Results tagged “syllabi” 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.

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 sit on the Academic Technologies Committee at SHU, and we often talk about trends on our campus and others, to see how we might better employ computers, software and technological devices in the classroom. Recently, the provost sent us a link to a NY Times article, "Welcome, Freshman. Have an iPod." by Johnathan D. Glater, which talks about how some schools are giving away (not iPods but) iPhones to their students. The motive of these schools, if it isn't obvious, is that gizmos like these are perceived as "cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation."

They also might enhance or catalyze learning. Making decisions about campus technology always means trying to weigh symbolic value against actual use value. We have to predict whether students and faculty will actually use the technology we budget for, and whether it really will benefit the learner or the learning environment. Obviously, we have to be careful how money is spent, but also a little skeptical of whiz-bang pop trends, because they are quickly surmounted by new technologies as it so rapidly evolves. Today's clickers are tomorrow's eight track tapes. And as teachers and administrators age, they try to leap across the generation gap and sometimes land in the wrong place, alienating students despite their good intentions.

In the margins of the NY Times article, a reader opinion from "Paul" is pulled out that cries, "Are we training thinkers in our colleges or gadget users?" I understand the feeling behind this. But I think this false dualism is beyond the point, because our thinkers in the classroom are already gadget users; our gadget users already are thinkers. The challenge of the modern teacher is to synthesize these tools with the way people think (just as we might teach penmanship in early education, so that students can use the technology of the ink pen). These are tools that students use in their everyday lives, and they'll be expected to use them well in the workplace after college.

I received this article as I was revising my syllabi for the term (that begins on Monday), and it caused me to reflect a little bit on how I treat portable electronic devices in the classroom. We're not giving away iPhones at our college, and I'm not changing my classroom into a "gizmo training" place, but the campus is evolving into a more wireless-friendly space. Between classes, I see virtually every student in the hallway working on their cell phones or portable game systems. The culture has shifted, but education and much of the subject matter we teach remains timeless.

It's easy to be reactionary or even live in denial. I'm as guilty as anyone. I have been brash about not allowing these elements to become distractions in my classroom, often demanding students to focus on the class and not their gizmos. In the past, I've order students to turn their cell phones to silent ring mode, and I have almost always told any students I see working with devices to shut them off. I have never really articulated my policies about this, other than orally when I spot an offense (say, a student starts texting during another student's presentation), simply because it seemed like common sense and common courtesy for people not to interrupt or ignore one another during a classroom activity or lecture.

The rules of common courtesy have changed. I've decided that things have changed so much that the time has come to put a policy in writing in my syllabus, so students understand where I'm coming from. My motive is not to punish, but to highlight the propriety of social communication. I want to recognize and support student use of technology as a tool for learning, while also combating the rising problem of blaring ring tones during lectures/discussions, or the distracted student who can't stop playing with his game or web browser during class time.

In some ways, there's no difference between a student texting and a student flipping through a magazine in the back row of a class, but there are times when we use technology to multitask and this is where the issue gets thorny and complex. What if we're discussing Foucault's "Panopticism" in the classroom and a student wants to quickly do some web research on a referenced person in the article, like Jeremy Bentham? I wouldn't want to ban such ambitious impulses to learn more, so long as it pertained to the subject at hand or contributed to the collaborative learning of the class.

What I'm really concerned about is multitasking that puts personal interest above the class interest, and the fetishism of technology that reinforces gizmo play for its own sake. My hope is that I can help students consciously rethink their gizmos as tools for learning and research and communication, and to respect the social space and dynamic of the classroom.

My new policy is an attempt to prevent what is known as "backgrounding" in the classroom while respecting the existence and purpose of these portable devices. I'd be interested to hear what readers of this blog think about this policy statement, whether in the form of editorial suggestions or by mentioning problems I might not foresee.

