constructive criticism.

I've had a string of days full of tiny irritations--each little thing is insignificant on its own, but as they accumulate I start to feel like I'm being nibbled to death by cats.  I've locked myself out of my campus office five times in two days, locked myself out of the house once, and even managed to lock myself out of my locker at the gym.  A lot of the campus-office lockouts happened because I had to move offices--it's much easier to forget your keys when your hands are full of books, papers, and miscellaneous office accoutrement like tea canisters and little plastic airplanes.  Moving offices is itself slightly irritating, because it's a very physical reminder of my impermanence in this department, and on top of that, the new office is much further from the water cooler and the copy room.  (Do you see what I meant when I said these were tiny insignificant irritations?)  One of the books on order for my spring semester class hasn't come in yet, which means I can't check page numbers for assigning reading on my syllabus, and the library's only copy has gone missing, which means that I -still- can't check page numbers -and- we probably won't have a copy of the book on course reserve for students who can't afford to buy their own copy. 

Tiny, minor, absolutely petty things.   For me, the best way to wipe out this state of mounting irrational irritation (somewhere inbetween the mood Jed calls "the mullygrubs" and Holly Golightly called "the mean reds") is to get thoroughly involved in some kind of work, so I've thrown myself head-first into next semester's course prep, even though we're almost two weeks away from the first day of class.  I have a course reader, I have a syllabus (although still tragically lacking specific assignments from the missing book), I have the first lecture done and good outlines for the next few. 

Part of my preparation for the new semester involves reading course evaluations.  At the end of each course, our students are asked to fill out evaluation forms for the instructors.  The forms are anonymous, and instructors aren't allowed to look at them until after final grades have been submitted.  It's never been clear to me whether course evals actually mean anything.  People applying for jobs will use selected quotes from the evals as "demonstrations of teaching excellence", and I hear rumors that they may be involved in tenure review, but I don't know if they're used for anything else.  From what I can tell, a lot of faculty members never even look at their course evals.  I like to check mine over, though, to see if there are any general trends in my teaching I need to pay attention to. 

As I'm writing this, it's occurring to me that the best advice for reading course evaluations is the same as the best advice for dealing with manuscript critiques from a writing workshop.  You'll get some completely contradictory responses to the exact same material, and you can't take any one response too seriously or try to change everything that people suggest changing.  That said, if almost everyone says that you need to change one particular thing, you should think about changing it.  You may not end up making the change, but you should at least think about it.

With all of the caveats in mind, I do take my course evaluations very seriously.  After my first semester teaching, a lot of people said that they found the material interesting but didn't always see what the point was.  The next semester, I did more signposting ("here is the thing I am about to say, here is why it is important") and made more frequent (and more explicit) connections between the specific topics and the overall course themes or concepts.  At times it started to feel ridiculous, like I was telling them the same things over and over again, but the feedback the next time around was extremely positive, and many students said that all that signposting and connection-drawing had really helped them understand the material better.  All of my students say that I talk too fast, and I'm actively working on that, but apparently with only minimal success.   I've even taken some of those sharp stinging critcisms to heart--one of last fall's evaluations said "she keeps saying that things are 'interesting' when they aren't really."  Since then, I try to not refer to things as "interesting", because that's subjective.  As the authority in the classroom, I can say that something is "relevant" or "significant" or "meaningful" or "important", but "interesting" varies from person to person.  (To be briefly immodest: every semester, I get a few evaluations that say things like "I took this class because I needed to fill a requirement, and I've never liked history classes before, but Professor Groppi made it really interesting!"  I hope those students realize how incredibly valuable that kind of thing is to a teacher, not because it's useful per se, but because that's the kind of comment that gets you through the bad days.) 

The one thing that consistently jumps out at me from my course evaluations, though, is how visual these students are, at least in terms of their expectations.  I use PowerPoint presentations in my lectures, but fairly minimally.  Whenever I mention a specific person, I try to have a picture of that person.  Whenever I talk about geography, I try to have a map.  I use diagrams to illustrate some key concepts (important in teaching the early history of science), I use pictures of scientific apparatus, and (I'll confess) sometimes I just use pictures for visual distraction or amusement value.  My presentations are mostly images, though, not "key concepts" or bullet points or outlines.  Every semester, the student feedback about the visuals hits the same two points:  they want more pictures, and they want bullet-points and outlines.  (This semester, someone even suggested that I use embedded video clips, to liven things up a little.) 

This is one area where I feel like I'm swimming against a current.  I understand that the bullet-point PowerPoint is practically an industry standard at this point, but I don't like it.  As a visual display, I don't think it's a good way to communicate information, but more importantly, I think it's bad pedagogy.  It short-circuits some of the information processing that the students need to be doing on their own.  I don't want them going down some list of key ideas and ticking them off as I recite them--I want them to be fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, seeing the categories and connections and contexts.  The bullet-point teaching style always looks to me like a slide backwards towards rote learning and recitation, and that's not what we should be doing, certainly not at the college level, and certainly not at a school like Berkeley, where I can reasonably assume that my students have an educational background that's prepared them to do this kind of work.

You know, I'm too young to be a cranky old woman. The good news for my students is that this semester's class ("History of Science in the United States") covers a modern-enough time period that I'll have a lot more pictures available to me than I have in past semesters.  (Y'all have no -idea- how hard it is to find good illustrations of people, places, and equipment when you're dealing with, like, ancient Mesopotamia or the Kingdom of Kush.  Even in slightly more modern times, all of my portraits of Indian and Islamic mathematicians and astronomers last semester came off of postage stamps.) 

