Decision Matrix

What kind of chocolate chip cookie do you like?

Some are crisp and dip well into milk. Some are gooey. Some have molasses, some have a nutty flavor from browning the butter. And then there's the chocolate! Dark, semisweet, milk. With all of these possibilities, how do you decide which is the best overall?

That's where a decision matrix can help.

To teach this lesson, I bring to class a variety of mass-produced cookies. The students come up with the qualities to compare, and they sample the cookies to determine the scores in each category.

I ask them to use a decision matrix when determining their recommendation for their formal reports, and this is a fun way to help them see how it works.

Substituting

I taught two composition classes this week for a teacher who is ill. I'm not familiar with the teacher's normal practices, so I was somewhat stressed preparing for the class. Their assignment for Tuesday was to bring their homework and two historical artifacts, and the assignment for Thursday was to read.

There were several surprises in store for me, but the biggest was that this class rarely uses small groups. Most of their classes are large-group discussion.

I depend upon small groups, especially in composition class. They enable participation from a wider range of students, they teach teamwork, and they help students make personal connections--which to me is just as important as the first two reasons.

Based upon this and a few other discoveries, I suspect that the students are not producing high-quality work. They aren't preparing well for class, they don't know to read the syllabus, they're confused about the assignment, and they don't know each other.

What I'm really wondering: Is my grade distribution higher than normal because I utilize a wider range of pedagogical approaches?

The dangers of lecture

This past week, I took a risk in my Workplace Writing class. The lesson concerned accepting constructive criticism, and it seemed to me that the most useful way to model it would be to let them criticize me. I put the students in groups and had them come up with a criticism jointly, so they would be more daring.

Only three groups of five were able to come up with anything. One criticism was that sometimes my voice is too quiet (something I wondered about with the room's weird acoustics), and another was that sometimes on Canvas the assignments are hard to find. The third was that they want to spend more time going group work.

From my perspective, they do group work ALL THE TIME. Every day there's an active learning activity, either individual or group. To clarify, I asked, "so it seems like I lecture a lot?" And the way they said yes made it seem like that should be obvious.

As I'm lecturing, I stop and ask the class questions, or have them ask me questions. From my perspective, that feels less like lecture and more like discussion to me, but it may not for them.

It's also possible that I've fallen into one of the dangers of lecture: getting carried away with talking. It's important to stop talking sometimes and turn control over to the class. Not just for a minute, but for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

My goal for next week is to begin with a group activity to make sure there's enough time.

Striking a balance

The beginning of the semester is incredibly important, as it sets the tone for the rest of the semester.

The first thing that has to occur is showing your students that the class has value. This makes them willing to work and more patient with the educational process. The way I do this in Writing for the Workplace and Technical Communication is beginning with a lesson about email. Many students use it poorly or too informally. Interestingly, as texting has replaced email for informal communication, student awareness of email as professional communication has increased, so it's possible I will need to change tactics.

In a writing class, the second task is to establish community. The students will be providing feedback to one another and working in project groups, so it's vital that they get to know each other. I accomplish this through group work such as asking composition or literature students to share their favorite quote from the text with one another.

Neither of these projects is complex or mentally demanding, and there lies the danger. If too much time is spent on them, students may start to think they don't have to work.

As I was talking to my Workplace Writing students today, I noticed that none of them had their book out. Few even had their computers open. That had to change. When I put them into groups, I gave them a task requiring the book, and for once I didn't project the book onto the classroom's screen. I'm always urging students to be self-directed, which means I had better stop babying them!

I titled this post "striking a balance" because a successful educational environment must be comfortable but not TOO comfortable.

In-class collaboration with Google Docs

BLUF: Google Docs is useful for collaboration and community building. 

Today each of my composition classes created a chart using Google Docs. Based on the "Writing in the Disciplines" section of the Writer's Harbrace Handbook, they compared standards of writing in the humanities, in the social sciences, in the natural sciences, and in business. I asked them to compare the purposes for writing (such as interpretation or solving a problem), tasks (like summary, description, literature review, laboratory steps), sources of evidence, and some conventions. Here is part of one class's chart: 

I assigned this task because their first paper asks them to evaluate "truth and knowledge" in a discipline, which is a broad, vague topic that must be refined and limited to be successful. I argue that examining standards of writing is one way to approach the types of claims and evidence valued in a field. 

