Thoughts on Teaching – Wrapping up the first Unit – 10/3/2013
Week 5 in my hybrid class was the final class of the first Unit of the semester. So, we have essentially finished a third of the class to this point. In wrapping up the Unit, I tried to do two things. First, I took some time out to talk about research. Second, I set up a discussion about what united and divided the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution.
For the first part of the class, I started what will eventually be a three-part series on how to write a history paper. This is something that I find we do not do at the college level. (And, based upon what I see, is never taught before college either.) The only class where we actually teach students how to write is the introductory English class, and the only class where we teach students research is the second English class they take. Since my students are often taking my class concurrently with the English classes, they may or may not have any of these skills by the time they are writing for me. And, in the past, I have generally assumed that my students will be able to write effectively for me without ever teaching them how. In fact, I think that is how it is generally approached in most non-English classes — namely that we give them a paper topic and the next time we see anything from them is when they turn in the final draft. We just assumed they could do that without any guidance. However, the quality of the writing from that method was always rather poor, and the opportunities to teach them how to fix their problems only came in the comments left on their writing, which most students never read anyway.
So, I have embarked on a mission to try and teach them what it means to write a history paper and what it means to use historical sources in a paper. Some of this comes from my college’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), where we are to teach research methods throughout the college. But it has also come just because I have grown sick and tired of never getting what I am looking for from my students. This first presentation, which you can see below, concentrates in on two things — the need for an argument and the method for reading and understanding primary sources. I started with the failings of high school education at teaching students how to make a historical argument, and I talked about what it means to make an argument. I showed them the difference between what I call an information dump paper, where you try to get everything you know down on the paper in the hopes that you hit the points the teacher will be looking for, and an argument paper, where you have an organized and coherent argument that runs throughout the paper. Then, I took them through a 9-point method for reading primary sources. This is key because students have very little experience reading documents from the past. They generally pick them up, read them, find them incomprehensible, and then put them down. Thus, when we assign them to read something, they come away seeing it as unnecessary torture to read something that they are not going to understand anyway. So, I take them through how they should be approaching a document, especially in getting them to think about the context of the document as a way to see why it might be something important. I stressed to them that I do not assign things out of spite or sadism but instead assign things that emphasize the ideas I am trying to get across in the course. I also talked about how it is important to try to read the document as if you were there in the past rather than as someone from today reading something in the past. This is a difficult thing to do, but it can help the students understand why I would assign something for them to read. As an example of this, I talked about William Penn’s “Plan for a Union” from 1697. That was something I had assigned for them to read, and it is something that is difficult and largely opaque to the students. What I pointed out to them was that if you considered the source and context, it could be a very interesting document, since it is a document that calls for political union among the colonies many decades before the Revolution.
Here is the PowerPoint that I used to hit these themes in my class: SourcesPresentation1. I don’t know how successful it was to talk to the students about these ideas, but I think it is important.
Going through those parts took between 30-40 minutes in each class. That left only about 35-45 minutes for the rest of the discussion. I put two columns on the board — Unites and Divides — and had the students talk about what they would put in each column to show the things that united the colonies and the things that divided the colonies. This is part of the bigger Semester Project that the students are working on, where they are asked to eventually write a long paper on the subject of whether we can consider the colonies/United States as united or divided. The main goal, and one that was met in all of the classes, was to get the students to see that all of the major issues could realistically be put in both the unites and divides column. As a specific example, I took the topic of religion. I wrote on the board the statement that the American colonies were founded on the Christian religion. Then we talked about how that could be seen as both true and false. The true part, of course, comes from the fact that 99.5+% of the people who formed the colonies were Christian, all of whom believed in the same God and read the same Bible. Colonial society, politics, and the like were all taken from a context of a people who shared very similar beliefs. Then, we talked about what might make that statement not true, namely that, despite all being Christian, the colonists were all from vastly different sects and backgrounds. In fact, many of the dominant sects very explicitly opposed each other and found the beliefs of each to be quite abhorrent. In fact, the varieties of religion could be considered to be so vast that calling them a common group of Christians basically elides the reality of religion in the colonies. As one of the students put it, it is not really a question of Christian values, but of which set of Christian values. I was rather pleased with how the students grasped this concept overall, not just on religion, but on the broader idea that most major ideas could be both uniting and dividing.
The other thing that I wanted to cover in some detail, but largely ran out of time on, was the question of who we were talking about. When we consider the question of what made the colonies united or divided, we are mostly considering the white, European colonists. I raised the question at the very end of the class about whether we should also consider the slaves and the Native Americans. We ran out of time to talk about this in any detail, but I was happy that I, at least, got to put the idea in their heads.
