Blogging Pedagogy - participation

Because I Can't Help Myself: Using Canvas Discussion to Practice Style and Grammar

Aubrey Plourde — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:18:33 +0000

Author:

Aubri Plourde

Image Credit:

Ohio University Department of Linguistics

When I began teaching E316K, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that by and large, my students couldn’t write well. Sure, there were a few outliers who turned in clear, dynamic prose; overall, though, I could be administered a vaccine for redundant sentences and clunky syntax. Often, I’d catch myself wondering, “Who let you get this far without teaching you how to write?”

I realize this is an unfair question. Even in the moment, I knew enough about the teaching requirements of basic writing courses to know that there is just not enough time. By the time they even get to higher education, they’ve forgotten subjects and verbs, let alone participial phrases and nominal clauses or, more ambitiously, style.

If I had world enough and time, if there were room on my syllabus, I would teach them grammar along with the skills of argument. I wish with painful naiveté to teach them how to build and rearrange syntax, instead of “just” ethos, logos, and pathos. The truth is that more often than note, I’m working triage. If I can get my students to write a solid thesis, I will consider myself successful.

And perhaps that’s okay. I spent most of September in turmoil over the wealth of things I wanted to teach them. I realize this is a very immature mentality, one isolated from the long-term realities of only being able to teach a single syllabus at a time. Still, I’m going with it, because, for now, I still care when I read redundancies.

So, although I did finally give up on teaching the basics of infinitives, I have also worked in what seems, so far, to be a reasonable compromise. First, I did provide a series of links and PowerPoints to basic grammatical concepts, and I administered a take-home pretest (ungraded) to help students diagnose themselves. So much for one weekend.

The results were predictably dismal, but not quite as depressing as I’d feared. At least now I know what must be explained (subject-verb agreement, introductory subordinate clauses, comma rules) and what is better left to English majors (verbals, sentence modifiers). Since then, I’ve found a better way to take attendance. While I’ve used “bell work” or basic activities before, I’ve had a hard time integrating them as useful concepts rather than as busywork. It took some adjusting, but I’ve got my students accustomed to the new routine. It goes like this:

Instead of heading right to the center of the classroom upon arrival, they choose their individual computers, logging into Canvas immediately. Nothing fancy—just a discussion board. At the beginning of every class, I’ve posted some kind of prompt, generally related to an overarching stylistic goal. So, for example, this week, we focused on weak construction and redundancy. (I’m pushing for clarity.) The prompt asked students to spot the redundancies in three statements and to revise a fourth for clarity and rhythm:

Label

The submarine fired at the cruiser at a distance of ten thousand meters.

He falsely misrepresented the situation.

The troops advanced forward on the outer Falklands today.

Revise

His brother, who is a student at law school, loves to bring up controversial topics that everyone has a different opinion about.

Sometimes, I simply ask the students to point out the weak construction or redundancy, such as with these statements:

“The reason is because…”

“Due to the fact that…”

“a number of”

“in regard to”

“despite the fact that”

“in the very near future”

“cancel out”

“disappear from sight”

Other times, I ask them to syntactically copy a sentence to get practice recognizing the different parts of speech and how they function.

The routine is that they sign onto Canvas, fill out the discussion post (I require them to post before they can see others’ replies), and do a tiny bit of thinking about style or cosmetics before we begin the agenda for the day. It enables me to count attendance later as I look through responses, and I think they like the feedback.

I’m still working out some knots with this practice, and yes, sometimes it takes longer than I would like it to—although I do think it helps students who get paralyzed when writing to loosen up and get something out. For now, though, I’ve set up mini bites of grammatical, syntactical, or stylistic information to introduce through exercises. Using Canvas’s discussion board is nothing revolutionary, of course, but since we don’t have automatic attendance enabled anyway, and since revising at the sentence level is something they seem not to have considered, I’ll keep doing this for a while—even just to make myself feel like we’re collectively making their writing clearer.

