Blogging Pedagogy - classroom management

Administering What All Students Dread: Reading Quizzes

Regina Mills — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Regina Marie Mills

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I have spent a lot of time this semester thinking about how to best encourage my students to do the reading, in addition to how to prep them for class discussion of the material. I have decided upon reading quizzes/prep assignments during the first 10 minutes of class. I came to this conclusion after a few student evaluations and some colleagues told me about how successful this technique is for ensuring more students are ready to add to the conversation. Since my discussions have been fruitful and have consistently included a variety of student voices, I don’t intend to stop doing them. However, the best format of this strange genre of formative assessment has eluded me.

Since I teach in a computer classroom, in which all students have access to their own Mac computer, I have been trying to balance using these tools, not because I feel I always have to, but in order to challenge myself and my students to use unfamiliar tools (like Storify) or to learn new things about old tools (like how to add page numbers in the header using Microsoft Word). Thus, I have also experimented with how I might use the computer to administer my reading quizzes. I have tried 3 different ways so far and will elaborate on these methods, with their pros and cons, in addition to throwing out a few other ideas that I may try (or that you could try and give me feedback on!).

1. Blackboard Test Function

What is it? Blackboard is like Canvas or Sakai or any other on-line class management system. The test function allows you to create on-line quizzes and tests (from test banks or with a create-your-own-question function) which allows all aspects of the quiz (the administration and grading) to happen on-line.

Pros: No paper (go green!), no need to move grades from the paper or another system to the grade book. Easy to read the answers, since it avoids the student handwriting issue. Allows you to leave feedback or to give automatic feedback depending on whether or not the answer is right or wrong (ex. you can write in where the student could have found the answer as an automatic feedback response to an incorrect answer). Great for multiple-choice, True/False, and fill-in-the-blank. You can stop students from backtracking and cut them off after a certain amount of time. Answer choices and the questions can be randomized to prevent students from copying each other’s answers.

Cons: Creating the test is time-consuming and has way too many steps. Much faster to make it on Word. You can’t reuse questions or quizzes for different courses (or if you can, it is not clear how). Doesn’t really save you time on grading short-answer questions. Possibility that you will lose connection or have an error that makes the student lose all of their answers and/or the submission. Takes awhile to log-in to computers, so students who come in right when class starts (or worse, late) have much less time to write.

2. Blackboard Discussion Board

What is it? A forum for the class within the Blackboard course management system. The threads and replies are viewable by the entire class and instructors.

Pros: No paper. Submission and grades all happen in one place. Students can copy and paste quotes easier (so they don’t need to waste time re-writing quotes from a text). Allows students to browse each other’s answers later. Great for freewriting. Can still set a time for the forum to close. Professor can respond publicly to each post. Creating the forum is quick and painless and you have some good options to make sure that students can’t edit their posts after submission (to reduce cheating based on skimming others’ answers). Allows more writing space.

Cons: Possibility that you will lose connection or have an error that makes the student lose their submission. Replying to the students’ post is clunky. Grading the posts is not quite as simple as grading through the test/quiz function. Only suitable for short-essay responses, not multiple-choice or other more specific test questions. Takes awhile to log-in to computers, so students who come in right when class starts or late have much less time to write.

3. Quiz on paper

What is it? The class paper-and-pen/cil assessment. You have the choice of allowing students access to only printed materials and notes or letting them use the computer to access texts from the course management system.

Pros: No issue with submissions. Students don’t need to juggle windows so much. Not dependent on typing speed. Students are used to it this way. No time wasted on logging in to computers and getting to the right screen. Tardy students can get started right away (unless they need the computer for the readings). Nice to hand them something physical back.

Cons: Instructor can lose it easier. Need to transfer grades from sheet to gradebook. Requires you to use paper and ink. Student handwriting can be hard to read, as can teacher feedback (disclaimer: I have bad handwriting). Need to be a bit pushy on the time-limit. Harder to prevent cheating in smaller classrooms. Annoying to have to re-write quotes from the text.

My ideas for the future:

1. Partner with someone and co-write an answer to a complex question related to the reading (gets discussion started right away and no excuse to not share, but allows students who didn’t read to lean on the well-prepared student)

2. Use a class wiki and have students respond/comment on questions

3. Have students add comments to a class Google Doc, or create their own Google Doc, which must be shared with intructor or a link posted to the class discussion board/forum

4. Have them turn in homework questions/activities (the danger here is that students might have cheated or copied answers)

These are my reflections on administering the Reading Quiz/Prep Assignment in class. Feel free to use them and definitely leave any comments or suggestions that could help me be a better teacher to my students.

