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>>Fernando Naveda: So let me tell you a little bit about Jeff.
I got his short bio right here.
All the yellow is what I was going to tell you.
What is not highlighted these are words I
can't pronounce. It's like reading the back of a Twinkee
Wonder. You know that together they are good, they make this
thing last for a 100 years underground,
but uh anyway he is actually a geologist who
graduated from Stanford University, and then went to
teach at Colorado College ever since. He's been on the
block plan for 30 years I guess, uh, so um he's a
very experienced uh teacher of what we call here, "intensive
courses," he does that for a living. And while somebody
here and I went to uh visit with him in Colorado we discovered
something very peculiar about the place. Everybody talks about
the block plan. They have official Colorado public watches
that have blocks in them they have t-shirts that have blocks
in them. And when you ask somebody for the time of they
day they tell you the time of block it is. They don't tell you
the actual time. So you will hear him talk about blocks at
some point in time or many times if he keeps on bringing it up in
the conversation so we can check the term.
OK. But uh we are not planning to implement
blocks here. And we are only planning to get his uh
opinions and ideas and see how we can make these work. Um, he
is right now the associate Dean for uh, Dean for Faculty. He has
many responsibilites, Colorado College has a very flat
structure. So he oversees general education,
he oversees study abroad, he oversees all kinds of things
and chairs many committees and he can tell you a little bit
more about that.
>>Jeff Noblett: Thank you I'm escaping all of them we're
not talking about it. [laughing] Thank you for bringing me here.
>>Naveda: He's also in charge of the first year experiance and he
has taught interesting courses in Eco-Feminism, Ethno-Geology,
Earth Systems and what have you. He has also taught multi-
disciplinary courses as well, block courses if you will, so
uh I'm going to leave you with Jeff he's a great guy he's open
to questions. He wanted to run this like a class. In fact he
didn't want these overheads we had to tell him that RIT people
like overheads so anyway. [Clapping]
>>Noblett: In case you haven't ever met a geologist before, you
know we don't wear these so
I really appreciate the invitation to come and talk with
you. Cause I haven't had a chance in those 33 years
of Colorado College to put together how the blocks
work. And it's been fun this last month trying to come
up with a reasonable talk and I'm going to do this, it's
the worst possible etiquette:
if you walk out of here with 1
lesson it's do not lecture in the intersession from day 1 to
day 15. Don't. but I'm going to do that for the next 50 minutes,
as quickly as I possibly can and
see what questions you may have. One of the beauties of
working the block plan of course is I don't know if I'm an
excellent speaker but I do know I can talk for 3 hours really
quickly. So we'll see how that turns out.
>> The key message today is one of pedagogical innovation.
You have the opportunity to create a class distinct
for many youth taught in semesters or quarters
to reconceive your goals, that's the key word,
based on the special focus
the students will have on your class alone.
And consider what techniques will allow you
to create a student learning experience they won't forget.
Here's the heart of the message.
It is really important to start from scratch,
reconceive your class rather than try
to move you semester notes into
or quarter notes into three weeks.
If you've got nothing else there it is.
We'll start out briefly by reviewing the history,
motivations, aspirations, the people like the Dean
of Colorado College had for creating this kind
of an intensive course that we use.
And you can judge if your rationales were similar.
And then the second part of the talk we'd like to describe some
of the structural aspects that we've used
that seemed to work well in intensive courses
that should lead you to think
about teaching pedagogies you currently use
that can be easily adapted.
So really quick overview.
CC didn't invent the blocks or intensive courses
but in the words of a person I'm going
to quote a great deal this morning,
our former Dean Glenn Brooks
who was a young political science professor
in the late 1960s and became the architect of the block plan.
Quote, we chose in 1970 not to change the curriculum directly
but rather to alter the structure within which teaching
and learning occur and to let faculty decide according
to their own lives what curricular changes would make
sense within this new structure.
Now we know that intersession type formats were used
in World War II for language training.
Hiram College tried a block like system
in the late '40s early '50s.
Apparently and I have this only second hand, it fell apart
because facility had issues over contact hours that didn't appear
to be equitable to them.
The 1960s, great time of protest, questioning,
rethinking old norms, intriguingly
as riots were tearing other universities apart,
Colorado College faculty and students came together
around the question of how to give more attention
to the students in a liberal arts setting.
Today other schools using the system include Cornell College,
University of Montana Western, Tusculum College,
Clark University in Canada, numerous schools
with J-terms, M-terms, many business schools
and oddly enough it's becoming more present
in our high schools these days.
Our plan is a little bit different
from what you're conceiving in detail.
Our calendar's divided into eight three
and a half week modules or blocks during each
of which a student takes
and a faculty member teaches one course.
We now teach six as our required load.
Blocks run, and this is where I will get confused with you
and your block plan because I understand you're starting
at an odd day in the middle of a week
for this first intersession, ours start always at 9:00 a.m.
on a Monday and then end always at noon on a Wednesday.
In between that, there's four and a half days of block break
where the students are free to do as they please.
That's also an important concept in here.
And then we have a half block of nine days
because the 18 day block was no sufficient.
The nine days takes place in the second semester early
in January much like your intersession.
And I do want to come back to that
because it tells you something you will be able to do
with your intersession courses.
There are variations on this theme.
Some departments have different needs
so we've developed extended format courses
for fractional credit.
It would help students if their program needed more duration.
These might include dance technique, language courses,
senior thesis seminars for seniors,
joint faculty student research projects like that.
But to return to Glenn Brooks words,
faculty sought a curriculum that was not rigid or tightly defined
but built on discover, experimentation,
choice and individual coherence.
Key factors in the arguments were the eliminations
of cross-pressures or time scaling.
For instance, heaven forbid, a student spending an evening
in a chemistry lab rather
than reading their English novel carefully.
Better time management, allowing individual classes
to establish their own needs and organize a day
as best suited each class.
And for students to learn to manage their time for study,
labs and leisure activities responsibly.
Classes meeting in the best possible setting even
if that involved extended field trips or travel
and the improved social personal connections among students
engaged in these small classes.
For Dean Brooks the heart
of the block plan is the intense block course
which provides latitude to teachers and students
to explore together the most effective ways
to learn the subject at hand.
No bells abbreviate a class meeting, classes tend
to meet formally at least five days a week for about two
and half to three hours a day but the time
and format very widely even within a course.
His key message I believe was that one soon discovers
that lecturing three hours a day, all block,
violates the spirit of the block plan.
But mixtures of informal lecture and discussion groups, labs,
films, debates, tutorials and a rich menu
of field work away from campus abound.
The faculty member acquires an exciting opportunity
and obligation to find the best way to accomplish the task.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the block plan is
to challenge it repeatedly presents
to decide just what a course should be.
Dean Brooks continues with aspects of the early system.
Once adopted, so this may sound familiar,
a thorough reexamination of teaching styles
and classroom procedures was required.
