As scholars, we are always looking for high quality research related to our disciplines and the courses we teach.  Why not apply that lens to learning?  The field of cognitive psychology has developed dramatically over the past 20 years or so, and we now have quite a large body of research describing how people learn.  I don’t want to overwhelm you with data, so I am going to create a series of posts that describe nine primary principles of learning and how they apply in our classrooms.

The nine principles and some of the examples in these posts come from the Lifelong Leaning at Work and at Home initiative website.  This initiative was started by a group of cognitive researchers dedicated to applying cognitive science research to lifelong learning and higher education.   The website has detailed links to more in-depth information and references if you would like to dig deeper.

• The single most important variable in promoting long-term retention and transfer is “practice at retrieval”–learners generate responses, with minimal retrieval cues, repeatedly, over time.” (http://psyc.memphis.edu/learning/principles/index.shtml) 

This just means that students need multiple opportunities to recall and use information or skills that you want them to remember after your class is over.  If students merely re-read notes or books without practicing retrieving what they have heard and read, they will not retain that material for long.  My first reaction to this statement was “well, duh” but the “single most important” label made me pay more attention, as well as the mention of transfer.

If this statement is correct (and there is quite a lot of research to back it up) what does it imply for the classroom?  What can we do to help students practice retrieving important information?  Here are a few possibilities:

• Align your classroom activities, assignments and tests so that students must repeatedly access the same information.  For example, ask students questions that require them to recall and demonstrate understanding of material from earlier in the course.  You may want to pose a probing question and have everyone write down a response before you ask for volunteers – that way the entire class gets to practice retrieving information.  Otherwise, only the individuals called on will be engaging in this important task.  This technique also allows you to correct any misunderstanding and it shows students the cumulative nature of learning.  At first, you may get blank stares but if you do this consistently students are more likely to get the message.
• Test repeatedly on the same material.  My undergraduate self hated the cumulative final exam with great passion, but it is an excellent method for promoting long term retention and retrieval – but only if the material has already been tested earlier in the semester.   You also can get this effect by using chapter quizzes and then repeating important material on exams.  Even giving a unit exam on the last day of class and then a cumulative final a week later will help with retention of recently presented information.   Research suggests that spacing the testing out across the semester leads to better results, and that for maximum effect recall should be somewhat delayed.  As we have probably all experienced, testing or recall efforts that occur immediately after teaching or reading material tends to produce short term positive effects that disappear quickly.   So you might want to start by giving a reading quiz perhaps a week after the reading was discussed in class.  Questions on the same material could appear on a mid-term or be incorporated into a later assignment and then tested again on a comprehensive final.  For maximum effect, the student should be using recall methods like short answer questions or essays and not recognition methods such as multiple-choice, true-false or matching.
• Encourage students to question themselves or each other instead of re-reading notes or texts.  Give a series of open-ended questions as a study guide or have students bring open-ended questions to class, exchange them, and practice answering them.  Online quizzes can work as recall practice too, although they tend to be more recognition focused.  Assign online quizzes strategically to keep the students repeatedly working with the material over the course of the semester.
• If you do not use tests, you can still require students to recall and reuse previously learned material for projects, case studies or other activities.  Varying the method of retrieval e.g. using an in-class exercise or presentation instead of a test, enhances retention, since it gives students multiple cues for recalling information.  Material that becomes embedded in a narrative or other rich experience is more likely to be retained (but more on that later).
• When asking students to retrieve previously learned material, try to provide as few hints (“retrieval cues” in cognitive jargon) as possible.  Thus, a free response essay or an application that requires the student to recall material is better at promoting retention than a multiple choice question that requires only recognition of the correct answer.
• Give students immediate feedback on their answers to avoid them practicing and learning incorrect material.  When you are working on this kind of long term learning, you want to make sure it is correct!

