Results tagged “efficiency” from PEDABLOGUE

Today I noticed that PlanBook 2.06 has been released for the Macintosh. It's also available in a Windows version (which I haven't tested yet, but hope to). If you like to use the computer to organize your ideas, I recommend it!

The key focus of PlanBook is on weekly calendaring. I tend to think this way, as a college teacher, and my course plan always is conceptualized right from the get-go on a weekly system. This excellent "lesson plan" generator allows teachers to organize courses in a 'weekly calendar' mode, while remaining flexible enough to keep individual class units in the foreground, through color coding and filtering systems. You can schedule classes, enter lesson information, link up entries to files, and print professional looking reports. While there are many software-based teaching tools, this one really fills a gap because few are about the actual organization of learning units, and most are instead focused on grading or student communication.

I don't usually keep lesson plans the way that most people do; I organize my files by thematic clusters, and chart my plans on the syllabus, rather than in some private binder or lockstep chart. But I still found this software useful post-facto, because it allowed me to keep track of what I did every period. After a class, I would go into PlanBook, type out what I was able to cover in class that day, and save it for future reference. Later, I found myself going back to this 'journal' to both track what I wanted to quiz students on, and also plot out revisions to my future course calendars.

The interface is relatively easy to use, once you figure out the routine ways of keying in information for each course. Although I haven't tested the Windows version, I know that it 'fits' the Mac paradigm well, and is intuitive enough to use in a customized way, depending on how you work. It is easily adaptable to different school calendar systems (like a 6 period school day or a two week rotation). This, I think, is one of its numerous appeals.

Software like this needs to be approached as a tool for organizing and planning. Most faculty might want this to plot out a course, week by week. It lends itself toward processing ideas in this way, and can help keep you organized. But many will likely say they can do this the old fashioned way, with pen and paper.

But I see the side benefits of doing this on a computer with dedicated software: you can run searches for, say, every time you've taught a particular text; you can build a good archive of lessons for assessment purposes; you can print out or e-mail your lesson plans to a substitute teacher from home; or you can simply publish your homework calendar for students to view online. Yes, PlanBook can publish your lesson plans to the web, and I think this is a very strong component of the software, especially if you don't already have access to a campus Content Management System.

There's not much more to say about it: it works, it helps, and it rocks. Verdict: A+!

PlanBook is a great way to "process" your calendar and I recommend you give it a try -- especially if you HAVE no routine system of your own for course planning yet. Visit Hellmansoft to download a demo.

Mano Singham at the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University has published a great page of advice for faculty in Managing Time More Effectively. It kindly reprints a handout I produced for a Teaching and Learning Seminar a few years back (called "Faculty Time Savers" in teaching, scholarship and service, published here on Pedablogue) among other great resources for advice online.

I love reading tips and tactics like these; one little change can make a whopping difference in not simply productivity but keeping one's sanity!

I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Studies course this term, and one of the early assignments in the class asked students to create a "collage that reflects your perspective on literary study". To explain the assignment, I developed a handout that explained what collage artists think they're doing and other requirements for the task. When I passed that around the room, I projected a graphic of a collage I'd made once on the No Child Left Behind Act, and explained my creative process...reporting how I discovered the theme along the way, and suggesting that the collage still meant more than what I intended it to mean.

I was thoroughly impressed by what the students came up with for this homework assignment. Many of the students went far beyond my expectations, and I asked a few if I could share their work here.

I liked Melissa Kaufold's collage entitled "How Do You See Me?" (above), because it interestingly represented the identity of an English student, with competing voices (mostly negative) surrounding the figure -- who herself is a multifaceted construct (the four-fold face) ostensibly holding an armload of books that obscure the rest of her body. A very colorful thought balloon reveals the value in her thoughts about literature, impervious to the onslaught of negativity espoused in the "external" world; the strength of these thoughts is reinforced by the thick black boundaries lines that protect these "thoughts" from interference and keep them relatively cohesive.

The collages of the class as a whole seemed to inherently lean toward conflicts like these. In her collage, "Transcendence" (below), Julia Leksell took an artful approach to semiotics, employing negative/white space in an intriguing way that differed from many of the other collages the students created. Here, she took control over the bricolage of symbols to add her own imagery to the piece, where she portrays a dove-like ascent or emergence from what seems like a pile of abandoned and contradictory signs and symbols:

The diagonal lines in Leksell's postmodernist piece make me imagine that the pictured bird is hefting a weighty net of language, struggling but succeeding to rise. I like the positive message here.

Attempts like these to come to some cogent "perspective" on literary studies opened up the floodgates of discussion in class, and allowed everyone -- whether creative writer, journalist, or literary scholar-in-training, to participate on a fairly equal plane.

I followed up the assignment by having students swap collages and write up analyses of them. We discussed this process as one inherent to both artistic production (crafting sense out of found language and fragments) and criticism (analyzing the whole by breaking down the structure into its parts). This two-pronged approach to the assignment created a dialogue between creativity and criticism in a really successful way, I think. It both raised the question, "What is literature?" and unveiled that it is, if anything, a conversation that meaning-making demands.

