The author of this article gave a presentation to the Community College of Philadelphia Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) on February 3, 2005. This article summarizes that presentation and the action research that inspired it, completed during the Fall 2004 semester at Rutgers University.
Action Research is the systematic problem solving that is performed in the immediate setting of the classroom. It is based on the premise that in the learner-centered environment, innovative and effective instructional strategies can be delivered, reflected upon, evaluated and revised, during the semester time frame of a course. The research for this presentation was conducted as part of a teaching practicum at Rutgers University. The students were in a Writing Skills III class at Camden County College, roughly equivalent to our CAP B students. I was trying to answer a few questions with this research. For example:
Are students as reluctant to work with other students as they indicated in the student interviews that I conducted?
How can I effectively respond to their fears as expressed in the interview response: “I don’t know anything myself, so how can I help another student?”
Are there affective strategies that would enhance student self-image, while serving to move them up a hierarchy of learning?
Can reflective teaching work in the developmental classroom?
I began by helping students imagine themselves as “teacher” to move their perspective to one more effective for the immediate exercise and for their metacognitive development. I used “if I were the teacher” scenarios, asking students to respond to them anonymously on index cards. Initially many students found it difficult to let go of the student persona. I received responses such as, “I understand that I am not doing the work” or “I did not study enough.” However, before the start of the next exercise of this type, I talked about roles and gave them some hints for moving from one to another. I gave them some tips that included:
Immerse yourself for these few minutes. As soon as you get the index card, look down and begin to write. Do not talk with other students until you are finished writing.
Give a little thought to yourself in the role. What do you look like? How are you dressed?
Imagine yourself at the front of the room, standing and facing students. What do you say about this topic?
After the next exercise, I received responses like: “Students will be able to accept criticism at a peer level…” “This will allow student essays to be better written…” “I did not do enough practice in the class for my students to feel confident…”
For the final exercise of this type, I asked students to complete the following: My name is _________________and I teach writing at Camden County College in New Jersey. I attended this college as a student and then I transferred to __________________ where I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees. There was a time when I was afraid that I could not write, but then....
I told them that, although the name had to be filled-in, they did not have to use their real names. One of the students used the pseudonym “Simone Sharp”! In this fantasy, the students graduated from Rutgers, Rowan, DeVry or the University of Maryland. They described the turning point in their writing in the following ways: “I would go for a walk and meditate…” “I used all the steps, like free writing…once I decided what type of writing I wanted to do; I was able to fully articulate myself on paper.” “I focused on studying…gave me confidence…” “I also let my creative side out and writing became easy and fun.” “I realized that my writing inspired some of my students.” “I learned the meaning of writing…how it is the key to many jobs and a way to let other people know what you feel…”
I have no way of knowing, because of the use of student anonymity, if the student who started this project with me, unable to put herself in the role of a teacher, evolved into “Simone Sharp.” I also make no claims to a completely transformative experience for all students; however, I can assert my claim that this process helped me reclaim my authority and integrity in the classroom. I was transformed by this process, but more on this later.
Other work with the students involved group sessions that were designed to multiply the number of exercises the students could draw from when working on essays, in particular rhetorical styles. By working in groups and then as a class, student confidence was enhanced and their exposure to the work of outlining for these essays was significantly increased. By the time we were ready for peer-review, the students were used to working with each other, less dependent on me, and more confident in their abilities. For this student editing process I paired students who were matched in skill level. I wanted students to experience the “peer” of peer review. Here I had one student who insisted on self-editing and others who, having practiced this with another essay, were efficient. A few students went into “tutorial mode.” I saw them teaching each other functions in Microsoft Word, pouring over the chapter on Division/Classification essays, explaining to one another that they had misunderstood the assignment, and I heard various calls across the room to verify some fact.
In the CASTL group, we talked about how enhanced student emotional development creates enhanced student learning. I believe I was a witness to this in my own classroom during this project. Barr and Tagg claimed that students must be the “discoverers and constructors of their own knowledge” (Barr and Tagg 19) and it seems clear, from even my initial work with this class, that the students need self awareness and motivation for this to happen.
Vygotsky believed that students’ problem solving skills fell into three categories:
I wanted to guide the students to perform tasks that they thought they could not do, but were only slightly beyond their abilities. At least, that is how the students saw their writing. They thought they could not write well enough themselves to help other students. I also think that the affective environment in my classroom was not developed enough in the beginning of the semester to promote the risk involved in their trying. So, I decided to concentrate on the factors that I thought influenced the affective environment in the college classroom:
Learning styles: I moved from handouts, to talking, to writing on the board, to wild gesturing in order to get my point across. I watched for students who could not compose on the computers, students who could not write, or even revise, if the room was not quiet, and students who had to write everything down before they got it.
