Blogging Pedagogy - presentations

How to Outsource Your Grading and Look (and Feel) Good Doing It

Beck Wise — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 22:09:43 +0000

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Image Credit:

"Crowdsurfing at the Tocotronic show". Photo: daspunkt.

Or, The Power of Crowdsourcing Assessment.

Like a lot of instructors at UT, I have required presentations in my classes and over the years, these presentations have taken a lot of different forms, from three solid days of argumentative presentations to close out the semester in my first-year writing class, to having students introduce a critical section of the text and lead discussion in my current literature class. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is the way I assess presentations. Which is to say: I don't.

This isn't to say that presentations aren't assessed, though. Whether course grades are determined by the instructor, in the traditional mode, or argued for by students in the Learning Record, I consider it critical that students receive concrete feedback on their various achievements within their presentations -- and further, that this feedback come from more than just the instructor.

Peer review for writing assignments gives students the opportunity to receive criticism and guidance from others in the class as they move through their writing process towards complete drafts, but it's tough to think of an equivalent opportunity for presentations. While you do write and rewrite in preparation, the nature of a classroom speech is essentially one and done. It's rare for students to present more than once in any single time-strapped college course, and there's certainly no way to revise and resubmit! The best a student can hope for is substantive feedback on their presentation that's specific to that class but generic enough to apply to the presentations they'll have to make later in their careers.

However, you can bring in more voices through peer assessment. Whenever I require presentations of my students, I also require that they provide feedback to each of their peers and that they record the grade the speaker has earnt. The grade isn't the important bit, so I won't spend time here on the various ways I've handled those in the past. But receiving written feedback from 20 or so peers on a single piece of work is the single most effective way I've found of letting students self-identify things to work on. Instead of yet another professor insisting that they speak slower, they get 15 classmates noting that the speed of the presentation made it tough to understand: they see the pattern and can act accordingly. In addition, students gain practice listening critically and assessing performance--and they tend to like the idea that their comments and assessments matter.

I can't deal with reams of paper anymore, so instead of handing out paper comment cards or the like, I use Google Forms to administer these presentation assessments, using the computers in my current networked classroom or, in non-digital spaces, having students bring their own devices and having a few paper worksheets on hand for those who don't have or prefer not to use web-capable tech in class. Google Forms--online questionaires whose responses automatically populate a spreadsheet on your Google Drive--have several affordances that make them well-suited to this kind of exercise:

Students can fill them in anonymously, with no sign-in required (or the possibility that their handwriting will be recognised by their peer), but I can still ask them to self-identify alongside their feedback; this lets me monitor the process to ensure that everyone is participating fully and seriously, and helps make sure the process doesn't further prove the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
You can set up questions with a variety of answer types, from multiple choice (with one or more possible answers) to checkboxes to short open responses to paragraphs to drop-downs. I use short answer questions to collect the presenter's and reviewer's names, multiple choice questions to assess the specific goals of the presentation ("Did the presenter clearly identify important features of their excerpt?" "Yes" - "Sometimes / kind of" - "No"), an open paragraph box for detailed feedback, and a final multiple choice question for the assessed grade. You can also select which questions are compulsory
You can copy and paste the detailed feedback straight from that column in the spreadsheet into another document to be provided to the student--it's quick and painless
You can embed the form into your class website for easy access; if you don't have one, a URL shortener will be your friend

I was tempted, in composing this blog post, to title it 'Many Hands'--but as we all know, many hands can as easily make a big damn mess as they can make light work. And having students offer peer feedback doesn't abnegate your responsibility as an instructor to offer feedback--the document I give students after presentations includes an average two pages of peer feedback plus a paragraph or two of my own comments, of the length I would give even without peer feedback. (This semester I'm also including graphs of the responses to the multiple-choice questions.) This process in no way saves me time--but by automating the process in this way, it adds maybe a minute to the time I spend writing feedback, while ensuring my students get far more information about their performance. That's a trade-off I can get behind.

On the Virtues of Student Presentations

Jay Voss — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:47:17 +0000

Author:

Jay Voss

Image Credit:

Alexander Raths via The Atlantic

I currently teach Banned Books and Novel Ideas here at the University of Texas, a required course that is intended for undergraduates just commencing work in the major. The reading on my syllabus tends toward Slavic texts, namely various selections from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov. Such texts are challenging for students – both in terms of my students’ ability to decode the layers of irony spouted off by such characters as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and also in terms of the way these works often spotlight regional pride and arrogance. Imperial Russia, after all, has a phenomenal number of things in common with twenty-first century Texas, but digressing on this point is fit for another venue. The best way I’ve found to make these challenges most accessible to my students is to require each student to introduce class discussion one day each semester.

