Cole Wehrle's blog

Truth Baiting

Cole Wehrle — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 20:03:34 +0000

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Cole Wehrle

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Wikipedia

Earlier this semester I wrote a post which ruminated on the pedagogic possibilities of Google Docs. I’ve been experimenting with the platform for about a year now and have found the possibilities vast but the actual activities mostly chaotic. Of course, classrooms need a little chaos, and it’s often an environment worth courting. (For more on that first experience, you can check out my earlier post here).

A couple of weeks ago I decide to revisit that activity and think of new ways to use the tremendous energy and creativity that the last collaborative writing exercise fostered. First I thought it was important to not take that wonderful, disorderly session for granted. What had, exactly, produced that much energy? It seemed like a mistake to attribute it to the software. Google Docs can be plenty chaotic but I think it was mainly a result of two other things: a goal and a time limit.

To review: students were asked to break into groups and then produce a research summary of a short video within the space of one class period. Whatever they had at the end of the 75 minute class period would be turned in to me. I would not take late papers. Groups used a single Google Docs file to monitor each other’s progress and hammer out the final document. This public platform allowed them to correct one another and ask me questions about both style and content as they appeared. The result was nearly unmanageable chaos that was nonetheless extremely productive. Because of the finite time limit and simple goal, students focused their attention on the task at hand. The collaboration software was incidental. Indeed, I imagine the activity could have worked with pen and paper, but doing it on the computer made it easier for them to communicate with one another and allowed the activity to get closer to their writing practice.

The assignment was partly an outgrowth of my interest in reverse classrooms and the possibility of adapting the principle to writing instruction. I wondered what would happen if they were to take on a more complicated (even multi-day) assignment.

More complicated assignments presented a double threat to the two attributes that allowed the assignment to be effective in the first place. They muddied the simplicity of the assignment’s goal and also distorted the time limit. The second concern is a big one. Immediacy is a hard thing for anyone to wrap their head around. If I gave them two class sessions to do an assignment, the students would just Candy Crush away the first day and then work extra hard the second. I’d probably do the same myself. As interested as I was in solving the time issue, I decided to tackle one thing at a time and take a look at giving the students a more complicated goal.

Complicated goals are a tricky thing when designing activities because they can distract participants from learning the necessary skills and instead focus on the evaluative framework. There is a reason why the goal of most sports boils down to “get more points” or “shove this thing into that space.” The best games allow their complexity to emerge organically. This is an especially important thing to remember in teaching writing. The goal is often to develop and communicate an argument clearly. Everything else is at the service of that goal. That’s not to say that writing is a simple task, but it’s important that the objective stay simple. When players first learn chess they are told that the goal is to capture the opponent’s King. Teachers would be advised to save the conversation about exchanges, initiative, traps, board development and the importance of central positions for the next lecture.

I needed a good goal and one that would foster complications without exhausting my students in minutia. As the students were preparing to write their annotated bibliographies, I decided to build an activity around that assignment. Anyone who has had to grade a stack of annotated bibliographies knows, however, that they can be a bit dull. They seemed like a poor motivation for a classroom activity that I wanted to be brimming with energy and creativity. So, I decided to supply some stakes to the assignment. “Suppose,” I told my students, “You work for a US charity that is looking into the Ukraine and is considering giving aid to either Putin or the Ukraine government. Which do you give to?” The students then had about an hour to produce an annotated bibliography that ended with a policy recommendation. The assignment (5 sources and a recommendation) would need to be turned in by the end of class.

None of my students study geopolitics, but they have become astute readers and were certainly up to the task. Arguments broke out constantly and opinions differed, but the result was almost always a sharpening of a proposal or annotation. It also allowed them a space to ask me questions about annotations and research overviews as they encountered their problems. When a group ran into a big problem I had them share the document with me and I put it up on the projector and helped them work through the issue. It made for an exhausting class period but at the end I had a stack of interesting annotated bibliographies and the students had a sense of how their research skills could be applied to the murky realities of the real world.

