course goals

Active Learning in the Online Classroom

Posted by Natalie Berkman

With the arrival of the pandemic, my day job as the Academic Manager at SAE Institute Paris has essentially transformed into one of my part-time jobs, online teaching. While I’ve already posted about the administrative side of this shift a few weeks ago (feel free to read it here), I figured that another post about actual pedagogical strategies might be helpful to all the other teachers out there who might have to stay online in the fall and would like to prepare new types of classes that are designed specifically for the online classroom. Since I’m most familiar with Zoom, I will structure this post as a series of lists, each one corresponding to one of Zoom’s many functionalities. While not by any means exhaustive, I hope these tips and tricks that have been very useful in my online classroom will help others!

Share Screen

Just like in a traditional classroom, it is often helpful to mix it up. With Zoom, you can share your traditional PowerPoint, for sure, but you can also share videos (be sure to click “share computer sound” first!), websites, different software, and more. In certain types of classrooms, sharing something particularly interactive (even if you didn’t have to prepare it in advance) can be far more beneficial for the students. Indeed, unlike a traditional classroom (unless you’re in a computer lab or allow your students to bring their computers), in the Zoom classroom, students can have the software or website open themselves and practice themselves. For instance, in my work with ViaX, I teach students text encoding in XML-TEI using the software Oxygen. Opening Oxygen in the class and having students help me (either orally or in the chat) tag a document is much better than showing them what encoding looks like on a PowerPoint slide or having them try to do it without the appropriate tools. At SAE, teachers have been incorporating a wide range of software and media into their online classrooms, which has been essential to continuing the students’ creative media education.

Annotations

Let’s say you don’t have any interactive software or websites that you could do with your students based on your specific subject matter. For instance, I’ve been teaching academic writing to video games students at SAE for the past few months, and Microsoft Word isn’t a particularly exciting or interesting software to use in class. In this case, a traditional PowerPoint can absolutely be the backbone of your course, just as you would use one in a traditional classroom. That said, to encourage students to participate more, there are certain ways that you can design your PowerPoint to make use of other Zoom features, specifically the annotations. For instance, the other day, I was teaching one of my ViaX students how to perform a close reading on an excerpt I had chosen. While we could have just had a discussion about the text, this task was greatly facilitated by Zoom’s annotations feature. I was able to have her highlight repeated words and sounds, underline sentences that she found particularly meaningful, and even place stars, checks, and more directly onto the slides to keep track of our observations. While these annotations aren’t saved on the PowerPoint slides themselves, you can save the finished product to send to your student(s) and/or post in your LMS as an additional course document, and if the class has been recorded, students can rewatch the line of reasoning that went into those annotations.

Chat

The chat serves a very obvious purpose: students who are more reluctant to speak in class (or perhaps who don’t have a microphone) can post their questions, comments, or concerns in the chat. If there are more than 10-15 students, I would highly encourage using the chat during more lecture-oriented parts of your class to avoid being derailed by endless questions. You can even make it so students cannot unmute themselves, reserving actual conversations for moments you predefined. If the class is recorded, you will have a copy of the chat transcript, but if you want to encourage students to view this textual conversation as a more important aspect of class, I would also encourage you to put the link to a Google Doc in the chat, where students can take notes collaboratively, beyond just asking questions. This sort of strategy works better if you have a second screen, so you can keep track of what students are finding most useful during your class and also point them in the right direction. The Google Doc strategy also works well with the next functionality I will discuss.

Breakout Rooms

As all teachers know, the oldest trick in the book is to put students into pairs or small groups for directed learning activities during an in-person class. However, in the online classroom, this might seem impossible if Zoom did not have the breakout room feature! The breakout rooms can be used very effectively, but proper preparation and explanation are necessary for the students to stay focused in these separate rooms (since you can’t be in all of them at once). The way I have found to make productive use of the breakout rooms is also by leaning on the collaborative nature of Google Docs. Before class, I create the Google Docs, set up the groups, and include in each Doc the rules to the exercise. At the start of class, I explain the group assignment, share the Google Docs with the assigned group members, and split them into their breakout rooms. Then, I can bounce back and forth between the different groups, but can also make sure students in the other rooms are staying on track. Instead of Google Docs, you can also consider using Google Slides and having students end the breakout rooms assignment with a group presentation. A final way to keep students on task is to push messages to all breakout rooms at the same time (for instance, tips or time limits).

