Classroom innovation

 So, here's some thinking about teaching next semester.

First, what's most important to me: I want student to (a) connect to the material; (b) learn about both the content and themselves (regarding the latter -- learn about themselves as learners, that they can work hard and that they are capable of so much that they might not have realized) and (c) become better readers & askers of questions.

Second, I want to somehow loosen students focus on grades — using specification grading I've framed work done in class as akin to work done at work.  We don't get grades at work. It's either good enough or it isn't.  So, they focus less on little things and more on make it 'good enough' — but I'd still like to figure out how to intrinsically motivate them.

Currently, my approach is to assign a fair amount of reading and rely on them to do the work with papers (and other more formative work) designed to get them to do the work.

I'm toying with the idea of giving students a list of possible books and telling them what they can choose to read what they want from that list (and can, if motivated by something on the list, read other things (w/my approval).  I'd put students into groups with others who are reading the same book so that they can work together on making sense of the book (they'd meet during class and I would 'drop in' on these discussions).  

Right now what I'm thinking is that papers would involve 'briefs' of each book (and I'd give them smaller tasks to develop the briefs -- these tasks could be worked on in the groups but the brief would have to be written by the individual).  Then there'd be a final paper that'd focus on taking a position about main question of class.

The briefs would focus them on reading and then the final paper would be the culmination of the semester and what they'd be working on all semester (that is, the final paper topic would be in the background of all the briefs).

Downsides to this? (a) I'd have more reading (would need to stay on top of wherever the groups were) and (b) some students might flake.

I'm really intrigued by the notion of prioritizing learning and sparking intrinsic motivation but not sure how to do it.  Am going to be reading Ungrading so that will hopefully give me some ideas.