Tag Archives: Teaching

Open Thread Wednesday: Do You Use Shame in Your Work?

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An illustration of a pig with staring eyesRecently, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about shame. Some of this comes from the Freakonomics podcast, which I’ve become enamored of. (If you’re looking for something to listen to, ProfHacker readers have previously chimed in about their favorite podcasts.) An episode from January 2012 discussed the problem of hand-washing among doctors who—contrary to what one might guess—tend to have the worst hand hygiene practices at hospitals. The solution to the problem: shame. Public announcements of those who have not been following hand sanitation procedures at staff meetings led to a dramatic increase of hand-washing at L.A.’s Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Shame, as the Freakonomics team likes to point out, is a tremendous incentive to change behavior.

Changing behavior is also something that my wife and I have been thinking about: specifically that of our children during dinner time. When placed at a table and served food, each of our three kids has one or more tendencies that we would like to eradicate before they be seen too often in public. We have tried numerous approaches, but we recently came up with something that works: the Shame Pig.

The Shame Pig (SP)—which you can see in my lead image—is a little cardboard stand-up that we made with some cardboard, construction paper, and a Google image search. If you misbehave during dinner, the Shame Pig comes and sits in front of you. The Pig will move if someone else commits an act of brazen rudery. Not only does he look at you with those baleful eyes (and as Bethany Nowviskie tweeted, the eyes make a difference) but whoever ends the meal with the SP in front of him or her has the responsibility of clearing and washing the table and loading the dishwasher. We have found that the Shame Pig has resulted in immediate shifts in behaviors of our kids (and ourselves, I must confess). We all have a visual reminder of the standards of manners and there is immediate feedback when an infraction has occurred. The kids actually kind of love the schadenfreude of the SP and are on the lookout to catch others—especially their parents.

When I shared the idea of the Shame Pig a few weeks ago with Jason, Kathleen, Bethany and some other friends of ProfHacker, Jason immediately suggested that there might be some pedagogical applications of the Shame Pig. [NB: Jason remembers this conversation differently, and is pretty sure he thought that this would get a phone call from a crabby dean or provost.--The Editors.] In particular, Jason opined that  a “Participation Pig” could be put in front of the student who enthusiastically talks so much in class that his peers don’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise. (Confession: I was / am this student.) [That really *was* Jason's idea.--ibid.] I really like this idea, and if I was teaching this semester, I would put it to use. I’d also work to encourage my students to place the Pig in front of me if I talked for more than 3 minutes at a time. (I’ve thought about using a chess clock for this too.)

Now. There are clearly some important reasons to think carefully about how to use shame productively in our careers. But I also think it’s an idea with some merit to it. Jason has more or less made this argument when he wrote about how “bad meetings are your fault.” And Dan Cohen’s terrific post yesterday about open access and the tragic death of Aaron Swartz suggests that we should employ shame as one incentive for academics who do not make their work publicly accessible.

So I’d like to turn the question to you, ProfHackers: what role can you see for shame in your work? Could you use it to improve your teaching? Your meetings? Your commitment to write those next three pages? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: shame pig2 / Brian Croxall / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Clever, Catchy, Descriptive? A Forum on Effective Course Naming

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I know most of us are worried primarily about the end of the fall semester, but lately the spring has been on my mind as I begin prepping for its courses. I’m pretty sure one of my classes for the spring will not make—there aren’t enough students registered at the moment and the rush of registrants has ended. I think it’s partly a function of being a new faculty member at this institution: students here can access data about teachers’ student evaluations, for instance, but I have none yet by which potential students could evaluate me. But I think it’s also partly my own fault, for trying to be too clever with the course title. It was to be an upper-level, undergraduate seminar, and I tried to give it a title that would speak to its content—in this case, nineteenth-century popular print culture—but in a cheeky, slightly irreverant way. Looking at the course title again, I realize it was probably opaque to students not in the know about the course’s content, particularly if they didn’t read the course description. And we know that many, many students register for courses without reading course descriptions.

