Ixchell Reyes 0:00
Are deadlines hurting students? Should we adopt more flexible submission policies? In this episode, we discuss how educators are reconsidering their policies and implementing flexible approaches to foster a more supportive learning environment.

Brent Warner 0:28
Welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and I’m here with Ixchell Reyes, award winning educator in innovation and professional development, world traveler and all sorts of other things extraordinary. Ixchell, how are you doing?

Ixchell Reyes 0:50
I’m pretty good. How are you?

Brent Warner 0:52
I’m doing Okay,

Ixchell Reyes 0:54
Yeah.

Brent Warner 0:55
I know that you’re getting ready to go somewhere else again, flying around the world, prepping, I hope you’re doing okay and breathing

Ixchell Reyes 1:05
I’ll be doing okay once I’m on a plane.

Brent Warner 1:10
I mean that moving stuff’s a lot of work. I’m still, still settling back in here. So…

Ixchell Reyes 1:15
You’ve been back, or what, like just a little over a month, or just about a month,

Brent Warner 1:19
A little over a month, yeah, and still kind of like, Whoa. Okay, so, but, you know, got to get back to work. We got those work deadlines to live up to.

Ixchell Reyes 1:29
Speaking of which…

Brent Warner 1:32
All right, so today’s topic, we’re going to be talking about deadlines. This is, you know, it’s a little bit of a contentious topic, right? A lot of people either fall into regular patterns or maybe haven’t necessarily thought things through a lot. And so we’re gonna be talking about whether they’re good ideas, what to kind of understand for students in the current generation, what they’re looking for, and what changes maybe we can make to to help our students maybe be a little more successful with deadlines. So let’s jump in. Alright, Ixchell, before we get started, just very quickly. There are some people that don’t like the violence of language around like deadlines. You know, things like a deadline means blah, blah, so, so just a couple other suggestions. We’ll probably be saying deadlines, but I’m just going to give a couple suggestions. If you don’t like that, you could say due date, submission time, target completion time. Or this one I asked AI and said the moment of truth, which, if you could put that into your your papers. That’s a nice way to phrase it, too. So all right, so what are we talking about here? Rachelle,

Ixchell Reyes 2:48
all right, we initially had looked at an article that you shared Brent, and it was about the experiences with and lessons learned on deadlines and submission behavior. That’s by Castro leonan, hopefully I pronounced that right, and Hellas, that’s a great last name. But the conversation really started with the fact that you’ve changed a little bit of your approach to deadlines or assignment submission dates, right? And whether that is something that, uh, benefits students, causes more anxiety, or if it actually makes a difference in the the work that students are submitting, or if it’s making them procrastinate more or encouraging them to procrastinate more. So this is something that I think you and I have gone back and forth, because I think we share similar approaches. But we’re mostly going to be talking about takeaways from a student survey mentioned in a higher ed Inside Higher Ed article where they looked at there they talked to students who had a they wanted to know whether what they thought about deadlines. And

Brent Warner 4:03
go ahead, yeah, no, I just think this. So it’s one of those things where we say, like, hey, if we’re talking about student centered learning, we have to make decisions around what we know is best versus what students want, right? And so, so I know it’s easy for a lot of people to just go, well, students, of course, they want longer deadlines, or whatever else it is, right? But I think it’s important to kind of recognize what these, what these actual questions are getting at and and whether or not we’re only sticking to our guns on the way that we do our deadlines, because that’s how we came up with them, or how we learned when we were how we learned. Yeah, right, or is it really the best thing? So Ixchell, I know you kind of have the first main point here.

Ixchell Reyes 4:43
Yeah, no, I think, I think you’re right. Obviously, as an instructor, I’m the type of instructor that always thinks of how I learned and how I was taught, and then I never want to do it the same. I always want to push back like, no. It’s gonna be better. Or no, it doesn’t work for me. Or no, I saw these errors. So again, so this was a survey, and this survey found that 72% of students overall, and this was at Cornell University, really.

Brent Warner 5:15
This one was not Cornell. This was the Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, they did a survey here,

Ixchell Reyes 5:24
so 72% of students overall agreed that deadlines should be flexible for extenuating circumstances, for example, family emergencies and health issues.