Policy on Personal Electronic Devices

Our classroom is a haven from the distractions of everyday life, giving us a place to focus attentively, in collaboration, on learning. Listening to each other is imperative and enables focused concentration. "Multitasking" inhibits learning and disrupts communication; unexpected beeps and surprising ring tones distract us all. Thus, while you are permitted to bring personal devices (cell phones, PDAs, laptops, sound recorders, and other electronic devices) to class, they must only serve class needs (e.g., typing on a laptop for an in-class writing assignment; using an iPhone to record lectures). My policy on this matter can be summed up in one phrase: "class in the foreground." If you ever appear to be "backgrounding" the class you will receive an absence for the day, and may be expelled from the room and not permitted to make up missed in-class work. Examples of "backgrounding" the class in a punishable way include: answering or making a cell phone call; texting or IMing; checking or writing e-mail; surfing the web; wearing headphones; logging into MySpace, Facebook, your SHU blog, or other social network; reading an ebook or any printed matter not related to class content (e.g. a magazine); and handheld gaming. Please set your cell phones to "silent" mode before class begins. I reserve the right to ban electronic devices entirely if I feel they are distracting you or your classmates from proper study.

I'll post an update if warranted. If you have comments or want to share your own experiences of such issues, please post.

"...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.

Take a look at one of the course objectives from my syllabus for Literary Criticism (a 300-level course in theory and analysis):

"To become comfortable reading academic criticism and applying critical methods in your writing"

Seems like a good objective, no? At a recent faculty workshop on Bloom's taxonomy, I discovered that this seemingly innocent -- and to me, important -- objective may be more problematic than I realized. And by revising this objective I've come up with some strategies for strengthening my course.

I think most teachers would agree that reducing student anxiety about a course's content is a prime objective, because anxiety and fear can impede learning. Everyone knows that motivation plays a role in student learning. And what teacher of English doesn't harbor some desire to inculcate students with some awareness and appreciation of the "pleasure of the text"? But the problem my objective raises is quite simple. How does one objectively evaluate whether or not a student has become more "comfortable"? Is comfort-level really a measurable skill? Without utilizing biofeedback technology, it's probably difficult to assess (let alone grade) in an objective manner.

When I teach lit crit, I always encounter a latent fear and anxiety among students about the level of discourse encountered in literary theory. The reactions to the writing of critics like Jacques Derrida range from jaw-dropping bafflement to outrageous hostility. Literary criticism can read like a foreign language to a college student. The attitudes one develops early in relation to criticism can become a sort of baggage one carries throughout their academic life -- and many advanced learners carry chips on their shoulders (or, alternatively, a defensive arrogance) in regards to theory. So one of my missions in teaching the class is to encourage students to bracket off their emotional responses to (and alienation from) the Otherness of writing and to "run with it" even if they don't completely understand what a critical text is saying. It takes several reads and much learning to comprehend a difficult piece of theory, and I dare say only a fool would pretend to entirely understand what the critic means in some cases. Indeed, since theory is often philosophically abstract, the complicated syntax and the poetics of the writing are often required to encapsulate a thought, and it often approaches creative writing -- and therefore it requires a great deal of interpretive flexibility on the part of the reader.

Beyond the matter of "difficulty," I also try to encourage students to become comfortable forwarding their ideas and making risky interpretive moves that will advance their theoretical arguments beyond basic (and often "vulgar" -- meaning common and oversimplified, not grotesque) socio-historical interpretations. Undergraduate students who are finally "coming of age" as English majors aren't entirely comfortable having the legs they have recently mastered pulled out from under them. But too often they rely on habitual forms of interpretation that have worked in their other classes. When pressed to try something new, students will too often "consult the oracle" in their research and parrot the arguments of others, sometimes avoiding the advancement of authentic or original claims in the process. Trying to raise a student's comfort level with literary discourse invites them to participate more effectively in that discourse as an active critic, and to learn more about the value of alternative approaches to literature.

