In this month's Carnegie Perspectives looks at the difficulties of evaluating work done with input and assistance from others. It is by Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The posting is #40 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the CFAT
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Power of Play in Teaching and Learning
Lee S. Shulman
It's a scene we have watched dozens of times in the movies. A young man or woman of modest talent tries out for the baseball or football or basketball team under the tutelage of a gruff, demanding coach who expresses initial doubts about the likelihood that the kid will prove himself or herself worthy of a spot on the team. The coach is tough and persistent, setting high standards and then mercilessly driving all his charges to meet them. In the climactic scene at the season's end, the good guys or gals are losing by several baskets, or runs, or a touchdown-depending on the sport. "Send me in, coach," pleads our young hero/ine, which coach reluctantly does. The kid scores the winning points, and the team wins. The coach turns out to have a heart of gold, and the reasons for his seeming cruelty become apparent.
What exactly is it that the coach provides the aspirant? Let me propose five processes associated with both the coach and mentor roles: 1) technique, learned through endless drill; 2) strategy, that allows the person who is coached to become capable of a conception of the work that will turn out to be pivotal in their eventual victory; 3) motivation, which produces a "Rocky-like" level of commitment that will help them exceed their own and others' expectations; 4) vision, where players come together in a new vision of the process and their capabilities for success; and 5) identity, whereby the protagonist not only wins, but is transformed, with an internalized new sense of self.
In sports there is always a clear line between the coaching situation and the performance context. When the final jump shot is made from the three-point line by the basketball player, the coach can't jump onto the court and give the ball the extra momentum or spin it might need. I prefer to call such typical relationships between a coach/mentor and player/protégé examples of unmediated mentoring. No separate product comes in the middle between the coaching and the performing that renders the relative contributions of the coach and the coached inherently ambiguous because the entire performance is visible and is itself the basis for evaluating success or failure.
There is, however, an entire genre of mediated mentoring. The performance is not directly observed and has yielded a product which is the focal point of competition and evaluation. Thus in the case of mediated performances, the respective roles of coach and performer are inherently invisible. Although the five processes are in place and just as transformative, there is inherently no way to discern how much of the work was done independently by the candidate, by peers or by advisors.
Whenever mentoring is mediated by a product whose actual authoring processes are not directly observable, as is the case with literature, objects of architectural or mechanical design, scholarly publications, doctoral dissertations, and even paintings, assessment of individual competence is problematic. But are these problems of educational measurement or a new set of realities regarding the conditions of expert performance? Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg and others point out that the crux of the problem may not be measurement error but rather the inherently social and interactive character of the performances whose competence is assessed. Writing is and should be critiqued and edited, as should painting, the designs for buildings and the research performed in scientific laboratories. To avoid mentoring merely to ensure the legitimacy of individual test scores might even be judged a form of malpractice! So we are faced with an essential tension between the inherently social character of most forms of complex human performance and the psychometric imperative to estimate a "true score" for ability or any other personal trait using the individual as the unit of analysis.
In an education setting, the distinction between the scores that a student earns on any test-like event-multiple choice test, essay exam, portfolio or senior sermon in a seminary-and their underlying "true" capability is a reflection of the distinction, borrowed perhaps from the field of linguistics, between competence and performance. Psychometrics rests on the claim that the observed performance is a valid indicator if it tracks the underlying competence faithfully. But what if mentored or coached performances actually track underlying competence more validly than measurement of students working alone? What if the composition written by a student in the presence of his editing team is a better indicator of his future writing competence than having him write alone?
That is what sits at the heart of the puzzle.
My proposal for "getting over" this essential tension is three-fold: making changes in the processes of assessment, making explicit the parameters of mentoring, and developing a clear code of ethical principles for both assessment and mentoring. At the heart of these proposals is the principle of transparency. Everything possible must be done to ensure that the roles of mentors, peers and students be transparently clear in any mediated mentoring activity. There should be ways of reporting on the character of coaching for test performance that make the efforts of the coach entirely transparent to assessment.
I have often written that collaboration is a marriage of insufficiencies; that students can work together in ways that scaffold and support each others' learning, and in ways that support each others' knowledge. Now I call for a marriage of sufficiencies to overcome the essential tensions between individual work and collaborative performance, coaching support and independent assessment, the mentor as an agent of zealous advocacy and the mentor as a steward of the commons.
As Dewey observed, we will not solve this problem, we will get over it. It is built in to the psychometric paradox: Our measurement models are psychometric but our assessment needs are often sociometric, requiring the measurement of socially scaffolded and joint productions.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Carnegie Conversations provides a public forum where you can engage publicly with the author and read and respond to what others have to say.
If you are going to give a talk at a scholarly meeting, do you need new material?
That's the question being debated in political science - as evidenced by a series of articles in the new edition of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. While the journal finds a range of views on whether the trend is understandable or regrettable, the authors agree that it is real, and that attitudes appear generational.
As Nelson C. Dometrius, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, writes in his introduction to the journal's debate, when he raised the question with senior faculty members, he received mixed reactions, with people quickly outlining special cases where they viewed such "double dipping" as justified. When he posed the same question to graduate students, Dometrius relates, "the modal reply was a blank stare - a lack of comprehension that presenting the same paper as many times as you wished would be viewed by anyone as an unusual or questionable practice."
Many senior faculty members say they first were discouraged from the practice in grad school - as often through subtle instruction as through any formal list of rules. In the PS articles, scholars consider the question of whether this shift in attitudes is one to fight or accept. Why, Dometrius wonders, is it now acceptable to do what was once "bad form"? (Via e-mail, he said that while he hasn't rechecked every paper he has given, he does not believe he has ever double dipped.)
While noting that the practice has become visible largely when reviewing job applications, Dometrius wanted to quantify it, so he assembled 114 vitas from political science departments at seven regional universities. The pool was made up of 87 faculty members and 27 graduate students, and departmental or institution-specific conferences were excluded, so the focus was only on conferences to which scholars regionally or nationally might apply to present or would travel to attend. He counted as "double" any paper with the same title or substantially the same title (although he notes from experiences that some who may be more ashamed of the practice try to hide it with substantially different titles for the same paper, so he may be undercounting).
In his sample, he found not a single case of double presentations prior to 1992. Then in the mid-1990's, he finds a paper or two a year, and by this decade it becomes fairly common - even if there is still a ton of new material out there. While double presentations are pretty much a non-factor for those who earned Ph.D.'s through 1985, the attitude is quite different now.
Consider the following table showing double presentations by year doctorate was received. (The numbers for the most recent group may appear low, but that is primarily because these scholars have had less time to make presentations of any kind, let alone doubles, and the percentage suggests that their figures will rise considerably.)
Duplicate Presentations, by Year Doctorate Received
Year of Doctorate % Who Have Double Dipped Duplicates as % of All Papers Presented
1960-1985 14.8% 0.5%
1986-1995 46.7% 4.1%
1996-2005 52.6% 6.7%
2006 - present 25.9% 7.4%
The traditional reason given for double presentations - getting feedback and then revising - remains a strong justification, according to the articles in the journal. But many question whether in fact such revisions are taking place, as opposed to other motivations (such as CV padding). A variety of ethical issues are raised: Is this fair at a time that major conferences are turning away record number of paper proposals? Do those who fill resumes in this way gain an unfair edge over those who give fewer (but perhaps more original) papers? Do those who double dip have an obligation to flag the practice?
Lee Siegelman, a professor at George Washington University and immediate past editor of American Political Science Review, raises the question of whether such double presentations make some professors hypocrites, in light of the direction they provide students.
"Suppose that in a course you are teaching on the presidency during the spring semester, a student seeks your permission to submit, for full credit, a paper on the veto power for which or she already received credit in a course on Congress during the fall semester, or perhaps a somewhat reworked version of that paper. Would you grant the requested permission? I am betting that you wouldn't. Indeed if you 'caught' a student doing what this student has sought permission to do, you may even bring him or her up on plagiarism charges."
Others, however, defend the duplicate practice. For starters, defenders note that many conference sessions have remarkably small audiences - so if 2 of the 15 audience members at a regional meeting of the discipline heard the same paper at the national meeting, it's not like hundreds of scholars are being denied anything.
Two political scientists at Michigan State University - Saundra K. Schneider and William G. Jacoby - write jointly to "confess" to duplicate presentations and to defend them. They note several reasons: With more political scientists out there, "research productivity requirements" are growing, and graduate students are expected to present earlier in their academic careers. These trends create "enormous pressure" to present at scholarly meetings when possible and it is "unrealistic and undesirable" to expect completely new work for each such event, they write.
Further, they say, papers do get better with feedback, but that sometimes you need multiple presentations before you get good feedback. If the end result is a paper to be sent to a journal or the start of a book, quality should count, and presenting multiple times encourages quality, they write.
In some other disciplines, the norms are different and there is no shame about duplicate presentations, although there are some issues related to how such papers are noted on CV's. Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said that it is fairly common for scholars to present a paper more than once. "The audience at MLA is going to be different from the audience at the 18th Century Studies Association," Feal said. In fact, she noted that scholars are so accepting of the practice that speakers will acknowledge what they are doing with remarks such as "when I last presented, I received a lot of questions about this point," she said.
And that shows the benefit of the practice, Feal said. Arguments are refined. Issues are clarified.
At the same time, Feal noted that ethical issues are raised if scholars try to imply that that a series of papers - essentially versions of the same work - are all original. The new edition of the MLA Style Manual notes in the plagiarism section the concept of "self plagiarism," in which a scholar repackages earlier work as if new.
Applying this to conference papers and CV's, Feal said that it should be clear - if one comes across a long list of papers on a resume - whether they were all original. Feal said that there is nothing wrong with telling a hiring committee that asks how many papers you gave in the last year that you gave two original papers, three times each at different conferences. But it would be wrong to represent that record as having presented six original papers.
