J. Patrick McGrail says two things have become anathema in his classroom: risk and ambiguity.
More and more he realizes his students are interested in acquiring technical skills rather than theoretical ones. But “what about the creative side?” he asks.
Mr. McGrail, an associate professor of communication at Jacksonville State University, in Alabama, says he gets peppered with more questions from students about the organization of his examinations than about the content of his lectures, and that’s a problem. Over the last several years, Mr. McGrail has struggled to resist simplifying his courses into rubrics to meet increased student demands for clarity in learning objectives.
“I have noticed students want there always to be a right answer,” he says. “They get upset when the answer is slippery — and in media, it frequently is.”
The problem, he says, is that too many students expect there to be a right answer and a wrong answer. And the theory of editing audio and video, something he often teaches, is ambiguous and requires trial and error before a project is ready for publication. But how do you persuade students to embrace risk when their grade is on the line?
For a while now, Mr. McGrail has wondered how he can adapt his teaching to meet students somewhere in the middle, by making clearer objectives while continuing to push students to flex their creative muscles.
He asks: How can professors embrace the students’ desire for a graspable skill and marry it with creative inquiry?
He brought us that question after we asked readers what puzzles them about how college teaching is changing, and his question got the most votes from other readers. After reaching out to professors across the country, it’s clear that Mr. McGrail is not the only one wrestling with the question.
Below are three creative solutions we found from talking to professors.
1. Integrating Career Development
A couple of years ago, Ann M. Tschetter noticed that she and her students weren’t on the same page. “There is this huge disconnect in what we think as faculty and what the students think,” says Ms. Tschetter, a professor of practice and undergraduate history adviser at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. To Ms. Tschetter, who has taught for 18 years, it’s clear that the skills her courses cover, such as reading, writing, and arguing, are invaluable. But for students, it’s not obvious how those skills are marketable in the real world.
It’s no secret that enrollment in history departments and other humanities programs has fallen steadily across the country. Part of the reason, Ms. Tschetter says, is that students and parents can’t connect the faded dots between a history degree and a full-time job.
Last year she set out to draw that line more clearly by incorporating tasks into the syllabus for History 250, “Introduction to Historical Methods.” The first task was small: Explain why you are a history major. But her students didn’t find it all too simple. “Students would say, ‘I don’t know, I just like history,’” she says. But when pushed to give elevator pitches about how their interest in the discipline connected to their career goals — and when part of their grade included interviewing professors in the department — the answer became clearer to students like Jessica H. Carter, a junior who took Ms. Tschetter’s course last semester.
Another task: Go to the career fair. Ms. Carter had never been, and she was nervous. But once she got there, she was handed a list of employers who sought out history majors. “It allowed me to realize the scope history majors can go into,” she says. “A lot of times people think history majors are for going to law school.” Although that is what Ms. Carter plans to do after graduation, she also realized that banks, businesses, and governments systems also seek history majors.
By the end of the semester the positive feedback from students made it clear to Ms. Tschetter that career development was something the entire department should consider weaving into courses. It hasn’t been so easy to persuade her colleagues. “They know their careers,” she says. But helping students envision how their coursework might apply to a different job is another matter.
2. Experiential Learning
Ambiguity is a part of life, and students need to learn that, says J. Wesley Leckrone, an associate professor of political science at Widener University. But as a professor, it’s his job to teach them how to wade through the complexity of political theory as it conflicts with the reality of the political climate today. He wanted students to learn to think on their feet. So he created a mock super political-action committee, or PAC, to give them hands-on experience working in politics.
“You have to learn to think creatively,” he tells students. “You have to realize people you deal with in life need different messages, and they believe different things.”
Specifically, the student-run super PAC helps them apply the theory they learn in lecture to the problem of rising costs in higher education. One day a week, he lectures about relevant theory and readings, as well as how to solve problems and argue. The rest of the time, though, the students take the reins, discussing how to raise awareness in the local community and lobby for more state funding. There is no clear syllabus. Nor is there a clear outcome. The point is that students learn to figure things out as they go, he says.
From the very first day, Mr. Leckrone says he tells students there is little chance that what they do will get passed by legislators. But that’s “part of the way our political system works,” he says, adding that failure is a part of it. That’s not the easiest thing for students to accept, but Mr. Leckrone strongly believes that professors cannot continue to teach only in a traditional lecture format, and experiential learning is key.
Every year Mr. Leckrone leads a trip to the Pennsylvania State Capitol, in Harrisburg, where students meet with legislators and put what they’ve learned to the test.
Nicole E. Crossey, now a senior at Widener, has participated in the mock PAC in a number of courses since its creation four years ago. At the beginning, she says, it was a “trial by fire.” Neither she nor her classmates had experience lobbying or promoting a campaign. But she says she’s learned that, “in politics and working with people, you can’t have black and white.”
Ms. Crossey, who plans to work in politics after graduation, says the hands-on experience with the super PAC has allowed her to see what actually motivates the political process. “It helped open my eyes to see some people can impact the political system and can lead change,” she says.
3. Digital Open Badges
Bernard D. Bull is another professor who has thought a lot about how to balance teaching hard and soft skills. Several years ago, he wondered, “What if we could find some ways to recognize the more discrete knowledge, skills, and abilities people are developing as they go through a program?”
Mr. Bull is an associate professor of education and assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he teaches courses in a badge-based master’s program in educational design and technology. In each course students can earn up to seven or eight badges for different skills. An overall course may be about learning design, but individual badges can be awarded for projects that demonstrate the student understands game-based learning or service-based learning, for example. “Eventually our entire program is a master’s portfolio,” Mr. Bull says.
His students also write reflections after each badge is earned, which means they can’t simply gloss over challenge areas and move on.
The digital-open-badge model at Concordia stretches across the entire degree, but Mr. Bull says professors could use badges to structure learning in any classroom. For example, students could get badges for public speaking or collaborating with classmates. The badges themselves may not have much currency outside of that classroom, but it’s still one way of rewarding the nuances of learning, he says.
Badges can also level the playing field for students who arrive with fewer skills. “Sometimes you have to swim in the ambiguity until you understand it,” he says. “But other times you can break it down until you understand it.” Badges allow students to see the individual building blocks of what they are learning and set their sights on short-term goals while working to stack those blocks into a holistic project.
Badges might not work for every classroom environment, Mr. Bull concedes, but it’s one way students could prove to employers a particular competency with more depth than a traditional transcript.
Students today are under a lot of pressure to succeed, do well, and have the right answers, says Nancy H. Hensel, head of the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of independent institutions. But as someone who has worked in higher education for decades, Ms. Hensel says the big questions in life don’t have right answers — they have many answers.
“We need to recognize that not being successful in some efforts is legitimate, and we need to help them understand that failure isn’t real failure, but it’s that you haven’t been successful yet,” she says of students. “That’s part of the process of scholarship.”
The professors we talked to acknowledge that their interactive courses are a lot more work for them — it takes more daily planning and a little scrambling to make sure things run smoothly. But they all agree that college teaching needs to meld a traditional liberal-arts education with skills students can apply to their working life after graduation.
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