Archive for the 'First Year Seminar' Category

An interesting message for students?

Registration for our first year students began this week, and with it, my interest in enrolling students in the First Year Seminar I teach who really want to be there. For an FSEM to reach its potential to be more than just another freshman class, the students need to buy in to the premise that the purpose of the course is neither grades nor credits but to introduce new students to the best that education can be: real school.

This challenge has become noticeably more difficult since the FSEM became a requirement, rather than an opportunity. We need to find a way around this difficulty. The last time I taught an FSEM, the first day of class as we were introducing ourselves, one student announced:

I want to tell you that I have no interest at all in the topic of this course, that the only reason I’m taking it was that it was the last open FSEM when I registered. I hope you won’t hold my honesty against me!

I’ve thought a lot about this student since that day nearly two years ago. It was as if she was looking for an ‘excused absence’ from the engagement that I hope for in my students. From conversation over the term I inferred that she would be happy earning a minimal passing grade, as long as I didn’t expect her to buy into the course in the way I clearly did. On the one hand, I appreciate her honesty since I am sure that from time to time there are other students who choose to stay unengaged, but do so as unobtrusively as possible. But on the other hand, what am I supposed to do with a student who doesn’t want to be there, who really isn’t willing to ‘take’ the course in more than a superficial way, not the way it was intended. More generally, what should a teacher do with a student who has no interest in a course, but must take it to satisfy a requirement?

Enter Gardner’s intriguing post of the other day. Gardner posits that

[T]he strategic foundation for learning is interest, a particular kind of intrinsic motivation that manifests as openness to new ideas, a willingness to be in conversation, a genuine reaching-out to the unfamiliar and sometimes even the daunting or repellent. A penchant for wanting to know. A habit of inquiry.

Gardner references Paul Silvia’s work on interest. For me, the money quote from Gardner’s post is

[I]nterest is far from simple, … acquiring the ability to make something interesting to oneself is one of the highest metacognitive capacities we can develop.

What I infer is that the common view of interest as something that either happens to you or not is not accurate, that interest is something that can be fanned like a spark into a flame, and that it’s even possibly to enhance one’s own interest in a topic.

If this is true, then it rules out any ‘excused absence’ for students who lack an interest in the topic of a course; Rather, it demands that they develop an interest. It also suggests that learning how to fan the flame is an important tool for teachers to master. I look forward to Gardner’s fleshing out of this notion, preferably with practical suggestions! No pressure, Gardo.

First Year Writers

Published on December 4, 2008 in First Year Seminar. 8 Comments

The biggest thing I’ve learned from teaching a first year seminar is how freshman writing differs from upper class writing. Today I handed back the second formal paper my students have written and here is what I told them:

The biggest flaw I saw in your papers, from the best paper to the worst, is that you didn’t develop your ideas enough; you didn’t think more deeply about your topic. How does one bake bread? Answer: Mix and knead the ingredients, let the dough rise, bake and enjoy! How does one make wine? Answer: Crush the grapes, add yeast, let it age, drink and enjoy! Writing is like baking bread or making wine. After you start it, you need to put it aside to give it time to mature, rise, age.

First year writers tend to put their thoughts down and be done with it. That may be all they know. They don’t seem to understand that writing is a creative process; a writer doesn’t write what they already know; rather the process of writing/thinking creates new insights which the writer can discover through the composition process. Of course this takes patience, as well as planning so that one doesn’t wait until the night before the assignment is due to start.

If one doesn’t know that the process is productive, it may not make sense to wait before putting the paper to bed. We need to explain this to students as explicitly as we can, especially when we are teaching first year students. I certainly never learned this in high school or frankly, in college, so we shouldn’t expect first years to know this.

