Setting the Ton
e
Last week we asked Teaching readers to share some ways that they try to start their courses off on the right foot. Here are two responses.
Heather Dubrow, a professor of English at Fordham University, has tried some version of the following exercise on the first day of class. She walks in dressed “fairly formally” (typically wearing a blazer), sits behind the desk, and says, “Good morning. I’m Professor Dubrow. Please record the following class policies.”
Then she walks out.
She then comes back without her blazer, sits on the desk or pulls up a chair, and says, “Hello there, I’m Heather Dubrow. Let’s talk about our opportunities in this class.”
She and her students discuss her two styles of greeting, and how and why different messages are conveyed linguistically. “This is obviously well suited to literature courses like mine,” she wrote in an email, “but would, I think, work well in other classes too since it’s related to issues of authority, evidence, etc. that recur in many subjects.”
Other readers relayed different strategies that appealed directly to students’ interests before they’ve acquired knowledge of the subject — which is a topic we’ve explored before.
For example, Seth Matthew Fishman, an assistant professor of education and counseling at Villanova University, asked students in his graduate-level course in counseling-research methods to describe something that makes them happy. They grouped the answers into categories and discussed how to measure them. From there, they talked about how they’d develop a national happiness index.
“The students were instantly engaged,” he wrote. “All participated, and I was able to demonstrate a few of the key course takeaways that we’ll discuss during the semester.”
ICYMI
- At Harvey Mudd College, students complained that they were feeling overwhelmed by the academic requirements and said they had little time “for showers or sleep, much less extracurricular activities or time to reflect,” our colleague Katherine Mangan recently wrote in The Chronicle. Now a curriculum committee is trying to figure out how best to help ease students’ feelings of being pressured without sacrificing rigor in the process.
- As the college-going population grows less socioeconomically advantaged than those of years past, and students become more likely to experience depression and anxiety, professors have been feeling the need to intervene more proactively than they had before. One method, as Beckie wrote recently, is to communicate — through the syllabus and other vehicles — a sense of concern for students from the outset of a course. You can read more about what Beckie calls an emerging pattern here.
Places, Everyone!
Conventional wisdom, and some research, suggests that students who are more motivated to do well in a course are likelier to sit near the center of a row and relatively close to the instructor. But why do students really choose to sit where they do, and what relationship does seat location have to achievement?
David P. Smith, of Britain’s Sheffield Hallam University, led a team of researchers that sought to unpack those questions. The results were described in FEBS Open Bio. The main takeaway: There is no direct correlation between students’ seat location and their educational attainment.
But the study’s nuances are what’s interesting. Smith and his co-authors, Angela Hoare and Melissa M. Lacey, surveyed about 150 first- and second-year biology students about why they sat where they did. The two most common factors, accounting for 80 percent of responses, were to sit with friends or for “audio‐visual reasons.”
When instructors were asked to identify why they thought their students sat where they did, they largely echoed the conventional wisdom.
It turns out that the biggest determinant of how well students fared in course assessments was how well their friends — meaning, the people they sat with — performed. “Students physically locate into friendship group clusters,” the researchers wrote, and “these clusters obtained similar levels of attainment in problem‐solving tasks.”
To improve student outcomes, the authors wrote, professors should try to understand “how and when these peer groups form and how they interact within a taught session.”
They also offered three recommendations:
Professors can break up low-performing groups and sort the members at random or to mix ability, though they cautioned that this strategy should be used sparingly because it can backfire.
Faculty members can also ask students during “think-pair-share” activities to interact with classmates they don’t know in the row in front of them or behind them instead of those who are next to them.
Or instructors can use “targeted interventions,” like clickers, to drive home key points.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
—Dan, Beth, and Beckie
