In Socrates' Wake
Survey of Topics in Ethics Courses
I have created a survey to try to identify which topics are most commonly addressed in introductory ethics courses that have a contemporary moral issues or problems component. If (and only if) you teach a course that focuses on practical issues (with little to no discussion of moral theory) or has a mix of theory and problems (either a unit on theory and then problems or a mix of theory and problems throughout), please fill out this survey below:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ethics-course-survey Thanks!
Feminist philosophers agree: Down with grading!
Over at the Feminist Philosophers blog, someone asked: "If there were one or two things you could change about academia, what would it be?" A heartening answer (from my point of view at least) given by several commenters: grading!
Some choice comments and observations below the fold:
San Diego's H.E. Baber:
Grading. From the perspective of an American academic, grading creates a serious conflict of interests. On the one hand, we’re teachers: we want students to understand the stuff, get excited about the stuff, and do well. On the other hand we’re agents of the university which functions as an employment pre-screening and credentialing agency, ranking students who are after scarce resources: jobs and places in graduate and professional programs. So, we have to produce a spread of grades and make sure that a sufficient percentage of students get bad ones. At my place in particular we’re under constant pressure to keep a lid on grade-inflation.Brandon:I teach at a community college, and the conflict between the aims of education and of certification represented by grades is very acute here. What is more, grading often obscures rather than conveys information about student learning; from learning that Student A got an A in an Intro course at one college and that Student B got an A in an Intro course at another (or very often even at the same college, from different instructors), and nothing more, one has learned nothing about their education. You don’t know what they’ve learned, you don’t know how they have been challenged, you don’t know the skills they’ve picked up. The two grades are not commensurable, but we treat them as if they were, and when we do, it’s just pseudo-information, pseudo-knowledge.Baber's remarks in particular struck a chord. It's frustrating to be playing roles with antithetical aims: the students' educational partner and the students' performance evaluator.
Some choice comments and observations below the fold:
San Diego's H.E. Baber:
Grading. From the perspective of an American academic, grading creates a serious conflict of interests. On the one hand, we’re teachers: we want students to understand the stuff, get excited about the stuff, and do well. On the other hand we’re agents of the university which functions as an employment pre-screening and credentialing agency, ranking students who are after scarce resources: jobs and places in graduate and professional programs. So, we have to produce a spread of grades and make sure that a sufficient percentage of students get bad ones. At my place in particular we’re under constant pressure to keep a lid on grade-inflation.Brandon:I teach at a community college, and the conflict between the aims of education and of certification represented by grades is very acute here. What is more, grading often obscures rather than conveys information about student learning; from learning that Student A got an A in an Intro course at one college and that Student B got an A in an Intro course at another (or very often even at the same college, from different instructors), and nothing more, one has learned nothing about their education. You don’t know what they’ve learned, you don’t know how they have been challenged, you don’t know the skills they’ve picked up. The two grades are not commensurable, but we treat them as if they were, and when we do, it’s just pseudo-information, pseudo-knowledge.Baber's remarks in particular struck a chord. It's frustrating to be playing roles with antithetical aims: the students' educational partner and the students' performance evaluator.
On Teaching Statements
Most philosophy instructors have had to produce a teaching statement at one point, either in the attempt to get a job or receive promotion/tenure. Professor Kevin Haggerty, at the University of Alberta, claims that "Teaching Statements are Bunk."
Haggerty says,
The first suspicion that there is something insincere about teaching statements derives from the fact that almost every author professes to love teaching. Cumulatively, this pandemic of instructional ardor strikes a dissonant note when compared with the routine activities of academics, many of whom spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to secure release time from teaching. That is, when they're not complaining about the petty hassles of coordinating teaching assistants, dealing with "grade grubbers," writing reference letters for undergraduates they could barely identify in a police lineup, evaluating essays, ordering textbooks, completing copyright permission forms, revising syllabi, learning the latest instructional software, and worrying about the time all of that takes away from other academic pursuits. Such grumblings dominate the hallway conversations of most faculty members I know....This, then, is a plea for greater specificity in reflections on the techniques and tactics used in teaching. I have learned almost nothing useful from the smattering of statements that I have read, but my students and I have benefited enormously from pragmatic lessons that colleagues have passed along about how they coordinate assignments over the course of a term, train teaching assistants, craft course outlines, remember students' names, and organize online resources.Haggerty argues that we should be concrete when constructing teaching statements, rather than speaking in general and nearly universally-expressed abstractions. I think he's right in many ways, but then the crafting of a teaching statement is nearly useless, and perhaps irrational to require, of a job applicant with limited teaching experience (say, a freshly-minted PhD). On second thought, it might be quite reasonable to require such a statement from a new PhD, because it may be more difficult to give concrete and pragmatic lessons learned about teaching rather than the standard general claims about "instilling a love for philosophy in my students," "not teaching them what to think, but how to think," "showing students the relevance of philosophy," and other such statements contained within the standard teaching statement.
Haggerty says,
The first suspicion that there is something insincere about teaching statements derives from the fact that almost every author professes to love teaching. Cumulatively, this pandemic of instructional ardor strikes a dissonant note when compared with the routine activities of academics, many of whom spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to secure release time from teaching. That is, when they're not complaining about the petty hassles of coordinating teaching assistants, dealing with "grade grubbers," writing reference letters for undergraduates they could barely identify in a police lineup, evaluating essays, ordering textbooks, completing copyright permission forms, revising syllabi, learning the latest instructional software, and worrying about the time all of that takes away from other academic pursuits. Such grumblings dominate the hallway conversations of most faculty members I know....This, then, is a plea for greater specificity in reflections on the techniques and tactics used in teaching. I have learned almost nothing useful from the smattering of statements that I have read, but my students and I have benefited enormously from pragmatic lessons that colleagues have passed along about how they coordinate assignments over the course of a term, train teaching assistants, craft course outlines, remember students' names, and organize online resources.Haggerty argues that we should be concrete when constructing teaching statements, rather than speaking in general and nearly universally-expressed abstractions. I think he's right in many ways, but then the crafting of a teaching statement is nearly useless, and perhaps irrational to require, of a job applicant with limited teaching experience (say, a freshly-minted PhD). On second thought, it might be quite reasonable to require such a statement from a new PhD, because it may be more difficult to give concrete and pragmatic lessons learned about teaching rather than the standard general claims about "instilling a love for philosophy in my students," "not teaching them what to think, but how to think," "showing students the relevance of philosophy," and other such statements contained within the standard teaching statement.
"A mildly discreditable day job"
Cambridge philosopher Raymond Geuss on the profession of teaching philosophy:
Read, react, discuss?
I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable, partly because I don’t think, finally, that this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations which would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is an open area within which it is possible that some of these young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some minimal mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. The remaining 5 percent of my job, by the way, what I would call the actual “philosophical” part, is almost invisible from the outside, totally unclassifiable in any schema known to me—and quantitatively, in any case, so insignificant that it can more or less be ignored.
So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole.Read, react, discuss?
On making reading unavoidable
Inside Higher Ed's Rob Weir usually offers sage advice on all matters pedagogical. A few months back, Rob tackled an age old teaching problem: students who don't read. Rob notes that there probably never was a Golden Age of Student Literacy, a halcyon era when students would gladly forego doing the Charleston/hitting the drive-in/scoping out Facebook for the opportunity to read assigned academic material.
The fact of the matter is that most students are not like us; they are not intrinsically motivated to read difficult or challenging academic texts. In my experience at least, students don't see that reading the material before class makes it possible to participate meaningfully in class discussion, readies one to write papers, etc. Students generally don't see a connection between reading and learning, or between reading and other academic tasks. (Or they see these connections, but just don't want to put in the effort.)
