Tag: classroom behavior

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“No to E! News red carpet events in the classroom!”

I struggle with technology in the classroom. And not in the “should I allow my students to use laptops or not” way. I am firmly in the camp that allows the use of laptops and tablets in my lectures. There is plenty of debate on this issue: some encourage it; others discourage it. There is no right answer, and ultimately how we handle this “problem” is up to each of us. My choice for laptops is largely based on my feeling like a hypocrite if I insist on pen and paper. I use my laptop/smartphone in my teaching, research, and just general existence. The last time I wrote by hand thank you cards, my hand started aching.

My struggle comes from the “appropriate” use of technology in the classroom. Or better: my students’ changing understanding of what is “appropriate”. Or better-better: What is my role in educating young adults on what is appropriate in the classroom regarding technology? Can I expect certain things? Or are we starting at zero?

I am fully aware that on their lists of priorities, attending my class with 100% devotion ranks relatively low: behind the lunch menu, their friends, weekend plans, and whether somebody texts them back. And yet, in the recent past I have encountered a myriad of strange situations in the classroom that required my intervention because students either forgot where they were or thought they could get lost in the anonymity of the crowd. I had to call out a student who was watching four (!) basketball games at the same time on a split-screen, another one for watching an E! News red carpet event during a group assignment, and another who was so furiously typing while we were watching something as a group that I had to inquire whether they were transcribing the clip (they immediately stopped when I said something). At a guest lecture I gave this week in hybrid form, the inviting professor muted me for a second to admonish two students for playing chess and watching soccer respectively on their screens: they hadn’t noticed that the angle of the zoom cameras in the lecture hall meant that their shenanigans were being projected to the big screen.

A newer contender in the distracting technology game is the rise of Air Pods and other small Bluetooth headphones. They disappear under a student’s hoodie or their hair. A colleague and I recently exchanged thoughts on that, and we both agreed that it is strange to tell students to take out their headphones…in class. And yet, we do it. Has the bar been lowered from “pay attention” to “don’t obstruct your only tool to hear”?

As a teacher I can prepare well for class, make sure the activities are pedagogically sound, and I can set clear boundaries of what the purpose of our classroom is. I do that at the beginning of the semester with the syllabus and my laptop guidelines, which I reiterate in person. I encourage responsible and positive use, and I also highlight – hopefully in a not intimidating way – that in our learning community I can see what they do, just like they see what I do.

What I don’t want to do is play whack amole with Air Pods and E! News. This frustration that I harbor over the misuse of technology and the disregard for our shared learning space stands in odds with my aims of creating an open, inclusive, and comfortable learning environment. And I am not even certain if my frustration is appropriate as an educator. Even as I am writing this, I keep going back and forth on whether it is okay to be frustrated, whether I should be more understanding, whether my students need even more guidance on appropriate classroom behavior, whether I am too harsh or not harsh enough, and whether I should retrain my hand to write with a pen and demand the same of my students.

Maybe someone here will know how to fix all my problems. Perhaps cut off the Wi-Fi?

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“How to spark curiosity”

Hi everyone, my name is Jennifer Ostojski. I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in International Relations at Colgate University. In August 2022, I defended my dissertation on European identity. I recently joined the ALPS team, handling some of the day-to-day stuff, contributing weekly (on Fridays) my thoughts on teaching, and also soliciting guest posts to present new and exciting teaching tools. Looking forward to our time together!

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What is it that we do in Political Science? That’s a question a faculty member prompted us to think about in a department meeting I recently attended. The Geology department “produces” geologists”. The Physics department “produces” physicists. But what do we mean by “producing” political scientists? I could give you the old spiel of pre-law tracks and policy-oriented folks. They have clearer expectations of what happens in the great beyond when they leave their undergraduate institutions. But what about my students, who focus on International Relations or Comparative Politics, who have internships in consulting firms, architectural firms, or even on the stock market? I don’t know about you, but I am not producing consulters, architects, and stock market experts in class.

Reflecting on this question, I realized that the “what I do” in class is to try just genuinely spark curiosity and excitement for everything that politics is (see Chad’s three-part series on the Death of Curiosity here, here, and here). I find that when students come to class, their perception of politics is much more limited to distant actors, processes, and things they think they have no power over. Missing from their radar is the consciousness that ultimately everything they do, engage with, and consume is and can be tied to politics. And more importantly, they are not passive observants but actors in the political world. This realization does not happen organically, but when achieved it can create a curious mind about the world around them – maybe not in perpetuity but at least for the length of the semester.

