One perennial problem in the oral comm class--and really, any performance based class--involves getting through student performances smoothly. This is at once a logistical problem and a mental capacity problem. First, we've all had days where we planned on getting through ten speeches and every single student somehow takes ten minutes to get started, the technology explodes, and so on. And secondly, there's that other pesky problem: how on Earth are we supposed to keep so much stuff in our heads as we sit through ten student speeches?
I'll address a few things I do to make sure things go smoothly.
1) Make students upload their PowerPoints in advance.
In ELMS, I have created an assignment explicitly for students to upload their visual materials. It is worth zero points, I do not grade it, and it is strictly practical. Make sure that when you set up the assignment, you let students post a URL or upload a file (since some will want to use a Prezi):
On speech day, before students get up to perform, click on the "download submissions" link on the main assignment page. It will let you download a ZIP file that has every single student's PowerPoint, organized by last name. You'll want to weep it's so beautiful.
2) Make sure everything works technology-wise.
Sometimes technology fails. Okay, often technology fails. Arrive to your classroom a few minutes early to make sure everything's in working order so you can get OIT on the case before you need to start having students perform. Or, if that's not possible because you teach two classes in different rooms back-to-back, try to visit the classroom the previous day or that morning to check. It's not ideal, but it works.
3) Let students know it's going to be brisk in advance.
Let students know that on speech days to arrive on time, be prepared on arrival, and that there won't be more than a minute or two between each speech. If you like to do Question and Answer exercises, perhaps allocate those to a discussion board post after the class, or have students write down a series of questions to save for the end if there's time. [You also might've worked an extra day of speeches into your schedule, to guarantee that there's time to get through everyone and have some discussion questions. That's okay too.] 4) Take good qualitative notes; grade that night.
Everybody's got their style of grading, but if you're struggling with spending way too long on grades, this is an approach I use.
This is what I've found to be the fastest, best way to give students fair feedback on their speeches that occupies as little of my time as possible on grading. During their speeches, I create a basic list of the main categories on the rubric. Literally, it's just a list of every item on the rubric. During the speech, I make sure that I type up at least one piece of concrete, qualitative, observational feedback for each item on the rubric. By "observational," I mean--literally, something I observe about the speech (a particular place their hand gestures are weird, a point or argument that was particularly astute, what percentage of the time they spend making eye contact, etc.--concrete things that are justification for grading later). I don't worry about the points at this time, because I probably won't be making fair decisions in-the-moment anyway.
Then, owing to the sheer horribleness of my memory, I try to sit down and grade the speeches the same day, or within the next two to three days if possible. If my qualitative notes are good, it doesn't take me long to translate them into quantitative grades in the rubric. I then tidy up the notes, add some comments, and post those in the "comments" section beneath the rubric.
This is efficient, the grades are fair, and I can rest easy knowing that the points I awarded are grounded in clear pieces of evidence I observed during their presentations. And I don't have to spend too much time in class typing feedback between speeches--when the student stops talking I can move on.
Hope these help--and feel free in the comments to suggest any strategies you use to make sure speech days aren't a mess!
In the opening of his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson provides a
rationale for his narrative-driven account of scientific history. He recalls a
story from his elementary school years, when he discovered a picture that “captivated”
him: “a cutaway diagram showing the Earth’s interior as it would look if you
cut into the planet with a large knife”:
In his account, this image enamored him. “I clearly remember
being transfixed,” he explains; “my initial interest was based on a private
image of streams of unsuspecting eastbound motorists in the American plains
states plunging over the edge of a sudden 4,000-mile-high-cliff running between
Central America and the North Pole.” Following this imaginative exercise, a
million curiosities about the makeup of the earth spawned from his observation—but
the book failed to answer them:
It didn’t answer any of the
questions that the illustrations stirred up in a normal inquiring mind: How did
we end up with a Sun in the middle of our planet? And if it is burning away
down there, why isn’t the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isn’t
the rest of the interior melting—or is it? And when the core at last burns
itself out, will some of the Earth slump into the void, leaving a giant
sinkhole on the surface? And how do you know
this? How did you figure it out?”
Bryson’s anecdote resonates because we’ve all had this
experience. Time and again, we’ve encountered textbooks that take subjects that
inspire in us a sense of awe and cosmic wonder—and reduce them to something
altogether uninteresting.
Textbooks are a genre. They’re not a particularly elegant or
popular genre, but they are one nonetheless. Genres have a particular form they
have to follow. The moves textbook authors make on every page are preordained:
by the books they have read, the expectations of publishers, and the culture
surrounding textbooks. The genre has several rules:
That information be conveyed
dryly and without personality.
That information be presented
authoritatively and objectively.
Relating to #2: That information
be presented without controversy.
That the idea of “information”
is, itself, the end goal of education: something to be retained, remembered,
and repeated, at least until the exam at the course’s end.
Some textbook authors avoid these rules—but I wouldn’t
exactly call what they’ve written “textbooks,” since in the process of breaking
the rules they’ve also in some ways avoided writing a textbook at all. And so,
for the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to just say that all textbooks
are dry, personality-less, authoritative, uncontroversial, and strictly
informational texts. I recognize that my argument is tautological. But be kind
here—I’m stepping into dangerous territory.
