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Month: September 2017

Published on Leave a comment on Mistake? Get Back Up!

How do you respond when you make a mistake?

I made a big mistake this summer. It was a rather embarrassing one, but I am sharing it in order to demonstrate to all, especially students, that we all mess up. What matters most is how we respond to our screw ups.

I wrote up an article for submission to a journal. I went out on a limb and wrote a piece that was to be in APA style, which I don’t ever use. Art historians use the Chicago Manual of Style for all submissions; I hadn’t ever used APA style. I had references, but didn’t add a reference list. For those of you who know APA style (better than me!), you know that is a big no-no. The editor of the journal sent my piece back to me, saying, “there is no list of references on this, please add one.”

Now, this might not seem like a big deal to some of you, but I can assure you, aside from being really dumb, it was also very embarrassing. It demonstrated that I really didn’t know what I was doing (which I didn’t!). And I hate looking like I don't know what I am doing.

I thought about just not sending it back or fixing it. Because I was embarrassed. But then I thought, well, I have the piece written, and it's good. And I do have references, I just need to add that list in the right way. So, I sat down and I did it. And this week I was told it will be published.

What matters is how I reacted to the knowledge that I messed up.

This is true for you students, too. How you react when something doesn’t go well, or when the football team you play for loses a game, or you don’t get the grade you had hoped on a test or a paper, matters. As I posted last week, there is a lot of buzz right now around resilience and grit. I have developed resilience from years of critical reviews from my peers. I have learned to suck it up, make changes that seem appropriate, and send it back in.

I am seeing that with the football players that I mentor, too. They get back up after getting knocked down. And this week, after a tough loss last week, they won. They got back up. Learned from their mistakes. That is resilience. And grit.

So students: do not give up. Try again. Talk to your professors. Admit when you are confused. Because your reaction matters.

Published on Leave a comment on Keep the Flip!

This story from September 5th in Inside Higher Ed bummed me out. It's about a professor who "flipped, but then "unflipped" his class. But in my opinion, he did it all wrong.

First of all, taping long lectures isn't ideal. It is way worse to watch a thirty minute video alone in your room than being there. And I can't tell from this short piece if the instructor had them come to class to apply the information. But it's clear that he thought watching a long video lecture was the same as being in class listening to one. It's not.

Flipped classes can work if you have students watch some lecture segments, short, broken up, to get specific pieces of information. But it is then imperative that they then come to class and do something with it. That way, you can see if the students have understood the concepts by asking them to apply it to new contexts and situations. But just giving them the content and stepping away (which it is not clear this professor did, but it sounds like he did)? That is not an effective way to flip a class.

I have flipped my western art survey part one and now teach it in a hybrid manner, meaning that students watch videos online on works of art about which in the past I would have lectured. The ideas in the Standard of Ur are just as clear from Smarthistory/Khan academy videos as what I would say. I really don't have anything innovative to say about that work for an introductory level class.

But what makes the class work, and what I bring to it, is to come up with assignments in which students apply the information to a new context. This is what I, as the instructor, bring to the table that is innovative and can't be replicated as easily online. So, this year, my student will learn about the art of the ancient Near East and Egypt, and then design a digital exhibition. During the unit on Greek and Roman art, when we are in class together, they will take part in a structured debate that will take two full class periods and time outside of class to decide if the Elgin/Parthenon marbles should be returned to Greece.

What we do in the face to face class should be something that can't be easily replicated in an online environment. The hybrid format of classes allows more flexibility for students to learn factual information on their own time. Then we do meet as a class, I can lead them in something that is more active and engaging, and allows me to see how well they understood the content.

How might you shift your teaching so that your in-class time is devoted to making sure students understand the material rather than lecturing to them?

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Published on 13 Comments on For the Green Terror Football Team

For those who do not know, I have the distinct privilege of being the faculty mentor to McDaniel College's Green Terror Football Team. In addition to that role, I am also privileged to teach these young men, many of whom sign up for my classes. This past Saturday I watched them fight a dogged battle against a conference foe. And come up a wee bit short. Like three points short. But short is short. I get that.

So this post is for them.

I have watched football all my life. I understand (most of) the rules and the plays. But I have never really understood football until now. And I am only starting to understand it: what it takes to get up play after play after you have been banged around. Or what it takes to play with your whole heart and come up short, and yet get on the bus, go back to campus, and get ready for the next opponent the next week. And I freely admit that I still have a lot to learn.

