Weird is Good!

Last August, I participated in our Freshmen Convocation, the university’s official first academic event for new first-year students at Ball State University. During the event, our President and Provost formally welcome the first-year students to campus and speak about the exciting year ahead. This being an academic event, faculty participate in this event--dressed in our academic regalia--by processing in and sitting on the stage during the event. There is also usually a guest speaker--an alumnus or faculty member--who is asked to deliver some inspiring words of wisdom. Last fall, that speaker was Maura Jasper, Associate Professor of Art, from the BSU School of Art.

Maura claimed that weird is good! Initially, that seemed like strange advice to give to a room full of first-year students who are likely trying to figure out how to fit in with everyone else. Yet, she was emphatic that weird is good.

Let's explore this a bit. Merriam-Webster offers this definition of "weird".

"of strange or extraordinary character"

It also offers this definition of "good".

"of a favorable character or tendency"

Thus, perhaps she was stating that strange or extraordinary is favorable. I can live with this! Anyone who knows me would likely not be surprised that I'd agree that weird is good.

One of the many statements Maura made that day has stuck with me. She said,

"If we're not exploring weird stuff, we're not learning. We already know the normal stuff."

And one of my favorite musicians, Frank Zappa, seems to agree:

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."

So, in an effort to establish how good I am, I've compiled a list of the ways others likely think I'm weird.

• my sense of humor
• my use of puns
• my "interesting" socks
• wearing socks with sandals
• wearing sandals with a suit
• wearing a suit and tie when it's not required
• my "interesting" ties
• wearing bow ties
• shoulder-length hair
• staying up late, and then getting up early
• enjoying music ranging from Bach to Zappa
• playing the tambourine in my high school marching band
• being a Boy Scout most all of my life
• power walking for exercise
• being a non-tenure line faculty member who researches and publishes
• utilizing flipped learning and specifications grading

I'm sure there are other items that I should add to my list. What do you think I've left off?

But more importantly, I want to hear about the good in you. How are you weird?

Lilly Conference reflections: 2019 edition

I recently spent three wonderful days at the 39th Original Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This is the fifth time I’ve been able to attend this conference and have been privileged to present at the conference all five times as well. As I said in my post last year, if you can afford the time and money, I highly recommend attending this conference which is held the weekend before Thanksgiving every year.

The last two years, I’ve talked about my experiences combining specifications grading with learner-centered teaching. This year I focused on just specifications grading, leading a three-hour pre-conference workshop and delivering a conference presentation. I've blogged about specs grading here and here. I also volunteered to host a discussion table during lunch on Saturday for the first seven people who signed up to eat with me and discuss specs grading. All three events seemed to go well with lots of participant interaction and positive responses from the participants.

I’ve said it before, but every time I’ve attended Lilly, I’ve come away from the experience rejuvenated. When you spend time in conversations with others excited and interested in finding the best way to teach, how can you not become excited yourself? The conference attendees are a very friendly group of people. One has a sense of attending a homecoming and getting reacquainted with old friends when one attends Lilly.

I always come away from Lilly feeling like I was trying to drink from a fire hose; there is so much good information received in such a short time. I’m still mentally processing this year’s insights, so I’m simply going to provide a list of very briefly annotated quotes I wrote down while listening to presenters. They are presented here in the order in which I experienced them.

• “If you believe the words in your video are important, why wouldn’t you want all people to have access to them?” (Brenda Jo Brueggemann) Seems like a pretty obvious justification for captioning to me.
• “On quizzes, include questions about the new material, as well as previous material.” (Sheri Stover) Retrieval learning reinforces previous learning.
• “Cramming works for a day. A week later, you’ve lost most of it.” (Sheri Stover) Spread out the studying if you really want to learn the material.
• “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” (Nelson Mandela) What more is there to say?
• “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” (Albert Einstein) If you can think, you can continue to learn.
• “Teaching is leading students into a situation in which they can only escape by thinking.” (Unknown) Sounds like a great situation to be in!
• “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of their tomorrow.” (John Dewey) As we learn of better ways to teach, we must adopt them.
• “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” (Eric Hoffer) We must be life-long learners, lest we get left behind.
• “Engagement requires both motivation and active learning.” (Elizabeth Barkley) One of them by themselves is not sufficient.
• “Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.” (Chuang Tzu) Carrots and sticks don’t work as well as other approaches.
• “Forget the mistake. Remember the lesson.” (Unknown) Move towards a growth mindset.
• “Unpredictability can generate emotional learning.” (Mike Pinter and Peter Giordano) Shake things up a bit and get people’s attention.

Share your thoughts below. What quotes resonate with you? What ones raise questions? Do you find fault with any of them?

Image credits: All images by Dave Largent

Breaking up discussions: My 2019 redesign of CS 239

Although I’ve taught CS 239 (Social and Professional Issues) many previous semesters, I have not been assigned to teach it for a few semesters. Spring 2019 changed that, so I took the opportunity to revisit the learning environment I provided for the course.

