My first day of class as a session zero
A first attempt at collaborative syllabus design
In collaborative role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, a session zero is a common way to set the norms of a game table. In a session before the first play session, players and game leaders discuss the gamut of meta-game aspects like what they enjoy in a role-playing game, what they’re hoping for in the upcoming campaign, themes that are off-limits, and their style of play.
As a D&D lover, I wanted to invoke the spirit of a session zero in my classrooms this semester as part of a much-needed burst of authenticity in my work. So I used the first day of class as my workbench.
Given the multitude of design aspects involved in an in-person college learning environment, I wanted to start my planning by centering the feeling that I wanted this session zero activity to instill. When I play D&D, I long for the game table to feel like a deep friendship. One that feels peacefully exuberant. Where I can trust my fellow players and game leader to take the story to places that are fascinating for my own character. And where I can join in the same for the other players.
From this feeling, I chose to structure part of my first day as a collaborative syllabus design activity: I gave students the opportunity to shape the course learning goals and choose one of two options for our course grading system (specifications grading or ungrading).
Shaping the course learning goals with students was important for me in building their trust—showing them that I wanted to steer the story of our learning in the directions that they wanted. Letting them choose their grading system was also important for me in building trust in two ways: with me and among the students themselves. First, just giving them an option was a way for me to relinquish some power and reinforce the feeling that we’re all in this for the students’ learning—not for grading or ranking or some other misaligned extrinsic incentive. Second, I hoped that having this discussion just among the students would help them trust each other through hearing everyone’s specific concerns about grades, motivation, and stress.
So how did it work out?
In terms of shaping the course learning goals (which was for an intermediate data science course), the activity mostly was a space to affirm that many of the goals that I had already laid out aligned with what they were hoping for. In some cases, the students added more detail to learning objectives.
In terms of choosing the course grading system, it was interesting to observe that not everyone was in agreement. This was most apparent in my first section where I observed a group vote before stepping out of the room to give the students privacy to discuss. When I returned, it was satisfying to see that the students had come to a consensus. In my second section, the students had more clarifications about the difference between the two systems but eventually settled on the same system that the first section chose: the ungrading option.
That ungrading was chosen was particularly interesting to me because it underscored the spirit that I wanted to invoke in this first day experience. In a nutshell, ungrading describes a variety of alternative grading approaches that often center a conversation between the students and instructor about the students’ progress—as opposed to a final evaluative judgment in the form of a letter bequeathed by the instructor alone. The ungrading approach affirmed the feeling that we’re all at the game table wanting to tell an awesome learning story together.
When reading the emotion of the room, I got the sense that I had started to cultivate the trust that I wanted with the students. And equally important, I had a good experience using this structure for the first day of class. I felt good, authentic, and peaceful. And being able to look forward to doing this again is huge for me.
Here’s to many more session zero’s 🙂