In all my many long years of teaching, I've never been assigned a course that has large lecture classes plus smaller discussion sections. Now it's my turn. Normally my classes are very interactive, so this is uncharted territory for me. The number of students will be 100+.
The course involves an aspect of popular culture. So, something that ought to interest students — if they can make it through my lectures.
One problem is that the lectures are supposed to be an hour and twenty minutes long. Ugh, who could keep their attention focused on a talking head that long? Even a talking head with a PowerPoint?
What tips do you experienced folks have for what I should be doing in the lecture classes to keep us all from falling asleep?
What else should a newbie to lecture classes be aware of?
Small group activities in lecture followed by surveys that cleverly lead into what you planned to discuss next.
'Now turn to the person sitting next to you, and think of all the examples of the male gaze/landmarks on the hero's journey/commentary on capitalism that you can identify in Rise of the Clones.'
...
'Now, how many people identified <x>? Yes, quite a lot of you. Did anyone bring up <y>? Yup, a few. Now, what about <z>--did that come up in your discussions? No? Well, let's see why <x>, <y>and <y> all serve as examples of the male gaze/landmarks on the hero's journey/commentary on capitalism. While we're discussing that, see if you can think of other examples from the Star Wars franchise that unite these ideas in a similar way.'
Then, if there's time, you can ask for volunteers to share what they came up with that wasn't <x>, <y> or <z>.
In other words, students don't need to share everything they discussed with the whole class the way they might in a smaller discussion session. Surveys can help them feel like their discussion was productive, without needing to spend a lot of time sitting through the thoughts of 100 students. And discussions/surveys might also break up large lectures into smaller bite-sized pieces. Each survey serves as a kind of chapter break: 'you have now heard enough about this topic to form an opinion that will feed into the next topic.'
In general, I'd recommend coming up with chapters or sections in your lectures. Instead of using the whole 1:20 to build a grand theme, use it to build four smaller ideas, each one of which stands alone, and so is robust against fading attention, but all of which can be tied together in the discussion section if it's really important to finish witha grand conclusion.
I regularly teach a 100 person class, and would never lecture the whole time.
In fact, two years ago I decided the flip the class, so lectures are now short segments online interspersed with MC learning check questions, and class time is discussion and in class assignments. However, that takes a lot of planning and work, so I wouldn't suggest doing that for fall.
Before the flip though, I still incorporated discussion in the class-- a mix of questions that I would take a few answers to from the full class and then elaborate on, raise-your-hand polling questions (I didn't use clickers, but that's an option-- there are phone apps now so they don't have to buy and remember to bring a separate device), and group-discuss-report back. I also used lots of video clips to illustrate things, as well as participatory demos, which may ore may not be relevant to your course material. I would try never to have more than 5 min of straight lecturing without something different happening.
Similar to what ergative describes. Do not feel that you have to totally change your style during the "lectures"! Be as interactive as you can. However there are issues that you should ponder in advance with a large section.
The biggest difference with a really big lecture is the ability of students to hide/ not respond/ not attend. Do you you care about attendance? Participation? If so you can use various phone based apps to track who is there and how they respond to in class prompts. These can be worth points if you want. The plus side to big classes is that some students will find safety in the anonymous online responses, where they would never respond verbally in a small class.
The other issue that can happen in a big class with activities like a think/pair/share etc. is difficulty getting the students/room back on track looking and listening to you. The younger the students the more this can be an issue. Especially if this is a primarily fresh-person course, I would establish a standard signal to the room that the discussion should end. Flashing the lights often works for me.
This is how courses with TAs were organized at my doctoral program: the prof teaches the whole class twice a week (usually for one hour, but occasionally 1hr20) and the TA leads a discussion section of 35 for an hour once a week (well, usually you had two separate discussion sections, but whatever).
Like the others said, just do your usual thing in the lectures. 1hr20 isn't as bad as it may seem; it's about the limit for attention without a break, but you're breaking things up with discussion and stuff anyway. Power through content in the lectures, and in the discussion section, focus everyone's attention on something in particular. That's the time for group work and focused discussion, as well as remedial instruction.
Interactive polling is also a good way to keep them engaged.
Long before clickers, my Econ 101 (micro) undergrad instructor used to use the class as a 'case study sample' when teaching profit/loss and cost intersects. This was in a large lecture hall (I'd say at least100 folks, probably more).
He'd lecture briefly on the terms needed to discuss the day's topic (graph, supply/demand curves, and axes the first day, say) and then set up a cluster of related polls, asking us, for example, "If I offered a slice of pizza for $100.00 at the Buckeye Inn, how many of you would buy one if you'd just finished watching an OSU game and you were starving to death after celebrating the win over Michigan?" (thus, obviously, pulling in pop culture references to keep them engaged). He'd also proceed to drop the price under all the same circumstances.