Over time this transformation and realization can take place when prompted by the instructor (you and me!). Over the last couple semesters, I have put more emphasis on creating activities and classroom designs to elicit this realization in my students and involve them and their ideas more strongly in our classroom environment. Below, I outline some of examples that I am currently doing in my two courses.

1. Participation now makes up 20% of my students’ grade. It is a lot – I think – compared to other courses, but ultimately I decided that I need to motivate my students to speak up in any capacity, share their ideas, and allow themselves to play around with concepts without necessarily feeling the need to say the “right” or “correct” thing.

  • Caveat: I have seen an uptick in participation. But the hurdle of “saying the right thing” is ever present. I had a student recently apologize to me after class for not knowing the answer.

Assuring and reminding my students about the opportunity the classroom provides to freely exchange ideas has worked so far only in parts for me. 

2. I begin every class session with a 5-minute news recap session. It wakes up the students (especially those pesky early Monday morning sessions), and it allows students to share news stories that peaked their interests about domestic or international issues.

  • Caveat: If students don’t read, and I come across that a bunch (maybe you too?), it can become an exercise in cricket sounds. I counter that by keeping in my metaphorical back pocket a couple of stories when students are not sharing anything on their own. They can then at least respond to that and communicate their thoughts.
    • The cynic in me is a bit baffled when I encounter folks who just don’t read anything. But that is beside the point here.

3. A core assignment in my class, which I have done now for a couple of semesters, is a short in-person presentation, in which each student picks their own topic in relation to the class theme (this semester it is broadly “International Relations”). For me, it is Important that they are free to choose the topic and put their own mark on our class. Often, they contribute fresh new case studies that enrich our understanding of core concepts. Also, if they choose on their own, they are more likely to genuinely like the topic, which can be felt in the way they approach the presentation research itself. Students in the past have talked about Princess Diana as an international diplomat, the efforts of the NBA to start an African basketball league, the emerging norm of returning stolen artifacts to former colonized states, and the rise and fall of the Adani Group.

  • Caveat: I have found that when first confronted with the assignment, some students “get it”, while other students are a bit overwhelmed. Two reasons stand out: (1) the freedom of choice is almost too much, but providing examples helps quite a lot for students to be able to narrow down; and (2) a lack of interest in seemingly a lot of things, which then transpires into not knowing where to start and how to proceed. In the case of the second option, I have found that it takes a lot of probing and pulling to define half-heartedly some “interesting” topic.

These three are by no means perfect, but they have created a warmer and more engaged back-and-forth that I appreciate and prefer over my monologues. I try and improve upon that regularly. No empirical evidence exists on the effects of my efforts (yet), but I see it as my responsibility of “what I do” to instill – especially in introductory courses – a sense of curiosity and ownership by our students over politics. Maybe in twenty years one of them will reach out about their international political efforts in architectural design.

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The Death of Curiosity? Part 1

Our fall semester is nearly done, and I’ve already started mentally reviewing it. Although this might be a consequence of recency bias, the teaching-learning environment feels like it has been below average.

Given their annotations on Perusall, many students seem to still have great difficulty identifying the thesis, independent variables, and dependent variable of assigned readings — despite the accurate comments written by classmates.

Attendance in class has frequently been below fifty percent, and a greater portion than usual of the students who do come to class look like they mentally check out during discussions. For context, see my October series on physical presence in the classroom here, here, and here.

Possible solutions to the above problems? Instituting pop quizzes based on Perusall readings and class discussions, machine-graded in the Canvas LMS, comes to mind. If students don’t want to voluntarily eat the carrot of knowledge, then perhaps I should use the stick of multiple choice questions that directly affect the course grade. Two potential drawbacks to this method: first, the difficulty of guiding in-class discussions toward quiz questions that were created before the discussion occurred, and second, potential complaints about not being allowed to “make up” quizzes that were missed when absent. My general policy is not to complicate my life by scheduling alternative testing dates, granting deadline extensions, etc. As I’ve stated before, I regard students as legal adults capable of setting their own priorities.

Before classes end this week, I’ll be gathering slightly more objective feedback on the “skills” components of my two undergraduate courses via anonymous surveys. I’ll report the results in my next post.

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Physical Presence, Part 2

As promised in my last post, here are the results of my unscientific survey on absenteeism. I anonymously polled the 47 students enrolled in the two undergraduate courses that I’m teaching this semester. I received 41 responses.

The survey contained three questions:

  • What has been the main reason you have not attended one or more classes for this course?
  • Does attending class in this course have a positive or negative effect on your mental health?
  • Does attending class in this course have a positive or negative effect on your learning?

Lack of sleep or food, physical illness, and depression/mental health were, in descending order, the most common reasons given for not attending class:

These two courses meet at 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I’m going to assume that insufficient sleep, rather than food, drove the most common response to this question.

