Meredith Coffey's blog

The Adapted Lesson Plan

Meredith Coffey — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 20:27:50 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

Photo by Meredith Coffey, 2009

I love borrowing and tweaking a good lesson plan to meet my own students’ needs. From my first formal teacher training, when I received an enormous binder of lesson plans ready to adapt, to the DWRL’s encouragement to check out its amazing database of lab member-generated plans, I’ve been lucky enough to have regular access to other teachers’ excellent ideas. After years of reworking others’ plans, however, I’ve only recently come to terms with the fact that there is just no set formula or foolproof way to make these adaptations work flawlessly—just like any lesson plan I invent on my own.

Let me give you just two of many possible examples. Last year, I attempted to use Cate Blouke’s plan for using Prezi to introduce the course syllabus. Following her instructions diligently, I reserved plenty of time to prepare a Prezi that reflected my own course’s guidelines. When the big day came, everyone’s introductions ran long, and with limited time to spare—horror of horrors, the Prezi would not play. I tried the link I’d emailed to myself; I tried opening it through my Prezi account; I tried different browsers. Failure.

Of course, this type of technology hiccup can happen under any circumstances, borrowed lesson plan or not, but somehow it had always seemed to me that if someone had done it before successfully, then it should work smoothly in my class, too. A seriously flawed assumption, I know. So, with no Prezi to show for all that preparation, I had to make that move with which every teacher is all too familiar—I had to come up with an entirely different plan on the spot. I promptly directed the students to review the syllabus in small groups and then present key information to the rest of the class. It wasn’t a terribly exciting icebreaker, but at least they had to learn some of each others’ names, read the syllabus closely, and speak just briefly in front of the class. My takeaway from that experience, then, was that even when you think you’re relying on a tried-and-true plan, you still have to remain able to adapt, and keep adapting, as circumstances require.

My second example comes from just a few weeks ago, when I was teaching Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and decided to borrow from Andy Uzendoski’s Lit Genius close reading activity. I followed his guidelines closely: before class, I added five passages from assigned short stories to Lit Genius; I broke them into five small groups, one to annotate each passage; and I had them present their annotations to the class. Overall, this exercise went extremely well. Several of the students were already familiar with Genius (particularly Rap Genius), and something about the digital format made creating annotations seem exciting and novel. Some groups went beyond the exercise’s requirements, adding images to their annotations, for instance. Indeed, it was popular enough that for a later presentation assignment, one group elected to use Lit Genius to share their work.

Once again, though, an unanticipated challenge arose. By and large, the groups spent much longer discussing and annotating their assigned passages than I’d anticipated. The posted lesson plan had warned that the activity could take one to two class periods, but I imagined that if we began right at the start of class, we could manage the complete exercise (one round of annotations, a round of mini-presentations, and another round of annotations of another group’s passage) in one seventy-five minute class period. As will probably not be surprising to readers of this post, this estimation turned out to be overly optimistic. I wound up extending the activity to the next class session, which was not ideal but was certainly doable.

This time around, I couldn’t pin the plan’s failure on a technology problem. Instead, it was an issue of my not having revised the plan sufficiently to meet my timeframe requirements. Even though I knew that the plan could potentially take up to two class sessions, I didn’t sufficiently limit the length of the excerpts, the close reading questions to ask, etc., to make it work for my particular group of students. Sticking closely to script made the exercise an overall success, but further work on my end to hone the plan would have made the execution go even more smoothly.

Of course, the amount of revision necessary to adapt to a lesson plan varies significantly. Sometimes plans turn out to be too short instead of too long (rarely my problem, but it happens!). Indeed, all sorts of challenges can arise while constructing or implementing a lesson plan. All this is to say that I remain a huge fan of adapting others’ lesson plans to work for my own classes—and sometimes sharing my own plans with others—but one of the many skills I continue to develop is that of the adaptation/revision process itself. Process over product, after all.

Physical Objects in the Digital Lab

Meredith Coffey — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:05:37 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

Papier-mâché image: Toshiyuki IMAI

Computers image: Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz

These days I only accept student papers through electronic submission, but this May I’ll have quite a handful of things to carry away (literally) from my last class.

Let me explain.

For their final project, and as is the case in many other Rhetoric classes at UT, my students must create an argument toward the controversy they’ve been researching all semester. They can choose any medium they’d like. To offer some potential jumping off points, my prompt suggests ideas like a website, a video, an image, a political cartoon, or a song. Part of my pedagogical goal is for them to try something new, along the lines of the multimedia arguments we’ve been analyzing over the course of the semester. Whatever medium they choose, I also require that they defend this rhetorical choice in a presentation and reflection paper—so it’s not just a question of what type of project they most “feel like” doing.

Since we have access to so many great materials in our DWRL classroom, I also include whole class days dedicated to requiring students to try out iMovie, Photoshop, and easy-to-use website builders like Wix and Weebly. Many students are initially intimidated by such programs but go on to fulfill my teacherly hopes by developing confidence through these in-class exercises.

