What they learned, what I learned: pre and post-assessment

They learned some logic, I learned some things about teaching and learning logic.  That makes us a pretty happy bunch.  One of the best moments in class this semester was the penultimate day, just before the final exam, when I handed out the same pre-assessment we had done on the first day of class.

On that first day, students approached the logic questions on the worksheet with wrinkled brows, worried frowns, and a little confusion.  While many students were able to reason through the logic of the questions and get some right answers, there wasn't much confidence.  When I handed them the same questions THIS week, I saw expressions of relief, comfort, and confidence.  They were smiling.  Students were able to quickly get the right answers, and were confident not only in their answers, but in why they were correct and what efficient logical rules and structures got them there.

Most importantly, students were also able see just how much they've learned in Logic this semester, and have a sense of accomplishment in what they've done.  I'm confident that this boosted their logical self-esteem going into the final, and also likely reinforced everything they've learned as they leave the class (hopefully to apply their logical tools throughout the rest of their lives).  Of course, it also gives me a sense of what this class has learned, as I continue to change and build the course from year to year.

So, that's one thing I've learned:  the value of a pre and post-assessment assignment.  Seeing the calm and confident way in which students used logic by the end of the semester in comparison with the start was a bright moment for me.

Logic for the public good

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One of my favorite activities in Logic class is a service learning assignment (really!).  I call it the "Logic consultation project," and it requires that students offer their logical analysis skills to another person (preferably outside of class, and not necessarily another college student).  Students read an academic paper, letter to the editor, blog post, business plan, presentation, etc., analyze (or even symbolize) the logical structure, and then make recommendations based on the strength or validity of the argument.  This has to be a service to someone students know, and they're required to actually give the person their analysis.

Of course there are multiple goals of an assignment like this.  Students are required to apply their skills so that I (and they) know that they're able to take what they've learned during the semester and really put it to use in their lives.  I'm also serious about the service component--I do believe that the skills learned in a Logic class should be useful and used for some public good.  We can all benefit from a little logical analysis of our writing, right?  Finally, I hope that this assignment spreads the goodness of Logic around a little--so that other students see the benefits of what we're doing and think about learning some tools on their own or during a future class.

The analyses are really interesting.  Some students went an inductive route and pointed out informal fallacies and problems with the strength of the relationship between premises and conclusions.  Others used their deductive reasoning skills to simplify and symbolize whole papers into categorical syllogisms or truth-functional derivations.  Students who had trouble finding the main argument of a paper or presentation gently let their "clients" know that their arguments needed some clarification and structure.  The end goal is that everyone has a better understanding of the need for clear and careful communication.

See--liberal arts education IS a public good!

Fun, rigor, intrinsic value, and threats: what's not to like?

There was a perfect storm of reasons to come to Logic class yesterday, but there were apparently also insurmountable obstacles preventing it.  Yesterday, we had the Truth Table Olympics final round (prizes!  competition!  fun!), an assignment due (hand-in-able only in class, as usual on Mondays), the promise of new material essential to the coming last days of the semester, and a rainy cold day (as opposed to a warm morning that would have tempted students to go outside instead of to class).  Who wouldn't want to go to class?

Slightly more than half of the 21 students.

Sigh.

Truth Table Olympics

There's a lot of talk in K-12 and higher ed these days about "gamification," which is  just what it sounds like--using a gaming design to interest students in learning.  Vocabulary like "leveling up" is starting to sound as familiar as "grading" to many educators.  Whether it makes sense to go full force into this way of framing college education (and, let's face it, we dusty professors mostly wish that students would just find learning intrinsically rewarding), I've always enjoyed throwing a little competition at my students in Logic, at the very least to give them a goal to train for and a group activity that's fun and different.

So, today was the 7th annual Truth Table Olympics!  I put students on teams and established a system of tip-offs and rounds which left two teams for our final round next week (with chocolate gold medals).  I think there are a lot of benefits of this activity, aside from the fact that it's fun.  Students work together to solve problems, they help each other and care about how they're doing (including empathizing with teams whose simple mistakes take them out of contention for the gold), and they get a lot of low stakes practice (because it's not a graded assignment or exam) with fairly complex logical problems.  Another benefit is that there's a lot of student work being done publicly--that is, everyone in class gets to see how others are doing.  Under some circumstances, this could be discouraging to students who are having difficulty; but with a little careful framing, I've found that it's helpful for students to see each other excelling.  It's clear that complex logic is doable, and it causes students to seek help (ideally from each other, but also from their TA and me) so that they can achieve the same goals their peers are.

