Fail

March 25, 2013 By 1 Comment

Failure is everywhere, we’re always talking about it, but we’re never willing to do it or encourage it.

Last week I ran a faculty development roundtable here at Baruch called “Invention in the Classroom.” Many interesting things came out of it, but one in particular has been sticking with me over the past couple days: the importance of failing, failing publicly and epically, including in the classroom.

After the roundtable, a few of us continued talking about failure, noting especially that our New York City public school students are brought up thinking that if they fail in an assignment or a test, they’re failing themselves, their parents, their teachers (whose careers are now increasingly linked to their students’ test scores), and their schools (which might even get shut down if they fail too epically, or even just a little). If our students are taught to always stick to the rules and never take a risk — to never fail — they are going to fail epically where it counts: in being inventive, inquisitive people.

At the college level, we often ask our students to “be creative” with an assignment. Here’s one example, from my course blog, of me asking that of mine:

Screen Shot 2013-03-22 at 4.03.54 PMAlmost none of them chose to write these extra posts (which I consider my own failure — one which I am attempting to work through and respond to in future assignments). In general, our students prefer clear-cut assignments that tell them exactly what the professor wants. I don’t blame them. I wanted that A, too, and I wasn’t expecting that I would get it through a semester of botched experiments.

There are a lot of ways to bring failure, and with it, creativity into the classroom, and I’d love to invite a discussion about it in the comments or elsewhere. In fact, I’m already thinking about a faculty roundtable for next semester specifically about failure.

But in the meantime, I wanted to end this post with one idea about how to bring failure into the classroom.

Model failure yourself. Or, to put it another way, model risk taking. Erica Kaufman, the faculty member and Schwartz Communication Fellow who helped us lead the roundtable, told us about asking her students to use technologies in assignments that she herself hadn’t mastered. (One such experiment was written about in the Ticker last week.) It takes guts to go to a room full of students and say (and this is an imaginative recreation of what she might have said): “I don’t know everything about how to use the 3-D printer/video editing software/animation software that I’m asking you to use, and I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to get out of this assignment, but I have a gut instinct that creating something physical that relates to your research will be instructive, and will ultimately help you figure out your argument.” It also pays off. By creating assignments that ask her students to fail again and again, hit a wall, and then by helping them to gather strength, look around them, and move beyond their failure, and by modeling a willingness to fail herself, Erica gets her students to consistently produce work that is stunning, mature, risky, and thoughtful.You can see one of her course blogs here. (And search her other course blogs from there.) It’s worth looking at her assignments, and considering how much risk they require of her students. Look at the “Our Blog!” page on the course site and you’ll see some of the things they wrote and made. The payoff seems obvious.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Grading, Pedagogy, Teaching

Did You Do the Reading?

March 7, 2013 By 1 Comment

If you’ve taught a College Now course, you know that inevitably, teaching in a program designed to give younger students a taste of college involves explicitly targeting a set of life skills in addition to course content.  College Now is a program through which NYC public high school students can take certain CUNY courses for college credit.  After class, I find myself helping students take the plunge into dialing the number of the tech help desk to troubleshoot a computer login problem, or walking students through the various ways they can find my email address if they’ve misplaced the course syllabus.

And although I generally teach the course the same way I do with undergrads, I do end up bulking up my systems of accountability and scaffolding of assignments.  I require students to do a little more to respond to weekly readings, break larger assignments down into smaller steps, etc.  These little changes have me thinking about how these kinds of accountability systems can be perceived as micromanaging or even condescending, but how if done effectively, they can vastly strengthen learning experiences in many educational contexts.

I’ve noticed I’m quick to assume that the idyllic Midwestern liberal arts college experience I had, in which most of my courses followed the model of “read something and come in and talk about it,” is the educational ideal.  And while I took many wonderful classes, some course titles come to mind from which I remember literally nothing.  As a teacher, I’m often mock (sort of) horrified when friends—people I view as successful, smart adults—dismissively reference all of the assigned readings they didn’t do in college.  But then I remember those long-forgotten books for classes outside my own major that I acquired but rarely opened.  What was in them?

