Now that I'm not teaching, I can admit that every once in a while I had a favorite student. In fall 2017, my penultimate teaching experience, the student came to my attention in a most delightful but very unusual way. Each week she turned in her work well before the deadline. I had never experienced this before. After a while, we had an email thread that served as a critique and commentary on the class. I had an approach with "soft deadlines" where a due date and time was given for each assignment but students could still get credit if they submitted their work not too far beyond that. For the blogging they did, I would read and comment on those over the weekend. If some other posts came in while I was still working on that, it was no big deal on my part to allow the submissions into the queue for my reading and commenting. She had never experienced soft deadlines in a course before and referred to it as - treating the students as adults - which she greatly appreciated, although for her it seemed this rule didn't matter. Instead, it was all about the tone it set for the class. The bulk of the students took advantage of the soft deadlines, but in the other direction - they got their work done after the official deadline had past. Indeed, they may have only started on the blogging over the weekend, while the official deadline was the Friday before.
More than once during our exchanges she asked me why I simply didn't enjoy my retirement. Why teach at all? And then, why put greater effort into the teaching than other instructors did? It was clear that the reading and commenting on student blogs was time consuming, and no other instructor in the Economics Department taught that way. Further, it was evident to her that I spent considerable time worrying about students who didn't seem to be trying very hard. Why would I do that? I didn't have a very good answer for her. So I relied on something I first wrote more than 20 years earlier. Teaching good students was always a joy and easy for me to do. The challenge, however, was teaching ordinary students to see if they could be transformed into good students. All these years later, I must confess that it rarely, if ever, happened, though I did try to make it happen. Indeed, it was one of the compelling reasons for me to keep teaching.
There is much irony in this. When I first came to Illinois, I dreaded teaching intermediate microeconomics, which many faculty did as part of their undergraduate service teaching for the department. While I had been a good and popular TA at Northwestern, mainly for principles of microeconomics, there is something different about being the main teacher - for example choice of textbook, setting the difficulty level and tone of the course, as well as selecting topic coverage. Then there was my age. I was 25 when I started, not much older than the students I was teaching. At first they would ask - are you the TA? So I felt that I needed to establish my authority. Many years later I learned the expression - best graduate course a freshman every had. Intermediate micro is a sophomore-junior course, but the roots of that expression were at play in my class, no doubt. Then there was that the first time around the class was taught in the dreaded room DKH 19 (which no longer exists) where I would be sweating while at the blackboard while some kids sitting in the back of the room wore winter coats because they were freezing. There was still another factor that I didn't understand till many years later. Intermediate micro was required for all Business majors. Most of them hated the requirement. It was akin to the requirement of organic chemistry for pre-med students. So I was apt to confront student resistance, especially from those students majoring in Accounting.
Yet all of this was really secondary. What truly mattered was my own ignorance. I had been a math major as an undergraduate and never took intermediate micro. So I had no sense of what it should be like. And I grew up in New York, not Illinois. Were the kids different just because of that? I had wondered the same thing as a TA at Northwestern. Somehow it wasn't a big obstacle then, perhaps because the Northwestern kids seemed like Ivy League wannabes. The Illinois students weren't trying for that and I didn't have a different category available to me which I could put them in. So I didn't have a good mental model for how to teach in a way that would be appropriate for them. I had no such problem when I taught graduate level courses or the undergraduate math econ course. I had confidence in my teaching those courses. In contrast, I was frightened of teaching intermediate micro and was greatly relieved that in my third year I started to teach graduate level micro, so didn't have to teach intermediate micro at all, much preferring to avoid what I was fearful of rather than confront the fear head on.
About a decade after I started at Illinois I was back teaching intermediate micro, but by then the fear was gone. There were many factors that explain this. Here I want to focus on only one. When I first started I was heavily into the models as things in themselves. For a math type like me, that's where the interest in the subject matter could be found. But there were very few math types in my intermediate micro classes. Over that decade I learned a very important skill, to explain a social situation via a microeconomics analysis. In other words, I learned to tell stories about real-world things where the stories had an economics basis that provided coherence to them. The students would be much more interested in the stories than in the pure theory, but they could then tolerate the theory as a means to an end.
