EDITORIAL. Roger Moore .........................2

Some Reflections on Assessment, Arshad Ahmad .................................................3

Oral French Proficiency, Evaluation, Alice Allain ..................................5

Responding to Student Evaluations of Your Teaching, Eileen M. Herteis..........6

Escaping the Weir, Russ Hunt and Thom Parkhill ......................7

‘What if …?’ Desmond Hunter.................8

“And who shall assess the assessors?” Roger Moore .................10

A Terrible WOMBAT, Tony Rhinelander ............................................... 11

A View from the Field of Foreign Languages, Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes ......12

Teacher, teach thyself? Andrew Titus ....13

What Am I... We... They Doing Wrong? P.G. Toner ..............14

A Teaching Conversation, Rosemary Clews and Roger Moore ........15

The Byrd-Einstein Scale, Earnest Hummingbird ................................17

Stimulating Class Discussions, David Ingham ...............................................18

Transforming the College Classroom Experience, Martin Kutnowski ........................................19

A Journey of Discovery, Christian Mbarga .........................................20

Teaching with Hypertext, Trevor Sawler ................................................21

Finding a Détente Between Research and Teaching, Tony Tremblay ...............................................22

In memory of John McKendy, Sylvia Hale .....................................................24

ISSN 1916-4629 Teaching Perspectives (Print) • ISSN 1916-4637 Teaching Perspectives (Online) Winter 2009

2

EDITORIALRoger MooreTeaching Perspectives 11 contains 18 articles and, with 28 pages is the largest issue yet. The central theme is A & E, which some think of as Arts and Entertainment, but which I interpret as Assessment and Evaluation. There are 10 articles on this theme, 7 general articles on teaching, and we end with a very moving tribute to John McKendy, written by Sylvia Hale.

I have arranged the articles in each section in alphabetical order, by surname. Those whose names appear in bold were invited to write guest editorials, and I wish to thank them for doing so. Their presence in our magazine greatly strengthens the validity of our readings. In this fashion, Arshad Ahmad (Concordia), the current director of the 3M National Teaching Fellowship Program, offers us some reflections on assessment and invites us to reflect carefully on what and whom we are assessing. He ends with this sentence: “Assessment then, is the mirror that can help us improve our teaching practice as much as it can help students to learn.” We must, quite simply, take our assessment very seriously.

Alice Allain sets out for us, in great detail, the New Brunswick Oral Proficiency Tests which she offers to her students and she explains that candidates are “evaluated according to their ability to converse in the language, their ease in using the language, and their clarity of communication.” Eileen Herteis (Mount Allison University) offers advice on how to react to the evaluations which students produce for us. “By all means, read and heed your students’ evaluations from last term,” she tells us, “but don’t let them paralyze or dispirit you.” Earnest Hummingbird invites us to explore the Byrd-Einstein feedback scale which provides instant feedback on student reactions to tests. Russ Hunt and Thom Parkhill argue convincingly for a pass-fail grade in at least some courses. Desmond Hunter (University of Ulster), himself a National Teaching fellow, invites us to speculate on what would happen if we lived in an ideal world and made some radical changes to our assessment procedures. In my own article, I touch on the differences between surface meaning and deep meaning and I ask the age old question: “And who shall assess the assessors?” Tony Rhinelander, our Professor Emeritus from History, defines the text term WOMBAT, and suggests that out current evaluation sheet might be just that: a WOMBAT! Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes (Universidad de Salamanca en Ávila) describes the changes currently being made to the European Evaluation system as courses and credits are made inter-changeable across the European Union. Andrew Titus suggests that as teachers, we should both assess ourselves and teach ourselves in a slightly different light. Finally, Peter Toner questions the results of the current teacher evaluation questionnaire and notes that in certain areas, such as helping students to think critically, we may not be doing as well as we might think.

In the section on teaching, David Ingham offers some very useful notes on stimulating class discussions. We all have our own methods for doing this, but much of this article is

useful both as a guide and a reminder. Martín Kutnowski develops the idea of the inner and outer circle of apprentices where all participate, according to their levels and skills, an idea based on that of medieval apprenticeship in guilds. Christian Mbarga describes his development in St. Thomas and shows us how the tree can be useful as a symbol of learning and knowledge. Rosemary Clews and I look back on our lengthy, and soon to be over, careers as academics. It is interesting to see how we move across our careers from the transferral of content to the importance of the person who receives that content. Trevor Sawler delivers an excellent presentation on the use of hyper-text: quite simply, we must, as teachers, keep up with the electronic times. Tony Tremblay, one of our Canada Research Chairs, explains how he integrates teaching and research in his classroom. This is an object lesson for all of us, incidentally, for research and teaching can, and should, be inter-related.

Finally, Sylvia Hale delivers a moving and enduring tribute to John McKendy. For John McKendy, teaching was “... a vocation and also a joy. John was always attentive to process, striving to actively involve students in their own learning.” More, “John encouraged close personal engagement with students. He set high standards for his students because it mattered to him that they come to see the structural practices and processes through which the patterns that we come to experience as ‘society’ are continually constituted, negotiated, and changed. The point of understanding social processes was to understand the parts that we ourselves play in constituting them, and to be able to intervene to create space for positive social change.”

I hope you enjoy Teaching Perspectives 11. It will, in all probability, be the last issue that I edit. I would like to thank all of you who have participated in the last 6 issues, under my editorship. So, here you all are, in alphabetical order, and a big thank you to each one of you for your hard work, deep thought, courtesy and cooperation: Arshad Ahmad, Alice Allain, Sheila Andrew, Rusty Bitterman, Michael Boudreau, Rosemary Clews, Brad Cross, Mike Dawson, Kim Fenwick, Cecilia Francis, Ian Fraser, Kate Frego, Sylvia Hale, Eileen Herteis, Mike Houlihan, Earnest Hummingbird, Russ Hunt, Desmond Hunter, David Ingham, Barry Joe, Dave Korotkov, Martín Kutnowski, Joe Masciulli, Michael Higgins, Colm Kelly, Gayle MacDonald, Sara MacDonald, Susan Machum, Ron Marken, Chris Mbarga, Kathleen McConnell, Mikail Molchonov, Shaun Narine, Mark Nyvlt, Brian Ouellette, Thom Parkhill, Tony Rhinelander, Don Robinson, Sonsoles Sánchez-Reyes, Jean Sauvageau, Trevor Sawler, Louis Schmier, Derek Simons, Andrew Titus, Peter Toner, Julia Torrie, Tony Tremblay, James Whitehead, Rodger Wilkie, and Ray Williams.

Over the last five years (2004-2009), 51 people have written for Teaching Perspectives. Of these, 40 are (or were) full time faculty members at St. Thomas University; 3 are members of the STU part-time faculty group; and 8 are guest writers from other institutions, among them 4 holders of 3M National Teaching Fellowships and 1 National Teaching Fellow from Northern Ireland. Teaching Perspectives has more than served its purpose, then, for approximately 33% of the full time faculty at STU have demonstrated their commitment to teaching by first thinking deeply about what they do in and out of class, then by analysing it, and

3

finally by writing for their university teaching magazine. To each and every one of you, a great big “THANK YOU”!

Some Reflections on AssessmentArshad Ahmad1992 3M National Teaching Fellow & STLHE Awards Program CoordinatorConcordia University, MontrealBlessing or Curse? The Merriam-Webster dictionary indicates that the word, “assess” is derived from Medieval Latin. An “Assessus”, was commonly used in the 15th century to sit beside and assist in the office of a judge. This might explain why the word “assess” continues to be used synonymously with judgment.

We look to the sports official to adjudicate when rules are broken; he “assesses a penalty”, during a hockey or football game. Or when the Canada Revenue Agency sends its “Notice of Assessment”, it informs on how much taxes are owed. Or more generally, we size up a situation or assess the importance or magnitude of a given problem.

Many experts would give an arm and a leg to be in the business of assessment. They would take pride, basking in the glory of their expertise and be revered for their insights. Yet, in the academe, the practice of assessment can be dreadful.

I have often asked participants at workshops and conferences to think of the first word that comes to mind after “assessment”. The most common responses tend to include: grading, time consuming, frustrating – indicating it is a burden and responsibility that they would rather delegate, automate or eliminate.

In my own department, some bemoan and blame those assessments which often reveal that their students don’t care, can barely read and write – and they point to a generation that defies minimal expectations. Many educators worry. Perhaps it is not surprising that with growing class sizes, fewer resources and an explosion of faculty responsibilities, assessment is seen as increasingly onerous. Accordingly, it elicits negative comments, a curse in the “last leg of learning” that many would rather avoid.

First or Last? When I started my teaching career, I was handed a course outline template where I made cosmetic changes. For many years, I was too busy and thrilled to teach and never really questioned the outline I inherited. Along came a Chair who was somewhat interested in curriculum development and encouraged younger faculty to attend workshops on course design.

The first step was to formulate course objectives or goals which were accompanied by verbs that helped to us to formulate measurable learning outcomes. Action goals were followed by the selection of appropriate content, its sequencing, relevance, currency and so on. We were also asked to think explicitly about teaching methods – lectures, case discussion, labs, field trips, etc., and consider problem based and enquiry methods as legitimate forms of pedagogy. Then came the buzz around instructional technology integration. I was quick to participate

and embrace online conferencing, devices and tools on the World Wide Web, classroom management software, podcasts, vidcasts, etc. It was not surprising that there was precious time left for that last step that we love to discuss but do little about in practice.

The last step for many is the assessment of student learning. Instructors always knew that this step was not only time consuming but also messy. The challenge of designing appropriate assessments to an increasingly diverse audience that could get vocal about fairness led to discrepant practices.

Like many others, I tweaked and recycled existing assessments - assignments and tests that students were not allowed to keep but were archived in the drawers of my colleagues. Then I was greeted by a proliferation of test banks, problem sets, instructor’s manuals etc that publishers had learned were likely going to influence adoptions. A textbook packaged with a suite of assessment materials continued to provide relief to instructors who either thought that assessment was someone else’s job, or left it as the last step that needed their attention.

If you have done something similar in designing a new course, you may not be surprised to hear that students tend to do the exact opposite. Students approach their learning after looking at how they will be assessed. They are quick to figure out their time on task(s) and strategies to get the work done after a quick look at the assessment scheme.

The amount time students will put into the course sometimes translates into how much effort they will put in to learn and succeed. This pragmatic approach goes hand in hand with their first impressions of our teaching abilities. Of these abilities, I have learned that students value fairness, empathy and compassion over competence, efficiency and passion.

The last item students tend to reflect upon are the learning outcomes that anchor the course. The ritual of distributing the course outline and discussing learning goals can be followed by an awkward silence, but as soon as possible changes in the assessment are on the table, you have their attention. One lesson from student is to reconsider the importance of assessment and try expending your effort backwards.

Why is this common? Think of a memorable teaching moment - when you elegantly explained a difficult concept followed by a deep insight that synthesized a series of other beautiful concepts. At this glorious moment, you are likely to get the question: “is this important for the exam”?

What about meeting students during office hours? Suppose you learn that students do value contact with faculty and often consider “access to the instructor” as a very important element in their course evaluations. Accordingly you make yourself available after class to chat with students and decide to extend your office hours. If you were expecting questions about your lecture, or course material or anticipating any expressions reflecting your student’s love of learning, you are likely to be disappointed. On many occasions you are probably going to get a grade related question or concern. “Sir, I put in the time…. How is this mark possible? What else do you expect from me?”

Deep or Surface Learning? Perhaps some answers

4

can be found in the design of various assessments we have come to use. According to leading experts in educational psychology, unless assessments are congruent and well aligned with learning goals, students are likely to learn at a superficial level. This may be puzzling, but studies reveal that this seems to be the case in many undergraduate programs.

Instructors can articulate higher order goals - talk about creating deep learning, personal meaning-making, changing belief systems, leadership, citizenship, and developing critical thinking skills… but if we do not have a way to assess whether these goals can be achieved, perhaps we should not be surprised that students remain stuck with lower levels of learning.

Why blame the students for asking surface level questions when much of what is tested uses memory and regurgitation? This is a central premise of Marton and Säljö (1976a, 1976b) from Sweden, who first coined the terms “deep” and “surface” approaches to learning. Revisited by Ramsden (1983) from England and more recently by Biggs from Australia – these psychologists refer to “deep learning” as an approach that emphasizes the pursuit of meaning and understanding for its own sake.

Deep learners appear to be largely intrinsically motivated. The act of learning is its own reward, and the major goal of such learners is to integrate new learning and ideas into their existing understanding.

Surface learners on the other hand are primarily motivated to meet minimum task requirements (e.g. to pass the course), and they see learning as mainly a matter of reproducing information without any particular interest in its meaning.

Of course all of us frequently engage in surface learning just to get through the many tasks we face in our everyday lives, and surface learning may indeed be appropriate for many routine matters. But to meet the challenges of change and complexity in modern society, university students inevitably need to use learning approaches that stress depth – in the sense of conceptual understanding and integration of new knowledge with existing ideas, to solve complex and often novel or unanticipated problems.

One ambitious longitudinal investigation of 540 students by Watkins and Hattie revealed that students’ learning orientations in fact became progressively more surface over the three years of their university studies. They attributed their results primarily to the examination system which, they concluded, discouraged adoption of deeper learning approaches.

While other studies offer more positive results about effective teaching interventions it is important to repeat that, if instructors are not sure whether our assessments measure deep approaches to learning, or if we simply avoid assessments for deep learning, we should not be surprised that students are learning surface level stuff.

Marking the End or a Beginning? A rather obvious, but often overlooked point is that while many of us see assessment as the end of a learning cycle, it is actually the starting point. Or it is part of a process and not a destination. Assessment milestones help both the teacher

and the learner to make adjustments.

As a student, some of the most valuable lessons I learned about my discipline was when I was allowed to struggle (with some hope) that I could turn the situation around, or when I learned about my limitations. I needed space to make the adjustments. It was not so much a second chance as a challenge packaged with encouragement that I could believe in turning the situation around. Hope in believing I could influence a change in my attitude and behaviour, and eventually translated into a new way to learn.

Assessment exercises clearly provide opportunities for students to receive feedback. For successful students, these opportunities help to reinforce learning strategies that are working for them. For students that are struggling, these are golden occasions for improvement. They are critical for reflection and change.

Whereas, in teaching, I learned that I had to consciously build ongoing (formative) assessments as I lectured in order to gauge whether the audience was learning what I intended them to. Taking a poll, using clickers, asking for the muddiest point, questioning, and silence are now part of a repertoire that encourages the development of my own meta-cognition and what Donald Schon refers to as reflection-in-action.

It seems that when assessment becomes seamlessly integrated with all other aspects of instruction, it neither marks the end nor a beginning. Rather it lives in the moment as learning happens.

Help, I Need Somebody! How many times have students asked: I am putting in the time, I am working hard, I practice all of the questions you have assigned, I am not sleeping and I barely passed your exam? What the hell? What advice would you give me? (The student should get some sleep).

How many times has the entire class asked that question? How many times do we give final exams worth significant percentages of the grade but there are no opportunities for meaningful feedback?

You might be surprised to hear from the following finding, that students want to be assessed. According to Richard Light who wrote “Making the most of college: Students speak their minds”, the majority of 30,000 students he interviewed wanted to be tested frequently. They also wanted tests that reflected what they were taught and with the expectation that they would receive feedback.

