In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, a research scientist at MIT describes a way to encourage class discussion in a Zoom class. The approach, derived from tech industry practice, is to post a shared document during class and then to lead a discussion of various parts of the document in a shared folder.

He felt that the usual awkward, fragmented “discussion” that can occur in a typical Zoom class is replaced by a dynamic exchange of insights. I think the text-based work we do would lend itself well to this strategy.

Yes, the Modern Language Association has a blog, “Behind the Style,” devoted to both well-known and obscure grammar and style practices. You may find material that you can use in a course you’re teaching or to answer questions in an office hour. The level is quite basic and would be suitable for first-year students.

Is the title of the blog a bemused acknowledgement that worrying about “the rules” is unfashionable? Perhaps another page explaining why grammar is relevant to today’s writing, “Helping Students Use Grammar to Support Their Writing Goals,” is an answer.

We’re now a part of a growing community of professors exiled to our homes, collectively reimagining course delivery and assessment. Hitesh Doshi recently commented on our “eerie silence” about the pedagogical and logistical challenges that he knows we’re all thinking about. The subject also came up in a recent New York Times article: what will we do to serve students who don’t have ready access to functioning technology; what are we implying about the value of classroom teaching in our acceptance of stopgap virtual learning?

As always I’m conflicted. I’m actually looking forward to having students in one course devise personalized videos to replace classroom presentations, but I also worry about anyone who will be forced to scramble to find the means to produce them. Then there are the lost opportunities that we take for granted in the classroom: the project groups that ask important questions because something we said prompts a realization that a requirement was misunderstood.

Doubtless this odd episode will be fodder for research, but that knowledge does little to alleviate anxiety about the decisions we need to make now.

As many of you know, I can get quite stubborn about the value of comprehensive feedback on student writing. I learned effective writing strategies as a student through tough, detailed commentary on my expression, then took the same approach when evaluating student essays and reports in courses I taught over many years. It always seemed common sense that this kind of feedback helps students learn not just how to avoid specific mistakes but to become alert and careful editors of their own work over time.

Admittedly, with large enrollments, this approach can be crippling, particularly with multiple large classes and quick turn-around goals. Experienced writing instructors tackling this problem in a Chronicle of Higher Education Forum (“Freshman Composition/Writing Courses: Class Sizes Up and Up? What to do?”) volunteered tolerable enrollment caps of up to 24 per section. The Association of Departments of English (ADE) supports even lower enrollments of “no more than” 20. ADE’s statement of policy and Alice Horning’s “The Definitive Article on Class Size,” explain exactly why small class sizes should be protected for writing-intensive courses.

Needless to say, instructors don’t have the power to set class-size limits. This year, some class enrollment caps have been set 30% higher than last year’s, and it’s up to us to find a way to maintain pedagogical standards when faced with mountains of marking. One strategy could be to give individualized feedback on the first assignment and then follow-up in-class exercises or mini lectures on common errors throughout the semester. Comments on the rest of the assignments would be limited to summaries of strengths and areas for improvement. Such summaries can’t fully replace inserted commentary, but they can encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning, and so instill a reflex that presumably is at the core of higher education.

You can find articles on how to mark efficiently elsewhere on this blog, but this year’s class sizes require some pragmatic cost-benefit analysis that we haven’t been faced with in the past quite as much. A Procom colleague, Susan Cody, who has served on teaching committees at Ryerson, drew my attention to an article on efficient grading methods that takes into account students’ possible responses to correction. You may also want to plough through the comments on the linked Chronicle forum for more tips and reflections, expressed with a little more passion than I’ve indulged in here.

This online pamphlet may come a bit late for those of you who have already carefully planned your first day of class, but if you’re up for a bit of experimentation still, you may find the ideas described here worth considering.  You may also end up skipping over advice that is second nature already.

When in the academic year is it an opportune time to bring up precarious employment in academe? It occurred to me that the answer is never.  In the spring we’re worried about getting rehired and don’t want to think about the worst-case scenario.  In the summer we’re hoping to catch our breath long enough to conduct research, reduce our teaching load or take a much-needed break.  In the fall, we need morale to focus on our students.  Just before the scheduled breaks, we definitely don’t want to think about the challenges of our position, so my apologies in advance for raising this issue now.

However, I’ve come across some useful information about the sessional instructor juggling act that you might find interesting now that your marking is (temporarily) behind you. The first is the teaching newsletter, Profession, produced by the MLA. Like me in a previous post, the editors thought of Sisyphus when choosing their featured image. The link is for this fall’s special issue, but you’ll find many other well-written articles about university teaching, specifically in the field of language and literature, in past issues.

The other resource is an article in Quill & Quire on a research project by an undergraduate student at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver that documents the punishing workload of contingent professors.  Though the project focuses primarily on the difficult trade-offs of instructors in the creative industries, much of the discussion applies to all disciplines.

Both resources explore the unfortunate compromises inherent in our roles.  Still, you’ll find hope alongside the angst.

SortOfNatural

James Lang, a veteran professor writing for ChronicleVitae has some great advice for making classes less time-consuming to organize.  He suggests lots of engaging, pedagogically valuable strategies for in-class assignments that prompt student self-efficacy and allow for flexible, ad-hoc coverage of the course material.

Though as a School we routinely use in-class exercises as teaching tools, we don’t always see them as moments when students internalize their own responsibility for learning.  As we brace ourselves for the fall, it’s not a bad idea to remember that we can relax a bit and trust the learning will happen if we just create the right conditions.

A post in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter summarizes a teaching conference session that demonstrated the power of the “Naive Task,” an exercise assigned, often at the beginning of a class, before any principles, theories or facts have been covered.  The reasoning is that students will pay more attention to what the professor has to say about the subject if they’ve already tried to puzzle out an answer with their peers.  You can read the account here: The Power of the ‘Naïve-Task’

You may find this paper on team-based learning, published in the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, useful for planning this kind of activity.

An experiential exercise in my Interpersonal Communication Class on the ideal problem-solving group size, which is a kind of naive task, does engage students on more than one level.  I plan to try this approach in other classes this fall.  If you already throw students in at the deep end, and have observed the results, please share your experience!