Progress Report

Published on October 18, 2008 in First Year Seminar. 0 Comments

Since it’s mid-term time, I decided to make appointments with each of my FSEM students to see how the course was going for them. They thought they were making appointments with me, and they weren’t sure what it was all about. The appointments, which took five to ten minutes at most, were helpful to me in getting a sense of how each student was perceiving the course. One question I asked each student was what changes I could make to the course to make it a better learning experience for them. I also asked how they felt about the loose structure of the course, where they have the freedom and responsibility to what to read on each topic and when to complete writing assignments within certain broad parameters. I learned a little something from each student, and several offered thoughtful (though minor) suggestions, which I appreciated for their honesty. Most, but not all, said they liked the freedom the course offered and weren’t bothered by the loose structure. Two students made particular impressions on me with their remarks.

The challenging student apologized for not having more time to devote to the course, and expressed a concern that she didn’t contribute enough in class. She admitted that she never did anything for the course that wasn’t explicitly assigned. She said that she wished she found the material interesting and that the lack of interest made it hard for her to find things either to say in class or to blog about. Interestingly, I didn’t prompt these comments with specific questions. She then offered an example of something that interested her, the practice of international surrogacy, where women in India carry fetuses to term for American parents, at roughly half the price charged in this country. I observed that that would be an excellent topic for a blog post, and she expressed surprise but also some satisfaction that she had something to contribute.

The second student who impressed me was one who has been hot and cold about the course, missing class on a fairly regular basis, but being attentive when she attends. We were discussing in general terms the recent essay I asked students to write, when she responded in what I found to be an extraordinary way–certainly, no student has ever said this to me before.

I’m uncomfortable with what you’re asking us to do. …I’ve never had to have an original thought before. I’ve never been asked what I think about something. It’s been enough to report what the experts say on a topic. I did learn in high school, though, never to use “I” in a formal paper.

As with the previous student, this wasn’t a response to a particular question. There was just a moment in the conversation where my silence apparently prompted them to reveal something. I told the student that what she was expressing was common among first year students, that she shouldn’t feel bad about it, but that one of characteristics of college level thinking and writing was using what others have said to draw your own conclusions about a topic. She took in what I had to say and I had a sense that perhaps real learning was taking place.

Why don’t we faculty have conversations like this with students more often? Perhaps because it’s not directly related to course content? Is this an example of teaching or advising?

A Research Project for First Year Students

Published on June 7, 2008 in First Year Seminar. 3 Comments

One of the things I haven’t done particularly well over the last two years in my First Year Seminar on globalization is the research paper assignment. My first attempt was Version 1: The Expert Study, essentially a research paper by a different name. Some papers turned out quite well, but many did not. Looking back, I’m embarrassed to see what little guidance I provided, but here it is. To be fair, we also spent a fair amount of class time discussing what should go into the assignment. I wrote about this in a previous post (which despite the title is mostly about the research paper).

Taking these thoughts into account, my second attempt was Version 2: The Collaborative Research Project. In this version, I provided a lot more structure, and asked students to work in groups instead of as individuals. Additionally, the product was a series of class presentations, where I hoped students would learn from what the other groups had done. Unfortunately, the outcome was similar to Version 1: Some were good, but many really weren’t. The sharing of work, which occurred both within and across groups (via presentations) was an improvement over Version 1, but there was little or nothing in the way of tangible products. For example, while one group provided a decent powerpoint presentation which we ended up posting on the course website, another group gave an extemporaneous talk with essentially no notes. I wonder what the rest of the class took away from that?

In both cases I underestimated first year students’ abilities to give me what I wanted. The first time, I found that most really didn’t understand how to write an analytical, thesis-driven research paper. The second time, I discovered that first years don’t really know how to work effectively in collaboration with peers.

Perhaps a better way to look at this is that I didn’t put enough thought into the assignments. I knew what a university-level research project was (it was the part of a first year seminar that I (thought I) understood the best) so I didn’t think to spell it out in detail for my students. Or rather, the students that I usually teach know what university-level research is. But most first year students aren’t at that point yet. Clearly this misconception was my fault, and I’d like to rectify that next year.