Perhaps the grandest recommendation this system offers is that it automatically insures that each student has an opportunity to voice his or her own interpretive concerns. Students in my class are allotted however much time they need to introduce the text – I suggest something in the ballpark of 10-15 minutes in my syllabus, but these presentations often go much longer. I merely require that individual students “introduce” the previous night’s reading. Students are subsequently free to go about this in any way they deem fit. Their burden of having to think about introducing material – without really any directing on my part – forces students to think about the text thoroughly and in ways that are important to themselves. Each semester, several students inevitably decide to ask their peers a list of questions. Others, however, have opted to show video, present a close reading of a text, or share personal information that illuminates the text and ultimately fosters class cohesion. Students like the system because they feel they’re in control of discussion. Which, if literature is valuable because it enhances our empathy, including everyone’s perspective in discussion is most necessary.

But, you might ask, how do I ensure that my own pedagogical imperatives are brought to the fore each and every day in class? Well, I’m always subtly directing conversation towards the precise things that I want to talk about, and if there’s ever a moment that needs and clarification or interpolation, I make sure we stop and muse over that particular moment. Maybe I ask my students a question about whatever text we’re reading in order to get them thinking in the directions that I think are important. Students are much smarter than we often give them credit for. If given a complicated text, as a group they will almost always be able to identify most of the important moments that deserve closer attention and “interpretive pressure” (to use a trendy phrase). All they often need is someone who can make sure that their reasoning is logically sound. In my own teaching, it has proved immensely valuable to discover a way to provide each student with just such an opportunity in class.

Oral Presentation by Peers

Coulson — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Doug Coulson

Image Credit:

Jbrazito's Photostream

I’m teaching an upper-division rhetorical theory course about legal rhetoric that requires students to write a 2,500-4,000 word research paper in which they rhetorically analyze two or more opposing arguments regarding an evidentiary controversy in a forensic dispute (typically this will be a trial or similar proceeding), and critique or extend a particular theory of forensic rhetoric as it applies to the rhetorical analysis they provide. This is a staged writing assignment that begins about a thirdd of the way through the semester and is concluded at the end of the semester. During the second half of the semester, I have students deliver oral presentations on the papers in progress.

This semester, rather than have students present their own papers to the class, I've paired them with a peer and asked each to present the other's paper instead. The detais of this exercise may be found here. After participating in such a peer presentation format myself at a professional workshop, I became convinced that such a format could facilitate a deeper level of peer review and collaborative learning as well as facilitate classroom discussion regarding the writing process in undergraduate and graduate student environments as well. No classroom technology is required for this assignment, although a media consolae/projector facilitates students who want to use technology in their presentations.

The assignment requires students to deliver an 8-12 minute oral presentation to the class (1) restating their peer’s paper, (2) identifying the conversation in which their peer’s paper is situated, and (2) offering constructive feedback or questions regarding their peer’s paper that might be helpful for the class to discuss to assist the author. Their peer in turn delivers a presentation regarding their paper. After each presentation, a brief Q&A period is permitted for the class to discuss the paper and ask the author questions if desired. The author may respond to questions during this period, but otherwise the author is discouraged from intervening to explain their work during the presentation but encouraged instead simply listen to the restatement and commentary offered by the presenter and the class. Part of the pedagogical value of the assignment is to liberate the author from the defensiveness that often accompanies presenting their own work and allow them to carefully listen to their peers' interpretations and comments on their work.

Students are encouraged to approach the presentations as writer sharing a peer’s work with fellow writers and to not be overly formal. The presentations are required to follow a formal outline, contain the content called for by the protocol below and be in the order set forth in the protocol, and be delivered within the stated time limits. When the time limit is up, the presentation is stopped. Students are allowed but not required to use audio-visual materials during their presentations as long as they’re not used to substitute for extemporaneous commentary.

The protocol I provide to students as an arrangement device is to spend the first 4-6 minutes describing the paper and identifying its central arguments and contributions. What appears to be the central question that the paper seeks to address? How would the presenter state the author’s central argument or thesis? How does the author develop the paper? In what debates or discussions does the paper situate itself? What does the author contribute to the conversation the paper engages? The presenter is then asked to spend a couple of minutes identifying the evidence and methods the author uses to support the claims made. Finally, the presenter is asked to conclude with 2-6 minutes of constructive feedback identifying one or two broad areas in which the paper might be improved and raising issues for the group to discuss to assist the author.