The idea, she said, is "don't misrepresent what you've done."
Scott Jaschik
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/20/double.
The posting below looks at touchy subject of giving the same presentation more than once. It is by Scott Jaschik and is from the May 20, 2008 issue of INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent - and free - online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. You can subscribe by going to: http://insidehighered.com/. Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher Ed, e-mail [scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com]. Copyright © 2008 Inside Higher Ed. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: When Coaching and Testing Collide
The posting below looks at the notion of "adaptive leadership," leadership needed when the solution is unknown and participants have to be drawn together to discern a new pathway. It is from Chapter 4, Preparing Leadership for the Future, in the book, Deeper Learning In Leadership :Helping College Students Find The Potential Within, by Dennis C. Roberts. Published by Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 [www.josseybass.com] Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Double Dipping in Conference Papers
Ronald Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994) asks us to address leadership as it is informed by the nuance and dynamics of the group. He referred to two broad categories of leadership: technical and adaptive. Heifetz defined technical leadership as doing what was required to address an issue or problem when there was a known or knowable resolution. Adaptive leadership worked best when the solution was unknown and participants had to be drawn together to discern a new pathway. Technical leadership was more direct than adaptive leadership and was clearly more comfortable for organization members. In fact, it was so comfortable that members frequently sought a technical solution even when an adaptive response was more appropriate. For example, in a student organization context, technical questions related to participation would include what could be done to achieve more visibility on campus and which marketing and promotion methods would get the organization name out more effectively. An adaptive leadership question would refer to the organization's perceived or real values and how they can be promoted in a way that is of compelling interest to students. Essentially related to public relations, the technical question and response might achieve some gain. However, the issue of how to best promote the organization could be resolved within the organization's resources. Exploring the core values and purposes of the organization requires a deeper level of leadership and adaptive challenges, and it is on these challenges that Heifetz focused his attention.
Heifetz warned that there were a number of perils involved in adaptive leadership, because such challenges require experimentation, the discovery of new knowledge, and various adjustments throughout the organization. Only by adjusting attitudes, values, and behaviors could participants adapt to a new environment and sustain such change over time; this shift in values or perspective was the most difficult. For change to occur, participants had to be disloyal to their past and some of the constructs and relationships that shaped it. For example, if a student government were to consider abandoning formal organization processes such as resolutions, formal reports, and Robert's Rules of Order, they would have to be disloyal to the processes utilized in previous student governments, city councils, and even state and federal legislative bodies. Exploring new possibilities meant entertaining the prospect that current organization processes were ineffective. However, staying with the old way may have obscured the deeper and more important concern related to core organization purposes. Returning to the example of the student organization's participation, better public relations might help, but using a technical approach may also mask the more substantial change that could enhance the organization's effectiveness.
Heifetz noted that adaptive leadership was threatening to organizations and could elicit different forms of resistance. Marginalizing, diverting, and attacking were three strategies that organizations used to shut down adaptive change. These varied in the degree to which they represented overt or covert strategies, but they were relatively easy to spot as resistance. Another attempt that was less easy to identify was seduction or co-opting. In the co-pting strategy, members resisted adaptive leadership by incorporating it into the regular functions of the organization. An Example could be when a grassroots change effort, such as a drive to purchase only clothing produced in work environments that pay a fair wage, was incorporated into the institutional purchasing process. Such a strategy would not necessarily undermine the effort but could slow or reduce the impact of a more active student boycott of sweatshop-manufactured clothing.
Another important lesson that Heifetz offered was that leaders frequently avoided or did not listen to those who disagreed with them. Heifetz recommended doing just the opposite. In order to refine one's own strategy and respond to the questions of adversaries, one needed to listen carefully to the reservations others expressed. Listening does not mean abandoning one's goal but does push one to become better informed of others' reservations and thus work more effectively for change.
One of the most frequently cited metaphors from Heifetz's work is the concept of going to the balcony. Adaptive leadership would be most effective when leaders gained objectivity and perspective by going to the balcony to observe the dance floor below. Many leaders failed because they could not see the patterns, nuances, and intricacies of what was going on around them. A skilled and adaptive leader would use one or more strategies to help regulate the tension presented in an organization facing adaptive challenges. The adaptive leadership response included (Heifetz & Laurie, 2001); direction (identifying the challenge and framing the issues); protection (letting the organization feel tolerable external pressures); orientation (challenging current or quickly emerging roles); managing conflict (exposing or letting conflict emerge); and shaping norms (challenging unproductive norms). These adaptive leadership responses gave the work back to the group and sought to engage members more fully so that the best responses could be identified. Only by managing the tension of adaptive leadership could leaders hope to secure the fullest and most helpful contributions from participants.
Another caution Heifetz and Linsky (2002) offered was that those who wished to lead needed to learn to manage their hungers. Hungers need not be avoided but simply managed. The primary hungers they identified were power, importance, and intimacy. Power could undermine adaptive leadership because the need to control and to direct would prohibit others from taking on adaptive work. The hungers for importance and affirmation bred heroic desires and behaviors that robbed contributors of the opportunity to develop their own issues. Heifetz and Linsky proposed that the third primary hunger, intimacy, could result in seeking intimate company and relationships that would compromise effective leadership when left unchecked. There have been numerous public cases of leaders who have not managed their emotions, but the hunger for intimacy also routinely affects regular workplaces and communities where stress or loneliness cause leaders to turn to others for support and solace. Spreading office gossip and using confidants to vent about work frustrations are examples of sharing individuals' personal concerns that may reflect lingering hungers for intimacy.
The insights offered by Heifetz and his collaborators provide powerful lessons intended to help leaders maintain adaptive leadership commitments when appropriate. Falling into the resistance traps laid by others, not listening to those who disagree, losing objectivity, and falling prey to our hungers are all dynamics that can draw adaptive leadership away from its primary purpose: giving the work back to the groups and organizations we seek to lead.
Heifetz has perfected adaptive processes in his teaching. By creating course experiences that demonstrate the adaptive leadership variables he identified, Heifetz extended the relevance of the model while also providing guidance for those who wished to use the model in their own work. This Case-in-Point method has been described by Sharon Parks (2005) in great detail. This method of teaching provides the opportunity to use explicit and underlying issues in the group to demonstrate course content; thus the classroom becomes a studio for demonstration, performance, and experimentation. Although Parks described the teaching methods Heifetz used in a classroom setting, she offered insights that also hold relevance for cocurricular experiences. Most important, the Case-in-Point method enables the shift from positivist and heroic teaching to improvisational and artistic learning. Five elements-conscious conflict; pause; image or insight; repatterning; interpretation, testimony, and testing-form the core of both the artistic learning and leadership processes (Parks, 2005). Conscious conflict involves creating something new from what isn't working. Pause stimulates deeper thinking when the active mind is forced to step back. Image or insight occur when "aha" moments emerge, facilitating the resolution of conflict and students' abilities to interpret their own experiences. Repatterning results when previous assumptions are reconfigured in the light of new evidence. Bringing the new way seeing and thinking to another party or group for confirmation or contradiction gives rise to the interpretation, testimony and testing phase.
Heifetz's adaptive leadership model and the Case-in-Point pedagogy that he has perfected provide bridges between the worlds of studying, critiquing, and practicing leadership. With skillful and deep preparation, educators can adapt the pearls of wisdom in Case-in-Point learning to a variety of settings. The adaptive leadership model also provided a link between the two broad areas that framed the theories we have explored in this chapter. The Making the Match research determined that the two broad gaps in what employers seek and what higher education prepares graduates to do are managing people and tasks and mobilizing innovation and change. Technical leadership, focused on how specific and knowable strategies guide a leader-centric group, results in a type of leadership that is more related to managing people and tasks. Adaptive leadership, focused on eliciting full participation from community members to devise previously unknowable responses to complex and difficult questions, is essential to mobilizing innovation and change.
References
Heifetz, R.A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Heifetz, R.A., & Laurie, D.L. (2001). The work of leadership. In G. Goleman, W. Peace, W. Pagonis, T. Peters, G. Jones, & H. Collingwood (Eds.), Harvard Business Review on breakthrough leadership (pp. 131-141). Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Heifetz, R.A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Parks, S.D. (2005). Leadership can be taught. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
]]>The posting below is an interesting look at the acceptance, or not, of teacher-centered vs student-centered classrooms in Mainland China and Hong Kong.. It is by Mei-Yung Leung and Xinhong Lu and is from the Teaching Toolbox, Journal of Engineering Education Selects "Research in Practice" section of ASEE Prism, April 2008 Volume 17, Number 8. © Copyright 2008, American Society for Engineering Education, 1818 N Street, N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036-2479, Web: www.asee.org
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT:
By Mei-Yung Leung and Xinhong Lu
What works at mainland universities may not be as effective in Hong Kong.
Since the 1990s, China has attracted considerable global attention with its rapid economic development and the expansion of its higher education system. Starting in 1999, China transitioned from a system geared to educating the elite to one that reaches a broader population. To cope with growing numbers of students, the country has had to expand university faculties by adding young and comparatively inexperienced instructors. When these new teachers are paired with students who are often passive rote learners, the result is a challenging teaching and learning environment.
Our study investigated relationships between different approaches to teaching and learning and student satisfaction. We focused on construction engineering education because it is a major program of study in China.
In particular, we sought to examine the differences in teaching approaches between Hong Kong and mainland China, and their impact on the learning process. Due to an intertwined history with the United Kingdom, Hong Kong's educational programs have been modeled after the British system, while universities in mainland China have a significantly different educational heritage. The popular approach to teaching in mainland China remains a teacher-centered one. Hong Kong, by contrast, emphasizes both teacher-centered and student-centered strategies.
