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.