Pedagogical Minute
A Weekly Service of the College of Arts & Sciences
For the beginning of a new semester: Pre-Test/Post-Test
No doubt you’ve packed the time available with as much as you think it can hold, and if you had more time, you’d have no shortage of ways to use it productively. But maybe these suggestions, meant to be general enough to adapt to a wide variety of disciplines, will be of use to you at some juncture when you think what’s really needed is a change of pace. Use what’s useful, disregard what’s not, and please send your own ideas back for sharing.
An effective pre-test/post-test & self-evaluation exercise: in the first week of the course, ask students to give a one-paragraph summary of the course-topic at hand, written for the purpose of enlightening a hypothetical audience of intelligent, interested but woefully uninformed adults. Encourage them to be as systematic and detailed as their present knowledge allows. What is the subject? Its methods? Its history? Its divisions? The current questions? Give this some time, and be prepared to encounter a certain degree of bewilderment and frustration – it’s part of the process. Collect the responses (and study them for patterns that might guide your own teaching; every class has its own complexion).
Administer the same prompt in the final week of the course; then return the first week’s responses, and ask students to compare the two, and give a written account of their growth in understanding. Students report that the exercise helps them to consolidate and integrate their own understanding, and the act of taking stock regularly impresses them with their own achievement.
2) Discipline-Specific Anxiety
This idea is probably better suited to LSP courses than to classes in the major, where students are already – presumably – at home in the field.
You probably know that there’s math anxiety, science anxiety, foreign language anxiety. You’d be amazed – well, I’m amazed -- at the number of students who are afraid of poetry. We practitioners are, by definition and selection, ill-suited to this one aspect of our professional lives – dealing with people who don’t share our love of our particular subject.
So find out. Prompt them to write, anonymously, about what scares them in this subject matter, or maybe other negative feelings – resentment, boredom. I’ve found it helpful to point out that the statement “x is boring:” has the outward form of being a statement about x, but of course is merely a statement about the speaker. We’ve had good talks about the nature of boredom, and whether one can will oneself to be interested in a thing (I don’t think so, not for long, anyhow), or whether it’s possible to frame questions about a given subject that provide a path for finding one’s own interest in it (that, I think, is possible – even essential).
Look over these responses, and maybe share some particularly telling items in a subsequent class, as a conversation starter. Get them to talk about the experiences that brought them to this point. Hey, I remember public humiliations over speed-drills in certain subjects that did nothing to sweeten my attitude towards particular subjects. Psychotrauma is real.
You can anticipate a certain number of fatalistic responses that chalk it up to talent or disposition (or lack thereof). But that’s not a point at which to let the conversation drop. Barring actual disability, just about everybody can sing, dance, draw – all kinds of anxiety-provoking activities. “Talent” is real, but it’s also a dodge, a mystification of performance that exculpates the non-engaged.
These conversations could take a turn into hectoring or judgmentalism on one side, whining and excuse-making on the other – neither would be productive. Find your own style, but the key thing is to convey recognition that affective and attitudinal factors are real, widespread and genuine barriers to best performance and richest interaction with other bodies of knowledge, and can be addressed by finding one’s own pathway to relevance. Narratives are especially powerful (about which, more in coming weeks).
Here are suggestions from a physicist which might be adaptable to your own classes:
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199810/anxiety.cfm