Given this, Rob's motto strikes me as correct: If you want students to read, make it hard (or impossible) to avoid.
Here are some of Rob's tips to make it reading unavoidable:
Rob also mentions a technique I use: quizzes. I'm not a big fan of pop quizzes based on assigned readings. In many of my classes, I make available a short quiz each week via Blackboard. They usually have about six questions, most based on the assigned readings. Students can only take the quiz once, but I give them an hour to complete it. I've found that this approach does compel students to read eventually. No, they still may not read between class sessions, and yes, many of them probably pick up their texts while they do the quiz in order to find the right answers. But I'm not so bothered by that. They end up having to read carefully, the quizzes reinforce their comprehension of the reading, and they get important cues on the sorts of things to read for.
Anyone have any other ideas to make reading unavoidable for students?
The fact of the matter is that most students are not like us; they are not intrinsically motivated to read difficult or challenging academic texts. In my experience at least, students don't see that reading the material before class makes it possible to participate meaningfully in class discussion, readies one to write papers, etc. Students generally don't see a connection between reading and learning, or between reading and other academic tasks. (Or they see these connections, but just don't want to put in the effort.)
Given this, Rob's motto strikes me as correct: If you want students to read, make it hard (or impossible) to avoid.
Here are some of Rob's tips to make it reading unavoidable:
- "Assign appropriate material. Just because you found an 800-page specialty tome to be spellbinding doesn’t mean your students will. Don’t expect undergrads to get excited about most journal articles either; you’ll need to teach them how to approach such dense reading. Seek material that is appropriate for what students need to know — the more engagingly written and short, the better."
- Craft frequent writing assignments to help ensure reading. (Rob also has some advice on to deal with grading a large volume of papers.)"
- "Construct lectures and discussions in such a way that reading is a prerequisite for comprehension. One should allude to materials in the reading — if you don’t, expect complaints that you made students buy things you never used — but don’t waste class time with a point-by-point rehash of the assignment. I often clue students about what they need to pay close attention to in order to understand an upcoming lesson. In that lesson I entertain questions about the reading, but I seldom walk through it.In like fashion, write lectures around reading concepts and content, or spin them in a new direction, but don’t repeat what the readings say."
- "If you give exams, make certain that parts of those exams are based on material that could only have been gotten from the reading."
- "Research and reflection papers should definitely require student writers to grapple with assigned readings."
Rob also mentions a technique I use: quizzes. I'm not a big fan of pop quizzes based on assigned readings. In many of my classes, I make available a short quiz each week via Blackboard. They usually have about six questions, most based on the assigned readings. Students can only take the quiz once, but I give them an hour to complete it. I've found that this approach does compel students to read eventually. No, they still may not read between class sessions, and yes, many of them probably pick up their texts while they do the quiz in order to find the right answers. But I'm not so bothered by that. They end up having to read carefully, the quizzes reinforce their comprehension of the reading, and they get important cues on the sorts of things to read for.
Anyone have any other ideas to make reading unavoidable for students?
Suggestions for Helping Students Find "Dialectic" Indicators?
Hi, folks,
One of my departmental colleagues recently expressed some frustration about his students' reading abilities, and I thought that it might be useful to air the source of his frustration here. To paraphrase my colleague: he finds that at all levels of his Philosophy courses, many students have a very difficult time either identifying or following the dialectic thread of an essay, article, book chapter, etc. I have noticed this difficulty in most of my Philosophy courses, as well.
There is already a challenge to get some students to recognize something as an argument when they're reading a text. Spending some time with those students on identifying indicator terms -- by which I mean, the words and phrases that indicate (likely) premises, intermediate conclusions, and main conclusions of arguments -- can help quite a bit. However, there is a second, probably larger challenge, and this is the one that my colleague was talking about: even when students can recognize that an argument is being presented, they often have real trouble recognizing what the author is doing with that argument in the context in which it appears.
For example -- you might ask your students: What seems to be the author's relationship to this argument in this section? Is the author setting it out "simply" to present it, without either endorsing it or criticizing it? Is the author setting it out so that, one paragraph later, they can begin to criticize it or to present someone else's criticism of it? Is the author presenting it and endorsing its conclusion, but not all of its premises? And so on. (I don't mean to suggest that those possibilities are mutually exclusive, of course.) In my experience -- and in my colleague's experience -- students overwhelmingly treat arguments that the author discusses as ones that the author is endorsing; the results for their understanding of what they read are easily predictable. I have sometimes assigned "guided reading questions" to accompany the assignments, in which I ask, e.g., ""What seems to be the author's relationship to this argument, and how can you tell?" But even when I've thereby alerted them to the need to ask that sort of meta-level question as they're doing the readings, I find that many students still struggle to figure out how to do it.
(Assuming that I've described it correctly,) Is this a challenge that others of you regularly face in your courses? What are some of your favorite ways to meet that challenge?
One of my departmental colleagues recently expressed some frustration about his students' reading abilities, and I thought that it might be useful to air the source of his frustration here. To paraphrase my colleague: he finds that at all levels of his Philosophy courses, many students have a very difficult time either identifying or following the dialectic thread of an essay, article, book chapter, etc. I have noticed this difficulty in most of my Philosophy courses, as well.
There is already a challenge to get some students to recognize something as an argument when they're reading a text. Spending some time with those students on identifying indicator terms -- by which I mean, the words and phrases that indicate (likely) premises, intermediate conclusions, and main conclusions of arguments -- can help quite a bit. However, there is a second, probably larger challenge, and this is the one that my colleague was talking about: even when students can recognize that an argument is being presented, they often have real trouble recognizing what the author is doing with that argument in the context in which it appears.
For example -- you might ask your students: What seems to be the author's relationship to this argument in this section? Is the author setting it out "simply" to present it, without either endorsing it or criticizing it? Is the author setting it out so that, one paragraph later, they can begin to criticize it or to present someone else's criticism of it? Is the author presenting it and endorsing its conclusion, but not all of its premises? And so on. (I don't mean to suggest that those possibilities are mutually exclusive, of course.) In my experience -- and in my colleague's experience -- students overwhelmingly treat arguments that the author discusses as ones that the author is endorsing; the results for their understanding of what they read are easily predictable. I have sometimes assigned "guided reading questions" to accompany the assignments, in which I ask, e.g., ""What seems to be the author's relationship to this argument, and how can you tell?" But even when I've thereby alerted them to the need to ask that sort of meta-level question as they're doing the readings, I find that many students still struggle to figure out how to do it.
(Assuming that I've described it correctly,) Is this a challenge that others of you regularly face in your courses? What are some of your favorite ways to meet that challenge?
The Myth of the "Life of the Mind"
Thomas Benton at the Chronicle of Higher Education has written a thought provoking piece on the culture of humanities graduate schools and its resistance to bridging the gap between being practical and living the "life of the mind". Is it disconcerting that humanities graduate schools often neglect giving practical advise to their students regarding the difficulties inherent in getting a humanities teaching post? What are the responsibilities of professors/advisors? Is the professor/student paradigm in place at most institutions antiquarian? What if anything can/should be done?
Student evaluations — in the long run
Following up on our recent discussion of how to evaluate your own teaching evaluations, Tom Deans at Inside Higher Ed describes some of his efforts to get more "longitudinal feedback" on his teaching — feedback on a longer time horizon than simply the end-of-term evaluations most of our institutions rely on.
Deans, who teachers English, outlines his "small experiment with long-delayed course assessments, surveys that ask students to reflect on the classes that they have taken a year or two or three earlier."
I've been considering such evaluations ever since I went through the tenure [process] a second time: the first was at a liberal arts college, the second two years later when I moved to a research university. Both institutions valued teaching but took markedly different approaches to student course evaluations. The research university relied almost exclusively on the summary scores of bubble-sheet course evaluations, while the liberal arts college didn't even allow candidates to include end-of-semester forms in tenure files. Instead they contacted former students, including alumni, and asked them to write letters. ...But how to get that kind of longitudinal feedback at a big, public university?
