Welcome to the Active Learning in Political Science blog. Our goal is to provide resources and ideas for using active learning techniques in the political science classroom and to promote general discussion about innovative teaching methods.
I’m very pleased to be able to introduce another guest post from Holly Snaith (Aston): if you’d like to contribute, then please just get in touch with any of us.
Simon
I was intending to write an entirely different post for this blog (which I’ll keep in the back pocket for the future). Instead, while mulling over what I’d like to say and browsing recent posts to consider the tone, I was struck by Simon’s last post on student reflections and self-assessment.
This year has been rather a whirlwind as my first year lecturing. In many respects the step up from seminar teaching has been far easier than I might have imagined, but it’s also entailed that I’ve had to think very hard about how to integrate the kind of interaction and mutual learning that I’m used to, into a far more prescriptive physical environment. It’s not so much of an interpersonal challenge to ask a quiet participant in a 10-student seminar what they think in order to boost their reflection and confidence; doing the same in a room of 100 is much more liable to be counterproductive.
One of the ways I’ve been trying to manage this is soliciting regular feedback through a variety of different means, and since interpersonal contact is now less of a reliable barometer (since the students that talk to me tend to be the ones that are more engaged) I have been getting creative. Some methods, I think, have worked better than others, so I wanted to mull them over below:
1. The formal module reflections.
These are standardised across our school and are mostly designed to allow students to assess our performance. While this is obviously valuable and important, it’s not terribly useful to us as teachers since students don’t tend to fill in much by way of qualitative reflection (so knowing that your average response to question ‘the lecturer made the subject interesting’ is 4.36 on a Likert scale of 1-5 doesn’t tell you very much about what you are actually doing right). As with Simon, therefore, I’ve been pushed to trying a few other tricks.
2. Informal module reflections.
I first drafted some informal accompaniments (we do the evaluations on hard copy, so this didn’t require any extra fiddling, although I have considered trying survey monkey via email) asking mostly about what subjects they enjoyed and did not enjoyed, which learning methods they got the most out of, whether and in what ways their confidence and knowledge had improved, and so on.
3. Questions in class.
This is by definition a little shallow in a lecture environment, but I make sure to build pauses into my lectures every few slides, to give the audience the opportunity to ask questions and offer feedback. I find that using the white board and prompting specific topics works well to get the students to volunteer answers, since it puts the focus on my writing things down, rather than on them speaking out loud.
4. Optivote.
My students have gone bonkers for optivote. I’m a little less sold (it works brilliantly in some sessions, but is little more than a gimmick for others) but I found it incredibly useful in interpreting the written feedback where it was potentially contradictory. The week after getting the forms, I used the qualitative sections (scant though it was) in order to get broader feedback. So, if one student said ‘I want more exams, rather than essays’ or ‘I didn’t find the week on the Commission relevant’ or ‘I thought this module was too hard in comparison to first year’, I was able to poll the whole class to find out how widespread this opinion was. The answers tended to be understandably split, but students liked that they were asked what worked for them (and were able to give reflection on topics they wouldn’t have independently thought of), and I liked that I was able to give far more substantive feedback for the module reflections I have to complete to go back to the school.
What have I learnt from this process? Mostly, that I need to explicitly build in reflection at an early stage. Students took it far more seriously when I told them in week one that they were active participants in the learning process and that I needed them to tell me what worked. Some seemed so used to playing a passive role that it wasn’t intuitive to them that they were ‘allowed’ to judge me throughout the process. As a result, I think I would in future run the process in week 1 in order to ask what their expectations of the module were and prepare them for thinking reflexively as they go.
In reference to Simon’s post about using the ABC method to get formative “feedfoward” while a course is still running:
After some end-of-semester reflection and a helpful, informative meeting with my department chairperson, it occurred to me that the ABC method can also be constructively applied to oneself, if one is honest enough.
Each item in my pedagogical repertoire typically falls into one of two categories: either a classroom activity works fabulously the first time I try it, or it never works but I’m reluctant to abandon it.