In my last semester of graduate school coursework, I took a class outside of my discipline that turned out to have a tiny student enrollment.  I felt out of my element and awkwardly in the spotlight.  Rather than having to post a discussion question or the equivalent in response to each week’s reading, we were assigned to hand in a more thorough weekly summary/response in writing.  This was more accountability than I was used to in graduate school, and it was uncomfortable at first.  But oh how I read, wrote, spoke, and ultimately… remembered.  The same goes for knowledge I acquired while studying for recent comprehensive exams.  These structures of accountability unquestionably compelled me to learn more efficiently and effectively than I often have.

Although being a student (especially a graduate student) means being responsible for one’s own learning, teacher-imposed structures for recording and responding to course content have a huge impact on what kind of learning takes place.  Systems of holding students accountable for learning come in an infinite array of forms. They are obviously not only for College Now students.  This is hardly a new or unusual idea, but it’s an important one—one that I wish even some of my own teachers had chosen to take more seriously.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Teaching

Competition Piece

April 4, 2012 By 2 Comments

In high school, I participated in a large-scale competitive festival of performances by high school drama clubs. This was not the beginning of my interest in theatre-making but it was a turning point for me. The production process was so intense that it was not until I had graduated college and moved to Poland to work with a professional experimental ensemble that I found something to match it.

My high school, Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, was a participant in the Massachusetts High School Drama Guild Festival, which we simply called “Festival.” I remember the competition rules exactly: Each high school sent a forty-minute production to compete. Five minutes were allowed for set-up and for strike. These time limits were strictly enforced and exceeding them meant disqualification. I remember practicing one year, over and over, to ensure the set-up of a fairly massive stage design in under five minutes. Putting up the set was as precisely choreographed as the show itself.

Comic and Tragic Masks: The MHSDG Logo

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Filed Under: Art, Assessment, Baseball, Debating, Education, Pedagogy, Process, To Ponder, Uncategorized

Really Writing Writing Rubrics

March 29, 2012 By 3 Comments

I’m writing this post from the Landmark Ballroom, Salon 4, in the Renaissance Hotel in St. Louis, MO. Even more specifically, I just left a session at the Conference on College Composition and Communication titled, “Teaching Reading and Writing in New Media,” featuring presentations by Barclay Barrios, Richard E. Miller, and Cynthia Selfe. Their talks were titled: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Digital Literacy…” (Barrios), “Learning by Doing: A Year of Thinking in Public” (Miller), and “A More Capacious Conception: Long-Form Scholarship in Digital Environments” (Selfe). For me, what resonated across the presentations was the idea that the way that writing is composed and presented (whether to the public, to a select group of friends, or to instructors/colleagues) is changing–gravitating rapidly towards what Miller refers to as an “eternal future on screen.”

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to find the language to write about something that happened in my Composition 2 class, a class that revolves around the theme, “Pay Attention: Or, What is our Brain on the Internet?” Thus far, we’ve spent the semester working through texts that focus on our relationship with the Internet—how the web changes the way we interact with the basic tenets of a traditional composition classroom—writing and reading and thinking. We began by reading Nicholas Carr, who clearly states, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving steam of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”)

I’m not sure that I agree with Carr’s point, yet when faced with my first batch of papers to grade, I literally didn’t know what to do. After weeks of reading and writing together, and after weeks of conversation and thinking together, I was at a total loss. I had no idea what to do with this stack of twenty-eight, typed and printed (12pt. font/double-spaced), three to five page papers. I find myself thinking about how, in this class, we use technology, we blog, but we also write papers and every single student must purchase the required books for the class—the print books—no e-readers, we hold the books in our hands, the pages are turned and folded, and we explore a world where those things might no longer exist. It feels crucial to me that I do not fully abandon the formal typed paper, but what do I do with them? And, how do I approach reading this form of writing, when I am so accustomed to the experience of reading the student blogs—the low stakes posts they make on a regular basis. Has the internet done something to my assessing brain? Why now?