Deans then wrote a six-question survey on SurveyMonkey and e-mailed a link to the survey to students from courses he had taught one year ago and three years ago. I was surprised by the rate of return Deans got: 60 percent, not makedly worse than I sometimes get for my regular end-of-term evaluations. As Deans puts it, he was interested "to know what stuck -- which readings (if any) continued to rattle around in their heads, whether all the drafting and revising we did proved relevant (or not) to their writing in other courses, and how the service experience shaped (or didn't) any future community engagement." I won't go into the details of the results Deans got, but suffice to say that he got a powerful picture of which assignments and readings made an impact and which didn't.
Deans' efforts are laudable, and they raise an issue I've long thought about: the timing of student evaluations. Why should we suppose that students are best situated to evaluate their learning experiences immediately after they take place (or in some cases, as they are still taking place)?
I understand that the proximity of student evaluations to the final exam in particular tends to influence how students evaluate the course, but beyond this, I wonder if various situational factors lead students to evaluate their own learning experiences in distorted ways. The student who, at the end of term, is laboring under a ton of deadlines is probably going to say that course workload is too heavy. The student who came into the course afraid of essay writing who got an A on the most recent assignment is more likely to say positive things about such assignments. And so on. This isn't to say that situational factors might not also influence students evaluating a course a year or two after it took place, but I would speculate that hindsight, while not 20/20, is still clearer than students' immediate perception of their learning experiences. (I'm reminded of that message on a car's side mirrors: "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.")
Think of it this way: We're asking students to evaluate their learning experiences. Just after those learning experiences occur, it's likely that their evaluations will be shaped by their memories of the experiences. As time passes (and students have more information about themselves as learners, their needs, etc.), the particulars of the experiences will recede and the learning may come to the fore. Or so I would hypothesize.
So I find myself very tempted to follow Deans and create my own instruments for gathering longitudinal feedback. Are others similarly tempted? Should we expect this feedback to be more insightful, accurate, and useful than the feedback gathered as courses reach their conclusions?
Deans, who teachers English, outlines his "small experiment with long-delayed course assessments, surveys that ask students to reflect on the classes that they have taken a year or two or three earlier."
I've been considering such evaluations ever since I went through the tenure [process] a second time: the first was at a liberal arts college, the second two years later when I moved to a research university. Both institutions valued teaching but took markedly different approaches to student course evaluations. The research university relied almost exclusively on the summary scores of bubble-sheet course evaluations, while the liberal arts college didn't even allow candidates to include end-of-semester forms in tenure files. Instead they contacted former students, including alumni, and asked them to write letters. ...But how to get that kind of longitudinal feedback at a big, public university?
Deans then wrote a six-question survey on SurveyMonkey and e-mailed a link to the survey to students from courses he had taught one year ago and three years ago. I was surprised by the rate of return Deans got: 60 percent, not makedly worse than I sometimes get for my regular end-of-term evaluations. As Deans puts it, he was interested "to know what stuck -- which readings (if any) continued to rattle around in their heads, whether all the drafting and revising we did proved relevant (or not) to their writing in other courses, and how the service experience shaped (or didn't) any future community engagement." I won't go into the details of the results Deans got, but suffice to say that he got a powerful picture of which assignments and readings made an impact and which didn't.
Deans' efforts are laudable, and they raise an issue I've long thought about: the timing of student evaluations. Why should we suppose that students are best situated to evaluate their learning experiences immediately after they take place (or in some cases, as they are still taking place)?
I understand that the proximity of student evaluations to the final exam in particular tends to influence how students evaluate the course, but beyond this, I wonder if various situational factors lead students to evaluate their own learning experiences in distorted ways. The student who, at the end of term, is laboring under a ton of deadlines is probably going to say that course workload is too heavy. The student who came into the course afraid of essay writing who got an A on the most recent assignment is more likely to say positive things about such assignments. And so on. This isn't to say that situational factors might not also influence students evaluating a course a year or two after it took place, but I would speculate that hindsight, while not 20/20, is still clearer than students' immediate perception of their learning experiences. (I'm reminded of that message on a car's side mirrors: "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.")
Think of it this way: We're asking students to evaluate their learning experiences. Just after those learning experiences occur, it's likely that their evaluations will be shaped by their memories of the experiences. As time passes (and students have more information about themselves as learners, their needs, etc.), the particulars of the experiences will recede and the learning may come to the fore. Or so I would hypothesize.
So I find myself very tempted to follow Deans and create my own instruments for gathering longitudinal feedback. Are others similarly tempted? Should we expect this feedback to be more insightful, accurate, and useful than the feedback gathered as courses reach their conclusions?
Students on what frustrates them
A teaching note from the faculty center on my campus describes some recent studies about what students find to be the most frustrating instructor behaviors. The results from one student survey are below the fold. Anyone surprised by these results? What can we learn from them?:
An extensive study received about 1700 responses from 250 students concerning annoying instructor behavior (Kearney, Plax, Hays, & Ivy, 1991). The researchers coded the responses into 28 categories, which can further be categorized into about five major classes of problem behavior:
• a variety of disorganized behaviors
• lack of feedback on student work
• poorly designed coursework or unprofessional content delivery
• disrespect towards students, including unfairness, discourtesy, or even abusive behavior
• professional misconduct, including not keeping up with the field
Other, newer, studies pretty much concur with the 1991 study. Disorganization is the most disruptive behavior on the part of an instructor, and can take a few different forms:
• Giving rambling or incoherent lectures
• Changing due dates
• Losing student materials
• Lack of awareness about issues outside class that affect students
Other researchers took a positive tack, asking students about helpful instructor behaviors: “giving lectures that are clear and well-organized” was the top helpful behavior no matter how students were sorted (by major, sex, year in program, achievement level).
Other helpful behaviors included:
• Helping students prepare for exams by giving review sessions
• Providing prompt feedback on student work
• Collecting and responding to student feedback about the class
• Providing examples of excellent work
Number 10 on the top 10 helpful list was “Having group discussion activities in class.” (Oh well, at least it made the top 10.)
These results are actually quite heartening, because the top problems (or helpful behaviors) are closely related to student learning. Organization and clarity are the top factors impacting student learning. Rapport and stimulation of interest are important but not as important as organization and clarity (Feldman, 1998). Students like rapport and stimulation of interest, of course, but it does not affect their learning to the extent that clear, organized coursework does.
A final exam on grading
Teach Philosophy 101 has a thought-provoking "final exam" on grading, aimed at instructors. All of the questions raise important issues about grading, but here are a couple of the exam questions that struck me. Curious to know how ISW readers would answer them:
3. ESSAY QUESTION: Student X writes an excellent paper and gets an A. Student Y writes a poor paper but takes advantage of the offer made to all students in the class that they may rewrite their paper as many times as they wish. After several rewrites (responding to the teachers comments each time), student Y finally produces a paper that is as good as student X’s original paper. Is it appropriate for them both to receive the same grade? Does that send a misleading message to external audiences?
7. TRUE OR FALSE?: Although many teachers say that they want students to learn higher order mastery of the material (such as understanding and applying the material), they often grade their students on material that is less significant but easier to grade.
3. ESSAY QUESTION: Student X writes an excellent paper and gets an A. Student Y writes a poor paper but takes advantage of the offer made to all students in the class that they may rewrite their paper as many times as they wish. After several rewrites (responding to the teachers comments each time), student Y finally produces a paper that is as good as student X’s original paper. Is it appropriate for them both to receive the same grade? Does that send a misleading message to external audiences?
