Papers: Models and Exercises

Casting Out Nines says “Learning Objectives Matter.”

In assessments, preceding each problem there was a little blurb that said what learning objective the item was addressing. For example, an item on proof by contradiction might be preceded by the statement, “The purpose of this item is to assess your skill at proving conditional statements by contradiction”. So simple — and very helpful for both instructor and student.

I like this idea.

I always tell my students I never do anything for one reason, but this at least would make sure they knew what one of the reasons was.

5. Create stunning slides.
Slides are optional, but if you’re going to use them, make them great. Even if you’re not a graphic designer, it’s relatively easy to stand out from the crowd of bullet points and PowerPoint templates, by licensing high-quality images from stock sites like istockphoto and Veer, or searching for Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flickr using Compfight (just make sure you read the licensing terms carefully, especially for commercial use!). And Garr Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen Design will introduce you to basic design principles for creating slides from the images.

And if you are a graphic designer, check out Nancy Duarte’s beautiful book Slide:ology, for a stimulating guide to the creative possibilities of slide design. Nancy and her team designed the slides for Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” presentation and feature film, so she knows a thing or two about creating slides with impact.

6. Keep it simple.
Simplicity – focusing on core themes and eliminating fluff – is the key to a lot of great design, great writing, great music, great dance, and great art of many kinds. It’s also one of the things that makes presentations powerful and memorable.

This is all you need for a truly great presentation:
One big idea
Three key points
One compelling story
One idea per slide (and no more than six words)
One clear call to action

from 99%’s How to Create a Captivating Presentation

For Linguistics class.

From Scientific American:

A long-existing speech phenomenon has recently become a big thing among young women. Called vocal fry, it’s a low guttural vibration typically found at the end of sentences. You can hear it in this young reporter’s voice. [Listen to podcast for audio sample.]

As an optional assignment (worth more points than the original assignment), I offered my British literature students the opportunity to create a digital story–audio and video and text–instead of just presenting their ideas while, after, or before we listened to a piece of music chosen to match a particular character.

I had 7 students out of 21 who did the digital story. They were amazingly well done. Excellent job.

And, for the students whose presentations I was able to hear (time constraints were tighter than I expected), the students who did the original assignment alone also did a wonderful job.

If the whole class had done digital storytelling I would have been jumping up and down with joy at how well the work was done. But I will tell you right now that the folks who did those digital stories ROCKED!

The original assignment is Hrothgar’s Playlist.

Students did music playlists and images and text for:
the wife from The Wife’s Lament –amazingly well done and a very difficult idea
Imogen from Cymbeline
Posthumus from Cymbeline x2
Beowulf from Beowulf
Chanticleer from The Canterbury Tales–amazingly well done with beautiful images
Judith from Judith–great use of text to explain how parts of the song were related to the tale

The first student to do a non-expanded assignment did Grendel from Beowulf. It was very well done.

Another student did the Shepherd from Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”–I would never have thought of doing the shepherd as my character, but she did it and it went well.

This assignment was designed to have the students do a couple of things:
Have them think through the character’s actions and experiences and try to relate those to modern times and music. (It’s an early Brit lit class.)
Have them do an oral presentation.
Have them apply something they (most of them) know well–music–to something less familiar–literature.
Have them engage the subject matter with technology, either familiar (iTunes and/or Youtube) or less familiar (iMovies, Final Cut Pro).
Give them a chance to show their creativity.
Give them a chance to indulge themselves in the conceptual elements as presented in this class (play, design, meaning, narrative, empathy, big picture, and innovation–modified from Daniel H. Pink’s A Whole New Mind).

from AcademicCog

As the authors of Writing Analytically explain, “The person who is doing the interpreting too often stops with the first answer that springs to mind as he or she moves from observation to implication, usually landing upon a cliche. If this first response becomes the X, then he or she is prompted by the formula to come up with other, probably less commonplace interpretations as the Y.”*

As an example, they mention a Nike Freestyle tv ad that contains basketball players dribbling and passing and maneuvering to the accompaniment of hip-hop music. The authors suggest that the ad seems to be about basketball (or shoes) but is really about…

Here they tell you to create a rapid-fire brainstorm list, such as:
Seems to be about basketball but is really about dance.
Seems to be about selling shoes but is really about artistry.
Seems to be about artistry but is really about selling shoes.
Seems to be about basketball but is really about race.
Seems to be about basketball but is really about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media and society.
Seems to be about the greater acceptance of black culture in America but is really about representing black basketball players as performing seals or freaks.
Seems to be about individual expertise but is really about working as a group.

I’m going to put up a bunch of Mad-Lib style sentences around the themes of this unit and ask them to complete them, then to do a rapid-fire list around one that really interests them, and then connect their lists to our various readings.

For example:
America seems to be ______ but it is really ________.