Thoughts on Teaching – Talking about Religion – 9/28/2013
I am, again, late on discussing what I am doing on a week-by-week basis in my class. This week, my excuse is that we had an accident last Friday. In the rain, we hydroplaned on the freeway and were hit by an 18-wheeler. Everyone came out ok, but the car is going to be in the shop for a while. So, blogging has been kind of the last thing on my mind as we’ve been dealing with the fallout from the accident.
But, I do want to talk about what I am doing each week in my hybrid class, and so, this is what we did in Week 4, even though we just finished up Week 5. The topic for the class was — religion. I set up the discussion with a disclaimer. From my experience, religion is something that is just not discussed in much detail in most history classes, except in a mostly cursory manner. I will take out two of the classes this semester and talk exclusively about religion, once with the First Great Awakening and once with the Second Great Awakening. Yet, discussing religion in class is hard. It is an extremely personal subject, and it is hard to discuss it without people making it about themselves.
To set up the discussion, I had the students do two things — watch part 1 of a documentary called God in America and read a sermon from the First Great Awakening. As to discussion, we approached religion in two ways. First, we looked at the impact of the clash of religions between the arriving Europeans and the people who were already there. There were two basic things we took from that:
- That you cannot believe in a religion without believing that you are completely correct and that people who believe otherwise are wrong.
- That the idea of evangelicalism in religion is a difficult thing to achieve, as it is based upon the assumption that you simply have to tell people who have not heard the good word before simply have to hear about your religion and they will then convert.
With those two things as our base starting point, we worked from there. We discussed how religion shaped the colonies as they developed, looking at the assumptions on both sides and the rise of a religious idea in the colonies. We then moved rather quickly forward to the First Great Awakening, talking about what the older forms of religion had become by a century or so later and what the new ideas of the Great Awakening were. We talked about why the people in the Awakening felt that there was a religious problem in America by the mid-1700s and what their solution was. I did not do as good of a job here as I would have liked to, as I never really brought in the sermons explicitly. That’s a bad idea, as I need to hold the students directly responsible for the readings that I assign them. Still, the discussion went reasonably well, especially with the two points above in the bank already. We talked about the importance of the ideas of the Awakening in moving toward a new form of American religion as well as the push toward a break with old English ways that would be important for the ideas of the Revolution.
Overall, I think the class went reasonably well. We finished up tying everything back to the theme of unity or division in the colonies, and we left with the good historians answer — yes and no. The Awakening unified because it was a common experience among the colonists, yet it divided as the Awakening ended up dividing many in America over religious ideas. I closed everything with my final thoughts on the Awakening, that it was one of the most important pre-Revolutionary movements that is really not talked about very much in a lot of history classes.
As I mentioned above, the only problem I really have with it is that I did not actually directly discuss the documentary or the readings that much. I need to be holding them more directly responsible for the assignments that I have set for them. It is hard, as I know that a lot are not doing anything, yet, I am encouraging them not to do anything by not holding them responsible. It’s a bit of a catch-22.
Thoughts on Teaching – A Depressing Class – 9/19/2013
I know I missed last week, so I will try to double up this week on posts. This first one concerns last week’s class, which was quite depressing. That is one reason that I did not have the motivation or energy to write about it last week. Yet, I want to make sure to write about my class weekly, and so, I am not going to leave last week out. I just needed some cool down time before I set anything down on “paper.”
So, here’s what happened:
For my hybrid class, I have the last assignments close on Sunday night at midnight. That means that I spend Monday going through and entering grades from the previous week. So, we were essentially heading into Week 3 of my class at that point, and I had a chance to see, before I met them that week, how the previous assignments had gone. In addition to the normal weekly assignments, however, I also had a set of assignments that I call the Initial Assignments and Orientations, which is a basic set of things like reading the syllabus, signing up for the textbook site, taking a few introductory surveys, and the like. To get credit, you simply have to complete these things, at which point I will give you a 100. If you do not do them, you get a 0. It counts for 5% of the overall grade. Largely, I see it as an assignment to get the students going and get them comfortable in the classroom. So, I was entering both the grades for that assignment and for the weekly assignments due just before. What I found was a completely dismal set of grades. This has nothing to do with my online class but is unique to my hybrid class this semester. When the only grade on the orientation assignment is either a 100 or 0, then a class average of 50 means that only half of the people did the assignment. And, I had between a 45 and 55 average with the hybrid sections, meaning that roughly half of the class did not do them. The assignment had been open for the first 12 days of the semester, and only half of the students had bothered to complete it. Then, as I was entering the weekly grades, I noted that not only had a significant minority not done the chapter assignments they had in the textbook website, but that about a quarter of my students had not even signed up yet, even though we were already two chapters into the assignments at that point.
