Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

When I was a boy I was extremely proud of one of my dad’s apple trees, the one onto which he had grafted three varieties of apples and a pear. By carefully attaching cuttings from these different fruits onto the stem of a single tree he had been able to make it bear a cornucopia. This is probably why I use the grafting metaphor to speak of what I see myself doing in the classroom.

Students come to us with a range of knowledge about many things (although many of us are much more concerned about what they seem not to know). I think it helps enormously to find out what our students do know and then put this information to use as starting points-the places where we can begin grafting on the new concepts we seek to impart to them. If we simply begin tossing out information, without having a sense of what students are able and ready to do with it, we run the risk of having it hurtle right past them, without finding any place to attach. If we take some time to find out what they already know, then we can graft the new material onto a trunk full of sap that will help the new ideas blossom and fruit.

I often come to a full stop before starting a new topic and spend a little time feeling the class out. I pass out blank index cards and ask them to answer a few questions anonymously. Then I read them out to the class, so that we all get some sense of what the group collectively knows and doesn’t know. In the course of this I’m able to begin planting seeds of interest, to provoke some of them into curiosity, and to help them reflect on what it is they’ve already learned somewhere else but thought they’d forgotten (and it also assures them that they do know something). And then I work to graft the new material onto what we’ve found they already know.

(Glenn’s caveat: I’m writing this for new teachers, folks still struggling to find their way in the classroom, and not for seasoned professionals, though the old salts among you are welcome to it.)

Is it me or are many of our BBA students preoccupied with securing the type of prestigious, high-paying jobs that can take a terrible toll on the personal life? How many undergraduate students do you know whose life ambition is to be an investment banker, management consultant or auditor for the Big Four? Don’t get me wrong—I know many who are happily employed by such firms (even in this economy), and it reflects well on Baruch College every time we place a student. My question is this: should professors push their students to think more about their future work-life balance?

Over the years, I discovered some interesting comments on careers and job hunting that I share with students every semester. I’d like to share a sample with you.

1. Michael R. Bloomberg’s commencement address, Johns Hopkins, May 22, 2003 (click here for transcription). Read the two paragraphs that begin, “Whether or not you go to graduate school…”

2. Steve Jobs’ commencement address, Stanford, June 14, 2005 (click here for transcription). Read the two paragraphs that follow the “My third story is about death” subsection, or fast forward to time 8:45 in the following video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA[/youtube]

3. “Stupid Interview Questions,” by Liz Ryan, Business Week, Sept 21, 2005 (click here for full text).

(more…)

My classes meet twice a week. And while my syllabus presents a carefully planned series of linked readings, writing assignments, and in-class activities, I know my students don’t always experience the course as seamlessly as I might like. How could they with everything else they have to do?

One simple technique I’ve been experimenting with aims to create stronger links between individual class sessions. It’s a version of the strategy I used while writing my dissertation: to end each day’s work by jotting down a single concrete task to get started with in the morning. Applying this strategy to the classroom is easy and takes only a few minutes of class time; what’s more, it can provide an important form of intellectual communication between students and professor.

Here’s what I do:

Step 1. At the end of class, I ask students to reflect in writing on a still unclear point, a key concept just covered, or a remaining question from that day’s activity or discussion. (3-5 minutes)

Step 2. At the beginning of the next class, I ask students to share some of what they wrote at the end of the previous class and we use that as our new starting point. (3-5 minutes)

Building in time to think and reflect at the end of each class in this way can enable students to create continuity in their learning, and develop the good habit of ending a work session by identifying some next steps. In addition, students get practice summarizing and assimilating what they know, what they’ve learned, and what’s still not clear. And instructors get a better sense of students’ experience of the course.

Since the writing functions as a kind of mental bookmark, to be consulted and taken up at the beginning of the next class, there’s no need to collect it (although you might).

(more…)