With that, I introduced a new part to my intermediate microeconomics class called Econ in the News. I would take an article from the New York Times, have the class read it, and then we'd do an economic analysis in class via the Socratic Method, where I would ask questions to uncover the underlying economic issues that were at the heart of the piece and hope there were students who would raise their hands to respond to those questions. I made a rather painful discovery this way. Many of the students couldn't give good meaning to the New York Times article, which was intended for a general audience. Of course, I couldn't fully identify the cause. Perhaps the students had shirked and hadn't looked at the article, then were winging it in class. But why do that? It wasn't a very onerous requirement, or so I thought. Somewhere in that time frame I had a discussion about this with an economist in NRES (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences) who had drawn the same conclusion. Every time I saw him we'd bring up the student literacy issue, with inability to read a piece from the New York Times our quintessential example. This view about the reading ability of typical students hardened over time for me and I still subscribe to it now.
Nevertheless, in the mid to late 1990s, when I embraced online learning (we called it ALN back then), my focus was on something else in my teaching - getting students to be able to do the end of chapter problems from their textbook and providing online office hours with undergraduate TAs to encourage that understanding. Since my SCALE project was to teach intermediate micro in a large class setting (with 3 times the enrollment of a typical intermediate micro section) I didn't trouble myself on the student literacy issue then.
The following decade was different. I became a full time administrator, so I taught less frequently and when I did it was as an overload. Then I taught smaller classes, the last three of which were for students in the Campus Honors Program. And during this time I was self-educating on how people learn. Simultaneously, I got involved with the edublog community where I had many interesting sojourns about promoting learning, and became increasingly comfortable with my own voice in speaking about learning issues, in my blog or on a listserv, of which there were a few that were quite prominent. And I received a lot of positive feedback from colleagues nationally an internationally too that I was on the mark with my analysis and commentary.
The experiment with my SCALE project was done to please the Sloan Foundation. Now I was experimenting with the teaching to please myself. Many of those experiments seemed to work, though definitely not all of them. The successes were more than sufficient for me to keep at it. (Two caveats are of note here. One is that CHP classes tend to be smaller than regular classes. Successful experiments in a small class setting may not work with larger classes. The other is that CHP students differ from other students, perhaps more in motivation than in aptitude. As an instructor you're apt to find intrinsic motivation with at least some of the CHP students. Regular students are typically far more instrumental and want to know whether putting in effort will matter for their course grade.)
The last time I taught a CHP class the campus was in budget crisis, a consequence of the Great Recession. I began to have ethical qualms about CHP classes. Indirectly, they took teaching resources and allocated them to some of the best students on campus, although every student paid tuition that depended on family income but did not depend on whether the student was in CHP or not. I thought a compelling case could be made to allocate more teaching resource to ordinary students, provided there was some evident benefit to those students. So when I retired I vowed my occasional teaching would be regular classes for the Economics department, with my more intensive effort than usual aimed at showing there was such a benefit. (I also learned, reasonably recently, that the campus discouraged though did not forbid retirees from teaching altogether, which made teaching for the CHP program near impossible.) If and when retirees teach, it needs to be contrasted with hiring visitors to do the same teaching and/or paying regular faculty for overload teaching. The efficient outcome needs to be analyzed on a case to case basis. A priori, there is no one right answer. It depends on the subject matter of the course to be staffed which, in turn, determines the pool of potentially available instructors. But retirees teaching, so double dipping (they are collecting retirement pay as well), can cause bad press for the university. The university does not need that at all.
After trying a variety of things the first few times I taught post retirement, I settled on teaching one class in the fall on The Economics of Organizations, where I could combine my prior experience as an administrator along with the economic theory. (One of the things I learned from those early attempts was that for classes with a significant number of seniors enrolled, teach it in the fall rather than in the spring. Students who are less than a semester away from graduating are apt to have a serious case of senioritis. That can be quite discouraging for the instructor who wants to see students fully engaged. There are some students who graduate after the fall semester, but there are comparatively few of them.) For fall 2012, fall 2013, and fall 2014 I made reasonably good connection with the students. The student blogging was reasonably effective in getting students to learn the story telling side of the economics, with my comments and their responses to those giving a coaching approach to instruction that makes sense to me, though it is labor intensive. Getting students to comment on the posts of other students was less successful. So building a community out of the class was a goal I didn't achieve, but one that still does seem reachable to me.