I'm Going to Make People Angry
I place this note up front because this post asks us to read
our communication textbook—Berko,
Wolvin, Wolvin, and Aitken’s Communicating:
A Social, Career and Cultural Focus—critically. I want to be very clear
that I am not singling out this textbook as a particularly bad or problematic
example. Frankly, as textbooks go, it’s pretty good. At my previous graduate
program, I had to review about six different introductory communication
textbooks. While some are better than others, they are all unequivocally members of the textbook genre—and thus guilty of
everything I listed above. And so let’s all give Berko, et al. a break here—they’re
confronted with a quite complex set of generic and cultural constraints.
In short, I’m not trying to be the Howard Zinn of critiquing
the Fundamentals of Oral Communication textbook. I’m not trying to blaspheme or
overthrow the textbook in the name of some other text.
I do, however,
think it’s essential to teach our students to think critically about the
concepts in the textbook as they read. There are two reasons for this:
In their
feedback on the course last semester, some students expressed (I’d argue fair)
concerns that the textbook oversimplifies issues of race, class, and gender in
some of its discussions of these concepts. Anecdotally, I’ve had some students
suggest to me that they find some of the models of communication in the book over-simplistic.
We
desire in this class that students develop skills not just as speakers and
persuaders, but also as critical consumers of the messages they encounter. Training
them to critically interrogate the messages we place in front of them—rather than
embrace them as pure “factual” content to regurgitate back to us on tests—is an
important way to move them toward this outcome.
An Example of
Critically Engaging the Textbook on Issues of Race
In Chapter 2: Foundations of Verbal Language, the authors of
the textbook provide a discussion of “Nonstandard English Dialects.” Below, I
provide you with a few possible techniques you might use to get students to
critically engage with this topic.
Before I start, though, a warning. Any time you dig into
issues of race, you risk prompting a heated discussion. I would recommend that
you precede this conversation with some “ground rules” or expectations for
treating these topics respectfully and tactfully.
1) Prompt students to
think about the complexities of code-switching.
Before you even introduce the concept in the textbook, it
helps to prime students’ thinking about a topic with a concrete example to
provoke an inductive conversation. While they’re probably all too young to know
who Dave Chappelle is—my God, did I just say that?—I find that his interview on
Inside the Actor’s Studio still
eloquently leads into a good conversation on the topic.
(The video should jump straight to the relevant part—if not,
it happens at 7:06.)
There’s a lot going on in this video for students to unpack.
First, Chappelle calls out the ways that others in his own area of business
automatically stereotype him and start talking to him in a different way.
Likewise, he establishes how he can switch languages on a dime depending on the
social circumstance he enters. The guiding question here is simply: is this okay? That is: Why does society
privilege certain types of speech over others? And how should students grapple
with this fact as speakers?
To add more complexity to this—if you’re comfortable enough
discussing issues of race in class—you might also bring up some of Chappelle’s
own reasons for leaving the comedy career back in 2005. As he has recounted on
several occasions, he often felt a discomfort when white fans would quote some
of the racial language in his show back at him, or laughed
a bit too hard at some of his jokes. There’s not really a specific answer
to this, or a specific takeaway students should have. Students should
appreciate that Chappelle’s discomfort with a white person yelling the N-word
at him makes sense. More importantly, it adds another layer of complexity to
this already complex issue.
2) Help students think
through the considerations authors make when they write textbooks.
As you instruct students to review the section of the
textbook on page 48-49, you’ll want to prime how they’re thinking about it
first. Students may not always consciously recognize textbooks as authored. After all, they’re deliberately
written in an objective tone that causes the authors to recede as far into the
background as possible. A first set of questions can concern this point:
Why
might different dialects be a difficult issue for a textbook author to write
about?
What cultural or political
pressures do the textbook authors face when they sit down to describe this
topic?
If that previous
question proves difficult, prime students with this follow-up: What
expectations does this university have for students coming out of this class?
From the perspective of the people who run the university, how should everyone
perform, talk, and so on upon leaving this class?
The goal is, of course, to get students thinking about the
bind the authors of the textbook face as they write. Even if they want to
explicitly write: “The United States has a long, sordid history of racial
injustice and cultural intolerance,” they can’t actually do that. The expectation for students coming out of these classes
is that they’ll be able to speak in a particular way that’s sought by employers,
non-profits, and others in that big, neoliberal “outside world.” And so the
textbook has to toe that line.
Whether you agree with what I just wrote or not, the
important thing is getting students to think about the sorts of challenges
textbook authors face. Helping students understand why this issue is complex
and difficult for the authors can, in turn, provoke them to think about the
complexities and difficulties of these issues themselves.
3) Encourage students
to evaluate and weigh the logical linkages and strength of ideas in the text.
Here’s the passage in question, which student should discuss
with their nearby peers:
Recent studies have reinforced the
concept that for those living in the United States, speaking a nonstandard
dialect rather than Standard American English can be detrimental to a person’s
educational and economic health. The message seems clear: “You need to speak
right to go to college, to get a good job.”
Children entering schools with weak
Standard American English skills are at a definite disadvantage. Since they may
not know the alphabet or have the vocabulary, learning to read and understanding
class discussions become extremely difficult. They often tune out and
eventually drop out. Research shows that ‘while 75 percent of white students
graduated from U.S. high schools, only 50 percent of all Black students, 51 percent
of Native American students, and 53 percent of all Hispanic students got a high
school diploma. The study also found that the drop-out problem was even worse
for Black, Native American, and Hispanic young men at 43 percent, 47 percent
and 48 percent, respectively.
