Performance in the Classroom, Learning Communities Style

Last semester, I was lucky enough to observe the final project of Bonnie G. and Lindsay C.'s Speech 151/Spanish 252 Twofer learning community, "Exprésate--With Feeling."

The male student group

The female student group

The project, a performance collage called the Bilingual Reader's Theatre, required that students--four female students in one group and four male students in another--explore elements of Hispanic culture and create text based performances around their findings.

The Reader's Theatre project required that the students perform 25% of each performance collage in Spanish. The students had been practicing integrating more and more Spanish into speeches all semester long. One practice session came mid-semester when students performed for a group of three year olds from MCC's own Children's Learning Center: fun and educational!

For this final project, the groups decided to use the gender split of the class to their advantage, so the female student group explored issues of domestic violence, and the male student group explored issues of machismo. The groups named their sources, which included writers as varied as Oscar Hijuelos and John Leguizamo, during the presentation. They used props, choreographed pantomime, and translations that overlapped with original recitations of Spanish. The idea--whether it was the negativity of stereotypes or the empowerment of women--was always clear, regardless of the audience's fluency in the language (specifically this audience member, whose six years of French about seventeen years ago didn't quite prepare her for this...).

Illustrating machismo in Spanish culture

Pantomiming poetry lyrics

Illustrating domestic violence in Spanish Culture

What was the most obvious, though, was the success of the Speech and Spanish learning community. The students were able to get up in front of a dozen friends and strangers (some wielding cameras) and perform snippets of the prose, drama, and poetry they had researched and vetted to express (¡exprésate!) the ideas they'd been learning for sixteen weeks. Were they nervous? Absolutely. But they were also terrific.

Now that we've seen two ways our MCC instructors have used performance in their classrooms, how would you use skits or other types of performance in your classroom? Would you ask students to do a relatively quick illustration of a single concept, like with S.V.'s Sociology of Deviance skits? Or would you have them illustrate a semester's worth of content, as Bonnie and Lindsay did? Either way, this kind of interactive group activity can be a terrific classroom tool!

Spring Faculty Development Day Re-cap

Our apologies for such a belated re-cap of the Spring Faculty Development Day--after January 10th  and the following mini-conference on the 11th, we all got a little swept away in the start of the new semester. We're sure you all got swept away, too, but we hope you're floating on nicely now and have had a chance to catch your breath.

From our perspective, January 10th went along quite well! From the morning "Outside the Classroom" sessions...

Peter Ponzio talks Charles Dickens

John Peters talks family history

Dawn Valdes-Wagner talks Arab Emirates

Jim Gould talks family obstacles

Kate Midday talks princesses (or not...)

David White talks teaching abroad

...and the "Inside the Classroom Sessions" that were all mapped back to our four Excellence in Teaching tenants (Subject Matter, Pedagogy, Assessment, and Professionalism)...

iClickers in the Classroom

MOOCs: Friend or Foe?

ConnectMath

Smart Board Technology and Practice

The new Learning Management System (LMS), Canvas

 

Assessment

Teaching Outside the Lines

The Socratic Method

...to the College Update and Colleague Connectivity "Beyond the Classroom" sessions:

Dr. Vicky Smith

Dr. Tony Miksa

We also had five terrific sessions for anyone who could stay past dinner, although I didn't get any pictures because I was leading a session on "Reaching the Modern Student" for a terrific audience of part time and full time faculty members. We also had re-run Smart Board, ConnectMath, and LMS/Canvas sessions, and an Adjunct 101 session for our brand new adjunct faculty members.

The Adjunct 101, led by Robin Deak and Christina Swanson, is consistently popular and consistently useful. If you're an adjunct faculty member and interested in learning more about our Adjunct Orientation (which will be Monday evenings this Spring!), then contact Robin for more information.

Our Friday mini-conference--the first of its kind--drew just a handful of faculty members, but the sessions went very well and we'll continue to offer this the Friday after workshop days so that interested faculty can get in a bit of development before the semester begins.

Check back here later in the week for more posts on using skits and performance to reinforce concepts, and our classrooms outside of campus!

To see the What's New in Faculty Development presentation that we didn't have time for on January 10, please click here!

It's Almost Time!

Thursday, January 10 is Spring Faculty Development Day, and we hope you're ready to get down and developed!