After that it seemed as if the wheels fell off the vehicle. One clear indicator was class attendance. It was fine in 2012-14, indeed it was fine back in 1980 when on my course evaluations some students wrote I was the worst teacher on campus. And it was fine in the 1990s, before I started to teach intermediate micro in large sections. But it wasn't fine starting in fall 2015, in a class that was intended for Econ majors, with an instructor who was putting in a lot of effort into the teaching.
To be fair to the students, my method was different from other classes. Homework was meant as preparation for in class discussion, which is more like how things are in the world of work. Staff members are supposed to come prepared to meetings. But it differs from most other classes, especially those that are lecture based. Then homework is meant as a test of understanding of the lecture material. In that more traditional approach, there is some incentive to attend the lecture even when attendance is not taken, as attendance may be necessary to do the homework. In contrast, in my class with the homework already completed and the class discussion meant to push the ideas beyond that, but where the class discussion itself was not graded, a purely instrumental student would see no reason to come to class. My approach would appeal to those students who wanted a deeper understanding of the material. And there is another category of students who matters here. Some students feel obligated to their parents to attend class because their parents are paying tuition. These students develop the habit of always going to class, regardless of what happens in the classroom. As I said, through fall 2014 the latter two groups of students constituted the bulk of the class. In fall 2015, the majority were those students who care only about the grade.
And it has remained that way since. Indeed in my 2019 class, several students remarked in their ultimate blog post that unless there was some explicit incentive for coming to class they wouldn't attend. (Apparently many other classes do have such an incentive, perhaps via student use of clickers. When evaluating the benefits of technology, we rarely, if ever, consider the impact in other classes than those where the technology is deployed.) While I marked this change in the ethos of undergraduates, I never understood fully what caused it. Yet I was able to conclude that there wasn't much I could do about it in my upper level class. If I was to counteract it in a serious way, I needed to get to the students earlier in their college trajectory.
Much of my tilting at windmills, as in the title of this post, is about purely hypothetical experiments that are aimed at addressing the issues with undergraduate education that I see in my own teaching and/or read about in popular outlets. When I was a campus administrator I had additional sources of information to inform this penchant for theorizing about solutions - conversations with other faculty and with peers in educational technology. Since I retired, those additional sources have largely dried up for me. Perhaps it has made me more radical in my thinking as a consequence. For example, soon after that fall 2015 semester course had concluded I wrote this post, The Holistic First-Year College Course - A Non-Solution, and a few years later wrote about a different possible experiment, A Summer Camp for Teaching College Level Reading and Learning to Learn. These were meant as theoretical explorations only. Yet I had a hunger for actually trying experiments of this sort.
So, on two separate occasions I volunteered to teach a first-year class and take no salary for doing so. One of these was to be a freshman seminar in Economics. The other was the freshman composition course, Rhet 105, which is taught in many individual sections. I volunteered to teach one of these, as I thought my blogging approach might be a good way for students to learn to write. In both cases I was turned down. There were probably sensible reasons for that, sensible here meaning that there was a current way of going about things and this would upset the apple cart. From the perspective of then, this makes sense. However, from the perspective of now, in the midst of the pandemic where institutions we had previously trusted, notably nursing homes, have failed quite miserably, maybe our trust in the current way of doing things and not wanting to upset the apple cart should itself be questioned. I will return to that later in this piece.
Now I want to take a step backward chronologically, after the fall 2014 semester had concluded but before the fall 2015 semester had begun. It's important to understand that sometime my tilting at windmills is not an outgrowth of my direct experience, but rather is driven by my reaction to things happening elsewhere on my campus or elsewhere in the profession. In this case it seemed to me that my campus was going MOOC crazy and while I was quite okay with experimenting in that arena, I thought putting all our teaching innovation eggs in that basket was a mistake. MOOCs are known for having thousands of student in one class. So I focused on the opposite extreme, small classes at approximately the same size of the CHP classes I described earlier. Then I gave a marketing name to this - high touch teaching. It's the type of instruction where the students and instructor(s) get to know each other and learn about each other. I wrote a series of blog posts under the label Everybody Teaches, that argued the campus should innovate in high touch teaching in a variety of different ways. I had a particular audience in mind when I wrote these posts. Deanna Raineri, my good friend and then Associate Provost for Innovation in Learning was leading the campus MOOC effort. These posts were meant for her.
