Suppose you are required to teach a full course’s worth of content in a course that meets for only half of the time that a full course normally meets, said meetings coming just once a week (two hours forty minutes per meeting) for eight weeks.
Suppose your subject matter is of the sort that requires the students to work through a lot of examples, from simple to more complex, in order to master each topic. So in other words, more like a math class than a lit class.
Suppose you have been strongly encouraged not to have any homework due on any day other than a class meeting day.
Suppose one of the meeting days has been taken away due to a holiday.
Fill in the details however you like. How would you handle a situation like this?
I’m in sort of the same situation. I teach a course that used to be a 4 credit (4 contact hours per week) that has been turned into a 2 credit course due to curriculum revision. Here’s what I’d suggest:
Be honest with students about what you believe is required to master the subject matter. If that’s more than you can grade them on, so be it. But if there’s a way to make more practice optional by giving out practice questions or whatever I’d so it.
Can you create some peer-moderated or small-group activities that they can use as practice and peer-feedback while you grade the homework at the beginning of the class that it’s due, so that the graded homework can be distributed after the activity and used as a jumping-off point?
Also, consider using a Course Management System (Blackboard, WebCT, D2L) to provide feedback on homework in between classes, so students come prepared with your feedback about their weaknesses and where they need to focus.
Assuming that your job is not secure enough to ignore these concerns, I’d baffle the students with extra credit. No homework is due on days the class doesn’t meet, but they’ll get extra credit if they do anyway. You can make the extra credit worth so little that it doesn’t dramatically affect their final grade, or you can grade as if it isn’t really extra, but the phrase has a magical effect on students.
I’m making certain assumptions here: for whatever reason, the department is fearful of students who don’t have a good time in the short term, and is unconcerned about their learning in the long term.
Really, though, this situation should not arise in a reputable educational institution. If you’re qualified to teach the class, you’re qualified to design it.
In most classes homework is turned in on class days.
As far as the actual class material you might want to use the scheduled class time for lecture and schedule non-required recitation session(s) for helping the students work thru the example problems. You can’t require the students to attend but many will because it’s in their best interest. This is twice as much work for you but it would benefit the students. It’s your call.
FWIW I think this type of situation is unfair to both you and your students. I personally would refuse to teach a class under those circumstances unless I really, really needed the money.
BTW how is this course accredited and how many credit hours is it worth? We are required to have something like 45 sessions @ 50 minutes each for a 3 credit hour course.
In my experience, this sort of accelerated course is often offered to older, more mature and motivated students, who can be expected to take more responsibility for their own education and do more independent work outside of the regular class meetings. At least, that’s the theory; sometimes it works that way in practice, other times you get a watered-down version of the course that doesn’t cover nearly as much material.
Assuming you’re trying to have your course be the former rather than the latter, you have to make very efficient use of class time, and you have to give substantial, worthwhile assignments for them to do outside of class. Have them make good use of the textbook and/or supplemental sources. Have them work lots of problems, at least some of which they have the answers to so that they can check to see if they’re doing them correctly. Insist that they come to class prepared. All this will require you to be organized and clear in your expectations.
Like sinjin, I don’t think this is anything out of the ordinary. Just because the homework is due on a class meeting day doesn’t mean it should all be done on that day; you can have them turn in a whole week’s worth of work. (And not everything that you tell them to do need be something they hand in.) If you have some sort of online or computerized practice or quiz facility available to you, where they can get immediate feedback, that might help.
If possible, I’d try to get that class meeting rescheduled. Depending on how the course is accredited, there may be a minimum required number of contact hours for a class to count. If I couldn’t do that, I’d assign extra work for the extra week, and I’d arrange to be available throughout that time, via email or phone, if the students had problems with the work.
You know, while you are qualified to design it, for core type courses and prerequisites, you have to standardize them a bit. It’s not a reflection on the teaching staff, it’s about what you need to be able to rely on to continue with future coursework.
I like the idea of giving them a packet of work that maybe has some “think beyond” type problems that stretch what they can do, if that’s possible in your framework. Sort of as a way of doing more with analytical thinking – like when my first year h.s teacher gave the basic physics kids an A.P packet.