There are even more reasons why I would list "becoming comfortable" as a course objective, but the problem is assessment. It is nearly impossible to judge whether a student has met such an outcome using Bloom's cognitive taxonomy (although the objective on my syllabus does indeed use the term "applying," the phrase "to become comfortable" is the operative phrase).

The leader of our syllabus workshop suggested that I look into the "affective domain" of Bloom's Taxonomy, rather than the cognitive domain. He later turned me on to a very useful document that gives an overview of them, and I've begun looking into this material more deeply. The "Affective" taxonomy examines a student's growth in feelings or emotional areas -- it is an attitudinal form of assessment. Looking over the affective domain, I believe my objective ("to become comfortable") is most in line with this category:

Responding to Phenomena: Active participation on the part of the learners. Attends and reacts to a particular phenomenon. Learning outcomes may emphasize compliance in responding, willingness to respond, or satisfaction in responding (motivation).

Examples: Participates in class discussions. Gives a presentation. Questions new ideals, concepts, models, etc. in order to fully understand them. Know the safety rules and practices them.

Key Words: answers, assists, aids, complies, conforms, discusses, greets, helps, labels, performs, practices, presents, reads, recites, reports, selects, tells, writes.

And indeed, all of those examples and keywords are methods I employ in Literary Criticism to raise the students' comfort with the texts. Students not only write and participate in discussions, but even read a difficult essay outside of class and give a presentation to class about it. I am trying to raise the students' "willingness to respond" to criticism by asking them to respond with their own advanced critical thinking.

Here's how I might revise my objective:
FROM: "To become comfortable reading academic criticism and applying critical methods in your writing"
TO: "To apply critical methodology in response to criticism, through writing, presentation, and discussion."

Although that revision robs the objective of my drive to reduce student anxiety and increase comfort, it is easier for me to assess their application of criticism, than it is to determine their feelings about it. But as a creative writing instructor, I suspect that I am particularly attentive to student affects and attitudes and have some skill in helping students express themselves. I might consider mobilizing some of the techniques I apply in the creative writing classroom in the literary criticism classroom. This might enable students to move toward a higher level on the "affective" skill taxonomy, such as "integrating and organizing values" in relation to schools of critical thought. One technique I might adopt in the class is to ask students to keep a journal that invites them to share their feelings, gut reactions, and personal investment in the theories we are discussing, so that they might better integrate them into their own value system and career plans. Or I might ask them to express the attitudes inherent to (or, alternatively their own attitudes about) a particular school of thought through their own poetry, for example. In the past, I've assigned a paper that allows the student to write about their own "experience of feminism" and perhaps I can get them to do more personal writing in addition to the critical writing they perform.

I've only scratched the surface of this topic, but I've found a few useful essays on assessing the affective domain. Yeap Lay Leng's piece on "Learner Analysis in Instructional Design: The Affective Domain" offers an overview of ways in which affect is "taught and caught". Mary Miller's article, "Learning and Teaching in the Affective Domain" addresses how pervasive attitudinal assessment is in education, and offers good strategies for teaching in the affective domain.

In my entry "Remembering the Objective of Learning Objectives" two years ago, I wrote about Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and how it gives teachers a great way to think about course design -- from syllabus construction to assignments. This term, our campus is hosting "Teaching and Learning Forums" which will specifically focus on Bloom's taxonomy. A group of instructors at SHU will be workshopping their syllabi with it in mind, led by Dr. Terrance DePasquale. We've only just begun these forums, but I'm confident that doing this with colleagues will be a great way to reflect on and retool my/our courses.

In fact, I've become something of a taxonomic terror this past week: my Freshman Composition course is writing their first major essays on issues in Education, and -- thanks to the suggestion of my colleague Laura Patterson (who is expertly steering our campus toward a Writing Across the Curriculum model) -- I actually used the taxonomy itself as a focal point for class discussion. I put the cognitive processes (knowledge, comprehension, analysis, etc.) on the board and asked students to tell me what they thought these words meant -- and whether they thought they were equally good at all of them. The students got very interested in this, once they started sharing stories about their high school experiences and the majority agreed that most classes never go much deeper than teaching "knowledge."

