I don’t really have an answer for agents yet, and I’m not sure anyone does.
For me, the hope is to design better learning experiences.
And I will say that shifting to process hasn’t ballooned my work at all, especially with the shift to student agency and alternative assessment a bit more. I just spread out the work differently.
Nice piece, Jason. This feels important because the tendency you identify of treating process as a step-by-step formula and opposing it to product is, as Owen on LinkedIn says, merely recreating the problem. That's especially true if you're using a product to structure and track the completion of the process.
The point is to collapse the distinction and embrace the ungraded messiness that occurs when you turn a group of students on to a problem with no clear outcome or assurance of success.
That "third step" you outline is the key. It cuts against the systems we have set up that expect replication and control. The problem is not so much theoretical as our habits of mind about what we expect students to do. The older students get, the more their habits of mind are a factor. My own hot take is that students are the biggest barrier to adopting active learning approaches because it feels so alien and strange, and they have become addicted to being ranked and measured.
I can see the process model being appropriate in some contexts, but at some point, we assume the student knows the process. If we're still wanting to see how the student is making sausage in a 400-level course, we clearly are into surveillance. For a 100-level class, it makes sense. "This is how you do things in this field...."
As a doctoral student, my first class was a process class. For a 15-20 page research paper we had to submit an initial 20-source bibliography, then an annotated bibliography, then an outline, then the final product. IN other words, 4 total products. Fine. Still felt a bit elementary for a doctoral program, to be honest. But now, while those scaffolded steps are still available for most major papers, (if the student desires feedback) the only graded piece is the final product.
This is a very reflective post that has me also thinking about a lot of assumptions I’ve made.
What first stood out for me in the example you gave where process needs documenting which led to ballooned output is how education in general needs and wants to treat the external. So much of learning is an internal process but the formal education system is based on capturing that in some way to then mark.
The second that that came to mind is indeed how prescribed the process is and whether it calls for students to learn how to define their own processes.
From the k12 side of things, i’m seeing a torrent of products that are required to prove process.
You’ve written about it very well here - and I’m not sure you’ll agree with the conclusions I’ve come to based on my observations.
But- when you have more than a few students, it is nearly impossible to grade anything but Product.
You can break that product down into a little bits but anybody who studied agents knows that those little bits can be defined and created.
I sound like a fatalist - I’m actually really excited about K-12 AI, and sending those students on to you.
But oversimplification is not the answer .
Really looking forward to the rest of the series .
It’s true!
I don’t really have an answer for agents yet, and I’m not sure anyone does.
For me, the hope is to design better learning experiences.
And I will say that shifting to process hasn’t ballooned my work at all, especially with the shift to student agency and alternative assessment a bit more. I just spread out the work differently.
Nice piece, Jason. This feels important because the tendency you identify of treating process as a step-by-step formula and opposing it to product is, as Owen on LinkedIn says, merely recreating the problem. That's especially true if you're using a product to structure and track the completion of the process.
The point is to collapse the distinction and embrace the ungraded messiness that occurs when you turn a group of students on to a problem with no clear outcome or assurance of success.
That "third step" you outline is the key. It cuts against the systems we have set up that expect replication and control. The problem is not so much theoretical as our habits of mind about what we expect students to do. The older students get, the more their habits of mind are a factor. My own hot take is that students are the biggest barrier to adopting active learning approaches because it feels so alien and strange, and they have become addicted to being ranked and measured.
I can see the process model being appropriate in some contexts, but at some point, we assume the student knows the process. If we're still wanting to see how the student is making sausage in a 400-level course, we clearly are into surveillance. For a 100-level class, it makes sense. "This is how you do things in this field...."
As a doctoral student, my first class was a process class. For a 15-20 page research paper we had to submit an initial 20-source bibliography, then an annotated bibliography, then an outline, then the final product. IN other words, 4 total products. Fine. Still felt a bit elementary for a doctoral program, to be honest. But now, while those scaffolded steps are still available for most major papers, (if the student desires feedback) the only graded piece is the final product.
This is a very reflective post that has me also thinking about a lot of assumptions I’ve made.
What first stood out for me in the example you gave where process needs documenting which led to ballooned output is how education in general needs and wants to treat the external. So much of learning is an internal process but the formal education system is based on capturing that in some way to then mark.
The second that that came to mind is indeed how prescribed the process is and whether it calls for students to learn how to define their own processes.
Right! I think that’s what we need to be careful of!
It’s fine to say that students should submit process documents and be able to resubmit anything to prove their growth. But that balloons quickly!