Assessment then, is the mirror that can help us improve our teaching practice as much as it can help students to learn. Perhaps we need to think about each assessment piece as the glue that builds the imagination and shapes our thinking.

Paolo Freire’s philosophy of the “progressive educator” speaks to overturning the existing “culture of silence in the ways in which we give feedback”. Give your audience the tools to encounter knowledge no matter how ignorant the listeners might be, for they “will gradually become aware of their perceptions of reality and deal critically with it” (Freire, 1998:14).

5

Oral French Proficiency EvaluationAlice Allain Romance Languages - French / Education At the end of the academic year, students enrolled in University St Thomas‘s FREN 2336 - Communication orale are eligible for an Oral French Proficiency Evaluation.

What is the Second Language Oral Proficiency Evaluation? The Oral Proficiency Test, which is administered by the Province of New Brunswick, assesses an individual’s ability to speak and comprehend French as a second language. It evaluates the overall ability to communicate based on the language skills one has mastered. This evaluation is rated according to the criteria of the New Brunswick Oral Proficiency Rating Scale.

How is this test administered? Each April, a professional evaluator from the Provincial Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour visits the campus to administer the test. This face-to-face interview takes anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes and is tape-recorded for documentary purposes. The evaluator structures the conversation toward work or school-related topics. This type of general conversation allows the evaluator to obtain an individual’s proficiency in the other official language.

What will the evaluator evaluate? The candidate is evaluated according to their ability to converse in the language, their ease in using the language, and their clarity of communication.

Accuracy refers to the degree to which fluency, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation affect the communication. At each level of proficiency, the ability to perform specific language tasks is evaluated by asking questions or engaging in a conversational type dialogue.

What are the conversation topics? Typical questions can be centered around their academic studies, work place, people they are acquainted with in the work place or university setting etc. The candidate would be engaged in conversations which would be similar to those they would encounter in real life. At the lower level, topics are relatively simple and focus on such things as hours of work and routine tasks. As one progresses to higher levels, a candidate is required to deal with more complex topics. Examples could include things such as: describing projects they have worked on, problems encountered, or their views on issues affecting their life or studies. It is important to note, however, that an individual will be evaluated on how well they communicate in French, and not on the factual content or ideas expressed.

What is the Oral Proficiency scale? There are different scales. For example, the federal government uses the letters A, B, C and E (for exemption) while other institutions use the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. The provincial government uses the following Oral Proficiency Rating Scale (http://www.gnb.ca/0381/20?e.asp):

Novice (0+) Basic (1 )Basic+ (1+)

Intermediate (2)Intermediate+ (2+)Advanced (3)Advanced+ (3+)Superior (4)

N.B. The (+) notation to a level indicates that nearly all the criteria of the next level of proficiency have been met.

What language tasks are involved? Language tasks involve performing communicative activities such as asking questions, relating events, giving explanations, and expressing and supporting opinions. For example:

Basic- Ask and Answer simple questions. - Give simple directions or instructions. - Handle simple work-related situations.

Intermediate - Give simple explanations. - Give factual descriptions (of people, places or things). - Narrate events (past, present, future). - Handle work-related situations with a complication.

Advanced- Give detailed explanations and descriptions. - Handle hypothetical questions - Support an opinion, defend a point of view, or justify an action. - Counsel and give advice. - Handle complex work-related situations.

Superior- perform extensive language tasks- uses language for all representational purposes - makes native cultural references

What levels students enrolled in FREN 2336 - Communication orale will obtain in April? In FREN 2336, which is designated as a 2nd year FSL course not open to Francophones and Immersion students, most students are at a “basic plus” level and have completed FREN 1506 when they enrolled in September.

Therefore, since levels at year’s end largely depends also upon the student’s language proficiency level when they began the course in September, most students obtain the Intermediate or Intermediate Plus level. A few candidates will possibly obtain the Advanced level.

And do students enrolled in the FSL Education program need to be evaluated? Yes, students enrolled in my EDUC 5523/EDUC 5533 courses (French Second Language Methods) are advised to have the Certificate of Oral Proficiency if they wish to teach in the New Brunswick public schools. A French Immersion teacher must have a Superior level while others who teach any FSL class should have an Advanced level.

In conclusion, the training I received while studying the FSL Oral Proficiency Interview and the FSL Oral Proficiency Evaluation methods helps me to better evaluate a student’s overall second language proficiency. When using a standardized procedure for the global assessment of functional speaking ability, I feel I can

6

systematically measure the success of my language learners and help them to attain their linguistic goals. References:The Oral Proficiency Evaluation

http://www.gnb.ca/0381/002?e.asp

Responding to Student Evaluations of Your TeachingEileen M. Herteis, DirectorPurdy Crawford Teaching CentreMount Allison UniversityThere’s a strong likelihood that you have already looked at the student evaluations from last term’s classes. Though so much emphasis is placed on end-of-term student evaluation of teaching (SET), teaching can be evaluated in many ways (by students, by peers, by self-reflection), at many times (mid-course or end of course), and for several purposes: summative—to select new faculty, or to make personnel decisions such as tenure and promotion; formative—to gather information to enhance the quality of teaching. No matter the purpose or time, no single source of data or any single course evaluation provides sufficient information on which to base decisions.

Personnel decisions dramatically affect both the individual professor’s career and the overall quality of the education the institution provides; therefore, for summative evaluation, it is vital to use many sources of information to assess all components of effective teaching. Student evaluations alone should never be used to make personnel decisions. The professor should contextualize them with reflective explanations, complement them with peers’ assessments, and situate them within a teaching portfolio that also provides documentary evidence, such as course outlines, sample assignments, and a teaching philosophy statement.

Similarly, if teaching improvement is the goal, formative evaluation, SET data alone is still not enough; instructors should discuss results with colleagues or teaching centre staff, contextualize results in terms of their own goals, compare end-of-term results to mid-term evaluations. The literature shows that instructors are less likely to use evaluation data to modify their teaching without this kind of consultation and reflection. Furthermore, such discussions help you to put your feelings into perspective, identify practical things you can do to respond to the feedback, or reassure you that you are not the only professor who has ever received negative comments. (Just for the record, YOU’RE NOT!)

A word about definitions, here. Many institutions assign the tag “summative” to the scaled questions and “formative” to the open-ended questions which occur on most evaluation instruments. This is inaccurate. The terms summative and formative refer to the end-use of the data, not whether the questions require a numerical or a written response.

Though the literature agrees that students are reliable judges of teaching, there are a number of components of effective teaching that

only peers are fully qualified to evaluate, including the following identified by Pallett (2006):

• The appropriateness of an instructor’s objectives• The instructor’s knowledge of the subject matter• The degree to which instructional processes or materials are current, balanced, and relevant to objectives

• The quality and appropriateness of assessment methods• The appropriateness of grading standards• The instructor’s support for department teaching efforts such as curriculum development

• The instructor’s contribution to a department climate that values teaching, e.g., mentoring new faculty

The Teaching Centre at Princeton University cautions that rather than judgments of teaching performance, student evaluations are more meaningful when seen as “reflecting the spectrum of ways that students as novices learn and think within our disciplines.”

The best way to use SET data is to gather it over a number of terms, looking at response patterns from a number of courses over time (at least 5 courses, some sources say, even more if the class size is small). In interpreting numerical results, don’t treat a small difference as significant; decimal places are seductive but not precise. There is little meaningful difference between a 4.65 and a 4.7; yet a professor who routinely receives 4.65 for overall satisfaction can be genuinely pleased with that sustained pattern. For an egregious example of how one US university is [mis]using teaching evaluation data, take a look at the article “$10,000 Bonus”!

It is not surprising that even the very best teachers receive negative comments from students once in a while. In fact, there would be no challenge, no reason to try new things, experiment, or engage with our teaching if we pleased everyone! Yet teachers can become obsessed with the negative comments and rather than seeing them as a springboard to getting even better evaluations next time—an opportunity to be in control—they become discouraged.

The same scholar who gamely edits and resubmits articles to journals again and again, becomes distraught when 5 out of 50 students rate him as “unsatisfactory.” Ninety percent of the students in class think he is good, even excellent, and he is upset by the five others . . .

Admittedly, in most cases, the students’ written comments, rather than the numerical responses, incite such a visceral reaction. Regardless, it is essential that you put negative feedback into context. For example, how many of the comments relate to your teaching and things you can alter (for example, volume of speaking) and how many are course-related things over which you have little influence (the classroom, the class time)?

Do patterns emerge when you read what students listed as strengths and weaknesses of the course? Are the comments consistent or variable? Recurring comments may help you identify a potential change; comments that range from very positive to very negative may say more about students’ expectations of the course, their backgrounds, or their intellectual development or preferred learning styles. How many comments are just plain rude—more a reflection of students’ incivility than your teaching practice? These reflect pressures and dissatisfaction with a broad range of issues that go far beyond your teaching.

Contextualize negative comments in your teaching portfolio, especially

7

if you are a candidate for tenure and promotion or for a new job, and explain any circumstances that might have affected your evaluations. For example, research shows that faculty who try something new often receive lower evaluations at first. It is also important to differentiate student satisfaction, which some might consider superficial, from real student learning outcomes.

Going Forward By all means, read and heed your students’ evaluations from last term, but don’t let them paralyze or dispirit you. Put them into context; tell yourself that this term you’ll do a mid-term evaluation of your teaching to identify issues early enough to make productive changes; or consider inviting a colleague into your class to give you another perspective on your teaching. References

Gravestock, P. & Gregor-Greenleaf, E. (2008) Student Course Evaluations: Research Models & Trends. Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

Pallett, W. (2006). Uses and Abuses of Student Ratings. In P. Seldin & Associates. Evaluating Faculty Performance. Boston, MA: Anker.

Rhem. J. The High Risks of Improving Teaching. National Teaching and Learning Forum. 15(6).

$10,000 Bonus for Good Teaching Evaluations?

In a very controversial move, the Chancellor of Texas A&M University is offering faculty the opportunity to vie for a $10,000 salary bonus, based on student evaluations of their teaching. Designed by a conservative think-tank, and endorsed by Republican Governor Rick Perry, the bonus is meant to give teachers “incentive to strive toward excellence.”

Even though the evaluations used will be distinct from those used for promotion and tenure, and participation in the bonus scheme is voluntary, many faculty at the university are outraged by the Chancellor’s allusion to “customer satisfaction.” Citing the maintenance of high standards, tough grading, and challenging content, these professors argue that student happiness is often subordinate to student learning. They are also concerned that unscrupulous teachers will inflate grades in order to raise their scores and win the $10,000.

Even the scholar who wrote the study on which Texas A&M’s bonus is based disagrees with the university’s approach. Lawrence Aleamoni says that while students can judge a professor’s classroom performance, any substantive teaching evaluation must involve “peer analysis” of such things as course design, currency of materials, and appropriateness of standards.

The final word goes to Dr. Cary Nelson, President of the American Association for University Professors, who dismisses the A&M bonus as a public relations ploy rather than an attempt to increase and reward long-term teaching effectiveness. This is paying professors “by applause meter,” he claims:

“This corrupts peer evaluation, diminishes the faculty role, and encourages grade inflation. You give them A’s, and you get 10 grand.”

For the complete article, visit Inside Higher Education online at: http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/13/bonuspay

Escaping the WeirRuss Hunt (English) and Thom Parkhill (Religious Studies)Herring are creatures of social habit. In a weir, they follow the barrier around and around, never noticing that if they just made a solitary U-turn at the end of the barrier, they’d be free. Perhaps they never realize that they’re trapped; everyone else is swimming along, so things must be okay. At least till the seiner arrives.

We believe that, by and large, university faculty are swimming around in a weir called marks. Not many, it appears, feel trapped. We, however, do, and, fellow herring, we’re going to argue that a change would be good for us. We’d like to make that U-turn -- or at least open up the possibility, for some faculty and some students, of swimming back out into the open sea.

St. Thomas, like most North American universities, holds in tension attention to learning on one hand and certification on the other. While most of us profess that we are about the former and give over the latter to the Registrar’s Office, the fact is that we spend an inordinate amount of time certifying our students because we spend an inordinate amount of time sorting B+s from A-s and C-s from Ds, keeping records that will allow us to defend our decisions, measuring what really can’t be measured, and counting what can be counted, although it’s of only dubious relationship to the judgments of “quality” that we find ourselves making. The relationship of marking to learning is a whole other matter.

There is, for those who look, a tidal wave of evidence that marks are destructive of learning. Major figures in learning research like E. L. Deci, Mark Lepper and Alfie Kohn have shown -- at least to our satisfaction -- that rewarding behavior with external rewards undermines intrinsic interest in the task being rewarded. While the controversy over this work continues, we find that our experience with the differences, for instance, between students writing to convince others in the absence of marks, and students writing to impress an evaluator (in the phrase of James Britton, writing for “the teacher-as-examiner”), has led us toward more confidence in the wider work of those questioning the effectiveness of external rewards as motivators for learning, at least for the many students who have not developed the ability to comply with external pressures and still engage with the task.

There are other problems with our dependence on marks, of course: it is often the case that students choose courses not on the basis of what’s interesting to them, or even what they think will be valuable, but what they think will help -- or not hurt -- their GPA. Again, of course, this is not a universal phenomenon; we’ve all known students who took challenging courses for the challenge. But it is clear that the framework of marks, and everyone’s commitment to GPA as a way of evaluating merit, work against such choices, and towards limiting them to the courageous or the naive.

Further, there can be little doubt that what marks measure -- among other things, dutiful compliance and

8

docility -- entails a devaluing of some of the things we would most like to reward; creativity, initiative, critical thinking. Again, this is not always the case, but in our own experience it is a common pressure, on us as markers and on our students as thinkers, writers, and experimenters.

We are not, however, arguing for the abolition of marks. Yes, there are institutions which have done this (Alverno College and Evergreen State come to mind), but there is simply too much dependence on the structure of marks -- for transfer students, for admission to graduate programs, for showing merit to employers -- for a university to abandon the structure casually.

However, we would argue that by imposing the necessity of producing a mark for everybody we’re imposing a certain set of educational practices on everybody and on all courses. It is clear that there are at least some cases -- methods courses, service learning, practica and internships, and others, where institutions regularly allow a student in a particular course to be marked simply as Pass (awarded credit for the course, but the course is not figured in the GPA), or Fail (no credit for the course is given, and the course is or is not figured in the GPA depending on the policy). St. Thomas already does this, although in rare cases. There is an impressively large number of universities where such an option exists, under different constraints and restrictions. We are arguing here that although the option already exists at Saint Thomas, the circumstances under which it can be used need to be made clearer and more public.

Working out what those circumstances might be is the purview of the Academic Senate, but we have some suggestions that might serve to form a basis for its deliberations. A professor might opt to offer her course pass/fail if she were wanting to eschew the coverage model of teaching for a more exploratory pedagogy in which the learning goals were more process- than content-driven. Another scenario might have a professor teaching a course that involves a group of honours students in a workshop style course that requires them to take chances in order to learn, and in which she wanted to make it very clear that there would be no penalty for taking those chances and not being able to follow through. Students might have their own reasons for preferring a pass/fail option in one or two of their courses. The biggest might be to take a chance on an unknown discipline or course the marks from which might negatively affect one’s GPA if the risk did not pan out. For both professor and student the benefits are obvious: to be able to give or receive a P which would work like a transfer credit but not affect the GPA would encourage us all to focus more on learning than marks.

