Grading Tips, From The "Basics" of the Basic Communication Course: A Graduate Student Teacher's Survival Guide

From The "Basics" of the Basic Communication Course: A Graduate Student Teacher's Survival Guide

 

We all develop our own strategies in time. But below are some tricks and tips that I’ve found useful in grading. 

1. Become adept at writing comments on the rubric during the speakers’ speeches. Don’t worry about making eye contact with the speakers the whole time. The rest of class should be good audience members. You can, however, do quick scans of the classroom every now and then. In short, it's okay to not look at students for their entire speech if it means making constructive comments. 

2. On a separate sheet of paper, record your first impressions honestly. You won’t show students these comments, but they will help you once you get back to your office to grade. After competing in and coaching collegiate speech and debate for 11 years, I can accurately predict a speaker’s grade in the first 30 seconds of their speech. After you’ve been teaching for a while, your instincts will be similarly honed. 

3. Get the lay of the land. Wait to assign scores, and do not assign grades after each speech. Tentatively give a score for each rubric item for the first three speeches. Later, reflect on whether these are accurate. If so, then use them as a gauge for the rest of the speeches. Yes, students may want their grades quickly, but grading is not only a time for you to assess your students; it's a time for you to be reflexive about your own teaching.

For example, if none of your students include transitions for their speeches, does that mean the entire class is clueless? Might it be something in your instructions to them that was confusing? Did you not provide clear examples? Maybe they don't think transitions are important. Did you stress the importance of transitions to students? Obviously, if the answers to these questions lead you to believe there was something you could have explained more clearly, you'll want to carefully consider how harshly you'll grade your students on this aspect of the speech

You might ask, "Well, if I've got a rubric and each part of the rubric has been given a point or percentage weight, how can I grade "less harshly"? Remember our previous discussion about meeting the minimum requirements: if you think you could have explained something more clearly, perhaps your "minimum" benchmark can be altered. The students won't see this alteration; you might just give a Satisfactory score based on a lower benchmark.

It's true that you could simply take those points out of the equation altogether and reduce the total number of points for the speech. But that requires more reconfiguring on the back end as the total possible points for your class will change. You could add another assignment to make up those points, but your supervising faculty member may frown upon changing the syllabus when you're already into the semester. If you've included the caveat that the number and frequency of assignments may change based on the progress of the class, then you're likely to be technically in the right if you were to add another assignment. But, you've got your own classes to worry about in the meantime--do you really want to create more work yourself?

Top COMM 103 Student Tweets (So Far) of Fall 2011 (NSFW)

Ironic that although some tweets aren't safe for work, I've read them and counted them as part of my work as a university professor teaching communication and media literacy to mostly first-year students.

Using Student Tweets to Illustrate Media Literacy Concepts
I've had a debate with some teacher friends on facebook as to whether I should take students to task for their tweets. I find it useful to use some examples of questionable tweets in class as a way of teaching media literacy. It helps me illustrate: 1) there's not such thing as "privacy" or "anonymity" on the web; 2) you need to mindful of multiple audiences with social media messages; and 3) you must be mindful of possible unintended messages when using social media.

Now, I never call out specific students, and I don't intend to put them "on blast," as the students like to say (and get no shortage of laughs hearing me say it in class). I should note that I make it clear on our  BlackBoard site as well as on the syllabus that there is a class Twitter account. In most cases I use publicly accessible tweets (i.e., tweets that aren't locked and only available for followers, and tweets that can be found through a simple term search on twitter). In other cases, I use the tweets of students who chose to follow our COMM 103 class, thereby giving me access to their tweets. I use their tweets in class lectures in an attempt to teach students to be more mindful of the messages they send out into the amorphous universe of electronic media.

Why Not? Blurring Classroom Boundaries for Better or Worse
So, what's the debate? Well, some friends say that I shouldn't hold students accountable for what they say on twitter because, although I have a twitter account for class and many students choose to follow me, it's not really classroom communication. I disagree. The classroom is wherever students and teachers interact. Now, that may be an unfairly broad definition which may prompt the questions, "So, if you see a student at Target should you expect them to act like a student (e.g., respectful, polite)? And in turn, should you be expected to answer their questions about class at said Target store?"

