Small Successes I: Paper Activities

So I realize that I haven't had much to say in a while about my class, and in part, I want to record the successes that I've had along the way--things that I hope to repeat in the future.  I know that last time I checked in I was on the verge of despair.  *sigh*  I still have more moments of weariness than enthusiasm, but I haven't felt that bad since that week.  I have also been allowing myself to read for pleasure more, and not forcing myself to read along with everything I assign.  The latter makes me feel like a bad teacher, but it's not as if I'm lecturing on it, so I'll give myself a pass.

One thing that I feel I have done the right way is breaking the steps of the paper down for them and requiring students to "check in" (more or less) to demonstrate that they are working on the paper.  These assignments help them to stretch out the work on the assignment rather than saving it until the last minute.  They give me the opportunity to monitor progress--or not, because for the most part the burden is on them (which I'll explain).  Because they are wrestling with the paper over time, I do, in fact, hear more from them when things aren't going quite right, if they get stuck, etc.  This is definitely a success in an online course.  

What I'm proposing is something that was standard in composition classes--Topic Proposal Memo, Thesis Statement, List of Sources, Outline (maybe), Rough Draft, Final Draft.  Besides teaching time management and giving the opportunity for feedback along the way, we were also making sure that if a student was inclined to plagiarize, the supporting materials would have to be plagiarized, since a paper would not be accepted without them.  That's not really my rationale, since my paper is fairly unique and probably can't just be downloaded.  What is unusual is requiring these steps for a sophomore-level class.  Sophomores are supposed to be able to do these things on their own, right?  And sink or swim?  Well...  not really.  Not in reality. 

One of the amazing things about the online-only class is the opportunities I have along the way to correct what they're thinking about things, how they're interpreting things, how they are expressing their ideas in writing.  In class, if they don't speak, I don't know what they're thinking. Because the class meets every day, there are no assignments designed to let me know what they're thinking--whether they're getting it.  As a result, they don't necessarily get it, and I don't know until the test.  Heck--they don't know until the test.  In this case, I know.  And if we can have a discussion about it where other students can see, I'm actually teaching.  Yay!  This is how being a "guide" instead of a "sage" can still be an important function, requiring a teacher who is insightful and engaged.  

This paper was a beginning lit review, if you will.  My intentions (objectives, really) were to have them be able to write a research question, use it to do research, find scholarly sources on a literary topic, read and summarize, and begin to synthesize the sources in a very basic way in order to present the articles to an audience who wishes to know more about the literary topic in question.  It took a bit of wrangling to get them there, and I haven't graded the papers yet, but I know that learning has happened along the way.

Their supporting activities were:

1. A research question posted to a forum.  Each student had to post a question in order to see others' questions so that they were not influenced beforehand.
2. A bibliography submitted as an assignment to the instructor only.  This gave me the opportunity to check to see whether the sources were scholarly and whether the bibliography format was correct.
3. A rough draft/peer review wiki.  While it did not really function as a peer review, it could have.  Students posted their rough draft to a new page in the wiki.  They could also make changes to theirs (technically they could have to others' as well), and make comments on their and others' drafts.  If they wanted my feedback, they had to solicit it, and one did.  I could have forced each student to comment on another's draft, but feedback-by-coersion is not typically good quality stuff, so I let it go.

I had many questions during the first two stages.  Some were caught up in adhering to the question or making it perfect, so those people learned that research ideas do mutate.  Many, many students learned to construct better database searches.  And at least half of the remaining students had a rough draft in time.  All in all, a success--they did not drift away completely.

These supporting assignments were only worth 25 points each.  At first, I was going to roll these in to the daily grade equivalent--a pathetic 10% (which should be more given the effort).  Instead, I decided to reward their efforts by making the 75 points part of the paper grade, which is 15% of the overall grade.  I believe that the effort of staying on task and the learning activities involved deserve to be 3/7 of the 15%, because they are being rewarded, here, for the considerable effort of learning on their own, being engaged, and asking for assistance when they needed it.

Unpacking a Workshop Activity: "Last Man Standing," Communication Styles, and Resistance

On Friday, I participated in a Professional Development workshop conducted by the "soft skills" side of our department.  I belong to the technology side.  My side teaches tech skills; the "soft skills" people teach people and personal skills.  The workshop title was "Interpersonal Communication."

I decided to take this workshop for a couple of basic reasons.  Once a week (or less often, if we're lucky), we have "Huddles"--meetings with the whole group, which includes both groups of trainers, people who design online training, administrative support, and directors.  Unfortunately, because our main director is on the "soft skills" side of things, the emphasis tends to be on things that really don't concern the tech trainers, which is irritating, and frequently, there are unexplained references to things taught by the soft skills people.  So, for example, different members of the department were being referred to as "dove" or "peacock" in order to explain certain traits that the exhibited.  Eventually, I learned that the birds were representative of communication styles as taught in the "Interpersonal Communication" class, so I signed up for the 3-hour class (which our director has since made mandatory).