A few thoughts (in which I tip my hat to Cathy Davidson, whose Now You See It is required reading in this course, and whose NY Times response helped me think through the issue at hand:

  •  One of my priorities when creating essay assignments is that they should be either student-generated, or at least should propose a question that is open enough so that no two papers will deal with the same idea or argument.
  • If my modus operandi behind assignment design is to privilege student input and curiosities, why not do the same with my assessment process?
  • Baruch students almost always ask for a rubric so they can see “how” they are being evaluated–they seem accustomed to rubric-based grading, and might even “like” it.

After thinking through these things, I decided to see what would happen if I asked my students to design their own rubric, to give them a chance to really think through how they are graded and how they wish they were graded.

The above image is what the class decided to do after being asked to write about their experiences being graded on their writing. As a class, they decided to generated a list of terms that felt important and put it all up on the board. I tried to relinquish my authority to the class–and basically kept silent as they generated this list. I want to point to a few terms that I was interested in and surprised by–effort, creativity, compelling, arouse curiosity.

The class then decided to take their “key terms” and organize them by category–they then turned these categories into the prose that filled the boxes of the rubric.

Again, I was surprised and fascinated by the decisions the class made–particularly in the category of “writing style” and its link to “organization.”I felt as though the rubric the class wanted and created was far better than any rubric I’ve used in the past.

But, in the piece of process writing we did after creating the rubric, a number of students expressed frustration with the task–they wanted the teacher to tell them what to do, despite the fact that those who voiced displeasure were the same students who demanded that terms like “creativity” be included.

I’m still not totally sure what to make of this experience. But, I do wonder if the same issues raised in the panel discussion I attended (online writing, the “end of privacy” when all writing is public) might have something to do with the way the class handled the task at hand. Do students now value their own ability to create more than ever? Are students learning to take responsibility for what they write and  how they write it (since they are essentially producing more language than ever)? What does this mean for the world of assessment and high stakes assignments? And, what do we do as writing teachers?

 

Filed Under: Assessment, Grading, Higher Education, Pedagogy, To Ponder, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Instruction

Facebook: The Third ‘R’?

March 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

http://doctortext-info.blogspot.com/2009/08/techniques-for-custom-research-paper.html

How much writing did you do as a first semester undergraduate? 15 pages? 30? 22? 2?

How much should a first semester undergraduate write?

I’ve been thinking about the answer to that second question since I met with a student— I’ll call her Jane—in the midst of a routine day of individual appointments with Introduction to Theatre students. Immediately after I had made an introduction in her class in the early days of the semester, Jane emailed me seeking general feedback on her writing– she is a transfer student from another CUNY college, and is eager to take advantage of Baruch’s resources now that she’s here. Unlike the majority of students who utilize the services we offer when supporting THE1041C, Jane wasn’t panicked about a soon-to-be-due assignment, but wanted a kind of general consultation on her academic writing skills. I asked Jane to send me some samples of her written work, and she told me that so far, she only had blog assignments.

When we met, we spoke about her approach to these blog entries; it was clear that she had given them some thought, but her sentence structure was often confusing, and it took me repeated readings to fully grasp her meaning. In most of her blog entries, she was beating around the bush of her argument or main idea. This isn’t an uncommon problem; I face it all of the time in my own writing, and it is among the biggest issues that our students face.

