February 2009

Education Person of the Year Reboots

“We saw that there is a big difference between graduating from high school and being ready for college,” said Gates.

And THAT is especially true for low SES students who are the first in their family to go to college.

The Value of a College Degree in the Networked World says:

Selling students a degree does not fulfill the responsibility of schools. It’s not enough. To prepare college students for success in the world in which they will live, schools must teach the students to share. Schools much teach students how to be public; public in the world of digital.

I have had difficulty with this. No matter how much I tell my students, they often do not do what I’ve said. I just went in today and deleted one student’s name from a post. She’s given her last name as her handle and I don’t want the two connected.

Do teach them to blog. Encourage them to connect their public blogs at conferences and create a personal learning network of their peers.

I am trying to do this within our class blog, getting the student connected and paying attention to others who are like them (or not). Tinto says that connection helps students stay in college and I want that for them.

I think as the cohort class for health science majors comes to fruition that the sort of connected blogging that the article is talking about will flourish.  I certainly hope so, anyway.

Taking Advantage of Generational Diversity in the Classroom

Community colleges have a large diversity of students based on age. Forty-three percent of our students are traditional, ages seventeen to twenty-one, but almost as large a cohort, forty-two percent, are between the ages of twenty-two and forty (“Community College Stats”). Facilitating students talking to one another increases their retention in college (Tinto) and thereby increases their habits of lifelong learning, since they have been successful learning in a new environment.

The college itself can encourage intergenerational teaching and learning. Flexibility of time and type of offerings allows students with work and family responsibilities to attend. Active focused clubs, which meet in the evenings, supports cross-generational communication. Innovative teaching awards, on-campus conference days, and continuing education offerings facilitate intergenerational learning and teaching among the faculty.

Within the freshman composition classroom, often “the only place where involvement may arise” (Tinto 601), I have found three successful strategies for encouraging generational diversity and lifelong learning.

Strategy 1: Peer Editing
An activity which encourages transgenerational communication is peer editing of the narrative paper, the first major writing assignment in the course. The narrative paper acts as a bridge from personal and high school writing to college writing which helps the students through the entry stage in college (Christie and Dinham). This section of the peer editing has often led to conversations between the writer and the reader over their very different experiences.

Strategy 2: Blogging
Since community college students thrive when they feel like they belong (Schuetz), creating an ongoing classroom blog, where students post and comment regularly, is an effective activity. Through the blog, students connect with one another. This encourages intergenerational discussions and relationship-building, which contributes to the students’ retention (Astin).

The blog is a very useful classroom tool. WebCT and Blackboard can be used in very similar and non-public ways. I prefer using a blog because students from different classes can “meet” and get to know one another, sometimes we get comments from the general reading population, or from other students at other colleges. That is fun for the students.

Also the fact that there are more students on the blog means it is more likely that they will find someone who is “like them,” which solidifies the sense of belonging.

Strategy 3: Interviewing
A third activity that encourages cross-generation conversations is an interview assignment. Since students often pick a major without a thorough understanding of what is required by it, and a poor fit is a reason for student attrition (Tinto), I have them interview a practitioner in their chosen major. Usually those people are in a different age cohort than the students. Many of the students have learned unexpected information in their interview, some of which has led them to change their plans.

A New Strategy: Cohort classes
In addition, this fall I will be adding another dimension to my attempts to encourage intergenerational learning in the composition classroom. Starting in August 2009, Lone Star will offer a Freshman Composition for Health Science Majors, where the entire class is made up of students who plan to get a degree and work in the health sciences. This will increase the likelihood of their retention (Tinto) and encourage them in their adoption of lifelong learning.

Thought to ponder: Traditional = nontraditional
Since even traditional students in the community college have dual lives, lack of separation from their high school friends creates a second life when coupled with their college lives, they are similar to nontraditional students (Christie and Dinham) in trying to maintain a balance between life and school. Encouraging social integration in the classroom will help students across the generations become lifelong learners.

This was an abstract (with some additions) for a CFP. I have no idea if it will be accepted, but I would be very interested in developing this line of thought regardless. I have made a lot of choices in my classroom very specifically because of Tinto’s work and it would be exciting to share those pedagogical choices with others.