I’m not a professional teacher but if I want someone to truly learn something I hand out my notes to the student and teach off that. By cutting out the note taking time it is easier to focus on the key points.
Using math as an example, half the battle is teaching how to translate a problem into a math formula. ex: to find out the “something per something” replace the word “per” with a "divider sign. Cost per lb is now translated to Cost / lb… If that is passed out in note form then you explain it and let the student work through other examples that they make up such as miles per gallon, cost per mile etc…
Thanks for the responses. Some helpful ideas here!
Some comments and clarifications:
Each week I give them a fairly large exercise packet, and I encourage them copiously and emphatically to email me during the week to tell me what kinds of answers their getting, what problems they’re finding difficult, etc, so that I can get them some feedback. But, so far almost none of them are taking advantage of this.
I should have mentioned this in the OP. Part of the problem is motivating the students not just to “do the work” (they do it) but to interact with me outside the classroom. Since we’ve got so little classtime, I really need email- or face-time with them in order to be able to provide meaningful feedback to them. But what ends up happening is, they do all the work over the week, they never contact me about it, they make a lot of crucial mistakes, and so they’re unprepared for the quiz over the material that comes at the next class session.
I’ll put some thought into something like this. They can do a sort of preview exercise together while I look over what they’ve done for the week.
The big problem, though, is that in order to procede at the accelerated pace the class is supposed to be moving at, evaluation of and feedback concerning homework really needs to happen somehow between sessions. I need to be able to quiz them one meeting about the stuff introduced in the previous meeting. Otherwise, there’s no way to fit an entire course’s worth of material into the course.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that I think it would be bad to give them a quiz right after I’ve reviewed the material with them, i.e., in the same class session. Even if I could fit such review into the alloted time, I don’t think it’s a good idea to quiz right after review. That doesn’t say anything about long-term recall.
I’ve never been a fan of “participation grades” but maybe I should do something like what you suggest, not for getting them to do the work (because, as I said, they do indeed do it) but rather, for getting them to show it to me during the week. Extra credit for doing the work early and emailing it to me…
Hmm…
Not sure what this means. To clarify, I do design the course. It’s just that there are scheduling restrictions that apply to every course taught during the Summer semester. That’s pretty normal at Universities in the US in my experience.
Regarding my having been “strongly encouraged” not to have homework due at times other than during class meetings, I didn’t mean to imply that the school told me not to. (I haven’t even brought it up with them.) Rather, the “strong encouragement” came from the genuine fear expressed by the students when I suggested the idea. It wasn’t a case of whining about too much work. These are busy, often financially troubled adults with one or more full time jobs etc. They were genuinely panic stricken at the idea that I might change the schedule of due dates so radically. It’s a bit of a “you had to be there” thing, but I was convinced that if I made things due in the middle of the week, after these guys had arranged their work week around the class as it was originally structured, I’d be causing serious problems of a type that should be avoided if possible.
That said, I’m still tempted to make things due in the middle of the week, if that’s what it takes to make this course the complete course that it’s supposed to be.
(By the way, last night I found out that a few years ago when they went to this “meet once a week for only half the time” Summer Schedule, the math department got a special dispensation to meet twice a week for the full forty hours. The math department’s arguments were a lot like the ones I would make. I don’t teach math, I teach logic–but logic’s a lot like math pedagogically speaking. Students need to work through a lot of examples and get ample feedback on them before it is fair to quiz them on the concepts. Meeting more than once a week for an eight week course is probably crucial for this. So, assuming I’m still around next Summer, I may see what I can do about approaching TPTB for a dispensation for Logic courses much like that which was given to the Math courses.)
That’s the theory, and I designed the course with these assumptions in mind. And these students do take responsibility for their education. They do work hard. But it’s difficult for them to work “independently” on a topic like this, if “independently” means “sans instructor feedback”. And that’s the big problem–getting feedback to them before it’s too late. What I do is make myself emphatically available for tutoring via email and in person, and I give them answers to a lot of the exercises to compare their own answers to (along with brief explanations). But “answers in the back of the book” doesn’t really substitute for feedback tailored to an individual, and for whatever reason, I’ve not had a lot of them coming to me to discuss the problems. I like the extra credit idea mentioned above–I think I’ll give it a go.
