by driftword

Is there a hidden agenda behind all of this extra work we’re doing with Student Learning Outcomes?

Writing Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) has recently appeared front and center on my radar screen, and the deadline is closing fast. After digging through the resources found on UC’s Semester Conversion home page, I have to say that there seems to be a hidden agenda behind all of this extra work. Crafting “approved” student learning outcomes becomes an exercise in teaching effectiveness (or lack thereof) as much as meeting the semester-conversion deadlines.

Because of Semester Conversion, now is the perfect time to rethink the way we teach our courses—which means we probably have to rebuild them from the ground up. Not only do we have to write learning outcomes for our individual courses, but these individual outcomes must carefully align with our program outcomes…which means we as a faculty must come together to review the classes we teach as a group. Ouch! Who needs all this extra work?

by Ruth Benander, PhD and Ruth Kletzander, PhD

We often hear complaints from colleagues that students want to be “spoon fed;”  clearly, we reason, if students would only carefully read the assignment, they would know what to do without our having to spoon feed them! However, what may be clear as day to us may be clear as mud to our students. To understand this, we may need a little refresher regarding compassion.  One way to refresh our compassion is to become a student again.  This cold-water bath of experiencing what it’s like to learn something new can be quite powerful.  When we professors, accustomed to the power and expertise of our position, re-experience the student condition of powerlessness and novice incompetence and ignorance, it forces us to a fresh perspective on the student experience. This experiment can help us think more creatively about how we can support our students’ learning. What professors might consider “spoon feeding,” students may actually perceive as helping them achieve what we’ve asked of them.

 We do not suggest, Gentle Reader, that you go out and enroll in one of your colleague’s classes. We are suggesting that you spend some time outside the box of your expertise.  What about signing up for that juggling class offered by the Communiversity?  By spending just three hours learning to juggle, you will experience a crash course in how novices feel when presented with an apparently impossible task that the instructor insists is easy. “Just watch me do it….” he says, effortlessly sending three balls into the air while you mutter under your breath to yourself, “Yeah, right,” and your juggling balls fly away in three directions across the room, pointedly not in the air, but inextricably earthbound.  This is an important wake-up call: Your students are trying to metaphorically juggle your discipline, your syllabus, and your expectations.  It is oddly refreshing to revisit learning from the learner’s point of view.

by Kevin Oberlin, PhD

The gap in expectations between teachers and students in the classroom appears to be widening.  As a first-year composition teacher, I most frequently perceive this gap as an unearned sense of entitlement on the students’ part.  On the whole, this perception is not incorrect.  Generation Me, one of the common text selections for beginning composition courses, provides mounting evidence to support the argument that today’s teens to twenty-somethings have been reared to expect that the world owes them success because they are each special and unique, a logical impossibility.

Indeed, first-year composition students on the whole seem to approach the classroom with the sense that course content will be presented to them at best, and inflicted upon them at worst.  In either case, they will walk away from the course having learned something they didn’t particularly care to learn, and something they don’t particularly need to know.  Even teachers attuned to this attitude, who often rightly emphasize to their students that they must earn their education rather than expect it to be given to them, often continue to use language that unwittingly reinforces students’ sense of entitlement.  While such teachers might never say that they are forcing their students to learn, they will often still explain what a particular assignment “forces” students to do so that students will develop a certain skill set.