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[marigolds]

One way to do that is by putting the responsibility on the students for establishing relevance and identifying applications. One of the things that struck me about Polly_mer's account is that Polly, you found the coolest applications and you showed them the coolest things you could think of to do with magnets. What if, a couple of weeks before that topic, you gave students the assignment to find the coolest applications they could and the coolest things to do with magnets and turn those in to you? Either the whole class, or just you, could then choose which to use in the lesson. Better yet, if you have a discussion board for the class, students can post their findings, share their reasoning and vote on what to use as examples, post questions, etc. If they choose inappropriate examples, you can veto and explain why, and if they're unhappy about the veto they can explain their reasoning, etc. You may get through a little less material, but students may learn it more deeply and retain it longer if they have more responsibility for the content.

Great idea, Outlier.  Now, tell me what I do with the students who tell me that they have no curiosity whatsoever in any of the topics that I have presented to them.  I gave the magnetism as a recent example, but I have examples from exactly what you have mentioned in allowing students to take responsibility for their learning.

Earlier in the semester I had students write three questions that interested them about science, any science at all, share the questions with their group, and then choose one question to research and bring back to the class the next week.  Yes, many of the students got excited and did something good.  However, a non-negligible fraction of my students told me to my face that they had zero interest in any science anywhere including the questions of their classmates and any that I threw out from other sections.  They preferred to take a zero rather than even take one of their classmate's questions and spend five minutes with Google.


I have given students a topic on which we had been reading and instructions of "Make a lesson plan on anything related to this topic.  Discuss possibilities with your group during class today, do some internet research, and turn in your lesson plan and related materials on X date".  Again, while some students get excited, other students refuse to do it, preferring the zero to doing work that is harder than merely listening to a lecture and regurgitating the main points.


All of my students have portfolios due at the end of the semester that they chose from the broad categories presented in class that must include demonstrations and field trips that they research and select as interesting to them.  Again, some of the students have gotten excited about the possibilities and brought in cool things to show me and their classmates, even though the portfolios are not due until December.  However, other students, even when given class time to work on those portfolios have looked me in the eye and said, "Why do I have to do this?  I don't care about any of these things.  I will never use this in my life."   Keep in mind that these are prospective elementary schoolteachers who should be using the opportunity to get a couple lesson plans in place on topics that they will be teaching.  I don't believe that any elementary school teacher anywhere doesn't include at least one science lesson during the whole year, particularly after I pointed out multiple times how various topics fit into the state curriculum for a variety of grades.

So, yes, great ideas, Outlier.  Now, what do I do with my students who refuse to engage with the material even when they get to choose what aspects of the material are most interesting to them?

Two things, Polly (both actually completely unhelpful to you):

1. Your students don't know how good they have it.

2. Your lesson plans are AMAZING.  I'm (so, so, SO) not in science, but I wish I could see them just to adapt your techniques and assignment planning to English. 

So, despite their stupid dum-dum-headedness, you rule. 

[wild_rose]

I make the first weeks of this class, up until the drop deadline, an intellectual bootcamp.

Are you tenured, litdawg? Because the rest of us, especially those of us who are on one or two year contracts, are resentfully dependent on those damned evaluations that say nothing about how much the students learn in class and everything about how easy they find the class to be.

I will probably be unemployed after my contract runs out because I've stuck to my principles and refused to dumb down my gen-ed classes. Maybe that's a bad idea. Maybe I should just give in, as so many of my colleagues have admitted to doing, and just teach to the evals. If you expect nothing, then you'll never be disappointed. And you might even get tenure for being such a "good" teacher.

WildRose--I am untenured and the averages of my teaching evals are 1 SD higher than my department's averages for first year courses. It may be that the serial eval slammers are dropping my class and hence I get a larger percentage of good, "intrinsically motivated" students as a result. The context of my approach is important--the students have to have other options-- in order for me to do what I do.

Yes, I see what you mean. I hadn't thought of that! You get rid of the problem students right from the beginning.  Someone hinted to me about this about a year ago; we were pressured to have high enrollments --but only for the first week, when the figures were taken (wink, wink). I had forgotten.

I'll keep your ideas in mind for the future; right now I'm the only one teaching this class, and I think it's the same for spring.

I'm sorry to hear that your commitment to excellence in teaching may cost you your job. That is wrong, and students should not be given such power. A longitudinal study of student success is a far more rational way of measuring the quality of teaching, although that might only tell us about the learning aptitudes of the students admitted to the university rather than the quality of the teaching.