Other students, however, choose a different route.

To illustrate what I mean, at the end of last semester I received:

eleven websites
five videos
two magazine spreads
one brochure
…and one hardcover book, handmade by a student using scrapbooking and other crafting materials.

Based on my current students’ project proposals, this semester I can anticipate receiving:

five websites
four videos
five magazine spreads
one infographic
one song
one political cartoon
…and one hardcover book, one poster board, and yes, one model of Machu Picchu.

Why, in a specialized Digital Writing & Research Lab classroom, after a semester of analyzing a range of digitally produced arguments, and after several class days of working with digital multimedia tools, are some students still driven to create physical objects?

It’s certainly not a slacker move, since these students all know that creating a physical project will likely be highly labor-intensive. I warned them that the student who submitted the hardcover book last semester lamented that her project required substantially more hours of work than did many of her classmates’ projects. Despite this cautionary tale, I now have three students committed to creating a physical object. (I can’t even fathom how much time the Machu Picchu replica will take. The student told me he plans to use Styrofoam, papier-mâché, and various tools of which I’ve never heard, but which he assures me he will use in a well ventilated space.)

And what’s a digital lab instructor to do with this insistence on working with decidedly non-digital media in a digital classroom? I suppose I could require that final projects entail a digital component, but I find myself hesitant to do so. Frankly, when my colleagues ask how my class is going, I am surprised to be especially eager to mention the non-digital final projects. To be sure, I’m no less impressed by Wix-built websites or Photoshop-designed magazine spreads. Somehow, though, there’s a compelling novelty—and I use that word advisedly—in students handing over a physical object, especially when all of their previous assignments have been submitted electronically.

Clearly, there’s a role for physical objects to play in digital spaces—but how should we approach that role? I have no brilliant answers just yet, but if you catch me clumsily hauling a book, a poster, and a Machu Picchu model out of my basement classroom in a few weeks, at least you’ll know what I’ll be mulling over.

pedagogy; assignment prompts; objects

On Making Your Class Mad: Some Pros and Cons

Meredith Coffey — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 20:35:05 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

Plashing Vole

There’s nothing quite like having twenty-one angry people gathered in a small windowless room—especially when they’re all angry at you. Now I know to expect (and to look forward to!) just such a class day when I teach Jamaica Kincaid’s 1988 essay A Small Place.

When I initially planned the syllabus for my course, Rhetoric of Tourism, I included Kincaid’s text for remarkably straightforward reasons: it makes an argument about tourism; it deploys a number of different rhetorical strategies to make its argument; and it influenced me tremendously when I first read it for an undergraduate class. And from the beginning, I knew that A Small Place would trigger a strong reaction from my students. The essay opens by critiquing tourists in Antigua, calling them “ugly,” “stupid,” “pastrylike-fleshed,” and so forth; it goes on to draw connections between the colonization of Antigua and the contemporary tourism industry.

In teaching A Small Place, however, I’ve been struck both by the degree of emotion it has provoked in my students, and the differences in their reactions each semester. Last fall, (most of) my students were genuinely offended by Kincaid’s argument. Substantial portions of the text use the second person voice, identifying the reader herself as the “ugly” tourist. Many students either became angry at the text’s accusations (“But I’m not like that! She can’t assume!”) or ashamed (“This makes me never want to travel again!”).

From a pedagogical point of view, there were some real benefits to these responses. We could discuss tone (would the argument have been more effective if it had been gentler on its audience?), distinguish types of appeals (they were all on board with her reasons, but the emotional appeals overwhelmed many students), delve into a nuanced ethos analysis (as an Antiguan, Kincaid is credible, but she seems to have little regard for her audience), etc. At the same time, however, their strong feelings also created obstacles. Some students did not want to finish reading the essay, for example, while others insistently attempted snarky, defensive commentary throughout the class discussion.

Following that experience, I still felt that the pros of teaching A Small Place outweighed the cons, so I included it again on my spring syllabus. To my surprise, however, my second group of students was far less upset by the essay. “She makes a lot of good points,” they said, and, “If I were in her position, I would probably feel the same way.” Despite their less hostile initial reactions, our subsequent discussion annoyed this class in a different way.

After a brief opening discussion, I asked the students to create a single sentence that summed up Kincaid’s main thesis in the essay. (I had my previous class do the same, but I had been much less intent on getting them to cut their ideas down to a single sentence.) They brainstormed as a class, and then I broke them into small groups to construct thesis statements. I gathered their proposed sentences, posted them at the front of the room, and asked them all to vote on which group’s thesis statement most effectively conveyed Kincaid’s argument. I also said that they could revise particular words or phrases within the four or five suggested candidates for “best sum-up of Kincaid’s thesis.” I imagined that this exercise would take twenty minutes at most.