In economic terms, nonstandard
speakers are given shorter interviews and fewer job offers than Standard
American English speakers. When job offers are presented, nonstandard speakers
are offered positions paying as much as 35 percent less than jobs offered to
Standard American English speakers.
In social terms, speakers of
nonstandard dialects often are confronted with mistaken, negative assumptions
concerning their intelligence, dependability, and creativity. Many different
languages and accents make the United States a rich tapestry; however, people
speaking dialects should be aware that in some instances, education and speech
therapy can make alterations in their vocabulary and speaking patterns if they
desire change. That desire is usually based on a person’s awareness that his or
her career and social goals include particular language requirements that the person
does not possess.
Discussion around this topic can address several points of
critique:
The idea of “Nonstandard” Dialects. From
the get-go, this language suggests that some dialects are standard and others
are abnormal or different. Prompt students to consider why this might be
problematic.
Its problematic logic. Students should
quickly spot the logical leap that occurs in the second paragraph. The authors
jump directly from a statement that students with “weak Standard American English
skills are at a definite disadvantage,” before jumping to a set of statistics
about dropout rates and job interviews. The paragraph proceeds on a logical
fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc
(after, therefore because of). It implies that a lack of Standard American
English skills are to blame for the high dropout rates among certain
populations—while disregarding that countless other systemic, institutional,
historical, racial, and economic problems contribute to the poor education and
societal mistreatment of these populations. Again, link this critique back to
the challenges the authors face in talking about these problems in the first
place.
Its (mis)use of research. Students
should be directed to the textbook’s citations on page 448-449. The relevant
citations are endnotes 68-72. Students should recognize a few things about
these citations.
First,
the authors cite a specific scholarly study: Walsh, S. (2010). Which English?
Whose English? An investigation of ‘non-native’ teachers’ beliefs about target
varieties. Language, Culture &
Curriculum, 23(2) 123-137. The
article is available online at this link.
Students should recognize the limitations of this research, and what gets lost
in translation as the research is subsumed into the textbook genre. In the
study, the authors have a solid sixteen pages to qualify and nuance the results
of their research. They also can specify their methodology—in this case, a
focus group study of twenty-six teachers. In the textbook, all this complexity
gets boiled down to a single sentence.
The
citation also has some highly misleading interpretations. Berko, et al. write that “for
those living in the United States, speaking a nonstandard dialect rather than
Standard American English can be detrimental to a person’s educational and
economic health.” But the study doesn’t analyze teachers from the United States
at all—Young and Walsh are both professors at Newscastle University in the UK,
and the teachers focus grouped for the study were “from countries in Europe,
Africa, and West, Southeast and East Asia” (see page 127, bottom). Clearly,
there are some misleading assertions being made in the text!
Note
that the quotation from the text comes from a newspaper source in the Washington Post. Students should
consider the credibility of this quote lifted from a newspaper article
published in 1998 as an authoritative statement on this topic. To what extent
should this person be taken seriously?
We
also do not know much about the symposium lecture delivered by Mims, H.A.
(2000) at Cleveland State University. Because it’s a lecture, it’s not actually
published, and so we cannot access it to determine whether it actually supports
or strengthens the authors’ claims.
How it avoids controversy. This loops
back into the points addressed above with the Chappelle video. The authors
avoid digging into topics of code-switching, and pretty explicitly (albeit
carefully) urge those without standard dialects to “make alterations in their
vocabulary and speaking patterns if they desire change.” Rather than confront
the controversy or complexity that characterizes issues over dialect in the United
States (and these issues are, indeed, endlessly complicated), it brushes over
them. This isn’t the only textbook guilty of this, but students should be
critically aware of it as they read nonetheless.
Taken together, a
critical interrogation of this passage can have two effects for students.
First, it can help them engage more intelligently with the material they’re
consuming not just in this textbook, but all of their research. Remind students
that these problems with citations are not isolated to the texts they read for
class, but are also prevalent on Wikipedia and other sources they encounter
online. Secondly, it can prompt a more robust discussion in class around issues
of language diversity. Rather than brushing past the concept, it can lead them
to contemplate it on a deeper level.
But Wait: How Can I
Test Students on the Textbook if We Spend Classtime Criticizing It?
I have three responses to this question.
If students walk away just
thinking, “Man, this book sure is bad!” they will have missed the entire point of this exercise. The
point isn’t that the book itself has issues; it’s that all kinds of things students read uncritically every day are chock
full of issues just like these.
I’ve selected a particularly
egregious example of textbook problems to focus on here. Plenty of the book
doesn’t deal with such controversial themes, and for the most part it does a
perfectly reasonable job of laying out important elements of oral
communication.
But yes, this does mean you’ll have to change the way
you think about examining students on these topics. Rather than a few multiple
choice questions regarding “Why Nonstandard Dialects are bad,” you’ll instead
pose short answer or essay questions that require students to grapple with the complexity
of this topic. You might…
Ask them to explain why language diversity is a controversial issue in the
United States.
Have students articulate a few different perspectives on language diversity.
Have students take a stance on “code-switching.”
Ask students to explicate how these considerations should factor into their speeches and/or
interactions with peers on campus.
Frame a scenario for students that features a conflict around language
diversity and have students unpack the perspectives of different interlocutors.
The bottom line is that the world is a complicated place and
that students need to learn to treat it as such. Reading passages from their
assigned textbooks critically is an excellent entre point for developing this
skill.