That made me rather depressed right there. The assignments that I have set out as graded assignments, and, not to mention, the first graded assignments of the semester, are not being completed by my students. Then, I took a dangerous turn for the worst. I had set up the students for the coming week to do three things — to access my online lectures, complete two chapters in the textbook, and view some video lectures on an external site. What the students don’t know is that I can directly track who does what in my LMS (Learning Management System), as the LMS allows me to see how many “clicks” there have been on each thing that I have given the students to do. That is always a depressing thing to look at, because it puts directly in your face as a teacher how few students are bothering to access the material you are requiring them to do. What I found confirmed my suspicions, as a dismally small number of students had accessed anything at all in preparation for that week’s activities. They had not read my online lectures. They had not completed the textbook material. They had not looked at the external link to the video lectures. When I say they had not, I mean that the number of clicks in the classroom equalled about 1/4 of the students in the class. That is even optimistic, as it assumes that each click is a distinct student, which is not necessarily true.
The problem with this is probably obvious. I assigned something, and the students did not do it. Beyond that, however, I am currently employing the flipped model of classroom, which means that the students access the central “lecture” material for the course outside of the classroom, and then we apply the material in classroom activities. So, if the students are not prepared, we cannot work.
So, all of that is depressing enough, but what made it a depressing class is that I then had to address this in class. I have to have a talk with students every semester that I teach. It is the nature, especially, of a community college that the students are not ready for college. They do not know what it means to be in college, and most approach it as just an extension of high school. We have a large DFW rate each semester (a D (which does not transfer), and F, or a withdrawal. It usually runs between 40-50% of students in the freshman core classes, like mine. We have done everything we can to try and fix this, and one of the things I have to do is have that heart-to-heart talk every semester about what they are doing here in college. I ask them directly to think about why they are there. I ask them to consider what is making them come to college and whether they are putting out the effort necessary to succeed. I also talk about what it means to be successful in college. And, honestly, I ask them to consider if this is something they value at all. I point out that nobody is making them show up to class, do the work, and so forth. I can do everything on my end to try and get them to succeed, but if they can’t meet me at least halfway, then it will be a failure. This is not high school, and nobody is going to get a C for showing up. I can and will fail them, which is something that most have not heard before. I ask them to consider what it is they are wasting by being in college and wasting the opportunity they have — whether its money, their time, my time, another student’s chance to be in the class, or whatever. I am blunt. I am direct. And, I am not particularly nice about it. I don’t like doing this, which makes for a depressing week, as I then had to do the same thing in all of the other classes that week, which meant that day-by-day I had to drag myself to class to deliver one depressing talk after another. And, sadly, I don’t know if it does any good. I can’t know, really, and that is also depressing.
A week of depressing talk later, and I, as you can probably imagine, really didn’t have much interest in blogging about it. Now, I am a couple of days out of it, and things are a bit further in my mind, leaving me able to talk about it without getting all worked up again.
And, in case you were wondering, after having that talk, no, the rest of the class that day did not go particularly well either.
Thoughts on Teaching – Presidential Visit – 9/7/13
No, not that president. I’m not that important. The college president stopped by and visited my class on Thursday. He did this last school year as well. I asked my Dean about that last year, and he said that the president considered it to be his right to stop in and see any class he wants to. At the same time, I don’t know of anyone else who has been visited, and I certainly don’t know of anyone who has had two visits in two years.
What was interesting, however, is that, unlike last year, the president talked to me this year afterwards, in an email. He made three observations:
- The students showed a striking lack of critical thinking.
- There was one student who was very disruptive.
- There was one student who was smoking a vapor cigarette in class.
So, how did I address those things.
For the first one, I confirmed what he saw. I said that students come to us from high school with very limited skills. They have very minimal critical thinking, writing, or reading skills. The nature of high school history in my state is dismal, with history generally being one of my students’ least favorite classes when they come to my class. Then, I talked about what I do with my students, that this is one of the big things that I emphasize over the course of my class, and that it is a very slow process to teach them something that they have not successfully learned in the 12 years before that. I also said that if I have the chance, that I generally see the biggest improvements when I have them for two semesters at a time. This is absolutely true. The students who stick with me and work through the assignments in my class over two semesters come out stronger. I’m not trying to brag, but when I can work with the same student for a whole school year, I can really start to make a difference.