All these results were graphed quickly on the board and a discussion held about them after, say, 6 plot points were determined for that set of conditions and the curve drawn. Then on to the next.
We'd end up with, say, 4 graphs of various conditional situations, and then he'd ask for analysis. He'd also refer us to the TAs for anything we didn't understand, and they were well-versed in fielding and answering more specific questions.
So a semi-flipped class before that was even a thing. I still remember Phillips curves.
It was a real let-down the next term when the Econ 102 (macro) guy read us his book all term for lectures, and the TAs had no idea what he was talking about, either.
In teaching art history, even with large intro classes, or music theory, I do a lot of interactive, "what do you see/hear" stuff to keep the sensate responses uppermost in their minds. In teaching dance, of course, the whole thing is interactive: the instructor sets an exercise, everyone does it, you do the next, and the next, and the next.
In theater class it's usually more mixed, some lecture, some video, some short readings, etc., with a mind to emphasis on period style, writers and performers of a give era or location, etc. And in French, I'm constantly doing feedback drills, with pronunciation emphasis, the shifting forms of declensions and conjugations, and fluidity the goals as well as the praxis.
Even in Bible Study--closest thing I get to lecturing, really--I consistently fold in music and art examples, theater readings, dance and opera videos (there's a beautiful one of Villella dancing the finale to Balanchine's 'Prodigal Son' as well as the "Fix Me, Jesus" duet in Ailey's "Revelations" just for starters...) and I can't show things without inviting conversation about them, so....we talk.
Probably the idea of comparison/contrast is most useful in contradistinction to the more linear developments one expects from a straight lecture. By mixing it up and not only folding in student involvement, but varied approaches and the challenge to verbalize the differences in an area, the liveliness stays aloft and the snores (if any) are drowned out.
And of course--but this is probably a given--taking student input on its own terms, finding what one can agree with first, and critiquing (but not criticizing) later. Much smaller scale, but I just had the coolest 1-on-1 discussion of cross-dressing traditions in theater and opera with my middle-school voice student who's sorting out his own ID at the moment.
So, going with more up-to-date topics pertinent to the students themselves can also help....but you probably already know and do that.
M.
The activities you can fold in really depend on the topic.
In a psychology class, you can do mini experiments, especially if you have clickers. Choose some extremely robust, replicable result, and have students do a couple of trials of the experiment, and then graph the results.
In a statistics class, you can have the students provide the measurements for analysis--e.g., take their height to illustrate bimodal distributions; or if you have a variety of ages, do something like give them a list of pop culture touchstones and ask them to provide their date of birth and the number of touchstones they recognize, to illustrate correlation.
I've found that a carefully formatted Google doc works well: provide the link to the place where they enter their data, and then switch to another tab where you've got a results graph ready and waiting to update as the data is input.
Yeah, I really don't understand our university practice in this arrangement. Regular classes are 3 hours a week, period, for a standard number of credits. These large classes are 3 hours a week, plus an hour's discussion section (so total 4 hours), for the same number of credits. This baffles me.
In addition, the discussion sections are supposed to be taught by a graduate student, but the particular graduate student I will be getting will be in her first semester of graduate school, having never taught before. So to give this have a hope of working, I think I will need to design the discussion section meetings with considerable detail.
Unfortunately the material of the class is all text-based, rather than lending itself to images or films.
My heart is sinking.
FWIW, it's standard practice in my field--in Canada; the US is a bit different--to throw first-semester grads right into the deep end like that. A discussion section is something of a soft landing. You probably don't need to sweat it too much, although having some kind of pre-existing structure she can adapt or borrow from will probably make her life easier. But really, so would very clear expectations for what the sections be like. Although they're touted as an opportunity to "discuss" the material in a more intimate setting, really they mostly end up being about helping students "get" (/review) what's going on in the reading, and communicating expectations about the assessments. Or even just reading some passages together and figuring out WTF is going on.
This may or may not be relevant to your situation, but what are the expectations of these lectures: ie, are they to be recorded for students to watch later?
In which case the interactive stuff might not be ideal (and may raise other issues, in terms of consent for students to be recorded on something that's available to watch later).
And yeah, 1hr 20 is a slog.
No, mercifully they won't be recorded.
Quote from: Hegemony on June 03, 2022, 04:39:15 PM
In addition, the discussion sections are supposed to be taught by a graduate student, but the particular graduate student I will be getting will be in her first semester of graduate school, having never taught before. So to give this have a hope of working, I think I will need to design the discussion section meetings with considerable detail.
I agree mostly with Parasaurolophus here.
