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The Take-Out Quiz

This idea comes from a friend who teaches developmental English at a community college:

Students have a specified amount of time to complete a low-stakes quiz; for example, 20 or 30 minutes. They are allowed to consult fellow students and can use books, phones, or the internet. They can even take the quizzes out of the room to work in the hallway or the library. The only rule is that they must turn in their quizzes at the end of the specified time period.

In my friend’s experience, students do not score 100 percent on the quizzes. In fact, they tend to score about the same as they do on closed-book quizzes taken solo. Students who do the readings and take notes in class do well, while those who don’t know the material invariably try to copy answers from the wrong people.

The classroom dynamic produced by take-out quizzes is unpredictable. Some students opt to work alone whether they are quiet in class or not. Students who choose to work in groups can self-sort according to academic ability, but you might see the usually shy student become extroverted within the group when he or she advocates for an answer that he or she believes is correct.

The main advantage of the take-out quiz is that it gets students engaged with the material in a different way than lecture or the traditional independently-taken, closed-book quiz. It also rewards the students who do homework.

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Death and the Modem

As I sit here, surrounded by my desktop, three laptops, a smart phone and a new modem/wifi box, I wonder if it’s possible to become overly dependent on technology.  The scene has been necessitated by the death of the old modem, which had lasted a good six years, and the problems of getting its fancy-pants replacement to connect to my various devices: certainly the demands I make now of my IT are much greater than they were even just a few years ago.

The same has also happened in the classroom.  Powerpoint presentations are ubiquitous, as are laptops for students and assorted e-learning tools.  But the question of necessity was really brought home to me by today’s class on communication.

We started off with my twitter game, which again demonstrated the pitfalls of online media to the group.  But we then followed up with a very simple game that involved no more than some Lego and a sheet of instructions.  The game is a common one, where the group have to recreate a lego construction, but with only one person looking at the original and unable to speak, another person being the only one to touch the bricks and a third being unable to do anything except ask questions of the first.

My impression from the class was they appreciated the dimensions of communication and of teamwork as much (if not, indeed, more) from this little game as they did from the more ‘enabled’ twitter game.  Naturally, they are looking at somewhat different things, but sometimes we might want to think about simple ways to do things, not just the complicated ones.

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Dipping into Podcasting

After many years of saying I’ll go it, I have finally taken to podcasting.  Despite having what I feel to be a generally positive attitude towards technology and a very good working relationship with our e-learning unit at the University, it was always something that seemed just that bit too much like hard work, both to make the podcasts at all and to make them of a sufficient standard.

The benefits have always been clear to me.  By clearing out a big chunk of passive consumption by students in classtime, I have more time to engage in active learning and student-driven feedback and discussion.  In addition, students get to consume my lecture at a time when they are more likely to be paying attention, and they can come back to it as often as they like, when they like.

Two things have changed to get me finally over the hurdle.  Firstly, the technology has become a whole lot simpler: I can record audio over a powerpoint on my laptop using Profcast, which cost a very reasonable amount for a single academic-user licence [sic], producing a MOV file that can either go to iTunes or (as in my case) to the University’s own Box of Broadcasts site. BoB lets me either stream the file, or have it to download, plus I’m able to restrict who can access it.  I can even embed the files into our VLE, so students keep their one-stop-shop for the module’s resources.

Secondly, my negotiating politics module has given me an opportunity to do this in a more focused way: I have a six-week block of classes where I want students to be just doing activities, with minimal input from me.  Last year I was appending a twenty minute lecture at the end of the class to talk about wider aspects, but these have translated very simply into short podcasts: I would feel it necessary to trim down an hour-long lecture for this type of delivery.

Naturally, there are some issues of compatibility and access, plus a need to work some more on linking the podcasts into the classroom sessions, but generally it’s given me the confidence to go and try this on a bigger scale next time.

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Active Learning About Plagiarism

All my syllabi contain the usual policy statement about plagiarism — refer to the catalog for the university’s definition, don’t do it, if you do do it you might fail the course. And as is the norm for information that’s in a course syllabus, the statement often gets ignored, and I end up meeting budding plagiarists in my office for face to face discussions.

I’ve started requiring that any student who wants to “discuss” a plagiarized paper and the the grade (of zero) that it has received bring a document (typed, paper) to the meeting. The document has to contain, in the student’s own words, how the contents of his or her paper relate to the definition of plagiarism contained in the catalog. In other words, the student has to argue effectively that the paper was not plagiarized or admit to the plagiarism.

This method prevents the usual weepy sniffling or feigned indignation that occurs at such meetings. The student is forced to reflect on his or her actions, and the consequences thereof, before he or she enters my office. And I get a written confession.

Another benefit is that the process makes me less central to the situation and the conflict becomes more impersonal. When students read the university’s definition of plagiarism and begin writing about it, they see that they have violated a university policy, which I, as a faculty member, am simply upholding.

