Thoughts on Teaching – Third Week of Online Classes – 9/14/2014
This has been a mixed semester so far. I really thought it was going to be a rough one after the first week, which I referenced in my last post. I got everything cleaned up from my first mistake of having the incorrect link up for my classroom, and things have been fairly smooth since then. I always forget from one fall semester to the next how clueless about how to work online many of these students are in their first classes at college. Many students get shuttled into online classes as they work well with any schedule and are often perceived as easier than face-to-face classes. Yet, many have had no experience with online classes and really have trouble in those first weeks of classes. So, I end up doing a lot of technical support and repetition of information to the students as they try to grasp what they need to do. Luckily, by the time you get to the third week, most of that is behind, and the rest of the next couple of weeks is mostly maintaining the course and keeping it going.
What is interesting is how these first weeks are the same every semester. If I could somehow get it through to all of my students, I would set up a couple of things:
- The reaction I get from students who are taking their first online class with me is that my class is complicated and hard to understand. By contrast, any student who is coming into my class from other classes (and often the same students who were confused at first by the end of the semester) comments on how well laid-out and straightforward it is. I wish I could tell those students more directly that they will get used to it.
- Read the course outline. Again, read the course outline. And, read it again. Have a question? Read the course outline. Have a specific question? Look in that section of the course outline and see if I have answered it already.
- If you have a question that you can’t find the answer to, let me know as soon as possible. Do not wait until the second or third week to ask me a question that you had from the first moment in the class. By then, assignments will have come due, and it will be harder to fix things.
- Come by and talk to me if you have any questions. I can show you how everything works, and it often works better to show you how things are done rather than tell you.
You might think, well, why don’t you just say these things. The issue is that I do. In fact, I say them over and over. However, here is an example of what I am up against. Shortly after I wrote my last post, I got an email from a student. He said that some students (including him) were have trouble getting to the correct assignment and I should really tell the students about the problems there. If you will remember from my last post, the issue was that I had two contradictory links on how to access the textbook site in the classroom. I discovered this on Tuesday and corrected it at that point. So, I am getting this email about a week later telling me that I really needed to tell the students about this. As I then pointed out to that student, I had sent out 4 different announcements to students addressing this issue. I had also answered two questions posted in the questions forum in the class about this issue. I had answered about 20 different emails from students about this issue. So, when this student emails me telling me that I had not done anything to inform the students about this problem, I just had nothing left to say. And, this is the problem, no matter how many times I say anything, I can’t say it enough to reach every student.
So, what really is the answer is that I just have to keep my cool and remember that every student is new to this. Their problems are unique to them and they do not have the eight years of online teaching experience behind them. Unfortunately, this is not something I am particularly good with, as I get easily frustrated after dealing with issues over and over everyday. I just have to remind myself over and over about this.
The good thing is, by the third week, this section of troubleshooting and explaining is pretty much done. Some scattered issues with my online classes will come up, I’m sure, but things should be fairly stable until the first set of big assignments are due. I can’t say as much for my hybrid classes, but that will be another post.
Thoughts on Education – Continuing Education with Limited Time and Money – 7/31/2014
One of those interesting topics that comes up sometimes is the question of how and when those of us who teach can keep our job skills up to date. Admittedly, many who teach do not care about this at all, and they are happy to teach as they have always taught because it works for them. I, for one, am never happy with where I am as a teacher and educator. To my family’s ongoing chagrin, I am always reinventing, reconfiguring, rewriting, and reforming my classes. Only rarely do I run the same course again the next year as I did the year before. I am always making changes, and I am always seeking out ways to make these changes.
The problem comes in the question of what to change and how to make changes. In this case, my own desires for continuing education and change meets the ongoing budgetary crisis head on. We do not have the money for conferences or continuing education. And, as a community-college instructor who teaches full time with overloads and summer courses (essentially a 6/6/3 load), there is little time and money on my own for going to and doing things to improve my education. One of the options is, of course, books, but I find myself with little time and motivation to read professionally any more. This is sad, as I used to read history for fun, but now, after 8 years of graduate school and 8 years of full-time teaching, the idea of sitting down and reading a historical monograph is just not very appealing. I have had to confront this in myself, as my job is history education, and I should have the responsibility to be up on the latest scholarship, while also reading widely in topics relevant to what I teach. However, much like my students, if it is not required, I am not going to read it. In the spare time I do have for teaching, I generally read fiction, as it allows me an escape from everything else. Unfortunately, that means that one primary avenue for continuing education is largely unavailable for me.