Game Controllers and Course Design

Scott Nelson — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:21:56 +0000

Author:

Scott Nelson

Image Credit:

Scott Nelson, 2013, CC BY-NC-SA

So, I've been thinking this week about controllers and controls. The Playstation 4 controller was announced, and there are some significant changes in the design that speak to the changing nature of gaming in general. The new controller has a touch screen and a color-coded light bar to identify different players. Most significant to this post, though, is the missing 'Select' and 'Start' buttons. Since the 1980s, these buttons have been standard on most game controllers, and Sony's decision to replace them with the 'Share' and 'Options' button signals a shift in video games' focus. Gamers have definitely noticed this seemingly small shift, with some making video tributes to the lost buttons.

The earliest computer games were somewhat solitary affairs -- a single human player competed against the computer. Later, with Tennis for Two, two human players could go head-to-head. Competitions in the arcade era focused on beating a high score set by another player at another time. Players had to be in physical proximity to one another to share a game. In the 1970s, though, that changed with the advent of online games where multiple players could compete simultaneously.

However, even through these changes, the basic controller signaled a particular interface with the machine. The relationship between the player and the game was highlighted. You could select from certain options and start the game. Sony's redesign shifts that relationship to one among a community of gamers. With a quick press of a standard button, gamers can share their experience with others through short screencaptures and broadcasts.

So what does this have to do with pedagogy? More than you'd initially think. My particular preferences as a gamer got me thinking about this shift and the design considerations that will surely follow. While pedagogues may not focus on these considerations, video game designers have made it a focus of significant study. Damien Schubert -- the lead designer of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Star Wars: The Old Republic -- made it the focus of his 2011 Game Developer's Conference presentation. In designing for a game genre that by definition brings many people together, how can we still make space for the "lone wolves"?

At least in gaming, I happen to be one of those loners. I have a handful of Playstation Network friends who never hear from me, as I prefer to game alone. And I think World of Warcraft is boring. There, I said it. I'm sure other gamers will say that WoW really gets good after you begin raiding with others, but I just don't prefer that kind of experience. And game designers know that there's enough people similar to me that they should design with us in mind.

The same can be said for our classrooms. Digital Media production invites collaboration, as it can be too complex for a single student's workload. However, not all students thrive with those constraints. We should be careful to nudge students outside of their comfort zones, but also be mindful of the lone wolves out there. Not all students' careers will require them to collaborate often, and some web technologies are allowing us to work together, yet separately.

One way I mitigate these different learning styles is to design unit projects with options -- students can opt for simpler, individual projects, or for more complex group projects. The pull of the larger projects tends to be their "wow" factor. Some students would just prefer to make a video over a static image.

The other way is with something I call "Nelsonslist" (after the classifieds site Craigslist). I ask students to post on the course wiki a brief introduction to both their current digital media skills and skills they'd like to pick up. Students are then invited to network with others of similar interests. Over three years, it's worked quite well. Some students form affinity groups while others express their desire to work alone.

Though Web 2.0 technologies encourage us to share more and more of ourselves online, we can't assume all who participate in these communities enjoy posting their meals, high scores, and random thoughts. Lurkers make up an important part of those ecosystems, and we'd do well to keep them in mind when designing assignments.

What to Do When Students Want to Talk in Class

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:02:47 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

Marc St. Gill

I’ve been feeling very invigorated this semester as a teacher for several reasons: I’m teaching RHE 309S for the first time, incorporating more digital writing and texts into my syllabus, and the kids I’m teaching seem pretty invested in the material. In fact, they love to talk in class. Managing the class discussions, then, has presented a new challenge for me as a teacher.

Like my colleague Steven, I’m much more familiar with the problem of getting reluctant students to participate in discussion. As such, I’ve figured out how to use my particular exuberant energy to crack jokes, to present the material in a non-threatening manner, to encourage students to feel comfortable participating (and how to learn everyone’s name so you can call on them in to spread the talking around). Teaching my RHE 309S for the Liberal Arts Honors program has significantly changed the dynamic, however. Whereas in most classes you’re lucky to have about two students who talk on a regular basis, right now about ten of my twenty-one students participate in every class, and about fifteen raise their hands at least once a week. It’s the stragglers who are more noticeable at this point than the talkers.