Comments

[Mary Anne Mohanraj]

Hmm...teaching comp, lit., and creative writing, I don't think I've ever gotten a comment that I should include more pictures. Which is odd, given that I generally don't include any, or use the blackboard hardly at all. (I do feel like I should, because I know that some percentage of the population are more visual learners than auditory learners, but I have to make a real effort to prep anything visual at all; it's so against my normal talk-talk-talk instincts). But in any case, it's weird that my students don't seem to care/notice and yours do...is there a specific question about the visual stuff on the evaluation?

[Jackie M.]

I think I disagree on the Power Point bullets/pedagogy thing.

Okay, so, Chris just got back from the annual meeting for the recipients of his current NSF fellowship--the responsibilities of which include an education/outreach component--and he was pretty excited by Bob Mathieu's science education talk. The most important thing to do in any lecture, according to Mathieu, is to start straight off by telling your students exactly what it is you want them to learn during the next hour, and how that fits into the larger picture of what you want them to learn for next test. Which means, if what you want is for them to put the pieces together themselves, then the absolute best thing for you to do is to tell them that at the beginning--not just that you want them to put pieces together for themselves, but what the pieces are, and how they fit together. Right when they sit down and pull out their notebooks/laptops.

And yeah, I suppose they'll all make lists of facts, and then you'll worry that you're spoiling your punchline... but Mathieu says don't worry. Most students have to hear things more than once to learn them, let alone put them into context... and now at least you've got them paying attention to the context. Otherwise, it's just a firehose of facts--and that is speaking from my own damn experience. As a student.

(The other thing Mathieu was harping on was making sure that you test for the thing you claim is most important, ie., if you claim critical thinking is more important than facts, don't give them multiple choice tests. Because students are focused on grades. And if you test facts, then clearly facts are the only things that really matter in the course.

Oh, oh! And then! Chris says Mathieu pulled out these little fill-in-the-bubble flow charts as examples of teaching/testing the bigger pictures. How the various concepts in, say, cosmology or star formation relate to each other. And, oh my god, I wish _I_ could take Mathieu's tests. Because I bet I'd learn stuff I never knew I never knew about astronomy... anyway. That sounds like exactly what you're trying to do with your courses, tying all these concepts together to make a bigger picture.)

[Susan Marie Groppi]

Those are great points! And it sounds like it was a great talk. I'm very careful when writing tests to make sure that I ask questions that relate directly to what I told them was important for them to learn, and I do make a point of telling them over and over again what those things are. (I commented a few times in lecture last semester that I'm not subtle about the course themes--if something seems repetitive, it's because it's important.)

I think there's a distinction (even if only a thin one) between telling them up-front what the teaching objective is and giving them a list of points to tick off during lecture, though. I'm not worried about building dramatic tension or anything--that's good theater but not always good teaching. To give a concrete example, though: last semester, when we had our set of lectures on Ptolemaic Alexandria, I started off by telling them that we were spending so much time on Alexandria because a few important course themes were all showcased in the history of Alexandrian science. I went through what those themes were (the impact of state support of science, the relationship between science and religion, and the benefits of blending multiple knowledge traditions) before we got into any details, and I checked back in with them at various points during the Alexandria lectures. At every point, the students knew (I hope!) what the structure was, what the content was, and what was expected of them.

What I didn't do was give them a pre-printed list of the major content points that would be coming up in the lectures. And, I don't know, maybe that would be of some benefit. I've had experience as a teaching assistant in classes that did that, and sometimes it seems to work okay. But sometimes it results in student laziness, a kind of disengagement from the course content, and that's what I'm trying to avoid.

[Susan Marie Groppi]

Oh, I forgot to answer Mary Anne's question! Sorry about that.

I think a lot of it comes down to expectation. The PowerPoint thing is very entrenched, especially in science classes, and I teach a lot of science majors. Every other class they take makes extensive use of PowerPoint, so it stands out for them when I don't. So if your students aren't taking classes where this happens, then their expectations are different.

But it's not all expectations. Especially in the survey class on the history of science, there's a lot of value to the visuals. I wouldn't dream of talking about anything geographical (trade routes, population migrations, or even regional influences) without using maps, and when I talk about individual people, I've found that the students have an easier time keeping the names straight if they've also seen a picture. (Even a grainy one from a Soviet-era postage stamp!) I don't know if the content you're using in your classes would benefit from visuals in the same way.

[Bill Preston]

I happened upon your blog through your recent comments on the Asimov's board...

I teach English to middle school and high school students; I'm with you about PowerPoint. I have only ever seen it used badly in presentations (Is there a good use for it?), students who prepare presentations with it *almost* invariably spend more time with design bells and whistles that with information, and my own style of presentation, like yours, is to use visuals in a supplemental or complementary way. I suppose if I had kids taking actual notes, I'd think differently.

Cheers.

[Marshall Perrin]

I'm coming to this conversation a little late, but just in case your still paying attention to these comments, it's worth pointing out that not all scientists are on the Powerpoint bandwagon, either. I can't call it a movement, but there's at least a school of thought that agrees completely with you about its potential to dumb down academic thinking. The unofficial ringleader of all this is Edward Tufte, an author, professor, and graphic design demagogue from Yale. I highly recommend all of his works, and in particular his "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" essay.

In my own talks, I try to use Powerpoint/Keynote primarily as slide projectors: presenting data and images, not text and bullet points. I'll show a figure taken from some paper, and that one figure will fill the whole slide as I talk about it, with no other explanatory text on screen. Or if I do put text on screen, it's usually backup explanatory material like citations and references, which I generally do not read aloud. There's nothing worse than waiting for someone to slowly read through bullet points you read in the first 5 seconds the slide was up... I don't always pull this off as well as I'd like - crappy slides are easier to make than good ones, and we're all pressed for time - but it's something to strive for, anyway.