scrivel

I often find student course evaluations kind of frustrating, partly because there’s really no way to respond, even to the positive ones. So, out of that frustration, I offer the following responses to some of the comments from the three courses I taught last semester (you’ll have to infer the comments from the responses):

• I’m glad you feel that your writing improved. I think everyone’s writing (almost) always improves in a comp course, but students don’t always recognize the fact.
• Lots of other students say that they find the group work really useful, and I’ve got sound pedagogical reasons for doing them. I’ll try to explain this better next time, but I suspect that some of you just don’t like to play with others.
• Me? Organized? I’m glad you thought so.
• I would rather not have done the once-a-week, three-hour format for our literature class, either. I didn’t have any control over the time the course was offered.
• It’s graduate school; it’s supposed to be challenging.
• You’re right — I should put those due dates on the syllabus next time. Thanks for suggesting it.
• Really? You think you got absolutely nothing from this class? I doubt it, but if that’s true, surely you bear some of the blame for that.
• Yes, Middle English is sexy.
• There is more to becoming a composition teacher than writing syllabi and lesson plans. An effective teacher knows how to engage with the research and scholarship of the field. We did the research paper to help you do that.
• I’m flattered, really, but I’m taken.

Last week I went to (most of) my school’s new faculty orientation. Much of it focused on stuff like benefits and tenure, but I was intrigued by the morning devoted to what the organizers called “Universal Design for Learning” (or UDL). In architecture and engineering, the term “universal design” refers to a set of principles for accessibility that result in things like wheelchair ramps and large, flat light switches. UDL, by metaphorical extension, is ostensibly concerned with providing accessible learning environments, so that students with disabilities have equal opportunities to learn.

I say “ostensibly,” because it’s pretty clear that part of the UDL agenda is not just about addressing the needs of students with disabilities, but also about changing core pedagogies of teachers. According to the website linked above, there are three key principles of UDL:

• Faculty can offer various ways to REPRESENT essential course concepts
• Faculty can offer various ways to encourage student ENGAGEMENT
• Faculty can offer students various formats for EXPRESSION of what they have learned

With a little tweaking, these principles could pass as a distillation of Chickering and Gamson’s “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.” And the examples of good UDL solutions (which can be viewed in an online tutorial) looked a lot like the kinds of active, experiential pedagogy that college teaching centers tend to espouse.

So, UDL isn’t just about addressing disability; it’s also about reforming teachers. I’m okay with this, but I also think it’s an uphill climb. In the Q&A session at the end of our workshop, there was a concern that experiential activities are all well and good, but that instructors in some disciplines can’t spend valuable class time on stuff like that when there is so much material to be covered. This propensity to think of teaching in terms of content coverage is more prevalent, perhaps, than you’d think. I saw it all the time when I worked for a teaching center, especially (but not exclusively) when talking to instructors in the hard sciences. As one of the workshop presenters pointed out, this model of learning posits students as empty vessels into which a teacher pours knowledge.

I believe (along with many others) that deep learning is the result of active engagement and participation, not passive reception. If UDL principles can encourage teachers to rethink their teaching in these terms, then all of their students stand to benefit–not just the ones living with disabilities.

Okay, it’s been a while since I wrote about writing up my new attendance policies, and my overall feeling is that the policy itself might make very little difference. I finally realized that attendance is actually something I could track with, you know, numbers and stuff.

I came up with a simple formula to help me out: N/D * 100, where N = the number of absences, D = the total number of class meetings, and 100 = 100 (to turn it into a percentage). I then averaged this percentage across students to come up with a single “Absence Factor” for each of my courses in the past couple of years.

Here are how recent numbers fell out for me:

Fall 2006: 11%
Spring 2007: 8.6%
Fall 2007: 6.4%
Winter 2008 (so far): 7.5% and 10.2%

I think these numbers really test some of the assumptions we (or I) often make, like the idea that attendance takes a dive in the spring term. I was also surprised to see that loosening my policy between Spring ‘07 and Fall ‘07 didn’t result in a mass exodus. In fact, last fall was the “most attended” course of the bunch.

With that in mind, I further reduced the impact attendance has on grades for Winter ‘08. But even here, nothing seems conclusive. I’m teaching two sections of the exact same class, and one has a respectable 7.5%, while the other is a somewhat disturbing 10.2%. I might blame part of that 10.2% on one student who has missed 50% of our meetings, but it might also have to do with the fact that that class meets earlier in the morning.

But even as I try to make sense of these numbers, I wonder if maybe they don’t mean anything at all. Maybe attendance, like many things in teaching, is just a matter of luck.

Since I teach a course in ethnographic writing, I find it necessary to give my students some practice in interviewing. In order to do this, I borrow a technique from k-ho called  a “fishbowl interview,” in which students take turns interviewing me while everyone else observes.

This activity always makes me more nervous than any other day of class, mostly because I tell students that they can ask me anything they want. I set up a “context” for the interviews, such that they’re supposed to ask me things that help them understand our class as a subculture. But I’ve learned that some students, given the opportunity to grill their teacher, want to know way too much. I’ve been asked where I buy my clothes, whether I’m an “attention whore,” and which female body parts I prefer (asked in the crudest way you can imagine).

Of course, other students ask me great questions, like why I got into teaching in the first place, why I do the research I do, and why we do stuff like small group discussion in class.

To turn this ethnographic exercise back on itself, I think sometimes that the questions students ask me are glimpses into their own experience of school. I think it’s fair to say that professors and instructors are largely baffling to students, like black boxes in tweed. I always come away from these interviews with a renewed sense of the need at least to explain what we’re doing in class. Why am I putting you in small groups today? Why did we read this really dense, difficult essay? (That I seem to forget this lesson from semester to semester is probably a topic that deserves its own post.)

I used to obsesses about the arrangement of furniture in my classrooms. I had a deep and abiding hatred of rows, and I thought that making my students sit in rows was the ultimate expression of hierarchy and institutional authority. On the first day of class, and every day thereafter, I’d make my students pick up their desks and scoot them (noisily) into some other, more “decentered” configuration. I tried circles, semi-circles, concentric circles, horseshoes, and even pods–anything but straight rows. (more…)

Absence, that is.

I was revising my attendance policy the other day, partly to line up with what other people do around here, and I got to wondering why I even had one in the first place. In the past, I’ve used attendance as a factor in students’ participation grades, essentially lowering that grade, which usually counts for 15% of the course grade, after a certain number of absences. But I also had a mechanism for lowering a student’s final course grade if they were excessively absent, as in missing more than two full week’s worth of class. This policy was similar to what many other instructors had at my last university.

But was it necessary? Or, looking at it from the other direction, was it even effective? The truth is that I’m not sure. Every semester, I’d have one or two students who skipped enough classes to have their final grades suffer. These students often didn’t have great grades in the first place, having missed so much class. So their absences hurt them in terms of their actual performance in the course, and it hurt them in terms of the attendance policy. I’m not sure I’m comfortable any more with that kind of double-whammy. (more…)