Poll

At SAE, we have used the poll feature in our open days to ask participants in these very large marketing events anonymous questions about their interest and appreciation. That said, the poll can also be used for sporadic checks that students have understood the material, as well as to see how students are appreciating the classes to get live feedback. I know that I’ve used the polls a surprising amount to get quick student feedback at the end of classes so I make sure that students are responding to the various activities the way I’d like. You can even use the polls as a way to incite conversation — for instance, in an English-language workshop I run with my French-speaking games students, I gave them polarizing questions related to common debates surrounding video games (for instance, do video games have the potential to make children more violent?). This led to lively debates in English, even though many of the students are not necessarily the first to participate in a different language.

Whiteboard

While there are certainly more functionalities and strategies, I think I will end this post with the whiteboard. Now, I know it’s hard to draw/write properly with the trackpad or even a mouse (not everyone has a tablet/stylus that they can use, for sure), but thankfully the whiteboard comes with the option to type. I’ve found that the whiteboard greatly facilitates group brainstorming activities, mind mapping, as well as helping students work collaboratively in the breakout rooms. Just as with the annotation function, it is easy to take a snapshot of the final result to then share with the students in their LMS, via the chat, or by email.

Conclusion

While online teaching is certainly difficult, hopefully these tips will help you. I know that at first, online teaching was a task that I spent hours and hours prepping for because I was very nervous about how students would react in the online classroom (since I was much more familiar with in-person classes). That said, the more I taught, the more I realized that these types of strategies that make use of the distinguishing features of the online classroom can help reduce prep time and improve student satisfaction. It can certainly seem scary to let more unknown variables into the online classroom (in addition to the typical ones — student and teacher internet connection, being the most important), but I can honestly say, fostering active learning in the online classroom has been the only way I have found to make it so I am not completely drained at the end of a long day of teaching on Zoom. Hopefully they work for you as well! Feel free to leave a comment or share your own strategies below! Together, we can get through these trying times and virtually support each other!

McGraw Teaching Seminar: Putting it Together: Integrated Course Design

Posted by Natalie Berkman

Assignment

For this final meeting, we prepped by finding what we found were “model” syllabi in our fields — either good or bad. As I was searching for Princeton-specific syllabi for the introductory French literature courses, I noticed that syllabi were difficult to find! We had all agreed in the previous seminar that syllabi represent a contract between students and the professor and were therefore a fundamental part of integrated course design. So, I found it odd that without actually attending the first lecture at Princeton, it was impossible to see a syllabus in advance. In the end, I dug up my old Hopkins syllabi, which were underwhelming. Each focused more on what texts we were reading and administrative details than course goals and details about assessment. The second half of the assignment was to draft a lesson plan using a template. I designed one based on 17th century French classical theater and the notion of rules.

Discussion

Our final discussion consisted of our reactions to the course in the form of a timeline recap. The calendar of the course had been posted on the main wall, and we were instructed to put two post-its on specific days: first for our favorite moment and second for our least favorite. Seeing how everyone else reacted to various parts of the course and discussing what we wish we had had more of or less of led to great reflections on the topic as a whole. How do we integrate all that we learned into innovative course design?

My main takeaway from this course is that course design can and must be broken up into its constituent parts. In the future, I will always begin from a student’s perspective. What do I want them to learn and how can I get them there? What do they know already and how can we build? From there, you can design pointed assignments and have the class be driven by what the students will do, rather than a series of texts. For these assignments, designing a rubric can help me as the teacher understand what I expect of the students. But I am still unsure of how to make use of them in the classroom. Overall, I am excited to synthesize all of this and create my first syllabus! I hope to design the introduction to French literature class that I wish I had.

 

McGraw Teaching Seminar: Connecting Online and Classroom Environments / Writing Teaching Statements

Posted by Natalie Berkman

For introducing us to the subtle art of writing teaching statements, the McGraw staff “flipped” the classroom, giving us an extremely structured online lesson to introduce us to the expectations that lie behind this essential pedagogical document. While I found the experience to be productive, the concept of the flipped lecture as it was presented to us raised a series of questions to me that were unrelated to the teaching statement.