The assignment is graded based primarily on the basis of completion, contingent only on the students meeting the minimum requirements that the presentation follow a formal outline, contain the content called for by the protocol and in the order set forth in the protocol, and be delivered within the stated time limits.

Students have reported some anxiety both as author and as presenter of a peer's paper, particularly regarding losing control of the presentation and not being in a position to defend their work as author or mischaracterizing their peer's work as presenter. My experience is that students take the presentations more seriously when presenting a peer's work than when presenting their own, however, and in some ways experience less anxiety because they don't have to defend their work. They also appear to value the experience of hearing a peer restate their paper's content. Requiring them to read a peer's paper in sufficient depth to deliver a presentation regarding it has also proved educational about the writing process.

All in all I've been impressed with the results of peer presentations as opposed to author presentations of student work in the classroom. It offers presentations with some perspective for the benefit of the class and offers student authors a much deeper experience of peer review of their work while liberating them to carefully listen to how a peer is reading and interpreting their writing. It also challenges presenters to develop their skills of offering metacritical commentary for a larger audience. Students have approached the assignment with great care and discipline, and I expect the format contributes to this improved presentation ethic over author presentations.

The Pedagogy of LOL

Hala Herbly — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:00:23 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

Cheezburger

Like most writing teachers, I like incorporating informal writing assignments into my class in order to make my students comfortable with writing casually and in the moment, without the the threat of a bad grade stifling their process. One way I've done this in my Banned Books class this semester is by requiring them to post a blog entry on the day's reading at least once during the semester. (The post is graded pass/fail, which also enables them to stretch the parameters of the assignment in any way they like.) This semester, the blogging assignment has created some interesting, and I think helpful, resonances between our material and popular culture.

I should add here that even though I believe that informal writing assignments are important, I also take care to reiterate to my class that the informality of the blogging assignment doesn't carry over into their midterm, final, and assorted short papers. These I grade pretty strictly. That's why I like the blog so much--it provides what I think is a needed counterpoint to the finality of the writing assignments. Writing doesn't always have to be fraught with anxiety.

That said, the blog posts also allow my students to incorporate other kinds of media into their thoughts on the day's reading. The assignment asks them to write a post before class summarizing the day's reading. In addition I also ask them to incorporate critical observations about the reading, connecting it to themes we've already covered, or even to our other texts. They are also required to post three to five critically substantive discussion questions to guide the day's discussion. These questions can be conceptually or thematically oriented, or they can ask the class to pay special attention to a particular scene or passage in the reading, encouraging the class to perform, together, a close reading of the passage in question. The blog posts are assigned at the beginning of the semester, and it usually works out that there is one scheduled blog post per class day. This way, each student gets to lead discussion for one day during the semester--the day's blogger has to walk us through his or her post, and explain the discussion questions.

Since they are writing in blog format, I expect them to follow "blogging conventions," which for me includes incorporating other forms of media--mostly images--into the posts. It was about halfway through our reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau that I began to notice an interesting confluence between the reading and, in particular, the images that my students chose to use in their posts.

First, some background. As most of you probably know, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau is an early science fiction novel that dramatizes the horror of the proximity of our cruel animal natures. Dr. Moreau, an island-bound exiled vivisectionist, performs "experiments" on animals, attempting surgically to instill in them human physical and mental characteristics. The result is a grotesque menagerie of half-human, half-animal beings who both manifest the cruelty of their natures and inspire similar cruelty in their holders--Moreau and the two men who are trapped on the island with him. The idea, of course, is that it's unclear whether cruelty is inherently a human or animal instinct, and by the end of the novel we are left questioning the utility of the nominal boundary between "human" and "animal."

Here's where it gets interesting. The students assigned to blog about The Island of Dr. Moreau tended, apparently organically, to incorporate LOLcat images into their posts. Though the gesture is perhaps a bit flippant (an attitude that I don't frown upon in class, if it's in response to the content of a text--I take it as a sign of engagement) to me it suggested some kind of affinity between our cultural obsession with the comically illiterate cats and the horror of the just-barely human animals in the text. Below, a couple of examples of their images.