Then I asked them if the taxonomy was a hierarchy -- with "knowledge" at the bottom and "evaluation" at the top -- or if they were all equally important. One student interestingly posited that "knowledge" is like the hub of a wheel, with spokes leading to all the other cognitive skills. Another suggested that people who don't know very much are still often good at "evaluation" from their gut instincts.

The discussion of "evaluation" was most productive. Out of the blue, I suggested we evaluate something we all know a thing or two about, like "chicken strips." The class laughed at this idea, but then I pointed to one student and said: "Seriously, what do you like about a chicken strip?" She shrugged and replied, "I dunno...I like them crunchy, I guess." Immediately everyone started spitting out things they liked or hated about them: greasiness, dipping sauces, batter, meatiness, etc. I transcribed all these on the board. Then we set to wittling the list down to isolate the most important "criteria" for evaluation. I think I was successful at getting across the idea that there's a difference between a snap value judgment and true evaluation, which requires a set of socially agreed-upon criteria.

Then I opened up the proverbial can of worms: "So how do your teachers evaluate you? How should I grade your writing?"

That, as the cliche goes, is the question.

It circled right back to Bloom's taxonomy...and some grading criteria I listed on the syllabus distributed on the first day of class. I think my attempt at making students conscious of the assumptions of the teaching situation was a productive and positive move. And I hope they'll continue to think about these issues as they become more reflexive thinkers.

The problem with taxonomies, obviously, is that they become monolithic abstractions that can lose their meanings entirely, reduced to meaningless buzzwords. Bloom's taxonomy is wonderful, but I still think I prefer Lorin Anderson's revision of Bloom's taxonomy, which changes some of Bloom's terms from nouns to verbs (e.g. "knowledge" is "remembering"; "comprehension" is "understanding"). Perhaps I'll bring this up with the class later on. The point I want them to recognize is that not only does evaluation require social justification, but also that the criteria shift and change as social groups evolve.

I adored Terry Caesar's article, "Against Syllabi" recently posted to Inside Higher Ed. In it, Caesar argues that the course syllabus has become so overridden by legalese that it's been rendered meaningless: "It seems to me that we have become unsure about what not to put on syllabi because we have become unsure what a course is. It is no longer self-contained."

Caesar's right, of course. There are so many institutionally-driven guidelines that have very little to do with the course that the document is longer than a real estate contract. Although many of us teach close reading, I wonder if the long-winded, legalistic syllabus is a genre that -- like the forms put out by the IRS -- are reader unfriendly by design.

But aside from all the course policies and mandatory statements, a syllabus is a great course organizing tool, one that makes me a better teacher. I think of it as being akin to a book outline -- it maps out the territory to be covered in the course. I'm one of those teachers who outlines the entire term in a calendar that is integrated into my syllabus, and I follow my plan rather strictly. Homework due dates, reading assignments -- it's all in there, in a really big table. It also helps me revise the course as I go: I jot notes on the printed sylllabus after each class meeting, so I'll remember what to change for the next time. By thinking of the syllabus as not only a road map or a contract, but also as a document in revision, I find a well-organized syllabus invaluable.

I'm not against syllabi, obviously, but I think they do need to be focused on course learning objectives. It's worth critically reexamining your approach if you haven't changed your course syllabi for awhile. he Orientation to College Teaching website at San Francisco State U offers a really good discussion of Course Design and Creating a Syllabus, among other things.

