Results tagged “reflection” from PEDABLOGUE

This morning I was pointed to an article on "The Five Mental Habits of Innovative People" that I found interesting, because it identifies the skillsets I would want to foster in my students, especially in a course related to creativity (like writing).

Drawing from research by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen at BYU, called "How Do Innovators Think?" [available at Harvard Business Publishing's neat "Creativity at Work" page, which is worth a look-see], Jessica Stillman isolates (and explains) these five "mental habits":

* Associating * Questioning * Observing * Experimenting * Networking

The researches suggest 'questioning' is really the engine that drives all of the above, yet "questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others."

In my classes, I have been a big advocate for question-generation -- it is the trigger behind all "inquiry" -- creative and scholarly -- and it protects the teacher from doing all the thinking for the student (without thinking, no learning!). I run students through an activity I call 'question-storming'; I often give them prompts for writing that encourage them to raise their own questions-at-issue; I'll play devil's advocate to challenge them to question their own assumptions; etc.

When a writer approaches the blank page "questioning" rather than feeling as though they need to be the "authority" they are open to making discoveries through writing...and they never have block.

What would I add to the list? LISTENING.

By which I mean "Active Listening".

Although 'listening' (like 'reading') is related to 'observing', I don't think people think of 'listening' as a skill that leads to innovation and creativity. They think of it as a passive act, which it is not. Part of this assumption of passivity comes from the education system: we sit in desks our whole lives, listening, listening, listening...more than doing, creating, innovating. The invisible work of learning happens in our heads, if we are self-disciplined enough to pay attention and listen actively. But that skill is rarely cultivated or directly taught.

LISTENING is crucial to mastering the art of concentration, but it also factors into creativity. As a creative writer, I could never write dialogue if I didn't listen closely to how people actually speak -- and not just listening to the words, but also to the musicality of it. If I did not listen intensely I could not know what it means to be a reader, who mentally 'listens' to the author's voice as they read. Listening enables emulation and imitative learning, as well: when we listen, we see how others raise questions and discover the pathways available to us in an attempt to answer them. When we listen to an audience, we can test our own answers to questions by getting responses. So listening is a feedback loop into questioning. Listening fuels creativity. Not all creativity springs out from within us; sometimes it pools and settles in, before feeding into the outward flow.

If your teaching is in a rut, or if you want to try to do something innovative in your classroom to solve problems or enable excitement in the room, try listening to your students. You might learn something.

My quest for finding good books on creative writing pedagogy continues. A week or two ago, I decided to drop a chunk of my paycheck on titles I found on the cheap at half.com, and I've begun reading them with great abandon, as I prepare to teach a new online class on the teaching of writing for graduate students in our MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

This weekend I've been reading the late Wendy Bishop's book, Released Into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing (NCTE, 1990) -- a book that is, astonishingly, available digitally via ERIC, the wonderful Education Resources Information Center. Though a bit dated by this point in time, Bishop's text remains a quite solid study of the different ways that creative writing can be taught well in the undergraduate curriculum, arguing for a transactional and reflective approach that addresses where students really are, and how students really think, striking a pitch-perfect balance between praxis and theory.

While the classroom activities and approaches in the book are not necessarily new to me, what I'm enjoying most about reading this book is the way it articulates how the assumptions of graduate programs in creative writing don't always translate well into the teaching of undergraduate programs in the same field. This is helping me rethink my own assumptions, as someone who often teaches similar material in both venues...and as I read it, I'm recalling just how often I have drawn upon my teaching of composition in the creative writing classroom, and vice-versa. I recommend all writing teachers take a look, if only for inspiration.

The title comes from a passage by Adrienne Rich (from her classic, On Lies, Secrets and Silence), which I like so much I wanted to post it here so I can return to it again later:

At the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering; and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality. What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it.... -- Adrienne Rich (emphasis added)

Empowerment. Social justice. Transformation. Discovery. It's all encapsulated here, in this brief passage about teaching and writing.

On the topic of the cross-overs between composition and creative writing pedagogy, I'm eager to study another book that I've ordered: (Re)Writing Craft by Timothy Mayers. I think it will prove quite useful to us at SHU, since we are presently considering "(re)writing" our undergraduate curriculum a little bit in the year ahead.

"The classroom is like my garden. There is nothing that is ever ugly in it. If it is capable of blooming, it stays." -- Louis Schmier, "My Most Important Teaching Tool", Peer Review

The quote above comes from Schmier's reflective essay in the Spring 2009 issue of the AACU's journal, Peer Review. (I blush to brag that I just learned my analysis of Rate My Professor from this blog was also cited by the editor elsewhere in this issue). In his opening anecdote, Schmier describes how he was once asked the question by her mentor, "What is your most important pedagogical tool?" and it later struck him that it was ultimately herself and "the power of [his] intentions."

This may seem quite obvious. But the key word here is "intention." It takes reflexive practice to really know what your own intentions are as a teacher. Our job title is a verb that sometimes becomes a tautology ("As a teacher I intend to teach") that focuses on the content of the teaching, rather than the actual process of how we teach and what it means to teach.