I don’t know if it will be accepted though. It certainly isn’t terribly sexy. I mean, who doesn’t do peer editing? But… those are three of the activities in my classroom that work.

The NYTimes article covers the study that shows that students think they are entitled to grades for effort. According to it, perceived effort should be rewarded with a B.

First, what the student perceives as effort and what actually is effort are not necessarily the same thing. We might could discuss that in the definition section of writing.

But, having said that, how can we enlighten students that their grades mean that they have accomplished the required work well?

Make sure our syllabus says that an A is for exceptional work.

We need to state up front that A’s are not the standard grade in the class and that our students need to do above the minimum and more for an A.

Samples of A work would also be good. The library on campus will often hold a notebook in the reserve section into which you can place samples for your students to look at.

An advantage to that is that the students who want an A enough to work for it will probably aim higher than they would have otherwise.

Tell them that C is average.

We should probably make sure that they know that C is average. They’ve never heard that in their life. If we are grading their work on C as average, then they need to know.

It should be in our syllabus. It should be on our grading rubric.

Shoot, make a poster and hang it in the room.

Give them sufficient feedback.

One problem in some of the courses I have seen is that students don’t know how they are doing. Yes, they should know how they are doing. We give them papers with grades back on a regular basis.

(If you don’t, then you need to. Papers should be returned at a minimum within two weeks from their reception.)

Despite the fact that students could see their running scores, they often do not add these up and keep track. I have had abysmal students who have never made above a D on a paper demand to know why they were making an F when I passed out interim grades and I have had a student who was making a B+ try to drop the class because she made a 50 on a single homework assignment. They don’t know how to view their grades. Even when we tell them the system, they don’t know.

So we need to give them grade averages throughout the semester. I try to give these out three times. Five weeks, ten weeks, and fifteen weeks.

An advantage of giving the averages out three times is that students know what they are making as they work on the course. At five weeks if they have a 44 and they actually want to make a B, they know they need to get in gear. At ten weeks if they have a 44, they need to either miraculously ramp it up (I’ve had students do it) or give over their hope for a B and aim for a C. At fifteen weeks, they know going into the final what they are making.

I also let anyone who is making a 95 or above out of the final. It lets the other students know that people did make that high a grade. (The down side to it is that all the interesting finals don’t get written. But I am willing to grade fewer papers for this.)

Let them know that effort doesn’t count.

I have personal stories of effort that I made and still I failed. I tell them those stories and relate them to the class. I tell them I went for tutoring, that I worked hard, that I tried my best, and that I still made a D.

If you don’t have a personal story, give them a hypothetical example.

If someone were working on your house and they didn’t know how to put up drywall, but they made an effort– and it was all crooked, with the insulation showing and holes in the wall, would you be happy? Would you pay them for their work? No. But they worked. They tried.

Then relate it to the class.

Explain that a C, while not a great grade, can be a shining mark of distinction.

I know you are shaking your head on this one. But here’s how I do it.

I tell my students that they need to do the best they can. I tell them that their work is what matters. If they are doing the best they can and they get a C, then they should be proud of that C.

I also remind them that if they aren’t doing the best they can and they get a C, they will be right to be ashamed of that grade. The problem isn’t a C. The problem is that they didn’t do their best.

Then I tell them of the C I am most proud of in my life. I took a class without the two years of prerequisites required. I took the class without the math background necessary. I took the class in the summer. (Yes, I was a fool.) Seventy people started in that class. Nine people passed. I made a C. I am very proud of that C.

Students DO think they are entitled to good grades if they “worked hard.”

The NYTimes said:

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.
…
“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

It could also be that we have been teaching them with our “self-esteem first” program that they are entitled.

As a teacher, I have seen this in many students. The one who really disparaged my class on RateYourProfessors.com was mad because she did all the extra work and she didn’t earn an A. She did not seem to realize that the extra work earned her the B, otherwise it would have been a C.

Hmm. Maybe the US educational system isn’t the problem. She was from a school system in another country.

