{"id":181,"date":"2011-03-27T10:48:42","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T08:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=181"},"modified":"2011-03-27T10:48:42","modified_gmt":"2011-03-27T08:48:42","slug":"espabilation-skills-or-how-to-motivate-passive-students-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2011\/03\/27\/espabilation-skills-or-how-to-motivate-passive-students-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"ESPABILATION SKILLS, OR HOW TO MOTIVATE PASSIVE STUDENTS (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tI spent 4 hours last Friday in a seminar on formative continuous assessment applied to university teaching. The seminar, run by Joan Sim\u00f3n, a Pharmacy senior lecturer at UB (http:\/\/joansimon.nom.es\/cms3\/<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n

\t\u2018Formative continuous assessment\u2019, 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\u2019s 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\u2019d been using it, without knowing I was a convert, since 1992 at UAB. My Department has never favoured lecturing (\u2018clases magistrales\u2019) 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.<\/p>\n

\tWhat 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\u2019ll have to wait 20 years to try their own methods on a younger generation who, of course, will require others… maybe ours.<\/p>\n

\tAn 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\u2019 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 \u2013apart 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 \u2013too much to read…). I\u2019m tempted to ask first year students to take the poems we\u2019re going to read and accompany them with a PowerPoint presentation, with images suggested by reading them (as I\u2019ve 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<\/em> subject requires, and might even be more time-consuming than reading dictionary in hand. (I know I\u2019ll end up giving this a try, anyway… more about it in May).<\/p>\n

\tA witty colleague, Felicity, tells me that our students need \u2018espabilation skills\u2019 (\u2018wising-up skills\u2019?) and I fully agree. What I don\u2019t 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 \u2018bunch of i…\u2019, given our rewards). We\u2019re naturally inclined to studying<\/em>… think about that! Faced with a student who is naturally inclined NOT to study, I don\u2019t quite sympathise, much less feel, um, motivated<\/em>, to help. <\/p>\n

The funny thing is that the university system tells me I am the one in need of the \u2018espabilation skills\u2019 required to turn passive students into active learners. Maybe if unmotivated students took useful seminars like Joan Sim\u00f3n\u2019s addressing them<\/em> that would save us, teachers, precious time for… research?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent 4 hours last Friday in a seminar on formative continuous assessment applied to university teaching. The seminar, run by Joan Sim\u00f3n, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}