On the second one, it was easy. I have an autistic student, and I have been warned by the college that he is likely to be disruptive. As he has as much of a right as any other student to be in my class, I have to manage it as best I can. The president agreed that I was doing the best job I could on that one.
The third took a bit of back and forth. The school policy is no tobacco products, and we have no policy on the vapor cigarettes. They apparently give off a water vapor when smoked, and, when I first saw it, I thought we had a fire in the classroom. After it was explained to me what it is, I really had no idea what to do with it, so I decided to let it go. However, the president was adamant that I should have stopped it in class, as it could be considered a distraction. What I replied back is that when we have no policy on those things specifically, then I really don’t know what to do about it. And, so, the result of that is that, as of Friday, we now have a policy on them that says we do not allow them in class.
So, it was an interesting day. Again, I don’t know if there’s any agenda in the president visiting my class two years in a row. But, like so many other things, I don’t really have any choice in the matter, and so, like so many other things, this is what we do.
Thoughts on Teaching – First Discussion – 9/3/2013
Today was the first week of discussion in my hybrid class. I have reoriented this American history class on a more dominant theme throughout the semester. I will write about that in a later post, but the short version is that we are looking at the overall question of whether the American colonies/United States could be considered a united group at any point in time, with the definite connection to our sense of unity today. But, I digress from my main point today.
This discussion was really set up to get my students started in the class. I had them read two chapters in the textbook and access one lecture that I had written in preparation for the class. I had no other major assignments for them to do before class, except that I provided them with a series of questions to think about to prepare them for the discussion.
These were the questions I gave them to think about as we approached the discussion:
- what the Americas were like before the Europeans arrived
- what the Europeans were like before arriving in America
- why the Europeans chose to colonize and settle in the manner that they did
- why we do not generally talk about the non-English origins of the Americas
- what we can learn about the United States today from this era
I started off the discussion with a quote from the book that influenced my thinking on this topic more than any other — 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. This is what I wrote on the board: The idea that the natives “had existed without change in a landscape unmarked by their presence. Then they encountered European society and for the first time their history acquired a narrative flow.” I had the students first take apart the quotation, and then we delved into what the societies looked like. I worked both from having answer questions and draw conclusions on their own, while also imparting new information. In addition to 1491, I also referred repeatedly to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. That book has been highly influential to my own thinking of the period, and I talked a lot about the differences between the European and American societies and how they encountered each other.
The underlying theme, however, was that of civilization, namely, how do we define civilization in the interaction between these two societies. I will be the first to admit that I did not go as far as that as I would have liked to, but the level of knowledge of the scholarly articles is low with my students, and much of the day was filled with imparting information, even though it was a scheduled discussion. This is something I get into trouble with repeatedly, in that I fall into lecturing too easily still. I try to have it a discussion, but I still talk too much. Still, I think it went pretty well today.
As to the students, about half participated, which is not bad for a first discussion. The responses were varied in quality, but a number of people said at least 3-4 things in a 75-minute discussion, which is really not too bad overall. They seemed to understand the general ideas, but I would have liked to delve more, as well, into why they are not taught these things up to this point. Namely, I would be very interested in their ideas about why we hear so little about what really happened in history and are more often taught a simplified and sanitized version of history. We will definitely hit on that theme as we go through the class, but I would have liked to have brought it up more explicitly today.
Anyway, that was today, the first full discussion day. I run the same discussion in the next three class days, and the cool thing is that the exact same topic can very likely go three more different ways. We shall see.
Thoughts on Teaching – The First Week – 8/30/2013
We are just finishing up the first week of classes. It is my eighth first week of classes since I got my first full-time teaching job, and it is certainly starting to feel relatively normal at this point. I was fairly prepared this semester going into my classes, which did help. My online class is pretty much set in place at this point until I am ready to do a major overhaul. So, it is largely a matter of updating the dates and links, and then that class is ready to go. The hybrid class was a bit more work, as I really did want to make some overhauls from what I did last year. However, my best-laid plans from the summer of spending a lot of time recreating the course did not pan out. As is true most academic years, I do my primary prep in the week before the semester starts, and so I get a limited amount of work done.
I did have one big change come my way in the week or so before classes started. Late in the week before our in-service week, I was asked (with refusal not really being an option) to take on another course. Our normal course load at my community college is 5 classes a semester. I normally have an overload, so I generally teach 6. As I was given this extra course, I am now teaching 7 classes this semester. 5 covered by my normal pay and 2 more at adjunct pay ($1800/course). So, my semester is now set at the highest number of students I have ever taught in one semester (around 230). There are two good things about this. First, I was given another online course section, so largely I just have to integrate in 30 more students to my existing course. There is not an extra course prep, just more students to respond to and grade. Second, I was given this extra section with enough time to be able to compensate for it in my assigned work load. I reduced the number of assignments in my online class and changed up some of the ideas that I had for my hybrid class in order to make up for the extra grading I knew I was going to have to do.