Jane’s eagerness to write more was what was uncommon. As we talked, she peppered me with questions. How could she improve her writing? What should she be doing differently? What kinds of exercises would help her improve her writing on her own? I had never before had a student actively seeking additional written work, so I asked her about the assignments she had coming up in the semester. I discovered that Jane was not being asked to write very much at all. Out of four classes, her longest assignment was a four-page paper. After talking with her a bit more, a few questions kept popping up:

How do we negotiate the balance between boldly experimenting with new technology and maintaining certain (old) standards of rigor? This question comes out of the sheer lack of quantity (yes, not always quality, but important nonetheless) of writing that I saw this student being challenged with, thanks to word-capped Facebook and blog assignments. Often, adventurous faculty members are juggling many different assessment elements at once– course blogs, maybe a course wiki, too, and then oral presentations, low-stakes writing in class, plus quizzes and finals. Your syllabus is busting out before you’ve even gotten to factor in class participation. So it’s not hard to imagine that having students write  extended essays might be what gets lost in the shuffle.

How do we make the assignment diversity feel relevant, not random? Jane was a little self-conscious about her blog posts, confessing that she wasn’t sure of the expectations in terms of formality. But, as I gave her feedback on them, she also defended herself; these weren’t really evaluated, she explained, they were just graded on the basis of whether she had done them or not. She felt they were an after-thought, and so, that’s how she thought of them: after. (Click here for my own reflections on the challenges and triumphs of course blogging, here for a course blogger superstar story, and here for much more about the phenomenal Blogs@Baruch and profs who are using it to thrilling ends.)

Can we teach code-switching within online social networks? Jane was not assigned any papers in her Sociology course, either. The class has a Facebook wall, where they post pertinent links and have lively conversation about readings and class discussions—even the organizing logic of the course is debated on the Facebook page, which looked to me to be a healthy and vibrant online commons. Still, the Facebook page comments are either 250-300 words or 420 characters. Since Jane is likely using Facebook to communicate with her friends and contacts, too, how will this Sociology professor go about making the distinction between one mode of commenting and another?

Could Jane’s lack of high-stakes writing assignments have to do with work-avoidance on the part of her Instructors (and so what if it does)? Are Jane’s assignments—blog posts about 18th century acting techniques and Facebook comments in response to Sociology theory– examples of radical teaching, or just radical avoidance of the time-consuming task of reading through an 8-10 page (or 10-15 page) academic paper? None of her classes culminated with one of those. (In her Math class, Jane had no writing. In her Great Works class, the bulk of assignments were short—very short, 150 word assignments identifying a certain theme in the literature they were reading.) As is the norm within CUNY, half of Jane’s faculty is adjunct; adjuncts are generally only getting paid for one hour of work outside of their time in the classroom. A Facebook page can easily be monitored in one hour of work, so having students compose 420 characters at a pop could seem like a good way to minimize faculty labor while shaking up the tired old models, too. But there is a vast qualitative difference between infusing your syllabus with a diversity of learning objectives through multiple learning styles and creatively trying to avoid grading 10-page papers from 30+ students.

Are Jane’s assignments  preparing her for future employment challenges? The ability to communicate short, coherent messages is a fundamental expectation of many, many jobs. Just this year, at my “side gig,” I found myself parsing copy for a website, brochure, and even the 140 characters allotted for a web advertising button. These kinds of tasks will await Jane in every one of the fields she expressed interest in pursuing.

Still, these jobs will also expect the ability to sustain an argument (or inquiry into a topic or question)—exactly what is exercised in writing the long essay. Indeed, my friend who does just the kind of work Jane is interested in—communications for a policy organization—is called upon to write everything from one-page letters to the Mexican parliament to lengthy research reports on human rights abuses in Cuba. He is generally not the one tapped to write the blog posts or tweets for his organization, but someone else there is. So if we are giving students Facebook comments and blog posts as assignments, what kind of an evaluative standard should we use to ensure that they’re not just throw-away writings, but reach the kind of level that may one day be expected of them professionally?

I’m not advocating that we willy-nilly unleash a bevy of high-stakes writing assignments on our students, or mandate a standard number of pages of “academic writing” expected of each student. This post is appropriately full of questions, not answers. (And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Write-to-Learn strategies can and should be employed with incredible effectiveness.) And yet, it seems fairly clear that I saw something else happening in Jane’s coursework, and that something seems to be connected to a very worthy kind of experimentation on the part of her instructors. We can’t draw hard and fast conclusions from any one student’s anecdotal experience– and it is important also to mention that Jane was absolutely inspired by many of her classes and professors, and she was motivated to master their individual challenges. And yet, the question nags– what could explain this?– that an undergraduate could be writing so little? And what would you recommend to Jane?