Group activities that foster positive interaction: I used several different formats for these activities but I repeated each one twice to give students a chance at mastery. I also noticed that sometimes the students were just starting to really enjoy the process at the end of the exercise, so I found ways to expand the process when I could see this happening. I reinforced all the work they did, thus setting the stage for revision as a positive thing, rather than simply focusing on mistakes students had made.
Scenarios that ask students to respond in the role of the teacher: This work started as a way to get students to have some vision beyond the semester. I was trying to reinforce “staying in college,” but then I realized that if the students could see themselves as teachers, it would lend itself well to the peer-editing process. So I expanded this exercise with the “My name is…” exercise (see above).
If, as Rochford said, “independent self-teaching is a critical skill needed to survive in college and one that is reinforced by decades of adult learner research,” (Rochford 670) then this project not only increased student interaction and socialization, but enhanced their learning process and laid a foundation for the culture of peer feedback that exists in many business arenas and other workplaces today. I hope, of course, that the continual redistribution of authority was also empowering for them. The sense of hierarchy is never completely gone, but it is softened in this type of classroom environment.
Conclusion
This project taught me to take risks with my students in the classroom. I have often taken risks when only my feelings were at stake or my expertise could be challenged, but I rarely took risks with students’ feelings. During this project, the improvement in student confidence was evident. No longer can most of these students say they “can’t work in a group.” The peer-editing, especially, seemed to foster a lessening of their fears; in addition, all of the work involved with this project made more efficient use of class time. My goals for this project were to find innovative ways to make student-to-student activities more rewarding for the Writing Skills III students and to begin to study how these activities changed the positionality in our class. I have offered description, analysis and interpretation in this paper, but it is difficult to put on paper what I felt as this group of students responded to their own development.
In the initial issue of the Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, Marshall Gregory makes the point that we not only teach subject knowledge, but also “what they [students] know about the world and what they know about themselves.” “Change what I know and you change who I am” (Gregory 5). During a light moment between two students during a peer-review session, I heard one of the students say to her partner, “I used to not know that!” Students come to class to learn, of course, but rarely is the process stopped in mid-air so that someone can reflect on that idea. I am reminded of Paulo Freire and the idea that education is never neutral. Change what our students know and we change who they are as well. This is very careful work, I think.
In future semesters, I will start this work in the first week of class. I may not abandon the lecture completely or in all classes, but I will be suspicious of its effectiveness from now on.. Clearly many students flourished in this environment. If I had constructed more activities to help the class become familiar with group work sooner, it would have allowed us to start the process earlier in the term.
Epilogue
About my transformation…At the start of this project, I believed two things: one, that the students in my class were not comfortable, and in fact, were not willing to work with other students; and two, that I could not effect a change in this practice without exerting more authority in the classroom than I was comfortable with. I was wrong on both counts. True, there was some initial resistance. When I asked students, they would tell me they did not want to participate in this work. However, when the process started and the students were actually engaged in it, their initial reluctance dissipated quickly. Also, as it turns out, a little authority goes a long way. I insisted, of course, but the first time we worked in this way, my strategy was to appear very celebratory, as though we were about to do something that would be interesting and rewarding.
Early in the semester, I read a short inspirational piece aloud to students in class. The purpose of the reading was to set a tone for the education that was about to happen, to frame our work together with an eye toward interiority. I had students interrupting me as I started. They wanted me to read more slowly so they could take notes. Someone demanded to know where this was on the syllabus. I stopped reading, looked at them, and said quietly: “There’s no need for notes or remembering this for a test. Simply take it into your heart.” I saw several faces with puzzled looks, but everyone became quiet and listened. Several students wrote about this incident in their journals, remarking that I was trying to get them to “love” what they were doing or guessing that I liked poetry. The first night of the active learning project, when some students were resistant, a few other students said to them, “Come on! She wants us to get it in our hearts.”
References
Palmer, Parker. The Courage to Teach Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.
Sommers, Jeffrey. “Two-Year College English Faculty and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: the Journey Awaits.” TETYC. 32.1 (Sept. 2004): 14-25.
Vygotsky, L. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
©Copyright 2005. Contact author for permission
Maintained by Jay Howard,Sept 2005