Tag Archives: pedagogy

Thinking about course texts and technologies

After teaching a course designed to introduce students to Shakespeare’s plays and to their film adaptations, I’ve been wondering how reading technologies shape students’ engagement with course materials.  On reflection, the traditional screening format for films or film clips (single focal point, lights off) might implicitly invite students to tune out or change their focus when our classes don’t explicitly discuss the assumptions that we bring when we begin reading or interpreting.

When we used electronic versions of the plays (eBook readers, tablets, and laptops), the change in format seemed to free students from the implicit authority of the printed text and spur conversation.  At the same time, many of my students have talked about how their study habits differ when they work with either electronic or printed course texts.  Some prefer to print even short readings because the medium changes the relationship between the student and the text.

How, then, do embedded video clips within a course management system differ from the same clips shown during a classroom session? How do they differ as modes of educational instruction with their own implicit interpretive maps?

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Electronic Texts, or Staying on the Same Page

Having organized two extra-credit “reader’s theater” sessions in my general education Shakespeare courses this semester, I was drawn to the possibilities that electronic texts provided for this kind of learning experience.  While more carefully edited texts continue to have a central place in my classroom, I decided to work with a public domain text from Project Gutenberg because the primary intent of these sessions was to invite students to experience the aural quality of the texts at length*.  Many might not ordinarily attend a Shakespeare performance or even imagine themselves in an actor’s role, and the more informal setting meant that asking students to purchase texts would be a difficult proposition at best.  Because I would be trimming the texts down to about two hours’ time in performance (no small feat with some Shakespeare texts, which is why I didn’t suggest King Lear), I wanted to give students a single e-text that they could print or use as they saw fit within the reading.  The advantages of providing a single version for students would be that students should theoretically have the same texts, but I have some concerns about the possibility of needing to troubleshoot several different media (print texts, tablet, e-reader, laptop, phone) within a very short session.  Where should this kind of training and support come from in the twenty-first century university?

*As the Project Gutenberg terms indicate, these public domain e-texts can be reproduced/changed provided they are not sold and that those texts including any references to Project Gutenberg itself must then include their full terms of use.

Asynchronous Questions as Starting Points for Discussion

One pedagogical experiment that I’m taking on this semester is an attempt to draw students into the lecture/discussion more fully by using exploratory questions to invite students to work on a common problem with the instructor.  While it is admittedly somewhat Socratic, beginning with a shared question can help to articulate the purpose of the class session and motivate students to think about the underlying intellectual issues that this problem engages.  For classes that tend to be relatively pragmatic, this kind of starting point seems to provide a more concrete analog for discussion at a more theoretical level.

Teachers can pose these initial, exploratory questions to the class directly, or they might pose them rhetorically and articulate the stakes before inviting student input.  According to What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain (Harvard UP, 2004), these questions “confront students with a common problem (of understanding, application, analysis, or synthesis)” and help to explain its broader significance.  In a larger class, however, this can lead to a few students frequently dominating the conversation if other students feel less comfortable speaking publicly about new ideas.  I’ve tried a number of strategies to try to invite more of the class into the conversation.

The first strategy is requiring that students complete a course journal or discussion board question on the topics to be discussed in class.  Gathering these responses before class allows me to see what students throughout the class are thinking, and calling on students based on their ‘published’ written work does not put them on the spot in the same way that asking them to respond to a question or idea for the first time might do.  A second option, which I’m trying this semester for the first time, is to use in-class polling.  Many campuses still have “clickers” for this purpose, and smaller classes can use the resources at PollEverywhere to have students answer with their phones or computers.  Students can see the breakdown of results immediately, and the distribution of responses (particularly to more open-ended questions) can be provocative.  In a sense, students can see how many other students in the class share their opinion in real time, which might inspire confidence in students less likely to speak on their own or might encourage students with different opinions challenge the prevailing assumptions.

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

from ProfHacker: “Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)”

For those of us interested in what Sterne calls “large lecture pedagogy,” this post from ProfHacker covers some of the best practices for large sections in humanities classrooms that can mitigate some of the potential shortcomings of the multiple-choice test.  The comment on clickers resonates with my experiences as a student and an instructor, but I have seen them used in more illuminating ways from time to time.  Ultimately, what may be the biggest challenge related to the multiple-choice format of assessment is the fact that the instructor cannot fully control the way in which students approach the exam–through the lens of their previous experiences with this kind of assessment.  The genre of the ‘test’  can encourage students to draw upon either positive or negative habits of thought developed in their earlier educational experiences.

Social Media and the Classroom

Social Media and the Classroom

From Forbes magazine – an instructor at Temple University talks about using social media in the classroom as a way of engaging students twice with the same material. While the article offers some great starting points and can provoke some useful discussion among the technophiles and curmudgeons, I think that Shapiro might have emphasizes more strongly the underlying point that harnessing these existing technologies means educating students about the potential benefits and limitations of these technologies.  He points to this explicitly when talking about Twitter, but changes to the traditional curriculum–such as hybrid or online courses–means asking students to think critically about their existing use of technology and meeting them at widely varying levels of familiarity and technological fluency.

Pomodoro Productivity

Towards the end of last year, one of my colleagues (also an ABD literature student) pointed me towards the ‘pomodoro’ method of increasing productivity. The time management idea apparently comes from a book by Francesco Cirillo, and the idea is that you take about five minutes off for every 25 that you work on the task in order to keep your mind and focus fresh for the task at hand. Part of what made this stand out to me is my interest in trying to avoid a repetitive stress injury while writing my dissertation since the effects of the injury would be present for years to come. Coupled with concentrated efforts to reduce multitasking and distractions, the benefits of this kind of time management have become almost cliché among graduate students trying to finish their dissertations or theses. Having found it to be useful in my own work, I have begun to question why our time management goals differ so dramatically from the way in which we ordinarily structure classroom time.

Given this fact, what does this knowledge and these practices imply about the way in which teachers traditionally order their classrooms? From my experience, the conventional knowledge in many institutions of higher education is that variety and changing teaching methods (group and individual work, lecture and discussion, reflection and recall) can help students maintain focus, but is there too little room for downtime or breaks? Are students in 3-hour evening classes, for instance, better served by an intricate and wholly uninterrupted class that allows them to cover the maximum amount of material, or would they be able to engage with the material more with structured time that permits them to relax or pause their focus during the class period? Perhaps it is this need for this kind of structuring that makes integrating downtime in the classroom so difficult, as it is easy for students to ‘lose focus’ when instructors provide down time or early dismissals without the structure needed to make the downtime productive in the long run. How might one assess downtime and its purpose, student focus in a way that permits a variety of learning styles and differences?

-Donovan Tann