Now, we have reached the Friday of the first week of classes. I have met each of my hybrid classes twice, and they have now been divided up into the sections that meet once a week. I have fully introduced the course to them, and I have them set to be ready to start real class work next week. My online class is in its fifth day at this point, and, while there have been some questions and issues, I would say that this is one of the smoothest starts to the semester that I have had. In fact, things are really going so smoothly so far, that I am really waiting to see when the wheels are going to come off and the fist major crisis is going to begin.
For now, however, I think that the first week has been a success. I’ll write more specifics about the classes I’m teaching in the next couple of days, so I will get more into the nuts and bolts of the particular classes and talk about what I am doing, what I plan to do, and how things are going.
Thoughts on Education – Teaching Mistakes 2 – 8/9/2013
Here’s my second post covering the ideas of teaching mistakes from the this article. You can find Part 1 here, where I talked about the ideas behind this post and detailed the ones that I agreed with.
In this post, I wanted to note the ones that I feel are either misguided, incorrect, or just do not work for me. In a list of the 67 worst teaching mistakes as posted by actual instructors, there are going to be a lot of general ideas that work and specific advice that people have that works for them but is not applicable in the broader sense. Most of what I have here fall into the latter category, as in something that one person has discovered that they think is a truth, while it, in reality, is really only relevant to very specific circumstances. The other big category are the overly broad pieces of advice. We have all fallen into that category before, someone asks for you opinion on something, and you give them a general statement. Then, it’s published somewhere, and you think to yourself that you should have said something more specific. Or, maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the ones that I think are misses from the list:
1. Lacking professional variety – I wish we all had this choice. Where I teach, I am allowed to teach two classes. So, I teach them over and over. It would be nice to follow this advice, but some of us have no choice.
5. Failing to see the influence of Cultural Imperialism – OK, so this made me throw up in my mouth a little. I can absolutely see exactly who this person is, as I knew many in graduate school. They are so tied up into theory and the like that they have forgotten how to just teach students. They are so concerned with having all of the latest things at their disposal that they lose track of what they are doing. What’s more, they lose track completely of how to teach undergraduates, who could care less about all of this.
15. Making a course so easy that almost no learning takes place – This one is not bad at all, but the type of people who would do this are not going to be reading a post about teaching or ever think about reading about education, pedagogy, or the like. They care so little anyway that this advice is useless.
25. Not knowing every student’s name by the second week of class – OK. I fail at this every semester. I teach 80 students in class and 120 online every semester and 90 students online every summer. I wish my brain worked to where I could remember them, but not all of us work this way. I have never had a student complain about this, and I am not sure how relevant it is.
34. Adopting a new strategy just because it is popular, or everybody is doing it, without thinking it through as to whether you really are committed to that strategy – This one is so general as to be dangerous. The idea is not bad, but it also can lead to never changing at all. I see more people in academia who are convinced they know it all and always do things the same way no matter what more than I see people who fail at this I would like to see more people take chances and do something new, even if it happens to be popular rather than having people still lecturing from the same notes they copied from their professors in grad school.
35. Making a hard and fast deadline for every major assignment and allowing no make-up or extra-credit alternatives to meeting course objectives – Honestly, it was this one that inspired me to divide this post into two parts. I mean, come on. If you have no deadlines and no consequences, what is the purpose of teaching? I see this attitude that there should never be any consequences in the education my kids are getting now. They can turn in anything, anywhere, at any time, and with no consequences. If all we want is for everyone to complete with an A, then why not let this happen. But, when students get out into the real world, they are going to find that there are deadlines, and that there are consequences for not meeting them. By being infinitely flexible, you are setting them up to expect that in everything. The “get things done when you can” attitude is a killer in real life. I have strict deadlines with no make up and minimal extra credit. However, I am not blind to the fact that students do lead busy lives, especially for nontraditional students. What I do then is have everything open for multiple days and have a syllabus that is laid out clearly from the beginning so that they have plenty of time to finish the material and can plan ahead.