My colleague in the English program at Seton Hill U, Dennis Jerz, posts a superb reflective entry on teaching in his blog today, discussing how he routinely uses the internet to distribute handouts to students and how he might better meet student needs with them. The post focuses on what he calls "Just in Time Handouts" -- a method for typing up guidelines for the paper "live" on a computer, in a sort of collaboration with the students, in order that they might better understand the expectations for the paper and that he might know what questions they'll have before-the-fact (and so he'll be able to anticipate them in the future). I liked this idea a lot, at first blush. Get the students involved in producing the guidelines, and maybe they'll understand them better, if only because they're responsible for them to some degree. The more you can involve students in their own learning the better. And the teacher, via this process, can learn a thing or two, too. But as I re-read the post, the more skeptical I became that "just in time" handouts would really work, despite their good intentions. Who are these handouts "just in time" for? And how collaborative are they, really?

I can't really tell from Jerz' discussion whether students are free to determine any of the specifics in these guidelines -- or if he's just typing up what he wants when he discusses the assignment in class and addressing student questions as they come up while he types and talks. Probably the latter. I would worry that I would forget something important if I were doing this 'live' rather than thinking it through carefully before the fact. I assume he's got some scribbled down notes or a rough template to work with before he begins this exercise. Beyond my own forgetfulness, if I were to compose this way, it also might send the message to students that I'm totally unprepared and making things up as I went along -- rather than reflecting the fact that the teacher is trying to be flexible and adapt to current needs. Distributing polished handouts in advance sends a message that you're a prepared teacher, working with a master plan. Students tend to respect that, even if they don't understand what that plan is all the time. I know that students will drop classes with vague syllabi that don't map out homework assignments and deadlines in advance, for example. And sometimes a poorly-written handout can unconsciously/accidentally generate poorly-written papers. Would creating them "live" with up to thirty other people make them better or worse? "Too many cooks..."

I do admire Jerz' creative idea and his desire to write these things in a way that serves the students and the online community of teachers. And it would probably work well with handouts that summarize course content (like, producing a class handout on "themes in Flannery O'Connor" if they read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" that day) but I'm not sure it's appropriate for generating paper guidelines. It has good intentions, but if it isn't collaborative in the true sense of the word, then it probably won't work well.

One problem: it takes up valuable class time that might otherwise be spent on the course content. Another: if the "just in time" handout is as sketchy as Jerz's example (an actual .rtf file made in his lit class) suggests, then this would penalize absent students and not really empower the students, ultimately, to address the assignment. Jerz writes: "it probably won't make much sense if you weren't there in the class as we were constructing it -- which only shows just how much effort goes into preparing an instructional resource for the Internet." True, but I also think it only goes to show that you need to put that much effort into the resource (for students, not the internet) before the fact. If a document "doesn't make much sense," then it probably isn't worth posting or printing out, is it? I think there's something convoluted about generating a sketchy first draft of a handout "live" and expecting that that process will somehow produce a more polished paper from the students as a result. If anything, it tacitly endorses "just in time" writing: which sounds a lot like it might promote procrastination to me.

I empathize with Jerz' lament that he wishes to emphasize the students' writing process over the end product -- but that they still inevitably "protest that, if they had known what I wanted in advance, they would have given it to me in the first place, and then they wouldn't need to revise it so much." Jerz suggests that the "just in time handout" might emphasize process over product...and I'd like to believe that's true, but I wonder. While the discussion of a handout might model the "process" of planning, it isn't the process of writing the paper, really. Wouldn't it be better to spend class time having students brainstorm, write and talk about their papers and peer edit drafts than dicker over the guidelines in a handout?

Perhaps contributing to the problem is that Jerz is serving a dual audience: the freshman students in his class and those who read (and probably borrow from) his guidelines online. While this dual audience is always in place (any administrator or colleague or parent might read your assignment guidelines in a student portfolio, for example), Jerz seems to suggest that it takes more time to develop a handout for an online audience, whereas his students are a pressing need that he has to address immediately. I don't see these as competing interests -- the students, of course, should come first. The teacher can always post a revised copy of the guidelines online later (but not if it radically changes the assignment...because then students will cry "unfair!"). I don't see this as a problem with Jerz' teaching, per se -- I see it as a problem endemic to making your class public and almost "live," warts and all, on the internet...particularly if one is overloaded or has very little preparation time. I liked the moment in Jerz' blog where he wrote "I tell myself that it's OK for me, once in a great while, to create a handout that's just for the students of one class, and that is OK for me to use the Internet like a photocopier, simply to distribute that handout without turning it into a respectable online document." That's the way most of us teach, I think. One class at a time. Although Jerz' handout repository is a wonderful resource (I mean it -- check it out!), the classroom needs to come first, of course.

