This week we have held in my Department the 10th TELLC (Teaching English Language, Literature and Culture) workshop. This yearly meeting, which I set up after my time as BA Coordinator and still run, is aimed at discussing our experiences as teachers in all the areas and degrees of the Department. The presentations are supposed to be conversation starters and not the standard conference paper. The idea is to find time to share what we do in the classroom and discuss how to do it better, which is always possible. After ten years, TELLC is, I hope, fully established, for it has proven to be necessary and, in many ways, cathartic. Sorry to sound so smug, but I recommend all Departments of any time to set up their own annual teaching workshop. It is very rewarding as a professional and a social event. And if you’re wondering, it takes just one morning, 9:00-14:00 with about 6 presentations. I issue certificates of participation, and so far they have been accepted in the regional teaching assessment exercises.
This year the presentation that started the most crowded conversation was Prof. Mercè Coll’s review of how we assess the item described as ‘class participation’ in our syllabi. Prof. Coll asked us how we value and evaluate this element and the results of her survey demonstrate that we no longer know what we are talking about. As it turns out (I asked both the BA Coordinator for the Departament and for the School), we have no obligation to include an item connected to class participation in evaluation. However, in my Department we have traditionally assessed class participation because we are a second-language teaching institution and we have always envisioned the classroom as a space for oral practice and interaction. This is why our classes mix the lecture and the seminar in one, with all the difficulties this entails. You can try to keep the conversation flowing as in a seminar but, logically, the bigger the class the worse this will work. Anyway, Prof. Coll’s survey showed that since the conversation is not flowing, we have introduced other strategies such as valuing online interaction in our online Moodle classroom or asking students to produce specific exercises for class participation assessment. In many cases, however, teachers had difficulties to explain to Prof. Coll how exactly they award that part of the final mark (valued between 5% and 20%). Many showed discomfort with the impressionistic, subjective approach this mark requires.
In my case, I have been using self-assessment for that aspect of Victorian Literature. I take it for granted that students must participate in class debates by voicing their opinions, as this is for me a fundamental skill. Shyness and reluctance should be no excuse for learning to communicate orally in English, which is essential to our degree. I give students a basic rubric which links the numbers of interventions throughout the semester to a specific mark (basically one point per intervention). To round this off, students need to comment in class on a passage they select from the novel we are reading and on a passage from a secondary source. They need to post these passages to the corresponding Moodle forum, so that there are no overlappings. They may include, then, in their self-assessment spontaneous comments in class and the two guided exercises (both live and online). Does this work? Well, partly. I have not been keeping track of attendance nor of how many interventions in debate students make, so I don’t know whether their marks are fair. My impression is that they are, so that in the last six years or so, I have hardly had to modify any (I keep that right). What is less satisfactory are the guided exercises, which have failed to stimulate class attendance. Students who don’t attend regularly only show up to offer their two compulsory comments and never return.
I have applied this method so far to the groups under 65 students but this semester I have 75. Here’s my dilemma: I cannot maintain the illusion that I can talk with so many students and I have simply no time to include the guided comments by all of them in class. At the same time, I know very well that I can only count on a small percentage, possibly a maximum of 40% attending class, and this is the real hub of the question. The perfect storm destroying the mark for class participation comes from two fronts. On the one hand, we are only allowed to split our classes into smaller groups if they are bigger than 80 (this is a privilege since the figure is 140 for the rest of BA degrees in UAB). On the other hand, the figures for students’ attendance have fallen dramatically, so that any activity that takes it for granted they will be in class is out of the question. We don’t consider attendance compulsory, though it is expected.
It seems, then, that the only way to escape the habit of valuing and assessing students’ class participation is by doing away with it altogether. I we don’t assume that students MUST do any specific activities in class, then they need not be in class. If attendance stops being an issue, then we can relax and stop worrying about whether students should be in class at all. Let the ones truly engaged come to us, and allow the rest finally to stay away without distorting with their boredom the march of each session.
A typical question that surfaces when discussing class participation is how this is different from class attendance. My view is that attending every single session passively, without ever showing any interest or participating in the debates can only lead to a fail in class participation. Nonetheless, if a student only comes to class 10 times (out of 30/32 sessions in total) and participates actively in them, they might award themselves an A, following my own rubric. I have not demanded a minimum attendance so far, but it would be odd to award an A to someone who has missed two thirds of the sessions and a D to someone who has attended them all. I would say that the ideal performance is that of a student who attends 75-80% of all sessions and participates actively in 30% of the total.
One of my colleagues commented in the conversation following Prof. Coll’s intervention that perhaps smiling at the teacher as a sign of paying attention is a more positive contribution to the classroom than openly voicing an idea that might not contribute much. I would say that a positive attitude should be a basic element of class attendance (=being there) but is not an element of class participation (=being actively engaged in debate). The problem in my case, then, is that I don’t enjoy hearing myself drone on for 80 minutes, and I find that classroom time is more enjoyable if spent in conversation (that is, I prefer seminar-style teaching to lecturing). I ask questions all the time, as I believe that brains need to be exercised, and they are not activated in lecturing, which consists of absorbing information and argumentation passively, no matter how actively notes are taken.
Having explained all this and now that I know that the mark for class participation is not compulsory, I am done with taking into account spontaneous comment, which is a real pity. I will focus only on the guided compulsory exercises (=oral presentations), which are far easier to track and assess, and will forget about class conversation as something which should be part of what we do in class.
A strategy to salvage conversation from the disaster that having an overcrowded class is consists of subdividing the groups into smaller units. Instead of, as I do, read a passage from a novel and ask the whole class for comments, I could ask them to work in groups of four, give them a few minutes for discussion and then invite each group’s spokesperson to share. They might take turns so that everyone ends up offering comments. There are, however, two main inconvenients in this plan. The furniture of my classroom consists of benches, not chairs. The second problem is that group work is time consuming and a waste, since not all groups work at the same pace and some are done when others are barely starting.
In the end, however, I feel defeated in two major fronts: students don’t want to attend classes and, if they come, they don’t want to engage in conversation. They want lectures that can be easily skipped because their classmates can pass them the class notes (though fewer and fewer take notes). This is going back to the traditional way of teaching, which was supposed to end with the implementation of the new degrees back in 2009. It could be said that the effort made in the last fifteen years to turn higher education into a collaborative process based on continuous interaction and assessment is not what the students want. They are expressing their opinion if not vocally, at least indirectly by abandoning the classroom and retreating into their silence.
Next week I am returning to class after one semester away. I am enchanted with the idea of my MA class with just 11 students (plus one auditor), but, to be perfectly honest, I do not know at all how I will deal with my class of 75 students in Victorian Literature, it’s the biggest one I have ever taught in 32 years. I’ll keep you posted. As for class participation, we’ll see…