Having students fill the whiteboards with correct truth tables to determine validity of arguments, and to feel proud when they finish, fills me with the thrill of victory.

Rollin' up the sleeves for some fresh, organic logic

Last fall, I attended a presentation by one of my colleagues on an interesting, though complicated, concept in math.  He spent most of his presentation writing on the chalkboard and talking through the math while drawing examples.  About 2/3 of the way through his presentation, he switched to powerpoint slides.  I noticed that I was less able to keep up with the mathematical bits of his presentation when he was using the packaged version, probably because the extra time he took writing on the chalkboard was time I apparently needed to process what he was talking about.  Since then, I've tried to approach fairly difficult topics in Logic in the same way.  Last week it was swapping myself out and putting in my excellent and patient teaching assistant.  Today it was staying far away from the computer/projector, instead working through problems on the whiteboard.

I enjoy these kinds of days in Logic.  Let's face it, sometimes our old powerpoints put us to sleep, as well as the students (as easy as it is to dust them off and use them again and again).  I like my Logic fresh, though, and I actually enjoy working through problems. I sometimes even make mistakes, which is an excellent learning opportunity for those astute students who catch me, and for others who need to see that it's OK to take risks and sometimes fail.  I also figure that if they see me enjoying the work, they might open themselves up the possibility that Logic could even be fun.

Logical frost heaves

Typical of Vermont in the springtime, we've hit some bumps in the road in Logic this week.  The field of deductive logic involves many ways to achieve the same goal--to determine the validity of arguments.  Though this is generally an advantage (if you don't like Venn diagrams, just wait until truth tables!), there are often rough spots when we transition from one kind of logic to the next (if you DO like Venn diagrams, why bother with truth tables?!).  We're having those rough spots this week as we venture into truth functional logic (and putting "truth FUNctional logic" on a power point, it seems, doesn't actually make people think it's fun.  Huh.).

I've been scrambling to find ways to help students do well with truth tables, from extra office hours (not very many takers) to slowing things down in class.  I've made practice worksheets for each class day this week, with the idea that students can move at their own pace (i.e., hit those bumps slowly or gleefully become airborne).  That seemed to work somewhat.  Maybe the best idea was to have my superstar TA teach much of class today.  Possibly he's more patient than I am, but he also moves a little more slowly (he's only had the class once--I've taught it 10 or more times).  I think the change of instructor and the pace was helpful today.  Then we still did some individual work on worksheets, and I started feeling a lot better about class at the end of this week than at the beginning.

Stay tuned for next week--it's the annual truth table Olympics!  I'm optimistic that students who at the start of class today thought that 4 line truth tables were insurmountable will be burning up the whiteboards on 32 lines!

More disrobing: midcourse review

One of the most useful things that our new teaching center offers is a midcourse review.  While students have a chance to weigh in on the success of the course at the end of the semester in course evaluations, their suggestions (often quite constructive) can only benefit future students.  A midcourse review by a teaching center staff member or faculty colleague, has the advantage of students being able to suggest adjustments (or reinforce successful strategies) for the course for the remaining part of the semester.

Though it may be awkward and perhaps embarrassing (yes!) to allow someone else into your classroom mid-semester, whether it's for an observation or for a review, I've found that the benefits outweigh the risks.  There are gentle and minimally disruptive ways to conduct such a review that emphasize constructive comments, and I've always found when I do reviews that the students very much appreciate the chance to talk about the structure of the class and quality of instruction (whether or not they feel successful in the course), and that just asking them to be part of the review process gets them more engaged in the class.  There's also the obvious benefit of getting some data that allow you to make adjustments during the rest of the semester.

We introduce three topics when we conduct a review:  what instructional methods are working well, what could be improved, and what students can do (individually and collectively) to enhance their own learning.  We find that this last question causes students to really think about their own role in the class community, and they often publicly promise to do things such as prepare better or show up to class more often and on time.  Having students answer these questions in small groups can prevent outliers from monopolizing the review, and offers more reticent students a chance to weigh in (students present from their groups).  Our reviews end up with a report that is anything from a brief conversation to a formal document (usable in promotion files), and comes along with some tools for making adjustments.