This is why, perhaps, crafting and annually revising a "philosophy of teaching" statement could be a valuable "tool" for your teaching toolbox.

Schmier's essay essentially concludes with such a philosophy. I really liked his iteration of seven elements that compose his "vision statement." These are overtly optimistic and necessarily general, leading with the metaphor above: that "the classroom is like my garden." It's a good metaphor, though it ostensibly includes nurturing rather than weeding. The teacher feeds and cultivates, but lets learning take its own natural course.

In doing so, there must be room for aberrant growth and unpredictable weather. In another element of his vision statement, he writes: "The classroom is a shop of 'serious novelties'...we must never get into a predictable, old-hat, stagnating, repetitive, and mind-numbing routine. New ways of looking at, thinking about, and using both the material and ourselves must be the rule of each day." I share this vision. Constructing moments of 'serious novelty' is the only way to prime the pump of intellectual curiosity -- which is a pro forma requirement for autonomous learning.

-- postscript: thanks for the corrections Charles B.!

For a few years now, I've had this nagging worry that students are coming to college more and more distracted, less and less prepared to concentrate long enough to read -- and my intuition, like that of most, is to correlate this with the proliferation of cell phone texting, twittering, IMing, gaming, etc., etc.

Then I myself learn more about this trend via Twitter itself (thanks Matt Cardin). There's a good article in the May 17 2008 issue of New York magazine by Sam Anderson, called "In Defense of Distraction: The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation" which I think teachers who share my growing concern about student multitasking, ADD, and lack of focus ought to read.

Are we experiencing a "cognitive plague" -- or are we simply wasting our cognitive surplus? Is "multi-tasking" a myth? Is paying attention "a kind of sexy, visceral activity"? (Sure it is!) Is meditation the solution? These are the kinds of questions raised by the article.

My question is: how can we teach focus and concentration...or at least, teach it better than our curriculum already presumes we do. I think the answer lies somewhere in how well we teach reading -- whether book-length prose or complex arguments or even, perhaps, well-crafted poetry -- and listening. There's a degree to which we already expect students to be able to concentrate well; perhaps this is not an assumption we can rely on any longer in the same old ways.

It is paradoxically difficult to teach concentration and focus because it may take concentration and focus to learn it.

But there may be ways of fomenting the sort of positive distractions that Anderson writes about, which lead to greater awareness. This is why, I think Improv activities and Drama Games in the classroom work so well.

"More than any other profession...teaching is a confluence of opposites. Teaching draws on instinct, and it draws on acquired skills. Teaching involves routine, and it involves improvisation. Teaching is prose surprised by moments of poetry. Teaching is applied pedagogy, tested by trial and error. There is no better way to learn something than to teach it, and teaching itself is a continual learning process -- a methodology that changes every time new students walk in the door and sit down at their desks." -- Tim Lemire, I'm an English Major -- Now What?

This semester, my "Introduction to Literary Studies" course read Lemire's book as a way for students to start thinking realistically about their future careers. There was a great interest in teaching as a potential profession, which is common among English majors. In fact, it's sort of a "default" for many of them. Even if they don't know what they're getting into, it is still our job to provide them with models they might draw on in the future, when they scramble to understand what it really means to be responsible to both the field and their students' future.

I do always try to model good teaching practice, even when I'm only playing the goofball in the front of the room. But now that the term is almost over, I'm wondering: do I employ my own teaching in a way that not only models what it is that teachers actually do in a classroom, but also how they navigate this "confluence of opposites" that Lemire describes? Do they learn to intellectually and performatively cope with and manage the oppositions? Do they know how to synthesize the oppositions or how to separate them when required? Are they learning instincts as much as acquired skills. Improv as well routine? Poetry as much prose? Application and experiment? Flexibility to learn continually?

This quote above really spoke to me as a poetic truism about the impulses of the profession -- which often moves in opposite directions simultaneously. Even here in this blog, the two primary categories -- theory and praxis -- are at once separate in their purpose and yet brought together in any act of writing. But is such a "bringing together" going on in my classroom when I host a discussion or mark up a paper? How 'dialectical' is my teaching, really? I'll keep musing over it, but for now, I just liked that quotation so much that I wanted to share it... and encourage other English professionals to consider using Lemire's book in their classroom or in their advising. It is quite a practical and thoughtful guide to the various options our major affords.

Just file this one under "thought of the day."

"Writing is less a profession than a professing -- a way of stimulating, organizing and affirming thoughts to give meaning to some slice of life." -- William Safire

I culled this quote from the introduction to a book of quotations called Good Advice on Writing, edited by William Safire and Leonard Safir, (Simon and Schuster, 1992). At first I just liked the way Safire framed the act of writing as something akin to teaching, construing writers as professors, of a sort. But looking over it again, I think those functions he lists are precisely what defines the professorial role:

• stimulating


• organizing


• affirming


• interpreting ["giving meaning to"]

This list (perhaps incomplete) still functions as something of a "writing teacher's taxonomy." We stimulate students to think and act in the world -- a stimulus that produces a written response. We organize our curriculum and our syllabi content and our daily class periods, and we arm students with organizational strategies for their own ideas. We affirm what students do right in our comments and we reaffirm the wisdom of the textbooks and literature in our discussions and reinforcement of them. We interpret the world and its culture -- and by employing and modeling the methods of our discipline, or by having students interpret one another's work in peer groups, we help students develop these skills on their own.