37. Ignoring the Affective Domain – Again, I might gag a bit here.
59. Destroying the students’ inborn, natural desire to learn through competition and grades – Ahh . . . to be young and idealistic. Oh wait, the person who wrote this is retired. So, yeah, no grades would be nice, except then how do you decide who succeeds and who fails? Oh, yes, I will just magically know. And, I’m sure that when I decide, based upon my own intuition, who has succeeded and who has not, I’m sure that no students will protest that at all. Teaching at a community college, I get very few students who are there because of their “inborn, natural desire to learn.” Instead, they are there for a concrete goal, and my required survey course is an inconvenient step along the way that they have to survive. While I don’t necessarily believe that everyone needs a college education, if we left it up to only those with an inherent desire to learn our subjects, I imagine most of us would be out of a job quickly. As well, I think this swerves dangerously toward a very elitist system of education, like the early stages of college education, where the only people who get an advanced education are those well off enough to not have to work.
OK. That’s about it for now. I could hit more, but I’m a bit tired and have a headache, so I will stop there. Thoughts?
Thoughts on Education – Teaching Mistakes I – 8/1/2013
I came across an article recently that had me reading a long list. I’m not crazy about lists, but when I use them, I try to keep them short (under 5-6). I also write a lot in general, so a long list format doesn’t work great for me because I tend to make each item way too long. But this one was interesting to me, and should be interesting to anyone who teaches or takes classes. The article is The 67 Worst Teaching Mistakes. What was interesting to me was that the list was not produced by some editor at an online publication somewhere, as those types of lists tend to be so vague and general as to be completely useless. Instead, this list came from user submitted mistakes, all submitted by current educators with both their names and institutions included in the list. This makes it inherently more interesting and worth looking at. Here are some of the highlights that I agree with:
3. Always standing behind the lectern – This is something I have come more and more to do as I move forward with my teaching. In fact, I believe teaching from any single spot is a drawback, as it easily lulls the students into a torpor upon looking at the same spot for 75 minutes. I may walk around excessively, but it is better than standing still the whole time.
7. Talking too much or doing too much – I fail at this every day I teach. I am a talker by nature, and I have a hard time controlling myself in a classroom setting. I know I say too much, and I know I don’t leave enough time for the students to speak.
26. Telling students they must read the textbook or other materials and then not following up on that requirement – I have been working on this one, but it is something I do not do well. I don’t like having my students read a textbook, but it is something that is a requirement in my department, and so I have to. My feelings on textbooks in general are mixed, as I don’t find them to be very useful, and I think students rarely get much out of reading them. At the same time, however, I can’t assume that my students have a strong level of knowledge on my subject prior to my classes, so there has to be something there to give them the basics. As well, since I do a hybrid, flipped classroom, they have to get this information from outside of class in some way, and the textbook is the least objectionable form for it. Because of all of this, I am not good at integrating the actual material into my course. There are chapter quizzes, but they are separate from anything else in my class, making them disconnected. This was the biggest negative comment about my class from last semester, and I am working on ways to improve the integration of the required readings into my course.
30. Testing for knowledge and understanding of course content through multiple-choice tests and exams only – This is what inspired me to move to a hybrid, flipped model of teaching, as I strongly believe that rote memorization is an abject failure of teaching in the history classroom.
65. Believing that you are the answer person for the students, that you should never admit that you don’t know something, because students might lose respect for you as the professor – Although this one is directly contradicted by some of the other mistakes here, I do believe this one is spot on. I teach my class in a way that has the students question everything, and I could not do that and then set myself up as infallible. I admit when I don’t know the answer, and I usually hedge a lot of my answers with something like “My understanding is . . .” or “This is how it is currently understood . . .” The key is that history is changing, and there are many topics that we don’t know the answer to. If you present history as a completed subject, then you are just asking the students to memorize the accepted answers. I want my students to think, and the course is centered around that. I want them to question what they know, what they are told, and what the “truth” is, and I would be failing them if I presented myself as the ultimate source on everything.
Those are the ones that stuck out to me as ones that I have tried to work on or agree with very strongly. That’s not to say that others aren’t relevant as well, but I don’t want to just sit here and comment on all of them. As this post is already of a pretty decent length, I’m going to make this one part 1. In my next post, I’ll go through the same list and talk about the ones I disagree with. So, keep an eye out here for part 2.
Thoughts on Teaching – Open Forums – 7/20/2013
I tried something new this summer. I have always had fairly formulaic discussion forums in my class. Something along the lines of — here is a paper topic; write the paper; discuss the ideas of the paper in this discussion forum; repeat several times a semester. That was always a very discouraging discussion format for me, as this narrowly bounded topic selection led to very unoriginal submissions and dull reading on my part. The students largely repeated what they had written about, and, since most had written fairly similar things, the results were basically the same. And then, when I had the requirement that they had to respond to each other as well, then they largely just said they agreed with each other over and over, because, honestly, what else were they going to do. They had all written essentially the same thing over essentially the same topic. What else could they possibly do.