It’s worth noting that they earnestly believed that there was one answer to the problem. I encouraged them to think in this way because it made them work all the harder to get to the bottom of things. Of course this isn’t the case, but it’s an important illusion to maintain when one is researching. The goals should stay simple, even if the reality complicates things.

Serious Games

Cole Wehrle — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:58:26 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

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Ricardo Christe Homsi

Last year I wrote a blog entry on games in the classroom. The general guist of the piece went something like this: teaching practices, especially the implementation of classroom games, seems to have stalled since the fast and loose days of Hangman and other such earth shattering innovations. This is all especially odd because games, as a field of thought, are undergoing something of a renaissance right now—and I’m not just talking about narrative advances and new, more immersive interfaces. No, I’m referring instead to a new, deeper awareness of what it is to be a player and how players relate to each other in a game space. This development has been going on for nearly 30 years, but has only recently started to make its way into anything approaching the main stream. And, better yet, many of the most critical advances in thought don’t require fancy visualizations to challenge their players. Most of these game spaces (and their educational properties) could be easily created in a physical space with just a few props. And yet, in classrooms everywhere we might as well be playing the same classroom games that our grandparents played. This seems a little sad. So, as I set out to revise my 309 class over winter break, I decided to build a space for a game. My class covers (well, “touches on”) the Rhetoric of Independence. It starts with a look at some basic tenets of philosophy and economics and moves through case studies which consider the founding Documents of the United States, the Civil War, the early muckraking journalists and right on through the marketing of the “indie” concept and the success of the crowd funding platform, Kickstarter.

This semester I altered my syllabus to include an extended discussion of debt and financial and economic dependency, and I wanted to find a way for students to get a hands-on understanding of some of the issue’s complexity. Since many games have their origins in economic game theory, it seemed like an appropriate place to look. And after investigating a few options, I decided to adapt Stefan Dorra’s cruel and unusual game, Intrigue.

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Intrigue was originally published as a card game 1994. In it players take the roll of princely Italian families who attempt to farm out their family members to various lucrative positions and secure the most cash by the end of the game. It’s a curious game for many reasons, but perhaps chiefly because the players directly control the flow of money into the game—with the small caveat that they cannot give it to themselves. In other words, Intrigue is a game about gift giving. Its play generates a strange dance of obligations as negotiations that get more baroque with each passing turn.

However, the game itself wouldn't work in a classroom. For one, it would require me to find four or five copies of the game and would likely take too long to teach and moderate each group. So instead I decided to “blow up” the game. Rather than having players manage a little “family” of playing pieces, separated the players into families and had them act out the game as if it was a life-sized chess board. I made various labels for the different players and reshaped the class room to resemble the board. Now, a move like this might push the exercise a step too close to role-playing for my comfort. I wanted to maintain the game’s integrity so we spent a lot of time discussing strategy and I reminded the players that they needed to work as a team even if the game’s play would scatter the players around the classroom. After spending nearly half the class describing the rules and basic strategy we were ready to begin.

At first the class plunged into chaos. This was expected (as any classroom exercise where all 22 students are actively involved will generally produce a lot of noise and confusion), but soon the players became to organize themselves, almost without my intervention. Though the rules of the game are spartan, by the end an elaborate protocol had emerged, with the players inventing a whole system of rules organically. For instance, when negotiations would transpire between two parties, they would huddle and whisper so the other teams couldn’t interfere. One placed in their position, it was customary for the students to excuse themselves from any further discussions, and though I explicitly told them they were welcome to confer with their entire team. The students seemed to be developing an awareness of the impact of obligation and the limits of their own position’s independence.

Collaboration and Chaos

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 16:46:08 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

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Cole Wehrle

As long as I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in one of the DWRL class rooms I’ve flirted with the idea of using Google Docs in a classroom setting. In-class writing assignments are certainly nothing new, but Google Docs made it possible to transform what was a space for quiet reflection into one that demanded open collaboration.

At least, it was theoretically possible. While useful for all kinds of list-making and brainstorming, the promise of Google Docs, as a productive space for real-time collaboration seems largely illusory. As anyone who has ever tried to write a CFP at the same time knows, what results is mostly frustration and confusion. It might be easier to have everyone shouting over a laptop.