Fundamental changes were made by the faculty and its use of time
in classes, in preparation for classes, in student advising
and in scholarly endeavors.
The plan fostered changes in classroom pedagogies,
flexibility in curricular thinking
and interdisciplinary engagement, classes were limited
to 25 students and most were smaller.
Students were actively involved in teaching,
learning and research.
Discussion classes became the norm ranging from free
and open student initiated classes
to more structured guided seminars.
Preparation and planning for class were recognized
and emphasized as the key to the full use of the block,
couldn't emphasize that one more.
Faculty reported that teaching and the close work
with students was more taxing than the semester system
but the advantages to teaching a single course rather
than juggling three per semester were significant.
Students lauded the approach although obviously they
were somewhat self-selected.
The overall effect of no conflicts with other classes,
more conferences between students and faculty
and a less hurried and structured day fits well
with the ideas that reflection
and contemplation are the ultimate activities
of a liberal education.
It permits faculty to work with students
in more varied ways unlimited by the 50 minute period,
unencumbered by too large classes and assured
of the possibility of each student's full attention.
In Dean Brooks words, those early days were festive,
creative and indeed a little scary.
We had a very clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish
but were not at all sure how best it could be,
does that sound familiar?
We wanted to do a better job of traditional liberal education
by gaining control over the time and place of education
by concentrating our energies more effectively
and by establishing an intimate and close relationship
between students and professors.
But we simply had to use our good judgment and a lot
of guesswork about how to teach and learn under the new plan.
One note, CC avoided the problem Hiram College had
by adopting an approach that one class receives one credit
regardless of lab, field trips, study abroad
with weekend classes, etc. It is a faculty choice to hold lab
or put in the extra hours for field work.
Interestingly an survey that our faculty took should
that the total work time
across all the divisions including class prep
and grading came out exactly equal.
One early example of change
in this new system comes from a geology class.
Professor Lewis took his students out into the field
on day one and never went back to the classroom.
First day the students were told to look at the rocks
in the field and see if they could identify different
minerals which called M1 and M2, different rocks
that they were sitting in called R1 and R2.
The next day they'd go to a new outcrop, is it the same
as R1 or is this different?
Do we need an R3?
And he kept this going for the entire block until by the end
of the block they had created their own geological structure
exactly the way the first geologist had had
to do the work.
So it was an awesome learning experience.
There was one young lady in the class, Marcia McNutt,
some of you may have heard the name,
she was the first woman director
of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago
and was just appointed the Chief Editor of Science
and its family of journals.
She was in that class.
She had 1600 SATs, 4.0 gpa in high school in the Boston area,
had her pick of schools probably including RIT
who would have loved to have her come and asked
on public television when she was interviewed as one
of the key women scientists
in the country why she went to Colorado College.
We're all sitting there with baited breath.
Block plan, innovative teaching.
Her answer was because of the block breaks
when she could go skiing.
Those early days adapting the block plan was a learning
experience for many aspects.
Courses that needed the repetition or time
such as the languages
and science experiments developed these extended formats
meeting once a week for an hour or so.
And we all agreed that we would end courses by 3:00 p.m.
in the afternoon so that students could take these
extended courses or participate in athletics
or other leisure programs.
Field trip budgets, now we don't have the Provost here,
this is what you need to let him know you need.
We have a fleet of two Greyhound busses with drivers,
two 28 passenger vehicles, a dozen 12 passenger vans,
several 7 passenger SUVs, our own mechanic shop
with its engineers that turns out to be much cheaper to run
that then to rent the vehicles all the time.
I don't know what'll cost you at RIT depending
on how often you use such vehicles
but please do investigate that year to year and see
which way works better.
It's an ongoing task, this must be the part that fascinates you,
to think about reorganizing classes like Calc 1 to 3.
This afternoon in the workshop I'll be sharing the syllabi we
use for Calc 1 and Calc 2 so you can get a feel
for what those look like in a short system.
But even geology classes and the question is always,
what do you do first?
So should I go and talk about how rocks fold and break first
and then take students out into the field
where they can see examples?
Or should I go first into the field
and have them suddenly discover that the pattern
of the rocks was broken and this is a fault
and then have the stellar summation lecture
of what was going on ready for them?
Or if you're an art class.
Do you show the Rembrandt painting first
and say analyze it and walk away for an hour?
Or do you start out by telling them how to analyze Rembrandt
and then show the painting
and have a much more focused discussion?
The answer from Colorado College is, it depends, it's a chicken
and the egg thing, we don't know.
Important places that do matter.
Library or IT help desks, excuse me, I should have mentioned
that I have horrible allergies and even with a few pills.
It's way better here than it is sleeping
with the three cats I left at home but it's still there.
The patterns of usage are very different.
We had a firm that was us to conceive a new library
and they did a study and discovered
that our students use the library starting
at the beginning of the block on day one and they peak the end
of each block and repeat this four times in a semester.
They compare that with semester usage which started
out down here, had a little peak near mid-terms
and then skyrocketed at the end.
With student usage and the need for staffing
in the library was much higher than in the semester system.
Same thing is true of the help desk.
Day one of the class students need to be
in making sure their programs are loaded right,
they've got the right technology, it's all set
up because they can't wait and do it on day two or day three.
So your folks in IT need to be ready to roll with this.
Basically, students expect immediate response
since waiting overnight for help is not an option,
that would be the key message.
Our international programs office is a wonderful center
for communication with partners abroad
and with parents tracking students and faculty abroad,
keeping up with Visa requirements,
establishing good polices for faculty,
your responsibilities while abroad,
student health forms, behavior issues.
We'll talk a lot more about that on Friday morning.
Our center really does provide significant preparation
and support but it won't serve as a travel agency.
I don't know what you all can expect here but we'll see.
The Students Success Centers.
We have writing, reading and quantitative centers,
also have the same different pattern
if that makes sense, not an oxymoron.
Support is needed the first afternoon of the first day.
Students will be there.
And they'll be there every night for the rest of the block.
Sunday's are especially heavy.
So making sure you've got staffing to help will be good.
Disability services.
Same support that you would provide for qualifying students
in the semester applies to your intersession,
whether it's more time to take exams, using smart pens
in classes, converting text to audio format.
The key here looking at your schedule is does text need to be
in the hands of the disability services
who convert them a month ahead, maybe by Thanksgiving?
Because if you hand them to somebody on day one
and say please convert this
and it's ready a week later, it's too late.
Considering alternative projects if you plan a field trip.
So if you were a geologist taking them out on a hike,
what is the student who's
in the wheelchair going to be able to do?
Facilities and labs.
If you're using any of these, if you had a power outage
or a plumbing issue in the middle of a lab,
maybe in the semester you've got time to look around
and get it fixed a bit, you don't have the time on this.
All of our major instruments have service contracts
to provide for same day service,
next day at the worst and rapid response.
We can replace two of them on the spot
out of an emergency fund, but it's really important
for faculty to know how to jury-rig
to keep the labs running.