Some students said that attending class had a positive effect on their mental health, but more said it had no effect:

In contrast, most students said that class attendance had a positive effect on their learning:

So there you have it. Small sample, muddy picture, but I’ll draw two tentative “conclusions” from the data. First, given the well-documented links between sleep and physical and mental health, there is a good chance that these students’ stated reasons for being absent would change dramatically if they went to bed earlier or if classes did not begin until later in the day. Second, while it’s been my anecdotal experience that students who are chronically absent from class have poor academic performance, the former can’t be said to cause the latter given the likely presence of confounding, omitted variables. We also know from research on active learning pedagogies that people usually have a very inaccurate sense of how much and why they’ve learned. It would be nice to know when and why some students learn more than others when they are in a physical classroom.

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Behavior Management

Things might be bit different in the classroom. In the USA, we are now seeing undergraduates who spent the last two years of high school at home and online. Healthy psycho-social development and adequate academic preparation for college, in decline long before the pandemic, might be at a new low. Your students may be exhibiting behaviors that make classroom discussion more difficult to manage than in the past. It might be a case of the socially cueless, the know-it-all with verbal diarrhea, or the off-topic tangentialist. Or, worst of all, the rage-filled misogynist.

I’ve never been a fan of tossing out a question to the whole class. The practice often leads to complete silence or one of the above types of students derailing the discussion. There are several alternatives, many of which we’ve outlined here before. Splitting the class into small groups for a few minutes gets the whole class involved in discussion rather than just one person. Given the perceived social ramifications, students are often more likely to communicate, civilly, with each other than with the professor. Soliciting a concise verbal report from some groups immediately afterward also tends to filter out irrelevant or objectionable remarks.

The result of a previous exit survey, a.k.a. the muddiest point technique, can be used at the start of class as a small group discussion prompt.

Cold calling — directly addressing a question to a single student — can also work. The trick, however, is to ensure that all students, not just those eager to talk, get an equal chance to speak and feel safe enough psychologically to do so. This can be done via a random number generator, seating chart, or Cards of Fate — a deck of note cards on which are written students names. Shuffle the deck with names face down, and pull the top card each time you ask a question. A student can choose to pass once in a specified time period — per class, per week, per semester. Just write a “P” on the card to record this and set the card aside the next time it is drawn. Names of students absent from class can be removed from the deck beforehand, if it’s convenient — this doubles as an attendance-taking method.

If a student who is called on does begin to ramble, interject with something like “That’s an interesting topic, but right now I need to keep the discussion focused on X.” Then ask a different student the same question.

The last remedy for the over- or inappropriate-talker is the one-on-one meeting in your office. State that while you appreciate the person’s interest in the course, other students need an equal opportunity to participate. Then set a rule that limits how and when this student can speak. Document the meeting with, for example, an email to the student’s advisor. If needed, ask your department chair to be present.

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Preventing Zoombies

As the end of the semester approaches, I’m noticing fewer students signing into my synchronous online classes. I’m also noticing that some students sign in, don’t turn on webcams, and do not respond when asked verbally or in text chat to answer questions. These students log into Zoom and then completely ignore whatever might be happening in class.

How to increase student “presence” in a course? The usual solution — whether face-to-face or online — is to make attendance obligatory and penalize students when they are absent. Early in my teaching career I abandoned this type of policy because I got tired of deciphering students’ claims about “excused” absences. I have no interest in learning about students’ medical or other problems, and I don’t want sick students attending class only to avoid exceeding an allowed number of absences. I believe that legal adults get to set their own priorities and suffer the consequences of their decisions. And students who don’t regularly attend and participate in my classes invariably do poorly grade-wise anyway. That’s their choice.

But that was the pre-Covid era. Given the difficulty students had with the transition to online instruction last spring, there is a chance that the student with mediocre academic performance in the physical classroom is doing terribly as an online student, simply because their time management skills, motivation, and willingness to exert effort weren’t great to begin with.

So I’m starting to experiment with a few techniques that I’m hoping will increase student participation in my synchronous online courses next semester. I believe they will operate as positive reinforcement rather than as a punitive attendance policy.

Continue reading “Preventing Zoombies”
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From Frying Pan To Fire?

A brief meditation on teaching in the era of Trump. From a comparative perspective. In more ways than one.

As someone whose income is in the world’s top one percent, I have the luxury of partaking in long-distance travel on a purely voluntary basis. Soon I’ll be vacationing outside the USA, a country where corrupt, narcissistic xenophobes are doing their best to undermine the rule of law, with the full approval of their supporters. My destination? A country where corrupt, narcissistic xenophobes are doing their best to undermine the rule of law, with the full approval of their supporters.