If your new grad assistant has a strong record as an undergrad, she may be enthusiastic about the discussion sections and have good ideas about how she wants to run them. She was an undergrad who experienced college teaching and probably has ideas about what works well. Why not provide some guidelines, let her work for her pay, and see how it goes? If you sense the discussions are going poorly, you can intervene. I once had a teaching assistant (fresh out of undergrad) who did very well and shared a few new ideas for teaching her age group.
It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases. It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs. Random suggestions include:
1) making sure, at least in freshman classes, that, at the beginning of the semester, students get quick and direct lessons on notetaking, the old fashioned kind with actual pen and paper, and reinforce this requirement by checking notebooks periodically
2) making sure that material lectured upon, at least material that professor emphasizes as important through writing on board and such like, regularly appears on quizzes and tests
3) holding a zero tolerance policy for electronics use in class
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 04, 2022, 10:46:30 PM
It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases. It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs. Random suggestions include:
1) making sure, at least in freshman classes, that, at the beginning of the semester, students get quick and direct lessons on notetaking, the old fashioned kind with actual pen and paper, and reinforce this requirement by checking notebooks periodically
2) making sure that material lectured upon, at least material that professor emphasizes as important through writing on board and such like, regularly appears on quizzes and tests
3) holding a zero tolerance policy for electronics use in class
Given the decreasing dexterity with handwriting, and the fact that many students are actually extremely effective in note-taking with digital devices (e.g., downloading lecture slides in advance and annotating them directly during lecture), to say nothing of disabilities accommodations, I think this is a losing battle that, even if won, would not actually benefit our students.
With ergative on this one. I have had rules of "no laptops" during discussion sections, because I tell them their goal is to engage with each other, not the screen: and they have better conversations like that in a small group. But for lectures, a lot of students take notes electronically, and that's fine - a surprising number though still use paper and pen, which I also find interesting.
(I'm also not for checking anybody's notebooks, that sounds pretty oppressive).
I'm sticking with a no-electronics rule, myself. My students tell me that in the big lecture classes, they sit near people who are surfing the web, buying stuff on ebay, and watching porn on their laptops or their phones. Electronics are designed to be distracting. I have enough problems dealing with an 80-minute lecture class without competing with the internet.
Quote from: ergative on June 05, 2022, 01:13:01 AM
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 04, 2022, 10:46:30 PM
It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases. It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs. Random suggestions include:
1) making sure, at least in freshman classes, that, at the beginning of the semester, students get quick and direct lessons on notetaking, the old fashioned kind with actual pen and paper, and reinforce this requirement by checking notebooks periodically
2) making sure that material lectured upon, at least material that professor emphasizes as important through writing on board and such like, regularly appears on quizzes and tests
3) holding a zero tolerance policy for electronics use in class
Given the decreasing dexterity with handwriting, and the fact that many students are actually extremely effective in note-taking with digital devices (e.g., downloading lecture slides in advance and annotating them directly during lecture), to say nothing of disabilities accommodations, I think this is a losing battle that, even if won, would not actually benefit our students.
In my freshman writing classes, I share some studies about the neuroscience behind writing notes rather than typing (including writing with a digital stylus), and so far I've seen a steady 50/50 split between those who hand write and those who type. The same ratio has been consistent for those who do their rough drafts of assignments by hand rather than typed.
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 04, 2022, 10:46:30 PM
It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases. It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs. Random suggestions include:
I mostly lecture and it's fine, so I wouldn't say things are that dire. When things are going well, however, my lectures are always pretty interactive. I ask questions as we go, including some pretty open ended ones to try to get at least a bit of discussion going and set up some of the questions we are looking at. When there's reading, we discuss it where it fits in. I encourage students to break in with questions and am perfectly happy to get sidetracked by something the students are interested in. I don't really love group work, but it can be useful to break stuff up and get different people involved as the semester goes on.
I never teach classes bigger than 50, however, and I do think a lot of this can be harder for a 100 person class. Talking starts to seem like a public performance for the students, so I would try to incorporate more group work just to allow more people to get involved.
Most of my students use their laptops to take notes, but I have one student this year who is using one of this Rocketbook smart notebooks to take notes by hand, then upload them electronically. This student's handwriting is amazingly legible; i don't know if the system would work with my horrid handwriting, but I'm tempted to get one and try it out. Has anyone ever tried one?
Interestingly, I don't often see "use of laptop" in my disability accommodations letters (almost every letter this year was the ability to audio record classes and extended time on exams), but I wonder if that is because I don't think anyone in my department uses a laptop ban.
kaysixteen, I would be surprised there would be many higher-ed professors using notebook checking (if you are referencing the actual checking of the notebook and not a quiz that is open-notebook), particularly in large lecture courses. I think the last time I had anyone check my notebooks was freshman year of high school. I always failed that assignment due to lack of organization, but aced the class (intro Latin) anyway.
