819. Teaching Early Morning Classes
October 04, 2007
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An early morning reduces enrollment and increases both absenteeism and tardiness. With a smaller class, I know a higher proportion of student names, can use essay questions on the examinations, and assign terms papers and projects that I would not consider in a large class.
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Posted by markep on October 4, 2007
819. Teaching Early Morning Classes
October 04, 2007
Folks
The posting below is by Robert Sommer, distinguished professor of psychology emeritus at the University of California, Davis., and self-described "latecomer" to early morning classes. With keen insight he describes the pros and cons of teaching 8 am classes. He welcomes comments at: [rosommer@ucdavis.edu].
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Meta-Profession of Teaching
Teaching Early Morning Classes
I wasn't unhappy when my summer school class in 2006 was scheduled for 8 AM. As a morning person, the hour was not a problem. I had avoided teaching early morning throughout my academic career because this was prime writing time. My head is clearest early mornings and ideas flow more freely. I'd estimate that over 90% of my writing has been done in the early morning. Because teaching an 8 AM class was a novel experience, I kept detailed notes.
An unforeseen advantage of the early morning class was greater thermal comfort. This geographic area has a Mediterranean climate with mild winters and hot summers. It gets very warm during the day in July and August but cools in the evening. Early mornings are always pleasant. Instructors who teach later in the day, especially in the afternoon, must travel to class and return in intense heat. At 8 AM my classroom was cool, clean, and the air was fresh. Later in the day, instructors faced stuffy rooms, smudged blackboards, chalk dust in the air, and floor litter. Teaching the first period of the day allowed me to come early and set up the A/V equipment without needing to rush the preceding instructor and students out of the room. A disadvantage of an early morning hour was difficulty in recruiting a Reader. Most preferred to come to campus later in the day.
Enrollment was significantly lower than in previous offerings of the same course at later hours. This is a popular class, often oversubscribed. Due to its large size, I relied on multiple-choice examinations scored by Scantron machines. My 8 AM class was under-enrolled with only 50 students, a size that allowed me to make the course more interactive and participatory. I included a required term paper and added essay questions to the examinations. Comparing enrollment to sections of the same class I taught the two previous summers at later hours, enrollment was 32% lower, and attendance on the last day (when the teaching evaluations were handed out, providing an attendance record) was 58% of enrolled students, relative to an average of 72% in the two sections of the course taught later in the day. Overall teaching evaluations for the course and instructor were virtually identical (4.2 average on a 5-point scale) in the 8 AM class and the two previous years when the course was taught at a later hour.
Student numbers in the 8 AM class were even smaller when attendance and punctuality are considered. Although I did not call roll, I counted the number of students in the room when class started and midway through the 2-hour session. Excluding exam days, attendance when the class began averaged 15 students, and midway through the period, averaged 24 students, which represented approximately one-third and one-half the course enrollment respectively. The early birds tended to be the same students every period and I made it a point to know them by name. There was another group of tardy but interested students, of whom I knew a few, and about half the class whom I barely recognized. I should point out that this course is highly structured and transparent, with syllabus, lecture outlines, and previous examinations with answers posted online, and lecture notes from previous classes available through a student-run note-taking service. Based on class evaluations and other indices, I am a good (but not outstanding) instructor who teaches a good course, so I don't take it personally when students skip class and pass examinations by reading the assigned materials and archival notes.
I saw myself as having two classes, one of motivated and interested students who attended lecture and a second class of phantoms who showed up primarily for examinations. For the first hour of the two-hour class, I had essentially a seminar with 15 students, and later in the period, a small class of 24 students. This was a welcome change from the large lecture courses I taught for so many years. Still, I was concerned about the number of students who came late or not at all. My laissez faire side said this was none of my business so long as students passed the examinations, but my values as a college teacher said that students who paid tuition should be attending classes. I could not increase attendance and punctuality through penalties, as these practices are explicitly prohibited by academic senate regulations.
My ambivalence about attendance came into play when I requested summer school teaching for the following year. I was torn between requesting an 8 AM class which would mean smaller enrollment and more personal instruction at the cost of poor punctuality and low attendance. For me to request later teaching hours would require other instructors to teach at 8 AM. The campus has room utilization standards and the registrar will not leave classrooms unoccupied because faculty don't want to teach certain hours. I can choose a class time that most instructors avoid in order to receive its benefits (smaller, more participatory class and greater thermal comfort) and accept its liabilities (lower attendance and increased tardiness) or not request the early morning hour and shift 8 AM teaching to other instructors for whom it might be more of a burden.
Accepting the campus prohibition against penalties for absenteeism, there are measures I can legally take to increase attendance. I could give "snap quizzes," thereby penalizing absentees. I could decrease the availability of course material through other channels (put less material online, deny the student note-taking service permission to cover my class; refuse to make previous exams available). I could deliberately introduce lecture material not available from other sources and increase examination coverage of lecture material. Instead of the existing 50-50 split between lectures and readings on tests, I could announce that exams would be based 75% on lectures.
