Category: Online Teaching

Here’s what I want my students to do: understand some of the main events and trends in history, get exposed to some of the possible interpretations of those events, learn some historical skills, practice these skills by doing the kinds of things historians do, think and write historically, create their own interpretations, and read some primary sources that contain great ideas that we need even today.

To actually achieve all that, each student would need to do the following tasks each week:

1. Read a textbook or Wikipedia or something that narrates events.

2. Gather, understand, evaluate, cite and use primary sources in their writing in support of their own intepretations.

3. Converse with others to entertain various opinions and interpretations.

4. Read and analyze primary sources assigned by me.

Consider these the four juggling balls of learning history. Each is a slightly different shape, and so easier or harder for a certain individual to handle. But it’s necessary to have them all in the air to achieve some understanding of the discipline. As a semester continues, the sound of dropping balls is common.

And I’ve noticed a pattern.

A and B-level students will keep them all in the air to some degree, because many of them are intelligent and can strategize the time spent on learning. They will occasionally set one aside, depending on their own talents and interests. But they will juggle all four balls most of the time, completing almost all if not all of the various assignments.

Mid-level (C and high D) students will drop a ball early on, and they’ll drop whichever is most difficult for them, regardless of how many points are involved. Most don’t pick it up again, and if they do, they’ve already forgotten how to juggle that many.

And if we look again at the four balls again, there are serious qualitative differences, regardless of which ones are “hard” to work with.

1. Read about the facts: this is what everyone is used to doing through 12 years of schooling, so they expect it and think it’s most important. It’s the easy, round ball. But at college, it’s just the foundation.

2. Understand and use primary sources: this is kind of fun, because they get to discover these on their own and see everyone else’s, so also a fairly round ball. But it takes some work, and some time, to keep it going.

3. Discuss: this is also something they’ve done before, a round ball that’s a little slippery. It’s hard to learn to discuss history critically, but because it seems simple, they’ll set this one aside to deal with the first two when they run short on time – they see it as an extra (many see it in a classroom as an extra also), not real learning.

4. Read and analyze primary sources: a ball with weird stitching, this involves reading English at a level many of them have not achieved, so it’s hard and they put it aside a lot.

So what’s the problem? All students strategize and choose what work they want to do, right?

Take one of the sets of primary sources I assign – selections from Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Beowulf. All have moral lessons, lessons about becoming an adult that can be very meaningful to a 19-year-old, particularly one who’s male, has a tough relationship with his dad (if he has one around), and isn’t sure how to make his own way in the world.

The high-level 19-year-olds will read and learn, but many of them are from higher socio-economic groups in our society, and have gotten the moral lessons elsewhere anyway (they implicitly understood that Star Wars wasn’t just a sci-fi tale). The mid-level students are the ones who need the lesson, but they’re the most likely to avoid these readings.

But I can’t make those sources the whole class. Without the context (#1 – the facts) teaching sources like these is teaching mythology, or ethics, or literature, not history.

We must have the context. But mid-level students read too poorly to do it all, so they pick up a few facts, find a few sources, write some, and skip the hard reading.

So perhaps my own maturity has encountered their efforts at maturity.

As an inexperienced instructor, I too focused on facts. I was into the textbook and the facts I presented in my lecture, and tested them on that. They wrote essays on those facts, the kind you find in essay banks on the internet. After a few years, I began emphasizing interpretations, then more recently I’ve focused on collecting sources and developing historical writing. Now I’m thinking about morality – what is the importance of history if not to teach lessons?

Yes, this is unpopular. The development of social science since the 1940s says that History should be an objective pursuit, while the continuation of History as a humanities class says we are teaching core values. But the social scientists missed the point of historical study – the very focus of scientific endeavor is guided by the needs of society at that particular moment in time. It’s a natural, Dead-Poets-Society kind of thing to try to help young people by using the universal texts that have helped others shape themselves as individuals, in some case for thousands of years.