This post is going to sketch out my ideas for Version 3, drawing on what I learned from the FSEM Workshop this summer. I like the idea of an “expert study” where students develop expertise and become the class expert on a topic. The key is to design an assignment where first years can genuinely do that.

What I have in mind is a very structured research project – one organized around a large number of stages, more than I typically ask for in my upper courses. The idea is to take the normal stages in a research project and break them into smaller steps. The focus of the project will be for each student to explore and evaluate the effects of globalization on a specific foreign country, and to become the class expert on that country. The students will choose the countries they study, but I’d like to have a sampling of countries from different parts of the world, different stages of economic development, etc.

Students will begin by investigating the history, geography, political system, economy, culture and language of the country in very factual ways, along the lines of what’s provided by the CIA World Factbook).

Students will then move into more analytical issues, applying what we are doing broadly in the class (the effects of globalization on employment, income and other aspects of the economy, politics, culture) to their specific country.

The project will culminate in a research paper addressing the question: Is globalization (on balance) good or bad for your country? The paper will essentially cumulate the previous project assignments.

Through sharing of work, and peer review along the way, students will hopefully learn more about the broader issues we explore in class in the context of their country.

One concern I have is that all that structure could trivialize the assignment. Or that it will inhibit the quality of the projects of the best students, in order to bring up the bottom, like the Virginia Standards of Learning/No Child Left Behind does. But after overshooting the last two years, I’m willing to risk undershooting this time.

Thoughts? Do you think this will work? What do you see as potential problems?

Is this something the FSEM planners need to see?

Published on March 3, 2008 in First Year Seminar. 1 Comment

Declining By Degrees

Seems like a good use of $30.

Thanks to Lanny for the heads-up.

More on FSEM 2.0

Published on March 3, 2008 in First Year Seminar. 2 Comments

When you teach an elective course, you can pretty much teach it as you like. The content and pedagogical approach are up to you.

When you teach a required course or a prerequisite, you are expected to meet or at least consider the expectations of others, your department in the case of a major requirement, and the faculty at large when you teach a general education course. Of course, the extent to which instructors respect this expectation varies, since it conflicts with another strong cultural belief, namely academic freedom.

How does this apply to FSEMs? I think it means the faculty and staff who care about the FSEM program, including all the instructors, need to participate in the conversation to define the vision. That’s what I was trying to promote with the last post. One of the things I’ve found interesting over the three years that we’ve been developing this program is the variety of opinions on this question. Part of this reflects the different places that we’re coming from: administrators who are focussed on issues of student satisfaction, retention, etc., faculty who want to induct students into the life of the mind they themselves are pursuing. But another part reflects the fact that this is a complex and difficult question. One of the advantages of participating since the beginning is that my view has become clearer. That doesn’t make it the right view, but it does mean I have a better idea of what I think that view is.

I don’t think we all need to have exactly the same view of what the FSEM is about (given the culture of academia, that would be highly unlikely), but I do think we can all learn from the conversation. There’s always going to be a tension between what I want to accomplish in my class and what the collective goals are. That’s okay. I feel strongly that the conversation alone should generate a common structure to the program, that is, if all the instructors participate. I also think that instructors who do not participate may be saying that they don’t accept a common structure. And I think that’s wrong.

I’ve spent some time reviewing the acclaimed First Year Experience program at the University of South Carolina. One thing that I think I know is that their program is substantially different from ours. It’s certainly broader, encompassing issues that involve first year advising, and remedial (for lack of a better term) learning to bring students up to the college level. Our program is designed to be more academic or intellectual in approach.

Shannon recently described what we are up against:

Lets be honest the University is competing for student’s attention and it is really an unbalanced fight. For freshman that are getting their first taste of freedom away from parents and the identity they have been living with most of their lives, it is a time to explore new ideas. There are also friends, clubs, parties, etc. Academics are going to take a back seat to these things most of the time. Combine this with the anti-school sentiment and it is plain to see that for most students being a student isn’t really the most important thing. And here is what I am really getting at, when there is no community built around learning, students will not be interested. I don’t believe cool tools or awesome professors could fully convince someone of the importance of learning. It would just be a blip on the radar screen in a sea of tradition, non-controversial, and rote schooling.