Then I will have them do the reverse: This reading seems to be about theme X, but really it is about _____. I hope this really inspires creative thinking and analysis that goes in a little more depth than the obvious. Did I mention that in addition to defining and exploring what is analysis is, the authors define what is an idea and what makes a good idea?

I think this might be a good prewriting exercise. To use it for my classes, I would add it to the digital analysis of a commercial.

I can easily see how this would have helped the students analyze the commercials they chose. For instance, using one of the commercials chosen this semester,

Klondike’s Five Seconds to Glory commercial seems to be about Klondike bars, but it is really about the stereotype of American husbands, wives, and marriages.

Now if I can just figure out how to move them from the analysis (which they did well. I just think this would help them to do better.) to the evaluation aspect of the next paper built on the analysis paper.

Note: I would have posted a comment on AcademicCog’s post, but I don’t have either of those IDs on Dr. DavisTCE.

Students create quizzes:
If you have reading assignments for a course you teach in multiple classes, why not have the homework be that the students create a quiz? Have them turn in one copy of the quiz that is “clean” and one copy with the answers. Then give the classes the other group’s quizzes.

Classes create quizzes:
Or have the class as a whole create a quiz from the individual ones and then exchange the quizzes between classes.

You might want to limit the type of questions they can use, but I can see where this could really help them think about the reading.

We’re having four readings that are the subject of our final. I may use this idea as a reading quiz.

Update:
Creator gets own quiz:
Or you could give the quiz to the person who created it (without the answers) the next class period and see how they do.

Best quizzes get bonuses:
Another idea based on this would be to have all the students turn in clean and answered quizzes. Give them credit for that as long as they meet your criteria (whatever that was). However, let them know ahead of time that you are going to choose the best (not necessarily hardest) three or four or however many quizzes and use those in a class. Then give bonus points (20-50) to the people who created the best quizzes.

If all the quizzes are lousy, then you can take the best questions and only give a few (2-5) points for each question you use.

I am very good at seeing the problems with a student paper and not so good with expressing what they have done right.

I know that some of my students, who work hard and still don’t do well, get very frustrated. I am not sure positive feedback will really fix that problem, but I think if I tell them what they have done well, it would be better.

Part of the problem is that I assume a 100 for whichever section of the paper I am grading (content, organization, etc) and then take off points from there. I only add points on if 1) it is novel and good or it made me smile (I cry easily.) and 2) if the paper was far more developed or detailed than I expected/wanted.

Perhaps I should go with a rubric that gives generalities instead. I did that with one paper and that seemed to be more positively received. Of course, that could be because I gave them the rubrics in an email and didn’t hand the papers back in class so that I didn’t see the frustrations.

I’m still thinking about this and any feedback that would help would be appreciated.

While reading the CHE fora, I found an answer to this problem of missing positive feedback. I am adding it here because while bookmarking on the fora works, I am far more likely to search for the information on TCE.

lasquires gave this advice:

I would say don’t give any positive feedback that isn’t sincere, and if an essay really does need quite a bit of work, the bulk of your comments will naturally address things that aren’t quite right. I usually write comments following a hierarchy of concerns:

1. Does the paper have a topic that is germane to the assignment?

2. Does the paper have a supportable argument?

3. Does the writer provide sufficient evidence in support of that argument?

4. Is the paper organized effectively as a whole?

5. Is the paper written and organized effectively at the paragraph level (appropriate transitions, etc.)?

6. Does the writer document sources correctly?

7. Does the writer use appropriate diction/style and is the paper well-edited?

8. Does the paper rise to a level of uniqueness or eloquence that sets it apart from the majority of papers produced by students at this level? (For me, an affirmative answer in this category is necessary for an A).

Almost all of these could be written about on most of my students’ papers. Perhaps I need to use a rubric that just lists these questions and says:
yes, mostly, halfway, somewhat, no

I kind of like that idea.

How can we engage students when we lecture?

Have you ever given a lecture to a class where everyone sat still the entire class period? One where the students did not jump and run as soon as (or even before) the bell rang? If you have, how often have you wondered exactly how you managed that? If you haven’t, do you dream of this or just give it up as an impossible dream?

According to Robert B. Cialdini, students can become engrossed in a lecture with a single, simple feature at the beginning. They will listen raptly, eagerly and not even shift when the bell rings, if we start our lecture with it. They will clamor to know the answer, even when they should be out the door on to their next class.

What is this single feature that we can add to the experience?
If you are intrigued, not just wanting to know the answer, but wondering when I will give it, then you won’t be surprised to hear that the key to engaging the audience is a mystery.

No, I don’t mean we don’t know. I mean it is a mystery, a puzzle, a tale that involves questions. It’s a mystery story.