It is worth considering, as well, how widespread this practice is at other universities. A 1970 ERIC document found this pattern: “In an attempt to isolate new trends and options in grading, 150 four-year colleges and universities were surveyed. Of these, 102 offered pass/fail or a similar grading option, 30 had no grading option, 6 indicated that a system was under serious consideration and 12 failed to respond. The two major reasons for having a pass/fail system were: (1) to encourage students to explore subjects outside their major without fear of jeopardizing

their grade point average, and (2) to minimize the fear of failing. The great majority of schools used A, B, C, and

D as equivalent to “pass.” The most common practice was to allow students to enroll in one course per term under pass/fail, though 10 institutions indicated no limit. Most institutions indicated some form of limitation on those wishing to enroll under the option. The methods of registering for the various options varied, with some institutions allowing the students to declare the option up to the “normal deadline for adds and drops” and others requiring that it be declared at registration. In most instances, consent was required for enrollment in a grading option. Twenty-two of the respondents indicated that the instructors were denied knowledge of pass/fail enrollments, and thus reported standard grades that were converted by the Registrar, while in 80 cases, the instructors were aware of those enrolled under the option.” (Quann, 1970)

Later studies have been difficult to find, but an online report of a 2003 survey at the University of Colorado identified the following prestigious institutions as having deadlines by which students need to opt for pass/fail options: Brandeis, Buffalo, Catholic, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Florida, Harvard, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, MIT, Ohio, Oregon, Penn, Penn, Pittsburgh, Princeton, Rice, Rochester, Rutgers, Stanford, Syracuse, Texas, U California, U Colorado, UCLA, UNC, UNL, USC, Vanderbilt, Washington. There are many others, and many in Canada; the relevant committee of the Academic Senate would want to identify them as part of its research into this matter.

Rather than provide a mark for every student in every course we teach, we contend that our time and energy are better spent in the service of learning, and that moving to broaden and define a pass/fail option for some courses and for some students would allow us to occasionally break the weir and swim for the ocean. References

Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 105-115.

Kohn, Alfie. (1993). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Lepper, Mark R., & Greene, David, eds. (1978). The Hidden Costs of Reward: New Perspectives on the Psychology of Human Motivation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Quann, Charles J. Pass-Fail Grading: What Are the Trends? Paper presented at the 56th annual meeting of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission

Officers, April 23, 1970.

‘What if …?’ – designing assessment to encourage student creativityDesmond HunterNational Teaching FellowUniversity of UlsterI am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to this issue of Teaching Perspectives and greatly appreciate Roger Moore’s kind invitation to do so.

I would like to share some personal thoughts on assessment linked to

9

the promotion of creativity and present a series of What if scenarios, the dimensions of some or all of which may be familiar. (For clarification, I subscribe to the view that the basic ingredient of creativity is lateral thinking.) I have not detailed the approaches that might be taken to explain how the scenarios might play out; the suggestions put forward are designed to provoke thought rather than offer models of practice.

John Heywood has expressed the view that ‘Assessment is a multidimensional process of judging the individual in action’ (Heywood: 32). As we know, assessment is not just about measuring student performance; it’s also about facilitating and validating the learning process. Ideally, assessment is integrated within the learning and provides a variety of opportunities for students to reflect on their progress as individuals within a learning community – one that includes other students and also staff. Inevitably, there is a focus on self evaluation but one that is informed by a range of other perspectives, including peer and tutor evaluation.

The evaluation/assessment of learning may be punctuated and characterised by the presentation of assignments submitted during the learning process. The nature of the assignments will vary and may include work in progress. End-of-semester examinations may be used to assess the accumulation of learning throughout a module. Examinations tend to be detached from the learning process, yet they have the potential to promote deep engagement with relevant subject matter. So, there is a range of approaches on which we can draw and we select those methods that are appropriate to and benefit student learning in individual modules.

How much flexibility can (and should) we accommodate within our assessment processes to facilitate student learning, to foster creativity and to ensure that students develop good learning habits? Should all students within a module be required to complete the same assessment tasks? What if we provide scope for negotiation of the tasks, their timing and weighting, and even the assessment criteria? (One is reminded of the competitive high-jumper who may decline to jump at a particular stage in the competition, reserving their energy for a more challenging height.) Providing opportunity for students to negotiate the nature and weighting of assignments, operating within predetermined limits, encourages them to reflect on the skills that they bring to particular tasks and can ensure a greater sense of ownership of the work prepared than might otherwise occur.

What if an assessment schedule in a module offered some options alongside the standard diet of assessments? Let’s assume that the normal requirement is for two assignments, submitted during the semester, with a class test set at the end of the teaching period. Students are made aware, however, that, rather than undertaking the two relatively-short assignments, they could pursue a more extended project, the topic of which could be negotiated with the tutor. And, instead of taking the class test at the end of the teaching period, the students could undergo a viva voce. Would the options proposed provide attractive alternatives for the creative thinker/ practitioner?

Lewis Elton argues that ‘the traditional principle of fair assessment, i.e. that all students are assessed in the same way and compared

with each other through normative assessment on the same materials and individually, is inappropriate for the assessment of creative work.’ (Elton: 4)

What if self and peer evaluation became a central feature within the assessment process along with tutor evaluation? After all, assessment is a vital part of the learning cycle for students. It helps them in the preparation of their own work and involvement in peer assessment provides students with the skills and experience to engage in informed self evaluation. Where student assessment supplements or feeds into staff assessment it adds a valuable dimension to the process in that students are able to relate more closely to the assessment experience.

What if assessment focused on process, with self, peer and tutor evaluation (drawing on these sources as appropriate) monitoring and shaping work in progress to ensure a structured, yet exploratory, learning experience? The outcome should provide the necessary evidence that the process has worked. But, if we concentrate the assessment on the outcome alone, does that not present a rather narrow view of the learning that has taken place?

Often students are given an element of choice in relation to at least some of the modules that they take in any one year of study. And, within certain modules (final-year dissertation or project modules) students construct their own learning around self-selected topics. In a sense, these are ‘open-box’ modules in that the content is not (or is only partially) predetermined. What if we provided other open boxes, optional modules to be designed by students and staff together (developing a real sense of partnership in learning), but working within prescribed parameters? Open-box modules provide ideal opportunities for creative work, particularly if they involve students from different disciplines. In a recent conversation with a graduate who had pursued projects with students in other disciplines, he underlined the value of working in collaboration with others and, in particular, working across discipline boundaries. Engaging with other creative perspectives enabled him to work on a larger canvas and the connexions that he was able to make provided a platform for further exploration. ‘Creativity often depends on cross-disciplinary curiosity and thrives on opportunities to learn from others’. (Helen Storey and Mathilda Marie Joubert in Miell and Littleton: 44). Although collaborative projects may not always run smoothly, the value of the learning experience cannot be overstated; as one student commented - ‘projects that don’t run so smoothly are as beneficial as those which do as one is forced to solve certain problems, be it creatively or socially’.

If we are going to promote creativity, perhaps the question that we have to ask is what do we need to change to allow students the ‘freedom to work in new and interesting ways’ (Jackson: 4), and bearing in mind that we have to be prepared for unexpected outcomes.

Creativity can be promoted in simple ways and it is happening already. There is scope for working within the boxes we inhabit and doing things differently. If we take the traditional end-of-semester examination, which tends to get a bad press (‘exams usually force students into surface learning’ (Race in Brown and Glasner: 63)), there is scope for using it as a means

10

of promoting imaginative thinking, even though it is detached from the learning. The traditional written examination often requires students to answer a number of questions drawn from those presented on an examination paper. What if we replaced some (or all) of the questions with a series of stimuli and provided a rubric that invited students to formulate questions that would interrogate the substance of the material presented and explain the thinking behind the choice of questions? Is that an approach worth considering? It might present an attractive (and challenging) option for the creative thinker.

Many students in higher education are, to use the jargon, ‘thinking outside the box’ and drawing on other experiences. Some are ‘climbing outside the box’ – exploring relationships with other disciplines. What if cross-disciplinary engagement on collaborative projects were built into undergraduate programmes? This might be considered particularly valuable in first year, if we share the view that ‘collaborative learning provides the platform on which independent learning is nurtured’. (Hunter: 78) Of course, there is a variety of approaches that can be taken to engage students in group work, including discipline-based vertical groupings that provide opportunities for first-year students to benefit from the experience of working on projects with those in other year groups.

Ideally, the structures within which we work should be flexible with opportunities for negotiation and renegotiation in an environment in which boundaries present challenges rather than blockages. Perhaps the greatest challenge is in relation to assessment. The two extremes on the assessment continuum are tutor assessment of outcome and student self evaluation of process. In between, there are various stages, including collaborative assessment and peer assessment. Ultimately, we want our students to be able to evaluate their own work in a critically-informed manner. Empowering students to manage and assess their learning is perhaps the ultimate goal in embracing the creativity agenda. References

Sally Brown and Angela Glasner, eds. (1999) Assessment Matters in Higher Education. SRHE and Open University Press. Buckingham and Philadelphia.

Lewis Elton (2005) ‘Designing Assessment for Creativity: an imaginative curriculum guide’.

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id59_Elton.rtf (accessed 9th February 2009)

John Heywood (2000) Assessment in Higher Education. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Desmond Hunter (2006) ‘Assessing collaborative learning’. British Journal of Music Education, 23/1: 75-89.

Norman Jackson (2004) ‘Creativity in Higher Education’.

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id251_creativity_in_higher_education.doc (accessed 9th February 2009)

Dorothy Miell and Karen Littleton, eds. (2004) Collaborative Creativity. London: Free Association Books.

© Desmond Hunter (2009)

“And who shall assess the assessors?”Roger MooreRomance Languages DepartmentIn teaching, specifically, a great many of us use transformative teaching, or problem based learning, or community based learning, or developmental theories, without realizing that there is a technical word for what we, as practitioners, have quietly developed, often in isolation. I have studied under several teachers, some of them quite famous, whose great ideas were based on a new vocabulary which, when learned and understood, revealed very little new and original thought. The difference between surface knowledge and deep knowledge, for example, two of today’s buzz words, is in many ways parallel (or seems to be parallel) to Chomsky’s surface structures and deep structures in language acquisition and analysis. Many of us subscribe to the difference between surface learning and deep learning, without reading technical articles on the subject.

In similar fashion, in language learning, the experts talk of passive vocabulary (a surprisingly large number of words which you can recognize when used by someone else) and active vocabulary (a much smaller number of words which you can use actively yourself). This same thought can be applied to ideas: there are passive ideas which we meet, understand, and recognize, without actually subscribing to them and active ideas which are part and parcel of our lives and daily thought. We use these active ideas on a regular basis and they motivate us and give us direction.

By extension, part of the skill of language teaching is to change a general, passive knowledge of a language (first and second years) into a genuine, specific, active and inter-active knowledge of a language (in the third and fourth years). To assist my students in their development, I have taken the four traditional skills of language learning (listening, speaking, reading, writing) and have added to them thought, culture, literacy, and understanding.

Presumably, these additional skills are assumed to be present in the four initial skills; but given the traditionally mindless and irrelevant drills ever-present in basic language-learning text books, it is often the absence of thought, culture, literacy and understanding which is impressive.

Further, it is necessary to decide how we, as committed teachers, are going to teach the thought-provoking areas which we feel we should highlight. Some methods are founded on case based learning, problem based learning, professional based learning, transformative learning, experiential learning, developmental learning, and careful nurturing. Some of this can take place in the classroom, but a lot must, of necessity happen in the world outside.

Clearly, as I make these statements, I am placing more and more emphasis on the development of the entire human being, and less and less emphasis on the skills acquired in one specific course or the grades given at the end of one specific test. Equally clear should be the need

11

for work, research, knowledge to be acquired outside the classroom, not in it. If the sole aspect of teaching is the text book and the teacher never moves beyond it, then students are probably not getting very much from the classroom other than text book knowledge. For me, and hopefully for the best of my students, it is not the transfer of knowledge, but the use and understanding of that knowledge once it has been acquired (and while it is being acquired) that is important.

Students who have read about the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) may have the dates and the battles and the ebb and flow memorized and well thought out. They may even have become “mini” experts on the Mac-Paps, the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion that fought, as Canadians, for the International Brigades during and after the siege of Madrid. However, they are rarely prepared emotionally to meet the political and cultural divide between left (Republican Democracy) and right (Franco’s National Socialism) that still exists in Spain, seventy years after the civil war, when most of the participants are dead. Indeed, I witnessed a very violent incident in Spain in the summer of 2006 involving two people whose grand-parents had been killed on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War. They got into an argument, in a restaurant, and actually came to blows. Why? What exactly happened? Why do emotions still run so high? It is this dimension of understanding -- the deep structure of language as culture and history -- that I try to develop, not in one course, nor in an undergraduate program, but as an emotional, analytical, and critical foundation into which students can delve for the rest of their lives.

When we talk assessment, we also have to talk how to assess such knowledge and such understanding, not just the facts, important as they are, but also the emotional content that binds us to our humanity and leads us to confront the other in his or her humanity (or lack of it) as well. This is possibly the highest level of learning and teaching. It cannot be measured by normal standards, but the students who experience it, who embrace it, and who learn and benefit from it, are usually changed -- reformed, reborn, regenerated, transformed -- at much deeper levels than those who pick up the words, but not their underlying meanings, the structures, but not their underlying emotions, the historical facts, but not the uglifying and beautifying effects that those facts have on the human beings who are affected by them.

So: talk to me about assessment -- and then tell me how to assess my students’ appreciation and understanding of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain (as witnessed and painted by Goya, whose artistic impressions regularly adorn the walls of the Prado), of the Spanish Civil War (as witnessed, imagined, and painted by Picasso, whose paintings, drawings and sketches, once hanging in the Casón de Guernica, now occupy the walls of the Museo Reina Sofía), of the Madrid bombings of a few years ago, in which 167 people perished and about which people still talk and view the videos and the photographs …

And what will we put on our course outlines? Assessment will be by (choose any combination of the following): two research essays, a mid-term exam, a 3 hour final examination (with questions set and prepared in advance), oral examinations and interviews (with questions chosen at random from a pre-distributed list), group discussions, sundry

written summaries, short in-class essays, regular in-class tests, journal entries, in-class presentations, podcasts, web-page building, multiple-choice questions (computer generated from a knowledge bank and computer marked), true and false questions …

Who shall assess the levels and standards of knowledge to be assessed? Who shall assess the means of assessment? And, above all, who shall assess the assessors ...?

Course Evaluations: A Terrible WOMBATTony RhinelanderProfessor Emeritus in HistoryThe official course evaluation carried out by St. Thomas University is decidedly a WOMBAT. In texting-speak, that means a Waste of Money, Brains and Time.

The evaluation introduces itself by stating that “course evaluations are carried out for the purposes of improving instruction and of providing evidence of effective teaching.” That may be true of some course evaluations, but certainly not this one.

Some of the questions are laughable. The funniest is No. 3: “The professor did not arbitrarily cancel classes.” Never mind the meaning of “arbitrarily” in the question and the student’s ability to judge that, but after a cursory reading in fact many students respond to the negative statement by choosing “I disagree” to mean they agree. I am sure I am not the only one who has received a 1 or a 2 (disagree) when in fact I have not missed a single class. A basic rule of questionnaires: never pose questions in the negative.