We all want to distinguish our courses, particularly upper-level courses that aim to do more than survey a given field. We want to appeal to students, attract those who might not think they’re interested in our topic, and suggest why we find a subject compelling. At some institutions or in some departments, there can be pressure from the administration to attract more students. How have you effectively balanced the need to craft interesting course titles with the need to craft informative course titles? I realize answers may vary widely by field, but I’d love to hear your tips for creating course titles that catch students’ attention while still giving them much-needed context. Please share your tips in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user crimsong19.]

Open Thread Wednesday: Scheduling a Department’s Courses

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As one semester or quarter is coming to a close, a ProfHacker’s s thoughts inevitably turn to the next. Unless that ProfHacker is a Chair or Director of Undergraduate Studies who is responsible for planning the courses and schedules for the entire following academic year.

As a new, alt-ac faculty member in my department, I’ve recently become acquainted with how we go about this scheduling process. The DUS sends out a Word document as an attachment with six questions, ranging from asking about which core course the faculty member would prefer to teach, to graduate seminars, and the preferred time slots in which that teaching will happen. Faculty members type up their responses on the form and then return them electronically or printed out to the DUS, who then gets to work planning the schedule.

Someone in our department recently suggested that there could be a more efficient way of at least collecting the data. And I think that’s true and easy to do. A tool like Google Forms (which we’ve written about on more than one occasion) or Survey Monkey could make the data entry and collection faster for everyone involved (and who doesn’t want to be done with such things as quickly as possible). Survey Monkey even has a tool that will help you send reminders out to the people who haven’t yet filled out the form. One more obvious incentive for using electronic means to collect these data is that it comes formatted ready for a spreadsheet (one of my favorite tools), which means it will be easier to sort and then see the masochists outliers who really DO want to teach that 8:30am class on MWF.

But once the data has been made more accessible, there’s still the problem of sorting everyone and making those assignments. And that’s the question that I want to pose (perhaps somewhat selfishly) to the ProfHacker community this afternoon: does your department or program have a really great way for making those assignments once you know what people’s preferences are? Do you have a meeting with everyone? Do you have any tools (besides chocolate, coffee, or some other comfort) that help make this process any easier? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: Bar Camp Schedule REBCPHX 2010 / Dru Bloomfield / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Prepare, for the End (of the Semester) is Near

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You know it’s coming.

You’ve been through it before.

But that doesn’t make it any easier.

I’m talking about the end of the semester. Or, not exactly the end — but the week or two leading up to the semester’s close. Crunch time, stress time, or whatever you might call it on your campus.

At most U.S. colleges and universities, the fall semester winds down by uncomfortably sandwiching a week or two of classes plus final exams in between Thanksgiving and the start of the winter break. Not only do most instructors have final projects, papers, and tests to grade before giving and grading final exams, but the end of the semester also creates deadlines for administrative reports, committee projects, and student theses.

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written several posts with good suggestions for the true end of semester, including May 2011′s From the Archives post on Getting Through the End of Term and Ethan’s End of Semester Checklist.

But how can you best get through the next couple of weeks until the end arrives? The same way people in apocalyptic movies survive:

  • Gather Supplies
  • Form a Group
  • Be Tough

Gather Supplies: It’s worth it to do whatever you can right now to make your life easier for the next three weeks. One easy way is to make sure you stock up your household with nonperishable supplies so that you won’t have to be running errands when you’re already feeling overwhelmed. Having some healthy snacks on hand can help balance your energy when you’re grading. Consider preparing and freezing some meals now so that you’ll have less cooking to do in a couple of weeks. Obviously, unless you’re already pretty well prepared for the apocalypse, you won’t have time or space to prepare and freeze three weeks of meals. But a big batch of soup or chili can go a long way and make things just a bit easier later on.