7. TRUE OR FALSE?: Although many teachers say that they want students to learn higher order mastery of the material (such as understanding and applying the material), they often grade their students on material that is less significant but easier to grade.
A frustration: Evaluating reasoning vs. evaluating premises
Here's a frustration I have in teaching reasoning to students.
I don't teach logic or critical thinking, but do feel compelled to give students a foothold in logical reasoning in introductory level philosophy courses. So in my introduction to ethics courses, I introduce students to the concept of an argument and try to put them in a position to begin evaluating the arguments we confront in the course.
Since this is not a formal logic course, I try to keep things loose or informal, stating that arguments should have (a) good reasoning, and (b) premises that are true (or for which there is compelling evidence). And when they have (a) and (b), I direct them to call such arguments 'sound'. As I said, I'm pretty loose about all of this, particularly (a). I don't distinguish among inductive and deductive arguments, don't go into validity or fallacies, etc. The aim here is simply to get them to appreciate two dimensions of argumentative strength: the reasoning and the veracity of the premises.
So the frustration is this: (a) just seems to pass students by. When we begin to look at actual arguments, students rarely if ever ask questions about, or criticize arguments for, their reasoning. All of their attention is directed at assessing the truth of the premises. And this is so even though I underscore that both (a) and (b) are crucial to arguments; that criticizing an argument for its reasoning is in many respects a more effective form of critique, since often times whether a premise is true is more contentious than whether the reasoning is good; etc. But it seems like in my efforts to teach "reasoning," the students don't latch onto the importance of reasoning!
I'm not sure why (a) doesn't get a grip on the students. (One thought I had is that it requires them to think relationally rather than atomically, which is perhaps more challenging?) In any event, I have three questions for our readers:
I don't teach logic or critical thinking, but do feel compelled to give students a foothold in logical reasoning in introductory level philosophy courses. So in my introduction to ethics courses, I introduce students to the concept of an argument and try to put them in a position to begin evaluating the arguments we confront in the course.
Since this is not a formal logic course, I try to keep things loose or informal, stating that arguments should have (a) good reasoning, and (b) premises that are true (or for which there is compelling evidence). And when they have (a) and (b), I direct them to call such arguments 'sound'. As I said, I'm pretty loose about all of this, particularly (a). I don't distinguish among inductive and deductive arguments, don't go into validity or fallacies, etc. The aim here is simply to get them to appreciate two dimensions of argumentative strength: the reasoning and the veracity of the premises.
So the frustration is this: (a) just seems to pass students by. When we begin to look at actual arguments, students rarely if ever ask questions about, or criticize arguments for, their reasoning. All of their attention is directed at assessing the truth of the premises. And this is so even though I underscore that both (a) and (b) are crucial to arguments; that criticizing an argument for its reasoning is in many respects a more effective form of critique, since often times whether a premise is true is more contentious than whether the reasoning is good; etc. But it seems like in my efforts to teach "reasoning," the students don't latch onto the importance of reasoning!
I'm not sure why (a) doesn't get a grip on the students. (One thought I had is that it requires them to think relationally rather than atomically, which is perhaps more challenging?) In any event, I have three questions for our readers:
- Does our experience echo mine — that students tend to evaluate arguments solely in terms of the veracity of their premises rather than the strength of the reasoning?
- And if so, what explains this tendency?
- How might we, as teachers of reasoning, counteract it?
Reading Student E-Mails
Now that my long sabbatical is effectively over (sigh), it’s time to start thinking about school again and about issues that haven’t crossed my mind in a while. As I was putting together my syllabi, one of them struck me: the issue of how to write a proper email to a professor. Perhaps it’s just me, but I get the distinct impression that with respect to emails the writing skills of many of my students has degraded to an almost embarrassing level. The problem is so bad at times that I keep reminding myself to put some policy about it into my syllabus, but I never get around to doing it (which is why I thought of it while crafting a syllabus). The main reason it never makes it into the syllabus is that I’m not convinced yet that this is just a personal problem that I have with email correspondence, or if this is really a problem that lots of people see and think needs to be addressed. Moreover, I’m not sure it’s my job to combat it.
If you are a professor, you know what I’m talking about. Over the years I have received more and more emails that look like this:
——-#1 ———-
Hey
Where’s the assignment for this week
———————
OR
—–#2 ———–
Panza
Where’s the assignment?
——————-
OR
—— #3 ———-
i prolly wont’ be ther today im sick
——————–
OR
—–#4 ———–
send me the paper assignment i wasn’t in class
——————-
I could go on and on, as there are endless versions of these things. I’m sure many of you have favorite versions or pet peeves. Some of the emails I get are just careless, and some are just rude. Overall, I think, the main problems that I see boil down to:
1. The addressee is not addressed at all, or is not properly addressed. If I’m addressed, it might be as “hey” or as “Panza”. Just to be clear: I don’t want to be called “Dr. Panza” – that’s not my beef. Actually I ask students to call me “CP” so that will do. My main issue here is that “hey” is far too informal (I’m your professor not your buddy) and “Panza” is rude (only my best friends call me that).
Although I’m not a stickler for hierarchy, this _is_ a student/teacher relationship, and a properly composed email really should have an addressee. This doesn’t mean that our relationship can’t be somewhat informal, because it can be (mine often are). However, “hey” or “Panza” come off as rude (though I don’t think it is intended to come off this way most times). Ways of composing an email to a friend don’t immediately carry over to the ways you can speak to a professor, even one you know well or one that you goof around with to some degree.
2. The email is not signed. Why not?
3. The email uses no proper capitalization and is full of spelling errors or IM speak. Again, this is not an email to your friend, so “prolly” and “coulpa” and other such words should actually be spelled out. Frankly, a badly composed email at this level gives off a very bad impression about you, your intelligence level, and your character (it says that you are disrespectful, lazy, etc.). Why would you do that?
4. The email demands things without the required softening language. “I need X” or “Get me X” is not appropriate way to talk in a student to teacher email. Something like “Could you send me X?” is perfectly appropriate, sends the same message, and maintains a respectful tone.
5. There is no subject line in the email at all. This is a basic courtesy. People get lots of emails, and often need to prioritize which ones get read when. Besides, I like to know what it’s about before I open it.
6. The email has an attachment inside with no subject line and with no writing in it at all. Something like “CP, here’s my paper. Thanks, Poindexter” will do.
It all boils down to a few things for me.
a) If you don’t know the person well on a friendly non-formal level, then you should write an email the same way you would actually type a letter that you would print and send in the mail (not that this happens anymore!). Moreover, you should type that letter remembering that this is a form of communication like any other – and so it says something about you. It leaves an impression. If you were talking to your boss at work, you wouldn’t slur your words or use IM speak or say “hey” or call your boss by her last name only or say “get me X”.
b) A teacher-student relationship requires _some_ level of respect going up and down. Much as it offends sensitive ears raised in the “consumer model” culture, the teacher/student relationship _is_ a hierarchical relationship – I know more than you do about this subject, and I’m going to teach you that material. But for that relationship to work right requires respect on both sides, even if that respect has different rituals depending on the role you are in (student or teacher). I will always be respectful to you, so be respectful to me. Communication (in class, in office, and email) counts.
I’m also worried, to be honest, that these students will graduate thinking that this way of conducting a virtual email exchange is okay, and then will be embarrassed in the workplace (or worse yet, never know that they’ve created a sloppy impression of who they are for others to take away from such exchanges).
Do we instructors have a responsibility to stop students from writing emails like this – to at least make it clear that it is unacceptable? If so, how do we put that into practice?
Of course, it is also very possible that I shouldn’t be worked up about this at all. It could be that bosses come from the IM culture too, so they don’t care. Soon enough, professors will email students and other people the same way. So it could be that the offense I take from these emails is an artifact of me being brought up in a non-internet world when I was their age. As a consequence, acceptable written communication, for me, has a different set of rituals. Is that right?
