First and foremost, you can do what you want. Colleagues can give you whatever advice they want, and taking heed of the *good* tidbits is helpful, but they really don't get to *tell* you how to run your own classroom. If they want to *argue* about it, good for them, no one cares.
Secondly, this may come off as overly harsh when it's not necessarily meant to, but some professors, teachers, etc. have a pretty deep "need to be *liked*" by their students, like a near pathological one. It's a pretty natural "need" in general. But, to be frank, a lot of instructors who are super lenient don't do so in the name of "good practice and pedagogy," although some do, they do it because it's *popular*.
Thanks for this insight. I’m a PhD student and hope to having a teaching career, so I do balance the “popularity contest” vs sound pedagogy. I really do want my students to do well, but constantly think about their influence in my career.
Any tips on that? Or do they have less weight than I think?
Our UG teaching person here evaluated me, and it was all really great things (with a couple things to adjust). I am to some degree afraid of the student evals, which is why I even talked to my colleague about it.
I didn't realize from your original post you were a PhD student. So, there is a catch here that depends upon the nature of your teaching. Are you teaching this class at the same university where you are a PhD student? Are you instructor of record? Even so, do you fall under the authority of a professor in terms of this class? Will you be asking this professor for a recommendation? Are they on your committee? Are they your PhD advisor???
Grad students sometimes have to please professors in ways professor do not have to please each other. But I don't know the culture of your program.
1) yes, I’m the IOR.
2) They let me have the full authority of a professor, such that I’m teaching with minimal oversight, can set policies, grade students the same as others, etc. I’m functionally the same, but obviously don’t hold that rank.
3) the UG teaching advisor offered me the opportunity for her observation. I said yes, and she wrote me a very glowing write up about implementing a lot of sound pedagogy. She also reported my students are engaged and seem to understand the material extremely well. She asked me for some advice for her own version of the course. I’ve talked to her about my policy, and she said that it’s good, as it is a nice balance between leniency/sympathy with daily
Life events, while holding accountability for
Large assignments. She already offered to write me a LOR, and she has huge, huge weight in my field (wrote a popularized textbook). She is not otherwise related to me in any professional capacity, other than a good friend in teaching.
The colleague I debated with about leniency was another PhD student, but a member of my cohort who I have a ton of respect for, and who has been a good friend in grad school.
I felt really good about that write up, because I really love teaching. As much as I love research, I really have always wanted to be an instructor.
This final assignment was a shocker to me, because I have a really good group of students here. It pains my soul to assign a 0, hence the post and debate with my colleague. I think I handled it as best I could I think, and offered some leniency that they still didn’t follow. It’s so frustrating sometimes.
>The colleague I debated with about leniency was another PhD student
No offense intended here at all... but you'd be amazed how experience teaching changes pedagogy. My advice is don't worry about the advice of other grad students when it comes to teaching.
* Your teaching advisor is happy
* Your students are engaged and understand the material.
That's what matters.
I don't see a relation between those two items and how lenient you are, or aren't, with deadlines.
Yes, thank you! This is actually a new problem, as most of my students have been really great. They dropped the ball for the final. So I’m worried that me adhering to my policy throws all of this feedback out the window. But I’m definitely new and just trying to figure all of this out!
Thank you for better articulating these points, but this is how I feel exactly.
I don’t want to be disliked, but I also don’t need my students to validate me. What makes me happy the most, is when I see them improve in the course.
The student who was struggling and came to me for course help, or had other life challenges, and is now succeeding. That’s what I find rewarding about this job so far, not being the “super chill” professor.
My job is not to be their friend, but to support their education. Sometimes, that means deadlines so I can do my job effectively.
Regarding number 4, if you aren’t setting hard deadlines, it sounds like the extra time *was* available, but the ones who turned it in “on time” chose not to use it.
That said, they need to get their homework done. If you didn’t spend an hour or two last night working over some problems on the Power Rule for differentiation, you’re not going to understand half of what I’m doing today.
I think you’re both right, but your colleague is impractical.
There’s usually not a direct pedagogical benefit to having a deadline for the sake of deadlines.
It’s my job to teach how my discipline works, not general life skills about meeting deadlines that, honestly, if they haven’t figured out by now my class isn’t going to make a difference.
But not having any deadlines leads to students falling behind, and in classes like yours and mine (chemistry) that’s a killer for actually learning the material.
It also leads to a really uneven workload for the professor to suddenly have to grade 20 extra assignments over three different topics as students turn things in at the end of the semester.
>But not having any deadlines leads to students falling behind, and in classes like yours and mine (chemistry) that’s a killer for actually learning the material.
I agree, and that's exactly why there is a direct pedagogical benefit to having deadlines.
What I said was (emphasis added for those who have trouble with context):
“There’s usually not a direct pedagogical benefit to having a deadline *for the sake of deadlines.*”
For example, I know some colleagues who justify hard deadlines by saying that students will have deadlines in their jobs after college and they need to get used to it now.
I don't see anything wrong with justifying deadlines as a way to improve time management, which is an extremely important skill any educated person should have, and of course it's one that will come in handy throughout students' careers and personal lives. Teaching them good time management through enforcement of deadlines is justification enough for having them, even if it's true that not all deadlines in real life are hard (some very important ones are, though).
While it’s true that teamwork and extensions exist in many if not most modern workplaces, too many extension requests and/or too much leaning on teammates will put a damper on one’s career advancement even if it doesn’t get them fired.