Form a Group: This is, of course, a standard plot device in apocalypse and disaster movies: acquaintances, friends, or strangers find themselves in a situation in which they have to work together to survive (though usually one or more get eaten by mutant sharks or whatever the threat is). Even though we each have our own reports, grades, and paperwork to complete, being supportive and understanding of colleagues can help ease tensions at this busy time of year. Sitting with a friend at a coffee shop and grading together can make it a bit more enjoyable. Instead of just complaining with colleagues and friends, imagine how you could band together to help everyone get through this time with a little more ease.

Be Tough: You’re not surviving the wipe out of all electrical devices or an alien invasion, but you still need to draw on your inner resources to make tough decisions, tackle things you’d probably rather not do, and sacrifice some of your usual habits or pleasures to get through the next few weeks. Sometimes being tough simply means figuring out how to take care of yourself so you don’t get sick or overly exhausted. Who knows, your inner resilience might surprise you when you’re tested. (And if it helps your attitude to put on a certain pair of boots or imagine yourself leading a polar expedition, then why not.)

Just remember, it’s temporary. We all just have to hang on and get through.

What’s your favorite strategy for managing the crunch at the end of the fall semester? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed image by flickr user mikelehen]

Reacting to the Past: An Open Game Based Pedagogy Workshop at Duke, January 19-20

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In June this year, I found myself screaming at the Ming dynasty Emperor Wanli for wanting to anoint his third born son in place of the first born. For all my remonstrations, I was executed as a Confucian martyr on the next morning. The following day, I entered a chaotic meeting between illustrious American citizens desperate to uphold slavery and a team of Abolitionists. All in all, in the last week I travelled between five centuries in a matter of four days.

I was not in a time machine. I was at the Reacting to the Past Institute at Barnard College, one of the most exhilarating new methods of revolutionizing higher education that I have experienced. Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborate games, set in the past, where students take on the roles of historical characters, and through arguments and gameplay, have the potential to reshape history. In order for students to “win” the game, they have to thoroughly master literary and historical texts for their games’ time period, and to be able to fight against their in-game opponents through a series of oral presentations and written work. In other words, students in Reacting to the Past have to basically do everything their professors want them to do in a college class—read and analyze texts, learn about historical contexts, learn how to construct forceful and convincing arguments—but in the guise of a game. I played two characters in two games—a follower of the Ming Confucian extremist Hai Rui in Confucianism and the Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, set in 1587, and an undiscovered, young Walt Whitman in 1845 in Frederick Douglass and Abolition.

I was astounded by how participating in the games completely changed the way both my fellow gameplayers and I learned. Like many of our students, most of us had come to the workshops less prepared than we should have. But the intensity of the gameplay drove us to comb The Analects the night after the first game to find evidence to thwart our foes; and to thumb through Douglass’s autobiography to make claims against the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. I can only imagine what Reacting to the Past does for the undergraduate classroom.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Reacting, join us at Duke for an open Reacting workshop January 19-20.  The registration fee is $75 for faculty and administrators and $25 for graduate students. The fee includes tuition, materials, and most meals. The costs are so low because the workshop is being generously supported by the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke and by the Teaching and Learning Center at Wake Forest University. At the Duke workshop, participants will learn about RTTP by experiencing the games as would their students. The program will consist of two game tracks, along with a series of plenary sessions: one will feature Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945; and the other, Frederick Douglass, Abolitionism, Slavery, and the Constitution, 1845. Both Mark Carnes, the brainchild of Reacting pedagogy at Columbia, and Mark Higbee, game designer of the Douglass game from Eastern Michigan University, will be joining us.

We hope to see many of you there! Sign up today here!

More information about Reacting:

1. Another review of Reacting pedagogy in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

2. Descriptions of all the games, links to peer-reviewed studies and publications, and other instructor resources are available on the main Reacting web site.

3. For a 60-second introduction to RTTP, check out the exchange between Alex Trebek and professor Stephanie Jass.

4. For additional testimonials by veteran RTTP instructors from around the nation, visit here.

**Parts of this post were originally posted on my own blog.