Axel Bohmann's blog

Distance Peer Observation

Axel Bohmann — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 16:06:18 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

One of the greatest resources you can have as a teacher is other teachers’ experience, suggestions, and comments. At the DWRL we are lucky enough to have Blogging Pedagogy, Lesson Plans, and other platforms that help us benefit from each other’s great work. I use these regularly, but there is one aspect of teacher collaboration that so far I have not been able to incorporate in my practice as much as I would like to: immediate feedback and conversations about my (and others’) teaching as it unfolds in real-time classroom interaction (as opposed to feedback on artifacts derived from these interactions, such as lesson plan entries).

Attending the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Graduate Teaching Scholars seminar a couple of semesters back has given me the opportunity to both observe and be observed by fellow assistant instructors, and this has given me some of the most valuable insights about my own classroom presence that I’ve gotten so far. Now, the obvious downside is that it is relatively time-consuming to organize peer observations. I still try to do at least one every semester, but there are some activities that only fully make sense in the context of an entire unit’s trajectory. This semester, by accident I’ve come across a way to facilitate ‘distance peer observation’ over a longer period of time without imposing too much effort on anyone involved.

My supervisor kindly agreed to observe one of my class sessions and in preparation I added him to the course wiki. The initial purpose was purely for him to be able to have a look at the syllabus before coming to class. But as the semester went on, I would get occasional messages from him about new assignment prompts I’d uploaded or comments left on the front page. These would often develop into conversations about specific instructional goals, about future iterations of an exercise, etc. I’ve come to greatly appreciate the light-hearted, informal nature of these conversations and the feeling they give me of someone else being interested in what is happening in my classroom.

So, in future I will make sure to add one or two colleagues to my class websites and give them a chance to stay in the loop about what is happening in my class (and hopefully to share theirs as well). Especially with classes like RHE 306 or 309 that follow similar structures, I can see the benefits working both ways. I get inspiration from the exercises you design and you get feedback that will help you get the most out of these exercises. And it’s fairly non-committal: if I have a set of 7-page papers to grade this week, perhaps I won’t have a chance to look at my colleagues’ course sites, and that’s fine. But once these papers are done I’ll start a new unit and will be grateful for some inspiration on how to tweak my teaching.

I’m not suggesting this is a substitute for in-the-flesh peer observations, but it could work well to supplement them and to keep conversations going beyond the individual class session. And most of us have some sort of course website already, so the effort to get it going should be minimal.

Embodying a Controversy

Axel Bohmann — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

Art E. Rial | Body Worlds 3: The Thinker

This summer, my parents asked me to review an article they were writing for a handbook on systemic counselling. The topic was using the body as a resource as well as an agent in problem-solving strategies and decision-making. Mom and Dad wrote the interaction between cognition and embodiment (and their fundamental inseparability), the bi-directionality of psycho-somatic processes, etc. All of which I felt was very interesting, but at the time seemed slightly too obvious to really excite me. But as I think about my teaching this semester, I keep coming back to the issue of embodiment and I realize that, yes, I have been aware of it for quite some time but, admittedly, have failed to … well, embody what I knew.

An example from the rhetoric classes I teach (it's intermediate level this semester, but I speak mostly from my past experience with introductory courses). In these, each student has to select a controversy to map, analyze chosen positions in depth, and finally take her own stance. One of the key realizations I want students to make is that a controversy is much more multi-faceted than “pro and con.” To that end, my students get to use a number of tools for visualizing the relationships between individual stakeholders when they work towards mapping their controversy (color coding, mind mapping, etc.). Students typically find these quite helpful.

Yet as they begin defining and verbalizing their own position, I've noticed there often is a relapse into the two-camps model. And I as the instructor am probably not innocent in that regard. An exercise I've been doing at the beginning of Unit 3 (constructing arguments) serves as a good example: this is only a slight variation of the split-the-class-in-half-then-debate exercise I am familiar with from high school. There are three groups and each gets assigned one position in a given controversy, usually with the third group mediating between the first two. They get into three different corners of the room and rhetorically batter away at each other (well, there is a reflection part to it, too, but that just as an aside). I think it's quite telling that the third group often ends up aligning more or less with one of the first two and feels like they argue that group's point only less decidedly.

The problem is that this splitting up into distinct blocks with predetermined position glosses over a lot of the nuances students have learned to identify when mapping and analyzing controversies. It presents positions as fairly unitary and static, and puts direct argumentative confrontation center stage.

This semester I hope to use space, movement, gaze and posture in better ways to help students navigate their controversies with more flexibly and elegantly. I'm not sure about the exact details yet, but I am thinking about smaller group exercises where each individual has an assigned set of basic beliefs and a goal expressed in proxemic terms (e.g. “try to get Kim to stand as closely to you as possible” or “separate Max and Kabriesha as far from each other as possible”). I would probably have each group member put forth an argument in turn and have everybody else react to this argument physically (by moving away from/towards others, directing their gaze one particular way, etc.). The goal would be for students to see that their arguments influence everybody in the controversy, even the ones that do not move, since the constellation inevitably gets altered. Also, this could be really helpful in getting them to think about navigating multiple audiences: convincing one group without agitating another, for instance.

Screencast Feedback with Jing

Axel Bohmann — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 02:51:31 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

Techsmith

After teaching RHE 306 for my second semester, I still have not fully decided on a consistent system for students to turn in their work. Electronic copies have a couple of advantages that pertain to the particular format of the class: a) different versions can easily be compared in text processing software (it’s called “merge documents” in LibreOffice and in Word). In a course that highlights writing as a process and the role of revision, this helps gauge the extent of changes made from one stage to the next. b) Very often, assignment deadlines occur in rapid succession and it is important for students to get feedback as soon as possible. An electronic copy can be marked, graded and returned promptly, whereas with a paper copy you have to wait at least until the next class day. Especially the smaller, one-page assignments I try to return within 24 hours in order to not slow down the work flow.