On the other hand, communication is sort of what I do.  For years, I taught composition and rhetoric, until I had a pretty good command of key rhetorical concepts like "appeal" and "resistance."  Audience has been an interest of mine since long before graduate school--specifically, the ways in which fiction authors place their readers in certain roles using narrative clues like direct address.  One of the things I want to return to is audience engagement by way of open-ended questions or lack of resolution in fictional narratives.  I am pretty adept at written communication.  So on the one hand, a class on "Interpersonal Communication" simply provides a new vocabulary to discuss something that already interests me.

Finally, I am painfully introspective and enjoy considering categories.  So personality types and communication types are a lot of fun--as long as they don't result in typing and stereotyping.  I can "own" the INFP label that Meyers-Briggs assigns, but if people are given advice on how to circumvent my most "peacock" tendencies, or if I stand to be brushed aside in meetings because I'm a "peacock" (thing "persuader"--not my term--rather than flashy and arrogant, though that implication is impossible to avoid), then I have a problem with the categories.  But figuring that I could learn something useful, I signed up.

I see immediate applications for personality types and communication styles in undergraduate education, as I do believe that raising--and shaping--self-awareness in students is a valuable part of humanities education, but more on that later.  Right now, I want to focus on one particular activity, which we learned as a group when an outside trainer came last July to teach us how to be better facilitators (not really something that was useful for tech trainers, who simply show-and-tell).  It is called "Last Man Standing"--though shouldn't it be "Last Person Standing," or "Last Group Standing"?

In the context of the particular class, we were asked about barriers to communication.  Each table (a group of 3 or 4) was asked to brainstorm as many possible barriers to communication as they could, writing each one on a post-it note.  When the time (about 4-6 minutes) was up, we were asked to arrange our post-its into groups.  Then, each group picked a representative to go to the front of the class and take turns placing a post-it on the board.  Duplicates were not permitted, so if one team had "technology," another team could not get credit for having "technology" as well--or a term that was judged as too close to "technology," eg. "technophobia" or "technological innovation."  As the game progressed, team after team will run out of unique contributions, and the game is over when one team is left standing with additional unique ideas.

It wasn't particularly well-executed in this workshop for a number of reasons.  First, our instructor (and my co-worker), who tends to be a bit too self-conscious in spite of the fact that he is basically as competent as anyone else, called in another trainer, who designed the course, to be the "judge" and determine whether the particular post-it term was permissible or whether it had already been used.  As she is a very "inside the box," more-restrictive-than-literal-interpretation kind of person, she wound up overturning more possibilities than she should have, closing down rather than opening up the discussion in a number of ways.  For example, the facilitator could not see how "politics" could be a barrier to communication, and interpreted "having an accent" as being indistinguishable from "culture."  Although he didn't think about it--and possibly others didn't either--he rather compromised his own credibility as an instructor by bringing her in as an "expert" rather than facilitating the exercise himself.  By facilitating the exercise himself, he would have made certain that the kind of classroom dynamic he was working to create was preserved.

In a work environment, people are already more deflated and defeated, and more easily accept when their ideas are shot down.  Not so in an undergraduate classroom--or really, in any environment in which inquiry and free-exchange of thought is supposed to be valued.  Closing off possibility breeds resistance because people feel their ideas are not understood or valued.  I can tell you that that is where I was during parts of the activity, and though I have been accused by students (education majors, who had their own reasons for resistance to my children's literature course) of "needing to learn that mine was not the only valid opinion," I am very careful to let literature and composition students give their interpretations, and to respond to them in some way.

The other major flaw in how the activity was facilitated is that although participants were instructed to put terms into groups according to which were similar, the grouping was not exploited at all.  It's a related problem, really.  Instead of shutting people down, the broader categories could be used to shape the game board.  So instead of saying that "having an accent" was the same barrier to communication as "culture," "culture" should have been the broad category (placed at the top of the board) under which "having an accent" or "language" or "respect for elders," etc. would fall.  So "texting" might be a subset of "communication" rather than being thrown out altogether.  The discussion becomes not only more satisfying for all participants, but more comprehensive.

Aside from the problems with its execution, this exercise has great potential as an entry point for discussions of rhetoric, particularly appeal and resistance.  The initial question might be the same: what are barriers to communication?