The better writer you are, perhaps, the better teacher you can be. I see this all the time in our Writing Popular Fiction program, which on top of having a rock solid full time faculty base of PhDs who write fiction, also brings in professional writers as adjuncts to mentor novelists and teach courses in the craft. I see the transference of good writing to good teaching in the Freshman Comp courses taught by people who enjoy the craft and employ it as part of their career both in the English major and throughout the disciplines; and it is self-evident in the student tutors who work in our writing center, hired because of their strong writing skills. I see it in the writers who have taught me much in their non-fiction instructional books about the art and craft and methods of teaching, learning, writing, reading.

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.

I have to thank Marc Sheffner for turning me on to Ed Nuhfer's excellent Nutshell Notes -- a collection of tips for teachers hosted at Idaho State U (earlier copies are also gathered in a big .pdf file by CU Denver, where it used to be published). It's a wonderful resource!

Since we're fast approaching the New Year, I thought I'd celebrate by pointing readers to Nuhfer's article "Toward a New Year: Strengthening Syllabi". It was written in 2003, but that doesn't mean it's out of date: the essay spoke to me because I, too, am revising my syllabi over the Winter Break as I prepare for the new term. The article is brief, but I liked the section where the teacher is encouraged to "Tell something about yourself [on the syllabus] because you will be the most important person in this course to each student." Simple truth, followed by good advice and what personal things to divulge.

As I browsed through the various issues of Nutshell Notes, I bookmarked another one that really made me sit up and rethink a few things. It was Nuhfer's "Levels of Thinking and Educational Outcomes" piece, which features a great table of Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Domains in relation to the taxonomy of others (even DeBono's six thinking "hats"). Bloom becomes very dogmatic in educational circles, so it was nice to see this consideration of alternative frameworks for student development. Nuhfer organizes the various tables on his chart by four areas of a learner's emphasis: content-intensive emphases, process-intensive emphasis, self-reflection, and judgment from experience. The latter is the one least addressed by Bloom's Taxonomy, which gave me pause. Nuhfer negotiates these differences in terms of William Perry's treatment of the stages of intellectual growth with an emphasis on Lee Knefelkamp's discussion on "personalism" -- all this is a part of a series of essays spurred by a teacher's workshop related to Nutshell Notes that focused on Perry's book, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. I'd like to read that book. I plan to think about my syllabi in relation to these issues, too, as I revise them. [I'm also updating Pedablogue's design a bit, particularly by adding tags to entries to ease navigation... if you have a recommended tag you'd like me to add, let me know in a comment.]

Happy New Year!

I stopped at a Half-Priced Books store in Monroeville this past October and found myself burrowing around in their really great section in the back of the store, for "Teaching." In it, I picked up some really great titles cheap, including a book I want to call attention to in this review, called Reflective Practice in Action: 80 Reflection Breaks for Busy Teachers by Thomas S.C. Farrell. But before I get to it, I wanted to first say that spontaneously browsing around in the "Teaching" or "Education" section of a bookstore is a really good idea once in awhile -- especially if you're not a pedagogy specialist or teacher trainer by profession -- and I encourage you to take a moment to do this if you're shopping in a bookstore for the holidays. You might be surprised by what gifts you might find for yourself.

It's also the case that those bookstore sections for Teaching and Education are rarely well-organized and become a catch-all for any title that smacks of school. Thus, you often find exercises for kindergarteners and home-schooler workbooks placed side by side with philosophical books and guitar instructional manuals. It's a mess. That's both good and bad (and perhaps says something about the coherency of our industry): you'll have to dig to find what you need, but you might find a hidden treasure.

Of course, that's true of all bookstore shelves to some degree. And the ENTIRE bookstore is really about learning, is it not?

In any case, one of those hidden treasures I recently found was Reflective Practice in Action by Thomas S.C. Farrell (Corwin Press, 2004). It seems like just the sort of book any teacher who blogs or keeps a journal would find of interest, because it is filled with questions, worksheets and discussions intended to prompt thinking and writing about one's mission and career as an instructor. Through reflective teaching, Farrell claims, "teachers can begin to locate themselves within their profession and start to take more responsibility for shaping their practice" (6).

I know a lot of teachers who struggle over writing their annual self-reports, development plans, and teaching portfolios. Sometimes this struggle is located in one's relationship to writing itself. At other times, these documents that we have to write in the name of development sometimes are seen as empty exercises in paper shuffling, bureaucratical nonsense, and just one more thing to do on top of a million others. One sometimes wonders what the point of it all is, when only one person or committee often reads it closely before it's filed away in some infinitely-receding drawer of bureaucratic paperwork, never to be seen again.