This course is a one credit hour course which meets once per week for 50 minutes. Historically, I led lectures and discussions for a third to half of the weeks. I assigned the remainder of the weeks to groups of three to five students to research and present their assigned topic. Usually the group presentations consisted of lecturing, despite my encouragement to do something different.

This semester, I wanted to focus on getting the students engaged in the material. I decided to not utilize group presentations or lecturing. I focused on discussions, but also felt that keeping students engaged in fifty minutes of class discussion was a bit of a stretch. I wanted them to dig into the material and explore its importance and applicability to them as future computer scientists. With a bit of thought, I developed a plan to break each week’s fifty-minute class into a series of short discussions which focused on the week’s material in different ways.

Prior to class each week, I expected students to read an assigned chapter or topical material and find a recently published article related to it. (I called this assignment “In the News.”) Each 50-minute class session roughly followed this schedule:

1. Announcements/reminders/questions (5 minutes)
2. Chapter/topic quiz via clickers (10 minutes)
3. Review/impression of the chapter/topic (18 minutes total)
1. Assemble groups of 4 people (6 minutes)
1. Agree on exactly 4 words (single words and/or a phrase) to describe the chapter
2. Groups report their words (5 minutes)
3. Groups choose one word/phrase from the accumulated list (2 minutes)
4. Groups report back (2 minutes)
5. Discuss common themes of (selected) words/phrases (3 minutes)
4. In the News discussion (17 minutes total)
1. Assemble new four-person groups (7 minutes)
1. Very briefly discuss each person’s ItN article
2. Select the most interesting or important article
3. Prepare a 60 second (non-tech supported) presentation which includes:
1. Topic and very brief description
2. Why interesting or important?
3. How related to the course material?
4. Which word/phrase from above list does it relate to?
2. Individual 60-second group presentations (10 minutes)

Thus, my objective each week was not to lecture, or directly discuss the content of the reading, but to have them engage with the material, first individually, then in small groups, and finally the full class. They first read the assigned material outside of class, and critically thought about the content as they selected a related article for the In the News assignment. Then in class, we had a short quiz, which was easy to pass if you’d done the reading, but a bit more challenging, if not. The quiz was intended to encourage coming to class prepared. If more than a few students missed a given question, we’d briefly discuss it before moving on to the next one.

After the quiz, the class split up into four-person groups to briefly discuss their understanding of the material, ultimately agreeing on exactly four words (individual words, a phrase of four words, or some other combination) which they felt represented the material. Each group reported their words, and I wrote them on the white board. After all groups had reported, I asked the groups to reconvene again, and select the one word or phrase from the accumulated list they felt best represented the material. We then briefly discussed their observations about what was, and was not, chosen.

I then asked them to form new four-person groups, where each person would very quickly summarize their selected In the News article. The group then had to decide whose article was the most interesting or most important for others to hear about. Someone (usually the student whose article was selected) from each group then reported details about the article in a one-minute presentation to the full class. (See above for the expected details.) Time permitting, we’d then have another brief discussion about their observations of the selected articles.

This format led to good—and sometimes very lively—discussion each week. The students were aware our time was limited, and thus tended to keep the discussion moving forward, rather than dwelling on one particular point. Overall, my perception of the semester was good. Most students appeared to be engaged, and willing to participate, at least in the small group discussions, if not the full class discussions. Many students were also willing to respectfully voice differing opinions, and to listen to other’s thoughts.

Rather than a final exam, the students had to write reflective responses to a few prompts. One of the prompts included (in part) the following request.

Write an essay describing, specifically, how you learned one of the items in the Top N list we created in class during our final exam time. Be specific about the context of learning: the place, the time, the people, and the process.

The class of 33 students submitted a variety of responses, some of them average. However, many responses stood out to me, and helped validate that the course had met my objective of getting students engaged with the material. I provide examples of these responses here, with the author’s permission.

Student 1:

“I have found that everyone DOES have their own ethical standards; however, it is important to adhere to the ethical standards of the field and company as well. I learned this pretty early on while going through chapter 9 about the ethics and responsibilities of professionals.; however, the ITN articles I went through really solidified the meaning for me.”

Student 2:

“In most of our discussions, if someone offered a dissenting opinion, it was often presented as an alternative way of thinking, rather than as a retort or any sort of rude negation of the presented thought. It was nice to see that a group of random students with different views were able to have respectful discourse about a variety of topics, many of which students had opposing views on.”

“This was a good opportunity to see in a real environment how even those with inherently opposing views could come to a solid and satisfactory conclusion from a “debate”, while maintaining a high level of respect for one another through the entire process. It was fitting that in a class about the professional world, we put into practice the item from the list in real life, rather than just learning about it from the text or through assignments.”

Student 3:

“This situation of disagreeing with someone’s opinion most commonly occurred on the two diversity days of class. Although the situation for me was frustrating because I felt like I couldn’t respond how I usually would outside of a classroom environment, I do think that these days were the more productive days of class because they seemed to generate the most class discussions due to the differing opinions. It was useful to be in this situation in a more professional environment because usually I am in an unprofessional environment.”