Technology as Boon and Challenge to the English Classroom

As composition instructors, we are challenged to teach our students to write, a practice which is easier if they are motivated and interested. Engaging them in a real-world writing situation with an immediate and focused audience, the discourse community of the internet, seems a relevant approach. Many students do not even recognize electronic text as writing (Lenhart, et al) since they compartmentalize knowledge (Abbott and Nance) and expanding their writing into a social medium could encourage them to see relationships between their education and the rest of their lives (“Theory and Research-Based Principles of Learning”).

Despite the boon technology offers to the classroom, many professors are reticent about employing it. We may be afraid to give up our status as epistemological authorities and become novices again and we assume our students, as digital natives, have a higher knowledge level than we do (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking).

There are a few issues for the students as well. The pervasiveness of the internet in modern America can become a detriment to students, if they use leetspeak to write (Lee). In addition, though many students are fluent participants, other students have never used the internet (Jones). Taking advantage of the opportunities technology offers requires that these students gain mastery over content specific learning as well as over technology in the same course.

Technology can expand the students’ ability to read, write, research, and learn, if we are willing to expand our classroom repertoire.

The above was written for an MLA proposal. Recently I have run into some blog posts on the topic that are worth reading.

Teachers and technology

5 Reasons we aren’t integrating technology

Also, a report on the influence (or lack thereof) of technology on assessment.

Update: This was not accepted.

For the first time in three days, I have had a minute or two to look at blogs. I have found a lot of posts worth perusing.

Majoring in business?
Cal Newport at Study Hacks says “don’t major in business.” Instead, he suggests students who want to work in business should major in the classics and take four years of math in college.

I don’t know if that would get you a job, but it would make you seem smarter than the average college student.

Personal note: My eldest is getting a math degree in college and I want him to take humanities courses as a way to round out his education.

Lost: Common Sense
Betsy’s Page has the story of the student who was suspended for carrying the wooden rifles for her drill team to school.

I think that part of the reason this happened is that we have adopted zero tolerance because we don’t want to have to make the hard decisions, not because we don’t think people are able to do so.

Classroom Management
D-Ed Reckoning has a video on classroom management by Saul Axelrod.

Diversity in colleges
Discriminations has a post on the benefits, if any, of diversity.

We found that neither the multicultural policies of the university nor the general multiethnic environment had profound effects on the intergroup attitudes of the students. Thus, in broad terms, the students left the university with largely the same social and political views that they entered college with.

How to minimize disparities in education
Joanne Jacobs carries the story of the way to disguise disparities in education– don’t let the motivated kids do anything.

This happened to me for one year in math in the eighth grade and really messed up my college-preparation experience. I spent the whole year in math doing art projects, because I could do the math in the class in two minutes. But the seventh grade teacher wouldn’t let me take the math test to go into Algebra I because she didn’t like me.

Dealing with controversial issues
At TYCA I talked about introducing controversial issues and how to do so well. Most of the teachers there thought I was teaching a “duh” topic. Apparently, not everyone has realized that controversial issues mean that equally intelligent people have differing opinions. The LA Times carries the tale of a speech teacher calling a student a “fascist bastard” and dismissing the class so they didn’t have to listen to his informational speech.

Volokh, a lawyer, discusses the situation.

In particular, the evaluation sheet on p. 31 reflects that the teacher indeed didn’t give a grade, but instead said “Ask God what your grade is.” It seems to me pretty clear that refusal to give a grade because the teacher disapproves of the religiosity of the student’s presentation, or of the student’s opposition to same-sex marriage, is indeed a First Amendment violation.
…
Finally, note that one of the College’s responses (pp. 37-38) states that the College is indeed acknowledging that the teacher’s behavior was improper, that the teacher would be disciplined in some unspecified way, and that Lopez wouldn’t ultimately be penalized on his final grade. At the same time, though, the College’s response notes that several students were offended by Lopez’s statements, and says:

“Regardless of the other students’ reactions to Mr. Lopez’ speech, Mr. Matteson will still be disciplined. First amendment rights will not be violated as is evidenced by the fact that even though many of the students were offended by Mr. Lopez’ speech, no action will be taken against any of them for expressing their opinions.”

Erin O’Connor has an interesting response to it. I have to admit that I thought about the point she makes last week (for about a minute), but it did not reoccur to me when there was such a blatant example as the Lopez case.

