Michael Beltz, Department of Philosophy & Religion, University of North Dakota
At the beginning of this semester, I decided to change some of the aspects of my teaching methodology. Instead of changing components of my teaching in a random manner, I set out to address and correct some specific problems that I have encountered in past semesters. I also hoped to address some of my own teaching deficiencies. Below, I will focus on an analysis of three changes I implemented. Now that we are to the middle of the semester, it is time to assess whether these experiments are showing signs of success and whether they have led to any unintended consequences.
Problem meant to be addressed: I have found, over the past several years, that I am not especially good at learning students’ names. However, most of the teaching literature in higher education indicates that students perform better when faculty take the time to learn their names.
Core idea of the solution: On the first day of the semester, I had each student fill out a placard with his or her first name and first initial of his or her last name. At the start of each class period, students are expected to pick-up their placards and have them visible from the front of the classroom and visible to the rest of the class. At the end of each class session, students leave their placard at their desks, and they are collected by me for distribution during the next class period. The core idea behind this approach is to provide me with constant reminders of the student’s name. This should help me learn the student’s name more efficiently, refer to each student by his or her name in a more meaningful manner, and to have a stronger immediate connection between the quality of comments made by the student and their subsequent grades. At the same time, by having students’ placards developed during the first class period, no class time would need to be spent by me learning the student’s names through repetitive role calling.
Results and observations: The solution was implemented this semester has yielded some unexpected results. It turns out that I feel that I actually know fewer of my students’ names than I knew at comparable times in previous semesters. However, the students, themselves, may not be aware that I do not know their names. When each student has their name in front of them during the majority of my interactions with them, I am easily able to address each one by name and establish a sense of positive connection. The problem is that before I refer to any student by name, my eyes in variably glance to his or her placard for reassurance. In short, this solution has done exactly the opposite of what it was intended to accomplish; knowing that I always have the students’ names available to me means that I never spent the hard work at the beginning of the semester to memorize the student names. Equally problematic is the fact that their placards have their first name and first initial of their last names. Because I never am reinforced by their last names, whenever I need to recognize their last names (like on deficiency reports, etc.), the names seem as foreign to me as they did on the first day of classes.
Having made these observations, it turns out that I would not declare this experiment a failure; it turns out that this approach has had a major unintended beneficial consequence. This semester, the number of students that arrive late to my classes is significantly lower than in past semesters. This low rate of tardiness seems to be a product of the placard system. Since students need to collect their placard at the beginning of each class from a collection at the front of the class, there is a strong disincentive for tardiness. Any student that is late ends up standing at the front entry of the room finding his or her placard. Thus, a student cannot sneak into a classroom unnoticed by the instructor or their peers. Without ever having to address tardiness directly to the class, after the first week of classes, the number of late students has dropped to a negligible number.
Problem meant to be addressed: As occurs in many lower-division courses, students tend to rely heavily on how the instructor interprets primary texts. In the context of ethics, this means that students generally learn the history of ethics and the development of ideas, but struggle being able to see ethical problems and have a difficult time applying ethical theories to novel situations.
Core idea of the solution: For one of my courses, “Ethics in Health Care,” I carved out one class period a week (a third of my total class time) for students to explore ethical issue on their own. The class is divided into analysis groups of five or six students. These groups explore 50 pages of primary source material each week (in this context they are exploring two journalistic accounts of health care decision makers). The students are each expected to bring 2 discussion questions each week and the instructor provides five discussion questions. These class periods consist entirely of the groups discussing their questions and thoughts on the ethical issues involved. At the end of each discussion period, each student is responsible for submitting a short summary of the discussions relating to their discussion topics.
Results and observations: In many ways, this experiment has been a great success. After the initial few weeks, the students in this class have taken to this type of project. Even without direct guidance for how to be successful, each group rapidly developed strategies for how to approach the texts and how to discuss the ethical themes in the books. In six of the eight groups, the students engage in the discussions to such a level that they do not get to each student’s second questions. The groups hold each other accountable and engage in ethical analysis that is closer to most medical ethics analysis. Individuals and groups must make sense of the subject matter themselves, rather than having analysis strategies and answers provided by outside sources. The individual students’ work has shown a strong willingness to try to use the discipline’s methods in novel circumstances. At the group work level, the results are even stronger. Since groups have been given limited guidance on how to reach consensus or compromise for ethical issues, the groups have developed their own understandings of what ‘compromise’ and ‘consensus’ mean for ethics and how to reach group conclusions. None of this came immediately to the individuals or the groups, but the rate of progress has been more rapid than I had anticipated.
There does seem to be a negative unintended consequence to this approach. By defining one day a week as time for students to work through issues as a group, students seem much more passive during the other class periods each week. In the past semesters, this course had involved quite a bit of full class discussion of cases and ethical issues. This semester, students seem like they cannot wait to talk on the group day, but are quiet the rest of the days. I suspect that this is a result of how the class time is framed. When one day a week is set aside for students’ voices to be heard, this implies that the other days student voices may be less welcome. While this is not true, the students’ perception of how the time is to be used does seem to have affected students’ understanding of the course.
Problem meant to be addressed: I want to provide positive incentives for students to contribute to class discussions. I also want to provide short-term incentives for students to be properly prepared for each class period. However, I recognize that not all students feel comfortable discussing personal ideas within a large classroom environment. Equally important, I want to avoid creating incentives for students to ‘participate’ in class discussions in an uninformed manner.
Core idea of the solution: To deal with this problem, I decided to change the way I talk about student engagement and participation in my classes and my syllabi. I have relabeled all ‘participation’ components of the courses as ‘engagement’ components. At the beginning of the semester, I spent some time discussing the difference between ‘participation’ and ‘active engagement.’ This included examples of when participating in a discussion is not engaging other students or ideas from the textbooks. I talked about how people can engage with the course material and discussions, even if they do not participate. These discussions focused on student concerns, and allowed them to talk about these issues in the first week of class, rather than having them distributed in a top-down manner.
Results and observations: The experiment has been a complete success. Across my classes this semester the shift to engagement points has significantly improved the quality of discussions. A higher number of students contribute to the discussions, and those that contribute tend to have their ideas more closely connected to course concepts (as opposed to emotional responses based on no evidence). Students seem to have embraced the idea that quality is more important than quantity. My observations at this point are too anecdotal to reach general conclusions; for example, it is possible that the strengths I am seeing are a product of the specific students I have in my classes this semester. This is unlikely, though, because the benefits cross lower-level and mid-level courses and cross majors and non-majors. A more likely possibility is that the reframing of the course language was not the causal factor. Instead, the results could be based on the fact that I spent more time and energy in the beginning of the semester discussing proper engagement and incorporated the students’ frustrations and perspectives.