I'm not sure if it's typical, but I was funded by a teaching assistantship in grad school, so I taught discussion/recitation sections starting my 1st semester of grad school (we typically started with intro courses, but you could be assigned any course department-wide, regardless of how related that course was to your emphasis). After we obtained our masters, we taught our own courses, without any additional training.
I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital. However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.
Quote from: Ruralguy on June 05, 2022, 06:39:12 AM
I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital. However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.
Those studies didn't really replicate well. It turns out (surprise surprise) to be more complicated than that-- different modalities are best for different types of notes. Most people these days can type much faster and more comfortably than they can write by hand, so I would never bar laptops from my classroom. If they choose to do things that are distracting to themselves instead of taking notes, that's really their business, so long as they don't distract those seated around them.
Quote from: Puget on June 05, 2022, 08:39:01 AM
Quote from: Ruralguy on June 05, 2022, 06:39:12 AM
I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital. However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.
Those studies didn't really replicate well. It turns out (surprise surprise) to be more complicated than that-- different modalities are best for different types of notes. Most people these days can type much faster and more comfortably than they can write by hand, so I would never bar laptops from my classroom. If they choose to do things that are distracting to themselves instead of taking notes, that's really their business, so long as they don't distract those seated around them.
I also suspect the passage of time has something to do with the replication failures. Studies published in 2015 or earlier were probably testing college students in 2013 or so, which means those students learned their classroom skills ca 2000-2005. Not too many laptops in elementary schools in 2000, so they probably got pretty formative grounding with pencil and paper. That could well have produced a genuine advantage for handwritten notes. But students in 2022 were in elementary schools in 2012, and things got real digital real fast in the last ten years, so I bet a lot of our current students and our future students will have learned to take notes by typing, which means they haven't just
become more comfortable typing than writing, but they will
always have been more comfortable typing than writing.
(please note: I have literally no expertise in this particular area, unlike puget who seems familiar with the actual research. I'm simply pontificating on the internet, which is, after all, what it's for.)
Quote from: ergative on June 05, 2022, 09:22:18 AM
Quote from: Puget on June 05, 2022, 08:39:01 AM
Quote from: Ruralguy on June 05, 2022, 06:39:12 AM
I agree with Ergative. I know a few years ago there were some limited studies (I have no idea what was even published, just one of those things that got passed around) that showed that manual notes led to better results in testing than digital. However, we're losing that battle more and more every day. Be ready to fail nearly everyone on the assignment if you do this (we require it for advanced physical sciences labs and many still write nothing...of course a few never accomplish anything anyway, but that's a different story. We're in process of switching to digital notebooks for lab.
Those studies didn't really replicate well. It turns out (surprise surprise) to be more complicated than that-- different modalities are best for different types of notes. Most people these days can type much faster and more comfortably than they can write by hand, so I would never bar laptops from my classroom. If they choose to do things that are distracting to themselves instead of taking notes, that's really their business, so long as they don't distract those seated around them.
I also suspect the passage of time has something to do with the replication failures. Studies published in 2015 or earlier were probably testing college students in 2013 or so, which means those students learned their classroom skills ca 2000-2005. Not too many laptops in elementary schools in 2000, so they probably got pretty formative grounding with pencil and paper. That could well have produced a genuine advantage for handwritten notes. But students in 2022 were in elementary schools in 2012, and things got real digital real fast in the last ten years, so I bet a lot of our current students and our future students will have learned to take notes by typing, which means they haven't just become more comfortable typing than writing, but they will always have been more comfortable typing than writing.
(please note: I have literally no expertise in this particular area, unlike puget who seems familiar with the actual research. I'm simply pontificating on the internet, which is, after all, what it's for.)
It's possible, though there were studies finding the opposite (laptop notes superior) published just a couple years later, so I don't think cohort effects can fully explain it. Lots of things fail to replicate, and that original study was published just before the field really started grappling with that fact and adjusting research practices to try to make results more replaceable and robust.
Here's a failure to (for the most part) replicate, which also discusses other work failing to replicate these effects: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09468-2/
As the authors note, distraction from doing other things on a laptop is really a separate question from whether they are more or less effective for taking notes. I think we'd be much better off talking to students about avoiding distraction (which they know happens) than trying to convince them that there is something superior about taking notes on paper (which often doesn't accord with their personal experience and just makes the professor seem like an antiquated dinosaur).
Checking notebooks would be a pain in the ass, yes, and I do not want to have to do it.
But I do have responsibilities as a professor, one big one of which is to see to it that the students learn, or at least have the best chance of learning, the material. I cannot do this if I essentially surrender to the computerization mentality, because, well, even if students say they are going to use the computer to take notes, and some actually more or less do do so, the damn things are just too distracting, and too tempting to misuse. No grazie.
