The Freshman Seminar - Taught By A Retired Faculty Member

A couple of weeks ago the Econ Department contacted me about whether I wanted to teach my course next fall.  This is much earlier than in past years.  I was told that it is harder to hire retirees now.  A justification for that would need to be written.  And the funds to pay me would have to come from the College of LAS, not the department.

I took this as true but didn't quite understand why it was so.  As I teach an upper level class in the major, the rationale for offering my course, or indeed any special topics class, is to give majors an ample selection of such classes from which they must choose.  (I believe the requirement is 4 such courses.)  When I first started to teach the class, the department had recently experienced an outside review, which argued there wasn't sufficient variety of elective courses then.  Perhaps we've more than caught up since.  But I know the number of majors has been on the rise as well.  (I don't know whether that growth is faster than overall enrollment growth or not, which itself may be an issue.)

The rehiring of retirees under contract, whether faculty or staff, has been an issue for some time, with one of the larger concerns that "double dipping" seems an abuse of the public trust.  There are regulations in place to curb the double dipping.  Earnings under contract can be no greater than 40% of earnings while a full time employee.  I come nowhere close to that teaching this one course.

There has also been a lack of imagination by campus administration in considering how to deploy retirees effectively and whether to do so in an entirely voluntary capacity, if exclusively in a contract capacity, or possibly in some mixture of the two.  As it is now, when I supervise a student in an independent study for credit, or when I mentor a student, or when I engage a group of students in a discussion group that is not for credit, those activities are done on a voluntary basis.  If, however, I teach a course listed in the timetable for which students get course credit, then that is done as contract work, meaning that I get paid for it.   I want to note that there might be some connection between these different activities, and in what I say below I will amplify on that.

I also want to note that in some respects there can be volunteer activity happening within paid work, though this conception requires a different way to conceive of work than we normally do.  A framework that helps in considering this is Akerlof's model of Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange, which I described in this post. 

Here are the model's basic elements.

There is a minimal performance standard below which the employee will get fired.  There is a performance norm, substantially above the minimal standard, that typifies what workers produce.  The difference between the minimal standard and the higher norm constitutes a gift that workers give to the firm.  Likewise, there is a minimal wage below which workers would quit and find work elsewhere and there is an actual wage above that minimum that the firm pays to workers.  The difference is a gift that the firm gives to its employees.  Gift giving demands reciprocation for it to be sustained.  When that happens all involved feel good about the place of work and productivity is high as a consequence.

The gift part is then a voluntary contribution.  I want to focus on a particular type of gift giving by the employee, where the employee puts in more time at work than is required.  We might say such work is done in a labor intensive manner.  Then I want to consider instruction, in particular, from this perspective.  A course that is lecture based, has auto-graded homework, and multiple choice exams scored by scantron represents the minimal standard.  One obvious reason that this mode of teaching persists (perhaps with tweaks like clicker questions offered during the live class session) is that it economizes on instructor time.  In this approach the only time that the instructor devotes to giving feedback to students is in answering questions during lecture or during office hours.  Further, in many such classes neither of those modes are very active, meaning students don't opt in, so there is very little feedback altogether that students receive.

In contrast, consider instruction where there is both a lot of in class discussion (ergo a seminar) and also a lot of interaction between students and the instructor outside of class, either via mandatory office hours or via written work that students do which receive extensive comments from the instructor.  In either case the student receives substantial feedback on the student's own formative thinking under this alternative.

Why have any instruction in this alternative mode, as it is certainly a more costly way to teach (as measured by the instructor time required, if not the dollars needed to elicit that time)?  It's a question that needs asking and requires a serious answer.  Here I will content myself with one component of a possible answer.  Under this alternative mode the students will, no doubt, observe this additional effort being put in by the instructor.  And it should be clear that the effort is being made on behalf of the student's learning.  They should, therefore, become convinced that the instructor cares about them both as students and as human beings.  One of damning things said about undergraduate education at Big Public U is that students become anonymous and in the process become convinced that nobody cares about them.  Labor intensive teaching should aim to counter that.