Bottom line on all of this is that faculty needs to know
and have good working relationships with all the staff
who supports your work, including a specific librarian,
IT troubleshooters and facilities people
who can keep your labs running.
Plan ahead and give people time to prepare for the faster pace.
I want to turn then, the second part of this talk to some
of the aspects of teaching
that doesn't seem to work in this plan.
Structural aspects.
Just by having an intersession course, some things will change.
And I've divided these into, excuse me I think I'm going
to get a little water for a moment,
oh I've been told you all don't have plastic bottles.
Make sure you understand I've carried this bottle
for about three weeks, this is hotel water, going to back empty
through airplane security and be filled up inside.
I do like the attitude.
It works well.
Starting with some of the positive aspects.
The classroom belongs to one course all day.
I assume something similar is going to operate here.
But that means that activities can continue
in the afternoon and the evening.
You can leave materials in the classroom, you're not going
to erase your board for the next person coming in.
In fact if you're lucky the custodians won't erase your
board so that information is there
in the evening for students.
We have to write save next to key pieces on our boards.
Students will come back to the classroom often
as the best place to study.
So whether it's a small discussion group
or a student's just looking for a quieter place to study
than their rooms, knowing the classroom is available.
The block promotes close relationships between faculty
and students in and out of the classroom.
There's an expectation that faculty will pay attention
to individual student learning needs, even if you're not trying
to teach five different ways at the same time,
but through interactive instruction
and class activities students will work together
and build more cohesion that is found in a traditional class.
It's common for us to have a class
over for either a class breakfast or dinner near the end
of the intersession if you will.
Watch this one.
Students know that you have no other classes to prepare,
no other students to teach
and they will ignore your scholarship,
service and family life.
So they believe you're available 24/7 texting at 3:00 a.m.
to solve their problems.
Let them know your boundaries.
I used to tell students when my daughter was about eight and had
to go to school the next morning that anybody
who woke my daughter up at night, failed the course.
And the next question was always what time does she go to bed?
The intensive teaching
and immersion programs may also influence you
to incorporate more interaction, discussion
and other constructive teaching methods and provide
for more continuity of discussion inside
and outside the classroom.
You might suggest topics to students to create
such continuity and either let the students self-organize
or create little groups to talk over dinner or coffee.
Flexible scheduling.
You can change the type of instruction you're using
on the fly in response to student difficulties.
I'm going to use one example of extreme.
This also comes from geology.
It did not involve me, thank heavens.
But the students noted on a particular Thursday
that there were free ski lift tickets at Copper Mountain
in Colorado and they came to the professor
and said could we cancel class today
if we were to meet on Saturday?
In the block plan you can do that.
They then asked the professor to drive a van that was
at geology expense to go skiing, which he did.
Multi-day field trips of various lengths.
Every department on our campus has a field trip budget
that uses day trips, community based learning ideas,
lectures up at CU Boulder or going to museums in Denver
or interacting with local industry.
Off campus courses, extensive field trips are also encouraged
because students can leave the campus
without disrupting concurrent responsibilities whether it's
work or athletics though, you might want to pay attentions
that do interfere even if they're just in the one class.
Advice would be to be sure that you have clear policies
on everything imaginable from whether personal vehicles
on college trips are covered by college insurance,
they're not at CC, so you can get badly sued
if there's an accident.
Will you leave as a group from a point on campus
or will you just meet at a destination?
What alcohol and drug polices, is you're out overnight.
Or are you going to make a trip completely dry regardless
of individual's ages or let local laws apply.
Who do you call for and what type of emergency?
What are your faculty responsibilities?
You want to know these things before you delve
into the field trips.
The block type system allows you
to attract distinguished professionals and experts
in a field who could spend time with your class
that they could not have spent with a semester.
A short course might accommodate them for the three weeks
and they might immensely enrich the curriculum.
A variation, you might all think about this on the east coast,
is coming up with someone you think is interesting whether
it's a religious leader, business CEO or diplomat
from the UN who could come and be with your class
for a whole day or several days.
One thing parent notice when they visit the campus is
that there are no clocks in our classrooms.
No bells ringing to signal the end of the day.
No time stealing from other classes.
Make use of these during an intersession.
It also seems to promote team teaching
and interdisciplinary teaching.
Interdisciplinary courses are just easier to create
when you don't have to worry out each other's semester system.
Although I would caution you, our faculty are very gung ho
about this and both faculty knowing they have all day,
tend to teach their entire classes, it's not team teaching,
two classes stuffed at once into six hours a day, don't do that.
There's no cramming for a week of examines
on your students part.
Just one exam at a time.
Much simpler for them.
And at one point that Fernando was asking
about that I would love to make is
that combining our half block, the nine day session,
with a class in block five right after that
or with a semester class extended has worked extremely
well for us.
So blending your intersession course
with a semester course should be just a fabulous thing
to consider.
So for instance our biology classes use the half block
to teach field ecology principals and then they travel
to either Belize or Patagonia in block five
where apparently that's the only place
where plants exist on the planet.
Chemistry combined a semester long extended course
on the science of AIDS with a service learning trip
to Tanzania during that half block.
Religion had a half block course
on religious experiences followed
with a semester long practicum.
So combining these two might create some opportunities
that you would not otherwise be able
to share with your students.
You may have noticed I'm enthusiastic
about these short intensive courses.
There are some problems.
Some of the negative aspects and the one
that I could not emphasize enough is it's exhausting.
When you start looking at your contact hours
or minimum really is three hours daily for the 18 days
with scattered afternoon work sessions going on.
So about 60 hours for what we call four semester hours credit.
But if you're teaching a lab course from 9:00 to 3:00 or 9:00
to 5:00, most if not all days a week, that's 108 contact hours
for that one class which translates
to 30 faculty contact hours a week.
If you're running a field class, 8:00 to 5:00 all day plus
on duty 24/7, it gets even higher.
So watching the exhaustion for your students and for yourself.
Monitor and respond with daily changes is essential.
Remember you can't procrastinate your grading,
you can't come to class unprepared.
If a class goes bad, you've got no time to recover so you need
to pay close attention to your student learning abilities
and the particulars of that class.
What are you going to do in case of illness or absence?
Typically we allow two days of illness in an 18 day block
after which we'll need a good excuse.
But could you help a student make
up missing work virtually now while they're sitting
in their bed hacking the flu or bird flu
or whatever they might have had?
Are there alternative assignments you might be able
to give them if they're really ill?
Or worst of all, how about athletes
who are leaving campus Friday morning for a game.
I've heard there's another Tiger hockey team
out here somewhere that's pretty decent.
Some faculty worry that they need even more time
for the reflection analysis of what they're studying which is
where the afternoon sessions often come in.
And the big issue, for which we don't have an answer,
depth versus breadth and the role
of experiential aspects in a course.