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Writing Instruction Tagged With:

Clear as Mud

March 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Page A15 of the New York Times on March 7th looked suspiciously like a story from The Onion about the tangled mess that is teacher evaluation in New York City public schools. Winning the award for the most understated headline of the year, “Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie,” Michael Winerip tells the (predictably?) sad story of Stacey Isaacson, a 7th grade English and Social Studies teacher at the Lab school, described as “very dedicated,” “wonderful,” and “one of a kind,” by teachers, students, and principals alike.

So why, then, is poor Ms. Isaacson ranked in the 7th percentile of city teachers when it comes to student academic progress?

Because of this formula, designed to calculate a teacher’s value-added score by the Department of Education’s “accountability experts” (satirists, start your engines):

Click to view full size.


As someone who once taught for the NYC Department of Education and is also a product of it, I wasn’t really surprised that they had gotten it all wrong. I wasn’t even surprised to imagine that they would think such a formula could be an accurate method for tenure evaluation. They did, however, outdo themselves in the category of overall incoherence; not only did this tool strike me as wrong-headed, but it was also completely unintelligible. This is so unbelievably unhelpful a formula (ready-made for critique by visualization genius Edward Tufte), that no teacher could be expected to look at it and see her work (or her true challenges) reflected within it. Matrix-like in its complexity and opaque in its reasoning, it is a formula incapable of communicating what it is measuring or how a teacher might improve her practices based upon it. And from what I can tell, the variables are wonky, too.

It is not until the 16th paragraph of the article that Winerip summons the courage to try to explain the thing:

According to her “data report,” Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. “Her students were predicted to get a 3.69– based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored a 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s valued added in 3.63-3.69.” Simple enough, right? Wrong. The author– who knows he’s hit pay dirt with this one– goes on:

“These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as ‘the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Eh? And the calculation for her predicted score is based on 32 variables, which are plugged into a statistical model– the one that made me feel like I was, surely, reading The Onion.

Anyone reading this case study of Ms. Isaacson will naturally wonder a few things, like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to calculate what percentage of Joel Klein’s contract at Fox News Corporation represents Ms. Isaacson’s salary?” or, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to invite these statisticians to actually teach us this formula and how it works?” I frequently work on assessment at the Schwartz Institute, and it is also a built-in aspect of every course I teach. So I know that evaluating teaching and learning is a tricky thing indeed, a hall of mirrors in which you think you see the student reflected but often, you don’t.

I decided, then, to concoct my own formula, with my own variables, to evaluate the teaching that I do at Baruch in my capacity as a Fellow and an instructor of Communication Studies. What variables get in the way of student progress that cannot be accounted for after you have observed my class, read my syllabus, and tested my students for their proficiency level?

Click to view full size.

What if you really tried to articulate the variables that come into play when facing a group of students and a set of learning objectives?

Winerip explains that teachers are eligible for tenure based upon three categories: instructional practices (including observations), contribution to the school community, and student achievement (which is where the formula comes in). Now, I’ve never been much of a whiz at statistics, but maybe that’s okay. After all, if the communications people made the formulas, and the formula people made the communications, perhaps we’d all start getting somewhere?

So please—in the spirit of collaborative learning, improve upon my draft and post your own visual and/or variables in the comments section.

Filed Under: Assessment, Baruch College, Education, Uncategorized, What if . . . Tagged With: , , ,

Testing As a Weapon

April 5, 2010 By 2 Comments

Photo credit: Robert King/Getty Images

A bill that will link individual teacher’s salaries to student performance and effectively destroy teacher job security was passed by the Florida state Senate last week.

