Blogging Pedagogy - classroom politics

Truth Baiting

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

Author:

Cole Wehrle

Image Credit:

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.

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

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

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

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.