It really is difficult to cover the same material
that you would have in a semester or even a quarter
if you replace some of your lecture moments
with these experiential moments, trips, whatever you are doing.
So students might not be asked to read as much material
as in other systems, how do you feel about the trade off?
Now that's your personal decision.
Courses at CC in history for example have titles like Europe
from 1789 to 1848, I still haven't figured out 1848,
I was too much Americanized.
I know what it is in geology but Europe?
Or from 1848 to 1914.
Define the manageable chunk for what you want to cover
within your intersession course.
There are administrators in here.
You'll discover that the shorter intersession courses are going
to have some cost increases in everything from registration
to recordkeeping, course scheduling, student advising.
Our faculty discovered there was a problem during the block,
there's no time for informal interchange
with your colleagues.
You're just too busy.
So you won't see anybody else to chat with.
And probably the most important out of this list,
do not plan on reading a journal article, except on the toilet,
much less composing a grant proposal
or an article while you're teaching an intersession course.
It just isn't going to work,
especially the first time around.
I think the key at RIT is that you're going to avoid many
of the longer term negatives involved here
because you just have the one intersession course rather
than the back to back to back approach that we would have.
But do think carefully about how much grading you're going
to plan to do over the weekend between intersession
and the start of the semester and when you're going
to get your semester courses ready.
So, how might you take advantage
of these positive negative structures
and actually build good teaching practices into your class?
Many of the practices that CC developed back
in 1970 have become good teaching practices
nationwide now.
So the ideas of student centered learning,
hands on activity based learning,
flipping the classroom, blended learning exercises are all ones
that we've fiddled with over the last 40 odd years.
And my message would be that good teaching is good teaching
in any system regardless of the curricular structure.
So just stick with that.
Among some of the good practices that we know work well
in our block, one,
you definitely prepare the class well ahead
because you're still going to need time to reread a text,
look at your notes daily while you're grading papers.
If you're not prepared then at most four hours
of sleep a night before teaching your next class,
five days in a row, gets pretty intense.
Would you have help if you want to set up a lab exercise?
Or are you going to have to do that during breakfast or lunch?
When are you going to put materials on the computer
for students to look at?
So we have a Moodle equivalent we call PROWL.
Are you going to have those materials up by Thanksgiving
which would be really planning ahead or over Christmas break
which would be normal?
Putting them up the first day of class or finding time
to put them up after that is going to be very difficult.
Keep up with your work daily and come prepared.
From Dean Brooks, one more time, one good approach is
to give students a lot of reading and daily classes based
on the reading in the first week
with at least one short paper during that week
so that you can take the measure
of their spoken and written analysis.
This then is much easier to know what students are getting
out of a course.
When one looks out on 50 faces for 50 minutes
in a semester course, not very much comes back
from the students.
Not so in the block plan or intersession.
A professor knows through his
or her pores what the class is doing.
And if one is sensitive,
adjustments suggest themselves accordingly.
In the second week one might change the pace a bit
with a free reading or writing day.
And some individual conferences as well
as several full class sessions.
In the last week or week in a half in our case,
you might allow at least some time for preparation
of longer final paper or other concluding assignments,
written exam, oral exam, oral presentations,
the manner of evaluation is up to you.
We do strongly suggest reduced lecturing.
The three hour lecture harkens back to the days
of the sage on the stage.
Fifteen days at three hours per day is overwhelming.
But lectures can be effective in the right circumstances.
So we use mini-lectures.
Fifteen to 20 minutes at a time to initiate discussion,
summarize discussion half way through and at the end
of the course for a morning, to set up a problem for students
to work on, have them work on it for a little bit
and then offer a lecture to help with the points
that they were missing during that problem working moment.
Interactive lectures or presentations
of material work very well filled with questions
for the students to see what they understand,
looking at the Web for a new piece of information,
unlike what I'm doing this morning,
really bad pedagogy in my block.
Faculty are less like to come to class
with detailed lecture notes than to carry an index card
with three critical concepts they want
to make sure that they cover.
And even your lecture class can be filled
with student presentations.
On teaching about earthquakes I might do an overview
of earthquakes then have the students come up
and do three minute presentations
on particular earthquakes where they describe what's happened
by having gone to the Web the night before.
Discussion also becomes deadly if you have a standard approach
of students reading say 100 pages a night and then talking
about it the next day for 15 days in a row.
So student led discussions tend to be more impactful.
They increase accountability, they get everyone involved
because students love to start their discussions by asking all
of their peers right around the circle
to summarize each section of the reading.
And everybody coming knows they're going to be asked
to do some section but they don't know
which one it's going to be.
It's a little more free ranging but you can guide it.
It does help if as a faculty member in a system like that,
you ask the students who are going
to lead the next day's discussion to meet
with you the afternoon ahead and go over the work with them
to kind of guide them to what the key concepts ought to be.
Remember that if students keep turning to you
as the faculty member to see if they said the right stuff,
you're back to sage on the stage.
Don't do that.
Try to get them talking to each other.
Breakout groups work very well.
You can have a breakout group run for an hour.
Have a discussion for an hour and breakout and put them
in pairs or small groups.
Remember that long class period.
The discussions tend to go much deeper, you have time
for close reading, checking information out,
taking the discussions further into a text than you can do
in a 50 minute period.
You may expect, you will expect the students
to do extensive reading work at night and come
to class having done their work.
Homework, reading, lab reports need to be done that same day.
And in fact if your students are used to semester timing
where they've got a day's break, you're going to need
to remind them they have to go do it that day.
Classrooms thus tend to be pre-flipped
in the new sense of the word.
We didn't know to use that word.
But they tend to be flipped already, more active,
more student centered.
And peer pressure is wonderful.
If you have a group of 12 students and two
of them didn't come prepared, the other 10 are going
to let them know that they didn't hold up their end
of the three hours of discussion with that professor
and they better do the work the next night.
If students are unprepared at class, you have another option.
Let them know what it was you expected to have done
and then send them home for the morning and do it
and hold your class in the afternoon.
Number of techniques that have worked well for us.
E-journaling, you know the techniques, listen to the pace.
You send the students home with a reading and by 9:00 p.m.
that night they all have to have written a one page essay
that others are going to read and get it loaded
up into whatever chat room file system you're using.
By 9:00 a.m. they have to have read two of the other entries
and add a paragraph comments on those entries.
And if you're fortunate and this has happened once to me,
you walk into the classroom
and the students are calling each other names and arguing
with each other so intensely they don't even know
that you came in and the conversation is already started.
Jigsaw projects are one of my favorites.
You may know the technique but again the timing.
So I use the Los Angeles earthquake.
I get them the thesis, there will be a magnitude A earthquake
in Los Angeles in your lifetime that will cause
over 1 trillion dollars worth of damage.
Now what? Divide them up into five groups.
One is doing the probability of that earthquake,
one is doing historic earthquakes,
one might be doing economics of that system, politics.
I tell students that you need to vote
for the person you don't want in power
because when the earthquake hits, that party is toast
because we won't be able to fix it.