I suspect that any of these measures would increase attendance, and together would have a significant impact. Yet adopting them diminishes my self-image as a college instructor. My role in the classroom has dual objectives- to teach a subject matter and to develop mature, responsible adults. To reduce the transparency of my course by withholding material seems irresponsible and immature on my part. From the start of my teaching career, I have made previous exams available, encouraged the campus note-taking service to cover my classes, and urged students to buy the lecture notes for classes they miss. I choose a comprehensive textbook and evaluate student response at the end of the semester, so I know it is a "good textbook." The idea of reducing coverage of textbook material to 25% of the exam seems poor pedagogy.
Postscript 2007
I was asked to teach both summer sessions and requested my two classes at 8 AM. For interested students and for me, this will mean a smaller, more personal class with more frequent opportunities for interaction, greater thermal comfort, ease in setting up A/V equipment, and increased use of essay questions and term projects. The 8 AM time will also be a boon to the Registrar who wants to maintain occupancy standards during non-prime hours, and a favor to colleagues who aren't at their best during early morning hours.
Although I have reservations about capitalizing on student aversion to 8 AM courses in order to secure a smaller, more interactive class, my department and the registrar are happy about my decision since it increases classroom utilization. Yet I feel guilty about pandering to motives that I do not respect and choosing to teach at an hour that I know most student will avoid. This decision means less work for me and no complaints. What else should I want or expect?
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If you would like to increase attendance at early morning classes, I recommend incorporating in-class discussion exercises. They can be based on material covered that day, so they lack the heavy handedness of 'snap quizzes.' I typically have students work through a single exercise in small groups (~3) halfway through class. I let them work for 5 minutes, then we review it as a class. The students get to grapple with a key concept, get moving and talking during an 8:30am course, and receive a few points for their efforts each day. In fairness, I have set up the grading scheme so a student who never attends class can still earn a 4.0 in the course, however, they would have to do very well on exams and quizzes. The students who regularly attend class end up doing much better on exams as a result of their attendance, they appreciate the points resulting from their in-class efforts, and I receive immediate feedback on how well I communicated the material for that day. This approach is currently working as well in a class of 180 as it has previously in classes of approximately 40 students. For example, this past Tuesday attendance was 77%.
Posted by: Kevin Theis / Michigan State University on October 4, 2007 03:25 PM
serve bllack coffee& buttered roll @ 8 am
classes.
everyone knows undergrads will come out of the walls like roaches if they know there is free food.
Posted by: sommer,martin r on October 5, 2007 10:15 AM
Comments:
(1) The author says that one of his responsibilities in the classroom is “to develop mature, responsible adults”. I seriously doubt that anything he does will make much of a difference in that regard. Students will develop in response to a daily 24 hours of “life” and the effect from the time spent in this class is negligible.
(2) He then says that “To reduce the transparency of my course by withholding material seems irresponsible”. I am not sure how encouraging students to attend class out of self-interest constitutes a statement about the professor’s character. The earlier description of the course as “highly structured and transparent, with syllabus, lecture outlines” etc. seems to indicate that the teacher is an unnecessary distraction. If this is really so or if the author feels this way then artificially enhancing his role in the course by withholding material or employing other incentives to attendance, does seem out of place. But if his classroom time is a valuable addition to the students’ learning, then “encouraging them to attend” seems like a good idea.
(3) The author says that enhancing his comfort in the classroom (thermal comfort, affinity for early hours, smaller and more personal class, etc.) feels like “pandering to motives that I do not respect”. This seems to me to be assuming that he has the power to make his classes smaller and more personal and forgetting that it is the students’ choice that makes the class smaller. I don’t think that he should use artifice to reduce class size; would he make his lectures artificially boring if his early class suddenly became hugely popular? I think he is confused about his own motives.
jim scandale
Posted by: jim scandale / SUNY @ Buffalo on October 5, 2007 01:23 PM
1. Black coffee and buttered rolls will NOT entice an 18 year old to go anywhere. It wouldn't motivate me and I need free food.
2. What more do these students want? They have posted past exams and a paid note-taking service so that they don't need to learn how to take notes.
3. Grades for the course depend on mastering what is on the syllabus. It's your call if it's lecture or text based and it's the students' obligation to meet the requirements. As long as you tell them they have no complaints.
4. Stop blaming yourself for your students' poor attendance. They know the game as well as we do.
5. Making students into mature and responsible adults is ethically laudable BUT what is the University of California's purpose? I EXPECT such ethical formation from San Francisco University (http://www.usfca.edu/) but not from a state school. Besides, being mature means meeting obligations OR making trade-off decisions. Let them learn that the hard way if they wish.
VJM
Posted by: Vincent Marchionni/Semi-retired on October 8, 2007 04:28 PM