Jason’s Reading Log for his Music Education
I have no musical talent or abilities. I never took a piano lesson as a kid, I wasn’t in the band, I can’t read music, I’ve never even taken a music appreciation course, so I was surprised to see exactly how much overlap there is between problems in teaching music and the problems that I face teaching sociology. This is one of the reasons that I am so interested in SoTL research, while every discipline is different, we all are confronted with many of the same difficulties.
With that said, I thought a great point made in the readings was framing motivation as (at least partially) a teaching problem. I always hear professors complaining that students today are not motivated to learn, well, what motivated you to learn? Chances are it was a professor that took the time to offer insights, quality feedback, and demonstrated to you that they genuinely cared bout your learning. The motivated you to do the reading, when you could have watched TV or went out with friends, because they convinced you that waht they were asking you to spend you time on mattered, and that they were there to guide you in your learning. Now if we are all sure that we are doing all of this for our studentst, and they are still not motivated, we can start ranting against their individual work ethic. However, if we are not fully sure of this fact, we may need to review what we can do to motivate students, and what social forces may be limiting us from doing so.
While I do tend to agree that we are competing with an onslaught of distracting entertainment that is pulling people away from devoting their time to the learning process (and our time to the teaching process), there are some other notable forces at work. Students are paying more for college and getting less. Faculty are teaching more students than ever and getting paid less for their effort. Expanding class sizes are a budgetary solution but a teaching and learning problem. So, a student puts serious effort into a paper and receives a check mark, often regardless of the overall quality of the work. A professor gives that check mark because they have to manystudents and can’t realistically give quality feedback to all of them. I did the math, the author estimates that six three minute audio feedback can be completed each hour. If I was to do that I would need to dedicate a full work week (over 40hrs) just to responding to one activity. This is not a personal problem. This is not a disciplinary specific problem. This is not even a higher education specific problem. This is a core public issue. We need to invest in hiring more teachers to lower the student to teacher ratio. Podcasting feedback is a great idea for a number of reasons, as are number of other teaching ideas, and they may work at institutions with good student to teacher ratios, but we are kidding ourselves if we expect these ideas to be implemented in the current reality of most classrooms.
Useful advice from a fellow graduate student about sharing your interests
Amusing article in the Chronicle, particularly for folks like me who did graduate work in the humanities. What do you think the buzzwords for higher education students would be?
Aracelie_Thoughts on “Teaching as Research”
More math for those who are not doing as well in it – what a concept. It’s so counterintuitive to the way we are programmed with respect to testing prior to a class. As a teacher, I would think that to be the ideal situation because you do have the opportunity to see your students improve and possibly excel at the subject. I am interested, though, in what the students’ views would be regarding the tests and the additional coursework. Because so many of us are trained to think of more schoolwork as a type of punishment rather than a reward, would more work be a demotivator in the classroom? Perhaps it depends on the method in which the content and ideas are delivered. A teacher who believes there is purpose to the added work may get very positive feedback and results.
Teaching as Research (Jason)
Ever since we discussed teaching as a research process (design, deliver, gather results, analyze results, etc.) I can’t help but see the classroom in this way. Today was my first real exam day for my morning classes and I felt like I was handing out my data collection tool, not a test. I designed the course, the discussions, the video’s, the group work, the writings to prepare students to be able to think sociologically. I then designed a measurement (my test) to see if the course design is working as expected. I hypothesized that these methods would lead to a specific set of learning outcomes, and now I am gathering the data. That “research” analogy has made me look at grading in a very different light.
This made me think about a study conducted in Montgomery County. As in most schools, students had to “test into” the higher level math classes. So if you weren’t ready for algebra you didn’t get an Algebra class. Well in this experiment they did the exact opposite. Students that tested poorly on the math section got a double dose of algebra class. The standardized math test was now being viewed as a way to gauge student needs, not a way to gauge IQ, personal ability, work ethic, worthiness, etc. So the appropriate response to a low math score was MORE math, not LESS math. Approaching grading in this way is much more productive process because it can lead to self reflection and becoming a better teacher.
Jason’s Chapter 6 Response
After reading chapter six, I think that I have more questions than answers regarding my research design. I knew that the Quantitative vs. Qualitative debate would pop up, but I hadn’t fully considered all of the research design options. I originally wanted to go with a qualitative model to measure learning outcomes, because I am a little suspect of the traditional pre/post test quantitative design. Although, a post test could be thrown into SPSS and analyzed, I believe that there are validity issues. Plus, the sample size will most likely be one class (no larger than 50) so I could efficiently use some richer qualitative methods.
I like the idea of one-minute feedback responses, providing the data for theme seeking content analysis. I think that this would lend itself to a quick turn around time, and may allow me to bypass the IRB process. I also really like the idea of putting together a course portfolio. However, I think that for practical reasons I should focus on one class topic with multiple teaching techniques. If I do this narrow focus I may be able to combine qualitative and quantitative elements. For example the content analysis of one-minute feedbacks and a brief survey.