But I have always refused to see any project that involves writing as a waste of time. It makes me a better writer and often my writing leads me to new ways of seeing a topic, inspiring me to change my relationship to it. So rather than treating those "official" forms of reflection as dehumanizing forms of busy work, I have tried to use those documents as moments to write reflectively about my career (sometimes to the consternation of those who have to read them, because I write a lot). This book reminds me that reflection -- taking stock about where one has gone and where one is going -- is entirely the point of those documents to begin with.

Moreover, this slim, 100 page book makes reflecting on one's work easier, more pleasurable and, ultimately, more significant. Grounded in the principles of reflective practice, it aims at helping teachers see their work in a less technical and more organic fashion. While not every "guided reflection break" offered in the book is equally of value, the book does an excellent job identifying the diverse areas where one might direct their attention in thinking reflectively, and it utilizes research in a refreshingly clear and practical manner, by emphasizing activity and application of the principles it outlines in a systematic (but not overly formal) way.

The book opens by exploring the theories behind "reflective practice" by immediately engaging the reader in thinking that reexamines one's assumptions about teaching and how they have played out in our practical work. It is a transformative process founded on heightened self-awareness. "...Reflective practice is a systematic and structured process in which we look at concrete aspects of teaching and learning with the overall goal of personal change and more effective practice...we change as a result of the awareness brought about by engaging in reflection." (27).

Farrell seems to draw the bulk of his research from the work of Kenneth Zeichner and Daniel Liston, authors of Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, which delves into the pedagogical theory behind reflective practice in depth. The book brings more critics into the picture -- like Daniel Schon and Max Van Manen -- and the bibliography covers all the primary sources in this field of pedagogy. I think Farrell's book can be seen as a sort of practical workbook to go along with Zeichner and Liston's title, so the two could work hand in hand if assigned in a teacher development course. Some of Farrell's "prompts" would occur naturally to a reader of Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, but what makes Farrell's book useful is the systematic and proactive way in which he guides the application of its concepts.

The first four chapters of the book provide an array of models for reflective practice and explore methods for any teacher or group to put theory into action. It's a great concise overview, while being inspirational (covering the first 24 prompts of the 80 in the book). In the book's fifth chapter, the author outlines the "Farrell Model of Reflective Practice," which identifies a wide range of different ways in which the prompts in the book can be utilized, whether in isolation or in groups, while covering the principle modalities of reflection (37). This section opens up the numerous arenas in which reflection can occur -- from journals to teacher development workshops -- and readers might be surprised by the number of reflective practices happening all around us on campus all the time, and the myriad ways one can approach reflective thinking.

The latter chapters of Farrell's book are focused on specific means toward enhancing one's reflective practice. These processes are: group discussions, classroom observations, journal writing, and the teaching portfolio. The book ends by encouraging one to be a "reflective practitioner" and is the most involved and personal chapter for helping teachers come up with their own prompts for reflection. Here he draws upon and expands Zeichner and Liston's five principle elements of the reflective practitioner in a way worthy of citing fully:

A reflective teacher:

• Examines, frames, and attempts to solve dilemmas in classroom practice.
• Is aware of and questions the assumptions and values he or she brings to teaching
• Is attentive to the institutional and cultural contexts in which he or she teaches
• Takes part in curriculum development and is involved in school change efforts
• Takes responsibility for his or her own professional development

Farrell's book is a great assistant in making one a more reflective teacher, in general. But there are other things he brings to the table that got my interest. For example, he talks about using a method called the SCORE (Seating Chart Observation Record) to analyze how teachers interact with groups that seems very useful for, say, analyzing a videotape of one's class or observing a colleague's class. This would involve drawing a seating chart,and drawing lines between teacher and students when questions are asked or addressed, which I imagine could be revelatory of unconscious habits like favoring one side of the room or calling on the same set of students over and over again.

Overall, I'm glad I stumbled upon this book and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for something to prompt their writing about teaching (like bloggers) or help in writing their own self-assessments. I think administrators and faculty development coordinators who are looking for practical ways to help faculty energize their growth in an autonomous-yet-connected fashion would benefit greatly from this title.

See ItsLife's coverage of more issues in reflective practice.

This morning I read an article by Kelly McGonigal posted at Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning, called "Teaching for Transformation: From Learning Theory to Teaching Strategies" [note: this link opens a PDF File]. McGonigal outlines "transformative learning theory" -- a concept developed by Jack Mezirow -- in order to argue that teachers should not just "unload" new information on students in a blind hope that they will absorb it, but that they must instead "transform" the knowledge and skills they already bring with them into the classroom into something new. McGonigal elaborates a solid outline of the process by which students can best revise their assumptions and adopt a new paradigm, by discussing the five key conditions which enhance transformative learning:

1. an activating event that exposes the limitations of a student’s current knowledge/approach;

2. opportunities for the student to identify and articulate the underlying assumptions in the student’s current knowledge/approach;

3. critical self-reflection as the student considers where these underlying assumptions came from, how these assumptions influenced or limited understanding;

4. critical discourse with other students and the instructor as the group examines alternative ideas and approaches;

5. opportunities to test and apply new perspectives.

