A follow-up to Simon’s post about field trips:
I too am a fan of changing the physical environment in which students learn. I’ve gone long on two occasions — twelve-day study abroad programs in Egypt — but it’s immensely complicated for the instructor. You never know when a revolution might break out. Also, because of time and money required, the practice frequently excludes students for whom such an experience would be the most beneficial.
Going short, at least in the USA, is also often problematic. I can hold an audience captive for only fifty or seventy-five minutes, depending on the day of the week that the class meets. We can’t go very far on foot or on public transportation in such a short period of time.
There is another version of the field trip that is much more convenient: the campus presentation or lecture. Yet like most of my colleagues, I expected students to attend these events for their own good, and I was dismayed when they didn’t.
Over the last two years my attitude has changed, for three reasons:
- If we claim that these events are opportunities for learning, then why shouldn’t they contribute toward students’ grades? I should be sending the message to students that I am not the only person who matters in their college educations.
- Assignments based on attending campus lectures do not in any way detract from what I do in the classroom. Students normally don’t remember much of that anyway, and getting a different perspective on the same topic, or a related one, might spark some thinking that would not otherwise occur.
- I place responsibility for success on students by calculating the course grade on a 1,000 point scale with assignments and quizzes that are in total worth about 1,2000 points. Campus presentations become just one more option for students to improve their grades, and they occur with such frequency that I can usually connect three or four of them to the subject of a particular course. If a student can’t attend an event because of some other commitment, it won’t automatically negatively affect the student’s performance in the course.
Since I’m a believer in writing as a way of thinking, students have to write about the content of a presentation to earn anything toward the course grade. My standard instructions for the assignment are to discuss the following in no more than two pages:
- What was the presenter’s argument?
- What evidence did the presenter use to support his or her argument?
- Was the presenter’s argument convincing? Why?
- How could the presentation be improved?
This is my way of ensuring that the student’s written product contains specific details about the presentation. I make these assignments worth ten points, or one percent, of the final grade.