 These are good questions. And although social media has certainly blurred the boundaries of in-class and out-of-class, is it fair for me to (re)define those boundaries in a way convenient for me? I don't have an easy answer.

So, my response to tweets isn't necessarily one of chastising but usually silence (and somehow referencing it in class) or measured responses. Below are some examples.

Example One: Why do I need this class?
I talk in class about why, although some communication concepts may seem common sense, it's important to think about these concepts to be mindful of our communication habits and in which contexts those habits might or might not be appropriate.

Somehow, though, the concept of mindfulness didn't seem to resonate with this student:

These tweets are publicly accessible and easily found with a Twitter search of "communicate"

I didn't respond to these specific tweets, though I did to another one about one of our quizzes (I again found it through a search). Although this student didn't go back and delete these posts above (some do with their more "saucy" tweets), this student did respond to me. Hopefully, the interaction generated via Twitter will lodge itself in this student's thinking about media use.

Example Two: I don't need this class; in fact, I hate this class
The tweets below were decidedly more vitriolic:

These are publicly accessible with a simple search of COMM103

Here's how I responded:

I'm not sure if this student still checks this Twitter account. But my response is typical of how I handle such things. I find this approach usually does work with students who might initially seem like they hate the class but are, in actually, just worried, nervous, or otherwise concerned with their class performance. Which leads me to the next example:


Example Three: I sound like I hate this class, but I'm actually just a little overwhelmed
Sometimes, I think students spew some tweets that don't actually mean what they might sound like to a teacher. Case in point, the below exchange, which began with a measured response to an "I hate this class" tweet (like my example above):

These are publicly accessible with a simple search of COMM103

Unlike the above example, though, this student responded to me. And not in the way I expected:

The bottom tweet is the first one in the series

So, I responded in kind:

And this exchange had a (sort of) happy ending. Perhaps the best a teacher could hope for in this asynchronous social media exchange.

Example Four: I actually like this class
There are many positive tweets as well. Below is one:

Obviously, the #COMM103 hashtag, which I encourage students to use, makes this publicly accessible tweet easy to find

To these I usually respond, "Glad you're enjoying it" or something like that, taking a chance that the tweet isn't ironic in its use of multiple exclamation points.

What's It All For? The Future of Social Media in My Classroom
My use of the class Twitter account is a work in progress. But I think its utility and possibly lie in more than just communicating class information to students or answering questions (out of class or, as some instructor now use it, in class with a moderated live feed). Its use, and teachers' framing of its use, is rooted in the concepts of media literacy. We must be vigilant in illustrating to students the ways intention, audience, and tone play complex roles in social media.

Update
I was recently honored for the kind of experiments I detail above. You can read more about this on the SDSU News page.

Bursting the Bubble, Knocking Down Silos, and Other Metaphors We Live By

A while ago I came across this provocative interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who's so adamant that school no longer teaches us what we need to know to succeed in the "real world," that he gives money to schools' best and brightest to leave school and start a business. Such a move implies that colleges aren't teaching students what they need to learn in order to succeed "out there."

I consider this now well-trodden metaphor of the "bubble." The dotcom bubble burst a while ago. The housing bubble just recently burst. When thinking about this metaphor, a few aspects of a bubble come to mind. First, a bubble obviously isn't sustainable. It floats in the air without the ability to avoid something that might break it. The thin membrane filled with air is bound to either land then burst, or pop in midair. But watching a bubble can be mesmerizing and peaceful, a seemingly undisturbed journey that ends suddenly (if one can't see what pops up in the bubble's path). The bubble can't last forever.

Have we, as Thiel argues, become so mesmerized with the seemingly undisturbed "journey" of higher education? Hardly. Some of us have gotten pretty good at spotting things in our way and have begun to adapt.

In the midst of considering this, I came across this news story regarding an open letter from the University of Texas-Austin Student Body President, Natalie Butler. She accompanied some UT regents on a trip to Arizona State University, my alma mater, about which I've written before. The trip was apparently an effort to learn how to increase UT's online learning program. The letter, however, warns the regents about becoming like ASU, who practices a "use-inspired" research, rather than the "intellectually-inspired" research practiced at UT-Austin.

