Presentation Fail

More on this semester’s comparative politics course:

After doing the in-class exercise on how to produce a concise thesis statement, I created this template for students to use when writing essays in which they apply theory to historical events. We shall see if students take advantage of it on the next essay assignment.

Student presentations have also been problematic. My instructions for this task have been:

Your team’s presentation needs to discuss which theoretical perspective (rational actor, structure, or culture) best matches the readings for your theme for this geographic region. Include specific examples from the readings to support your argument.

Teams create their presentations after their members have individually written essays that accomplish the same function, a deliberate sequence on my part. However, the presentations have been terribly organized — no clear thesis statement and few to no examples drawn from readings that actually support whatever argument students think they are communicating.

It’s possible that my directions are still too broad and that students need more step-by-step instructions; if so, the easy solution is to modify the template that I created for essays and require that teams use it when designing presentations. 

I don’t really want to do this. I prefer students to be creative in their approach to solving problems and to take responsibility for their learning. To continuously break tasks down into smaller pieces and decrease the need for effort or ingenuity risks turning students into box-checking monkeys. Yet without enough structure it is unlikely that an assignment will serve its intended purpose.

This tension reflects the difficulty in overcoming the problem of transfer. My assignments — which in this course include fourteen one-page responses to readings, five multi-page essays, and five presentations — represent multiple opportunities for each student to develop a single skill, the effective communication of an argument. Yet students don’t see this. They are blind to the possibility that a technique that they have learned to use in one context can be successfully applied in another one. After fifteen years as a professor, I still am trying to figure out how to move students from needing a list of steps to follow to being able to recognize that they already have the tools needed to figure things out for themselves.