Some questions are pathetic. No. 9: “Reading materials used in the course were valuable.” How can a student who did not do the readings judge their value? Most often, in my experience, students who avoided readings simply answer “Disagree.”

Or No. 13: “I received sufficient feedback on the quality of my work.” Besides the misuse of the word “feedback” (an electronic term meaning interference), if grades on assignments have been poor, no amount of “feedback” would be sufficient to convince the student to give a positive answer.

Or, consider the statistical consequences of the faulty language built into the very answers: how can one “strongly” disagree (or “strongly” agree) to anything? Either you agree, or you don’t. Agreement and disagreement, like death and pregnancy, are absolute. There are really only three meaningful answers (presuming the question is meaningful): Agree, Disagree, and Meh (or “Whatever”). Yet a student can give two different weights for “agree”: a 4 or a 5. Since the computer adds up the numbers and pretends to be precise to the nearest hundredth (University average response to No. 3 is a ludicrous 4.57), the differences between 1 and 2, or 4 and 5, are statistically significant but practically meaningless, if not downright misleading.

And consider, too, the problem that the evaluation weights all students’ answers equally. Even assuming students

12

are reasonably honest in filling out their GPA and number of study hours or classes missed (a dubious assumption), should a C student’s answers carry the same weight as an A student? The computer could be asked to count only the answers of the (hopeful) A students, but in my experience it never has been.

In short, St Thomas’s official course evaluation is incapable of either “improving instruction” or saying anything about “effective teaching” (itself a slippery and subjective term: given the nature of the teaching profession, a hundred faculty will have a hundred different ways of teaching “effectively”.)

Do people know that about 10 years ago, in disgust at this form, the faculty underwent a lengthy (and expensive) testing of alternative course evaluations? The result? Nothing. Keep the old one, warts and all. Someone might find it useful someday.

Let’s be fair. St Thomas’s official course evaluation might be useful for one thing: determining serious problems. (One supposes that an average score of 2.00 or less for questions 1-21 would start some sort of tenure review, and perhaps over the years there have been one or two isolated such cases.) But that is a negative and punitive thing, and of possible use only for administrators.

If that is it’s only use, then it should state so on the form. Forget the pretence that it has positive uses.

Let teachers trade tips with each other. I once picked up an extremely useful tip in an LTD session (as they used to be called) about the pedagogical usefulness of assigning regular in-class “reflections” or “commentaries” to students, which I have used ever since. Far more useful than anything I ever learned from the results of the Official Evaluation.

Better yet, the evaluation should simply be trashed. Faculty Council and Senate should move to refuse to administer the official course evaluations as being not only disingenuous but a terrible WOMBAT.

Evaluation in European Higher Education:

A View from the Field of Foreign LanguagesSonsoles Sánchez-ReyesUniversidad de Salamanca, Campus de Ávila – EspañaEurope is now immersed in a total review of the assumptions that have traditionally inspired the organization of Higher Education. The arrival of the so-called European Higher Education System, a result of the Bologna Declaration, brought about the standardization of university systems throughout the continent. This permitted worker mobility for qualified people throughout the various countries. This was a legal recognition that, in practice, came up against a wall of resistance from some deeply entrenched national systems of higher education. The achieving of this desire to bring together and harmonize assumes the undertaking of

a heavy preparatory workload in the elaboration of new plans of study for universities, administrations, and the

teachers themselves. In Spain, the current academic year has seen the beginning of a few new courses resulting from this reform. Next year, 2009-2010, will see the emergence of a great number of new courses which are now being prepared under great pressure. For the academic year 2010-2011, all studies in all European universities must be adapted to meet the European Higher Education System (EHES).

In traditional Spanish university teaching, students acquired along with their enrollment, the right (but not the obligation) to attend classes (mainly lectures) given by teachers. These classes consisted mainly of a professorial monologue delivered to a group of learners who were forced to take down the lecture in note form. The paradox is that each credit (the measure of value of the subject) corresponded to ten class hours, in spite of the fact that there was no demand for the student to attend the class. In the same fashion, the registration fees gave the student the right to take on up to two occasions an examination, usually of the theoretical type. There were the usual exams at the end of the first four months of courses (taken in January and February) and then there were exams at the end of the second four month term (May and June). This second examination period also contained examinations for all full year courses. Then there was the additional make up examination, usually in September, for those who had failed the previous exams.

In this fashion, students in this style of education might never have come to class; but, never the less, they could have successfully passed the final exam, an exam which is usually scored on a scale of 0-10, as follows: Outstanding / Sobresaliente (9-10); Noteworthy / Notable (7-8.99); Pass / Aprobado (5-6.99); Fail / Suspenso (less than 4.99). In Further Education (Enseñanzas Medias), there also exists the grade of Fair / Bien (6 – 6.99). Until the actual moment of the exam, then, not even the teacher can see the results of his teaching, nor does the student have any objective way of knowing what progress he is making in the subject. Evaluation and grade are actually synonymous.

The EHES is bringing a new scenario for university teaching, one in which the idea of evaluation is radically different. This evaluation aims at rating the quality of learning achieved by the student and it must be centered on what the student has actually learned, rather than on what he knows. Emphasis is placed on learning, not on teaching, as it is now conceived: a mere transferral of knowledge. Lecture classes are now giving way and are being complemented with seminars, tutorials, individual and group work, and cooperative teaching and learning. This demands a greater dedication from the teacher who must diversify his methodologies of teaching and restrict the quantity of expository lecture classes, which tend towards reproduction of ideas rather than towards formation of thought.

In this fashion, the classroom is no longer the sole scenario for learning and the virtual environment begins to have as much importance as class presence. The new credits (ECTS / European Credit Transfer System) are the equivalent of 25-30 hours of student effort and this implies a system of continuous evaluation which is both formative (of the process) and summative (of the product). There is also room for self-evaluation by the student, peer evaluation, and evaluation by means of portfolios. These evaluation systems demand careful planning on the part of the teacher as well as the giving of

13

detailed information to the student. This is translated into an increase in the hours dedicated by the teacher to evaluating and working with the student. The student is no longer the passive recipient of content transferred to him by the expert teacher; he is now an active protagonist in the teaching-learning process and his personal work is the centre of the teaching activities of an active teacher who is now a facilitator and guide. In this fashion, strategies of self-teaching are developed and the student can take advantage of these throughout his life. This new European credit system is based on learning by competencies, that is to say capacities and skills, general or specific, which the student must gain, thus linking university training with the professional world, the classroom with society.

Evaluation in the EHES is based on the objectives which the teacher desires the student to obtain. As a result, it is not focused only on the content of the program or subject as it transcends both. The outcomes of the course constitute the ends of the learning process and can refer to conceptual content, skills, and the abilities which students must acquire.

When evaluation takes place on the basis of a single final exam (what students call “staking it all on one throw”), the majority of students tend to postpone their studies until just a few days before the exam. This, in itself, makes it difficult for them to follow the teacher’s explanations which continue as the course advances. It also leads to absenteeism especially if the student feels that he is lost. Because of the system of the single final exam, long term development of knowledge suffers as a great deal of information is processed in only a very short time, via the short term memory system, and knowledge is not assimilated in a lasting form. Long term teaching is usually more effective, especially when evaluation is continuous and the student must make an effort throughout the whole course.

The majority of foreign language university professors have long been using these evaluation methods, perhaps influenced by the systems of those other countries where we have completed our training. Also there is an obvious need to implicate the student in his own process of learning a foreign language, for his own constant and continuous participation is an indispensable element if he is to make any progress. In the field of languages, error analysis also gives us an incredible amount of information about the internal language processes of the student and formative evaluation is necessary to study and follow the student’s advancement. This stresses the usefulness of frequent evaluations which permit the student to improve performance without suffering negative repercussions in terms of grades. It will now be necessary to develop this evaluative culture in other areas of knowledge where such evaluation is much less common.

Teacher, teach thyself?Andrew Titus

“All those idiots who taught me/ don’t know anything at all.”The Rheostatics

When I was finished my yoga class the other day, my teacher asked me how I did. I said, “well, I don’t think I did quite as well as I did the other day, but it was alright,” to which she replied that yoga is not at

all about consistently, or even necessarily getting better from one day to the next as much as it is about doing everything that you possibly can on each day to be as flexible and as open to our strengths and weaknesses as possible.

To me, evaluation and performance in the classroom is much more akin to yoga than it is to, say, Olympic cross country skiing where each and every day you have to get better, you have to improve yourself, you have to become more guarded, you have to become faster. Yoga, on the other hand, is much more about experiencing the moment and doing everything you can to be present in that moment to the maximum of your capabilities. From what I have learned from those who I consider to be masters of the art, I know for sure that there’s no end to teaching; that I’m not going to reach some point of perfection where every lecture that I give is pure gold coming out of my mouth – and really, how completely boring would that be?

No, teaching, and evaluating my own teaching, is all about being in that moment, it’s about knowing how much I gave to the students on that given day; it’s not, about whether or not it was as good as it was yesterday, because I am sure that in some ways I was worse than it was yesterday and in some ways better. The question is how open I was to what was going on, how open I was to other points of view, how much I facilitated discussion, how closely I listened to them, how much I worked with what I had on that day and so helped to produce the best possible class that I could.

There is a story that’s told about two Zen monks who are walking along when they see a man being carried on a platform by two servants who have their arms filled with the man’s bags from the day’s shopping. Perhaps you know this one already. He commands that they stop and let him down, but there is a puddle underfoot and they can’t put down his packages to lift him off. He berates and shouts at them for their incompetence. The older of the two monks goes over, picks him up, carries him through the mud, and sets him down. Without a word of thanks, the nasty man walks on. Much later, after several hours of brooding over the situation and unable to contain his frustration any longer, the younger monks bursts out, “He was so mean! How could you just carry him over that puddle when it was clear that he wasn’t about to thank you for the service?” The older monk looks at the younger monk and says, “I put that man down hours ago, why are you still carrying him?”

The same goes for teaching – yesterday is gone, why would I still be carrying it around with me? Yesterday’s teaching is over – sure I can learn from it, but why succumb to the voice in my head that demands I suffer for what I can’t change? We often feel that we need to overly criticize ourselves, but in doing so we also become our own worst enemies. Today we go back to class.

Perhaps a hockey analogy would work better. Maybe today you didn’t play as well as you did yesterday; but perhaps also that’s all a matter of perception. Yesterday you had two goals and an assist, which to the audience looked good. Today you didn’t score any goals, but you played with more finesse, you were more conscious of

14

what was happening around you, how well you were playing, and how you felt with your skates beneath you, your eye on the puck and on the play yet to come.

That’s what I would suggest is evaluation: just how well you are doing today? How open are you to what’s going on around you, how flexible are your ideas, how much muscle can you put into it, how willing are you to expose your weaknesses, how much strength and attention can you exert, how much of yourself can you put out there, and how little do you hold back? When we do that, when we are reflective and honest, when we educate through engagement, then we can criticize ourselves with our eyes to betterment.

What Am I Doing Wrong? What Are We Doing Wrong? What Are They Doing Wrong?P.G. TonerDepartment of AnthropologyIn preparing my application for promotion and tenure, I decided to undertake a reasonably thorough analysis of the results of student evaluations of my teaching since my arrival at St. Thomas University in 2004. My assumption was that an open and honest bit of number-crunching might help me to identify weaknesses in my teaching style, as well as to suggest possible solutions. My analysis did indeed accomplish this. What I did not expect, however, was for this exercise to point toward larger issues of teaching praxis within the university as a whole, issues that seem to me to strike at the heart of liberal arts pedagogy. I offer here, then, a suggestive snapshot which may enable us to look beyond our individual student evaluations toward questions of what we do as a scholarly community, and what our students expect.

My teaching portfolio opens, as many do, with a statement of my teaching philosophy, a smorgasbord of motherhood statements about teaching, maxims for effective teaching, and goals that have more disciplinary specificity. Although some of these may actually be dealt with in a practical way, others—cultivating an enthusiasm for life-long learning, for example—are simply too general, vague, or long-term to be actualized in anything like a tangible way, and must act as an abstract form of motivation to get us through day by day, semester by semester. But the aspect of my teaching philosophy that stands above all of the others, as a kind of pedagogical uber-principle, is critical thinking—cultivating it, promoting it, begging for it, despairing at its absence, and occasionally succeeding in exemplifying it. I try to put critical thinking at the very centre of my pedagogy, and my working assumption is that nothing is more important to teaching in a liberal arts context. After all, the number-one goal of a liberal education at St. Thomas University, according to the calendar, is “an independent, inquiring mind”.

With this in mind, the starting point for my analysis of my student evaluations was to create a spreadsheet and to enter all of my scores

for each of the twenty-two questions on our student evaluation forms for each semester that I had taught

at STU. This allowed me to calculate average scores across each measure. Generally speaking, I am happy with the results of my student evaluations. But as I examined my averages for each survey item, I was naturally somewhat dismayed by some of my lowest scores: “I found time spent in class was generally useful” (#16 out of 22), “this course helped me to grasp some difficult concepts and ideas” (#17), “methods of evaluation were a fair measure of my performance and learning” (#19), “overall, how would you evaluate this course?” (#21), and—most disturbing of all—“my ability to think and to learn for myself was developed in this course” at #22, my lowest average score.

These results seemed particularly disheartening because they struck at what I consider to be some of my core pedagogical values. These scores seemed to indicate that my students considered my classes to be a waste of time, that my courses did not challenge them intellectually or encourage them to think critically, that they felt they were unfairly assessed, and that overall they did not evaluate the course highly. Syllabi can be clarified, class activities can be re-arranged or improved, projects and assignments can be re-designed, more time and effort can be spent on providing feedback—one expects that students will rate something lowest, and that something can be remedied. But thinking and learning for themselves? How can that be my lowest score? Isn’t that the whole point of the game? Given the emphasis of my teaching philosophy, it seemed that I had failed at that element of teaching that matters the most, and the one that motivates my teaching the most. What, I asked myself, am I doing wrong?

It turned out, with a little more statistical analysis, that I wasn’t doing anything particularly wrong, although it is necessary to seek improvement in all areas as a matter of course. When I examined the university averages for the same survey items, they were ranked (respectively) #15 (tie), #17 (tie), #15 (tie), #19 (tie), and #22. In other words, it appears that, for whatever reasons, students score ALL of their professors relatively lowly on each of those items. Whether this is because of the intellectual climate here at STU, or because of prevailing student expectations, or for some unknown demographic reasons, students seem to give lower scores on certain items and higher scores on others. Perhaps this is well-known throughout the university community, but for me it was a minor revelation.

So this analysis begs two additional rhetorical questions. The first is, what are we doing wrong? Let us take a closer look at university average scores for student evaluations, ranked from highest to lowest. These averages are for the period from the fall semester of 2004 to the winter semester of 2008 (minus one semester’s parental leave and one semester’s sabbatical leave):

COuRSE EVALuATION FORM quESTION univ. avg.

