🎓A Radical Reimagining of the Undergraduate Higher Education Classroom

It felt like just another office hour. I'm hunched over a wobbly desk in the windowless basement of Uris Hall at Cornell University. A group of us sit clustered around the Teaching Assistant, trying to decipher the black magic that is linear regression. Even without a window, there is a brightness from the shared sharing of answers. After wrestling through a problem, I finally get it. Relief floods in.

That's when a student taps me on the shoulder.

I turned to see a girl—wrinkled hoodie, caffeine-stained water bottle, baggy eyes. “Could you help me with this?” she asked, sliding over her worksheet. I look down and notice it's the exact same question I just got help on. Not only could I help her—I could look like a goddamn mathematical prophet. I smiled. “Sure.”

For the next twenty minutes, I guided her through. Once she'd done it, I turned to the TA for a follow-up question.

Another tap. It's the same student. "Wait... Are you a TA?"

"If I'm a TA, we're more doomed than I thought." And then she says something I'll never forget. Something that, after over 15 years of teaching or being taught, is a statement that still turns my breadth to ice. Whenever I find myself stuck in the seemingly hopeless dirt hole of our current education system, I remind myself it's students like these who we're fighting for.

She looks at me with those bagged, caffeinated eyes, and says, "Then why did you help me?"

I remember standing there baffled. Not angry. Not confused. Just a dreary soup of sadness and disappointment. And to be honest, it isn't entirely her fault; at an Ivy League, this student, this brilliant, tired, human student, had been trained like a GPT model on the dataset of education to optimize for one thing: get the grade. And because the class was curved—the better other students do, the worse she does—she saw no reason students should help each other.

Unfortunately, this story has become only one in a long, long line, showcasing just one of my issues with higher education. You know the other issues. It's why you're here. Let's name them at their extreme because you can't mold what you can't see.

Across the globe, millions of students are still entombed in classrooms where "learning" means sitting passively in lecture halls designed more for content dumps than connection. There's little personalization. There's sparse socialization—especially in STEM—and when there is, discussions and group work are often lifeless.

Feedback arrives slower than a hospital waiting room. Tests are crammed for, then flushed from memory like dreams after waking up. The content is often cosmically disconnected from the student's lives it might as well be spoken in another language known only by tenure-track aliens.

Classroom culture, even if only subconsciously, can teach students to adopt a fixed mindset, the notion that no matter how hard they work they can't become more intelligent or skilled and failure is an indication of their ineptitude. Critical thinking, or intrinsic motivation is often sacrificed at the altar of "making it through the curriculum."

Readings if assigned are rarely done because they are boring, too long, irrelevant, behind a paywall, or confusing. Meanwhile, AI is exiled like a forbidden spell, banned not because it has no use, but because we haven’t built the rituals to wield it wisely. It becomes the scapegoat of a system which fears cheating and the offloading of learning.

The one thing that motivates many students to even wake up are grades dangled in front of them like the last Oreo. A grading system which is mathematically inaccurate to learning objectives, making failure 65% or the scale! A grading system which in many places throughout the world has crystalized and supported institutional and structural discrimination, “meritocracy” in name only, graded not just on performance, but on privilege. And a grading which has destroyed students' intrinsic motivation to learn, take risks, and be critical thinkers.

This may sound apocalyptic, but it's not dystopian fiction. It’s the reality that far too many undergraduates live, silently, every semester.

The Golden Questions: What Do We Do, Who Am I? And Why Now?

I want to make one thing perfectly clear: this article is not a manifesto for all the individual reasons education sucks because of students, educators, or administrators. Making undergraduate higher education better is a systemic issue with individual aspects. So educators; I'm not saying you're bad at teaching. You care so much and I've met some incredible teachers in my life. I'm pointing out the bad system we live under and giving guidance for how I think you can take your amazing subject knowledge and align it with best teaching practices since many of us did not get taught how to teach or even if we did, we don't know how to teach well in the system we operate in. Students, I'm not saying acting like that girl did above is your fault—or being a bad student is any way is yours either; you exist in a system that makes real learning harder. Administrators, you aren't evil for attempting to stick to certain guidelines; those guidelines exist in the system.

But even though we aren't at fault, we are still responsible for doing the best with what we have.

For educators this article will answer questions such as: how do I create a class that students love? Why aren't students doing the homework? Why don't students remember anything I teach them? If I don't lecture, what is my role in the classroom, especially alongside AI? How do I give better feedback? How do I unsuck grades and groupwork? How do I incorporate AI into my class? How do I foster a classroom culture where students want to participate? But even as a student you can still get valuable insights from this article into bettering your classroom experience and as an administrator you can understand what changes your educators could make to better the classroom.

Who Am I To Tell You These Things?

I'm Aidan Helfant, howdy. I envision a world where education is enjoyable, accessible, and effective. To achieve this I’ve honed my skills in educating both online and offline. Online, I’ve impacted 500+ students with four video courses alongside four years of YouTube, podcasting, and blogging to an audience of 10,000+. Offline, I’ve taught 100s of kids, students, and faculty, through inside Cornell Outdoor Education, Ithaca High School, and Cornell SPLASH.

True, I'm not a professor and I haven't taught a standard undergraduate class. But I bring a unique perspective. I just went through four years of undergraduate higher education at an Ivy League. I know what it's like to be a student. As someone with two parents who are teachers, sometimes, your expertise makes you blind to the problems you don't even see.

As a recently graduated Ivy League student, I'm intimately aware of all the problems which exist. Cornell University should be the pinnacle of education across the world. I'll admit, some of it was good, great even. But as we'll see throughout this article, there's so much that can be improved.

Another Question: Why Change Now?

I'll give you three reasons: economically, socially, and technologically.

Economically, undergraduate education in the U.S. is—I’m sorry—a fucking disaster. We are the first generation in modern history expected to make less than our parents. Not just in vibes, but in real, adjusted-for-inflation, can't-afford-a-house-unless-you're-a-crypto-baron dollars. Meanwhile, college tuition has skyrocketed like a rocket powered by false promises and desperation. Student loans might as well cost a kidney and a lung, and that’s before interest turns them into a third mortgage on your soul. The average student loan debt including private loans may be as high as $40,681. And the wildest part? The best educators I’ve had often weren’t professors, but YouTubers and bloggers with patreon links. There are now free, world-class teachers online who pause when you hit the space bar. And yet we keep funneling kids into traditional classrooms because... what, nostalgia? If college is supposed to be worth the cost, it needs to offer more than lectures you could've streamed in your pajamas.

Socially, Gen Z is starving for connection in a world force-feeding us content. On a Cigna survey 73% of Gen Z in the U.S. aged 18-22 reports feeling lonely sometimes or always. We live in the most socially connected time in history and yet every app is a digital vending machine for distraction, not belonging. Mental health stats are through the roof, with a Health Harmony survey finding 46% of Gen Z have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Meanwhile, the world is literally on fire, polarization is a national sport, and with the cough, president, we now have in office, education needs to remind society why it's so important.

Technologically, the old-school classroom is on the edge of being outpaced by a freaking language model. And yeah, that should scare us a little. AI is now rapidly becoming better than most teachers at explaining, quizzing, and even giving feedback—and it does it in real time with no sleep and no office hours. And as virtual reality keeps improving, it won’t be long before students can walk through a Roman forum in a headset while eating ramen at 2 a.m. in bed. So the question is: what makes a physical institution still worth showing up to? If schools want to stay relevant, they must become spaces of experience, not just information. Places where relationships, experimentation, mentorship, and sacred play happen. Because if education doesn’t evolve, students won’t just stay home—they’ll upload themselves elsewhere.

How Do I Recommend You Read This Article?

This is not an in-depth actionable guide but more a high-order view of how we might improve education individually and systemically. Instead of attempting to implement everything I talk about in this article, I suggest you read it once through to get a summary of the ideas. Then, read it through again and decide on the thing you are most passionate about, is most likely to work with your school's administration, and what will most improve your course. The last thing I want you to do is read this whole article and get overwhelmed—that's not helping anyone. Side note, I'm wondering whether I should keep using my beloved em dash because everyone just associates it with AI now. But you don't have to wonder—this article was definitely written with the help of ChatGPT. It says hi.

As you come across problems or questions during your course, come back to this article and answer them. As an educator, you know the value of just-in-time learning. Over months and years you'll be able to experiment with these educational ideas in a way where you can actually implement them. And it will be sort of scientific, yay!

Now, do anything but sit down and prepare for an hour-long lecture, and we'll get journeying. To start off, we will explore the seven goals of higher education so we have a north star, as well as two critical mindset shifts that will help us pursue those goals.

Before We Redesign The Educational Car, Maybe Ask Where It's Going?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood… but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Before moving on to improving the classroom, we must first clarify what we're improving towards. I've spent a lot of time thinking, researching, and talking with others about the purpose of higher education. Here are seven high-level goals in no particular order I think we should strive towards. Everything we do as educators should build toward one or more of these seven shining lights.

Firstly, higher education must create critical thinkers.

Speaking from the U.S., political polarization is at an extreme high, search algorithms dominate our lives like digital puppet masters, and AI radically boosts the information at our fingertips.

We desperately need better critical thinkers. This doesn't just mean critically assessing the information we come across, our learnings, how systems impact our lives, and how to solve problems, but improving the very processes through which we critically assess information, learn, interact with systems, and solve problems. This is called meta-critical thinking or meta-learning when ascribed to a learning context.

Secondly, the higher education system must foster intrinsically motivated, self-regulated learners.

Extrinsic motivation worked when our tasks were clear and repeatable. Now, our tasks are ambiguous, fast-changing, team-based, AI-filled, and occasionally involve Slack threads that never die. Of course, extrinsic motivation has its use cases even in these scenarios, but decades of research shows extrinsic motivation over the long term leads to less effort, less creativity, and cutting corners[^1]—exactly what we don't want for non-clear, non-repeatable tasks. Intrinsic motivation, in contrast, leads to more effort, deeper learning strategies[^3], better psychological outcomes[^5], and more creativity, actually helping academic achievement in the long run, a win-win[^1]. Best of all, students might actually remember what they learned for more than a week. Revolutionary, I know.

Self-regulation refers to the set of processes for regulating ourselves at the level of physiology, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in order to resist problematic impulses (I won't), promote adaptive behavior (I will), and pursue long-term goals (I want). Most of a student's time is spent outside class. Without good self-regulation strategies, it doesn't matter how good our class is in class. That's why it's critical we support students in building these strategies so they can do well physically and mentally not only outside our class, but also across their life.

Thirdly, higher education should create compassionate, group-oriented students.

Many believe as work shifts online and AI propagates, human interaction will become less essential. That couldn't be further from the truth. Online work requires more compassion and social skills because there's so much less innate compassion and responsibility from proximity in time, space, and relation. As AI increasingly can do jobs with less human interaction, human interaction becomes more important as well. That means more projects, group work, discussions, and active learning in the class to create these abilities.

Fourth, higher education must instill in students a degree of subject matter knowledge.

Let's not forget the obvious: students need to actually know things. Despite the modern push toward soft skills and critical thinking, higher education still serves the vital purpose of transmitting domain-specific knowledge. You can't critique quantum mechanics if you don't know what a quark is. You can't challenge an economic model if you've never seen a supply curve. But this isn't just about memorizing facts to win at Jeopardy. The challenge is in giving subject matter knowledge in a way that actually matters to the student while not conflicting with the other four educational goals.

Fifthly, higher education must build students' relationships with themselves, others, and the world.

To this day, it still baffles me I never had opportunities in college classes about discovering what I valued, or how we could apply our learnings for good. Instead, my college classes focused more on the objective transfer of knowledge. Sure, there were opportunities outside of class, like the career services center or talks about meaning set up often by students, but this taught us to see these sorts of things as side projects rather than a core focus.

It’s like getting handed a golden ticket to Hogwarts and spending the whole semester memorizing wand safety regulations.

While many non-traditional students go to college, most college students are in an age range where they are still trying to figure out their self and its place in the world. College isn’t just where you fill your head with facts—it’s where many students wrestle, for the first time, with who they are and what kind of life is worth living. Why not make space in the curriculum for those questions instead of leaving them to student-led side quests? In a time of rising loneliness, burnout, and despair, helping students connect meaningfully with themselves, their peers, and the world should be seen not as a luxury—but a necessity.

Sixth, education should help both historically disadvantaged students, not just make the privileged more privileged.

I'm not here to convince you systemic inequalities exist, or that it's our responsibility to navigate them. If you aren't already, this article isn't for you. With the current presidency, I'm sure you can find many people you will be right at home with.

For those who already know this is a problem, we must be mindful in our pursuit of making education better, that we don't just make it better for those who are already thriving. A rising tide only lifts the boats which aren't already leaking.

Seventh and finally, higher education should prepare students for the outside world.

That means equipping them with practical knowledge, applicable skills, network opportunities, and confidence in their chosen paths. In class, that could look like interview roleplays, real-world simulations, or capstone projects with community partners. But it also includes civic engagement, ethical decision-making, systems thinking, and scientific literacy—because students aren’t just entering industries. They’re entering societies.

With these seven educational goals serving as our shining light, let's explore how we can improve undergraduate higher education, starting with a mindset shift that will change how you view it.

Educators, Don't Be Teachers Be...

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - W.B. Yeats

Think of your favorite educator. Someone who painted their passion for their subject onto you like you were an oil canvas. What are the qualities and actions that made that educator different?

I, like you, am probably thinking of someone who was passionate, believed in you (perhaps more than you believed in yourself), listened to your needs, tried to learn about you and your personal goals (or at least had TAs trained to do so), was knowledgeable, engaging, and interesting. Notice how I didn't say anything about the specific subject they were teaching aside from being knowledgeable. What's the gestalt of these things (forgive me I've been looking for a place to use that word for months).

The qualities I'm describing sound less like an educator and more like a mentor.

The best educators (or TAs) are the best mentors as well, and I believe this will only continue in the future. Of course, educators will always benefit from having a great understanding of their subject matter, especially if they're teaching massive lectures heavy classes. However, with the advent of large language models who will no doubt be just as knowledgeable, if not more than the average educator in their subject matter given a few years, the mentoring qualities of an educator are becoming more pronounced.

As an educator, that means more work spent trying to get to know your student's individual interests, values, background knowledge, goals in life, and more, and then personalizing the course to those specific differences. It means spending more time helping students frame their personal why for the course. It means designing activities where students don't just get told knowledge but stumble into it. It means creating psychological safety so students take risks.

It means helping students improve their learning process rather than just the outcome. I still remember when I showed up to my translational research psychology seminar and the professor found out nobody had done the reading. Instead of getting mad he asked us a simple question: "why did nobody do it? And what can I change about the course so we do it next time?" We were flabbergasted. A Professor was actually curious and involving us in the creation of the course itself.

I call moments like these teachable moments, emotionally valent opportunities for reflection and integration of a valuable lesson. Education is overflowing with teachable moments but many educators don't have the wherewithal to act on them. It's easy, literally talk to the class.

Students didn't do the homework: Why? Students felt the test was too hard: how were they studying? Students feel they have to little guidance for learning the material: what does learning mean to them? Every one of these questions can spark valuable conversations which will change them for much longer than the individual class will.

So, transitioning from an educator to an educational mentor is the first major identity shift. But another core mindset that must occur for this educational movement is how we see learning itself.

Students Don’t Just Need To Know—They Need To Become

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Why do kids play so much?

During play, kids engage in an activity without clear rules, for the sake of the activity itself, often for hours on end. What dopamine-fueled fever dream drives this sorcery?

It seems like an odd question, and yet it's one to which NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt has devoted much of his research. To sum it up, Haidt believes play is gamified identity growth[^6]. During play, kids are free to explore new roles, in a low-stakes environment, without the restriction of rules. They aren't taking in more propositional knowledge about the world. They are learning through something deeper, something more foundational.

How is this relevant to higher education? Look at our current higher education model, and it doesn't take a magnifying glass to notice there is no play. It would be bizarre. Play is for kids, not adults. And how does play move us forward with subject matter knowledge?

I'm not advocating we change our classrooms into big improv classes with pool noodles (though one session per semester sounds like a vibe). What I'm pointing out here is a fundamental misinterpretation of what learning is corrupting the very roots of education.

Play in higher education seems absurd because our educational system is built on seeing learning as mostly propositional.