So, with no money or time for traveling to conferences and not really being willing to read the things that I should, I have turned to taking MOOC courses through Coursera. Last Spring, I took University Teaching 101, and this summer, I am in two of them. The first one, which I am in the middle of right now, is e-Learning Ecologies, which looks at new ways we can think about the online learning environment. It runs for eight weeks, and it is week 5 right now. The other one that I am taking now is Learning to Teach Online, which takes a more basic approach to looking at how we teach in an online environment. I am hoping to learn more through these courses about how I teach, how I could teach, and what other ideas there are out there. I can’t say much more about them than that, as I am still working on them.
Those of you who teach, what do you do to keep updated with your skills? Those of you who do not, what else can you think of that could be useful?
Thoughts on Teaching – Class-Testing a New Book – 6/4/2014
I am teaching this summer. The summer sessions are always interesting at a community college, as we get a completely different crop of students. While there are certainly a number of continuing students from the semesters, we also get a significant population of students who are attending a four-year university who take a class or two from us over the summer. Thus, in many cases, we get students who would not normally be in a community college here over the summer. I am not saying they are better students, although some certainly are, but they are definitely a completely different group of students.
This summer, I have decided to class test a new textbook. So often, the textbook choice time catches all of us completely off guard. We choose a new textbook every three years, and, so often, we start making that choice essentially at the last minute, relying on a quick glance at the book, a demo of the online material, and a visit from a rep. Sometimes that is enough to get a sense of a book and to choose a good one, but it has also led to some duds over the years. When approached this year about a new textbook from a different company than the one we are currently using, I decided to take it for a test drive to see how it might compare. I will leave the names of the companies out of this, but they are all major publishing companies for college history textbooks.
I am not trying out the new textbook and company because I think that what they offer is superior, I am trying it out because I do not have any idea if they are superior. We have used two different publisher’s books so far since I have been in my current teaching position, and I strongly disliked one and generally like the other. When this third company approached me, I couldn’t help but be interested because I want to see what is out there. I certainly have the time to go out and explore on my own, but if nothing is forcing me to, I probably won’t. So, a class test forces me to delve into a different book and online system in more detail. It also allows me to see how it actually works in practice.
I have launched on this with full openness to my students that this is a class test. They have to know it anyway, as only this class has a different textbook than the others, as we use a common department textbook. However, I also wanted to let them know, as I want their feedback as well. It is just as important to me that the textbook and online system be manageable and accessible to them as it is that it be something that works for me. It could be the best book in the world, but if they can’t deal with it, it is a failure.
The summer session started this week, and I have kept the students completely informed about the changes and expectations. In my course outline, this is how I explained it to them:
Over the course of the summer session, we will cover the first 15 chapters of the textbook, which is what is included in Volume 1. This section is what I am class-testing this summer. Thus, all of the assignments in this section are new to me, just as they are new to you. I will be working through them along with you, and I will be evaluating them from my own historical perspective as well as looking at your own responses and performance in this section. We class-test material such as this both to ensure that we are using the best possible material for our classes at Weatherford College and to evaluate new content that we have not seen before.
What that means for you is that the material is presented to you in a way that explores all of the different options available from XX [censored to not show what book I am using]. What I have seen appears to be a manageable amount of material, but I will be evaluating as I go along in case what is here is too much. I am very happy to change if necessary, as this is all about testing out the material, both in quantity and quality. I also will be looking at how the material is assigned and accessed. It appears to be fairly obvious what material is due when, and it appears to be clear what assignments you need to do. If there is a problem, I will work with the material to try to figure out what is going on. As of right now, the material is organized by chapter, with the exception of the introductory assignments at the top.
Again, I want to be as open with them, so that I can evaluate the book and they can evaluate the book. That way, when our choice comes up next spring, I can talk about not only the book we are currently using but another one as well. We can all make an informed choice at that point and come up with the best possible outcome for our department and our students.