Some may discount this as only a description of students who aren’t serious about their education. Yes, but I also think it’s a dead-on description of the majority of our students. The FSEM program may be one way to address this disconnect between academia’s view of higher education and the typical undergraduate view. One thing is for sure: our FSEM won’t be successful if it doesn’t.

FSEM 2.0

Published on March 1, 2008 in First Year Seminar. 12 Comments

For a couple of years, I’ve written about our institution’s pilot program to offer first year seminars.

We have now made it a requirement as part of our general education curriculum. It’s not clear, though, that all our faculty really understand what the FSEM program is about. What I’ve witnessed is that even professors with decades of experience don’t really comprehend the program until they try teaching a course in it. Teaching a seminar-style course to first year students, where the emphasis in the course is on inquiry, rather than presentation or even exploration of a settled body of knowledge is quite different from either an upper-level seminar or a traditionally introductory course which enrolls first year students. The fundamental purpose of the FSEMs is not to teach content, but rather to introduce students to the life of the mind. At one level this has developed as an emphasis on teaching skills, but what we’re really to articulate is something more holistic, not skills per se, but rather a model of the process of intellectual inquiry, the art or culture of the intellectual life.

A group of us are developing a summer workshop for FSEM instructors. In the past, we’ve had a one day (6 hour) workshop organized along skill lines, with sessions on writing, speaking, research skills and technology tools. This year we’re making it two full days.

Yesterday we had what may prove to be an epiphany. Instead of a skills-orientation, we’re going to try to organize the sessions in terms of the themes we want FSEMs to embody. The idea is to bring in the skills in context as appropriate. The next step is to identify the themes. I’m finding that easier said than done. Examples might include:

* What is a scholar?

* The role of inquiry/exploration (as opposed to learning established ideas)

* Knowledge as development of arguments rather than a collection of facts

* Critical Thinking

* Evidence, credibility, expertise

* Rhetoric

This listing is incomplete at best. I’d really appreciate some additional ideas along these lines and I suspect that talking about it with you will help.

Any suggestions?

Response to Gardner’s Rock/Soul/Progressive: II

Published on January 11, 2008 in First Year Seminar and UMW Teaching Center. 1 Comment

I started to leave a comment on Gardner’s second post about his
recently concluded First Year Seminar, but found it was turning out to be longer than a comment typically is, so I moved it here.

After your previous post I was in awe that you appeared to have found the magic bullet for teaching an FSEM without the snags the rest of us faced. I’m glad to see that you ran into many of the same that I have experienced. I wish there was a way that the FSEM instructors as a group could collaborate on developing a list of such snags. I think a collective approach to addressing them would be more efficient and probably effective than each of us working on our own. Also, it might be helpful for new FSEM instructors to have a better idea of what to expect, and how not to panic when these snags occur. (Is there perhaps a role here for UMW’s upcoming Center for Teaching Excellence?) Let me respond to some of the specific points you made.

The day I asked the seminarians why they weren’t more lively in the question-and-answer period that followed their classmates’ presentations, and they replied that they didn’t want to ask questions for fear of making their peers look ignorant or stupid. … for most of them it was the absolute truth: they didn’t look at the Q&A as a time to go deeper with what their classmates had already showed they knew, or to bring in interesting connections, or generally to take the level of engagement and enthusiasm and inspiration up a notch or ten.

I ran into this as well. I’ve blogged before about how this year I’ve become more aware of how first year students are different from upper class students, and how they need explicit guidance about how higher education is different from high school. I expect Gardner’s observation above is common with first year students, and it’s something we should put on our common list of FSEM goals: to teach students this deeper purpose of Q&A. It’s not something that comes to them naturally.

