The Adjunct

PART 2
(Click here to read PART 1)

This seminar was not just a failure, but also a major failure. The idea behind this seminar was to show how collaborative learning can be more effective than traditional lecturing, but it ended up proving the exact opposite. We were unable to complete small tasks in a timely fashion (in fact, no task was fully completed). Most people complained of the tedium and irrelevance of the exercises in our groups, and keep in mind we were all teachers. Imagine a student’s reaction.

In addition to this, no information was successfully gained from the group work. Most of the time was spent with us sharing ideas that we already had, and new information was only gained when we left our groups and the professor leading the seminar proceeded to lecture further about the subject.

The theory is that a group exploring a topic collaboratively will be more successful than the traditional lecture, retain, and repeat (via test) method. There is some truth to this, and I use a combination of lecture, group work, and independent study in all my classes. However, it has become too trendy (and too easy) to reject traditional teaching methods in favor of a more “free-learning” experience. The professor leading the seminar told us that her classes are 100% collaborative learning environments. She hands out worksheets, organizes groups, and then lets the students figure it out in their groups. She said that she has a rule in which she will not answer any student’s questions about anything until that student has asked at least three other students if they know the answer. This includes everything from questions regarding the syllabus, to questions about the final exam. I couldn’t help but feel that one reason she prefers this purely collaborative method is that she simply has to hand out worksheets, and then sit back and let the students do the rest. I imagine the students who already posses the information and skills that the class requires will succeed in this environment (”Okay! We’re outlining a speech about our family today. I know how to do that, its easy!”), while those who are unclear and have questions will be unable to learn much (especially if they can’t ask their teacher until asking three classmates), and will ultimately fail the class (or, pass the class with a C, and move on having learned nothing).

Remember when I said that there was another voice of dissent during the Peanuts cartoon farce? After our groups had aborted, and we returned to the class as a whole, the professor leading the seminar commented on how allowing Rerun to explore his art more freely would likely make him a better artist. An instructor raised his hand, and told us that he was, in fact, an art teacher himself. He politely explained that if his students did not follow his specific instructions, it would not make them better artists.

“But don’t you think they should learn creativity?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he replied. “I think creativity is good, but if I have asked them to sketch still life, then I need them to follow my instructions and sketch still life. If they do something different, then they will not learn techniques such as cross hatching, or drawing perspective, or shadowing. If they all just did what they wanted and disregarded my instructions, then they would never learn these techniques on their own. One lesson leads to the next lesson, first you draw still life then you learn figure drawing, and you must learn one before the other. So perhaps in this cartoon the teacher was trying to teach the student a skill, and he refused to learn it because he just wanted to do his own thing. You can do your own thing all you want outside of class. You come to class to learn a skill that you cannot learn on your own. So you need to follow instructions and listen to your teacher in order to do this.”

I applauded him, as did a few others, but the professor leading the seminar suddenly got a look on her face as if she smelled a really ripe fart, and quickly moved on to the next group activity.

There was another moment where I looked proudly up at one of my fellow attending adjuncts. After the scavenger hunt, just before we were let out, the professor leading the seminar was again discussing the importance of group work, stressing the need to learn social skills and interaction. A chemistry teacher raised her hand and admitted that, even after our four-hour seminar, she still didn’t see how she could incorporate social interaction skills into her chemistry class. Again, the seminar leader responded by stressing ideas which only promoted the students interacting with one another, sharing their names and interests, working together to complete a puzzle, etc. She boasted that these social skills happened to be what her most prized class, Speech 10, was all about. A different instructor raised his hand and said, “Yes, I think these are some really good exercises for a Speech 10 class, but I think they may not have direct applications for a lot of other classes, even in Speech, that don’t set out to teach inter-personal skills as a goal. In fact, I teach Speech 1A and I mostly lecture. They independently give their speeches, and group work is kept at a minimum.”

“I don’t teach Speech 1A,” she told him in a hoity manner. “I teach Speech 10.”

“Well,” said the adjunct, “I do teach Speech 1A, and I couldn’t see using a lot of these activities in that class. They wouldn’t accomplish the goals of the class. It sounds great for Speech 10, but not Speech 1A. If I can’t even translate these exercises to meet my goals for a Speech 1A class, then I doubt other instructors here, who teach vastly different subjects, can use them as heavily as you’re saying we should.”

