I teach online. I require students to defend their opinions about cases on 5 assignments. I encourage them to use and cite the textbook and other sources for evidence, so that they learn to evaluate evidence and justify their opinions and conclusions. I offer extra credit for those who go to the writing lab and offer to read rough drafts to show them how to cite and write; at best 10% in a given class will take me up on my offer and help themselves out. I seek to promote two things with this tactic: 1) significant learning; 2) academic integrity.
I just had yet another case of a student (who did not seek any help) plagiarizing by pasting personal opinions found at other online community-based sites and at essay production sites while filling in personal fill-in-the-blank spots with current information. This student did defend the actions as thinking it was okay as long as the sentences were about the student and not the originator of the paragraph. What made this situation so heartbreaking for me was that the student could not put a sentence together properly in even an email (i.e., proper capitalization, punctuation/grammar, and use of subject-verb agreement) but stated the goal of upper division college at the beginning of the course. The student had made passing scores on the first two essay submissions thanks to content but must have been feeling desperate about the course grade to break down and paste content on two essays back to back.
Normally, students try me with the behavior at the beginning of class under the excuse of "nobody ever told me this was cheating" or "I've always written this way and no other professor has complained." I usually reply with the following: "here's how it works in my class, you get zeros until you figure out how to write a paper without cheating, or if you don't figure out how to write original work, you will fail; how you handle yourself at this point is your choice."
I have actually had a nearly perfect success rate in working with those students needing to learn not only course content but also better writing and citing. They are usually rewarded with the opportunity in the last few days of class to submit extra credit essays! They earn the reward of making up points lost due to needing to learn academic integrity. I've even had a couple students follow up in the subsequent semesters to tell me a heart-felt thank you for "being mean" and caring about their success enough to "stick it out" with them, because the next time they encountered a professor like me, they wrote better, cited well, and earned As--a big-time, long term reward, if you ask me.
Back to today, I encourage you to consider what you would do to improve the learning potential for a student in a bad situation of the student's own making. If the student's test scores were not so bad, which was probably what led to the desperate acts, then I would have told the student the writing lab and SafeAssign was mandatory. For this student in the case study, I encouraged the student to drop: Something I do not do if I can avoid it, but in this student's case, why make the situation more painful on both of us! We humans avoid pain. Other than telling the student to use the writing lab in the future, knowing the student is already failing the exams and really in no hope of getting better than a low D, if that, what could I do?
Alas, the significant learning here is that sometimes the caring professor has to learn to let go too. However, the caring professor has to let go with compassion and hope the student reflects on the past and works toward the successes waiting in the future.
Showing posts with label teaching goals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching goals. Show all posts
Monday, June 28, 2010
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
On Deciding What to Teach and Learn
I noticed that the keynote speaker on Thursday night for the upcoming AACU Conference on Integrative Learning is Veronica Boix Mansilla.
Mansilla is Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, and Principal Investigator with Project Zero, Harvard University.
Upon seeing her name in the program and realizing she was part of Project Zero I was reminded of the respect I've held for Project Zero for many years. I've always thought it a shame that not more educators know who they are or what they do.
Howard Gardner, who wrote Five Minds for the Future (which one of the CORE committees is reading) is also part of Project Zero. As is my hero, David Perkins, from whom you shall hear more in a moment.
In case you are curious, the reason Project Zero has the zero in its name is it's founder believed that "... learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity, but that "zero" had been firmly established about the field."
Their mission, then is "to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels."
But I digress.
In Smart Schools which was published in 1992, Perkins included a section he called Theory One.
As we embark on the task of deciding what this much ballyhooed Learning Framework/s? course ought to be, I thought it might be helpful to review what he said.
So here it is straight from page 45: Theory One.
A rather good theory of teaching and learning can be stated in a single sentence.The theory is not terribly sophisticated. It does not require elaborate laboratory research to test and justify. But pursuing its implications can take us a long way toward a much improved vision of classroom practice. So simple is this theory, so much a rough-hewn, first-order approximation to the conditions that foster learning, that we will call it Theory One, saving higher numbers for fancier theories.