[T]he way so many of the third presentations suddenly gelled into the kind of deep, thoughtful, rigorous, playful work I’d been hoping for–and trying to encourage–all along. …

There were times I thought we wouldn’t get there.

I saw this as well. Just when I was starting to give up hope, my students showed the depth of work I was looking for.It seems to take first year students longer to get what we expect in university-level work than upper level students. This isn’t surprising given their training and experience. So an entry level college course need to be less rigorous in content than an upper level course, but also different in terms of instructor’s expectations for how students will make progress towards learning how to do university-level work.

Then there was the day when it became clear that I’d have to tell them they should blog twice a week [emphasis added], when I had hoped that with this small group and a topic of some urgency to all of us music lovers, I could just step back and let the blogging commence.

This is another manifestation of the previous point. First year students need to be more explicitly told what the expectations are. It’s not that we dumb down the type of analysis and other work that we expect of first years, but rather that we need to provide more structure, more scaffolding about how to achieve the type of work.

After two tries at teaching an FSEM, I think that one of the key issues in achieving success is arriving at the right balance between what Gardner calls structure and emergence. The mistake that I’ve made twice now is to put too much emphasis on the latter, but I am getting closer to the target.

At the risk of a bit of reduction, I think the distinction between task-orientation and inquiry-orientation that Gardner raises reflects confusion in the students’ minds about who’s in charge. Are they satisfying an instructor’s requirement by completing a task, or are they searching for the answer to a question they find gripping. It’s the latter that FSEMs are trying to promote, but it’s the former that most students (even upper level students) have experience with.

Another sign of success is the extent to which students adopt a practice of self-reflection about their learning. Obviously, instructors can promote this or not, but when they don’t it’s very unlikely to occur. I was pleased to see that Gardner, like me a year ago, experienced a “Shannon Moment” when an FSEM student demonstrated that they “got it”:

Perhaps the most startling moment of all came after the class was over, when a student in my freshman seminar commented on my Theme Parks and Sandboxes blog post. It was as if something I had been saying over and over, all semester long, had suddenly connected.

Of course, Gardner identifies the most important factor for success in an FSEM:

[M]y best chance is always to let my fascination with the subject carry everything else along with it.

One final observation about the FSEM. I’ve had more interactions down the road with my former FSEM students, than with my other former non-major students, so it appears that the FSEM enables a stronger connection than a general education course.

Chicken Little?

Published on January 7, 2008 in Economics and First Year Seminar. 2 Comments

This post originated in a series of conversations I had over the holiday with my in-laws who were children of the Great Depression. But it’s also something I’ve thought about for a long time. The catalyst for posting probably came from Shannon’s recent missive “Why Wait?”. If you’re looking for thoughts on pedagogy, this post probably isn’t for you.

Two years ago, I had an interest in globalization, but didn’t really know that much about it. Having twice taught a first year seminar on the subject, I have turned an interest into at least a modest amount of expertise.

I generally take an optimistic view of life. I believe in the American Dream. As a mainstream economist, I also believe that international trade and investment are beneficial for both countries participating in such transactions. Though some individuals in both may be harmed, the gains to each country in the aggregate offset the losses. Change always has losers as well as winners, even change that is ultimately for the good. What I’m beginning to question is how long the US will continue to be among the most economically affluent nations in the world. What I suspect may be coming is that the US will continue to grow, but certain other countries will grow more quickly and surpass us. China comes to mind. This outcome is not a certainty, but what’s clear is that the US has no manifest destiny to remain at the top of the economic heap. What will be required to keep us there is innovation, investment, education, and hard work. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll be able to maintain those. Why? Because I think most Americans, especially the younger generation, have become complacent about their economic affluence.