The first image refers to the twisted biblical allusions that the Beast-men make in their attempts to comprehend morality, and the second, whcih in our blog was captioned "A Drunken Beast," humorously reinterprets Moreau's epithet for his creations. Despite their levity, the lolcat images seemed weirdly appropriate for the text, and to me demonstrates that, even perhaps unconsciously, my students were processing the humanity/animality theme. Seen this way, their use of images suggests to me a sense of creative play with the ideas in the text, resulting in a digital archive of their personal, vernacular responses to the reading. I like to think of these posts as a collage of popular references around the complex themes in the text.

Their images were not always lolcat related. They also referenced other pop-culture phenomena, including body modification, plastic surgery, and cosplay. These images, some of which are rather shocking, emphasize the tenuousness of the human/animal divide. All depict people who, in some way, want to appear as animalistic or not human. Which led us to the question: what is the attraction of animality? In what ways can it be attractive, and in what ways can it be distasteful or even repellent?

The blog also allows them to insinuate their own political views into the post (though I don't generally tell them to do this). Below, an image in a post about The Handmaid's Tale. Needless to say these kinds of images tend to inspire interesting discussion.

At the very least, these images have led my class to make strong and unexpected connections to the popular culture they are immersed in, and allows them to make these connections in internet vernacular, in which they are very well versed. Indeed, this is a form of engagment that we teachers and writers often exhibit ourselves.

Bringing the Blog to the Classroom: Special-Topics Blogging and Presentations

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:58:16 +0000

Author:

Ty Alyea

Image Credit:

Matt Hurst

Since the beginning of my time instructing students in rhetoric and English courses, I have found that students are much more successful at communicating and developing their ideas when they become more aware that their writing is geared toward a concrete audience. I have also found that writing skills improve significantly when students learn to articulate their ideas in a variety of situations and formats. Finally, in talking with countless graduate students and professors about their own intellectual development, I have noticed a common refrain: teaching a topic is a crucial motivator and test for the mastery of a topic. In my "Special Topics Presentation and Blog Post"assignments, I have attempted to combine several of these values at once by requiring students to prepare the class for an upcoming discussion and take the reins for the first ten minutes of class. In doing so, the students write a blog post that provides an angle of entry into the day's reading and then make a presentation. In doing so, the students present an argument about the reading and follow up on their approach by asking questions which encourage the class to respond to their analysis, exploring how it relates to other parts of the reading selection.

In the first half of the semester, I emphasize the fact that texts can be read through a variety of critical lenses; for example, in light of its historical background, the text's formal qualities, or the text's mediation of cultural conflict. After walking them through some examples of these kinds of approaches, I encourage them to hone their own critical tendencies with an initial round of papers. Once these skills have been established, they refine their skills by preparing their peers for a segment of the assigned reading. In the week before the class presentations, I discuss the next week's reading with students who are preparing presentations. Over that week, we discuss the aspects of the reading that interest them most and I point out some resources that can help them pursue that approach further.

Two days before the class, they write a blog post which advances their main claims and sets the stage for the presentation that they will give on the material. The other students in the class are then notified of this and encouraged to take a look at the presentation topic. The setup for this presentation encourages students to make sure that they are, in fact, making an argument about the text that can be responded to. During the class period, they share their "way in" to the selected reading and explain its relevance to a passage or two from the reading. In doing so, presenters reframe their arguments to allow for more active discussion and conversation. Whereas a blog post invites students to respond to the substance of the analysis, many of the most successful presentations have been punctuated by moments where the discussion leader encouraged their peers to do short close reading exercises that are set up by the presentation.

So far, I have found that this assignment has produced some of the best discussion sections I have ever seen in action. I have also found that students who learn to respond to one another in this way become more effective at finding their own personal stakes in finding . Finally, no matter what profession they ultimately choose, I hope that assignment will help the students get ready to think of themselves as "teachers"--as masters of a skill, art, or craft that they can pass on to their friends and coworkers.

For more details about this assignment, please visit my detailed lesson plan here.

Teaching Ethos with No Impact Man

Rosen — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:32:11 +0000

Author:

Stephanie Rosen

Image Credit:

Jimmy Gardner

This semester I’ve had my students teach each other key terms and concepts in rhetoric during weekly student presentations. After each presentation, I plan an activity designed to put the concepts just learned into practice, often using a text I provide or one from their research projects. I designed one such activity on “Ethos in No Impact Man” with specific attention to problems former students have had with ethical appeals. Because many students wrote incomplete analyses of rhetorical appeals, I provided guided questions which elucidated three main parts of successful rhetorical analysis. Because some students misunderstood altogether the concept of rhetorical appeal, I put students in groups so that any major questions could be answered by a classmate. And because students sometimes struggled with texts that made less explicit rhetorical appeals, I provided a text which makes many obvious ethical appeals (so many that, although each group was only assigned a two-page excerpt, no group had trouble finding examples).

