Monday, December 7, 2020

Distance Learning and Compliance Culture

Compliance culture in the classroom has always, always been a problem.

This is the teacher who demands compliance, in fact, grades on compliance. Most folks have a story about That Teacher--the one who wouldn't accept a paper because it was ten minutes late, or who took off a letter grade because the paper had the "wrong" heading on it. 

For some people, compliance is practically the whole point. No Excuses charter schools are founded on the principle that students need to learn to comply with every action in every moment of the school day. Just this weekend, a USA Today op-ed suggested that if students aren't given zeros for late work, that's a failure to hold those students to standards of excellence. 

Students have to learn compliance, the argument goes (though it rarely uses the term "compliance"), because out in the Real World, students will have to learn to meet deadlines and expectations and basically do as they're told promptly and "correctly," and the longer the argument goes, the more you can see that compliance culture is often meant for Those Peoples' children. But it is also true that life involves deadlines and expectations and most of us don't grow up to live in the world of do-as-you-please. Compliance has its place (like on your face, over your mouth and nose, too, please).

The problem with compliance culture in the classroom is that it loses the plot, falls off the track of what te classroom is actually for. If I see a low score for a student's essay, I expect that to mean that the essay was poorly written or argued, not that the student used the wrong size margins and put her heading on the wrong side of the header. If a student fails calculus, I expect that to mean that he couldn't master the skills and knowledge involved in calculus, not that he didn't turn a bunch of assignments and was late to class many days. Tying grades to compliance issues inevitably means punishing some students for things over which they have no control while requiring them to worry more about rule-following than intellectual attainment.

Education is about building relationships. You do not build relationships--at least not healthy ones--by demanding compliance above all else.

Distance learning in particular (and really, ed tech in general) adds more layers of compliance to student work. Students have to use the correct format for a project, then send it through the "correct" channel, just for things to work. Assignments come time-stamped. Students (and their frustrated parents) now have several layers of technology with which they need to comply.

This is no time for teachers and schools to double down on compliance culture. If a student throws up her hands and finally submits an assignment via email instead of through Canvas or the designated Google app, that student deserves credit for perseverance and not a grade penalty for failing to comply. Did the parent finally crack at 2 AM and email a picture of the completed worksheet instead of sending it through the proper channels yesterday? Hallelujah! The assignment was turned in, and you can now do what you meant to do, which is use the worksheet to assess how well the student has grasped the concepts you were trying to teach.

I get that this can become hugely frustrated and labor intensive for teachers as you try to make sure that you've located all the different submissions of a particular assignment from all the various channels through which they arrived. But at some point (maybe many points) you have to take a step back and ask yourself if you are assessing command of the material or rewarding compliance. 

As the stories roll in about the avalanche of failing grades, I have to wonder how much of that failure is a failure to comply with a dizzying new complex of techno-based requirements. 

Sometimes compliance culture is driven by administration, and sometimes by the classroom teacher (though it always requires the teacher's cooperation to function). I accept that some compliance issues have a place in a classroom (I can't easily assess the skills of a student who never hands in an assignment), but compliance culture cannot be the center or foundation of a classroom, and that is triply true under current conditions. Distance learning comes with its own set of hurdles and obstacles, most of them unfamiliar and challenging for many students and their families. In the battle between students and those obstacles, teachers should be backing the students-- not the obstacles. If you are deleting assignments just because students didn't submit them the "correct" way or because they have a late time stamp, you are not demanding excellence--you're just being a jerk. 

Teachers are supposed to be helping students become their best selves while learning how to be fully human in the world. It's about building up people, not programming robots. 

3 comments:

  1. I love this, as we always need to remember what is most important. Related to some of the frustrations, I often think of universal design for learning and how we need to make things easier to accomplish for everyone. It should not be so much work to find an assignment and to turn it in for everyone. I worked with students who are blind and teachers often gave assignments that were not accessible and called the students lazy for not turning them in, when really they were just beaten down because they tried and were not able to accomplish the task without assistance from another person.

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  2. Though I agree with the general premise put forth, I believe there is a fine line between compliance culture and a willful neglect of instructions. I am one of the awful teachers referenced who emphasizes the need for "proper" headings on essays. My goal is not to punish students for compliance failure but to stress the importance of following proper format instructions. If students are asked to fill out college applications, scholarship applications or job applications in a specified format then they damn well better comply. If not, their application will most likely be discarded. How is this different from asking students to follow the proper header format on an essay? If I want to instill essential work habits in my students, why not insist on following simple instructions? One can do so without being draconian. My policy is to take ten points off a first draft while allowing them to restore these points through simple revision. Don't teachers have an obligation to detail, to encourage students to pay attention and be more careful in their work? To me an improper heading indicates carelessness more than an unwillingness to comply. And part of my task as an English teacher is to discourage carelessness. This can be done, I believe, without sacrificing larger aims.

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