“In a professional environment, both parties are held to professional standards, whereas, in an unprofessional environment one person can be respectful, but the other person may not because of the lack of a professional environment. … The combination of these professional experiences in class and unprofessional experiences out of class helped show the differences of the same situation when people are held to professional standards or when they are not. Those differences helped cement the idea that you can have a professional conversation with two differing opinions as long as you adhere to the standards of a professional environment by being respectful.”

Student 4:

“The most prominent thing I learned was that everyone has their own ethical standards. The one moment that comes to mind that taught me this the most was early in the semester in the discussion of privacy. All four of us in the group had different opinions on what constitutes a breach of privacy. As I thought more about it later, I realized that none of us were necessarily wrong, but we just had different standards to one another. I also realized some time later that this is another argument for diversity as well, because it can help make a product that the most users will be comfortable with.”

Student 5:

“I thought everyone knew. That being said, I was proven wrong multiple times by my classmates who didn’t seem to really “get” certain concepts, like the importance of diversity or what is actually ethically sound. I sometimes found myself frustrated and wondering if I should even state my perspective because they weren’t going to “get” my point. It wasn’t until I decided that my perspective deserves to be heard just as much as the other guys that I would participate in class discussion. When I did, I remember commenting on why I didn’t agree with someone, and after I spoke someone else commented that they felt similarly to me. This gave me more confidence in my opinions, not because I knew I shared them with another classmate, but because the conversation kept going. We continued to share ideas. We didn’t stop talking just because we didn’t agree. I am often scared in conversations that if I voice my opinion either I or the person I am speaking to will let their emotions get the better of them and the conversation ends at that. With mutual respect and an open mind, even those who don’t always agree can work productively together.”

I am anxious to teach this course again using the same pedagogy to see if I get the same results. It could simply be that I had an unusual bunch of students this semester that were willing to discuss and listen to each other, and that another group of students may not do as well. I’m hoping that is not the case, as I really liked how the class worked out this time.
What are your thoughts and experiences? Please share them below in the comments.

(Edited on 07/09/2019 to add student 5's quote.)

Lilly Conference reflections: 2018 edition

I spent the last three days at the 38th Original Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This is the fourth time I’ve been able to attend this conference and have been privileged to present at the conference all four times as well. If you can afford the time and money, I highly recommend attending this conference held the weekend before Thanksgiving every year.

At my first Lilly (2013), I presented a poster with three of my colleagues (Rebecca Pierce, Lynne Stallings, and Petra Zimmermann) titled “Classroom Interaction Redefined: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Moving Beyond Traditional Classroom Spaces to Promote Student Engagement.” We translated this into a journal article, which was recently published online.

In 2016, I talked about helping computer science students explore the issue of lack of diversity and inclusivity in our educational programs and profession. The last two years, I’ve talked about my experiences combining specifications grading with learner-centered teaching. I've blogged about specs grading here and here.

Every time I’ve attended Lilly, I’ve come away from the experience rejuvenated. When you spend time in conversations with others excited and interested in finding the best way to teach, how can you not become excited yourself? The conference attendees are a very friendly group of people. One has a sense of attending a homecoming and getting reacquainted with old friends when one attends Lilly.

Rather than try to detail everything I absorbed at the conference this year, I’m simply going to provide a list of very briefly annotated quotes I wrote down while listening to presenters. I’m not going into depth partly because I don’t have the time to do so right now, and partly because I’m yet to fully process most of what I experienced. They are presented here in the order in which I experienced them.

• “Get more sleep.” We have to have adequate sleep for our brains to make memories.
• “We can't solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.”  Time to think outside of the box.
• “Give authority to students and be prepared to be amazed.” I’ve had this experience many times, as recently as a week ago with honors colloquium students.
• “Memorizing is what you do when something doesn't make sense.” To truly learn something, it has to make sense.
• “What would students do if we gave them wrong or missing instructions?” Should we do this to make them think and question?
• “Students must have past knowledge to which they can connect the new information we give them.” Our brains store new information by attaching it to previous knowledge and experiences.
• “Test for what you want your students to know a year from now.” If it’s not important enough that you want the student to know it a year from now, why test them on it? What does it matter if they know it now?
• “Peer feedback should be thought of as reciprocal teaching, not an evaluation.” This changes the nature of the conversation.
• “Flipped learning may not be evidenced by short term assessments gains but will be reflected in long term knowledge.” Learners can cram for a test and do well but are much less likely to remember it later. True learning is for the long term.
• “We can’t change what we cannot see.” If we don’t know there is an issue, how could we know it needs changed? We have to look and observe.
• “What are the things going on in our students lives? How might those things affect their learning? How could it change our teaching if we knew?” We must do more than simply teach content.
• “Everything we do is a rehearsal for the future.” Extremely few things are ever done only once. Always strive to do better.
• “Impatience is the enemy of empathy.” Take time to understand.
• “Grades should be indicative of the quality and quantity of learning.” The key here is measuring learning, not testing.

Share your thoughts below. What quotes resonate with you? What ones raise questions? Do you find fault with any of them?