While this might seem like an embarrassment of riches or a straight #humblebrag, I’ve had some surprisingly challenging moments: for example, at one point during a discussion of stasis theory not only was I fielding some pretty challenging questions, I had two students arguing during a stasis analysis of the same-sex marriage debate about whether or not law should be determined by religious morality. The conversation got so tense that I had to raise my voice and shout “HEY!” to end the debate, and one of the other students approached me after the class to talk about how uncomfortable the tension made her feel. This kind of rough-and-ready exchange provides both some nice intellectual charge and an uncomfortable dynamic: how do you monitor classroom discussion when everybody wants to have a say? Does that mean that you have to let everyone talk equally? How do you encourage silent students to participate when others are eager to speak, or is that even advisable? What is the balance between leading the discussion and letting the discussion be student-centered? And how far do you try to balance the contributors?

The nice thing about this situation was that it led me to consult with experienced instructors to hear their reflections and advice. One professor recommended turning this argument into a teachable moment that could connect back to the previous lesson—what makes rhetoric and stasis so important is how it provides the means to have productive debate on important issues. Another suggested I connect the situation to a discussion about where rhetoric takes place: it rarely happens in polite, controlled circumstances and people don’t always adhere to the rules. Others recommended that I talk about appropriate classroom behavior or even gamify it. I was even told that to handle honors students, I should alternate between catering to their sense of themselves “special snowflakes” and attempting to “melt” it. I loved that each response helped attend to a different aspect of the problem: accommodating the egos in play, creating the rules of interaction for classroom discussion, and connecting the rhetorical material to the ways in which discuss rhetoric.

Since then, I’ve adopted several different strategies to help lead successful discussion among students. I ended up following the advice about addressing it as a teachable moment, and tried to make my questions explicit to the students in order to invite them to help provide the answers. I’ve also since tried to intervene to frame the goals for discussion and to keep them on topic by asking them to cite examples from the text. To organize the conversations, I occasionally clarify what I see emerging from the discussion as a way to help redirect at various points. Like Steven, I’ve tried to provide opportunities for students to do short writing exercises at the beginning of class to allow the other students to come up with contributions, deliberately framing them in this way, as well as just calling on students occasionally when a rare silent moment presents itself. I’m cautious in some ways too in how gender dynamics are playing out—it seems like while of these ten most talkative students seven of them are women, the three male students tend to talk back and forth to each other for extended periods. I try to recognize and affirm positive contributions and try to intervene more directly to keep the conversations related to the day’s topic. While I hope I show my students that I value their interests and directions, I also try to find ways to encourage a variety of students to respond to make the conversations not only more lively but also more inclusive. I can only hope that my students will help teach me how to make the class discussion productive for them all.

Mitigating Silence

Steven LeMieux — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:01:20 +0000

Author:

Steven J. LeMieux

Image Credit:

Steven J. LeMieux

I’ve never been able to hold a silence in class. There’s lots of talk about how long you can let a question hang in the air--there’s a swagger in these discussions, a sort of teacherly way of one-upping one another. And I’ve heard boasts about a minute or two and stories about those rare masters that can hold the three, four, five minute silence (we can, in this regard, look toward John Cage as having raised the long silence to an artform). As I’ve met it, this chatter about silence carries with it the tacit assumption that there’s a fundamental good behind the slight squirm caused by a long silence, that it’s worth waiting out our students, letting them know that they’re still on the hook. More than that, though, there’s a belief in the emergent powers of discussion--that we learn by talking things out, asking questions, raising issues, testing out ideas aloud.

It’s hard to disagree with some of these assumptions. We want students to engage the material, to raise issues and questions and begin a conversation, a real thinking through the issue at hand. Plus, there’s an excitement when you’re teaching and real talk breaks out. It feels like your students are learning, that work is being done, and it’s good. But it’s hard to get that conversation going if students won’t offer their opinions, so we ask a question and then wait.

