When was the last time you gave an extension?
When was the last time you were asked for one?
Extension requests have always been common inbox arrivals – life happens, and it sometimes happens a little harder or more unexpectedly to students learning how to navigate their lives. During the pandemic, faculty and students were forced to lean into flexibility in the classroom– whether they wanted to or not. Requests for extensions – and granting them – became commonplace.
Post-pandemic, that hasn’t entirely gone away, with faculty reporting that students still demonstrate a high need for – and expectation of – flexibility regarding coursework, alongside a significant increase in requests for accommodation.
While many faculty may want to accommodate student requests, depending on class size, the sheer number of emails can create an overwhelming administrative load – particularly in courses with hundreds of students. And while even the most well-intentioned faculty may try to keep up with these requests, it sometimes can feel like too much, especially for those at the helm of those large classes.
No matter how strong your ethic of care is for your students and their well-being, the task of reading and responding to an onslaught of emails, each bearing a message from a unique student with a specific set of extenuating circumstances, is no small task. It can actually require a feat of administrative logistics – and can present a considerable challenge for faculty who, by virtue of their lives lived in academia, are already bearing many cognitive loads at once.
Of course, it’s important to see students as whole humans with complex lives that they’re learning to manage, and to recognize their unique circumstances and challenges.
But it’s equally important that we recognize faculty as whole humans with complex lives –lives that straddle the worlds inside and outside academia.
But it’s equally important that we recognize faculty as whole humans with complex lives –lives that straddle the worlds inside and outside academia.
So, the question becomes: how can we protect and nurture student and faculty health and well-being, and allow faculty, particularly those teaching large courses, to catch even a whiff of a work-life balance? And if your gut reaction is “HA! What’s that?” – you’re not alone.
Is it possible to provide flexibility at scale?
Believe it or not, the answer may be yes: and here’s one creative example of how a Cornell faculty member did just that.
Experimental Pedagogy: Extensions without Penalty (EWP)
Mark Sarvary, Ph.D. ’06, senior lecturer and director of the Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, teaches Investigative Biology, an introductory biology course with a capacity of more than 400 students.
Like many faculty, as the COVID-era waned he found that students’ expectations for flexibility with assignments did not. And that led to administrative burden – responding to multiple, reoccurring requests for assignment extensions over the course of the semester, hindering the teaching team’s ability to provide timely and responsive assistance.
So, in an attempt to address this, in the fall of 2022, Sarvary and postdoctoral associate Joseph Ruesch, M.S. ’16, Ph.D. ’22, decided to implement a new teaching strategy and survey the results.
They called it the “extension without penalty,” or EWP. The EWP approach creates a two-tiered extension system, in which students are offered two assignment deadlines, one “ideal” deadline and the other the EWP. The instructions are simple: students can hand in their assignment on the “ideal” due date, or – depending on their schedules and competing due dates for other courses – they can have an EWP, and submit the assignment by the later due date, with no impact on their grade.
Grounded in the educational theories of Universal Design for Learning and Self-Determination Theory, Sarvary found the approach “meets the diverse needs of all students by recognizing that they have varied pacing needs and personal circumstances that impact their learning.”
The goal is simple: embed flexibility within the structure of a course, giving students both a sense of security and personal agency as they balance their semester coursework.
The keys to making this work lie in clearly framing the EWP – what it is, how it works, and what it means for students – and then providing clear, consistent and repeated communication about it.
And it did work. In essence, when implemented clearly and effectively, the EWP functions as a safety net, which for students encourages better time management and reduces stress.
The benefits for faculty were also evident that first semester. The EWP resulted in reducing the faculty administrative load, as fewer students were contacting the teaching team about extensions because they were able to opt into an already built-in extension if they needed to.
And because the teaching team wasn’t spending time tracking and responding to multiple incoming requests, they found they had more time to focus on students who needed extra attention and support to succeed in the course.
Sarvary and Ruesch wanted evidence to support this strategy’s effectiveness, so during 2022-2023, as they implemented the EWP, they surveyed 563 students regarding their preference for assignment due dates. Survey options were “no due date,” “one due date” or “dual due date (ideal plus extension)” system. More than 80% of student preferred the dual due date system.
Survey results also pushed back on a counterargument that students would simply use the EWP as an excuse to procrastinate and hand in assignments at the second deadline. This didn’t happen – nor did students procrastinate and simply ask for extensions in bulk later.
In fact, according to Sarvary and Ruesch’s survey, of the 347 students enrolled in Investigative Biology in Fall 2022, only 37% of students used the EWP option more than once. Forty-one percent used it for just one assignment, and 22% didn’t use it at all.
It provides flexibility and helps faculty show empathy while maintaining structure in the course, without jeopardizing the rigor of education.
Mark Sarvary
Their full study, “Structure and Flexibility: Systemic and Explicit Assignment Extensions Foster an Inclusive Learning Environment” was published in Frontiers in Education, in March.
Additionally, the study “has shown many positive impacts on students’ mental health while not affecting their grades negatively. It provides flexibility and helps faculty show empathy while maintaining structure in the course, without jeopardizing the rigor of education,” Sarvary said.
And there was another advantage.
Combatting the “Hidden Curriculum”
As a student-centered, evidence-based inclusive practice, the EWP fosters students’ metacognitive skills. But it also combats what’s known as the “hidden curriculum” – the unstated or implicit rules, norms or expectations of a course – by making extensions available to all students, not just those who know it’s possible to ask for them.
This can have a positive impact on many students, and particularly for international and first-generation students, and students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who may be unaware they can ask for an extension in the first place. Building extensions into a course’s framework can simultaneously build equity into a course, creating a more inclusive experience for everyone.
Less stress for students, a stronger sense of agency and inclusivity in the classroom, and fewer emails for faculty – we may not be able to solve all of higher ed’s issues, but perhaps we can work toward recognizing the humans within it, two due dates at a time.
Interested in a deeper dive? On March 21, 2024, Sarvary and Ruesch, published “Structure and Flexibility: Systemic and Explicit Assignment Extensions Foster an Inclusive Learning Environment” in Frontiers in Education, with full survey results, pedagogical grounding, methods and analysis, and more.