Monthly Archives: December 2008

It’s December 22nd and you’re up to your ears in grading (right?) The good, the bad, the 4-and-a-half paragraph essay revealing a student’s ability to resell her textbook in “perfect” condition on Amazon… It’s that time of year again. But this year has a new twist…

Kyra Gaunt and her Anthro 1001 class created a video that reminded me why I love our students (even when they don’t remember the difference between a change agent and an opinion leader on an exam)…

The subject of the soon-to-be-viral video is “What can $199US buy?” The goal is to get other faculty and students on-board to raise money for children who need it. The 4-minute video is beautifully assembled and features a typical class of Baruch students – hailing from Cote d’Ivoire to the Philippines.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/QSWu6CLVL6Y" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

You’ll learn where $199 can buy building materials for four houses (hint: it’s not Florida, though I hear you can buy four houses…) and what you and your students can do to experience the “priceless” joy of “giving a child access to the world.”

Once you’ve watched the video, you can…

1. Engage this semester’s students in the project – send the video link around as you distribute grades (OK – maybe only with the good grades), forward it to your favorite student club leaders, etc.

2. Get involved as an individual – donate yourself, forward the video to colleagues, give to your favorite charity to celebrate whatever holiday you celebrate (or to celebrate not having to celebrate holidays at all!)

3. Plan for next semester – Kyra and her students want the spirit of giving continue. What better way to get our students thinking about the value of their own educations than to encourage them to “give back” to less privileged individuals!

4. Talk to your colleagues – Many of us have favorite educational charities (not surprisingly, mine are in Rwanda!). Follow Kyra’s lead and engage your colleagues in the same sorts of discussions about what $199 buys… What a great way to start the New Year!

In addition to the official end-of-semester course evaluation, I like to ask my students to write a self-reflective “retrospective essay” about what they have learned and how they have experienced the course. For example, here’s the prompt I use for English 2100 (Writing I):

“Please take some time to write in response to the following questions: What aspects of the course have worked well for you? What’s missing or could be improved? What is the biggest change in your writing—or your understanding of writing—since the beginning of the semester, and how are you feeling about it? What specific goals do you set for yourself going forward and how do you plan to achieve them?”

I don’t grade or necessarily even comment on these—part of their usefulness is that they are not formal or “official” in any way—but I do count them toward the students’ participation grade. The responses are always interesting and usually fun to read. Students are remarkably honest, and I’ve had several tell me that they were surprised at how much came up for them in this exercise and how much they appreciated it.

As an informal self-evaluation, the assignment gives students a chance to reflect on their progress—to pause and evaluate what has happened for them during the course of the semester, and to articulate for themselves what they still need to work on and/or do in terms of process.

But from a course-evaluation perspective, there are several clear benefits for instructors, too: The responses are content- and course-specific, so I can tell if a particular teaching strategy or tool (the draft workshop, one-on-one conference, outside writing groups, etc.) is having the desired result. Also, the evaluative categories are student-generated, so what rises to the surface in these pieces is often very telling and helps me tailor future iterations of the course in content-specific ways. (I do this exercise at midterm, too, which gives me the chance to address any issues or concerns while the students are still in my course.)

This isn’t just for writing courses, either. There’s the pedagogic value of students writing about course material in their own words, reinforcing what has been learned, giving them a sense of progress, and creating an opportunity for them to take ownership of their goals and produce a game plan for future work in any discipline. Informal writing has been shown to help students learn—and remember—course content.

Another thing I ask students to do at the very end of the term is to write a brief letter to the next semester’s class about their experience over the course of the term and anything they wish they knew at the start that they know now. I then share these with my new classes, either by including outtakes on my syllabus or reading selections aloud in one of the early sessions the following semester.

These techniques don’t replace the official evaluation form, of course, but they do help give me another view into what students are learning and how they’re feeling about the course.