Getting Students to Disagree

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

Author:

Axel Bohmann

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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.

Learning to Let Go: My Friday Non-interference Pact with my Students

Ptacek — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:42:51 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

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The Internet

I think virtually every newcomer to collegiate teaching realizes early on, with varying degrees of dismay, that “teaching” and “parenting” are closely related functions. I find my students often find it hard to think outside of a kind of parental relationship: they are legitimately shocked when I tell them, for example, that I don’t care why they missed class, or that their C (or B, or A-, even) is neither a reflection of my personal feelings about them nor assigned punitively but rather my best assessment of their performance on an assignment ruled against some form of index. But the thing is, I find myself at least as often somewhat neurotically embodying a “parental” role. I reward my students for good behavior (“We’ll have cookies next class to celebrate your revised papers!”), scold them for bad (“Why did no one show up for cookie day?”), feel a general anxiety about how they perform in front of strangers or in statistical comparison (“Please let them behave well on evaluation day!”), and worry about their health, happiness, class attendance, and a million other small things.

So part of my goal this semester has been to try to let go of some of this parental anxiety, as well as to cede some pedagogical control over my class to the students. I teach a 314L course on Banned Books, which means it’s a relatively small class (I have 22 students) that is required for English majors and encouraged for most humanities students (through interdepartmental flagging). The goal of the course is to introduce students to reading critically at a collegiate level and the fundamental goals of literary research; so a good deal of the class is devoted to teaching how to close read (and, more challengingly, teaching students the rationale behind choosing a passage to read closely), how to use theoretical models when making an argument, and resources for developing those arguments. Though my students are finding the texts we’re reading (texts like Lolita and Beloved) by turns bewildering, challenging, exciting, and ultimately rewarding, I often have that “new instructor” / “parental” anxiety: are they getting this? Are they taking away from the text the right stuff? I have so much to say, and teaching literature is so genuinely exciting, that I feel that all too often, in my anxiety over their progress, I’m steamrolling what they have to say, forcing them to talk only about what I’m interested in.

So to my solution: beginning now, with the second half of the semester, every Friday is given over to my students. We don’t have any readings assigned by me, and I don’t plan any material for the class. Instead, small groups of 3-5 students are responsible for determining the day’s content and executing that. Against all better judgment, I haven’t given the groups much more definition than this: you need to plan some sort of activity that will last at least 30 minutes; it must engage the whole class; and it must relate in an immediate way to the text we are currently reading. Otherwise, you are free to plan what you want, and I won’t interfere.

This was initially—and remains—somewhat anxiety-producing to my students. The initial response was universally, “Part of my grade depends on this and you won’t tell me what to do?” After the anxiety wears off, though, my students often seem to engage with the activity remarkably well. It encourages ownership of the material, it provokes them to think in depth about a week’s worth of reading, and the discussion that have come out of it (so far) have turned out to be really enlightening.

This was—and remains—anxiety –producing for me as an instructor, as well. It’s hard to give up directing the conversation, steering students towards thinking about thematic meanings or linguistic questions that resonate—but of course, I still do that Mondays and Wednesdays. And what I discovered is that this group of students, at least, generally comes around to the right questions and interpretive moments, anyways. Today one of the group members asked about tree symbolism in Beloved. “Perhaps it’s coincidental,” one student said—and this is the moment where I’d normally jump in with a long-winded talk about the painstaking construction of the novel, or about the often futile hunt for symbolic meanings. “Well,” another student answered, “it’s hard to imagine that it would be coincidental—think of all the planning that went into the novel.” And from there they were off, debating the symbolism and even debating the value of reading for symbolism, thinking about intentionality and narrative structure and a whole host of interesting ideas that I almost cut off with a well-meaning interjection. Though their arguments often lacked an advanced theoretical vocabulary, my students were really thinking at high levels with great rigor.

The pedagogical point of all this, if I have one, is not that everyone should take one weekday off from teaching. Every class is different, and what works for your 10:00 class may differ wildly from what works for your 11:00 class that same day. But it is that there is a real value in letting go of control of the classroom for a while. Let your students make mistakes, and see if they can sort them out on their own. Let your students talk about what they’re invested in, what they find compelling about the topic at hand, what they don’t care about, and why. Let go of being a classroom “parent” and let your students take responsibility for themselves.