Check out the program below, and don't forget to fill out your evaluation when the e-mail comes on Friday; we'd love to hear your thoughts on the day!

Out of the Box…In the Box: Small Plays in the Classroom

Contributed by S.V., Instructor of Sociology

Scene 1: A concerned Chris converses with Erica on phone wondering why his friend Dennis is avoiding him.

Scene 2: Erica confronts Dennis who has taken on cheerleading.

Scene 3: Dennis reveals to Chris his new role as a cheerleader emphasizing its hypermasculine characteristics such as cheerleading being a tough sport and his ability to hang out with the best-looking girls in school.

"Men Who Cheer"

This is a play on "Men Who Cheer" from the Sociology of Deviance class this fall. October 31^st was the opening night. Students drew on five readings from the textbook. They documented three to five key actions/dialogues for each scene that explains the process of development/management of deviant identity.  They demonstrated what puts people in the trajectory of deviance and how they rationalize and manage their deviant status, which they must live with. The students were responsible for the script, role assignment, direction, props, and anything else they decided to include.

Students Act Out: the stigma of homeless youth

S.V., introducing the skits

During the discussion after the plays, the class said that they had thoroughly enjoyed this assignment. They were able to understand and retain the material in the reading for their plays compared to other assignments including presentations and class discussions. They were able to put themselves in the shoes of the deviants. The only concern expressed was offending their peers in class who may be living with a particular deviance. Other plays included topics of bisexualilty and anorexia, stigma management strategies of homeless kids, and techniques of neutralization used by car thieves.

Overall this “out of the box” assignment was a very fruitful exercise. Students were also satisfied with the time for preparation which included one entire class period (80 minutes) over a few days. On a personal level, it was a very exciting experience to watch the work of some of the sociologists come to life in my classroom.

How could you use skits to demonstrate key concepts and ideas in your own classroom?

The Sociology of Deviance class, Fall 2012

Visit us again next week for another story about MCC instructors using skits/performance in the classroom!

2013 New Year's Resolution #1: Apply For A Grant!

Contributed by Marcella Reca Zipp, Director of Resource Development

Grants are a great way to obtain external funding for your department, try out a new curriculum or activity, travel abroad, write a book, help students receive scholarships to pursue higher education, add an impressive accolade to your CV, and so much more--the list goes on and on for potential grant opportunities as faculty members to improve education and student success at MCC!

Grant writer Don Peek of Education World poses some questions to ask yourself when deciding if a grant would be helpful:

• What challenges are your students facing?
• What do they need help learning in your school?
• What behaviors are they exhibiting that might get in the way of achievement?

Obtaining a grant at MCC should be done through the Office of Resource Development (ORD). We will help you find an appropriate funder, draft your proposal, develop a budget, complete the application, and more. We are your gateway to external funding and support!

ORD has posted a thorough list of external funding opportunities that may be of interest to MCC administrators, faculty, and staff. The list is located at myMCC>Advancement & Planning>Grant Seeking>Documents>Grants and Other Funding Opportunities.

Some words of advice from the Dean of Education at The Citadel:
“Most institutions have fallen on hard times. Instead of worrying about your needs, search for a grant agency that supports needs that are similar to yours and then carefully craft a proposal that assures the evaluators that, if given the opportunity, you will out-perform your competition on meeting the organization's goals. Should your proposal be rejected, realize that in grant writing, rejection is an essential step to success. Just take a deep breath and rewrite your proposal, making it irresistible to the next evaluators.”

If you are interested in pursuing one of these opportunities, please discuss your idea with your supervisor or dean, and then contact Marcella (x7515) or Caroline (x7538) in ORD.

Five Ways to Keep Your Sanity Through Finals Week

1. Bake cookies


And it only took an hour away from grading to bake these! Totally worth it.


If you're looking at how much you have to do this week, you'll only be able to really start after you've made a plan. And who doesn't plan better while they're creaming butter and shaping little one-inch balls of cookie dough?

2. Eat someone else's homemade cookies


Just wander around campus and you'll be sure to run into some sort of baked good, just hanging around some one's desk. Grab it and run.

 If you don't have enough time to bake your own cookies, then just eat someone else's! You need a bit of brain food to get through all of your grading this week, and there's no better brain food than sugar; so load up, friends, and then buzz through those final students projects like you're being chased by a dragon. (what does that mean? I don't know. too much sugar.)