Brent Warner 5:35
Yeah, I mean that to me, seems fairly obvious, although I’ve seen cases where people do not allow for that, right? They’re like, well, you should, oh, yeah, you know, you should have thought of that before someone got sick or whatever

Ixchell Reyes 5:47
else. Well, you know this, this will always remind me of an instructor I had in my master’s program. A family member was dying of cancer, and I had to say my goodbyes on that evening, we only had one class a week, and I asked for permission to leave and submit my work later. And the response I got was, you know, you’re missing four hours of class, right? Yeah. And I was so shocked, and so again, I never, I would never want to put my student in a situation like that, where you have to weigh, extend you any circumstance, right?

Brent Warner 6:32
Well, and here’s the thing from, you know, I think there’s a lot of teachers that think their students are, you know, running a scam. They’re doing the my grandma got sick thing, right? And, like, these are lies that students do sometimes tell, right? And so, but to me, it’s like, well, would you rather be, you know, helping out the person who’s lying, or would you rather be harming the person who’s telling the truth in that situation? And if I have to choose, I’m going to be helping or, you know, I’m going to choose to help the person who is actually hurting, and maybe someone else gets a benefit from lying about that as well. But for sure, like, Come on, let’s be human here. Let’s, let’s have a, have a little bit of compassion and understanding for those situations. I do get it, but also in an ESL setting. So if we’ve got students here in the States, for example, and they’re like, hey, this means that I’m gonna have to, you know, fly home to Iran to see my ailing mother, or, you know, something like that. It’s like, yeah, you gotta do that. You need to go take care of your family, whatever health issues first, like my deadlines are missing a little bit of class, or whatever else it is should not really be the thing making that decision now, I will say I have had occasions where it’s like, it takes too much, right? Like, hey, if you’ve got, you know, an ailing family member, and that’s going to take you six weeks to take care of, you know, unfortunately, that kind of means you’re going to need to put your life on pause for a bit, that includes the class, and then try and take it again, you know, maybe the next semester, or when, when your family affairs are sorted. But that’s not just a single class issue that is like a your whole life issue that comes up something to be aware of,

Ixchell Reyes 8:22
right? And just to clarify, I misspoke at the beginning. This is not from the corn from Cornell, but the survey, I looked it up, and it was 3000 students at 128 four and two year institutions that were surveyed. So that was, that’s the sample that together. Yeah,

Brent Warner 8:41
pretty broad spread. Okay, so next part here is one next second. Takeaway from this survey is that more than half of the students of 56% agree that it’s helpful when professors break down big tasks into smaller deadlines throughout the term. So let’s say you’ve got a large final assignment to do, and you’re like, Okay, it’s going to be due in, you know, five weeks or something like that. That’s not really helpful to the students. It’s more helpful to say, Okay, your outline is going to be due on Thursday, and then the following part you’re going to have to have Part One due by, you know, the following Monday. And, you know, so if you break it down, and some of this research in here has shown that the more deadlines you have, the more successful the students are on these big projects, right? Like to actually kind of get through the steps to get through everything. So don’t just leave it big and long and abstract far into the distance, but really kind of think about it and then set up the goals throughout, throughout the process of that.

Ixchell Reyes 9:45
Yeah. So the next takeaway from the survey is that half of students say that they typically rely on deadlines to motivate and keep them on track and sort of piggybacking along the last takeaway that you shared, the last point you mentioned, Brent Mia. A language learner and a student in the United States, not understanding necessarily the approach to just a writing process. It made it very hard for me as a college student to to stay on track for my first essay that I had to write, and I remember just being completely lost at what to do over time, I found that teachers who gave us very clear deadlines and lists, checklists of things that we could use to manage our own time, helped me to internalize that process. And I would say that absolutely, knowing that I was on track helped me feel a little bit for me, more motivated and more maybe I got more self confidence in that I was completing what I was supposed to. And that’s necessary, right? It’s breaking up a difficult task into manageable chunks, and especially for language learners, I always remember that,

Brent Warner 10:58
yeah, yeah. Well, one of these articles that I read, too, was talking about how college, at least at college age, you know, a lot of times for students, this is the first time when they’re living an unstructured life, right or not given to them, and yet they’re still, you know, they’re still in need of prefrontal cortex development. So it’s like, you kind of have these things where it’s like, you’re, you’re putting rules on things, but it’s, they called it the perfect storm of problems for the, you know, for all of this at the same time. So it’s like, how do you open this up to say, like, hey, I want to help you through this, but I’m also not going to punish you for some of these things that you’re trying to Oh, you’re

Ixchell Reyes 11:38
still developing, right? And learning that’s that you don’t just turn into an adult the moment you enter college.

