Author: mallendo

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Quick and Easy Classroom Polls

I know there are approximately one billion classroom polling options, each with its own special features and quirks. But, if you’re not already familiar with Zeetings, it’s a great one to consider.

What I like about Zeetings is that it is free to use for classes up to 500 students (with the Education and Non-Profits plan). Students can follow along on a laptop, tablet, or phone. Unless you want to track attendance or participation, they don’t have to login which makes set-up pretty easy. And it has a number of cool features. You can upload a PowerPoint presentation into Zeetings and then add polls or other features into the PowerPoint. You can embed YouTube videos and other content as well.

As far as polls, you can create different types: “thumbs up/thumbs down,” multiple choice, scales, rankings, text, and word cloud. I don’t use it for taking attendance or marking participation, although you can require that students put in their names to access the Zeeting (that’s under Settings). In my class, I typically use the polls as conversation starters and quick interactive interjections.

For example, I use it a lot in my 40-person Human Rights class. In a session on international human rights law, we talk about the concept of compliance. Before discussing why states comply (or not) with human rights treaties, I get them thinking and talking about compliance with domestic law by asking a few questions about their personal compliance with laws. Zeetings – if you don’t have participants to log in with names – means their answers are anonymous. So, I can ask questions like “Have you ever stolen anything from Whole Foods?” (the Whole Foods on campus used to be a notorious site for shop-lifting but, as I learned from this exercise last year, they are now banning students if they are caught shoplifting so the numbers went way down in the poll compared to previous years). I ask them a mix of questions about laws I assume at least some have violated and some that I assume none have violated. Then I use the word cloud

Word Cloud
Responses to: “Using one word, describe why you don’t comply with certain domestic laws?”

feature to ask two follow-up questions: “Using one word, describe why you don’t comply with certain domestic laws?” and “Using one word, describe why you generally comply with certain domestic laws?” These word clouds kick off a good discussion of compliance that flows into discussions of how domestic and international law are similar and ways they are not. And then we can apply that specifically to why states comply or not comply with international human rights laws.

Zeetings, because of different polling options, works really well to frame this discussion. I just started using it last year and I plan to play around with its features and integrate it into class even more when I teach Human Rights next semester.

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If at first you don’t succeed…. try, try again

Over the years, I have tried to incorporate a blog assignment into my Introduction to Comparative Politics class. I think this is the fourth attempt and I might finally be close to a format that works.

The most recent iteration of this assignment, which I did last fall and revised for this semester, centers on the students selecting a country for the entire semester. I have them fill out a preference survey and then assign, to avoid overlap. I call the assignment the Country Expert Project and it involves a couple of components. First, the students write a short reflection paper before they start the blog posts. They are supposed to talk about what they already know about the country (sometimes the answer is “very little”) and why they picked it. This serves as a baseline, because they will also end the project with a reflection on what they learned about their country and what surprised them. Another small assignment at the beginning requires them to read a handful of academic blog posts; we then discuss blogs as a genre and how it is different than a research paper.

Continue reading “If at first you don’t succeed…. try, try again”

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Keeping up with current events in the classroom

How do you include current events in your courses?

I’m teaching Introduction to Comparative Politics this semester and I just can’t keep up with all the relevant current events. Every morning, I scroll through my Twitter feed, full of examples that I can be using in class. My students tend to be very engaged with the news and I want to tap into this excitement by integrating more current events into class, but I just find it overwhelming.

What, in particular, are some of my challenges to integrating current events into a political science course, particularly an introductory course?

Continue reading “Keeping up with current events in the classroom”

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Do you have 2 minutes to improve your teaching? Watch one of these videos.

When I talk to other instructors about using more active learning in their classes, I regularly hear concerns about the time it takes to plan activities.  My number one piece of advice is to liberally borrow ideas from others. And, in fact, one of my favorite things about the active learning community in higher education is how many great ideas are already out there, just ripe for the taking.  