Anyone who has taught the same class multiple times (or even more so multiple sections of the same course) can tell you that the general talkativeness of a given class varies wildly from one group of students to the next. Some classes seem to reach the critical mass necessary for robust discussion--there are those 5 or 6 students that you can rely upon to fill silences, to respond to texts and coax out other responses from quieter students. In other classes, though, it’s like pulling teeth. Every bit of back and forth is a struggle.

I can’t help but feel sympathy for those silent classes. While I’ve never been able to hold a silence as a teacher, as a student I used to last entire semesters without saying word one. Thinking back to my quiet undergrad days there often wasn’t anything in particular that had me holding my tongue so tightly. I did the readings, always came to class, did well on my assignments, etc. etc., but I just didn’t talk. I just wasn’t feeling it. It took me some time, after I had begun teaching, to remember how that felt--to have things to say without really wanting to say them. So rather than developing my silence-holding-skills I’ve instead moved toward mitigating the silence in those quiet classes.

Part of this has been incorporating different modes of expression within the class. In my current course, The Rhetoric of Technology, I have them write fairly regular blog posts about their reading (I also have them comment on each other’s posts). The blogs are nice because not only can I get a general sense for how everyone is encountering the texts but I can be sure to bring up issues that they’ve raised in their posts but are silent on in class. I break the silence with their already articulated questions and comments.

Also, following a method used in a seminar I was recently in, I’ve begun beginning class discussion by asking them to briefly discuss the readings with their peers. The basic idea (as I’ve understood it both as a student and teacher) behind these discussions is that it gives students a relaxed, low-risk environment to talk about the reading, to gesture toward interesting or difficult portions of the text. They can test things out before trying them before the whole class. I wrap up these sessions by asking my students to simply share what they discussed with their group. I’ve grown to love these short (5-10 minute) break out sessions. They tend to scaffold nicely into larger class discussions, but even when they don’t I hear my students, like with the blogs, engaging the material and pushing one another toward new understandings.

Alongside these practices, though, I have been working on my own frame of mind. Part of mitigating the silence is resituating my relationship with it. It’s pretty easy to feel lousy when discussion dies down or when my students are feeling reticent. But rather than blame myself (or my students) I have been thinking more about what they want from me, about how we can situate ourselves and the interaction between teacher and student together. This doesn’t mean that I want to walk into class a blank slate, hostage to my students’ whims. More than anything it’s about recognizing how we’re going to share the load, how we can meet the silence in the middle.

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.

Encouraging Class Participation with Google Docs

Rachel Mazique — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 18:35:40 +0000

Author:

Rachel Mazique

Image Credit:

Salman. "Google Docs VS Microsoft Office Web Apps." Techtoggle. 15 July 2009. Web. Sept. 30 2012.

Classroom dynamics can vary widely from one group of students to the next. This fact has really struck home now that I’m teaching two sessions of Rhetoric and Writing: “Disability in Pop Culture.” I walk into both classes with the same lesson plans, with (one of) the same interpreters, and with the same kinds of technology available. Many variables are different; different buildings, different classroom space (in terms of size), one interpreter is different, different days, different time of day (although both take place in the afternoon).

However, the biggest difference is the group of students themselves. Both classes have a range of upper classmen with a few sophomores. One class has a good number of journalism majors, but both classes have students with a wide range of majors and educational backgrounds.

Because I assess students using The Learning Record, I know from their background information (interview and reflection), that many students in one class prefer to listen rather than speak when learning new ideas or grappling with new concepts. In the class that took about four weeks to open up and have a rolling discussion (or one that doesn’t require my constant prompting) many students are self-professed introverts. Now, because The Learning Record requires “outstanding participation in all course activities” for an “A” grade, the hesitation to participate in class discussions becomes a concern for those students who learn best by listening—or those who have a fear of speaking in class.

In order to have a class document of students’ questions and thoughts on their assigned reading, I planned an in-class activity in which students would write their questions on a class wiki page—for all to see. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, our course work is conducted almost entirely on the wiki (excluding class meetings, office hours, and required reading in the form of printed text). This class document would also serve as an informal work sample (in the language of The Learning Record) documenting evidence of their reflective learning and critical thinking processes. However, my original plan to use a wiki page for the activity did not go as planned, as PBWorks does not allow for more than one typist at a time.

