Last year, I was teaching high school and our administration assigned a book study to the staff. We read and collaborated on 15 Fixes for Broken Grades by Ken O'Connor. This iconic book is an interesting and provocative read. It challenges standard operating procedure in terms of the way students are assessed. The fix that stirred the pot the most amongst our faculty was Fix #2:

Don't reduce marks on work that is submitted late

In the program, I mistakenly refer to Fix #2 as Fix #4. On its face, Fix #2 makes sense. You don't want to punish a behavior academically. But, wouldn't Fix #2 encourage procrastination and irresponsibility?

Interestingly enough, during my first day this past week with my college students, i challenged them to collaborate in groups on the creation of class norms. One topic that all struggled with was how to deal with late work. To a group, students were in favor of score reduction. I found this fascinating and so we embarked on a magnificent tangential conversation on should an instructor, which they all hope to be one day, punish a behavior academically? The ensuing conversation caused a titanic paradigm shift in many of my students. This episode might be similar to the discussion in my class last week in the sense that you might think about this issue differently.

I'll discuss this fascinating idea thoroughly this week with Josh Frame. Josh is a middle school principal and he embraces the idea that students should not suffer academically for behaviors.
We'll talk about how he sold this idea to his staff, how he managed the pushback, and how he's adapted his school's response to students who are not appropriately pursuing learning.