While these ideas and suggestions can help us design courses that maximize students’ ability to remember and transfer information more effectively, we still have to decide which material needs to be emphasized in this way.  We don’t have the time to require frequent testing and recall of all or even most of the material in a typical course, so it is vital for us to distinguish between material that must be automatically available versus material that can and should be looked up as needed.  The current wealth of easily accessible online information has made this a difficult question, but looking at basic conceptual frameworks, core concepts and strategies is a good place for most of us to start. Using a cognitively informed approach asks us to be more intentional about identifying and choosing the most important material in the course and strategically requiring students to recall it multiple times in multiple ways.  It may require rethinking some aspects of your course, but the reward is longer retention and better transfer of your course’s most important concepts.

Most of this post has been summarized and paraphrased from http://psyc.memphis.edu/learning/principles/lp3.shtml

Next up:  Varying Learning Methods

Not surprisingly, the most commonly endorsed strategy was “taking careful notes in class” which was endorsed by 88% of freshmen and 86% of seniors.  Unfortunately, many students were not doing much with those notes after taking them (and many of us may wonder how careful those notes really are).  Only about two-thirds of each group said they reviewed their notes after class, and only about three-quarters of either group went back and organized their notes to make them more meaningful.

When it came to completing reading assignments, around 80% of both groups reported that they “identified key information” in their reading.   However only two-thirds reported that they stayed focused while reading course and avoided distractions during studying. Sixty percent or fewer of the students who responded took notes while reading.   How effectively can they be identifying key information if they are distracted, unfocused and not taking notes?

More active strategies were used by even fewer students.  Only about half of those responding said they created their own examples to help them study, or outlined major topics or ideas from their study materials.

Finally, while three-quarters of the students surveyed said that they “set goals before starting academic tasks”, fewer sought help when they did not understand, and only about half of freshmen and fewer than half of seniors ever discussed effective study strategies with anyone.  The only other strategy that was chosen by 80% or more of both groups was “connected to learning things you already knew”.  This is an excellent strategy, but one wonders at what level this is happening given some of the other responses.

The clear implication of these findings is that our students really don’t know what it means to study effectively and efficiently.  For decades, research in cognitive psychology and education has demonstrated the need for learners to actively engage with material if they are going to truly learn and remember it.  If students are not spontaneously adopting active study strategies, we can help them by building these strategies into our course requirements.  Most of us do try to help students link new knowledge to prior knowledge, but there are more concrete things we can also do.  For example, requiring some kind of written response to readings such as notes, response logs or responses to questions based on course readings helps students learn to identify what is important and to concentrate while reading. Asking them to create study guides that involve outlining, organizing and/or summarizing their class notes and readings will promote the kind of higher level thinking that we are trying to foster. When students create case examples or problems, write potential exam questions, or otherwise actively use course material, they are more likely to develop habits of deep studying that lead to deeper learning.

Fine for freshmen, perhaps, but shouldn’t upper level or graduate students be able to do this on their own?  At least according to these NSSE results, the differences in responses between freshmen and seniors was minimal, which suggests that students are not internalizing effective study strategies as they progress through undergraduate education.  It also suggests that beginning graduate students are unlikely to have highly developed study skills.  Some schools have attempted to address the issue by requiring study skills, orientation and/or critical thinking courses or workshops, but these tend to be ineffective unless the skills are somehow embedded into a larger topic or them.  Robert Leamson quotes the response of a failing student when asked why he was not using the success strategies that he had learned in a freshman orientation course.  “You mean we were supposed to actually do all the stuff in that book?”  (Leamson, 1999, p. 41)    I think that by working these skills into many of our course requirements we are likely to reach a much broader audience as well as ensure that they “actually do” what we know works.

What strategies do you use to help students develop better learning habits?

To read the entire article Major Engagement (which addresses a number of other interesting findings and issues from the NSSE) go to

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/17/nsse-2011-measures-student-engagement-major?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=twitterfeed#ixzz1dzE5czJM

Leamson, R. (1999) Thinking about teaching and learning.  Sterling, VA:Stylus.

Your midterm grades are in (I hope) and some of your students are about to get a wake-up call about their performance in your class. You may be somewhat depressed about the number of students who are failing or close to it. But many highly successful teachers, entrepreneurs and researchers believe that failure is a critical part of the learning process. It’s what students think and do about failure that makes the difference.