Should I lighten up, or is this really a growing problem that needs to be addressed?
If you are a professor, you know what I’m talking about. Over the years I have received more and more emails that look like this:
——-#1 ———-
Hey
Where’s the assignment for this week
———————
OR
—–#2 ———–
Panza
Where’s the assignment?
——————-
OR
—— #3 ———-
i prolly wont’ be ther today im sick
——————–
OR
—–#4 ———–
send me the paper assignment i wasn’t in class
——————-
I could go on and on, as there are endless versions of these things. I’m sure many of you have favorite versions or pet peeves. Some of the emails I get are just careless, and some are just rude. Overall, I think, the main problems that I see boil down to:
1. The addressee is not addressed at all, or is not properly addressed. If I’m addressed, it might be as “hey” or as “Panza”. Just to be clear: I don’t want to be called “Dr. Panza” – that’s not my beef. Actually I ask students to call me “CP” so that will do. My main issue here is that “hey” is far too informal (I’m your professor not your buddy) and “Panza” is rude (only my best friends call me that).
Although I’m not a stickler for hierarchy, this _is_ a student/teacher relationship, and a properly composed email really should have an addressee. This doesn’t mean that our relationship can’t be somewhat informal, because it can be (mine often are). However, “hey” or “Panza” come off as rude (though I don’t think it is intended to come off this way most times). Ways of composing an email to a friend don’t immediately carry over to the ways you can speak to a professor, even one you know well or one that you goof around with to some degree.
2. The email is not signed. Why not?
3. The email uses no proper capitalization and is full of spelling errors or IM speak. Again, this is not an email to your friend, so “prolly” and “coulpa” and other such words should actually be spelled out. Frankly, a badly composed email at this level gives off a very bad impression about you, your intelligence level, and your character (it says that you are disrespectful, lazy, etc.). Why would you do that?
4. The email demands things without the required softening language. “I need X” or “Get me X” is not appropriate way to talk in a student to teacher email. Something like “Could you send me X?” is perfectly appropriate, sends the same message, and maintains a respectful tone.
5. There is no subject line in the email at all. This is a basic courtesy. People get lots of emails, and often need to prioritize which ones get read when. Besides, I like to know what it’s about before I open it.
6. The email has an attachment inside with no subject line and with no writing in it at all. Something like “CP, here’s my paper. Thanks, Poindexter” will do.
It all boils down to a few things for me.
a) If you don’t know the person well on a friendly non-formal level, then you should write an email the same way you would actually type a letter that you would print and send in the mail (not that this happens anymore!). Moreover, you should type that letter remembering that this is a form of communication like any other – and so it says something about you. It leaves an impression. If you were talking to your boss at work, you wouldn’t slur your words or use IM speak or say “hey” or call your boss by her last name only or say “get me X”.
b) A teacher-student relationship requires _some_ level of respect going up and down. Much as it offends sensitive ears raised in the “consumer model” culture, the teacher/student relationship _is_ a hierarchical relationship – I know more than you do about this subject, and I’m going to teach you that material. But for that relationship to work right requires respect on both sides, even if that respect has different rituals depending on the role you are in (student or teacher). I will always be respectful to you, so be respectful to me. Communication (in class, in office, and email) counts.
I’m also worried, to be honest, that these students will graduate thinking that this way of conducting a virtual email exchange is okay, and then will be embarrassed in the workplace (or worse yet, never know that they’ve created a sloppy impression of who they are for others to take away from such exchanges).
Do we instructors have a responsibility to stop students from writing emails like this – to at least make it clear that it is unacceptable? If so, how do we put that into practice?
Of course, it is also very possible that I shouldn’t be worked up about this at all. It could be that bosses come from the IM culture too, so they don’t care. Soon enough, professors will email students and other people the same way. So it could be that the offense I take from these emails is an artifact of me being brought up in a non-internet world when I was their age. As a consequence, acceptable written communication, for me, has a different set of rituals. Is that right?
Should I lighten up, or is this really a growing problem that needs to be addressed?
Making Asian Studies (More) Interdisciplinary
One of my many projects over sabbatical was to rethink my Asian Ethics course. The main population of this course consists not of philosophy majors (though they enroll too, but I teach a more specific and directed course for them), but rather two main groups of students: first, and foremost, those seeking to fulfill the Ethics component of our general education requirements at my university and secondly, students enrolled in Asian studies.
A major source of weakness in the course before, as I saw it, was that it focused a bit too heavily just on seeing texts from a philosophical point of view. Students enjoyed the course, but I personally found it a bit stiff. I felt that students didn’t really come away appreciating the Asian component as much as they could have. Instead, they got a course in ethics using Asian texts. To fix this, I though, I needed to make the course more interdisciplinary. So I’ve made some changes. Not huge ones, but I’ve made a start.
The major alteration in the syllabus is the inclusion of guest speakers. I invited six professors to come and speak to the class on a variety of topics (I tried to insert the acctual schedule for the semester, but Blogspot can't handle it -- so I'll just point out that we cover these major texts, first Analects, then Dhammapada, then Bhagavad Gita, then Tao Te Ching, then Zhuangzi, with some other smaller authors put in here and there. If you'd like to see the schedule more specifically and how the course is laid out, see my reproduced post at my own blog, here, where the semester scheduled readings table came out fine in the post: http://akuindeed.com/?p=2018)
In any event, with respect to each talk, here’s what I was envisioning:
1. History talk: students reading the Analects (and the Tao Te Ching, later on) need to have some appreciation and understanding of the specific challenges (understood in a variety of ways) that existed for people living in pre-Qin China.
2. Meditation talk: this interactive session on Buddhist meditation techniques (students are expected to actually do the techniques in class) occurs right after reading about it and studying its importance in Dhammapada. Reading about meditation and its uses is one thing, doing it is another!
3. Psychology talk: the point here was to show students that ancient Confucian thought is not dead, or confined to the ancient Chinese world. Can key Confucian beliefs and ways of thinking be seen in modern China? If so, how would you set up psychological experiments to test for the presence of Confucian thinking? Also here some emphasis on how these results might affect modern concerns (for instance, cross-cultural discussions of human rights) will be highlighted.
4. Literature talk: anyone who teaches Asian texts cannot help but admit that there are obvious literary dimensions to these works; as such, dissecting them simply from a philosophical point of view is short sighted. Specifically, this talk will focus on the beauty of reading Zhuangzi from a literary perspective.
5. Art talk: when trying to think about what (if any) differences exist between “western” and “eastern” ways of thinking about the world (or differences between various “eastern” ways of thinking), looking at art can be revealing. The ways that the artist comes at the work and develops it reveals a lot about his/her conceptual presuppositions. This talk would highlight some of those possible ways of approaching Asian artwork.
6. Calligraphy talk: my hope here was that, in starting the Tao Te Ching, students would come to feel the Chinese language by trying to work on writing the characters themselves. In the class, we focus for a day on the first poem of the TTC, so in this class the hope is that students can learn to appreciate Chinese philosophy even more by having an actual experience in trying to see what goes into actually writing it (they would focus on the first line of the TTC, which has few characters.
----
In trying to make Asian studies (in this case Asian Ethics) more interdisciplinary, I’ve started at the ground floor, obviously – spicing up the semester with talks from people with expertise in Asian studies from other areas. Of course, a more ambitious effort would go much further than this in trying to make such courses truly interdisciplinary. It’s a big task, however.
If anyone is willing to leave their thoughts, I’m curious about (a) what your thoughts are about this current attempt I am trying out this semester (on any level – for example, any other possible talks you would try to include, in an ideal world? An obvious glaring problem in this schedule is the lack of talks about India, but this was more of a scheduling problem with the professor I was hoping to bring in). But also (b): how could the project of making courses like this one more interdisciplinary be conducted in an even bolder and far more innovative and ambitious way?