So, a colleague from the teaching center reviewed my course the other day, and I received some helpful ideas for improvement in the next weeks.  I think my students also got the feeling that they were respected, serious members of the class and that I rely on them to take some ownership in their own success.  It's hard to undress your course and instruction in front of others, but I highly recommend it.

Ode to a teaching assistant

This blogger was struck down by a stomach virus this week, which reinforced the idea that teaching and learning are community activities.  Fortunately, I have a stellar undergraduate teaching assistant.  I was able to email my UTA at the last minute and know that he would take over class and, likely, do a much better job than I do on most days.  Not only did he teach the new material we were to cover, but he went over homework assignments with the students (correcting their mistakes and assigning grades), taught the new stuff (Venn diagrams for categorical syllogisms--one of the most important tools of the class), but then he also followed up the lecture with an email to all students clarifying a tight spot in the new material and giving an example.  I'm wondering if there might be a coup on the horizon--I would totally replace me with my UTA if I could!

This is a change in my teaching from past years.  The few times I've had to miss class in the past, I've generally just cancelled, assuming that if I'm not there, class can't happen.  Today, there are many opportunities for student learning in my class that don't require my presence.  Some of these rely on technology (such as a learning management system, or other online way of holding class).  Having materials, even discussion forums, for students online can be very useful in the event of a snow day, sick day, or conference.  Students generally need to be familiar with the online environment already to make these things work.  There are also in-class activities that, it turns out, don't require my presence.  A good, old-fashioned TA can be great because he (in this case) is able to keep class moving, while also providing a fresh perspective (and different jokes!).  I imagine that it also gives students a chance to try out skills or ideas with a little less pressure than they may normally feel when I'm in the room.  Again, it helps if students are already familiar with their TA.  It also occurred to me that there are, by now, several students in the class that I could email to be discussion or problem-solving workshop leaders, and class would continue just fine without me.  While my ego might think that I'm an essential component of every Logic experience students have together, it's also good to think that we've developed a rhythm and community that is bigger than me as a professor.  Learning is about community inquiry, and the classroom should offer opportunities for students to problem-solve together, even (especially) if the person perceived to have the answers is sidelined by plague.

Feedback loop

This blogger went to the New England Educational Assessment "dialogues across the disciplines" workshop last week.  Did the mention of "assessment" put you to sleep?  Actually, it was a great day--good information, fascinating people, and real evidence of and tools for what higher education could be doing better to engage students and help them to learn.  Folks from the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts presented findings from their Wabash Study on student learning of liberal arts outcomes.  It turns out that good teaching seems to help students to learn better!  Yes, obvious.  What might be less obvious is that good (clear, organized, passionate) teaching actually seems to result in students scoring higher on outcomes such as moral reasoning, critical thinking, and even the desire and ability to engage with diversity.  It's not JUST the material students are learning in these areas--students' perceptions of faculty as caring, passionate, and organized is correlated with higher achievement of liberal arts goals.

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As I said, it was a great conference, and I'll be unpacking the tools and information I gained for weeks to come.  THIS week, I decided to focus on the "feedback loop" part of organized teaching.  Feedback from faculty that is prompt and responsive is high on the list of things that facilitate learning.  

My Logic students turn in a weekly set of exercises every Monday.  This time, rather than picking up assignments (or, sometimes I allow students to "workshop" their exercises in small groups, then I pick them up), I went over the full assignment with students, allowing them to ask questions when they missed points, and demonstrating some skills on the whiteboard that I thought might be tricky.  I guided students in assigning grades, and then recorded them individually in my gradebook.  That way, students knew immediately what they had trouble with on the assignment.  Did I mention that an added benefit was that I didn't have to grade their papers?

Obviously, this strategy to giving prompt and responsive feedback won't work on most kinds of assignments.  In this case, there were clear right and wrong answers, and the stakes were pretty low gradewise (the benefits outweighed, I thought, the risk that students would inflate their scores on this fairly small assignment).  I'm going to keep doing it when appropriate, and then work hard to grade things more promptly when I pick up homework to grade myself.

Let us know about your tools and tricks for prompt and responsive feedback!