And a real-world exercise would include the old-fashioned skill of paper and pen, well-organized and formatted notes.
I'm also open to more suggestions about what to do to engage students in the 80-minute period aside from droning on delivering information.
I will be teaching a class of first-year students this fall, 80 minutes twice a week. An intro course, fairly technical material, gen ed. I suspect I will end up doing quite a lot of droning on. It probably is not ideal for the students. But there are various forces that keep things that way.
Walking around during classes, it is clear that droning on is by far the most common method of teaching. There's no institutional support for other approaches.
Organizing group work is generally hard to do and I've rarely seen it be very useful.
Maybe I will try to make class a bit more interactive, with student polls, for example. It's often a fair amount of work to plan those out. If I knew for sure that I will be teaching the same course for the next few years, I'd be more ready to invest the time. But I have no such guarantee.
In other classes I get students to do presentations, but in this one, I suspect that there are more students who won't have relevant skills, and the material does not lend itself easily to student presentations.
Quote from: Hegemony on June 05, 2022, 02:31:55 AM
I'm sticking with a no-electronics rule, myself. My students tell me that in the big lecture classes, they sit near people who are surfing the web, buying stuff on ebay, and watching porn on their laptops or their phones. Electronics are designed to be distracting. I have enough problems dealing with an 80-minute lecture class without competing with the internet.
And that gets to the reason why it's not enough to just take an "if they want to waste their time surfing the 'net during lecture it's their own business" approach. This behavior is creating distractions for neighboring students who may be trying to concentrate on the lecture. In the case of porn watching, it may also be creating what some neighboring students consider a hostile environment.
A friend whose classes I visited from time to time, teaching American history in a business-school setting, motivated students by, A) polling them on a 4-answer multiple-guess question at 3-4 random points during the class (lo-tech, baseball hatches against each possible letter on the board, a larger class you'd maybe use a doc cam for the same thing), and giving the right answer afterwards, with brief discussion to follow ("...why did you think c," etc), and the B) reminded them it would be--in some form, answer order swapped, etc.-- on the next class day's opening quiz--there was always a 5-point, 4-question quiz (1 point for your name, which also yielded the attendance list for the day)...and then did so.
This kept attendance up, got them reading and thinking, and some number, 2 or 3, I think, of the lowest scores were dropped, since there were too many, anyway...the average totaled into their class points overall, as I recall.
They had the formulas set up in Excel, so little grade work was needed, since they used the same format for all the courses they taught (global history, civics, history of American documents, business history,, etc.).
Might be useful in some ways.
M.
That is very ingenious, Mamselle — thanks!
I've not done this with 100 students, but I used to teach very long composition classes (90+ minutes) and often set up a short discussion board that would open up mid-class so that I could ask students to make a post about the day's topic and then comment on or critique 1 or 2 classmates' posts (e.g. the first student might write a thesis statement according to set guidelines and the second student might write a sentence describing the sections or topics that one might expect to see in the essay). A few minutes before the time ended, I would skim through the posts and choose a few to discuss as a class. I usually made these worth a nominal number of points and graded pass/fail.
AR.
Quote from: apl68 on June 06, 2022, 08:04:04 AM
Quote from: Hegemony on June 05, 2022, 02:31:55 AM
I'm sticking with a no-electronics rule, myself. My students tell me that in the big lecture classes, they sit near people who are surfing the web, buying stuff on ebay, and watching porn on their laptops or their phones. Electronics are designed to be distracting. I have enough problems dealing with an 80-minute lecture class without competing with the internet.
And that gets to the reason why it's not enough to just take an "if they want to waste their time surfing the 'net during lecture it's their own business" approach. This behavior is creating distractions for neighboring students who may be trying to concentrate on the lecture. In the case of porn watching, it may also be creating what some neighboring students consider a hostile environment.
I mean if I learned that a student was watching porn in class, I'd obviously need to deal with that. Not really something I'm likely to encounter. The number of people who think that a classroom is a good place to watch porn is pretty small.
I can understand why some people would ban computers. For me, it isn't worth it for all the reasons others have already discussed. There's a middle ground between trying to enforce no tolerance rules and just letting everything go. I can't say I've completely found that balance, but I try to remind students about responsible use of laptops and not distracting others. I also make an effort to wander around the classroom, and if I notice somebody seems particularly distracted I might walk through the aisle behind them. I know people who will go and stand by a distracted student and just stop talking till the student realizes everyone is staring at them. I probably need to start doing that kind of thing more...
apl is obviously right, of course, but even if letting the students (ab)use electronics in class did not distract (and potentially worse) other students, it does distract the users. Often to the point of making their class attendance useless. And I as the teacher, whether k-12 or higher ed, do have a responsibility to not surrender and let them do this. I am actually supposed to be *teaching* them the material, and bogus appeals to things like 'they're adults', 'it's their responsibility', well.. nein danke.