So, this summer, I tried something new. I introduced open forums. Instead of tying the discussion forums to a specific topic or to a specific assignment, I had them as open discussions for the students. Here are the instructions I gave them:
The purpose of this discussion forum is for further discussion on the course material. One of the consistent pieces of feedback I have gotten back over the years is that there is not really a place to discuss what is being read and accessed throughout the course. This forum is intended to correct that. As well, I am trying something new with this forum, as I have not been happy with more focused forums in the past, as they generally are uninteresting and everyone says close to the same thing. I do not know if this one will be any better, but I am trying to branch out to a new idea here.
For this forum, I am asking you to discuss the material that you are working with in class. For Unit 1, that includes Chapters 11-, the lectures Topics 1-8, Critical Mission 1, and any other material relevant to the course. As this is an open-ended forum, I am really not going to say much more than that. Here are some examples of things you could post about:
- I was reading the textbook/lecture, and this was something I did not know anything about/I found interesting.
- In the lecture/textbook, it says _____. I don’t understand what this means. I think it means this, but I’m not sure. What do you think it means?
- As we looked at this event in history, it reminded me of something going on today.
- I found this piece of history really interesting. Where might I find more information on it?
- How do we know that this piece of history we are studying is correct/true? What information is it based on? What might we not know?
Those are just some ideas, and you can go beyond that at will. I will be trying to actively participate in the forums, but I will not respond to things immediately, as I prefer for you to answer and respond to each other rather than just having me respond. I find that my responses in discussion forums almost always end the discussion, and so I will be posting only occasionally.
I think it went pretty well overall. I wanted to try it in a summer session first, as the student base is smaller, and the expectations are different. Most of them would not have had me before or probably even heard much about my class, so they could approach it as a brand new assignment. As well, in the summer, I can have an assignment like this and work with it more, as I have more time in a summer session to dive into the material myself as well. I was pleased with the results from those who participated, although there were a pretty decent number of people who did not participate. The topics posted were quite varied, and it did go in many different directions. I am not going to kid anyone and say they were all wonderful, as the majority were about what you would expect out of undergraduate students — fairly simple and short in form. However, they were a vast improvement over what I had before.
I also had to grade this forum in some way, and I posted up a grading rubric for the students. As I can’t get the formatting to work out correctly, the rubric will be the last thing in the post here. It was interesting to see how it went based on the grading. One of the things to note is that I did have a specific number of posts the students were required to make, and this is where most people, even those who participated well, did not meet my expectations. I’m not sure if I set the number too high, but I thought it was fairly reasonable. Still, I would love some feedback from anyone who is teaching or from anyone who might look at this from a student’s perspective.
The other thing to say about the open forum at this point is that I found it nice from my perspective. I could go in and comment and explain on what I found interesting. As well, if I came across an interesting article or podcast somewhere, it made for a very convenient place to post that for student consideration. Overall, I was pleased.
Has anyone else used something like this? Have you taken a class that included this? What do you think of my instructions and rubric? What would you change or improve?
Grading rubric for Discussion Forum
| Standard | Not Done | Poor | Average | Good | Excellent |
| Timeliness
(25 points) |
Does not participate in the discussion at all.
(0 points) |
The student participates poorly in the discussion, participating less than 6 times during the discussion.
(10 points) |
The student waits until the last minute to post, having all posts in the last days of the discussion.
(15 points) |
The student posts throughout the discussion as well as early in the discussion. The student participates at least 2 times early in the discussion and a total of at least 6 times throughout the discussion.
(20 points) |
The student posts frequently throughout the discussion, with posts at the beginning, middle and end parts of the discussion. The student posts at least 8 times.
(25 points) |
| Posting
(25 points) |
Does not contribute to existing discussions.
(0 points) |
The student only posts his or her own ideas without interacting with other students.
(10 points) |
The student only replies to other students and does not make any original posts of their own.
(15 points) |
The student contributes his or her original posts and relevant follow-up questions to posts by other students. The follow up questions are timely and do not slow the discussion.
(20 points) |
The student posts original content and follow-up questions that are timely and highly relevant to the discussion and spark further conversation. The student has asked questions that others have not considered.
(25 points) |
| Content Quality
(25 points) |
Does not make any references to the content of the discussion from the video, lectures, or textbook.
(0 points) |
The student shows little engagement with the content of the course. (10 points) |
The student posts content that is related to the discussion.
(15 points) |
The student posts content that is related to the discussion and uses specific historical references from the material to support their ideas.
(20 points) |
The student posts highly relevant content and helps keep the discussion engaging and educational using the material from the course.
