In her recent “Students Get Away With…What Exactly?” concerning her practice of crowdsourcing grading, Dr. Cathy N. Davidson rightly argues that “if students are challenged, if they know that their learning will make a difference in their lives, the sky is the limit. And that’s the limit we’re going for!”

Frankly, after reading “How to Crowdsource Grading” last summer, I realized that such a practice was not something that I could successfully implement in my classroom. It is not that Dr. Davidson teaches at a major university while I am at a community college. Instead, I am not sure that I have the personality and teaching style to implement crowdsourcing as Dr. Davidson implements crowdsourcing. However, I do not believe that this is her purpose in writing about her classroom.

Instead of advocating that we all adopt crowdsourcing because it works for her, Dr. Davidson is really challenging us to challenge our students, to design our classes so that students truly appreciate that learning will make a difference in their lives, and to avoid a course design that limits their ability to fly as high as they can.

Recently, I asked my history students to form teams each of whom will take responsibility for teaching one of the chapters in the textbook. Although I have made it clear that students are not to lecture out of the textbook that we have all read, I have refused to tell them what I do want them to do.

Sometimes a team of students will ask, “Would you approach the material in such and such a way?” or “Do you think that such and such a topic is interesting?” In most cases, I honestly answer “No.” But then I tell them that these are the wrong questions. Their job is not to teach like I would teach or to choose the topics on which I might choose to focus. If I wanted them to do that, I explain, it would be easier to simply make the decisions myself.

Dr. Davidson might put it this way, “Just because I crowdsource grading does not mean you need to crowdsource grading. Your job is to figure out how you are going to provide a challenging learning environment for your peers.”

I find that the less I teach, the more my students learn. Therefore, I do my best to teach as little as possible.

A couple of years ago, I co-presented a session at a statewide conference in which we argued that students learn more when professors teach less. My co-presenters were three students. My job for “our” presentation was to sit in the back of the room and drink my coffee in silence.

During the session, one of my co-presenters described the series of classroom activities that lead to his successful completion of his video, The Story of Siddhartha: Education. He concluded by saying, “And at this point, Dr. Berg hadn’t taught us anything!” It was a humorous moment; especially because my dean was sitting in the audience. But his message was well taken. At that point, I hadn’t taught him anything. I had only provided the opportunity for him to learn.

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Full Disclosure
Dr. Davidson was my major professor of English while I was a graduate student at Michigan State University; in a time before the concept of crowd sourcing had been developed. However, her student centered approach to teaching was evident even then and continues to influence my approach to working with students.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD