Ring Around The Rosie In The College Economics Classroom

I'm not yet sure whether I will be teaching this fall nor if I do teach whether it will be for the Economics Department.  But for the sake of this piece let's say it will happen and it will be the course I had been teaching on The Economics of Organizations.  Periodically, I consider experiments I might try in class to improve things.  These are not experiments in the sense of the scientific method.  They are reflective practice where once tried I then do an informal evaluation of it to see how the students react.  If it isn't a complete disaster, I will likely try it again the next time I teach and then also do an informal evaluation. At least, that's how its worked in the past. My future teaching is more uncertain now, yet I'm still intrigued by the possibility of this experiment, if I do indeed teach this time around.

The underlying motivation is whether some sense of social conscience can be taught with the teaching done in a way where it will matter to the students.  The ideal I have in mind is that a student who is doing well in the course, and in school more generally, takes it upon herself or himself to assist a teammate who is struggling, with my class and quite possibly with school more broadly considered.  Further, the good student is sufficiently discerning so as to distinguish the struggling student from another teammate who really is shirking but is otherwise well adjusted.  Some fairly recent experience I've had suggests that the good student will instead confound the two situations and treat them both as if shirking has occurred. The good student becomes embittered as a consequence (shirking seems so widespread).  Imagine the difference in mindset and attitude if the good student did put in the effort to help the struggling student and the good student could see some benefit coming from such effort. That ideal as outcome may only be the delusions of a doddering old professor.  Yet it is such delusions that have motivated my previous experiments.  So why not another one now?

Now I confess this is not a well researched idea.  It comes, instead, from couple of different family experiences.  The first was when one of my kids was young and struggling to learn to read, even as this same kid had qualified to be in the "gifted program" at his school.  This discord impacted the family in a big way.  Eventually, we pulled the kid from the gifted classroom and took him to a reading specialist outside the school setting.  The specialist did help.   She used a multisensory approach, something I had never heard of before, but apparently one that works well with kids who have dyslexia.  I have some vague memories of my son having his fingers on one hand in a metal tray with sand in it, while they were working through the reading exercises.  I do not understand why this was helpful, but apparently it was.   The other experience happened much later in life.  I was raised Jewish but my wife is Methodist.  When visiting some of her family, they would offer a prayer before dinner.  During the prayer, people at the table held hands, making solidarity with one another.  I'm not big on prayer in the open, but the holding hands like that made an impression on me.

So, I suppose that, subliminally, I've wondered for some time whether adult learners could be partially engaged by their sense of touch and not make all the teaching and learning purely about their cognitive processes. Indeed, a few years ago after seeing a lecture by Harry Boyte I wrote a long blog post because that lecture had a significant impact on my own thinking, yet I was physically uncomfortable during the talk (my neck was hurting) so I didn't engage Boyte after the talk was over, but then we did have an email thread, where I shared that post with him and we talked about related ideas. I liked very much his metaphor of educating the head, the hands, and the heart as the way we produce good citizens.  (Good citizens and social conscience are essentially the same for me, though the former may convey more the acts of good citizenship while the latter might speak more to the mindset that encourages those acts.)  These days it seems that among the people I know educating the hands is about learning to cook, a good life skill, one where I am substantially below average, so I definitely won't be teaching my students that. Where I talk about using the hand in what follows, it is as an instrument of the heart.  I want to focus on using the sense of touch not for other things but for other people.  Holding hands is a way to feel other people and, I hope, support a cognitive sense of other people as well.

In a nutshell, I'd like to teach a class where students hold hands during the class session to see whether it impacts how the session goes and whether the students appreciate their fellow students more as a result.

But while this would seem perfectly natural in elementary school, it's a bit weird for the college classroom.  So the question is how to initiate this in a way where the students might perceive it as daffy (I do other things that they find daffy like having them write blog posts), but even so they think it benign and non-threatening.   The kids game/song Ring Around the Rosie is there to help with that.  My hope is that most of the kids in the class would already be familiar with it, which would be a big plus.  My class features that students bring their own experiences and tie it to the subject matter we study.  This would be in a similar vein.