These activities are often a lively portion of our class meetings, so students were already enthused when they settled down to the task. I was pleased to find that groups worked well together and stayed focused for the ten minutes they were given. The guiding questions, plus the assignment to synthesize their findings in a few sentences, gave them plenty to do. Furthermore, the fact that their sentences would go on a wiki page being projected on a screen for all the class to see kept their writing at a high level.

The most interesting part of this exercise was the presentation at the end, in which each group read its findings aloud for the class. Because everyone was analyzing the ethos of the same author, hearing all the groups’ findings yielded a very thorough and complete sense of Beavan’s ethos in this chapter and the purpose that ethos serves for the arguments he makes in his book. Sharing our findings this way also showed students how they could build up a more sophisticated understanding of an author’s ethos in their own analyses (in their essays) by analyzing multiple examples of ethical appeals in the same text.

This activity, fairly simple in assignment and structure, was successful precisely because of its repetitiveness and accumulation. Students need to hear many examples of good rhetorical analysis in order to understand how to write such analysis, just as they need a demonstration that the quantity of evidence can actually change the quality of the claims it supports.

Experimenting with Workshops

Megan Eatman — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:19:28 +0000

Author:

Megan Eatman

Image Credit:

Eric James Sarmiento

I’ve ended each of the past three semesters with several days of project presentations. Part of my reasoning was that I did not want to teach right down to the wire; I gave students their final project assignment and we spent some time talking about it, but then I wanted to give them time to work. Since the presentations were extensions of the project, I felt that devoting class to student presentations would help achieve this goal. These presentations also allowed students to see what their classmates were doing, so they were exposed to stronger and weaker arguments well in advance of the project due date. I also feel that practice with oral presentation, including producing an effective visual aid, is useful for students, since many will have occasion to do something similar in their future jobs.

However, in spite of what I think are good reasons for doing presentations, I decided not to do them this semester. Instead, we will spend several days workshopping project proposals and initial work samples. Last semester, I asked students to do multimodal final projects for the first time, and while the results were often really successful, I changed a few aspects of my teaching this semester in hopes of preparing them better and receiving more sophisticated arguments. By workshopping project proposals and samples, I want to:

Give students an idea of the possibilities of this project. (To be fair, presentations would do this, too.)
Encourage students to come up with ideas that they aren’t yet sure how to execute with the knowledge that the class can help them figure it out.
Identify possible problems early, although students who present on one of the later dates will have less time to revise.
Keep students, especially those doing projects with visuals or sound, focused on audience and persuasion rather than symbolism.

The last objective in particular is based on my experience last semester. I felt like last semester I did a poor job of reminding students that visual arguments need to be legible for an audience. While the author may include an image that she feels symbolizes some aspect of her controversy, that image is useless unless an audience has time to see and process it and is then likely to come to the same conclusion. We did traditional peer review with these projects, which but it did little to fix this problem. Since individuals can have idiosyncratic readings, it is easy for an author to say that this one reader just doesn’t understand her project, and authors who have invested significant time and effort into a slideshow or a poster design may be hesitant to revise at a later stage. By having the whole class evaluate the idea and the beginnings of the project, I’m hoping to put emphasis back on arguing for an audience rather than just composing a text that says something about a controversy.

I can see a wide variety of potential problems with this approach. I ask students to select a particular audience and then design an argument to reach them, so the class will have to keep in mind that they may not be the argument’s intended audience. We have spent a lot of time talking about commonplaces and imagining an audience’s values, desires, and objections, so I hope that the workshoppers will be able to imagine themselves as a different audience to evaluate the argument. I will instruct them to do so. Additionally, I have not yet decided what (if anything) will happen if “workshoppees” decline to submit their materials in advance of the workshop. My general practice is to always have a quantifiable consequence (point deductions) because otherwise the motivation for doing this, especially toward the end of the semester, might be too low.

Last but not least, I am most concerned about in-class participation. Right now, the assignment emphasizes group discussion, but I am reconsidering that aspect. While I don't want to ask students to do too much outside work, I may consider shifting some of the in-class work to online environments, perhaps a workshopping wiki. That approach could lighten students' homework (they could look at the project proposals without writing about them before class) and head off participation problems while still allowing students access to each other's comments. I will have to consider it further, but any suggestions on workshopping practices are welcome.