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 06, 2022, 07:59:42 PM
apl is obviously right, of course, but even if letting the students (ab)use electronics in class did not distract (and potentially worse) other students, it does distract the users. Often to the point of making their class attendance useless. And I as the teacher, whether k-12 or higher ed, do have a responsibility to not surrender and let them do this]. I am actually supposed to be *teaching* them the material, and bogus appeals to things like 'they're adults', 'it's their responsibility', well.. nein danke.
I think this is where we disagree. In k-12, yes, you do have a responsibility to teach your students how to be students, and that includes monitoring their attention and note-taking. In higher ed, however they
are adults, and what is more, the students who
are paying attention are also adults, with a better claim to your time and attention than their flaky classmates.
We have a limited amount of time and attention we can give to teaching, and it's not fair to the students who are doing everything right for us to be constantly fretting over the ones who don't respect us or their classmates or the time and effort that higher ed demands from everyone. I don't think we should be shortchanging the students who
want to be there by chastising and picking at the students who couldn't care less.
By enforcing a respectful and collaborative environment with the students who do it right, we'll not only improve their experience, but we might pull in some of the flakey students who would otherwise treat our classes as grade 13 and fall back on their reflexive classroom dynamics of combative resistance to the teacher.
Quote from: ergative on June 06, 2022, 11:06:10 PM
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 06, 2022, 07:59:42 PM
apl is obviously right, of course, but even if letting the students (ab)use electronics in class did not distract (and potentially worse) other students, it does distract the users. Often to the point of making their class attendance useless. And I as the teacher, whether k-12 or higher ed, do have a responsibility to not surrender and let them do this]. I am actually supposed to be *teaching* them the material, and bogus appeals to things like 'they're adults', 'it's their responsibility', well.. nein danke.
I think this is where we disagree. In k-12, yes, you do have a responsibility to teach your students how to be students, and that includes monitoring their attention and note-taking. In higher ed, however they are adults, and what is more, the students who are paying attention are also adults, with a better claim to your time and attention than their flaky classmates.
We have a limited amount of time and attention we can give to teaching, and it's not fair to the students who are doing everything right for us to be constantly fretting over the ones who don't respect us or their classmates or the time and effort that higher ed demands from everyone. I don't think we should be shortchanging the students who want to be there by chastising and picking at the students who couldn't care less.
By enforcing a respectful and collaborative environment with the students who do it right, we'll not only improve their experience, but we might pull in some of the flakey students who would otherwise treat our classes as grade 13 and fall back on their reflexive classroom dynamics of combative resistance to the teacher.
Yeah, that's well put and more or less how I approach things. I'm trying to make my class meaningful, useful and interesting for students who care. That still involves some classroom management, but it helps me when I think of it in terms of my responsibility to students who are trying. The problem with students chortling to each other in the middle of class isn't that they need to learn to be respectful-the issue is that the rest of us can't focus.
I actually do more attendance and reading quizzes and things than I'd really like to. I'm not doing it to try to get the completely disinterested students to come to class or do the reading. If you are determined not to do the reading you can probably manage the quizzes by looking stuff up-or getting the answers from someone else. If you don't participate or pay any attention, I don't really care if you come to class. I do this stuff because a discussion where only two people have done the reading is painful and boring for everyone and when only a third of the class comes on Friday morning, its hard to maintain any kind of momentum or cohesion.
I've had students tell me that even though they find the reading quizzes irritating, they do help them to keep up with the reading and improve their grade and their enjoyment of the class. That's how teaching should work in college. All I'm doing is providing a reminder to do the reading. The student is the one who actually spends some time on the reading and comes to class with interesting things to say about it.
It's like having students in a writing course turn in a full draft. I can't make them spend time on the draft and devote time to revising it. I'm just trying to create a structure that will teach a motivated student how to go through this process.
It isn't perfect but I've tried to capitalize the electronics with my students in the following ways:
I use menti.com for interactive polling and students can easily engage with their own devices (my quieter students tell me in their feedback forms that they like being able to contribute without feeling pressure of speaking out all the time).
I regularly have them open the LMS to do a quick online group activity (and then those are autograded or if it is a group response, I can do group grading to save time - winning!)
I send them to Google to find information or an example in small groups to discuss.
I find open source simulations that they can do online as part of an in-class activity or explorations. For example, LearnGenetics.com has the fun pigeonetics game where students can goof around and breed cartoon pigeons to practice basic genetics. They get in small groups where at least one student has a device larger than a phone, and I ask them to try one of the activities together, then we come back together and talk about it.