3. The professor did not arbitrarily cancel classes. 4.57

20. The professor conveyed interest in and enthusiasm for the subject matter. 4.54

11. The professor was willing to schedule consultation time with me. 4.31

15

1. I found that course requirements were clearly communicated to me. 4.29

10. The professor showed a genuine concern for my progress and was approachable. 4.28

18. Where appropriate, I felt encouraged to express my own views. 4.28

2. I found a close agreement between course objectives and activities. 4.27

6. It was clear to me how the topics covered formed a coherent course of study. 4.23

19. Experiences and questions were effectively used to help our learning. 4.22

5. The professor communicates effectively. 4.21

8. Projects and assignments helped to further my understanding of the subject. 4.17

7. I found the various parts of the course were effectively coordinated. 4.16

9. Reading materials used in the course were valuable. 4.14

21. I would recommend this course to other students. 4.13

4. I found time spent in class was generally useful. 4.07

12. Methods of evaluation were a fair measure of my performance and learning. 4.07

15. This course helped me to grasp some difficult concepts and ideas. 4.02

17. I found this course intellectually challenging. 4.02

13. I received sufficient feedback on the quality of my work. 3.98

22. Overall, how would you evaluate this course? 3.98

14. I received helpful comments concerning my work. 3.94

16. My ability to think and to learn for myself was developed in this course. 3.93

From these results, we seem to be enthusiastic, generous with our time, concerned about our students, and willing to give our students the floor to express their own views. In the middle range of our scores, our courses are reasonably coherent and well-designed, our course materials are reasonably well-suited to the task, and we communicate reasonably well. At the low end, these average scores suggest that students are ambivalent about the usefulness of time spent in class, the fairness of our methods of evaluation, and the degree to which our courses challenge them and cultivate their ability to think for themselves. It would seem, then, that we score highly in terms of our personal qualities and attributes (the term “the professor” only appears in statements in the top ten), but that those elements closest to the heart of a liberal arts philosophy are the ones calling for the most attention. St. Thomas University positions itself with the mantra “Think for Yourself”, but our students seem to be telling us that we are not helping them to do it.

This leads to a brief consideration of the second rhetorical question: what are they doing wrong? Another analysis that I performed in preparing my teaching portfolio was to examine which survey items were ranked in my “top 11” (i.e., which half of the 22 items were ranked most highly), compared to which items were ranked in the university’s “top 11”. In other words, I was interested in examining whether our students consistently give higher scores to certain survey items and lower scores to others across the board, irrespective of the professor in question. As it turns out, there were only two survey items in which an average score in the university’s “top 11” was not in my own personal “top 11”. On the other hand, this also means that two survey items were in my own “top 11” but not in the university’s. Overall, however, these relative rankings seem to indicate that students tend to score certain survey items leniently, and others stringently. Are our students doing something wrong here? It would surely be speculative for me to say. It may be that our students have extremely high standards when it comes to critical thinking, and that, therefore, they are hardest on us in those areas. With 21.5% of students reporting 0-2 hours per week of study, it may be that a significant number of students don’t take their courses seriously, to say nothing of their course evaluations. With 84 credit hours of non-major courses in a typical degree, it may be that students find it hard to appreciate the intellectual challenges of courses outside of their major discipline. It is impossible, and possibly unproductive, to say.

At any rate, each of my three titular questions is rhetorical, and so attempting to answer them is beside the point. What these analyses of my student evaluations have demonstrated to me, and I hope to you, is that as a scholarly community we need to think more critically about such evaluations: the way they are worded, the expectations (ours and theirs) that they may reflect, and the ways in which their data may help us to improve our teaching. But we must also use these evaluations to consider broader issues—not only the nature and value of a liberal arts education, but perhaps more importantly the tripartite responsibilities that must be shared by individual faculty members, by a scholarly community of colleagues, and by students themselves, if we are all to live up to our collective goals.

A Teaching Conversation Rosemary Clews (Social Work) and Roger Moore (Spanish)As they near the end of their teaching careers, Rosemary and Roger discuss some of the changes they have experienced over their extensive lives as teachers. It is interesting how both focus on the change from the delivery of content (early in their careers) to the need to nurture, transform, and develop the learner (later in their careers). Also interesting is the presence of assumptions, which both scholarly teachers have made.

RC: My first teaching job was back in the 60s, the year after I completed my BSc (Sociology) degree. I taught one course, social psychology to first year students in a communications degree programme in a British polytechnic. I was given

16

very little advice about what I should teach or how I should teach it. I had never encountered a Course Outline or a Syllabus so I did not consider providing one for my students or myself. I decided week-by-week what I would teach.

The course included 4 hours of “class contact” time, one hour of lecture and three hours when the class was broken down into seminar groups. The lecture worried me. I considered that my knowledge of the subject was limited so I spent hours and hours reading textbooks. Then I tried to summarize everything I had learned as concisely as possible. I rarely got to the end of my notes and I worried that I was falling behind my self-imposed goals. My worries were about content; I can’t remember thinking about teaching and learning methods. The seminar groups worried me even more. How would I deal with questions when I did not know the answers? How much should I encourage discussion among the students and how much should I take the lead? I had nobody to advise me and I considered it would demonstrate my incompetence if I asked for help so I kept my problems to myself (and the students).

I learned a lot that year. It surprised me to learn that I actually knew more than most of the students. I began to gain confidence in encouraging students to contribute to class learning. Finally, I remember thinking that a “good class” was a class in which students learned rather than one in which I covered a lot of material.

I also remember asking a class of trade students in a technical college to read aloud from a textbook - it had not occurred to me that some of them would be unable to do so.

RGM: What a fascinating last sentence! It raises the question of assumptions: what assumptions did we have and do we now have as teachers and how do we and our students react to these assumptions? By extension, what other assumptions do we make? For example, I assume, correctly or incorrectly, that students are interested in the subject that I teach and will actually do the work that is necessary to succeed in the class. However, I am sure that, especially at the first year level, some are just there for the grade. They continue while they are doing well and leave when they start to do badly.

I am very aware that to assume is to make an ass out of you and me (ass+u+me). Are we wrong to assume? Should we declare our assumptions openly and honestly? Should we ask our students to tell us their assumptions at the beginning of the year? What assumptions do students have in the current generation? What assumptions did they have when we first started teaching?

I once, not so long ago, asked a student to take her essay home and to rework it on the computer over the weekend. She replied that she could not do so. I asked why not and she explained that she lived in a cabin in the woods with her grandmother and that there was neither electricity nor running water. Needless to say, this shocked me totally. What other assumptions do we have as teachers?

RC: I made a huge number of assumptions when I began teaching. I made assumptions about the ability levels of students, about their existing knowledge and about their interest in what I was teaching.

Also I made the assumption that I needed to focus on content and I paid little attention to teaching and learning methods.

I had a privileged education in a British boarding school. I assumed that the students I taught would be similar to myself and should be taught in a similar way. But these students often were not like me. My first full time teaching job was in a technical college. My students included students on trade courses who were “sentenced” to one hour of general (liberal arts) education. Many of them resented the time spent in this way. They had come to college to gain qualifications in plumbing or carpentry. They wanted entertainment in the classroom if the course was not directly relevant to their trade. I had the challenge of trying to get them interested in what I was teaching.

I also taught Sociology to 15 to 17 year olds in the college. You will recall that when we were young teachers many British children left school at 15. I made assumptions about what the young school leavers would remember. On one occasion when I mentioned “The Beatles” one student asked “Who or what are ‘The Beatles’?” This was before “The Beatles” became famous for the second time.

I taught social sciences to health visiting nurses who assumed that they would be shown the direct application of social science in their work. I assumed that they would work this out for themselves. These assumptions were never clearly articulated or shared.

I wanted to be a good teacher so I tried to follow the example of people who I considered to be good teachers and avoid some of the errors of people who I considered were poor teachers. How important were role models to you, Roger?

RGM: Role models, Rosemary? Well: most of my role models were so negative that I determined never to be like them. They beat us mercilessly with sticks and straps. They criticized us. They poured scorn over us. They diminished us. They reduced us to nothing and made themselves so grand that they towered over us and appeared all mighty. Trying to do the opposite to what they did seems to have been reasonably successful.

I remember one old professor, at my undergraduate university: he used to imbibe sherry at lunch time and then ask us to read poetry to him. We would read alternate lines or nonsense verse with the words all lisped and jumbled up. He would close his eyes, rock back and forth, and burp to himself and the class, saying “Ah yes! (Burp) Wonderful poet! (Burp)!” This, incidentally, was the same professor who pronounced the unforgettable line: “Knowledge is that which flows from my page to your page without passing through anyone’s brain.” I am afraid there is still much of that sort of knowledge being taught, even in the 21st Century.

My best role models, on the other hand, were not teachers but the coaches who taught me how to coach. The most important player in the team, they told me, is not the superstar but the lowliest reserve who might have to come on to the field at a very important moment. If he doesn’t know what to do, all is lost. Every member of the team, the squad, the class, is equally important. And each one must know

17

exactly what he or she is meant to be doing. In chess, the pawn, the humblest piece, can gain the opponent’s eighth rank and become the most powerful piece on the board: a queen. We must be aware of the moments when we teach even the most seemingly unpromising of students. For each student is an individual, a human being who can grow and develop in directions which we can suggest and shape but must never control.

This is the magic of teaching: to open doors and to leave doors open. To be there, to be supportive, to nurture, to develop, to transform, to demand, and above all to have faith in the individuals who come before us, to spot their strengths and weaknesses, and to help them develop and to grow into themselves.

RC: I try to communicate a social work value base and assist students to develop conceptual skills that they can apply as social workers. I try to create an environment where students can learn from each other as well as myself and any text we might be studying.

Sometimes the atmosphere in the classroom suggests to me that something important is happening for students but I don’t know precisely what is happening.

I consider that the learning process has been successful when graduates tell me about something they learned from me that has assisted them in practice. Often I have just a vague memory of teaching what has been learned. Sometimes I can’t remember trying to teach it. Your turn . . .

RGM: I have been asked on several occasions recently: “What do you teach?” My reply, almost invariably, is: “I no longer know.” I am not being coy. I honestly do not know what the living, breathing, thinking human being who sits before me in class takes away from his or her time with me. I do not honestly know what I teach. Nor do I know whether or not I am a teacher, in the strictest sense of the word. When I enter class at the beginning of a course, then I begin by asking the students what they would like to learn from the course. What I want to teach and what they want to learn are not always the same thing. However, it is often easy to twist what you want to teach into a format that will also permit the students to learn in a way which they see to be useful to them. I think now that the students want and need to learn is far more important than what I want to try and teach.

This first open conversation is followed by a second one: in what ways would you, as learners, like to approach the learning you have targeted for yourselves? The third open conversation revolves around how students would like to be assessed during their learning process. I try to offer a series of different assessment processes from which students can, as a group, engage in one or more. Often, I allow small differences in assessment, so that individual students can make choices which conform to their interests and abilities. Once this basic outline is established, we can start looking at the different routes that individual student wishes to take in their pursuit of knowledge.

I begin this style of learning and teaching in year one and continue it, offering more and more choice, through years two, three, and four. By fourth year, students are in a position to plan their own work and to recognize their own weaknesses and strengths. As a result, we arrive

together at situations in which students can teach themselves, with my assistance. As a result, I have very little teaching to do. On the other hand, I do a great deal of facilitating, supporting, encouraging, assisting, guiding, directing, reinforcing ...

My goal is to give the students the ability to establish themselves as motivated self-teachers with a lively curiosity in the fields in which I specialize. My goal is to eliminate the need for me to teach traditional classes in traditional ways. My goal is for the student to embark on a voyage of discovery and of self-discovery that continues way beyond the classroom and continues throughout later life.

In this fashion, I teach students to think: I do not teach them what to think. I teach them to read and research: I do not tell them what to read and research. I teach them how to write and how to organize their thoughts: I do not teach them what to write and how to write it. I teach them that there are worlds beyond the infinitely small world from which they start. I invite them to explore those worlds and I am amazed, as they grow in skill and confidence, by their curiosity, their interest, their intensity, their thirst for knowledge, and their strength of character and purpose.

I know that this style of teaching does not appeal to everyone. I also realize that in some programs, content delivery is seen to be more important than individual development. However, from what I have seen and heard in my conversations within STLHE, the 3M Fellowship, and even within St. Thomas University, this is what some of our best teachers are also striving for.

So, on we go, Rosemary, and as teachers, we can go on and on and on!

The Byrd-Einstein ScaleEarnest HummingbirdDepartment of Creative SolutionsThe Byrd-Einstein Scale is a very good instrument for measuring student reactions to the scope and nature of testing. I use it in courses where there are several tests offered on a regular basis. In first year courses, for example, I set a test every two weeks for a total of 6 tests per semester, the best 5 of these counting towards the students’ final grade.

At the end of each test, I place the Byrd-Einstein Scale which reads as follows:

On a scale from 1 (much too easy / Byrd) to 10 (much too hard / Einstein) please rate this test. You do so by circling the number that corresponds closest to your rating of the test.

Byrd About Right Einstein

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I usually follow this scale with another one which reads as follows:

On a scale of 1 (not at all) to 10 (very well indeed) how well does this test assess the work we have completed in class since the last test?

18

Not at all About Right Great test

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

In addition, I add a space for comments on the current state of the class and their learning experience and I invite students to write asking for an appointment with me, should they need one.

These four simple steps mean that I am in constant contact with the class and can keep my finger on the pulse of the learning that takes place. I try and keep the difficulty (Byrd-Einstein) within the Range 6, 7, and 8, but I aim for 9 / 10 on the second scale.

The system works well and I have not found that students take advantage of the system by deliberately scoring low or by writing insensitive comments. In fact, on several occasions, when students have rated the test as 10 (Einstein) they have taken the time to explain to me that this was because they didn’t prepare for it, and they often give me the reasons why not.

In addition to the Byrd-Einstein Scale, I also build at least 3 days a semester (one a month) into course discourse. We take that day to discuss where we are going, what we are doing, and what improvements are needed to best cater to the particular group of students with whom I am working.

Admittedly this means that less content is delivered; however, what content is delivered is, to a certain extent controlled by the students and this allows for student ownership, better participation, and an enhanced commitment to the course.

Stimulating Class Discussions David Ingham, EnglishPreface: While great teachers are to some extent born, not made (with things like charisma, audience awareness, and some of the intangibles of interpersonal skills being relatively innate), there are also principles that can be extracted and used by anyone. Even the best can run into difficulties stimulating discussions; even the least successful can profit from following these principles.

Creating the Right Atmosphere: This is likely the most crucial factor: if the right rapport can be created, virtually any sort of question can provoke responses. Here the first step is showing students that you respect and care about them as interesting, intelligent (if occasionally grammatically challenged) human beings. (Simply telling them won’t work, especially if the instructor’s words or actions belie it.) When students come to STU, especially if it is their first semester, they will be understandably apprehensive. A little reassurance and assuaging of their fears goes a long way. You have to care, and care deeply; this can’t be faked. A chilly or adversarial atmosphere will quickly quench any possibility of stimulating discussions.

Breaking the Paradigm: Many (if not most) students fresh out of high school will carry with them the paradigm of the instructor as fount

of all knowledge, which he or she will impart to students, who in turn write it down and parrot it back as best they

can. My students need to learn early that what is being taught is not information, but skills: how to read accurately, sensitively, perceptively, and critically, how to write clearly, coherently, fluently, grammatically, and intelligently; and how to think rationally, logically, and deeply. Just as one can’t learn to play the violin by sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture, so students cannot learn these skills except by practicing them. A professor isn’t there simply to tell students what they need to know, but to show them how. You’re on their side: you want them to succeed, to learn how, and you are delighted at their successes. (A physician doesn’t get upset at his or her patients because they’re sick; similarly a professor shouldn’t get upset because students don’t read or write very well - though a cardiologist will note that patients too have responsibilities, like quitting smoking and working on their eating habits . . .) In the classroom, the paradigm that likely works best is to see the professor as a helper and enabler: the moderator of (and occasionally enthusiastic participant in) stimulating discussions, not the dispenser of truth. And the key here is asking questions.

