Blog Entry #2

The Week’s Readings and My Chemistry Set

My parents bought me a chemistry set on my birthday one year. I think I was nine or ten years old. I was very excited about the gift and couldn't wait to start using it. I imagined myself mixing different chemicals almost at random in an effort to get thrilling, perhaps explosive, reactions. My mother forbade me to do this, as you might expect, and I was ordered to follow the instructions set out in a booklet that came with the set. The booklet contained dozens of simple, introductory “experiments” designed to demonstrate basic chemical properties and rules. As I began leafing through the book, though, I became increasingly disappointed as I realized that virtually all of the lessons required tools, compounds, and other items not included with the chemistry set. What this meant was that unless I (or, more accurately, my parents) were willing and able to invest a lot more time and money into my budding chemistry avocation, I wasn't going to be able to do much of anything.

I was reminded of this childhood episode, ironically, because after I finished the reading, I felt the opposite of what I felt then. Chapters 3, 4, and 6 of First Day to Final Grade offer many practical tips and suggestions that are both extremely helpful and, as they like to say in the intelligence community, actionable. That is, I could do virtually everything suggested in the book with little or no additional materials. Executing them only requires a little forethought and planning, which is a natural part of the teaching process, anyway.

The beginning of chapter 3 dealt with lesson goals, or objectives, but I'm going to write about this at the end of my entry because it's the only thing I didn't like about the readings this week and I don’t want to ruin the nice complimentary tone I’ve started with.

PowerPoint Prowess

I really like PowerPoint presentations--both as a student and as a teacher, so I read carefully what the authors of First Day to Final Grade had to say about PowerPoint, particularly what they see as cons. They say that PowerPoint tends to move too quickly and that students are often too busy copying content to pay attention to lecture or they expect to have the slides made available to them after class, so they don’t pay it any attention.

I think I may have overcome these cons, at least somewhat. First, I told my students on day one that I would not make my PowerPoint presentations available on Blackboard or in any other way unless there was some extraordinary reason to do so. Second, as much as possible I use images and short phrases that evoke the topic of my lecture or provide some visual information, and avoid excessive text or other content that students would feel compelled to write down. For example, in the COMM 112 (Understanding Mass Media in a Changing Society) course I co-teach, we use the controversy over the novel The Wind Done Gone to highlight the issue of copyright infringement. My PowerPoint starts with a photo of the front cover of The Wind Done Gone. I then ask students if the name of the book sounds familiar or if they know about the controversy. Eventually I reveal a photo of the front cover of Gone With the Wind next to The Wind Done Gone. I then talk about the details of the controversy, after which I allow one line of text to appear under the book covers. This text summarizes what I just said and includes the main facts they should note. I then give students a moment to write this in their notes.

I don’t have any confirmation of this yet, but I think this style keeps students’ attention on the PowerPoint, without distracting them with lots of text they might feel obliged to write down. And by using the animation features of PowerPoint, I control when the text I do include comes on to the screen. Creating this kind of PowerPoint presentations takes more time, but the results are worth it, I think, as the presentations are usually more fun to deliver and more engaging for the students.

Unfortunately, the nature of the content in my teaching demonstration this week won’t permit me to showcase this self-proclaimed PowerPoint prowess, but anyone reading this is welcome to come see me in another class and see it firsthand.


“Good Discussing”

Whenever I hear the word “discussion” used in the classroom context, I’m reminded of a history teacher I had one semester as an undergraduate. Dr. Gudmar Gudmansen was from Iceland and generally spoke exceptional English, but he did have a few quirky usage issues. My favorite was heard almost every class period after even the most perfunctory exchange of opinions with students. Dr. Gudmansen would sharply nod his head once and say “Good discussing.” I was never sure whether he was just mispronouncing “discussion” or whether he was using “discussing” as a gerund, the way one might say to a fellow oarsman on a canoe, “Good rowing!”

“Running a Discussion” is the title of chapter 4, which I really enjoyed and appreciated. I think I have an innate ability to conduct a productive, enjoyable class discussion, but the chapter introduced me to some wonderful variations that I eagerly hope to attempt. I particularly appreciated the distinction the authors made between discussion and task-based participation. I like to do task-based participation but have been calling it discussion.

