Miss (Lazy) Piggy

The fifth chapter reading from my Blendkit2014 class discusses “hallmarks of quality” in online and blended courses.

Basically, there’s no One Size Fits Most quality control model for blended classes because standards vary from course to course, semester to semester, student to student. Essentially, if some grand set of standards were created, by the following semester they would be obsolete for various reasons, among them the evolution of the technology used to facilitate learning.

What the chapter argues most strongly for is communication between faculty members about best practices.  The chapter notes course instructors should “solicit peer review of specific resources, activities, or assessment strategies” in order to improve. Communicating with my colleagues about what works and what falls short is something I started doing when I began to teach over a decade ago. I did it because I felt inferior. Because I hadn't spent nearly a decade student teaching before I got my first tenure-track position. Because I didn't spend nine years on a PhD. I student taught for one year. And I didn't have to take the ubiquitous "This is How You Need to Teach" graduate course in order to teach. How I got so lucky, I have no idea. But this bit of luck left me feeling like I was swinging for the fences without knowing exactly where The Green Monster was located.

So I’m all for sharing. What I hate is when we share, and I change, but everyone else goes right on doing the same ole thing.

Case in point: Miss Piggy—a former colleague who, though she was thin as a rail, looked so much like the Muppet that I couldn’t stand to make eye contact with her, lest I inquire about her lopsided relationship with Kermit.

Miss Piggy’s favorite pastime was to complain about an ethnography project she assigned to her freshmen writing students. She made the information about the assignment—lecture, PowerPoints, examples, links—available for students through the online platform used by the College. Yet every semester she would give that high-pitched "hurm" and complain her students “just didn’t get it.”

After three years of her bitching and moaning—which inevitably found me cornered in a stairwell while she gesticulated and huffed—I  finally asked if she wanted me to review the directions for the assignment and help her identify any shortcomings.
She gave me that famous Miss Piggy scowl. And said, “Why do students need directions?”

No joke.

I modified my question and framed it ineloquently while using the phrase “guidelines by which to complete the research and writing.”

The scowl remained, this time coupled with the downward nose-bend. “If I tell them what to do, I’ll be doing the work for them,” she finally said.

It was hard to take Miss Piggy seriously.

Especially when she was out of touch with quality control in her pedagogy.  She deemed even the mention of explaining an outcome, goal, or expectation beneath her.

Miss Piggy is not alone. There are hundreds of instructors on University, College, and CC campuses that feel like students should “just know.” They should “just know” how to navigate an online platform. They should “just know” good writing from bad. They should “just know” that the liver is not an organ in the neck.

I wonder where all of this “just knowing” should come from.

Chapter Five asserts “it is the lived experiences of the students and teachers, their actual interactions, in which teaching and learning are made manifest.” If this is the case—and I believe it is—Miss Piggy and her fellow players need to, as Grandma would say, “Git down offa their high horses.” The students, though they may be incapable of whipping up an ethnography of their own extended family, are sometimes the best teachers a professional educator can have (and so says the chapter). They adapt to technology more quickly than those of us who remember our first typewriters with near-sexual fondness. They were born into a world of .com, and are capable of using tools older instructors find frustrating. Instead of seeing them as peons who benefit only from expostulations from the mouth of a Muppet pig, perhaps they should be seen as potential equals who need a little guidance. Otherwise, when we forget to open a drop box or close a unit prematurely, we might find them looking at us and saying, “You’re the one implementing the technology, so shouldn’t you know how to do this?”

People—professionals and novices—learn through experience. We internalize what we’ve learned and we change things (hopefully for the better). If those things fail, we try something else. We don’t continue to use a failed model and expect a different result each time. That’s insanity.

But to admit that what we’re doing is failing, or falling short of “good” teaching, is perhaps difficult for Miss Piggy and the other Muppets, perhaps because they’ve reached a point in their teaching careers that to admit failure is to admit they really hate what they do. And that admission is scary because then the students may not be—gasp!—as stupid as Miss Piggy wants us to believe.

Miss Piggy's ethnography assignment made me panic over ponder the quality of education her freshmen were getting in comparison to my own students. She had spent years on her dissertation, had been a student teacher for longer than I was in graduate school, and used the word "pedagogy" before I even knew I had one. Clearly, she was better/smarter than I was when it came to handling students. Chapter Five says comparison is a natural instinct, that “there is likely always to be some degree of comparison since it seems that there is always someone concerned with whether this course is ‘good enough’.” Though this phrase seems to imply there is little validity in panic comparing and making judgments of quality, I know bullshit when I see it.

And what I saw was one lazy Miss Piggy.