Brent Warner 11:46
You know, despite what a lot of professors might tell their students, right? Not quite that easy. So Okay, next one is that 45% of students, so same, same group, right? But, you know, kind of going through different versions of what they’re saying. 45% said that deadlines should be flexible in general, not just in emergency. So and then, by the way, it says also that students who are receiving financial aid are likelier to say this than those without financial aid. So if you’re so, 48% of people are saying, Yeah, you know, we like all deadlines should be flexible, whereas 34% are saying a lot, you know, if they’re not getting financial aid. So it’s a really interesting thing to kind of think about. Well, who are those students that need this, right? You know, maybe students, students who are getting financial aid, often have a more stressful life, right? Another job, people to take care of, right, all these other things going on. And so if you’re only benefiting the students who are already coming in the classes as a place of privilege in a certain way, right? Then we want to look at that too. So just you know, something to keep in mind.

Ixchell Reyes 12:57
And then the final takeaway here is that while just 9% of students say that deadlines should remain firm, doing away with deadlines is unpopular too, so 12% of the students say, said that deadline should be eliminated altogether. So,

Brent Warner 13:15
yeah, so people like, they don’t want no deadlines. They don’t want, like, the extreme right, right, right there, there’s actually a middle ground, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But just one of these points inside of here too, they did mention Ixchell, is that a lot of professors go, oh, well, you know, extending deadlines or being willing to do that just, you know, opens up procrastination for people. It gives them more opportunities to be procrastinators and things like that. But they did say that, and this language here is a little bit complicated. We’ll break it down, but it says if students who rely on deadlines for motivation are more likely to be procrastinators. So say, hey, I need that deadline. That’s going to help me out, but that means that I am more likely to be a procrastinator. Then these students seem interested in interim deadlines that help them work towards long term goals. So if they know that the that the deadlines help them and that, but that, but that they’re going to only go at the end, then multiple deadlines, or interim deadlines, are like, Okay, I know I need to get this part done, this part done. So it’s actually helping them out to have some of those deadlines inside of there and then, and then they can choose, like, if it’s going to be flexible for them to say, like, Hey, I’m going to skip this deadline, you know, or I’m going to be late on this one when a real emergency comes up. And they’re not necessarily responsible for sorting out every part. So that’s that’s a nice part for the people who are already going to be procrastinators. And then the second one is if students who don’t rely on deadlines are less likely to be procrastinators. So the other other side of it, they are less interested in the strict deadline regime, right? So it means they’re. Like, I don’t really care, because it’s not the thing that’s driving me one way or another. So it’s actually a better benefit to have, you know, multiple deadlines, or flexible deadlines, or something like that. We’ll talk about those in a minute, but, but you can start to see, like, hey, we don’t want nothing. We don’t want it to be too hardcore. So where do we find that middle ground?

Ixchell Reyes 15:22
Oh, all right, Brent, you and I are co presenting for a new P That’s Association National universitaria de professores de Inglis. And that is an Association, the National Association of English language university professors. And that is an Ixtapa Mexico, November 7 through the 10th. So if you are around, take a vacation. Go, go, go see us.