While I admire this Tempe native's dedication to rigorous study, I take umbrage with this dichotomy of use-inspired versus intellectually-inspired research. All communication research should solve problems. Period. Granted, to some people, some of the problems we're tackling in higher education and communication research may seem needlessly esoteric or theoretical. That's to be expected. But whether we're building on theory or out in the streets with protesters, we're solving problems. Unfortunately, we often think of certain types of problems as being the domain of a particular discipline. We've built these silos around ourselves and claim ownership over problems, issues, approaches, etc. I think part of what Ms. Butler is witnessing is a move away from these silos.

ASU President Michael Crow's move what toward he calls a "New American University" has been accompanied by, at times, seismic shifts in the symbolic identities scholars craft for themselves. This includes changing the names of departments whose presence on the university campus has been a mainstay for perhaps as long as higher education has existed in its current, more-or-less, publicly accessible form. For example, ASU no longer has an Anthropology department (or school); instead it has a School of Human Evolution and Social Change. No longer is there a Political Science department; there is, however, a School of Politics and Global Studies.

For all the flak ASU President Michael Crow has gotten, I appreciate his move toward issue- or problem-oriented research. I also understand and appreciate the resistance toward such a move. For those unfamiliar with academia, talk of solving "real-world" problems often includes applying for grants--external funding from philanthropic, private and public not-for-profit agencies.

What's wrong with that? Getting money for your research is a good thing, you might say. Yes, but. The "but" is that often these granting institutions and the grant application evaluators expect reports that quantify results. Many in the communication discipline don't use a quantitative approach to gathering and analyzing data. This leaves some of us forced to employ methodologies we're either not familiar with or disagree with on an epistemological level. Sure, this thinking might be akin to the silo metaphor I invoked earlier, but I can empathize with these folks. The communication field is broad and deep, and those more humanistic researchers who qualitatively analyze texts of all kinds may not identify a place for them in this "problem-solving" approach.

Some have managed to cross this divide in interesting and uncompromising ways. I've been taught well by these folks and strive to incorporate it into my own research. Selling out? Compromising? Tacitly accepting the devaluing of humanities and reifying the place of the almighty dollar in academic research? I suppose some might say that's where this line of thinking leads. But I prefer to view it optimistically as an opportunity to begin chipping away at these calcified silo walls.

Stories as Teaching Tools

It's been a while since my last post. I've been busy with writing and teaching. In the first case, I've gotten caught up in the revise and resubmit cycle as I submit articles for publication. Same with teaching: prepping, grading, etc. In both of these cases, it's easy to lose track of the stories I'm trying to tell. All of which prompts me to consider the role of stories in my teaching.

For my morning classes, I come into the lecture hall at the tail end of a History professor's basic course. And I listen, caught up in the stories he tells to teach the class about English expansion and Napoleon's conquest, about the development of raw materials like gold and salt as precious commodities, about ethnic strife. And I think about what I teach: theories and concepts broken down into bits and pieces, partly because of who I'm teaching (first-year students), but also, I think, because of the subject matter.

I know that many communication scholars, especially qualitative communication scholars (like H.L. Goodall and others), claim that scholarly articles and theories are themselves narratives, stories. So, what are the stories in a basic communication course?

I'm sure they're there. But because the basic communication course (which often focuses on public speaking) is chunked up into discrete skills (language use, gestures, researching, using citations, supporting arguments, volume, rate, pitch, etc.) for the purpose of teaching students both "life skills" and skills that will be useful to them for the rest of their college careers, the format resists stories and a "big picture" approach. And believe me, I've tried time and again to stress the latter. But without much life experience, it's difficult, I think, for students to appreciate the big picture.

So, the question for me becomes not only what stories do I tell, but how do I tell them? It's a shame that many of the basic studies-general education classes we ask students to take resist the story form, as that's what students are most used to (in songs, movies, television shows). My task, then, is to figure out the stories embedded in common communication experiences and attempt to tell them. But whose stories? Mine? Some students could surely relate, but there's a generation gap that may be difficult to cross. Theirs? I can't speak for them. I continue to look for the stories to tell.

Students as facebook friends: Too much, too close?