Somebody else might do personal psychological issues.
And then the next morning you come in the groups right,
and you have them all count off.
So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
you put all of the ones together in a new group
and have them write the paper, the three page white paper
that goes to the president advising the president
of what needs to be done at this time.
Accountability is huge because each
of the new groups has only one expert from that topic
and you have to know the topic.
And the interaction, students have just met 10
of their classmates which in our classes is half of the class.
So I love that kind of an exercise.
It just works fast.
Workshop models, particularly
in writing classes are incredibly effective whether you
pair students up or have one student present their work
to the group for feedback.
Blended learning techniques looking wonderful to us.
Whether it's video clips that you have
to help students review fundamental principals
in the middle of the night
or whether you're downloading live data
on an environmental site with a class that's sitting in Brazil
and comparing what's going on in the tropics
with your class in the mountains.
Have fun. Everywhere, whatever you do, it's strength
in the experiential hands on activities based moments.
And just think about the time you have each day to do that.
Concept that is very important
as you're going along during the days
and that's estimate of student learning.
I've slowly learned that what CC has meant by that
and what others mean by that are somewhat different.
But the things that we do during a day that matter.
Day one, learn you student names.
One, it lets them know you care and two,
it lets them know they're not going to be able to hide.
So I'll typically take a class into the field on the first day
and as they're working on out crop,
I'm going around making sure I've got all three names,
all three names as they're in little groups.
And when we come back as a group, I just go around
and name them all and point is made.
Or you can put little nametags in front of you.
Over the course of a week, get their names down pat that way.
Pay close attention to the students
and their state of exhaustion.
There are limits to what they can absorb regardless
of your efforts to vary your pedagogy.
So don't be afraid to have a day without formal class
when the students might have a project, library research,
a poem to write or hear some wonderful engineering feat
to pull off.
You aren't held in check by bells
so you can take a few minutes to settle in and check
on where the students are before class each day.
Take your time at the start of class.
You might use short quizzes.
A five question, three question quiz
on the previous night's reading,
a question on the previous day's work.
Another form of e-journals that works here is to ask
for a daily entry from the students,
you don't count grammar, bullets are great, fragments are great
and just ask them what the three key ideas from the reading were.
You read those in your office before you go down to class
and you've got a pretty good sense
of where your students are starting from
and what you need to do.
Student led reviews, have a pair of students who will come in
and for 10 minutes at the start
of class tell you what they thought was important
from the previous day.
Get through any or all of these techniques and take 10
to 30 minutes to review what they should have gotten
from the day before.
You can't do that in a 50 minute period.
Prompt grading is essential.
The students need your feedback before they start working
on the next assignment.
So structure any exams or papers to allow for this.
Consider posting the results of your labs and homework
as assignments are turned in.
They aren't going to turn in late assignments.
They have the next one due the next day so you don't have
to worry about whether you've posted the answers
for the late person.
One of our faculty members uses iAnnotate PDF and drop box
to mark student papers with little audio clips attached
so they're getting feedback about three times as fast
as people like me who still write comments
on a paper and hand them back.
So think about some of the technology ways...
[Question]
>> iAnnotate, capital A, small i, PDF.
Did you know about the system?
Talk with Anne afterwards.
I don't know this one.
>> Some of the faculty use personal response systems
as little eye clickers or electronic buzzers
to get immediate feedback and whether are with them.
What's the next step in the lecture going to be
or for accountability on discussion breakouts,
use the old system of randomly choosing one person
out of the group who's going to speak for the group.
A one to three page paper that you assign on the first day
of class and is due on the third day is a fantastic way
to really let the students know what your expectations
and standards are if you can grade it on that third night
and return it on the fourth day.
Halfway course, see valuation check.
Like a red light, yellow light, green light system.
We'll have a list of approaches that I've been trying, lectures,
discussions, reading assignments, journals,
problem sets and ask students to put red,
yellow or green next to it.
Meaning stop doing this, there's problems ahead
or we're going fine.
And if you do that early in the second week,
middle of the second week, you've still got a chance
to adjust your course and keep people on track.
If you decide to require a final paper,
you need to review every step of the process early and often.
You want a topic and a bibliography
by the end of the first week.
You'll want to check on the students references
that they have on hand, not that are still
in inner library loan space somewhere
by the end of the second week.
Then you probably want to leave the second weekend open for them
to work on that paper and complete a draft,
which if you had time and were really gung ho you could look
at a few days before the end of the class
and give them quick comments.
Key moments when you're planning a class and we'll do some
of this this afternoon in the second workshop.
Put the experiential moments in there first, always a mistake
to do it the other way around.
So start with what you're going to build your course
around in terms of the students activities, excuse me,
and think about anything that needs to be flexible like going
out into the field in case you've got a snowstorm.
Are you going to have community based learning projects?
Are you going to have day trips to a city,
a museum, a concert, a show?
Will you have a weeklong trip and if so are you camping
or using a motel and what's the cost to students.
They'll want to know that way ahead.
Our anthropology department will go for a week into the southwest
to a Native American dance.
They get three days' notice of when the dance is going to occur
but they can get the vans and go.
We had a class on Dante and Michelangelo
that decided the best place
to teach it would be Florence in Rome.
So they went over to Italy and managed,
this one I'm truly jealous of, one hour alone just the class
in the Sistine Chapel.
Yeah, should have been an English teacher.
We have an economics of innovation class that goes
to Boston of all places for a week and just interacts
with different businesses morning, afternoon and evening.
Block long trips, geology has gone to Japan,
New Zealand, Scotland.
We have archeoastronomy in the southwest.
I'm just trying to give you ideas to get you thinking here.
Sociology has gone to Sierra Leone as well as Polynesia.
English has been taught in Harlem and in Paris.
There's a senior art trip every year to New York City.
We teach drama in London.
Filmmaking is taught in Hollywood.
You've heard about biology going to Patagonia and Belize.
Drawing is being taught in Spain as we speak.
Summer classes, because you can do some of this
in the summer as well, right?
Language instruction is done in a language
that speaks the language.
Just go. A fun note on the field trips.
If you wake up one morning
and realize you really aren't prepared for class, get a van,
take the students somewhere, anywhere,
they're going to love the class.
Day one is crucial.
Students make a choice about whether they're going to stay
or leave your class on that first day.
Do not read the syllabus, call roll and then leave.
You need a real class on the first day.
Some activity that is typical of the class
and help students make up their minds.
In a geology class, we take them out into the field
and have them looking at rocks and minerals,
putting a story together, plate tectonics and mountain building.
And if they don't enjoy
that they know they're in the wrong class.
An eco-feminism class that Fernando mentioned
that I teach, I have a wonderful little article.
It's all of six or seven pages long.
Very controversial.
I hand it to them on the first morning, tell them to go read it
over lunch and come back after lunch and we're going
to take an hour and talk about it.