The game might start with the following instructions:  "Think of a time when you were reading an article/surfing the internet/browsing Facebook/listening to a speech or a commentary, and something made you want to stop listening.  You might have started thinking about counter-arguments rather than focusing on what was being said.  Think about how you felt and why.  This is resistance.  Now, with your group, brainstorm all of the reasons why you or someone else might feel resistant to a particular message, how it was being delivered, or a speaker."

This approach narrows the "barriers to communication" somewhat, rooting it in a particular experience.  This might be good because it creates immediacy.  But it might be bad because it asks students to remember being irritated, and this might not be the best way to get started.  It would depend on the class dynamic and how comfortable the teacher felt with the students.

An alternate scenario might be, "Think of a time when you were having a conversation with someone.  After a while, you realized that you were no longer listening to what they were saying.  What makes someone stop listening or paying attention in conversation?"

I think I might simply leave it at "barriers to communication" to see what would happen.

The rest of the exercise would remain the same:  write each one on a post-it note; group like terms; designate a group leader, and take terms placing the post-it notes on the board.  I would recommend to the groups that they look for broad categories first and place them at the top of the board.  As more specific barriers to communication were mentioned, they could be categorized.  Then, discuss.

As a follow-up, rather than simply reiterating the barriers, we would address how writers anticipate and overcome barriers to communication by considering the rhetorical situation and appeals.  When a writer anticipates a barrier, ignoring the barrier is an option, but not the best strategy, especially for a writer without authority (and all writers start out lacking authority).  So strategies for overcoming a perceived barrier to communication (which we're going to call resistance) include neutralizing the resistance in some way--by citing authorities that the resistant audience will accept, perhaps--or addressing the barriers directly, using the perceived communication barrier ("I may sound like your mom, but..."), explaining it ("Our views are different because they are shaped by our experience. Let me tell you where I'm coming from so that you can relate to my perspective, and realize why you are different."), or proposing common ground ("We have differences, but the similarities are what matter.")  I would likely want to assign a reading that did address difference directly--something like "Serving the Purpose of Education" by Leona Okakok (Harvard Educational Review 1989).

Another possibility would be to prepare a series of mini-prompts with scenarios:  "You are explaining X to someone who thinks Y."  "You are explaining your reasons for wanting to break curfew to a parent."  "You are explaining why a friend who hates fantasy should read Harry Potter."  Etc. Then, have the students either 1) brainstorm ways to convince that particular resistant audience, or 2) write a short paragraph that attempts to overcome resistance.  The prompts might be more or less political or socially relevant, but "Explaining to an white Evangelical Protestant male from Texas why he should support Gay Marriage" just opens up potential for stereotypes, so the situations would have to be extremely well-fleshed out in order to avoid bigotry. I would stick to scenarios that were more or less neutral, like the Harry Potter example, or universals, like parent-child dynamics.  Another good one might be "Convince a die-hard Windows user of the superiority of Mac OS," but that could also get heated...

Anyway, the point of the exercise is twofold--to demystify, and to get the conversation started.  Also, there may not be enough "fun" competition in the undergraduate classroom.  Group activities often feel stale and forced, or devolve into opportunities to socialize.  I think the "Last Group Standing" activity has the added potential to increase students' comfort level with each other, and with the active role that they play in the course.

"Ways of Seeing" vs. "Ways of Doing"

I'm not sure this is an insight, necessarily.  But as I think about what Training has to offer to Teaching, I find myself thinking about how I am using the two terms.  The distinction is one that feels a bit arbitrary to me, because I feel like what I am doing now is simply a subset of teaching rather than a different thing altogether.

So what am I doing?

Right now, after 10+ years as a graduate student and postdoc, teaching between 1 and 3 sections of composition and literature courses to undergraduates at an R1 university, I find myself at the same university, teaching technology courses to staff.  See? Teaching.  It's impossible to get around it.  When we talk about what we do in terms of mission/vision statements, it is always "training."  What do we do?  We train.  But when we talk about what we actually are doing when we're in the classroom, it's always teaching.  Where is Mary right now?  Oh, she's teaching.  She's actually teaching HTML.  I don't teach HTML.  I teach Microsoft Word (3 skill levels), Outlook (2 skill levels), PowerPoint (1 skill level), and Adobe Acrobat Pro (1 skill level).  And the kitchen sink, for anyone who's counting.  It's a far cry from "Composition and Rhetoric" and "Introduction to Literature"!

And how is it different, you might ask?