Besides its obvious anti-unionism (pretty much business as usual for Florida politics), this bill will most likely serve to punish rather than help schools that are facing a number of difficult obstacles while rewarding those that are already relatively successful. It’s unfortunate that the war against public education in recent years is so often waged using the tools of accountability and evaluation, both concepts that might actually be put to good use. Even historian and former assistant secretary of education under Bush Diane Ravitch, a long-time supporter of standardized testing and No Child Left Behind, seems to be reversing her position on the matter in her newest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

If the bill passes (as it most likely will given the comfortable Republican majority in the House and the willingness of Florida Governor Charlie Crist) notoriously inaccurate standardized testing outcomes will be used to evaluate teacher salaries and job security, essentially using one inaccurate form of evaluation as a foundation for another; however, it will also have a much more direct effect on learning. When Florida teachers begin “teaching to the test” in a desperate attempt to hold onto their jobs and a decent standard of living, it seems inevitable that the teaching of many important written and oral communication skills will quickly drop out of the curriculum.

Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Administration, Assessment, Politics

The Stressful CPE

March 5, 2010 By 2 Comments

184; Stress level: Midnight (please read description!)
Creative Commons License photo credit: Sara. Nel

After doing several workshops for students planning to take the CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE) I’ve been thinking about some fairly basic questions about standardized testing that are nonetheless important ones. I’ve come to realize (as have other Fellows at Baruch) that one of the most important functions of these workshops is to alleviate student anxiety. While some students do not seem to worry too much about the exam, many (some of them excellent students) become rather anxious especially in regards to the time constraints. This raises a number of questions for me regarding the effectiveness of this form of assessment. Are we really setting up a situation that accurately measures student performance of these skills given the stress of the testing situation? According to this article, we aren’t.

As health blogger Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen points out, “Scientists have long known that long-term stress impairs brain cell communication, but they’re just now learning that even short-term stress – such as a few hours of anxiety – can negatively affect cognitive skills.” Pawlik-Kienlen cites research from the University of California (Irvine) School of Medicine as well as the Laboratory of Stress Research at Douglas Hospital Research Center to make this point. Given this negative affect of stress on memory it would seem that we are setting up students for failure. Of course, it could be argued that the anxiety-producing test situation is preparation for stress soon to be experienced by students in the work world. If this were the case, why wouldn’t we coach students on ways to manage this type of stress early in their educational careers? In general I understand the need for assessment of student learning; however, I wonder if it isn’t time for us to start thinking about some different ways of accomplishing this goal outside of the traditional timed exam.

Filed Under: Assessment, CUNY, Pedagogy

Of Student Debates and Other Demons

November 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

20090419_EUD_045
Creative Commons License photo credit: mhonpoo

I finally figured out what to write about for Cacophony! Following the advice of my colleagues at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, the best way to approach this was to write about something I am familiar with in the context of my work.  As a professor myself, I set specific guidelines and objectives when giving assignments to my students in order to avoid writer’s block because of the openness of possibilities. I don’t want to curtail, however: Cacophony’s open posting policy makes it versatile and unique.

I hope this post gives some basic guidelines for anyone out there interested in organizing debates as a classroom assignment.  The topics of the debates I am coaching are in the 12th Edition of the Management and Society textbook issued by the Department of Management at Baruch College. But you can device your own and have students do a little research to defend their positions.

The first step is to assign students to groups and divide the groups into PRO and CON sides of a given topic.   Then, provide precise instructions about the format of the debate.  For example, one format consist of a ten minute opening presentation, followed by a five minute period for rebuttal, and three minutes for conclusions, going back and forth between the PRO and CON side.  Ten minutes for the PRO, Ten for the CON; five minutes for the PRO, five for the CON; and three minutes for the PRO, and three for the CON. You can make them longer depending on the number of participants and the time available.

Make sure students understand that the objective is to persuade the audience that their point of view (in the debate) is the most valid: they need to make arguments.