One last note: I’ve
uploaded with this post a PDF of the section of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything I cited earlier. I recommend giving it to students as a supplemental reading (it’s
only a page, after all) to prompt conversations around two points. First, it’s
handy before the Informative Speeches to help get students thinking about how
to make their arguments more engaging and interesting. Secondly, it obviously
helps prime students to think about textbooks as authored and deliberately written in a particular way.
Welcome to the "Making Things Matter" Blog for 2013-2014. As Jean and I observe classrooms and notice trends, I will use this space both to highlight effective instructional practices on the part of our new cohort as well as address recurrent problems or challenges people are facing in the classroom.
One common issue in the classroom involves the usage of video as a teaching tool. Video can be a helpful way to engage students, provide them concrete examples, provide another perspective, and so on. But it can also be a pacifying agent, leaving students disinterested or passive in what should be an engaging, activity-centered classroom. It's important to use video in a way that complements your lesson, rather than dominating it.
1) Select a segment of a video, not a whole video.
Students gain just as little from watching a TED Talk of someone lecturing for an hour as they would from watching you lecture for an hour. Besides--most of the strong discussions you might have in class surrounding a certain video are usually centered on a few specific parts. This is as simple as writing down ahead of time the exact segment on the video's timeline (e.g., from 38:10 to 41:02) that you wish to show students. Heck, you can even copy the YouTube URL so that it opens at exactly that moment--just right click on the video and chose "Copy video URL at this time."
As a rule of thumb, I'd keep videos in class at a length of 6 minutes, tops, with lots of discussion in-between if you use multiple videos. The only exception would be when you show students an example speech video during class (e.g., to have them practice grade-norming). But even then, make sure you pick a video that's reasonably close in length to what they'll have to give in class. Watching a 15 minute TED Talk won't help students prepare for a 5-minute speech!
Speaking of which, TED lets you search for videos under a certain length on their web site:
2) Prime students for the video before you play it.
A lot of times, beginning teachers will play students a video without sufficiently priming them beforehand as to what the purpose of the video is--or what they're supposed to be thinking about. There are two problems with doing this.
First of all, video is (or can be) a very passive medium. I'm thinking of back when I was in high school in my sociology class and the teacher played Gandhi to teach us about Indian culture. He spread out a 3-hour movie over an entire week of class time, and didn't really lead into or follow the playing of the movie in 40-minute chunks with any sort of discussion or debrief. Suffice to say, I didn't learn much about Indian culture, other than that they really like salt.
If you don't tell students what to think about with a video, or what to focus on, there's a really good chance they'll just zone out. This comes from years of conditioning from high school teachers who would treat "movie day" as a reward for solving math problems instead of an active part of the learning process. Students aren't conditioned to watch movies or television critically. And if you don't prompt them to do so, or give them a list of questions to think about, they most certainly will not!
Then, afterward, you'll get those blank stares and awkward silences because they haven't been thinking and have nothing to share.
Secondly, passivity notwithstanding, there's the whole matter of interpretation. We're all familiar with those dual weltanshauung photos, where you can see two different things in the same picture. Wittgenstein was particularly enamored with the one where, depending on how you orient it, you'll see duck or a rabbit:
The point is, you can't just show students a video and expect them to see it how you see it. Sometimes students will focus on the wrong elements of a video, honing in on some aspect that is inconsequential to the lesson. Sometimes students will make judgments about a person in a video instead of paying attention to a particular aspect of what they did that you care about (e.g., you might want them to focus on argument--they'll just focus on gestures). And sometimes students will simply stumble confusingly through the video, not knowing what on Earth it is about because you didn't give them any guidance as to why they were watching it, who it features, or how it relates to the lesson.
Let's say, for example, you want to teach students about another culture. In fact, I had a bad experience with this (with high school students who are, of course, tend to be a little more resistant to other cultures than college students). I played them this video of William Kamkwamba, a boy who built a windmill near his family's hut in Africa to generate electricity and gather water:
Because I didn't set up students ahead of time to briefly suspend their cultural stereotypes and assumptions, they didn't focus on the epiphanies I wanted them to about understanding Kamkwamba's cultural situation. Instead, they focused on trivial aspects of his windmill building, whined about his accent and how hard he was to understand, or whatever else.
A better strategy is to tell students ahead of time: "As you watch this video, I want you to be thinking about..." And then provide a list of three or four questions that help students focus on the important aspects of the video you want to draw them toward. Tell them to think about what concepts to apply or moments to feel curious about.
3) Give students a moment to discuss the video with the people around them.
As with other activities and discussions, it's essential after you play a video to give students a few minutes to digest the video on their own. If you jump straight in afterward with a list of questions, there is no chance that a lot of students will have fully formulated their thoughts on the subject yet. Some students need that time--that small-group engagement--to digest the video and voice their opinions on it. Having even just two minutes for students to discuss will go a long way toward getting more of them willing to share out to the whole class.
During this time, I would project on the PowerPoint the list of questions you want them to consider or think about, just to help cue their thinking. If you see a group not talking or sharing, you can walk over to them and simply ask: "What did all of you have to say about the third question?"
4) Think through your debrief ahead of time.
Why are you playing this video?
Seriously--what's the point of the video? Do you want students to model or mimic some behavior in the video? Is there a certain point expressed in the video that matters? Do you want to reinforce a concept from the textbook as it plays out in the context of the video?