And they know what the topic of the course is going to be like.
That first week you really need a lot
of representative readings, set the tone and expectations high.
Go to the last week, what are you going to do on your next
to last day which I think is a Wednesday
for the intersession this time around.
Are you going to review your course for a final test?
Are you going to add in new material
that the students won't have an opportunity
to really practice with?
Or are you going to keep that next to last day
for the best summary lecture you could imagine pulling the whole
class together?
From Dean Brooks again, the central educational principal
of the block plan is that an active participant,
the student is an active participant instead
of a passive spectator.
To this end, faculty have virtually complete control
of the time, place and format of the course.
We trust you to make pedagogical judgments about what needs
to be done on a given day or week
to enhance active student learning.
Therefore, we have no class schedule.
It will be up to you to decide what time the class meets,
how long and how often it meets
and in some cases where it meets.
We had a philosophy professor who met day one
in his assigned classroom
and then started walking around class.
And if you weren't with him at the end of the day,
you wouldn't know where the nest day's class was starting much
less where it was going to end up.
It has become increasingly important
to add a poster syllabus online or somewhere early
so that work study students and athletes,
those in extended courses can make plans ahead.
Course formats will vary greatly under the block plan.
To continue quoting Dean Brooks,
of course in modern fiction differ significantly
from organic chemistry.
What professor has the opportunity to decide
on the appropriate mix among lectures, reading assignments,
small group discussions, individual conferences
or tutorials, examinations,
papers and student presentations?
This is not to suggest all of these should be used
in a single course only that you are free to use anything
in the academic repertoire that seems suitable.
Depending on your own style and the background of the students,
you may find that some lectures,
at least mini-lectures are helpful,
but since you can expect students to be prepared
for class and to be present,
you find that structured discussions based
on the readings are usually productive.
The key to the block plan is varying the rhythm.
What you do with your daily class is levels of assignments,
building in the research day in the library,
how many pages are you going to read daily?
Is it better to have them read 50 pages,
which they might actually read twice,
and then put an intelligent entry into an e-journal or get
through 250 pages which you know they're skimming
and the smart ones are reading the ends so they'll sound
like they finished the whole thing even though they never
read the beginning.
Don't do daily discussion or lecture the same.
Whatever you do there's going to be burn
out the end of your second week.
Students are going to be burned out as they go
into that second weekend and come back
to class that last Monday.
So be prepared for that.
Think about how you plan you exams and papers on this.
If you give a test on Friday, you have the weekend to grade.
If you give a test on Monday,
the students have the weekend to study.
If you do finals, for heaven's sake do not have a final paper
and a final exam due on the last day of the intersession.
You won't be ready for the semester to start
if you're grading these.
Space them out so that students might spend
that second weekend working on a project and prepare
for the last day during that third week.
Our faculty often use oral exams or presentations instead
of written finals because it reduces the grading time,
one of our great secrets at the end of the block.
Whether you do these in small groups or individually.
The last few moments here this morning I wanted
to look a little bit about assessment of these kinds
of intensive courses, how do we know how well they work
if you will?
The answer is that all the evidence is indirect.
There have been really no comparative studies,
a lot of self-studies but they're very limited.
Small sample sizes, loosely defined learning outcomes,
difficulty of assessing retention
across different disciplines and controlling
for all the intervening variables you could imagine.
We asked the Hanover Research Group down in D.C. a year ago
to do a summary study for us of everything they could find
that have been done for research on these kinds of classes.
And between them and some of our own studies the rest
of this information's coming out of those reports.
So a couple of the results we've noticed for students.
The students report an increase in focus and stamina
and retention with a decrease in procrastination.
Dean Brooks noted in one of his reviews that students come
to class practically all the time and are
with few exceptions well prepared for class discussion.
They have little alternative
but to give first priority to your course.
Concentrating on just that one topic has another practical
consideration for traditional age college students.
Research has shown that 18
to 20 year olds have not acquired the organizational
ability to juggle five courses
with their inconsistent requirements, overlapping
and competing deadlines.
Because studies have indicated the human brain is not equipped
to do multiple things well at one time, like driving
and talking on the cell phone, taking one course
at a time can help all sorts of students stay on track.
Students report anecdotally that they are well prepared
for the intensity of medical and law schools.
They don't have the same issues that their peers seem to suffer
from with the pacing of those schools.
Students who study abroad are known
to purchase their textbooks before the class starts,
do every assignment immediately and then look around
and discover that their fellow students
from semester systems haven't even bought the book
until mid-terms.
Block breaks are important.
And notice you've built at least a three day break
into this first intersession.
The students will need time to recover
from that intersession course.
We do a lot of student life trips particularly service trips
around the southwest.
And it's a great moment for your student life housing people
if they have something planned.
I would just watch for the first week of the semester.
They're going to slack off.
And if you start the semester slow you'll find they might not
notice it.
But if you're ready to start your semester at full speed,
the students who are in intersession are going
to be not quite there with you.
From Glenn Brooks, his evaluation
of the block plan indicates
that our students do not show dramatic improvement
in factual retention over students
in conventional semesters but do seem
to develop certain skills more effectively.
Our students do not procrastinate,
they are very good at sustained concentration
and managing their time, they are fast learners
and develop a rather high degree of self-confidence.
Small classes with limits increase the probability
that students will speak more frequently.
And by the time a student is a senior at Colorado College,
he or she has had multiple opportunities
to try publically spoken analysis.
All of us have complaints about student writing.
But students write at least much
under the block plan intersession as they did
under a semester system with more emphasis on short papers
and quick turnaround time.
That's really the key.
The Hanover Research Group noted the following that are put
up there, cognitive research, suggest taking multiple courses
at one time may cause interference
that hinders the brain's ability to store new knowledge
in its long term memory.
Students may experience cognitive overloading
when taking simultaneous courses or conflicting subjects
and demonstrable improvements that incur
in the block plan include, increasing focus and stamina,
curving dropouts, that was an interesting side effect we had
not expected, improving rapport and cohesion between students
and teachers and increasing flexibility
in a student's course of study.
That report led to the following key findings.
Block plans with intensive courses were created
because of time constraints posed
by traditional semester long classes,
intensive courses are a hotly debated subject
within the higher education realm today
and there's conflicting literature regarding
pedagogical effectiveness.
Accelerated learning programs
that offer intensive courses are expected
to continue growing particularly for nontraditional students.
It is estimated there are 250 institutions
in the U.S. offering courses that fall
under an accelerated learning model.
Overall many of the studies suggested intensive course have
the equivalent or superior learning outcomes compared
to traditional studies.
But there's no clear evidence to suggest
that intensive courses sustain positive long term outcomes.
Due to conflicting research and methodological approaches,
it is difficult to make generalizations comparing
teaching practices but some documented practices shown
to have success include,
modifying your instructional approaches
to maximize student learning experiences,
establishing a comfortable classroom environment
and a positive learning experience
by implementing a variety of teaching methods,
utilizing alternative forms of assessment
such as student performance classroom discussions
and demonstrations.
