Has it been four years? The marking blues, or, the cost of too much feedback.

Has it been five four years?

Apparently I started this blog five four years ago. My plans for creating a centralized record of my attempts to improve my own teaching has failed. However, I have been experimenting with various pedagogical techniques over that time.

My most recent conundrum: the marking blues

My current conundrum concerns (alliterative, no?) my realization that I hate marking, even though it is important. I don't mind making rubrics (though sometimes I resort to a checklist). I think clear feedback is useful, at least when students read it. But marking grinds down my mental reserves like the trench warfare of WWI left a dent in France's population pyramid that took decades to work out. Ok, maybe marking isn't that bad.

I have a tendency to provide too much line-editing. I sometimes feel as if I provide more feedback than students will use (at least before I started requiring second drafts that showed how they incorporated or responded to my feedback). This was in addition to summarizing comments. And a detailed rubric (though not more than could fit on a single double-sided sheet).

One tool I've found to help speed my marking along is to use two highlighters, one green and one pink. The green marker is used to underline things students do well, the pink marker underlines those things students do poorly. I then might also add some margin notes. This seems to help me mark more quickly. One way it helps me is that I now routinely have a big fat highlighter in my paw instead of a pen or pencil. Mechanically, this means it is well-nigh impossible to automatically scrawl comments in the margins, or line edit, without first replacing the highlighter with a more finely-nibbed writing instrument. And that little act, I surmise, is often too much effort.

The takeaway

If when marking, you discover you are a compulsive line-editor and comment-leaver, using two colors of highlighter might reduce your marking time. This still leaves you time to also provide summarizing comments.

Inaugural posting in which I introduce the genesis of the term Instructional Kaizen

What is kaizen?
Economic geographers from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, along with many other social scientists interested in really-existing capitalism, examined the workings of the then-ascendant Japanese economy. At the time, Post-war Japan's economic might flowed from its substantial manufacturing base. One of the key institutional features of Japanese manufacturing systems was an internalized routine of continuous product and process upgrading, often called kaizen. Because this feature was alleged to be the norm in Japanese manufacturing culture, perhaps it is more clear to say it is a culturally-specific commonsensical understanding of how work flows on the shopfloor. Kaizen suggests a constant tinkering and monitoring and revising of a production process or workflow in an effort to always make it that much better.

Why not Tüftler?
In the German-language industrial restructuring and economic geography literature, there was also reference to the Tüftler, which calls up images of the inventor toiling away in the garage or shop, trying to perfect the proverbial widget, or the process for making it. However, Tüftler never achieved widespread use in the English-language literature (I only learned the term while conducting fieldwork in 2000-2002 on the locational dynamics of the German book trade, a decade after I'd already been exposed to the ideas of kaizen, just-in-time production, flexible production, flexible accumulation and post-Fordism). Furthermore, my understanding of the useage of Tüftler doesn't suggest a widespread, collectively held mindset or disposition about how work is done, which is how kaizen is usually described. Instead, Tüftler refers to individuals who operate on their own. While these Tüftler are not unknown, their mindset was not described as ubiquitously held in German manufacturing in the way that the kaizen principle was alleged to be among Japanese workers.

The term Kaizen captures this principle in a single word.

Instructional Kaizen
I see my own teaching practice informed by this principle of kaizen, which leads me to coin the term 'instructional kaizen' both as shorthand and to recall the literature where I first encountered this principle of constant monitoring and improvement. While the evidence-based pedagogical literature doesn't use the term Instructional Kaizen, its findings (and the rigorous process through which the findings are derived) are consistent with a kaizen mindset.

Why Instructional Kaizen and not TüftlerInnenfest?
Instructional Kaizen suggests that there is a community of other instructors who embrace this mindset and possess this disposition, and share their successes, failures and practices to create a commonwealth of instructional knowledge. The image of Der Tüftler or Die Tüftlerin always conjured up a proprietary and guarded (if not downright secretive) lone wolf whose connection to a larger community of work was linked not through collaboration and sharing, but through reverse-engineering. Finally, I am not longer sure where I would stand with the Rechtschreibungsreformen if I made the lovely compound noun, BildingstüftlerInnenfest, which would translate as 'the festival of instructional tinkerers (of both sexes).'

More breadcrumbs
My YouTube account is ProfBoggs, and my long-standing webpage is www.jeffboggs.com . I work here and am affiliated with this.