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The Age of Non-Exploration

I am continually frustrated by students’ reluctance to experiment with the user-friendly technological tools that I give them. Most recently this has been demonstrated in my blog-based Europe1914 simulation and in a class that is piloting a new learning management system, Canvas by Instructure. (Please note that I have no financial interest in Instructure; my university is also piloting Blackboard’s 9.1 Learn.)

In the Europe1914 simulation, I intended the blogs to function as a platform for student communication and collaboration. The students did learn how to use the blogs – I provided them with specific directions both on the blogs and elsewhere, and I conducted a short in-class training session. But the students’ use of the blogs was limited to posts and occasional comments. No students explored ways of using the blogs for other purposes or even text formatting options. Conversations consisted primarily of each student on a team posting his or her work, which one or two team members consolidated into a single end product. Teams did not use the blogs to develop negotiation strategies or to bargain with each other.

For the other class, I have been pushing students to use with features in Canvas like discussion threads, wikis, and shared Google Docs. It’s been a tough slog. Many of the students are completely unfamiliar with these tools, and it seems that once they stumble upon one method of communication, they are reluctant to use another, even if it might meet their needs more effectively.

It appears to me that students today are socialized to view learning as a top-down, regimented process in which they do not have to exercise initiative. They expect to be told both what to learn and how to learn. I wish I knew how to break students out of this mindset, but I don’t.

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Step aside, Spielberg…

It’s always with a certain reticence that I tell people about my one video on Youtube, both because I’m a generally unassuming sort of person and because I know it’s not a great piece of work.  However, I’ve reached the point in the year where it gets a dusting-down and is shared with my students.

The video marks a key transition point in my negotiation module, from theory to practice, from me teaching to them learning directly.  Based on a real-life experience of mine in Istanbul, it shows that even with a lot of knowledge about principled bargaining (not least from teaching it for several years), it is not always easy to apply that knowledge to actual negotiations.

Using a video allows me to do some things that would otherwise be very difficult to do.  When analysing negotiations, you typically need a considerable block of time to read the relevant materials and reflect, time which is in short supply in my case.  The alternative of having students engage in their own negotiation scenario similarly takes up a bigger block of time and I can’t be certain about what will happen (i.e. will it cover what I need it to?).  Thus, showing a video allows me to present my central point (the shortcomings of theory) in a time-efficient and focused way.  Moreover, as a novel teaching method (for all involved), it has consistently made an impression on students, who can recall the key points even at some remove.

It’s not something that I have made a habit of, since I think it really only applies in some specific contents, but it’s certainly worth thinking about doing, especially if you want to move students out of their habitual patterns. Technically, it’s very simple to put together and share with other. Plus, you can always disable the comments function.

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Color-Coded Grading

Following Chad’s post earlier this week about using rubrics, i thought I would share a method for grading papers that a colleague shared during a workshop.

Following the stoplight method of green is good, red is stop, and yellow is caution, this method involves marking up papers with colored highlighters to provide a visual cue to students as to their overall performance on the paper.  Sections where the student is doing well are marked in green; grammatical errors are marked in yellow, and substantive problems are marked in red.

The use of colors has a number of benefits.  The use of green balances the standard practice of using red ink to indicate problems, and using a separate color for grammatic problems allows us to note the problems without having to explain the problem in detail.  I find that it reduces the amount of time I spend making comments, as the color often suffices to indicate to students the nature of the problem or success without having to generate individualized comments. I find it particularly useful for the grammar comments, which I usually want to note but not spend a great deal of time on. This type of grading is also easily adapted for either hard copies (where you use actual highlighters) or electronic papers (using the highlighter in Word).

The color system is easily understood by students and only requires a few moments to explain when turning back the first paper.  I haven’t yet looked into whether this method works better for students than the traditional commenting method, but I do find that it reduces the amount of time I spend trying to generate comments for papers.

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More on human nature

Following on last week’s discussion about when do people learn, as against their nature, I found myself after class having exactly the same conversation with a student.  The assessment for my module on ‘negotiating politics’ is a reflective piece, where students consider their development as negotiators, in light of both the literature and their own experience through the weeks.

Today’s class was about principled negotiation, taking Fisher and Ury’s classic “Getting to Yes” as the key text.  The student was bemoaning the idea that it was necessary to analyse one’s own actions and that over-analysis was the likely outcome.  Indeed, he claimed that now we’d covered the model, everyone in the class was just going to stick to it and no one would really learn anything.

I reminded him of the second round of Victor’s card game, where a student had just ploughed on because “it’s nice to have more than one card.”  I then also remarked that even though I’d closed today’s class with a reminder about the centrality of good (or indeed, any) preparation in being an effective negotiator, I was confident that not everyone in the class would prepare, not even for the session in a fortnight entitled “preparation in negotiations”, which I have flagged repeatedly as requiring preparation.