So, in the spirit of self-evaluation, here’s a quick ABC analysis of my past semester:
Abandon: assignments and classroom presentations explicitly intended to teach students how to ask good questions, especially for exams that are supposed to measure how well they can synthesize knowledge. Despite tweaking the activity associated with this goal, I didn’t see any improvement. Like critical thinking, maybe asking good questions requires more domain knowledge and practice with meta-cognitive strategies than my students can acquire within a single course. In any event, it’s time for me to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing with this and should simply stop doing it.
Begin: writing assignments and student presentations that are more problem solving-oriented. As Joe Jaeger has pointed out, much of what I assign students is abstract. While I
do well at explaining the big picture, I don’t do a great job at helping students connect grand theory with the real-world experiences of individuals. If I can also figure out how to get one group of students to build off of what another group of students has said or done, all the better.
Continue: offer multiple routes for student success in a course. As a freshly-minted Ph.D., I was concerned about producing a grade distribution shaped like a bell curve. Now I’m not, for a couple reasons. First, grade inflation is so endemic that I won’t do myself any favors career-wise if I fail every student whose final average is more than two standard deviations below the class mean. Second, students who do more reading and writing on a subject than is necessary should be rewarded for it since there’s a good chance they’ve more than they otherwise would have. So in all my undergraduate courses, students have a number of ways in which they can go beyond the minimum bar I’ve set. If their work meets or exceeds the standards that I’ve set, they’ll get rewarded for it in their final grades. These opportunities are built into a course from the first day of the semester — I leave it up to students to decide whether and how they want to take advantage of them.
Since it’s the final week of the teaching semester, I’ve been getting feedback on my modules, both through the standard module evaluations (run by the university) and in-class discussion. As always, it makes for a fascinating interaction.
Instead of discussing mechanisms for feedback, this time I’d like to focus on the lessons I have taken from the process, since that is obviously also a key part of it all. In particular, it really shows a light on how students construct their own learning spaces.
To give just one example, a student noted that the course textbook was excellent and should continue to be used. This sounds fine, until I tell you that we don’t have a course textbook on that module (I suggest a number of texts instead, because there is a good choice in the subject).
Similarly, in one class opinion was split on my use of randomised presentations, with several disliking the uncertainty, and several liking the incentive to prepare every week. And it is this that has made me reflect more on the need for clarity in the lecturer’s part.
As a general rule, I like to be very transparent about what I’m doing with any given class: even when using a simulation, I usually explain the point, because I’m confident that this won’t actually affect what happens (and in simulations, the students typically get so sucked into what they are doing that they forget what I’ve told them). If I can be clear about what I aim to achieve with a class, then it’s much more likely that the class will be able to achieve it, rather than roaming around the general area.
In the case of the randomised presentations, I spent a good block of time at the start of the module explaining how the system would work, its implications and consequences, and its connections to the rest of the learning process in the module. During the module, I tried to stress this, by discussing it in class from time to time, and – as the students will find out in a couple of weeks – those presentations and their summaries will feed directly into the final exam.
However, it is also apparent from the feedback that not everyone gets this. We might usefully separate that ‘getting’ into ‘understanding’ and ‘liking’: I have the impression that the very large majority could explain my logic in using it, but fewer would say that they think it is their prefered way of doing things.
I can see that this is due, in part, to our different approaches. For a student, they often want to be able to plan their time across their different modules, with blocks focused on single topics. For me, I would like them to be engaged on a semi-permanent basis, where they are also pulling in their learning from all the other things they do. My advantage is that my research falls in the same area, so I enjoy reinforcing benefits, while the students are working across a much broader range of topics.
If I am to take anything from this, then it is that clarity needs to be coupled to communication and debate. I need to appreciate the different dynamics under which students operate, just as I need to communicate my approach and my anticipations to students. As I frequently say to them, university isn’t about putting obstacles in their way, but about helping them to achieve their potential and make the most of their time. If we don’t communicate, then that it not going to happen.
