Friday, May 4, 2012

I'm Baffled About Making Us All Normal.

I know I'm alone in my department about this. Perhaps here as well.

But it baffles me how so many of my colleagues want us to get together and bring our teaching "in line" with each others'.

We share student work, have workshops about norming. (They want us to be normal. No, seriously.) We write and rewrite courses' standards and outcomes, all in the name of making our classes transparent, clear, something.

Now, I know my colleagues think there's something strange about my view on these things, so I'm happy to hear some undiluted opinion if you care to share.

Here's the thing. I don't care what Colleague Crystal does in her 2201 class. That's her thing. She's brilliant and funny, with a PhD from Coolomatic College. I teach 2201, too, and I don't know why she'd give a damn what I do in my own. (I went to Casual-as-hell College, but I'm brilliant, too.)

I don't have a problem if Crystal does something different, or if she stands on the desk, or if she teaches like Prof. Kingsfield, or if she marches them around in the courtyard doing Latin declension.

I love Crystal. More power to her. I think we hired a good'un when we got her, and I wouldn't want what I think the class should do change what she believes works best.

But, I say this in the faculty lounge - usually with my mouth full of cold spaghetti - and the natives get restless.

What say you?

14 comments:

  1. I'm with you, Hiram. Luckily, my department is pretty laissez faire about this, and no-one expects that we conform our syllabi and our teaching approaches to a single standard.

    This semester, for example, I'm teaching a class that is an upper level course for our majors, and is also a required course for students in a different major. Because of its status as a required course, this subject is in high demand, and there are usually three or four classes offered per semester.

    This semester, there are four classes, and there are four different people teaching those classes: two full-time faculty, and two adjuncts. We chat with one another occasionally about how our classes are going, and I have a sense of what each of the other teachers are doing, but we haven't consulted with one another about our syllabi, and I know for a fact that we are all using quite different sources and different approaches to the course.

    I don't kid myself that I know everything, and I chat to the other teachers about what works for them and what doesn't. I've also made changes in my course based on discussions with my colleagues. But I also think that I'm a better teacher when I'm allowed to design my own syllabus and set up my course in a way that works for me. Requiring some sort of cookie-cutter approach would, in my opinion, result in dissatisfied faculty and inferior pedagogy.

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  2. Done properly, "norming" shouldn't alter the uniqueness of your teaching, but it might affect your grading: it should be about aligning expectations so that students and administrators understand that there is a reasonably strong share set of values and grading patterns.

    Done properly, it can be a useful tool for bringing deadwood instructors back up to some semblance of life (more a silverback problem than an adjunct problem here, though I know some folks see it the other way 'round) or giving the administration grounds to encourage them out the door.

    Done improperly, it's Camazotz all over again. Or A Brave New World if you've got good drugs.

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  3. 80% with you Hiram. There are courses that require a normalization. All students that move from French 101 to French 102 sure need to have acquired the same set of vocabulary and grammar--otherwise the 102 instructor cannot build from 101. I suppose that the same thing happens in Math classes.

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  4. ahistorically has it right. I'd add that accreditation is often cited as a reason for standardization. In my department, we have a few faculty who simply want to teach what they think is interesting. That's great for a senior-level special topics class, not so great for the first semester of general chemistry.

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  5. I teach upper level classes now, and the lower level ones are the ones that have been fully standardized.

    But before.... holy crap. This whole situation just pisses me off.

    I won a well-deserved teaching award for some of the very cool things I was doing with my class. The very next year I was no longer allowed to do them because the other teachers probably *couldn't* do them. The very next year I could have been fired for the things that won me an award the year before.

    And the only real result was that the students I had suffered from lack of those cool projects that actually broke through their BS veneer occasionally. *sigh*

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    1. This is precisely why normalization and the movement for statewide or nationwide standards makes me nervous, even though I think that they can be useful. There are small-minded administrators who take those standards as a template rather than an aspiration, as a maximum rather than a minimum, and as a bludgeon rather than a road map.

      The assumption that there's one right way to do things, that's just stupid. I'm totally with you there.

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  6. Like ^French Prof, I teach in a discipline with levels. A few years ago I was on the committee that wrote the "learning outcomes" for each level, from basic NDC to the core course required for the degree. That's as far as it goes, though--there is no common syllabus or text and we all take different approach to getting to the outcomes. It's one of the things that appealed to me about teaching at my school, having come from adjuncting at Large Urban Catholic U where we all had the same text and syllabus and it SUCKED. At my school, the learning outcomes help guide us in our course design. Students who pass my 1101 should be able to function properly in anyone else's 1102. And anyone who passes 1102 should have a decent skill set that will serve the when they take other classes outside the discipline.

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    1. I work in a similar system, and also think it works well: basically, instructors have freedom within limits.

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  7. I'm with Hiram here.

    I understand why the administration wants to standardize everything. It makes things easy to run and to control - you can switch schedules, profs, etc. with no hassle. You can design "assessments" more "rationally." It is the perennial desire of modern bureaucracies to create uniformity (see Scott: Seeing Like A State).

    Also, it de-skills the instructors, making them cheaper. If they don't design the courses, that's another thing they can't claim they are necessary for. It is part of a wider trend toward devaluing content expertise.

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    1. Yes, I totally see that as the logical outcome of "modules"--which is why I'm glad that so far, my department has resisted the push.

      I took a tech survey from my school yesterday, and I made it VERY clear in the comments that I am a professor, not an "instructional designer."

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    2. I understand a "bottom-up" approach where faculty may, for various pedagogical reasons want to make sure certain aspects of a course (or sequences of courses) are taught. I am very suspicious of any sort of "top-down" approach from administrators who want to make assessment easier at the expense of meaningful educational experiences. What frightens me is we are getting pushed in this direction from our accrediting agencies (Where are they getting it from???) I also suspect whining students and helicopter parents want "homogenous" "normed" courses so Little Johnny Snowflake doesn't accidentally take a tough proffie and wreck his meaningless GPA.

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  8. Those of you who don't have any standardization must not work for state institutions. While we have some choice in textbooks (and the faculty, through committees, make those choices within the limited guidelines we're given), and we're free to design whatever types of assessment we want, each course has student learning outcomes which must be met. They are uniform across courses. Certain courses also have minimum numbers of essays, research projects, or word counts. We are working toward standardizing them across our system, and that in turn will align with SLOs coming from the state ed agency. It's like the Borg. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

    As to what Professor Patty next door is doing, yes, I actually do want to know and think we should share the things we do in class. My style may not be the same as Professor Patty, but if she has a great assignment which gets results, maybe I can adapt it to the way I teach and do a better job as a result. I also like to hear from my colleagues about what didn't work. Maybe I did something similar that did so I can help them next time. Or maybe it didn't work for me either, so we can talk about why and think about a way to try it better next time. It's a free education based on others' experiences, and it builds collegiality as long as it's done in the proper spirit. No one wants Professor Know-It-All standing around pontificating about all the perfect things she has done in class and how her students all love her and think she's the best thing ever.

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  9. I have nothing to add here except that I am very glad Hiram posts often.

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  10. The level and quantity of material covered in a particular course and the grading standards should not be contingent on which professor a student chooses to take. There absolutely should be oversight on these issues, yet it seems there is often little to none. This doesn't mean every instructor must follow the same template, although sadly since that's the easiest route to ensure such consistency, it's probably the one that gets followed at institutions who take the issue seriously.

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