I would first like to define low stakes and
high stakes just to be clear about what
those terms mean.
By low stakes I mean assignments that
don’t offer students a lot of points,
but at the same time they don’t have to
put a lot of effort into them.
They should be able to take care of them
in a timely manner,
not spend a lot of time on them,
and they do get points, but they also
don’t have to spend a lot of time
worrying about grammar and punctuation
they can just write, and I’m looking for a
certain amount of bulk to just see that they’ve
been using writing to get their ideas out,
writing as a way of thinking.
So, that’s low stakes.
High stakes, this is where a kind of
assignment like a research paper assignment,
where they are expected to be putting a lot of
time into it, they’re expected to be using
the conventions of the English language
in a manner appropriate to college students,
a professional manner, where there are
a lot of points involved, sometimes
as much as 35% of the grade, so this is
a high stakes assignment.
So, for low stakes assignments, I like to use
those as staging grounds for the high stakes
assignments and, also, as places for students
to work out their ideas about readings,
about ideas that are coming up in class.
So, an example of a low stakes assignment
in the lower division classes would be
participating in an online discussion,
in which they’re expected to put forth
their ideas about the reading,
synthesize ideas from reading and lecture,
and come up with ways of interpreting
certain objects that they’ve seen
in class based on the readings,
and these online discussion,
in turn, prepare them for the exams.
In the upper division, the low stakes
assignments are frequently blogs
in which students complete the reading
and then they’ll go ahead and submit a blog
online, and that initial blog is submitted blind,
in other words, they can’t see the other
students’ blogs but, after everyone
has had a chance to post, I open it up,
having alerted them before hand that
this is going to happen, I open it up before
they come into class, so they have a chance
to read everyone else’s posts before
they come into class.
This, I have found, really enhances discussion,
because they’re writing to think,
they’re getting their ideas out and writing
before they have to come in
and discuss things in class.
Now, for some students, going into class
and launching into a discussion without
having written a word is easy, it’s no problem.
But I find, for the majority of students,
this is very difficult, especially when they’re
working with a tricky text.
So, having a chance to write their ideas out,
and getting points for it, they’re being
rewarded for that time that they’re
putting in thinking about the assignment.
Whereas if they didn’t have that blog,
they didn’t have an assignment,
they’d be spending hours doing the reading
and trying to think it through without really
being rewarded in any way.
Now, the high stakes assignments,
especially in the upper division classes,
give students an opportunity to polish their
writing, because this is the time to do it.
Once, they get out into the professional world,
if they want to represent themselves
professionally, they are going need this skill
and, at this point, they might see writing
as a chore that they just have to finish up,
get through so that they can get to the next
assignment, or go to work,
or whatever they need to do.
But I try to instill in them confidence
in their writing and the idea that
this is a practical skill that you
can use in the world and it’s a way
of representing yourself.