It’s been months since I last blogged. Between becoming a father, struggling through my dissertation, and the regular duties of faculty work, I have let blogging slip. But now that the semester is ending, and I’m about to analyze my course feedback, I figured that I might as well post about the feedback as I did last year. Though I’ll take a different approach this time around.
Rather than post stats and charts, I think I’ll take a more thematic approach to the analysis.
What changed from last year?
First, the course number changed. The university added zeros to the ends of all course numbers, so 509 became 5090. Sounds more professional, doesn’t it?
I also got rid of the discussion board. I had great success with discussion boards as a student at TechBC, but when I later took a course with SFU that involved asynchronous discussion, it was painful. I even made a post to my class explaining *how* to participate in an online asynchronous discussion. While at TechBC, I just assumed that people knew how to participate in BB discussions, since all my classmates at TechBC could do it. But my experience at SFU showed me that it must be a inherent talent in geeks (TechBC was, not surprisingly, populated by geeks) and an acquired skill by regular folk (the SFU course was a Shakespeare distance ed class – ironic that English majors could not get the hang of written communication – I guess they never learned to interact through their writing).
This trouble with asynchronous communication likewise plagued my TESOL class last year. Just like the Shakespeare students, they had no concept of interaction. Rather than ask questions and respond to one another (thereby building their knowledge of the weekly topic), they simply posted homework questions to the BB in succession without even reading one another’s posts.
As a result, the discussion board questions were the most frequently cited feature of the course that students cited as “uninteresting” in last year’s course evaluations (even though students admitted that it help them make sure that they did the reading). So this year I had two ideas: 1) teach students how to participate in asynchronous discussion and hope that they do it effectively, or 2) switch to face-to-face discussion. I opted for face-to-face and asked students to prepare short notes on the assigned reading questions in preparation for small group discussion in class.
But I didn’t abandon technology completely. The assigned questions were posted to the class wiki, and at the end of each discussion session, groups were randomly assigned one of the questions to summarize and post to the wiki. As such, the wiki served as a topical repository of the major issues each week. I told students that the wiki would later serve as their study guide for the oral exam.
On a side note, although all of my students had certainly heard of wikipedia, none of them knew what wikiwiki means, nor had any of them ever edited a wiki before. So much for the “digital natives” myth. In any case, even if I didn’t teach the students how to participate in effective discussion board knowledge-building, I did at least expose them to the wonders of wiki editing. And that was probably the biggest change that I made to this year’s course.
What stayed the same?
I kept the same textbook, the same syllabus, the same assignments. All in all, structurally (at least) the course was the same. However, the population of learners was drastically different. Last year, I had a larger number of students, a classroom less than half as big, and less reliable technology. This year, I had only a couple grad students, hardly any linguistics majors, and an overwhelming number of fourth-year students who were suffering from typical senioritis. The entire atmosphere of the class changed from being dynamic and inquisitive (last year’s group) to being quiet, absent, and lethargic (who a few notable and remarkable exceptions) with this year’s group. These were not lazy or dull students, but they simply lacked the energy and enthusiasm of last year’s cohort.
What’s the best aspect about this year’s class?
Despite the change in rapport (between the students and I, and among the students), this year’s class was very efficient with their learning. They instantly recognized when something was useful, and they were just as sharp at identifying waste. For example, they all cited how useful and practical most of the assignments were, and they were just as vocal about their intolerance for boring or poorly planned TESOL Issue Presentations (15 minute presentations given by their peers on an assigned topic).
If nothing else, this had shown me that just as we cannot expect students to have great discussion board skills, we cannot expect them to have good oral presentation skills either. Don’t get me wrong – we had some great presentations – but I was just as surprised to discover that some fourth-year students could be on the verge of completing an undergraduate degree and still not be able to give a concise, direct, and engaging presentation, even when I provide them with all the materials. I guess I will need to spend more time teaching students how to give an effective presentation (it worked wonders in my ESL first-year writing course this semester).
What’s the least successful aspect?
The most frequent response that I got on this topic from the course evaluations refereed to the “learning contract.” It’s a concept I adopted from a graduate course as part of my PhD coursework. He required the students to review the syllabus, determine whether they would follow the the recommended assignments (or substitute them with equitable alternatives)and what grade they expected from the course based on what effort they expected to put into the course. The point was to make students responsible for their own learning.
I tried this out last year, with decent results. Some students liked the appreciated the flexibility and designed a personalized contract. The rest stuck to the syllabus but appreciated the fact that I would have allowed them to cater it to their needs, and they all appreciated the flexible due dates. Only one student last year (a fourth-year) struggled to complete the assignments before the end of the course.
But this year NO ONE altered the syllabus. They all said that they would follow the assignments as prescribed by me, yet – again with a few notable exceptions – the majority of the class ignored all due dates and they let nearly all the assignment pile up during the last 3 weeks of the course. I was shocked. I kept warning them. I was sure they’d snap out of it. But they didn’t. And they noted it on their course evaluations. One student wrote, “I think the learning contract is an excellent idea conceptually, but in practice I am not disciplined enough to handle flexible due dates. I procrastinated everything and now I’m rushing to get everything done. I’m not mature enough to handle that kind of responsibility.” What? A graduating university student cannot handle that kind of responsibility? What have they been doing for the past 4 years?
I think this is an unfortunate trademark of US education. It starts in grade school, peaks in high school, and continues on through university. Students learn what the teacher tells them to learn, rather than learning what they want to learn and what they think will be most beneficial to them. And of course young children need to rely on their teachers to guide them in this way, but by the time a student is in his 20s, he ought to have developed some ability to self-direct his learning and to self-manage his time. But the evidence suggests that the average student cannot do this, and shrinks away from any opportunity to do this.
I remember taking a graduate English course during the second year of my MA in TESOL program. I was taking the course as a co-requirement in order to be able to teach composition for the English department. For one assignment, I was placed in a group with all English MA students. As we discussed our presentation topic, I explained what I was interested in and how I planned to approach the topic. All of the other students seemed nervous and indecisive. “Are you sure that’s allowed?” one asked. “Is that what he [the instructor] is looking for?” piped another. I was flabbergasted; I could care less what the professor wanted out of the presentation. I was looking to create a presentation that met my interests and that I thought would be useful for the other students in the class. My classmates disagreed. They wanted a good grade, so that wanted to find out exactly what the professor wanted, and then they wanted to give it right back to him. It was at that point that I said a silent prayer to Heavenly Father that he had guided me to get a Masters in Applied Linguistics and NOT in English. The English MA students were not researchers, they were “homeworkers.”
And that’s what I worry about this group of students. I’m concerned that they may have spent too much of their education learning what they thought someone else wanted them to learn, and not enough time learning how to figure out what they want to learn and *how* to learn what they want to learn.
What will I do differently next time around?
Do I want to give up on all the things that students struggle with (the discussion boards, the learning contracts, the oral presentations), or do I want to build into my course mini-lessons that help students learn these kinds of skills. The truth is, no one is teaching a class in how to use a wiki, and no one is teaching a class in how to adapt the homework assignment to your future career goals. And probably no one ever will. But maybe, via a course in Applied Linguistics, I can help them develop these competencies. I don’t know how many of these students will actually go one to teach ESL or EFL, but I do know that every one of them will continue to use technology, presentations skills, and self-direction no matter what career path they take.
So I’m not going to get rid of the tough stuff; I’m just going to get better at helping them see how they can do the tough stuff.