Whatever you want to accomplish, you need to map out--in advance--a set of questions or key takeaways that you hope to push students toward afterward. Your questions should push their thinking on the topic, and interrogate them, urging them toward some sort of epiphany or conclusion. If you just randomly ask questions, without having a clear sense of what you want students to understand, chances are that your discussion will not proceed very smoothly or engagingly.
A formula.
Teaching preparation actually can be pretty formulaic. For videos, the process can almost always be:
1) Introduce the video, give some context, and pose some questions/points to consider while watching.
2) Play the video, which should be short but useful as an illustration or point of analysis.
3) Give students two to three minutes to unpack the video with their groups, following questions on the PPT.
4) Lead a full-class discussion, driving them toward a few specific outcomes with your questions.
Hope that helps! Please follow up in comments if you have any further questions, or additional questions for those who want to use video in their lessons.
Yesterday, I realized that the way I have always taught logical fallacies and argumentation is kind of boring, and primarily features me throwing a million examples at students that don't stick. Today, in an effort to improve this exercise, I hunted around on the Chronicle of Higher Education forums and assembled a COMM 107-friendly activity from some of the recommendations there. Behold, a more fun and effective approach to teaching fallacies!
This was a fun and helpful exercise to get students' brains activated regarding logical fallacies.
1) "You are Wrong Because" Handout: First, I adapted a handout for students from the list provided at this link. It provides about thirty examples of common argumentative mistakes and examples. It eschews the jargon of the Greeks to instead emphasize memorability, which I like for the purposes of 107. We briefly discuss the list: I ask students to share any examples they can think of where friends, family members, etc. violated the rules of the list. (It's a pretty funny list, so it works!)
2) Video Clip for Applying Concepts: I then have students view the following clip and identify as many fallacies as possible:
3) Outline Feedback/Review: After that, I have students turn their attention to each others' outlines to give one another feedback. I told them to focus specifically on each others' argumentation to try to highlight any places where their classmates were employing faulty arguments. This worked great! Typically, when I tell students to challenge one another's argumentation, they don't get beyond the surface much. But I found that in the context of trying to hunt down logical fallacies in one another's speeches, they were better attuned to the sort of challenges people might mount.
Joe Biden + Paul Ryan Video for Teaching Charisma
Last semester, I set up a whole class debate around this video. This semester, outside the context of the election, I hunted far and wide on YouTube for a simple highlights reel that would provide the necessary context and talking points from the vice-presidential debate. You can see it at this link.
This video is great, in particular, for teaching about charisma, authority, and experience. How do Biden/Ryan summon all three of those strengths to challenge their opponent? Where might these strategies backfire? I discuss how different people might perceive Biden's laughter/"malarkey" comment differently; my mom thought he was being a jerk, but I thought he was hilarious and channeling my inner curmudgeon effectively.
I find that this helps cultivate a pretty robust conversation about credibility!
One of the problems I had last semester was students giving lame informative speeches. I thought about the problems with those speeches, and narrowed it down to a few trends:
- The topic was something they didn't really care about much.
- The topic could not be researched; it relied too exclusively on their personal expertise.
- The topic was something with no relevance whatsoever to the class (and no effort made to make it relevant)
- The topic was too persuasive, and not informative.
So, I put together this quick assignment for an ELMS upload where students justify their topics. I invite you to copy+paste and steal this wholesale, or modify it however you like--but I definitely HIGHLY recommend having them turn in a topic in advance and taking the hour or so to give them good feedback. I just graded several student submissions, and can already tell they will have much better topics this time than in the past for having been through this process.
You can remove the three points dedicated to topic+purpose in the informative briefing and allocate those three points to this assignment.
Without further ado, the assignment:
Selecting an Informative Topic
This will be a short (one page or less) description of what you would like to deliver your briefing about. You will need to address in this page how your topic meets the four criteria listed below. If you want, you can provide a short explanation of the topic, then just number: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Your topic could be:
- A hobby or activity you are passionate about.
- A cool scientific discovery you want to convey to your classmates.
- An event in the life of a famous person or organization.
- A process or concept you want to break down for people.
-- Just about anything: See 430-431 in your textbook for examples.
The topic has to meet the following criteria:
1) It must be uniquely important to you. You must have a personal connection to the topic. Don't just talk about anything; I want your personal expertise to play a role in this!
2) It must be researchable. That is: You need to be able to find research out there that supplements or advances what you already know. So, no "How to make a peanut butter and jelly" speeches.
3) It must be something that you can make interesting or relevant to your classmates. It doesn't have to be intrinsically interesting to them--you need to *make* it interesting.
4) It must be informative, not persuasive. A informative briefing teaches us about something you think we should learn more about. A persuasive speech advocates for a position, and tries to convince us we should change our minds about something.
For those who actively frequent my blog, I am happy to take requests! I call it "Dear Steudey." For this week's Dear Steudey, I have a set of blog questions from a colleague...
Michael,
1. How to deal with that one student who never "gets it" when the rest of the class does. These sort of disparities between classes can be problematic because you want to make sure the student understands, but if you slow down too much, you risk alienating the other students.
2. That e-mail exchange we had earlier about the student who lost her mind and started swearing at the prof would work as a blog.
3. Un-pack the cell phone policy you have a little more. Some folks have a hands off approach--I don't really care--and others crack down hard. Which is best? Why?
4. A student asks for help but can't meet during office hours (or keeps flaking on you when there are scheduled appointments). Is there ever a tipping point when you just stop reaching out to a student?
