Results tagged “administration” from PEDABLOGUE

"...however effectively one 'prepares' for a class, the realities of learning alter the original orientation in a number of creative and unpredictable ways. If the structure is too tight, or the scenario is too predictable, then we move towards a tightly organized outcomes-based approach to learning. We end up confusing the relationship between clear goals (set by the teacher), and an anticipation that the student will meet the expectations of the course, because they have replicated the core meaning of the content. This is, to some degree, summarized by the assumption that teachers need to envision what students should know at the end of a course. Yet, knowledge cannot be packaged in such a simplistic way. We gain an understanding of an idea, for example, through dialogue. The dialogue can lead in an untold number of different directions. The fundamental unpredictability of dialogue is that both interacting parties may have no sense of where they are headed and may, indeed, learn in ways that they had not anticipated. This should be a source of excitement, but it is often a source of anxiety. I believe the anxiety is partially situated in how we define teachers and students." Ron Burnett, in "The Radical Impossibility of Teaching"

I have not really processed this article as fully as I should yet, but Ron Burnett's "The Radical Impossibility of Teaching" was a fascinating read for me, because -- among many interesting ideas that question the assumptions we have about institutionalized learning -- the argument cited above encapsulates my occasional resistance to "outcomes based" assessment. I believe that having assessable goals and objectives gives a class a focus, a common ground, and a sense of direction. But by the same token, there's a degree to which these outcomes need to emerge organically from the class itself more collaboratively than they typically do. Burnett argues against the notion that objectives be prescribed by the teacher's hasty, generalized prediction about what students "need" that is handed down from above before the fact -- especially if "above" means not only the teacher, but some larger institutional group which the teacher is simply delivering like some enforcer or mediator between the institution and the student. Burnett invites us to think about some radical reconfigurations which cultivate creativity in the classroom. Like, what if the students were allowed to collaborate with the teacher, modifying and revising the learning objectives in the class? (The answer asks for more responsibility from the student than you might think).

In a system controlled universally through "outcome-based" assessment, where curricular administration risks becoming reduced to an act of enforcing policies rather than enhancing the development of teaching, such revision is virtually impossible. And yet at the same time, students do in their very particularity and individuality revise and adapt the learning objectives in their own ways. Assignments like "reflective essays" and "self-assessments" encourage students to gauge their own investment in course outcomes and to pursue them as they feel they need. And as long as teachers are working closely with students in interpersonal ways -- such as in individual office conferences -- the learning that happens can be guided and modulated to some degree in concert with the teacher.

While a teacher can use the course itself to "play" off the objectives, the syllabus remains the invariable law and point of accountability. The outcomes themselves are never really open to student revision in any way that can be filed, made permanent, or recognized publicly in the name of "accountability" or "assessment." Thus, I would suggest that the "radical impossibility" at work here is not one of teaching or of learning, per se, but of the very idea of a universal "outcome." Although grading and assessment have numerous modalities, a self-conscious teacher must recognize the virtual impossibility of measuring outcomes in any concrete way, beyond some abstract/numerical method (evaluations by ranking rather than providing qualitative comments) that reduces the significance of the experience and threatens to rob the quality of the course objective -- if not the course itself -- of meaningful substance.

Ah well...I'm still mulling these ideas over. Burnett's essay was originally delivered to the Federation Internationale des Sciences Sociales, in Milan Italy in 1999, and subsequently published in Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia, his excellent weblog.

"E-mail," business writer Mark Suskino has written, "is the cholesterol of modern management."

Teachers have to be managers, too, to some degree, and not just in the classroom. We collect and comment on so many documents that our lives are riddled with as much paperwork as a tax attorney's desk. The massive growth in reliance on e-mail invisibly adds to our workload, as student and administrative messages are delivered to our inboxes in lieu of face-to-face communication more and more.

Anyone returning from holiday break to open their e-mail knows what I'm talking about: hundreds of messages awaiting response, student queries about grades and required books, administration briefings, alerts from the registrar, and junk mail awaiting deletion...even junk mail filter bins awaiting review to see if anything important got put in the same folder as so many ads for Rolex watches.

