We’re at the end of the semester here at USF, and this is a short debriefing of the semester. My particular form of craziness this semester was teaching three courses while serving as department chair. Technically, I was teaching four sections of our undergraduate Schools and Society course, but two of them met in the same room at the same time and were divided to reserve some of the seats for a particular program. The other two sections were on the Lakeland campus, as part of the teachout that comes with the closure of USF Polytechnic at the end of last June, and I ended up with them because the remaining teachout faculty did not have anyone qualified to teach that course this semester, and I could not persuade either qualified adjuncts or full-time faculty to teach either section, even with an overload payment. So I taught the sections, with TA support, and we ran the course in a blended format for both sections. Thank goodness I made the effort last summer to write a textbook for the course, as the discussion questions in the text could be used to start online discussions. ((The textbook is currently missing an advanced-topics chapter on critical theory and a few other matters, as well as featurelets I am planning to add–I forget the text-publisher’s term for what I am calling a featurelet. As I have told my students, if I know that the major options for a text were all mediocre and overpriced, they should at least have a free mediocre text.)) Other factors that made this a little easier: I was already gearing up to teach the dual-section course in Tampa and thinking about TA organization and communication; I had a wonderful group of TAs for all the sections, I have an Audible account and had a list of audiobooks I was interested in listening to; and most importantly, the students were wonderful about communicating their needs and interests, and my department colleagues were patient and understanding that their chair was essentially offsite for 15% of the semester. Now, for the (teaching) lessons learned:
- The advantage of a blended format, or any requirement for occasional mandatory online discussion: students cannot hide in an online discussion. I used Instructure Canvas as the platform (which is now USF’s platform, though faculty can still use Blackboard for a few more terms). Canvas allowed me to force students to write an initial response to each discussion prompt before seeing their peers’ responses. (Yes, I made my Tampa students respond to the same prompts for the most part, as preparation for our classes. Writing for an audience of a professor and a few TAs is a little different from writing for an audience of a professor and peers.)
- I probably need an average of 60-75 minutes face-to-face with undergraduates to cook the grits for this class. Having had several weeks without contact in the blended section, I just don’t think that gap worked as well as the end of the semester, when I saw students face-to-face every week. Or at least starting the semester with a good string of weekly face-to-face meetings is important, even if there are a few gaps. Some part of that conclusion may have been affected by the fact that students did not have a choice of a face-to-face class: as noted above, my assigning myself to the classes was not my first choice, and as a result of my other duties, the blended format was a matter of practicality even if program faculty had talked about a blended option before this semester.
- Google Docs forms and mail-merge worked well to help with TA organization/task management, especially on major assignments. Some of the questions for individual assignments came from the rubrics for the assignments, and others were prompts so that I could turn everyone’s scores and comments into a letter to each individual student. ((The process in a little more detail: a TA used Google Doc form to score and provide comments on each of her or his students’ work. I downloaded the spreadsheet, created a template document, and then used mail-merge to create and then edit the individual feedback letters. I divided the letters into groups based on TA and then sent the TAs their own sets of letters. All the TAs had to do at that point was go into Canvas, fill in the rubric, and copy and paste an individual student’s feedback letter into comments.)) I think this system worked well both to use TA time wisely and to make sure students received the feedback they needed.
- My “conceptual scavenger hunt” assignment needs additional fine-tuning. ((In this course, we have a number of common paper assignments for all sections in Tampa, but the conceptual scavenger hunt is something just in my sections.)) This is an assignment I originally created last summer where I asked students to identify major course concepts and illustrate them using events in their own lives, in the lives of people they knew, or in news articles. In both the summer and this semester, I had students submit drafts of a subset, but students made the same types of mistakes on the final version as in the drafts, at least this semester, and they made some poor choices on concepts. I think I need to give them a restricted list of concepts and tell them they can only use events in their lives and the lives of people they knew personally. And maybe use the format for a few low-stakes pop-quizzes early in the semester.
- On the other hand, giving more choice to students in that assignment revealed a new misunderstanding of students: confusing the ways that people value both public and private purposes of schooling, on the one hand, with public and private schools, on the other. I need to figure this out, because I started the semester by exploring arguments over higher education as a private and public good. (Students don’t know that at the start of the first class: I just ask them what a USF degree is good for.) This is a critical concept in the course — you want future teachers and anyone else who takes the course to understand the tensions between different goals people have for schooling — and I need to help students with this. Oh, and we cannot really change the label to avoid the dual public/private terms: public good and private good are standard in economics.
- An interesting misunderstanding: in a few places, students conflated the discussion of normative ethics (and specifically virtue ethics) with the historical expectations that teachers will be morally upstanding. I think this is because both topics are in the same chapter in the current version of the text. But this is not the only example of students conflating historical debates with normative content–students readily misinterpret the early 19th century arguments over gender (specifically, part of the feminization of teaching could be attributed to beliefs that women were more nurturing and thus would be natural teachers) with an essentialist form of gender truth (the regular claim by students that teaching became feminized in the 19th century because women are more nurturing).
- I also discovered a brand-new student misunderstanding about social capital, but this one was all my fault. I was trying to explain the difference between human-capital models and social capital, and I blurted out, “In social capital, it’s not what you know but who you know,” and despite the illustrations I gave, a significant number of students conflated the sharing of information that’s typical of social capital with outright favoritism in job-seeking. Are they related? Absolutely! But they are not the same, and I obviously need a different explanation.
- I still struggle with explaining cultural capital, which I find the slipperiest major concept I emphasize in the course. I found a very good talk by Annette Lareau on Youtube that a few students said helped them, and I may make it (or parts of it) required viewing in future sections. But because cultural capital is a model about intangible habits, a sort of invisible college of social class, it is inevitably going to be a more difficult concept to teach.
- Long-term goals: There are important concepts that are about as difficult to explain as cultural capital, mostly around the politics of bureaucracy, and I know that improving how I teach them will require a good bit of experimentation. Right now, I present them in a lumpish fashion in a single chapter of the text. I know what you’re thinking: “Undergraduate class on school and society, a chapter devoted to the structure of policy and social-science models of bureaucracy. What could possibly go wrong?” I asked students to write songs about bureaucracy based on the chapter, which helped a little. But while I was excited as an undergraduate to learn about the historicist critique of structural-functionalism from David Karen, ((Very briefly, a structural-functionalist model of schooling has a very difficult time explaining change except in the “it’s turtles all the way down” sense. Oh, I see that expression on your face: want some coffee?)) that really can’t be at the center of my class. My friend and colleague Barbara and I talked a few months ago about whether we really have the chance to include a comparison of structural-functionalism, conflict, and neoinstitutionalist models in an undergraduate class where few of the students have touched sociology, and now that you have read the beginning of the sentence, you know what her answer was.
- Another long-term goal: figuring out what pieces of critical theory to include and where. I sprinkle bits and pieces in the text, and my inclination is to write a seventh chapter of the text that will include critical theory and some other material labeled as advance topics. Maybe I should move some of the bureaucracy topics into that chapter.
That’s enough for now; grades are due today, and I have a few tasks left.