Thoughts on Teaching – First Grading Session – 2/24/2014
I am coming to the close of the first big grading session of the semester. I have the class divided up into three units, with major assignments due at the end of each unit. For me, that means that my busy time starts after each unit closes. And, the first unit hits before I get any significant number of drops, which means that I grade more in the first grading session than any that follows. This session has been no different. I have had my students complete papers, discussion forums, and essay exams, which means a lot of direct grading by me. I strongly believe that my students need to write and need to write a lot, but the curse of that is that I am then the one who has to grade them. So, I have been grading since last Monday, meaning I am just over a week into this grading session, which I hope to wrap up tomorrow.
The other feature of the first grading session is that I also get my first round of drops from the class at this point. Students can cruise along in the class for the first 4 weeks, completing some basic reading quizzes and the like. However, once a paper is due, a discussion forum closes, and an exam must be taken, that’s when the first round of students are gone. There are always a number of those, so it is part of the process.
The other thing that always comes up with first assignments in the semester is that the first technical glitches hit. Luckily, this time I actually had no glitches on the exam, which is where they usually occur. Instead, this time the paper has been the problem. The students are required to submit their paper to turnitin.com (to check for plagiarism and grade easily with a rubric), but I had about 10 students who managed to miss this part of the assignment. This is despite the fact that every place that the assignment is referred to says that it is due in to turnitin.com, as well as the fact that I sent out two announcements in the last week warning students that they needed to submit to turnitin.com. What it really shows, unfortunately, is how the students seem to run mostly on autopilot. Many just click on the next thing to do without ever looking at any instructions or materials that teachers post. This does mean that often I do not get what I am really looking for, as the autopilot mode often means that students hit a very minimal level of work.
I wonder if there is a way to combat these problems, but I have yet to come up with any yet. I modify my class every semester, working on the phrasing of instructions and reconsidering the structure and order of assignments. And yet, it really doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, as the same problems continue. Unfortunately, where it ends up is that I end up just assuming a certain level of attrition with little I can do to help them. All of my efforts end up failing for a certain number of students. Of course, if they can’t meet my standards, then they probably do not belong in the class and certainly do not deserve a decent grade from me. That does not make me feel any better about it, but it is the best I can do for now.
Thoughts on Teaching – A New Semester and a New Beginning – 1/31/14
It seems like I am always starting blog posts off with an apology for not having written in a while. Since the birth of our daughter 15 months ago, spare time has been harder and harder to come by. However, she is settling down into a good routine, so I hope to do better this semester. I had hoped, after the post in November to be back on track, but shortly after that, we had a major family health issue come up that pushed out non-essential items. Now I think things have settled down, and I hope to be going again with my blog.
So, here we are, with a new semester (three weeks in but, hey, what can you do about that). I have, yet again, been given a double overload in classes, meaning that I am teaching 7 classes this semester for the second semester in a row. I have 4 online sections and 3 hybrid sections. My online sections are running as they always do. I am in roughly the 5th year of my current configuration of my online class, as so they can largely run without much effort on my part. That is one of the truths about online classes, that they are very involved and difficult to get going, but they can run pretty easily once you get them done. However, if you have followed my blog so far, you will see that I am rarely satisfied with how my classes are going. My online class is far overdue for a reworking, and I hope to start thinking about it this summer. I have made some changes over the last 5 years on the margins, moving assignments around and changing a few things here and there. However, I think it’s about time for an overhaul soon. And, the model that I will use for my overhaul are my hybrid classes.
I have started getting my hybrid class really going in the direction that I like. I am in the second year of working with this new hybrid format, and I am adjusting and working with the class as it moves forward. Following what I worked with last, this semester, I have moved into a model of weekly work and a long paper at the end. There are no exams, although I do have some chapter quizzing going on. The big part of the grade (about 45% overall) is discussion based, both online and in-class. Then, to keep the students on track, I have weekly, one-page response papers. I have returned to this model from what I did the first year, because I tried not having response papers last semester, and I found that students did not do the work if I did not hold them directly responsible. So, I am hoping that this semester they will do more of the work I expect them to do outside of class. I don’t have any great desire to grade weekly papers, but I want my students doing the work, and their grades will improve (hopefully).
As I have this hybrid model settled in well, I think I can use a lot of the ideas from this format in my online course. I would like to move beyond the exam model and include a lot more activities and discussions. Right now, the online class is primarily made up of reading lectures and the textbook and taking quizzes and exams. That is exactly the format that I have moved away from in my hybrid class, and I would like to move the online class beyond it as well. I hope that I get it together relatively soon.