Yet I usually ask students to bring print copies of their assignments to turn in in class. For one thing, I already find myself staring at a computer screen for too much time every day and it is nice to take a stack of papers to the park or the pool and do grading there. More importantly though, paper copies allow me to make in-text and marginal comments with an ease and precision that I can’t seem to get with text processing software, even with the “comment” and “track changes” functions.

However, recently Mary Hedengren (all credit to her) pointed me to a piece of software that may mitigate the latter problem and give some additional benefits. It’s called Jing and it is a screenshot/screencast program. There is nothing really fancy to it and I am sure there are other applications that do similar stuff, but it still seems really useful.

So, here is what you can do with it: Open the paper you want to give feedback on. Connect a headset or other microphone, or use the built-in one if that is good enough. Start Jing and have it video cap the window containing the document you are working with and simultaneously record audio from the mic. Go through the paper, highlight aspects, comment on them, maybe give real-time examples of how to make a not-so-good sentence/transition/source attribution/etc. into a better one. Save the product as an SWF video file. Send it to your student.

Here is what I think are the advantages of using Jing with electronic copies. Obviously, everything I said about electronic copies in general still applies. In addition, it seems like it will be much easier to give precise feedback on individual passages. The easiest way to do this, it seems to me, would be to highlight the passages you want to talk about in advance and then address each one verbally as you go through. Scrolling back for cross-references is also easy enough.

The real strength here in my opinion is that sending a video makes the feedback you give to students a lot more personal. There is so much potential for misunderstandings with written comments because they are entirely stripped of non-verbal cues like inflection, stress, etc. This is one of the reasons we ideally would like all of our students to come to office hours all the time (well, maybe not quite that, but you get the idea). Jing seems to offer perhaps the next best thing to actual face-to-face feedback. Plus, the free version of the program has the 'affordance' of allowing no more than 5 minutes of video to be recorded at one time. So there is an automatic safeguard against spending too much time on one paper built into the program.

From a student's perspective, I see three chief advantages. The first one is the way they are likely to perceive feedback. I feel a recording of your professor actually talking to you would make you feel a lot more valued as a person than detached written comments. Of course, this depends on the tone of the writing/recording as well, but I feel it is fair to say it holds in general.

The second point is related to the first. Like many colleagues, I am concerned whether students actually take time to read my written comments (let alone re-read them). An audiovisual recording provides a mode of engagement that I hope students will be more open to.

Finally, I have often found there to be a bit of a gap in terms of what I prioritize in grading and what parts of my feedback students focus on most. This is especially true when students read the comments as a justification of their grade: “But you said I had a good introduction, so why am I not getting an A.” Here, the screencast format should also make it easier for students to see where the focus lies, simply by allowing the instructor to insert meta-comments (“and this is really what you need to work on to get an A in revision,” etc.) more easily.

Unfortunately, all of the above remains hypothetical so far. I have not had a chance to try Jing in my class yet since I only very recently heard of it. But my students are turning their next major assignment in at the end of the week, and I'll definitely try it for that. Will keep you posted-

Getting Students to Disagree

Axel Bohmann — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:52:20 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

The Chalkboard Manifesto by Shawn R. McDonald

I am teaching 306 for the first time this semester. Apart from the typical anxieties and uncertainties of teaching a new format (and a lot of content that had thus far been foreign to me) things are going pretty well. More important, they seem to be going better every week. Of course there are still many things I struggle with. One of the most important ones to me is getting a decent group discussion going.

Now, my students grasp concepts relatively quickly, they ask sensible questions, make valuable contributions when explicitly asked to do so. They have things to say. So why are they so reticent when it comes to speaking their mind in discussions? One explanation may be that they are not used to articulating their own thoughts in the classroom, let alone defend them against other positions. Conversely, I feel like many of my students equate challenging their peers' comments with being rude, even backstabbing. And I feel a lot of this has to do with the way classroom discourse is channeled through me as a teacher. With so many assignments and deadlines and the emphasis so heavily on grades, I fear the primary way my students see me is as a distributor of letters from A to F. Hence the attempt to elicit direct teacher validation for any given comment and to see that validation as normative. If it is given, no need to explore or challenge further. All too often, this results in a sequence of instructor question → one or two answers → 20 heads nodding → silence.

So recently I've tried around with methods to take myself as a teacher out of the conversation more. In general it mostly works, although of course not always at a hundred percent. One resource I found very helpful to capitalize on was students' sense of competitiveness. For instance, last week I had the entire class get up out of their seats to watch the second presidential debate with them. At this point in the course, we are talking about ethos, pathos, and logos. So I told the students whoever could point out an appeal to either of these three and explain precisely how Romney or Obama made them could sit down. And we would not finish until everybody was seated. I expected this to take little more than 10 minutes, but it ended up taking up a good deal of the lecture. Because students talked. They contradicted each others' interpretations, elaborated what they understood about the three concepts much clearly and vividly than before and actually challenged some of my positions, which I loved.

I am not generally a big fan of foregrounding competition, and I would not do this exercise the same way. Although I stopped it before everyone was seated I felt a little bad afterwards for the students who were still standing towards the end. And I was not completely satisfied with the fact that I was still ultimately the one to make the call whether a case a student made was “good enough” for them to sit down. But I could imagine developing this further into a team activity with teams of three where two teams are challenging each other and the third has to decide who is making the better case. That way students will not only be doing rhetorical analysis, but actually have to construct rhetorically effective arguments on the spot. And they will not be able to turn to the instructor for validation.