Tag Archives: classroom activity

Teaching Reflection: Professionalism Memos

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Every semester, I struggle with how I can fairly measure, assess, and reward student classroom engagement. “Participation” is a ubiquitous grading category on course syllabi, but as a student and instructor, participation has always felt like a way for instructors to reward students and penalize others based on often arbitrary, inconsistent standards. Reading critiques of participation from scholars like Margaret Price (have you read Mad at School yet? because you should) made me rethink participation from an accessibility standpoint. As an instructor deeply committed to creating positive classroom social dynamics and student learning, I value students’ various forms of classroom engagement. I want students to be aware of their classroom engagement and how it impacts their learning and their peers’ learning. For me, assigning a grade for participation at the end of the semester was not the best way for students to take control of their learning or for me to assess the various ways students engage in the course.

So this semester in my technical writing course, I am experimenting with professionalism. The concept of “professionalism” makes sense in the context of my class, which prepares students to write in professional contexts. However, I would also use “participation” as a framework in a different course.

Discussing Professionalism

I began the semester with a discussion about professionalism. In the first week of class, I assigned students a free-write for homework about professionalism using these prompts:

  • What does professionalism mean? How can we be professional in classroom environments?
  • What professional behaviors help you learn best?
  • What professional behaviors do you expect from classmates?
  • What professional behaviors do you expect from group members?
  • What professional behaviors do you expect from the instructor?

I also asked students to read “The Do’s and Don’ts of Professionalism in the Workplace” (Levo), “What Does Professionalism Look Like?” (Harvard Business Review), and  “You Call It Professionalism; I Call It Oppression in a Three-Piece Suit” (Everyday Feminism). These articles trouble the concept of professionalism, and in class I facilitate a discussion about how professional standards represent cultural values about identity (gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, ability, age, etc.) that are embodied. We also discuss differences in professionalism across cultures and contexts (for example, professionalism expectation differences in a start-up company vs a Fortune 500 company; differences across cultures if students have experience working in different communities or countries).

Establishing Professionalism Expectations

After we discussed professionalism as a class, we created a set of class standards for professionalism. I asked students to share their responses to the last 4 questions with group members and as a group to decide on at least 1 concrete action for each question. I created an open Google document, and students shared their group responses there. As a class, we reviewed each question response, clarified any vague actions (for example, what does “being prepared for class” entail?), and ultimately agreed on a set of classroom expectations. We also explicitly linked these behaviors to individual and peer learning, so we discussed how a classmate’s lack of preparation, such as not completing the reading or homework assignment, might impact other students in the class.

Reflecting on Professionalism Expectations

As part of the professionalism discussion, I’ve assigned midterm and end-of-semester professionalism reflection memos. The memo genre is part of technical writing, and students may be asked in the future to write performance evaluations, so these assignments align with larger course objectives. The memos ask students to reflect on the class expectations for professionalism and learning. Students use the class expectations to reflect on their own classroom learning behaviors to assess their professionalism. For the mid-term memo, I also asked students to consider how they can improve or sustain their professional behaviors to better facilitate their learning. The memos so far have demonstrated that students are critically thinking about how they can best engage with the course material to support their learning and their peers’ learning. For example, students have shared their different approaches to understand the course readings. They also share other ways they are engaging with the class material, such as by taking pictures on their smartphones of “technical writing in the wild.” These methods would normally not be visible in the daily activities of my class, but they demonstrate how students are using a variety of techniques to prepare for class and to take responsibility over the material.

So far the professionalism expectations and memos seem to be serving their intended purpose in my class; there are always unavoidable personal issues that complicate established standards, but for the most part, students are productively engaged in class. In the future, I would want to devote more time to discussing professionalism and learning in class; because of a packed course schedule, the “discussing” and “establishing” portions were limited to 30 minutes. I think this framework would be particularly appropriate in early undergraduate courses. Most of my students are juniors and seniors, and they already have a strong sense of how they learn best and what they need from their peers. I believe the professionalism/participation expectations and memos could be particularly useful for students early in their undergraduate careers who may still be learning how to learn especially when it comes to collaborative projects.

Reading Reflection: Small Teaching

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Finished reading: Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning by James M. Lang (2016)

This year, I’ve been working as a graduate writing program administrator for the second-year writing program. It’s been a great opportunity for several reasons including supporting the teaching of graduate students and lecturers, participating in various administrative discussions about the role of the program in the larger department and university setting, designing and conducting an assessment of student learning in the course, and as a bonus, providing a structured time schedule so I can focus on writing my dissertation. However, the administrative appointment means I haven’t taught in the traditional sense since Spring 2015, and I’m anxiously awaiting the next time I get to work with a group of students. I miss teaching.