McGonigal gives some great pragmatic examples of how teachers can enable these conditions. I think my favorite is the "edgy" approach to designing the "activating event" which is intended to shake a student out of their habitual patterns of thought. (See my earlier post on "Outrageously Theatrical Teaching"). She recommends, for example, creating disorienting dilemmas through examples or evidence which challenges what students believe. More controversial, perhaps, she talks about setting students up for failure so that they must seek out new methods to succeed, or new paradigms for understanding a concept.

As a teacher of thinking and writing to entering college freshmen, I think transformative learning lies behind a great deal of what I do. To some degree, I spend more time prompting students into critical thinking (by staging active discussions of issues raised by a text), and on critical discourse in the class (by hosting peer editing workshops) than I do rotely teaching basic writing skills...and it often pays off in a student's desire to refine those skills on their own along the way.

The most complicated area of this theory, I think, lies in the "critical self-reflection" component. McGonigal offers good strategies for this (keeping an intellectual timeline, assigning a reading journal, etc.) but when it comes right down to it, students often fake transformation in an effort to mollify the teacher, instead of genuinely examining the state of their learning -- which they would rather have the teacher do. I tend to assign a number of "reflection" papers, and sometimes a student's self-confessed "transformation" rings hollow in my ears when they tell me they suddenly can "see the light" thanks to something I've assigned or something we've done in class. Sure, some students may very well feel like their composition class was their "salvation" or something. But many students will simply play the role of the transformed thinker, and I'm skeptical of that performance when it's an emotional appeal designed only to persuade me that their lives have been changed by my teaching. Transformative learning should not be about converting their identities into something a teacher wants them to "become". The fact is, we are constantly transformed by what we learn -- change is never total. One isn't transformed their freshman year and then over and done with learning. Rather, it's the structure of their thinking (often concretized during high school into patterns of "survival" or assumptions about "success") that I seek to transform. And it's only in grading the actual writing itself across the term -- tracking the stages of the revision process and engaging in process-oriented assessment -- where I have to look to find evidence of student transformation. A "transformation narrative" or memoir of enlightenment is not what I'm after at all.

McGonigal's article is chock full of teaching strategies for all five of the conditions she outlines, and it's definitely worth a review. It made me think about whether I'm following through on the "activating events" I stage in class and given me reason to think more carefully about how I try to teach reflective thinking.

For more on this theory, see Susan Imel's "Transformative Learning in Adult Education". For further reading, a primary source on this concept is Mezirow's 1991 book Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning.

TV TurnOff Week (April 25-May 1, 2005) has officially begun. Do you have the guts to turn your television off for an entire week? Can you and the people you live with stand to miss an episode of your favorite show? Are you able to shun the television news and opt for the printed paper or an internet site instead? What would you do without your Simpsons fix?

I believe that television media should be studied, not blindly consumed or, alternately, snobishly scoffed at by scholars. But I love the idea behind TV Turn Off Week. One of its many aims is to try to get people off the couch and more active in their communities, their families, and their own lives. It also aims at raising literacy by showing kids the alternatives to the so-called "idiot box" or "boob tube."

I taught a course in Media & Society a few years ago, and integrated TV Turn-Off Week into the curriculum. I distributed the scary "tv facts and figures" handouts from the Turn-off Network's home page to students on the first day of class, had them read a book on Culture Jamming and later had students make posters (like those at Adbusters) and spread the word on campus, under the auspices of "service learning" and literacy activism. They did a good job. I think my favorite poster was a photoshop trick one of the students used, pointing a smoking pistol at a smashed up television screen. The campaign was only moderately successful, however, because the students could find no way to measure its effectiveness, and many of them put up the posters too late in the term. If I did this again, I'd launch the class with a more agressive campaign.

[Adbusters really takes the campaign into radical territory. Check out their advocacy campaign for TV Turnoff and be sure to check out their "TVBeGone" remote control zapper!]

TV Turnoff had mixed results, but a related and more-successful experiment we performed in that Media & Society course was a "Media Deprivation Assignment" (guidelines in Word format) which asked students to consciously "unplug" from all the technological media they use for an entire day, keeping a log about their "media fasting" and writing a reflection on the experience. I got the idea for of this assignment from a course listing I found online by Karen Cristiano which sounded like a thrilling thing to try.

They all HATED it, but learned just how saturated they are with media and how reliant they have habitually become on it. Students wrote about the sheer terror of actually hearing their car engines while they drove, or the frustrating horrors of not being able to play with their X-Boxes or the haunting sounds of other people's media that they couldn't escape from. Several admitted failure and gobbling up as much IM'ing and CD playing as they could after going half a day without them, like a smoker caving in to the cravings of a nicotine fix. I wouldn't say it changed their lives, but it really opened their eyes.