Asking the Right questions: With some classes, and with the right atmosphere, almost anything will work to get the ball rolling: “what did you think of it” can work like a lob serve, and intelligently following up on student responses can keep the rally going for a satisfyingly long time. With other classes, and especially with very large ones (where it’s more difficult to create much intimacy and where the intimidation factor and desire for anonymity are greater), such a question might produce nothing but downcast eyes. What questions work best? And what questions work poorly?

There are several types of questions that don’t work well. One pitfall for instructors (hoping to get things going by serving up an “easy one” to begin) is the short, factual, obvious, no-brainer (“who is the author of the essay? “). Such questions insult the students’ intelligence, and often they can’t be bothered to respond. More difficult questions of the right/wrong variety also tend to elicit few responses: students are afraid they’ll give the wrong answer and look foolish, not only in your eyes but also those of their classmates (whose opinion of them likely matters more to them than does yours). Such questions are related to the “guess what’s in my mind” type: students understand that there’s a particular answer you’re looking for, and will hesitate if they aren’t confident that they’ve divined it. “What do you think (feel) . . . ?” generally works better than “What is . . .?” But even open-ended questions can fail to elicit responses if they are too broad (“what are the moral implications of this essay?”); such questions haven’t been sufficiently limited (or more accurately, not enough framework for possible answers has been given). In a nutshell then, good questions require students to think, are open-ended, and are also sufficiently delimited.

Follow-up: Don’t blow it here. One ego-demolishing reaction to an answer (ranging from dismissal to ridicule or hostility) will not only lose you that student, but the effect will ripple to others as well. A student who volunteers to speak in class puts him or herself on the line, and care must be taken to treat that student’s response (and by extension, the student) with respect. (This applies to the other students as well: the cardinal rule is that they can disagree with ideas - it can even be encouraged - but they must respect individuals.) If the response isn’t anything like what you were looking for, chances are that

19

the question was to blame, not the responder. Follow-up questions (which now need not be broad at all, since you’re creating a one-on-one situation) directed only to that student can lead him or her to the sort of response or understanding you were seeking. Well into the course, having established the classroom as a completely safe and mutually respecting place, you might be able to get away with “No, but thank you for playing”; in general, though, whatever you do should be seen as validating.

One good way to do this is to build on student responses when asking further questions (directed to the entire class). You need to be flexible here, and quick on your feet, sensing promising avenues of discussion while also keeping it tethered (to some extent, at least) to areas relevant to the course. If you’re going to err, though, it’s best to err on the side of freedom: if a subject is of general interest and sparks thoughtful discussion (it shouldn’t be like a talk show, after all, consisting only of the clashing of entrenched prejudices and no reflection or thought), chances are it’s worthwhile.

The “speakers list”: A good technique to use when the hands start to fly up (they will) is to point to them in sequence, assigning each a number (“one,” “two,” and so on). This is not only a subtle means of keeping control (keeping the “organized” in “organized chaos”), but also makes certain that everyone who wishes to speak gets a chance to. The alternative (choosing only one) is “more authoritarian (“the Chair recognizes ... “), forces you to ask again after each response, and risks overlooking the patient student who keeps raising his or her arm and is never called upon.

You know you’ve arrived when . . . While it’s gratifying to have most (if not all) students contributing to class discussions, all too often the dynamic is actually a large series of one-on-ones between the professor and individual students. In the best ones, though, students are listening and responding to each other – and feel comfortable enough to disagree (respectfully) with each other and with the professor.

quizzes: A common stumbling block to good discussions is students who haven’t read the required material. One National Teaching Award winner, faced with this problem, asked for a show of hands as to who had read the material. Those who hadn’t were allowed to remain in the classroom and to take notes, but were not permitted to take part in any of the discussion. This is a trifle extreme (and if the resulting discussion isn’t a real barn-burner, risks falling utterly flat), but can work, subtly ostracizing those who haven’t kept up their end of the bargain. A less confrontational way, however, is to give quizzes on the required reading.

A good quiz, though, doesn’t simply reward those who’ve read the material. Questions that focus on obscure or irrelevant details will simply annoy students. The best quizzes highlight the details that a sensitive and careful reading would glean, but that a cursory skim would not. Such quizzes in fact train students to read. The questions should cover all (or most) of the main aspects of the text that you wish to address, and taking up the quiz (pausing after each answer to discuss it, and thus demonstrating ineluctably why this particular detail is crucial to a thorough reading) might well end up consuming the

entire period.

Diads: A method that can be used successfully even in humungous classes (>100) is to divide the class into “diads”: each person chooses a neighbour for the duration of the class (use triads if the numbers aren’t even) and when you ask a question, each student discusses it with his or her “partner(s).” Having had a chance to try out a response in the relative safety of a small nonthreatening group, students are far more willing to speak, even in front of a large number of their peers. How do you know when to start calling on students? Just watch them. There will be a time of intense discussion (which can last a full minute or more), silence will gradually descend, eyes will come forward, and you can start pointing, even if no hands come up.

This technique is, however, a demanding one. Essentially, it forces every student to address seriously every question you ask (they can get tired, and even ask for a break, for you just to lecture to them). It also forces you to ask very good questions.

Final Thoughts: Much of the foregoing simply belabours the obvious, I expect; most professors will have realized a great deal of this already. Moreover, some professors will undoubtedly disagree with at least some of it. Nonetheless, if you aren’t consistently getting a forest of arms in the air, you might want to think about trying some of these ideas. After all, if it was good enough for Socrates...

Lessons from the Medieval Workshop to the Post-Industrial Corporation:

Transforming the College Classroom ExperienceMartin Kutnowski Fine Arts (Music)“The Seven Samurai,” by Akira Kurosawa, one of the best films of all time, is one of the first depicting the impossible recruitment of a team, mandated with an impossible mission: A poor village of defenseless farmers, routinely ransacked by cruel bandits, must hire mercenary samurais to protect them for no monetary reward. The farmers’ predicament at the beginning of the story makes their ultimate success all the more inspiring. Each new semester, and in many similar ways, the teacher of first-year college students faces equivalent challenges, albeit perhaps less explicitly dramatic. Like the master samurai who is first gained for the cause, the true teacher must also engage sophomore students beyond their initial expectations, transforming them, empowering them, inspiring them. To effect this change, the teacher must transform the classroom dynamics, shaking the passive high-school expectation where information flows unilaterally—or, at most, bi-laterally—facilitating instead a new format where knowledge is created collectively by all the participants, and where the teacher, him or herself, is forever changed.

Etienne Wenger questions the established learning model which is predominant in Western formal education by contrasting it with an older model, which he calls “situated learning,”

20

found in non- or less-formal learning situations such as medieval workshops. In this model, learners—apprentices—are situated somewhere within a series of concentric circles, with a core of “practitioners” and a series of “rings” progressively farther from the center. Belonging to these concentric rings, no matter the distance from the center, is what he calls “legitimate peripheral participation”; the sum of all rings is what he calls a “community of practice.” This learning paradigm, which accurately describes formal artistic training, is also the de-facto learning mechanism in post-industrial business corporations.

In many music conservatories around the world, a typical master class includes voluntary performances of different performers, at any time and in any order. Some of the advanced students may play piano concerti, or virtuoso sonatas. Less advanced students may struggle with simpler pieces. But, no matter the skills or the difficulty involved, it is understood that all practitioners—including the teacher—have something to learn from each performance. In a modern business corporation, which is seemingly an organization with an even more overtly rigid, pyramidal structure, most learning occurs not through vertical directives but, paradoxically, by horizontal interaction. Notwithstanding the responsibilities towards their immediate supervisors, employees are primarily members within a community of practitioners, all learning from one another. As explained by Peter Senge, belonging to the community provides a strong sense of identity, and the protocols and mannerisms created by the interaction among members shape and re-shape the inner mental models and overall performance of the organization as a whole.

In the last few years, the key importance of human resources and the power of horizontal learning has been recognized and harnessed by thousands of organizations worldwide, in every conceivable type of economic activity. Undeniably, Wenger’s “situated learning” is an authentic, profound idea, valid in the “real” world. But, as obvious or unsettling as it may be to admit it, college teachers don’t teach in the real world: They teach in classrooms, sacred spaces for reflection which are separated from the world outside by the campus walls. The design of lecturing classrooms goes back to the time when the teacher was an actor, someone who created a bridge between the outside world and the gated monastery. Lecturing made perfect sense at a time when information was scarce—students did not have access to primary sources—and the world was conceived mostly as a static text to be dogmatically explained.

By contrast, the world is now a highly dynamic, hyper-connected, ever-growing system, not explainable by any single individual person, but which must be collectively—and only provisionally—decoded. As soon as they graduate and enter the post-industrial workforce, students join teams entrusted with formulating and solving new, never-encountered-before problems and situations; in other words, they must collectively create new knowledge. To better serve their students, no matter the content, and because information is readily available today, teachers should resist the temptation to just lecture in their classes, using

instead learner-centered strategies while creating frequent opportunities for horizontal interaction.

From Graduate Student to Professor: A Journey of DiscoveryChristian MbargaRomance Languages Department (French)After six years living in Fredericton and teaching at STU, I can look back and measure how far I have gone on my journey of discovery; indeed for me, life is a journey of unending discovery. This piece is mostly about my personal experience as a faculty member at STU in Fredericton.

Let me start by the most recent accomplishment in my life. After a few years of frustrating gestation, my book finally came out in October 2008, almost two years after I signed a contract with the publisher. As it the case with anyone who has published, my joy and sense of accomplishment was overwhelming, almost equal to what I experienced when I received my PhD, although much more subdued.

This event is even more satisfying when looking back at the beginning of my career move to Fredericton and my first two semesters. This time is particularly memorable because it was my first academic job after earning my PhD and it meant moving to Fredericton, a truly cultural, emotional and intellectual journey through time and space. From vibrant Ontario to more laid-back New Brunswick, from research-oriented and intellectually bustling Johns Hopkins University through U of Toronto to mainly teaching-focused St. Thomas University. Being assigned four (4) courses in my very first semester, 3 in literature and one in language, was quite challenging, especially given the fact that the three literature courses were in Francophone literature, a field I had little expertise in, my main research area being 19th Century literature and Emile Zola and Naturalism. I sat down full of excitement and I thought, reflected, prayed and came up with a well-thought out, detailed and waterproof syllabus. Or so I thought. Little did I know that it was nothing short of a colander. Indeed after 2 sessions, I realized that my students, having a different background from those I had taught as a graduate student, needed a totally new kind of syllabus. Needless to say that I also changed some of the reading materials to make my first year of tenure-track full-time teaching job an exciting and learning experience for both my students and myself. I used my first year at STU reviewing and adapting my methodological approach to teaching and assumptions about students, to my students’ satisfaction. It is therefore no wonder that I worked on average until 9 pm every week day and 4-6 hours on weekend days.

After a few semesters and having understood the environment I was in, I decided that one of the areas that I should focus on as a teacher was the area of critical thinking. For many students, analyzing a book or any piece of writing is an extremely tedious exercise. To remedy the situation, I chose to assign not more than 3 novels and often articles and short stories per semester. The rationale behind this move was my undergraduate studies. It was typical in Germany to study just a few books but these were studied thoroughly, often the same chapter would be reviewed, chewed, dissected week after week. The result of such a method was that we learned how to critically think as we had

21

learned to consider all aspects of the topic or novel. Going in depth was useful and gave students the right tool, once they had learned how to analyze a book or a theme in depth from the limited number of books we had to read, it therefore becomes easier to apply the same method with the necessary adjustments to almost any piece that needs to be critically analyzed, from a novel to a crime scene I would say.

One of my methodological strategies is the use of ‘nature’ or everyday objects to illustrate my point. This methodology, I believe, helps to bridge the real world to the academic and intellectual world with much less resistance. In order to teach how to analyze answer a question, essay or otherwise, I have often used a tree, where every part of a tree plays a major role, from the trunk to the branches, twigs leaves to the roots and even the earth around the tree. A cross section of the tree, starting with the trunk as the main idea is drawn and branches, leaves, roots are added, one at a time, by the time the whole tree is drawn, we have the ‘backbone’ as well as the ‘flesh’ and ‘muscles’ of what will be a healthy tree. This tree is drawn on the board by one or two students while the whole class is brainstorming relevant ideas, because this is a collaborative and inclusive effort, students participate more readily as their interest is thus elicited. This is comparable to a good and well-structured and detailed critical analytical essay or research. This has done more to help my students than the hand-out detailing how to critically analyze a theme or novel that I had been distributing. But I still give this hand-out to my students because I know that both the Tree and the hand-out sheet are part of the progressive process of learning and acquiring the right tools for the task at hand in a liberal arts institution like ours. I believe in teaching my students how I learned in the hope that they will be inspired and helped in their way.

One of my dreams as newly minted PhD was to continue doing research in my field while teaching. Indeed, I always thought that once I found a teaching position, doing research would be a given, however the reality was different. With four totally new courses in a field that was simply my secondary research focus, I found it more difficult to teach and do research at the level I had hoped and imagined. However, through dedication and motivation, I was able to conduct high quality research while teaching.

Combining research and teaching has been a challenge. This difficulty arises mainly from the fact the HIL library does not carry a great deal of documents relevant to my (new) field of research, namely Sub-Saharan and Caribbean Francophone Literature, although 19th Century French literature (my primary research field prior to coming to STU) is better served. Trying to locate relevant documents has proved to be often elusive, time-consuming and frustrating, because I have had to read into and get acquainted with the body of literature in my new field. Attending conferences has proved to be a big challenge because of the financial burden it places on me. One way I have found to alleviate the lack of relevant documents at the HIL has been research trips. By organizing short research trips to well-known research universities with their impressive libraries, I am able to discover new and hitherto unknown relevant books, I believe that nothing compares to being able to physically browse an aisle in a library and discovering books one is unaware of, the gratifying feeling derived from this activity is unbeatable. Very little data has been collected in my field and, contrary to many

other well-researched and documented disciplines with huge and diverse databanks, my field has close to none. Another challenging aspect of my research is the difficulty of finding publishers in North-America for manuscripts dealing mainly with Sub-Saharan Africa. In spite of these difficulties, I will continue to enjoy teaching and researching at STU.

Teaching with HypertextTrevor SawlerEnglish Department

A vast mass of school learning is DEAD. It is as deadly as corpse infection.

—Ezra Pound

I do not teach. I awaken. —Ezra Pound

There is a certain satisfaction found in presenting the work of modernist poets to a class of students for the first time, but there is also a certain amount of frustration. For many students, approaching a long, difficult poem like Ezra Pound’s The Cantos or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is, to say the least, a daunting experience. Both artists are difficult, and over the last eighteen years of teaching this material I have become intimately familiar with student reactions ranging from bafflement to outright hostility. Modernist poets demand a great deal from their readers, including familiarity with a variety of languages both modern and ancient, a wide-ranging familiarity with historical figures, obscure references to paintings, sculpture and architecture, and an intimate knowledge of the artists own life. These demands on the reader often result in student frustration. This kind of reaction is not in the least unfamiliar to those who find themselves teaching modernism. In fact, in my experience it is not only the normal response—it is entirely understandable. Students coming to Pound for the first time inevitably demand to know if the [pet actually expected his readers to have any idea as to what the poems are without first having read the same books, studied the same languages, and talked to the same people that Pound did. I direct them to Eliot’s statement on the topic: “We can only say that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.” (Eliot 248). To Eliot, at least, the very culture in which he lived demanded difficult poetry.