The student took the point, but it was apparent that he didn’t quite buy it.  And it’s here that the experiential model will really kick in.  In a few weeks, I’ll be able to go back to students and ask them how the theory they’ve learnt has helped them and shaped their actions; not because I think it will have changed much, but because it won’t.  Likewise, even though they know they should be keeping notes to help them produce their reflective piece at the end of the module, most will not have been particularly assiduous about it.  By making them confront their natures, I hope to make it more likely that they will change (or at least modify) them.

Then again, I’d not bet on it…

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Using Rubrics As Teaching Tools

In the early years of my teaching career, I adopted rubrics to speed up grading of student writing, but I’d see the same mistakes, from the same students, on paper after paper throughout the semester. The content of the rubric would leave as little an impression on students’ minds as the inked comments on their papers. And there were the usual end-of-semester complaints of “Why didn’t I get a good grade on this?”

Now I have students create their own rubrics (sort of). About a week before the first major writing assignment is due, I distribute a few short writing samples to students. Each sample is a modified anonymous passage written by students in prior semesters. Each passage contains a variety of writing errors — vague or hard to find thesis statement, illogical organization, run-on sentences, spelling mistakes, etc.  I usually hand out five or six different samples. Students read and write comments on the samples and then form groups with other students who have the same one.

While in groups, students compare notes and discuss how the passage they’ve examined can be improved. In the final stage of the exercise, one student from each group reports on the group’s findings to the rest of the class. I jot down notes and ask questions.

I then tell the class that I will create a rubric based on what they have identified as indicators of good and bad writing. Students are therefore responsible for following their own recommendations.

Students make similar comments every semester, so I don’t have to change my rubric much, if at all.

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The Advantage of the Long Course

Last night my 8 week US politics course finished up–its the same credits as a 16 week course, but we meet once a week for 4 hours for 8 weeks, so everything is condensed. These types of courses are primarily aimed at the non-traditional student who works during the day, although many traditional aged students take them as well.

Three or four hour courses are not uncommon in colleges today, and when we tell job candidates about them, the reaction typically varies from mild horror to ‘thanks, i’d rather not have a job right now’.  My reaction was similar at first, but I’ve come to love these courses.  Here are my top five reasons to perk up at the chance to teach a long night class.

5. It counts as part of your load.

We have a 3-3 teaching load, with no more than 25 students per class.  The 8 week class counts as part of the load–which means that the other 8 weeks, I only have two courses.  Teach two night classes a semester, and you either have a 2-2 the entire year, or if you teach them at the same time, the odd 3-1.  And if you want to pick up some extra cash via an overload, a night class in your ‘off’ term is the way to do it.

4. You Can Take Advantage of the Down Time

You have to break up the time anyway–the best lecturer in the world is not going to keep students on their toes for 4 hours week after week. Sure you can give them ‘breaks’ but why not take it further?  In the middle of each class I give the students a 15 minute break followed by ‘current issues discussion’.  The break is long enough for them to scour the local food options for dinner; then we sit down and eat while talking politics for 20-30 minutes.  Each week 3-4 students are responsible for choosing the issue and leading the discussion, which has the added bonus of giving me a break and time to eat my own dinner. Its a great way to take a ‘break’ from the class while still giving the students time to talk and learn.

3. Active Learning Bonanza

Four hour classes offer an amazing opportunity to try out active learning principles.  There is so much room for simulations and games in these classes–finally you have the time to brief, play the game, and debrief.  You can get the students out of their seats and moving around, and still have plenty of time to hit the highlights of the week’s topic.  In a four hour class, active learning becomes a necessary part of the course.

2. Students Can Really Learn The Material

I don’t find any difference in student learning in the 16 and 8 week version of my US politics course.  As previously posted, I use the US citizenship test as a pre- and post- test in this class, and the 8 week students do just as well as the 16 week students (last nights crop was no different: on the pre-test only 1 student passed; on the post-test everyone passed).  Students sometimes feel that they are missing out by only having 8 weeks instead of 16, and indeed they have to learn the material twice as quickly.  But I can be confident that these students aren’t being cheated in any way.

1. They Push You as a Teacher

I may feel exhausted both before and after I step into the classroom, but while I’m there, I’m completely energized. Four hours isn’t a hardship: its an opportunity–an opportunity to figure out the essential ideas of each content area and how to deliver it to the students.  I can experiment with new types of assessment, with new games and simulations, with readings, and with different technologies.  The challenges of this kind of course have led me to engage in more reflection on my teaching than any other course.

Are there downsides?  Sure.  Its exhausting.  The students are sometimes late to class due to traffic or work or kid issues; and sometimes they power down despite your best efforts.  But these hassles are no different than those faced in day time classes.  So my advice?  If you get a chance to teach a non-traditionally timed class, jump at it.  You may be surprised at how much you enjoy it!