Anyway, that’s a good start for the semester. Wish me luck.
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 – 6/6/2012 – Studying in college
I wonder about this all the time. How much work do students really do in a class? I don’t know if my own memories are clouded by the distance, but I certainly remember working a lot in college. Admittedly, I went to an upper-tier private school, but still, I worked on my classes every day of the week. The only day that I took off completely throughout almost all of my college experience was Friday. I only worked a few Fridays over the four years I did my undergraduate work. All other days were fair game, and I usually did school work on all other days. Now, I did not study all the time by any means, and I did plenty of other things as well, but I just remember doing almost all of the assigned readings, working on assignments before they were due, and just generally being engaged throughout the school year as a full-time student. Of course, I did have the luxury of being a full-time student, working only enough to earn some extra spending money, so that did affect what I did.
At my community college now, things could not be more different. We struggle to get the students to do any work, and certainly do not expect the students to work on anything any earlier than absolutely necessary. Of course, it is a community college, and the students here are largely not that strong academically and often work in addition to going to school. Still, it is disappointing and difficult to try and teach students like this. I’m certainly not trying to romanticize my own background, but I think I was a pretty good and pretty diligent student overall. I had good semesters and bad semesters, good classes and bad classes, but I consistently did my work, paid attention to assignments, and was mostly engaged in my classes.
I’m certainly not the only one who has noted this. You just have to talk with any of my fellow instructors, or really instructors in general, and we all feel like the students aren’t doing enough. It is easy to dismiss this, as it is the same type of thing that teachers have been saying about students for a long time. I’m sure my own professors groaned about me and my fellow students as well. So, I don’t know if I’m really bringing up anything new, but I have come across a couple of articles on the subject as well.
This Washington Post article is interesting, just from the perspective that it takes. According to the article, the average student today studies around 15 hours a week, whereas in the 1960s, the total was 24. Even at the “better” universities, apparently the average is only up around 18 hours a week. The article then notes the 5 top reporting schools, each of which exceed this average. Most are small, isolate, private liberal-arts schools, with the University of Wisconsin being the only exception. I have to wonder, however, what the average is at my community college, as I’m assuming that community colleges were not included in these numbers, although I could be wrong.
Also in the Washington Post, is this article, asking the question, “Is college too easy?” It takes these same statistics and turns it around. Is the problem that the students aren’t working hard enough or is it that we instructors aren’t asking enough of them. The data they have shows that the average student in the 1960s worked roughly 40 hours a week in college, while the average today is 27 hours a week. That brings about the chicken-and-egg conundrum. Are we asking less of students because we expect less of them or are students doing less because we ask less of them. Or is it really a symbiotic relationship all the way around that has led to this decline? I don’t really know. I have taught for around 10 years now, and I can see the creep toward asking less and less. This is especially true in an era of tight budgets and increased class sizes, since asking more of students means more work for me with no more (and sometimes less) compensation. So, I wonder where to look to think about this problem. Even my own wife has said to me that she remembers working harder in high school (over a decade ago) than in the bachelor’s degree program she just finished.
I don’t know what to think about it, so I’m just raising questions here. What do you think?
Thoughts on Education – 4/29/2012 – Technology in the classroom – iPads and more
I have been saving up quite a few articles over my inactive time the last month or so, and today I want to turn to a couple that address technology in the classroom. Technology is often presented as the cure-all for education, and I will admit as much guilt as far as this goes as anyone else. I am always out looking for the new piece of technology (although often I can’t afford it), and I will often then sit down and think about how I could use it in the classroom. Unfortunately, a lot of what I would like to do with technology, namely engage the students more directly, would be difficult without all of the students having the same access to the same technology. This can be fixed through things like classroom sets of technology instruments, but that is an inelegant solution at best.
We have done several of those things at my community college in the past and present. A couple of years ago, we acquired a couple of sets of clickers, when that was seen as the latest tool for attracting student interest. We also had a push for getting online classes to think about using Second Life for a short period of time. Both of those technologies seemed limited and untried at the time, and I never found any interest in adopting them. Neither went far at the college, although I do think we have a couple of people still using clickers, and we do teach some of our gaming in Second Life. The question of the day on this topic is, of course, iPads. They are the latest thing, and I am part of a faculty workgroup that has gotten iPads as a test piece for our own educational use as well as overseeing the deployment and use of classroom sets of iPads. The question will be if this is another short-spike-of-interest device or if it has a long shelf life in education.