The complex nature of modernist poetry is in many ways rooted in its highly allusive nature, and therein lies the difficulty for many readers. Poetic language often depends upon allusion in a way that other artistic mediums do not. Tom Hansen writes about the difficulty of teaching modern poetry—in this particular case Williams oft-anthologized “The red wheelbarrow”—and sums up the reaction of so many first time readers as follows:

Artists whose medium is not language do not have to contend with this specter of meaning... When a painter paints a picture of a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the

22

white chickens, we like its homeyness and know — without having to think about what it means — that we “get” the painting. But when a poet says, “so much depends,” we scratch our heads and knit our brows and purse our lips, as if to say, “I don’t get it, and I don’t like it.” (Hansen)

Objections such as the ones raised by Hansen are admittedly not specific to the work of the modernists; indeed, many teachers of poetry have had such a response from students regardless of the poetry being taught. It is the language of poetry itself that raises objections among students. How much more of a negative reaction, then, can we expect The Cantos of Ezra Pound to provoke? In The Cantos, students are faced not only with the difficulties common to poetry in general, but also with the specific complexities, layers of meaning, and allusive nature of Pound’s work. Gail McDonald explores the complexity of teaching the “modernist difficulty” and suggests that the difficulty found therein is “of two kinds: one that is primarily a difficulty of surface and one that is more profound. Both have implications for pedagogical theory and praxis because both raise fundamental questions about how we acquire and evaluate knowledge. What makes a text opaque? What claims may an artist legitimately make on a reader’s energies?” (McDonald 18).

The “surface” difficulties that McDonald refers to are self-evident; the vast majority of them are allusions, and it is these allusions that have been the focus of the efforts of scholars such as Carroll Terrell and William Cookson, who devoted much of their careers to annotating the Cantos. The “more profound” difficulties to which McDonald refers are the complexities of the poem that become apparent once the surface difficulties have been dealt with. Yet it is McDonald’s question as to what claims Pound is entitled to make on a “reader’s energies” that I find particularly interesting. There is no question that Pound consciously and deliberately places demands on his readers, but it is a common misconception among students, at least in my experience, that The Cantos somehow made more sense to Pound’s contemporaries; the assumption seems to be that readers “back then” had at least a reasonable grasp of the things to which Pound alludes. A quick review of the responses to the poetry upon its first publication demonstrates that this attitude is for the most part nothing more than a myth; “back then” was not all that long ago, and the average reader then had as much, if not more, difficulty with the text as readers today.

Teaching with Hypertext

There has been a great deal of interest in using hypertext as a teaching tool over the past decade. For highly technical disciplines such as software development, its utility is somewhat self-evident: it is a medium well suited for the delivery of technical resources such as those involved in computer programming. Ask anyone who has spent hours sifting through literally thousands of pages of documentation for a modern programming language about the advantages of hypertext over the printed page, and they will without a doubt tell you of the advantages of the former over the latter. Simply having the ability to search for text, let alone instantaneous cross-referencing, subject searches, or rapid access to examples, tutorials, and near real-time

access to subject matter experts, makes the electronic distribution of such information vastly more useful. Many

educators and researches have also explored using the medium in both the arts and humanities. To date, the vast majority of such exploration has been limited to course websites, class discussion via electronic bulletin board systems, and mailing lists. I use such techniques in my own teaching, and have found them to be remarkably useful. For example, in my “Survey of English Literature” course, I have done away with the need for course textbooks, and post all required reading as electronic texts. The full text of Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and a host of other material that make up the so-called “canon” of English literature are readily available online. In addition, having a course “blog” is a remarkably easy and useful way to get additional information to student outside of regular class time; furthermore, it permits students to have a forum to ask questions, comment upon what has been covered in class, and to “push” information to students in a timely and efficient manner.

Yet these things are really little more than a faster and somewhat fancier method of employing traditional teaching techniques. A course blog can be implemented in a somewhat less technical fashion merely through the judicious use of a photocopier on the part of the instructor, and a three-ring binder on the part of the student. A web site is in some ways no more sophisticated than copying whatever might be shown using an overhead projector during a lecture and handing it out to students at the end of a class, or putting the course notes on reserve in the library. In the same way, an online discussion forum could (albeit in a clumsy manner) be duplicated with a physical bulletin board, pen, paper, and a box of pushpins. Each of these technological advances can on some level be duplicated using more traditional methods that have been around for a very long time.

Yet technology can be a very useful means of improving the learning experience, and the advantages are not limited to merely technical subject areas such as computer programming. Much of the focus in recent years has been on distance-based education, where the student is separated from the instructor by geographic distance. An enormous amount of effort has gone into converting traditional classroom based teaching into an online format. I had the opportunity of visiting a number of universities and colleges in Massachusetts in 1999 and 2000 to see what was then the “state of the art” in distance based education. After careful review, I, along with a number of other consultants, found that the vast majority of these courses, which had almost without exception been highly successful in the classroom, were decidedly less than effective when moved into an online setting. This was in no way the result of lack of effort; rather, it was a mistake that was made by a great number of educational institutions and corporate training centers: the efforts devoted to “course content conversion” resulted in little more than converting overheads and lecture notes into web pages. The technology of distance based education that passed for “state of the art” as recently as eight years ago had no real advantages over something as simple as photocopying course notes, putting them into an envelope and mailing the package to a student. This technique failed to take into account the fact that the electronic medium is inherently different, and must be treated differently.

Suffice it to say, then, that hypertext can in no way be seen as a kind of “magic bullet” that will take the place of a gifted instructor and a class

23

of engaged students. Until technology advances to the point where it becomes transparent, and students and instructors can interact with one another as easily as if they were in the same room, any technology, no matter how impressive, will be little more than a pale copy of the classroom. Instead, technology can and should be used to enhance the teaching process, and not replace it.

Consider the medium of hypertext. Reading hypertext is inherently different from reading the printed page. Setting aside such obvious differences as the physical means by which one accesses information—a book is, after all, considerably more “user friendly” than any current computer system—there are a number of important distinctions between the two. First, reading a traditional book is for the most part a linear experience. We begin at the beginning, and apart from periodic trips to the index or table of contents to find something of particular interest we continue in a linear fashion until we either reach the end or lose interest. In essence, we are one half of a conversation, but we are unable to participate in or contribute to that conversation. We merely listen. In contrast, hypertext is not linear. Reading a hypertext is a discontinuous series of jumps within a single text, or between a variety of texts. It is not a single, continuous narrative with an identifiable beginning, middle and end; rather, the reader determines the path and structure of the narrative on his or her own. In most cases two different readers will have two very different reading experiences. Furthermore, reading a hypertext can more closely resemble a true conversation than does reading a traditional book, as the reader can in many cases contribute to the hypertext—the reader no longer merely listens, but can instead engage in the conversation as an active participant.

It is the interactive and discontinuous nature of the hypertext that gives it the potential to be a useful teaching tool—one that is particularly well suited to the teaching of modernist poetry in general, and The Cantos in particular. At least in part this is because The Cantos, like other long, difficult poems, effectively prefigures the medium of hypertext. Tim Redman suggests that “The Cantos may be considered a protohypertext, a new poetic form intuited by its author, and that there may be a new kind of poetics, a poetics of hypertext, that offers a valuable way to approach Pound’s difficult epic” (Redman 117). Redman envisions the use of what is variously termed hypermedia, multimedia and hypertext as a means to more fully explore what Pound gives us in his poem. A reader would be hard pressed to find a single page within The Cantos that does not draw upon or allude to a multitude of external sources. As one contributor to the EPOUND mailing list recently put it, “if any text cries out for the hypertext treatment, it is the Cantos!” (Pare).

There is no question that the text lends itself to a hypertext treatment, but the utility of that treatment insofar as a teaching tool remains to be seen. Certainly it has been tried before, and the results of such attempts have been documented and discussed. Gail McDonald has written extensively on her use of her hypertext treatment of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI, and records both the advantages that the medium gives, as well as the challenges that it presents. This hypertext version of a very small part of Pound’s poem is a simple website with links to background information on the “difficult words” in the poem. She describes the site, quite rightly, as little more than “flash footnotes”, but student responses to it are rather remarkable.

MacDonald begins her study of the poetry where it rightly should begin: with the poetry itself divorced from any kind of aid, whether traditional or technological. The students are encouraged to approach the poetry on their own, and to take from it whatever they can with nothing more than the text of the poem and their own understanding of it. In essence, they are encouraged to experience the poem as Pound almost certainly intended—it is to be read, meditated upon, and enjoyed.

I have used this approach myself, and have found that student responses to the poetry without any kind of critical apparatus result in a wide variety of responses, ranging from genuine bewilderment to genuine engagement. Following this traditional exposure to the poetry, McDonald then introduces her students to the hypertext version of Canto LXXXI. The most obvious advantage to this treatment is readily apparent: the difficult or obscure words are linked to explanatory material, and act so as to fill in the blanks—words that previously may have had little or no meaning to the student are now placed in context. Providing the student with ready access to the source and meaning of words and phrases that acted as obstacles to their reading of the poem does two very important things: first, it removes some of what McDonald calls the “surface difficulty” of the text; and second, it allows the student to begin to grasp some of the nuances and complexity of the poem that lay beyond the surface difficulty. When the more obscure language of the poem is made clear, we can come much closer to reading it as Pound almost certainly intended. Pound wants his readers to make associations and intuitive leaps in logic, and he does so through a vortex of what he called “multitudinous detail.” If the reader is consistently taken out of the text of the poem and forced to look up innumerable references, the vortex never reaches critical mass, and the effect that he wanted to achieve remains just out of reach. A hypertext treatment of the poem allows the reader to come much closer to the reading experience that Pound hopes to achieve.

Student reactions to the hypertext suggest that this is indeed the case. Much of my doctoral work has focused on creating a much more complete and complex hypertext version of Pound’s Cantos. I recently presented Canto LXXIV to a group of students first as nothing more than the poem itself, and then later as hypertext. Although the reactions were generally positive, there were some interesting responses that were less than enthusiastic. “When I first read the poem by itself,” one reader reported, “I was overwhelmed. I only understood a fraction of what was going on. Who is Kiang? What does OỶ ΤΙΣ mean? When I read the same thing as hypertext, I could at least follow some of what was going on. It really helped.” Another reader suggested that she had “no idea what any of it meant until I got some of the background. The hypertext made it seem that it might at least be possible to read this poem, and that it might actually be worth the effort.” Despite comments such as these, which suggest that the technological treatment of the poetry is generally helpful, other readers were less positive about the experience. “I read the poem without the links and it made almost no sense,” says one reader, “and then I read it with the links, and I didn’t know where to click first. When I did click, I found myself wishing there were more things to click on in the annotation. There is so much I don’t know!” Another reader found

24

the annotations intrusive: “The background information is helpful, but the poem is very hard to read like this. I find myself reading the linked words, and skipping a lot of the words that aren’t linked. I have to force myself to ignore the hyperlinks and read the whole line. The links get in the way. Maybe they should be clickable, but not coloured or underlined?”

I found the comment about the links being intrusive most interesting, and in fact modified my original hypertext engine to permit the user to make the links “invisible.” The link was still there, and clicking on a (now invisible) hyperlink would have the same result, but the link itself was the same colour as the text around it, and was not underlined. The only indication that a given word or phrase could be clicked on was the fact that the mouse pointer would change to a hand when rolled over the text. I then conducted the same in-class experiment with a different group of students. The results were very similar, but with one important exception. “I like the hypertext,” one student reported, “but the links should be underlined, or a different colour or something. Without that, I spend more time rolling over the text to see what might be linked than I do reading the poetry.” There were a number of comments in this vein, and it seems that when a reader knows that there are links, even though they are concealed, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to spend more time searching for them then reading the poetry. As a compromise, I implemented a simple toggle feature that allows the user to turn the links on or off. In this way, the user can turn the links on when they are needed, and make them invisible when they are in the way.

Conclusion

One of the most interesting advantages of using hypertext as a teaching tool with Pound’s poetry is how closely the technology parallels the very way that Pound approached teaching. Rather than explicitly giving the student a lesson, Pound instead focused on providing the component elements of what was to be taught, and allowed the student to come to the appropriate conclusion. The onus for learning is entirely upon the learner. This is abundantly clear from his prose, from his role as professor at the Ezuversity, and from the structure and form of his poetry. Everything depended upon “luminous details” that would work together to bring about a kind of epiphany. Hypertext, with its rapid access to background information, links to the plethora of material to which Pound alludes, and the explication of “difficult” material, gives the student of Pound’s poetry the means to at least approach the poetry in the way that Pound almost certainly intended. For this reason alone, it becomes an invaluable tool in the teaching of The Cantos.

Works Cited

Hansen, T. “Reclaiming the body: Teaching Modern Poetry.” 16 October 2008. <http://www.ncte.org/second/ideas/116257.htm>

McDonald, Gail. “Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty.” Pedagogy 2:1, 2001, pp. 17-25.

-----------------. “KYBERNEKYIA: Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI.” University of North Carolina at Greensboro. 1 Jul 2004. 16 Jun 2008 <http://www.uncg.edu/eng/pound/canto.htm>.

Pare, Tom. “Re: A beginner begins.” Online posting. 22 January 2009. EPOUND-L@LISTS.MAINE.EDU. 22 January 2009.

Redman, Tim. “An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry: Eleven New Cantos (31-41) by Ezra Pound.” A Poem Containing History. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Finding a Détente Between Research and TeachingTony TremblayProfessor and Canada Research ChairDepartment of EnglishWhen Roger asked me to write this piece I originally said, “No, I don’t have the time.” I had two February essay deadlines, two talks to prepare, a pile of editorial work, and a demanding new course. But as I thought more about it, and as he persisted (as all editors must), I realized that in reneging I was breaking a cardinal rule that has guided me for most of my career: to always keep fresh that détente between teaching and research. (I didn’t say “balance” because there never is any; at best, research and teaching are always in temporary equipoise, with one or the other holding the greater claim on our time and energy.) It is the job of the academic to achieve some kind of truce between them. How I developed and maintain that truce will be the focus of this article.

Let me begin by relaying an anecdote about a friend I knew in graduate school. The son of a Tamil Tiger, and thus no stranger to finding efficiencies, he was in Canada on a five-year Commonwealth Scholarship, the short duration of which necessitated his unusual application. In that time, he completed an MA and PhD. (Only Henri Gaudier-Brezska, who wrote his dissertation in Greek and defended it in Latin, was faster.) The secret to my friend’s success was planning. From the day he arrived, every seminar he delivered and essay he wrote became a chapter in his doctoral dissertation. The strategy was simple yet effective, and I never forgot it. To this day, I’ve never taught a class that wasn’t directed toward providing me with the raw materials for my research. I select primary texts and critical readings based on what I’m working on. The course I am teaching this winter—Literary Ferment in the East—is wholly designed to serve the scholarly needs of my next big project. If saying that out loud breaches a guild secret, then so be it. Ditto, if my admission appears self-serving or pedagogically irresponsible. What I’ve learned from 15 years in this profession is that we’re all pretty much on our own. If we don’t do what works for us, no one will look after our interests. The pluralism of interests guarantee it.