Propositional knowing is knowledge about facts or opinions expressed in statements like water is made of H20, World War 2 occurred from 1939 to 1945, and Aidan's writing skills are exquisite. This form of knowing is important. We should be teaching it in our classes. But when propositional knowing becomes the only thing we teach, we miss out on some of the most valuable growth toward the seven educational goals we can get. We mistake teaching for knowledge transfer rather than scaffolding someone into learning something on their own.

According to University of Toronto cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, there are three other types of knowing aside from the propositional which form the 4Ps of knowing. Those three are:

Procedural Knowing:

• This is knowing how to do things. It involves skills and procedures and is often tacit, meaning it can be hard to explain verbally, but it is evident in action. For example, how to use a 3d printer, write a great essay, or engage in effective group work.

Perspectival Knowing:

• This is knowing about what it's like to exist from a certain perspective. It is context-dependent, knowing which changes depending upon one's environment, the people you're with, what's happening around you, and how you fit into that scenario. For example, what does it feel like to be a John Vervaeke as he lectures, or give a presentation as me.

Participatory Knowing:

• This is the most fundamental foundational type of knowing. This is knowing how to be in not only one context but your relationship with the world in general. This form of knowledge is pre-conceptual, not describable, and relates to the fit between the agent (the person) and the arena (the environment or context they are in). It's about the attunement of the individual to their surroundings. For example, what it's like to be me not only in my student life but in all my other relationships with life like work, personal, and more.

The core takeaway is simple but powerful: our job as educators isn't just to "build propositional knowing," it's to build procedural, perspectival, and participatory learning as well.

And that can't be done solely through a passive knowledge-based lecture. Deeper change comes through experiences and relationships. How do we do that? I'm glad you asked because armed with these two critical mindset shifts—teacher to mentor, and knowing to becoming—let’s move on to improving class before, and during the semester to support these mindset shifts and our seven educational goals.

Plan Your Class Like a Professor, Not a Student at 3am

“Winging it is not a pedagogy.” — Someone who’s graded 300 finals on no sleep

"Oh, wait, that slide isn't relevant anymore." My professor flipped to the next slide. "Oop, neither is that one."

I sat in the back of the classroom hands tugging at my hair and trying desperately not to whistle. For the last forty-five minutes, our professor had been lecturing us on something we had already read before class. To make it even better, most of the slides were from four years ago. We could literally see the 2020 date written on the bottom right of every page! By the third slide, I wasn’t sure if we were "learning" or uncovering an archeological dig of his 2020 brain.

You'd be surprised how many classes I've had where it feels like the educator scrapped together a makeshift Mad Max car from various old material and outdated project notes.

Again, I'm not trying to riff on educators here. We have a tough job in a system that works against us. But you'd be even more surprised at the solution: planning. Groundbreaking I know, but sometimes we forget because the ground is beneath our feet all the time.

Most professors do plan their classes out beforehand. They have to get their classes accepted. However, through my research, I've come across a few planning tips that can help set us up to build the seven educational goals we explored earlier.

Everything in this section must be considered against this world's version of The Sith: administrators. I'm just joking, administrators should be on your side, not against. Of course, some of the things I talk about in this article won't be easily applied because of bureaucratic influence, but it will only become harder with them aiming their Death Star at you. So, measure everything in this section based on the practicality of having it done with your school's administration.

With that being said, every great class stems from knowing its students and structural constraints.

I learned this not only from my experience in the business world but also from the wonderful book by Norman Eng, Teaching College. This is where you get to put your business hat on! A student persona is a representation of what the average student who's taking your class is like. What's their college year, age, gender, race, interests, and more? Your student persona will inform the learning objectives, activities, examples, and more you put in your class.

It might seem strange to borrow so blatantly from the business marketing world for teaching, and yet they aren't so different. Both worlds are trying to get people invested in a experience or product. Both worlds must consider the motivations and wants of their target audience to do so. To put it blatantly, the business world just does a better job.

How do you build your student persona? If you have data from previous classes use that. But if this is a new group of students, your first assignment or in-class work could involve learning a little more about the students you are working with. Perhaps they create a slide of themselves showcasing interests, major, life goals, etc., which they present to each other for five minutes and submit to you. Be creative!

How might this inform your class? Let's say I were teaching a class to freshmen. I would think a lot more about getting them to critically reflect on their meta-learning processes since this is their first year as well as scaffolding relationship building since they likely aren't a college celebrity. Just don't ask your students to fund you like a normal start up. Trust me, they barely have enough to pay rent in this economically infernal housing market.

You also want to know the structural constraints affecting your class. This could be anything from limited internet access, to if the classroom is a lecture hall versus round table discussion room, to how many students are in your class. Write down the most important of these alongside your student persona.

After You Know Your Students And Structural Constraints, It's Time To Create Your Learning Objectives.

I know, I know, you've all seen and made learning objectives before. But we're returning to them now because they form the foundation of your class, and with the new goals we explored earlier, they might be different for you now. So put on your Zen Buddhism beginner mind, and let's re-explore this fundamental educational skill.

Learning objectives are your north star when designing learning experiences. They ensure what your doing in class actually supports what you're trying to learn. Because of this they are structured in a hierarchy from course objectives, to topic objectives, and finally to individual class objectives. Of course, they will change throughout the semester so don't get to hung up on getting them perfect right away.

What makes great learning objectives?

Great ones are measurable—avoid words like "understand," and "appreciate"—as well as meaningful—they should contribute to the seven educational goals we set earlier. Every learning objective starts with the stem: by the end of this lesson, you will be able to... Ideally, we word learning objectives inspired by Blooms taxonomy:

I'll be honest: I have many problems with Bloom's Taxonomy. It makes learning seem overly rigid, doesn't support learning terms that might not fit on the triangle, and makes higher levels seem objectively better. But it's one of the most well-known and useful tools for creating learning objectives. So, until we get something better, let's stick to this while being mindful of its flaws.

Generally, our goal is to get as high up Blooms Taxonomy as possible because it's more likely we will be doing active learning as we do. Here's an example of some learning objectives if I were teaching a class on gamification. I separated them into unacceptable, weak, and strong so you could see the different. At the end of this class, students will be able to:

• Unacceptable: Know what gamification is
• Weak: Learn how to explain the principles of gamification in ones own words
• Strong: Compare and contrast The Octalysis Framework to other big psychological frameworks like Flow Theory, Self-Determination Theory, and 4Keys2Fun in one's own words
• Strong: Evaluate which core drives in The Octalysis Framework are in a given experience
• Strong: Critique peer's gamification work and provide questions and suggestions to spark positive growth
• Strong: Gamify their own chosen experience using the five step Octalysis Design Process working alongside a partner

One important thing to note is to not use this formal learning objective talk with your learners. You can and should still give them objectives, but word them more like adventures. Trust me, I've read enough syllabuses that say something along the lines of "recognize the duplicitive dynamical nature of modern informational cascades and classify them on a diagram." Your learner's eyes will glaze over like a Dunkin Donut. Learning objectives are for YOU, the educator, when you're creating the learning and evaluating it afterward.

Once You Have Your Student Persona, Structural Limitations, And Learning Objectives, Its Time To Backwards Design Your Class.

You might be familiar with this concept but backwards design is exactly what it sounds like: you take your learning objectives and design everything else based on what will get you to those learning objectives, keeping the seven educational goals in mind. This includes the educational model of your class, homework, the grading system, syllabus, and more. Backwards design ensures you build your class around what will actually further your students in their educational goals.

This is revolutionary compared to what most educators do which is come up with the content of their course first, and then construct the learning objectives afterward. This manner of creating your class means all sorts of activities could have nothing to do with furthering the learning objectives.

We're so close to starting our class! We just need two more things. If we're going to do backwards design, we need to know not only the educational tools we will be using but also the great elephant in the room: how are we going to grade?

Turning Grades from a Blunt Discriminatory Instrument into a Useful Stick

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." — William Bruce Cameron

I'm sitting in a college prep class at Ithaca High School, talking to a junior. For ten minutes straight, I've gently nudged, prodded, and pleaded with her to fill out her project reflection. "Please," I say. "It'll help you improve." She shoots me a glare like I've just eaten the last cookie she baked for her dead grandmother.

Then the teacher strolls by and casually mentions, "By the way, these reflections are graded."

She turns around, not with a look of excitement, but with the look of someone who just realized they haven't eaten in three days and need to get some food in them, NOW. It's like hearing grades sparked a primal, animalistic need. They did the project reflection but with the same degree of enjoyment, I expect of someone shoveling manure.

Other students around the room, even after hearing the reflections were graded, still didn't do it. I asked them why and got differing answers. One said the tests counted for much more of the grade, so she would just focus on those. Some were failing the course. "What's the point in trying if there's no chance of coming back anyway?"

I get goosebumps. It seemed like grades were promoting every behavior we didn't want in the kids. Extrinsic motivation to get work done. Lost hope after students were too far gone. And inaccurate reflections of an understanding of the material. There must be a better way.

Grades. The arch nemesis of every teacher and student. I kid you not, I have never met a single person who has ever spoken positively about them. But we do need some way of showcasing student understanding of material. What we get wrong is that they need to be implemented in the way they are right now.

Luckily, after swaths of research, especially from the book Grading For Equity by Joe Feldman I have some radical ideas on how we can make grades better in three main areas:

• Mathematical Accuracy
• Antibias
• Motivation

To explore these three areas, we must first understand the false assumptions on which our current grading system is founded, as they perpetuate our current grading cycle. Before revealing these assumptions, I want to encourage you to open your mind. Grading policies are some of the most polarizing aspects of a professor's teaching philosophy. They are so important, and yet we are rarely taught how to use them effectively.

As a result, many professors develop personal ideas about how grades should be used, based on what they believe students should achieve. This is great in principle, but when these aspirations are thwarted by science, we can run into problems. So please, at least for the next few minutes, open your mind to the possibility of change.

The False Assumptions Grades Are Based On

Our modern grading system is a fossilized remnant of the historical incentives from over a hundred years ago (I'm talking specifically the U.S. here). It was a different time.

Firstly, industrialization was sweeping the country. Categorization, efficiency, and obedience were the ink that stained the nation's printing press—values etched into every dollar bill. As a result, education was heavily incentivized to teach children these values so they could exit into the industrialized world. So, schools took inspiration from the ranking system used in the Military and began assigning letter grades as a means of showing progress toward this ideal.

Secondly, at the same time, grades were used as a means of validating the privileged place in society over the downtrodden, historically oppressed people and immigrants like Native Americans, black people, and Latinos. Grades were often biased consciously or unconsciously towards those with cultural knowledge, inequitable resources, networks, or home situations, which whites often possessed and the oppressed of society didn't. When disadvantaged groups performed poorly, there was now an "objective" number to validate their inability.

Third and finally, behaviorism was getting huge. This was a psychological theory developed by B.F. Skinner put human motivation down to simply being the sum result of rewards and punishments. Rewards made people want to do a behavior more. Punishments made people want to do it less, or change their behavior for the better. This mindset was of course adopted into schools.

Here's the problem: each of these historical factors is either no longer relevant, or outright wrong.

Firstly, categorization, efficiency, and obedience worked wonders when the world ran like a conveyor belt. But today's world is no longer a factory floor. With the rise of AI, modern work is improvisational jazz, not a marching band. It's messy, nonlinear, and requires skills a machine can't automate—creativity, critical thinking, self-direction, and human collaboration. So why are we still schooling students for the assembly line?

Secondly, while most schools no longer intentionally rig grades to privilege the privileged, the foundation of our grading system is still cracked—and leaking. Grades were built with bias baked in, and even now they quietly tilt the playing field. Extra credit might as well be labeled "bonus points for the resourced," favoring those with free time, cultural familiarity, or a stable home life. Zeros and averaged grades punish early strugglers, especially those with tough starts. And grading participation or effort? That's grading vibes. It's handing out points for what looks like trying—often through the warped lens of a professor's implicit bias.

Finally, our entire grading system rests on a psychological model that flattens human complexity into Pavlovian bell rings: behaviorism. Reward the behavior you like. Punish what you don't. But students aren't lab rats pressing levers for pellets. They're meaning-seeking creatures. And while external motivation can get them to jump through hoops, it doesn't fuel the kind of learning that sticks. Studies show again and again: extrinsic rewards can smother curiosity, stifle creativity, and teach students one lesson above all—failure is fatal[^1]. Even when we say otherwise, our grading practices send the message loud and clear: mistakes aren't stepping stones, they're landmines.

I'm not against grades. I'm against grades, which promote the negatives we've talked about above. We need a grading system that responds to the new needs of the modern era. In effect, grades that are mathematically accurate, anti-biasing, and motivating. If we get this right, we can teach students down to the very system education operates under that the seven educational goals we discussed are important. Rather than empty talk, they will see the results support the ideas.

Let's go through each of these three goals to see how this can be accomplished.

From Zeros to Heroes: Fixing the Broken Math Behind Grades

You likely experienced this grading system in your college experience. Every class was slightly different. Some graded things that others did not and weighted things differently. Retakes weren't a given. If you missed a deadline or didn't put something in, you were often given a zero. Most graded homework, participation, quizzes, projects, and tests. At the end of the semester, your points were tallied up, and you were given a final average score out of 100.

This grading system, though seemingly objective, is incredibly mathematically inaccurate because it doesn't represent your actual comprehension of material.

Let's say you have three students, Richard, Amina, and Kenji. Richard does quite well on all the homework, participates in every class, and does all the extra credit. But at the end of class, he doesn't do very well on the summative assessments. The professor was dissatisfied with his B-, so they rounded it up to a final grade of a B for effort. Amina, does decently on the homework (though she gets a zero on a few), decently in participation, and doesn't do the extra credit. But she aces the summative assessments. Nonetheless, she also gets a B. Kenji's parents went through a divorce at the beginning of the semester, and he has an unstable home setting. As a result, he performs poorly at the beginning of the semester, and despite doing better later on, even getting a B on the final test, the averaged grades cause him to end the class with a F, forcing him to retake the class.

That doesn't make sense! Richard and Amina received the same letter grade despite one clearly showing better comprehension of the material. Both students go to the next semester, but Richard struggles immensely with the material because he was moved before he was ready. And Kenji has to retake the class despite showing comprehension of the material as the semester progressed.

How do we fix this?

Firstly, To Make Grades More Mathematically Accurate, We Must Rethink What We Grade And What We Don't

Grading participation, homework, effort, extra credit, and more don't showcase comprehension of the material. They often showcase the implicit bias of the teacher for what participation and effort look like. And because most higher education faculty is still white, that implicit bias is weighted against colored students. Or they showcase the unfair advantages students have outside of class like being able to go to a movie for extra credit.

If we want grades to truly mathematically show student comprehension of material, they should focus mostly on summative assessments. This ensures people's ability to progress to the next class is based more on their understanding of the material and less on implicit bias and unfair advantages (which will both inevitably still have some factor). In the above case, Amina would do better than Richard like she deserves because she knows the material. You might backlash saying it would be crazy to weight only summative assessments. Students wouldn't be motivated to participate, do homework, and become overly stressed about tests. All of these things will be addressed in the next two sections of grading.

Secondly, To Improve Grade Mathematical Accuracy, We Should Replace The 0-100 Scale With A 0-4

Seems crazy, it's what we're used to after all. But once you begin looking at it it starts to look insane. In the 0-100 scale 0-65 represents failure and 0-45 represents differing derivations of success. Why is a whopping 65% of the spectrum devoted to failure?! This implicitly teaches students failure is much more weighty and costly than they should.

This is only made worse because most teachers allow zero as a grade. Again, it seems intuitive. A student doesn't hand something in, so they should get a 0/100 for it. But because of the 0-65 grading scale, this grade is weighted vastly more than it should represent comprehension of the content. Think about it: if a student doesn't hand something in one time, does that really mean they have zero knowledge of the concept? No, you don't know their comprehension. To make matters worse, Zero's unfairly biased against historically oppressed students who might have more difficult home situations and couldn't hand the assignment in on time or who haven't been taught how to ask for help.

A lot of professors validate zeros or a 0-100 grading scale by saying they motivate students to do better and, unfortunately, in some cases, because they like the reputation of having "the hardest class." This relies on a behaviorist notion of human motivation. Failing grades can actually demotivate students from trying harder. Students associate that failure as indicative of them and then they assume they just aren't meant for school. Once students like Kanji from above start doing poorly, and especially once they get a zero, it's really hard to return. Any student who has gotten a 0 out of 100 can tell you it's devastating. Like Donald Trump winning the presidency devastating.