Philosophy and education

I (Heather) am on the road this week at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy's annual conference (this year, in chilly Grand Rapids, MI).  This conference highlights pragmatist philosophy, and there are often sessions on using philosophy to solve the problems of our time.  That is especially true this year since the conference's central theme is sustainability.  I went to a fine panel discussion this morning put together by the host institution, Grand Valley State University, about community and project based education.

Though the central ideas aren't new to Green Mountain (as we have many, many classes that use service learning, and, of course, every GMC student does a service project in our Environmental Liberal Arts gen ed capstone course), I did get some ideas about ways we could better "scaffold" service learning opportunities to make them more useful both to students and to partners.  Many folks who work with students on service learning projects develop "partner fatigue" when they tire of projects that aren't successful or productive.  To avoid this, GVSU tries to scaffold the experience so that students take more than one semester to conceptualize and activate project components.  We're starting to do this in our first-year experience by having Voices of Community (our second-semester writing course) students engage with capstone students about project development.  It's on our radar, but something I hope we can facilitate more as we build our first-year experience.

GVSU's Danielle Lake uses the engaged pedagogical philosophies of John Dewey and Jane Addams in a course in which she has students frame community issues as "wicked problems" which requires that they explore the complexity of social or ecological problems before posing lasting solutions.  I've been thinking that the wicked problems approach might be useful to us as we think more about building toward the capstone projects.  Minimally, it requires students (and faculty) to more fully understand the social and ecological systems in which we live (and serve), which I would think makes empathy more likely.  THAT is certainly central to Deweyan and Addamsian pragmatist philosophy.

Piling on resources

We're getting to a tricky place in Logic (categorical logic) during which time if students get behind, it's pretty tough to catch up since each new logical tool builds on previous knowledge.  So, I'm working hard this week to provide extra, outside resources for students to use.  I think of these as digital office hours (since very few people actually come to in-person office hours these days--maybe that's a different post!), though the difference is that students can view resources over and over again (and even at midnight, when I'm not having actual office hours).

Mostly, I'm creating and posting very short whiteboard lectures.  There are a lot of whiteboard apps out there (for use with a touchscreen--I use my iPad).  I've chosen a free app (Educreations) that is incredibly user-friendly, both for the creator and the viewer.  The downside is that the lectures are stored on a website over which I have no control.  I am able to keep the lectures private, but I don't technically have control over them.  The stakes are pretty low, though--if I lose one, I can just take 5 minutes to create a new one.  In fact, I was so lazy last night that I didn't bother looking for an old one--I just created a new one.  I don't edit, so it really only takes me 5 minutes.  If you're interested in whiteboard apps, come in for a chat in the teaching center.  Here's an example of one of my lectures.

Thinking about thinking about thinking.

That's right, I'm thinking about metacognition this week.  After an interesting discussion at the AAC&U annual meeting on the more general use of student reflection on their own learning (such as in general education programs), I've been inspired to experiment with metacognition in the classroom.

This week, I'll try different ways of getting students to think about their logical learning and thinking.  Today, I asked them to answer two questions during a short in-class writing period:  what they've learned so far in class that has been useful outside of class (in other classes or, gasp, even in "real" life), and what has been difficult for them to learn or understand so far.  On Wednesday, I'll offer students the option to revise some answers on their first exam.  The scores were fine, as a whole, but the process of revision should solidify their understand of concepts they may have misunderstood.  I'm requiring that they not only fix answers, but that they explain why they thought they missed them and what they know now that they didn't on exam day.  They'll be thinking about their thinking, that way, which should further solidify their knowledge of Logic.

GMC's teaching center just happened to have a newsletter on metacognition last semester.

American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting

Naked Teaching is on the road (fully clothed--you know that's just a metaphor, right?)!  I (Heather) am at the AAC&U annual meeting on general education assessment.  Did you just go to sleep?  I didn't, because if you take out the assessment bit, which CAN be a little boring, this organization is ALL about liberal arts and general education.  People here are talking about making Shakespeare relevant to today's students!  They like values education!  They see general education as a public good!  Leslie Wong, president of San Francisco State, just said that the most important thing we can teach our students is to "own their own minds."  Yes.

