Theory and practice

Of Pirouettes and Penning Steps:

The Importance of Low-Stakes Assignments as Tools for Growth

Time for Class

Reverence is the little girl in her pink tutu at the back of the ballet class who is watching the world spin around her dance teacher’s pirouette for the very first time. 

That little girl was me. And that pirouette was a graceful gust of movement that I could neither comprehend nor ignore. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such a combination of limbs and steps and turns. The motions of my world in elementary school consisted of tying my shoes, of petting strays with grubby hands, of falling off the merry-go-round. There was no precedent for such dexterity and accuracy in my life. 

Yet ... 

I Learned to Pirouette

The pirouette itself involves many steps that must coalesce into a magnificent, fluid whole.  

Not to mention that to effectively execute a turn like this, you need to have great balance and timing—you have to be able to spin all the way around without pause or dizziness from the shift in spatial perspective. 

How do you teach a beginner this turn? Certainly not by asking them to perform the whole move at once. In fact, it is not a whole move but rather a series of movements in marriage. 

The dancer must start by learning to plie, to carry out the five basic positions of ballet, etc.  

And then one day, the dancer can combine these steps seamlessly, readying themselves to view the world through the other side of a spin. 

A Plié of the Pen

For novice writers, completing a written project with no explicit or observable steps can feel a lot like spinning around a ballet studio with no guidance or direction. As writing instructors, it’s our job to help our students work their way up to those major assignments with their confidence and their learning-focuses intact. Ballet instruction offers basic lessons on the plie to help students grow and accomplish more difficult tasks; the composition classroom needs such lessons of its own. These lessons should come in the form of low-stakes assignments.

Low-stakes writing assignments are usually tools incorporated into a classroom for the purpose of scaffolding—or helping students build up to—the significant skills and knowledges that they will need to complete more complex works and develop more in-depth understandings of course materials. Such assignments might be utilized to teach students, for example, how to outline and organize their ideas so that they will be more prepared for writing a major research paper later on in the class.

According to the University of Toronto’s Teaching Assistants’ Training Program website, low-stakes assignments are usually “not graded – rather, they’re focused on helping students overcome anxiety about writing, getting students to focus” ("Low-Stakes Writing Activities"). So, students are essentially provided with a safe, unthreatening space for exploring and growing without the fear of harsh consequences or an overwhelming amount of information to internalize all at once. After all, you wouldn’t throw a young dancer headfirst into a complicated turn because that could result in confusion and even injury, so why would you throw a beginning writer into a paper without setting them up with necessary skills first? That would be a recipe for injuring students’ desires to learn and thrive in the classroom. 

Using low-stakes assignments also benefits instructors; ungraded activities can serve as manageable checkpoints for assessing “whether or not students are understanding the material as a course progresses” (“Low -Stakes Writing Assignments”). If students do not understand, then there is no penalty for that lack of understanding early on, and the sort of classroom environment that encourages risks and exploration in this way also certainly promotes learning and writing processes over products, which, as I have mentioned in a previous post, can help to alleviate the stresses that accompany a perfectionist mindset. 

Unafraid of Agency

Because they promote exploration and a level of comfort with failure, low-stakes assignments also nurture a sense of control for students in the classroom. They can serve as a useful way to breakdown intimidating power structures and dichotomies within course environments by giving students access to more informal and relaxed learning opportunities. Say, for example, an instructor decides to ask ungraded, open-ended questions at the beginning of each lesson. This sort of activity gives students a safe and unintimidating chance to act as an active stakeholder in their own learning by answering unabashedly; answers become catalysts for meaningful discussion instead of barriers and judgement criteria. One University Park Campus School teacher named James Kobialka puts it best when he says that, because these assignments “‘aren’t censored’” or “‘highly structured,’” they allow students “‘to have a sense of freedom’” (qtd. in Minero).

And, just like the pink-tutued dancer who is learning to watch the world turn in a gradual way, composition students might find themselves slowly opening up to new viewpoints and lessons through these educational practices.

Practice and Examples 

One form of low-stakes assignment I often use with the students in my shadowing class is the “write-pair-share" model (also known as the “think-pair-share" model) described by the University of Toronto. In this model, instructors ask students to take a few minutes to answer a question or reflect on class content by themselves, writing as they contemplate. Next, students partner with someone and share/discuss their answers. Finally, the class shares their answers, insights, and discoveries as a whole. This practice not only helps students begin making connections to course knowledges, but it also helps them open up by setting a precedent for welcomed curiosity and sharing in the learning space. 

Other low-stakes assignments—as I have said—can work as check-ins for student comprehension. One excellent example of this type of assignment that I plan to use in my future classes is asking students to reflect at the end of a lesson on the clearest point and the “muddiest” point—or the most unclear information from a course session (“Low-Stakes Writing Activities”). From there, educators can see where their students stand within the course, and they can determine the most beneficial actions to take to aid student success. 

Reverence is the little girl in her pink tutu at the back of the ballet class who is watching the world spin around her dance teacher’s pirouette for the very first time. 

It is also a student witness to the glide of a pen—the connecting tool to possibility.