A major source of weakness in the course before, as I saw it, was that it focused a bit too heavily just on seeing texts from a philosophical point of view. Students enjoyed the course, but I personally found it a bit stiff. I felt that students didn’t really come away appreciating the Asian component as much as they could have. Instead, they got a course in ethics using Asian texts. To fix this, I though, I needed to make the course more interdisciplinary. So I’ve made some changes. Not huge ones, but I’ve made a start.
The major alteration in the syllabus is the inclusion of guest speakers. I invited six professors to come and speak to the class on a variety of topics (I tried to insert the acctual schedule for the semester, but Blogspot can't handle it -- so I'll just point out that we cover these major texts, first Analects, then Dhammapada, then Bhagavad Gita, then Tao Te Ching, then Zhuangzi, with some other smaller authors put in here and there. If you'd like to see the schedule more specifically and how the course is laid out, see my reproduced post at my own blog, here, where the semester scheduled readings table came out fine in the post: http://akuindeed.com/?p=2018)
In any event, with respect to each talk, here’s what I was envisioning:
1. History talk: students reading the Analects (and the Tao Te Ching, later on) need to have some appreciation and understanding of the specific challenges (understood in a variety of ways) that existed for people living in pre-Qin China.
2. Meditation talk: this interactive session on Buddhist meditation techniques (students are expected to actually do the techniques in class) occurs right after reading about it and studying its importance in Dhammapada. Reading about meditation and its uses is one thing, doing it is another!
3. Psychology talk: the point here was to show students that ancient Confucian thought is not dead, or confined to the ancient Chinese world. Can key Confucian beliefs and ways of thinking be seen in modern China? If so, how would you set up psychological experiments to test for the presence of Confucian thinking? Also here some emphasis on how these results might affect modern concerns (for instance, cross-cultural discussions of human rights) will be highlighted.
4. Literature talk: anyone who teaches Asian texts cannot help but admit that there are obvious literary dimensions to these works; as such, dissecting them simply from a philosophical point of view is short sighted. Specifically, this talk will focus on the beauty of reading Zhuangzi from a literary perspective.
5. Art talk: when trying to think about what (if any) differences exist between “western” and “eastern” ways of thinking about the world (or differences between various “eastern” ways of thinking), looking at art can be revealing. The ways that the artist comes at the work and develops it reveals a lot about his/her conceptual presuppositions. This talk would highlight some of those possible ways of approaching Asian artwork.
6. Calligraphy talk: my hope here was that, in starting the Tao Te Ching, students would come to feel the Chinese language by trying to work on writing the characters themselves. In the class, we focus for a day on the first poem of the TTC, so in this class the hope is that students can learn to appreciate Chinese philosophy even more by having an actual experience in trying to see what goes into actually writing it (they would focus on the first line of the TTC, which has few characters.
----
In trying to make Asian studies (in this case Asian Ethics) more interdisciplinary, I’ve started at the ground floor, obviously – spicing up the semester with talks from people with expertise in Asian studies from other areas. Of course, a more ambitious effort would go much further than this in trying to make such courses truly interdisciplinary. It’s a big task, however.
If anyone is willing to leave their thoughts, I’m curious about (a) what your thoughts are about this current attempt I am trying out this semester (on any level – for example, any other possible talks you would try to include, in an ideal world? An obvious glaring problem in this schedule is the lack of talks about India, but this was more of a scheduling problem with the professor I was hoping to bring in). But also (b): how could the project of making courses like this one more interdisciplinary be conducted in an even bolder and far more innovative and ambitious way?
Evaluating your teaching evaluations
Inside Higher Ed's Rob Weir doles out his own thoughts on what to do once you get back those student teaching evaluations. Here are Rob's general thoughts, followed by my own:
There's inevitably something negative. Weir notes
Stay in the profession long enough and you’ll soon learn that it’s impossible to please everyone. Even if your class featured naked fire-jugglers, at least one student would still complain it was “boring.” You’ll also learn that some complaints are simply reflexive. When have students not grumbled that the workload was too heavy? Or that some courses were scheduled too early in the day? And even if you held office hours 23 hours per day, someone would complain you were hard to reach.Too true -- someone always has a negative experience in your class. When this happens to, I remind myself that there's a few students who frankly aren't suited for college life. No amount of effort or engagement on my part is going to please those who flat out hate the educational experience.
Give the evaluations just the importance your institution does. If you're on the tenure track, you should definitely have a clear picture of just how much student evaluations matter in evaluating your teaching.
Look for the trends in the data. The overall picture matters much more than scores in one course or on one particular question.
Here are some additional thoughts I'd add:
Go after the low hanging fruit. Most student evaluations I've seen ask big picture things ("Was this course a valuable learning experience?") and more directly behavioral things ("Were the lectures organized?", "Did the instructor return graded material promptly?"). Your best bet for improving your evaluations is to focus on those specific behavioral criteria.
Keep your audience in mind. Students in your upper-division or majors courses are more likely to find the material you're teaching engaging, but Gen Ed students can be tougher to reach. Expect lower evaluations from underprepared and less interested students.
Don't sweat small differences. If your institution is like mine, student evaluations are quantitatively compacted, i.e., they tend to fall within a fairly small numerical range. One implication of this is that a small swing in raw numerical results can lead to a larger swing in comparative or percentile scores. So (hypothetically) if 3 students in a class of 35 had rated you one level higher on a given question, you would have ended up in the 70th percentile among the instructors you're being compared to instead of the 50th percentile. That's the sort of small difference you shouldn't take too seriously. Again, look at the overall patterns in the data, not minute variations that are likely to be statistical noise.
That being said, I'm neither a skeptic nor an uncritical booster concerning student evaluations of teaching. Students evaluations vary in design, and some will identify good teaching better than others. What students say is one element in a larger body of evidence that can tell us something about quality teaching.
Incidentally, Terry Doyle at Ferris State University has written an excellent summary of the research on the validity and effectiveness of student evaluations . Great advice, and definitely worth checking out.
So how do other people interpret their evaluations? Any other advice you'd share?
There's inevitably something negative. Weir notes
Stay in the profession long enough and you’ll soon learn that it’s impossible to please everyone. Even if your class featured naked fire-jugglers, at least one student would still complain it was “boring.” You’ll also learn that some complaints are simply reflexive. When have students not grumbled that the workload was too heavy? Or that some courses were scheduled too early in the day? And even if you held office hours 23 hours per day, someone would complain you were hard to reach.Too true -- someone always has a negative experience in your class. When this happens to, I remind myself that there's a few students who frankly aren't suited for college life. No amount of effort or engagement on my part is going to please those who flat out hate the educational experience.
Give the evaluations just the importance your institution does. If you're on the tenure track, you should definitely have a clear picture of just how much student evaluations matter in evaluating your teaching.
Look for the trends in the data. The overall picture matters much more than scores in one course or on one particular question.
Here are some additional thoughts I'd add:
Go after the low hanging fruit. Most student evaluations I've seen ask big picture things ("Was this course a valuable learning experience?") and more directly behavioral things ("Were the lectures organized?", "Did the instructor return graded material promptly?"). Your best bet for improving your evaluations is to focus on those specific behavioral criteria.
Keep your audience in mind. Students in your upper-division or majors courses are more likely to find the material you're teaching engaging, but Gen Ed students can be tougher to reach. Expect lower evaluations from underprepared and less interested students.