Some of the task-based participation ideas, such as making lists and pairing-and-sharing, would be particularly effective activities for exam review days, which are part of the COMM 112 class I co-teach. My co-instructor tells me he has struggled to find interesting ways to review for the exams, so I’ll suggest one of these ideas to him. Chapter 6 talked about exam prep, which I used to see as pandering, as the authors describe in the second paragraph of page 96. But the rationale they give for exam reviews is compelling and, if done properly, exam reviews can improve students’ mastering of the material.

I also was very excited by the section on debate, which was in chapter 6, and would love to try to hold a debate in my COMM 110 class, perhaps as a way of introducing the persuasive speech. It could demonstrate to students the same kind of argumentation they should emulate in their speeches. The schedule and methods for the COMM 110 course is well regimented by the department, but perhaps I’ll have enough flexibility to try that.

Blooming Imprecision

My only real criticism of the readings concerns the section at the beginning of chapter 3 that discusses lesson objectives. In the authors' defense, they use the word "goal," not "objective," and I suspect they did so deliberately to avoid having to delve into Bloom's taxonomy and its verb-obsessed cognitive domains. But I think this is a disservice to teaching assistants, thus ultimately to students.

The sample lesson plan objectives in chapter 3 are too imprecise. Largely due to my undergraduate pedagogical conditioning, I believe that teachers are well-served to craft objectives that target specific knowledge and skills they want their students to develop. Strong objectives make it easier for teachers to create activities appropriate to the lesson and are generally clearly measurable. Weak objectives, invariably, do not correlate as easily to activities and are not so easy to measure. For example, the book's first sample objective is "Help students adopt the appropriate convention for scientific writing by reviewing the proper format for a lab report."

I can imagine what "help students adopt" means, but it's equivocal. "Help" in this context connotes "encourage" or "suggest," which implies more choice in the matter than is probably available to the students. If scientific writing conventions are required by the course assignments, students must adopt it or their grades will suffer. Removing "help" from the objective remedies this, but we are still left with the word "adopt," which suggests more of a conversion in beliefs or attitudes than in behavior. The axiom that good objectives are clearly measurable begs the question: how would this teacher measure her students' shift in beliefs? It would be easier, surely, to see whether or not students actually use the conventions in their writing assignments.

Perhaps this initial lesson was simply intended to introduce the writing conventions to the students, in which case my admonition might sound pedantic. But the choice of verb in the objective not only describes what the teacher wants from the students, it clarifies for the teacher how she might teach that lesson. In this example, if the teacher expects this lesson to result in students writing according to scientific conventions, then simply reviewing lab reports may not suffice. In that case, I would suggest that a good objective would be "Students will be able to demonstrate proper use of (or utilize) appropriate scientific conventions in their writings." The lesson's activities could start with reviewing lab reports, but would have to go beyond that in order for students to master the conventions and show the teacher that they have mastered the conventions.

The sample objectives also contain the activities by which the content will be taught. In the example I've been writing about, the objectives reads that the class will review properly formatted lab reports, presumably so they can see what scientific writing conventions look like. Including the activity in the objective implies that the activity is part of the objective. Activities should be pulled out of the objectives so there's no confusion. An activity is a means (or part of a means) to an end (the objective), not the end in itself.

I'm pleased that in class we're talking in more detail about objectives and Bloom's taxonomy. I recall from my undergraduate teaching methods courses how rewarding the objective writing exercises were and I'm hopeful that my colleagues in this class will feel similarly stimulated. Learning how to write good objectives can be difficult and even tedious, at times, but ultimately good objectives make teaching easier and more effective by being clearly relevant to class activities and being clearly measurable.

In my research for this week’s entry, I came across another good summary of the taxonomy, along with lists of verbs that can be incorporated into learning objectives. This one comes from the University of West Florida. I’ve provided a link to this document at the end of this blog entry.

Grading and Evaluation

This week COMM 110 (Fundamentals of Public Speaking) students are delivering their first speeches. In our TA seminar last week some effort was made to orient us to grading and evaluation, but I think it was inadequate. It may be that the department (perhaps the university) intends for each professor and graduate teaching assistant to set his or her own evaluation standards. I'm not very comfortable with this personally, and I’m not alone. The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Penn State University urges departments to work with their graduate teaching assistants to calibrate their grading, so that evaluation is as consistent as possible throughout the department. A link to the Schreyer Institute’s website can be found below. I’ll have more to say on this when we get to grading strategies, testing and assessment later in the semester.

Another stab at Bloom’s taxonomy: http://uwf.edu/atc/design/PDFs/bloomtaxonomyverblist.pdf

Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence website: http://www.schreyerinstitute.psu.edu/