Brent Warner 15:51
Yeah, looks really nice. So I so you’ve been to this conference before. This is my first time, and looking forward to it for sure. So if you’re around, come say hello. Okay, so Ixchell, just a couple things on like personal practices, maybe some things to think about around deadlines. I’ve brought this up on LinkedIn before about the question of, Do you have a midnight deadline, right? So what has happened in around the deadline conversation is a lot of professors or teachers have offloaded the impetus of or not the impetus, the the the need to think about this by letting the LMS system decide when the deadline is, which is, you know, in Canvas or in most deadline, in most of these systems, it’s midnight of whatever day that you choose, or 11:59pm, which is a curious time to say that you should be turning in an assignment. Right? So we’re encouraging students then, who do wait until the deadline to work when they’re probably tired, right? Probably not motivated to be doing work and would rather be going and doing something else, or, you know, like running out of steam or something kind of towards the end of the day, and then, you know, and then it’s being turned in at midnight. So for me, it’s like, am I going to start grading those papers at midnight? What’s the reason behind that timing? And so I think what ends up happening is, in the past, traditionally, a lot of teachers had their deadlines set as like, Okay, our papers are due on Tuesday. That’s when you guys come to class, and so therefore that’s when you’re going to be turning in your work, or your homework or whatever else it is. Now with this online world, it’s turned into these weird, dead, you know, times that don’t necessarily make any sense. There are a couple of exceptions here, but they’re not really thought through. They’re just kind of decided by the LMS, and most professors, I would argue, have not considered why they’re choosing that time, except to say this kind of a clear date at the end of a week, or whatever else it is. So a couple of things for me that I want to think about is, I set my deadlines, and Ixchell, I’m not sure if you do the same at at the beginning of class, when we’re going to meet. So next time we’re going to meet that’s that’s our deadline, that’s the time that you’re going to be turning something in before then is fine. But what that also means is that students can then come up and talk to me about the assignment before class. So I’ve got office hours or or even if it’s just the first couple of minutes before class, like just running in and saying, Hey, is this okay? A lot of times I’ll get that type of little quick comment, am I doing this right? Is this along the right lines? Can I turn it in? Yes, no, and then, and then make that submission there. So, so that’s one, you know, it’s actually quite a number of things. But like, are you going to be grading over the weekend? Okay, then are you setting Why are you setting up students to grade these things? You might be right. You might be grading over the weekend and then say, okay, Saturday morning is my deadline, and I’ll be working on the weekend to grade these things to have them back to you by Monday. Okay, that’s fine, but if not, if you’re taking the weekend off and you’re saying, Hey, I’m going on a holiday, and you guys will have to turn this in, what’s the reason behind that? It could be that you want your students to take the weekend off themselves and be done with the things, right? And that could be helpful, but you’re also making decisions for them that don’t necessarily align with what their needs are, right? And so if you’re going to be going to, you know, camping for the whole weekend and not looking at anything until Monday, you could theoretically say, Hey, first deadline on Friday afternoon and then. But if you need extra time, you can turn it in until Monday morning, right? So there are different ways to play with this, and you don’t necessarily have to be stuck into a single chosen time. Ixchell, how do you approach these things?

Ixchell Reyes 19:56
I think I’m very similar to you. I think when I first started. Teaching. I was the hard deadline. You might lose points. You know, after every day, I remember you having an instructor who would have your score for every day that you were late so you could get a zero, even if you turned it in, like, depending on how many days late it was. But I didn’t, I didn’t go that, that direction. But I then started questioning, okay, what’s the purpose? I’m not even going to get to these. So why should I have this student who’s panicking saying, Hey, I’m running late because this happened and I didn’t get a chance to submit it. Can I have a couple extra hours? I’ll have it this afternoon. I’m not even going to start reading them till that weekend. And then I sort of shifted to, yeah, I don’t I’m very flexible. Sure I need to make sure I need to organize my time around giving feedback and scoring, so that I’m also not spending continuous days grading, but But keeping that in mind giving students flexibility, because I’m not even going to score them. So what’s the point of scaring somebody then? Then they’re tired in class, they They’re only thinking about writing their draft. And I’ve had students in class trying to finish in class, you know, so that it’s like, no, I don’t. I need you here, yeah. So I’m pretty flexible. And then the approaches that we read about are the deadlines. So the hard deadlines, and I guess that means deadline, the midnight deadline, and if it’s late, it’s not accepted, or it’s marked late, there’s the no deadline approach, which I think seems to me to be the other extreme. I haven’t played with it only because I’m afraid of, yeah, yeah,

