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.