3. Take a stroll
Get the blood flowing to your limbs and to your brain with a jaunty stroll around campus. Walk down to the library for a view over the MCC pond, or walk down to the cafeteria to see what's cooking. Visit some colleagues and then feel better about yourself when they revel at how far ahead in your grading you are! (Little do they know what's waiting for you back in your office.)

4. Straighten your desk
Who can even consider grading anything when your desk looks like this:


This is waiting for you back in your office.

You'd better straighten it up, and quick. And your books could use some re-shelving. And your pens probably need to be organized by size and color. And that poster on your wall is a little crooked. Why don't you rehang it?

5. Take a nap

Because it's only Wednesday, after all, and grades aren't due until next Monday at noon. So there's plenty of time, really. Why are you stressing out?

Students "Grading" Teachers

On Tuesday, December 4, WBEZ, Chicago's public radio channel, aired a report called "Students Grading Teachers" on its news magazine, The Morning Shift. 

Tony Sarabia, host of The Morning Shift, interviewed Ronald Ferguson and Thomas Kane, two Harvard professors who have worked on the Measures of Effective Teaching project for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The 2009 project organized approximately 3,000 teacher volunteers to participate in a variety of activities meant to assess teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Although the project focused on elementary and secondary educators, the conversation on The Morning Shift also incorporated college level student evaluations, and Bruno Teboul, Associate Dean of the College of Communication at DePaul University, was one of Sarabia's guests.

Ronald Ferguson developed the "Tripod Survey" instrument for the MET project. This survey, which evolved from a decade's worth of Ferguson's work, was one of five measures developed to gauge and assess teacher effectiveness. Ferguson's survey included questions such as My teacher knows when the class understands, and when we do not; My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class; and When I turn in my work, my teacher gives me useful feedback that helps me improve.

During the twenty minute segment on The Morning Shift, Sarabia (who referred to this survey as "grading" teachers and was corrected immediately by Ferguson, who said that the surveys are not grades, nor are they popularity contests, but rather they are assessment tools meant to "document students' experiences in the classroom so that we could identify issues and set priorities for professional development...") interviewed Ferguson and his colleague Thomas Kane about their work on the survey and on the MET project, and he also interviewed Bruno Teboul about student evaluation surveys at the college level.

I was not surprised to learn that DePaul uses surveys the way that we use them here at MCC: to give instructors valuable feedback at the end of each semester about what works, what doesn't, and how we, as educators, can make changes to our classroom instruction to better meet our students' needs. I was surprised to hear from Sarabia, who used to teach Urban Studies at Loyola University, that he never received the feedback from his own course evaluations. I was also surprised to hear Ferguson say that many of the participating teachers were hesitant to get their individual results back--hesitant, that is, until they got a hint of the students' responses and understood how valuable those responses could be.

Here are some other bits from the segment that you might find interesting:

Ferguson says that academic press--pressing students to continue working, to push themselves even when work gets difficult--is the "strongest predictor of achievement gain."

He also says that one of the strongest predictors of learning is classroom management. It's "whether [the] class stays busy and doesn't waste time, and whether people treat one another respectfully." Ferguson says that "a close second is whether the teacher challenges students to think hard and to work hard."

Sarabia and some callers felt that using the feedback might be controversial; however Teboul felt that the surveys themselves are not controversial, but "the controversy can come from how they're used." Essentially, the feedback is best used for self-reflection: to adjust lesson plans and assess a teacher's own effectiveness in the classroom before applying changes themselves.

Ferguson states that the teachers just want the surveys "used fairly." There should be "no one measure" and there certainly should not be only one application of any kind of assessment.

The full segment is available below for your listening pleasure (or you can access it on The Morning Shift website), and you can read the MET project white paper here.

For more information on Ferguson's survey work, read this Atlantic article from October.

And for more information on deciphering student evaluations, read this recent blog post from Faculty Focus.

Press the orange play button below to hear the twenty-two minute Morning Shift segment!

E-portfolio in Composition I

Contributed by Lisa Crizer, Instructor of English

When creating my syllabus, I always struggle with what to do after Thanksgiving. Students and instructors come back stuffed, unfocused, and usually spend the final two weeks counting down the minutes until winter break. This semester, I decided to try out an e-portfolio.

