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January, 2008

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Discussion: It’s All about the Details
Sometimes it’s good to revisit an instructional standby. Discussion is a staple in most teachers’ repertoire of strategies, but it frequently disappoints. So few students are willing to participate and they tend to be the same ones. The students who do contribute often do so tentatively, blandly, and pretty much without anything that sounds like interest or conviction. On some days it’s just easier to present the material.

Discouraging Over Participators
By Nicholas F. Skinner, King’s University College, The University of Western Ontario
Over the years I have had considerable success in encouraging student participation in my senior seminars. As advised in this newsletter, I have a discussion early in the course about those characteristics that make discussion effective.

Hurtful Student Comments
By Glenn Hartz, The Ohio State University Mansfield
At most places now, students are given the opportunity to evaluate instructors at the end of each class. Along with standardized items, students are invited to offer open-ended narrative comments on the course and instructor. Sometimes the comments are nice; sometimes negative but constructive; sometimes negative and destructive.

Tips for Cheap Trips: Short-term Travel Courses on a Shoestring
By Susan Mooney and Karen Talentino, Stonehill College, Massachusetts
“Nothing was routine, and I had to think about each step I took, both figuratively and literally. I was freed from my regular responsibilities, and I was able to focus on learning all of the time.” The kind of learning this student describes is what we strive to foster each January when we take up to 26 sophomores on a 12-day camping trip to the Everglades. Although research clearly demonstrates the power of travel to create lasting learning experiences, cost (as well as personal circumstances) prevents many students from participating in traditional long-term study abroad programs.

Discussions with Structure
Students find discussions disillusioning just about as often as faculty do. In the analysis referenced below, students objected when a few fellow classmates dominated the discussion; when the discussion wandered off topic, making it difficult to ascertain main points; and when students participated just for the sake of participating.

Hard Courses and Student Ratings: The Facts
Regrettably, some myths about student ratings persist. One of the most erroneous claims that if you teach a “hard” course, one where the content challenges students and the workload is heavy, students will rate that course lower. The assumption is that students “like” and therefore rate higher courses that are easy and do not challenge them.

The Teacher Midwife
The midwife is still my favorite metaphor for teaching. I’ve written about it before in the newsletter—lots of years ago now—but it continues to influence the way I think about teaching. I don’t think there’s a metaphor that more aptly captures the complexity, power, and richness of the dynamic relationship between teachers, students, and learning. The metaphor is not original with me, and although I have read some quibbles in the literature as to who first proposed it, I first encountered it in a 1986 Harvard Educational Review essay by William Ayer. Here’s some of my current thinking about how the midwife mirrors all that a good teacher should be.

Student Attention Spans
Have you heard that advice about chunking content in 10- to 15-minute blocks because that’s about as long as students can attend to material in class? It’s a widely touted statistic and given the behaviors indicative of inattentiveness observed in class, most faculty haven’t questioned it. But Karen Wilson and James H. Korn did. They got to wondering how researchers made that determination. “What was the dependent measure, and how did researchers measure attention during a lecture without influencing the lecture itself as well as students’ attention?” (p. 85)