A Lesson Full of Student Agency (and a tiny bit of AI)

Today, I experimented with a different combination of activities than I’m used to, and I realized I had inadvertently basically done a class centered around student agency from start to finish.

Here is what I did. But for context: I do mid-semester self-assessment as a form of ungrading; and my students are doing a game project, the first step of which was to play at least 7 games developed by others and reflect on them. So here is what we did today:

1. Read about grading and ungrading: When students walked into class, I gave them a choice to read one of 3 things related to ungrading: They could either ask an AI tool to give them ideas about why grades are not good and ask about alternative approaches to grading OR to ask it what Alfie Kohn and Munir Fasheh think about grading; OR they could read one of these two articles: Either Munir Fasheh’s The Trouble With Knowledge or Alife Kohn’s The Case Against Grades. Whichever reading they chose, they would put in the chat a quote they liked from there. We had discussed the inequity in grading earlier when discussing the difference between equity and equality, so we didn’t need to discuss it again, but they needed to read a bit more about it on their own, I felt.
2. Self-assessment: They would open a Google form where they did their self-assessment. That form has a list of things we do in class and whether they feel like they’re exceptional, good, average, or poor at it. And many open ended questions on what they enjoy in class, how they like to learn, which readings/videos to keep vs discard, and also what they think they’re doing well and how they might do better. Then they say the grade they’re aiming for and the grade they think they’ve been performing at, and then what they’ll do to reach the grade they are aiming for. And then at the end, a little part where they thank one person from the class for something.
3. Reflect on games together in writing: I have several whiteboards around the class, so one whiteboard asked students to reflect on features of games that promoted good learning, versus those that were enjoyable versus those that were less enjoyable and add the names of the paritcular games and discuss with others and add to what others wrote. So those who finish the self-assessment would walk around the boards and add their answers and discuss with others
4. Full class discussion on criteria for good games: Once everyone was done with everything, we had a full class discussion on each of the criteria of games and I put all of it in a Google doc, while we discussed aloud why some of the games were better than others
5. Student-designed Rubric: I told them that their notes would form the basis of how their own games that they develop later will be assessed… by each other as peers. We had the list of criteria in a Google doc already, and I copy/pasted it into ChatGPT in front of them to get a rubric. We decided it was too long and a bit repetitive, so we agreed to make them 6 or 7 criteria only and have fewer levels, and we asked ChatGPT to regenerate… and when we were happy with that, we used it and copied it into our document with the raw criteria
6. Finding purpose: I gave a preview for next class, so students know they will be doing Ikigai to help them choose the topic of their game. They’ll be asking themselves: what do I love? what am I good at? what does the world need? and for the last question: “what can I create a game for?” (a modification on Ikigai where the question is about what they can get paid for/work) they’ll ask AI to suggest topics of games for them based on the combination of things they love, are good at, and feel the world needs.

In the end of class 2-minute paper we do, so many of the student comments were on how much they enjoyed the self-assessment process itself, and the idea of creating their own criteria, and learning to use ChatGPT to generate a rubric, and also several of them asked for more activities and assignments where they can set their own criteria and such. Which makes me really happy 🙂

Header image by Moondance from Pixabay I liked how each person is doing a different thing, which is what happened today because each student’s pace was different.