I’ve assigned portfolios in the past, usually in composition I, and I use them as an opportunity for students to look back on how far they’ve come in one semester. We gather all of our work together in one place and take a look back at the process for each essay: What did the pre-writing look like? The first draft? Now, compare that to the edited final draft you submitted. Can you see the difference?

Normally, I collect the hard copies of the essays, along with any reflection pieces, in a pocket folder. If you stop by my office, you’ll see evidence of this on my overcrowded shelves.



Exhibit A

This semester, however, I decided to try something different. Since we’ve been talking about e-portfolios as a possible graduation requirement and since I was able to pull one off when I created my tenure portfolio last year, I figured my students could give it a go.   

We used Google Sites and the students did really well with the assignment. I created a template for them, so that instead of focusing all their energy on designing the e-portfolio, they could spend their time reflecting on their writing. Even with the template, they were still able to make the portfolio look how they wanted it to look, which they really enjoyed. Here’s a link to the template I created for them.

I am very happy with how this went, and I will definitely do it again in the future. My students have an e-portfolio that they can refer back to, and I can begin to reclaim my shelves. Everybody wins!

Translating Words into Images

On November 26, Deborah Miller Fox, a contributor to the Faculty Focus blog, wrote a post entitled "Get Visual: A Technique for Improving Student Writing."

Miller Fox's post brought up interesting ideas of using images and visual representations to explore and better understand concepts. I believe in the importance of using visuals in my writing classroom, so I found this article--and the "poster" assignment that Miller Fox used in her own classroom--inspiring. So inspiring, actually, that I decided to adapt the assignment (let's be honest: I stole it outright) to use for an in-class activity in my English Composition 152 classroom last week.

Since the beginning of November, my students have been working on a synthesis problem solving essay. They've identified an issue related to violence in schools (one of the texts for the class is Columbine by Dave Cullen), proposed a specific and reasonable solution, and then argued the solution's workability and effectiveness.

The students were turning in their final drafts last Tuesday, so I decided, after reading Miller Fox's article, that I'd have them create a poster to advertise one of the solutions detailed in their papers. I asked them to choose a target audience and explain where they would hang the posters. These are just a few examples of what the students produced.

Student Nick R. created a poster based on a service learning component he completed for his proposal paper

Joshua K., a student studying criminal justice at MCC, identified juvenile delinquency as a serious problem to be solved

Kiersten C., an active member of MCC's Pride Club, made this poster reflecting solutions to anti-LGBT bullying

In addition to creating the posters, the students explained the posters, their intended audiences, and where they'd hang them. They also created MLA style citations for any images they'd found and used from the Internet.

I've decided that this is an assignment I'll start using in the future for this particular paper, and I'll restructure it to give students more time (they only had forty-five minutes of one class period).

For more detail and great ideas for your own classroom, check out the Miller Fox article and other articles from the Faculty Focus blog.

Reaching the Modern Student

In preparation for my workshop this Friday, Reaching Modern Students, I did a quick and very informal survey of my two English Composition 152 classes. I asked my students to define a "modern" student and identify what made them "modern" students.

I got a variety of answers, and some were more useful than others (one student claimed to be a "laid back learner," which is a learning style I'm not too familiar with...). But I did get some insightful feedback.


The "laid-back" learning style at play


Many of my students like to be "hands on" when learning concepts. They prefer to get an overview and explanation of a concept, an example of that concept in action, and then they like to take action themselves by using that concept on their own. For my writing classes, this means getting the overview and examples of a particular concept (e.g. using appeals [logos, ethos, pathos] in argumentative and persuasive writing) before applying it themselves during an in-class activity or homework essay. In other disciplines this might mean lab work, discussion, or some other way of the students beginning to take ownership over the course concepts.

My students also seem to consider themselves to be visual learners, and this is a learning style that may be cultivated more and more by the on-screen way young people are receiving information. They want PowerPoint or Prezi presentations (though one student warned that "no matter what, if you don't have good 'stage presence', slides won't make up for it." yikes.) and video clips, and pictures and stories or narratives that reinforce concepts. And although they all noted their heavy use of technology and social media, not one student mentioned an interest in using an e-textbook.

For more about what makes a modern student and how we can reach our students more effectively, register for the workshop, which will take place from 1 - 2 p.m. on Friday, November 16 (use the Professional Development auto-registration system).

Hope to see you then!