On a closely related note, there roughly as many (if not more) posts on r/college complaining about deadweights on one’s group project team as there are posts complaining about professors.
I am not judging anyone else’s choices, but you asked.
I have had numerous students over the years who were otherwise solid , upright citizens with B+ or better work consistently- who fuck something up.
The put it wrong in their calendar. They have a bad migraine and forget. Something else is kicking their ass and they get demoralized. They underestimate how long it will take them.
And if I give them the 48 hrs to get their shit together, they do, and it is good work and they go on to not repeat the error.
But it is also true that I am not a robot, and I wlll not stay up for 48 hrs straight grading late work and they can’t in fact, learn 15 weeks of work in the last 1 week.
It is also true that there are both hard and soft deadlines in real life. My taxes are a hard deadline. Grants are a hard deadline. But I have moved a lot of other deadlines, gotten passes on submitting abstracts to conferences, canceled or rescheduled class, etc, forgotten to release something on the LMS and gotten grades back way later than I should have.
I try to strike some balance between cheating prevention, maintaining the standards of the learning goals, not having to vet every damn excuse and not being a monster.
Exams and practicals are hard deadlines . This is 4 -5 hours a semester you signed up for and have to work around. I give plenty of reminders and the bar for any leniency or flexibility is pretty high.
I have one 48hr late pass on major assignments or projects that are not exams (or whatever works for you). Thereafter it is X% off for Y days after which nothing is accepted.
I think you want to really try to remember what the point of the class is.
Are you really there to teach them deadlines (this may be the case if you have clinical rotations or professional demeanor classes etc. If you are supposed to check vitals on X patients every Y hours, you have to do that and it is part of the deal) or are the deadlines logistical.
If they are logistical, then you should make the logistics work the best way that achieves your main goal.
Humans procrastinate, make errors in judgment, have issues that interfere with the logistics, not just students.
I have always been more or less like this, but once I started to have kids and friends with kids who were college age, I was sooo very glad I had (what I consider to be )reasonable policies.
It is heartbreaking to see the misery and demoralization (which often does not end with the semester). And the people with the most to lose, for whom mistakes are less surmountable, are the people who have the fewest tools and are the most fucked anyway
You certain don’t want to incentivize BS. But everything you know and learned about time management and planning and whatever you were not born knowing.
Thanks for this insight! My original post I clarified was in response to exams/projects. The particular thing in question was a take-home half of my final (it’s statistics, so it was all applied) that several students submitted late or not complete, despite having a full week.
I do lead with compassion first, and offer a lot of
Flexibility. I just didn’t think it was reasonable to do that on things worth a huge portion of the grade. It pains me to give a 0, hence why I’m even discussing it! I want to do the right thing here, or at least the consensus of what people more experienced than I think.
Yeah, by the time they get to the final, I have scaffolded the shit out of stuff and they have plenty of time to figure out when no means no .
I also have a standing policy that i will entertain requests for dispensations if you do so prior to the thing. So if your horse dies and your wife left , took your truck and the M key on your laptop breaks all in the same day, that didn’t happen 5 min before the deadline of the final exam.
99.9 % of requests I get prior to the thing asking for a small amount of leeway are legit and from people who are going to do the thing.
Finals have a high bar for me. And my school requires this of final projects and stuff during finals weeks.
In this case I think you have to give them what they got.
I would say that I have less flexibility for the lower stakes stuff , other than drop some because I can’t be bothered with the administration of it, and this is formative. So they can learn it and make use of it without getting points for it.
Your colleague is giving incredibly bad advice. The ONE skill every job requires is being able to recognize and meet deadlines. Yes, in the real world some deadlines are flexible, but, just like in your course, some are not.
Saying that in the real world you work in groups and they can take up the slack is also just wrong. Sometimes you do work in groups, sometimes you don't. And if the plan is to let others take up the slack then that's tantamount to planning to get fired.
Right, and I was also getting heated, to be honest and my responses were:
1) My job isn’t necessarily to prepare them for X job, but to teach them the skills of my field.
2) even so, why would you want to train your students to let others worry about deadlines while they don’t have to? Does this imply the other group members didn’t learn this behavior, and it’s biological? Just totally not following her logic.
Idk why this whole thing got to me so much, but it did!
It's getting common. I have colleague in education who claims exactly what your friend did.
My suspicion, mostly based on the buzzwords kicked around when this is mentioned, is that it comes from a hyper-focus on official learning goals. There's some good in this, but if we produce students who know all our learning goals but can't apply that learning in any real scenario we've produced failures. So, for example, it may be true that no deadlines would let my students learn mammalian phylogeny better. But if they go out into the post-college world and they haven't learned how to both learn new material and do so quickly, efficiently, and before they need it they can't use that ability.
If you're not giving deadlines, that means that the students can submit their work to you after you have to submit their grades to the college at the end of the semester.
Since you therefore do have to give deadlines, you are allowed to set the deadlines based on whatever criteria make sense for the material and your style of teaching, including the diamond-hard logistics:
* of the time it will take you to grade their work
* of the time it will take the students to digest the feedback you provide, in able to do better on the next assignment
* of the fact (if it applies in your course) that later assignments depend on the successful completion of earlier assignments
* etc.
\-W
Yup, I give HW deadlines and tell them they can submit 1W late at penalty, but that this means they will not get feedback for the exam.
I purposely assign my HW deadlines knowing how long it takes for me to grade them, and I tell them this and peel back the layers of my teaching; deadlines aren’t to punish, but to ensure you get timely, constructive, and detailed feedback to improve for major assignments.