Don't sweat small differences. If your institution is like mine, student evaluations are quantitatively compacted, i.e., they tend to fall within a fairly small numerical range. One implication of this is that a small swing in raw numerical results can lead to a larger swing in comparative or percentile scores. So (hypothetically) if 3 students in a class of 35 had rated you one level higher on a given question, you would have ended up in the 70th percentile among the instructors you're being compared to instead of the 50th percentile. That's the sort of small difference you shouldn't take too seriously. Again, look at the overall patterns in the data, not minute variations that are likely to be statistical noise.
That being said, I'm neither a skeptic nor an uncritical booster concerning student evaluations of teaching. Students evaluations vary in design, and some will identify good teaching better than others. What students say is one element in a larger body of evidence that can tell us something about quality teaching.
Incidentally, Terry Doyle at Ferris State University has written an excellent summary of the research on the validity and effectiveness of student evaluations . Great advice, and definitely worth checking out.
So how do other people interpret their evaluations? Any other advice you'd share?
Groups: Random or self-selected?
This term, I'm organizing all my students in my lower-division ethics courses into learning groups. (For those of you who use the Blackboard CMS, the latest version makes it very easy to create such groups.) I plan to use the same groups throughout the quarter, for a wide variety of in-class and online activities (more on that later).
But the question I'd like to raise now is this: I used Blackboard's group building feature to place the students in randomly selected groups. I simply announced to students which groups they are in during the first meeting of the term. I think that randomly created groups are better, but I can imagine some reasons for permitting students to select their own groups.
Letting students select their own groups has some obvious advantages. First, if there are students in class who already know one another, then their groups are more likely to function well and have some initial momentum. Students might also feel that selecting their own groups is more respectful of their autonomy and maturity than being placed randomly in groups by their instructors.
But I opted for randomly selected groups, for what I think are decisive reasons. First, I need my groups to get organized quickly. I teach in ten week quarters, and if I let the students select the groups, they might take several weeks to do so. Second, random groups are likely to be more diverse than self-selected groups, in terms of gender, background, academic major, and the like. And it seems to me that a group benefits from the intellectual and cognitive diversity that may result. Lastly, being placed in random groups more closely resembles how students will later have to work in groups once they are employed. In workplaces, students may be asked to complete projects with people they have never met and who are fundamentally different from them culturally and in terms of their skills. So random groups prepare them for an important challenge later in life.
So: which is better — randomly selected learning groups or self-selected groups?
But the question I'd like to raise now is this: I used Blackboard's group building feature to place the students in randomly selected groups. I simply announced to students which groups they are in during the first meeting of the term. I think that randomly created groups are better, but I can imagine some reasons for permitting students to select their own groups.
Letting students select their own groups has some obvious advantages. First, if there are students in class who already know one another, then their groups are more likely to function well and have some initial momentum. Students might also feel that selecting their own groups is more respectful of their autonomy and maturity than being placed randomly in groups by their instructors.
But I opted for randomly selected groups, for what I think are decisive reasons. First, I need my groups to get organized quickly. I teach in ten week quarters, and if I let the students select the groups, they might take several weeks to do so. Second, random groups are likely to be more diverse than self-selected groups, in terms of gender, background, academic major, and the like. And it seems to me that a group benefits from the intellectual and cognitive diversity that may result. Lastly, being placed in random groups more closely resembles how students will later have to work in groups once they are employed. In workplaces, students may be asked to complete projects with people they have never met and who are fundamentally different from them culturally and in terms of their skills. So random groups prepare them for an important challenge later in life.
So: which is better — randomly selected learning groups or self-selected groups?
Teaching X-phi session at APA Pacific meeting
Doubtless many of you are enjoying the Marriott Meat Market, er, APA Eastern meeting in New York. But for those of you headed to the Pacific meeting in San Francisco three months, the APA Committee on Teaching Philosophy has put together an intriguing session on teaching experimental philosophy. Details below the fold ....
APA Committee Session: Experimental Philosophy in the Classroom
1:00-4:00 p.m.
Arranged by the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy
Chair:Alexandra Bradner (Denison University)
Speakers:Emily Esch (College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University)
Chris Weigel (Utah Valley University)
“Experimental Philosophy in Introduction to Philosophy: Opportunities and Challenges”
Joshua May (University of California–Santa Barbara)
“Philosophy 101 and Experimental Philosophy”
Kevin L. Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University)
“Polling as Pedagogy: Experimental Philosophy in a Metaphysics Course”
Richard Kamber (The College of New Jersey)
“Teaching Aesthetics with Experimental Philosophy”
Commentator:Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University)
APA Committee Session: Experimental Philosophy in the Classroom
1:00-4:00 p.m.
Arranged by the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy
Chair:Alexandra Bradner (Denison University)
Speakers:Emily Esch (College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University)
Chris Weigel (Utah Valley University)
“Experimental Philosophy in Introduction to Philosophy: Opportunities and Challenges”
Joshua May (University of California–Santa Barbara)
“Philosophy 101 and Experimental Philosophy”
Kevin L. Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University)
“Polling as Pedagogy: Experimental Philosophy in a Metaphysics Course”
Richard Kamber (The College of New Jersey)
“Teaching Aesthetics with Experimental Philosophy”
Commentator:Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University)
Tailoring to student learning styles: Don't bother?
The CHE reports on a recent study concluding that while differences in learning styles (kinesthetic, visual, auditory, etc.) exist, it is unwise for instructors to 'match' their teaching techniques to their students' learning styles:
no one has ever proved that any particular style of instruction simultaneously helps students who have one learning style while also harming students who have a different learning style.The experimenters taught the same material (in this case, a lesson on molecular structure) to students using a given learning style (kinesthetic) for one group and a second style (verbal) for another. The 'matching' claim predicts that students with a given style will learn the material best with their favored style, but the researchers found that one learning style worked best for both groups, even though students tended to enjoy learning in their own favored style.
I'm certainly not qualified to comment on the methodological and disciplinary questions raised by the study. (From the article, there's clearly a lot of controversy about it.) But I can say that I think this is a welcome finding from my own admittedly limited pedagogical perspective. Varying your techniques to help students with different learning styles is now standard advice for college teachers. But I've always instinctually recoiled from taking this too much to heart.
First, not all content is easily presentable according to the various learning styles. Sure, Venn diagrams are nice for logic. There are of course some famous visual metaphors in philosophy — Plato's cave, Hume's billiard balls, the ship of Theseus. I once had a blast putting students in groups and asking them to draw pictures that explain and contrast Spinoza's metaphysics with Lebniz's. (And I've occasionally had students get out of their chairs and place themselves along a continuum to indicate their position on some question.) But philosophy is a highly verbal discipline for a reason. Making logical distinctions, keeping track of the give-and-take surrounding an argument, etc., are things most readily and naturally done in language. So while I'm not opposed to working in different learning styles into the classroom, I don't think instructors should go to extraordinary lengths to accommodate these styles.
Second, this underscores the point that disciplines are what they are. Philosophy is what it is. Part of our responsibility as instructors is to foster the skills — the 'styles,' if you will — conducive to mastering our disciplinary content. Philosophers teach philosophy, yes, but we also implicitly teach reading, writing, and reasoning (among other capacities). And the soundest response to the diversity of student learning styles is not to fit the content to the styles, but to expand the range of styles through which students can learn effectively. This is a bit snarky, but our response to students having difficulty with math is not to try teach them science in a math-free way. Nor do PE teachers try to improve the fitness of students with verbal learning styles by having them read books about exercise.
Lastly, even if it were a good idea to have students master material according to their preferred styles, it's not obvious that this tailoring or matching is the instructor's responsibility. For one thing, presenting material in multiple styles is time-consuming, and at least in my classroom, time is a very precious commodity. But on top of that, students who are aware of their own learning styles can be encouraged to figure out how to adapt the material to their own learning styles. Consider: I teach in English. This is a second or complementary language for many of my students. Doubtless many of them study or discuss the material outside the classroom in languages with which they are more comfortable. And so they should. I'm not so finicky to suggest that they must master the material through English (even though they'll have to ultimately demonstrate their master in English). In doing this, they are adapting the material to their own knowledge or learning style, so to speak. But the same applies to students with diverse learning styles.