* * * * *

I'm going to switch gears now and talk about the course I've been teaching as of late - The Economics of Organizations, which is an upper level course in the major.  It is my experience from teaching this class that motivates what I write here.  I want to consider the following issues:  (a) my motivation in teaching, (b) what I've learned about the students as a consequence of teaching this course repeatedly, (c) a little on the methodology of teaching, and (d) mentoring or discussion groups that happen with students who have previously taken this class.  In considering each of these I will try to connect to how it is relevant for teaching a freshman seminar.

I teach now, admittedly, because it gives some work focus to my life during the fall.  The money is part of it, but only a small part.  There are certain aspects of teaching, particularly grading, also some of the administrative/clerical work, that I dislike.  As I've commented elsewhere, not completely in jest, if I could get rid of the disagreeable elements I would teach entirely for free, as a volunteer activity.

This gets to the real reason for teaching.  I want it to matter somehow to the students.  When I can see that the teaching does matter, it is enormously satisfying.  When it evidently doesn't matter, I find it quite disappointing, sometimes even distressing.  There are also many intermediate situations where it is not evident whether the teaching matters or where it is not evident how much it matters.  In these cases I want to know what I can do to make the teaching matter more.

For my efforts to matter to the student, the student must care about the course.  When students do care, my batting average for mattering is pretty high.  However, perhaps surprisingly, especially since my course is an upper level class in the major and the subject matter is much more relevant to "the real world" than most other economics classes, plus I put considerable effort into the teaching, many of my students, roughly one third of the class last semester, don't seem to care much at all.  This offers something of a puzzle, at least to those of us approximately my age, who don't recall experiencing something like this when we were college students.  In contrast, if you ask those students who evidently do care about the course to discuss their experiences in doing group work for other courses,  invariably they will tell stories about teammates who shirk by free riding on the efforts of the other group members.  They've had sufficient history with group work that the existence of students who don't care about the course would come as no surprise to them.

In either case, it is worth considering explanations for the lack of engagement, so to ask whether anything can be done about it.  Let's consider two possible explanations, one social, the other "academic alienation."  The social explanation takes the student perspective as something like this.  Once the student has graduated the student expects to work quite hard on the job, whatever that is.  So the student, perhaps a bit myopic when reckoning with the situation, wants to have some fun now while that is still possible.  Further, there may be some indirect consequence.   Initially this is from living away from home and not having parents to answer to.  That freedom from adult oversight is apt to result in putting social activity front and center.  Afters a few years it is from having 21 be the drinking age, where when I was in college it was 18.  Once the kid is "legal" that would seem to give further license to the have-fun-now mindset.  It's hard to tell if this is true or not from an instructor perspective.  But I think it is fair to say that any regulation has direct consequences that are intended and then indirect consequences that aren't intended.  Kids drinking during the middle of week, and that perhaps encouraging them to skip classes, may be one of those unintended consequences.  I don't believe it was much of an issue when I was in college and I don't know how much this is a driver for lack of student engagement now, but to the extent that it is I don't see the University having much ability to do anything about it.

Now let's consider academic alienation as an alternative explanation.  The story goes something like this.  The students have been involved in a paper chase for quite some time before college, certainly during high school, maybe well before that too. The paper chase is not particularly nurturing of the student, neither intellectually nor emotionally.  So you might expect the alienation to manifest earlier and in some cases it does, but often it is forestalled.  The counter force is that the students were good at the paper chase in high school, witness that they got into the university where they wanted to attend.  They take pride in their academic achievement, which is measured by the trappings (GPA, number of AP courses taken, etc.) rather than by some internal meter of intellectual satisfaction.  This blows up on them, however, once they've gotten to college.