So I tabled the idea until, a few weeks ago, I found myself reading about the idea of the “flipped-classroom,” which had become the pedagogical-tactic-of-the-month and was generating lots of buzz on various blogs and op-ed pages. For those who missed the wave (or have yet to catch it), the idea is simple and counterintuitive. Teachers, usually working in small groups, record all of the classroom lectures and send them to students so they can stream them at home. Then, when the students come to class the next day, the teacher will help them with their homework. This has been applied to subjects as diverse as algebra and American history, and many teachers are finding that the “flipped-classroom” has allowed them to tailor their class to the needs of individual students without sacrificing content.

I was intrigued by the concept but was unsure how to apply it to a writing class. When I was a journalism student we routinely had to produce short articles in the space of a 75 minute lab class, but it was a demanding experience and seemed unfair to give it to students in a basic writing class. About that time I realized that Google Docs might provide the answer. If it was too much to ask a single student to produce a research summary in a 75 minute class, perhaps it was somewhat more reasonable to ask it of a group.

Before the class I asked my students to look over two sample research summaries, one very good and the other very bad. Then, during the next class period we began by coming up with two lists of what qualities made the good research summary good and the bad example bad. I then played a short video, passed out a transcript, and asked each group of 3-4 students to produce a good research summary using Google Docs on that video. After a few minutes, when they had set everything up, I casually mentioned that they had to turn it in by the end of class. No late assignments would be accepted.

Panic ensued, complaints were levied, but, after they realized that this was not a point for compromise, they began dividing the work and approaching their job systematically. The activity had forced them all into the 11^th hour crunch, but this time both their classmates and I were on-hand to help. Over the next 45 minutes the students bombarded me with concise, earnest questions about phrasing and grammar while helping each other frame and format their citations. By the end of the class every single group had produced a finished research summary and it was likely the best batch of short papers I’ve ever received.

I’m not sure how to apply the activity to a longer paper, but it certainly seems like an avenue worth exploring.

Thank You, Mr. Putin

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

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Cole Wehrle

When I talk to fellow teachers about students in Rhetoric 306, the complaint is curiously uniform: students struggle with limiting their engagement with a source to the level of rhetoric. Though the distinction between a particular argument and the subject of that argument can seem perfectly clear to teachers in the field, it’s a divide that continues to puzzle students, sometimes deep into a semester. I think the problem owes quite a bit to the structural design of most rhetoric classes, which initially emphasize summary and other descriptive modes over analysis: hey teach students to map then, shortly after ask them to hypothesize.

This semester, while teaching my 309: The Rhetoric of Independence, I opted for a somewhat different approach. Because many of the students in 309 have tested out of the department’s Introduction to Rhetoric course, I wanted to be sure to provide all of the students with a basic background and vocabulary in the discipline before we moved on to our particular subject. In order to do this I designed a heavily abridged version of that introductory class which fit into two 75-minute classes. Of course, two class periods can hardly equal the scope and depth of 306. Nevertheless, collapsing 306 into such a small space allowed me to experiment.

My first decision was easy. Instead of moving from summary to analysis I would instead begin by glossing over the critical vocabulary (ethos, pathos, logos, etc) used in analysis and then move into their argumentation around their subject’s rhetoric. We spent some time applying this vocabulary in a variety of exercises which asked students to engage deeply with advertisements (both political and commercial). After about 45 minutes the students had a pretty good sense of what to look for and we moved on to the second step. Here I began with a simple conceit. After watching a Romney political add I announced to my students, “One rhetorical function is more critical than all the others.” I then divided them into groups and had them work on figuring out which was the “correct” element. Then, as the groups presented their findings, I put them in conversation with the discordant opinions of their classmates and allowed space for rebuttal. By the close of the second day of classes, just about everyone had a strong sense of the elements of a work that were “fair game” and how to build an argument around those elements.

Still, they had yet to put it into writing, and I was unsure what text I should assign them. I knew I wanted it to be a print source. Though videos, photographs, and print advertisements teach easily, they engage with a different subset of skills that can leave a student off-balance when he or she encounters a knotty print source.