Student responses to failure are shaped by several factors; one of these is their attitude toward failure. Students who come in the door believing that intellectual ability is fixed and cannot be changed (entity theorists) see failure as a confirmation of their lack of ability. If this is what you believe, why would you try again? Students who believe that intellectual ability can be increased through hard work (incremental theorists) are more open to seeing the inherent challenge in a failure.

Entity thinkers focus more on getting that A because they see it as a confirmation of their ability – how many of you have heard “but I’m an A student, how could I get a B (or C!) in this class?” Students who truly believe they can’t do math or philosophy or economics because they lack some essential mental quality are going to give up the first time they see a low score.

Our society and our schools often foster entity thinking, without necessarily intending to do so. I think it’s one example of John Tagg’s dichotomy between espoused theory (Take intellectual risks!) and theory-in-use (Do it right the first time because you won’t get another chance!).  If you’re faced with a classroom of entity theorists who play it safe to avoid failure or give up after an initial failure, how can you encourage them to embrace failure?

Tell failure stories – lots of them. Students need to hear about the failures of famous people they know and well-known people in your field. They also need to hear about the mistakes you have made, how many drafts you wrote or projects you tossed. Even better, take some risks in your class, and when one of your ideas doesn’t work, use it as an illustration. The technology doesn’t work today? Show them how to cope with failures that aren’t even your fault! Students need to see models for how to cope with failure graciously, how to analyze failure and learn from it. It’s one of the most useful life skills you’ll ever teach. Talking about the process of trying, failing and improving also normalizes failure and makes it less threatening and more of an opportunity. Sometimes talking quite directly about these types of attitudes and asking students to think about their own beliefs can help them begin to let go of these attitudes.

Help students practice learning from failures. Have students analyze their performance in your class. Why did they do poorly on a test? What made the paper they wrote a C or D instead of an A or a B? Don’t let them say “I didn’t study/work hard enough” and stop there. How did they study? How long, what did they do, when and where did they do it? How could they have improved? Who could they talk to about learning better ways to study? Have them re-write answers to test questions (for partial credit), re-submit or critique their papers. Videotape their presentations (the CTE has mini-video cameras!) and ask them to watch and analyze them.  Critiquing completed works is good, but it’s even better if there is the opportunity to apply the critique to improve the work.

Encourage failures in class. My music teachers have always said that it’s better to make a mistake confidently and loudly rather than refuse to make the commitment. This is true in class discussion, problem solving and all kinds of creative projects. Give bonus points and praise for a risk taking students even if (ESPECIALLY if) their idea goes down in flames. Encourage other students to see questioning and risk taking as admirable. And do not subtly excuse failure – “that’s a really hard one”. These kinds of statements are meant to be reassuring, but they also imply that the student can’t do hard work. Better to say something like “this one takes awhile to figure out – keep at it.” This tells the students that if they are willing to do the work, they will get there. And that it’s completely normal not to figure out a problem or answer a question on the first try. If you are feeling playful you could even have a competition for the biggest and best mistake of the day!

Now, I know that some of your students fall more easily into the category of passive failures – their motivation, their readiness for college, or maybe their personal problems are getting in the way of their success. Their attitudes towards failure may not have much to do with their current problems. Dealing with student failures, like dealing with students, is not one size fits all. But helping all students learn to embrace failure as a necessary part of learning and life is a goal well worth seeking. Think about the rest of the semester. How could you incorporate more failure in your course?

If you’re interested in further reading, Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion was written for k-12 audiences but has applications in post-secondary education and beyond.

McMahon describes how critical thinking practice works in his class.  He gives students related texts–flood stories, for example–and asks them to “1) group everything we know about the stories by what is common to them; 2) start separating the stories by what distinguishes them; and 3) evaluate the stories by a specified criteria (for example, realism, destructiveness, moralism, and so on).”

“To teach predictive validity,” he continues, “I might engage in a close reading of a story or poem—phrase by phrase or line by line—and ask a series of questions after each line about the things that could happen next.”

What do you do to teach critical thinking?

