The Right Stuff

I am free-styling – thoughts generated by my reflections as I attempted to address this week’s prompts!

 I will be teaching a course next semester, a course I taught as an intensive one month class this past summer.  In all honesty, it would have been much better for those students if I had had this class (COMM 702) before I taught that course!  One piece I was really missing was thinking about students’ needs and strengths through a developmental lens, such as the stages of intellectual development offered by Perry (cited in both the Lang and Davis texts).  Whether or not Perry’s stages are truly developmental or are more a result of the way school has been done unto students in the US over the past several hundred years may be a moot point.  In any case, none of my prior training -- as an elementary teacher, as a special education teacher, or as an adult group facilitator had prepared me for the unique presentation of college students in their early 20’s. 

Nor had my nearly 20 years of experience as a consulting teacher and teacher study group facilitator.  I have facilitated or co-facilitated seminars with teachers and community members each school year for most of my teaching career.  The seminars, held monthly from September through May, were designed as continuing education courses for career k-12 teachers and were based on the national Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) Program.  Through the years I have sometimes been asked to teach the seminar as a college class for teachers-in-training (pre-service teachers).  I had done so on a couple of occasions but ended up believing that the format of a one semester college course was too restrictive to do justice to the program.  The one month intensive course had addressed a number (though not all) of the concerns I had experienced in my earlier attempts, but I was still left with significant questions about the full semester format. 

My current belief is that, previous to this class, I did not have "the right stuff" when it came to teaching young college students.  There were two key areas in which I had gone astray with my previous attempts at teaching an introductory level college course.  One, I did not even consider stages of intellectual development.  This seems rather odd to me given that an understanding of developmental stages was at the center of my teaching with k-12 students…  Huh (shaking my head a bit here).  Two, I had adapted the course syllabus only slightly from the syllabus provided to me by the department chair.  Whereas it is of course important to keep to the priorities of the department, as I look now on the manner in which the learning objectives were articulated I see that in large measure my goals for the course had not mapped on very well to those objectives.  I fully expect that this opportunity to re-write that syllabus with my new expanded vision will much improve the course – for students as well as for me!

Would Good Teaching by Any Other Name... Smell So Dour?

      Regarding academic honesty, Lang and Davis both provide many suggestions for minimizing the likelihood of and opportunities for cheating.  Lang cites an author (McKeachie) who bemoans the inevitability and magnitude of college student cheating stating that “studies of cheating behavior over several decades invariably find that a majority of students report that they have cheated at some time.”  Lang provides additional examples of reports of cheating indicating that some 47% of graduate students report cheating.  Another researcher (McCabe) who has pursued this topic for over 15 years in the USA and Canada asserts that “On most campuses, 70% of students admit to some cheating.”   At this point Lang wonders halfheartedly “if we can trust the research” (p. 199) but then proceeds as if he does.  I have to say that I do not – trust the research that is.  If anywhere near that many people around me are cheating I am completely unaware of it. 

     Here’s my theory regarding why the research may be (and probably is in my opinion) inaccurate.  It is likely that people who have cheated, when offered the opportunity via a survey to admit to cheating, are anxious to confess in order to alleviate their guilt.  In survey research there is a construct known as nonresponse bias.  That is, folks who are filling out the survey are significantly different than the folks who are not filling out the survey and thus the survey results would significantly change if we were able to poll those nonresponders – a tricky thing to do since they are not responding!  If assessment of nonresponse bias was to be accomplished (and there are ways to do this) I predict that the findings would indicate that the vast majority of students do NOT cheat.  I admit I have not read the original research so perhaps nonresponse bias has been addressed; however, the manner in which the findings are stated makes me skeptical.  What do “cheated at some time” and “some cheating” really represent in real world Joe- and Jolene-student terms?  Are we asking if they ever in their lives cheated? Are we asking strictly about school work?  Are we asking about specific instances or just in general “have you ever cheated?”  Nope, I do not trust the research.  It does not match my lived experience nor by current observations.  Not even close.

     A related concern for me is the primary approach that both Lang and Davis take in addressing issues of cheating.  Since these books are both oriented toward good teaching, why is the “because it’s just good teaching” argument so secondary to the question of what to do about cheating?  Why not begin from the premise that good teaching by its very nature reduces students’ felt need and opportunities for cheating and progress from there?