Image description: an illuminated clock in the dark.
Photo by Denilo Vieira on Unsplash

My university had its annual Teaching Day a couple of weeks ago and the keynote speaker was Claire Howell Major.  Among the many other insightful elements of her presentation, she shared a resource that was new to me: the K. Patricia Cross Academy. One of the primary elements of the website is a library of videos presenting teaching techniques.  Each video is short – just 2-3 minutes long – and presents a very practical and concise summary of a teaching technique.  The videos are clearly developed with the busy instructor in mind; each technique is presented with quick tips on how to use it in class. There are currently 39 techniques on the website. Some might be old hat to active learning pros, like the Think-Pair-Share, but there were some ideas that were new to me like the “Update your classmate” writing activity which I plan to use soon. Many of the techniques will be familiar to readers of my favorite book, Student Engagement Techniques (which I’ve already talked about here, here, and here), which isn’t surprising when you see that Elizabeth Barkley and her frequent co-author Claire Howell Major are the instructors behind the project.

In just 2 short minutes, you can find a new idea to engage your students.

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Social Capital and M&Ms

Social capital is a “fuzzy” concept but serves as the foundation for some key comparative politics theories that we cover in my Introduction to Comparative Politics course. To help my students get a better grasp of the concept, I borrowed an activity from economics: the ultimatum game.

Briefly, I have the students pair up and distribute a handout to keep track of offers in the game. The students first need to allocate roles: proposer and responder. I tell them that the student whose middle name starts with an earlier letter in the alphabet is the proposer, just to randomize it somewhat. The proposer makes an offer of a division of some resource. Because candy is a (near) universal motivator, I use M&Ms and Skittles (I let the pairs decide which candy to play for, but I like to offer skittles for lactose-free students). I distribute 50 candies per pair and they play 5 rounds; in each round, the proposer makes an offer to split 10 candies. The responder can only accept or reject the offer. If the responder rejects, neither get any (they go back to me). If the responder accepts, then they divide the candy.

Continue reading “Social Capital and M&Ms”

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Faculty Pathologies I: Inadequate Administrative Processes

Continuing on the theme of what I’ve learned in the last year of building my own business doing dissertation and academic coaching and freelance editing, at the invitation of the blog owner, Chad, I’m back for a two-part series on common problems that I’ve seen working with faculty on their research, project, and time management. This is part 1 of 2.

Faculty usually begin their careers trained to do one thing: research. If they’re lucky, they’ve been trained to teach, at least a little bit, too. But no one ever begins their career trained in administration and management. Those are, theoretically, on-the-job skills that you pick up on the way. As a result, most faculty have vastly underdeveloped systems for managing administrative processes: committee work, cycles of paperwork like monthly meeting agendas, required paperwork for grants and other funding, and the most dreaded one of all – email.

For most of us, email becomes the default way of managing our committee work, paperwork, and other not-research-but-still-necessary-business. Which means, then, that a system to manage our email becomes a necessity. That system needs to comprise two parts: incoming management, and archiving management.

Managing incoming email needs to be something that you do deliberately, not something done haphazardly. I recommend setting aside 2-3 times per day to process your inbox. Anything that can be answered in 3 sentences or less gets a response; the rest get deleted, archived immediately if appropriate, or placed in a specific folder or given a tag/flag indicating that follow-up is required. Then, once a day, have a dedicated time for churning through the things that require more detailed follow-up. Set a designated amount of time for this and stick to it. That doesn’t mean you can’t tackle one or two semi-quick ones if you have 10 minutes between meetings, but it does mean that email becomes a designated, deliberate task, rather than an interstitial one.

The second part of email management is archiving. The goal is to keep your inbox containing only those things that are active: ongoing conversations, tasks you’re working on, things you need to follow up on. Everything else that’s closed should be either deleted or archived into a system of folders. Most of us are reasonably good at this, but it’s a good idea to make part of your Friday shutdown routine a quick cleanout of the inbox to archive anything that’s been completed that week that hasn’t already been put away so that you can start the week with an empty inbox.