Frustrated, the professor leading the seminar blurted out, “It is important that these kids learn how to interact with one another!”

And there you have it. The fatal flaw in this seminar was that the professor leading it viewed her college students as children, and felt that shaping their ability to play well with others trumped any course objectives, skills or outcomes. If a fellow speech professor felt that this level of collaborative learning wouldn’t even apply to other speech classes, then as a teaching method intended to replace the traditional lecture it is fatally flawed.

At the end of the seminar I told her my classes utilized lecture, class discussion, independent study, and even a little group work. Of the four, my classes were primarily lecture and class discussion. I asked her if she considered class discussion, where all students are encouraged and required to voice their ideas, their analysis, their questions and concerns, to be a form of collaborative learning. “Aren’t we then functioning as one big group?” I asked her. “With me their as their teacher to guide the direction of the discussion, and make sure that all the learning outcomes are accomplished?”

“No,” she told me. “That isn’t collaborative learning. If all you do is lecture, and then just call on students who raise their hand, then they’ll never learn how to interact with each other.”

Oh well. At least they’d still learn class objectives such as cross hatching, or the periodic table of elements, or how to give a speech.

PART 1
(Click here to read PART 2)

I recently attended a collaborative learning seminar, and although it provided me with great material for this blog, it did not do much in the way of making me a better teacher. On second thought, strike that, because it did make me a better teacher by way of showing me exactly what I should never do.

Collaborative learning is an unnecessarily fancy way of saying group work, and that is what this seminar was all about: how to give your students group work. This may seem like the most unnecessary, worthless, asinine waste of time, but I got paid $100 for attending.

Of additional interest to the site is the fact that all the attending instructors of the seminar were adjuncts. A tenured professor of speech led the seminar, and most of the activities seemed to be best geared for a speech class.

Here are my notes from the seminar, which I meticulously took in order to capture how it was both ineffective and of no use whatsoever. However, I’m afraid that the only accurate way to simulate the mind-crushing tedium of the four hour long seminar is to have a friend gently lower a refrigerator onto your head. Enjoy!

•We spent the first 45 minutes playing “The Name Game!” This is an icebreaker game where the entire class forms a circle, and then people introduce themselves one at a time, in clockwise order. The trick, however, is that before you can introduce yourself, you must first say “Hello, (name)!” to each person who has already introduced themselves. In other words, “Hello Sally! Hello Ted! Hello Vickram!” etc. The merits of performing this activity in Chemistry 1A, Physical Anthropology, or a World Geography class (all classes that various instructors present at the meeting taught) was never fully explained. It is beyond the capabilities of my comprehension why we had to actually engage in this activity ourselves, instead of just being told, “An effective ice-breaker is having everyone say their name, and also to say and remember the names of their classmates.”

We were told the The Name Game! took about 10 minutes, tops. Our seminar was about half the size of an average classroom, and it took us 45 minutes.

There were follow-up questions. “Should we have students give their last names too?” and “Would you advise us asking students to also name a hobby or activity that they enjoy?” Answer to the latter: Yes, if that hobby or activity begins with the same letter as their name.

•Next, the professor leading the seminar took about 10 minutes to explain the concept of group work. Actual quote: “Now, you can expect to have them work in this group in class, but it is unlikely that this group will continue out of class.”

•Oh, but what happens to a teacher’s role when collaborative learning is taking place? Again, actual quote: “You must learn as a teacher to move from, the sage on the stage, to the guide on the side.” Snappy!

•Next lesson: How to select group members. According to a three-page handout that took 15 minutes to get through, teachers can point at four students and say, “You four are in a group.” This process can be repeated until all students are in groups. It was at this point that I noticed my left ear was bleeding.

•We spent the next 30 minutes analyzing a Peanuts cartoon. The gist: Rerun and Sally are drawing in class. Sally looks at what Rerun has drawn, and informs him “We’re supposed to be drawing flowers!” Rerun then proudly explains that he found the assignment too limiting, and instead created an elaborate and imaginative series of comic book like illustrations. However, after showing these creative drawings to his teacher, Rerun sullenly returns to his desk and says, “Teacher says we’re drawing flowers today.” Ho-ho!