Wrapping this up, all of this suggests to me that the types
of courses RIT is experimenting
with this first year make really good sense.
Think about interesting liberal art courses that focus
on one topic not Russian literature but maybe Tolstoy.
It's not the introduction to geology
but my favorite catastrophic geology earthquakes, volcanos,
doom gloom, you're all going to die as well as courses
that are designed to review and prepare students
for the next class in a sequence.
So your Calc 1 or foreign language review
from the first semester to build the skills and confidence
in students going into a second semester.
The one thing I would suggest if you do that is do not try
to reteach the entire first semester class
but use your good judgment as a faculty member to know
where it is students typically have problems and focus
in on those key concepts.
If you have time in a small enough class,
working individually with them
on the pieces they don't understand is going
to make the intersession a joy.
If you have an idea for field work, off campus study
or international travel plan early and start
with those concepts and build the class around them.
Overall, Colorado College faculty stay at the college
because we love the block plan despite its rapid pace,
demand for prompt grading and exhaustion.
The opportunity for innovative teaching, for instance teaching
in the field for a geologist is just too good to pass up.
Because RIT's going to be doing this
as a single intersession course rather than back to back
to back blocks, you should have all the joys
of developing a new pedagogy without any
of the faculty exhaustion.
And in the end you're going
to be your own best teachers on this.
So I do urge you to come back as a group after the intersession
and talk about techniques that did and didn't work for you.
I do with you truly well in this endeavor and thank you
for your attention this morning.
[ audience applause ]
>> Any questions?
>> You mentioned students getting sick
but how do you handle faculty when they get sick?
>> You may not do that.
[Inaudible] And the amazing part is the faculty get
in after a year or two of teaching,
it just works that way.
Students need their first year to understand it.
You get during block week, you do everything you possibly can
to keep going for the three weeks and that three days
that you'll have between intersession semester,
there's going to be a lot of students just sleeping in it.
I've thought a lot actually about that question
because it's very difficult.
And a lot of it comes down because we're in it as a group.
So if I were teaching Calc 1, what you don't want me to do
to by the way, I haven't done Calc 1 for very many years,
and I actually fell ill and knew that I wasn't going to be coming
to class for two days, have the flu, you know,
cold you just dose up and keep coming.
I'm calling the department and saying is there somebody there,
we're doing integration today, everybody knows it,
who could come in, step in and do this?
If I were in a class that were somewhat more singular,
let's say geology class, I might call one of my fellow colleagues
in the department and say could you do
that fabulous lecture I know you do on dinosaurs?
It doesn't have anything to do with earthquakes and volcanos
but wait, there were some volcanos
that might have wiped dinosaurs out.
But it could, make something up and give them a talk.
>> Aren't they teaching their course?
>> If, remember the eight blocks, six out of eight?
Any given block there's someone in the department of four
or five who's not teaching.
And that's the person you count on.
Although these is one block a year in geology for instance,
every October, at the end of October
which is national meeting that none of us are teaching.
The Dean looks at the schedule
and says why aren't there any geology classes?
Well we're all at the meetings and it's three or four days
and we can't juggle that.
We let any visitors we have come in and teach on those blocks.
Does that, it's not a great answer but it's a,
you struggle through answer.
>> We talked with the faculty, we had dinner with them
and we met with a whole bunch of them and they all basically
said, you can't get sick, we don't get sick.
They were exhausted and they were getting tired,
and they did say it's hard to find someone
because you've got your other faculty teaching one course
in the same block.
But they did mentioned too with,
some of them would design some independent activities
that if something did happen,
they could have a research day kind of in their back pocket
or something that would substitute the day.
But they said, we can't get sick.
And after the first year...
>> You're in the cycle.
>> You get on the cycle and I said, people have children,
people have, you know.
And they said for a lot of their dual career academics
and they said they actually try to juggle their schedules
so that they're not in the same block and it's like,
you know, well, I don't know if it's going to be a block,
So they try to...
>> The've got a block in the intersession but...
>> Yeah right.
>> But lining that library day or reading day,
you might just have to move it.
>> Yeah right.
So they have a little, they have like they talked about plan A,
plan B, plan C and plan D. They always had some, in case of
anything, they had multiple plans.
But they don't get sick.
>> There was a question back there.
>> So you said they're setting a budget
for each class for field trips.
And...
>>Fernando just disappeared!
>> And so field trips in Paris.
Of course probably that, that, the student would have to come
up with the, some kind of funding to cover their expense.
How does the field trip and study abroad come to play?
>> What I think is a very important point
and I do want to, Friday morning we're going to focus
on field trips and international and I want to talk
about that at that point.
The most unfair practice left at Colorado College
and the new president has been told
in no uncertain terms she's going to terminate this,
is charging students a program fee to go abroad.
So if we take a field trip to our, we have a cabin
in the mountains, we have a campus [inaudible]
with townhouses and condos, no ski area.
And a lot of it's just go with the buses.
If we do those, the departments have budgets that have been
in place for 30 years, although they have been increased.
So the question you're asking is the question
that our faculty asked 40 years ago.
How do we build the budget to do this?
Gradually, carefully, you just have
to keep putting some money in there.
Those students just got on the bus and go, there's no cost.
But when you want to go abroad, students need the airfare,
they need the extra room because they've already paid for room
at home and now they're paying for room there.
We get board rebates so that's covered.
But Visas, all sorts of things come up.
And we've known for years that basically the only students
that go abroad with you are the wealthy.
The ones aren't on aid.
So we have a woman who teaches African American Negrotive
Movement in Paris which is the English class that goes to Paris
and she really wants to have it for the students.
And for years, all she has gotten are the very wealthy
who go to Paris and spend their afternoons
and evenings in the shops.
Drove her up a wall.
And we finally came up with some extra money
to help pay these student program fees
so that anybody could go.
And the first class that was like that was highly diverse.
She called it the best class she'd ever taught.
Students were in awe of what they learned in that process.
So part of the new capital campaign is going to be creating
an endowed fund that will provide aid for every student
to cover their program.
That would be my recommendation is you want
to have that as your goal.
That there should be no charge
to a student going abroad with a class.
And then you're going to get the students who want to be there.
That's a longer...
>> How do you figure scholarship
and service requests during your,
currently you said that you don't.
I don't think that's an option here.
>> Oh with the faculty during the, yeah.
No seriously you don't.
When I'm in the middle of a teaching block, you know,
and it is, you've got to listen, six out of eight.
So the message a new faculty, I tell that to new faculty,
you know, I've been mentoring the new faculty they'd be toast
the message needs to be that during the six blocks you're
teaching a block. You are teaching the block.
And the students really own you.
You truly, if you have time to read a journal article
in that month, you're lucky.
You're not going to do much writing.