We use jamboard for them to collaborate online to build mental maps or graphic organizers together that they can then link back to later. I just post the links on our LMS home page.
Again, it isn't perfect, they still screw around from time to time, but mostly it keeps the students engaged, helps me stay organized, and turns the electronics into a learning tool rather than a learning distraction.
we're just gonna have to agree to disagree as to whether 18yos are properly 'adults'... I have been beating this personal hobbyhorse on these fora, old and new, for 15 years. I think that lowering the legal age of adulthood was one of the worst public policy decisions we ever took in this country, and 50 years later, with all we now know about adolescent brain development, it looks even worse.
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 08, 2022, 11:27:10 PM
we're just gonna have to agree to disagree as to whether 18yos are properly 'adults'... I have been beating this personal hobbyhorse on these fora, old and new, for 15 years. I think that lowering the legal age of adulthood was one of the worst public policy decisions we ever took in this country, and 50 years later, with all we now know about adolescent brain development, it looks even worse.
1. In practical terms, I would teach my classes differently if all of my students were over 25.
2. I want to relate to my students as adults who I have a professional relationship with.
There's obviously some tension between these two points, but I try to maintain both of them. Many of the students I teach need structure and incentives to do the things they should be doing and providing those with things like reading quizzes and attendance grades creates a better class experience. However, I think the way you help adolescents develop adulting skills is by giving them space and assuming they are capable of making good choices. Will they always make them? Of course not, but micromanaging isn't going to result in better outcomes.
In terms of note taking, I really don't like the idea of prescribed methods of taking notes in college. If we are talking about a college success course or something, then sure, you can teach particular ways of taking notes so students have those in their toolbox. However, in a content focused class, students should be able to take notes that work for them.
Carcal, can you mention, broadly, what field you're in?
I've forgotten, but I'm wondering if it might be the case that variations in approach are field-specific?
ETA: Ah, ignore, found a recent note in the next thread I opened!
M.
Quote from: Caracal on June 09, 2022, 08:05:36 AM
However, I think the way you help adolescents develop adulting skills is by giving them space and assuming they are capable of making good choices. Will they always make them? Of course not, but micromanaging isn't going to result in better outcomes.
This, very much this!
I study this age group ("emerging adults"). Yes, their executive function is not fully developed. No, that doesn't mean treating them like children is appropriate. They need to learn to be adults by practicing being adults, in a setting where the stakes are relatively low, and college can provide that (e.g., doing poorly on an exam vs. getting fired). We can help them by teaching some of these skills and providing some scaffolding, but micromanaging just keeps them depending on adults as surrogate frontal lobes rather than learning to manage themselves.
I like the phrase, "surrogate frontal lobes...."
;--}
M.
I didn't say I wanted to treat them like children. But
1) they are adolescents, and that ain't the same as adults, and
2) I do have a responsibility to take all reasonable steps to maximize their learning of the material I am teaching.
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 09, 2022, 11:20:59 PM
I didn't say I wanted to treat them like children. But
1) they are adolescents, and that ain't the same as adults, and
2) I do have a responsibility to take all reasonable steps to maximize their learning of the material I am teaching.
1) as Puget stated below, traditional age college students are generally considered "emerging adults," we need to be mindful of the developmental tasks and the developmental changes that occur of this life period rather than continuing to see our students as adolescents as they would be in high school. While it's true that 18 is not a magic number in terms of development (it's not a dichotomous change on the 18th birthday), it is a different life stage when individuals graduate from high school and make choices to enter into college (or the military or the workforce, or a combination of these) and a period of continued executive functioning growth.
2. I think there is the crux of the situation and where educators will differ. What are the
reasonable policies for this course set-up, this content, and these particular students? I assume that my colleagues at my Uni and on the fora are making the appropriate pedagogical decisions for their course given these considerations, and that policies will differ between courses. I don't use a laptop ban in mine for a variety of reasons that posters have stated here (e.g., disability considerations, access to electronic resources on the LMS during class, individual differences in typing vs handwriting skills), including the fact that one of the authors on a study which is often cited in support of laptop bans has made it clear that his results should not be used to support a whole-sale laptop ban, and that he does not ban laptops in his classroom.
I have no responsibility to maximize my students learning. I give them the opportunity to learn. It's up to them if they want to maximize or problem solve with their education.
My responsibility is to be good enough.
If I am feeling sufficiently motivated, I will go above and beyond. But my motivation depends on the school's efforts to motivate me.
So, if your students do not learn your content to a reasonable degree, how do you determine that you have, in fact, been 'good enough'.
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 10, 2022, 09:07:16 PM
So, if your students do not learn your content to a reasonable degree, how do you determine that you have, in fact, been 'good enough'.