A few months ago, I read a great idea for teaching a class in complete silence ("Using Silence to Make a Point" by John M. Knight, from The Jnl of the Imagination in Language Learning). In his article on silence, Knight talks about running an entire class non-verbally -- without speaking a word -- in honor of the National Day of Silence. As students entered the room, he'd hand them a card that read:

“Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. People who are silent today believe that laws and attitudes should be inclusive of people of all sexual orientations. The Day of Silence is to draw attention to those who have been silenced by hatred, oppression, and prejudice. Think about the voices you are not hearing. What can you do to end the silence? ”

The article explains how Knight artfully used in-class writing, the overhead projector, and other non-verbal devices to conduct a knock-out Intensive English class. Changing the rules of the game and forcing students to use alternative forms of discourse really got his students thinking contemplatively and resulted in an unforgettable learning experience.

His article is from 1999, but the Day of Silence -- which happens at college campuses nationwide as a form of protest against homosexual discrimination -- still happens annually. In fact, it is coming up next month, and I'd hoped to have a "surprise" silent class and write about the results here afterward. But I just checked my syllabi, and realized I can't change things now because students are scheduled to give presentations that day and the schedule is too tight to change things (and I doubt they'd receive the challenge of conducting a presentation non-verbally very warmly!).

Still: I encourage anyone reading this to give it a try. This year's Day of Silence is Wednesday, April 13, 2005. The DoS website offers helpful resources online for organizing an event. I might try to conduct a class silently despite it not being a "national day" anyway, as an experiment sans politics, to see how well it works.

Teaching non-verbally is one thing, but I'm reminded of what an important role "silence" can play in the art of teaching.... The pregnant pause. The "waiting game" of the Socratic method. The meditative reflection. Writing in class before discussion. It's all silence, framed by pensive pedagogy. Philosopher Paul Woodruff has written about silence as a form of reverence, and the power of silence to enhance education. Like any "moment of silence" it can prove productive. For more on this topic, I recommend reading a profile of his work, "Paul Woodruff: The Silent Teacher" (.pdf file from BYU's Focus on Faculty newsletter).

On an almost-barely-related note, I advocate educating people about "TV Turnoff Week" (April 25-May 1, 2005), and possibly even giving it a try yourself. I have used this as a class project before (in a "Media & Society" course I taught once) and while the class had fun making posters for the event and promoting it all over campus, I learned it was very difficult for students to live without TV for a week, let alone a "media free" day. (Perhaps I will blog more about this when the date approaches -- for now, I remain... silent).

A recent entry about the problems with student evaluations over at the anonymous weblog for "Bitch Ph.D." is garnering a lot of heated comments (as noted by my colleague, Dennis Jerz). Essentially, she's concerned that "our primary feedback on our work comes from children...18 year olds who don't understand what your job really is" and that "a major part of the reason we all feel so alienated and anxious is because we don't get feedback or praise from people who count on any kind of regular basis."

Having just reviewed a number of part-time faculty evaluations in my job as interim division chair this term, I can see what she means. While I don't think 18 year olds are "children," it's true that the evaluations are often emotionally-driven rants or raves, whether pro or con, and often don't focus on the teaching itself -- or, when they do, they're filled out like customer service surveys rather than critical feedback on pedagogy. While I typically garner very strong recommendations, the ones with thoughtful written comments that mention specific examples are the only ones that really help me. I'm way beyond doing this for my own ego -- so while it feels good for a moment when I read the evals that say "You're the best teacher in the world!" they are sometimes only as helpful as a blank form.

But student evaluations are only part of a larger process of self-reflection and administrative evaluation. What "Bitch, Ph.D." neglects to say is that we already are (or should be) the "authorities" on our own course teaching and that the best people to teach the teacher is the students because they are the living embodiments of our course objectives. Our peers also function as our continued mentors, but they can't sit in on the day-to-day experience of our classes. Though nothing's stopping a professor from inviting colleagues to sit in on her classes, and most colleges have a system of peer review. We also get our feedback in teacher development sessions and tenure review letters -- help that comes in an academic and collegial manner, not from some outsider boss up on high. Teachers need to take advantage of all the forums for the scholarship of teaching if they really want to improve.

Besides, she kind of misses the point of the evaluation process, too: the students really are the ONLY ONES "who count on any kind of regular basis." Not because they're the customers, but because they're the learners.

Of course, I do understand her point. If a class were a book, the sort of feedback we get from editors is what we'd like to get on our teaching. Students (esp Freshman) aren't really skilled in evaluating teachers -- and yet, perhaps they are to some degree because they've been studying teaching as much as course content their whole lives. The problem is that they haven't thought of what they're doing as students in a critical manner. But evaluation skills, too, could be taught in some classes and the teacher can "prep" the evaluation at the end of term. I often directly solicit comments on specific events, telling them outright how much I depend on their feedback to improve the class -- "last year's students who took this class influenced what I taught you this year," I'll say, and so I urge them to be specific about course activities. And before the class fills out their evaluations, I'll have them brainstorm orally while I transcribe on the board all the different sorts of class activities performed across the term. This works to get concrete feedback far better than just tossing the evaluation instrument at them blindly with a fistful of pencils. I also always seem to get better evaluations (meaning thorough and critical, with cited examples and thoughtful reasoning, not just "way to go" responses) in my courses that have writing workshops, because they train students to evaluate in thoughtful ways. Any class that has students engaging in "evaluation" as part of the course content can tie those same skills into the end of term course evaluation as well.