The 0–4 grading scale offers a clearer, more mathematically sound way to reflect student comprehension than the traditional 0–100 scale. Unlike a 0–100 system—where 65% of the scale represents failure and a single zero or bad grade can tank an average beyond repair—the 0–4 scale compresses the range and distributes it more equitably, reducing the disproportionate punishment of missing or late work.

In a 0-4 scale, 4 is exemplary work, 3 meets the standard, 2 is almost there with a little support, and 1 is needs significant help. If we were to map this out to our traditional letter grading it would be: 3.5–4.0: A 3.0–3.4: B 2.5–2.9: C 2.0–2.4: D 1.0-2.0: F

Notice how failure now represents only ~33% of the scale, rather than a whopping 65%. This sends the implicit message to students that they can succeed. The 0-4 scale also aligns more directly with standards-based grading, allows for nuanced distinctions (e.g., 3.5 vs. 3.0), and avoids the illusion of precision in assigning grades like 87.4%. By using a smaller, more meaningfully spaced scale, educators can better reflect what students actually know, reduce bias, and make the grading system feel less like a mathematical booby trap and more like a fair assessment of learning. And it navigates the zero problem by making zeros penalize way less.

Thirdly To Make Grades More Mathematically Accurate We Should Adopt Minimum Late Grades

Minimum late grades are thresholds below which students can't receive a lower grade simply for submitting work late. Most professors handle late deadlines either by immediately slapping a zero or lowering someone's grade until they get a zero. Again, this doesn't represent their comprehension of the material and punishes students who might need more time or are struggling with things at home.

Instead, we can implement minimum late grades like a 1 on the 4 point scale or a 50 on the 0-100. The first day a student hands in something late, their final assignment grade could get a late penalty of .5 or 10 on each scale—unless they provide a reason for being late beforehand, of course. Then, the late penalty could slowly rise before hitting the minimum grade. Once the student hands in the assignment, they get whatever their final grade is minus the late penalty but can't go below the minimum late grade, unless, of course, their final grade was below it even without the late penalty.

This system ensures grades are more indicative of actual comprehension and doesn't punish historically oppressed groups while giving incentives for handing assignments in on time.

Fourthly, To Improve Grades Mathematical Accuracy We Should Weight Later Assignments More

The fact that grades are calculated by the average semester score makes literally no sense. It means a student like Kanji, who does poorly at the beginning but could have learned the material by the end, doesn't have an incentive to. Once you start doing badly, it doesn't matter if you learn the material, 0-65 percent of the grading scale is devoted to making sure you don't.

Instead, we should weight later assignments more. This could be done by literally weighting later assignments more by percentage or by exchanging a previous assignment grade with a newer, better one if the student shows greater comprehension of knowledge over the previous thing. For example, a student might start with a 2 in their comprehension of air resistance for a Mechanical Engineering class, but on a later assessment score a 3. Instead of averaging the two scores to a 2.5, they should simply get a 3 for their later score. And why not? Isn't the point to show they have comprehension of the material by the end. Why are students punished so much for struggling at the beginning?

This system also incentivizes students who do poorly at the start of the semester to keep trying. A student like Kanji knows a single bad grade at the beginning won't destroy them. If they integrate feedback, and work hard, it's possible for them to still do fantastic in the class as long as they show comprehension later on.

Fifth And Finally, To Create More Mathematically Accurate Grades, We Should Get Rid Of The Curve

Grading on a curve essentially means students are graded relative to how other students do. A student could get what would qualify as an B without a curve but end up with an C because other students did so well.

Every student I've talked to hates this system. It promotes ruthless competition between classmates because you're actively disincentivized from helping each other. That student you help might be the reason you get a B instead of a A.

It also punishes particularly great student groups. It doesn't matter if everyone in the class is exemplary, the curve must go on and therefore some students who don't deserve it will get Cs and Bs.

Many professors keep this system because, quite frankly, they like the notion of having a tough class, and the real world is hard. But this assumes the world is dog eat dog. The reality is standards of knowledge comprehension doesn't change simply because your class is fantastic. A great class should be something to be celebrated, not punished.

And even if the world out there is in some places dog eat dog, is this really what we want to be teaching our students? That they must ruthlessly compete with others, without empathy, without care for each other's goals. This type of thinking creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. As more professors keep grading on a curve, more students exit into the world with this ruthless mindset.

This is not what we should be teaching out students. As batman says, I would rather die the hero, than live long enough to see myself become the villain. In school terms, I would rather teach students the values of kindness, collaboration, and compassion, than further support the very world we are scared of.

In sum, switching from a 0-100 scale to a 0-4, getting rid of zeros, integrating minimum late grades, weighting later assignments more, and getting rid of the curve, can all make grades much more mathematically accurate. They all bake into the very system that risk taking, integrating feedback, and working hard, will reward rather than punish students.

This leads us to the next part of unsucking grades: anti-biasing them.

Your Class Isn't As Fair As You Think. Here's How To Antibias Grades

Many of us educators like to think our grades are objective reflections of students comprehension of content. This is the ideal. But often, when we don't follow the principles I'm going to walk you through, we open our grades to bias and discrimination.

The Main Way Can Anti-bias Grades Is Getting Rid Of Foggy Grading

Foggy grading occurs when there isn't a clear standard off of which our grades are assessed. This most often occurs for grading ambiguous things like participation or effort, but it can also happen in our summative assessments to if we don't have a clear rubric for grading things like short answers.

Unfortunately, even if we don't mean to, this opens up our implicit biases to affecting grades. For example, a student might finish our class with a grade we think is lower than they deserve, so we give them some added points for "effort." What is effort based on? Likely visible effort; the time did they spend in office hours, visibly trying in class, and asking questions. This unfairly biases against other forms of effort we can't see from students who studied hard at home, and couldn't come to office hours or ask for extra help because they had commitments they needed to do at home.

In addition, foggy grading biases against students who haven't engaged with the educational system before. In a foggy graded system, students with parents who know "the school game," can help them succeed where other students couldn't. Then, students with less advantaged backgrounds are unfairly biased against as they don't know how the system works.

To alleviate this implicit bias, we must give clear standards off which we grade students. I explored this in the above section on creating mathematical accuracy in grades so check that out to learn what it entails. This also means not grading foggy things like participation or effort.

Many professors backlash against this saying if they didn't grade participation or effort, than students wouldn't come to class or raise their hand. But again, this misunderstands human motivation. If the class is designed well, and students know clearly the expectations for showing comprehension of concepts, they will naturally have the intrinsic motivation to participate and come to class. To put it bluntly, if they need a participation grade to motivate coming to class or raising their hand, something has gone wrong in the class design.

This doesn't, however, mean we can't assess and give feedback on these more foggy things. For example, a rubric can be made by yourself or better alongside students to assess a students ability to work in a group or give feedback. During or after a project, group members could reflect on a rubric how that student did and give them clear, actionable, feedback on how they can improve.

If you want to continue grading these more foggy things for students you can. It might prove useful to help explain why a student is struggling when they come to you for help. Just don't include it in the final grade for the student.

A Second Way We Can Anti-bias Grades Is By Getting Rid Of Extra Credit

I get it. Extra credit is meant well. We think it gives the opportunity for students to show increased effort in the class and therefore they deserve a better grade. But more often than not, it simply shows the unfair advantages one student has over another.

Often, extra credit involves answering funny culturally relevant questions that don't have to do with class material. Or watching a movie on the topic outside class. But what if a student doesn't have that cultural knowledge? Or they can't afford watching that movie? They will get a worse grade for no other reason than their circumstances.

Other times extra credit involves doing another assignment relevant to class or answering a extra credit question correct on a summative assessment. But again, this more often than not biases toward students who have the extra time to do assignments like these because they don't have to work outside of school, or take care of struggling family. Getting extra credit for answering a question correct on a summative assessment can also do a disservice to a student by artificially making it look like they have better comprehension in the course than they do. This hurts them, by giving them a fake sense of mastery.

Instead of extra credit, just make retakes the standard for getting better grades. This is something that can be done by everyone, and actively supports ones comprehension of learning in the class.

The Third Thing We Can Do To Anti-bias Grades Is Getting Rid Of Grading For Anything But Summative Assessments

Woah! Crazy I hear. I know it's quite revolutionary, but before you toss the thesis out with the typos, let me explain why.

As we know, foggy grading can bring in implicit bias and confusion over what you actually must do to get a grade. That's one of the reasons we shouldn't grade participation or effort. But what about homework and group projects? Why not grade these?

Let's start with homework. From a biased standpoint, homework grades hurt students who have unsupportive home situations. They might not have easy access to internet, a quiet space to complete work, or don't have the courage, role models, or parental support to ask for extra help or an extended deadline from the teacher.

Ungrading homework, actually helps all students by incentivizing the right learning goals and better showing comprehension. When we grade homework, we implicitly and explicitly tell students that failure is not okay. It's literally incorporated into their final grade in the semester.

So instead of taking risks on the homework, or learning in a way that suits the student more but is different from the homework, students play the homework game. They try to put exactly what they think the teacher wants. They see homework not as a tool for learning but as a route to getting a better grade in the class.

In some cases, they even cheat. We've all been guilty of copying off another student's homework at one point or another. We do this for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, because we don't want to get a bad grade on the assignment.

Homework grades also inaccurately represent students' comprehension of the material. A student can do badly on summative assessments, but if they had a good homework grade, they can be given a B at the end of the class. They progress to the next class, thinking they have an understanding of the material, only to be rudely awakened when they find everything difficult. In this sense, it's more empathetic in the long term to give them the grade which truly represents their understanding, rather than making them feel good in the short term.

All of this changes when homework is no longer graded, but rather checked for completion.

Students with out-of-class disadvantages are no longer punished by homework grades. Homework is perceived not as a grade requirement, but as a path to doing better on summative assessments, as it should be. Students are more encouraged to take risks and personalize their learning because they know it won't be punished. There's no longer an incentive to cheat. Final grades more accurately showcase a student's genuine comprehension of material, giving them confidence if they are ready for the next class.

When first implementing this practice, some teachers see decreased homework completion rates. This is a byproduct of an old system where students have been taught to play the school game. But once they realize doing the homework actively helps them in bettering their comprehension, they will start doing it again.

This works especially well if homework like pre-class quizzes, readings, or other things are made fundamental to class time or summative assessments. If they aren't relevant, can you really be surprised when students don't do them. Too many teachers assign homework only to summarize it at the beginning of class. Stop! If students believe doing homework won't help them in pursuing their learning objectives, they should be congratulated for not doing it. They're being smart for allocating their time and attention.

Again, not grading homework doesn't mean students can't get feedback on it. It can still be "graded" but not entered into the gradebook. Like with summative assessments, it should be made clear what aspects of the course learning objectives students are struggling with so they have clarity over how to improve.

You might understand not grading homework, but what about group projects, presentations, and other such things? These, like homework, can be graded but for feedback purposes, but not actually put into a grade book because of their foggy nature. The exception to this is if this type of summative assessment is fundamental to the learning objectives of the course.

For example, if you were teaching a class on public speaking, a written summative assessment wouldn't make any sense. Instead, some form of summative assessment through a presentation would be better. What's essential in this case is the expectations for what gets what grade are clear. Make a rubric, hopefully, with your students and analyze some speeches with it so they know what to expect. As long as a summative assessment isn't foggy and accurately represents progress on learning objectives, it's good.

The Fourth And Final Thing We Can Do To Anti-bias Grades Is Changing How We Handle Cheating

Cheating in most academic institutions is treated like cheating in relationships, very, very bad. Most professors see it as a personal affront to their person if they catch a person cheating. Often, the institution is involved, and the student gets a zero on the assignment, if not getting kicked out of the college itself with cheating forever branded on their transcript.

These reactions to cheating function primarily off of retribution and deterrence, punitive justice. Punitive justice is focused entirely on the punishment. And just like so much of society and education, it bastardizes how people learn to behaviorism. Punishments decentivize behavior. Rewards incentivize them.

Wouldn't we, in an ideal world, want the student who cheated to not only realize their wrong but fix it? Punitive justice, just like in the actual justice system, fails to do what I believe justice should really be about: rehabilitation. Think about it: why do students cheat?

It's rarely because they have a personal affront with the professor or class. They ran out of time. They're too focused on the grade over the process of learning. They're overwhelmed with work. When people do something bad, they rarely think they are doing bad. There might be an angel and devil on their shoulders, but the angel always comes up with more reasons for why doing that behavior is okay in their case.

In effect, just like in many real-life crimes, the student is rarely focusing on the punishment of cheating, nullifying the whole point of difference. They don't think they're going to get caught. And they don't think they are doing terrible wrong.

So, giving them such drastic punishments when they are caught isn't helping anyone. A zero for the assignment lets them off the hook for actually doing the assignment and doesn't accurately represent their comprehension of the subject. Kicking them out of school doesn't help them change their behavior. Worse yet, it unfairly punishes historically disadvantaged students who are more likely to have the contexts that would validate cheating in their minds than others.

Instead, when we catch cheating, we should focus on rehabilitation. We could have a discussion in class about what cheating means, why it's not okay, and how we can encourage our fellow students not to do it. We can implement the grading practices we've been discussing to decentivize cheating in the first place. When only summative assessments are incorporated into grades, students don't have an incentive to cheat on other assessments.

We can tell that the student who cheated to re-do the assignment. Alongside handing the assignment in, they can do a personal research project into the psychological, social, and learning drawbacks of cheating in school. Not only will this see their wrong, but it will help them actually better their behavior instead of being terribly punished for one wrongdoing. Of course, if the student keeps doing it afterward, more drastic action can be discussed, but not for the first time.

These four practices, getting rid of foggy grading, removing extra credit, grading only summative assessments, and changing our mindset on cheating, can all profoundly unbias grades. But we still must talk about the last aspect of how to improve grading: making grades motivating.

From "Please No" to "Let's Go": Designing Grades That Actually Motivate

You've likely heard a million times and more by now that grades take away students' intrinsic motivation to learn. But is it possible to implement a system of grades that motivate instead of burn? I think so. Here's how to do it.

The First Main Way We Can Create Motivating Grades Is By Lifting The Veil

For many students playing the game of school, deciphering the alien script behind a professor's grading system and optimizing it becomes the challenge of the class rather than the learning itself. I've personally done this by not doing certain homework or copying them and not showing up to certain classes just to optimize my time-to-grade ratio. For others, the system can be disempowering because they don't understand how the game of school works. Without standardization, professors—not consciously realizing it—can put bias into their classrooms by grading things how they think it should be graded, leaving students in the dark.

The single number letting system only perpetuates this. Students are handed back a single grade, which tells them nothing about what concepts they are weak on and must improve. If they want to uncover that, they must do an archaeological dig into their own test. The current system doesn't lift the veil, it gives students blindfolds with number signs on them.

The solution is to give students crystal clear clarity over what is needed to get a certain grade. At all times, they should know what the expectations are, where they fall short of those expectations, and how they can improve to reach those expectations.

One of the best ways to do this is by creating 1-4 grading scale rubrics. You can create this or make it alongside the students. Imagine that! How empowering would it be to create and fully understand exactly how you were going to be graded on an assignment? Once the rubric is made, you can apply it to a particularly exemplary piece of work and grade it alongside students so they have even more clarity over what is expected.

Another great thing about rubrics is they empower students to give each other feedback. Often, students don't do this because they don't know what to say. But when expectations are clearly laid out, it's much easier to.

How do we make great rubrics?

Every single item on your rubric should connect directly to a learning objective. If it doesn't? Yeet it into the pedagogical void. You're not grading effort. You're grading comprehension. A good rubric reads like a treasure map, where each "X" marks a specific skill, understanding, or ability the student is supposed to demonstrate.

Provide examples of work. Students don't just need to know what "argument clarity" means. They need to see it. Use anonymized student work or write hypothetical versions. "You must demonstrate insight" means zilch unless you show what insight actually looks like.

If you want to learn more about creating great rubrics, check out Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Williams (2017)[^10].

The Second Way We Can Create Motivating Grades Is By Allowing Retakes Of Summative Assessments

We've all gotten used to the system currently in place. The professor announces a summative assessment a few weeks before it comes, and students get out their study caps and energy drinks like they're preparing for a war. And they kind of are. Like the possibility of death in battle, most students believe this is one of their only chances for surviving the dreaded F (or if you're in an Ivy League anything below an A- because heaven forbid we get a B).

