Difficulties of the Novice Professor

I must admit that I am wary of Inoue's approach to Freshman Writing using a community-based assessment.  While I believe that his method has been successful within the four walls of his classroom, I was worried throughout the article about authority.  I think that it is especially difficult for new teachers, who are often not very far from their students in age, to learn how to establish authority in the classroom.  It is one of the things I worry about extensively when I think of teaching next fall, and I think that placing assessment in the students' hands would only encourage them to undermine my authority.  Even though Inoue describes that this has not been an issue in his classroom, he is a seasoned veteran of teaching, while I have no experience whatsoever.  I think that it would be exceedingly difficult to place the burden of assessment on the students - I know that I will want to control as much of the classroom experience as possible next fall.  So, while I do not dismiss his approach, I want to seriously question how effective brand new teachers can be while using it.

On the other hand, I enjoyed Peter Elbow's writings ("A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching" and "Good Enough Evaluation") and felt that I could use his approaches to Freshman Writing in my classroom next year.  I have always questioned the usefulness of rubric-style grading on papers - when I received this kind of assessment, I hardly ever looked at the specifics of the rubric and instead looked immediately for the letter grade at the bottom of the page.  The "bottom line" has always been most important to me.  I realize after reading Elbow's articles, though, that is because I have felt comfortable writing for quite some time now - the rubric was already ingrained in my mind.  Both these articles and the sessions with Nathan and Max have helped me realize that many of my students will benefit from a rubric that they can use to guide their writing.  While I think that the "bottom line" grade will still be important to my students, as the letter grade tends to mean everything on college campuses, a better understanding of specifically why that student got a B or a C will certainly be helpful as well, especially for the student who feels uncomfortable with writing.

On the other hand, I must admit that I do not think I would ever use the "grading contract" in my classroom, though I was intrigued by the practice.  Grades can be incredibly arbitrary - what one teacher believes is an A paper another may say is merely a B+.  I am not sure, though, that I would be comfortable stating at the outset of my first class that this is exactly what you need to do to get a B.  Once again, I feel that this would undermine my authority in the classroom.  And, perhaps this is simply because teaching is such a new endeavor for me.  I think, though, that I am not even sure what work I consider to be worthy of a B, yet, and so I would not be able to tell my students exactly what would get them a B in my class.  Again, this is an obstacle, in my opinion, primarily for new teachers, and so implementing these things in a classroom probably would not be as difficult for experienced teachers.