I spent 4 hours last Friday in a seminar on formative continuous assessment applied to university teaching. The seminar, run by Joan Simón, a Pharmacy senior lecturer at UB (http://joansimon.nom.es/cms3/), was very good, and served partly as a therapy session, which we, first year teachers down in the trenches, need badly. As usual, though, I missed being trained by someone with experience in teaching Literature. I also missed taking the seminar together with our students.
‘Formative continuous assessment’, as you may know, corresponds to a fashionable teaching methodology in which the student is assumed to be a motivated autonomous learner. S/he uses guidelines and samples showing how to produce the evidence on which s/he is to be assessed to, precisely produce it; also, s/he benefits from teacher’s constant, constructive feedback. I am familiar with the more formal aspects of the methodology since 1998, when I started working as an associate teacher at UOC, but I’d been using it, without knowing I was a convert, since 1992 at UAB. My Department has never favoured lecturing (‘clases magistrales’) and much less final exams as the only way to assess students. Our passage to the new Bologna system is, for this, smoother than in other Departments.
What is happening now, as everyone can see, is that Bologna has finally institutionalised continuous assessment as the most desirable methodology to encourage student autonomy… just at a time when the younger generation shows a remarkable passivity for which, possibly, lecturing and final exams would be perfectly adequate teaching and assessment methods. My impression is that my generation (born in the 1960s) is now implementing the kind of university teaching we wish we had received but not at all what the new generations (born in the early 1990s) need or want. They’ll have to wait 20 years to try their own methods on a younger generation who, of course, will require others… maybe ours.
An autonomous student is by definition a motivated student, and this is what my young first and second year students are not, mostly (this is quite different at UOC, where I teach mature students). Any Literature teacher knows that this translates into students’ not reading the set texts, which makes teaching them an often impossible task. How should we motivate them? Well, apparently enticing them with the use of computer technologies –apart from developing materials that clarify how we assess them and what they should be learning (we already do that, though not as well as we should, it seems –too much to read…). I’m tempted to ask first year students to take the poems we’re going to read and accompany them with a PowerPoint presentation, with images suggested by reading them (as I’ve seen on YouTube). Then it hits me: this is ridiculous, as it will distract them from reading the poems, which is exactly what the Literature subject requires, and might even be more time-consuming than reading dictionary in hand. (I know I’ll end up giving this a try, anyway… more about it in May).
A witty colleague, Felicity, tells me that our students need ‘espabilation skills’ (‘wising-up skills’?) and I fully agree. What I don’t know is whether, we, university teachers, are best qualified to teach these, as we are possibly one of the most highly self-motivated collectives on Earth (I was going to write ‘bunch of i…’, given our rewards). We’re naturally inclined to studying… think about that! Faced with a student who is naturally inclined NOT to study, I don’t quite sympathise, much less feel, um, motivated, to help.
The funny thing is that the university system tells me I am the one in need of the ‘espabilation skills’ required to turn passive students into active learners. Maybe if unmotivated students took useful seminars like Joan Simón’s addressing them that would save us, teachers, precious time for… research?