5. How do you handle that one group member who is slacking without telling him that his group members threw him under the bus?
Yours,Haranguing in Hyattsville
Well, Haranguing, I'll address each of your concerns point by point. You definitely raise a lot of important issues for those of us getting the hang of managing a class of newcomers.
1) The student who doesn't get it. Ah, yes. The one who is never quite in on the joke. We have all been there--we explain it, it's brilliant, lots of students chime in with great comments that follow it up. My rule of thumb here is this: if it's going to cost you too much momentum, it's not worth it. A classroom is like a shark: If it stops swimming, it dies. So, follow up with the student right at the end of class. Say: "Hey, make a note of this and see me right at the end so we can clear this up. I want to make sure you understand it, but I've got a lot to cover here." 2) The student who becomes violent or extremely disruptive during class. This stems from an earlier discussion we had over Facebook chat. This is the absolute worst-case scenario for an educator: the student who is so over-the-top defiant and out-of-line that we do not know how to respond. Some high school teachers deal with situations like this on a regular basis, but it's so unusual for a college classroom that when it does happen, a great many of us would absolutely freeze in uncertainty. I do think it's useful and important to think about how you'd respond in the absolute worst-case scenario, so I'll share my comments from that blog exchange here. First, the video clip in question. Again, absolute worst-case scenario here. I have never heard of anyone experiencing anything even close to this before. That said, there it is on video, so on some level this (or at least a less extreme version of this) is certainly possible. I share this not to be alarmist, but because it cannot hurt us to deal with the uncomfortable and extremely slight possibility that something like this could happen to us at some point in our teaching careers. My thoughts on what to do--and not to do--in this situation (and there are certainly no answers here that are exactly right; this is based on my experience dealing with such circumstances in the secondary setting):
Calmly but firmly demand that the student leave the room; if they initially resist this, calmly but firmly demand that they stand outside and calm down for a later discussion.
If the student refuses to leave: Calmly but firmly demand the other students to leave the room. The situation exacerbates dramatically because of the presence of other students filming, reacting, etc. In a situation like this with a volatile student you want to keep the others away from them--mainly for safety purposes. You might instruct the students to go get help from a nearby instructor. Fortunately, just about all of us have lots of other instructors in adjacent classrooms as we teach who could immediately call for help.
At the same time, the last thing you want is for you to be alone with the volatile student. So, move to be near the door of the classroom. Stand half in the door and half outside the door and call for help--have another student and/or nearby instructor phone campus police. Again, maintain calm in the situation. Do not yell back or attempt to argue with the student.
Have a number on speed dial for an emergency situation--campus police preferably--and keep the cell phone nearby. If the student won't stop berating you long enough to make the call yourself, hand off the phone to another student who can make the call from the hallway. Add the off-campus phone number for the University Police here.
Obviously, these situations are rare in higher ed; I have never heard of anything like this happening at UMD. The advent of cell phone videos obviously helps the instructor in terms of proving the offense was unprovoked and openly hostile later. But if it does happen, and your adrenaline inevitably takes over, the two phrases that need to flash inside your head in gigantic neon letters are: KEEP EVERYONE SAFE and GET CAMPUS POLICE IMMEDIATELY. Even if you can't deal with it with total finesse, those two guiding principles should be your guide.
3) Keeping students from being cell phone dependent. This one's obviously tricky. So much of it depends on your style. There are a few things I do here that have helped me alleviate this problem (though not 100%; I am still working on this sometimes):
Be brave. A simple admonition to put away the cell phone can be sufficiently embarrassing to most students.
Be context-dependent. Sometimes it's not a big deal; sometimes it's a huge deal. When you tell students to put the phone up, frame it in terms of the context: "It is disrespectful to text during a classmate's presentation." "This is a quiz--you cannot have an electronic device out right now." This can help take some of the awkwardness of confrontation out of the situation. It's notyou who is not getting on them. It's just that they're failing to meet the requirements of this particular circumstance.
Be schizophrenic. You can be perfectly bubbly, cheerful, and enthusiastic one minute, briefly transmorgify yourself into a fire-breathing dragon, and then immediately turn back. Early in the semester I tell students that I generally will seem like a cuddly polar bear; but that if they get on my bad side, they will see what a "bear" I can become. This is to illustrate that I have two personalities: one that's enthusiastic about the content of the course and eager to help them; but another who expects a tremendous amount of them.
4) The student who keeps missing appointments. I'd, at a certain point, simply issue that student an ultimatum: "If you can't make it to the next appointment, I am under no obligation to help you further. All I can do is make myself available." At a certain point it is incumbent on them to be responsible; this is college. That said,
5) Coming down on the slacker without having to come down on the group. Great question--not sure if it's possible. One solution I can think of would involve giving students a short period in class for participating in group work. That would give you an opportunity to see and call out a student who's staring into space or not participating in-the-moment. If the group has been complaining about the student, that gives you an opportunity to catch the student "in the act" of being lazy or difficult, thus absolving the group of culpability.
Alternately, I may just let these intra-group disputes remain intra-group disputes. When the group members complain, ask if they've talked to the student and how they've approached them. If they have not done it, or have done it in a particularly ineffective way, you can redirect. Then remind them that there are six points of credit their classmate will receive based on their feedback--so there is a built-in accountability system that they can (and should) hold over that student's head if they need a "stick" to get them to work.
