Intro fire hose

The biggest challenge facing Intro to Psyc instructors has been the same the entire time I've been teaching: how to cover everything. There's a familiar mantra among Intro instructors that every chapter in the book is an entire course later in the major, and it's mostly true. The point is that there are 12-18 chapters in most Intro texts and only 15 or 16 weeks in a term, so that's roughly a week to cover an entire semester's worth of material. An impossible task. The temptation is to employ the fire hose approach and blast students with as much material as you can squeeze into class time. This is a mistake, of course, for several reasons.

By far the most important reason this is a bad approach is that it doesn't work, if student learning is the goal. I remember feeling the pressure to cover everything as a new instructor. Intro is a required course for Psyc majors, and I felt like the instructors of courses taken later in the major were depending on me to lay out some foundational knowledge of the discipline that they could build upon. Since many of those instructors were my senior colleagues, I certainly wanted to come through. So my goals included students mastering the content of every chapter, which I now know to be an impossibility. This summer I counted the number of bold terms in the text, and the result was 560. Five hundred sixty. 560! I can assure you that I don't know all 560 terms and I've been at this for quite a while. The most talented instructor using the latest edtech and SoTL-infused design could not get students to master that much content. So blasting through all that content will not produce the desired learning. Do. Not. Do. This.

Another reason not to attempt to cover everything in Intro comes from a topic the very first chapter in most books: psychology is a science. This means that our current knowledge is not sacred, and in fact it will be outdated at some point in the (perhaps) near future. Would you consider using a book from the 1990s? Me neither, and our fancy books in 2017 will seems as unappealing years from now as the text I used as an undergrad (and which I still have!). At some point there was an instructor desperately trying to get to the facilitated communication section of the book. Don't be that person. In addition, I use an OER text, meaning the content is free and accessible to anyone with a device that hooks up to the web. Information is free.

My course of 190 students contains exactly 3 psychology majors. Now, I hope to recruit some of my students to the Major, but the overwhelming majority of students are taking the only psychology course of their lives. If anything this puts more pressure on me to make sure they know some things really well, because this is the only shot they have at it. But the list of things I really want them to know as they live their lives and work at non-psychology jobs is much shorter than 560 items long. I spent much of the summer going through the text and coming up with what I call the Most Important Concepts (MICs) for each chapter. I tried to limit myself to just one or two per chapter, and this was really tough. For example, what are the MICs for the chapter on the brain and neuron communication?* Or what's the one MIC for the chapter on disorders?** I tried to think about what I wanted someone to know about the topics 5 or 10 years from now. This reduced my goal for student learning from mastering everything to mastering 30-40 things. Much more realistic.

If I was teaching anatomy to pre-med or nursing students my goals would be different. In courses like that mastery of content is vital, critical, perhaps life-saving. No one's going to live or die because of what they learn in my class. Don't get me wrong, I believe in the importance of my discipline and I have seen students' lives improved because they took a psychology course. But mastery of every scintilla is not required.

So that leaves the question of what to cover. Again,  I think the better way to think about it is to recognize that students will not master all the content in the text or that you blast them with in class, and that there are things that I/we really want them to learn and remember for years. But that can't be too many things, and they are likely the big themes from the course, not the definitions of any term. What we as experts in the field can provide our students is some curation of the material, reducing it down to a digestible and nutritious series of nuggets. Do that and put down the fire hose.

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*I compromised on 2:  

• Neurons are the building blocks of the nervous system and have three main parts, and  
• The brain has parts that do different things

**Psychological disorders are often just extreme versions of normal, even healthy, feelings and thoughts

Intro to Intro

I rounded the corner of the hallway and saw hordes of students standing, sitting, and slouching near the door to the lecture hall. For reasons beyond my ken the administration decided that classrooms in this building needed to be locked between classes, so I pulled out the shiny new key and held the door open while the students filed past. One asked me if I was her professor, and when I said yes she stuck out her hand and said “Hi, my name is [unfortunately I don’t remember it]!”