Brent Warner 21:44
that’s the whole like, just as long as him by the end of the semester. It’s fine. I do see the problems with that for sure. You know, like we we know that the best learning happens in small intervals, over repeated times and then interleaved and overlapping with each other. So if a student just tries to crush through an entire course in the last, you know, week of it, and didn’t really participate or do anything, one, they probably already had the skill set that they needed to get through that course as it was right so So one, that, you know, we already failed them as an institution, putting them into the class and probably doesn’t suit their needs. But two, you know, it’s like they’re not actually going to walk away with long term retention. They’re just going to have, you know, the CRAM, the cramp, yeah, outputs, which is, I got it for the test, and then I’m done, and it’s not going to stick with me at

Ixchell Reyes 22:36
all. And then it also, I think, sends the message that maybe that is not as important, that the information is not important, that what is important is to check that box that you submitted whatever assignment, because as long as it’s done by the end of the term, then you get credit for it, or it gets scored. And I can think back to the types of classes that had that assignment. Maybe there it was a, like a large lecture, or like a one of those 200 people classes where you have to write one essay, and at the end, the poor student assistant, or the professor assistant, gets to score them. But again, if we’re talking about language learners, we want to scaffold. And that’s you know, deadlines is a form of scaffolding and a form of helping them to internalize the organizational and the chunking process. And I think the happy medium, the happy approach, a happy medium approach, is the flexible deadlines. And I think that means several things, depending on the class, depending on the topic, depending on the length of the course and on the on how many assignments might I’m thinking right now writing assignments, because there may be some assignments where deadlines can’t be flexible because one step has to happen before another one happens. But if we’re talking I’m thinking of writing assignments is what I’m thinking. Yeah.

Brent Warner 24:01
Well, I agree. I mean, I go through this a lot, and, you know, I teach one of my classes, an academic writing class, and so the way that I deal with this, my personal approach for a lot of the assignments for these classes, is I still have my deadline, but nothing the deadline doesn’t matter until you get a grade, right? So what I’ll say is like, hey, it’s due on Thursday at one o’clock. That’s what time my classes right now, Thursday at one o’clock, and if they haven’t turned it in, I’m still not maybe grading it until Thursday at four o’clock or five o’clock, or maybe not until Friday, or whatever it is, right? So I might not get to it right away. So if that student turns it in, in between the deadline and the time that I start grading, that’s fine. Like, to me, there’s no harm, no foul inside of that. They have to do a little bit of gambling on, like, you know, how long when am I going to get to my actual grading? And that’s fine too, right? But they’re also. Going to get punished for it. So if I’ve turned it in, I’ve given them a grade, then, then they’ve got the zero, then they can just come and talk to me and say, Hey, I didn’t finish this. Can I come and redo it? Or, you know, they can come and resubmit the assignment again. So it’s not that they’re out, you know, as soon as that grade comes in, that nothing grade, it’s going to be revisited anyways. And so, so what I do in my assignments is, you know, the majority of my assignments are at this point, are complete, incomplete. And so when students get an incomplete, it all automatically means that they are going to be resubmitting the assignment, not that they got a zero, right? And so, so So for me, my students are now, they’re going, Oh, I got an incomplete. Maybe they didn’t turn anything in, or maybe the work just wasn’t up to the standard that I need for them. And then once they get hit that standard, then we’re good to go.

Ixchell Reyes 25:54
Yeah. And I think one of the ways that I’ve implemented this is that I and again, I still, since I’m working with language learners who come from different styles of or approaches to education or learning, when I do these flexible deadlines, I I see my students daily, so I might from time to time, ask, how’s the writing going? How’s your assignment going work? Did you start on it? Are you still working on it. Is it in progress? Almost finished? Is it? Are you going to show me something soon, just to kind of help them kind of have the a term to describe the part of the process where they’re in to me, it doesn’t matter, because at the end, I’m going to be grading it and scoring it, looking at it anyway, whenever they submit it, but I want them to be able to put in towards I’m working on it, and I’ve had students tell me I haven’t started yet, and that’s one of the steps. So if you haven’t started yet, you got to tell me I haven’t started yet. Okay, no problem. Nope. And I don’t want them to feel bad for telling me that they haven’t started. There’s times when information has to, like, marinate in your head before you can sit down and actually get it, you know, get a chunk of it written down, yeah, and I’m totally okay with it, because it happens to me.

