TITLE: Notes to Your Future Self
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 27, 2008 3:15 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I received my copy of the student evaluations from my
spring course,
which was really three courses that felt like one to
me and a few common students. One of the open-ended
questions on the form my university uses asks the
student to complete this blank:
I could have improved my learning in this course by _____.
After teaching for a while now, I can predict what
students will say in this section. This semester was
a perfect example.
The second most common answer is a variation of ...
reading the textbook
It doesn't what book I assign; how big it is; whether
it is mostly exposition or mostly code; or whether it's
written in an academic style or in the vernacular. A
few students read the book, and a few of those will
typically praise it, but most don't read much if any
of it.
The most common answer is a variation of (drumroll,
please) ...
starting the homework assignments sooner
Sooner, so they had more time to work on them. Sooner,
so that they could ask questions when they were stumped.
Sooner for all sorts of reason, but always sooner.
Neither of these bits of wisdom are new to them. If
nothing else, they have heard me exhort them to start
sooner and to read more. I suppose I could do more to
encourage these behaviors, such as giving quick quizzes
every day over the reading, but most strategies feel
wrong. Do either students or I really want to turn the
class into a treadmill of points for their grade? Do
I want to have to grade all that stuff? Aren't they
adults?
For homework assignments, one thing we instructors can
do to encourage beginning sooner is to have short
iterations with frequent submission. In my spring
course, I had small programming exercises due weekly.
I could have tried biweekly submissions, or a problem
every other day. But that feels like micromanagement
to me. Students have other courses and work schedules
to consider, and I like to give them at least a few days
to navigate through their various duties. And besides,
aren't they adults?
I don't think that students want to be micromanaged
with quizzes and deadlines, and I do think think they
genuinely mean well. Maybe the problem is that they
view the comments they make on student evaluations as
backward-looking, when instead they should
think of them as forward-looking.
Perhaps we should phrase the question as
I will improve my learning in future courses by _____.
The student's evaluation of the instructor would then
be more like a
retrospective
that benefits the student as much as the instructor,
because it asks both parties to consider how they
can improve their results in the "next iteration" --
the next courses they take. These comments about the
future, not the past.
(Ooh, it just occurred to me: perhaps I could try a
brief something after one of the assignments early in
the course that plays the role of retrospective.
Maybe if students consciously consider the value of
starting sooner and reading the text during the course
they can change their behavior soon enough to affect
their performance. This would create more frequent
futures!)
What did I learn from these evaluations that will help
me in the future? In every course, there is a set of
common answers to the item "My learning in this course
would have improved if the instructor had _____.", but
for this item there are also usually an answer or two
that stand out as particularly salient or which teach
me something new.
From this course, students reminded me of the value in
reviewing solutions to homework assignments soon
after they submit their solutions. This is always
a valuable tactic, and especially in a course where
students are learning new languages and styles of
programming. The best way to learn is to see different
solutions, including ones that demonstrate idiomatic
usage. It gives students a way to compare their
solutions and to learn from differences. I let the
fact that most of students this semester were juniors
and seniors with a fair amount of programming experience
convince myself that maybe we could get by without this
sort of follow-up. But that was probably just a juicy
rationalization that allowed me to "squeeze in more
material", to the detriment of my student's learning.
I have written about that before in my blog. This
entry is now an example of how I am sometimes no better
than my students at practicing what I recommend in a
retrospective! Let's see if I can do better at this
in the fall.
The rest of my evaluation data was pretty good -- a
nice ego boost in a week where I needed one. Consider
this an open "thank you" to the students who take time
to write both suggestions for improvement and positive
comments that let me know that, on the whole, they like
my courses. Those positive comments help keep us
instructors motivated just as much as positive feedback
helps students feel better about hanging in there.
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