Idle Musings on PETAL

It occurred to me this week that it was almost exactly one year ago that I saw an ad in the Chronicle about an opening at the University of South Alabama to be the Director of something called “PETAL.” And to think I almost didn’t bother to apply…

I’m certainly glad that I did and that things have worked out the way they have. The University has proven to be a wonderful place to work with many wonderful people with which to work. Mobile has been great as well.

But that is not the point of this post. Over the last year, while making the transition from “candidate” to “incoming director” to “director” of the Program for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, as well as making the transition from “doctoral candidate” to just “doctor,” I have (of course) done a great deal of thinking about the “enhancement of teaching and learning” in higher education.

I’ve offered and/or arranged many seminars, workshops, and other activities for faculty on ways to improve their teaching, and while I would obviously like for more faculty to come to each of these sessions, turnout has generally been good for most events, and, more importantly, those who have attended have been very pleased and enthusiastic about what they are receiving there.

I’ve talked with many faculty here and at other institutions about teaching issues in today’s college classroom.

I’ve also talked with faculty about the use of technology in the classroom as well as about how it can allow teaching and learning to take place or continue outside of the classroom.
I’ve even often wondered if enhancement is even the proper “E” word in PETAL, and if excellence might be a better choice, but that debate is for another time.

What really stands out among all of my musings and mutterings on the subject, however, is that excellence in teaching is essentially meaningless.

For example, if you were to write a “great” poem, and no one, or at least very few of your readers, understood it, then you could attribute that lack of appreciation to any number of things that do not directly reflect on the inherent quality of the poem, and it would be natural and entirely possible for you to blame it on the audience for the poem not being suitably prepared or sophisticated enough to recognize, and therefore benefit from, your poem’s obvious greatness.

Teaching, however, is another matter entirely.

If I were to give a great lecture, and no one, or at least very few of my students, understood it, then it simply wasn’t a great lecture after all. By any standard. And even if the audience for the lecture was not suitably prepared or sophisticated enough to benefit from its brilliance, that is the fault of the lecture and lecturer, not of the audience.

Therefore excellence in teaching can only be measured by excellence in learning, and as teachers we must never forget that what we say is not nearly as important as what our students hear. To evaluate our success as teachers by any other measure is a corruption of the purpose of the University.

CommentPress and Dr. Sue Walker's Poetry Writing Class

Dr. Sue Walker has also been experimenting with CommentPress in her poetry writing course this semester. She has been using blogs in her poetry writing classes for some time, but she had always used conventional blog systems, where she would post the assignment in the blog area and students would post poems and comments in a long, linear string that was almost impossible to make sense of.

When she asked me about a month ago how she might do this more effectively, we decided that we would try CommentPress. We added all of her students to the system as authors so that they can each publish their poems as blog posts. Then, the other students (or anyone else) can post comments and pose questions in a contextually relevant and logical way.

As of this writing, there have been 37 blog entries posted on the site and a total of 148 comments.

Dr. Walker is so excited about its effectiveness that she has asked me to set up a CommentPress site for her composition class so that she can have them post their essays and receive constructive criticism from her students.

Let me know if you are interested in trying CommentPress with your classes.

Click here to view Dr. Walker’s poetry class’s CommentPress site.

CommentPress in My Classroom

I have written in the PETAL Newsletter and Blog about CommentPress, which is a new blogging software system that works with the popular WordPress blogging system. The value of CommentPress for higher education is that it offers promising possibilities for enabling students to interact with texts and with each other by dividing the computer screen in half vertically, with the original blog text on left half of the screen and visitor (i.e., student) comments on the right.

The advantage that CommentPress offers over other blogging systems is that instead of having all comments accumulating linearly at the bottom of the page, CommentPress allows you to make comments “in the margin,” next to the paragraph of the text to which the comment pertains. The system also allows a level of “threadedness” to the discussion, where commenters can reply to each other and related comments are displayed so that their logical connection is apparent.

I have been experimenting with CommentPress this semester in the British Literature course I have been teaching. Since we have been reading a lot of poetry in the class and most undergraduates are usually a bit afraid of poetry, I have been putting up one or two poems from each week’s reading into CommentPress and having students post comments or questions before the class period we plan to discuss that poem.

This has demonstrably elevated the level of class discussion about those poems. Because students have not only read the poems but have also written in a public space about the poem and read their classmates’ comments on the poem, they come to class better prepared for the in-class discussion. In addition, I come to class with a better understanding of where they are in their understanding of the poem.

I have also used more conventional threaded discussions this semester (and in the past), and the quality of the online and in-class discussions has been markedly better in the weeks that we’ve used CommentPress that in those where we used threads.

Click here to view my class's CommentPress site.

Blended Learning

It always takes awhile for the Chronicle of Higher Education to find its way through the library to my desk, but even though I have just now received the issue dated November 23rd, James Lang’s “On Course” column in that issue is worth pointing out. It is entitled “Midterm Grades for Blackboard” and discusses his use of the Blackboard™ online learning environment, which is similar to the eCollege system we have here at USA.

He defines four categories where he expected Blackboard to help his teaching:

• Organizing course materials
• Creating community
• Making use of multimedia
• Documenting teaching.

All of these offer significant advantages to any college classroom, and although his assessment of Blackboard is uneven (just as mine would be), in most of the places where he gives bad marks, he is clearly more responsible for the lack of success (and, to his credit, he readily admits his role in the shortcomings). However, it is unfortunate that it is Blackboard, and not himself, receiving the poor grades.

One such place is where he gives Blackboard a C for its (in)ability to create community. He had done something interesting in class and suggested that the students go online to discuss it. It turns out that no one did, and for some inexplicable reason this is supposed to be Blackboard’s fault. He provided no incentive for students to go online, no penalty for not going online, nor any discussion or explanation of why they ought to online.

He just assumed they would be excited about the opportunity to go somewhere online that they’d never been before to do extra work for no extra credit. Yet, in his analysis, it is neither his nor his students’ fault that the assignment failed. It’s Blackboard’s.

Another faulty assumption on his part is that such an activity will build community. If a community had already been “built,” then an expectation that they would go online and continue the discussion would be much more reasonable, but community building is something that requires planning and effort.

The lesson from all of this is that it is well worth your time to check out Lang’s column, but you should employ the same critical reading lenses that you encourage your students to develop and use. Online course management systems are wonderful and powerful tools that can significantly improve classroom instruction. Personally, I cannot imagine teaching a course without using one.

As wonderful as they are, however, they are just tools. They have many powerful features, but they don’t come with a magic wand. They require work. In the thoughtful application of imagination to the creation (or repurposing) of appropriate learning materials and activities. In setting up the necessary systems to aid your organization of course materials. And most importantly, in encouraging students to participate in the valuable opportunities such systems provide.

Critical Learning

The concept of writerly teaching has been featured in this space on several occasions and will most likely be again in the future, but that’s not going to stop me now…

All of this talking and writing that I’ve been doing about writerliness would seem to be vulnerable to one or two objections, one of which might be a question along the lines of “How is this any different than simply teaching critical reading skills?”

The difference I see is that when instructors teach critical or analytical reading (and writing), we teach students to apply those skills to all of the texts they encounter save one—the text of our own teaching.

Writerly teaching takes that last step, perhaps the most important step of all.