In the beginning, they should introduce themselves, the issue, the point they are defending and any terms that might be unfamiliar or that might take a particular meaning in the context of the debate.  For example, in a debate that deals with whether genetically modified foods should be labeled, it is necessary to know from the beginning what constitutes a genetically modified food product.

Encourage them to read the materials a couple of times (in the management course I coach these are organized in chapters), even the reading for the opposite team.  In that way they can figure out a strategy to organize their presentation as well as anticipate the points are going to be brought up against their arguments.  It’s also important for students to practice their entire presentation out loud so they have an idea of time management as they become familiar with public speaking.  In terms of oral presentation skills,  you should emphasize to the debaters that they should not read, and should maintain eye contact with the audience,  which is a non-verbal way of engaging their attention.  Index cards are an acceptable way of keeping track of the order of the arguments they will stress, but in order to avoid reading too much from them,  suggest they write bullet points, rather than entire sentences.

If they are using numerical data such as statistics and/or percentages, remind your students that if they are hard to understand, the audience will just glaze over them.  Quantitative data should be easy to read and understand and should make a strong point.  If they are quoting textbooks or the internet, make sure they cite valid sources and not just random articles (especially online),  and that they have those sources (author’s names particularly) readily available during the debate, in case someone asks.

Time does not have to be equally split, but all students in a team must participate.  Have students dress professionally (although this is not a strict requirement).  Attire is a non verbal language that reveals many things, and it is difficult to find credible someone wearing an oversized sweater whose sleeves are longer than the arms. Lastly, remind students to keep their language appropriate and to keep their composure.   Debates can get heated,  but for as much as a Jerry Springer fight will definitely engage the audience, the loudest people are usually revealing insecurity.

The end of each debate could be marked by an open Q&A period where the audience can participate and ask questions or comments to the presenters.  Here you can explain how the topic is still current and give an informal assessment of the students’ participation.

Filed Under: Assessment, Audience, Baruch College, BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Debating, Faculty Development

Assessment: the dirty word

November 3, 2009 By 1 Comment

Now seems like as good a time as any to reflect on something that’s been on my mind for a while: assessment. While maybe not the most exciting topic, I think it’s a really important and prevalent one. To be clear I’m referring to program assessment here, not assessment of student writing. Until last year my only experience with and training in assessment was through working at community-based organizations, specifically programs for youth that incorporated education and work readiness as well as several other elements. While this experience had its ups and downs, last year I figured out pretty quickly that assessment means something very different in the university context. I, of course, saw assessment and the implementation of Writing Across the Curriculum at CUNY as a great marriage. Faculty in different disciplines trying out different pedagogical tools? Lots of written products, i.e. data? Opportunities for different people to get together and talk about their teaching experiences, what works and what doesn’t? Great! I really did not expect the resentment and lack of cooperation I received when I began to talk to faculty about these issues.

Rather than focusing on all of the problems and tensions around these issues within some (not all) universities, I thought I might mention a few basic elements often emphasized by community-based organizations:

First, assessment should be truly collaborative or it can quickly become extremely divisive. Transparency seems really important here. Asking for all kinds of information about someone’s classroom, students, and teaching without being clear about how that information will be used can be a great way to alienate faculty members.

This leads to the second point, which is that assessment should serve as a means of improving the overall quality of education in a particular department or discipline or university rather than as a policing mechanism. While it’s important to be aware of areas that need improvement, highlighting best practices is equally, if not more, important.

Finally it seems important to start and finish with the people actually doing the work, in this case, faculty members teaching writing and using writing as a teaching tool. Being aware of the needs of these folks allows the assessment to be more than charts and graphs. This way the information gleaned from this assessment project can be put to practical use. This is also a good incentive for faculty members to cooperate and provide useful data. It can even make it possible to enlist their help more directly. While faculty and administration often have different priorities, they don’t have to conflict. I think both groups have some stake in assessment and, if designed and implemented properly, it can help both meet their goals.

Filed Under: Administration, Assessment, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Writing Across the Curriculum
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