[POSTSCRIPT: After posting this entry, Dr. Davis from Teaching College English asked if I'd share the guidelines. They're relatively specific to the context of my class syllabus, but I'll gladly share it here, if it helps in any way:

Collage Assignment Guidelines in MS Word .doc format

Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project just posted a link to an interesting Reflection Flow Chart (authors Alan Chapman and Sharon Drew Morgan call it a 'diary tool') that might might be useful for teachers engaging in reflexive practice through journaling (I discussed this in a book review a few weeks ago). Here's an embedded version of it:

REFLECTIVE DIARY TOOL - Get more Business Plans

Martin's blog has some great tips on reducing mental clutter, too...somewhat related to my winter break decluttering mission (still in progress!).

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Note: The pedablogue site design is down while the webmaster upgrades us to the latest version of Movable Type. Do not adjust your set.

"Buried in Paper" by writer couple Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem was recently posted at Storytellers Unplugged. It uncannily reflects my own recent resolution to declutter a lot of the paperwork that's piling sky high in my home office. I've been meticulously cataloguing and reorganizing my home bookshelves for months, and still haven't gotten it perfect, with stacks of books here and there still on the floors in offbeat categories that don't "fit" on shelves with others in a tidy way (I keep vacuuming around these stacks, secretly hoping the vacuum will suck them up and solve my problem).

I often go through bouts of decluttering in the early summer, right after classes end. It gives me a feeling, quite literally, of a 'clean break.' But whenever I've invested a little time during the (ever so short) winter break to do this, I've had a more enjoyable spring. Wish me luck.

A few related reading to pass along and note for later reading, should I fail to meet my resolution:

• Advice for clearing literary clutter from metafilter
• Pittfalls of Creativity Clutter from the great organization site, unclutterer.com
• Lifehacker: portal to tips and downloads for getting things done
• Zen Habits' Massive GTD (getting things done) Resource List
• Conquering Clutter an article on compulsive hoarding from David Dudley, AARP
• Sharon Crosby's Mind Over Clutter articles

"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.

Take, for example, the student who wants to use the office hour as a time to unpack all kinds of excuses for missed classes and/or late work. Most of these melodramatic performances are as boring as they are, well, dubious. So, I tell such students that I'm willing to listen to their sad tales, but only after they sign a release form giving me all rights to the material for stage, screen, and television. I mean it as a joke, although when one student laid out the story of how his ex-girlfriend let herself into his apartment (she still had a key) and took a meat cleaver to his water bed -- all this by way of explaining how his paper "drowned" -- I am now glad that I have possession of the signed form.-- Sanford Pinsker, The Irascible Professor

Ingenious thinking! I love Pinsker's idea in the article cited above, about putting a model "A" paper from the class assignment in the departmental office (or if I were doing it, online or on reserve), and demanding that students read it before they come to his office to argue for a higher grade. It turns the experience into a learning moment, even if it doesn't entirely dissuade the angry student from complaining.

I seem to get a lot of traffic during office hours, and I prefer that to the solitude that I might otherwise garner if I, say, held them at 8am or put a "do not disturb" sign on my door. Here's some random thoughts about how I approach them:

• Scheduling: I try to stagger my hours in my weekly schedule, if possible. What that means is I might hold them at 2pm on Mon/Wed and on 4pm on Tues/Thurs. Making myself available on even and odd days (e.g Mondays and Tuesdays, not just Mon Wed Fri) ensures that students will be less likely to have classes blocked out during my hours. I also recognize that students are more likely to come visit during afternoons or early evenings than early mornings. I always try to have at least one hour in the very late afternoon, for commuters or adult students: usually this is a 5-6pm block of time, scheduled right before a night class.

  
  

• Course Management: Obviously, you can get a lot of grading done during office hours, especially if no one drops by. I usually put my office hours in time slots before I have to teach, in order that I might get any last minute prepping/copying/reading done before a particular class. For classes that meet two days a week or less -- like my night classes -- I often make my office hours a paper collection deadline, asking students to drop off papers during my office hours. That often also invites some of them to drop by and talk about class issues...though many act like they have a train to catch.

  
  

• One Mandatory Meeting: In my writing classes, I typically have one mandatory meeting in my office with the student, to talk about a paper I've recently commented on. I ask them to bring their various drafts, and the readings they're responding to (or the research they've acquired, if any). I try to do this early in the term; especially with freshmen, it "humanizes" the process of learning for them, and opens many new students' eyes to the fact that office hours really are for them. After the "mandatory" meeting, which students usually find liberating in some way, I typically get a number of "returning" visits. In the very least, I know that they will be more willing to talk during class discussions. They suddenly feel a personal investment in the class they hadn't felt before.