Lest I am thought irresponsible, I openly discuss this strategy with students, involving them in the research questions I am thinking about and, more generally, involving them in discussions about the environment we share. I have had some surprising results. One has been the increase of students in my own research, an admittedly tricky business at an undergraduate institution. Monitored and coached

25

carefully, however, their contributions and engagements can be significant.

But how does one prepare the ground for that student involvement? Simply put, and apropos the maintenance of the détente between teaching and research, I have developed a method of full disclosure that establishes a foundation. Its attentions can sometimes take the first week of class discussion. And while I have become rather notorious for that disclosure document among a certain type of student, it is what former students mention when they get in touch with me years later (and considerably wiser). Because it is on my webpage, it is also what strangers write to me about. At least six teachers, professors, parents, or administrators contact me about it every year. The vast majority appreciate its candor; a few even understand how it contributes to creating a classroom environment that is as productive for me as for my students.

Knowing its history and controversy, Roger asked me to publish the document in Teaching Perspectives. (His view, which I don’t believe he would mind me sharing, is that it may give other faculty a model from which to think about student engagement.) At four pages, however, I have to condense it here. The full document is located on my webpage: <http://www.stu.ca/academic/engl/tremblay/index.htm>. Click the link to “Recommended Reading for Students Entering My Classes.”

I entitle this disclosure document “Guidelines for Academic and Public Discourse” because in our culture of social delinquency many people simply don’t know, having never learned, what kind of conduct is appropriate and constructive in a university setting.

I begin by outlining the three primary expectations of students in my classes. They are as follows, with my explanations attached (addressed to students):

Regular Attendance: By “regular” I mean attending all classes, except for when you are sick. Because my classes are collaborative, your presence is needed and valued by me and by others. If you miss more than five 75-minute classes (three three-hour classes) without medical excuse, I will send a letter to the Registrar asking that you be removed from the course. As Marshall McLuhan said, “Class is where all the action is.”

Adequate Preparation: By “adequate” I mean that students come to class having read and thought about the material we are going to cover. To do this, get into the habit of coming to class with a question about the reading or perhaps an overriding impression that you extracted. Better yet, jot down a few notes on the reading: what you think is important, what’s worth talking about, what puzzles you, and what you don’t agree with. You may not get a chance to ask your question or share your impressions but the effort of arriving at them will pay dividends in your understanding of the discussion. To assist you in this, I use “reading quizzes” that ask simple questions about the work that is going to be covered. For students who come prepared, the quizzes amount to bonus points.

Reasonable Participation: By “reasonable” I mean that students come to class prepared to voice their opinions. I know this is hard, but what I have learned is that there is a direct correlation between oral participation and learning. When you participate in the discussion you get your questions answered; you get your impressions, observations, concerns, anxieties

addressed; and you stimulate those around you into making associations they may not have made. As tough as it is, then, your voiced opinion or question is a service to others, enabling them to learn, and enabling the discussion to grow concentrically, which enables more learning, and so on. Participation is therefore part of your responsibility to others in the class.

From there, I explain to students what happens in my classes:

All my classes are built around a model of group discovery, of a diverse group of people coming together to learn, ask questions, reflect, and explore. Humans have been participating in this type of collective activity long before the modern-day classroom, even if, today, we have real anxieties about participating collectively (this paradox warrants some investigation). As for the collective: think of the early experience of drama and of worship; think of the modern cinema and what it offers in terms of the group experience of narrative. It seems to me that we fulfill many of our social needs and express many of our imaginative desires in the group or collective. My collaborative approach is an extension of the belief that people have come together historically to talk with, listen to, and learn from one another. Anthropologist Marianna Torgovnick’s aphorism that “meaning is not discovered but created” seems to me to be an accurate articulation of this social phenomenon. Applied to learning, Torgovnick’s aphorism implies that the action of many “live” minds in a classroom is far more enriching than one—the professor’s. Learning, then, is not a spectator sport!

Following that, I focus attention on respectful conduct, a social ethic that is in fairly abundant supply at St. Thomas but one that needs occasional reinforcement. Here is how I introduce it: Because class sizes are large (compounding diversions) and “class is where all the action is,” we all must make a special effort to optimize class time. That means following the basic rules of public discourse: arriving on time; turning off beepers on watches and phones; not wandering in and out of class without very good reason (illness, emergency); and not carrying on sidebar discussions during lectures or presentations. When you come in late, or your watch goes off, or you get up to “take a break,” your simple action affects everyone else in class. I stress this point because the many courtesies of public discourse are not learned today. In fact, contrary behaviours are cultivated and reinforced. Social delinquency has become a kind of virtue. Acting stupid or disengaged is the cool thing to do. But since my primary job is the maintenance of the learning environment so everyone has an unencumbered chance to learn, I come down hard on those whose misconduct jeopardizes the learning of others.

Cambridge University professor Edward de Bono said that chief among our obligations to others is simple respect. Where love and hate are cultivated emotions, respect is innate, at least in the healthy person. But de Bono also warns that the innate propensity to respect can be lost in a society bent on devaluing it, which is why each of us must work diligently to keep our natural inclination toward it vital. Think about it: would you want to live in a world without respect? Inter-personal relations would be crude and profane, and public/collective discourse would be all but impossible.

Respect manifests itself in a number of ways in the classroom: keeping an open mind; being willing to change or, at least, interrogate your own opinions; respecting the ideas and opinions of others, even (especially) if you don’t agree with those; and finally, and most importantly, being generous with your good will. As Desmond Pacey wrote: “the code of truly civilized behaviour . . . can be best summed up in the now slightly debased word

26

‘courtesy.’” Without courtesy, respect, and good will, we are little more than barbarians with cell phones.

Next comes the consideration of grades, that area of greatest concern for students and faculty alike. As the following illustrates, I tell students what I think constitutes good and poor performance: I mark students on what I call “manifest work.” Manifest work is the work you pass in to me (essays, exams, quizzes) and the work I see you doing in class (your engagement, participation, etc.). I don’t mark what I can’t see, thus I am not moved by arguments that hinge on what you did “behind the scenes.” Your efforts may have been considerable outside of class, but if those efforts don’t appear in your manifest work, you won’t get credit for them, as I have no way of assessing them. To be fair to all, I can evaluate only what is in evidence before me.

I respond unfavourably to students who lobby for marks, especially at the end of term. The work of the term is a thirteen-week exercise, not a last-minute negotiation. If you are interested in doing well apply yourself early and let me know of your intentions. Part of why I’m here is to help you reach your goals, so let me know what those goals are. But don’t come to me at the end of term with a lot of reasons why you should get a particular grade. Again, in order to be a fair arbiter, I don’t submit to lobbying by individuals.

I mark students more favourably who have shown steady improvement and a willingness to experiment with the allowances of the learning environment I’ve created. In other words, when there is a judgement call (and there often is, especially when a student lands on that nether space between, let’s say, a C+ and a B-), the student who has made an effort to participate, collaborate, and be fully present (i.e., actively engaged, serious, inquisitive, helpful to his/her peers) gets the higher grade.

The tone throughout the disclosure document is intentionally provocative, meant to elicit student discussion and disagreement. Soft-peddling would not achieve that outcome.

As I explain more fully in class, I take the time to outline my own working principles and expectations of students to make those as clear as possible. Students have a right to know what to expect. That is one of my responsibilities to them. They also have a right to know that I am serious about literature, my chosen subject—that I do not make light of the material I choose for class, dumb it down, or take time from its full and detailed investigation. Also, that class time must contribute as much to my learning as theirs.

I conclude by giving students a way out, should they wish to take it. I suggest they do some fieldwork, ask other students what their experiences of my classes were, and consider, finally, whether their own approach to learning is conducive with the expectations I have outlined. That fieldwork, I say, should serve as full disclosure so they know exactly what to expect. While I respect their possible opposition to how my courses are organized, I suggest they look for other options if their opposition is going to affect their performance.

What’s the result of this kind of full disclosure, many have asked? Instrumentally, it provides conscientious students with a roadmap to doing well and assists me greatly in explaining to some why they didn’t. More significantly, it turns the classroom from a space where I just teach to one where I also learn, thus respecting the kind of détente

that keeps my teaching fresh, my research advancing, and my students part of a greater intellectual enterprise. Isn’t

that what a university experience must be? And aren’t our students worthy of that attention?

In memory of John McKendy. We are called to celebrate with immense gratitude the light of John’s life.Sylvia Hale, SociologyFor John, teaching was a vocation and also a joy. John was always attentive to process, striving to actively involve students in their own learning. He was among the first of faculty members at St. Thomas to embrace the Aquinas Program - an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning in which a small group of students explore a major theme like “Truth in Society” through three related disciplines. His course would typically begin with a case study of Salem Witchcraft trials. The challenge for students was to explore the social processes through which so many well-meaning people become convinced that innocent neighbours were guilty of heinous crimes and executed them.

John also embraced the concept of “Service Learning” for his course on Inequality in Society. He arranged placements for twenty-six students in social service agencies throughout Fredericton area, and challenged students to use the theories and insights of sociology to explore the hard life experiences of agency clients. Students learned to track the bureaucratic administrative practices through which government and non-government agencies intervene in the lives of the poor and disadvantaged, and to critically investigate the policy discourses through which we come to understand inequality in society.

In both these teaching environments John welcomed the opportunity for teamwork with colleagues on and off campus, and for engaging intensively with students in relatively small classes. His courses were always concerned with understanding the multiple ways through which people come to experience unequal social relations, and with how intimate personal relations and problems reflect broader social processes and institutional practices.

John was an innovative teacher, frequently bringing proposals for new courses and teaching designs to departmental workshops. Two years ago he developed an advanced course in Discourse Analysis, designed to teach students the tools of institutional ethnography. Students were encouraged to explore how official texts and documents manage social interactions across disparate social locations, and how the structure of talk in the context of policy documents help to shape how readers come to think about policy issues and hence react to them in socially organized ways. This fall he proposed a new senior course “Research Practicum” in which a groups of students not involved in honours thesis, might gain experience in conducting research on critical social issues, using the tools of active teamwork .

John encouraged close personal engagement with students. He set high standards for his students because it mattered to him that they come to see the structural practices and processes through which the patterns that we come to experience as “society” are continually constituted, negotiated, and changed. The point of understanding social processes was to understand the parts that we ourselves play

27

“may John join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence...

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge our search to vaster issues...

So to join the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the world.”

in constituting them, and to be able to intervene to create space for positive social change.

As a colleague, John was above all a peacemaker. In his work within the sociology department John would focus on process as much as on outcomes. He always paid attention to how to present issues and problems in ways that would encourage colleagues to work collectively as a team. During our year-long departmental review process, John worked intensively to develop workshop environments as constructive encounters in which department members came together as equals sharing a common commitment. He saw our great diversity an asset to be cherished rather than something to be discouraged. John was a very effective leader. He led in a quiet but carefully planned and constructed way. He sought to transform our practices and he fundamentally believed in and promoted shared leadership, both inside and outside the classroom. We will miss his leadership greatly as we struggle to continue in our lives the respectful listening and careful attention to inclusive practices that he taught and modeled.

Throughout the January strike, John’s leadership was quiet and in the background, yet profoundly instrumental. He came to the strike headquarters daily to pray that in the anger and frustration of that time we would not hurt each other, but would hold fast the knowledge that we are one community, in this together.

As a researcher, John’s life’s work was to shine light in the dark corners of the soul, where anger, hate and violence lie. His first post-doctoral studies were with men in counselling groups for men convicted of domestic abuse. The counsellor directing the therapy group made it a condition of the research that John join the group as a participant, rather than watch as an outside observer. John, as a peaceful, gentle, and non-violent person, sat down as an equal among men convicted of violent offenses. His goal was not to judge, but to understand, to respect them as people, and to be open to hearing their stories. As he would tell his students, there is none among us who has not at

some time hurt those whom we love through frustration, selfishness, or inattention.

John’s next research was to collect lifestory narratives from men in maximum security prison in Dorchester for crimes of violence. He struggled to understand their actions in the contexts of their shattered, fragmented lives. It is through John’s work we hear the voice of Chris, an inmate at the institution, call out to us: “I know that I did it - but Why? That’s what I want to know.” John came to the prison not only to listen, but to give - to teach. He participated in Quaker-led “Alternatives to Violence” workshops. His goal was to give those most deeply in need the tools to act in new ways, to bring hope in a place where little light shines.

John’s most recent work was in Burundi - to be with people whose lives are engulfed in the aftermath of civil war. In civil war, the lines between perpetrators and victims are blurred. The torturers and the tortured are the same people. When the violence subsides they must come again together to live in the same neighbourhoods and villages. For two summers, John worked with a team that was helping to build a clinic for people suffering from AIDS.

In summary, there is a coherence to all John’s work with students, with colleagues, with people he met through his research, and his work as a religious person. He was intensely aware of inequalities and injustices in the world. He sought in his research to understand them and how people were hurt by them. In his teaching he sought to help students to see them and to act against them. In the space that was his life, he sought to sustain a place of peace and justice.

John’s life’s work calls to us in the tragedy of his death and our loss, not to seek vengeance but to seek understanding and peace. For John - there is no way that one can use to search for or find peace: Peace itself is the way.

I conclude with some words from George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) through us -

Roger Moore Sharon Murray Monika Stelzl James Whitehead Jocelyne LeGresley Sarah Blackadar

Learning and Teaching Development Committee Announcements and upcoming Events

undated events: the following undated events are planned by the LTD Committee. Due to the current crowded schedule of events, the dates, times and places will be announced by e-mail and flyer as soon as the events are confirmed. Meanwhile, please keep a watchful eye out for the following:

Meet the Authors: as soon as possible after the publication of Teaching Perspectives 11, there will be a meet and greet the authors event. Details will be forthcoming by e-mail and flyer.

Attendance Policies: there will be a panel discussion on the subject of attendance policies in the near future. Please be aware of this issue and attend the discussion if you have questions or comments.

14 April 2009: Our next major Teaching and Learning seminar/ workshop will be held on Tuesday, 14 April in Brian Mulroney Hall. The topic is still under discussion, but we are working on a combined LTD / Research seminar on, amongst other things, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

17-20 June, 2009: The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) will be meeting at the University of New Brunswick this year (17-20 June, 2009).

Faculty members who are interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as well as faculty members who are interested in improving their teaching are strongly encouraged to attend the STLHE conference. The LTD Committee will attempt to assist STU faculty members who attend this conference by paying part of the registration fee. Note that priority will be given to those who have had papers accepted.

The Vice-President Academic, Dr. Patrick Malcomson, has asked the Director of Teaching and Learning to strongly encourage young, untenured faculty, in particular, to attend the STLHE conference. The LTD Committee will make a real effort to assist this group in meeting the registration fees. If you belong to this group and want to know more about the activities of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) and / or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), you are invited to make an appointment to talk with the Director of Teaching and Learning about these two topics.

More information on the STLHE Conference can be found at the conference site:

www.unb.ca/stlhe

The opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor, the editorial board, or St. Thomas University.