A+ Best Tips

Students aren’t particularly fond of the research paper, but they need to learn how to do research and report it to be successful academics. When they are being asked to do something that is “hard” for them, it can be useful to maximize the use they get out of the project.

When my students are doing the research for their long papers (on a controversial issue) I require that they find sources both for the side they agree with and against that side. I want them to understand the entire issue and not just the side that they agree with.

Then the question becomes how to have them use both sides so that they actually see the strength of the opposition’s arguments.

Possibilities:

• Have them write the research paper from the side they disagree with first, then write the one they agree with.
• Allow them to write the research paper they agree with, then have them compose a short refutation, as if from the opposing side, arguing against one of the points they made in their paper.
• Have the first paper be a compare/contrast on the arguments on both sides of the topic. For example, “Global warming may or may not be caused by humans.” and then present the arguments from their research.

These multiple exercises, or even combinations thereof, allow the students to become more familiar with the arguments on both sides and encourage them to understand their side’s arguments better.

The photo is from Ricko on flickr.

When asking students to write a new kind of paper, I try to give them a visual metaphor that lets them see what place this paper would hold.

Today I went with a pothole in the road metaphor for the “gap in the literature.” I used that, further, to explain that someone who has seen the huge pothole in the road might create a literature review in order to point out the pothole to others and, to some extent, to lay the sand base to begin to fill the pothole in.

I also explained that while it would be totally cool if some of them were able to write that kind of a literature review, I did not actually expect it of them. What they should do, I told them, was to write a literature review to describe the road. They’re new; they don’t know where they are going. Their lit review should tell me what road they are on.

They laughed. But I hope it got through to them.

I also explained it another way. I told them if there were almost no papers on their topic, even with good search terms, then it was possible that they were at the top of a mountain where the snow is melting and starting to form a stream. It’s very cold and lonely up there, but they can hop right over that stream no problem.

If, on the other hand, there are thousands of papers on their topics, even after narrowing, they’re now trying to walk across the Mississippi in full flood. I asked them what would happen. They said they would drown. Exactly! So the lit review for them is supposed to make a little dam that slows part of the water down enough for them to be able to join the conversation.

I don’t know if those metaphors helped or not, but it was an interesting day.

The background of the class:
I am teaching a writing in the disciplines course with sophomore students who have not done any work in their fields. The course is supposed to both introduce them to their fields, in which I am not an expert, and introduce them to the writing of their fields, in which I am an expert.

The picture is from Mopo.ca..

1. Take a vacation. Take one day off, one of the weekend days, and go to the beach, the movies, the library. Go where you can in one day and do nothing related to school.

2. Drop one day’s worth of homework. Just take it out of the syllabus. You can drop one from all your courses at once or you can drop one from each over a period of days. Drop one from Class 1 on Monday, one from Class 2 on Wednesday, one from Class 3 on Friday. If you have lots of grading, this will give you a break. And the students will love it too.

3. Grade daily homeworks as “did” or “didn’t do” every once in a while. Don’t tell the students you are going to do that, but do it. Every third small homework: Did, didn’t do.

4. Get to know your students. Do something fun with your students. Spend a day reading riddles and having them write their own for homework. Have them find one article that is relevant to the course, read it, and give a short presentation on it. You’ll find out what they are interested in and maybe find some good readings too.

Focus on what you love about teaching. Look at your syllabus and pull your courses back to a focus on why you wanted to teach. Were you trying to help people write better? Have the students read a good piece and attempt to emulate its style. Were you wanting to advocate for the little people? Find some project and assign all your students to write a letter on the topic. (Make sure they can pick which side they support.)

Pardon me while I go take my own advice.

Give *NO* make-up exam *until* the end of the semester.

Make a cumulative exam from H.— l to give to *everyone* who ever missed *any* exam during the semester. Give it once, and if they have a schedule conflict —-> zero!

You look like you “really, really tried” to be helpful, and their failures rest solely on their heads.

I highly recommend essay exams! It’ll be the end of the semester and they will more than likely NEVER ask to see how hard you graded their lame responses!

Likewise, you’ll be super-impressed by the good students who do well.

from The Myth

I like this idea to some extent. If it were a cumulative exam and the ones missed were on sections, I think this would be a legitimate way to make up the work. Of course, it is irrelevant to me. I only have one class with exams and I don’t give make-ups. I suppose if one of my schools required it.

Oops. One of them does.

They allowed someone who skipped the final, had an F in the class anyway, and didn’t call about missing the final for three days to retake the final the next month. Student failed and then put the whole department through h— for not having passed the class. Unfortunately the student could literally not write a correct sentence. Ever. And this was a developmental English course.

Geoteo’s thought on this:

Since my goal is to get the students to learn, I offer them an inducement to avoid the makeup test by dropping the lowest test grade of students who are present in class to take all four exams and earn at least 55%. So far it’s working pretty well.

Update: 4 tips! See the comments.

Thoughts I really liked from Atalanta on the Chronicle forums.

1. If you make everything available online at the beginning of the term, they will not appreciate it (i.e., take it for granted) and will probably make unreasonable demands for more online stuff that you don’t want to prepare. So instead, try this:

Withhold a few course materials from your web site (review problems, practice exam, outline of topics to review for exam, useful links) and then reveal them one by one at a time when they will be most useful. Announce to the class, “I had a few requests” (even if you haven’t) “…for some practice problems so I’ve put together a set of extra problems with solutions to help you prepare for the exam. They’re now available on the course web site.” The students will think you are being very responsive and doing extra work just for them.

