You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.
This week:
- I tell you about one professor’s Hail Mary assignment, which led him to make a surprising discovery about how to inspire students.
- I share some of the themes that emerged from the experiments readers are trying in their classrooms this fall.
- We point you to some interesting reads that you may have missed.
From Desperation to Inspiration
Sometimes your best ideas come from a moment of desperation. That happened to Scott P. Roberts, and both his course, and his teaching, were transformed as a result.
Roberts, then director of undergraduate studies in psychology, had introduced a course at the University of Maryland called The Psychology of Evil — part of a general-education series designed to encourage undergraduates to think about life’s big questions. But he was also flying by the seat of his pants.
Having put the syllabus together on a tight deadline, Roberts found himself creating course content just a week ahead of schedule. By the eighth week, he was burned out. “I was literally sitting at the dining room table with my head in my hands,” he recalls, wondering what sort of assignment he could devise quickly. He posted a note to students on the class website: You’ve all learned a lot about good and evil, he wrote. Now here’s an opportunity to reflect. Do some random act of kindness, and next class, tell me what you did.
Roberts went to sleep, having no idea of what he had just unleashed.
By the following week, stories of his 120 students’ acts of kindness had poured in. Some students held open doors or gave money to the homeless. One helped an older veteran in a wheelchair wash his hands in a public restroom. Another bought umbrellas and stood in the rain to hand them out. Many of them seemed surprisingly affected by what they had done, particularly since many had been quite nervous beforehand. In their write-ups they reflected on what about the act was so satisfying, and about why people don’t do such acts more often — one of the more profound questions raised in the course.
In other words, it was true learning moment, for both the students and for Roberts. It was “the most fun” he’s had grading, he says.
The experience led Roberts to reflect on what it means to give students agency. In this case, he was teaching undergraduates about the enormous capacity the world has for evil, which was for many an unsettling experience. But he was also showing them that they didn’t have to be passive observers. One student later discovered that a meal she shared with a homeless man led the owner of the restaurant to offer him a job.
While the assignment was spur of the moment, it connected to a realization Roberts had earlier in the semester. He had given what he thought was a great lecture on why normal people do evil things, breaking down how and why that happens and including plenty of examples to make a compelling argument that ordinary people have the capacity for evil.
He expected students to be wowed. Instead, they looked defeated.
“I was suddenly hit with this moment of watching them leave. It was quiet, they weren’t talking to each other. Their heads were down.” His slam-dunk lecture had hit the mark, just not in the way he intended. “I just shattered 18 years of beliefs” they held about themselves and the people they love, he says. “And that’s really heavy.”
The next week, he circled back to that reaction and told them he was going to try something a bit different. At the end of every lecture he would show a video that in some way gave people faith in humanity. It could be something as simple as a heartwarming story from the nightly news. It turned out to be a meaningful addition, he says, one that students said in their course evaluations that they looked forward to at the end of each class.
Today Roberts, who is now director of instructional excellence and innovation at Maryland’s Teaching & Learning Transformation Center, only has time to teach his course during summer session, with a much smaller group of students. But he has fine-tuned the doing-good assignment, complete with a Mission: Impossible-like setup.
This year, for example, he instructed students to travel to a public place during the day, listen to a pre-recorded assignment on their headphones, then find a way to perform good deeds for strangers over the next 60 minutes.
In the writing assignment that follows, which asks them to reflect on why people don’t perform random acts of kindness more often, students discuss concepts such as the diffusion of responsibility, in which we each expect others to step in when help is needed. Or they write about how societal norms can inhibit us. It’s not normal, for example, to buy a meal for a stranger, even if he is homeless and hungry. They also write about how a lack of action can sometimes be defined as evil in itself, if it allows evil acts to take place.
“I love that it’s kind of a bait and switch,” he says of the course. “I suck them in with evil and send them out doing good.”
Roberts has also turned the lens on his own teaching, and is studying how the course, which he has been teaching since 2012, changes the way in which students see their place in the world. His surveys have shown, for example, that students were more likely to say that they are capable of making the world a better place after taking the course.
For Roberts this confirms that students can handle difficult ideas as long as they believe that they have agency over their own lives. “I’m confident,” he says, “long after students forget most of the information they learned, they will remember this experience.”
Have you made a last-minute addition to your course that turned out to be surprisingly enriching? If so, drop me a line at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and your story may appear in a future newsletter.