As we discussed in our feedback section, once students get a grade back, they rarely integrate feedback alongside it. Once it's done, it's done. Is this really the behavior we want to be pushing? The alternative is retakes.

If the student does do badly on the summative exam, there are three possible reasons:

• An outside situation which wasn't their fault i.e. a divorce
• A badly designed summative assessment
• Bad understanding of the concepts

In literally all three, retakes motivate students to actually integrate feedback and improve their comprehension of a topic, while helping navigate circumstances where it wasn't their fault. Isn't comprehension the end goal of grading? It tells students through the very system itself that professors are trying to help them succeed. Instead of tricking them or weeding them out, they genuinely think they can learn the concepts if they work at it.

It also encourages risk-taking, exploration, critical thinking, and more. Students know since there are retakes, there aren't nearly as many stakes for each assessment. They don't have to put blinders on and do only what will get them the best grade. They can relax more while taking the test as well, helping the students with terrible test anxiety.

Some teachers fear retakes will lead to complacency on tests because students can just keep retaking them over and over. The thing is, students in sum don't enjoy taking summative assessments, so they won't slack off just to take more. And if other things are set up well, students will actually have intrinsic motivation to do well on the tests. These aren't gremlins motivated only by food. They're human beings.

If we want to make retakes as effective and streamlined as possible, there are a few things as educators we should do.

Firstly, when we hand back a summative assessment, we can clearly include what concepts they are missing the standard for.

This lifts the veil on what they actually need to do to improve comprehension and get a better grade. Outside class, students will be more motivated to fill those learning gaps and get better comprehension at the end of the semester.

Secondly, students don't need to get a retake of the whole summative assessment if they only showed misunderstanding in a small range of concepts.

Just test them on those. When designing summative assessments, you can make them with this in mind, grouping questions based on the core concepts they assess and finding patterns in what students are struggling with while grading. Make the summative assessment a little different so they can't just paste your comments from the previous one. Don't let them retake it unless you believe they have actually done some work to understand the concepts better.

Thirdly, make every summative assessment cumulative.

This is simply better for learning by getting students to refresh old material alongside new. It makes re-tests easier because if a student shows comprehension of concepts on a newer version of an assessment, you can override an old assessment showing a lack of a concept with that new grade. It's also simply a great way of designing class in general. Have old concepts integrated into new ones so students don't forget as the course goes on.

A Third Way You Can Create Motivating Grades Is Through Setting Mastery Grade Goals

Mastery grade goals involve asking students what grade they would like to aim for in the course and how they would like to get there. Importantly, mastery goals emphasize the process over the outcome. A student might still include the outcome in their mastery goal, but it's the process improvements that will get them there. Mastery goals for a course could include bettering one's study habits by doing more interleaving, asking for more feedback from peers, going to office hours, and more.

Asking students to create mastery goals makes them feel more agency and purpose in the class. They're no longer swimming through a black void of confusion. They've got scuba diving gear, a flashlight, and a mission.

Another advantage of mastery goal setting is it helps you and the TAs personalize the class to the student. If they say they would like to work on their feedback integration, you can focus them on that during and outside class. If they state they're aiming for a 3 because of outside work and club commitments, you know you don't have to continually push them to strive for more.

So... Can We Finally Make Grades Not Suck?

We've covered a lot—from the historical nonsense that birthed grades, to the mathematical injustices of zeros and curves, to bias baked into the system like raisins in a cookie no one asked for. But through all this, the core message has remained the same:

Grades should serve learning.

Not punish it. Not gatekeep it. Not reduce it to a point salad so confusing students don't know if they're failing calculus or the class itself.

By making grades more mathematically accurate, less biased, and actually motivating, we can finally build a system that reflects what students know, not how well they've learned to play the game of school.

If you want to learn more, I suggest checking out Grading For Equity by Joe Feldman.

Awesome! Once we know how our grading system is going to work, the last aspect of backwards designing our class before it begins is thinking about the educational tools we will use for our classroom. Let's go!

Use The Right Educational Tool For The Right Situation, Or This Happens...

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” — George Box

One of the worst classes I've ever taken at Cornell was a psychology class which will not be named. It was a tragedy because the educator wasn't bad.

On day one I attended lecture, and the Professor spoke passionately about the semester ahead. I continued coming for the next few weeks until I began to feel the sensation that had become all too familiar to me in other lecture-based classes before: boredom. The class was too easy. And because there was almost no active learning element whatsoever—only readings we did outside of class and then lectures on those readings—I saw no point in coming to class anymore.

So, I stopped coming...

I did the readings outside of class. I wrote my essays. I did the open-book online quizzes, which were laughable because they were all open book multiple-choice. The only other class I showed up for was the final exam. Upon walking in, the Professor looked at me confused and said, "Are you sure you're in the right room? I don't think I've seen you here before."

"I'm sure," I said, taking the test from his hands. Easiest A I've ever gotten.

The point I want to highlight is every educator has a variety of tools in their toolbelt for teaching. There's lecture, project-based learning, problem-based work, discussions, group work, and more. Just like any good toolbelt it's essential you use the right tool for the situation. Use a crowbar to hammer in a nail, and it will probably work, but it won't be ideal.

The problem with that psychology class is my Professor tried to use a lecture for a class on psychology but wasn't a good lecturer. Yes, he was passionate, but the lectures weren't active, difficult, or storylike enough to genuinely interest me. What was even worse, though, was there was nothing connecting us to the outside communities we were learning psychology for in that class. He made the classic error of assuming learning was mostly a propositional matter.

To avoid this problem, we must understand not only the different tools available to us as educators but also what they are good and not good for. This will be hugely informed by if you're teaching Humanities or STEM, your class size, the amount of credit hours your class is, and more. Importantly, all of the tools can be mixed and mashed together (like mashed potatoes!) ,and there could be more tools I simply haven't heard about or don't think are used enough to point out. Here are the main one's I've researched with some benefits and drawbacks to each.

Lecture

“We have met the enemy, and it's name is PowerPoint.” — The First Undergraduate Student Ever

Ahhhhh, lecture. Despite what you might assume, I don't hate lectures, I despise them.

I'm joking, I hate passive lectures. Passive lectures are the academic version of elevator music. Studies on attention during lecture some stating students can only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time. Others saying individual variation, teacher style, content, and more clouds judgement and it's hard to say[^7][^8]. One thing is clear: completely passive lectures aren't good teaching. Lecturing can be incredible, especially when meshed with the other educational tools, for three reasons.

Firstly, lectures can be awesome as a first experience with new propositionally-based concepts.

You can't flavor your learning if you don't know what's in the spice rack first. Propositionally based material is inherently easier to transfer through a more lecture-style format because it doesn't take as much procedural, perspectival, or participatory changes in knowing, which, as we know, often require practice and experience to grow. Once students have seen the Wizard--err, the Professor—go through the material once, they're set up to start doing more active learning themselves. The value of lecturing in this way is especially true for larger class sizes where it's more challenging to make everything active because of the classroom, TA, or time limitations.

Secondly, lectures can be great for clarifying patterns of mistakes to students.

A good professor will attempt to find patterns of misunderstanding in their class. This can be done in a variety of ways we'll explore later on but some simple ones are polling the class, looking through homework, and asking during classwork. If they do, lectures can be an awesome way of clarifying that misunderstanding in a setting where everyone can see.

This leads us to the third, and most under-used reason to lecture I learned from YouTuber and History teacher Mr. Heimler: as a tool to awaken your student's imagination.

Lecturing, when done well, can be its own TedX talk. Imagine you're taking a class on the science of happiness. The Professor opens with a butt-clenching story about their journey on the happiness rollercoaster. It's got stakes, it's got highs and lows, it's got a surprising ending—the only thing it's missing is popcorn.

By the time the lecture is over, your interest in the subject has grown like Jack's beanstalk, and you can't wait to learn more about the material. This is the power of a knowledgeable lecturer with public speaking skills.

Now For The Issues With Lectures

The first major problem of lecturing is it can create lost or bored students.

At some point in every passive lecture, you can hear the exact moment a student's soul leaves their body—it sounds like the SMS text messaging notification. Why does this happen?

Because lectures inherently can't be personalized, you are always at risk of alienating the students who either don't understand or understand too well. Unfortunately, in class, the only solution to this tends to be teaching for the middle and then providing the right support and personalization outside class for students to catch up or challenge themselves (often by using the other educational models). Thankfully, when combined with other educational tools, like The Flipped classroom model, this major weakness of lecturing can be virtually nullified.

Another common reason for boredom is inactive, unpersonalized, non-relevant lectures. I'm often told by educators when I tell them to make their lectures more active that they won't be able to make it through all the material, in which case I usually say, "Those students aren't learning the math you're teaching, they're calculating how much time they can continue watching their football game or shopping for clothes before class ends" (usually I say it a little nicer). The students will retain much more with an active, engaging lecture because motivation is the glue of learning. If you don't finish everything, you can always record the last part of the lecture after class and upload it online.

You can navigate unpersonalized and non-relevant lectures by creating a student persona and adapting material to your specific students each semester. It will be different every time. We'll explore more later on how to incorporate feedback into changing your class, which will help with this point as well.

One last issue relevant to this point is lectures don't support active learning in the classroom. Often times, even if you give active learning time after lecture, students are lost because they literally just came across the information. They haven't had the time to engage in a difficult problem about it or think of curiosity driven questions.

A second problem with lecturing is on its own, it doesn't support the development of self-regulated, intrinsically motivated students.

Lectures are inherently structured and, even if made active, don't give students a large degree of autonomy, competence, or relatedness, which are the three aspects that makeup self-determination theory. I've seen the results firsthand when students exit into the real world after years of schooling and magically don't know how to learn for themselves. They've been given the structure the entire way! This is another reason that lectures should be enmeshed in the other educational tools we will explore later.

The third major problem of lecturing is it's unsuitable for teaching non-propositional forms of knowing.

Remember, the four types of knowing are propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory. Unless you're an amazing storyteller you won't be able to lecture past propositional. So, if you're teaching something that requires deeper levels of knowing, you should consider meshing other education tools with lecturing.

Keeping all these problems in mind, let's explore some general tips for making a lecture so good it feels like a TEDxTalk.

1. Why? Why? Why? What should draw students interest into a topic? Don't assume.
2. Grab students attention right away by starting with an anecdote, question, problem, analogy, or quote. This frames the rest of the lesson and drives students to actually care about what is being talked about.
3. Loop back and remix past content into new lecture material so students see the connections from the past with the present.
4. Spark student engagement through polls. This can drive not only a feeling of connection with the other students in the class but also help the you assess how people are handling the material.
5. Switch from lectures to other educational tools like problem-solving, discussion, project work, and more. This keeps students from zoning out.
6. Make things experiential if possible. The classic is a chemistry professor exploding something in front of their students but there are many ways this can be done in any subject.
7. Make lectures multimodal. Don't confine yourself to the "exhilarating" world of black text on a white screen but rather incorporate visuals, sounds, memes, and other things that make them more engaging.
8. Close with a punch. According to the peak end rule, students remember the peak and end of your lecture the most. So make sure the end is a banger in some way.
9. Reference and relate content to the students goals and lives.
10. Cold call compassionately. Let students know in advance they may be called on, and build psychological safety around it. This keeps everyone engaged without making them panic.
11. Include entrance/exit tickets. These are short written exercises where students answer some sort of prompt or give feedback. For an entrance ticket it could be something they're curious about for that day, or how they're feeling. For an exit ticket it could be summarizing the biggest takeaways from that class or giving feedback toward you.

If you want to learn more about creating incredible lectures I recommend the book, Teaching College by Norman Eng

Project-Based Learning

“What the hand does, the mind remembers.” — Maria Montessori

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is like the marmite of education; you either uplift it as your lord and savior, or hate it, probably because you despise group work. Before we can talk about its benefits and drawbacks we must define what PBL even is, because it can be a slippery eel.

Daniel Jones, author of Modern PBL, defines project-based learning as this: the act of using a project to develop hands-on engagement where students, fueled by their curiosity and passion, work collaboratively to explore, absorb, and internalize classroom content beyond rote memorization. This project might be an essay, a class presentation, a physical machine (in engineering), a comic, and so much more.

The biggest misconception regarding PBL is treating it only as a method rather than a mindset. The spirit of PBL is empowering your students to self-regulate, be creative, and apply what they have learned to personal or group projects that resonate with them. With that being said, compared to lecture, project-based learning (PBL) has a number of benefits, all of which are actually quite complimentary since they fill in a lot of the holes lecture brings.

Firstly PBL is fantastic at building self-regulation and intrinsic motivation.

Since students must actively work on taking class learnings and applying them to a project, they must learn how to learn and structure their time on their own. This isn't direct instruction, where learning materials are clearly laid out in order. PBL is purposefully more flexible—while not being chaotic—to teach students self-regulation skills. This better mirrors how they will actually be learning outside of college and encourages lifelong learning.

It also builds intrinsic motivation. According to Daniel H. Pink in his book Drive alongside psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's Self-Determination Theory[^2], intrinsic motivation is fostered through autonomy, mastery, relatedness, and purpose.

Every single one of these things is inherent to PBL.

Students have autonomy—and therefore personalization—through choosing what, when, how, why, where, and with who to work on something. PBL builds mastery because it can include fast, high-quality feedback if designed well. PBL builds relatedness through working with and helping other students on projects. Finally, there is purpose because PBL, at its best, is personalized to the student's interests and oriented toward a meaningful real-world problem.

Secondly, PBL can be a powerful manner of building the deeper forms of knowing.

Because of a project's hands-on nature, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing are all in the realm of possibility. For example, instead of learning about the scientific process, PBL would actually get students to learn the procedural skill of scientific thinking by creating a research project. And if things go really well, they might adopt their own participatory science relationship with the world.

Finally, PBL can build teamwork and emotional intelligence.

This can be done by making the projects group-based (don't worry; I'll discuss how to make it not suck later on) or by integrating peer feedback into each work session. Engaging in projects alongside other people is one of the core elements students will likely face when entering the working world, so doing it while they are in education is a great idea.

Of Course, PBL Can Have A Host Of Drawbacks As Well

Firstly, if not implemented mindfully PBL can be very chaotic.

Lecture is inherently ordered. Students know they should come into class, sit down in their seats quietly, and take notes if they feel like trying. PBL, if not structured well with routines and clear deadlines, can easily devolve. This isn't helped by most classes not having a PBL format, meaning many students don't have a foundation they can work off of.

Secondly, PBL can feel like a distraction from lectures. Especially in STEM, there is such a massive amount of material that must be covered that devoting hours away from lectures can feel like an utter waste of time and effort.

Sometimes, this is true. But often it’s a product of faulty beliefs regarding how people learn, students come to class with. If the ladder, having a conversation with students about what they think great learning looks like and how PBL builds on that, can be a great teachable moment. Or a conversation about how PBL could be structured more effectively.

Another option is to integrate PBL with lectures or other educational tools. Many classes I've seen have one or two lectures a week with a discussion or PBL session outside. Generally, these are done with TAs who are hopefully trained in effective pedagogy.

Here are a few quick tips for incorporating PBL effectively into the classroom:

1. Anchor projects to a meaningful real-world question. Start with a driving question that’s ambiguous, complex, and relevant—something students can wrestle with, not Google in two seconds.
2. Involve students in shaping the project. Give students choice in what to create, who to work with, or how to present their learning. Autonomy fuels motivation. Ensure the project they do still aligns with the larger learning objectives you have for the class so they learn the material and feel agency in the experience.
3. Make the project process visible. PBL isn’t just about the final product. Use whiteboards, journals, class Kanbans, progress logs, or even sticky note walls to track ideation, feedback, and iteration. This helps students—and you—see the learning unfold.
4. Bake in frequent and formative feedback. Don’t wait until the end. Use gallery walks, peer critique rounds, and check-ins to give feedback while it still matters.
5. Teach project skills explicitly. Most students don’t naturally know how to collaborate, manage time, resolve conflict, or build a presentation. Offer short workshops or resources on these “soft” skills (they’re not soft, they’re essential).
6. Set milestones, not just deadlines. Break the project into checkpoints with mini-goals (e.g. proposal, rough prototype, peer review). This reduces procrastination and panic—and helps you spot issues before they snowball.
7. Create an authentic audience. Don’t make the final project just for you. Invite stakeholders, community members, alumni, or even other students to view the work. A real audience raises the stakes and deepens ownership.
8. Scaffold reflection throughout the process. After each checkpoint (or at least at the end), prompt reflection with questions like:
   • What have you learned so far?
   • What would you do differently next time?
   • What part are you most proud of?
9. Design for multiple types of success. Not every project needs to end in a pristine final product. Sometimes the best learning comes from projects that fail forward. Grade the learning, not just the artifact.
10. Align project with both skills and identity. The best PBL helps students not only practice skills, but explore who they are or want to become. Let projects touch personal passions, moral dilemmas, or social issues that matter to them.

