Medaille CollegeBusiness Department
Medaille Collegeother pages
overview | scholarship | service | career plan
student opinion surveys
summary | discussion
this page
significant teaching achievements
achieving objectives |
effectiveness | changes
I taught MBA 504, MBA 600, MBA 604, and probably 624 for the last time. I taught a summer course for the fifth time in the last six years.
This year, I taught WRT/ENG 200 for the first time in a decade.
Even though I was on the committee that developed the original Gen Ed curriculum and on the sub-committee that developed this course, GEN 230, I had not taught it until Fall 2006.
In all the sections that I taught, the students filled out opinion surveys at the end of the course. In addition, I asked for student feedback in other ways.
This formative feedbacks indicates that I am an effective classroom teacher. However, I consider myself more learner-in-chief than the sage on the stage. I learn about the content of the course, and I learn about teaching.
The feedback here was summative: stop accepting new students, teach out the current five dozen students. With no new students, no student organization, and no future to the program, it was hard to be my usual upbeat positive self. I don't think I handled it especially well because I was placed in an embarrassing, indefensible position with the students:
why was the program shut down?
why was it shut down in the manner in which it was shut down?
How was I supposed to answer those questions? For almost every one of those students, I was their first faculty contact during the admissions process. Part of the reason they decided to enroll was my attitude and the promise for their lives inherent in it. Yes, I said, it will be worth your time and money to get this degree if only because of the career-long networking with other alums of the program. For eight years, I put a lot of work into our MBA program. I was the advisor for the MBA Student Organization. Eliminating the program in spite of the faculty and the dozens of students was short-sighted and doing it without the decision makers' ever having to be accountable for it in front of the students was cowardly. It undermined my credibility, and I am unlikely to buy into any similar administrative initiative again.
Having developed WRT 200 with Jan Schlegel and Carol Harrison in the late 1980's, I was surprised to see how little it had changed in the past decade. I was able to step right back in, but I found that I have changed more than the course has. This year, while the student opinion surveys indicate that I was effective, I started to uncover ways in which I can increase that effectiveness.
Earlier in my career, I assumed that a writing course should be about writing, that written words and coherent sentences are fundamental -- and sufficient. In my courses, I made students aware of the pictures that the words conjured in the mind's theater. I had the students read their essays aloud in class. When their tongues tripped over a sentence, I would suggest that as a sign of a syntax problem. But a writing course should be about writing.
Now, I assume that a writing course should be about thinking and communicating. Words should be central to a writing course, but they are no longer sufficient. Images, sounds, and oral summaries (presentations) augment the words. I want the students to build the other media into the process, not an add-on, not a decoration. Instead, all the media are part of the research and revision processes. Then the media taken together, including the words, create associations and synergies that the writer can harness into virtuous cycles. The insights gained feed back into the next revision of the words and make them stronger in the sense of more effectively communicating the writer's thinking to a specific audience for a specific purpose.
In the two 200 sections of over three dozen students, four or five had various degrees of difficulty accepting my assumptions about the role of other media in strengthening writing. They wanted to use words only. I spent a fair amount of time talking with them, not only to help them change their assumptions but also to understand them better and to be able to help others like them in the future.
Two of them didn't seem to get it, but they didn't get other aspects of the course, also. Most of the students, however, seemed to have no problem accepting my assumptions, and many students welcomed them.
The other difficulty with this course is one that I had ten years ago: what will the students write about?
Decades ago, when writing courses were taught by English Lit PhDs, the students wrote about the professors' favorite literature. Now that writing courses are taught by Rhetoric and Communication PhDs and creative writing MFAs, the students are supposed to write about things other than literature.
Twenty years ago, Jan, Carol, and I used this feature -- the content of student essays -- to distinguish WRT 175 from WRT 200. In WRT 175, the students would write stand-alone essays about whatever they wanted as long as they practiced the standard rhetorical modes. In WRT 200, they would write a series of essays organized according to the standard problem-solving model.
Most often, the students wrote about social problems, often related to their major: rainforest destruction, stem-cell research, ADD, welfare, etc. In class and while evaluating their writing, I was faced with a question I could not answer: to what extent is ENG 200 about writing and to what extent is it about whatever social problem the students are writing about? For example, if the paragraph describes the differences between stem cells and skin cells and misstates something about DNA or natural selection, to what extent is that a writing problem alone? What if I know enough about DNA to have some doubts about the student's statement but not enough to be confident? Should I do the research myself before I put my foot in my mouth when I write my marginal comments? If I let it go, am I validating erroneous information, giving the student confidence to use it again?
Last summer, I agreed in August to teach GEN 230 for the first time. Having only
a few weeks to develop the course materials, I soon discovered that none of the sections
completely followed the course outline as we had written it, and some of the
sections were primarily analytical rather than creative. That is, instead of
learning art, the students learned about art. Instead of making art, they wrote
another research paper.
I am meeting with other GEN 230 faculty to re-think the course, and I am
thankful to see that it is returning to its roots as an art course. Meanwhile,
last fall I did what I thought was best. I emphasized the creative rather than
the analytical, and I let the students help me discover how to best work with
what they brought to the course. Every week, I took class time to get feedback
orally.