Teaching can be considered a simple matter of transferring knowledge or shaping students, or it can be understood as a complex matter in which the teacher and student share a journey of mutual growth to gain knowledge and to develop. The former approach is teacher-centered, based on content-oriented instruction, while the latter is student-centered, using learning-oriented instruction.
Learning, on the other hand, involves two main dimensions, motivation and strategies, each of which has various approaches. A student's motivation can be intrinsic, that is, engaging willingly in tasks; extrinsic?seeking to obtain a passing grade with minimal effort; or achievement oriented?seeking high marks. Similarly, learning strategies can be deep?that is, striving for meaning and understanding; surface?seeking rote knowledge; or achievement-oriented?applying any method to optimize final marks. Different learning motivations can produce different learning strategies or behaviors, and subsequently produce different learning outcomes.
Our study revealed interesting differences in student reactions. In Hong Kong, where both teacher-centered and student-centered strategies are employed, teacher-centered instruction correlated with surface or achievement-learning strategies, while student-centered teaching correlated with deep learning strategies. This was not the case in mainland China, however. There, the predominant educational strategy, teacher-centered instruction, correlated with deep learning strategies. Indeed, students in the mainland Chinese programs, and especially those in what are considered the top 10 universities, were less satisfied with a student-centered orientation, as opposed to their counterparts in Hong Kong.
For reasons not yet clear, it appears that mainland Chinese students are somewhat indifferent to teaching approaches and naturally employ deep learning approaches in their studies.
Both teacher-centered and student-centered teaching approaches have their merits. The results of this study suggest that educators in mainland China can apply various teaching methods in the construction education process. Since the student-centered approach produces deep learning strategies in Hong Kong, and students there are generally satisfied with this approach, it is recommended that Hong Kong educators apply this approach through problem-based learning, interdisciplinary team projects and action learning.
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Mei-yung Leung is an assistant professor in the Department of Building and Construction at the City University of Hong Kong, People?s Republic of China. Xinhong Lu is an associate professor in the School of Real Estate at Shanghai University, PRC. This article is adapted from ?Impacts of Teaching Approaches on Learning Approaches of Construction Engineering Students: A Comparative Study between Hong Kong and Mainland China? in the April, 2008 Journal of Engineering Education.
The posting below looks at the importance of academic advising in student learning. It is by By Susan M. Campbell, associate vice president for academic affairs, University of Southern Maine; and Charlie L. Nutt, executive director, National Academic Advising Association. The article is from the Winter, 2008 issue of Peer Review, Volume 10, Number 1. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2008, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: China's Learning Curves
In her article "Losing Sleep over Student SUCCESS?" in the spring 2006 issue of The Presidency, France A. Cordova, then chancellor of the University of California-Riverside and now president of Purdue University, stresses the importance of student success and achievement to all higher education stakeholders-parents, students, educators, as well as the public at large. She also acknowledges the challenges inherent in supporting a concept that is sometimes difficult to articulate. Cordova suggests that a renewed focus on student success could "reinvigorate the public's appreciation" of higher education as a place of opportunity in which to grow, to dream, and to think. In this regard student success is about facilitating curiosity, wonder, and immersion in the college experience and, as Cordova says, institutions should focus their efforts on supporting those college experiences that create, foster, and cultivate student curiosity and engagement in learning-all in service of their achievement or a set of essential outcomes as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has suggested. While certainly there are many ways to support student immersion and engagement in learning, one strategy that is increasingly being acknowledged for its potential in this regard is academic advising.
Academic Advising as an Engaging Educational Process
When viewed as an educational process and done well, academic advising plays a critical role in connecting students with learning opportunities to foster and support their engagement, success, and the attainment of key learning outcomes. Viewing academic advising as an educational process moves it from a paradigm of teaching that focuses on information or inputs to a paradigm of learning that focuses on outcomes for student learning. In this way, academic advising supports key institutional conditions that have been identified with promoting student success. Such conditions include setting high expectations, providing support, offering feedback, and facilitating involvement in learning through frequent student contact with faculty and staff (Tinto 2002). As a strategy, academic advising holds the potential to address these key conditions for student success that Tinto notes, particularly when it is approached as a process grounded in teaching and learning. The case for the power of academic advising in supporting student success has been made over and over again in the literature, but perhaps not succinctly or clearly enough, particularly in relationship to supporting institutional goals for persistence toward graduation and the achievement of key learning outcomes.
In his seminal work, Leaving College, Tinto (1993) describes retention not as a goal but as a by-product of a successful and engaging college experience. AAC&U's 2007 report, College Learning for the New Global Century, also notes that retention and graduation rates are important, but the ultimate measure of progress and success is whether students have learned what they need to know to be successful both professionally and in their personal and civic lives. Thus, for institutions, the focus of attention ought to be on developing value-added educational opportunities that actively engage students in their own learning. If we do this, the by-product will be increased student satisfaction, learning, and persistence toward graduation. How does academic advising fit into this scenario? Tinto indicates that institutions have come to understand that quality academic advising is at the very core of successful student success initiatives, for it reflects an institution's commitment to the education of its students. Indeed, in Making the Most of College, Richard Light (2001) found that academic advising was perhaps one of the most "underestimated characteristics of a successful college experience," adding further evidence that academic advising, when done well, adds value to the college student experience.
The concept of engagement in learning is not that old, but not that new, particularly in student affairs. In Involving Colleges Kuh, Schuh, Whitt, and Associates (1991) concluded that institutions that value and expect student initiative and responsibility encourage involvement. These researchers also suggested that campuses should "spend more effort encouraging student involvement in learning opportunities than designing new ones." AAC&U has identified a set of these practices that research demonstrates have an impact on student success. In a forthcoming AAC&U publication, George Kuh makes the further point that these practices have an even greater positive impact on students who are still underserved by higher education. Effective academic advising practices are especially important for these often first-generation students. Encouraging students to take advantage of learning opportunities that are designed to challenge their intellectual and social development and add value to the college experience is central to good academic advising and at the heart of student engagement.
Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, and Associates (2005), talk about the dimensions of the college experience as including both student behaviors and institutional conditions. They describe engagement as the intersection between student behaviors and institutional conditions over which institutions have at least marginal control. The challenge is directing students toward those activities that are the "right" ones for student learning and success. The concept of engagement is significant when thinking about academic advising, for we would argue that all institutions have some control over the design and delivery of academic advising. We would also argue that, when done well, academic advising can serve as a powerful lever in improving the college student experience and in supporting an institution's goals with regard to persistence and time to graduation because it provides the structured opportunity to direct student behavior toward the 'right' activities.
Hunter and White (2004) write that academic advising is "perhaps the only structured campus endeavor that can guarantee students sustained interaction with a caring and concerned adult who can help them shape a meaningful learning experience for themselves." As such, academic advising can and should play a pivotal role in directing student behavior toward those activities that will nurture and support their success toward educational, career, and life goal achievement.
When equated with course schedule development and registration, the potential of academic advising in facilitating student immersion and engagement in learning as Cordova (2006), Tinto (1993), and Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, and Associates (2005) describe is diminished and trivialized. Academic advising that facilitates student engagement and success is developmental and, in that regard, acknowledges that one lens cannot be used to view the experience and skills of all students. Effective developmental academic advising supports the social and intellectual growth that occurs during the college experience, regardless of the age at which students begin their postsecondary journeys or their level of preparedness for college-level work. It is grounded in teaching and learning, understands, embraces, and is responsive to the complex nature of effective teaching as well as to the myriad ways in which people learn. Developmental academic advising is inextricably linked to the educational mission of the institution and is considered, recognized, and rewarded as a form of teaching. This is the academic advising of the twenty-first century, and colleges and universities nationally and internationally are acknowledging and realizing the potential of this powerful educational strategy to engage and support student learning.
In 2006, the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) developed the Concept of Academic Advising in response to the growing body of literature that, however loosely or tightly, coupled academic advising to student engagement in learning. The concept intentionally and rightfully aligns academic advising with teaching and learning and more fully integrates it into the educational fabric of an institution-not merely "layered on" as a student service. The preamble of the concept makes this critical educational point:
Academic advising is integral to fulfilling the teaching and learning mission of higher education. Through academic advising, students learn to become members of their higher education community, to think critically about their roles and responsibilities as students, and to prepare to be educated citizens of a democratic society and a global community. Academic advising engages students beyond their own world views, while acknowledging their individual characteristics, values, and motivations as they enter, move through, and exit the institution. Regardless of the diversity of our institutions, our students, our advisers, and our organizational structures, academic advising has three components: curriculum (what advising deals with), pedagogy (how advising does what it does), and student learning outcomes (the result of academic advising). (2006)
This preamble outlines several key concepts to guide academic advising on campuses today. First, the concept frames academic advising around a student's learning-learning that concerns much more than knowing about institutional policies and processes and includes knowledge about the broad essential outcomes of a good college education. Second, the concept outlines that the activities of academic advising are intentional and occur throughout a student's undergraduate experience and not merely in the first year, first semester, or until a program of study as been developed. Sequencing and scaffolding learning experiences as part of a comprehensive educational plan assumes a collaborative partnership between students and advisers in which the roles and responsibilities of each are clearly defined. Finally, since we recognize academic advising really is a form of teaching, we must explicitly develop and articulate the curriculum for academic advising, address the myriad pedagogies available to address students' individual learning styles, and identify the expected outcomes for student learning within the context of the academic advising experience. The challenge for academic advising is significant; facilitating the development of coherent educational plans across a student's educational career is no small task and requires those who are committed to the intellectual and social development of students both in and outside the formal classroom.
Marc Lowenstein (2005) articulated the comprehensive nature of the academic adviser's role in this way: An excellent adviser does the same for the student's entire curriculum that the excellent teacher does for one course.