The fact is, that even teachers who don't post their work online make the mistake of writing guidelines for their administrators or colleagues, rather than for their students -- and -- even more often -- in an effort to "preemptively strike" against commonly received errors in papers (the ones that drive us teachers crazy -- like unsourced citations), they overload the guidelines with limitations: "make it this long, do it this way, utilize this font, and for heaven's sake don't write about XYorZ, let alone ABandC." Ironically, I attended a conference panel just yesterday related to this very topic. Our campus is hosting a great conference for the East Central Writers Association called "The Many Faces of the Writing Center" and I sat in on a session called "Making Critical Writing Pedagogy Visible in the Writing Center: Creating a Synergy of Student and Scholarly Voices," led by writing center professionals out of Indiana University-Purdue University. The gist of their presentation was that assignment guidelines tend to suppress student voices by focusing quite a bit on what should NOT go in a paper -- or otherwise saying what the teacher wants rather than what the student wants to explore. We need to make room for -- if not enable -- student voices and well-written assignment guidelines can accomplish this.

So, thinking in that vein, I would recommend "just in time" handouts only if the students truly had a hand in the content of the guidelines -- not just in terms of answering questions, but possibly writing the guidelines themselves. They can construct the rhetorical task. Have them type, while the teacher sits down and stimulates conversations about what needs to be in the document. Have them come up with the wording of the assignment, in addition to limitations. Have them bargain with issues of length, research requirements, and so forth. If the teacher isn't comfortable giving students this power and truly collaborating with them in this way -- or if the students simply are too green to know what an assignment guideline sheet needs to include -- then the teacher would probably do better to design these things before the bell rings and the class begins.

But in a doubly-ironic spin: the presenters in that panel were jotting down comments from the audience on the overhead. This is related to Jerz' method: collaborating visibly, taking down notes for visual learners, and organizing group ideas in print "live." But whereas we produced a two-column list of thoughts in blurry Sharpie ink, I wouldn't call that document anything other than, well, 'notes.' It certainly didn't give me any guidelines for producing my own assignments...just a loose batch of ideas.

One brilliant idea I took away from the panel yesterday that I never would have considered before: instructors can bring assignment guidelines to the writing center and get their feedback on it, just as a student might when they take a draft to the center! Who is in a better position to know the truth about student confusion over instructions than the campus Writing Center? Of course, teachers are loathe to seek outside help in this way -- as if it admitted that they didn't know what they were doing -- but I think it might be a way to solve the problems that Jerz brings up.

Finally, here's a few pages to look at if you came to this post looking for help in putting together your own assignment guidelines. The Manoa Writing Program has a wonderful discussion on Designing Writing Assignments that explains point-by-point what misleads students. Here's an anonymous Heuristic for Designing Writing Assignments. Univ of Toronto (which may have been co-written by Dr. Jerz himself!) has some good prompts. I also posted an entry here on Remembering the Objective of Learning Objectives last year that might be of help.

Dr. Arnzen: I'm sorry to inform you that your textbook, _____, is out of stock til May 2004. It is being revised. -- The Bookstore

YIKES! How would you respond if you got the above message in your e-mail inbox...two business days before classes begin?!