We were placed into our own groups (if confused about how you put people into groups, please see the 3 page handout entitled, “The Most Unnecessary Thing That Needs Fucking Explaining”) and then we are told to analyze the lesson learned in the Peanuts comic. Our starting question: What do you think the teacher was thinking when Rerun showed her his off-assignment drawing, and do you agree with her assessment? I suggested that the teacher was thinking what all teachers think when students don’t do what you have asked them to do, which is, “I don’t get paid enough for this shit.” I said that if indeed the teacher was thinking this, then I agreed with her. The other members in my group felt that Rerun should have been encouraged to explore his creativity, and that the teacher should not stifle students by relying on traditional, old-fashioned teaching methods. The rest of the class also came to this conclusion. There was one other adjunct who was the exception to this, but I’ll talk about him later.

•As we were lectured about the difference between communicating and meta-communicating (spoilers: one means “to share or exchange information” and the other is just bullshit jingoism) a thought occurred to me: just how much was this seminar costing the school? I was being paid $100 to be there, as was every other adjunct instructor there. I counted heads, and found there to be 19 people present. That’s $1,900 right there. I don’t know what the professor leading the seminar was getting paid, but I’d imagine that she wasn’t working for free. I would guess she was getting at least $500, maybe more. At that district, I get paid about $2,500 gross per 4-unit class, per semester that I teach. I think it is safe to say that if this collaborative learning seminar had been canceled, then the money could have been used to give one of us adjuncts an extra class to teach.

Budget cuts caused a record number of class cuts this semester, and more are expected just over the horizon. A lot of students were unable to take the classes that they needed due to these cuts. This seminar was also one of five total that was being offered for adjuncts over a two-month period. Now, while not all of them may be as useless as this one (we’ll find out, I registered for all five), I think that it would have been in everyone’s best interest to just add 5 extra classes to the schedule, much to the adjunct’s and student’s benefit.

•We get to do Parrot Partners! Yay! We are teamed up in pairs and we each tell our partner our opinion on a subject, in this case the effectiveness of collaborative learning. Our partner must then repeat the essence of what we have told them back to us, using their own words but not adding or taking away any details. This goes on for about 25 minutes before the professor leading the seminar has to call an end to this activity. Time is running out and we have to move on. My partner had only just begun telling me why I thought traditional lectures and tests were far superior to this style of collaborative learning.

•We learn the Wall-Line game. Another time-eating exercise we don’t finish. We are asked our opinion of a subject, and all form a line with those that “Strongly Agree” at one end, and those that “Strongly Disagree” at the other. The idea is that we must explain our positions to each other in order to agree upon a ranking. In other words, if two or three people all think they should be at the very end of Strongly Agree, then they must work out who really agrees more strongly than the others by explaining their position. The prompt we were given was, “Collaborative Learning is the best teaching method.” While most of the other teachers bumbled around at the Strongly Agree end, I walked confidently to the opposite side at Strongly Disagree, and twiddled my thumbs until someone who had been deemed not to agree as strongly as the others was forced down towards me and had to explain themselves. Time was called before they could finish talking about how great group work such as this was, and without me being able to express my opinion at all.

•I realized that the focus of almost all these group exercises was to teach the students how to interact with one another. The goals of these group activities were always to encourage better social behavior, and never (as far as I could tell) to teach information or skills specific to a class. In other words, there were no applications of The Name Game, The Peanuts Cartoon, The Wall-Line, The Parrot Partners, or The Scavenger Hunt (see next) beyond social exercises. A Physical Anthropology class couldn’t teach a chapter from its textbook using The Wall-Line.

•The final hour of the seminar was spent breaking us into groups and having us do a building-wide scavenger hunt. We were given clues as to where to look within the building for various forms of information (when the building was made, what purpose it was intended for, etc) and we needed to first find our own specific information, and then exchange that information with the other groups. This activity was a colossal fail. Forgiving the fact that it was more of a sixth grade activity than one for the college classroom, it gobbled up the entire hour, everyone in my group (college professors, remember) bitched and moaned about it, and at the end no one had successfully gathered all the necessary information. We ended up aborting it, and being told, “You get the general idea.”

•Each of us is given one portrait of Mr. Benjamin Franklin.

To be continued…