I know one of our superstar faculty is capable during the
course of a three hour morning we often have 10,
15 minute breaks in there, he will go back to his office
and edit an article during that 10 minutes
and then get back into class mode.
He's insane.
But if you have six blocks you teach, 18 days a block,
how many days of the year are left?
The opportunity for focused periods
about scholarship not just an hour stolen today, an hour here
in a semester are unbelievable.
And the amount of work you can get done when you have a
non-teaching block and you have actually 22 days ahead
of you with no students and maybe one committee
that you have to show up for, what can you get written?
So I mentioned that the scholarly pedagogy's changing.
There is the example.
You have to set your time to respect the block because doing
that grading, you know, if it's a calculus class I pray
that you've thought about student graders
for the daily homework.
Because if you have to do the homework every night yourself,
it's going to be a very long intersession class.
So getting help from students for the daily grinds
of the work is important.
When service and faculty don't show up for committee
and the administrator's going to go where were you?
We missed you.
And they're like, grading a paper.
What can you say?
Great excuse, really works.
I'm going to use that a lot.
I'm going back to teaching next year.
This is my eight years in the Dean's office is enough,
so sabbatical for the next year and back to teaching.
So that matters to me.
>> My question is about student expectations.
So you said the faculty during this period is available
for these intensive amounts of times.
I can see our students looking at course that met like,
we'll we meet in class every morning for four hours
and you said there's times where we're going
to meet again in the afternoon.
And for our courses specifically there will be teams,
people will meet in teams afterwards
and I can see our students doing,
they're working part time or they have to kind to be
see the class time as their commitment.
So, that's probably built into your culture already but,
you know,
>>Eh...with difficulty.
The athletes understand it.
Some of our best students on campus are our athletes
because they are so scheduled and so organized.
They've got it broken down to 15 minute slots.
When they're at practice, when they're out,
when they're doing this reading, when they're doing this project.
It's lovely to watch.
It's the work study students haven't figured out how
to organize but have to work that you're looking out for.
So step one is if your syllabus
with its afternoon expectations is online a month ahead,
they will sign up or not sign up because of it.
And if they do sign up and they have work, they're going
to have a month to talk with their employer
about shifting schedules.
So the important thing is don't surprise them.
Don't come in if you know you have the work study students
then the flexibility, some of it disappears.
You can't come in on a Wednesday, oh today I want
to have afternoon class.
And they're all looking at you, we don't have time
to work with our employer, that is what you can't do.
So if it's online, if they can read it ahead,
make their plans ahead, you're remind them
on day one you have these expectations
in the next three weeks of their afternoon times.
I would recommend sticking with our 3:00 rule.
Plan on being done by 3:00 in a way that allows somebody
who has work study or has sports practice to go, roughly.
The rule doesn't apply to field trips
and international trips by the way.
Does that answer enough of?
>> Yes it does, thank you.
>> Something else in the back here?
>> Oh sorry, one quick question.
You seem to imply but didn't come right out and say:
add/drop is day one?
>> I know that yours and ours are a little different
in the schedules, that is trying not
to conflate our two institutions too much
this morning.
Ours is day two.
So we start on a Monday at 9:00 and by Tuesday
at 5:00 add/drop period, the free add/drop period is over.
So after Tuesday at 5:00 if you walk in Wednesday morning
to a class and say I've got
to have your class is there space, can I get in?
It's up to the professor.
The Dean's office will never tell the professor they need
to add that student even if the course is needed to graduate.
If the professor wants to take that student late
and can make a case for how they're going to,
two days they missed, two out of 15.
Do the math.
Are they going to make it up or not?
How can you do this to make it up?
There are faculty that will add somebody that third morning,
nobody will add after that.
We do allow students to drop up through the second week Tuesday
without failure, no cut at showing up on their record
but they can't add anything else.
They've lost the money.
We don't refund.
The administration should be hearing this.
No refunds after that Tuesday at 5:00.
So it's a schedule that's worked out, well known.
My only concern if I were a student here would be
that the students know it.
So they probably know what your semesters are going
to be, they're used to the quarters
and know they have a certain amount of time.
But in that intersession,
how many days before they have to decide, drop/add?
>> We are thinking about it.
>> Thinking about it.
My advice then would be two days
of work can typically be made up.
Three days can't be.
That's a fifth of your,
20 percent of your class down the tubes.
So, those are good practical questions.
And if you've heard some of this and some
of what I'll repeat this afternoon
and tomorrow particularly polices are your best friend.
Policies, we have a 25 student limit
but students are always coming in, I've heard such great things
about your class, I've always wanted to take it.
Well yes I was signed up for another class but I couldn't get
in there so I'm coming to your class now.
Will you take a 26th, a 27th, a 28th student?
And it is incredible what those last three kids cost you
in grading time.
When you're focused on 25 you know where 25 is, you know,
you pace yourself grading a paper.
Those last three are killers and it's unfair for the students
who got in the class in the first place, right.
Because you have 25 students who got in there
by following our registration system
and they expect 1/25th of your attention.
You add three more suddenly they're not getting it.
So sticking to the policies and letting the policies protect you
from yourself is really the way I like to think of that.
It can be very important.
>> Have you done it with larger classes of 40 or 50?
>> There is, it's a debate within the faculty.
So our psychology department is of the opinion
that they're going to lecture anyway regardless
of everything I just said.
And therefore having 50 students
in a class is much more effective and efficient way
to get them through the psychology major then having 25.
But the parents didn't pay for 50 in class.
They paid for 25 at our ridiculous tuition levels.
And we get the calls from the parents pretty quick.
In the two courses like that and neuropsychology is one of them
that we've experimented with,
the student response has been pretty positive
because they're science majors.
They're good at lecture notes.
And the kids are coming out of high school who are really good
at taking lecture notes and scored really high
on SATs, they're A students.
They want that three hour lecture.
They'll just take the notes down
and they won't be there, they'll be zoned out.
Just in la la land while they're hands are taking notes
and they'll say we learned it.
And we're sitting there trying to turn the system on its head.
For the sciences it's still a little tough.
For the humanities, liberal arts courses students get it
from the first block they take that they're going
to have reading at night and they're going to come prepared
to discuss and they better hold their part of the stick up.
But how you break up, the chemists are almost
as bad as the psychologists.
They know nothing other than lecturing on the periodic table.
There's got to be other ways
to present the periodic table than a lecture.
But maybe those 20 minute summary places
in between student struggles, you know,
what's the first column got in common, kids?
What changes from one row to the next?
And wait four seconds, right.
The average amount of time a faculty member can wait
between they ask a question of the class and the silence
that they'll receive before they give the answer.
And the student's know it's four seconds.
So they're waiting five because they know you're going
to give them the answer.
Don't. This is a great moment to break bad teaching habits.
>> No more questions?
Well I'd like to thank you for a great talk and you've left
a lot of thinking and probably thinking forward.
>> Let's hope so.
>> So thank you very much, Jeff.
>> Thank you.
[ Audience applause ]