(25 points) |
| Clarity
(25 points) |
Posts are incoherent, distracting, and/or in very poor form.
(0 points) |
Posts are simple in nature and largely just agree with what others say. (10 points) |
Posts show some awareness of the ongoing discussion and attempt to engage. Some grammatical errors.
(15 points) |
The student contributes in a thoughtful way. The student has used grammar correctly and expresses opinions without denigrating others.
(20 points) |
The student has used language that expresses thoughts and opinions clearly and respectfully. The text is clear and concise and free from major grammatical mistakes.
(25 points) |
Thoughts on Teaching Summer School – 7/17/2013
Yes. I know. I have not written in a while. You can blame the birth of our daughter and the first nine months or so of her life. Between teaching a full load, teaching an overload, taking care of the other three kids, and taking care of a baby, blogging has taken a back seat to the rest of life. Now that things are settled down some, and my teaching is done for the summer, I hope to get back on here a bit. We shall see how I do, but you have to start somewhere.
I just finished up my seventh summer of teaching full time (yes, I also taught some summer classes as a graduate student). I have taught online every summer session that I have taught, and this one went about the same as usual. Since our pay decrease two summers ago, I now have to teach three summer classes to make the amount of money that I want to make, so I taught three sections — two of the first half of American history and one of the second. I am not sure why my department chair assigns me both halves in the session, as it would be easier to do all of one, but I don’t have a lot of choice there.
While teaching in the summer, I had some general thoughts that I thought I would share.
The quality of students we get at a community college is dramatically higher in the summer. The majority of students are ones that are off at a 4-year university somewhere and have come back to get a few classes out of the way cheaply. Thus, the quality of work submitted is often much higher, and the ratio of A’s to the rest of my teaching is much higher. It reminds me a lot of my teaching in graduate school, where I was always fairly pleased with the quality of work submitted to me.
At the same time, we also get a lot of students who are taking summer classes who should not. I started out at the end of the spring semester with three full sections at 30 students each. By the time the summer session started, I was down by about 10 students, as we always lose some for academic suspensions or failure to pay. Then, in the first week, upon getting into the class and seeing the level of work required, I lost about 10-12 more students. Then, over the course of the summer session, I had more drop and/or stop attending. All together, I started out with 90 students at the end of the spring semester and ended up submitting about 55 real grades to students who worked on material all the way through the summer. This is fairly typical.
One of the requirements at my community college is that we hold physical office hours over the summer, even if we are teaching only online. The required number of on-campus office hours is fairly flexible, but some must be there, and I ended up holding 8 on campus each week. In the five weeks of the summer session, I saw three students in those office hours, and they all came on the day before the first exam opened. So, except for that day, it was a waste of both my time and gas to go to campus every day. I also held online office hours in the evening for students who could not make the on-campus hours. In the five weeks, I had no students in my online office hours. So, traditional office hours were largely a waste. However, I answered emails all day every day, participated in online discussions, responded to student posts with questions in the classroom, answered messages in our LMS system, graded, evaluated, read drafts, worked on course material, and more. Yet, if you count my output on what I did during my “official” time in office hours, it would look like I did very little. This is the conflict that we run into with teaching online, that the actual productive activities are not easily quantifiable or restricted to traditional avenues. In our culture that wants to quantify everything, it can easily look like I don’t do much, yet, if you ask my wife, I never stop working. I am busy in the class every day from when I get up until when I go to bed.
As usual, 20% of my students say they loved the class, 1-2 students said they hated it, and the rest are never heard from. It is frustrating sometimes, as I can only assume I am doing good as most of what I hear is positive. Yet, all it takes is that one students to write how much (s)he hated the course to drag down the rest. That is the comment I obsess over and worry about. I know I shouldn’t when that person is outnumbered by far by the rest. The one this summer session hit me harder than usual, as she said that I came off as rude and unwelcome in my Announcements to my students. Thus, now she has me paranoid that this is how I came off, and that is why I don’t hear from the other students. The so-called rude Announcement that I made was that the students should read the syllabus and Announcements before contacting me, as I get irritated when I have to copy and paste the answer back to them from something I have already said. I didn’t think that was an unreasonable thing to say, and I have sent an Announcement out along that line most semesters that I have taught. Sigh. It only takes one comment to get under your skin.
And, finally, the good thing about my course now is that I have it all pretty well set up. So, it largely runs itself, which allows me more time to actually participate in the classroom rather than spending my time creating and maintaining. It was a generally pleasant experience overall.
And, with that, I’m out for now. I just hit 1000 words, which is pretty good for the first time out in a while. I promise to try and write more.
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 