As I watched the team yesterday, I was thinking about how there is a theme running through higher education circles currently about instilling more grit and resilience in college students. Some feel that this generation's students are too weak and anxious; they need to toughen up!

Well, there are 125 or so young men on a college football team in Westminster, Maryland who are pretty danged tough. They show grit and resilience every Saturday afternoon. They showed it in abundance this past Saturday, in a tough, hard loss. But they never gave up until the very last second. Every single one of them was attuned to what was happening. They were a group of gritty and resilient souls.

I am the luckiest professor in the conference to be this close to these champions, these student athletes who show so much grit and resilience on the field and in their lives. Because as the mentor, I get to hear about the struggles they have in their lives, too. In their classrooms. At home. With finances. And how they overcome them. I am privileged and blessed (yes, I'm using that word) to get to help them.

For those administrators and faculty out there in higher education who want to cultivate more grit and resilience among their student body: look to your student athletes.

Because if they are anything like the Green Terror Football team, they've got grit and resilience in spades.

Published on Leave a comment on Using Case Studies in Art History

In the first part of the introduction to western art, we talk about the move to farming from hunting/gathering. To have students really understand how difficult it was to move to farming, I use a case study/role-playing scenario that I have adapted from Paula Lazrus’ Reacting to the Past game, Hunter Gatherers in Transition. Because this is a content-heavy introductory course, it is difficult to use an entire Reacting game. [I have written about Reacting to the Past games in the past and more on the Reacting to the Past as a pedagogy can be read here.]

For this case-study, students are placed in groups and each group is given their specific scenario that describes their current circumstances and situation. The scenario is different for each group, though they are divided into three types: those who are still hunter-gatherers, those who are in transition to farming, and those who have adopted farming practices wholly.

After they read their scenarios, they choose cards from a deck that have “events” listed on them. In this deck of cards are events such as floods, that destroy all the seed inventory, or illnesses that wipe out a large portion of the population. Or other events happen like lessening access to animals for those that are still hunting. The choosing of the cards is random and they read the card event to the entire class. They then have time to figure out what they will do to respond, if they are even able to respond. To help them figure out their response, each group is also given at the start of this class a set of “tools,” printed on cards. They can use those tools (which can range from animals to stone tools or other objects) to solve their current predicament. They have about 10 minutes to come up with a solution, and then choose another event card and repeat the process.

One goal of this entire exercise is to have students understand the difficulties in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. In the past I had always taught rather casually that this transition went smoothly and have even – wrongly – suggested in past classes that it was somehow inevitable. Reading and using Lazrus’ game has taught me differently. And students who participate in this role-play/case-study have a chance to really experience the difficulties of the transition as they make their way through the deck of cards.

The context of the movement of people versus the stationary establishment of farming communities becomes clearer through this exercise than a lecture from me about the differences.

How might you adapt such a case-study/role-play model to a class in your discipline?

Published on Leave a comment on First Week Woes

This past week I was confounded by a number of student athletes lamenting to me personally and/or on social media about how much they "hated school." It made me so sad.

But it also got me thinking.

It got me thinking about an address I heard José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College, give a few years ago about how weird it is that we, as professors, love school. Not much of the regular population does. That was confirmed for me by the echoes of "I hate school" I kept hearing our first week back. And I *do* like school. I have been here my whole life!

And it also got me thinking about a book I read last summer: Susan Blum's book I Love Learning; I Hate School, published by Cornell University Press. In her book, she outlines that the myriad of services, financial and Registrar, are bewildering to students. I can't do much about that. But she also notes that students are bored in class.

I know we could (and some do!) say, "Well TOUGH. It's their job to be in school and they better find a way to get interested." Or, we could yammer on about "this generation..." as if really there were better students before. Mark Carnes, in his book Minds on Fire, published by Harvard University Press, notes several passages from the eighteenth and nineteenth century in which professors lament the same things I hear from my colleagues today about students not probing more deeply, not reading enough, not thinking enough. On and on.

I can't do anything about the systems that are in place that are bewildering, esoteric, and not user-friendly to our population of college students. But I can make my classes more interesting and more engaging.

This blog is devoted to helping faculty think about ways to create more active and engaging classrooms and ones that still ask students to learn content. But in the activities I have developed, they also work with different people, solve problems, communicate ideas - all skills that employers say that they want newly hired employees to be able to do - without sacrificing content of the discipline of art history.

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