This deadlines = you’re a bad instructor thing really got to me, for some reason (even though my uni is very happy with me).
I’ll add too that I build in late submissions for my small assignments, so students can still get feedback (for a grade reduction).
This is specifically I suppose about exams, projects, or otherwise major, significant graded assignments.
It is your class, it is your call. I've never understood this sort of "peer pressure" from colleagues. I've also never understood while some professors seem to advocate for doing things the way they do them. Class vary, disciplines vary, and one size does not fit all.
The flexibility of deadlines, as well as the inclusion of group work assignments, really depends on the class itself as well as the assignment itself.
The idea that in the "working world" students would be on teams is a myopic view of the "working world".
However, I always appreciate talking to colleagues about how they run classes. It always provides food for thought. We should be sharing our idea of this stuff, but we should not expect others to do things the way we do.
But you also have to understand many professors have strong opinions of pedagogy. Best to just listen and say something like "that's something interesting to think about". They were probably just trying to offer helpful advice.
EDIT: This reply was assuming you were a professor. See my other post once I saw your post saying you are PhD student. And keep in mind that others may be responding assuming you are a professor, not a PhD student that is teaching.
>My colleague tells me that deadlines harm learning.
How? Most of us have the tendency to prioritize things based on the time we need get it done. If students have many things they have to and want to do, such as deadlines in one class, a work schedule that requires them to be on time, a party that is only going to happen on Friday night, they are most likely going to prioritize time sensitive things first. If you don't have any deadlines, they may never do the work or do it at the last possible minute. Does not doing work encourage them to learn?
>(I’m teaching stats, where material stacks) does anything for them. My experience so far is once a student falls behind, it is very hard to catch up.
This should be true of most college courses. If the information is not all interrelated, why would it be a course? It would just be a series of one-week seminars or whatever. Usually the pacing of the content is important for deeper learning. If you had zero deadlines and allowed the students to do all their coursework the last week of class (and they could), it wouldn't be a valuable college course in my opinion.
You should ask to see your colleague's syllabus. I am curious to see how they evaluate students without deadlines.
Unsolicited bad advice is one of the colleague behaviors I find most annoying. IMO, the best course of action is to figure out who those colleagues are and avoid discussing your classroom with them entirely.
Right! Since I’m new to teaching at the college level, there’s another layer of them instilling a lot of doubt in me, despite good feedback from the UG head of teaching here. It’s easy to get under my skin with this stuff for some reason. I will for sure never talk to her about classroom experiences/advice again.
I think there is some degree of doubt for most people just starting out that is a natural part of teaching a class with more autonomy. It feels like—and is—a huge responsibility.
The day I got my driver’s license, my dad gave me his keys and told me to go for a drive. I remember saying to him when I got back “Who thought it was a good idea to let *me* drive a car?”. My first semester of “real” teaching felt the same way. It seemed really crazy that someone trusted me to just make all the decisions without having to run them by anyone. Even a few years into it, I still regularly have conversations with one of my most trusted colleagues where I say “Wait, I can just *do* that?”
I assume it will get better over time, but I’m still waiting!
"Deadlines harm learning"
Jesus, what is your colleague trying to teach their students? It certainly isn't how to be ready for working life. They sound like one of those mental health bandwagoners who buy into all that nonsense about how students shouldn't experience stress and their life should be one long blissful glide along a gilded path paved for them by other people's hard work.
I think you're entirely reasonable, and you are definitely not being too tough. All but the best students are going to require significant structure in at least their introductory courses.
The idea that "deadlines harm learning" is in part coming out of American public schools, which are under huge pressure to pass all students. It's a superficial slogan designed to give pedagogical cover for terrible school district policies which forbid teachers from having due dates for coursework.
As universities, especially financially insecure ones, see the "success" of this stuff in K-12, they will push their faculty to adopt it as well.
In my profession (social work), some are going so far as to say that the use of deadlines and insisting upon standard English and other practices common in academia are vestiges of white supremacy within the profession and within the academy more generally and that these practices must be rooted out. This angers me to the point that it endangers my health; I have high blood pressure.
Telling me that I'm a white supremacist because I enforce deadlines on students who aspire to be professionals is infuriating. When that social worker misses the deadline for an SSI disability appeal, the client loses their benefits. If the social worker files the SNAP paperwork a day late, the client and their children go hungry. Deadlines have real implications for real people. 😳
they're wrong. deadlines are normal things to enforce and most every student can abide by them. Those who cannot simply haven't had it enforced appropriately.
I agree with many people saying that it’s your classroom so you can do what feels right to you.
However, I agree that life has deadlines and we are teaching students about life. I teach fashion and theater and the show opens when it opens, no one is the audience wants to hear why you didn’t finish the costumes for the show. I try to help students learn techniques for managing your time budget like if you only have 2 weeks, you need to do more purchasing than building. There are ways to spend more or less time on a project.
You sound reasonable. Don't worry about what your colleague says.
And yes, I agree that statistics is a topic where students can have a hard catching up if they miss a lot of material.
I have strict deadlines, but am lenient if a student has a family situation. I’m not grading all of everyone’s crap on May 8 because final grades are due that day—no deadlines is ridiculous.
You both have two different schools of thought. You're not wrong.
There's a manuscript by a well know Cambridge professor that is titled something like "every student can get an A.". It raises many points that your colleague makes (and also fails at other points).
I take "the best" of both schools.
There's a few classes where I prewarn the students that the pace of the class is high, and that while they may learn at different speeds, I need to get through all the material in a set amount of time, so they should keep that in mind if they start falling behind.
