Making participation count.

Thanks Harry! Your posts on teaching are always enlightening and challenging. I gave up on grading discussion and participation in survey classes ten years ago, but I try to constantly improve the quality of my class discussions every semester.

It amazes me that some colleagues are still happy to blame poor quality class discussions on the students. Yes, individual students might be unprepared, but the class as a whole can still succeed if you prepare them to participate.

My dad has been telling me for years that “You’ve got to work on your questions.”…

Thanks for another great post and links to others ( excerpt quoted above). We can and should grade for participation. However, if this is going to work we have to have some very clear metrics for analysis. Recording, monitoring, and otherwise playing close attention to students initial discussions is essential to form the base for term progress. And your dad is quite right – questions matter at least as much as answers – in many cases the most basic questions, the ones most easily overlooked because these seem so obvious and simple yield the most productive results. Then, there’s the second question, the ability to use one’s imagination to construct an abstract world in which people make decisions and form questions of their own, yields another layer of discussion. We work in pairs and groups throughout the class. Rather than discuss peer sensitive topics directly – we engage in simple exercises – for example – what are the interior dialogues of the hare and tortoise during their race? Or, does Cinderella’s “evil” step-mother really treat her so badly? And if so, why does she do so? The key here is that students unfamiliar with these kinds of “use your imagination” exercises need early success on question creation in discussions if they’re going to start taking risks. As I place a very high value on these sorts of exercises, I provide individual feedback to individual students and spend as little time as possible lecturing. Writing the simple questions on the board gives students a fixed reference point – and allows me to board second questions created by students for others to use as models.

The second part of grading engagement involves reviewing written revisions to notes. Much like “old-fashioned” math teachers, I want to see the process and steps used to frame and address a question, and do so using students’ notes. How did students initially approach the problem, where, when, and with whom? To this end, notes and amendments are dated, I/C – O/C (in class…) and initialed by peers at the end of each discussion. I monitor during class and review these notes regularly. These are done in pencil usually and collected in simple A-4 folders, or in the margins of text books, again lightly in pencil.

Depending on the class – their term grade comes almost entirely from their discussions and their folders. I’ve seen some fine online work from peers, but prefer paper-based work myself. The folder and emphasis on question-skills greatly simplifies student grading. Sharing folders during each class allows students to situate their own performance with that of their peers. Rather than complain about individual performance – everyone gets praise – but… I ask students to evaluate their peers critically as competition – “based on these two folders A and B, which person would you hire to do analysis?” “If you’re required to explain this topic to someone new, which folder best helps others understand the problem?”

Grading engagement and process almost entirely eliminates plagiarism. I expect students to use the arguments and answers of others, properly cited, as part of their own individual discussions. Getting the best grades, of course, involves connecting other student work with their own and with the larger conversations. It’s a fun, effective, and stimulating way to run a class. Preparation is essential, and students who arrive in class unprepared, or unwilling to contribute are invited to take the necessary time in the library and return with something of substance to offer. Or not. Most do a wonderful job and the quality of the work is very often impressive. Sorry about the long post. Great topic.

“Rather than discuss peer sensitive topics directly – we engage in simple exercises – for example – what are the interior dialogues of the hare and tortoise during their race? Or, does Cinderella’s “evil” step-mother really treat her so badly? And if so, why does she do so?”

Tangential question: do these types of exercises really have value? I am referring to the (in my mind) kindergarten level discussions (tortoise and hare, Cinderella discussion).
When I encounter this type of thing (from the target audiences’ perspective-not the teacher’s perspective), I internally roll my eyes and immediately tune out-I feel as if its a risk-free childish exercise that everyone has to pretend has value because it inherently doesn’t.
Note that it is not exclusive to teaching, or college, or this example. The same thing can be said about corporate leadership exercises that are mocked on Saturday Night Live (‘fall backwards into each other’s arms to establish trust’, ‘let’s get together and discuss how we can improve X-and everyone gets a stress card in case anything unacceptable is said’ etc etc). It seems as though 1/3 of the Office is devoted to mocking and deriding this type of training.

So, from the user’s (i.e. professors’ and trainers’) perspective: are they as silly as I, and our popular culture, seem to think? Is there hidden value that we aren’t seeing?

anon

Make that a “dull and uninteresting topic.” Favorite parables and comics and myths are topics many students enjoy discussing, btw, as well as their histories with gaming, and online shopping. Bad them.

A ground rule for typical academic discussions: being on-topic, but wrong, is OK, it’s being off-topic that’s a bigger problem.

A local situation, likely replicated almost everywhere. A highly senior member of department is (a) very assertive in his opinions and (b) sometimes – maybe even often – wrong. Well, I’m going to tell him I think he’s wrong, but then I’m another venerable (arguably, past it:-)) member of department. Advice to grad students: if you’re thinking he’s wrong, you may very well be right. Go on, you can get away with saying it…

I never even knew this was a thing and it just seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. I’ve got a background in teaching English as an additional language and working with autistic people and both of those are about giving people the skills and knowledge to speak, making them feel comfortable to do so, and waiting until they feel ready to participate themselves.

