Welcome to the Active Learning in Political Science blog. Our goal is to provide resources and ideas for using active learning techniques in the political science classroom and to promote general discussion about innovative teaching methods.
Learning isn’t a contact sport
Here in the UK, we increasingly worry about contact with our students, about the simple question of how much time do we spend with them in class or supervision.
The driver of this has been the introduction by the government of Key Information Sets (KIS) which provides basic metrics for each and every programme offering in England and Wales: here’s a typical one for a programme that I’ve randomly picked out of nowhere.
As you’ll see, it has a worthy aim at heart: to provide benchmarks for what a student can expect, in terms of costs, teaching delivery and career prospects. Equally obviously, I am going to question the utility of this data.
Firstly, it assumes that aggregated performance of previous cohorts holds some resemblance to the individual performance of future students. Spending, as I do, a lot of time with individual students and their specific learning requirements, I am dubious about the proposition, especially when I consider how the demographics of our current intake looks very different to the students we recruited three or four years ago (who data you now see).
Secondly, it mixes programme-, School- and University-level data, in ways that are not immediately apparent and which again do not give an applicant a meaningful understanding of what things are like. That’s why we invite all our applicants for a day on campus, so that they can make up their own minds.
But it is the third issue that I would like to develop. One of the metrics is the percentage of ‘time spent in lectures, seminars or similar’, as compared to independent study. The discourse around this (across the HE sector, I should point out) is that more contact time is A Good Thing.
Certainly, for subjects where lab work is an essential element, it’s easy to see the logic behind this. But for social sciences, much of what we are doing is developing students’ abilities to be self-reflective and critical thinkers, who are able to articulate their own views. In part, this requires opportunities to do that articulation (be it through discussion, or coursework), but it also requires time for students to pursue self-study, in order to begin to know their own mind.
If we want to build students’ self-reliance, then surely we also want to be giving them space to self-organise. This might seem a forlorn hope at times, but over-structuring of time can be counter-productive to initiative.
Ultimately, there is an irony that while observers and league tables might value more contact time, students actually on the programme often don’t treat it as such: despite offering a time-efficient way to get into issues and debate, there are always students who see it either as a distraction or as an irrelevance. Perhaps if we can understand that better, then we might be able to make the most of however much contact time we have.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Like many people who teach undergraduate students, I get a visceral reaction when one of them asks for “extra credit” opportunities. It’s always a student who won’t even do the bare minimum of what’s assigned in the syllabus. Recently I noticed I was getting the same reaction to colleagues who were encouraging me to me to award students extra credit for attending the lectures of invited speakers. I believed that students should be intrinsically motivated to go to these talks and that rewarding attendance communicated the message that they could safely pay less attention to the real work of reading and writing in my courses. So my usual response, whether spoken aloud or not, was no, this is not going to result in extra credit.
Then I realized that my reaction was the product of an emotional attachment to what I believed the world should be rather than the world that actually exists. I and my course are not what’s most important in my students’ lives, no matter how much I think they should be. And most people retain very little of what they encountered as undergraduates anyway.
Who better for students to learn from than people who are actual practitioners of what I and others teach? Many of my students were trained throughout elementary and high school to think that learning entails nothing but writing definitions on worksheets handed out by a teacher. They need to see the real world applications and consequences of the ideas that they are presented with in the classroom. And if a lecture is a waste of their time because the speaker is an idiot, they need to be able to explain why.
In future semesters, my syllabi will include assignments in which students write about the connections between what they are doing in my courses and what they hear at lectures outside of class. Given the number of speakers who come to campus every semester, it should not be too difficult for students to find two or three lectures to attend. For students who work or have other commitments in the evenings, I can just add some additional reading and writing assignments and include them when calculating grades. Everyone will be doing more work and, I hope, taking more responsibility for their own learning.
My Real World Survivor Experience
I recently returned from a trip to Heifer International’s Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas as part of my experimental new course called Real World Survivor: Experiencing Poverty through Heifer Ranch. After learning about the issues captured by the UN Millennium Development Goals, we–14 college students, 6 local high school students and 8 assorted faculty and staff–headed to Heifer to live in their Global Village for a three day simulation on hunger and poverty. The upper level course is team taught by myself, a philosopher, and an education professor and is the prototype for the interdisciplinary keystone courses that will cap our new general education program.
There are so many things I want to comment on now that we are more than halfway through the class: How fascinating, enriching and frustrating it is to team-teach with two other faculty, especially with an entire university community watching. The benefits of working in an environment where courses like this can be developed and put into action in less than a year, coupled with the aggravations of getting paid very little for a lot of work. The challenge of trying to intentionally incorporate six different skills into the course assignments and assessments. Handling the differing expectations of teachers and students, where the teachers see the course as New, Innovative, and Fundamentally Crucial to the University’s Mission, and the students see it as ‘that class I have on Wednesday evening.’ The new research questions about community development and experiential learning that are running rampant in my head. The joys of watching students handle living in hunger and poverty for three days and come out the other side stronger as individuals and a community–at least for now. And most importantly: how I managed to sleep on the abandoned school bus rife with hornet nests that served as my ‘home’ during the simulation.
In the coming weeks I plan to comment on all of the above as I think my experience with this course really illustrates the challenges and benefits of building an entire course around active learning principles.
Horses, water, learning
A hardy perennial of staff common room debate is how far to support students in their learning. Put differently, how student-centred should student-centred learning be?
