, consider the research group a community. Try to get to know this lab community, and take your place as a young researcher.

Teaching for the Compass Project summer program 2012 exposed me to a complete change in the paradigm within which I teach. In the Compass summer program, the curriculum changes every year. This means there is very little time for curriculum refinement and we only get one chance to do it right (which we don’t always do!). At the same time, there are no exams or topics that need to be covered. The lack of constraints on the summer program teachers allowed us to develop an entire curriculum based on our own interests and values.

Calvin, Punit, Ryan, and I choose to develop a curriculum based on using the falling slinky experiment as a framework to understand how to build models in physics. This was inspired by a recently popular youtube video of a slow motion slinky drop. We had our students develop two models of a falling slinky: a discrete model that took advantage of breaking the continuous slinky into simpler masses on springs that could be understood by forces and a continuous model where they could understand the motion of the slinky in terms of waves on the medium of the slinky’s coils. The students’  models gave them useful insights into the mechanics of a slinky drop.

During the last few days of the program, the students either investigated some question that extended their model of the slinky or came up with new behavior to model or interpret experimentally. I was impressed with the students creativity and ambition on the final projects. The result of the project are four interesting videos that have been posted on the Compass youtube channel. The end of the summer program left me proud of all of the concepts, both physical and metacognitive, that our students had begun to master. I’m very excited to continue to be involved in curriculum development and teaching within Compass.

Compass Summer 2012

        An entire week of non-stop physics. I know for any physics major that sounds like heaven but for the vast majority or people that doesn’t sound very appealing. However, I think one of the best parts of Compass was that no matter how much we knew about physics when we showed we left learning not only more physics concepts but also loving physics at least a little more.

        Throughout the week, we learned about models for a slinky. Somehow, we learned about tension, forces, springs, gravity and collisions by simply dropping slinkys. It was definitely a challenging week including homework that may or may not have been impossible. However, as valuable as the problem sets were more importantly the summer program helped show us how to effectively design and execute experiments and collect data.

        Beyond just the academic part of Compass all of us were given the opportunity to explore what physicists are doing right now by visiting several Berkeley labs and the Lick Observatory. In addition, we were even given the opportunity to meet and get to know fellow physics, engineering, and computer science students.

        Compass allowed us to learn about models but also make connections in the physics community. I’m looking forward to continuing my time in Compass by taking the Physics 98 class with my friends from Compass Summer 2012.