Anyway, I think the system is indeed a "weird gig" but I'd much rather have students evaluate me at the end of the term than some sort of outside inspector watching over my shoulder the whole time. A string of bad evaluations may not be a sign of badly taught classes at all, per se -- they may instead be a sign that the teacher isn't engaging in their own development as an educator (whether by attending pedagogical conferences, soliciting peer class sit-ins, or simply talking about teaching and genuinely revising their syllabi) in the scholarly and self-reflective ways that they probably ought to be. Students tend to write positive evaluations about those who genuinely care about teaching more than they do about their own needs and are flexible in adopting the course to the students learning...even students who aren't getting good grades respond positively to teachers who care about their jobs.

I'm not saying Bitch, PhD. doesn't care about her job...if she didn't she wouldn't host such a GREAT blog about education and she wouldn't have let those evaluations get to her. When bad evals sting us, they hurt because we do care. But we can't blame the students for it. The instititution might be partly to blame, but that's only because, perhaps, the system (at some research colleges anyway) is designed in a way that is more interested in what is taught than how it is delivered. That's one reason why "teaching certification" isn't required of professors. But when the scholarship of teaching is valued by a school, then the purpose of student evaluation becomes more meaningful.

Just passing along some enlightening reflections on change I've spotted on the web recently:

• John Spurlock reflects on how one can't escape the problem of race when teaching American history, even when far away in the classrooms of Montenegro. (He also just posted a good article on European Educational Reform).

• Barbara Feinberg reacts to the trend toward assigning "problem books" to children, and the idea that "A good book should make you cry."

• Dennis Jerz describes his struggle to introduce his home-schooled, overactive child to the Apollonian demands of his first chess tournament.

• Dr. Crazy realizes that the authority of a Ph.D. still doesn't manage to change the entrenched gender dynamics in the classroom.
  

My freshman composition class just wrapped up a three-day series of speeches, where students present and share their research to the rest of the class in a relatively formal address, before a videocamera. After they're done, they have to field questions from the class. Later they will write reflections based on their analysis of the videotape. I like this exercise because it gets some early research (and critical thinking) done on their final term paper, while doing double-duty as a way of learning oral presentation skills.

I always evaluate these speeches by typing out my responses to both their delivery and content. But this semester I tried something different: at the end of each class, I had the entire class take a moment to write a letter of support to the person they thought gave the best speech -- or a letter of advice for the weakest speaker. If they gave a speech that day, they had to write a letter to the entire class. I collected these, tore off the names of the writers, and handed them back the next period...and read the letters to the class out loud.

It worked out better than expected! The students liked the quick peer feedback, and the process was enhanced by the anonymity of the approach. Normally, it's a risk having students single out "the best" or "the worst" students, but I wanted to increase attentiveness to the speeches by the audience and engage them in critical responses. I was pleasantly surprised to find that only one student singled out "the worst" -- most letters were supportive pats on the back. And while the better speakers got the most letters, there was still a wide range of different recipients, so it seemed fair. But the main reason I did this was to not only reward those who put in the most effort, but to break the wall betwen the nervous speaker and the typically apathetic audience. Formal speech delivery in a class environment often is approached as an individual, rather than a dynamic, performance, and with the camera on and the teacher sitting in the back of the room, taking notes, it would seem as though the speech was a singular effort, rather than collaborative affair. Just as I try to get students to break out of the habit of just "writing for the teacher" (a one-to-one communication) I tried to get the speech event to go beyond being a student-to-teacher delivery. Using something akin to a dialogic listening approach, I wanted to help the students in the class as a whole to recognize their responsibilities as active listeners, to increase their attentiveness, and to help them develop an awareness of audience. And from the class reactions to this exercise, I really think it worked. Hopefully, this experience will help them develop a sense of audience for their papers, too -- and to internalize the dynamic required for meeting the diverse needs of multiple readers. And to think of their peers as scholars.

Now that students have this first experience giving speeches in front of a video camera, I want to remember to try something else new: to have them record speeches with a camera outside of class next term.

I started this blog in September, at the beginning of the school year. Now that the term is over, I've got two books I've gotta finish editing, a new course syllabus to finish up, and graduate program classes and workshops to prepare (our graduate program residencies are held over the winter and summer break -- no rest for the wicked!). So I'm taking a few days off from blogging to not only relax with the family but also get caught up with all those things.

In the mean time, I thought I'd post some reflections on -- and speculations about -- this blog.

• Before I say anything, I hereby claim that I am sick of the word "blog." It's a powerful word because of its quirkiness, and it's fun to say when your mouth is full of oatmeal (psycholinguists would have a field day with its relation to "bleah"). I really do like the word and I love the practice of weblogging, but "blog" is a word I say, think, see, and hear way too much. It starts to sound like goo-goo, gah-gah after awhile in my head. So I want my blogging colleagues to take note: I'm counting the number of times you use it in an everyday conversation. If you go over 65, I'm walking away without explanation.
  