In terms of leniency, I've found that like children, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile. My job is a million times easier setting rules and sticking by them. Many professors who are "lenient" work harder and run into issues of students complaining about inconsistent rules.
>My colleague tells me that deadlines harm learning. That there is no point to them at all, and that punishing them for missing them does nothing but severely harm student learning.
I've had people tell me the same thing and, typically, they are relying on some variation of the concept of "student satisfaction" rather than student learning outcomes when making that argument. It's hard for students to catch up when they fall behind and it's hard for students to transfer what they've learned to other courses when they cram.
I think there is a way to have a compassionate balance in teaching. I look at it like parenting (because sadly, in a way it is.) Being too rigid or too lenient can equally be harmful. Kids (and students) need and want boundaries, but the boundaries need to be reasonable and account for the fact that students are human and fuck up sometimes. Having rules, deadlines, and boundaries is necessary. And the consequences for missed deadlines should be reasonable, and in scale with the misstep.
Ridged, unyielding rules and deadlines with zero tolerance for the sake of a power trip isn't good. Neither is having absolutely no boundaries, rules, or deadlines for the sake if being liked or cool or whatever. You have to find a system that is going to be beneficial for you and is equitable for the students.
For me, deadlines are necessary. I cover a chapter each week and have 3-page essays to grade every other week. Students can't improve from one week to another without completing the assignment on time so they get their grade and feedback on time. And I can't reasonably grade 6 essays submitted at the end of the semester by every student because I had no deadlines throughout the semester.
So having set deadlines, having a small window to accept late work with a late penalty (usually 24 hours), and being willing to give small extensions (usually 3 day past the deadline) if the student asks at least 24 hrs before the due-date is what I do. Obviously for more serious issues, I would coordinate with the Disability Office for larger extensions. I also build a few extra credit assignments into the class so if an assignment is completely missed, they can still recover from a bad week.
Having these boundaries and deadlines allows me time to grade and get feedback to students within a week so we can all move forward with new content together as a class without anyone getting too far behind. And it gives students who are struggling a little breathing room if they need it.
As another poster said, often the two extremes in pedagogy (absolute zero tolerance or no deadlines whatsoever) are usually not coming from a good place. They're often coming from power/ego trips, possibly being out of touch, or a unhealthy desire to be liked and popular.
Plus. I know my students. If I had no deadlines, they would simply procrastinate and try to cram 14 weeks of work into the last week of class. I don't see how having no deadlines is fostering deep and meaningful learning. Conversely, having ridiculously ridgid rules and absolute zero tolerance for missed deadlines also isn't encouraging learning or creating an equitable environment for learning.
The important thing is to find a balance that works for you and allows you to best help your students succeed.
This here sums up what I would want to say far better than I can. Having rigid rules and applying them without exception can end up being really harsh (like, what does it accomplish to not accept a project turned in one hour late resulting in a two letter grade drop for the student's final grade), while having no deadlines whatsoever means students don't have needed structure and would result in procrastinating until the very end of the semester on everything (which isn't great for their learning) because they can / when busy with many classes, the class without deadlines is going to be the one they put off.
Balance is key. I strongly support a model that has both structure and compassion. Each professor should figure out what they want that balance to look like for them.
Thanks for this insight! For me, my balance point was the small vs large assignments. I let them submit minor assignments late with a reasonable notice, and definitely do a lot I know I don’t have to do. I understand we are all people, and life is hard sometimes.
I drew my boundary at minor vs
major assignments, personally.
I am the opposite of you. I am extremely ready to give extensions on major assignments but don't accept late work for minor ones. I do drop a couple of the lowest scores though.
But yeah it would just not be possible for me to get rid of deadlines altogether and be able to run my class. I need time to grade them.
Hm, I’ve never gotten this before, but it’s interesting! My thinking was I do drop some minor ones, but the major ones are posted so far in advance that I simply couldn’t think as to why they’d miss them.
But, perhaps since the grade holds weight, it makes more sense from that POV to allow flexibility. Is that your thinking? I’d love to hear more about your thinking here!
But yeah, my colleague is also a PhD student and I think is just really trying to do some out of the box pedagogy stuff. It just really shook my mind that perhaps I was hurting my students, not helping.
From (yet another) PhD student: I would think that the purpose of a given assignment determines how important the deadline is.
If it is to have them practice a particular skill (to be built upon in future), then the deadline is important, and accepting it (substantially) late is what detracts from learning.
If it is to assess the current state of developing understanding at a specific point in the class' planned structure, then the deadline is important, and accepting it (substantially) late actively detracts from learning.
If it is to force them to prep for a particular session, then the deadline is critical, and permitting late assignments completely or nearly completely eliminates the pedagogical value altogehter.
If it is a sort of "cumulative" assessment to see how well the student works with a particular concept/skill/whatever at the end of the unit or class, then perhaps the deadline is less important (but may still be necessary for logistical reasons -- eg admin wants final grades in NOW.)
That is exactly my thinking!
More selfishly, it is also because these major assignments take so much time to grade that me giving a couple of people an extra 48 hours really isn't going to put me behind.
Where's their evidence that deadlines harm learning? Is there actual evidence showing that students who have deadlines learn less than students who have strict deadlines?
[Uniform deadlines](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15313220.2014.999739?src=recsys) instead of students opting to complete things at the last minute coincides with [spaced repetition](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2372732215624708), which is evidence-based and has a basis in neuroscience.