As an educator, I spend a great deal of time interacting with students. As a parent, I do the same with children, my own and many others. I’m also a child of the 1960s, and had parents who lived through the Great Depression. At the risk of being reductive, here’s what I’ve concluded from these interactions:

* My parents’ generation believed that if they didn’t work as hard as they could, learn as much as they could, and save as much as they could, their families would go hungry (no hyperbole intended). As a result, they achieved a significant of economic affluence as evidenced by the growth of the middle class in second half of the twentieth century.

* My generation believes that if we work hard, learn much, and save, we will be economically successful. And we largely have been, as illustrated by the wealth of the baby boomers.

* The younger generation seems to believe that they will be economically successful, whether or not they work hard, learn or save. And as a consequence, they don’t seem to be doing those critical activities very much.

My students don’t seem to work very hard at school. They don’t seem to take college that seriously, and they don’t see learning as their full time job. Most of them seem to have part time jobs, not to pay for school-related expenses–that I could understand–but rather to pay for what to me at least are luxuries. Some students have told me that they take part time jobs because they have free time! I often wonder what these students think they are in university for? Shannon makes the same point, I think, when she notes

College is a unique environment unlike anything else we will ever experience, yet we focus on other things, even ignoring the reason colleges where created in the first place.

At one level, these students seem to be behaving the way I remember kids in high school doing: kids who were not particularly engaged in school taking a part-time job where the money was “good” and then making a career of it. I fear that many of my students will being doing essentially the same thing: not staying in a part time job, but ending up in second tier jobs because they didn’t work to their potential in school. And I worry that more and more jobs like that will be the norm in this country because Americans aren’t willing to put in the work necessary to be qualified for something better.

Some of this is to be expected, what economists call an income effect: As people become more affluent, they work less and take more leisure. The problem I see is that as a nation, we seem to be behaving myopically. If we did this wittingly that would be one thing, but I wonder if most Americans understand what’s going on? And even if we do, don’t we have a responsibility towards future generations?

There are places in the world where people are hungry, figuratively and literally. Increasingly they are competing with us for jobs. Increasingly I think they will be winning them. Americans will end up taking second-tier jobs with second tier incomes. This will happen slowly, and we won’t even notice until it’s a fait accompli. I hope I’m wrong.

Training First Years to be Intentional Learners

Published on December 3, 2007 in First Year Seminar, Teaching and Learning and Uncategorized. 4 Comments

For much of the second half of the semester, I’ve been concerned that the students in my First Year Seminar were not putting in the effort that I expected of them. This was surprising because they seem to be very bright and interested in the topic: globalization. Part of the reason for my concern was what I heard at the Course Redesign Conference: Freshmen don’t do optional. The FSEM is designed to give students a tremendous amount of flexibility about what they do for the course and when they do it. It gives them more options than they can reasonably be expected to do. A second reason was that almost no one had turned in a second draft of their first graded paper, and several students had not turned in the first draft of the second graded paper on time. (In the FSEM, the students are allowed to write as many drafts of the papers as they like and I will provide detailed formative comments on each, as long as they make the initial deadline.) A third reason was that no one seemed to be blogging very much.

A week or so ago, I polled the students using a version of Gardner’s APGAR. My initial review of the results suggested that they weren’t engaging very much. The next class I challenged them about it. They expressed some surprise at my challenge. They essentially said, they were working on it. Within a few days, there was a flurry of thoughtful blog posts, and paper submissions. The Course Redesign Conference essentially recommended taking the easy way out–Make students do the work or else they won’t. But if we want to teach students to be intentional learners, that suggestion won’t do. It’s true that first years may not have the intellectual maturity of upper level students, and that they’ve been trained for twelve years or more to only do what they’re required to. But if we’re going to train them differently, why not start as first years? If not the FSEM, what course then?

My take-away from this is that it’s true that first years need more structure to complete college level work, but the solution isn’t to make everything required. Rather, it’s that instructors who give first years flexibility need to regularly remind the students of what’s expected of them. (HT to Jerry who asked me if I was doing this!) And in time, they will produce it.