Specifying who did what to whom forces writers to clarify their ideas and usually livens their prose.

Of course, our workshop also acknowledges disciplinary differences since the sciences often favor passive voice for its objective veneer and emphasis on results rather than agents.

But as linguist Geoffrey Pullum points out in a rant for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, a rule like “don’t use the passive voice”–like all writing rules–begs to be broken.  If good writing could be boiled down to simple vaccines, we could simply innoculate our students.

So, I’ve been trying to think about how we can maintain that true stability Robbins describes, or at least get closer to it.  In my personal quest, I’ve experimented with just about every type of productivity enhancing gimmick and gizmo out there.  Some work for me, some others may work for you.  If you want some specific ideas, I’m happy to share them.  But mostly what I come back to is an attitude adjustment – this IS our work.  Our job is to help students grow and develop as learners and as people.  We are the park rangers; balance is what we do.

So what are some ways that we can balance more effectively? In the classroom I find that pre-planning course activities very thoroughly and having backups for the times when the technology fails or an activity bombs gives me the confidence to try something new that might not work.  I know if the fire gets out of control, I have resources to bring it back under control.   But if I get too attached to my plan or my syllabus, then I don’t take advantage of those learning opportunities that arise unexpectedly, no spark gets lit, and my class becomes rigid, dull and overgrown with weeds.  Stopping, asking questions, listening closely to students and reading their nonverbal behaviors can tell you if they are lighting up or not.

Outside of class, maintaining a good balance between order and disorder for me means trying to find technology that makes my life easier, like using Gmail labels and stars, saving files in Dropbox so I can access them from anywhere, and using an online to do list (I use Toodledo, despite the stupid name).  It’s doing a regular “mind dump” of every single thing I am supposed to be working on and then identifying what actions need to be taken when.  It’s building in Friday afternoon reflection time to tie up the loose ends, update the list for next week, and then allowing myself some down time.  We all have different ways of maintaining balance. Some people only check their email at certain times each day.  Others prepare a week’s worth of food on the weekend and live on the leftovers.  None of these strategies always works but at least we’re acknowledging the issue and trying to figure it out.  The important part again, is not getting so rigidly organized that your life goes up in flames when a student or a colleague or a family member suddenly needs more time than you expected.  If you have systems in place, you can quickly figure out what’s most important and bookmark the rest so you can get back to it when the crisis is over.   And you can share your strategies with your students too, as you help them figure out how to structure and prepare for your course.

Sometimes though, the fire just gets out of control.  Then we often ignore, rationalize and intellectualize the situation to avoid that anxious feeling of being overwhelmed.  When students do this, we shake our heads in disbelief.  How could they not have anticipated this problem?  Didn’t they see the smoke? Then we go and do the same.   But most of them have a lot less life experience than most of us do, so why do we expect that they will know what to do?  What helps you when you’re in an overload situation?  Could that same strategy help your students?

So how is this post a “teaching tip”?  Good question.  As I write I think the message I’m getting from that big teaching tip generator in the sky is that we should have more compassion for ourselves AND our students as we juggle the demands of 21^st century living.  Faculty and students alike try, succeed for awhile, get behind and then have to recover.  We hope it’s an upward spiral but it’s certainly a lifelong learning process. Could it be that one of the most important things we need to help our students learn is how to balance order and disorder in their lives? Especially for freshmen, helping students develop better life management skills is critical if they are to succeed in their classes, at the University and for life.  Some people will undoubtedly think that this should not be our problem.  Students should have learned this already, they shouldn’t need us to “hold their hands” or teach them things we learned on their own.  All I can say is – our students are where they are.  If this is what will help them learn more effectively, that’s what they need.  We have to deal with the fire in front of us, not the well-tended garden we think we ought to have.

According to Allen, “your ability to deal with surprise, elegantly and proactively, is your personal and organizational competitive edge. You just need to ensure that your systems can keep things under control from any angle, with appropriate distinctions between what’s movable and what’s not. Then turning on a dime is an effortless spin instead of a clumsy crash and burn.”