If I emphasize those sources more, it may also solve another problem I have – the current cultural focus on storytelling. I’ve never been able to relate to it, this urge to put everything (and in some cases every minute of ones life) into a story. But stories that matter have a lesson to them, which is why they’ve been around so long.

Now to get the C and D students to focus on them.

There is some limited agreement about “what’s wrong” with higher education. It is currently trendy to denigrate the lecture format, the high price of a college education, the usefulness of the curriculum, and the lack of focus on individual growth. The solution, depending on your view, might be MOOCs (free huge online classes), an acceptance of non-college-educated workers (no one wants to talk about that), or a focus on “student success”.  For those inside the current college system, this last is becoming most popular.

We admit that many of our students are underprepared, overly dependent, and unmotivated. A “student success” focus is designed to deal with these failings and enable students to graduate, presumably by somehow making them more prepared, less dependent and more motivated. Student services are ramped up, early alert systems enabled to provide counseling for those failing their classes. Even professional development for everyone from janitors to administrators is designed to promote “student success”.

However, the system as it exists is not set up to provide the type of personal attention that “student success” advocates say is needed. College is designed for the prepared, independent, motivated student – that’s what makes it “higher” education. Grades are assigned to those students to determine the level of their work compared to a discipline standard, and assessment assumes that the work they do is the result of their learning. At the undergraduate level, college is designed for general rather than deep learning, in a process that forces the student to do lots of reading and pay attention.

I commit heresy now when I say that this traditional design might be a good thing.

Certainly the patching we’re trying to do to fix it is counterproductive. If we accept and condone the underpreparedness, the dependency, and the lack of motivation, we increase the tendency of these students to come to college and expect high levels of deeply personal support. We refuse to say that a student is simply not ready for college, since this could both undermine their “self esteem” and hold them back for remedial work when they need to get their degree soon. So instead it falls on professors to desperately try to hold to a standard of college-level work, while both students and administrators exert pressure on them to ensure “student success”. Part-time college profs in particular know that if they don’t have a certain level of “success”, they’ll lose their jobs.

The view that profs should be deeply attentive to individual students is also leaking into the current arguments about online education. The recent New York Times article The Trouble with Online College has caused great consternation in the ranks, but what jumped out at me is the claim that online classes do not allow for “getting to know” ones students. (In response, some commenters insist that online classes have just as much or more personal interactions between profs and students as on-site classes. That’s true but it’s beside the point.)

I am increasingly having trouble with the argument that “getting to know your students” is the hallmark of class quality. Instead, quality education should create an environment for the students to get to know the ideas and the discipline. The energy for learning should originate with the student, who needs to study and work hard to figure out both the system and the content.  Professors are experts in their discipline, not in engendering character development. Their role is to model their scholarly engagement with their discipline, not their personal engagement with their students. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be good teachers, but it doesn’t define a good teacher as someone who really knows their individual students well. I will “know” a certain percentage of students, in person or online, as it happens naturally. And not knowing every student “well” doesn’t mean not contacting or following up with students who are doing poorly – that’s always appropriate. It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be nice – I’m an advocate of nice .

But over the past decade, I have watched my own students become increasingly unwilling to analyze collective feedback in terms of their own work. Instead they want individual feedback only, preferably in a one-on-one environment with me. At 40 students per class section, I cannot meet that expectation. But it’s a symptom of the individualized attention their sub-standard work has been given thus far. They know that the current system is focused on their “success”, and I’m supposed to make that possible rather than them. Instead of overcoming their own limitations (economic class, learning disability, living situation), they are taught that I will take those hurdles into consideration and lower my expectations. Some have internalized the learning problems and even learning styles they’ve been told they possess as individuals, and they see them as justification for lowered standards. I have students who tell me they can’t do the reading because they are visual learners. (I sometimes find myself mumbling “I’ll read it for you”, a line from Monty Python’s bookshop sketch.)