The similarities between the role of an academic adviser and the role of a teacher should not go unnoticed: both develop clear curricula that specify expectations for learning, both craft clear sets of student learning outcomes, both create a variety of learning experiences for students to learn what is expected, and both identify appropriate measures to determine the level of achievement of these outcomes in relation to learning expectations. Lowenstein's portrait of the academic adviser as educator suggests that, regardless of who serves in the formal academic advising role-professional staff member, faculty member, student peer adviser, etc.-the inherent importance of the role and the responsibilities of academic advising should be valued and supported as being integral to the teaching and learning process.
The Role of Academic Advising in Student Learning Success
Nationally, campuses are taking seriously the potential of academic advising in improving student success. The trends include acknowledging the contribution of effective academic advising to the quality of the college student experience by integrating improvements into campus planning; aligning statements of mission, goals, and program objectives with a campus's overall mission, designing initiatives to identify key outcomes for student learning and the delivery of academic advising, and implementing effective reward and recognition systems for academic advising. What emerges from these national (and international) trends in academic advising is the following set of guidelines that institutions can use to develop a coordinated, effective academic advising program that is linked to teaching and learning and focused on student learning success.
Collectively develop and widely share a philosophy/mission for academic advising that links it to the teaching and learning mission of the institution. These collectively developed statements of philosophy, in turn, guide the development of mission and goals statements at other organizational levels, such as school/college/department or program. For institutions with highly decentralized academic advising programs, these statements provide a framework within which to guide and foster consistency in academic advising across a campus.
Identify clear outcomes for student learning and the delivery of academic advising that are derived from the philosophy/mission and that guide the development of learning opportunities. It perhaps goes without saying that in order to link an academic advising program to an institution's teaching and learning mission, the program must be outcomes-based and student-learning focused. Increasingly, campuses are developing assessment plans for academic advising that identify what students are expected to learn as a result of participating in academic advising. Framing the intentions of academic advising in this way changes the conversation about what academic advising is and, in turn, how it is delivered. Treating academic advising as curriculum development opens avenues through which the intentions of academic advising can be communicated to students. Increasingly, campuses are adopting a syllabus format to communicate the intentions of and expectations for academic advising. The advising syllabus articulates the particular, and perhaps unique, goals and outcomes for academic advising, acknowledges the variety of ways in which academic advising might be organized (e.g., individual school/college-based, centralized advising center) and delivered (e.g., faculty, professional academic advisers, peer advisers), and identifies expectations for students and advisers in the academic advising relationship. More recently, some academic advising programs have elected to submit these syllabi to school/college curriculum review committees for official review and validation as valued institutional experiences.
Design systemic and systematic processes of assessment to inform and support changes in philosophy and practice. An outcomes-based approach to academic advising demands the development of an assessment plan through which learning opportunities are developed, benchmarks for success are identified, and multiple measure are used to gather evidence to inform improvement and demonstrate program success. Essential to this process is the identification of measures that go beyond mere measures of satisfaction and facilitate understanding of what and how student are learning what we expect them to learn. Multiple measures can be both quantitative and qualitative. The latter should include conversations with students about knowledge they have gained, skills they have developed, as well as their values regarding higher education and their futures. Clearly, these conversations extend beyond those about institutional policies and course requirements that are most often equated with academic advising.
Implement comprehensive and ongoing professional development programs that are informed by the identified outcomes for student learning and for the delivery of academic advising. These professional development programs are built around the mission and philosophy of academic advising, the expected outcomes for student learning, and the desired outcomes for the delivery of academic advising. These comprehensive programs recognize the myriad ways in which professional development programs can be delivered and utilized both campuswide and in more localized formats, as well as in combination with low- and high-tech pedagogies. Campuses that are effective in designing and delivering professional development programs for academic advising ensure that they are organizationally sustainable. On some campuses these programs are coordinated by someone responsible for academic advising professional development, while on others these programs are aligned with the centers for teaching and learning. Regardless of where it is housed, any professional development program for academic advising must consider advising as a form of teaching in order to be effective and successful in supporting student learning.
Develop campus programs and structures that recognize the value of academic advising and reward advisers for quality academic advising and for their contributions to the field. Increasingly, campuses are demonstrating, in key ways, the value of academic advising to the success of their students by rewarding the work of professional and faculty advisers. There is significant work being done on many campuses to develop career ladders or paths for professional advisers that reward such things as advanced graduate work in the field as well as research and publication in the field of advising. These career ladders or paths demonstrate, in very concrete ways, the institution's commitment to quality academic advising. For faculty members, more and more institutions are beginning to revisit policies concerning how academic advising is regarded in promotion and tenure processes. Research and scholarship in advising are becoming more universally accepted and supported as a field of applied research and publication.
The trends in academic advising indicate that institutional recognition of academic advising is a campuswide responsibility in which all constituencies-administrators, students, faculty, and staff -work together to promote student success. As higher education continues to find itself increasingly under the microscope of internal and external scrutiny, it must identify strategic ways to demonstrate student satisfaction and learning. If considered integral to the teaching and learning mission of an institution, academic advising then offers the potential for this visible demonstration of student satisfaction and learning through the experiences of students who are well served and connected to the campus. As Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, and Associates (2005) write in Student Success in College "Advising is viewed as a way to connect students to the campus and help them feel that someone is looking out for them." Indeed, these connections are essential to student engagement and the role of academic advising in facilitating them should not be underestimated.
References
Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2007. College learning for the new global century. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Cordova, F.A. 2006. Losing sleep over student SUCCESS? The Presidency 9(2): 5.
Hunter, M. S., and E. R. White. 2004. Could fixing academic advising fix higher education? About Campus 9(1): 20-25.
Kuh, G. Forthcoming. High impact educational practices: What are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Kuh, G., J. Kinzie, J. H. Schuh, E. J. Whitt, and Associates. 2005. Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Kuh, G., J. H. Schuh, E. J. Whitt, and Associates. 1991. Involving colleges: Successful approaches to fostering student learning and development outside the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Light, R. 2001. Making the most of college: Students speak their minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lowenstein, M. 2005. If advising is teaching, what do advisors teach? NACADA Journal 25(2): 65-73.
National Academic Advising Association. 2006. NACADA concept of academic advising. Retrieved March 21, 2008 from www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/Concept-Advising
Tinto, V. 1993. Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 2002. Taking retention seriously. Retrieved March 25, 2008 from soe.syr.edu/academics/grad/higher_education/Copy%20of%20Vtinto/Files/TakingRetentionSeriously.pdf
The posting below is a review by Philip G. Stack of the book, Venturing Abroad: Delivering U.S. Degrees through Overseas Branch Campuses and Programs, by Madeleine F. Green, Peter D. Eckel, Lourdes Calderon, and Dao T. Luu. The review originally appeared in Planning for Higher Education. April - June, 2008. Planning for Higher Education. 36(3): 81-82. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Society for College and University Planning (www.scup.org). Reprinted with permission. Planning for Higher Education book reviews appear at: (www.scup.org/phe).
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Academic Advising in the New Global Century
reviewed by Philip G. Stack
Most individuals would likely agree that higher education is now a global enterprise. That is not surprising given the tremendous attention paid to the broad issues of globalization; the interconnectedness of global economies; the continuing growth in international trade; the mass movement of people, production, and services around the world; and the profound impact of technology on how we interact, identify issues, communicate, and work collectively in developing solutions to an array of challenges. Books such as The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman (2005) highlight the changing global landscape and the vastly enhanced opportunities for global interaction and collaboration. Given this environment, many higher education institutions have identified internationalization as a major strategic thrust, with strategies ranging from increasing international recruitment of students to entering into memoranda of understanding with international institutions for the exchange of faculty, participating in collaborative international research projects, or establishing a branch campus in another country.
As a result of the growing interest in internationalization across higher education in the United States, the American Council on Higher Education Center for International Initiatives is seeking to provide the higher education community with timely and useful information on the ways in which colleges and universities adapt to an increasingly globalized world. Venturing Abroad: Delivering U.S. Degrees through Overseas Branch Campuses and Programs addresses one aspect of the globalization of higher education-the export of U.S. programs and degrees to other countries for non-U.S. students.
Madeleine Green, Peter Eckel, Lourdes Calderon, and Dao Luu have broad-based experience in international education. Green, the lead author, has published widely on higher education, focusing on program and policy studies related to the internationalization of U.S. higher education and international education public policy. The authors identify the increasing mobility of colleges and universities in establishing campuses and offering certificate and degree programs to students from other countries who never step foot inside the United States. Although this is an area of growth, the authors raise a number of important questions for consideration: What do we know about this type of activity by U.S. colleges and universities? Why are institutions pursuing such strategies? What are the different approaches to offering degree programs abroad? What are some of the central issues and challenges that institutional leaders face in pursing this strategy? Where are the hot spots for cross-border activity?
Given the breadth of this topic, the authors choose to focus only on the delivery of degrees through overseas branch campuses and programs from the perspective of the programs and providers. The authors clearly state that this working paper is not meant to be an exhaustive review, but rather an illustrative perspective of the programs and providers associated with branch campuses and programs. The authors address the basic issues associated with cross-border education and provide a snapshot of the current situation. They detail which institutions are abroad, what countries they are in, and what programs they offer. Importantly, the authors sketch a decision-making framework for college and university administrators and board leaders who wish to pursue this form of internationalization.
The authors note the broad range of definitions used in describing cross-border activities. For the purposes of their analysis, they have adopted Jane Knight's definition of cross-border education as "the movement of education across national jurisdictional or geographic borders" (p. 2), thus focusing on the importance of borders in their research. When examining cross-border programs, Knight's definition does so from the perspective of people, programs, providers, and projects/services. As previously noted, the authors choose to address cross-border education only from the viewpoint of programs and providers.