After discussing their findings, each group created an entry for "truth and knowledge" in their discipline. Here is what they found: 

• Humanities: Truth is subjective. Truth is an abstraction. Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Knowledge is facts and theories, history and perspectives. Reasoning is very important. Complex claims are most valued. Argumentation is valued to hone reasoning skills and for leading to better understanding.
• Social Sciences: Truth is observable/replicable and evidenced through research/experimentation. Truth is objective. Knowledge can be proven and should be shared. Knowledge contributes to the conversation in the field and can be expanded on by other professionals. Derives something concrete from broad, observable phenomena
• Natural Sciences: can only disprove or fail to disprove a “truth”. truth is what you observe and what can be reproduced. quantitative data are valued more than qualitative data when it comes to what is knowledge. extensive background knowledge of particular field required to get as close to truth as you can get. unarguable, empirical, fact based truth and knowledge. what can be seen and tested
• Business: Truth is often dependent upon the situation. Most truths are based on facts. However truths are commonly portrayed with bias leading to misconceptions. Knowledge is based upon truths paired with past experiences. Knowledge is more valuable as the genre requires the individual to be have a certain drive for the business or idea to be successful.

I'm very pleased with their thinking. They're gaining confidence and depth as they discover avenues for exploring the topic. I'm especially pleased with the community-building that occurred in each class as a result of the collaboration.

I enjoy using Google Docs in class because it's fun. It can have a large number of collaborators at any moment--20 seems to be a reasonable limit, based on past experience--which made some chaos inevitable. Sometimes one student would be writing a sentence only to have another edit it right behind them. The anonymity of logins makes it a challenge to discover who the culprit is! They laugh at the login-handles: animals like the loris or elephant. The laughter makes the task more enjoyable, encourages them to relax, and brings them together as a group. 

One further advantage of this task is that they'll have this document to look back on for the rest of the semester. 

Frustrated learners

It's very humbling to be bad at something.

I'm trying to learn to hula hoop. I have NEVER been able to do this. Not as a child. Not now. I want to do it because (a) it looks like fun and (b) I want to prove something to myself, that there's nothing wrong with me and I really can do this.

Obviously, there's a lot of psychological baggage tied up with this. It comes from watching everyone else do something and making it look so easy.

Is this how my students feel who tell me they've never been good at English? For some of us, language just clicks. Like someone who succeeds at hooping their very first time, people who are "good at English" probably enjoyed playing with words at an early age, took pleasure in their sounds and variety. And it came "naturally." Of course, "nature" depends on a lot of factors, like how much their parents read and their early teachers.

I suppose there was a time when language wasn't easy for me. I remember in kindergarten, my teacher asked me to summarize the story of the three little pigs after we had just watched a film on it, and I was embarrassed that I couldn't do it. There must have been other struggles before that. But it was so brief and so long ago.

Some of my students, though, have been stuck at the same skill level for years. They learned to read and compose their thoughts up to a certain level, and didn't progress beyond it. And it's terribly frustrating. If they feel anything like I felt tonight at my hooping class, they sometimes want to cry.

I think it's important to recognize that learning can be an incredibly emotional process. It's easy to turn off and give up when something causes us pain. Tonight the other students told me it takes time and that it was hard for them too. I don't fully believe them, but it's comforting. That's something our students need from us: the awareness that getting to the skill level they want to be at will take time, and the assurance that eventually they can do it.

tl;dr

We're all in such a hurry these days. Myself included. 

We skim our newsfeeds and social media. If a video is over 10 minutes, we seldom open it, and even a short video is abandoned if it doesn't engage us in the first 15 seconds. We depend on abstracts and summaries. 

This impatience extends to other areas of our lives. For instance, I've been ordering groceries online because it's faster. I can sit in my car, reading Facebook, while a clerk loads the trunk. I'm usually in and out within 10 minutes. 

As a teacher, the length of an assignment is something I have to give special consideration to. Will this engage the students? Will they watch/read the whole thing? Will they stop and think about it? Or will their response be "tl; dr" (too long; didn't read)? I'm beginning to prepare some videos for an online course I'm teaching in the summer, and the current recommendation is to keep videos under 5 minutes. Five! 

The benefits of slowing down are obvious. It takes time to consider multiple sides of an argument, to fact-check, to consider our logic, to formulate a response. Inspiration takes time. Art takes time. 

A recent book by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, advises faculty to reject the corporate culture of speed and train our students to slow down. But that's not what I'm arguing for today. 

What I would like to suggest is that people have always been in a hurry. Always. Humans feel the pressure of mortality and passing time. Think of Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be," or Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." Before television and mass transit, a family sat in their drawing room, sewing or playing games or reading, and wondering whether their lives were worthwhile. Now we're in a hurry faster, but Time's bending sickle is headed for us all. 

Urging people to slow down isn't the answer. Instead, we should focus on consciously choosing what we spend time on. As teachers, we can train future generations to use their limited time well, to consider what is best summarized and what is best read in depth, or what are the best sources for recaps. Accepting a natural, human impulse is a much better use of faculty time than complaining about students who are in a hurry.