As a result of summative feedback, I will no longer be teaching MBA courses.
While some students prefer to choose their own topic to write about, usually because they have already researched and written about it for another course, most seem just as happy for me to suggest and recommend. In the past, I approved social problems with a high media profile because they are easy to research and come with a lot of received wisdom that some undergrad-level research can challenge, thus advancing the critical thinking and primary research objectives of the course.
Sections of ENG 200 taught by other faculty limit the students to local problems. The next time that I teach it, I am going to take the opportunity to similarly direct the students to international topics. The students probably have not researched these topics before and they probably won't this opportunity elsewhere in the Medaille curriculum. In addition, the research will be done mostly online, which is one place where Medaille students have a level playing field with richer, more prestigious colleges.
As a result of the informal, ongoing formative feedback from the students in
Fall 2006, I am going to teach the two GEN 230 sections this spring differently. The course emphasizes the students' creative projects, which are
all different. The shared knowledge and skills are a small part of the course
compared to the divergent learning. The two questions I couldn't answer before
Fall's section was this: how much work could I get out of the students? How
sophisticated could I expect their projects to be?
In answer, I learned that I can expect more work and that the range of
sophistication is wider than I expected. Both aspects will be addressed by
having more small projects. Those who are less sophisticated will then have more
opportunities to start fresh and grow.
Also, I am going to provide the students with more prescriptive step-by-step
instructions. Most computer users use only a dozen or so commands out of the
thousands available in any software application. While there is value in
students exploring and discovering on their own (more divergent learning), the
semester has a time imperative, and I need to prescribe the few commands they
will most likely need for their projects.
|
Learn more about how these how these shorter term objectives fit into: |
For me, it takes three or more times teaching a course for a course web to mature. After
that, it can change, but it takes that long to try out the features available to
see what mix of them works best. The GEN 230 course web and its supporting
materials should be at that maturation point a year from now.
Depending on what else I teach, the webs for those courses will also be further along that
development process than they are now. For Spring 2007, I am scheduled to teach
MGT 110 Introduction to Management and BUS 298 Special Topics on new media
business communications. The latter course has no future because it doesn't fit
into the short list of electives in the downsized business curriculum. For Fall
2007, I assume that I will have more ENG 200 and GEN 230, but that remains to be
seen.
What should I do with the course webs for the MBA courses? I won't be maintaining them anymore, but they'll continue to get traffic. Perhaps I should add a rotting-links warning to every page.
That brings up the question of what to do with Ricci Street, the Bistro
discussion forum, and all the Parkside Plaza student webs.
I have begun to unsubscribe from the sources of information that kept me current
in the content of the MBA courses. It is unfortunate that some of these these
knowledge areas are now found nowhere in the College's curriculum. Without the
justification of these MBA courses, I won't have the time to keep current.
While the MBA students always had laptops, it wasn't until the College started
going wireless that I was able to move my courses out of the computer classrooms
in Huber Hall. It was a huge improvement to have the students learning on their
own computers, with all the resources available, rather than on the restricted,
network-managed desktop PCs in the classrooms. The other advantage was breaking
the students out of the factory-bench church-pew classroom. In the regular
classroom, we could rearrange the tables and get back to a more participative
gathering around the campfire where the students could talk to each other.
With the undergraduate courses, I am back to the computer classrooms, where both
the
pedagogy and learning environment suffer. The students will no longer be sitting
in a semi-circle where they can see each other, each student at a laptop, and
where I am the only person without a mouse in my hand and an open connection to
the Internet. One of their laptops is connected to the projector.
Instead, to get student access to the Internet, I have to use the Huber classrooms which are designed rigidly around the factory / church model of one foreman / priest in charge and all the workers / worshipers at their stations. This is a major constraint on the learning environment. Classroom management and authoritarian control are clearly more important than student communication. Students are in neat rows hidden in a forest of monitors and never have to even acknowledge each other's existence. The laptop at the teacher's station in the "front" is the only one connected to the projector. I am thus tethered to it and forced into a foreman / priest role, which destroys the pedagogy I found so effective in the MBA courses. Learning will happen in spite of these computer classrooms, not because of them.
What the students lose because of the physical constraints I can partially replace by:
encouraging them to bring their own laptops to class.
having them sit at the teacher's station to control what's
projected onto the screen. I can then move around the room and try to
reintegrate the fragmentation forced by the forest of monitors.
moving them
out of there for some of the class sessions that require more interactivity. But
I can only do that day by day on a campus which already doesn't have enough
classroom space. To make the pedagogy more granular would mean moving twenty
students in and out of a space I had to reserve in another building, which would
take more time than tolerable in a sixty-minute class session.
A year from now, I hope to have worked out the syllabus and the room reservation
system for these courses. The long-term solution would be to provide laptops to
all the students and let my courses move to a flexible environment more
conducive to learning.
If I am going to continue teaching in the Huber classrooms, the PCs need some software that they don't currently have. A year from now, the software should be complete. I have specified free, open-source software so that there is no added licensing expense for the College.
I've always included non-US examples in my courses, but the current presidential search lists internationalizing the campus among the challenges and opportunities. During the coming year, I intend to make the non-US component of my courses larger and more explicit.
modified: January 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/selfeval/2006/teaching.htm