In trying to envision how it would work, I would begin by saying that we're going to play a children's game as a way to help us learn what we want to study.  Before getting to the game I will note that in most of the economics they have been taught, each individual cares only about their own consumption bundle.  Their preferences depend on that, but typically don't directly depend on other people.  Yet in organizations people need to depend on other people - their co-workers, their managers, people they themselves may manage, etc. This dependency necessitates something of a sociological approach.  So we're going to play a game to get the class into the right mindset.

In previous years, I had already experimented with sitting the class in discussion mode, by which I mean moving the tablet armchairs from their customary position and instead placing them around the periphery of the room (in more of a horseshoe than a circle, though the exact shape would depend on how many students were there).  This much is now a common practice for me when we are not in lecture mode, which I do sparingly to cover some of the economic models that the students don't seem to be getting from the online homework.   Once seated in discussion mode, I would ask the class - how many learned Ring Around the Rosy when they were kids?  Among those who raised their hands I'd ask - does anybody want to recite it now to the class?  If I could get a taker, that would be great.  If not, I would recite it myself.

Ring around the rosie
A pocket full of posey
Ashes ashes
We all fall down. 

Then I would explain we are not going to sing it aloud as a group, because that might disturb some of the adjacent classrooms (there have been complaints in the recent past about noise from showing videos during class).  And we won't do the last part where we all fall down, because I would have trouble getting back up again.  I'd hope that would get a laugh or two.  Then I would tell them I'd like them to all hold hands.  Please do it gently, and please note this is a classroom exercise only.  It is not aimed to improve their social lives outside the classroom.  I would conclude this bit with observing that groups work better if they've had a prior bonding experience.  So they consider the hand holding activity from that perspective.

Then I would move us into discussion and observe that if they have each of their hands holding the hands of other people, one to the right and another to the left, then they don't have a hand free to raise to signal they want to contribute to the discussion.  So, they'd be paired up to free one of their hands.  If we had an even number of students, that would be easier.  With an odd number, one would be paired with me. That might provide its own mild interest.

I probably would want to try this in the second class session.  I typically cover in an abbreviated form Akerlof's model of Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange on that day.   The discussion would be about getting students to give examples of places they worked or organizations they were part of where people did the bare minimum, nothing more, and then other examples where people contributed much more than they had to do.  Then we'd get at their own conjectures for why the one or the other.   We'd then talk about which they would prefer and why that is.

About 5 minutes into the discussion I would make a quick scan of the class and make a mental note about whether the students had relaxed or if the hand holding still made them feel awkward.  I'd also want to subsequently get an impression of whether the hand holding had an impact on the class discussion.  Perhaps it gave some comfort to students, so they were more willing to participate.  In any event, I would make some mental note of my own impression of this.  But it is hard to process this way and conduct a class at the same time.  So I would have students evaluate the class after it was over.

The last time I taught the course I gave those students in attendance the option to fill out a survey after class which was about the quality of the class session.  They would get a few points for completing the survey, which might end up boosting their grade a little. This meant I would need to take attendance, which I did by means of a class sign-in sheet, and I would have to track the students in the survey to make sure they were actually there.   The last time around I had several Likert style questions to rate the class discussion in some way, and then one paragraph question for the comments.  Early on in the semester the responses to the Likert-style questions were informative, but later in the semester they weren't.  By then I had a pretty well formed impression of my own about the class.  But the responses to paragraph question were always interesting to see.  Here, I think I'd have a few different paragraph questions about the effect of the hand holding on the class.  Then I'd conclude with one yes-no question.  Should we do this again in the next class session?

I want to add one more thing and then close.  I had a policy of no electronic devices during discussion mode the last time I taught.  This setup might be more extreme in that it would probably block taking notes on paper as well, at least for those students where the hand they write with was being used to hold the hand of their neighbor.  If I said to the class no paper note taking along with no electronic devices, would that work?  Or would it end up making some students uncomfortable because of the lack of note taking, rather than because of the hand holding.  I would need to work this through before actually trying to implement the idea.

That sticking point notwithstanding, the idea does have me intrigued.