“One of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a prof,” he wrote, “is to start building my classes to start with one week of onboarding followed by just 12 weeks of content. Last two weeks are just catchup and reassessment. Course is basically over at Thanksgiving.”
Talbert explained, in a series of Twitter responses to a curious audience, that while it might seem like he’s cramming material into a shorter amount of time, the class sessions at the beginning of the semester — setting the stage — and near the end — reviewing what students have learned — are all part of the learning process. Or as he put it: “Students are learning for 15 weeks straight. We’re just not covering new material that entire time.”
Talbert’s onboarding includes explaining what students will be learning, forming teams, getting to know one another, and explaining how grading works and how to use the course tools. “The latter two are one whole class meeting apiece for me.”
At the end of the semester the focus is on review and reassessment. That allows students to catch up if they have fallen behind and to go over material they may not have fully understood or processed yet.
The general rule, he wrote, “is get content down to 80 percent of whatever your normal term length is, through a combination of speeding up *slightly*, and cutting/consolidating things. Then use the 20 percent for onboarding/reassessment. May not be possible, but worth a shot.”
“It sometimes feels like driving 75mph in a 65mph zone, but I wouldn’t call it ‘rushed,’” he acknowledged. “‘Brisk’ is more like it. :) I have cut content over time to make it fit, so now it’s just my normal menu of topics.”
Some instructors were skeptical that they could cram enough content into the previous weeks to make that work, particularly if they operated on a quarter system or any period of less than 15 weeks. But to others, it sounded like a great idea. And many noted they were doing something similar in their courses: setting aside time at the end of the term to review material.
I reached out to Talbert to ask him more about the culture of teaching at his university, how those last two weeks of the semester work, and whether he uses this strategy in all of his courses.
He said that he got the idea from his former department chair, who is now a vice provost. So while this particular practice might not be widespread, the culture at his university “is highly student-centered,” he wrote, which includes giving students time to breathe and focus.
Talbert noted that he uses specifications grading, which is integral to understanding how those last two weeks work the way they do. That form of grading gives clear criteria for what students need to do to earn a certain grade, and then builds in feedback and revision to enable students to meet “specs” that they may have missed the first time around.
In other words, assessments throughout the semester can, he said, get “re-assessed over and over. By the time the end of the semester gets here, many students have a backlog of reassessment that they need to take care of. That’s what we do in those two weeks.”
Last Monday, he wrote, his students spent the class meeting reassessing learning objectives from across the whole course. The following day they completed a “mini-reassessment” to give them another chance to meet learning targets on material they’d covered only recently. On Wednesday, he wrote, “I just converted the class meetings into extra office hours, which turned out to be the most heavily-used office hours of the semester so far.”
This week will be similar, he noted. There is no final exam, “just one big last-chance reassessment on anything that needs it. It’s an extremely busy time, and students are pulling a lot of threads together and learning a great deal. We are definitely not taking time off, as some might think, or watching movies in class, etc.”
In courses where he does give final exams, he said, it’s completed in the first hour with the rest of the time used for additional reassessment. “But, with specifications grading, there is so much reassessment taking place throughout the semester that I’ve found a final exam isn’t really needed. Students are constantly reviewing older ideas, and retrieval practice is happening every day.”
(For what it’s worth, it sounded as if others in the Twitter responses who also focused on review weren’t necessarily using specifications grading.)
Talbert has something of an unintentional experiment going this semester, teaching two sections of the same course, in which this design is built into the course. He picked up a third course when a colleague went on medical leave. And while his colleague drew up a schedule so that the last week of class is for reassessment and project presentations, “the next-to-last week (i.e., right now) we’re still covering material, and I can really tell a difference. The students in this class are hardworking, but they are completely saturated in terms of cognitive work. I’m not sure if they’re going to recall anything that happened this week!”
Do you do something similar in your courses, saving the last couple of weeks (if you’re on a semester system) for reviewing and reassessing, rather than introducing new content? If so, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and tell me why you chose that approach and how it’s working. Are there any trade-offs you had to make, such as reducing course content or speeding up the pace of the course to get in all of the material? Your story may appear in a future newsletter.
Difficult Conversations
Campuses today are more diverse than ever. We also live in a polarized society, in which disagreements quickly become heated and offensive. How can colleges support both inclusion and meaningful debate? That’s the premise for a recent Chronicle advice piece by Caroline Mehl and Jonathan Haidt, co-founders of the Constructive Dialogue Institute. Mehl and Haidt discuss why adding complexity to a topic can help pull students away from binary thinking, forcing them to debate nuances and scenarios they may not have initially considered.
That reminded me of a story I wrote a few years ago, in which I profiled professors on several campuses who were attempting to do something similar in their own classrooms. Some were tackling controversial writers and thinkers head-on; others taught students how to recognize faulty styles of argumentation, like circular reasoning, as they examined hot-button issues. In every case, these professors wanted students to think more critically about divisive topics and examine their own biases.
More recently, my colleague Sylvia Goodman reported on a summer seminar at Duke University that helps faculty members foster civil discourse in their classrooms.
Have you created a course that tackles controversial topics or helps students find better ways to tackle difficult conversations? If so, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
ICYMI
- Colleges that encourage friendships among students across religious differences can create more compassionate campus environments, according to a study described in this story by the Chronicle’s Grace Mayer.
- How does a racially diverse student body affect academic performance in college? Our Adrienne Lu digs into the research in a recent Chronicle Race on Campus newsletter
- Undergraduates who attended fully online classes reported higher levels of psychological distress than their peers taking a mix of online and in-person classes, according to a study described in The Hill.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beth
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