So when I saw social media posts about a new book, James M. Lang’s Small Teaching, I was interested in reading it both as a writing instructor and an administrator. As an instructor, I’m always trying to think of new ways to engage students in classroom content and to enhance their learning. As an administrator, I want to provide instructors with concrete strategies to help them become more effective and confident teachers.

The book develops Lang’s idea of small teaching: “an approach that seeks to spark positive changes in higher education through small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices” (5). A relatively small change, whether it’s a 10 minute class activity or rephrasing a discussion question, can result in big learning. Lang presents a wide range of studies from teaching and learning scholarship that offers insight into how students learn best.

Small Teaching is organized into three major units: Knowledge, Understanding, and Inspiration. These broad units focus on how students learn course material (Knowledge), how students use course material in their thinking (Understanding), and how students think and feel about their learning (Inspiration).  The chapters in each unit focus on specific actions that have been shown to improve student learning. “Part I: Knowledge” contains chapters on “Retrieving”, “Predicting”, and “Interleaving”; “Part II: Understanding” focuses on the practices of “Connecting”, “Practicing,” and “Self-Explaining”; and “Part III: Inspiration” includes “Motivating”, “Growing”, and “Expanding”. Each chapter breaks down into the following sections:

  • In Theory: summaries of relevant studies and key findings
  • Models: descriptions of how the learning/teaching strategy can be implemented in a range of courses
  • Principles: the essential idea about why the learning/teaching strategy works
  • Quick Small Teaching: brief reminders and tips on how to incorporate the teaching strategy in class

The chapter structure is very effective for returning to the key points. I read the book straight through, thanks to the luxury of spring break, and I enjoyed reading Lang’s relatable personal introductions and examples, which he then connected back to studies on teaching and learning. There’s an extensive amount of information in the theory sections, including recommendations for further reading, which makes it easy to find more sources on a particular practice. But I know in the future I won’t have this same luxury of time, and the principles and quick small teaching sections provide quick refresh that would be useful when lesson planning or grading. Although it is possible to just skim the chapters and focus on the principles and quick small teaching sections, I would encourage readers to spend time on the theory sections. Incorporating the principles and suggestions from the quick small teaching sections into a class can facilitate immediate learning, but understanding why these relatively small strategies work by reading the theoretical section will probably improve teaching and learning in the long-term. Luckily, Lang’s writing is engaging and readable, so the book is entertaining and a relatively quick read. That’s not to say it’s a forgettable read; I know I will be reflecting on the strategies even though I’m not currently teaching, and I will be returning to this book when I do teach again.

As an instructor: From an instructor perspective, Lang’s suggested strategies are easy to incorporate into any course (humanities, STEM, performance, etc.) and can take as much time as you can spare in a class period, a unit, or a semester. I appreciated how the book made me reflect on what I’m asking students to do in my class. As a writing instructor, I tend to focus more on the “Understanding” actions (such as drawing connections, applying readings and experience to discussions or their own writing) and less on the “Knowledge” practices, like information retrieval, that are needed to apply concepts. For example, Lang makes the case for incorporating small, frequent opportunities to practice information retrieval through methods like reading quizzes or short written responses at the beginning or end of class. I almost never give reading quizzes to my students because I’ve previously thought about quizzes as punitive. After reading Lang’s explanation of how quizzes can be beneficial for learning, I see how I could build in short, low-stakes opportunities for students to practice information retrieval and help them learn more effectively and efficiently. Overall, I felt that Lang’s suggestions weren’t anything revolutionary, and that’s why this book is incredibly useful; as someone who has taken an active interest in developing active pedagogies, I’ve encountered most of his classroom strategies before. None of his suggestions are too difficult or too time or energy-consuming for instructors or students in any course. Instead, the most valuable part of Small Teaching was the focus on how these teaching strategies actually impact student learning. I know from teaching experience that asking students to free-write at the beginning of class is a way to facilitate more productive class discussions, but now I can articulate to myself and to my students why this practice is an effective way to help them learn.