And then I read Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times (which can be found here). With all the art of a first-year rhetoric student, Putin drowns his audience in panoply of argumentative ploys. There is almost too much fodder to wade through, and, what’s more, it’s rendered in a crisp style that hardly makes it beyond its 2^nd page.

What’s more, the ongoing crisis in Syria is so confounding, morally ambiguous (and frustrating) that forcing students to anchor their arguments at the level are argumentation comes as relief. “Don’t worry guys,” I told them at the end of class, “you don’t need solve the problem on the ground, just on the page.”

Social Writing: Done with the One-on-One

Cole Wehrle — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

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Photo by Corand Poirier via Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (reference #P48,S1,P23104)

It’s been a few months since we had Criterion co-founder and innovator extraordinaire, Bob Stein, on campus, and since his visit I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the things he had the say. For those of you who missed it, Stein was showcasing a few new projects related to the future of the book, centered on the idea of social reading (you can hear Zeugma’s great interview with him here. Essentially, he argued that our understanding of reading is stuck in the 19-century and that technology has opened up new avenues for all kinds of new reading practices that could transform education. He wasn’t just talking about distribution modes like ebooks either. Instead, he was suggesting ways in which the book could be read and discussed community: discussions would flow beyond the classroom and a student would never have to face a difficult text alone. While, the technology that enables this kind of seamless discussion isn’t quite ready yet, I’ve been thinking about the concepts behind Stein’s idea. How did it apply to my teaching practice? Were there ways in which I could test some of these notions out in a first-year rhetoric and writing course (RHE 306)?

My first thought was writing itself. In 306 I spend a lot of time talking to students about their experience typing. It never takes long for the horror stories to come out: the all-nighters, the embarrassing typos, the misunderstood prompts, and, perhaps above all, the terrible blank page, ticking clock, and languishing page requirement. Of course, all of these problems are “student problems” and, though the isolation of writing is critical to its mastery, there are also ways in which the structure of 306 feeds into its less-than-welcoming appearance. In most courses a student’s work is a private affair, graded under cover of night (well, for most of us) and then discussed with hushed voices in tiny cubicles. But maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. This spring I began instituting formal writing groups in my 306. I borrowed this from my experience in Journalism School. Instead of one-on-ones, I decided to block longer meetings with small groups of between four and five students. Every student would have to read all of the other papers in their group and be prepared to share a comment on their writing. Praise doesn’t count. This sounds a little mean, but it’s not hard to keep it in the spirit of good fun. There’s a bad writer in all of us and the best way to root him out is to acknowledge his existence. I usually started meetings by finding terrible sentences that I had written in my own undergraduate papers. We would laugh together and then diligently pick apart the writing. Then, one student at a time, we would look at awkwardly phrased sentences, silly typos, and all kinds of convoluted language with that same care. At first this can be a little off-putting, but the slight embarrassment and knowledge that other people, your peers, will be reading your work, can be a very helpful motivator, and its not hard to keep things light-hearted when you have that much material. These meetings have proven so useful that I began to work them into the in-class peer-review workshops and my grading methods. On a recent paper I decided that instead of providing any marginal comments I would write each student a letter about their work, offering general instructions for improvement but without any specific prescription. Then, in the peer workshop I sat my students in a large circle and instructed them to take out an extra copy of their paper. Some students had expressed anxieties about their own proofreading, so I decided to help them defamiliarize their own writing. We began a “rapid line edit.” I had each student pass their paper to the person on their left then check for one thing about the paper. On the first pass they circled every main verb (and emphasized weak verbs with sad faces or extra circles). On the second pass they found the longest sentence and the shortest sentence in the paper. On the next pass they looked for thesis statements, then topic sentences, then transitions, et cetera. In each case classroom discussion flowed naturally from the exercise and, perhaps because of the open environment that we had built in our small meetings, students seemed comfortable asking questions like “What exactly is a main verb?” or “What is the difference between a Topic Sentence and a Thesis?”. And, as I clarified my terms and taught short lessons on grammar students cheerfully volunteered broken and beautiful passages alike. At the end of class I handed back my letters to each student with their grade and they went home with my comments, and a copy of their paper filled with all kinds of zany marginalia that could guide their revisions.