This, however, became what my colleague, Cate Blouke, called a “happy accident in the classroom,” as I quickly checked to make sure that all students had a gmail account, then added a link to a Google Document titled “Questions …” to the wiki page I had intended students to write on. Google Docs does allow for multiple writers at once; students, by way of experimentation (first-time experience for everyone) developed their Digital Literacy as they quickly navigated this new format and learned how to save their own space on the document and personalize it with their preferred font, font size, and color.

Having students work on the Google Doc allows everyone to see each other’s questions; it allows me to monitor their progress without peering over everyone’s shoulder or walking around to quickly check computer screens. I can stay in one place and observe their writing process—with all the backspaces, highlighting, rewriting, pauses, and self-correcting that goes on. Google Docs also allows me to quickly intervene if a student is not quite following instructions. I also get a better idea of the time it takes students to write and can easily see when most students are done writing—as activity quiets down on the Google Doc. (Without this document, students may appear to be busily working online, but they may have jumped to a different web page or activity once completing the given task.) Having all their questions as a starting point also helps guide the discussion, and the document allows us to return to past questions that are not answered in one class. The digital archive functions as collective class memory; we will not forget because it is saved online.

In these first four weeks of the semester, after our first “happy accident,” we have used Google Documents three times. The first was for their questions on the reading, the second time was for a collaborative class resource page on instances of “disability” in pop culture, and our most recent encounter was for a quick workshop on their individual research questions.

As useful as the tool has been to me as an instructor facilitating learning and working to make the best use of our class time, what I’ve found most interesting have been the student Observations on the use of Google docs during in-class activities.

One student wrote,

“I noticed the class seems much more comfortable using technology to interact with each other. Also, all the questions that were written on the google doc, while similar, all offered a unique perspective on how people interpreted the readings. (digital literacy; Creativity, originality, imagination)”

Another wrote of his difficulty with using this new format and of his strategy for adapting to it,

“In class today while we were all brainstorming on the Google Doc, I observed that it was extremely difficult to type information on the page because it was bouncing all over the place with everyone typing at once. To solve this I typed my comments on a seprate word proccessor and copied them in. Digital Literacy &prior and emerging experience”

A third indicated that she liked being able to participate via Google Docs (I should note that this student does not generally speak up during in-class discussions):

“In class today we used a google document to express any questions or reflections we had about the readings we have been assigned to read outside of class. This type of class participation allowed me to write my own reflection and also allowed me to see what were my fellow classmates reflections and questions about the readings were as well. (Skills and Strategies, Independence;Digital Literacy)”

One observant and introverted student (who also puts good effort into pitching in when he can) noted that the digital format for class participation allows for greater “accessibility:”

“I noted that the majority of students are still shy and don't contribute much in discussion, myself included. I did notice that working on a Google Doc simultaneously allows for more easy and accessible sharing of ideas though. (Presentation, Knowledge + Understanding)”

All four of these observations came from the class that has (up until our most recent meeting) been generally quiet and reserved during discussions. The student dynamic in the other class—which is much more vocal—did not seem to view the use of the Google Doc as an alternative mode for participating or accessing class discussions. Their observations focused on the pragmatics of the Google doc (observations along the lines of: "my reading notes allowed me to remember my questions and thoughts on the readings, so I knew what to write on the Google doc;"and, "the collaborative resource on disability in pop culture allows us to see how disability really is everywhere—even if we haven’t noticed it on our own").

However, those two comments also tell me that the Google Document has a pedagogical value when used in the classroom. When asking students if they have any questions, few, if any, may speak up. Open-ended, on-the-spot questions often leave students speechless. On the other hand, when asking students to write their questions, they know they are being observed “on paper” so to speak, so they are much more inclined to generate a question to demonstrate that they have, in fact, completed their homework. Last, collaboration in online spaces allows students to “see” each other and to realize that everyone has something to contribute.