Yesterday I completed my first official half marathon alongside my wife, who introduced me to running a few years ago (I feel comfortable blaming her for the post-race fatigue and
muscle pain). I also recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Both have given me cause to think about the importance of training oneself to learn.
Recent studies on subjects like decision fatigue indicate that the mind responds to exertion much like a muscle. The mind is lazy, preferring to expend as little energy as possible. It employs shortcuts and avoidance to achieve this goal, even though such strategies frequently lead to systematic errors of judgment. To get a sense at how effectively your mind can prevent itself from working hard, try mentally multiplying two- or three-digit numbers together while performing a physical task, like running, that requires a minimal amount of concentration. There’s a good chance that you will either trip and fall or be unable to compute a result.
So, drawing upon some analogies to running and Murakami’s very worthwhile book, here are few ruminations about learning:
I just saw an amazing documentary about a simulation used in a fourth grade classroom: World Peace Game. The creator, John Hunter, has been continuously using and improving this simulation for thirty-five years, and his account of his experiences has recently been published –World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements.
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My email inbox has several reminders that we are in the season of module evaluations. At Surrey, we run this centrally, with students completing forms online on each module and over a wider range of questions and I’m assuming that most of you have something similar.
These systems provide a useful benchmark for comparison across modules and teaching staff and – certainly in my case as a Director of Learning & Teaching - a good way into getting a handle on what’s happening across the School’s provision. At the same time, I also know that as a module leader they do not provide me with much in the way of formative feedback.
The reason for this is relatively simple. The questionnaires are set up as Lickert scales, with a couple of boxes at the end for ‘further comments’. This means that interpretation of the results becomes rather tricky, since I have no real way of knowing why someone has put 4 instead of 5 on one scale, even with the range of questions posed. The further comments are not always provided and certainly never explain all the reasoning behind individual scores.
The result is that we often spend time trying to work out ‘what students mean’ by their feedback, connecting it either to other formal routes (e.g. student-staff liaison meetings) or informal conversations. However, it’s still a bit hit-and-miss.
In particular, I notice that it is hard to incorporate these evaluations into developing modules for future delivery; to use the phrase that we’re talking about a lot more these days, there’s no ‘feedforward.’
Interesting, but not necessarily constructive
I fully accept that this is not the primary function of module evaluations, which are more about quality assurance, but it still seems like a sensible process to connect that to quality enhancement.
With that in mind, I’m also going to use the end of semester to run my ABC exercise in class. I’ve discussed this at length before (and made a video), but it suffices here to say that it is very much more focused activity that gives useful input into module development from students.
By its nature, ABC creates constructive feedforward that comes from students themselves: I’m always pleasantly surprised by the engagement that students have with the process and the interest they show in helping to improve things for their fellow students in years to come.
So if you feel that module evaluations aren’t giving you all you need, then consider raiding the stationary cupboard and trying something different.
A quick note to say that the quality of failure assignment that I instituted in my undergraduate courses this semester has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. The vast majority of my students responded to the assignment with great insight. In case others want to use it, here are the directions for the assignment (modified from the original source, which can be accessed via the link above to Amanda’s post):
This course requires realizing that progress requires curiosity, risk-taking, and failure. Making a mistake leads to the question “Why was that wrong?” and by answering this 
question, we are better able to develop new insights and eventually succeed. You’ll need to fail regularly to do well in this course because part of your final grade is based on your “quality of failure.” At the end of the semester, you’ll need to write a 2-3 page double-spaced essay analyzing your failures, why they occurred, and what you have learned from them. Your essay must conclude with an assessment on how you have evolved through your mistakes in the course (a grade that ranges from 0 – meaning “I never failed” or “I learned nothing from failing” to 10 – meaning “I learned in new and creative ways from my failures”).
I believe that this type of assignment could be very usefully made part of student evaluations of teaching.