Many teachers only deal with e-mail when they're in their faculty office, at appointed times. That's good advice for some, but I'm personally processing constantly at my home office, as well. For me, there is no "vacation" from e-mail, except, perhaps when I travel sans modem...and even then, I feel the need to find a terminal somewhere and check it over the web. Because I submit a lot of writing to editors, I need to check constantly for their replies, and I also don't like to keep others waiting for my responses. You have to keep your in-box in shape. Like blood, it's a constant stream, and if e-mail is like cholesterol, I fear blockage.

Some cholesterol is good and much is bad. What can faculty do to better manage e-mail? And how can we more effectively use it when interacting with students? I liberally invite my students to e-mail me and I actually enjoy working that way, but sometimes the number of messages can get high or students send inappropriate questions or materials. [I'll never forget when I hosted an e-mail discussion list for a Literary Criticism course, and one student sent an obscene e-mail to everyone, assuming it was pertinent to our discussion of Freud. I got a lot of complaints about that and had to institute a policy (and I've since used private discussion boards instead).] As I've written here before, some students treat a professor's inbox as a complaint box while others use it as a genuine enhancement of learning. Research from the PEW institute tells us that 82-90% of students contact with their profs via e-mail and around half of those students report that e-mail has enhanced their relationship with their professors. (That research also suggests that students only complain 4% of the time). Those numbers are only escalating...so how to best process it all?

There's lots of advice out there -- and the topic is too broad to adequately cover here. In "Student E-mail: Issues and Solutions," the Teaching Effectiveness program at my alma mater, University of Oregon, offers some fantastic tips from the faculty trenches on handling mail and integrating it into a course. Investing some time reading all the advice out there on e-mail management can help, too, from reading the help file in your e-mail software, to surfing google for advice. Microsoft Outlook is the dominant system on our campus, and Microsoft Office Online offers all sorts of good information about E-mail Management. Their "Crabby Office Lady" column has an article on "Pestering Students with E-mail" which might have some good advice for using e-mail to manage students (but I think most of us need the opposite -- to reduce the amount of e-mail we get). Perhaps a lecture or even an assignment on e-mail nettiquette can work.

Overall, the best trick is to keep your own messages low in cholesterol -- write brief messages and divert the "next action" to a face-to-face conversation or send the writer to a more appropriate source. Some things I've done with student e-mail that you might try:

• If you are as open to e-mail correspondence as I am, put your e-mail address on your syllabus or even on any directions/guidelines you distribute in handouts. I even post my e-mail address on my office door, right next to office hours.
  
• If a student raises a juicy class-related issue, usually a response to a reading, I'll print out a copy (usually with permission) and distribute it to class for open discussion rather than get pulled into an e-mail conversation.
  
• If a student writes almost daily, with "reactions" to virtually each class meeting, I won't ignore it but I'll respond in short, almost terse, messages, usually steering the student somewhere else: the library, the textbook, or to the next class discussion.
  
• If students write with simple questions about class policies, I'll e-mail them a copy of the syllabus and ask them to come to my office hours if they've still got questions. If they are valid questions that others might have, or oversights and errors I've made (say, mismatching paper deadlines on my syllabus and guideline sheets), I'll ask them to remind me to discuss it in the next class meeting -- OR -- I'll forward my answer in a distribution to the entire class.
  
• If the e-mail is one of those popular "forwards" (usually jokes or pictures or even pyramid schemes that people pass along) I'll just delete it. If it continues, I'll ask them to take me off their distribution lists and possibly send them to a copy of campus policies regarding e-mail.
  

Well, I've only scratched a very broad surface here...just sharing some random thoughts. Please post your own advice by commenting on this message.

Sometimes the simplest concepts are the most problematic. Take, for example, the notion of the "credit hour." It seems like a self-evident term: one earns a college "credit" for an "hour" of academic work. But quantifying work is a very complicated affair and one "hour" of work is often a misnomer.