Wong also talked about the changing "face" (i.e., demographics) of students in the next 30 years or so, and the importance of making general education culturally relevant.  This should make us think.  At GMC, we're pretty good at making gen ed (our beloved Environmental Liberal Arts) fairly relevant to the problems of our time, such as climate change, but culturally relevant?  We can work on this.  I heard this morning that there are only 12 or so people left who can speak the Omaha (Native American) language fluently, for example, and I was reminded of Paul Hawking's idea in Blessed Unrest that preserving indigenous cultures, especially their languages, was essential to "the movement" that is needed to mitigate climate change and other ecological disasters.  It's all connected.

Lots of people are live-tweeting the conference, including my alter Twitter ego, @JaybirdVT.  Just search #AACUGenEd15.

Getting Naked

When I began teaching at the tender age of 23, just five years older than my freshman writing students, my teaching was indeed naked--the first day that I walked into a classroom, attempting to project confidence in spite of my shaking hands and quaking voice, I felt stripped to the bone. I had to hold onto the podium for dear life with my shaky, sweaty palms threatening to jettison me out of orbit at any moment. Sure, I had my ice breakers ready to go, the sonorous reading of the syllabus planned, and the prompt for the writing sample ("What are five things you want me to know about you as a student? Discuss") in hand. Yet I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't know enough to convince my students that I was indeed justified in representing myself as a a teacher, since I was still a student myself.  Now, twenty years later, perhaps 200 classes later, I still feel like a student. And while that sometimes still frightens me, I have learned how to sit a little more with the fear.  I will not know everything about a text I teach for the first time, nor be an expert on a course that I prepare for the first time.  For that matter, I will not know everything about texts I have taught a hundred times--quite often, in fact, I reread the texts I teach, and glean novel insights upon those re-readings. In teaching my students, I try to be as "naked" as possible in the sense that I am upfront about ideas that perplex me and what I may still wonder about the text.  In sitting with the fear that my students might find out that I don't know everything, I embrace that wonder, and the more I practice the better I get.

In my history of the English language course, my students and I use the OED and study word etymologies.  This is a source of constant surprise, and indeed wonder, as we connect root words to the branches of various languages that multiply and magnify meaning in a marvelous way.  Indeed, the word "wonder" in its verb form, was an Old English word: "wundrian."  Endemic to our language, it becomes a metaphor for what the experience of teaching offers: to admire, to magnify, to be struck with astonishment, to marvel.  When it is working, many teachers would say that these are some of the best moments: when we are struck, astonished, provoked to admiration, or overcome by a sense of the marvelous. More of that, please!

Confessions of a lecturer

I was thwarted by classroom design today.  When I arrived, rather than the little group pods I had made out of tables, my classroom was arranged in straight rows facing the projector screen.  As students started arriving, they asked whether I wanted them to move tables.  In the spirit of democratic pedagogy, I said "I don't know, what do YOU want to do today?"  Someone expressed an interest in trying out rows, and others quickly agreed.  So, we left the classroom in lecture mode.

It's like something clicked in my brain.  I was in front of rows of students.  I had no choice but to talk at them.  They played their parts well, too, by waiting to be called on and looking confused when I finally, late in the class period, asked them to arrange themselves in little groups within their rows.

Lecturing isn't all bad.  Though I felt some guilt about so easily giving up on my flipped classroom experiment, I was also sure that they were exposed to the important material of the day, and I invited a lot of response during the lecture part of class.  Since class was particularly small today (13 out of 22 students!  I imagine the flu and a beautiful day at the Mountain were responsible for that.), it was easy for me to interact with students and to be sure that they were at least somewhat active in class.

I did leave some time for reflection with a very short assignment I've never tried in Logic.  Rather than have students reflect on mistakes in other people's reasoning (it's so easy!), I had them write a few sentences about their own reasoning and fallacies they know they should watch in their speaking and writing.  I'm going to follow up on this, since it's perhaps the most important thing students can learn in Logic--the power of clear, correct, and responsible communication.

Next time, it's back to the pods.

Flip it. Flip it good.

As I mentioned, my focus this week is on creating some outside of class resources for students so that we can spend time workshopping exercises and discussing Logic in class, while still covering a lot of necessary ground.  I'm using some ideas from the "flipped" classroom approach--asking students to do some of the work outside of class (in addition to reading their text), leaving room for more active work inside of class.  That means very little lecture on my part.