That's not really an issue that comes up. My pass rates are similar to those of other professors. In the US, there is no universal standard to meet. Each university, each dept, each professor has their own standards. So it is mostly a matter of a few decades of experience teaching at different places and talking to other profs about trends in student performance.
Quote from: OneMoreYear on June 10, 2022, 04:33:11 AM
Quote from: kaysixteen on June 09, 2022, 11:20:59 PM
I didn't say I wanted to treat them like children. But
1) they are adolescents, and that ain't the same as adults, and
2) I do have a responsibility to take all reasonable steps to maximize their learning of the material I am teaching.
1) as Puget stated below, traditional age college students are generally considered "emerging adults," we need to be mindful of the developmental tasks and the developmental changes that occur of this life period rather than continuing to see our students as adolescents as they would be in high school. While it's true that 18 is not a magic number in terms of development (it's not a dichotomous change on the 18th birthday), it is a different life stage when individuals graduate from high school and make choices to enter into college (or the military or the workforce, or a combination of these) and a period of continued executive functioning growth.
2. I think there is the crux of the situation and where educators will differ. What are the reasonable policies for this course set-up, this content, and these particular students? I assume that my colleagues at my Uni and on the fora are making the appropriate pedagogical decisions for their course given these considerations, and that policies will differ between courses. I don't use a laptop ban in mine for a variety of reasons that posters have stated here (e.g., disability considerations, access to electronic resources on the LMS during class, individual differences in typing vs handwriting skills), including the fact that one of the authors on a study which is often cited in support of laptop bans has made it clear that his results should not be used to support a whole-sale laptop ban, and that he does not ban laptops in his classroom.
Yeah, I agree with both of these points. Keeping in mind the dangers of overgeneralizing from my own experience, I know that I actually became a much more responsible student in college than I had been in high School partly because with nobody around to bother me about how and when I did the work, I felt a much greater sense of responsibility to do it. (It also helped that I was mostly taking classes I was interested in and good at, and that I had a lot more time to get everything done out of class.) Of course, some people have the opposite reaction, but I know a lot of people for whom failing courses was a wake up call that they needed to take responsibility and figure out what they were doing.
A colleague of mine has had luck with in-class group work. She assigns small groups at the beginning of the semester (usually 5 students) and then has them discuss concepts, readings, etc. in class. One of the most interesting things she does it has them take a short quiz or answer a quick question before class, then they can update their answers after discussion with the group. It gets the students to do the reading, etc. before class, but also engages them in discussion during class time. It works best if you have more than one TA who can walk around and encourage the wall flowers to participate in the discussion.
These are all great suggestions — Artalot's suggestion for instance seems very profitable — but the problem I see is that the Discussion Sections are the place where this more individualized close work is supposed to be done. So what would be left for the Discussion Section meetings to do?
Quote from: Hegemony on June 14, 2022, 01:55:35 PM
These are all great suggestions — Artalot's suggestion for instance seems very profitable — but the problem I see is that the Discussion Sections are the place where this more individualized close work is supposed to be done. So what would be left for the Discussion Section meetings to do?
Hegemony, I realize I'm not sure of your general field, and I think to some degree the construction of the discussion sections may be class/field dependent. As a grad student teaching recitation/discussion sections, some of the variety of ways they were structured were:
1. TA class sessions were dedicated to working toward a final project related to course material, so the meetings with the TA had scaffolding steps for the project and opportunities to work in groups (these projects included papers, presentations, posters, one class they were role-play skits demonstrating class concepts).
2. TA class sessions were focused on an applied topic related to that week's lecture (e.g., in abnormal psych, whole class lectures could be about the development and symptoms of the disorders and the recitation could be focused on the basics of intervention).
3. TA class sessions were focused on clarifying material from lecture. The professor had a system where the students at the end of class did an exit ticket type activity--I think the 2 questions were something like: Name one important thing you learned in class today and Write/ask one question about today's content - something that has left you puzzled. Then the "puzzling" concepts for that week were reviewed in the recitation.
How do your colleagues structure the discussion sections when they teach the course? Do you think what they do will not work for your style or this particular course content?
Well, my colleagues teach more general courses — "All The Things About Culture" — and then the idea is that the discussion section is about only one of those things at a time. But I have a sense that the discussion sections are not very well managed anyway, because the grad students teaching them seem a bit lost. They don't get a lot of direction about what to do in the classes.
My new course is "One Specific Part of Culture," so the lecture classes will be less of a lively grab-bag of stuff. And I'd like to provide more guidance to the poor grad students who will be running the discussions.
In addition the norm in my department is to have three 50-minute lectures per week; it's just an accident of scheduling that mine are two 80-minute lecture sessions. I'm definitely going to need multiple things to perk everyone up and make sure everyone's awake for the whole thing, including me.