Within this context, the authors examine the opportunities and drivers of cross-border education, recognizing that there is a "push" that includes prestige/competition, advancement of internationalization, quality improvement, and furthering of the service mission. At the same time, there is a "pull" that includes increased demand for higher education, the appeal of receiving a foreign education while staying at home, the increase of governmental policies that attract foreign educators, and the rise of English-language education. The authors then examine the landscape of cross-border education in terms of the types of providers, noting that they may be nonprofit public institutions, for-profit organizations, or other organizations privately or publicly traded. Providers may also choose to deliver their programs independently or through some type of partnership. The final defining characteristic of cross-border education that the authors identify involves the educational components of the program; specifically, whether the program offers non-degree certificates; pre-collegiate preparation; or degrees at the undergraduate, master's, or doctoral level.
Not surprisingly, the authors identify Asia as the primary destination for cross-border education and, in particular, the countries of China, Singapore, and India. In each case, the authors identify the types of cross-border programs currently in place, provide examples of institutions involved, and describe the current status or opportunity for establishing a cross-border educational program there. Specifically, the authors identify the continuing opportunities in China driven largely by rapidly growing demand, describe how opportunities may be ending in Singapore, and discuss how India is the next frontier. It is important to note, however, that many opportunities for cross-border education exist in numerous countries beyond these three.
>From an academic and financial planning perspective, the final section of the working paper is perhaps one of the most important. In this section, the authors identify critical issues that organizational leaders-both administrators and board leaders-must address if they are going to consider pursuing a cross-border educational opportunity. Most importantly, the authors highlight that this is not a trivial decision for an organization to make. Although there are many positive reasons why a college or university may wish to implement a cross-border educational program, an institution must apply a high degree of due diligence before making a final decision. The institution must assess the environment in which it may enter, understand the extensive range of accreditation issues, and be able to answer a series of strategic and operational questions. These questions involve the alignment of such an initiative with the strategic priorities of the institution, the full range of academic issues associated with establishing a cross-border program, and the financial and administrative implications of pursuing such a strategy. Any such decision must not be made lightly and must be made with a comprehensive understanding of the implications and potential risks.
Venturing Abroad: Delivering U.S. Degrees through Overseas Branch Campuses and Programs is a well-written and concise working paper on a very specific area within the extensive range of internationalization initiatives undertaken by colleges and universities. The strength of this working paper is that it remains focused by looking at only one aspect of internationalization-cross-border programs-and only as they relate to the issues associated with programs and providers. In this way the authors have taken a very broad and complex issue and presented it in a concise overview. In addition, the working paper does exactly what the authors said it would: provide an illustrative perspective on a specific topic. Importantly, the working paper does not just address the issue from an academic perspective; rather, it provides the reader with a practical overview of the issues that administrators and board leaders must consider. It is an excellent precursor to the topic and offers institutions that wish to pursue cross-border programs the opportunity to understand the range of issues, prospects, and risks that must be considered and carefully analyzed before making any final decision.
Reference
Friedman, T. L. 2005. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
]]>The posting below looks at a "problem" familiar to all of us with medium to large courses, i.e., students multitasking while in class. It by Andy Guess and is from the April 18, 2008 issue of INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent - and free - online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. You can subscribe by going to: http://insidehighered.com/. Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher Ed, e-mail [scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com]. Copyright © 2008 Inside Higher Ed Reprinted with permission.
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Mean And Nasty Academics
The students sit in class, tapping away at their laptops as the boring old law professor mechanically plods through his lecture. Except one. Instead of hunching over a portable computer or a notebook, he's playing solitaire with a deck of cards on his desk. The professor halts his droning. "What are you doing?" he demands. The student shrugs. "My laptop is broken," he says.
It was a sketch, performed at a Yale Law School skit night some time ago, that sent a chill through the professors' section in the auditorium.
Ian Ayres, the William K. Townsend Professor of Law at Yale, remembers it well. Long a critic of giving students free reign to surf the Web during class, he's tried multiple approaches to discouraging laptop users from distracting themselves with e-mail, games (like solitaire) and gossip. Now his theories are being put to the test.
Late last month, as students returned from spring break, the University of Chicago Law School announced that Internet access would be blocked from classrooms. While individual professors at law schools have created policies banning laptops or allowing them only for specific uses - and while some colleges don't even have classroom Internet access, or mandate classroom-only use without any enforcement - the move by Chicago appears to be the first institution-wide directive of its kind. Already, there's been an uproar among students and even senior administrators, while some law professors have stepped up to defend the policy.
As first reported in the blog Above the Law, Dean Saul Levmore sent an e-mail message to students on March 25 announcing the change, which came as a surprise to many. Calling the policy "experimental," he said it would now be considered a "breach of our norms" to use the Internet during class time.
"A great many conversations and classroom visits have generated the perception, and I think reality, that we have a growing problem in the form of the distractions presented by Internet surfing in the classroom," Levmore wrote. "You know better than I that for many students class has come to consist of some listening but also plenty of e-mailing, shopping, news browsing, and gossip-site visiting. Many students say that the visual images on classmates' screens are diverting, and they too eventually go off track and check e-mail, sometimes to return to the class discussion and sometimes barely so. Our faculty (and I, as well as many of your classmates with whom I have spoken) believe strongly that we need to do everything we can to make Chicago's classroom experiences all they can be."
Further down the message, he continued: "Visitors to classes, as well as many of our students, report that the rate of distracting Internet usage during class is astounding. Remarkably, usage appears to be contagious, if not epidemic. Several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes, and within twenty minutes an entire row is shoe shopping. Half the time a student is called on, the question needs to be repeated."
The solution, which has already been in place for over two weeks: Switching off most wireless access points and under-the-seat network jacks covering the law school's classrooms, a method that works only because they are located in a single building wing that can easily be isolated. But even Levmore conceded that there would be ways around the ban, such as using wireless cellular or radio cards that bypass the campus network.
There are also exceptions. The dean noted that one classroom would continue to have Internet access to "facilitate occasional computer training." At the same time, said Gregory A. Jackson, Chicago's chief information officer, one out of four classrooms - as well as all the podium areas - still has live connections available via network cable. He also added that depending on students' computers, they might be able to get online if they sit at the back of their classrooms. (Plus, Sprint has plans to launch its new WiMAX service in Chicago, which would provide a new, high-speed way to get on the Internet beyond the campus network.)
"I think now, the social norm is that people who have the equipment ... check their e-mail constantly, maybe even every 15 minutes," Levmore said in an interview, noting that those everyday norms seep into the classroom as well. Speaking of the policy, he added, "It's obviously paternalistic to a degree, and I wish it weren't. I feel quite libertarian in my own life," he said, but in this case he found that "intervention is worthwhile."
Levmore also said that many of the professors - as well as students - he's spoken with have expressed support for the policy. But others contest that view, saying he is painting a distorted picture of the opinions. It's "not terribly popular with anybody except the dean who requested it," said Jackson, the Chicago CIO who was ultimately charged with carrying out the policy. "I actually don't think it's a good idea and I don't think it will work." Moreover, he said, in conversations with senior administrators at the university, he found a "general consensus" that it wasn't a good policy.
In Jackson's view, students today are adept at multitasking and they expect to be connected in "sophisticated ways," and any attempt to circumvent those tendencies will eventually fail. If students aren't paying attention, he said, it's "not the fault of whatever is distracting them" but the lecturer who isn't captivating their attention. Levmore's idea to create some sort of "on-off switch" that would enable Internet access between classes, or give professors the ability to allow students online for specific classroom purposes, was also a non-starter, Jackson added: It "won't happen," he said.
Law lectures aren't necessarily more susceptible to the capricious attention spans of Web-surfing students than those of any other discipline, but they do tend to have the greatest concentration of laptop owners. Some law schools, such as Chicago, require students to take all exams on laptops - among other reasons, so that they can upload or e-mail their work on the spot. But as student technology use continues to evolve, even laptops are starting to be supplanted (or augmented) by smartphones such as BlackBerries, Treos and other devices that can access the Internet through cellular networks. Students using such devices would not be affected by the Chicago law school's policy.
Whether or not most Chicago law professors agree with the dean's view on Internet use, prominent academics have come out in favor of limiting it in the classroom setting. "I think that surfing the Internet is qualitatively worse than daydreaming and doodling in a couple of senses," Ayres said. "One, I think there's fairly strong evidence that it's a more addictive activity, and independent of that it has more of an externality, more distraction [to others] than many of the alternatives."
Ayres has tried different ways of regulating students' Internet use and has dreamed up even more, such as one scenario in which students who wanted to surf during class would sit in the back row (so that no one else would be distracted) or another that would require all applicants to law school to check a box pledging not to misuse the Web during lectures.
"I wholeheartedly applaud the move," said David D. Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, in an e-mail. "I've barred students from using laptops in my classes for two years now, and it has manifestly improved student participation and the level of engagement and discussion. And no wonder - allowing students access to the Internet is like putting several magazines, a telephone and a television monitor at each students' seat and inviting him or her to tune out and browse, talk or watch TV anytime their mind starts to wander. It is corrosive of an engaged classroom."
Not surprisingly, many students don't hold the same view, and most who responded to requests for comment did not want to be quoted by name. "Surfing the Web was widespread in class, but to be honest, class discussion hasn't changed much since the ban," wrote one in an e-mail. "People now play chess, solitaire or just go through their pictures in class." Another suggested that some students even save Web pages to their hard drives to read later in class.
The number of students who spend all of their class time on the Internet is relatively small, suggested Chicago Law student Hadi Nilforoshan. Another group, probably bigger, doesn't use the Internet at all in class. "The rest of the students probably fall into a middle range," he wrote in a Facebook message. "This group is usually paying attention to the professor, but will occasionally check their e-mail or chat online. The only time this group of students uses the Internet excessively is if they feel that the professor does a horrible job of teaching, and know that listening will be of no use. This is very rare, however, given that we have mostly phenomenal professors."
