Students These Days

A long time ago, half-way into my first semester as a faculty member in the Biology Department at Lincoln, I realized that to be an effective teacher, I have to meet the students where they are. In other words, I cannot expect our students to be anything other than who they are or know anything more than they do. To fail at this basic tenet is to set our students up for failure.

I was reminded of this thought as I read a blog-post titled “Ugly Consequences of Complaining about ‘Students These Days’” by Maryellen Weimer. The link to the blog can be found below. Here is an excerpt:

Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. Venting, especially to a trusted colleague, helps us put things in perspective. At some point, though, venting morphs into complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. And that’s when it starts getting dangerous, because it affects how we teach.

By meeting the students where they are, we may stop complaining and instead put energy into designing effective and engaging learning experiences for our students. If we keep expecting students to have background knowledge or skills that they simply never acquired, we are helping them fail.

You can probably imagine what this approach has meant for my teaching; I constantly assess my students’ prior knowledge to make sure that they have the background knowledge or skills that I expect; more often than not they don’t. Often, our students are unable to transfer skills from one class to another. Other times they simply have never learned a concept. Either way, I try to find ways to help them gain the knowledge so that they can succeed in my class. It doesn’t take more than a quick reminder sometimes, maybe a worksheet or two, or an online reading quiz that requires students to review previously learned concepts.

You may call this coddling, or hand-holding, maybe even enabling – and I admit that it would be if I never raised the bar but kept expecting them not to acquire knowledge. However, I have found that teaching my students how to swim before I throw them in the water helps them succeed. I am doing my best to meet them where they are – and then moving on to new experiences so that they can become lifelong learners.

Do you find yourself complaining about students? How do you think it effects your teaching? How do you meet your students where they are? 

Link to the full blog-post:

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/ugly-consequences-complaining-students-days/?utm_campaign=Faculty+Focus&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=37706321&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-84c1Ysxpkk2ozz9oBw8UIUuc1Gt_2dVjiYrD99iscHSC4cHWl4eokOHm969zMUAJGzTjbX0dDYW_m2WlvdxwoRjzaQKA&_hsmi=37706321

Online or Not Online: The Question Persists

I had just left a Distance Learning committee meeting this week when Elizabeth Pitt, librarian, passed along a “Fast Fact” from College and Research News, October 2015. It summarizes the main findings of a Gallup poll commissioned by Inside Higher Ed last year that surveyed 2,799 faculty members and 288 academic technology administrators.

According to the summary, “A majority of faculty members with online teaching experience say those courses produce results inferior to in-person courses. They say most online courses lack meaningful student-teacher interaction. Only about one-quarter of faculty respondents (26 percent) say online courses can produce results equal to in-person courses.What should we make of these results?  

If even experienced online teachers believe by such a large margin that online education is inferior to face-to-face learning, should we question whether our efforts here at Lincoln to put together a distance education plan—the purpose of the DL committee meeting I had attended—are warranted?  At most should we be planning distance learning options only for those populations we cannot feasibly meet in person?  

Or is that majority opinion simply skepticism without foundation, our human preference for what has always been and our innate distrust of the new?  Do you come down on the side of the studies that have shown no significant correlation between mode of delivery and learning outcomes? 

So your question for today (come on, you know that you need to take a break from thinking about midterms) is a simple yes/no one.  Do you personally believe that online teaching and learning—assuming the necessary technology, course design, and instructional expertise—can be as effective as classroom-based instruction?  (Of course if you have any additional energy, I would love to hear the reasoning behind your answer, whichever side of the issue you champion.)

Expanding Our Role Model Role

The idea that as professors we should be good role models for our students is certainly not anything new or surprising.  We all take care to speak professionally, proofread our handouts carefully, demonstrate our scholarly integrity by citing sources for ideas we use, show up on time--and prepared--for class. etc.  An article by David Googlar in The Chronicle of Higher Education, though, did make me rethink that role model issue.   

Among other suggestions, Googlar advises that rather than just modeling expertise, we should also “model stupidity”—showing students that not knowing an  answer is an acceptable and important part of being a scholar and then showing them the thinking processes we use to try to find a reasonable answer.

“Almost everything we do in the classroom -- the way we speak, how we make use of technologies, what we demand of our students -- provides a model for them in some way,” Googlar argues.

Do you agree?  In what ways do you see yourself as a role model in the classroom? What are the actions/attributes/awarenesses that you consciously try to model as you teach?