The latter option is reflected in this article, titled “How the iPad is Changing Education.” Although the article is more speculative than directly tied to evidence (probably because of the short time these devices have been really available), the article does point to some increase in learning and success among students using iPads. Of more interest is this point: “In the meantime, the devices make a great tool for self-directed, independent learning. There’s no shortage of one-off educational apps on any given subject, from American History to advanced biology.” Of course, this requires engaged students, and use outside of a classroom set (or time set aside in class to use the iPads for this purpose). Still, that is certainly what I have found as I have looked around for possible apps for use in the classroom myself. I can find dozens of whiteboard and projection apps, but the actual learning apps for the classroom are scarce. However, from teaching American history, I can certainly vouch for the number of American history apps out there, most of them informative and of very uneven quality. Few have much in the way of classroom application, although I have found a few. So, the iPad, as it stands right now is much more an information-retreival device than an active-use device in the classroom. As the article notes at the end, the real strength of the iPad for classroom use comes in the ability to make your own books and access iTunes U. As those areas develop more, there might be some possible in-class uses for them, but they still remain mostly passive presenters of information. I’ll be curious when the first truly in-class, adaptive, learning app comes along. Has anyone found one yet?
As this article notes, the issue is also not just what you can access through a device like the iPad, but also how the iPad is used. If it is used, as I noted above, as a substitute textbook, then that’s all it is. The students will ignore it just as they ignore the current textbooks today. This is my greatest fear of our adoption, that we will not find enough content out there and not have enough time ourselves to develop new, and the iPads will end as just a fancy way to access content, leaving it relatively unnecessary. It will then be a neat trick, and not much more. This article comes back to the whiteboard idea again. We will have a new academic building where our iPads are going to key into Apple TVs in the room and hopefully be able to interact with smart boards. I might get more use out of the iPad as a teaching tool, and whiteboarding might be a good way to get students working with each other. We shall see.
However, without the new building, I have been struggling to figure out how to use this new technology in the classroom. That’s why this title caught my attention – “Five Ways to Bring High-Tech Ideas into Low-Tech Classrooms” These ideas are interesting enough to detail a bit here:
- Put the Facebook page on paper – Start up something that the students can use as a reading log or something like that. Basically, it’s a way to create a live blog of material going on in the classroom and outside. The students can see each other’s blogs and like them. Status updates, posting of pictures, linking, etc. can all take place. This is the most promising use of the iPad in the classroom that I have come across, as a platform to extend what is going on outside of class into the classroom as well.
- Build a classroom search engine – less interesting to me because I tried this before. I started using wikis to create a classroom definition bank starting about 4 years ago. I never was able to use it with any real success, but it might be useful someday for something like this.
- Tweet to Learn – OK. I don’t use Twitter. I probably should, but I don’t. Why should I? You tell me how it could be useful in a classroom situation.
- Encourage students to “chat” – an in-class chatroom is something I’ve been toying with for a while. Maybe this coming semester, as part of my broader changes.
- Talk the Text Talk – OK. No. Not going to do this, especially not in college
Anyway, I thought those ideas were interesting enough as part of what we could all be doing more of. I’m also getting a bit more desperate about how I’m going to use the iPads in the classroom. The college has spent quite a bit of money to get me one and have several classroom sets. I’m just afraid I don’t know what to do with them, and so I’m trying to think about it more and more.
As a side note, I start the final grading push for the semester tomorrow, so I may not be very regular here for a while. We close on our house this Friday as well, so that will also bring a whole new set of obligations.
Thoughts on Education – 3/18/2012 – Comparing 5th graders to college students
My fifth grade boys brought home an interesting assignment on Monday. They had to write an outline for a “research” paper that they are working on. They had to pick a topic and then write a thesis statement. They had to put it all into the standard 5-paragraph essay format, putting in topic sentences for each paragraph and then listing 3 details they were going to put in each paragraph. What was interesting about that is that they really did not have a strong grasp on what a thesis statement was or how to put together the paragraphs. I saw the instructions that the teacher gave them, and it’s not like they hadn’t been taught this to a certain extent, but the boys obviously had not fully grasped it.