So yes, I see parallels, despite the geographic and cultural differences. The tribalistic nationalism. The sexism. The religious justifications. The cronyism. Most of all, the constant attempts to de-legitimize the very institutions that originally put these people into positions of power.

I know that I’m a bit more sensitive to the symbiotic relationship between popular prejudices and abusive government than many people, in part because my wife, as a Muslim and an immigrant, is classified as both a terrorist and a rapist in Trumpspeak. But history demonstrates that those who engage in idol worship and willful ignorance as a means to an end rarely see their expectations met.

And here is the connection to my teaching: the basic principle that I try to convey to students is that one benefits by comparing, as open-mindedly as possible, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Curiosity-driven analysis leads to unexpected insights, sounder judgments, and more satisfying outcomes in life. And it is quite acceptable to make mistakes along the way as long as one takes the time to try to figure out why things went wrong.

Unfortunately I am seeing an increasing resistance to this message among U.S. undergraduates. Far too many expect to be intellectually and morally validated solely on the basis of personal opinion. Far too few exhibit a willingness to consider the possibility that perspectives which differ from their own might have merit. If some students perceive my teaching as a threat to the comfortable psychological environment that they have constructed for themselves, I get labeled authoritarian, racist, sexist, or otherwise unprofessional — revenge for being told that their academic performance is not of the quality that they believe it to be. Who am I to tell them that they are not perfect?

This probably makes me sound like a disgruntled, insufferable elitist. But I wonder if we folks in the USA are in the midst of a disaster of our own making. Unstructured and unsupervised play during childhood has become the exception rather than the rule. Reality TV, online personae, and the War on Terror have been background noise for as long as today’s teenagers have been alive. Anxiety and depression are epidemic on college campuses. And now government by distortion, outrage, and caprice has been normalized. It’s probably only natural that many undergraduates think everyone has the right to their own immutable set of alternative facts.

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The Perfect Storm

I’ve been working on my paper for the upcoming APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, where I will be presenting research on students who were in different sections of my university’s fall semester first-year seminar. The survey was an attempt to compare levels of student academic engagement across sections, in the hope of showing that game design projects in my sections were associated with higher survey scores. As usually happens with my research on this kind of topic, there are no easily-recognizable patterns in the survey data. Aware of the looming conference paper deadline, I began thinking about possible alternative explanations for the data. This led me to look at the student evaluations for my seminar sections, and I was surprised to find that average evaluation scores had sharply decreased from the previous year, despite nearly identical course content. Odd.

So I starting asking colleagues what had happened in their seminar sections. I received reports of students’ problematic classroom behavior, lack of motivation, and declining academic performance. There also seems to have been an uptick in diagnosed or in-need-of-diagnosis psychological disorders among last fall’s incoming class of undergraduates.

While there is some solace in knowing that many of us had similar experiences, this could be the thin edge of a very problematic wedge. In the United States, academic ability and college preparedness correlate with socioeconomic status — unfortunate, but true. And at my university, as at others, more incoming students are being granted larger tuition discounts than in the past, which reduces net tuition revenue per student. In sum, in order to fill seats the university recruits a greater proportion of academically-marginal students by offering them greater amounts of financial aid.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you teach the students you have, or more accurately, the students that the university brings to you. If declining aptitude is a long term trend, what practical steps can I — on the front line, so to speak — take in an attempt to adjust to what might be the new normal? Continue reading “The Perfect Storm”

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The Risk Averse Generation

http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Kitten-Pet-Couch-Scaredy-Cat-Animal-Paws-2558459Fall semester is again drawing to a close — final exams are later this week — and as I have done in the past, I will review some teaching successes and failures by loosely applying Simon’s ABC method to myself.

But I will start with a general impression about a changing teaching environment, based on my own experiences this semester and discussions with some of my colleagues. We are seeing incoming college students who increasingly exhibit psychological traits that hinder academic success: an inability to plan, a reluctance to take risks, a lack of coping skills and emotional resiliency, and a fragile sense of self-worth. Learned helplessness is just one manifestation of this phenomenon.

While these students might have the same innate intellectual ability as students have had in the past, they are far less confident about themselves and fear uncertainty to a much greater extent. And so they try to avoid situations they perceive as challenging, refuse to test themselves on what they might not know, and their academic performance suffers as a result. In my case, I have seen the overall grade distribution in my first-year seminar shift markedly to the left — more D’s and F’s and fewer A’s. Maybe this is a one-time occurrence, but I doubt it.