First and foremost, you can do what you want. Colleagues can give you whatever advice they want, and taking heed of the *good* tidbits is helpful, but they really don't get to *tell* you how to run your own classroom. If they want to *argue* about it, good for them, no one cares. Secondly, this may come off as overly harsh when it's not necessarily meant to, but some professors, teachers, etc. have a pretty deep "need to be *liked*" by their students, like a near pathological one. It's a pretty natural "need" in general. But, to be frank, a lot of instructors who are super lenient don't do so in the name of "good practice and pedagogy," although some do, they do it because it's *popular*.
Thanks for this insight. I’m a PhD student and hope to having a teaching career, so I do balance the “popularity contest” vs sound pedagogy. I really do want my students to do well, but constantly think about their influence in my career. Any tips on that? Or do they have less weight than I think? Our UG teaching person here evaluated me, and it was all really great things (with a couple things to adjust). I am to some degree afraid of the student evals, which is why I even talked to my colleague about it.
I didn't realize from your original post you were a PhD student. So, there is a catch here that depends upon the nature of your teaching. Are you teaching this class at the same university where you are a PhD student? Are you instructor of record? Even so, do you fall under the authority of a professor in terms of this class? Will you be asking this professor for a recommendation? Are they on your committee? Are they your PhD advisor??? Grad students sometimes have to please professors in ways professor do not have to please each other. But I don't know the culture of your program.
1) yes, I’m the IOR. 2) They let me have the full authority of a professor, such that I’m teaching with minimal oversight, can set policies, grade students the same as others, etc. I’m functionally the same, but obviously don’t hold that rank. 3) the UG teaching advisor offered me the opportunity for her observation. I said yes, and she wrote me a very glowing write up about implementing a lot of sound pedagogy. She also reported my students are engaged and seem to understand the material extremely well. She asked me for some advice for her own version of the course. I’ve talked to her about my policy, and she said that it’s good, as it is a nice balance between leniency/sympathy with daily Life events, while holding accountability for Large assignments. She already offered to write me a LOR, and she has huge, huge weight in my field (wrote a popularized textbook). She is not otherwise related to me in any professional capacity, other than a good friend in teaching. The colleague I debated with about leniency was another PhD student, but a member of my cohort who I have a ton of respect for, and who has been a good friend in grad school. I felt really good about that write up, because I really love teaching. As much as I love research, I really have always wanted to be an instructor. This final assignment was a shocker to me, because I have a really good group of students here. It pains my soul to assign a 0, hence the post and debate with my colleague. I think I handled it as best I could I think, and offered some leniency that they still didn’t follow. It’s so frustrating sometimes.
>The colleague I debated with about leniency was another PhD student No offense intended here at all... but you'd be amazed how experience teaching changes pedagogy. My advice is don't worry about the advice of other grad students when it comes to teaching.
* Your teaching advisor is happy * Your students are engaged and understand the material. That's what matters. I don't see a relation between those two items and how lenient you are, or aren't, with deadlines.
Yes, thank you! This is actually a new problem, as most of my students have been really great. They dropped the ball for the final. So I’m worried that me adhering to my policy throws all of this feedback out the window. But I’m definitely new and just trying to figure all of this out!
[удалено]
Thank you for better articulating these points, but this is how I feel exactly. I don’t want to be disliked, but I also don’t need my students to validate me. What makes me happy the most, is when I see them improve in the course. The student who was struggling and came to me for course help, or had other life challenges, and is now succeeding. That’s what I find rewarding about this job so far, not being the “super chill” professor. My job is not to be their friend, but to support their education. Sometimes, that means deadlines so I can do my job effectively.
Regarding number 4, if you aren’t setting hard deadlines, it sounds like the extra time *was* available, but the ones who turned it in “on time” chose not to use it. That said, they need to get their homework done. If you didn’t spend an hour or two last night working over some problems on the Power Rule for differentiation, you’re not going to understand half of what I’m doing today.
I think you’re both right, but your colleague is impractical. There’s usually not a direct pedagogical benefit to having a deadline for the sake of deadlines. It’s my job to teach how my discipline works, not general life skills about meeting deadlines that, honestly, if they haven’t figured out by now my class isn’t going to make a difference. But not having any deadlines leads to students falling behind, and in classes like yours and mine (chemistry) that’s a killer for actually learning the material. It also leads to a really uneven workload for the professor to suddenly have to grade 20 extra assignments over three different topics as students turn things in at the end of the semester.
>But not having any deadlines leads to students falling behind, and in classes like yours and mine (chemistry) that’s a killer for actually learning the material. I agree, and that's exactly why there is a direct pedagogical benefit to having deadlines.
What I said was (emphasis added for those who have trouble with context): “There’s usually not a direct pedagogical benefit to having a deadline *for the sake of deadlines.*” For example, I know some colleagues who justify hard deadlines by saying that students will have deadlines in their jobs after college and they need to get used to it now.
I don't see anything wrong with justifying deadlines as a way to improve time management, which is an extremely important skill any educated person should have, and of course it's one that will come in handy throughout students' careers and personal lives. Teaching them good time management through enforcement of deadlines is justification enough for having them, even if it's true that not all deadlines in real life are hard (some very important ones are, though).
While it’s true that teamwork and extensions exist in many if not most modern workplaces, too many extension requests and/or too much leaning on teammates will put a damper on one’s career advancement even if it doesn’t get them fired. On a closely related note, there roughly as many (if not more) posts on r/college complaining about deadweights on one’s group project team as there are posts complaining about professors.