After pulling out several fistfulls of hair, I decided to just put the copy of the book that I have on reserve in the library and ask the students to access it that way. Revised or not, it's an important book for what I'm teaching (the text in question is Formatting Your Manuscript by Writer's Digest Books -- for my new "Publication Workshop" course -- and I doubt that the rules for ms format have changed much, beyond certain emergent conventions surrounding electronic submission). I thought about substituting a new book, but I may just use the sudden "empty space" on my syllabus to assign short articles (online and/or on reserve) instead.

I seem to encounter issues with books in my classes almost every semester. I don't blame my own bookstore -- and I've stopped thinking that I'm cursed. I think this happens to everone, everywhere. The way educational bookstores are run (especially on small campuses, where every dime counts) is very very strange. Sometimes the books just haven't been shipped -- a very common complaint. Partial orders come in, and only a handful of students have the book, while the remaining thirty students in the class complain and assume they can boycott homework until it arrives. Sometimes the publisher revises an edition without telling anyone (or at least without telling me, who once planned a syllabus around an outdated book and had to scramble to revise the entire term plan!). Once I called in the bookstore to add a book to my class. The person on the other end of the line apparently thought that meant I would ONLY be teaching out of that one book and cancelled the remaining four books for the class!

Like I said, I don't really blame the campus bookseller. They've got a lot of competition to deal with -- from used suppliers like eBay and half.com and Joe Student to the local chains like Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble. I don't really understand the economics of their business, but I believe they make most of their money from selling merchandise other than textbooks (even though I'm sure those books gouge out a profit of 10-25% on the list price), and that most of that profit goes straight to the institution or campus that sponsors the bookseller. It must be hard for them to handle orders from instructors that come in at different times during the year -- and most of those orders come in way past the "deadline" that establish enough time for freight shipping to make its way to campus in time for classes, I believe. They also can't predict how many students will be enrolling, so they don't quite know how many books to order...too big a surplus and you've got shipping issues and costly return labor; too small an order, and students line up to complain and the faculty breathe down your neck. It must not be easy being a campus bookstore.

They're trying to do new things to make their customers -- students -- satisfied. To compete with online companies that target them, 98% of all college bookstores have had to turn to online services, with mixed results. Some have sold out completely to chains or huge distributors like B&N or Follett -- and only 54% of bookstores in our country remain owned by the colleges themeselves. College bookstores have tried everything from moving to downtown locations to giving away free beer to attract more customers.

There are things booksellers can do to make the faculty happy, too (and not just by giving us beer...though it's a start!). Our bookstore hosts a faculty appreciation night one day a year (maybe twice?) to give us discounts on gift shopping. They send out reminders with lists of the books we ordered last semester and make it easy to re-order them if we don't have any changes. Is there more they could do? Probably. Maybe give us discounts year-round. Maybe reach out to us as sort of "agents" rather than customers -- maybe give us more incentives to use their services in a timely way, like playing matchmaker with publishing company representatives. They might send out reminders to ask us if we have any of our own books to stock, or send out surveys regarding what we'd like to sell through them. Maybe put out their own "new in the bookstore" newsletter, featuring books and merchandise that we all might buy. I can't speak for other campus' bookshops, but I usually only hear from mine when they sound out a letter to faculty, reminding them that the deadline for orders has passed and that they better get to it. I'm sure there's more they -- and I -- could do to improve our relationship.

But like I said -- I don't blame them. They've got their hands full with all sorts of problems to juggle. I think all bookstores do. As a writer, teacher, and scholar, I've been witness to many changes in the bookselling economy -- and none of it has been very pretty. I'd like to think that the internet and open source textbooks are the future, but I've been hearing the same thing about electric automobiles my whole lifetime, too, in regard to energy crises and wars. The fact is, profit-making will guide the system until the back breaks in any commercial endeavor. Right now it's bending.

Okay, so I went from complaining about one book's revision (which is really the publisher's fault) to the collapse of the entire bookstore economy in this blog entry. Some hasty generalizations in there. Just musing aloud...."my actual thoughts will not be available until May 2004; they are currently being revised. -- The Author"

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.