I've been thinking about this problem a lot recently, not only because I've hit that time of year when the grading stack avalanches down on me and I wonder whether or not I'm assigning too much. As I peruse student developmental portfolios, browse student course weblogs, and chat with faculty about the amount of reading and homework they're assigning, I really start to wonder how much is "just right" for three credit hours worth of work. Some colleagues in literature assign two or three short stories per week of reading; others assign a whole novel. When I see how much "work" students are putting into their other classes, I can't help but compare it to my own, and sometimes I end up feeling like I'm either a fascist slave driver or a dribbling softie, depending on the comparison. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm somewhere in-between and getting it just right, but since faculty seem to have such wildly disparate concepts of student workload, it's impossible to know for sure.

Although it's the gold standard for determining faculty workload and student progress toward a diploma, The "credit hour" is a slippery a concept because college students and teachers put far more "work" into a course than the typical three hours-per-week, student-in-seat interfacing. Homework, preparatory readings, office consultations...the whole gambit of learning tasks complicates matters. I try to use what I think is the "classic formula" for estimating student work: 1 hour of in-class time + 2 hours of study outside of class = one credit hour. But as Peter Ewell (from the PEW Forum on Undergraduate Learning) notes in his excellent inquiry, "Notes on the Credit Hour", there are too many inconsistencies among class approaches and that the credit hour system might be an inappropriate measurement standard for learning. Even if we set aside the impossibility of accounting for student labor outside of the classroom (though research suggests they aren't working very hard), the standards of measurement aren't "standard" at all. Different campuses design different measures of a "credit." Heck, just defining "in class" activity is slippery: some labs, internships, stage rehearsals, independent studies and other non-standard instructional activities are incongruous with the typical credit hour system.

At bottom the problem is the assumption that an hour spent in class equates with an hour of learning. But the "credit hour" could be an anachronism, given the various asynchronous methods of learning (as in online courses), and other changes that electronic media and new approaches to teaching have on the notion of "time" spent learning. Jane Wellman and Thomas Ehrlich have put a lot of work into investigating the shifts in the time and space of learning. In a Chronicle article related to their book, How the Student Credit Hour Shapes Higher Education, they recommend radical alternatives, predominantly because so much rides on the credit hour -- from faculty salaries to government funding. They smartly advocate replacing the term "hours" with "units" and suggest that emphasis on a "competency-based" system of learning assessment might be more meaningful. I haven't read this book yet, but the publisher's online excerpt from the introduction (.pdf format) suggests the following rationales for revising the system:

• The credit hour is a barrier to innovation in teaching and learning.
  
• The credit hour is a basic element of state budgets, and the measure gets in the way of budget reform.
  
• The credit hour is more often enforced as a regulatory measure in public institutions than in private institutions and within the public sector in two-year institutions more often than in four-year institutions.
  
• Innovative institutions work with and around the credit hour as a measure of student learning, but relatively few alternatives to the credit hour have occurred with respect to faculty workload.
  
• Credit hours are awarded inconsistently, with little internal policy guidance or external review about the basis for awarding them.
  

These are big institutional issues, and so much red tape has been secured to the "credit hour" that reform will be slow to come. Institutional funding and faculty workload issues are one thing, but what about student learning? Since financial aid and other forms of support require students to be enrolled "full time," at our college (which is typical of most, I think) students take 12-16 credit hours, or roughly four courses a term. This, in effect, makes sure they process out with their diplomas in four years. But some students leap for overloads because they aren't challenged, while others crumble under the weight of four when when they might more easily juggle three courses instead. At issue isn't so much the "in class" time, but the ambiguous amount of out of class work attached to any given course. While researching this topic, I found a newspaper article ("How Much Homework is Too Much?") that suggests that students can only do so much homework before their learning "plateaus" -- that is, there comes a point where doing extra homework won't do you any good. They loosely cite one study (my research suggests that it's this report from the Nat'l Center for Education Statistics), in which kids who worked on schoolwork for more than three hours a night scored lower overall than kids who had studied just 1 to 3 hours per night. I'm not sure if this holds water, because the stats tell me that the older kids get, the more extra studying pays off, but it does support the notion that maybe two hours of studying for each one hour class meeting might be "just right" for maximizing learning. Even so, time is always relative. So is learning. A "credit hour" can only operationally be defined.