If you you want to learn more about effectively implementing PBL, I highly recommend checking out Modern PBL by Daniel Jones

Discussion

“I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.” — Socrates

Discussion, like lecturing, is the bedrock of much modern education and a great educational tool. But too many educators I’ve seen either don’t use it, don’t use it in the right contexts, or don’t know how to facilitate a great discussion. So, let’s first look into what discussions are good for and what contexts make them good.

Firstly, discussions are great for getting students to connect material to their own lives and prime curiosity.

Many great classroom discussions begin by asking students about their background on a topic. My Better Decisions Psychology class started our unit on relationships by having us talk with a partner about what we think forms strong relationships. This made the class material relevant to our own lives and primed our curiosity for what came next. You can also start discussions with a scenario or problem and have students work in groups to figure out what to do.

The best part is that if done well, this can engage all students. Discussions can be conducted in pairs or small groups, making every student feel like they participated, a refreshing feeling when students are used to passive lectures.

Secondly, discussions can be great for thinking critically and making connections.

Discussions inherently make us think of an issue from multiple sides, not only because you can design questions to be multi-angled but also because humans have different perspectives from each other. This makes them great for spotting connections between things by making us reflect and discuss how things fit together.

Thirdly, discussions are great for building social skills.

Just like PBL, discussions get us to gasp and interact with other human beings. We must build our listening skills, synchronization, emotional intelligence, and more to discuss with others effectively. Especially when meshed with some of the principles that make great dialogue, discussion can also build perspectival and participatory knowing.

Keeping this in mind, we can understand the contexts that make discussion great and which don’t. Discussions work best in more multifaceted subjects with differing viewpoints that are less methodological, and where students come with a degree of background knowledge. This makes them particularly great in the humanities, where they are most often used, but lots of STEM classes would benefit from incorporating them as well.

Of Course, Discussions Have A Number Of Drawbacks As Well

Firstly, they aren’t very effective for more methodologically based subjects and when students don’t have a huge degree of background knowledge.

In more hard science disciplines like Physics or Chemistry, discussing the different methodological methods for completing problems might be helpful, but it’s certainly less subject to interpretation than something like the governmental system of the U.S. I would also be quite confused if you opened a lecture on Aboriginal Tribes of The South Americas with a discussion assessing background knowledge. I just don’t think many students coming to that would have much to offer. The students aren’t the experts, you are.

Secondly, many students have a distaste for discussions from past experiences or the belief they “aren’t teaching the material.”

Again, this could bring up a discussion about what students believe the nature of learning actually is (it's a discussion about discussions, so meta!). But it also warrants some tips about what makes a good discussion. Here are some low-hanging tips for creating better discussions:

1. Keep questions open-ended. This allows students to answer them in a more multifaceted way.
2. Don't veer off topic. If a student starts detailing how their grandma's blueberry muffins healed their heartbreak while you're trying to talk Kant, steer that ship back to port.
3. Don’t announce a group discussion until right before; otherwise, students will spend more time focusing on who they will be with than the actual question. Instead, I encourage you to assign groups themselves right before talking begins to keep the process seamless.
4. Progress up Bloom’s Taxonomy as the discussion progresses. It’s fine to start by summarizing a reading, for example, but students will quickly become bored if higher levels of discussion aren’t reached after this.
5. Mix up how you discuss. There are tons of methods for discussing, some of which we’ll discuss more (I’m so funny I know) later in the article, but some of the most powerful are think-pair-share, turn and talk, Socratic Seminar, and fishbowl. Discussions can also be done online after a reading to prime lecture or active learning in class.
6. Ensure students have something to say. We’ve all had discussions where our students seem to have no idea what to say. This could be because they didn’t do the reading, in which case you can discuss why not. But it’s often because they haven’t had enough time to develop meaningful opinions on the topic. Usually, discussions are done right after a lecture on the topic students have come across for the first time, which, if the subject is quite complex, can make it difficult to discuss right afterward. It can be helpful to have students do an exercise like QQC before the discussion which involves writing down a Question, Quote, or Comment about relevant material before class.
7. Cold Call. If you only call on students who raise their hands, there will be a large number of students who never talk. Unfortunately, these students often fit into marginalized communities and are uncomfortable putting themselves out. If done mindfully, cold calling can create a culture of participation, making people always think of what they might say since they know they might be called on anytime. Don’t call on people who aren’t paying attention. That will build resentment. Talk to them after class.
8. Know your students' names. Names are magic. The simple act of calling a student's name before asking them to respond can do wonders.
9. Go back to a student if they don’t know the answer. Letting students get away with saying “I don’t know” in every discussion teaches the class that they will be let off the hook for not participating. Instead, come back to them and ask them to paraphrase or add to another student's comment. If done kindly, this teaches the class the importance of listening to others and participating.
10. If some students dominate the class, use something like Popsicle Sticks to encourage more engagement. Give each student an item like a popsicle stick or something else (it could be more than one). Every time they answer a question or say something in a group discussion, they must put that stick down. Once they run out of sticks, they can no longer talk, leaving room for other people to participate.
11. Post discussions questions visibly on the board. I can't tell you the amount of times a student has forgotten a question and asked me or the professor to remind them what it was.
12. Challenge students responses. Not necessarily in a debatey way, but to further critical thinking on that issue.
13. Ensure good classroom arrangement. A circle U shape works best. Anything but rows of seats in a lecture hall.
14. Change up where you sit throughout a discussion or across the semester. Often, the students right across from you feel more pressured to speak. By mixing up where you sit you encourage more participation.

If you want to learn more about how to create an effective discussion, I highly recommend the book, Teaching College by Norman Eng

Problem-Based Work

“The solution to the problem lies within the problem.” — Louis Danziger

Problem-based work (PBW)—not to be confused with project-based learning—is one of the most powerful tools in the educational toolkit. PBW is the use of a real or simulated problem to get students actively thinking about and applying what they’re learning. This can include everything from lab work, to hands-on activities, and more. Why use it?

Firstly, problem-based work builds critical thinking through contextual application.

When students are asked to solve a problem, they’re not just memorizing content—they’re synthesizing, applying, adapting, and often failing gloriously before trying again. Unlike lectures, which can make knowledge feel abstract and disconnected, PBW forces them to ask: How does this actually work in the real life. This often reveals knowledge gaps they didn’t even know they had, which you can use to navigate future class sessions.

Secondly, it helps procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing come alive.

Working through a problem helps students embody the logic of a discipline. They start to internalize how an economist thinks or how an engineer problem-solves. And when they try to explain their solutions to others, the procedural muscles flex even more. Because now they’re not just solving problems—they’re learning how to teach their thought process.

Third, it encourages active learning without requiring huge changes to your class structure.

Unlike flipped classrooms or full-on projects, you can integrate problem-based work in little pockets. Pose a juicy problem after a mini-lecture. Break students into pairs to try solving something from the reading. Use it as an opener to a discussion. It’s flexible, modular, and highly snackable.

But of Course, Problem-Based Work Has Pitfalls Too

Firstly, if students don’t have enough background knowledge, the problem just feels like a trap.

This is the classic “throw them in the deep end” mistake. Yes, struggle is good for learning—but if the struggle is so intense they short-circuit, you’ve created frustration, not growth. PBW works best when students have just enough knowledge to feel challenged, not crushed.

That being said, there is value in giving students a problem that, while not impossible, is incredibly difficult. Many Mechanical Engineering classes do this very well. Students struggle with their knowledge to solve a problem, and when you or another resource gives them the answer, they retain the information much better than when they get it without the struggle.

Secondly, it can devolve into guesswork or groupthink.

Ever watched a group of students circle a whiteboard, each waiting for someone else to start writing? That’s not active learning. That’s collaborative procrastination. To avoid this, give structure. Clear roles. Visible scaffolding. Maybe even time blocks like:

• 3 minutes: read the prompt
• 5 minutes: think silently and jot notes
• 10 minutes: pair up and compare approaches

Now what are some general tips for making the quality of the problem based work not the problem?

1. Design problems with “productive struggle.” The problem should be hard enough to challenge, but not so hard students curl into a ball and cry in the corner. Ideally, it should make them think just past their current knowledge zone—what Vygotsky calls the Zone of Proximal Development. Sometimes it can be valuable to give a particulalry hard problem that primes people to learn the content better when they fail, but I dislike impossible problems because it can make the students feel cheated.
2. Give them the end, not the path. Provide a compelling goal or outcome, not a step-by-step instruction list. “Design a sustainable city block” is way better than “Follow these 12 procedures to calculate carbon output.” Unless you're scaffolding their learning because this is their first time into the topic.
3. Incorporate past learnings into solving new problems. If possible, this ensures students past learning builds on new learning keeping the past learning in mind and helping them see connections.
4. Make problems relevant to students’ lives or interests (or funny). Problems feel way more motivating when they connect to a real-world issue or personal values. Bonus if it sparks a little moral dilemma or debate. My Mechanical Engineering friend once had a professor give them a problem calculating what type of straw they would need to suck the coffee out of their professors cup from the second floor of The Temple of Zeus. Glorious. If possible you could even make the problem a real life issue meaning the students solution could have actual concrete change (checked by you of course).
5. Emphasize reflection. Build in time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and why. This turns the project from an assignment into a learning engine. The process of solving problems is just as important as the problem solving itself. You could turn this into a activity in itself by having students do think alouds where they must word out why they are pursuing a problem in a specific way to the partner, group, or professor they are with.
6. 3 Question System. Tell students before asking the you for help they should ask three of their peers or a TA. This ensures they learn to get help from each other before resorting to you.
7. Clarify your role: you're the coach, not the oracle. Students often expect the you to be a walking answer machine. Remind them your job is to guide thinking, not shortcut it. Ask questions. Nudge. Be a Socratic weirdo.

The Flipped Classroom

“The greatest enemy of learning is knowing.” — John C. Maxwell

A flipped classroom—what?! Unlike other educational tools, the flipped classroom is a relatively new phenomenon that has only gained traction in some educational spheres over the last two decades. Even in that short time, mounting evidence is building for its effectiveness as an active learning tool.

Paraphrasing Robert Talbert, author of Flipped Learning (which magically includes a flipped turtle for its cover), the flipped classroom essentially flips the class, making the first structured encounter with new concepts occur outside the classroom leaving more time in class for active learning through discussion, problem solving, projects, groupwork, and more.

This is perhaps the most radical of all the educational tools because it completely goes against the traditional form of lecture-based learning most higher education still uses. As Robert explores in his book, there are several reasons for making the flip:

1. It encourages self-regulation. Since students' first encounter with materials is outside class, they must learn to learn on their own, which better mirrors how they will actually be learning outside of college.
2. More personalization. During an in-class lecture, everyone must learn at the same rate. But when lectures are put outside the classroom, students can learn at their own rate.
3. Pre-exposure to learning before coming to class. One of the great dilemmas of in-class lectures is that it's difficult to do any active classwork after the lectures, as students have literally just come across the material and are often confused. In the flipped classroom, students have more time to think about and prepare for the active class time, as well as to come up with questions for the you.
4. More active learning with you. Unlike traditional education, you have ample time to talk to every group or even every student during a class period (depending on class size of course).
5. Educators can get ideas on what students are struggling with or interested in before class starts. When done well, flipped learning has pre-class discussions, questions, or problems to work on to apply learnings actively. You or an AI can go through these responses and find patterns of difficulties or interests that you can incorporate into the next lesson.

But naturally, with such a strange educational model, there can be two main issues which arise as well:

Firstly, students can be scared of or not prepared for the learning the flipped models entail.

Part of this is a natural fear of the new. Part of it is exposure to poorly designed flipped learning in the past. Part of it is traditional education teaches students a faulty model of learning that conflicts with everything the flipped model stands for.

The obvious and often underutilized solution to this problem is conversing with the students! Ask them what isn't working for them. What do they believe true learning looks like? How much time do they think should be devoted to a class per week? What support do they need to make this work?

Students might be surprised when you include them this avidly in the classroom because, well, they haven't experienced it before. But digging into their assumptions about what learning should be like can be productive in making them realize the value of flipped learning. And sometimes, you'll see that the problems they were voicing were genuine issues with the way the class is designed or framed.

Another concern related to this is some students find it much harder to motivate themselves to learn if they don't have an explicit time and place among other students to do so. This is especially true for more conceptually difficult subjects like Mechanical Engineering. But fear not! The flipped classroom, if designed well, can account for this issue.

You can still physically do lecture each week but not require student participation. This lecture will of course be recorded and uploaded online. However, the main in class time where students are heavily encouraged to come is for the active problem solving, projects, discussion, and more during the week. This way, students who need the motivation of lecture can go, and the rest of the students can remain with the online model.

The second major issue with flipped learning is the time and risk it can put on the educator.

It's no joke: making a traditional class flipped takes a lot of effort, especially if you haven't done it before. You might have to record your own videos, create your own problems, and construct active learning experiences in class. It's a lot of work. And you definitely shouldn't try to fit it all into a month. If it's your first time flipping a classroom, aim for six months to a year to give yourself the full time to process it and think about how to do it effectively. Don't be an educator who gives your students a bad experience with flipped learning.

Another question is the risk it gives to the educator. If you don't have tenure, flipping the classroom can seem like throwing your career into a garbage compactor. If you screw up, it could put your job at risk. Unfortunately, if you're in this position, the only way to navigate this is to try and do a great job on the first go. Again, give yourself enough time to process and create the flipped learning. Talk to your University administrators and, if you have one, a center for teaching and learning.

Ultimately, tenure is given to faculty who seem valuable to the university's efforts in the future. If you show improvement or even the same results, it could help you, not hurt you. And you'll be growing students with all seven educational goals we described earlier simultaneously.

For a more in-depth guide on how to flip your classroom, I highly recommend you read Flipped Learning by Robert Talbert.

With an understanding of all the educational tools (acknowledging I didn't talk about debate, roleplay, and more), your student persona, and learning objectives, it's time to actually create the syllabus for the class. Needless to say, there are a lot of ways you can improve it.

How To Make Your Syllabus Less Soul-Crushing

Groan. That piece of paper most students glance at once the first day of class and barely reference again. It's more for administration than anything.

What if the syllabus wasn't as boring as filling out tax forms? What if the syllabus was something that actually got people excited for the class, something that they read multiple times throughout the semester?

Luckily, I know this is possible because I've seen a lot of terrible syllabuses but a great many awesome ones as well. Here are some quick tips for making your syllabus the same:

1. Why? Why? Why? Imagine this: the person reading your syllabus has four other classes they're doing. They're taking care of grandparents at home. They're working a part time job. And they haven't gotten sleep in two days. What's going to get them through your syllabus? Make your syllabus engaging. Frame everything oriented towards the student. Spark curiosity gaps. Explain the reason you set the class up the way you did.
2. Use more friendly language. Don't say, I automatically fail late work. Say, I encourage you to submit early, because I generally don't accept late work. Don't say, participation is mandatory. Say, I encourage you to come to class because it's fun and graded.
3. Write in active voice. This is a sentence I have written in passive voice. Sounds terrible right? Then don't do it in your syllabus.
4. Make it less than 7.4 pages. 7.4 pages is around the average length of a syllabus and most students don't even get close to finishing even that. So don't make yours over that.
5. Consider sharing about yourself. Your syllabus isn't just an advertisement for your class, it's an advertisement for you! After all, they're going to be spending a whole semester with you. They want to feel they're going to be with someone who cares.
6. Add visuals. There's not reason your syllabus has to be black and white with the same degree of soul as a fossilized trilobite. Add pictures. Color. Get inspiration from what your class is about.
7. Provide useful suggestions for extra help, websites, misconceptions regarding the class, etc. These can be fun to sprinkle in boxes throughout the syllabus as breaks from the main content.
8. Make due dates more accessible by sprinkling them throughout multiple times. Trust me, your students will forget.
9. Consider what makes your course different from others. Lean into that on the syllabus.
10. Include easter eggs throughout the syllabus like, "made it this far, email me a picture of a dinosaur." It's super stupid but very bemusing.
11. Frontload the Gold. Put the juiciest, most exciting parts of the course front and center. If the first page is a wall of ADA compliance jargon, your students will mentally check out faster than you can say “learning objectives.”
12. Break It Up. Use headers, bolding, and bullet points.
13. Use "You" instead of student throughout the syllabus. It will feel much more personal.
14. Use Student-Centered Questions. Instead of just saying, “We will cover X topic,” try questions like: “Ever wonder why people fall for scams?” or “Could AI ever replace your job?” This adds intrigue and relevance.
15. Create an FAQ Section. Instead of hiding policies deep in footnotes, put the confusing stuff in Q&A form. (“What happens if I miss a class?” “Why can’t I email you my 20-page essay at 3AM?”)
16. Write feedback for your class you compile during the semester directly on the syllabus or somewhere else accessible making it easy to incorporate it the next time round.