I realize I sound like a 19th century conservative here, and I am no proponent of Samuel Smiles or social Darwinism. But the dependency of students is expanding within a system increasingly dedicated to enabling their helplessness. Equal opportunity and equal access are the hallmarks of democracy and public education, and I strongly believe in them. But that does not mean equal “success”, especially at the price of academic standards, massive instructor workload, increased student dependency, and an environment that caters to the underprepared and unmotivated.

So I question the current focus on the success of the underprepared, dependent, unmotivated college student. I’m getting concerned that the prepared, independent, motivated learner is being subjected to a restrictive and limited education instead of college or university learning. I have very little time to spend with the high-B student who could be an A, because I spend so much time re-explaining directions and answering individual questions that I’ve already answered collectively, or tracking down poor-performing students to recommend they get tutorial help. This focus on their ‘success” may help them do a little bit better, but at the sacrifice of leaving the better students at the same level as when they came in. I don’t have time to help them make their very good work excellent.

Perhaps “success” should be defined as self-development into an independent learner who can learn something valuable from any professor in any class. It should mean succeeding within various environments and with various teaching styles, and being able to learn something regardless – success as a learner, as someone becoming more educated. (I cringe now when people go off on the track that education reform should be based on people following their own path for learning their own way, studying only those subjects they really care about. College is for finding out the value of subjects you don’t care about, but I guess that’s another post.) I certainly want student success to mean that they come in at a certain level of understanding and increase it in my class. Instead it’s coming to mean a passing grade after lots of detailed and personal help. Thus the cranky post.

Two things have happened that have caused me to think again about professor-student communications and attitudes, and how they may impact learning.

A couple of weeks ago in the POT Facebook group, I posted this in total frustration, as a response to the student attitudes I mentioned in my last post.

Just an idea…..

Subject: Response failure

Hi student,

Your email could not be answered because it did not contain one or more of the following:

1. a subject in the subject line
2. a greeting (such as Hi Professor)
3. your class name and section number
4. a full explanation
5. a sign-off or signature of your name as registered

As a result, we were unable to fulfill the usual response time. 

Please resubmit your email or Message for a speedier response.

History 111 Online

 I was only half-serious. Yet several teachers began to use it as a template for making actual reponses to students, thanking me for the idea and reporting results.

This is because teachers are frustrated. Obviously I understand that.

Then this week Donna Marques posted this video in the POT Facebook group.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naxrUWXLJy4]

I have watched this a couple of times. My gut reaction to the voice of the professor is negative – he sounds pompous to say the least. The student sounds stupid. I try to imagine a student watching this. The “A” student says “duh”. The “C” student says, “That teacher is mean. This video is mean. It’s making fun of me.” But the gut reaction of teachers is, “Yes! This teaches the student about responsibility!”

I have concerns about the affective domain and its impact on teaching. The video enforces the power relationship between prof and student in the discussion of rules and grades. The underlying assumption is that strict rules, and sticking to them, provides an equitable environment for student learning.

I have three problems with this:

1. Students do not respond the same way to this attitude and message. In fact, the type of student for whom this needs to be said is the exact type of student who will resent the message and learn nothing from it.

2. The attitude perpetuates the dependence of the student (and professor!) at a very basic level of rules and obedience. The prof is now playing the low-level game of carrots and sticks, as if we were training dogs instead of educating citizens. At no point can we engage the larger issues of why one should follow deadlines and be responsible. This level of discussion is great for training hamburger flippers at McDonald’s, but not an educated citizenry.

3. It implies that a student will pass the class if they follow instructions. This isn’t true – some students will be cognitively unable to do the level of work required. And we can’t talk about that because of 1 and 2 above have already caused levels of emotion that make such a conversation impossible.

I cringe now when I hear profs say with pride that they allow “no late papers, I don’t care if they’re in the hospital!” or roll their eyes at yet another dead grandmother as an excuse. I’ve already made the point that we need to treat students like responsible adults, or they won’t behave that way. And, as I noted in that same post, I benefit from the fact that other profs are mean.