The pond has gotten a lot bigger and now they are just an average fish, maybe even a small one.  The classes in the first year tend to be large lectures and are rather impersonal.  There is grading on a curve, but even with that in some tough classes the raw scores on exams are quite ego deflating.  There is seemingly an excessive number of rules to manage all of this.  The rules make things more impersonal.  While it is possible to have human interaction with somebody in the know - e.g, by going to the TA's office hours - it is psychologically difficult to do this, especially at first, so the tendency is to avoid those interactions.   There is then a negative feedback loop at play.  It is just too tough emotionally to bust a gut studying for a test only to produce a mediocre performance.  So this encourages procrastination on the schoolwork and more time partying in the dorm.  In turn, the student stops caring so much about getting good grades.  That's a means of emotional self-protection, which in that limited case makes sense.  But it is the beginning of the end of the student caring about school.  By the time I see the students, when they are juniors or seniors, they've reached the other end of the tunnel.  The freshman seminar might then offer students a different experience at the get go. If the student had a positive reaction to the seminar, the student might then not fall into the negative feedback loop, in spite of the environment described earlier in the paragraph.  So the freshman seminar might hinder some of the academic alienation.

Before turning to those students who do care, let me note that there are other possible explanations for lack of student engagement.  Indeed, last week the Chronicle featured a series of pieces on student anxiety and depression.  I was struck reading one of those pieces how an instructor or the student's classmates might confound student anxiety for lack of engagement.  Not being a psychologist, I have no recommendation that can provide a proper sorting.  I simply want to note here that if a student is already suffering from deep anxiety as an entering freshman, a seminar might very well be ineffective to alleviate even some of the symptoms.

Let's turn to the paradox of the students who care.  These are students who are quite diligent about school, as measured by their attendance in class, the timeliness in which they submit course work, and the evident effort they show in the work they submit.  Yet for the the most part they seem unaware that their efforts are producing surface learning only.  An expression I first learned from Timothy Luke about 20 years go that at the time sounded like mere formalism but now seems to me prescient diagnosis is that the students are extremely instrumental about their studies.  School is a means to an end; learning is not an end in itself.  Grades are what matter.  Improvement in critical thinking is not on the radar.  The paradox is twofold.  Why is their so much instrumentalism?  How do the students sustain their own diligence in the presence of this instrumentalism?  I will note here that I mentioned Tim Luke to observe this was going on in the late 1990s, well before No Child Left Behind and the Accountability Movement that took hold.  These may very well have exacerbated the problem, but they didn't cause it.  We should ask what did.

Here's a simple and perhaps simplistic explanation.  The students who care, at least the ones whom I see in my class nowadays, were "good kids" when they were growing up.  They obeyed their parents and tried hard to make their parents proud of them.  Perhaps through elementary school parents can tell if their kids are learning in school by talking with them at the dinner table and/or by reviewing their homework.  Soon thereafter, however, the parents who themselves are not educators are unable to directly determine whether their kids are learning  Good grades then become a proxy for whether the kid learns.  Further, to the extent that schools have tracking, or there are better schools that have restrictive admissions, the parents then will push the kids to get good grades as the necessary hurdle to overcome to get into the privileged learning setting.

There has to be a different part of the story, however, which I don't doubt but which I find harder to explain.  The students have become expert at memorization via all the drill they had in spelling and in mastering basic arithmetic that they experience in elementary school.  They keep applying memorization thereafter, even though they really need a different way to learn to understand more sophisticated ideas.  The alternative would be explorative, learning by discovery.  Students would play with ideas and then try to make sense of them.  Yet most students I see don't seem to know how to do this.  I attribute this lack of skill to not reading sufficiently and/or not reading things that are intellectually challenging and that would foster the kids' intellectual development.  I'm pretty sure this is right.  The part I can't explain is why this doesn't happen, at least early on, say in middle school.  Some have argued that reading can't compete with video games or texting friends.  I don't buy that.  I watched a lot of TV, yet I also did a lot of reading.  Others argue that there is too much homework now.  Maybe that's right.  In any event, I believe the path to learn how to self-teach can be found through reading and that most students don't find that path on their own.