Here's what class looked like today:  students spent about 10-15 minutes workshopping their weekly written exercises (due today) in small groups.  Owen, my brilliant teaching assistant, and I walked around the groups, answering questions.  I allow students to change answers based on workshops in the interest of giving them immediate feedback.  Students then, still in their groups, were responsible for writing an example of part of today's topic on the board, and teaching that concept to the rest of the group.  Our material this week is informal fallacies--fairly easy and interesting, but a lot of vocabulary.

In past semesters, I would teach informal fallacies primarily by lecturing on the types and then looking at examples together as a whole class.  I like that approach for obvious reasons:  I had control of the class material, I could rest easy knowing that students were at least *exposed* to the ideas (because I said them!), and I knew that we'd get all of the ground covered.  What I didn't know was whether students were tuned in and learning.  Using my approach today left me sure that most students were tuned in (if they weren't, it was obvious), though I had a lot less control over the content.

To allow myself to rest more easily at night, I've created some online resources to accommodate all the lecturing I used to do.  I've made three quizzes, so far, for students to enjoy outside of class.  I'm making these optional (ungraded, though I can see who does them).  Students who do them will get immediate feedback on how well they're grasping the material, which is what I hoped to accomplish by looking at examples during a lecture in class.

The proof will, of course, be in the pudding.  That pudding will be dished out next week in our first exam.  And yes, that's almost as enjoyable to me as having DEVO songs going through my head.

Slow down, you move too fast...

This week, I paid attention to the speed of material and content of my class meetings, with the idea that I'd try to slow things down a bit to get students to think more actively and deeply.  Though we covered less of the material in the textbook than I might have liked, slowing down allowed us to transition between types of material (from parts of the argument to good vs. bad arguments to vagueness, ambiguity, and fallacies), and to allow students to spend more time in discussion and problem workshops.  I think it was useful.

An added benefit of slowing down was that I was able to introduce topics into our discussion that I hadn't anticipated.  An extra day, for example, on cognitive vs. emotive meaning, allowed me time to explore ideas in the news that I felt really should be discussed in classes.  I devoted part of Wednesday's class to a discussion of ISIS's use of video (of beheadings and burnings) to create emotive meaning.  It was a difficult discussion, but one that I hope caused students to think about both world events and Logic in new ways.

Covering less material in my 50 minute class periods this week also allowed for a little forecasting of coming topics, which I always think is a good idea and never seem to leave time for at the end of the class.  I might regret these decisions at the end of the semester when we've barely scratched the surface of propositional logic, but my hope is that giving students more time to discuss and apply what they're learning will lead to better use of their skills later on.  Though reading and exercises are essential to learning Logic, so are applying and discussing concepts.  Our teaching center just happens to have a newsletter coming out on Monday with an article on "Increasing class participation through inquiry" which has lots of tips on how to use questions to start, maintain, and ensure the quality of class discussion.

Tune in next week for a new theme:  speeding up while still using most of class for application and discussion!  To prepare for this, I've started putting more resources online (flipping the classroom, as they say) for use outside of class (such as practice quizzes that give immediate feedback--things I might usually do in class).

Slow teaching?

My focus this week is on balancing the structure of the Logic course (i.e., getting somewhere) with attempting to slow things down a little in order to experiment with facilitating deep learning in students.  The class is fifty minutes, which blows by like a bullet train.  Sometimes, students look like they may have been left on the platform, wondering where everyone is going, as the train whooshes by.  Having missed my share of trains, both literal and figurative, I know the feeling.

Slowing down in class has the benefit of allowing more time for reflection, questions, and applying what we're learning.  We workshop more exercises, look at more examples, and explore a tangent or two in discussion.  Ideally, students will gain deeper knowledge--ideas they are more likely to use because they stay with them over time.  As much as I enjoy Logic for its own sake, I really hope students learn to use it throughout their whole lives, which requires a deep connection with the material.  And maybe slow pedagogy, like food, is more likely to be organic, local, healthy, and delicious.

Here's a book (which I haven't found time to read) on all things slow, including education:  In Praise of Slowness.  You should read it and tell me about it.  Along the same lines, this piece just appeared in the New York Times on whether students can have too much tech (does that qualify as fast?).