This doesn’t mean I’m recommending being a pushover. And keep in mind that I’m writing this while I’m experiencing my own crisis about students not following instructions. I have basic requirements for primary source posts – post an image, the author/artist, its title, date and a link. About half of my students refuse to follow the basic instructions, even to the point where I had another student message me this morning offering to help them do it right.

I can repeat the instructions, and I do, in multiple places. I can grade them down, and eventually I will. And sure, I could create a video or use the one above, thinking it’s designed to teach them responsibility.

But all it will do is cause resentment. And if they’re resentful, we won’t be able to get past their badly cited posts, and into historical analysis. I need the students who are cognitively able to do the work to follow me into doing real history –  that’s my real job. And they won’t follow me if they think I’m mean.

 

Working

Crocodoc annotation

Student “Success”

There has been great focus lately on that slippery, administratively-led, accountability-driven beast we call “student success”. Our college is creating entire plans designed to “help students succeed”, which means (depending on whom you talk to) passing their classes, transferring to university, obtaining a certificate, or just not dropping the hell out of college. (It does not tend to mean, interestingly, students succeeding in achieving their own personal goals like having a reason to get out of bed, or not getting kicked out of their parent’s house, or having somewhere they’re supposed to be, or hanging with their friends, or staying on their parent’s health insurance, but that’s the subject of another post.)

Sometimes the focus is on student services, making sure that students aren’t abandoned on campus, that they know where to go for help. But there’s also an instructional aspect. Recently, our Professional Development Committee received a statewide vision statement that included the sentence,  “All personnel will have ongoing opportunities to develop and expand the skills and practices that influence students’ ability to complete their educational goals”. I don’t think by “personnel” they mean janitors and those helpful people over in the cafeteria.

The implication in applying “student success” directives to instruction is that pedagogy has a strong influence on whether students succeed or not. This should be a no-brainer. It should be obvious that better teaching leads to more student success.

But it isn’t that simple, of course. If it were, teachers’ unions wouldn’t react so strongly about tying their pay to student grades. We wouldn’t have Hattie’s 2009 study showing that only 30% of student success variations are related to instructional quality. (or see here).  And we would have some agreement on what constitutes good teaching (a consensus on this rarely lasts long).

So here’s my anecdotal, non-scientific list, a short draft based on 25 years of teaching experience, of pedagogical choices that appear to make little or no difference to student success. None of them are based on research – yet. I have in mind a longitudinal study of my own pedagogical methods related to grades, but that would take a sabbatical.

What Doesn’t Seem to Matter

Giving all test questions in advance.

Multiple-choice or essay, it doesn’t matter. The top students use them to increase confidence as they get the A they would have gotten anyway.

Having open book (or open lecture, materials, web) exams.

Online or on-site, having access to materials may improve certain individual’s work (usually those who would get an A anyway), but not the overall grades. In online classes, the effect is negligible.

Community (see previous post).

Active interaction with peers increases happiness but not grades.

Using the web in class during a test.

Test scores vary little even when students have their devices and access to the web. This may be related to the kind of tests I design, which don’t test facts but force students to use them. If they don’t study and internalize the information, open access to it doesn’t help.

Methods other than lecture.

Class grades have been close to the same regardless of whether the primary mode of classroom activity was me lecturing, students working in groups, or student-led projects (for this last, the drop rate, however, is very high).

Peer grading or working publicly.

Despite what I’ve heard from others, I have seen no improvement in quality based on students writing in public or grading each others’ work – I do not see the peer pressure that is presumably at play here. Revision of exam works or essays in consultation with peers similarly causes little if any improvement.

So why bother?

Any difference, as I’ve been saying for years, is affective. Open book or open web exams make students less stressed about the test, because their fear is the failure of memorization. Same with giving questions in advance.

Some would say that since these pedagogical techniques make no difference, we shouldn’t bother doing them. Let’s have closed exams, no community, droning lectures. I see it the opposite way – there’s no reason not to have open access during exams or opportunities to form community. It does no harm and creates a friendlier learning environment.

It just doesn’t seem to improve “student success”.