Incentives, Focus, and Games

Cole Wehrle — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 18:47:47 +0000

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

Hatdow

Most teachers who allow laptops in the classroom regret their choice shortly afterwards. Though students are always initially thankful and attentive, soon their eyes begin to wander to the screen. At first they play little games. Maybe they can have both MSWord and Wikipedia open at the same time, but maybe teacher will notice all that clicking and dragging so the reorganization goes unfinished and their browser sits blank, right next to whatever notes they are trying to compose. It’s not long before they start wondering if you will notice them. They begin a regular oscillation between empty looks towards the front of the class and quick glances back to their screens. After a few minutes of this their confidence builds. Slowly, with all the guile of a child stealing a cookie, they type in the f-a-c-e-b—that will launch them into a social-media stupor.

Such events are the grist for the mill of recreational teacher commiseration. The students are both brazen and listless—empty heads, somehow overstuffed with tripe. In talking to my peers, there seem to be only two solutions: either you implement an outright ban or vigilantly maintain surveillance state to shame them from their screens.

Of course, both solutions fail to really solve the problem. At their heart they are only treating the symptoms of a larger disengagement. In order to begin to solve problems of inattention, teachers must first address some uncomfortable questions. Why exactly do students want to fritter away their precious class time on Farmville, facebook, or ESPN.com? What do these resources provide that I, as the teacher, lack? The most common answer usually has something to do with the laziness of students and various cultures of disengagement and irresponsibility (i.e. “kids these days!”). However that line of thinking dismisses the considerable accomplishments of sites like ESPN.com, Facbook, and yes, Farmville.

After a summer of self-exile in the world of high school teaching, the answer to this question became immediately apparent. The vast majority of students in rhetoric and English classes arrive at the University of Texas fresh from their experience in high school. For many of these students, the rigor of a 30 hour high school course load all but precludes open disengagement. That’s not to say high school students don’t waste time, only that their engagement within class is heightened. There is simply more at stake. Thanks to college admissions and brow-beating parents, grades have serious consequences. Accordingly the students are placed into a tight information loop. Unlike the two or three meetings of a weekly college course, in high school their performance is constantly evaluated, and it’s not uncommon, especially in math and science classes, to receive grades daily.

These may be obvious observations, but they create a considerably underappreciated environment. Secondary school courses establish a culture of almost constant evaluation and considerable incentives. In some ways it’s not unlike the world they view on a Facebook news feed. The information is oriented around their position in their social sphere and contains constant feedback for every input. Of course, few would argue that the average status update carries the same importance as an algebra test, and it even seems a little silly to compare the two. Nevertheless, the unity in focus that might be directed towards alegrbra and Facebook reveal and important truth: the size of an incentive doesn’t matter; it’s the presence that commands focus, and it in this respect that the design principals of games demand our attention.

On Fridays, after a week of rigorous test preparation I would often reward my high school students with a day of classroom games. At first, in order to get them in the mood for something childish, I offered a range of incentives: homework passes, quiz boasts, participation points. At first I was elated by the response. A majority of the students seemed to genuinely become interested in the classroom activities. I even watched a student reprimand a fellow student for lollygagging on their cell phone during the competition. However, involvement was not uniform. By-and-large, the most active participants were the students who desired the “prize.” This led me to a new tactic. Instead of designing complicated and seductive prizes, I thought I would dream up more interesting games and keep the “prizes” either within the game or disregard them entirely. For instance, on one occasion I happened to draw each team a mascot on the board. As each team won points I would offer their team’s mascot various props (a top hat, a motorcycle, et cetera) to indicate who had won the round. Though first offered as a joke, the students became highly competitive over the virtual bling and kids who had little interest in the material immediately became engaged. By keeping the prizes within the space of the game, the students could allow themselves to become unplugged and focus just at the task at hand.