  1. While the online lecture they provided was professionally recorded and expertly designed, I failed to see exactly how this “flipped” lecture was actually flipped. This was not ordinarily a lecture-based class, but had always functioned as some form of individual readings or homework as well as outside group activities in order to prepare us for an extremely interactive discussion-based class. While the “flipped” lecture here did not assign us mandatory readings as usual, how was the video lecture fundamentally different from assigning readings? We watched the video, carried out the mini assignments along the way, and came to class with drafts and ideas to further discussion.
  2. This question had a simple answer that only raised more questions: the difference between this video lecture and the readings we had formerly been assigned was that this video was extremely structured. We watched a certain segment of the lecture, and then had a focused activity that helped us to put into action what we had just absorbed passively.
  3. I began to wonder, are humanities classes already flipped? This teaching seminar was not a “humanities” class in the strict sense, but it seemed to be already flipped. The only major difference between the flipped lecture and a traditional one is that the video provided immediate and structured activities for us to do.
  4. What if, rather than focusing on flipping classes in the sense that students watch a video at home, we could instead focus on structuring the work they do at home as well as structuring what is done in the classroom. In my experience teaching French language classes, I focused far less on what I assigned students outside of the classroom than what I hoped to accomplish in the classroom, as those 50 minutes represented their only real chance at an immersion experience. When I assign a film to watch, I focus on preparing them in the classroom before they watch it, arming them with the cultural background and specific vocabulary that will allow them to make the most of the 2-3 hours as well as bring back a productive conversation in the classroom.
  5. I thought back to my study abroad experience. The French university system, I had been told, encourages autonomy. Very little was done in the classroom, but very little was assigned. Students were implicitly aware that they either needed to structure their work on their own, or they would just squeeze by in the classroom. The American system is quite different. Everything is explicitly stated, and students as a result do not structure their own work.
  6. When designing my syllabus for the seminar, I attempted (and am still refining) how to best structure the work outside of the classroom to encourage students who are just making the jump from French language coursework to more advanced classes conducted entirely in French to structure their own work productively. I am hoping to continue to nuance this idea, enriching my pedagogy by structuring work both in and out of the classroom.

McGraw Teaching Seminar: A Deeper Look into the Classroom

Posted by Natalie Berkman

Course Observation

For this session, we needed to observe at least one class at Princeton taught by one of our colleagues in the seminar and one online course. I observed a molecular biology course, since I was curious what techniques are used to teach large lectures. Although the class was large, the instructors consistently broke the large group of students into smaller groups that still interacted with the overall class. Tables were given individual assignments and had to discuss smaller aspects of larger problems, which were then combined in a discussion with all the groups. While similar to techniques I have to use in French language classes, seeing it implemented on a larger scale and with more complex problems was useful. The final stage in each activity was particularly impressive — a representative from every group had to explain that group’s reasoning, and the instructors would then tie it all together.

My first year of college, I had taken physics 101, which was a large lecture class that required absolutely no engagement and just expected students to absorb lectures passively. The content of these lectures was often divorced from the homework and exam problems that served as our primary means of assessment. My classmates and I realized that if we wanted to succeed, we needed to do the majority of the “teaching” on our own, and viewed the lecture as an inconvenience. The professor began grading us on our “participation” in lecture given our clicker responses, but only gave us points if we answered questions, indicating that we were merely present.

Reflections

The Princeton biology course restored my faith in science classes, and reminded me how important pedagogy is in the reception of the material for students. Whereas I had assumed I would love physics, the actual physics class gave me a drastically different impression of the discipline: I did not want to waste a huge part of my college years in anonymous lecture halls not learning, and then be forced to teach myself everything on my own; I did not want to take tests that were designed to be impossible, with average grades between 30 and 50%; finally, I definitely did not want to feel like I was in competition with my classmates, aiming to beat out my neighbors for those those rare A grades. The Princeton class, however, was collaborative. As an outsider, I felt as though I had a real understanding of what microbiology research might be like, what collaborations would look and sound like, and what the bigger picture was.

These issues are analogous to those found in online classes. How do you elicit active learning from students whom you will never meet? How do you encourage collaboration between classmates who have different schedules, different levels of engagement, and possibly live on different continents? Finally, how do you harmonize what is learned and set reasonable learning goals knowing that the majority of the students will not actually pursue the course to the end?