So in classic debate format: Agree or disagree:
Philosophy instructors should not go to significant lengths to accommodate student 'learning styles'.
Thoughts?
no one has ever proved that any particular style of instruction simultaneously helps students who have one learning style while also harming students who have a different learning style.The experimenters taught the same material (in this case, a lesson on molecular structure) to students using a given learning style (kinesthetic) for one group and a second style (verbal) for another. The 'matching' claim predicts that students with a given style will learn the material best with their favored style, but the researchers found that one learning style worked best for both groups, even though students tended to enjoy learning in their own favored style.
I'm certainly not qualified to comment on the methodological and disciplinary questions raised by the study. (From the article, there's clearly a lot of controversy about it.) But I can say that I think this is a welcome finding from my own admittedly limited pedagogical perspective. Varying your techniques to help students with different learning styles is now standard advice for college teachers. But I've always instinctually recoiled from taking this too much to heart.
First, not all content is easily presentable according to the various learning styles. Sure, Venn diagrams are nice for logic. There are of course some famous visual metaphors in philosophy — Plato's cave, Hume's billiard balls, the ship of Theseus. I once had a blast putting students in groups and asking them to draw pictures that explain and contrast Spinoza's metaphysics with Lebniz's. (And I've occasionally had students get out of their chairs and place themselves along a continuum to indicate their position on some question.) But philosophy is a highly verbal discipline for a reason. Making logical distinctions, keeping track of the give-and-take surrounding an argument, etc., are things most readily and naturally done in language. So while I'm not opposed to working in different learning styles into the classroom, I don't think instructors should go to extraordinary lengths to accommodate these styles.
Second, this underscores the point that disciplines are what they are. Philosophy is what it is. Part of our responsibility as instructors is to foster the skills — the 'styles,' if you will — conducive to mastering our disciplinary content. Philosophers teach philosophy, yes, but we also implicitly teach reading, writing, and reasoning (among other capacities). And the soundest response to the diversity of student learning styles is not to fit the content to the styles, but to expand the range of styles through which students can learn effectively. This is a bit snarky, but our response to students having difficulty with math is not to try teach them science in a math-free way. Nor do PE teachers try to improve the fitness of students with verbal learning styles by having them read books about exercise.
Lastly, even if it were a good idea to have students master material according to their preferred styles, it's not obvious that this tailoring or matching is the instructor's responsibility. For one thing, presenting material in multiple styles is time-consuming, and at least in my classroom, time is a very precious commodity. But on top of that, students who are aware of their own learning styles can be encouraged to figure out how to adapt the material to their own learning styles. Consider: I teach in English. This is a second or complementary language for many of my students. Doubtless many of them study or discuss the material outside the classroom in languages with which they are more comfortable. And so they should. I'm not so finicky to suggest that they must master the material through English (even though they'll have to ultimately demonstrate their master in English). In doing this, they are adapting the material to their own knowledge or learning style, so to speak. But the same applies to students with diverse learning styles.
So in classic debate format: Agree or disagree:
Philosophy instructors should not go to significant lengths to accommodate student 'learning styles'.
Thoughts?
ProfHacker
Readers of ISW might already be aware of this, but in case you aren't ProfHacker is a site which "delivers tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education, Monday through Friday." A recent post, the End of Semester Checklist, has some good ideas for wrapping up the fall semester.
Bleg: Ancient philosophy anthologies
I'll be teaching Ancient Philosophy starting at the end of March and was hoping folks could direct me toward a good anthology for such a course. When last I taught it (2004), I used the Baird and Kaufmann anthology (Prentice-Hall). Here are the constraints:
Suggestions?
- It's a quarter course (ten weeks), so I'd prefer a shorter and/or less expensive anthology, since I probably can't assign a large portion of the material anyway.
- It's intended to be a survey of ancient — I plan on a day or so on the pre-Socratics, some early Socratic material, Plato through the Republic or Theatetus, and a bit of Aristotle. I probably won't be able to cover any post-Aristotelian material.
- I plan on having the students read one medium-length Platonic dialogue in its entirety (probably the Gorgias or Protagoras).
- I'd like most of the textbook to be primary sources. I don't mind a little bit of stage setting, context, analysis, etc. from the authors, but that shouldn't be the emphasis.
Suggestions?
A defense of lectures
Adam Kotsko at IHE gives one of the better defenses of lecturing I've encountered. Kostko's point is a simple one, and easy to forget: Discussion is a wonderful mode of learning, but it presupposes that students have knowledge and skills they often don't have.
Kotsko begins with an observation that resonates with me: Students often tell me they enjoy discussion, but they want more lectures because they feel they learn more from them. (Does everyone else have this experience?) Tempting as it is to dismiss this as students being lazy or passive, Kotsko suggests that this preference reflects students' (accurate) self-perception that they are not prepared for the lofty pedagogical ideal of a "lively discussion of a book by a small, engaged group." What do students lack that they need in order to be real participants in discursive inquiry? Kotsko's answer is familiar:
A big part of that has to be getting them to a point where they are good readers. That means being actual baseline good readers who are able to identify key themes, sympathetically state the author’s argument in their own words, talk about what each section of the book is supposed to be contributing to the whole, and so on — that kind of thing is the necessary foundation for the “critical reading” stage.
Kotsko begins with an observation that resonates with me: Students often tell me they enjoy discussion, but they want more lectures because they feel they learn more from them. (Does everyone else have this experience?) Tempting as it is to dismiss this as students being lazy or passive, Kotsko suggests that this preference reflects students' (accurate) self-perception that they are not prepared for the lofty pedagogical ideal of a "lively discussion of a book by a small, engaged group." What do students lack that they need in order to be real participants in discursive inquiry? Kotsko's answer is familiar:
A big part of that has to be getting them to a point where they are good readers. That means being actual baseline good readers who are able to identify key themes, sympathetically state the author’s argument in their own words, talk about what each section of the book is supposed to be contributing to the whole, and so on — that kind of thing is the necessary foundation for the “critical reading” stage.
I think that the assumption that students have baseline reading skills is behind the thinking of people who want more or less exclusively discussion-based classes — lectures, they suppose, are just trying to transmit information, which the books can do by themselves. If we assume that the students are reading attentively outside of class, we can use the class time to practice our critical reading with each other. I don’t think it’s at all clear, however, that students typically come to college with the skills necessary to make such a model work. Some will, but it’s much safer to assume that your students need help. And I believe that we should interpret students’ desire for more lectures precisely as a cry for help.
Kotsko's suggestion is that lecture can serve to develop these reading skills, and indeed, has significant advantages over other instructional modes:
Kotsko doesn't quite put it this way, but his thought is that lecturing is a form of modelling. We philosophers can reconstruct and represent our own forms of thinking and inquiring, which, after all, is what we want our students to ultimately develop. The hope is that once these forms of thinking and inquiring take root, students can then tackle course content on their own and will be ready to participate meaningfully in critical discussions that presuppose at least modest mastery of that content.
A final comment: Kotsko also reminds us that while lecturing can be criticized for being too passive to instill deep or genuine learning, lecturing is only as 'passive' as the lecturer. Yes, delivering information in a droning, unenthusiastic way is misguided. But if we approach lecture autobiographically, as a way of having students rehearse philosophical inquiry with us — and we do this with energy — it can be as intensive and intellectually active as any other teaching method.
ISW'ers: How do we make lecture something more than just the passive dissemination of information? And in particular, how do we use it to foster the skills requisite for discussion?