If you incorporate even a few of these syllabus writing tips, I bet students will be infinitely more excited to learn the first day. Because even if it's unfortunate, first impressions matter. And this is your best chance to nail your first impression. Speaking of though, what should we do on the first day to ensure it's a banger?

The First Day Of Class

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” (and if that impression involves a 42 hour slide show...) — Will Rogers

I still remember the first day of class for my Six Pretty Good Books course and it was three years ago.

When we walked into the lecture hall I clutched a lukewarm coffee and took a seat somewhere in the middle—not eager, not disengaged. Just ready to survive another syllabus day. Then, the professor came around and handed us some sticky notes. Some students got only green, some only purple, and some purple and green. He told us to write our name and hand it in.

Once we had handed in our notes and put them in a box, the professor walked to the front of the podium. "Now," the professor said, lifting a sticky note from the box like a magician pulling a card, "I'm going to guess three deeply personal facts about a random student."

You could feel the room shift—students sat up straighter. Phones went dark. He pulled a sticky note out of the box. "Rohan," he said, pointing to a man in the front row. "You were the winner of your state Cross Country sectionals. Your favorite flavor of ice cream is strawberry. And you value family a lot."

Rohan blinked twice like someone rebooting. "Errr… yeah? I mean—yeah." The professor proceeded to do this seeming magic with two more students, guessing obscure background facts and getting them right.

Once this was over, he asked the class to guess how he had done it. The conversation was electric. Everyone was trying to brainstorm what sorcery was occurring. Some believed he had intuited strange things from our names on the sticky notes. Some believed the color of the sticky notes had some clue. Others joked the professor was an alien with mind-reading powers, which to be fair, this is academia.

When the professor finally revealed the secret, you could hear a dust mite walking people were so locked in. "Well, you all will likely be disappointed, but I simply went on Instagram and did some background research. I faked as if I was pulling names from this box, but I knew the three people I would choose from the get-go. The sticky notes were simply a distraction from the real answer." The professor revealed the bias we had fallen for was the focusing illusion, the unconscious favoring of information right in front of us simply because it is in front of us. We made meaning out of the sticky notes simply because they were there.

Once he revealed this bias, he explained we would love the course if that fascinated us. The whole class would be about examining human psychology, biases, heuristics, and how they impact our rationality. Needless to say, I was at the next lecture.

There's something magical about the first class. And yet, so many courses waste it by either going over the syllabus in a manner so dry the classroom becomes a dessert or jumping straight into the material because "we need to get through the curriculum."

This is a tragedy because first impressions are crucial. Starting a class badly sets a terrible tone and misses out on motivating students early on. So, how can we make the first day of class the best possible?

Firstly, We Can Buy Students Into The Experience

It feels strange to word it this way, but our first class is an advertisement for the semester. Our students are likely juggling between many classes in the first week, just waiting to take their drop hammer and bludgeon something with it. If your class is required for some students, all the more reason to buy them in—they already feel a loss of agency, don't make them feel even worse.

You can draw them in many ways: through an experience, question, quote, anecdote, game, problem, and more. All of these methods should answer one question: why? Why should students take your class? What makes it interesting? What makes it important? What about it could be relevant to their real lives? We saw a good example of that in my Six Pretty Good Books course.

The Second Thing We Can Do To Make The First Day Of Class Awesome Is Introduce Ourselves And The Students To Each Other.

Hopefully, you'll be with each other for the next four months—which is longer than the average college romantic relationship—so you might want to get to know each other. You could create a short five-minute slideshow of yourself, your background, some fun facts and hobbies, and whatever else you think of.

Do this with your students too. You can make it long and have them create their own slide to present to each other in five minutes. Or you could give them a simple moment of connection question. Don't call it an icebreaker because most people hate those. If you do the connection question, for the love of all that is good, don't use something like "What's your name, major, and year?" If your students got a nickel for every time they answered that, they could each buy Cornell and actually make tuition affordable.

Ask something like, if your character was a fruit, what would it be and why? Or what's one thing you enjoyed the last week, are looking forward to, and scared about? Be creative: come up with something novel. It could be related to the class. You could even do some sort of name game if you wanted. Names are magic. Experiment!

Getting to know your students doesn't have to stop here. You can ask each student to write you a short email in the first week introducing themselves, their interests, and why they want to take your class. Unless your class is really big, you can consider setting up a virtual office hours where every student talks to you for five minutes about themselves. This may seem small, but that small moment of personal connection will make it so much more likely those students come to you during collaborative office hours and make them feel so much more welcome in the class.

The Third Thing We Can Do To Make The First Day Of Class Awesome Is Changing The Syllabus Walkthrough Into An Adventure.

Gamify it. Split students into groups and have each read a section of the syllabus and then explain it to the class. Quiz students on various parts of the syllabus by asking questions. Do literally anything that just read through it. These small touches will make what is usually the worst part about the first class a little more bearable.

Now here's where it gets crazy. Let the students co-create the syllabus with you. I know, I know, you might be thinking if you hand over the reins to your students, they will make it as easy on themselves as possible, and yet, from actual tests of this in practice, that rarely happens. In reality, co-creating the syllabus makes your students feel SO much more attached to the course[^9]. I mean, aren't the students paying the University to learn? Aren't they coming from different backgrounds and goals? When you think about it like that, it begins to seem crazy not to give them input into aspects of the course.

According to The New College Classroom, co-creating a syllabus with students doesn't mean handing over the whole course structure. Instead, it means collaboratively shaping key aspects of the course—especially expectations, norms, and values—so students feel more ownership and investment in their learning.

Here's what it might look like in practice:

• Setting Community Agreements: Invite students to help define classroom norms—how discussions should be held, what participation looks like, how late work should be treated, and the values that are promoted. This doesn't have to be done all upfront or exhaustively but rather when it becomes relevant. For example, before peer feedback is given on a project, you might collectively discuss as a class what valuable, kind, constructive feedback looks like in your subject.
• Negotiating Assignments or Policies: Offer students choices between assignment formats (e.g., paper, podcast, video), or let them co-design part of a grading rubric. Some instructors even offer a "negotiable zone" on the syllabus: a few policies or topics students can revise collectively during the first week.
• Syllabus as a Living Document: Frame the syllabus as a flexible map rather than a carved-stone contract. Revisit parts of it together during the term to tweak pacing, swap readings, or reflect on how the class is going.

While going through the syllabus make sure you clearly state how the grading system works in your class. Unfortunately, many students are still caught in the game of school rather than learning itself. But many others are also frustrated at how confusing many professor's grading system can be. There is little standard across classes and often students don't know what will be on the test until a couple weeks beforehand. '

Unfortunately, this often biases against the most historically disadvantaged students because they have the least cultural know how for how to navigate these ambiguous grading system. So, lift the veil. Make it very clear what your standards are for the course, and how each student can achieve those standards. Don't worry, we will explore much more how to do this in our section on grades.

The Last Thing That Can Make A Banging First Day Of Class Or Be Left To A Different Day, Perhaps A Discussion Section, Is Creating Mastery Goals For The Course.

Unlike performance goals, mastery goals are framed in ways that emphasize the process of coming to an outcome rather than the outcome itself. For example, a student might have a performance goal of getting an A in the class (classic Ivy Leaguer), but their mastery goal might be to become better at integrating feedback into their projects. Studies show creating mastery-based goals leads to more effort and positive affect than performance-based goals[^4].

The great thing about these mastery goals is that they can be used by you, TAs, or an AI as ways to personalize the class to the student and as check-in points throughout the semester. Perhaps every few weeks, a student assesses how they are doing on their mastery goals and makes any changes they would like before continuing on.

By integrating all four of these things into a first-class: a buy-in, introductions, co-syllabus creation, and mastery goal creation, you can make a class that will be remembered for ages. But, if you don't have a good class culture for the whole class, it won't matter how well your first class was. In the next session, we'll look at creating a banging, accessible classroom culture.

Fostering A Banging Accessible Classroom Culture

“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” — Margaret J. Wheatley

I sat in the back of the lecture hall with three thoughts at the same time:

1. When is this class over?
2. Has The Witcher 4 dropped yet?
3. How many collective human hours have we all sacrificed in this pedagogical purgatory?

The teacher glanced up at the students. "Anyone have any idea what the answer is?" She gave the question a full one-Mississipi before answering it herself.

I sighed, rotating in my chair, trying to see how many back cracks I could get in one go. Six. One student was deep into NFL stats. Another was scrolling ASOS for a "Fall Semi-Formal 'Slay' Fit." A girl two rows up hovered in the fascinating state right before someone falls asleep I will call aweep, as it is often precluded by internal weeping.

This class, which shall not be named, is the classic example of classroom culture gone wrong. And what a shame. It doesn't matter how good of a lecturer you are. How good your problems are. How good your tests are. If the classroom culture is messed up, everything else goes. This leaves many educators feeling confused and frustrated about where to go.

How do you improve something you can't see? Thankfully, there are several reliable ways you can create a more effective classroom culture.

1. Create psychological safety. Psychological safety is the sense that you can speak without the danger of backlash, embarrassment, or mistrust. It's the element that classroom culture is made of and is created through the rest of the tips we will go through.
2. Get to know your students and your students to know each other. I explored this in the last section on the first day of class, but to summarize, show a slide exhibiting your personality, play name games, or anything you can think of to get students acclimated to each other. Sometimes, remembering names can be hard, and, encouraging students to set up tent cards with their names on them each class can make things much easier. If the class is too big, this can also be reserved for smaller discussion sessions if those exist.
3. Foster a growth mindset. The growth mindset is the belief that with active effort and learning from failure, you can become better at anything you set your mind towards. Instilling this in your students depends on the way you frame everything. Frame feedback in ways like "not yet, but almost there," or "you're doing better." Give opportunities for extra credit and regrades. Affirm people's hard work rather than their innate intelligence. Affirming innate intelligence can counterintuitively disincentivize stepping out of one's comfort zone because students are scared of losing what they can't control.
4. Validate differing perspectives. Avoid black-and-white thinking unless something is a very clear industry standard in your classroom. This is especially true in classrooms like math, which can often make it look like there is only one way to approach a problem.
5. Integrate Universal Design For Learning principles. This topic deserves its own article, but this includes making classes multimodal and considering accessibility concerns, such as using subtitles for videos when non-native speakers are present. It also means planning examples that cut across multiple backgrounds. If your class examples seem like the lineup to a 1950s Toothpaste commercial, you're doing it wrong. Don't just use Jenny, Jane, and John, but Omar, Rohan, and Yao Xing. Don't use only masculine pronouns in examples. Don't tokenize marginalized students. Etc.
6. Shout out to students out of class for good suggestions, comments, or work. This could be through a quick email or discussion post. Ask to use their work as a future exemplar. This small reach-out takes barely any time for you, but you can rock the world of that student.
7. Explain why you do the things you do. Many students don't realize why think-pair-share is useful or why designing your presentations in the way you do is effective until you explain. Doing this builds trust by showing students there is a method behind the madness.
8. Don't scan the room to look for others to call on while a student speaks to you. This signals that you don't care about what they are saying.
9. Give students flex days. Flex days are days throughout the semester when they can prolong a deadline or skip class without participation problems if participation is graded. Flex days let the students know you respect their time and know they are busy. It encourages a classroom of balance rather than a go, go, go mentality.
10. Call out offensive, inappropriate language or action right away. If you don't call it out, that teaches students that these things are okay.
11. Set class norms with students, not for them. Co-create a "community agreement" for things when they come up, like group work, feedback, and more. Ask: What helps you learn best? What makes you shut down? When norms are collaborative, students internalize them—and weirdly, they'll start enforcing them for you.
12. Create rituals. Ritual = safety + predictability + anticipation. (It also makes students feel like they're part of a show.) I start and end my Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the same music number every time, and my group loves it.
13. Use humor. You don't have to be a stand-up comedian, but just trying to bake in humor occasionally can create a much warmer classroom environment.
14. Allow for regular feedback from students. This can be through exit cards or mid and end-of-semester evaluations. Showing students that you genuinely care about what they have to say will improve the class and the culture immensely.
15. Reflect on what students are saying if there is confusion. This ensures you accurately describe what they said to the class and model good listening behavior to others.

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend it even though it's focused on K-12 education The Courageous Classroom by Dr. Janet Taylor and Jed Dearybury. Of course, creating a great classroom culture depends on what you're doing day to day. That's why, in our next section, we'll move on to improving the average everyday class.

How To Improve The Average Everyday Class: A Smorgisborg Of Educational Activities

You've prepared your course and had the first day go well, but how do we make a regular Tuesday awesome?

It would be insane to try advising every class on every subject. So, instead, I'm going to give a high-level overview of how to plan an individual class with various activities that can be plugged and played into almost any educational model, depending on your goals for that day.

Every individual class session starts with creating learning objectives for the day.

You know the drill: measurable—avoid words like "understand" and "appreciate"—as well as meaningful—they should contribute to the seven educational goals we set earlier. Since this is for an individual class session, the learning objectives will be more specific but connect back to your larger learning objectives for the course.

Then, backward design your lesson based on those learning objectives and your student persona. If you have any insights into what students are struggling with or are particularly interested in, incorporate that into the design. These insights could come from regular semester feedback, class experience, exit tickets given to students at the end of every class, and more.

If your class is predominantly a lecture, refer to the section on lecturing as an educational tool to get tips for doing it well. If it's not (and even if it is to make lecture more active), here are a variety of plug-and-play activities you can adapt to any educational model to make it more active.

Warm Ups/Entrance Cards. Too many classes start the same way, with some students coming early, nothing to do, and the teacher jumping straight into the lesson without a lead-in. Warm-ups/entrance cards are short, less than five-minute experiences, questions, or problems that prepare students for the day's lesson. For example, during my training for the Cornell Team And Leadership Center, my boss put up the nine-dot problem for people to solve after lunch, giving people something fun to do while they waited. The warm-up could be relevant to class material, but it could also simply be something like a word cloud for how students are feeling that day.

Think, Pair, Share. Classic. Simple. Effective. And yet you would be surprised how many educators don't use it. Ask a question or frame a problem, then have students think about it on their own for a few seconds or minutes and discuss it with someone or someone next to them before sharing it with the class. This activity is incredible because it ensures EVERYONE has a chance to talk, even if they don't end up sharing with the full class.

Collaborative Problem Groupwork. Students receive a problem that they must work on individually for a few minutes and then join with a group. Option of sharing answers with the group afterward. This works especially well in STEM.

Predict The Outcome. Ask students to predict the outcome of something. It makes them much more likely to pay attention to what's next.

Think Aloud. Professor works through a problem and actively speaks out their thinking process. This helps teach students the meta skill of reflecting on their own problem-solving methods.

Fishbowl. A group of people discuss some question or problem in the middle of a set of chairs. Those not talking sit in chairs around them, observing non-verbal cues and tracking the throughline of the discussion. Afterward, the group on the outside summarizes what was talked about during the discussion, what was said non-verbally, and what helped or hindered its flow. This activity is great for getting students to reflect on the very meta-process of having a discussion.

Set A Goal. Ask students to set a goal for a certain activity. They're much more motivated to follow through when they feel personal stakes.

I, We, Y'all (And Any Other Variation). There's endless options to this process but it always boils down to having the professor, the individual student, and groups work through a problem or question in different orders depending on the learning objectives.

Group Brainstorm or Recall. Exactly as it sounds. Put a whole bunch of students together and have them brainstorm or recall something. Bonus points if you make them visualize it in some way.