This usually arises because a student (or group of students) either doesn’t avail themselves of the support on offer (e.g. for dissertation supervision) or doesn’t take part in group discussions in class.
If we accept that students have to be at the centre of the learning process and that we – as educators – are there to support, not to ‘teach’, then that requires that students are active and engaged actors. If not, then we are into the realm of failure and its pedagogic value.
My personal feeling is that mistakes and failure are valuable learning moments, since they stick in the mind rather well. Certainly, that is one of the great values of using simulations, since they often contain ‘unsuccessful’ options and even ‘success’ is very rarely ambiguous. But that value can only be realised if there is a process of reflection: why did I fail? how am I going to avoid it next time?
Too often, failure results solely in punishment and hinderance, rather than additional support, certainly at an institutional level: many universities that I know in the UK are tightening regulations to strongly limit the scope for any failure of assessment.
Ultimately, it would seem to boil down to what is reasonable. If we present a system of support that helps students to learn – including mechanisms to monitor engagement, intervene to help in times of difficulty and opportunities to reflect on success and failure – then that is as far as I feel we should go.
No student should be able to ‘buy’ a qualification simply by dint of paying their tuition fees: that merely gives them a seat in the room and access to the support we provide. Like the proverbial horse, if they choose not to drink, then as long as we have taken them to the water, then we cannot – and should not – do more.
Posted in Academia, Simon Usherwood
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The Digital Natives Are Not Restless
Somewhat related to Simon’s post about the use of new social media: Hurricane Sandy unexpectedly provided me with experimental environment in which to test student use online communication platforms. I’m currently teaching online courses for our master’s degree program in international relations. I have students on at least three continents and in who knows how many countries. Some reside locally and lost electrical power during the storm. A few might have evacuated to higher ground. Yet all of them were in communication with each other and me through the course websites, email, and phone. Assignments were submitted in a timely fashion even though I announced an extension of deadlines due to the weather.
I’m also teaching three traditional face to face undergraduate courses. All of these courses had tasks that could have or should have been completed using either the online Canvas LMS or the Statecraft simulation. Only six of my students submitted anything. I thought this was especially odd for the thirty-five students who are using Statecraft, since a new turn in the simulation began at 9:00 a.m. yesterday morning. Although classes were canceled, students were in the residence halls and the campus network remained operational. It appears that many undergraduates — at least at my university — still think of an education as something that is dependent on a physical classroom. While these students are quite happy to socialize via text message, they are not effective at using digital communication tools for other purposes. My older students — whose occupations frequently require problem solving – are much more capable of operating in a globalized electronic environment.
Posted in Chad Raymond, Online Classes, Problem solving, Technology
Tagged Canvas, hurricane, sandy, Statecraft
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Using New Social Media in Learning & Teaching
Last week, my colleagues and I presented to our Faculty on the School of Politics’ use of new social media (NSM) in our learning & teaching. This covered our work with Twitter, Facebook and blogging, plus some brief excursions into wikis.
The aim of the event was both to share our experiences and to reflect on the utility of NSM, since it remains a relatively new field for all involved.
Our Facebook page for the School has been very useful indeed for connecting with current students, alumni as well as future students and applicants. It provides a relatively stable place to post information about events and news, as well as connecting to colleagues’ research.
In contrast, our Twitter feeds allow us a much more high-tempo channel of communication. The School’s channel is a site for joining up other users and the Facebook page, especially for reminders of events. Myself and most colleagues (such as Jack Holland) run individual accounts, where we hashtag posts for individual modules and events. For the former, it has been a good way to stimulate debate outside of the classroom, to share resources and to connect teaching to the real world. For the latter, it has proved a particularly good way of getting in questions during public debates and for sharing those in real time with other people (e.g. our event last week was tagged as #FAHSLT).
Blogs serve a somewhat different market, mainly being aimed at academic colleagues and practitioner groups. Our two Surrey blogs (Politics @ Surrey and Cii), plus my own postings here on ALPS, allow us to post relatively timely contributions to topical debates, connect with new communities and try out new ideas for more substantial research projects.
Overall, we would argue that NSM has brought a number of basic benefits:
- It offers a much more speedy and timely way of engaging in discussion, with all our users, allowing us to shape those discussions in a way that was very difficult beforehand;
- It offers huge potential for synergies between teaching and research, as well as programme administration and marketing activities;
- Finally, it extends our reach and profile well beyond what we could have achieved with old media channels.
However, it is also important to reflect on the costs involved:
- Time costs are substantial, since NSM is predicated on constant interaction and the creation of new content. This requires many hours a week, however it is spread across individuals;
- Personnel costs are also significant, especially if the different channels are to interact with each other. We have been very lucky to have a 0.5FTE post for the past two years working on this, which has meant we can constantly update sites, cross-link materials and generally encourage others to contribute;
- Finally, NSM has the potential for serious reputational costs. We talk with students (and colleagues) about netiquette and the boundary between public and private. Usually that works, but sometimes not, so again that requires management of individuals. Just as good news can be spread very quickly, so too can criticism.
With all this in mind, the three basic questions to ask if you are a unit thinking of getting into NSM (and they are still relatively rare) are:
- Is it worth it for you to do this?
- Can you get it started? i.e. are there enough people who will be bothered enough to get over the initial hurdles?
- Can you keep it going? Nothing is worse that a NSM account that’s not touched for a few months, so you have to have people who can generate content, week after week.