There was an economics basis for what I argued in these posts. Economists distinguish between the extensive margin and the intensive margin. For instruction, the extensive margin is measured by enrollments and credit hours. (At Illinois, we refer to the product of the two as measured in IUs, which stands for Instructional Units.) It is very easy to count on the extensive margin and, given tuition rates and the number of courses taken by students on average, to translate IUs into tuition revenue generated. In contrast, the intensive margin is about the quality of the offering. Within a particular class, the students and the instructor may have a reasonable sense of course quality and the quality of performance of the various actors. But communicating that outside the class to others on campus, to potential employers or graduate programs, or to parents and other interested stakeholders outside the university is quite challenging. There isn't good data we can all agree upon that measures the intensive margin on a course by course basis. Course evaluations may be the best information we have, but they definitely don't cut it. So there may be bias in the decision making toward favoring the extensive margin, simply because of these measurement issues.
There is the additional issue that tenure track faculty tend to teach at the graduate level, while adjuncts are more likely to teach undergraduates. (At Illinois we refer to faculty whose sole job is to teach as specialized faculty.) Further, at least at Illinois, if you look at the institutional data on this, the share of undergraduate teaching by specialized faculty has been going up (at least that was true before the pandemic). Some of this was replacement of graduate teaching assistants. The rest was replacement of tenure track faculty. From this perspective, Everybody Teaches was aimed to reverse this trend, so more tenure track faculty would have recent undergraduate teaching experience. Given my comments in the previous paragraph about the difficulty of measuring on the intensive margin, I think it a reasonable metaphor to envision undergraduate instruction as an elephant, and each of us who teach undergraduates is blind and touching our little part of the elephant. Without such experience, we tend to be guided by our confirmation bias and then trust in our (good) press clippings. In that sense, Everybody Teaches is arguing that we need a greater share of tenure track faculty, and high level administrators too, to have such a touch. That would make discussions about the quality of undergraduate instruction more grounded.
There is always the instinctive response - how can we afford to do that? (This question is posed as a first step in an argument that we won't be doing that, as it is outside our model of the public research university. What follows is something of a counterargument to that.) A more subtle response might be that if we did do that, but much of it was by coercion - increasing teaching loads, for example - then it might very well not produce the desired results, as many instructors would go through the motions only. So, a still more subtle response includes two parts. Part one is that this would be done in phases and the first phase would include only early adopters who willingly would let their high touch classes be open to examination of the benefits that might ensue, so others could learn from that experience. We know about Hawthorne effects and that early good results don't guarantee subsequent broad success. But they are a needed start. Part two of the response is about relying on the students themselves as peer mentors, where some of the compensation for being a peer mentor would be in the form of course credit, including credit for certain Gen. Ed. requirements and possibly credit for requirements in the major. This would reduce the demand for instruction and make the approach affordable. Some of part two is argued in the last of the Everybody Teaches posts. Nonetheless, it may seem to be coming out of left field. I hope to bring it more down to earth in what follows.
I did not teach in fall 2018. The Economics Department had enough upper level courses to offer a good variety to students. So they didn't need my Economics of Organizations class. Under other circumstances I might have been disappointed by this, but I was experiencing some health issues then so it really was for the best. I did teach in fall 2019. There had been faculty turnover in the Economics Department, so they asked me to teach, and my health issues were behind me by then.
The experience was unsettling for me. Where the fall 2015 offering had issues that the fall 2014 did not, in the fall 2019 offering those issues were further exacerbated and a new issue arose that I want to discuss below. The linked piece here is explicit about (lack of) academic competency as a broader issue than the literacy issue I described above. In particular, many students were not competent in high school math. You can't do economic modeling without such competence. It's always been an issue for me in teaching, but my sense is that it is much worse now than it was years ago. Let me move on.
The new issue was about student mental health. Many students in the class openly (in writing) discussed with me that they were having problems of depression and anxiety. I don't know whether my approach to student blogging encouraged this openness or if they would have done likewise with their other instructors. Simultaneously to this happening, apparently there were discussions within the campus administration about student mental health, and there was a wealth of articles about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, mainly focused on the excess demand for mental health professionals on campus. Students need counseling, no doubt. But I think of counseling as being in the cure category. What would sensible prevention look like? I don't recall reading anything on that score. It seems to me it should be the main question that we're asking, yet I haven't seen it discussed.