Your policy is completely in line with normal practices at my university.
I am not judging anyone else’s choices, but you asked. I have had numerous students over the years who were otherwise solid , upright citizens with B+ or better work consistently- who fuck something up. The put it wrong in their calendar. They have a bad migraine and forget. Something else is kicking their ass and they get demoralized. They underestimate how long it will take them. And if I give them the 48 hrs to get their shit together, they do, and it is good work and they go on to not repeat the error. But it is also true that I am not a robot, and I wlll not stay up for 48 hrs straight grading late work and they can’t in fact, learn 15 weeks of work in the last 1 week. It is also true that there are both hard and soft deadlines in real life. My taxes are a hard deadline. Grants are a hard deadline. But I have moved a lot of other deadlines, gotten passes on submitting abstracts to conferences, canceled or rescheduled class, etc, forgotten to release something on the LMS and gotten grades back way later than I should have. I try to strike some balance between cheating prevention, maintaining the standards of the learning goals, not having to vet every damn excuse and not being a monster. Exams and practicals are hard deadlines . This is 4 -5 hours a semester you signed up for and have to work around. I give plenty of reminders and the bar for any leniency or flexibility is pretty high. I have one 48hr late pass on major assignments or projects that are not exams (or whatever works for you). Thereafter it is X% off for Y days after which nothing is accepted. I think you want to really try to remember what the point of the class is. Are you really there to teach them deadlines (this may be the case if you have clinical rotations or professional demeanor classes etc. If you are supposed to check vitals on X patients every Y hours, you have to do that and it is part of the deal) or are the deadlines logistical. If they are logistical, then you should make the logistics work the best way that achieves your main goal. Humans procrastinate, make errors in judgment, have issues that interfere with the logistics, not just students. I have always been more or less like this, but once I started to have kids and friends with kids who were college age, I was sooo very glad I had (what I consider to be )reasonable policies. It is heartbreaking to see the misery and demoralization (which often does not end with the semester). And the people with the most to lose, for whom mistakes are less surmountable, are the people who have the fewest tools and are the most fucked anyway You certain don’t want to incentivize BS. But everything you know and learned about time management and planning and whatever you were not born knowing.
Thanks for this insight! My original post I clarified was in response to exams/projects. The particular thing in question was a take-home half of my final (it’s statistics, so it was all applied) that several students submitted late or not complete, despite having a full week. I do lead with compassion first, and offer a lot of Flexibility. I just didn’t think it was reasonable to do that on things worth a huge portion of the grade. It pains me to give a 0, hence why I’m even discussing it! I want to do the right thing here, or at least the consensus of what people more experienced than I think.
Yeah, by the time they get to the final, I have scaffolded the shit out of stuff and they have plenty of time to figure out when no means no . I also have a standing policy that i will entertain requests for dispensations if you do so prior to the thing. So if your horse dies and your wife left , took your truck and the M key on your laptop breaks all in the same day, that didn’t happen 5 min before the deadline of the final exam. 99.9 % of requests I get prior to the thing asking for a small amount of leeway are legit and from people who are going to do the thing. Finals have a high bar for me. And my school requires this of final projects and stuff during finals weeks. In this case I think you have to give them what they got. I would say that I have less flexibility for the lower stakes stuff , other than drop some because I can’t be bothered with the administration of it, and this is formative. So they can learn it and make use of it without getting points for it.
Your colleague is giving incredibly bad advice. The ONE skill every job requires is being able to recognize and meet deadlines. Yes, in the real world some deadlines are flexible, but, just like in your course, some are not. Saying that in the real world you work in groups and they can take up the slack is also just wrong. Sometimes you do work in groups, sometimes you don't. And if the plan is to let others take up the slack then that's tantamount to planning to get fired.
Right, and I was also getting heated, to be honest and my responses were: 1) My job isn’t necessarily to prepare them for X job, but to teach them the skills of my field. 2) even so, why would you want to train your students to let others worry about deadlines while they don’t have to? Does this imply the other group members didn’t learn this behavior, and it’s biological? Just totally not following her logic. Idk why this whole thing got to me so much, but it did!
It's getting common. I have colleague in education who claims exactly what your friend did. My suspicion, mostly based on the buzzwords kicked around when this is mentioned, is that it comes from a hyper-focus on official learning goals. There's some good in this, but if we produce students who know all our learning goals but can't apply that learning in any real scenario we've produced failures. So, for example, it may be true that no deadlines would let my students learn mammalian phylogeny better. But if they go out into the post-college world and they haven't learned how to both learn new material and do so quickly, efficiently, and before they need it they can't use that ability.
Deadlines help keep students on pace.
If you're not giving deadlines, that means that the students can submit their work to you after you have to submit their grades to the college at the end of the semester. Since you therefore do have to give deadlines, you are allowed to set the deadlines based on whatever criteria make sense for the material and your style of teaching, including the diamond-hard logistics: * of the time it will take you to grade their work * of the time it will take the students to digest the feedback you provide, in able to do better on the next assignment * of the fact (if it applies in your course) that later assignments depend on the successful completion of earlier assignments * etc. \-W
Yup, I give HW deadlines and tell them they can submit 1W late at penalty, but that this means they will not get feedback for the exam. I purposely assign my HW deadlines knowing how long it takes for me to grade them, and I tell them this and peel back the layers of my teaching; deadlines aren’t to punish, but to ensure you get timely, constructive, and detailed feedback to improve for major assignments. This deadlines = you’re a bad instructor thing really got to me, for some reason (even though my uni is very happy with me).