How did you develop life management skills yourself?  How can we help students develop theirs?

As anyone who’s been through a WI workshop knows, I’m a fan of carefully guided peer review.  Even expert writers need feedback from readers as they draft and revise.  Discussing work in progress can engage students more deeply with the material; thinking about how a text conveys its message can building reading as well as writing skills.  Well done, peer review is a win-win assignment—creating an opportunity for student learning and smoothing papers’ roughest edges before you comment or grade.

But many of us have also had experiences when peer review failed, giving students false confidence, for instance, after a round of vacuous “good job” comments.

USF’S RUBRIC

The key to worthwhile peer review lies in the guidance you provide.  When the University of South Florida academic assessment team piloted a structured peer review process in several courses, it made many faculty converts.  Engineering professor Ralph Fehr commented,

“When introduced to the peer review process, I was somewhat skeptical as to how much, if any, it would improve the quality of the students’ writing. I was doubtful that the results would justify the effort put into the review process. After several semesters of participation in the Peer Review Pilot Project, I have seen substantial improvement in the organization and structure of most of the essays evaluated. I have also observed an increased level of collaboration and interaction among the students in non-writing assignments, which I am confident is a result of the peer review training. I will continue to integrate the peer review process into my courses to allow my students to continue to improve their communication skills.”

USF uses a rubric called the CLAQWA.  You can get a sense of it from USF’s 2006 “Assessment Brief.”  I’m on the trail of the revised version mentioned (emails are bouncing), to post on our MUIR wiki.  You can preview it in Appendix B of Irene Suzanne Penner’s 2010 dissertation, “Comparison of Effects of Cognitive Level and Quality Writing Assessment (CLAQWA) Rubric on Freshman College Student Writing.” 

In straightforward language, the CLAQWA looks at 15 “traits,” elaborating five criteria under each one.  I leave one as an example in my outline summary below:

ASSIGNMENT PARAMETERS

Level Trait 1: Assignment Requirements

Level Trait 2: Main Idea

5 The writer clearly has and maintains a main idea throughout.

4 The main idea is clear, although a rare extraneous element is introduced.

3 The paper has a main idea, but additional unrelated ideas distract the reader.

2 The main idea is not maintained or it is unclear.

1 The paper lacks a main idea or appears to reflect the writer’s “free association.”

Level Trait 3: Audience

Level Trait 4: Purpose

ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY

Level Trait 5: Opening

Level Trait 6: Coherence Devices

Level Trait 7: Paragraph Construction

Level Trait 8: Closing

ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT: REASONING & CONSISTENCY

Level Trait 9: Reasoning

Level Trait 10: Quality of Details

Level Trait 11: Quantity of Details

LANGUAGE: CONTEXTUAL AND AUDIENCE APPROPRIATENESS

Level Trait 12: Word Choice

Level Trait 13: Comprehensibility

Level Trait 14: Sentence Construction

Level Trait 15: Point of View

GRAMMAR AND MECHANICS: OBSERVATION OF STANDARD EDITED ENGLISH

Level Trait 16: Grammar and Mechanics [I don’t know why this is out of order in Penner’s appendix]

A number of peer review rubrics/guidelines are circulating on the Web, up for “citation” and adaptation.  I’m happy to go searching for a model that might work for your class.

LEARNING RESOURCE CENTER

Don’t forget the notion of “guidance” if you recommend that your students use the LRC.  You can arm your students with specific questions so that the peer tutor doesn’t have to try to make sense of the whole paper in half an hour.  Your student might say, “My professor asked me to come here to talk about my introduction … to see if my body paragraphs tie back to my thesis … to think about introducing quotes in my paper….”  Remind students to bring your written assignment with them to the LRC.

The LRC will be missing Liz Messman this fall (and moving to a trailer, temporarily, at some date TBA), but it has a great staff.  I hope to have some ongoing conversations with the writing tutors.