I did my degrees in the UK and always had small seminar groups, some discussions worked well and some didn’t but I can’t see how grading participation would help. I think through things a lot in my head before speaking, to try and work through the problem then thinking is this worth saying, have I spoken enough already etc. Sometimes by the time I’ve done that the point has been made or the discussion has moved this would just give me an extra thing to worry about before speaking. It would also make things worse for people with social anxiety.

What is the justification for requiring participation, is it to promote learning within the group or to develop skills for other aspects of life? If it is for learning, well people learn in different ways, some by asking lots of questions and some by being more introverted and contemplative. Why should there be an obligation for those people to participate? If it is for life skills then a university discussion isn’t really going to replicate other power dynamics so I don’t know how useful that will be, although there will be a benefit from feeling comfortable discussing complex issues. Still, I don’t see how grading participation is the best way to encourage it.

In my experience to develop good group discussion the students need to know why what they are discussing is important or interesting an be given time to think of responses rather than being put on the spot. If that doesn’t work then is discussion the best way to learn about the topic? It also helps if students know each other and get used to discussing things outside of the classroom so that it feels more natural when they are in the classroom, but structural things make that difficult.

https://teaching.berkeley.edu/news/peer-evaluation-class-participation

I use a version of this system and it works pretty well! It removes the impulse to parrot back to the prof and it gives students feedback. They also call each other out on lack of classroom etiquette (phones, side convos, etc)

anonymousse, I think participation and speaking in a group are useful skills that people should develop at university. It is different to not choosing to learn maths in a maths class as that is the explicit objective and it is also different to not doing required reading as that is essential for everyone to learn in an English class. I think there are lots of reasons why some people are less willing to participate and I think grading is too blunt an instrument. Maybe towards the end of the course when people have more experience and knowledge it could be helpful.

I always enjoy the post-secondary pedagogy posts here.

This is the second semester I’m teaching a college-level class (other than as a TA, which comes with varying, but always limited, levels of responsibility). I’ve been thinking very hard about evaluation, and one thing I’ve come to believe is that it’s up to us (the faculty) to design evaluation in a way such that a student who has at the end of the semester achieved an understanding and skill level that compares sufficiently well with the course objective, should pass the class. Not with an A, necessarily, but there’s not much more frustrating than to have a student who performs at a mastery level expected from someone after taking the class who nonetheless fails it. Sure, sometimes that’s entirely on the student (like, they never showed up to be assessed…), but it’s rare that there is nothing that has to do with the instructor and evaluation set-up.

I’m ok, btw, to make “demonstrates that they are a member of a community of collaborating practitioners” part of these criteria, so I’m not talking about someone who just shows up for assessments. This is even though in my field (earth sciences, and in my teaching specifically geospatial data science topics) learning takes place a lot less via exchanging arguments in class discussions than, say, in a history class. I do incorporate active learning techniques, usually via a think-pair-share activity every class, but the instructional sessions have nonetheless a lot of lecturing. The actual learning happens mostly in the lab.

And I’ve been dissatisfied with how labs are graded. The classical process is, hand out weekly assignments, have students work on them during the lab hours (2h or 3h or so), and then they have another week or two to finish the assignment and hand it in. This works well in graduate level classes, where everyone has a research project and is used to autonomous work. It is I think pretty unfair in first-year courses, where students often haven’t seen anything like the material taught in the lab before, hand it in after 2h (because freshman level) and get graded right away.

The class I’m teaching this time is third-year (junior) level, on paper, with an extremely heterogeneous audience (at least 5 or so different undergrad programs, plus an adult education student polishing their job skills, plus a few grad students, plus a Fullbright exchange scholar…). Turns out, a pretty high performing audience! Which is great! But I still wanted to separate the (weekly) evaluation from the (weekly) lab assignment, because they should be free to explore and take the time they need. Which led me to keep my predecessor (who taught the class for literally 20 years until he retired…) approach of giving a small chunk of points to attendance and participation — to incentivize students to actually come to the labs and do them, even though they don’t collect points on them directly, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do the quizzes.

I’m sure I could have introduced my plan better, and if I ever teach the subject again I will. But for the moment it seems to be working.

I get to say guilty as charged on being a verbose talker. I’m aware of it, so I tend to do a lot to manage myself and consciously try to bring in people who talk less (which is a pitfall of its own), but in our MA Research Methodology seminar group we were graded on participation and had two professors moderating over the two terms.

The first called me to one side about mid-way through the first term and I knew what she was going to ask me to do before she said anything. She seemed happy with me volunteering that I knew it was about me talking too much and I was consciously moderating it and so on. The second on the other hand actually congratulated me on the way I participated after the fact.

The same student, the same seminar group, similar texts but two different lecturers and two different grades for participation even within the same department. Sounds like a minefield alright.