Instead, it took about an hour, and the class was still far from satisfied with the “final” thesis statement. There were definitely some productive aspects of this apparently maddening exercise: students were forced to boil down a lengthy and nuanced argument into a concise sum-up, and the contrasts among the groups’ proposed sentences sparked a thoughtful sub-conversation. (The students’ debate over whether Kincaid’s argument focuses on “tourists” or “tourism,” for instance, was a high point.) That said, the exercise was deeply frustrating for many students; by the end, some were too tired of the activity to care anymore, while others could not stop tweaking the sentence by questioning word choices and orders, which led to some minor bickering.

All this is to say that I’ve used the same text to make two different classes angry in two different ways, and despite some small setbacks, I believe it’s been worth it. Sometimes students’ anger or annoyance isn’t productive, like when they are too wrapped up in their emotional reactions to follow the assigned reading, or when they snap at each other over a verb tense choice. That said, having students cope with demanding material forced them to confront emotional hurdles, difficulties with information synthesis, and other important personal and academic challenges. Moreover, these endeavors—I like to think—also helped them to grow together as a class. I suspect that intentionally making a class mad isn’t for everyone, and it certainly shouldn’t be a weekly activity. But it’s at least worth trying.

Confessions of a Teacher with Bias

Meredith Coffey — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 20:00:06 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

alexmuse

I spent a great deal of my first year teaching Rhetoric—last year—discussing bias with my students. Time after time, I reminded them: everything you’ll read has some kind of bias, but that’s okay, because bias isn’t inherently a bad thing. Though it is, I pointed out, a thing you’ll need to take into account.

And yet, all the while, the desire to hide my own bias held tremendous sway over how I presented myself as a teacher. Around the time I began graduate school, a politically conservative friend had confessed that she had been miserable in college, in no small part due to her discomfort in political science classes at our predominantly liberal institution. In those settings, she explained, professors often declared their political attitudes in a way that alienated the few students who held other positions. Her experiences of classroom anxiety worried me; I certainly didn’t want my own students to feel uncomfortable voicing their views in class, or even worse, to suspect that I might discriminate against them! To combat this risk, I determined that the easiest fix would be to avoid revealing my political, social, and other potentially controversial beliefs.

Naïve though it may seem, this strategy seemed doable enough at first. Even when I showed clips from the 2012 presidential debates, my students readily took to arguing over which rhetorical fallacies fell flat and which were effective; they picked apart statements by all candidates with equal zeal. I bit my tongue a few times during class discussion, but for the most part I felt like I was right on track with my “neutrality.” (I was surprised to learn that they didn’t make assumptions about my beliefs based on my affiliation with a humanities department. I was even a little proud when several of them mentioned that they had no idea which presidential candidate would be getting my vote.)

Eventually, however, I began to find myself struggling with the ethics of staying so consistently silent. In the interest of student confidence, I won’t recount the specifics of my turning point here. Suffice it to say that, in a class presentation, a student took a particular stance on a controversial issue—a position s/he earnestly defended, and by no means an unusual one—but nonetheless a stance that I found deeply morally troubling. Not wanting to shame the student, and still afraid to expose my own political leanings, I offered a weak counterpoint and mostly let it go. Class discussion moved on.

As soon as I walked out of the classroom, I knew my reaction had been absolutely wrong: ethically, pedagogically, personally wrong. Almost a year later, I still regret that I didn’t enable a “teachable moment”—worse, that I chose to hope that students with whom I profoundly disagreed would feel at ease, while in the same breath I effectively cast aside concern for students with whom I profoundly agreed. As any student of Rhetoric would have guessed, my effort to create a mask to hide my bias had resulted in a mask that instead suggested I had an entirely different bias. I realized more fully what I’d been telling my students all along: the fact that I come into the classroom with bias doesn’t necessarily make me a bad source. And in this case, I very strongly felt that working with, rather than against, my own bias would have made me a better teacher.

Clearly, I had to change tracks. I spent a semester halfheartedly trying to keep any remotely sensitive topics out of class discussion, which was certainly less interesting, but I don’t deny that it required me to make fewer tough decisions.

This year, though, I’m teaching Rhetoric of Tourism, so I knew I couldn’t—and genuinely wouldn’t want to—avoid all such questions. My students are writing about cultural authenticity, the distribution of labor within the tourism industry, travel to Cuba, and all other sorts of politically sensitive, but absolutely important, problems in tourism. So I’m trying a new approach. At the beginning of the semester, amidst all the other disclaimers (no late work, three tardies count as one absence), I told my students that I planned to offer my own point of view when I felt it was important, but that they should always feel safe and encouraged to express their own takes (so long as they remained respectful!). I didn’t tell them which presidential candidate I voted for last year, but unlike my Fall 2012 students, I bet most of this group can guess. I haven’t yet seen my new strategy through to the end of the term, but I’m hopeful. And I remind myself that my students are well aware that I, like anyone else, can’t eliminate my bias altogether. After all, if they weren’t aware, I’d hardly be doing my job.