Let's note that the pure financial issues are obviously important and have gotten quite a bit of attention. Carrying a large burden of student loan debt with uncertain prospects about finding a good job after graduation is no doubt quite stressful. Yet it is my opinion that other issues are equally or more important. Those issues might be divided between student life issues, on the one hand, and academic issues, on the other. Recently in the New Yorker there was a very depressing piece to read about a suicide cluster at Truman State University. It detailed on the student life side of things how events might go terribly wrong. I can report that one of my students from the fall 2019 class who was struggling with her mental health reported that she had a bad friend group from which she needed to separate, so moving back home during the pandemic had that as a positive aspect. I am out my element on student life issues to make recommendations there. I will content myself to note that I experienced depression both in high school and in college and ended up transferring from MIT to Cornell, because I recognized what I was feeling at MIT was like what I had felt in high school and I needed to be in a different environment that wouldn't trigger those feelings.
But beyond that I couldn't identify in advance what environment would provide good mental health for students in a way that they'd both enjoy it and find it nurtured their own development. From a different perspective, it is not that long ago that Illinois was named the #1 Party School by Princeton Review and that many students, certainly once they've turned 21 but perhaps even when they are younger, view college as their last hurrah before entering the world of work. Their mindset is to have as much fun as possible while they still can. I don't begrudge anyone having a good time once in a while. But as the main avocation it is apt to produce a very hedonistic and possibly nihilistic outlook, which I don't think is healthy. In other words, some balance is called for. How to achieve that balance, however, I will leave for others to determine.
Let's now turn to the academic issues, regarding which I have more expertise. The instrumental approach to classes coupled with only surface learning in every class can be a source of alienation, which in turn can lead to anxiety and depression. I will add here that many students at big public universities get the sense that nobody cares about them. That too can foster these negative feelings.
My most recent "project" is the Non-Course, based on the idea that students must take control over their own learning. They would do this to please themselves, not to please others. And they would do this by developing the reading habit and learning to think critically about what they have read. They would do this on their own or, if they prefer, with the coaching of instructors like me, who will react to their formative ideas with suggestions about how to think more deeply about what they are reading. The Non-Course especially makes sense to me now, when so much formal instruction is online and good jobs post graduation are still quite uncertain. Taking time off from school makes sense to me for those reasons. But even if a student doesn't take a gap year or gap semester, they may have much idle time if they are conforming to all the social distancing guidelines. The Non-Course would make sense for those students as well.
Yet so far the Non-Course is a concept only. I've gotten no students to try it. I did try to recruit students from that fall 2019 class, but they weren't responsive to my query on this. It occurred to me that I need assistance from friends and colleagues to make this a reality. I've initiated conversations of this sort but it has been very awkward. And there is a basic factor that may make it impossible to elicit such help. I've conceived of the Non-Course as happening outside the auspices of any university, particularly because I felt it essential that students shouldn't pay tuition nor get course credit for the work they do in the Non-Course. Without the usual trappings, there is no reason to be instrumental about the learning. But any colleague who might offer help to me will be at a university and will need somehow to internalize the ideas here, to make them a realistic possibility. Perhaps other retirees would be able to provide assistance. But why should they? As my former student asked, wouldn't they just be enjoying life?
As long as the pandemic is impacting how undergraduate education occurs, it will be the driver, with other factors playing at most a secondary role. My powers at prognostication are weak, at best. But my guess now is that fall 2022 will mark a return to normal, with fall 2021 a hybrid between full pandemic mode and normal mode of instruction. Assuming that's right for the sake of argument, the question is how prominent will student mental health be as an issue on campus? Let's say it is even more prominent than it was in fall 2019. Now there is a reason for other faculty on campus to explore both high touch teaching and Non-Course ideas, the former to get some insight into the academic causes of the student anxiety and depression, while the latter as a possible way to address those issues.
I feel like a runner in a long relay race. I'm ready to pass the baton now. My mind will always want to theorize about some social issue. That's the way I'm designed. But translating the theory into practice is much harder and I'm afraid it is beyond me now. So I hope I can find someone to take up the baton. And if not that, then I hope my theorizing serves as a catalyst for others in their own theorizing and implementation to address these issues.
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