I’ve never graded on participation per se, but rather focused on the desired outcomes of the exercises which feature explicitly collaborative or participatory components. I am sure they goal of your small group activities is more than simply getting the students to talk. Getting the students to talk and interact is, in fact, a means to some other end. Grading participation, then, simply involves assessing or measuring the success or failure of the students achieving the activities learn goal.

The best designed assignments will require participation and measuring student learning becomes an incentive for students to approach the assignment in the best way possible.

In other words, group work isn’t good because it teaches students to work in groups. Group work is good because students can learn more through group work. Evaluating the success of this technique is as “simple” as measuring the success of a group work against the same activities conducted without group work.

Bill

P.S. I find it better not to learn my students names at all or to assign them names that are easy for me to remember, but completely independent of their “given names”. This not only ensures the students have full privacy (and is compliant implicitly with FERPA), but also exposes students to the impersonal reality of the modern state. It’s basically a win-win.

If syllabi are statements of goals and intentions a syllabus does more good than harm. Providing your road map of where the course may go is very useful. Following it rigorously in spite of the happenstances of students’ proclivities, capabilities and events seems silly.

I’m reminded of the Eisenhower quote from the eve of Normandy, “Plans are useless. Planning is invaluable.” One owes one’s incoming students a statement of the planning for the semester.