These and other skills are things I can help you develop through academic coaching. If you’re interested in academic coaching, the summer is a great time to start. It gives you a chance to develop and solidify new or better habits before the chaos of term time arrives. Feel free to take a look around my website at http://www.leannecpowner.com/coaching/  and if you’re interested, drop me an email at Leanne@leannecpowner.com . The initial consultation is free. You can also follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LeanneCPowner/ or Twitter @LeanneCPowner for free daily writing tips.

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Grad Pathologies II: Breaking a Project into Reasonable Goals

Continuing on the theme of what I’ve learned in the last year of building my own business doing dissertation and academic coaching and freelance editing, at the invitation of the blog owner, Chad, I’m back for a two-part series on common problems that I’ve seen working with grad students on their dissertations. This is part 2 of 2. (Later there will be a two-part series on common faculty issues.)

The most common problem I saw with graduate students is a lack of midrange planning. The second most common problem that I see is difficulty in breaking projects into meaningful, doable tasks. It’s not uncommon to see “write theory chapter” on a student’s daily To Do list. The problem is, that’s not a helpful way to express the task. When are you done? What exactly are you writing? Is this really the thing you should be working on right now?

The solution to this problem is to think of your To Do list in terms of SMART goals. SMART goals are:

  • Specific They are precise in what they call for doing; you can tell exactly what the desired output form will be.
  • Measurable Goals should have a specific metric or target associated with them. You should be able to tell when you have completed a task.
  • Attainable The goal should be something you can reasonably achieve that day (or week, depending on what period you make your lists for), given the other commitments you have that day/week.
  • Relevant The goal should be directly connected to the weekly or semester goals that you have. If it’s not helping you reach your goals, should it be on your list?
  • Timely The goal should be the next logical step in the project, building toward the following logical step. It should be necessary for upcoming work, not just ‘for the future.’

So a better daily To Do list item for our hypothetical grad student would be “Write 300 words on scope section of theory chapter.” It tells us what part of the project, and where in that project, we should direct our attention. It tells us how much work we need to do to call this task “done.” Presumably, writing the theory chapter is one of the student’s goals for the semester, and this is the next section waiting to be written.

If you’re interested in dissertation or academic coaching, the summer is a great time to start. It gives you a chance to develop and solidify new or better habits before the chaos of term time arrives. Feel free to take a look around my website at http://www.leannecpowner.com/coaching/  and if you’re interested, drop me an email at Leanne@leannecpowner.com . The initial consultation is free. You can also follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LeanneCPowner/ or Twitter @LeanneCPowner for free daily writing tips.

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Grad Pathologies I: Lack of Midrange Planning

Some of you may have noticed my absence from ALPS for the last few months. I’ve been busily building my own business doing dissertation and academic coaching and freelance editing. At the invitation of the blog owner, Chad, I’m back for a two-part series on common problems that I’ve seen working with grad students on their dissertations. (Later there will be a two-part series on common faculty issues.)

The biggest, most frequent problem I observe in graduate students (and to be honest, in faculty too) is a lack of midrange planning. The military, into which I married, captures it best with the concepts of strategic, operational, and tactical planning. Strategic planning is overall goals and big picture thinking. We academics are pretty good at this: finish this paper by the conference, collect this data so we can write the next paper, complete the dissertation. We’re also pretty good at the hands-on tactical planning: the daily to-do list is a good example of tactical planning.

Where we fail badly is in connecting the two steps: the operational level. Operational planning makes our daily task lists meaningful towards achieving our strategic goals. It’s about planning ahead and thinking ahead so that our strategic goals are realized on the timeline we want. Operational planning allows you to finish the conference paper before the night before it’s due by getting you started on it well in advance of the deadline, in reasonable amounts.