Interactive Polling. Especially useful during large lectures, the teacher asks the students a question through a tool like PollEverywhere. It's great for making lectures more active, feeling a sense of companionship with fellow students, and reading the room to see how students feel about the information.

Turn and Talk. Simply turn to the student next to you and talk about something. Great as a quick active learning break that is faster than think, pair, share.

Cold Calling. Calling on students without them having raised their hand. Great for fostering a climate of active participation when done well.

Gallery Walks. Students walk around to various projects on display and discuss them with other students there. This is fantastic for project-based learning as it connects students to their fellow classmates' work.

Peer Share. Pair students up and allow them to share the project they're working on. Then, students give each other feedback.

Popsicle Stick. Students are handed one or two popsicle sticks or any other object at the beginning of class. Every time they answer a question, they must set aside a popsicle stick. Once all their popsicle sticks are up, they can't answer any more questions. This ensures that, in a fun way, more students get a chance to engage in the class instead of having one person dominate.

Social Reading. Unfortunately, many students don't do readings outside of class. Sometimes, this is because it's too long, but often, it's because it's not engaging, and they aren't held accountable. Social reading turns reading into a social adventure by hosting the readings on a social platform where students can see their classmates' comments and highlights. Teachers can incentivize interaction by saying every student must comment on two posts throughout the reading.

E-Discussion. A great way to make readings more engaging and prime people for class is to have an e-discussion students reply to before coming to class. Questions can be super varied, and students can be encouraged to reply to two other of their student's responses as well.

Listening Dyads. Split people into groups or duos. Assign one person as a listener and one as a speaker. If the speaker stops talking, the listener can reflect back on what they heard and ask follow-up questions. After a few minutes, switch. The next step is to share with the class, but each partner must share what their partner said instead of what they said. This encourages active listening instead of thinking only about what one has said. You should tell the students they will be doing this beforehand, or they might feel slighted.

Debate. Exactly like it sounds. Either spontaneously or with some preparation, have individuals or a group debate each other around some question or problem.

Reflection Circles. 5 or 10 minutes before class ends, have the whole class circle up or do a think pair share, reflecting on what they're taking away from that lesson.

Roleplay. Put students into duos or groups and assign each a role to play out. My psych and law class did this by roleplaying a negotiation exercise with some students as defendants and some as prosecutors.

Exit Cards. A minute or two before leaving class, have students answer a certain question, summarize their key takeaways, or give feedback on the course. This is especially useful for receiving much faster instructor feedback on how students feel about the course. Do things need to slow down, speed up, or be tailored in some way?

With this smorgisborg of activities for any individual class session you should have not problem thinking of ways to make class active. Now we're going to move onto another huge problem many professors face throughout the semester. How do you encourage students to do the readings?

How To Get Students To Do The Readings Without Resorting To Blackmail

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” — Ray Bradbury

I once was assigned a 1,000 page book as a reading over one week. We were given no chapter numbers, no guiding questions, just read the book. Did I mention it was written by the professor? Go figure.

Since it was early in my University experience I decided I needed to show what I was made of. So over a series of days I ate, drank, and slept, that book. I read by limelight and while walking to other classes. I slept with the book like it was a stuffed animal. When I showed up to class the following week, I held my head high, ready to have some incredible discussions on the topic.

We discussed the book for twenty minutes and then never brought it up again...

Needless to say I felt like a gambler who discovered the poker table was actually a monopoly board. For every single reading after that, I did the bare minimum. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I wasn't going to be nobody's sucker.

This is just one of the many experiences students have with readings in class. From a professor perspective, it's incredibly frustrating too because so many students don't do the readings, or don't to them effectively. This is a tragedy as when implemented effectively, readings allow students to come to class with a foundation, questions, and more for that lessons topic. Let's go through some of the common student complaints regarding readings and what you can do about them to encourage actually doing the readings.

Student: The readings are too long!

In this case, either the students are right or expectations need to be set on how much time should be spent on your class outside class time. In either case, involve the students in the discussion. Ask them what makes them feel like they are too long. What do they think is a reasonable amount of readings to do between classes?

If the readings are genuinely too long, shorten them. Give tighter page numbers and include only what is most essential. If the students just don't have the right expectations for how much time they should be spending outside of class, reaffirm this to them and explain why doing the readings is so powerful.

Student: The readings aren't relevant to class!

I get it. You're passionate about your subject—I mean, you're 15,000 words into a gargantuan article about improving education. There are all these topics you wish your students would dive into outside of class. But remember, they're busy people too. Relevant deadlines will always take priority over non-deadlines if time is short. So if your readings truly aren't relevant to class, either make them relevant, or cut down on those readings.

Student: The readings are boring!

Again, involve your students in a conversation. What makes them boring? What types of readings would be more engaging? If the readings truly are boring, perhaps finding a more engaging writer is the key, but that might not be possible.

In either case, making readings more engaging and social can navigate this. There are lots of social reading platforms out there like Hypothes.is and Perusall. These allow you to see the highlights and comments of your fellow classmates making the reading experience more engaging. You can encourage students (possibly with grades) to respond to two classmate comments and make two of their own throughout a reading.

In addition, e-discussions can also make readings more social. You could have a question for every reading which students reflect on. Similar to social reading, you could encourage students to respond to a students e-discussion before class.

Student: The professor just summarizes the readings in class anyways!

Unfortunately, if students realize they can cut corners and get the same result, they often will. So if they discover skipping the readings is okay as you will summarize it for them, then they likely will. The trick is to make the readings critical to every class. If students didn't do the readings, they will simply struggle to engage.

For example, instead of summarizing the readings yourself which is a very passive mode of learning, have students fill out entrance cards summarizing key takeaways, and discuss the readings in pairs or groups. If you're class is more problem, or project based, have the readings be critical to understanding what is going on in the project or problems.

The students don't know how to read...

You might think I'm joking but I'm dead serious. I would hedge my bets most students have no clue what effective reading looks like. Don't believe me. Ask them how they're reading. They're likely taking the readings you give them and scanning straight through, no stops, no reflection, once. If you're unlucky they're highlighting as they go to give an artificial sense of understanding.

If the students are doing the readings, but coming in with braindead thinking, it's a great opportunity to have a discussion about what great reading looks like. This might seem like a distraction away from your subject, but learning how to read is going to help them in every one of their classes including your own, for the rest of their lives.

You might ask how they are currently reading. Then you might construct some activities around learning to inspectionally read, analytically read, and syntopically read. If you want to learn more about what those are, check out my YouTube series exploring it.

Student: I didn’t know there was a reading...

Let’s face it: students are juggling 4–6 classes, part-time jobs, family obligations, three different group chats, and a YouTube algorithm trying to steal their soul. If you bury the reading assignment on page six of a PDF they downloaded in August, don’t be shocked when they miss it.

The solution is to make readings highly visible and easy to access. Put it in bold on your class calendar, email reminders, or LMS homepage. Say it out loud at the end of class. If the reading is online, hyperlink it in multiple places and test that the link doesn’t lead to an Error 404 page of existential despair.

Student: The reading is behind a paywall!

This one’s less about willpower and more about wallets. If your students need a $200 textbook, a $70 article behind a journal firewall, and three dead trees just to read something, they might say, “No thanks, I choose rent.”

The solution is to always try to find open-access versions of your readings. Work with your library to upload a PDF to your LMS under fair use. Ask yourself: Could this reading be replaced with a YouTube video, podcast, or blog post that hits the same learning goal?

Student: Waaaaa, I don't wanna!

Oh, poor you.

Navigating these common student complaints, you should have no issue getting students to do the readings. But there's another common complain students have about class and another tragedy at that because it's so useful when done right: group projects/work.

Group Work That Doesn’t Make You Hate Humanity

“Group work is the art of dividing the guilt equally among the innocent.” — Probably a sophomore with trust issues

My final group project for one of my psych classes senior year was an absolute catastrophe.

It was assigned a week before finals—great timing, really—so we all silently entered a mutual pact of academic procrastination. Finals came and went, and I was in full victory lap mode: writing more than ever, playing video games like Disco Elysium, and hanging out with friends before they left. One day, I organized a walk with a friend around Beebe Lake. While walking, I get a text from one of my group mates asking me to finish my five pages of research writing within three hours since the project was due that day at 5:00 p.m.

My spine stiffened. Of course, I received no warning that the project was due this early and naturally had done zero preparation beforehand. I sprinted back home and opened up the Google Doc.

It was a massacre...

I've been writing for over five years, but what I opened my eyes to next was a diabolical affront to my very soul. It was as if my group members had each written their sections in a unique alien language, with no understanding of what the other students had done. Terms were thrown out like leftover lasagna, lacking definitional consistency within a group's assigned section and between sections. Some words looked like someone lost a fight with autocorrect. Citations that violated every law of MLA, APA, and common sense.

I scurried to write my section within three hours and handed it in just in time. When I finally hit submit, I turned off my computer, stared at the ceiling, and whispered, "Never again." It's probably one of the worst writing assignments I've ever done. To be clear, this group project's horribleness was partially me, partially my group members, and partially the professor.

You've probably experienced a terrible group project yourself. You get put with students who you swear were dragged from the pits of Tartarus. So, like always, you do the entire project the night before on a 3:00 a.m. caffeine binge. Or, you give up and resign to learned helplessness.

Let's make group work good.

Because here's the thing, if students don't learn how to collaborate now, they're going to get a rude awakening when they exit into the real world. Getting them used to group work in school will not only teach them valuable teamwork, leadership, and emotional regulation skills, but also connect them to others in a world riddled with loneliness. And if your student thinks they could do everything better on their own anyway, they will have to work with other incompetent people in the real world as well.

Thankfully, we can do a few basic things to ensure group work is set up for success.

Firstly, confirm the group project/work is relevant to the students lives and perhaps in support of some real-world goal or problem.

Ideally, the project can be personalized by group, whether it be the format it's done through, nuances of what it's on, and more. If you can, make it relevant to some real world problem. It's crazy to me we have MILLIONS of students around the globe working on projects for hours and then handing things in only to be seen by their TAs or professors. What a tremendous waste of potential.

Why not have projects work toward something? I have two friends at Colgate who submitted the final film in their introduction to film class to The Hamilton Film Festival, where the community got to watch it. An environmental studies class might have students create a report on how a local power plant could reduce its power output while saving money in the process. Of course, the project must still be made in a way where the essential class learnings are showcased, but groups will feel so much more purpose and agency over their projects or work if they are allowed to do things like this.

The second next step of more effective group projects/work is role reflections.

This includes defining what the group project or work involves and then having each member figure out there role in the party. Think of it like building a Dungeons & Dragons party. You need a tank, a wizard, and someone who just pretends they're helping but mostly vibes. Here are some questions you can reflect on:

• What they're good at and like
• What they're not good at but like
• What they're good at and don't like
• What they're not good at and don't like

In addition, have each group member reflect on what they would like to work on in the project. Any skills or roles they seek to build, even if they don't like them or aren't the best. Group work isn't always about putting the best person in the best seat. It's about having each person support others in their growth.

If you really feel it, have the group come up with a name. It's amazing how much more ownership they will feel in the experience from doing just that. It makes it so much more fun to discuss meeting up too!

Using this, you can give each group member clear ownership over parts of the project or group work. Having ownership over something gives people much more intrinsic motivation to advance it. And they can't use the excuse they didn't know what to do. This avoids a lot of the complaints about group work mentioned above.

Third the group can come up with a list of shared norms and values for working together:

• Deadlines
• How feedback should be given
• How communication will be done
• Anything else that seems relevant

Communicating this upfront will make working together so much easier. Instead of having chaotic chats where group members speak in three different channels without delegating norms, work will be much more streamlined.

Even with all of this, it's still possible some group members fall short of their roles.

That's why the fourth thing we should do to improve group projects/work is incorporate accountability grading.

Apart from grading the actual output of the group, group members grade every group member on how well they worked, communicated, and anything else you think is relevant to grade them on. The rubric for this grading must be not only shown before the project so members know what to expect. It must also be as bias-proof as possible.

For example, some cultures don't like direct feedback as much as other cultures, Netherlands cough cough. It would be unfair to have these group members overly discounted for not giving as much feedback as others because of their culture unless it actively hurt group working dynamics. Accountability grading makes it much more likely group members will work and communicate effectively because it gives every member skin in the game.

Now, this grade doesn't actually need to be incorporated into the final grade for a student. As we explored in the grading section of this article, you grading social skills can be biasing and ambiguous. "Accountability grading" simply gives students a language through which to give each other feedback.

By incorporating project/work personalization, role reflections, shared values, and accountability grading, you can make group projects much more likely to succeed. But this still doesn't answer how we give great feedback while in a group. Or how we should give our students feedback in general. That's what we'll move on to in the next section.

How Do You Give Feedback That Actually Feeds Back?

"Five years experience iterated five times is worth infinitely more than twenty years experience repeated twenty times." — Me Lol

"How did you do in that class?" my dad asked.

"I have no idea," I said, sitting in our living room chair. I took a sip of chamomile tea amidst the moments of awkward silence.

His eyebrows rose. "You mean you haven't seen the final grades yet?"

"No, I mean I haven't seen any grade, all semester."

The room went quiet except for the soft hiss of the AC. I tapped my foot against the hardwood floor and took another long sip, before looking at my dad.

"Reasonable feedback windows? In this economy!"

He didn't laugh. He just blinked. I think he thought I was kidding.

This is a bit of an extreme example. But you've experienced something along those lines before. You work hard to hand something in for school, especially the night before, to avoid missing the deadline. As soon as the submit button is clicked or the paper is in the professor's hands, the weight of anxiety's dagger clouds pass over your head, and you go about your day acting like it never existed in the first place.

Perhaps you'll receive feedback on the assignment two to three weeks later (if you're lucky). Even if you look past the letter grade and to the feedback (if it exists), it's been too long to meaningfully care to change your behavior (if regrades are available, that is).

Unfortunately, this is the way most feedback works in education. Too many students are focused on grades over the process, which gets them great grades. This is because of Goodheart's Law: When a metric becomes a sole goal, it ceases to be a good metric. Grades—in an ideal world—measure learning and effort (we'll explore them in the next section). And yet, when students make them the sole goal, they often sacrifice those things, learning less and taking shortcuts instead. As a result, we wither without feedback's sun or water in soil of our own doing (and the systems of course).

I'm not entirely against letter grades. What I'm against is never change. Unfortunately, Dylan William explores in his book, Embedded Formative Assessment how if a letter grade is included at the front of an assignment, oftentimes the feedback is diminished or even completely ignored.

That's why the first step to giving better feedback is shifting students' mindset on school from an outcome-focused mindset to a process-focused one.

I explore how to do this in detail through the section on creating a great classroom culture and grading. But here are some new insights specifically to grades. Some studies indicate delaying grades when handing back assignments encourages students to take in the feedback before receiving the grade. For example, handing back an assignment without the grade attached and asking students to reflect on how they can integrate the feedback for five minutes before handing back the grades as well.

Perhaps students would receive grades in class first instead of online as, in my experience, the online grade never came with feedback attached, making it even easier to ignore entirely what you were getting.

Another problem is with the quality of the feedback itself. In short, it sucks. It sucks hard.

Let's make it better, which means we need to understand what types of feedback there are in the first place. There are three types of feedback, according to Scott Young (2019) in his book Ultralearning:

1. Outcome feedback: feedback on how well you did something through some sort of grade. This feedback can give you updates on your progress and show if changing your methods worked or not through improvement or regression.
2. Informational feedback: this feedback tells you what you are doing wrong but not necessarily how to fix it.
3. Corrective feedback: this feedback tells you what you are doing wrong and guides you toward fixing it.

Generally, corrective feedback is the best, but it's not always possible to get because it's mostly given by coaches, mentors, or teachers. But that doesn't mean we can't try to move up the feedback hierarchy.

For STEM, feedback will more often take the form of corrections for a student's work and suggestions on what areas of study they are weak on for future study. If a student consistently struggles with integrals on a calculus assignment, suggest they spend more time in that area. To save the teacher time, an answer sheet for a test could be given out afterward and handed alongside the student's paper test to encourage people to look. If the test is online, include a link to the answer sheet on the same page as the grade to promote the same thing.

Like in humanities, STEM can provide more process-oriented as well. After a project, problem, or group work is done, students could be given time to reflect and discuss the work process. What went well, what could have gone better, what roadblocked them, etc?