Well, COMMrades, that's all for this week. Let me know in the comments or via email if you have any thoughts, questions, comments, or other recommendations for what's here. And if you have any further questions related to teaching communication to undergrads, please send them my way! I am happy to cover topics as they arise.
I'm a bit ahead of everyone on the group assignment, so today I would like to share some guidance on setting up and grading students' outlines to guarantee a stronger performance. Please enjoy the guide below as a way to help you think about the outlining process as it unfolds.
1) Assign the Outline Early
It's important to have students turn in their outlines early. Even if you will not have a lot of time to look them over, it holds them accountable to getting it done sooner, and gives you a chance to catch any major problems before they arise. I actually break out the "Outline" points in ELMS and make them due a few days early (or very early, if there's a Spring Break right in the middle):
2) Give students more guidance than the rubric.
The rubrics we have are a little vague on the details of how, exactly, we are supposed to assess them on their outlines.
What are the "requirements?" These actually are not listed in the original assignment description. This is at once a good and a bad thing. On one hand, you have the flexibility and autonomy to decide your own criteria for evaluating these. (I did not have that level of autonomy at various points in my teaching career, and that's pretty stifling.) On the other hand, matters are a bit vague, so if you do not give students examples and clear expectations during class, they will give you some pretty bare-bones outlines.
Here's an example of a not-very-strong group presentation outline from last semester. (I have altered the offending students' names.)
Group Presentation
Outline
I. Introduction A.
Catchy video draws attention to our
topic.
B. Names
1. Our
names are Student A, Student B, Student C and Student D.
C. Topic
1. What
are the differences between males and females. communication
II. Physical Differences
A. Differences in Brains
1. Men
have larger brains than women. This is to control larger muscle mass. There
is no intelligence difference though.
2. Males
have more Grey matter, and women more White matter.
a)
White matter connects processing centers. Grey matter contains the processing
centers.
i)Thus
women are better at communicating interconnected ideas.
n Men
like to get to the point
2. Males
use right amygdala, and women more left.
3. Women
use both left and right in language processing, where men use only left.
a)
This would hold that women are more engaged in communicating, better than men
possibly?
4. Women
are better and quicker at reading emotions.
a)
Women can pick up on non-verbal better and therefore adjust. They use more
emotion in their communication.
5. Men
have stronger reactions to sexual images.
III. The Sociological Aspect of Male and
Female Communication A. “Nature
vs. Nurture” Idea: Are we really wired to act a certain way or is it how we are raised that influences us?
1.
Parents already start “gendering” their babies before they are born
a)
Blue rooms for boys and pink for girls
2.
Gender roles are enforced at a very young age
a)
Boys play competitive sports while girls are
encouraged to “play nice.”
b) Society is sympathetic to a girl crying, while
telling boys to “suck it up and
be a man.”
3. These gender roles shape the way males and
females communicate.
4. Today, it is more accepted for a
female to participate in male activities (after the feminist movement).
This allows for a shift in the stereotypical woman, who is now seen as
more aggressive goal oriented, like men.
5. However, it is not accepted for men to
participate in female activities, which is way gender socialization is still
especially strong for boys.
IIII. Male Tendencies A. What is the masculine gender
role? 1. Men often assume
the role as a provider 2.Men often assume the
role as a protector B. What is the structure of a man? 1. There are four main
“ways of being” men strive for
IV.
How Men and Women Communicate in
Different Situations A.
Men and women communicate differently when they want something. 1.
Men are usually very direct. They will ask for what they want. 2.
Women have a tendency to be indirect or assume their wants are known. B.
Men and women communicate differently when in a group setting. 1.
In groups, men are more likely to be impersonal and down to business. a)
Men are have a higher tendency to take control of the conversation by force 2.
Women are more likely to be personal and inclusive of everyone. a)
Women are less likely to speak for others or interrupt. C.
Men and women communicate differently when they are angry or upset. 1.
Men tend to be very withdrawn when they are upset. a)
When men do start to talk it is in order to find a solution 2.
Women will want to talk about how they feel and what is upsetting them a)
This talking is not always in an attempt to find a solution. D.
Different genders behave differently while socializing with each other. 1.
Men are more likely to approach the opposite sex and engage an interaction. 2.
Women play the waiting game. They expect men to make the first move. V. Conclusion A.
Here we will play another video that illustrates our topic.
After some initial feedback these students did make adjustments and ultimately produce a better presentation; nonetheless, it has a few problems that I endeavored to head off this semester:
Their outline has no hints of anything but information-spewing. The point of a "Group Lesson" assignment is its interactivity. I want to actually know what students are going to do during their presentation. I want them to describe what they're actually going to do, not just give me a list of topics they will discuss.
This means that student outlines must address the following questions:
Which student will speak when?
What strategies will students use to engage the audience?
The outline does not incorporate any of the evidence that will factor into the presentation. The students did have a bibliography on their PowerPoint, but I wanted actual source citations embedded into the outline.
The outline is sloppy and put together ineffectively. While it follows some formal aspects of outlining, there's no sense of logical organization pattern. There's little sense of beginning, middle, and end. And there are just some grammar issues.
The outline just isn't detailed enough to help me picture the presentation. I want to be able to imagine what the actual lesson looks like by reading over the page. I suppose I can imagine this one being a hot mess, but that's more my mental concoction than information provided by the students. I simply want something more thorough and clear about what will happen.
3) How do you set better expectations?