In grad school, when we talked about teaching, it was usually to define our role as teachers--our "classroom personae."  We discussed different types of assignments--ways of "decentering the classroom," of "avoiding the banking model" (which I have discussed before, elsewhere), of promoting inquiry.  We were excited about using technology to create community and to get students engaged with the material.  We learned that it was not actually okay to be an expert in the classroom, and that students should be participants in their own student-centered learning, which meant creating group assignments and other assignments that allowed for investigation and critical thinking.  At least, theoretically.  My most successful experiment in decentering, encouraging active learning, and promoting inquiry involved student blogging.  Hmmm.  Go figure.

In technology training, on the one hand, we have a ready-made, hands-on, participatory situation.  Each participant is in front of a computer.  The are following along with the instructor, trying out the strategies that I introduce, and completing activities either on their own or as I show them on the projector.  On the other hand, though "active learning" is a term that's all over training and professional development literature, I don't see what I'm doing as promoting active learning.  They follow my lead.  They repeat a model.  If we're lucky, they remember something.  If not, they have the book.  Retention really only happens when there is something that registers as the answer to a problem or something that will be particularly useful in their own job contexts.  As each of their contexts is unique, and as my experience with using the programs as support staff would do is limited, they supply the contexts and make the connections.  I am largely unable to do that at this point.

At root, this is the banking model, hands on or not.  I give them a skill (not knowledge--skill), and they give it back by showing that they know how to do it.  Transference is big--how do we know that what they have learned in this 6-hour class will transfer back to the workplace?  Well, we don't.  And we have different skill levels coming in, changing job duties, and many repeat customers (university-affiliated staff--or their departments--don't have to pay) who come back to learn things that they didn't use after the first class, or that they didn't remember.  They don't resent it, which is good.  (Or most don't.)  It is useful in a way that a writing or literature class seldom is, and so most participants are happy with what they can get out of the classes.

At the same time, I am very much expected to be an expert. I am not an expert.  If I am an expert in anything, it is not in Microsoft Office.  I would say that I'm getting there--certainly my comfort level is increasing.  But I don't know the ins and outs of the programs--in part because I don't use them for any real-world applications.  I am learning software for the sake of learning and teaching software.  Hmmm.  It actually feels a bit disingenuous--much more phony than teaching writing, which I definitely practice.  I am, however, expected to be an expert.  "Let's learn together" simply doesn't cut it here.  "Let's try it out" is a little bit better, but there's definitely a bit of skepticism when I can't immediately answer the question, "What does this button do?"  So having been taught absolutely not to lecture, and that the expert persona was rarely if ever the most effective way to teach, I am, in fact, having to lecture.  I am, in fact, filling the role of an expert. (No, I'm actually not.)

I worry about this.  A lot.  Because this is not my preferred method of instruction.  I like to be a co-collaborator and journey with my students.  And being forced to seem the expert makes me feel completely incompetent, which is how some of my students (if not all, or even most) perceive me.  And I don't want to learn this new mode at the expense of everything I have ever known about teaching.

So what does the training model offer?

There are some things that do transfer, but they are small things, practical things, approaches, methods, activities.  But they exist within the sphere of training.  Part of me worries about whether that crossover will be viewed askance by teachers in higher education.  As universities are wondering what their roles will be in the changing perception of education, worrying about things like "customer service" and "utilitarian" models of education, I am coming from exactly that place.  It could be that my insights will lend some rejuvenation and a sense of relevance, but I think it is equally likely that they will be dismissed as coming from exactly that threatening place.  We do not want teaching to become training.

And what about the title of the post?

I return to the difference between teaching and training--particularly humanities teaching, which is where my interest lies.  In the humanities, we teach because we are interested in perceptions--in "ways of seeing."  We teach to change perceptions, or raise awareness of perceptions, or to promote new perceptions.  I am thinking primarily of English and History, but the same could be said of Anthropology and Sociology, and perhaps even the soft side of Psychology.  Of course, the groupings change, and I am aware that most of the above would/could be considered Social Sciences rather than, strictly speaking, Humanities.  But perception is still key.  (Some would, no doubt, correct or add that we are interested in "ways of knowing." I'll leave that possibility for now.)  By contrast, training is about "ways of doing."  It is practical.  Applied.  Hands-on.  At least, that's the goal.  It is the "how"--not the "why" or even the "what."  (Well, it's a little bit of the "why," just differently...  More the "what for?" than the "why?")

I'm afraid that by melding the "ways of doing" with the "ways of seeing," I will mark myself as irrevocably practical and applied.  That my way of introducing relevance by way of training techniques, knowledge, and practices will be rejected because it is the Other against which, at this moment, higher education is poised.  I stand to put a utilitarian spin on courses that are already marked as "service" courses, and I understand the politics of that kind of move, even if it is not my intent.  And for a discipline that is struggling between being "unacknowledged legislators" and "mak[ing] nothing happen," it might not be the right moment for my insights.