What if they don’t learn?
What happens when our students don’t learn anything? They teach what they didn’t learn. Here’s a discussion of MBAs doing that.

Math Curmudgeon
I found another education blog that is really interesting, Math Curmudgeon.

I know I would like to earn money for education blogging, since that is what I do here.

The rules are here.

Just for entering you have a chance to win $500. That’s more than $1.00 a word for the blog post they want you to write.

Plus, if you are a blogger, you write words for free all the time.

So go to the contest and sign up today.

It’s partially a popularity contest. Feel free to go there often from my site, to prove that I am oh so popular. I am not sure when the popularity contest starts. The dates, at the bottom, say the popularity contest starts March 18. I may have to post again on this topic. But feel free to go there now to sign up.

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are artists.” –

Marcel Proust

Art can be fun. It can also be difficult. Or it can be confusing. And it can be intriguing.

Our classrooms are works of art that we create and play with, work with, and shape.

One way we play with writing in my classroom is through blogging.

Since many of our students are digital natives, and those who are not are at a significant disadvantage both academically and professionally, introducing and using Web 2.0 into my classroom seemed like a good idea.

I created a classroom blog, Davis English Addendum, where I could post things from class or about class and where the students could too. I actually started the blog in response to the question Why are we studying art in English? And the first four or five posts were written by me for the students. However, the blog soon went beyond that. Now it is really a class blog. The students are required to post and comment, but because of or perhaps despite that sometimes they get very involved in each other’s lives through the blog. The students are required to post and comment, but sometimes they get very involved in each other’s lives through the blog.

I have my students make blog posts. These posts are all about their lives and their classwork. I am trying to uncompartmentalize their learning, since studies have shown that students separate learning on one subject from learning on another (Abbott and Nance).

This is a Marine’s blog post and all the comments students made. It was part of an assignment to introduce the students to each other and the blog.

A very different approach to the same assignment is seen in Secret Spy.

As you can tell, these two posts generated a lot of feedback, even though they were very different posts.

Appreciate Everything, Take Nothing for Granted was part of the narrative cycle of papers, in which students were supposed to post a six word autobiography and discuss it.

Using a blog is a good idea for more than just an English classroom though. There have been many things we did with the blog that are not “English” oriented.

The students use the blog to get help for class. Here is an example of how a student got help on an assignment when I was out of pocket at the hospital with my father.

Two students got on the website quickly enough to help him do his homework.

Last September I used the website to keep students who were out of town up to date on the hurricane. Obviously that wasn’t useful for those of us around here without power.

We also used the website to discuss Hurricane Ike.

Right now in class we are working on their compare/contrast paper as part of the research paper cycle.

Things I mentioned in class, but that they might have forgotten, can be posted on the blog.

I have previously posted sample paragraphs from c/c’s on the blog, such as this one on embryonic stem cell research, this one on abortion, this one on health care reform, or this one on global warming.

Sometimes I reiterate important parts of the lesson, such as types of definitions, and give supplemental information, such as definition examples from real life.

The blog is a very useful classroom tool. WebCT and Blackboard can be used in very similar and non-public ways. I like using a blog because sometimes we get comments from the general reading population, or from other students at other colleges. That is fun for the students.

Related ideas (or “A word to the wise is sufficient.”)
“Digital tools do nothing more than make ongoing conversations efficient and approachable. They give kids a chance to participate in a school culture that continues to discourage participation. ” from The Tempered Radical

Finding the sources
Abbott, William and Kathryn Nantz. “History and Economics: Can Students (and Professors) Learn Together?”  College Teaching 42.1 (Winter 1994): 22-26. Academic Search Premier. Lone Star College Library, Kingwood. 27 April 2008 http://nhmcproxy.nhmccd.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9407114730&site=ehost-live.

Lenhart, Amanda, Aaron Smith, Alexandra Rankin Macgill, and Sousan Arafeh. “Writing, Technology and Teens.”  Pew Research Center Publcations. 24 April 2008. 24 April 2008 http://pewresearch.org/pubs/808/writing-technology-and-teens.

“Theory and Research-Based Principles of Learning.”  Enhancing Education: Carnegie Mellon University. 26 April 2008 https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/principles/learning.html#LP02.