How to inspire students to rise to the occasion?
There's a lot of understandable frustration in this sub about students' capacity to learn and what they can't do. Yes they are different humans than when I started teaching almost 20 years ago but the world is different. There is a vastly different attention economy than there used to be, these students now were hit with COVID at the worst possible time, parents remember what we did before cell phones and open access to the Internet and shelter their children with strict rules, or students are just scared themselves to push themselves out of their comfort zones.
I'd love to think with those of you who have unlocked something for how to build with these students that is different than how you were taught and that feels like a real win with inspiring students to rise to the occasion for difficult content and doing good and critical thinking.
For me, it comes down to student agency. Students are not used to being trusted or even trusting themselves. They want everything spelled out so they can check the boxes so they can move on. So that's what I push on. I teach writing intensive classes, as should be clear through my approaches, but I'm curious about how this plays out in other fields.
My project assignments have flexible benchmarks that students can hit through a topic that they get to choose in some way. It's not "choose anything you care about," but "inspired by this example, choose a topic that begins with a point of curiosity about the subject from your background or intellectual interests or career aspirations where you feel you have something to figure out." We study together a lot of examples that show how they can stretch their efforts in different ways depending on how they want to interpret the task, including student works-in-progress from their peers (not just through peer response, but in looking at a bunch of excerpts from current drafts in class as a large group discussion). When students ask "is it ok if I..." Or "can we?" I turn it back to them to say "that's a good question. What do you think?"
I ask for messiness in early iterations of projects, and then "leveled up" refinement in mechanics and polish later on. Revision and leveling up often means adding a new and sometimes playful dimension ("what if you changed the persona dramatically?" "What if you started the whole project from where you arrived on page four?" "What if your tangent is really the center?" And they're encouraged to try it and even if it doesn't work out they likely figured something out in the process, which is just as important to me.
When they turn in projects, I ask what they tried to do and ask for the feedback they most want from me, and I respond to that thoroughly in my responses. I tell them to explore with me how their intentions played out, and how they built what they did from what we do in class. These "reflections" are everything.
I believe in my students and they do exceptional things. I don't have large scale issues with attendance or inappropriate AI use. My student evaluations are routinely very high. It is possible to love this part of the job and have students genuinely succeed.
What do you do in your teaching to inspire students to rise to the occasion?