Theory One says this:
People learn much of what they have a reasonable opportunity and motivation to learn.
How could so outrageously bland a statement about teaching possibly imply anything about better classroom practice? Admittedly, Theory One seems entirely too mousy for the job. But this is the Mouse That Roared. To see its power, we need to elaborate somewhat on the implications of the one-sentence version of Theory One. What is "reasonable opportunity and motivation to learn."? Without resorting to any technical knowledge about learning, one might commonsensically put down the following conditions:
--Clear information. Descriptions and examples of the goals, knowledge needed, and the performances expected.
-- Thoughtful practice. Opportunity for learners to engage actively and reflectively whatever is to be learned -- adding numbers, solving word problems, writing essays.
-- Informative feedback. Clear, thorough counsel to learners about their performance, helping them to proceed more effectively.
-- Strong intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. Activities that are amply rewarded, either because they are very interesting and engaging in themselves or because they feed into other achievements that concern the learner.
So there it is, Theory One, a commonsense conception of a good teaching practice. Theory One aims simply to establish a baseline. For any performance we want to teach, if we supply clear information about the performance by way of examples and descriptions, offer learners time to practice the performance and think about how they are handling it, provide informative feedback, and work from a platform of strong intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, we are likely to have considerably success with the teaching.
Perkins, David. Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds. New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1992.
Mansilla is Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, and Principal Investigator with Project Zero, Harvard University.
Upon seeing her name in the program and realizing she was part of Project Zero I was reminded of the respect I've held for Project Zero for many years. I've always thought it a shame that not more educators know who they are or what they do.
Howard Gardner, who wrote Five Minds for the Future (which one of the CORE committees is reading) is also part of Project Zero. As is my hero, David Perkins, from whom you shall hear more in a moment.
In case you are curious, the reason Project Zero has the zero in its name is it's founder believed that "... learning should be studied as a serious cognitive activity, but that "zero" had been firmly established about the field."
Their mission, then is "to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels."
But I digress.
In Smart Schools which was published in 1992, Perkins included a section he called Theory One.
As we embark on the task of deciding what this much ballyhooed Learning Framework/s? course ought to be, I thought it might be helpful to review what he said.
So here it is straight from page 45: Theory One.
A rather good theory of teaching and learning can be stated in a single sentence.The theory is not terribly sophisticated. It does not require elaborate laboratory research to test and justify. But pursuing its implications can take us a long way toward a much improved vision of classroom practice. So simple is this theory, so much a rough-hewn, first-order approximation to the conditions that foster learning, that we will call it Theory One, saving higher numbers for fancier theories.
Theory One says this:
People learn much of what they have a reasonable opportunity and motivation to learn.
How could so outrageously bland a statement about teaching possibly imply anything about better classroom practice? Admittedly, Theory One seems entirely too mousy for the job. But this is the Mouse That Roared. To see its power, we need to elaborate somewhat on the implications of the one-sentence version of Theory One. What is "reasonable opportunity and motivation to learn."? Without resorting to any technical knowledge about learning, one might commonsensically put down the following conditions:
--Clear information. Descriptions and examples of the goals, knowledge needed, and the performances expected.
-- Thoughtful practice. Opportunity for learners to engage actively and reflectively whatever is to be learned -- adding numbers, solving word problems, writing essays.
-- Informative feedback. Clear, thorough counsel to learners about their performance, helping them to proceed more effectively.
-- Strong intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. Activities that are amply rewarded, either because they are very interesting and engaging in themselves or because they feed into other achievements that concern the learner.
So there it is, Theory One, a commonsense conception of a good teaching practice. Theory One aims simply to establish a baseline. For any performance we want to teach, if we supply clear information about the performance by way of examples and descriptions, offer learners time to practice the performance and think about how they are handling it, provide informative feedback, and work from a platform of strong intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, we are likely to have considerably success with the teaching.
Perkins, David. Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds. New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1992.
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