Brent Warner 27:06
So for sure, for sure. So I think these are all things to consider and maybe take a little time. I guess our suggestion is to take a little time and think about, like, not just like, hey, what’s going on, but like, why am I making these choices? And are they really the best way? Is it just a benefit to me? Is it really a benefit to my students, or is it just kind of what I’ve understood over time? So those things to consider, I do need to give a couple of exceptions, because a couple people push back on me when I’ve talked about this online before, and there are some reasonable exceptions for why at times when you might say, Hey, I’ve got a hard deadline, or a clear deadline, at least. So asynchronous courses, right? Like saying, Okay, well, I need to have this time, right? Like we are not meeting. We don’t have a time when students can come up necessarily and directly come talk, although I’d say, you know, there’s, there’s options for flexibility of course and asynchronous as well. And then the other one, a couple people mentioned, is that they’ve got students all across the world. And so setting a deadline, yeah, might just end up at midnight for someone randomly, right? And so it’s like, it’s like, well, you just kind of have to say, Hey, this is going to be the time. And and then put it on the students to say, Please make your own adjustments to turn this in beforehand. So your deadline for yourself might be, you know, 8pm the previous day, or whatever else it is, because I don’t want you pushing those things up. But at some hand, sometime you might have to put the responsibility into the students hands to make their own decisions as

Ixchell Reyes 28:36
well. Very cool. I All right, for our fun finds, I have rediscovered Richard Scarry books. I don’t know if you remember them, of course, but I recently found several just old, old versions online. I purchased them on eBay, and I wanted to have just a dictionary, like I don’t like the old school dictionaries or the overwhelming picture dictionaries, but those kind of help my students, because they’re, you know, they’re quirky, and you have all these cartoonish, cute little cartoon characters that are not too childish for adults to look at, and they’re just, I found that there was such a good tool to have in class for my emerging and high beginners, especially those who need the chunks of language, like the phrases, because you’ll have little animals performing tasks, and it’ll give you a sentence about it, and it’s just at their level. And so I ended up, and I ended up going to eBay, going on eBay, and purchasing like five of the the hardcover ones. And yeah, so I’ve rediscovered them. That’s my fun find. What do you have?

Brent Warner 29:41
Nice. Okay, cool. I’m also going with a book here. So mine is called Tokyo Underworld by Robert Whiting. This is really interesting book. It’s talking about, it kind of runs through many different people, but it talks about, kind of the, underground life, kind of crime adjacent and or other things, like some of the weird things that were happening in Tokyo, post war, all the way up and kind of until the modern era, and lots of interesting characters. But one reason that I got this book is because it features quite heavily my own uncle. I’ve mentioned a few times, I think that my uncle is, you know, was kind of a big deal in Tokyo in the 60s and 50s and 60s, etc. But anyways, he’s mentioned quite a few times. There’s quite a few stories I’d never heard about him inside of there and so, oh, and by the way, I guess I should point out that my uncle was NOT a criminal (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes 30:38
It’s confession hour (laughter)

Brent Warner 30:42
goes into it. But anyway, yeah, they really do talk about it’s fascinating to kind of hear what they had to say about him and like, how he was doing things in the world. Anyways. So Tokyo underworld, it’s been a great book, if you really, if you enjoyed the TV series Tokyo vice, this would be right up your alley to kind of that, like underground crime world, to combine with regular people and, you know, all that type of stuff. So Tokyo underworld, by Robert Whitey,

Ixchell Reyes 31:12
Very cool. For the show notes and other episodes. Check out DIESOL.org/ 110 that’s for episode 110 you can find us on youtube or on Instagram at @DIESOLpod. You can find me on most of the socials at @Ixy_Pixy that’s I X Y, underscore p, i, x, y,

Brent Warner 31:35
and you can find me at @BrentGWarner. All right, everybody, thank you so much for taking the time to join us, and thank you so much for listening to the DIESOL podcast. We will see you soon.

Ixchell Reyes 31:46
Thank you!