Obviously, telling students the expectations is important. But sometimes people go overboard on this, inundating students with a million slides. I instead tried to emphasize the main points I wanted to hit into four very strategic PowerPoint slides:
I first led a short discussion about the difference between a lecture and a lesson to help students generate (on their own) the difference in format I was seeking. I then showed them a slide that went over the important concepts I was looking for, with bolded emphasis on the most important things I noticed my students failed to do last semester. I then provided basic citation style information, with a link on where to find it. I probably only spent about fifteen minutes on this entire discussion. I also reinforced the expectations with an announcement on ELMS (where I shared this PowerPoint) and reiterated some of the expectations briefly in class the following period. Finally, I shared with them the outline above, briefly explaining to them its shortcomings and what I expected them to do differently.
I received the first student outline tonight (they're due tomorrow)--I'm pretty pleased with the differences. Again, the names are changed:
Student E
Student F
Student G
Student H
Oral Communication Problems: Texting
and Relationships
I.Student E will briefly
introduce their chosen problem in communication, which is how texting affects
various types of relationships, including professional relationships, peer
relationships and the relationship with oneself.
II.Group members will play a
short, group-created video clip (about 1:30 in length) demonstrating the
problems with texting, with scenes taking place in a classroom, at the dinner
table and within a romantic relationship.
III.Group members will begin
a class discussion, with each member asking students a question relevant to
the topic?
a.Student F: How many of
you have texted at some point during this class?
b.Student G: How many of
you have seen someone else texting during this class? During any class?
c.Student H: What are the
benefits of increased accessibility to communication?
d.Student E: In your own
experience, how has texting impacted your relationship with others?
IV.Group members will begin
the lecture portion of the presentation (with Student F introducing this
section of the presentation), sharing interesting and relevant pieces of
information from studies, articles, etc.
a.Student F will introduce
some statistics and facts about teenagers and texting.
i.A Pew Center research
poll shows that most teenagers prefer to text over calling people or talking
in person (Lenhart, 2012).
ii.The average 18- to
24-year old sends about 1,600 texts a month, and that number increases with
younger age groups — with the average 13- to 17-year-old sending about
3,000 texts per month (Parr, 2010).
b.Student G will talk about
how texting is a distraction that negatively affects our interaction with
others during in-person or face-to-face situations.
i.Students who text less
during class are usually the ones who pay more attention to the teacher or
professor and received better grades (“Texting in College Classrooms,” 2012).
ii.A Fresno State poll
showed more than 70 percent of students use their phone to text during class
(Besser, 2007).
c.Student H will talk about
how digital conversations can skew our perceptions of others.
i.Texting prevents people
from developing the social skills necessary for building and maintaining
relationships (Kluger, 2012).
ii.People can spend hours
deciphering a text or composing a new one, but they won’t necessarily ever
understand the true meaning because non-verbal expressions like emotions are
lost (Kluger, 2012).
d.Student E will talk about
the psychological impact of texting on human development.
i.A University of Plymouth
study showed that people who texted more than others tended to actually be
lonelier and more anxious (Reid and Reid, 2004).
ii.That being said, texters
tended to be more willing to talk about deeper, personal issues — via
text — which shows there may be some benefits to texting (Reid and Reid,
2004).
V.Student H will ask
audience members to give possible solutions to the problem in communication.
VI.Student E will sum up the
presentation, offering final thoughts on how people can maintain a balance
between the benefits of texting and the downsides of being too connected.
Works Cited and Additional References
Alexander, Anson (2012, May 22). AnsonAlex.com. Retrieved from http://ansonalex.com/infographics/text-messaging-statistics-2012-infographic/
Kluger, J. (2012, September 6). Cnn.
Retrieved from
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/31/tech/mobile/problem-text-messaging-oms/index.html
Lenhart, A. (2012, March 19). Pew
internet. Retrieved from
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Teens-and-smartphones/Summary-of-findings.aspx
Parr, Ben (2010, October 14). Mashable. Retrieved from
http://mashable.com/2010/10/14/nielsen-texting-stats/
Reid, Donna and Reid, Fraser (2004, February). University of Plymouth. Retrieved from
http://educ.ubc.ca/courses/etec540/May08/suz/assests/SocialEffectsOfTextMessaging.pdf
“Texting in College Classrooms Common, Distracting” (2012, April
5). U.S. News and World Report Health
Day. Retrieved from http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/04/05/texting-in-college-classrooms-common-distracting
This outline did literally everything I asked for.
It's not perfect, of course. I think it could go into more detail in a few places; for example, if students are creating a video, I'd like to know more of what they're doing in it. Also, I'd like them to have more discussion in mind about potential solutions to the problem in communication they have selected--they can't just rely on the audience to generate the answers. I want them to actually prepare a list of questions there.
But compared to the stuff I got last semester? Huge improvement. I can form a pretty clear picture, reading this, of what the presentation looks like. It clearly required collaboration among the students. It illustrates who will say what; it tells me what person will participate in what role; and ultimately, I am pretty positive it will be a good presentation.
4) Grading Outlines
I actually don't have much else to add at this point--because once you've done the work of setting up the assignment well, grading is a cinch. Did they do what you asked them to or not? That will dictate how you allocate their point totals. You have created a set of justifications and criteria whereby you can give a firm rationale for a grade, whether it is low or high.
In any case: if you have any further questions about setting up and grading rubrics, outlines, and other materials, please share in the comments! I'd like to know what you are doing, and how you are doing it.