What if I told you that in sixty minutes, I could increase your average college grades by a half a letter grade–for the next four years?

That’s the mystery I offered my students yesterday. Now the research has been done (though only using minority students) and I know the answer. I can increase their college averages by simply letting them know, making them believe, giving them sufficient examples to show that everyone is confused by college. Apparently many people are unaware that college students are often doubtful of their decisions, frustrated with their efforts, and confused about what to do next. Learning that is sufficient to increase their confidence and their grades.

Can I give you a more extended example?
That’s a short example and certainly not one that engages attention for a long time, at least not as I set it up here.

But is there a way to extend an example? Of course there is. Here is one from Cialdini’s 2005 Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology article.

One of the most successful book sections I registered was written by an astronomer. He began a 20–page section with a puzzle: How can we account for what is perhaps the most spectacular planetary fea- ture in our solar system, the Rings of Saturn? There’s nothing else like them. What are the Rings of Saturn made of. anyway?

Then, he deepened the mystery by asking how three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists could come to wholly different conclu- sions on the answer. One, at Cambridge University, proclaimed they were gas. Another group, at MIT, was convinced they were made up of dust particles. The third, at Cal Tech, insisted they were composed of ice crystals. How could this be? After all, each group was looking at the same thing, right? So, what was the answer?

I will not take you through the whole process of discovery and tell you how the differing backgrounds of the teams—astrophysicists here, as- tronomers there—led them to look at different aspects of the phenome- non and how a crucial measurement error led one team down the wrong path. Suffice it to say that the process of unraveling the mystery was not unlike the process of scientific investigation, wherein hypotheses are generated, implications are tested, nonproductive approaches are taken, errors of interpretation are made, and evidence is marshaled until a sat- isfactory resolution occurs. By the way, this is no small benefit of the use of mysteries in our lectures. The process of resolving mysteries is re- markably similar to the process of science. So, in the use of the mystery approach, we not only give students information about content, we also send them a sub–rosa message about process.
Let us get back to the main point. Which answer was revealed at the end of 20 pages? The beautiful, mysterious Rings of Saturn are mostly dust! Actually, they are ice–covered dust, which accounts for some of the confusion, but they are mostly dust nonetheless.

Now, I do not care about dust, and the composition of the Rings of Saturn is entirely irrelevant to my life. But, that scientist had me turning pages like a speed–reader. Here’s the telling thing: I am sure that I will never forget the answer to the mystery he constructed. Moreover, I am sure that I will never forget how three groups of scientists could have been so confident in their opposing answers to the question. This strikes me as an enormous advantage of mystery stories. They can get our stu- dents to become engrossed in and to remember important material that they otherwise would not care about because it does not seem relevant to their daily lives. Mystery stories do not need personal relevance—they bring their own. (24)

Cialdini doesn’t just offer the mystery story: a mystery, the players in the mystery, a discussion of possible alternatives for answers to the mystery, and finally the denouement as a way to improve lectures. He offers an additional tool as well.

There is another way to improve lectures.

Have you ever noticed that students are riveted by some material, not even noticing that the class period has gone by, while some material has them shifting (or Facebooking) through the entire class?

There’s a reason for this. It’s not really a secret.

Boredom.

When the students are wiggling and tuning us out, it is because they are bored.

Why are they bored?

Students are bored, not because we are boring, we are not inherently boring. All of us can remember an engaging discussion, a particularly well-told joke, or a story that we told to a breathless audience.

Nope. It is not that we are boring.

We are bored.

Yes, I said it. (Well, Cialdini said it first.) We are bored. We know the material isn’t that interesting, so we are bored. Our being bored makes our students bored.

How do WE become engaged in our own lectures?

We find something interesting, something engaging, something we think is fascinating and we add THAT to the lecture.

Just having an addition that is unique, interesting, and engaging TO US is enough to make the lecture more engaging to the student (28). We need to be excited in the classroom. If we are, they will become more excited.

Today’s lecture (in my class) is going to be about a proposing a solution paper. We are in the process of writing those in my fyc classes. But the beginning of the lecture, which is really a repeat of the reading we did yesterday, is a two-minute movie featuring Dr. Davis as Albert Einstein and starring Gandhi as my personal Socrates. There’s a really lame joke on the mispronunciation of precedent being understood as president, a discussion of the principle of fun as a guide for my solution, and a belch. (It is a college class, after all.)

I’m really looking forward to presenting this little two-minute movie, including Gandhi’s Homecoming Queen wave from the moon, in class.

Because I am excited about it, the students will be more excited about it as well.

Ever heard that proverb “like begets like?”

Here’s an example of it in teaching.

From the #FYCchat on Twitter Wednesday night, which I was unable to attend, but the archives of which I read:

Read “A Modest Proposal” when we are writing the Proposing a Solution essay.