As far as determining the amount of material that I put into my class assignments, I'll just have to keep trusting my gut. And keeping my ear to the ground. Talking about these things with students and faculty and administration -- and measuring them comparatively in such interdisciplinary assessment tools as developmental portfolios -- is the only way I know how to gauge whether my three credits are the same as anyone else's.

Is the No Child Left Behind Act creating a hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots" even before any sanctions are placed on schools that don't meet assessment standards?

In "School Pushes Reading, Writing, Reform" by Linda Perlstein in today's Washington Post, we learn that some schools, primarily, schools "that have low test scores and large numbers of poor children" are dropping their science and social studies curricula to focus on helping struggling students pass reading tests. "Two strata of schools are being created," Perlstein writes, "one in which students gain broad knowledge and the groundwork for becoming scientists, and another in which children will, in some ways, be left behind."

This is the very problem that many educators have predicted: if you institute standardized tests and enforce them by making the schools' funding dependent on them, then the schools will teach to the tests. Even if this shift in focus improves reading skills, it must sacrifice other portions of the curriculum to accomodate them. But I suspect that there's so much analysis and anxiety about this going on, that the students are not only being taught in very closed-minded ways, they are also being overtested, which means that classes that teach are being turned into classes that test. And there are many problems with relying on monolithic testing procedures.

For an outsider like me, who has very little to do with primary or secondary school education (beyond teaching and advising a few future English teachers -- and preparing for the future graduates from today's educational system), the NCLBA seems awfully complex and problematic -- and no one seems to like it. Pennsylvania offers a roadmap to figure out how to implement it. PBS's Frontline has a special page dedicated to it -- "Testing our Schools" -- with some fantastic links to opinions and information online about the act's various issues. I've only heard of a few arguments in favor of the Act's strengths (primarily, the money it dedicates to teacher development), but even those are skeptical. I'm still trying to learn more about the NCLB. Right now, it seems to me that the ends (accountability and improved basic skills) do not justify the means (holding funding over school's heads and over-assesing students).

The NEA opposes it, and some strong activist groups like Fair Test and Pencil's Down are adamantly against it. The handful of high school teachers I know in the trenches seem to generally oppose it and parents seem to agree. Reading around online reinforces my suspicion that the NCLB is punishing schools for failure rather than rewarding them for success. When polled, more than half of US parents would rather use federal funds to reduce class sizes, whereas only 10 percent would put those funds toward implementing and enforcing the NCLB. In fact, 3/4 would oppose cutting off funds to schools if the schools fail to meet the standards (these polls were conducted by the Civil Society Institute).

There is a lot of sabre rattling about this act, and it's a political hotbutton -- especially in an election year. Is a "Chalkboard Rebellion" in the works? Is the No Child Left Behind Act nothing more than a marketing scheme by the Bush Administration? A form of fascism we haven't seen since Nazi Germany?

Some reactions to the NCLBA are a bit over the top, but it's certainly an issue that's hitting home. It will be interesting to see how this plays out during the elections.

Dennis Jerz, my colleague right down the hall at SHU, posts an interesting deconstruction of press "spin" regarding Elizabeth Ito, a teacher who was terminated for promoting her views against the Iraq War in the classroom.

Ito is predominantly seen as a victim in most media treatments of this event. But Ito has also become a politcal poster child regarding political speech in the classroom given the current war climate. The anti-war group, Not in Our Name highlights Ito as a sort of poster child of the Bush administration "coming after the teachers" in the wake of the Patriot Act and you can read the Ito Defense Coalition's website if you're interested in Ito's response to her termination.

Although he treats Ito as a stereotypically "out-of-touch campus radical consumed by an irrational passion for one ideological issue," Jerz sets his sights on the press release itself, unveiling how the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education bias their audience through writing. Although I think any superficial look at the FIRE's website will reveal their political leanings, Jerz' analysis is a pretty good lesson in journalism, and Jerz offers this as an example of how he teaches politically-ripe issues in the classroom. He prefers to analyze the representation of the truth, rather than scrutinizing the truth value of the event itself. This, at least, tries to approach objectivity by taking the attention away from the teacher's politics in order to examine the politics of the texts themselves. In a journalism course, this allows the teacher to show how press releases can -- and ought to -- be read critically by reporters and not just reprinted verbetim, because, "language has the power to heal and the power to destroy." I've done similar analyses in my own journalism classes. And I concur with Dr. Jerz.