Levmore said that other law deans had contacted him about the policy, many of whom were enthusiastic or at least interested in the results. Yale Law, which had been reported to be considering a similar move, said through a spokeswoman that no such discussions (to the chagrin of Ayres and others who share his views) were under way.
]]>The posting below describes an innovative approach that can help all faculty with new course development. It is by Barbara Tewksbury (Hamilton College) and Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary).
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Hey, You! Pay Attention!
Is it time to really shake the tree and do something about one of your courses? Do you have a great idea for an innovative course but aren't quite sure where to start in designing it? If so, you might try using the following online tutorial designed to provide practical and effective help for faculty members interested in designing or redesigning a course:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html
This tutorial is an on-line version of a face-to-face course design workshop developed and taught to literally hundreds of undergraduate faculty in a variety of disciplines for over 12 years by Barbara Tewksbury (Hamilton College) and Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary). While the workshop was originally designed for geoscience faculty, the tutorial provides examples from other disciplines, including those of you outside the sciences, and offers an easy-to-apply strategy for designing courses in any discipline. This tutorial is designed to give you a way to get your arms around what is typically a daunting task and will guide you through a practical, effective strategy for designing or redesigning an effective and innovative course.
Overall philosophy
We believe that a course should do more than provide students with a strong background of knowledge in a field. We believe that a course should enable students to use their strong backgrounds to solve problems, and that a truly valuable course should focus beyond the final exam to add to students' future lives, abilities and skill sets and prepare students to think for themselves in the discipline after the course is over. Designing such a course is a challenge and involves providing not only opportunities for students to master content but also opportunities for students to practice thinking for themselves in the discipline so that they will be prepared to do so after the course is over.
Why use our tutorial?
This tutorial provides a pathway through what can look like a big, amorphous, overwhelming task and presents a logical way to proceed from the glimmer of a good idea toward a new course while avoiding too much blundering in the dark. Using this tutorial lets you avoid wasting energy on reinventing the wheel. We provide links to hundreds of activities that can be used either directly or indirectly as templates, plus examples of goals and syllabi that can be used as catalysts for your own work and that were developed by other faculty.
We know that the design strategy in this tutorial works. Workshop participants comment that our course design process helped them to develop rigorous, effective, and innovative courses and to make thoughtful choices about what and how to teach. In a follow-up survey of workshop participants, 90% of respondents followed through to teach the rigorous, goals-based, innovative course that they had begun to develop at the workshop. Furthermore, 80% of respondents found our course design process so useful that they followed it again when designing or redesigning another course.
Who is this tutorial for?
Most of the examples in this tutorial come from undergraduate courses in the geosciences, although some portions have links to examples from undergraduate courses in other disciplines. Despite the focus on geoscience, the process is generic, and we've used simple examples. If you are interested in designing a course outside the geosciences, you should have little trouble using the tutorial.
The tutorial itself
Course context. Teaching a course involves making choices about what an instructor will ask students to do and why. External factors such as course size, context, student demography, and support structure are significant and should influence the choices that need to be made during course design. We begin the tutorial by having you articulate who your students are, what they need during the course, and what they might need in the future.
Setting overarching goals. The heart of the tutorial involves having you set student-focused goals that enable your students, at an appropriate level, to think for themselves in the discipline, not just expose them to what professionals know. You will set goals that focus your course on developing students' abilities to think for themselves and solve problems in the discipline while still addressing mastery of content.
Setting ancillary skills goals. Before proceeding to content and course plan, you will set one or two ancillary skills goals for your students (e.g., improving writing, teamwork, oral presentation).
Choosing content to achieve overarching goals. Every field is awash in more than a semester's worth of content, and every one of us faces decisions about what content to include and what content to omit. You will make decisions about content by considering what general content topics could be used to achieve the overarching goals you have set for your students, rather than by making a laundry list of content that students should be exposed to.
Developing a course plan. A course plan includes not only the goals and the content topics, but also the order of content and concepts in each broad content topic, and how students will receive goal-related practice with increasing independence as they encounter content and concepts. You will choose appropriate classroom, assignment, and assessment strategies that both help students learn effectively and allow you to evaluate whether students have met the goals.
For Faculty Developers
We now have a complete description of how we run our course design workshops, including links to all of the materials we use to run our workshops, a detailed schedule, tips for adapting or adopting our workshop format, and suggestions for how to use our course design tutorial with faculty. You can find these materials on line at
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/for_developers.html
This course design tutorial is part of a larger web collection of professional development resources developed for undergraduate geoscience faculty through the NSF-funded program On the Cutting Edge (http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/index.html ).
]]>The posting below, while focusing on engineering faculty, has implications for all of us in how approachable we are to students. It is by Christina M. Vogt and is from the March 2008 issue of ASEE Prism, Volume 17, Number 7.
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: China's Learning Curves
Unapproachable, condescending faculty drive students out of engineering.
It is well known that large numbers of capable students leave engineering programs before graduation. Why? Largely, it is because of inaccessible and unapproachable faculty. This is the conclusion of a study that I conducted at four large, highly ranked West Coast universities. The research included a survey of 713 engineering students and advanced statistical modeling.
Self-efficacy has been found to be the major determinant of academic success. The term refers to a student's belief in his or her capability to organize and execute the steps necessary for success in a specific domain, such as engineering. Given two students of approximately equal ability, the one with the greater self-efficacy will most likely get higher grades.
I found that self-efficacy was directly and positively influenced by faculty approachability and negatively affected by faculty distance. Thus, a professor's interactions with students are crucial to student performance. Many engineering faculty members "intuitively" know this and also know that how approachable they are has an impact on student retention. However, the way a teacher interacts with students is seldom accorded the importance it deserves. The teaching and education component of a professor's annual review will often be confined to a sentence or two stating whether a professor did or did not perform the required amount of teaching. Research universities, in particular, often make a half-hearted attempt to encourage faculty to be more effective teachers.
Given the clear link between students' self-efficacy and the climate that exists in the classroom, professors need to work on developing a better rapport with students. They need to show that they are personally accessible and approachable. Often, small changes can make a major difference, such as showing an interest in students, sharing personal information, and advising students on research projects. One effective way of building rapport is for a professor to let students know that he or she also had to struggle at times. This kind of candor helps bridge the gap between students and faculty members. Students sometimes feel that professors are such intellectual giants that it's futile to try to match their accomplishments. Too often, professors seem to like this ivory tower image and are thus reluctant to break down the barriers separating them from students.
Expressions, intonation, and body language that might convey a condescending attitude need to be modified. Professors should never be derogatory or insulting when students do not answer correctly. Insulting remarks, such as "This was covered in the ABCs of fluid mechanics," should be avoided. Suggesting that you believe a particular student is less capable can be especially detrimental when dealing with women and/or minorities.
As my research highlighted, there are negative consequences for being stand-offish and condescending toward students. Such behavior by professors lowered students' self-efficacy, resulting in lower grade-point averages. Moreover, while good teaching is admirable, my more recent research-in which I measure teaching along two dimensions of interpersonal rapport and teaching skill-suggests that a professor's approachability is perhaps more important than his or her teaching abilities. While learning to teach well takes time, being personable can be instantly implemented.
The posting below is a review by Patrick Dilley, associate professor of higher education and qualitative research at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, of the book American Places: In Search of the Twenty-first Century Campus, M. Perry Chapman. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2006. It appeared in the March-April, 2008, Volume 94, Number 2 issue of Academe Online [http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/] the bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. 1012 Fourteenth Street, NW, Suite #500; Washington, DC 20005. Copyright ©2008 American Association of University Professors. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Professors Need to Lighten Up!
It is human nature to believe that our past experiences apply to new situations and environments. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that many faculty members refer to their time in college when they attempt to make sense of their working environments. Misunderstandings, however, can occur when faculty find themselves employed in institutions unlike those in which they studied. When that happens, they will inevitably have to search for a better guide than previous experience to understand differences among campuses, their missions, histories, and environments.
They might want to start with American Places: In Search of the Twenty-first Century Campus by M. Perry Chapman, which provides a good overview of the different forms of higher education in the United States. If academic "fit" is indeed a match between individual faculty members and their places of employment, this book will certainly help new faculty understand the character and nature of the campuses on which they might find themselves employed. At the very least, academics and campus leaders without extensive experience of U.S. higher education will gain insight into how different types of institutions developed, how their missions differ, and how physical campuses can reflect the nature or character of institutions.
Chapman examines college campuses according to several schema: in terms of their narrative history, as places of experience for students and faculty, as intentionally defined and delimited communities, as physical works of art, and as bridges to a more connected and enlightened citizenship. If the mission of American higher education is to advance the ideals of a better, more civil society, then the campus must be the living, material embodiment of those ideals. Each institution interprets those ideals as part of its educational mission and defines how they should be reflected in life and in the locales the institution serves.
Chapman's analysis is strongest when he examines the historical development of individual campuses in terms of their missions, student populations, and physical design. Readers will no doubt find that their own undergraduate campus resembles one of Chapman's institutional vignettes. Over seven chapters, he focuses on seven kinds of institutions, from independent liberal arts colleges, public flagship universities, and mid-sized state institutions in rural settings to large urban universities that serve "nontraditional" populations and civic needs. In many of his descriptions, he waxes nostalgic, effectively capturing the spirit of the students and the leaders. He is less effective when he attempts to predict the impact of digital distance education and the demand for colleges to address the nontraditional, lifelong learning needs of a society whose members will change jobs more frequently than in the past.