• But seriously. Now that I keep a blog, I read them. Way too much. I know more about my student's lives than I probably should. I know more about my new colleague in SHU's English program, Dennis Jerz, than I probably ever would have by just talking to him in the hallways. I know more about contemporary issues, period, from reading so much journalism online. And, of course, I've learned a heckuva lot about teaching, pedagogy, and learning -- which is the primary reason I started this blog to begin with. Blogging -- like all writing -- makes me consciously process and organize ideas I wouldn't have otherwise. But it amazes me how much time I now spend reading online. I've always been a web reader, but now it's gotten really bad. I just paid to register Feedemon, an RSS-feed reader that quickly downloads headlines from blogs around the world. I check it nearly as often as I do e-mail. In a directly-related fashion, last week I also got an eye exam and now wear reading glasses when I read at the computer.
  
• I'm no daily blogger, but I do think my entries are fairly meaty and chock full o' links. I've done 66 entries so far since launching this site in mid September. That means, roughly, four per week. Even more significant, I feel, are the number of comments -- 135 -- almost exactly twice as many comments as entries. That tells me that this site is generating a community of readers, and that's important. Although it's a "personal inquiry" I don't write for narcissistic reasons -- I wouldn't do this without a readership.
  
• I knew this blog was making an impact when I saw Nancy P's photo of the giftbox of teaching supplies she's sending to an Iraqi school she adopted. She was inspired by my post about schools in war-torn Iraq, "Gun and Pencil", which has a link to iraqischools.com. This impressed the heck out of me, and reminded me of the significance of what writers do. And that blogs can make a difference in the world.
  
• The great thing about blogging is that it keeps links to places you want to visit again. I constantly go straight to my blog -- or "memex" as Dennis Jerz reminds us -- to look up articles and resources I vaguely remember from the past.
  
• Today I discovered a second sister site, called Pedabloggy. This makes two that I know of.
  
• The extensive review I wrote of Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered in Sept/Oct generated the least feedback, but it also was one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in keeping this blog so far. In fact, now that I keep the Pedablogue, I more consciously study pedagogy. I've bought more books on teaching practices and theory this semester than ever before. I currently have McKeachie's Teaching Tips by my bedside right now -- and though I'm not learning much new out of it, it's confirming a lot of what I do and reminding me of what to avoid in the classroom. I really wish I would have had this book as graduate teaching assistant many moons ago...if you're a new teacher, pick it up!
  
• I've always known that the web harbors a great number of resources for K-12 teachers, but in the past I've always steered away from those exits on the info superhighway, assuming that such info wouldn't be useful for me as a college teacher. But now that I'm self-studying pedagogy, I'm seeing many more cross-overs than I realized and I now see that much more work on learning in general has been done in those areas than on college-aged learners. So I intend to keep studying work that's been done on children and trying to utilize it in my classrooms without dumbing down the content or treating the adult learners like babies. Instead, I hope to tap into that child within -- the one who has a sense of wonder about the world, and a yearning for learning.
  
• I've also been learning a lot about how blog software can be used to run a traditional document, like my newsletter. My offbeat horror genre newsletter, The Goreletter, has been a success so far (*it's the top nominee, presently, for the Bram Stoker Award in Alternate Forms, believe it or not), but as a blog it isn't generating the community and commentary that this site has. I suspect that the people who read my books prefer to get it as a whole, via e-mail. They're two different processes. But I still like using the blog to release "breaking news" between newsletters and having the blog has made it easier to service my RSS and PDA readers.
  
• I'm terrible with keeping "blog rolls" and I don't really like the economy of cross-linking. I don't really like how I set up the "sites that cite" generic list of search results, either, so I'll have to put more thought into this.
  

Okay, this is getting really too long, so I'll stop here and say thanks to everyone who has spent time here or has taken the trouble to leave a comment. Don't abandon this site -- I'm not! I'll pick up the habit again the first week in January. Happy holidays!

If it seems like I'm blogging about my quiz techniques all the time, it's because I'm experimenting with approaches and seeing what works. I've already told you about my "Quiz Grader/Note Taker" routine and the time I borrowed David Droppa's "collaborative quiz" routine. Tonight I did a variation on the latter: after everyone finished the quiz, I partnered them up and had them consult with one another about their answers before grading it as a class. This, I felt, solved the problem of "peer pressuring me into the wrong answer" which the students reported the last time I did a collaborative quiz (where students worked together in generating answers). What I liked about this latest method was that it encouraged the students to recognize the authority they already had (or didn't) over the material.

And it eased the tension in the room, too... a little levity was necessary, I think. It's that time of year. I want the students to put their energy into their term essay (a shot list and analysis) rather than basic material from the textbook. In fact, I typically design my courses so that by midterms the students will ideally have learned the basic discourse of the field of study (in this case, cinema technique and discourse terminlogy) and in the second half of the term they put it to use through some creative application, critical essay, or independent research project. This allows the class to be come progressively student-centered over time; as much as I try to "dive right in" to a student-centered classroom, they resist it until they warm up to the class dynamic.