It was early in the morning when I posted that, and I was basing it on prior experience. In the mid-afternoon light, I must admit that things may be different here; I need to check with the Dean's office to find out how much student evals count. My contract renewal this time, I suspect, will depend more on budgetary matters than evals. But the sting of being branded "unpopular" because you expect students to learn has a tendency to linger.

I was called on the carpet at a different school for my evals. Main complaint: I made them work too hard, and expected them to purchase and read the textbook.

[msmicrobe]

I was called on the carpet at a different school for my evals. Main complaint: I made them work too hard, and expected them to purchase and read the textbook.

Let me guess... the secondary complaint was that you expected them to learn something? And come to class? And use their brains?

Isn't that why one (in theory) goes to school?
I'm so sorry you had to deal with those jerks.

[hoodah_thunkett]

Yes, I see what you mean. I hadn't thought of that! You get rid of the problem students right from the beginning.  Someone hinted to me about this about a year ago; we were pressured to have high enrollments --but only for the first week, when the figures were taken (wink, wink). I had forgotten.

When my husband was teaching undergrad History, he would walk around the classroom early in the semester and silently set Drop slips on the desks of the few students who didn't appear motivated to learn. It often worked: they either disappeared or suddenly started paying attention.

[mountainguy]

Your lesson plans are AMAZING.  I'm (so, so, SO) not in science, but I wish I could see them just to adapt your techniques and assignment planning to English. 

Chime. It sounds like Polly is doing a lot for these students. As a humanities major, I only had to take two science classes in undergrad, which ended up being introductory biology and introductory geology. Both classes were a struggle to get through, but I managed to do it. I would have loved to have had an instructor who did as many hands-on activities as Polly. Keep up the good work!

[polly_mer]

Your lesson plans are AMAZING.  I'm (so, so, SO) not in science, but I wish I could see them just to adapt your techniques and assignment planning to English. 

Chime. It sounds like Polly is doing a lot for these students. As a humanities major, I only had to take two science classes in undergrad, which ended up being introductory biology and introductory geology. Both classes were a struggle to get through, but I managed to do it. I would have loved to have had an instructor who did as many hands-on activities as Polly. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the encouragement.  I did jump at taking this job because of the opportunity to put into action the high-falutin' ideas that I had been collecting about how to better educate non-science people who do the science teaching in elementary school, which is the main science education that the general population has so that's one of the areas that must be improved.

As follow-ups:

1) Outlier, yes, these students do have shadow days to go visit local schools.  In fact, that's how I have ended up with half empty classes a couple times during the semester.  However, that happens junior year and many of my students are freshmen because this class has no prerequisites, not even a passing grade on the intake placement English and math tests.  By and large, my juniors will at least attempt to play along now that they can see that I do know what I'm talking about, discovered that it might be useful later (some people are still resistant with "But [my graders] don't do any of this so why should I?") and will not let them memorize and regurgitate.

2) As for Alan's dream, one of the education classes just this week had the students pretend to be little kids while one student had charge of the classroom for a lesson.  Apparently, the results were not pretty, according to the discussion by my students of what happened in the other class.  The last week of the semester in my class will be each student teaching a ten-minute lesson related to the project using some appropriate pedagogical techniques (both topic and techniques chosen by the student). 

I expect that the teaching will be an eye-opening experience for many of these students since several have asked me whether they could include audience participation as part of their presentation or whether they have to have hand-outs, visual aids, or a demonstration.  My response was, "Do what you like for your ten minutes, but keep in mind that this is a tough crowd, ten minutes is not a lot of time, and they are grading you according to the rubric."  The average grade given by their classmates is 10% of 10% of their final grade, so practically speaking, zero effect, but somehow that freaks them out (I can make their poor math skills work for me when I need to). 

Of course, some of my students asked whether they really had to give a presentation because public speaking makes them nervous and they are afraid of being graded badly.  So far I have not laughed in anyone's anxious face as that statement was made because the fear is real, but I do have to wonder about the logic of being terrified of speaking in front of an audience and selecting a career that guarantees you are speaking in front of a captive, often hostile about it, audience on a regular basis.

3) I thought people might be interested to know that, on this week's test, I asked what people's favorite activities had been in class for a this-is-not-a-trick-put-something-and-get-a-free-point bonus question to gather more information on what's working and what really should be ditched for next semester.  Several people mentioned how much they liked the magnets because it solidified their knowledge on a hard topic.    Even my magnet- and electricity-I'm-not-learning-anything student listed a computer activity with a testimonial about how we should do more things like that.