What's the harm? I innocently thought. Having a facebook group for the basic communication class I teach was a great idea (started by a student and now handed over to me and the GTAs for the class). It wasn't long before undergrads (first-year students) started adding me as a friend. Given the group we all belonged to it, I felt refusing to confirm students' friend requests would be a bit of a double-standard. Sure, I would be well within a traditional student-teacher relationship if I had refused, but it seemed a bit hypocritical to encourage them to use the technology to foster community among lecture students and then refuse to fully be a part of that community.

Needless to say, this is no longer a traditional student-teacher relationship, and refusing to confirm students' friend requests of me is not like refusing to give them my home or cell phone number. It's more like asking them to be part of a phone tree with me and then refusing to give them my phone number.

So, social networking technology like facebook (which I believe can be an effective teaching tool) has changed the student-teacher relationship. This isn't news. And others have theorized, speculated, and written about this change better than I can.

More specific for me, I now get news of their photo albums on my own facebook news feed. While none of these photos are of a...compromising nature, some come close. Some involve activities that could be illegal, and others just provide more information about the students than I'd like to know.

The students aren't to blame, although they should think about taking down some of these photos before embarking on a serious job hunt or be "found out" by potential employers doing the regular google-facebook-myspace search of applicants. No, I think it's just a matter of technology fostering unintended consequences in a more nontraditional teacher-student relationship.

Interestingly, I think the next step is to use these experiences of mine as teaching tools in the classroom, examples of the ways technology is both open and public (even when we think it's private or, at the least, harmless to our "online reputations"). I'll certainly include this little talk in my lesson plan for lectures to the basic oral communication class I teach.

So, all I can do now is grin and bear it...and not click on the pictures when the icons pop up in my news feed!

How to "fix" a basic communication course?

Well, not fix so much as refine, revise, and improve.

My colleagues and I did some work on our basic communication course this past year with a grant from San Diego State's Course Design Institute/People, Information, Communication, and Technology institute. Here's the presentation from the CDI YouTube channel. Thanks to Suzanne and the ITS/CDI crew!

I'm planning more changes for this year, though it's a bit daunting when considering the impact on the 5,000 or so students we get in the basic course every year. Imagine steering a very sensitive, 50 foot yacht--even the slightest adjustment will be felt relatively strongly by all the passengers, and given its size it may be more difficult to readjust as the trip goes on. I've never been "yachting" (in case you get any misconceptions about professors' salaries here at SDSU!), but that seems to me to be an apt metaphor.

At any rate, watch the presentation and you'll get an idea of the complexities of teaching 5,000 first-year students (probably about 96% of all first-year students at SDSU) in a large lecture/break-out format. Of particular interest to me is the use of the facebook study group, which just happened by accident this past Spring but I plan to use deliberately this Fall. The clickers to which I refer, course response systems from einstruction.com, also worked out well. I'm interested to hear from others who've used similar technology in their classes.

Ethnographically speaking...

I was invited to "translate" one of my articles into a Communication Currents column. Communication Currents is the National Communication Association's version of Psychology Today, except online. The editor, currently Joann Keyton, invites people who have recently published in a NCA journal to "translate" their scholarly article into something more accessible to a person outside of the discipline, a layperson.

My piece, "Smashing Stereotypes? Communicating Disability in Wheelchair Rugby," will up for a couple of months. You can find it here.

This idea appealed to me because like so many of the communication scholars I admire, Bud Goodall, Nick Trujillo, Amira DelaGarza, and Patricia Geist-Martin, I'm interested in the ways communication scholarship can be translated into books one might find on the shelves of Borders and Barnes and Noble.

The experience was a bit difficult, though, as I'm used to speaking in this language called "academia." Disciplinary territoriality, building walls around one's department for fear of invaders and intruders claiming to study the same thing the same way, has no doubt contributed to this ossification of our lingua franca here in the academy (see, I'm doing it again: "ossification," "lingua franca," good grief!). We don't get credit for learning the other, more widely spoken language of the popular press (at least not in communication). That leaves me tongue-tied.

Paid to Talk

Getting to paid to talk isn't always a good thing. What you have to say may not interest others, and unfortunately, most people don't get paid to listen. This is where writing comes in handy. An imagined audience is sometimes the best audience.