And Then They Made Me Their Chief

Here’s a tid-bit from Chapter 4 of the Blendkit course I’m taking at UCF:

Traditionally, in a lecture format, the instructor provides motivation (scheduled class time) and content in pre-planned units according to the course’s relation to the program of study. As information has become more public and distributed, the role of instructor as organizer and dispenser of information has shifted. Learners can readily access online lectures, articles, podcasts, and other resources to augment the information provided by the instructor.

This passage made me think of the hunter-gatherer dichotomy. Here are all of my students, running across the open plains of information, flinging their spears and shooting arrows at the mastodons of knowledge. And when they bring back the carcasses, it’s my job, as their chief, to help them parse, digest, and assimilate that knowledge. To make sure that what they’re doing with it will benefit the tribe.

So.

I want a headdress. And a sweat lodge in my classroom. 

I also want an App for my class.

As in, “Are you taking English 1101 this semester? There’s an App for that.”

The Blendkit2014 chapter suggests Online materials are central to a blended course’s success, and the students’ work online must be relevant to the in-class activities. I want to take this one step further. I want my class to be relevant to their lives, thus making the class central to their success as hunters.

And hunters need Apps.

And I’m not talking about all of the Apps that would just “help” them in college in general.

Blackboard has an App similar to what I want, but my College hasn’t subscribed to it. So, as a good chief would, I'm doing the equivalent of a rain dance, asking the mother goddess to send me an App to strengthen my tribe.

I want my hunters to be able to whip out their Smart devices—at the beauty salon, at their kids’ t-ball games, while they are running through the prairies of information—and dazzle the other hunters with their accuracy at spearing a mastodon. When someone says, “Hey, what’s that App?” I want my students to say, “It’s my English class. I just read ‘Shooting an Elephant.’”

Ice Moustache

This week’s BlendKit chapter covered how to assess student learning. Ah assessment. How I love that word. My introduction to classroom assessment happened not long after I was hired at The School That Shall Not Be Named, and my Chair handed me a CD Rom with the label “Ass. Docs.” 

Yep. Thankfully, it was not a CD of strange MLA porn.

I’ve learned a few things since then. Mostly that when someone hands you a CD Rom with the label “Ass. Docs.” you should expect him/her not to be around much longer. And he wasn’t.

Then came his esteemed successor—Shriveled Spider—who had our division juke stats for assessment. Ass Docs indeed.

At my new institution, assessment is taken a bit more seriously. They have standardized tests in place that gauge student learning. Plug the assessment into your course, viola!

Still, these assessments are typically multiple choice exams (MCEs). So I stopped and pondered when I came across the following passage in my chapter reading this week:

“Despite the importance of real life application of knowledge and skills, perhaps the most common type of assessment is still the traditional multiple choice exam.  Placing such tests (or non-graded self-assessment versions) online is one of the most popular approaches to blended assessment of learning.”

Why is this the case? If educators—and assumingly administrators who used to be educators—realize the MCE runs a distant second to assessing students’ application of knowledge and skills why not chuck it and create/implement assessments that completely apply to what students will be doing in “real life”?

I loathe multiple choice tests—in college I was diagnosed with test anxiety and had to implement rituals strategies for completing MCEs. It was a rare occasion when I didn’t have a complete panic attack during one.  So I try not to have any MCEs in my classes.  However, in a writing course I just designed and built in our online platform (to be used by all faculty at my College) I had to implement two MCEs. One is to assess SLOs for SACS (so, really there’s no way around that one—the data has to be solid, unchanging, and not left up to interpretation). The other is to test for grammar—which to me is ridiculous. Grammar is not learned through rote instruction, it’s learned through trial and error. Then, we forget break the rules. Like misplaced modifiers. I’m reading a NYT Bestseller right now and on page 24, right there in broad daylight, living without shame, is an incredibly bad misplaced modifier. The author, the agent, the editor, the publisher—they all missed it/didn’t care it was there. So why, oh why, should I test my students on misplaced modifiers? Who cares if they write, “I saw a sculpture next to the man with a moustache made of ice.” I know the moustache wasn’t made of ice. We’re not on Pluto. Ice moustaches don’t exist. I’m just impressed they can spell moustache.

So why did I include the test? Simple. I’m lazy. There are ten assessments in the class—the two MCEs and eight writing assignments. Those eight assignments involve several steps and workshops before the final draft is submitted—drop boxes, peer edits, classroom presentation. I will spend most of my semester grading the writing assignments using a detailed rubric, giving grammar instruction through trial and error, and writing end notes that say things like, “If you can’t quit using the second person pronoun, you will fail the course.” I need a wee break, even if it comes in the form as a self-grading MCE.

And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

So I was very happy when the chapter reading directed me to the web-page by Bobby Hoffman and Denise Lowe. I am going to keep this little page in my back pocket as I create new, more effective MCEs.

And I’m also going to go polish my ice moustache.

And then I’m going to take my Ass Docs for a little walk.

