I had a brilliant idea. My students were going to solve REAL LIFE PROBLEMS. It was a business communications course with a dozen undergrads. I put them in groups, used some scenarios from the textbook company, and sent them off to do a multi-week project to create a business proposal. What could go wrong?
Apparently, a lot. Suffice it to say, my students were frustrated (a lot), and I was disappointed in their final products. As the semester wrapped up, I found myself thinking about who was to blame for our miserable semester. It was a good time for me to remember some of my early training as an educator and to apply a pedagogical theory to my own circumstance.
Attribution Theory. It’s a motivational theory based on the work of Bernard Weiner.1 Oversimplified, the theory is a fancy phrase for “Who do I blame?” Blame isn’t exactly the right word, because the attribution is not necessarily a bad thing. More accurately, it’s a matter of asking, “To what do I attribute my successes and failures?” When I worked in educator preparation with pre-service teachers, I tried to help them understand the value of encouraging their future students to attribute accurately. If a student succeeds, we want them to attribute their success to hard work and strategic thinking, not luck. If a student fails, we don’t want them to attribute failure to lack of intelligence. It’s an uphill battle to move students from a place of “I failed because I’m dumb” or “The test wasn’t fair” to “I failed because I didn’t understand it this time, but with different strategies I can succeed next time.” The motivational theory tells us that correct attributions will lead students to engage in challenging tasks in the future, rather than avoid them.
In the world of higher education teaching, attributions are important too. Professors need to accurately understand the relative successes of their students and the cause of those successes. We may assume that students passing our exams and giving us positive course evals are all based on our brilliance, and failures of our students are based on their inability to think and follow directions. This is myopic and potentially harmful to our students. The former attribution smacks of hubris and prevents us from understanding how to recreate quality learning when our audience or circumstances change (and they are changing rapidly). The latter attribution is really a circular argument (they can’t learn because they don’t know how to learn) and will do little to improve outcomes for my current students or the future ones who will enter my classroom.
As I continue to work through what it means to teach from a biblical worldview, this attribution phenomenon is another area to examine. The Bible has much to tell me about taking responsibility for my actions, walking in humility, and counting others (including my students) as more important than myself. The first instance of sin in the Bible (Genesis 3:12-13) led both Adam and Eve to deflect responsibility for their actions to someone else. This sin is wrapped up in pride and unwillingness to do as I John 1:9 calls us to ‘confess our sins.’ It may seem a stretch to call poor lesson or assignment preparation a sin, but I believe it can become so when we are unwilling to admit that being a teacher includes a call to humility and to counting our students as beloved brothers and sisters in Christ. As much as we believe in the respect our degrees and experiences have earned us, we are still called to fulfill the spirit of Philippians 2:1-5. “Therefore, if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort provided by love, and fellowship in the Spirit, any affection or mercy, complete my joy and be of the same mind, by having the same love, being united in spirit, and having one purpose. Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself.” (NET Bible) Praying those verses over your students, your assignments, and yes, even your course evaluations, may lead you to consider a different attribution for the struggles you and your students experience in your classes.
John Hattie’s Visible Learning Research (2015), and particularly his examination of the impact of educational interventions on student achievement in higher education, speaks to this as well. According to Hattie’s study, the greatest influence on achievement is a teacher’s desire to understand her impact on student learning. So attempting to correctly attribute successes and failures is the key element in improving learning.2
Some tools I used in pursuit of this goal in my classes were one-minute papers, an exercise known as 4-2-1, and mid-term evaluations of the course. In my mid-term evals, I asked students to tell me what they thought of as the most important concept or skill they had learned, how confident they felt in their mastery of that skill, and their muddiest point about the content of the course. These formative assessments allowed me to see the course, eight weeks in, through my learners’ eyes, and better understand what was working for them and what wasn’t, but specifically related to the learning outcomes of the course. There was still time to revisit important skills and concepts, and to try new strategies if the previous ones weren’t working.
I started off this post with the word ‘blame’ and I really don’t like that connotation, but what I especially don’t like is when we as educators tend to blame someone else for our failures while simultaneously owning our successes. Better to own them all equally, and while we are at it, use what we learn from assessment to improve learning outcomes in the future. Proverbs 11:2 says, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” (NET Bible) I don’t know about you, but I could use some wisdom in this hard job we call teaching. And yes, I revamped the project in my business communications course, as well as the instruction I provided prior to the assignment. Better course design from me, including several scaffolds, clearer assignment instructions, and a revised rubric, all led to better products. In the subsequent years, my students created truly outstanding proposals and presentations that made me, and more importantly them, proud.