Today, we spent most of our time looking at video examples of cognitive vs. emotive meaning (well, we spent all of our time looking at the ills of emotive meaning, which is more fun).  It was a good discussion, and maybe students will be more watchful in their consumption of advertising, politics, news, and social media.  We also had more time to process examples by moving a little more slowly.  I don't mean that we did less or lowered expectations.  Rather, I was asking for greater focus, depth, and appreciation.  Maybe by stopping a little longer to see the local sights (sites?), everyone had time to get on board and enjoy the trip.

Sometimes, a last-minute lesson plan written on a scrap piece of paper with a brown pencil you found on the floor is just as good as anything.

Being present in the classroom

In the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, James M. Lang wrote about the "pedagogy of presence" in the classroom.  Lang notes that there is often an invisible barrier between the instructor and students, built out of course material that needs to be covered, a strict plan for the class period, and even thinking about what's next in the day.  He cites research, though, that suggests that even more important than specific course material to students' learning are the personal relationships students experience during college.  To relate on a personal level means balancing plans, outcomes assessment, and the other technical bits of the profession, with really paying attention to the human beings in the room--seeing, hearing, and empathizing with them.  "Being more present to my students might mean letting go of my grip on my classroom schedule. If we don’t get through every scrap of the material today, we’ll probably get to it in the next class session."

I'm a big fan of mindfulness and reflection, and I'm always trying to be more present to the people in my life (and sorry readers and facebook friends, I really mean the people in the room).  I made this my personal goal for today's Logic class.  Being present to large groups of people doesn't come easy for most professors, I expect, especially not shy folk like me.  I credit much of any success I have as a classroom teacher to the acting and speech training I forced myself to endure in college to counter my introverted tendencies.  However, the stage has that fourth wall, and it's easy as an actor to stay behind the barrier.  I often find that I do the same at the front of the classroom.

I went to class early today and arranged the tables into small groupings, with the goal of having students looking at each other.  I did this so that students could work on paying attention to each other, and also to prevent myself from standing at the front behind my invisible barrier.  I had a plan for the class, and even a short powerpoint with the agenda and main topics for the day, but I allowed more space than usual in the activities--both for students to talk to each other, and for students to talk to me.  I focused on really listening, on following some lines of thought that students seemed interested in (even though those ideas weren't part of my material for the day), and on having them spend some time working with each other to make sure they were learning what they needed to before going on to the next section in the text.

Though I had to rethink the class period (no using last year's powerpoint which explained, quite clearly, the material--at least for those good at just sitting and listening!), I felt fairly good about the class. I think the students were learning, and I enjoyed the 50 minutes (which, of course, flew by).

First big fail

Oh technology, you fickle friend.  I stayed up late last night *really late* to have a whiz-bang activity ready for class using my tablet, and you failed me.  My tablet is not very useful without wireless.  I had to write on the chalk board!  I have chalk on my pants now!

As is often the case, I was able to (once I finished crying over my tablet) reconfigure a class activity by thinking of some quick group work.  Though I spent too much time trying to get the new-fangled technology working, things seemed to work well enough in the group activity.

One of the things I was hoping to do with my fancy tablet was to show students the answer to a difficult question on their pre-assessment, using Venn diagrams which I was going to draw right on the worksheet.  I did this on the chalk board (no fancy colors or other tabletty magic).  On the note of the pre-assessment, I do think it served some of its purpose, which was to give my TA and me a sense of the logical talent of the class.  Turns out there's quite a bit!  On the other hand, I'm worried, especially with my showcase of chalky Venn diagrams, that I may have overwhelmed students in the first week.  Time will tell.

Naked teaching, indeed.  It's the evening before the first day of classes in a new semester; the stuff of which nightmares of naked teaching are made.  I never actually have THAT dream.  My nightmares tend to run more along the lines of showing up to class sans syllabus, sans plans, and with an unappreciative audience that arrives late and throws things at me.  Usually, it's not that bad in real life; however, I don't typically think of my first day of classes as being particularly meaningful.

SO, I have big plans for tomorrow.  I'm using a "pre-assessment" for the first time in my Logic course.  I've taught Logic for years and years, but have always shied away from anything that seems like a test on the first day--especially because Logic, to some folks, can look like another language (or, worse yet, like math!).  This time, though, I'm determined to give the students a sense of what they should be able to do with the tools we'll learn in class, and I hope it also gives me a sense of their talents and challenges so that I can better think about the activities of the course.  Tune in tomorrow for the big news on how it worked!