Move to India, Please

Over the next five weeks I’m taking an online class on Blended Learning. Though I vowed when I finished the MFA program at Ole Miss that I would never again take another class, I have a genuine interest in the research and pedagogy of online learning. What an odd interest. I might’ve done better to admit that I’m interested in the treatment intestinal diseases.

But I’ve got kids now and once that happens every brain cell becomes dedicated to making sure they are the most prepared little jelly beans in the world.

Not really.

But I am curious how my children will experience online and/or hybrid classes. 

And—as a complete afterthought—I want to know if what I’m doing/plan to do as an Instructor of English at a secondary institution is helping or hindering the process of student learning, retention, and matriculation.

Over the next five weeks, I’ll be reading short amounts of text. I may post my responses here, I may not. 

In this week's chapter reading I came across this passage which tends to be very telling in terms of what children in India will do with their free time. I thought most children in India were playing the lottery, being sold into slavery and/or prostitution, or learning to be pick-pockets (thank you, American media). Not so:

“Sugata Mitra (2007) details an experiment he conducted in India (now commonly known as the “hole-in-the-wall” experiment) where he placed a computer with an Internet connection in a wall facing a ghetto. Within days children aged 6-12, with minimal education and limited understanding of English, were able to browse the web and perform other tasks – such as drawing – on the computer. The self-taught, minimally-guided nature of the experiment led Mitra to the conclusion that children do not require direct instruction to acquire basic computer literacy skills.” 

Sure, but they require access to a computer and, perhaps, nothing more. Other electronic devices, or distractions such as television and video games, seem to be siphoning American students away from computer-based communication. So really, what needs to happen is that I need to move my kids--and students--to a ghetto in India so they will learn to use a computer on their own.

Recurring problems my colleagues and I face with my college-level students (in the Central Georgia region of the U.S): they don’t have regular access to computer-based learning because they don’t have computers in the home and are not motivated to go to libraries and other facilities to obtain access (their socioeconomic status typically hinders the former); instead, they use their phones (because although they cannot afford computers, they can afford smart phones) to interact, search the net, and perform daily interactions. When they come into my classroom and are expected to use a computer for online instruction, many are baffled by the simple action of word processing. Some of them don’t know how to type. Others don’t know the difference between Word and a browser. Still others don’t know how to save documents to a flash drive. Nearly all of them don’t know how to surf the internet for reliable information (they think Wikipedia is a solution for anything unknown). Many of them don’t know how to attach a document to an email, use proper email etiquette, or remember basic information like their passwords. In short, they fail to gauge the seriousness of using the computer for instruction. I spend a good two weeks of class time doling out these basics with tough love. Essentially weeding out students who are lazy or incapable of following directions. Then the real study in the course begins.

Perhaps instead of a keyboard, if students were given a video game controller they might take online/hybrid instruction more seriously. How ironic. Turn learning into a game and suddenly it becomes important. I wonder what those kids in India would’ve done with a PS3 in-the-wall.

The focus of the reading material this week is Blended Interactions. In short, we're trying to target what might be the best ways to interact with our students in blended (hybrid) classes. At the start of each reading selection our course administrator posts questions to ponder. The one that resonated most with me this week was: 

What factors might limit the feasibility of robust interaction face-to-face or online?

I would never use the word “robust” to describe my teaching or classroom environment in my self-evaluations (“robust” makes me think of a good spaghetti sauce). But I have had very animated, positive, and exceptional discussions in my classes. My students have written award-winning essays. And poems. And stories. I take credit for all of it.

I consider myself technologically ignorant (I still have a landline at home and don’t own a smartphone), so I’m most interested in creating the same experience for my hybrid students as I do for those in courses taught completely face-to-face (f2f).

 

Two more gems from the chapter:

“[S]ome might argue that student interaction with faculty and with other students in the context of learning is an expression of a basic human need”

“[M]inimal guidance is not as effective as guided instruction”

I felt validated when I saw these two phrases in print, with data and research to support them. Not because I want to gloat about having an instinctual “well duh” reaction, but because I’m lazy and have never been able to back-up my “well duh” with data I’ve (never) collected from my successful students. I’ve been too busy facilitating successful classroom interactions to gather data on my successful classroom interactions.

So many people I’ve come across in academia (mostly the ones who dilly-dallied around getting several degrees then didn’t know what else to do so they went into teaching) want to move away from f2f and into a completely online form. They want to replace classroom instruction with tools like D2L or Pearson’s online learning modules. They want to sit at home grading papers at two in the morning, or clock into an office, plop down in front of a computer and collect a paycheck while said computer does all of the work for them.

Then they  bitch about how their jobs are so demanding. That the state of the world is in ruins. How ignorant their students are. They want to move to Europe because America is going to hell.

To them I say: Move to India, instead.