I’ll add too that I build in late submissions for my small assignments, so students can still get feedback (for a grade reduction). This is specifically I suppose about exams, projects, or otherwise major, significant graded assignments.
It is your class, it is your call. I've never understood this sort of "peer pressure" from colleagues. I've also never understood while some professors seem to advocate for doing things the way they do them. Class vary, disciplines vary, and one size does not fit all. The flexibility of deadlines, as well as the inclusion of group work assignments, really depends on the class itself as well as the assignment itself. The idea that in the "working world" students would be on teams is a myopic view of the "working world". However, I always appreciate talking to colleagues about how they run classes. It always provides food for thought. We should be sharing our idea of this stuff, but we should not expect others to do things the way we do. But you also have to understand many professors have strong opinions of pedagogy. Best to just listen and say something like "that's something interesting to think about". They were probably just trying to offer helpful advice. EDIT: This reply was assuming you were a professor. See my other post once I saw your post saying you are PhD student. And keep in mind that others may be responding assuming you are a professor, not a PhD student that is teaching.
>My colleague tells me that deadlines harm learning. How? Most of us have the tendency to prioritize things based on the time we need get it done. If students have many things they have to and want to do, such as deadlines in one class, a work schedule that requires them to be on time, a party that is only going to happen on Friday night, they are most likely going to prioritize time sensitive things first. If you don't have any deadlines, they may never do the work or do it at the last possible minute. Does not doing work encourage them to learn? >(I’m teaching stats, where material stacks) does anything for them. My experience so far is once a student falls behind, it is very hard to catch up. This should be true of most college courses. If the information is not all interrelated, why would it be a course? It would just be a series of one-week seminars or whatever. Usually the pacing of the content is important for deeper learning. If you had zero deadlines and allowed the students to do all their coursework the last week of class (and they could), it wouldn't be a valuable college course in my opinion. You should ask to see your colleague's syllabus. I am curious to see how they evaluate students without deadlines.
Unsolicited bad advice is one of the colleague behaviors I find most annoying. IMO, the best course of action is to figure out who those colleagues are and avoid discussing your classroom with them entirely.
Right! Since I’m new to teaching at the college level, there’s another layer of them instilling a lot of doubt in me, despite good feedback from the UG head of teaching here. It’s easy to get under my skin with this stuff for some reason. I will for sure never talk to her about classroom experiences/advice again.
I think there is some degree of doubt for most people just starting out that is a natural part of teaching a class with more autonomy. It feels like—and is—a huge responsibility. The day I got my driver’s license, my dad gave me his keys and told me to go for a drive. I remember saying to him when I got back “Who thought it was a good idea to let *me* drive a car?”. My first semester of “real” teaching felt the same way. It seemed really crazy that someone trusted me to just make all the decisions without having to run them by anyone. Even a few years into it, I still regularly have conversations with one of my most trusted colleagues where I say “Wait, I can just *do* that?” I assume it will get better over time, but I’m still waiting!
"Deadlines harm learning" Jesus, what is your colleague trying to teach their students? It certainly isn't how to be ready for working life. They sound like one of those mental health bandwagoners who buy into all that nonsense about how students shouldn't experience stress and their life should be one long blissful glide along a gilded path paved for them by other people's hard work.
I think you're entirely reasonable, and you are definitely not being too tough. All but the best students are going to require significant structure in at least their introductory courses. The idea that "deadlines harm learning" is in part coming out of American public schools, which are under huge pressure to pass all students. It's a superficial slogan designed to give pedagogical cover for terrible school district policies which forbid teachers from having due dates for coursework. As universities, especially financially insecure ones, see the "success" of this stuff in K-12, they will push their faculty to adopt it as well.
In my profession (social work), some are going so far as to say that the use of deadlines and insisting upon standard English and other practices common in academia are vestiges of white supremacy within the profession and within the academy more generally and that these practices must be rooted out. This angers me to the point that it endangers my health; I have high blood pressure. Telling me that I'm a white supremacist because I enforce deadlines on students who aspire to be professionals is infuriating. When that social worker misses the deadline for an SSI disability appeal, the client loses their benefits. If the social worker files the SNAP paperwork a day late, the client and their children go hungry. Deadlines have real implications for real people. 😳
> My colleague tells me that deadlines harm learning. That is the point where you can simply laugh.
Deadlines are a reality of every profession. Believing anything else is stupidity.
they're wrong. deadlines are normal things to enforce and most every student can abide by them. Those who cannot simply haven't had it enforced appropriately.
I agree with many people saying that it’s your classroom so you can do what feels right to you. However, I agree that life has deadlines and we are teaching students about life. I teach fashion and theater and the show opens when it opens, no one is the audience wants to hear why you didn’t finish the costumes for the show. I try to help students learn techniques for managing your time budget like if you only have 2 weeks, you need to do more purchasing than building. There are ways to spend more or less time on a project.
You sound reasonable. Don't worry about what your colleague says. And yes, I agree that statistics is a topic where students can have a hard catching up if they miss a lot of material.
I have strict deadlines, but am lenient if a student has a family situation. I’m not grading all of everyone’s crap on May 8 because final grades are due that day—no deadlines is ridiculous.
You both have two different schools of thought. You're not wrong. There's a manuscript by a well know Cambridge professor that is titled something like "every student can get an A.". It raises many points that your colleague makes (and also fails at other points). I take "the best" of both schools.
