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Putting the Blog on Hold

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By James M. Lang

I have never been an enthusiastic passenger on the blog bandwagon. I attempted to start two separate blogs myself, but never kept up with either of them. The latest one I started is on my Web site but the last time I posted, it was really warm here in New England.

I don't read a lot of academic blogs either, but last summer a friend pointed me to one that I began to read regularly.

I found it interesting for two reasons. The blogger, Gwynn Dujardin, was newly hired into a tenure-track position, which she started in the fall at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario. And her scholarly research concerned spelling reform and education in Renaissance England, so her posts provided witty and linguistically attuned analyses of all kinds of cultural phenomena -- everything from World Cup matches to musical adaptations of the work of Dr. Seuss.

I followed her blog with increasing interest as she moved from Chicago up to Kingston, Ontario, and prepared for the start of her career as a full-time faculty member. I was curious to see how she would fare in her first semester -- curious, too, to see whether she would continue posting blog entries that sometimes seemed to rival my dissertation in length.

Sure enough, through September and October, her posts became more sporadic and briefer. Gone were the days of blogging the spelling tournament on ESPN in real time. Now it was a recipe here and there, a trivia question, and the requisite apologies for not updating more frequently.

Then, on October 17, like the smiles of the title character in the Robert Browning poem "My Last Duchess," Gwynn's blog stopped altogether. As Gwynn told me in an e-mail interview, she had become crushed under her new responsibilities and wanted to reserve her intellectual energy for her students, rather than for her cyberspace readers. Her teaching load was just two courses, both in Renaissance poetry and prose, but she had 100 students in those courses and, hence, lots and lots of papers to grade.

So now that many of us are on winter break, a time to reflect on the past semester and gear up for the new one -- not to mention spend time with family (or try to avoid spending time with family), do research, and fulfil committee obligations you were too nice or too stupid to weasel out of in the fall -- I thought I would focus this month's column on discovering what a new faculty member learned about teaching in her first months on the job, and on what she plans to do differently next semester.

Gwynn was not teaching for the first time, I should note. She had lots of teaching experience as a graduate student and adjunct, but never wedded to all of the other responsibilities that accompany a full-time tenure-track position.

My hope was that we could all either learn something about teaching from the reflections of a new practitioner -- or, at the very least, we might remember something we hadn't thought about in a while, and re-energize ourselves for the coming semester.

In that spirit, I asked Gwynn, who is an assistant professor of English, to tell me three things she planned on doing differently next semester.

Her first thoughts concerned the syllabus, a topic covered a few columns back in this series. At the start of the semester, Gwynn says, she thought about the syllabus in the same way many of us do -- as a contract. That contract laid out two elements: the practical information, like dates and assignments, and the learning objectives for the students.

Her first dissonance of the semester occurred when her classes went "off-syllabus," otherwise known as "getting behind on the readings."

Even though those periods when her classes were not in tune with the syllabus meant that she was not fulfilling her end of the contract, Gwynn was willing to live with that: "I felt that we were getting behind for good reason, that is, to fulfill the learning objectives. Indeed the most intellectually productive sessions were those when we were, technically speaking, most 'off-course'!"

Her loyalty to the learning objectives she had listed meant that she had to break the contract on some of the dates and assignments -- a trade-off she felt was worth it.

The experience has changed her view of the syllabus altogether. This semester she plans to offer the syllabus not as a contract but as a thesis that the class will explore together. The dates and assignments may have to be modified as the dialogue between her and the students progresses.

I like that way of formulating the function of the syllabus, since I also schedule out the semester in great detail, and often find myself, like Gwynn, feeling conflicted when the class needs to slow down unexpectedly. Stick with what I had planned, or make adjustments?

Gwynn seems to have her priorities right here. Our loyalty should be to the learning objectives of the course, to its intellectual promises rather than its schedule -- even if veering off schedule makes us and our students somewhat uncomfortable. Instead of plotting out the course day by day, we should perhaps plan at the level of weeks and leave plenty of wiggle room.

But like many new faculty members in the humanities, Gwynn wasn't fully prepared for how time-consuming grading can be. "I was staggered by my first batch of 100 papers," she says.

So she developed a rubric to streamline the paper-grading process. Rubrics have been around for a long time, and are a good technique for anyone who has to evaluate student writing. A rubric identifies a set number of categories according to which a paper will be graded, and then scores the paper in each of those categories. The final score totals or averages the scores in each category.

Some instructors don't like rubrics because they are less flexible than more holistic forms of grading. They restrict the grader to evaluating a limited number of elements in the student's work. But rubrics also provide a more stable basis of comparison between students' work, and absolutely can save time. Pedagogically, they allow the instructor to emphasize and evaluate only the most important skills or ideas in the assignment, especially if the students have seen the rubric in advance.

Whenever I don't use a rubric for a major paper assignment, I usually end up kicking myself afterward, especially during finals week, when I'm staring glassy-eyed at my 50th paper and my friends in the economics department are already on the ski slopes.

A final issue for Gwynn arose with the methods she used to incorporate discussion into a large-scale lecture course. At the beginning of the semester, she divided students into discussion groups, and devoted class time throughout the semester to allowing those groups to meet and talk about the lecture topics.

She also worked to include discussion in the lecture portion of the class and was able to do so more effectively than she had anticipated. Her success, however, made the discussion groups redundant at best, and a waste of time at worst.

"I found that the students who regularly contributed to the lecture discussions were the only ones contributing to their groups," she says. "The class was only repeating itself, and not progressing and, worse, we were losing precious class time to the logistics of changing course midlecture -- i.e., reassembling into the small groups."

Gwynn got that information, in part, from a survey she had students fill out. The response to one of the questions indicated that the students liked the large-scale discussions but disliked the small ones -- exactly the opposite of what she would have expected.

When we talked, she was still unsure how she would revise that aspect of the course, but what I think deserves emphasis is her willingness to experiment, to teach a little differently, and then to check in with her students to see how they are responding.

No doubt most of us experimented with different teaching methods when we first started, as we were struggling to figure out what worked in the classroom, and what matched our teaching personalities. How many of us, though, 10 or 20 years into our teaching careers, are still experimenting -- and still care what the students think about those techniques?

The surveys that Gwynn handed out to assess the effectiveness of her teaching methods were separate from the end-of-term student rating forms that most of us are required to distribute in our classes. She designed each survey around specific concerns she had about the course, and it did the trick by helping her understand what needed modification.

So I'm recommending we all take a page from Gwynn's script (she loves Shakespeare, so I had to work in a dramatic reference) and combine a new teaching technique with an attempt to find out whether it worked for our students.

Gwynn used a survey she designed herself, but if you need help doing that, you might consult Classroom Assessment Techniques by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross (Jossey-Bass, 1993). It's a compendium of simple methods to get feedback from students on our teaching and our courses. Those methods range from quick response sheets that take no more than a minute or two of class time to more extensive and interactive means of gathering detailed responses from our students.

By the time this is published, Gwynn may have figured out how to revise her course in response to her student surveys. Check out her blog; she has promised to let us know. Just as I was finishing up this column, I saw that she had begun posting a few new entries on her blog, including one on the recent shake-up in the roster of the Wiggles.

End of the semester, rebirth of the blog.