She was one of the 188 students in my Introduction to Psychology course. I know that there are universities with larger, even MUCH larger, Intro courses than this, but this was a first for my university. Up to this point our Intro courses maxed out at 35 or so. Budget cuts prompted our Department to think about how we could reduce the number of adjuncts we hire, and this large section saves us 5 or 6 hires. 

Of course I’ve taught Intro many times before, but it has been almost 10 years since my last go-round. So my appetite for challenge was met by teaching Intro again after this lacuna and the large class size, a new experience for me. Actually one of my first teaching experiences (in grad school) was teaching Intro with a class of about 50, and that course was taught in an auditorium in a science building, as this one is as well. 

Intro to Psyc is perhaps the most frequently taken classes in higher education outside of required courses in math and writing, so the resources available for teaching it boggle the mind. Many of these resources seem to channel instructors into a traditional lecture format, perhaps because Intro is taught so often by inexperienced instructors. Every publisher has not only a complete set of ancillaries, but now most have engaging online supplements to the text. So I could have reduced prep time and effort, and my anxiety, by adopting the Intro text my Department had already chosen by committee, downloading the PowerPoints slides and test bank, and (digitally) dusting off my classroom activities from 10 years before. But where’s the fun in that?

Instead, I decided that I was going to draw on my 20+ years’ experience in the classroom and the research about how people learn and design my class with the students’ learning at the center. This decision led to many hours of work and the familiar feeling of walking the line between fearless and foolhardy.  In the next series of blogs I will describe the design decisions I made, why I made them, and how they turn out.

Buckle up.

The problem(s) of participation in classroom discussions, and how to overcome them

I read a very nice book over the holiday break by Jay Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom. Howard is a professor of sociology (and Dean) at Butler University, and he’s

published a bunch of scholarship of teaching and learning on classroom discussion. So this book is based on solid research and nicely referenced. 

Howard describes two psychological phenomena that students experience when in classes where discussion is encouraged (or even required). One is called civic attention. Students quickly figure out that they do not really need to pay close attention to the lecture or class discussion, they only need to act as if they are paying attention. This means that they shouldn’t be looking at their phones (at least not too often), they should make occasional eye contact with the professor (but not too much), and perhaps even nod in agreement (at the right time). Other than that, they can be thinking of whatever comes into their minds. This norm of civic attention is established early in each class when students realize there will be no adverse consequences to this minimal level of engagement. Howard points out that, like every norm, once this norm is established it is very difficult to change. 

The other phenomenon is called consolidation of responsibility. In every class there are a small number of students that will actively participate in discussion no matter the topic, and no matter the relevance or insight of their contributions. These talkers not only take up the time and space that other students could use to contribute, but they also serve as a sort of safety valve: when the instructor asks for participation the other students can relax in the knowledge that the talkers will eventually speak up. Thus the responsibility for participation is consolidated in the few talkers. Howard’s research has found that while the non-talkers are grateful to be freed from this responsibility, they can also become annoyed by the talkers talking too much, especially if the talkers are not always on-topic or veer into personal revelation too often. Thus it is potentially damaging to classroom culture to allow this consolidation of responsibly to solidify, and like civic attention this dynamic is very resistant to remedy once established.

Fortunately Howard provides many solutions to these problems in the book. As you likely anticipate, many of these are designed to head these dynamics off before they start. He emphasizes the importance of the first day of class: if you expect student participation in class you better ask for it the very first time you meet. He also suggests that you have a discussion about discussion where you lay out your reasons for asking for participation (or better yet, ask them to come up with those reasons) and your expectations for participation. You could also ask them about their best and worst experiences with class discussion. They will have stories. 

Howard also reports on research about why students do not participate in discussion. He reports that confidence and preparation are important factors. For me this meant requiring students to write up analyses of the reading before coming to class. Howard also suggests that when asking tough questions you give students time to formulate their answers, perhaps with a one-minute paper or think-pair-share activity, before coming back to a class-wide discussion. That way students who are not as quick on their feet are not disadvantaged. 

I recommend the book. It was clearly written with a nice mix of scholarship and practical suggestions.