So a real reason for the freshman seminar is to expose students to an alternative to memorization and do so early enough in their college careers that it might impact how they proceed in college thereafter.  I should note, however, several caveats.  First, the rote approach gets more and more ingrained the longer the student uses it without trying other alternatives.  So it might really be better to consider the freshman in high school seminar rather than the freshman in college seminar, for just this reason.  To this I'd say one step at a time.  If retired faculty are the ones doing the teaching, it makes sense that this happens in college, not in high school.  Second, for anything that is really new to learn, we'll be novices and need substantial practice to get better at it.  One seminar should be thought of as an introduction only, nothing more.  If students still care a lot about their grades, as they surely will,  trying the new approach across the board might be deemed too risky.  Perhaps students should do it in one course per semester only (one where they are apt to have an inherent interest in the subject) or maybe only in their pleasure reading.  Third, to embrace any new approach as an opt in rather than because it is required, the new approach must somehow resonate with the participant.  In other words, the freshman seminar has to click with students in a unique way, if it is to have a positive effect.  If it is seen as just another course, it will be entirely ineffective.

Let me turn to teaching method.  While my course has many different components, I want to focus on the the weekly blogging that students do.  I should note that this activity in no way follows from the economics training I received.  Indeed, I've had no formal training in writing after high school (indeed I don't recall much training on writing during high school) and only one WAC seminar (WAC stands for Writing Across The Curriculum) on how to teach with writing.  My own blogging was done via self-discovery.  The writing met some needs I had at the time to get ideas going around in my head out of my system.  Though I do it less frequently now, those needs persist.  The idea of teaching with blogs I got from Barbara Ganley, after which I learned that many other instructors did it as well.  I have since fitted the approach to my own inclinations.

The students get a prompt from me that ties into the economics topic we are studying.  The vast majority of students write to the prompt, though they have the option of writing on their own chosen theme, as long as they connect it to the course.  There is a 600 word minimum requirement.  Initially that may be daunting as is the blogging itself, which happens on a publicly available Web page.  Each student is assigned an alias to write under, so the concern that others outside the class will monitor their posts gets addressed that way.  Still, it is quite different for them as compared with other homework they do, so it takes about a month before students get comfortable with the activity. For the students who are diligent, the word requirement stops mattering by then.  For those who don't care, it is evident that some of them are just going through the motions by the brevity of their posts.

I respond to each post, typically with several paragraphs.  I have learned to focus on addressing what the student says, often zeroing in on a particular point that was made.  I then ask derivative questions, suggest possible related issues for the student to consider, and make a point of mentioning it when I don't understand something from my reading of the post.  The student is supposed to respond in kind.  The good students do that.  It makes for an interesting back and forth.  In this, I think I've been aided by my experience as an administrator.  I respond to my students like I would have responded to my staff.  There is a tendency to teach the subject rather than teach the student.  My administrative experience helps to counter that tendency. 

I don't grade individual posts.  I track them to let students know that I've seen what they wrote.  I use portfolio grading instead.  There is one grade given at mid semester for the first half of the blog posts and another grade given near the end of the semester for the second half of the posts.  While I would like to see improvement in the posts over the semester, mostly I'm hoping that the students take the activity seriously and are earnest in what they produce.  Such a student will get substantial credit for the blogging.

The underlying idea is to convince students that their job is to produce a narrative of their own creation that connects course ideas to their experiences and other things they already know.  This contrasts with the notion that their job is to absorb the narrative entirely produced by the instructor.  Further, through the commenting, the student should get the impression that teaching and learning is about having an extended conversation.  Then getting the course to click, as I mentioned above, happens when students come to realize they want such conversations.  Not every student does, to be sure.  But as it is a novel experience for them, the instructor can't know who does want it until the students have the opportunity to experience it.  Among the various components in my class, for the diligent students the blogging usually gets higher marks than the other parts of the course.