Chapman's book is distinguished by his emphasis on how higher education fits within society, figuratively and literally. His thesis is that American higher education has from its inception conceptually positioned itself in relation to the natural landscape and urbanity. Whether one side of the quad was open to town or facing a tree-lined hill, American college campuses were shaped by distinctly American notions about the social place of higher education-and the placement of higher education-that have changed over the past three hundred years. "Despite popular notions (and the insistence of many academics) that the campus should be an intellectual ivory tower, the American version has always been a working part of the world around it," Chapman writes. One of his conclusions is that there is room-indeed, a need-for different kinds of institutions of higher education in contemporary society. Chapman emphasizes the "civic relationship that U.S. campuses have with their communities, regions, and states, indeed with the nation and the world."
Yet despite their different purposes, missions, and student populations, all American colleges should promote an ethic of place through their campuses, Chapman argues. Such an ethic should be based on global ecological sustainability, regional authenticity (in terms of nature and architecture), and community, both on and beyond the campus. In some ways, he matches form with function in relation to the contours of history, geography, and social space.
Chapman is impressed by how Northeastern University integrated its service-learning mission into the civic life and the topography of Boston. He freely admits his preference for its model of social involvement-the way it conceived of its campus within the physical confines of the city in order to better serve its student population. (Richard Freeland, the president of Northeastern, wrote the foreword to American Places.)
Chapman is an architect and planner by training, and he occasionally relies on his technical knowledge to explain his understandings, particularly in relation to the physical layout of campuses. He draws heavily on notions familiar to those who study higher education (the ideas behind Thomas Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia, for example) as well as on the field of campus architecture (Frederick Law Olmsted's work). For readers lacking his design background, more illustrations-examples of the spatial axes of campus design or of the decorative or structural concepts that particular buildings exemplify-would have helped to demonstrate his ideas. Even so, Chapman offers much for academics to learn about the connections between the histories, missions, physical structures, and populations that constitute the enterprise of American higher education.
The posting below looks at a useful way for faculty to approach the design of new courses. It appeared in the newsletter: Speaking of Teaching, Center for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University - Winter 2004, Vol. 13, No.2, http://ctl.stanford.edu/Newsletter/ produced by the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The College as Campus (Review)
Every year, thousands of university professors, lecturers, and graduate students sit down at their desks and design courses. They start out excited, their desks are stacked high with all the material they want to cover, but there never seems to be enough time in the academic calendar to cover everything. So compromises are made: topics are cut, or several topics get crammed together in a single lecture, and in the planning crunch that inevitably occurs as the deadline for ordering materials approaches, assignment design gets pushed aside until a later date, usually well into the school term-about a week before the assignment is due.
Sound familiar? Interested in a different model for designing courses? The Center for Teaching and Learning offers quarterly workshops on designing courses for members of the Stanford teaching community, and CTL's three Associate Directors also offer individual consultation on course design.
At CTL, we have found helpful the concept of learning-centered course design, in which the teacher designing the course first identifies the learning goals of the course, and then "works backwards:"designing the course from the perspective of what we hope our students will have learned from the course when it is over, and then figuring out how best to help them achieve these goals.
This model for designing courses is intended to make the process both more efficient for you and to help focus your attention on where you can make the biggest difference for your students.
Here's how it works:
First Steps
Although "designing backward"is the heart of this process, we suggest that before you begin designing your course that you pay attention to some other initial considerations, like the nature of your students, your own strengths as a teacher, and the curricular framework the course may need to fit into.
Who are the students that will be taking this course? Will they be majors or non-majors? Will the course be required or elective for them? Will the students be freshmen and sophomores? Juniors and seniors? What prior learning will they have had? What are the best ways to find out? What assumptions about the subject might they need to unlearn? Why will the students be taking the class (as opposed to why you hope they are taking the class)?
Next, reflect on your strengths as a teacher: what do you do best? Giving lectures, leading discussions, designing writing assignments, designing exams? Another way to put it: how will you most likely be able to make a difference for your students? Try making a list of your strengths as a teacher and how you hope to make a difference for your students.See if it will be possible or appropriate to play to your strengths (or develop new strengths) for this course.
Finally, some broader preliminary questions:is the course part of a curricular sequence? Ifso,what issues should be taken into consideration? Is this an existing course? If so,what sort of feedback did you receive last time? What did student performance on exams and assignments indicate about how these assignments were helping the students to achieve your learning goals for them? Or is this a new course? If it is a true blank slate,you have an opportunity to design from scratch. If it is a new course,what is your vision for it? What do you hope that it will help your students to accomplish?
Reflecting on and ultimately answering these many questions will prepare you for the heart of the learning - centered course design process: identifying and clarifying your learning goals. At the end of your course, what should your students be able to do, know, or understand as a result of their work in your course?
Learning Goals
Taking some time to contemplate the knowledge,attitudes,and skills that you hope your students will have by the end of the course you are designing will have an invaluable effect on your course design process. These goals provide the floor plan for every other choice you make, and your choices will be influenced far less by external limitations. Instead, whenever you make a design choice, the deciding factor will be how the consequences change or support the learning goals at the foundation of the course
Difficult though it may seem, try to limit yourself to a total of only three to five goals. The goals can be general or specific, but either way, they will eventually be broken down into sub-goals that will shape the design of the course and which will ultimately dictate the content, the assignment structure, and the day-to-day classroom format as well.
For instance, if one of your goals is for your students to be able to assess the value of secondary critical arguments,it might be worthwhile to consider what steps are involved in this process, and design a session or two, as well as an assignment, that will model this process for the students and give them a chance to practice and develop this skill. For every knowledge-based learning goal, there should be a skill-based goal: what do we want our students to be able to do with the knowledge they gain from our courses?
When we consider the learning goals of our courses, we can discover the often unarticulated subtext to our
teaching: what matters most? Why do we hope that students will take our courses? What is the value of this subject for us,and how can we best convey this to our students? By taking a learning-centered approach to course design, as opposed to a coverage-driven approach, student engagement with the meaningful qualities of the course is far more likely to be achieved.
Content
Once you have outlined your learning goals for the course, the material you decide to use to support your learning goals may be quite different from what you initially set out to teach. You may have discovered that some of the material you thought was appropriate for the course doesn't really offer you an opportunity to help students reach your goals for them, and similarly you may have realized that there are several other texts or case studies that would support your goals much more clearly and substantially.
Starting with the list of your learning goals,make a short list under each goal of the content materials that will contribute to your hopes for what students will be able to take away from your course. Make a note beside each content topic regarding your plan to use it to support the goal under which it is listed. (See figure 1.) This will help you remember your learning-centered strategy as you plan you syllabus and outline your lecture notes.
Figure 1
LEARNING GOAL LEARNING GOAL
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CONTENT CONTENT
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CONTENT CONTENT
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CONTENT CONTENT
Assignment Design
Although we don't often think of it this way,assignments and exams are the way that we find out if our students have met our goals for them.We tend to think of assignments and exams as demonstrating the depth and extent of student knowledge, but they actually reveal a great deal more.
Once again, start with a list of your learning goals and beneath each goal, list several different kinds of assignments or exam formats that would both offer your students a chance to demonstrate that they had achieved your goals for them (by using the skills you identified as vital to their learning process) and which would allow you to determine how well, in fact, the goals have been achieved.
Class Format
The same model applies for planning your class formats.A variety of different class formats is always welcomed by students,and if we can design those formats to be directly geared towards supporting our already established learning goals (instead of for the sake of simply providing variety),then the structure as well as the content of our courses will have a pedagogical coherence as well as a built-in success mechanism for achieving our learning goals.
Try planning your format strategies class by class: imagine that you have an hour and a half for an ideal class to approach a learning goal,a related skill, and a portion of content that you have just outlined. In this ideal hour and a half, what are three different formats (each one lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to a half hour) that you could incorporate into a single class session? (See figure 2.) If possible,try to imagine at least one of these formats (if not more) involving active learning (direct engagement, participation, or application of knowledge and skills) on the part of the students.
Figure 2
CLASS#1 FORMATS
Learning Goal: critical thinking Lecture/Demonstration
Content: Chapter from text Discussion and Questions
Skill: thesis development Exercise: practice crafting sample thesis state-
ments in response to sample essay prompts
Granted, while some graduate seminars run up to three hours, most class sessions are shorter than an hour and a half; but even in a fifty minute lecture session,several different formats can be employed to both support your learning goals and to keep students actively engaged.
For example, every fifteen to twenty minutes, take a two minute break and ask the students a direct question, give them a minute to think about it, and take several responses. Or ask students to take a minute to think of some questions, and respond to one or two of them. Or ask students to work with a classmate sitting next to them and figure out the answer to a question or problem for a minute or two and then take several responses.
Whichever strategy you choose, it is important to tell students what you're doing and why,and to start using these active learning strategies on the very first day of class so that that they come to expect it. This way students will be ready to participate in this manner throughout the quarter.
These brief strategies not only keep students from becoming too passive, they serve as excellent "real time"opportunities for teachers to find out if their students are "getting it" and coming close to achieving the learning goals of the course. This is called a classroom assessment technique, and many more creative options for such activities are offered in the book on this subject listed in the bibliography on the final page of this newsletter (Classroom Assessment Techniques,ed.Angelo and Cross,1993).
The Calendar
Once all of the planning outlined above has been completed, you are finally ready to take out a calendar. But not just any calendar: start with the university's academic calendar so that while planning you can take all the university holidays into consideration. More than one professor has been frustrated weeks into a course after realizing that a lecture had been planned for an unexpected university holiday, or that the term ended a few days earlier than expected.
Now that the calendar is out, creative thinking about your course can take a new turn. Using your original learning goals list, map out a logical progression of knowledge and skills building over the course of the academic term. As a clear pattern emerges and you add the course content and developmental assignment structure onto the calendar, see if you can break down each week of the course into themes that will support your learning goals. This will help the students understand the trajectory of your course even better.
The Syllabus
The final documentation of all this planning is, of course,the syllabus.The syllabus is the place where you can outline your learning goals for the course as well as your philosophy of teaching, your thematic framework for the term, and your breakdown of readings and assignments.