2. Students ALWAYS want some sort of review sheet for exams. If you don’t already have one, you can do this: take the detailed outline from your syllabus and replace it with a bare bones outline. Then hand out the detailed outline just before the midterm or final exam and call it an exam review sheet.

3. The next trick is almost like cheating; I try to avoid it but it works if the course evals are done before a substantial final exam. Give them a midterm exam that is fairly straightforward and a little easier than average. It makes them all feel like they are doing well in the class. Then you can “even things out” with a slightly harder final exam. [But don't slam them with a crazy-hard final. That's not nice.]

4. You can tweak your evals slightly by judiciously using keywords from the evaluation questions in class. Example: I used to get low marks for the item “Professor provides constructive feedback throughout the course”. So now, every time I review homework or exams in class, I announce that I want to “take a few minutes to give some constructive feedback”. My scores shot up even though I didn’t really change anything.

I’m fairly sure 3 isn’t ethical and it doesn’t apply to comp courses anyway, but I really liked 1 and 4.

LarryC said,

The best way to keep standards high while getting good evals is to demonstrate respect and understanding for the students. And it turns out that the best way to get students to write about your respect and understanding on your evals is to tell them in class how much you respect them. “Thanks for taking my class. I want to tell you how much I respect and admire you. I know how hard it is to combine this night course with your busy lives yadda yadda yadda.”

Those are some good and simple ideas.
1. Tell students you respect them.
2. Use the words from the student evals in class to show when you are doing those things.
3. Present info in sections instead of giving everything at the beginning or on the syllabus.

One of the things that makes teaching easier and more interesting these days is the preponderance of information on the net.

When I began to teach Early British Literature, with no sample syllabus and few remaining notes from most of my own courses (except the Old English classes), I surfed the net looking for the beached treasures that I could take advantage of. I found many.

In no particular order:

Intro to Neoclassical Literature

Dryden introduction

Questions on Everyman. Dr. Wheeler has many good ideas and I have mined these assiduously. They often come out in another form in my class, but they are very useful.

Paradise Lost essay ?s sources
2. Cliff Notes
3, 5 ParadiseLost.org
7-15 Universal Teacher
I go find a bunch of essay questions and then I mix them up so that I don’t have the same topics I am reading every semester. These are some of the sources for the essay questions on Paradise Lost.

My lecture on Paradise Lost was assembled mostly from web sources. The ones I used are:
Johnstoi’s English 200
ParadiseLost.org
Dr. Drake’s work on Toliver’s structural analysis of the poem
Universal Teacher’s structural analysis.

Gulliver’s Travels
St. John’s discussion questions
Russell McNeil’s draft of a lecture on Laputa
Encarta’s introduction to satire, which I really stressed the first few years and now just gloss over
history of the novel, which I do not use now, but did help me organize my own thoughts on this topic
Read, Write, Think’s historical references in book I

I have plenty to offer my classes that are novel and unique. But part of the reason I am able to have that is I don’t try to do everything myself. Sometimes there is a better mousetrap. Sometimes we are just trying to reinvent the wheel.

Often students will complain about us, in the halls and in the classroom. “She’s too hard.” Or “We have to write EVERY class period.”

Often the criticisms are actually about the students, since they don’t want to study, or about colleagues, since they don’t require the same level of work.

If your students are making progress in your classes, then maybe it’s not all about you, even when they say it is.

Also encourage the students to think of the positive things that have been done in the classroom. “We learned how to do X. When you get to class Y, you will already know how to do X by yourself. So when the instructor says, ‘Go do X’ you will be able to!”

When you have students who are saying nice things about you or the class, note them. Write them down. For most people it takes TEN good things to overcome a single criticism. That means you will need a record of the ten good things.

Also, if you write them down, including the date and who said them and under what circumstance, you may be able to use them in your tenure review. Some colleges let you do that. Just make sure you keep it up. You don’t want two comments only. And you certainly don’t want to make that stuff up.

One thing I’ve begun trying to do more is ask the students to tell me what I am doing well. I explain that I revise the syllabus every semester and I would like their input on what they don’t want me to change, what they found helpful. I actually use these to decide what to leave out and what to keep and I let them know that, too.

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.

2 things it would be good to know about their big picture:

It would be good to know your students’ general educational goals.

It would also be good to know how your class relates to their goals.

Why would it be good to know these two things?

It would be good to know this for you to understand their motivation and for them to articulate their motivation. Sometimes students haven’t actually thought through why they are in your class.

To get them to start articulating this ask, Why do you need this class? How does it help you meet a goal?

It would also be good to know this so that you can use the information to encourage: “You need this class because of X, so you can do this.”

If someone has missed two classes, you could send an email reminding them about class and why they want to be in it. If you know, then you have a lever.

3 things that are good to know about their goals for your particular class:

What grade are they looking for?

Make sure you are clear that you aren’t going to give them a grade, they are going to earn it. But ask them what grade they plan on earning in your class. What’s their goal?

This can also increase your credibility when you discuss the fact that you know they are not majors and they’re not necessarily committed to an A in your class. –I still mention that it is easier to make a B when aiming for an A than when aiming for a B. I might miss an A and hit the B, but if I miss the B… Ouch.

What do they want to learn?

Your class is required for a reason. What is it that your class offers specifically that they want to learn? Give them a list of things that are very useful that you teach in your class.

For instance, in my class I teach them how to take exams. I tell them that when they get out of my class they can write any essay they will need to until graduate school. How many of them want to do well in their major courses? Well, they have to write for those.

How much are they committed to those grade and learning goals?

People are more likely to do something if they said they would. So ask them what level they are committing to.

Are they going to do the work required to meet their goals?

All you can do is ask them. Not all of them will do it, but it’s worth asking to get them to have to make some sort of commitment.