So, we had to have some work time on Monday on what a thesis statement is. Since these are fairly simple research papers (topics = muscle cars for one and puffins for the other), we had to start pretty basic. I had them think about why they wanted to write on those topics and then come up with three reasons for each one. So, the why they wanted to talk about the topic became their thesis, and the three reasons formed the body paragraphs. While that sounds pretty simple, it was actually a pretty long and agonizing discussion, as they had not really thought about why they had picked their topic, outside of the fact that it seemed cool. So, we had to work on some reasoning skills and delve down below the level of cool and into the reasons behind cool. It took quite a while, and one of the boys did have a short crying fit over frustration at not being able to articulate his reasons. However, we ultimately prevailed, and they were able to put together their ideas into the format that was desired.
What was interesting about that, is that we put more thought into how they were going to go about thinking and writing this paper than I think a lot of my own students do. They have just as much trouble with the idea of a thesis statement and presenting evidence, which makes me think that my 5th graders are not alone in not fully understanding this concept at this level. In fact, it seems to me that this is a concept that gets lost all the way through, as there really is no excuse for my college freshmen and sophomores to be having trouble writing a coherent thesis statement and using evidence if they are supposed to start learning about this all the way back to elementary school.
As I said, though, it was very obvious that even though my 5th graders had been taught generally how to do it, it took us a long time to translate that into a practical and working thesis and essay outline. So, maybe it is just assumed along the way that they have learned this before, when maybe they really have not.
The whole process has made me think about assumptions. I assume a lot about what the students I teach have had as a background before entering my class. As this example shows, however, just because someone is taught something, that does not mean they actually understand it. I think this is certainly a lesson that all of us in education need to consider on a regular basis.
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 
Thoughts on Education – 6/20/2012 – Vocal comments during grading?
So, I had no idea this was a thing until it came across my email (I just can’t say came across my desk, as nothing comes across anyone’s desk anymore). The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education ProfHacker blog titled, “Grading with Voice on an iPad,”raises the idea of leaving voice comments on graded material for students along with the normal written comments. Here is the reasoning by the guest author of the post: “One of the frustrating things I found in teaching online last semester was the lack of direct contact with students. The class felt impersonal, despite my efforts to give it life. I found that especially frustrating when I graded assignments. The feedback seemed cold and distant, even as I as I tried to point out strong areas of writing and multimedia projects. I overcame this in part by using my iPad to add audio comments to grading. This was a revelation to me.” As I said, I had never thought about this at all before. I then noted, as I am grading right now, that if you go to turnitin.com, you will also find an “advertisement” toward the top for adding voice to graded responses there as well.
I had not really noted the piece on turnitin before, considering that I normally have adblockers on my browsers and generally do everything I can to avoid advertisements of any kind in my daily life. So, this really hit me as something completely new. Has anyone else out there ever done this? Have any students out there had graded assignments returned with voice comments? I’m really curious about this.
Beyond just asking about this (which is a primary purpose here, so please let me know if this is something you have heard of), it also got me thinking about the whole concept of it. The basis on which the above instructor said they found it useful does not really apply very well to me. I have never provided verbal feedback after an assignment. History essays and work tends to be graded and handed back with no opportunities for correcting the material or working on it again. Thus, written comments work pretty well for the few students who actually bother to read them. Or, at least I assume they do. Am I missing out on a whole avenue for providing feedback here? This whole idea just set my mind swirling about the whole way I provide feedback. As I just said, I have strong doubts (and in the case of turnitin.com, which documents students who look at their graded assignment, I know) that many students ever look at the written comments. So, I’m spending a lot of time grading for a very minimal payout. Would verbal feedback in general get more of a response? I don’t mean just recorded as the article refers to, but actually sitting down with students and giving them verbal feedback. Or, would I be just as frustrated at that prospect considering most students would probably resent the fact that they were required to come in to talk to me to get feedback. I already offer to explain grades or answer questions after every assignment I hand back, with a near 0% acceptance rate for that offer. In fact, since most students don’t look at feedback and just accept the grade as given, perhaps providing verbal feedback would be just another waste of my time. I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud (on the keyboard?) here.
Any thoughts?