I do not know the answer to these questions, but attending classes from the perspective of an educator made me reconsider my own experiences as a student, which I believe is valuable. It also forced me to consider new strategies to implement in my own humanities classes. While reading is often considered a solitary activity, how do you make the classroom experience productive, collaborative, and structured?

McGraw Teaching Seminar: Intellectual Acts and Social Practices

Posted by Natalie Berkman

Our assignment for this seminar was to create an assignment and a rubric. These were then reviewed by our peers in the seminar, a process that was helpful in our understanding of what intellectual acts were actually going on in the classroom.

Assignment: Explication de Texte

Read the poem “Le dormeur du val” by Arthur Rimbaud and write a traditional “explication de texte” in French about it. The “explication de texte” is a common French assignment that has the student engage with the text in a quasi-scientific manner, explicating it terms of content, form, and rhetoric, in a structured essay that can be broken down as follows:

Introduction: In this part, the student situates the text, describes its main attributes, what happens in it, and its main themes. Details often mentioned in the introduction include (but are not limited to):

• Primary information: author’s name, title, the date of publication, pertinent historical context
• The form: genre, type of verses, rhyme scheme, fixed form poetry, variations
• The subject: what is the topic of the passage? What is the function of the passage within the larger text (if an excerpt)?
• Outline: Generally within an introduction to a French explication de texte, the student writes an outline at the end of the introduction, explaining the order of what will come next. Often, students will choose to analyze the text in order, with each major section of the text discussed in individual paragraphs; sometimes, students choose to write thematically.

Analysis: Here, the student describes the structure of the passage, the development, and the different parts of the text. The analysis depends on the text in question, and often deals with some of the following questions:

• Does the author move from a general idea to a specific one or vice versa?
• What is the tone?
• Who is speaking?
• What sort of language does the author use?
• What tense is the passage in, and what is the significance of the changing of tenses?
• Why does the author use this particular diction or syntax?
• What are the stylistic choices: images, metaphors, comparisons, paraphrasing, repetition of words or syntactical structures, historical or literary allusions, personification, etc.?
• What is the effect produced by such techniques?

Conclusion: Finally, the student should summarize the preceding study of the passage, with the main emphasis being on the main themes and their relationship to the form. Finally, he/she should give a personal evaluation of the text and your reactions. The purpose of an explication de texte is to deepen your understanding of the text and appreciation of the poetic and literary qualities of the author.

Rubric for Evaluation

Structure: ___ / 5

• Does the overall structure of the essay contain the introduction, analysis, and conclusion?
• Introduction: Does the introduction properly situate the text, give pertinent information about its historical/cultural context, the author, and the nature of the passage? Is there a clear thesis in the introduction? Does it include an outline?
• Analysis: Does the analysis follow the text in a logical manner? Is the text cited within the analysis section to support points made in the introduction? Does the analysis develop the claims made in the introduction? Does the structure of the analysis follow the outline presented in the introduction?
• Conclusion: Does the conclusion both summarize the preceding summary and provide a personal evaluation?
• Is the structure clearly defined throughout the essay and easy to recognize while reading?

Style: ___ / 5

• Is the essay well-written? Ex) Varied sentence structure, not too much repetition, precise word choice, consistent tense (explications de texte dealing with literature are always written in the present tense when describing the text, but past when describing the historical context), etc.
• Is the writing interesting? Does the introduction pull the reader in? Is the reader constantly engaged in the analysis?

Analysis: ___ / 5

• Language: Can student effectively identify types of literary language and explain how such language is important to the passage and its overall meaning?
• Theme: Can student expand the analysis of the language of the text to discuss the broader theme of the passage or novel? Perhaps even to other literature?
• Thesis: Can student maintain his thesis throughout the analysis?
• Examples: Does student give detailed examples from the text to substantiate his/her claims? Are examples presented logically and critically?
• Relationship to classroom discussions: Does the student expand beyond the classroom discussions in his/her analysis? Can he/she identify the text given the author and date of publication as well as situate it more profoundly within the larger literary history we have discussed?