I met some of them at the segment of training Liz gave last week:

1. (veteran) Erica Prong, graduate assistant in the humanities
2. (veteran—but she’s on study abroad this fall, I believe) Erin Evans, psychology
3. (new) Krysti Hartman, fashion merchandising
4. (new) Anna Macedonia, art education
5. (new) Niven McCall, history
6. (new) Adrianne Morris, English
7. (new) Nicholas Papadakis, politics (and philosophy, I believe he said)
8. (new) Melany Su, biology
9. (new) Casey Trottier, business

Also on the writing list but not at that training:

1. (new) Rochelle Coates, graphic design (will do makeup training)
2. (veteran) Rachael Raske, psychology (she’s done writing training before)
3. (veteran) Cyndi Trang, biology (she’s done writing training before)

Click here for a list of the entire staff.

SMARTHINKING

There’s now a tab in Blackboard that will take students to Smarthinking (no need to go through tools).  Preliminary data from last year’s pilot suggests a good result: LRC use was up slightly despite the introduction of Smarthinking’s online “e-structor” feedback, which student writers often sought when the LRC was closed.  Again, remind your students to cut and paste from your assignment (this is not the place for guesstimating!) into Smarthinking.  You may ask students to attach a copy of their feedback.

If you’re working with peer review, let me know how it goes.  And please, feed our bank of materials on the wiki!

~Sylvia, x6478

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Welcome back!

On my faculty developers’ listserv, we have been discussing the practice of writing an end of semester “case study” of one or more classes.   At one institution, every instructor is asked to critically examine each of their courses and reflect in writing on what went well, what did not go so well, potential ways to improve the course for the next offering, etc. This exercise was not part of the annual summative evaluation (although it might come in very handy), but was meant to provide a useful structure for analyzing and reviewing teaching progress.

Now, I think most of us do some kind of basic looking back at the end of the semester, but I don’t know if anyone at Marymount is doing anything quite this comprehensive (if you are, let me know!).  When I read about it, I first thought that it would take a non-trivial amount of time, particularly if taken seriously.  However, I think that the process would provide benefits that might just make that time worthwhile.  These are the benefits I see (so far anyway):

• If you only teach a course once a year (or even less), it’s hard to remember what you intended to change unless you keep some kind of records.  While I tend to scrawl a few notes on the old syllabus and assignment sheets and throw them into the course folder, after a year these often seem incomplete and sometimes incomprehensible.  How the future me would appreciate a thoughtful analysis in complete sentences! And since the future me is the only person who gets this, I don’t have to worry about editing it for public viewing.
• I’m pretty convinced that I would actually process more deeply and learn more from writing up my reflections than even just thinking deeply.  If there is one thing I believe in more every semester, it’s the power of writing to actually help thinking happen, not just record the thinking that occurred.  Writing is learning, and I want to learn things that will help me teach more effectively.
• I think using this process could help me remember points I want to make about my teaching performance during the annual assessment process, for example by identifying teaching strengths and weaknesses and show how I am addressing them.  So, this process could save time while writing that document, since essentially I will have done some of the work for it in advance.
• Finally, this process will help me identify where I want to improve as an instructor, what kind of reading I should be doing or what kind of sessions to attend at teaching conferences and what questions I want to ask my colleagues about how they handle specific teaching issues.

A couple of listserv responders suggested possible questions and formats for a course review or case study.  One is fairly structured toward the course itself and asks questions like:

• What do I think of the course’s learning objectives?  How might they need to be changed and how hard would that be?  Do they feed into other courses or program objectives?
• How well did students meet each objective?  What evidence am I using and is there better evidence that I could collect?  How well can I even judge how well students met each objective?  Was there an objective I really didn’t measure that well, or at all?
• Did my assignments help students to meet my course objectives?  Do some of my assignments not really relate to any of my course objectives and goals?
• Was the time I and my students spent on assignments and activities (e.g. completing assignments, giving feedback for and grading assignments, planning class activities) worth the academic payoff?

Another, more global approach was suggested by independent consultant Alice Cassidy and focuses on the classic paper, Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, Chickering & Gamson (1987).  Don’t be put off by the title if you teach graduate students.  The concepts are universal.