As an administrator:  Small Teaching has made me consider how my program prepares graduate instructors and lecturers to teach. Although Small Teaching is focused on undergraduate learning, I’d be interested in applying some of the principles to our certification workshop that graduate students must take before teaching in the program. For example, many of the graduate students in the certification workshop do not have extensive exposure to rhetoric and composition scholarship, and some may have only taught for 1 semester before teaching in our program. In the short four-hour session, it’s difficult to achieve Knowledge, Understanding, and Inspiration, so what is the most effective use of our time to help instructors learn about pedagogy, writing studies content, and the course curriculum? I also believe that Small Teaching would be useful beyond the professional development workshop as a way to follow-up on teaching observations. Providing instructors with specific strategies from Small Teaching may help them in the short-term incorporate practices to better enhance student learning and their own confidence as instructors while also considering how they would want to foster student learning in future units or courses.

If you are interested in hearing more about Small Teaching or small teaching, check out James Lang’s articles on the first five minutes of class and the last five minutes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He was also a recent guest on the podcast Teaching in Higher Ed (episode here).

Building Class Community on Day One

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After a long and simultaneously not long enough winter break, spring semester begins on Monday. This semester I’ll be teaching ENGL 2276: The Arts of Persuasion, which is a rhetoric survey course taken by mostly non-English majors. I have a lot of freedom with the course, so I’ve themed it around “Rhetoric(s) in Digital Culture.” We’ll be examining some of the foundational concepts in rhetoric for the first half of the semester and then move into cultural rhetorics to broaden our understanding of rhetoric. Throughout the entire course we’ll examine digital culture in order to apply the rhetorical theories/principles to see how these ideas work or need to shift to accommodate the 21st century context. I’m looking forward to the class; it’s a course that is a little outside of my comfort zone, and the sheer amount of great rhetorical material that I want to cover has made planning a 15 week lower-level course a bit difficult. I’ve focused more on learning objectives to thwart my initial desire to throw everything into the course just because I think it’s cool.

One of the aspects of course design and class facilitation that I spend a lot of time thinking about is building classroom community. Classroom community is so important, and it really begins the moment students step into the class. The first day sets up how the semester will go: how the students interact with each other, how they interact with the instructor, how the instructor interacts with them, and the type of content and how it is presented are all somewhat set after that first hour. The first day of class is often known as “syllabus day.” The teacher stands at the front of the room, takes roll (knowing there will be shifts in enrollments), reads straight from the syllabus, focuses on the rules of the class, and then dismisses the students early. From the student perspective, they’ve just been lectured at about the “do not’s” of the class, and they probably don’t have a sense about what the class is about or why they should care about it. Why would they be excited to come to the next class session? As an instructor, I can’t imagine being excited myself to show up at class the next day.

To combat the syllabus-day blues, on my first day of class, I like to start off with an ice breaker. My favorite ice breaker is what I call “The Self-Doodle.” Basically, I provide students with a large sheet of paper and a variety of markers, crayons, pens, stickers, and magazines, and I ask them to doodle a portrait of themselves (a doodleature) that contains information that they want their classmates to know about them. I generally ask students to doodle at least 5 objects. I tell students this isn’t a self-portrait because they don’t have to demonstrate any artistic skill, and they aren’t necessarily representing themselves physically. Many students end up doodling some sort of version of themselves surrounded by meaningful objects like a football or a slice of pizza. One memorable student doodled a combination of the sun and the moon. I then ask students to present their doodleature to the rest of the class. I always start off the presentations myself as a way to break down any apprehension students may feel about showing off their doodles; I purposefully doodle terribly so that the class can share a laugh and no one feels exposed by their lack of artistic skill.

From a pedagogical and academic perspective, I love this ice breaker for several reasons. First of all, it encourages multimodal thinking, which is a major component in all of my classes. It fosters community. Students learn more about each other from the visual and oral sharing of personal information, and students are also able to select the most important aspects of their identity rather than respond to a single ice-breaker question that they may have a difficult time connecting to. I’ve found that students learn each other’s names faster after this activity, and I also have been able to learn everyone’s name in one class session because the students present distinctive representations of themselves. “The Self-Doodle” also sets the expectation for what we will be doing in class from day-to-day: we will almost always work together in groups to engage in some sort of active learning opportunity. Most of the time it will be something that is hopefully fun (Rhetorical Jeopardy, Zombie Argumentation, Starting an Epidemic: Viral Productions! are some of the activities we’ll engage in this semester). The activity also has rhetorical components. I use “The Self-Doodle” as a way to show students how they are always making rhetorical decisions, even in small ways like deciding what 5 aspects of their personality they want to share with their classmate. This can lead into a discussion about audience, purpose, the rhetorical situation, the rhetorical appeals, really any rhetorical concept applies here! I like to bring “The Self-Doodle” exercise up in ensuing class sessions to provide students a concrete application of rhetorical concepts.