The tool for doing this is the Semester-At-A-Glance calendar. It’s a simple one-page calendar that shows four months at a time, allowing you to see everything that’s going on and budget your time to larger projects accordingly.

Briefly, the steps to using the Semester-At-A-Glance calendar are to identify your priority goals for the term – no more than two or three key things that you want to accomplish. Then, you begin breaking down those goals into weekly tasks or goals and assigning those to weeks on the calendar. (USE PENCIL!!) You can have more than one goal for each week, but the boxes are deliberately small for a reason. If you can’t get all of your semester goals on to the calendar at once, you need to rethink the reasonableness of your semester goals.

I will host a webinar on using the Semester-At-A-Glance calendar on Friday, April 20, at noon Central time (1 PM Eastern). You can find the URL for the webinar on my website, http://www.leannecpowner.com/coaching/ . I use Zoom.us for my webcasting, which will require you to download and install a small browser plugin to view the webinar. And of course, you can always download the most current Semester-At-A-Glance calendar from my website.

If you’re interested in dissertation or academic coaching, the summer is a great time to start. It gives you a chance to develop and solidify new or better habits before the chaos of term time arrives. Feel free to take a look around my website and if you’re interested, drop me an email at Leanne@leannecpowner.com . The initial consultation is free. You can also follow me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LeanneCPowner/ or Twitter @LeanneCPowner for free daily writing tips.

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Active Learning from Day 1: Comparing Textbooks

I like to start my semesters the way I intend to continue them, with an active learning activity on the first day of class. But what do you do when you don’t have any content yet? You let the students develop the content themselves. My last several (regular) posts for this group will focus on activities for the first day of class that don’t require any student background knowledge yet get them used to the idea that they’ll be out of their seats and interacting regularly in this course.

In Introduction to World Politics/International Relations, students are frequently unsure what exactly they’ve signed up to study. A significant minority think they’re studying the politics of other countries, others think they’re doing global current events, and others think it’s foreign policies of great powers. Over the years I’ve built a collection of textbook samples that vary widely in their approaches to the field. I give pairs of students a worksheet that asks them to compare two textbooks to the textbook we’re using in the class. What topics are included in all of the books? Can you find a topic that is in one book but not the other two? For fun, I throw a couple ambiguously titled comparative politics textbooks into the box. The point of the exercise is for them to define the central core of topics in the field of IR, and then we identify some of the contested or less-central issues that appear in a minority of books.

When I have a 75-minute class, I then ask them to compare two different editions of the same book, at least two editions apart. (This part of the activity is only possible because I’ve been collecting textbooks for 15 years and raided some retiring faculty members’ stashes as well; your campus library may have old titles that were previously in use at your school.) We compare topics that were prominent in immediate-post-Cold War titles to those that appear in post-9/11 titles, and in a few cases, we can even compare Cold War books too (I’ve got two Morgenthaus that I’ll sometimes entrust to students and a couple early Russett and Starrs). Students are usually quick to notice that the central core topics haven’t changed that much but that a lot more has been added to the scope of the field since the end of the Cold War. We talk about the implications of that for what we teach and study, and how.

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Data Visualization in the Classroom

Today’s post is guest-authored by Alexander Von Hagen-Jamar, a postdoctoral researcher with the STANCE research program, in the  Department of Political Science at Lund University. His research and teaching focus on international relations, international security, state building and capacity, and empirical methodology.

In 2013, I spent two trimesters teaching at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. While there, I had the opportunity to design a course about any subject I wished (within my expertise). I choose to organize the class topically around the consequences of violent political conflict. The other core learning goal was skill-oriented: I wanted to help the students develop applied quantitative literacy in context, and through doing so, encourage them to think deliberately about communication in a variety of mediums. To do that, I designed a series of assignments, centered around a group data visualization assignment. Continue reading “Data Visualization in the Classroom”