I didn’t mean to imply it was out of the ordinary.
In fact, I have them do two weeks worth of work between each class session. (It’s an eight meeting course that’s supposed to cover a full semester’s worth of material, hence each meeting is “worth” two weeks so to speak.)
I hear tell the school is working on setting something like this up, and I definitely plan to use it when it happens.
Can’t you post solutions for that? Take no lates and post solutions right after class. And pick one or two of the hardest problems and do them on the board at the start of class, while it’s still fresh in their mind. Even if they don’t understand the solution entirely, it forces them to think about it. And the very curious will go home and look at the solutions. Since they were most likely working on the same problems within the last 24 hours.
Well I don’t know your class, but I would think that if the solutions were well written then they should be able to work through them independently. “answers in the back of the book” are usually not that in depth.
The other thing I might add is make the class front heavy. Give lots of work at the beginning so students work the class into their schedule, and the ones who can’t manage the class will know right away.
And actually one more thing – do you use mailing lists? I did an MS where all classes met once a week and every one used mailing lists. You have to encourage students to use it, and use it yourself, but it’s a great way to keep the conversation going during the week while people are doing the rest of their real-life stuff.
Sort of good news: With some trepidation, I mentioned to a person with some say over scheduling the fact that I though Logic courses should be meeting for twice as long in the classroom than they are in the Summer. I was expecting hemming and hawing and expressions of administrative difficulty. Instead, the reply was a straightforward affirmation that next Summer, the class will be scheduled however I think it should be scheduled. So all right!
I think that’s the PERFECT time to get them to practice what you’ve just reviewed. Call it a practice exercise rather than a quiz - something to get them to apply the material that they just learned. Make it low stakes, and they’ll be able to try out the new concepts in a less-threatening setting than a “quiz” or “test.”
Well yes, we do lots of practice exercises in class. (Of course!) By “quiz” I mean an assignment I use to assess whether (and how well) they’ve ultimately learned the material. (For me, in-class exercises are mostly there to help the students practice and self-assess and get feedback. Quizzes are mostly there for me to assess their mastery with some finality.)
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I would go back to my original suggestion of having them do a practice review/exercise at the beginning of class while you grade the homework, then do a quiz, then review what the homework grades and quiz grades state they’re still missing before you move to the next concept.
Back when I was in university (MANY years ago) we had to do a load of reading before each class, and be prepared to discuss our readings during class time. And tests, of course, referred to the work we’d done on our own time.
I do recall a class member trying to grill us as we waited in the hall for someone to come unlock the classroom door. He had more important things to do than the assigned prep work. We all learned that some things just cannot be adequately condensed into ten minutes.
There were a couple of papers / assignments, also, worth mega marks. The papers, I fuzzily recall, were all subtitled, ‘Prove you did the prep work and can apply it meaningfully at least this one time’. I don’t remember ever hearing how Precis-Boy did
on the course.
As mentioned above, a course management program like Blackboard or WEbCT is very useful in this type of situation. You can make the course an informal hybrid (online/in class) course. They have great tools for quizzes, graded or not. And you can put in automatic feedback to each question or even each answer. You can also make a “Links” page to helpful study sites.
Also, I have used the discussion board section quite successfully. One way is to make posting in the discussion board part of the grade. For example, post one question/answer/thought per week for 5% of your grade. Another way is for you to post practice questions, but give no comments or solutions until someone in the class attempts an answer. You can also set “online office hours” and use the chat function. I haven’t tried that, but I have a friend who says it worked well.
Finally, I wouldn’t worry too much about the students’ response to mid-week homework. They are always going to say no to that. Just make it as easy for them to turn in as possible, i.e.- email or Blackboard/WebCT. I think midweek homework is actually a really good idea here. Otherwise, they will cram on Friday for the Saturday class, then do nothing until the next Friday. That will not work on an accelerated schedule. I also teach at a commuter school and I have found that the real hurdle is getting to campus. The more they can do off campus, the better.