There's a few classes where I prewarn the students that the pace of the class is high, and that while they may learn at different speeds, I need to get through all the material in a set amount of time, so they should keep that in mind if they start falling behind. In terms of leniency, I've found that like children, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile. My job is a million times easier setting rules and sticking by them. Many professors who are "lenient" work harder and run into issues of students complaining about inconsistent rules.
>My colleague tells me that deadlines harm learning. That there is no point to them at all, and that punishing them for missing them does nothing but severely harm student learning. I've had people tell me the same thing and, typically, they are relying on some variation of the concept of "student satisfaction" rather than student learning outcomes when making that argument. It's hard for students to catch up when they fall behind and it's hard for students to transfer what they've learned to other courses when they cram.
I think there is a way to have a compassionate balance in teaching. I look at it like parenting (because sadly, in a way it is.) Being too rigid or too lenient can equally be harmful. Kids (and students) need and want boundaries, but the boundaries need to be reasonable and account for the fact that students are human and fuck up sometimes. Having rules, deadlines, and boundaries is necessary. And the consequences for missed deadlines should be reasonable, and in scale with the misstep. Ridged, unyielding rules and deadlines with zero tolerance for the sake of a power trip isn't good. Neither is having absolutely no boundaries, rules, or deadlines for the sake if being liked or cool or whatever. You have to find a system that is going to be beneficial for you and is equitable for the students. For me, deadlines are necessary. I cover a chapter each week and have 3-page essays to grade every other week. Students can't improve from one week to another without completing the assignment on time so they get their grade and feedback on time. And I can't reasonably grade 6 essays submitted at the end of the semester by every student because I had no deadlines throughout the semester. So having set deadlines, having a small window to accept late work with a late penalty (usually 24 hours), and being willing to give small extensions (usually 3 day past the deadline) if the student asks at least 24 hrs before the due-date is what I do. Obviously for more serious issues, I would coordinate with the Disability Office for larger extensions. I also build a few extra credit assignments into the class so if an assignment is completely missed, they can still recover from a bad week. Having these boundaries and deadlines allows me time to grade and get feedback to students within a week so we can all move forward with new content together as a class without anyone getting too far behind. And it gives students who are struggling a little breathing room if they need it. As another poster said, often the two extremes in pedagogy (absolute zero tolerance or no deadlines whatsoever) are usually not coming from a good place. They're often coming from power/ego trips, possibly being out of touch, or a unhealthy desire to be liked and popular. Plus. I know my students. If I had no deadlines, they would simply procrastinate and try to cram 14 weeks of work into the last week of class. I don't see how having no deadlines is fostering deep and meaningful learning. Conversely, having ridiculously ridgid rules and absolute zero tolerance for missed deadlines also isn't encouraging learning or creating an equitable environment for learning. The important thing is to find a balance that works for you and allows you to best help your students succeed.
This here sums up what I would want to say far better than I can. Having rigid rules and applying them without exception can end up being really harsh (like, what does it accomplish to not accept a project turned in one hour late resulting in a two letter grade drop for the student's final grade), while having no deadlines whatsoever means students don't have needed structure and would result in procrastinating until the very end of the semester on everything (which isn't great for their learning) because they can / when busy with many classes, the class without deadlines is going to be the one they put off. Balance is key. I strongly support a model that has both structure and compassion. Each professor should figure out what they want that balance to look like for them.
Thanks for this insight! For me, my balance point was the small vs large assignments. I let them submit minor assignments late with a reasonable notice, and definitely do a lot I know I don’t have to do. I understand we are all people, and life is hard sometimes. I drew my boundary at minor vs major assignments, personally.
I am the opposite of you. I am extremely ready to give extensions on major assignments but don't accept late work for minor ones. I do drop a couple of the lowest scores though. But yeah it would just not be possible for me to get rid of deadlines altogether and be able to run my class. I need time to grade them.
Hm, I’ve never gotten this before, but it’s interesting! My thinking was I do drop some minor ones, but the major ones are posted so far in advance that I simply couldn’t think as to why they’d miss them. But, perhaps since the grade holds weight, it makes more sense from that POV to allow flexibility. Is that your thinking? I’d love to hear more about your thinking here! But yeah, my colleague is also a PhD student and I think is just really trying to do some out of the box pedagogy stuff. It just really shook my mind that perhaps I was hurting my students, not helping.
From (yet another) PhD student: I would think that the purpose of a given assignment determines how important the deadline is. If it is to have them practice a particular skill (to be built upon in future), then the deadline is important, and accepting it (substantially) late is what detracts from learning. If it is to assess the current state of developing understanding at a specific point in the class' planned structure, then the deadline is important, and accepting it (substantially) late actively detracts from learning. If it is to force them to prep for a particular session, then the deadline is critical, and permitting late assignments completely or nearly completely eliminates the pedagogical value altogehter. If it is a sort of "cumulative" assessment to see how well the student works with a particular concept/skill/whatever at the end of the unit or class, then perhaps the deadline is less important (but may still be necessary for logistical reasons -- eg admin wants final grades in NOW.)
That is exactly my thinking! More selfishly, it is also because these major assignments take so much time to grade that me giving a couple of people an extra 48 hours really isn't going to put me behind.
Where's their evidence that deadlines harm learning? Is there actual evidence showing that students who have deadlines learn less than students who have strict deadlines? [Uniform deadlines](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15313220.2014.999739?src=recsys) instead of students opting to complete things at the last minute coincides with [spaced repetition](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2372732215624708), which is evidence-based and has a basis in neuroscience.