But the more I scrutinize the Ito story itself, the more I think of the academic freedom issues that Ito's tale raises -- and that's what FIRE is really after. In many ways, all curriculum is political, all teachers are products of their ideology, and no content is free of bias. This is why academic freedom needs to be protected by structures like tenure. If a course is going to discuss political issues, I see nothing wrong with a teacher acknowledging his or her biases and leanings -- in fact, it seems more honest to me than a pretense toward pure objectivity. Naturally, a teacher can go too far in promoting their own views -- and Ito probably did -- and as a fan of the student-centered learning environment, I don't think the teacher should play a dominant role that would allow them to proselytize in the first place. But if we expect our students to have viewpoints and to support them in arguments we shouldn't pretend that we don't have viewpoints ourselves (note: I'm not saying my colleague, Jerz, doesn't already do this). The trick is to try to remain balanced and to be very conscious of the amount of power that a teacher wields in shaping the worldviews of his or her students. Teachers need to respect contesting opinions and alternative belief systems, whether political or religious. Such matters also depend on the class, of course -- my thoughts on this are more applicable to humanities courses, where politics become a matter of open discussion, rather than, say, to chemistry. But even in Chemistry, their might be debates about certain theories. In fact, every discourse community is a contested space where differences emerge. In some classes, particularly freshman composition, I try to make these differences more visible, so that we can dialogue about them and learn from one another.

Ito was also a first year teacher from what I read, which is typically a position with the least amount of power and the most amount of scrutiny and judgment that a new professor has to endure. I personally feel her administration could have "taught her a lesson" without terminating her contract. In fact, I would argue that most good schools do treat events like these as teachable moments -- where senior faculty consult with junior faculty about teaching options and appropriateness of politics in the classroom. (Some schools clearly differ on the level of appropriateness -- when I taught at the University of Oregon -- which was listed as one of the most "activist" campuses in the country -- I regularly saw teachers promote their own views in the classroom, especially graduate student teachers who were so political they had their own labor union). It seems to me that firing Ito was actually more politically radical (or reactionary) than Ito's expression of her beliefs in the classroom. But maybe it wasn't political in the usual sense at all. Maybe it was purely economic.

In looking into this story, I noticed that President Bush actually guest lectured at the school which dismissed Ito just a few months after she was fired.

Although every college should have a mission, and every class a series of desired outcomes, I sometimes feel that the way learning objectives are utilized can stultify a course: sometimes they lead to boggy syllabi (or other documents) brimming with academic jargon; at others, they dogmatically drive a course's direction and ultimately imply that when the class is over, the objectives have been actualized and "done with," rather than part of an on-going process of development. Outcomes should be measurable and quantifiable, but I'm not convinced they can be measured with accuracy by anyone other than the students themselves (ergo, the use of teaching evaluations).

But I forget that at root, objectives are a hueristic for educational design, which can be traced back to (among other things) Benjamin Bloom's classic taxonomy of educational objectives. Gunter Krumme provides a wonderful overview of Bloom's taxonomy along with a compilation of online sources in regards to it. KSU offers good guidelines for writing learning outcomes based on Bloom. Another article from Lee Shuhlman at the Carnegie Foundation outlines the institutional history of Bloom's taxonomy, while developing a new "table for learning." And Lorin Anderson (et. al) developed a new revision of Bloom's Taxonomy which has made a large impact on how teachers design course objectives.

Although the pressure to design a course with measurable outcomes can seem like a cold mechanism for measuring teaching performance and student learning, the objective of objectives should not be to bureaucratically satisfy an institution's administration or assuage the needs of an outside evaluator. So long as the student's learning remains at the center, objectives can do what they're meant to: send a student into a learning trajectory that may or may not end up where the syllabi suggests.