Near the end of the fall semester as the course is winding down, I offer the students the possibility of participating in a weekly discussion group in the spring.  In some sense this a way for those who want to participate to continue the conversation, albeit on other than course themes.  A few years ago I had a group of three that worked well and wrote about the experience here.  Since then I've had individual students take up the offer, which becomes more mentoring and less discussion, though I wouldn't split hairs about the difference between the two activities.  In one case this didn't get started till the following fall, but then the mentoring continued into the spring.  And in a couple of cases I've been having ongoing email threads with former students who have since graduated, as an alternative mode of discussion when face-to-face conversation is not available.  Further, I occasionally post to the class Web site, well after the course has concluded.  I know that at least a couple of students monitor that, since I recently posted about my stress fracture there and they sent their well wishes to me.  The point is that it is possible to stay in touch with students after the course is over and to do so in a more or less intensive manner.

This same point holds for the freshman seminar.  There is potential for the instructor to mentor a former student, at the student's inclination.  If the seminar were taught in the fall, the mentoring might be intensive in the following spring and then become more casual thereafter.  The contact would be there for the student if the student felt a need.  This is yet a different reason for the freshman seminar.  If the student comes to trust the instructor, that trust is itself an asset on which an ongoing relationship can be built.

* * * * *

I want to conclude in this last section with a few thoughts about whether my experience is too idiosyncratic to me to possibly scale or if it might actually be possible to pilot a program based on this experience and then expand beyond the pilot in due course.

Let me do some simple arithmetic first.  We have roughly 8,000 first-year students.  (Some, with enough AP credit, enter as sophomores.  They should be allowed to take this freshman seminar in spite of their class standing.)  If the enrollment in a particular seminar is 20 students, my preferred number, then we need about 400 such courses to give every student this sort of opportunity.  (We also have many transfer students.  They too should get the opportunity, so the numbers are actually far greater.   One wonders whether that would necessitate a different sort of course meant exclusively for transfer students or not.  I won't speculate on that further here.)

For a good pilot, I imagine having 10 different instructors teaching seminars in various fields.  Good candidates, in my view, are instructors who have taught WAC classes in the past, or who have done a lot of blogging on their own, or who have high marks as being very good teachers.  These sort of people probably could design their own seminars in according with their own inclinations.  As I have written elsewhere, early adopter types of instructors tend to produce good and interesting results, primarily as a consequence of their own creative efforts.  That doesn't mean the results can scale beyond the pilot and it doesn't indicate the sort of training other instructors would need before teaching such a seminar.  But it does seem clear that instructors beyond the pilot would need intensive training of some sort before teaching a seminar.

Scaling immediately beyond the pilot might happen with just the original set of instructors if additional labor were allowed to complement them.  Two possibilities are using students who have previously taken the seminar as helpers of various kinds, to offer feedback from a student perspective, and to use humanities instructors well trained in WAC to co-teach the course.  (Such co-teachers might be a way to eventually diffuse the approach to other instructors.)

Beyond this, one would have to ask what level of compensation would be needed to elicit participation from retirees who are potential instructors.  I don't know the answer to this, but I have a different experience to rely on to illustrate a possible answer.  In the previous decade, when I was still working full time, I taught for the Campus Honors Program.  I did that three times, twice Econ 101, and once a special topics class not in economics, which is the first time I taught with blogs.   They paid a fixed fee for teaching a CHP class.  I have no idea how they arrived at the number, but I interpreted the payment more as a recognition thing than a compensation thing.  Most of the CHP teaching then was done as an overload rather than on load.  It's recognition that would be needed here, in my judgment.

Also, there would need to be some resources put into tracking the students who took the seminar as well as to track parallel students who didn't take the seminar, so there is some basis of comparison.  The institution wants to know if the seminar matters for the student subsequently.  Undoubtedly, a pilot is insufficient to establish this proposition or to refute it entirely.  But it can be suggestive of the sort of follow up needed to understand the issues better.

I, for one, would rather teach freshman now, more for the upside potential than for any concrete sense of what can be achieved.  Battling senioritis is discouraging.  Having students who show interest in class only to see them graduate immediately also is less than satisfying.  I wonder if there are enough other retired faculty who see it the same way.