Designing and Pacing based on the slightly-better-than-good-enough student

Many times when we design a large assignment, module, or entire course, we focus (as we should) on goals and objectives.  We make sure they both align with programmatic or district mandates.  Often, we try to see all the things we can do, but sometimes we don't prioritize the "can" from the "must" do.  In fact, we often forget is what it feels like to be a student who obediently tries to go through our carefully designed steps.  Too often our pace is not sustainable with their skills.  If the internet has affected learning in many useful ways, it has also encouraged us to try to do too much and too fast.

What I do rely on are students with skills that I have accurately anticipated.  A diligent student should be able to complete this assignment in class; keeping in mind their other courses, they should be able to do this much work outside of class.  The old measure of two hours work outside of class for every one hour in class has long ago been discounted, though many people still offer it as a guideline, especially for college students who claim to only work on courses an hour or so a day outside of class.

I tell my students that they need to work as long and as hard as they need to, to learn the necessary skills ... i.e. the skills they will need to use to get the grade they want.  No, I can't easily get them to get out of the grade-centered mentality.  After more than a dozen years of school, they come to college and to my class with a set of protocols and expectations.  If I work this long, I'll get an A.  Far too many tell me at the beginning that they are in the course to get an A.  To them, that sounds like an expression of dedication to the grade-winning task; to me it sounds like a student who is signaling me that s/he has been rewarded for effort and expects me to agree.  This would-be over-achiever will knock herself out to be perfect, and whether s/he achieves perfection or not, s/he'll always think s/he's fallen short.

Often, it is this take-no-prisoners student who crumples first because they are only well suited to "do school," and when the tasks are more complex or take longer, s/he lacks the perseverence that another student of less accomplishment learned long ago.  That student has long ago settled for less than perfection, either because s/he knows it is unattainable or a fiction, or s/he knows her skills aren't adequate to achieving perfection.  Instead, s/he tries to be just a little bit better than good enough; s/he doesn't slack, but s/he knows when s/he has learned the skills and that another four sleepless hours are not going to result in mastery.  And so it is this student whom we must use to pace our instruction, and the one we keep in mind when we design a course.

Our just-a-little-better-than-good-enough student will prod the sluggard to some effort and show the perfectionist that there should be some joy in learning or a parallel social life.  It is with this student in mind that we need to find the course bottlenecks, prioritizing the high-order skills, and sequencing tasks so that this student who wants to do all right can succeed.

Brint, Steven, and Allison M. Cantwell. "Portrait of the Disengaged."Web. 6/13/2012 <http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=413>.