If the assignment has a less objective answer, like a rubric for a personalized project, or an essay, feedback framed as feelings or questions with possible suggestions often works better. For example, the best feedback I got for my essays in school tended to convey emotions. I was confused here, or this section was repetitive, etc. Then they might ask a question like, how can you make this feel more relevant to my life, and with a possible suggestion like I would do this. Feedback like this works better for these contexts because there is no right answer.

Another problem is with the speed of feedback, often it comes weeks after the assignment is actually done.

Part of this is unavoidable simply because there is a limited amount of professors and TAs, but another genius solution is to have students give feedback to each other before those grades come in. My professor in Six Pretty Good Books did this and it worked marvelously. Every essay we handed in was graded by six of our peers on a rubric we constructed. That's right, students literally made the rubric for what they felt made a good essay and then used it to grade each other.

When did these grades come in? One week after the assignment? Three days? Nope. They came in a day after we handed it in. I almost cried. I didn't know pedagogical love could feel so fast. How? Because when one student only has to grade six papers instead of tens or hundreds like the professor and a group of TAs, it doesn't take three deaths of a black hole to get back to you.

This feedback can occur after an assignment is done, as well as during the process itself. While working on a project, some class time can be used to show your work to someone else and get feedback right away, allowing you to avoid big errors that might have stayed had you never shown anybody.

This peer feedback shouldn't just be for peers, it should be for the class as well.

Most of the time, classes have one time where you can give feedback, and it's right at the end of the semester, so professors have the hardest time actually integrating it since they must wait a few months more before it's taught again (that is if it's taught again).

What if we had three or more dedicated times where students gave feedback on the course? Some say it's a waste of class time, but I say it's a much larger waste to spend the whole semester with students in a class who are dissatisfied.

Apart from those dedicated times to give feedback, it's not hard to include entry and exit tickets for students in the course. Entry tickets could be as simple as a wordle for students to show how they are feeling about the course at the current moment. And exit tickets could be as simple as filling out questions like, "What has been working in this course so far and what has not?"

This feedback can be contextual too. If the students seem to be struggling with a certain topic or aspect of the course, talk to them! A divine being isn't going to smite you for spending a few minutes of class time breaking away from the curriculum to have a teachable moment.

So, through changing our feedback mindset, giving higher quality feedback, peer feedback, and timelier feedback, we can improve our growth process so much more, changing our withering plant into a quickly blossoming behemoth of a tree.

But what if we stopped treating school like a feedback game students are forced to play and started treating it like one they want to? That's where we're headed next: gamification. Because if the current system teaches kids to dread learning, maybe it's time we learned from the one thing that's had millions of people voluntarily grinding for hours to collect imaginary armor sets: games.

Let's see what happens when learning gets a main quest.

Make Education More Enjoyable And Engaging Than Minecraft With Gamification

"The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression." — Brian Sutton-Smith

It was time. I'd been studying for weeks up to the test. I'd read forums, watched guides on YouTube, and spent countless caffeine-filled hours at night studying. I'd failed multiple times already, of course, but I knew failure was only a part of the learning process.

There were other things I could be doing: practicing for sectionals in tennis, reading fiction, and hanging out with family. Instead, I sat in my room at 9:00 p.m. and booted up the computer.

It was time to beat Darkest Dungeon.

You might have expected I was talking about a class for most of the intro paragraph. But education doesn't hold a candle to the game industry in terms of understanding the nuances behind human motivation. It has to. Games have to motivate people to play them even when they have no real-life transferable reward.

Games build intrinsic motivation by giving you autonomy, mastery, relatedness, and purpose. They tailor difficulty to your Goldilocks Zone—the zone in which the difficulty of the task and skill are in balance, optimizing growth. They have an addicting game loop, which makes you want to engage in the experience over and over again. They give instant feedback, allowing you to learn every go.

So, did I beat Darkest Dungeon? Does it matter if I did? The whole way was enjoyable and engaging.

Since five years ago I've been fascinated by the connection between games and motivation. And it's led me to a radical question: what if education motivated us more the way games do?

Imagine, a world in which students actually enjoy and are engaged by learning. A world in which they learn not because they have to but because they want to. A world in which difficulty and feedback are personalized to them, helping them improve in the most effective way possible. A world in which they prefer education over Minecraft.

Of course, I'm not saying education should always be enjoyable. Some things you don't want to do simply have to be done. But we can absolutely make it more engaging and enjoyable than it already is.

To explore this radical idea, we must first understand what gamification even is and then how it can be integrated into our classrooms.

Many people conflate gamification with pointsification, the slapsticking of points, badges, and leaderboards onto any experience and walking away as if it's "gamified" now. But there's so much more to what gamification is.

Gamification is the art of taking principles that make games enjoyable and engaging and applying them to real-world contexts. This definition shows why pointsification is completely different. You don't play a game because of the points, badges, and leaderboards. You play it because of the experience those points, badges, and leaderboards are embedded in. Without creating a meaningful motivating experience, it doesn't matter.

How can we integrate this into education?

The first way is by literally bringing games into the classroom. This can be done in a variety of ways.

Firstly, they can be used as study strategies.

You've likely played Kahoot, Quizizz, Jeopardy, or some other review game at some point in your life. And yeah, they're chaotic. Someone always chooses the wrong answer just to be funny. Someone else names themselves "LigmaBalls42." But amidst the chaos—magic.

These games turn studying from a dreary slog into a boss battle. Suddenly, information recall is time-sensitive. You're racing classmates. Your heart is pounding over… photosynthesis?! In these moments, repetition becomes pleasurable. Dopamine fires not when you win—although that's nice—but when you almost win. When you're so close you think, "One more round." That's the loop games live on: fail, learn, retry, repeat. And it's exactly the loop education should live on too.

Secondly, games can be used to simulate real-world systems and allow students to learn by doing.

Let's say you're teaching economics. You could run a classroom auction or a market simulation. Maybe you're teaching biology—have students play Plague Inc. or CellCraft to understand disease spread or cell systems. Teaching ethics? Try something like The Evolution of Trust or The Republic by Pol.is to simulate how moral systems break down or flourish. These aren't just "fun." They provide feedback-rich environments that feel meaningful.

When students have to make decisions inside a system that responds to them, they're forced to learn not just about the concept, but how that concept acts. They're not just memorizing ideas. They're wrestling with them.

Thirdly, games can be used as formative assessments.

Instead of giving a quiz (or in preparation for a quiz), what if you had a roleplay simulation where each student took on the persona of a historical figure and debated a major policy decision? Or a speaking evaluation for a language course in which students pull three random words out of a hat, and you have to converse with your partner inside this imaginary world. The professor could play a round of Werewolf before a lecture on social cognition, group dynamics, and deception.

Students don't forget these lessons. Nobody forgets the classmate who betrayed them in Codenames or the time they accidentally caused World War III in a mock UN summit. Emotion is the glue that makes learning stick.

Gamification Isn't Just Putting Games Into The Classroom, It's Also A Mindset.

Before a game design team makes a game, there are a myriad of decisions they must make. What is the fundamental experience you want to give the player? What aesthetic will promote that experience? What are the objectives of the game, and how can we drive desired actions toward those objectives? What player are you building this experience for? What game mechanics would incentivize those objectives? And so much more.

These types of questions aren't that different from a class. Educators must also reflect on the experience they want to give students. The visual aesthetic will promote that. The learning objectives of the class. How they can motivate desired actions toward those objectives. What students they are building this experience for. And what mechanics will drive that behavior.

That's right, we're educators, but we are also game designers.

Let me give you an example. Strategic Thinking was one of the most disappointing classes I've ever taken. Not because the material sucked—but because it could have been a great class, and wasn't. Passive lectures drained the soul. Feedback came back three weeks late, if it came at all. Class games were rare despite being the best part of the course. Readings? Never used. Students? Checked out.

So, I rebuilt it like a game designer.

I designed it so students would be split into semester-long teams with names, logos, and leaderboards. Throughout the course, every action, including, showing up, going to office hours, playing class games, doing assignments, and giving feedback, were tied to team points. Team scores were tallied up each class and shown on the board, keeping competition tense. The winning team would get a team dinner and hoodies with their team name and logo. This point system would drive students to engage in class not just for themselves, but for their team.

Essentially, not all points were tied to grades. This way, students still went out of their way to take risks and think critically because, at the end of the day, it's just a silly competition.

I designed a flipped class, meaning my first encounter with concepts was done outside classtime, leaving more time in class for active projects, games, group work, discussions, and more. I added flex days and points boosters as rewards for class games, and personalized projects as boss battles. I even designed a way for alumni to come back during future semesters as mentors and for an alumni game round.

Of course, you don't have to gamify your class to such a meta-degree. The point I want to get across is the value of thinking about your course like a game designer. If you want to dive more into gamification and how it can be used to supercharge education, check out my article, Gamify Your Learning Experience Design With The Octalysis Framework.

Even though we've gone through grades and have not checked out gamification, there's still one topic that sits silently in the back corner. The last topic we will handle in this extravaganza into education: AI.

"Okay Class, Open Your Laptops and Worship Our Robot Overlords": AI And Education

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan

My palms began sweating as I waited for my friends answer: which of the essays was written was written by me, and which by ChatGPT? I was recording a video on if an AI trained on my writing voice could trick my friends. After a length explanation and agonizing minutes, she responded.

She thought the AI's essay was mine.

I was gobstopped. Over the last few months I had heard countless people tell me AI could never write as well as a human. It doesn't have the soul. Doesn't have the empathy. Doesn't have the, humanness? But here, was definitive proof against the idea.

Sure, there's always the chance I'm a terrible writer in which case shame on you for submitting your conscious to such bad prose for more than 25,000 words at this point. But the deeper truth I think we all need to confront is these AI systems are becoming unimaginably good. Contrary to what you might believe though, seeing it trick my friends didn't make me scared. It got me excited.

What incredible writing could I create using AI as my writing partner? How much better could the standard for all our writing be if we knew how to use AI effectively? Then I remembered: many people in the world right now are terrified of AI, particularly for education. Students don't know how to use it properly. educators are scared it will take their jobs, destroy learning, and proliferate cheating. And parents are scared it will attach their already digitally addicted children even more to their devices.

These are all possibilities, if people use AI irresponsibly. Instead of solving the problem, I believe banning and stigmatizing it is making things work by not allowing people to learn how to use these it. The fact is AI isn't going away. Outside of education it's being used all around the world. We need to learn how to use it effectively while in education, so we aren't dumbfounded when we exit.

And if you don't think AI is there yet, it's already capable of passing the LCAT, the MCAT, and getting a great score on the SAT. Sure, this doesn't encapsulate even close to everything it means to be a good student or teacher. But it's only going to get better.

AI, The Ultimate Teaching...

Look at any educational intervention and the largest positive effect you will find is for students who are given teaching assistants. It's not hard to imagine why. Imagine if every educator and student had an assistant who was easily trainable, knowledgeable, could be in all places at once, and personalize itself to the exact interests, knowledge, and voice of the student its talking to. Sounds like a logistical and wage nightmare right? Nope.

With, AI, every student, every educator, has the ultimate teaching assistant right in their pocket.

Before class begins the AI can be trained on the class materials, the learning objectives, and the specific needs of each student, their individual learning plan (if they have one), their personal goals, interests, preferred voice, and more.

This navigates the dilemma which has stood at the root of teaching since the dawn of time: how do we personalize while also teaching a group? The AI personalizes by tailoring their responses to a students specific struggles and in ways that will resonate. It adapts in real time to a students developing understanding and preferences as the course goes on. Every class lecture, project, discussion, lab or whatever the AI could be trained on the days plan and give support specialized to that exact thing.

If the educator is overextended, the AI serves as a helpful other option for getting support. Feedback is instantaneous. Instead of waiting three growings of a stalagmite, the AI can give constructive criticism right away, at any time, even before the given thing is actually due.

At the end of every week or month, the AI can write a personalized report for the TAs, educator, or their parents (more relevant to secondary school), about how they are doing in the class, what they show the most interest in, the biggest gaps in their learning, and more. The educator can assemble all of these reports and get a high level overview of how their class is doing and what they should change. Heck, they could use a AI to summarize all the AI reports if its a super big class. Now that's meta.

This AI assistant will be especially valuable in less resource rich areas, where faculty and staff are already overburdened and might not be as knowledgeable as other places. While AI does require a subscription and an internet connection raising some accessibility concerns, it's much much better than paying and organizing an entire human TA for every person in the class.

Scared the AI will offload learning? Train the class AI to be a socratic dialoguer. It never directly gives the answer. It only asks questions, gives hints, and reframes things to allow the student to come to the answer themselves. For example, while writing an essay, the AI will never straight up right the essay for you if trained in the right way. But it could help you brainstorm topics, form an outline, reconstruct paragraphs, etc.

Scared of cheating? Require students to hand in a snapshot of the AI explaining how it was used during the process of the assignment. If the student used the AI to write the entire essay for them, it will tell the educator that. Sure, students might photoshop a fake image of the AI saying they didn't cheat at all, but at that point, there's nothing you could have done to stop them anyways.

AI is no longer the future of education—it’s the present tapping politely (or not-so-politely) on the classroom door. It’s faster than your syllabus updates, more patient than your office hours, and increasingly capable of adapting to each learner’s needs. But for all its strengths, AI lacks one thing we can’t afford to lose: soul.

It can tutor, explain, scaffold, and even assess, but it cannot human. It cannot be the steady breath in a moment of academic panic or the warmth behind a teacher’s belief in a struggling student. That’s our role. So as we integrate AI into our pedagogy, let us not abdicate the parts of teaching that are most human. Let us wield this new tool not as a replacement, but as an amplifier—and as we close this chapter, let's look forward to the kind of future we’re really building with all this…

The Future Is Grading Us

If we want a better world, we must start with better classrooms. Not just cleaner walls and brighter lights—but brighter minds and fuller hearts. We’ve inherited a system that was forged in the fires of industry and obedience, but our world no longer runs on factory belts. It runs on ideas. On collaboration. On adaptability. On the ability to learn, unlearn, and re-learn—again and again and again.

Education isn’t the transmission of facts; it’s the transformation of people. And if we’re not building systems that reflect that, then we’re not building anything that lasts. Every lesson plan, every syllabus, every grade is a statement about what we think matters. Right now, many of those statements say: obedience over curiosity, competition over compassion, performance over understanding. It doesn’t have to be this way.

This article asked you to rethink your educational practices at the root—not just what you teach, but why and how. To swap behaviorist carrots and sticks for something more nourishing. To reimagine grades not as shackles, but as stepping stones. To build classrooms where students don’t just know things, they become things. Where failure isn’t fatal, and feedback is more than a postmortem—it’s a lifeline.

Because here's the truth: Education is the soil of civilization. It's where every doctor first met biology, every poet first met metaphor, every friend first met someone different from themselves. It is the birthplace of revolutions and lullabies, of futures not yet written.

And if we build that soil poorly, if we don’t give it room to breathe, to stretch, to bloom—then we won’t just fail our students. We’ll fail whatever comes after us.

So choose to teach like life depends on it. Because it does. If you’re not living while you’re dying, then you will be dead while you’re alive. Let’s build classrooms where everyone can live.

References

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[^3]: Kamberi, Mimoza. (2025). The types of intrinsic motivation as predictors of academic achievement: the mediating role of deep learning strategy. Cogent Education. 12. 10.1080/2331186X.2025.2482482. 

[^4]: Katz-Vago I, Benita M. Mastery-approach and performance-approach goals predict distinct outcomes during personal academic goal pursuit. Br J Educ Psychol. 2024 Jun;94(2):309-327. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12645. Epub 2023 Nov 22. PMID: 37994118.

[^5]: Qureshi, F., Khawaja, S., Sokić, K., Pejić Bach, M., & Meško, M. (2024). Exploring Intrinsic Motivation and Mental Well-Being in Private Higher Educational Systems: A Cross-Sectional Study. Systems, 12(8), 281. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems12080281 

[^6]: Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018). The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Penguin Press. 

[^7]: Wilson, Karen & Korn, James. (2007). Attention During Lectures: Beyond Ten Minutes. Teaching of Psychology. 34. 10.1080/00986280701291291. 

[^8]: Bradbury A., 2016. Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Physiological Education. 10.1152/advan.00109.2016. 

[^9]: Omland, M., Hontvedt, M., Siddiq, F. et al. Co-creation in higher education: a conceptual systematic. review. High Educ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01364-1 

[^10]: Wiliam, D. (2017). Embedded formative assessment (2nd ed.). Solution Tree Press.