Since the syllabus is also an active contract with the students containing our expectations for them as well as guidelines for succeeding in the course, be sure to include a section in your syllabus for course and university policies, such as a percentage breakdown of how graded assignments and class participation will be factored into a final grade, an attendance and absence policy, a late papers and revision policy, a scholar/ athlete make-up class and work policy, a disability disclosure policy, and a reminder of the parameters of the honor code.
Getting Feedback
Aside from the in-class strategies discussed above, CTL strongly suggests that you build in a midterm evaluation process for feedback before the course is over. A midterm evaluation gives you the opportunity to make crucial and often easy changes to your course to ensure its success. While end-of-quarter evaluations are useful for the next time you teach a course, midterm evaluations benefit you and your students immediately.
There are many options for midterm evaluation.CTL offers a small group evaluation (SGE) in which a CTL consultant will come to your class at the mid-point of the term and take the last twenty minutes of class to facilitate discussion about the course among your students in small groups. Their anonymous responses are then reported to you in a confidential meeting. Faculty, lecturers, and TAs can sign up (ideally, one week in advance) for an SGE on the CTL website: http://ctl.stanford.edu.
If you like, a CTL consultant can also come to your class and observe your teaching, and then consult with you confidentially afterwards. Alternatively, you can be videotaped while teaching, and a CTL consultant can watch the tape and consult with you about the tape at your convenience.
At the very least,plan to hand out an anonymous questionnaire to your students to receive their candid feedback about the course at least once, if not more often.As with the other options described above, we recommend that these evaluation methods are most valuable when undertaken at the midterm.
Bibliography on Course Design
Angelo,Thomas and Cross,Patricia,Classroom Assessment Techniques, San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass,1993.
Davis,Barbara,Tools for Teaching, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,1993.
Diamond,Robert M.Designing and Assessing Courses and Curricula: A Practical Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,1997.
Diamond,Robert M. Designing and Improving Courses and Curricula in Higher
Education: A Systematic Approach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,1989.
Ericksen,Stanford C."Decisions About Course Content."The Essence ofGood
Teaching: Helping Students Learn and Remember What They Learn. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass,1984.
Grunert,Judith.The Course Syllabus: A Learning-Centered Approach. Boston:
Anker Publishing,1997.
Lowman,Joseph."Planning Course Content and Teaching Techniques to Maximize Interest."Mastering the Techniques ofTeaching. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass,1995.
McKeachie,Wilbert.Teaching Tips, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2002.
Ramsden,Paul."The Goals and Structure ofa Course."Learning to Teach in Higher Education.London and New York: Routledge,1992.
Williams,Charles."Architecting a Course."Lecture adapted for Excellence in Teaching Electrical Engineering: A Handbook for Faculty and Teaching Assistants.By Michele Marincovich and Loren Rusk.Stanford,CA:Stanford University, 1987.
]]>The posting below looks at four effective strategies in teaching large, often one night per week, evening courses. It is by Oscar Wambuguh, assistant professor of environmental health in the Department of Nursing and Health Sciences at California State University, East Bay. His e-mail address is oscar.wambuguh@csueastbay.edu. The article is from the January-February, 2008, Volume 94, Number 1 issue of Academe Online [http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/] the bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. 1012 Fourteenth Street, NW, Suite #500; Washington, DC 20005. Copyright ©2008 American Association of University Professors. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Designing Courses
They've been working all day, they're tired, and there are scores of them-how do you reach them all?
By Oscar Wambuguh
High enrollments, conflicting student work schedules, and the sheer convenience of once-a-week classes are pushing many colleges to schedule evening courses. Held from 6 to 9 pm or 7 to 10 pm, these classes at my institution are typically packed, sometimes with more than 150 students in a large lecture theater. How can faculty effectively teach, control, or even simply keep awake the students in such classes, many of whom start their days very early in the morning with family responsibilities?
Evening classes bring special teaching challenges. Evening students tend to interact socially more than day students, necessitating frequent instructor interventions to maintain calm and order, and many come to class overwhelmed, hungry, and tired. In addition, there are the usual challenges: poor lighting conditions in many large lecture theaters; lack of, or poor-quality, audiovisual equipment; and distractions caused by student electronic devices such as cell phones, iPods, or laptops. Under such conditions, even the most ardent instructor can become frustrated.
In my large evening classes, I always have a mix of students, ranging from the highly motivated to the couldn't-care-less types. I teach environmental health classes focusing on attention-catching topics such as global warming and climate change; air pollution; epidemiological issues like SARS and Asian bird flu; toxicology, especially of heavy metals in our water and food; biodiversity loss; and food concerns. Over the years, to enhance student engagement and maintain interest, I have incorporated strategies such as combining audiovisuals (PowerPoint presentations, short video clips, and transparencies) and class discussions and activities. Doing so is challenging in large classes set in "lecture-only" theaters. However, I have found four strategies that maintain student engagement and interest throughout what might otherwise be a long evening.
PowerPoint Presentations
I start my lectures with a two- to three-minute video clip about current course-related issues. Then I lecture using PowerPoint slides for about an hour and a quarter. Although PowerPoint isn't exactly a brand-new technology, it works well for my classes. Many students are relatively fresh at the beginning of class and likely to remain attentive through the whole lecture. I use illustrations and pictures interspersed with text slides as much as possible. I time myself carefully and always stop after seventy-five minutes, after which students take a ten-minute break to recharge for the next session.
Intergroup Questions
Before the first class meeting of a semester, I organize students in groups of eight to ten and post group numbers and the names of group members on a Blackboard site, where students can access them. I end up with fifteen to sixteen groups for a class of 150 students. During the first meeting, as I call students' names, I ask them to move into their groups for a "get-to-know each- other" session and information exchange. To maintain regularity, I ask group members to stay with their groups at the same location in the lecture theater in future meeting sessions. The groups are responsible for generating five short-answer questions (typed, with answers) for each class meeting. Within their groups, students take turns developing questions each week and circulating them among other group members for feedback through Blackboard before class. Once we begin intergroup question time, two groups are chosen to answer two questions asked by each of the other groups.
Here's how it works. When the first session begins, groups 1 and 2 are ready to begin answering questions. The first question comes from group 3, which asks group 1 one of its five short-answer questions. Members take turns each week reading the questions aloud as everyone in the class listens. One member from group 1 (members take turns) responds briefly (taking no more than two minutes total) to the question asked. If I judge that a concept is not clear, I add to the answer given. Then group 3 asks group 2 its next question, after which group 4 asks groups 1 and 2 questions. The process continues for between forty five and sixty minutes until all groups have been reached. Satisfactory answers are given two points each, recorded next to the question asked. Throughout, I maintain order and monitor timing. At the end, I collect all the groups' short-answer questions for grading and record the points earned by the two chosen groups. At the next meeting session, groups 3 and 4 will be the chosen groups, and so on until the last group is reached.
This system works well in a number of ways. It encourages students to read course material ahead of time; helps the instructor cover course content and explain concepts and material that are not clear during the question-and answer session; keeps students motivated and energized by requiring individual responsibility, attention, and group commitment (no one wants to be blamed for letting the group down); encourages active participation among students, allowing them to develop and polish their oral communication skills; gives students a sense of owning the questions and the learning; and creates excitement and a sense of achievement, especially if group members answer their questions correctly.
Article Time
Another part of our evening class deals with current articles in the field. Each group will have had a week to choose and summarize an article from the media (newspapers, newsmagazines, science magazines, journals, or the Internet) dealing with a topic covered by the course. Summaries, which are usually about half-a-page long, must be typed and must include the names of all the students in the group. Group members take turns choosing and summarizing the weekly article on behalf of their group.
During article time, the member of each group who chose and summarized the article stands up and tells the class the title of the article and the reasons why he or she chose it and then reads aloud the typed summary. The groups report in order of their group number, taking about two to three minutes each for a total of forty-five to sixty minutes. Everyone, including the instructor, listens, and the class is free to comment briefly after each article has been read. At the end of the session, the instructor collects the fifteen summaries for grading. This happens each week. Reviewing each article and its summary is quick, taking an average of about ten minutes (a total of just two-and a- half hours a week for the ten instruction weeks of the quarter).
I have found this process beneficial in many ways. It encourages literacy about current events in the field among everyone present, including the instructor; improves student reading and analytical and comprehension skills by requiring students to summarize two-to-three page articles in about half a page; improves students' confidence in their oral and written communication skills while also enhancing those skills; helps keep students engaged and motivated at a late hour of the evening as topics spin from one area to the next; and allows students to appreciate the practicality, complexity, and interdisciplinarity of some of the material covered by the course.
Short Quiz
While it is debatable whether college-level students should be required to physically attend every meeting session, I have made it hard for students to miss class unless something unavoidable happens (like an illness, a baby sitter not showing up, a transportation problem, or a family emergency). In such cases, students must call my voice mail or send me an e-mail and present a note at the next class meeting explaining the reasons for their absence.
What motivates students to be sure to come to my class? During the last ten to fifteen minutes of each evening session, we have an optional extra-credit quiz worth ten to fifteen points. If a student misses class but leaves me a voice or e-mail message and gives me a written note, I prorate his or her points based on a simple ratio of the total points earned for all prior quizzes divided by the total expected, multiplied by the total points for the quiz missed. The quiz, which is multiple choice, is given on a projection screen (eliminating unnecessary copying). Students complete it silently on fifteen- question Scantron forms- machine-readable forms designed for multiple-choice tests-without using class notes or text. I advance the questions on the projection screen as students answer them. I use a $20 sensor that works with PowerPoint and Word, which allows me to advance the questions remotely from anywhere in the room.
All the points students accumulate over the weeks are put into a "point savings account" that students can see on Blackboard. The "fatter" the account gets, the more motivated students become to keep it high. The account can swell to an average of about eight