French: ___ / 5

• Student is able to express him/herself in French with minimal comprehension errors.
• The grammatical points of the writing are representative of successful completion of required language prerequisite courses.
• The vocabulary the student uses in French is rich and varied.
• The spelling and accents are accurate with minimal errors.
• The student is able to maintain a formal, academic register of language throughout the essay.

McGraw Teaching Seminar: Course Assessment and Grading

Posted by Natalie Berkman

Learning Goals

For this new session of the McGraw Teaching Seminar, we had to refine the novice learning goals we had drafted in November and come up with some sort of an assessment that would allow us to see if students met those goals. Our novice learning goals were originally: “Learn to construct an argument about literary texts through contextualization (historical, cultural). Language is a main problematic in teaching both.” Reflecting, we decided that our learning goals could be divided into three specific aspects:

  1. Contextualization: the student should be able to contextualize the text within historical, cultural, linguistic frames
  2. Text: the student should sympathetically engage with the text and understand it on multiple levels
  3. Argument: the student should interpret, appreciate, and evaluate

With this in mind, we refined our novice learning goals to the following short sentence: “Students will contextualize, engage with, and interpret texts.”

Assessment

For the evaluation half of the assignment, rather than discussing an essay or final exam, we decided to develop a general rubric for a post/short response in the LMS in three parts:

  1. Identify the main problems the text deals with, with possible recourse to the historical and cultural context.
  2. Focus on a section of the text, looking specifically at language and rhetoric and the tools the author uses to accomplish what was said in part 1.
  3. Analyze the implications for the time in which the text was written and today.

When discussing what success would look like, we decided that the student should be able to use textual evidence in combination with analysis, persuasively arguing these three points, making cases for significance and fostering connections.

Our conversation also touched upon the difficulty of having a final exam in classes such as these. We decided that having the students carry out short, structured thinking exercises like these would allow for greater discussion in seminar-style classes. Furthermore, with such preparation, it would be possible to give an exercise like this as a final exam in addition to a final essay.

Seminar Discussion

Unsurprisingly, the seminar was about rubrics. When I was in school, rubrics were the bane of my existence. While based on good intentions, they often seemed reductive ways to understand assignments. In college and beyond, I rarely had rubrics and when I did, found that they often turned my experience of the assignment into a dry, uninteresting exercise that was a basic formality of the course.

That is why I was skeptical of this particular meeting, for which the follow-up assignment would be to create our own assignments and rubrics, which would be evaluated by my peers using a rubric for rubrics. That said, designing my assignment and rubric did force me to think more critically about my course goals and the purpose of the assignment itself. However, once I had designed an assignment that I thought was consistent with my course goals, I found that the rubric itself was almost superfluous.

In the end, perhaps rubrics are a useful exercise for teachers, but I am still not convinced that they bring out the best in our students. In the seminar, we had a heated discussion on the use of rubrics and everyone else seemed about as divided as I was. The readings for that session took the form of pseudo-scientific studies that raised more questions than they answered, and left many unimpressed. While I might steer clear of rubrics when I design and teach my first course, it is true that I learned a lot writing one.

McGraw Teaching Seminar: Course Goals

Posted by Natalie Berkman

Humanities Course Goals

After participating in the breakout groups and reflecting individually on what it means to be a novice and an expert in our disciplines, our seminar meeting today dealt primarily with course goals. Rather than being grouped with people in different disciplines as we were for the previous assignment, in this seminar we sat with other participants from similar disciplines. I was paired with two classicists and together, we developed succinct course goals that we could write on a poster and hang on the board. This is what we came up with:

Reflections

Once we had seen the course goals for each disciplinary group, we identified their strengths and weaknesses. At the core, every discipline wanted their students to learn critical reasoning and interpretation skills. Problem solving was also popular for science and engineering. In many cases, learning to speak properly about what is at stake in a discipline and communicate results was also important. In all disciplines, the subject was the student, and course goals best translated into strong, action verbs.

I appreciated the main takeaway from this seminar, which was that our goals as educators don’t differ too much from discipline to discipline. In each, we just want students to be able to think deeply about a particular topic and develop the skills and competencies necessary to understand the discipline. Specifically within the humanities, the goals are so similar that the division into departments seems almost redundant. Look for yourself. Below, you’ll find the course goals each group defined.