Good practice in undergraduate education:

1. Encourages contact between students and faculty
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students
3. Encourages active learning,
4. Gives prompt feedback,
5. Emphasizes time on task,
6. Communicates high expectations, and
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Cassidy asks instructors to reflect on how they are implementing each of the 7 principles as well as thinking about the following three questions:

* What do you do in class time, in meetings with students and through design of assignments?  How do you take part in professional development activities to explore more about these?

* In what ways do you document your work through a teaching portfolio/dossier or other material?

* When and how do you explain these to your students?

I’m definitely going to try this approach after my final grades are in.  If you already do something like this, please share your process with us, or other thoughts you have about ways we can learn from our teaching experiences.

I’ve spent the last day at an advising conference, which has prompted me to concentrate on the advisory role we play with students.  Whether or not they are your official advisees, giving feedback, support, suggestions and difficult doses of reality is an inescapable part of the faculty role.  How do we respond to these students appropriately, especially when we’re annoyed by their behavior?

Peter Hagen from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey  provided one perspective on this issue during his presentation on the role of narrative, metaphor and hermaneutics in advising.  While the following thoughts were inspired by his presentation, they are undoubtedly filtered through my own interpretations and certainly capture only a portion of his argument.

Narrative – every student has a story.  (So does everybody else, for that matter – we are a story-telling species.)  Sometimes we think we’ve heard them all, fiction and non-fiction alike. But how do we interpret this story?  How does the student see the arc of their life and experiences?  Is theirs a success story?  Or is it a story of redemption, overcoming odds to succeed at last?  Or a story of contamination where a good story inevitably goes bad?  Understanding how the student sees him or herself can help us understand what they expect, and how they may interpret and structure situations so that what they expect comes true.  If the student’s story shows them as members of a group to whom loyalty is more important than individual success, how will that affect their performance in your class?  Do they see themselves as agents or as buffeted helplessly by external forces?  Instead of brushing off those crazy stories, what if we tried to dig deeper and find the conflicts between their personal narratives and the norms and expectations of higher education?  What implicit assumptions do student stories contain and how can we go about making them explicit and confronting them?  This is not to excuse students from meeting the requirements of our programs, but to help them understand how their stories both help and hinder them in achieving their goals.

Metaphor – what is your metaphor for teaching?  What is your students’ metaphor for learning?  Do they expect learning to be hydraulic — you pour knowledge into their brains and they leak it out all over their final exam? (And then it’s gone!)  Do they think of courses as boxes that are unconnected to each other or to real life?  How can we shift metaphors that limit student and faculty understanding of learning, teaching and education into others that offer new meaning?  What if thought of teaching as more akin to coaching? What if student’s metaphors shifted too?  Could that affect their understanding of their responsibility for learning?  How would it change our understanding of good teaching?

Hermaneutics – how can we learn to “read” students – what is the real meaning behind their actions?  Instead of throwing up our hands at the lame excuses, can we look beneath the surface to see what is really going on?  I think this is related to both the stories they tell themselves (and us) and the metaphors that shape their thinking.  Think of the student who turns in work late, or not at all.  What is their action saying?  Is it “I know I can’t live up to expectations so I’m not going to risk failure.”  Or “I have never had to be responsible for myself before and I don’t know how to do it.”  Perhaps “My other responsibilities (or desires) are more important than my commitment to myself and my learning.”  Or even “I don’t think rules really apply to me, because they haven’t in the past.”  We can apply the same sanction to each of those students.  But will we have asked those students to really question their beliefs and assumptions, evaluated their choices and learned from them?

For some people, I am sure that this emphasis on looking beneath the surface of student behaviors sounds dangerously like counseling.  Perhaps I’m showing my own disciplinary bias here, but I believe that if we really want to educate the whole person, we need to see the whole person.

So, just what you want to hear at the end of the semester.  It’s much easier to just give an extension (or not), assign a grade and move on.  Digging deeper takes more time and effort. But pick one or two students, maybe the ones that really bug you.  See if you can see them from a different perspective.  At the very least, you may be less annoyed with them.  At best, you will make a difference in their lives.  Isn’t that why we are here?