  
  

• Consulting Hours: Maybe office hours should be "consulting hours" instead. "Office" is too officious. I find it odd that students pay thousands of dollars to consult with us in class, but rarely take advantage of the office hours. I think one of the reasons that students avoid office hours is out of fear: territorial studies would tell us that the office is the professor's "turf" whereas a classroom is more of an open field, in comparison. It's good to hold "office hours" outside of the office -- whether they're through "virtual office hours" (where you sit in a chatroom or promise to answer e-mail questions rapidly) or simply by arranging in advance to hold hours in the student union building, or a talk-friendly section of the library, or even out on the lawn. Bring a book or some papers to grade, and wait. I sometimes put post-it notes on my office door that say something like: "I'm downstairs in the cafeteria today: come join me."

  
  

• Furniture Talk: The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. [By the way, always be on the look-out for opportunities to trade office furnishings: sometimes you can get a chair or table from another building on campus, if they're refurnishing or throwing old materials out.]

  
  

• Order: This is probably my biggest weakness. And I'm not alone. Most of the professors I know are a little disorderly. We've all got too much on our mind to be troubled with filing all that paperwork on our tabletop or straightening out our bookshelves. It's tough to keep everything organized and in its place. I'm terrible with my inbox: it's still overflowing with last year's flyers and invitations. I've also still got a poster/calendar from 2002 on the wall. But I know I can do better. I'm not anal retentive about keeping my office clean and organized, but I do believe that the messier it is, the less respect I get from students (though I'm sure most of their dorm rooms are probably condemnable). Students expect their leaders to be more organized than they are; some go so far as to assume that a disorderly office is a reflection of a disorderly mind. You don't want to deck out the office with chiffon and make it look like a setpiece from The Stepford Wives, but you don't want it to smell like a locker room, either. At the bare minimum, I try to give my office the once-over at least once during winter and summer breaks -- even going so far as to clean things that the cleaning staff misses (like the windows). I've also made use of work study students before, asking them to help me reorder my bookshelves or sort through paperwork.

  
  

• Student Management: I always enjoy meeting with students and discussing course material, their lives, and even just shooting the breeze. But sometimes students wear out their welcome or haunt my doorstep. And you can always reposition the furniture or change your hours if you find yourself being pulled into a quagmire of endless student meetings that spill over beyond your regular hours and so forth. There are ways of managing students during office hours without resorting to offensive tactics or pleading cries of overwork. The best way, of course, is to use appointment scheduling effectively. Make appointments that have time limits in advance. Sometimes, you can line up these appointments, too, so that the student feels the weight of the people lining up outside the door. Another strategy is to end the consultation just as one would end a committee meeting when the hour is up: wind up the conversation by summarizing the key issues, and then breaking out the calendar and asking the student to schedule a follow-up to discuss them. Give them an "out" if they don't want to continue talking. You can also just start using phrases like "Next time we meet, we'll discuss X" or "Journal about that topic and let me read your thoughts when I grade it later on." Highlight the larger context of the conversation, as part of a larger process of learning. Sometimes you have to be firm. Set ground rules for any follow-up meeting: "Next time we talk, bring your textbook with specific questions about the reading."
  

Not every "tip" above will work for you and perhaps some would totally backfire and make more work. I know that there's a trade-off we make when we open ourselves up to extra office visits. It's more work, for one thing. And there often comes a point where students begin to treat their teachers like personal therapists, father/mother figures, or best buddies -- blurring the boundaries of professionalism and confusing the student's role as learner with some other role.

But sometimes the openness can pay off in other ways. Some students work harder to get an "A"; students write better evaluations; students are more openly engaged in class discussions. Some have been kind enough to bring me coffee or other treats, though I typically don't invite that. I've had students come to me to discuss --- gasp! -- independent research in literary theory and to talk about readings we didn't get to discuss openly in class. And when I'm sitting in my office, talking with a student about issues for their own sake, or to help the student with something they want to learn just because they want to learn it -- rather than just for the sake of a grade -- then that's when I know I'm doing office hours right.

Hmm.... I might develop this into an article some day. Post your own tips here, by clicking on "comments" below, if you like!

It's fall break at Seton Hill U, which means that students are given an extended weekend to recharge their batteries and teachers are given a little extra time to finish marking papers so they can turn in midterm grades. I find that if I have a little time leftover, I often declutter my office, which is usually littered with the traces of my whirling dervish of activity getting ready for the first month or two of classes. I apply a few "rules of two" that help me get organized, which I thought I'd post here:

• Two Year Rule: if you haven't read that magazine or article you were saving for a future class for two years of teaching the class, then -- like a suit you haven't worn for two years -- it's clutter and you probably should get rid of it. (Marlynn K. Clayton with Mary Beth Forton, Classroom Spaces that Work)
  
• Two Inch Rule: if a stack of paper on your desk is taller than two inches, it's time to sort, file, defer to someone else, or toss in the trash. (Clayton and Forton)
  
• Two minute Rule: when you go through items in your inbox, ask yourself if you can finish each item in two minutes or less. If the answer is yes, then do it immediately. If not, schedule it for later, defer it to someone else, or throw it away. (David Allen, Getting Things Done)
  

Now if I could only get through that four inch tall stack of student papers and exams....