Pinter, a professor of mathematics and director of the teaching center at Belmont University, shared the prompt he uses at the end of his “Honors Mathematics Inquiry Seminar,” which fulfills the general math requirement for students in the university’s honors program. The prompt refers to a math memoir that Pinter’s students write at the beginning of the semester. I found that idea intriguing and applicable to other disciplines, and thought I’d share it as a new semester gets underway.
The math memoir is a quick, informal assignment due before the first class period. Pinter directs students to “briefly describe what it is that you bring into HON 2340 in terms of background, attitude, perception, and so on. Write it mostly for yourself — I’ll look over it to see that you completed the assignment and to gain some insight about each of you and the class as a whole.”
Pinter also encourages students to set some goals for the course, if they like. “If you do,” he directs, “focus on intrinsic goals as opposed to extrinsic goals like grades. Hopefully you will have some sense of my goals for the course from our first class and the syllabus/assignment materials.”
Pinter sees several benefits in this assignment. It gets students to start reflecting, something that they’ll be expected to do throughout the course, which, Pinter says, is often different from what students expect in a math course, whether their previous experience with the subject has been positive or negative.
(I wondered if the assignment was in part to tackle the issue that many students describe themselves as not being “math people,” an idea that professors must sometimes help them reframe.)
The memoir also gives students, and Pinter, a reference point as they reflect on their learning throughout the course. And, he says, it opens up a dialogue between them.
Have you woven reflection throughout your course? Do you have another way to quickly signal something important about what you hope students will learn and do from the very beginning? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and I may use your example in a future issue of the newsletter.
Starting out
Alex C. Lange, an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University, responded to my recent question about how readers begin their courses, and I’d like to share those ideas:
“My framework for the first day of most of my classes is relevance and relationship,” Lange wrote. “First, I am the person who assigns something the first day of class — often a short chapter, article, or video — to get students to understand the broader importance of the class. I find students love to know the broader why as they take individual courses. For instance, in my student development class, we might talk about the latest trend about engaging college students. For college finance, I’ll assign a few articles from news sources that talk about the big headlines in college finances and how we’ll unpack those across the semester. Second, I know students are going to show up more often, engage better, and better use their resources if they are connected to someone other than me in class. So I do some kind of group activity — a co-construction of norms, a few rounds of icebreaker questions in pairs or triads, a syllabus scavenger hunt if I am pressed for time and need to accomplish multiple goals at once — in that first day to help those connection webs begin to form!”
Do you have a thoughtful approach for kicking off the semester you’d like to share? It’s not too late to let me know: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com
ICYMI
Last week, Beth shared some thoughts on what we learned from our reporting for the Teaching Gen Z series, which wrapped in December. But we know many readers were off of their email last week, so in case you missed them, I wanted to re-up the last two stories from the series:
- For “Why Generation Z Gives These Professors Hope,” Beth interviewed professors who found inspiration and connection in their classrooms, despite facing all the usual challenges.
- In “Some Assembly Still Required,” I traced how changes in K-12 schooling, among other things, have limited the kind of skill development that professors would normally expect from incoming students.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
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