Every fall is a reminder of the summer slide— the backwards roll in the summer months in what students learned the prior school year. Only this time I have been thinking about the summer slide for professors: how we seem to forget what we learned about our courses and how their assignments helped students learn, or, maybe missed the mark in that learning goal. I have been thinking a lot about that these last couple of weeks as I and my students started to ramp up our engagement in course requirements. I have written before about the need for structures and systems and scaffolding in coursework: those process aspects of learning that are critical to helping students understand the content of our courses. That scaffolding includes grading rubrics, delineated learning objectives, synchronized Moodle and syllabus entries, and handouts describing the nature of complicated assignments. While some have argued against these kinds of structures as reductionist and harmful to real thinking and student risk-taking (Alfie Kohn has made that well-cited argument against rubrics), my own experience and research have told me that, well, these kinds of course system work a lot of the time to help students perform better.
I think this is particularly true for me, because of the courses I teach and the assignments I assign. A business ethics course, for example, can be a highly ambiguous course experience for students when there are no right answers except for the ones for which they can convincingly argue. They have to discern their own values, and why they believe what they do, which can be a daunting assignment for an 18-22 year old. An organizational behavior course for which the required service-learning component counts for 25% of the course also engenders student anxiety because of so many unknowns: the community partner is external to Gustavus, the clients the community partner serves can come from backgrounds well outside those of our students’ experiences, and the reflection work! Reflection work has to take a form outside of a regular paper, like a piece of artwork or a poem, and community partners give feedback about students’ work that counts on their final evaluation. Huh, as I write this, it’s a good reminder that what I am asking students to do is really quite outside the formulaic work that their pre-college schools experiences beat into them.
It’s for those reasons—the fact that there are no right answers, and that doing aesthetically-based reflection may be the first time, ever, a student has done so—that I use lots of structure. A colleague of mine at Georgia State University, Deborah Butler, teaches massive lecture courses and yet still uses experiential learning methods more commonly found in small classes. She has repeatedly told me that students can only be creative within structure, not outside of it. And I have found that lesson is true in any size course. But, and here is the beginning-of-the-semester slide, how much structure is the ideal amount seems to be something I need to reconsider every fall. What is the balance between helpful scaffolding, within which students can take chances and be assured of the assessment criteria, and what I call ‘helicopter professoring’ which works just the same way as helicopter parenting with all of the pernicious outcomes and none of the fun?
Consider, for example, a composite of emails I tend to get at the beginning of any course, in any given semester, including this one. “Pat,” a student who generally gets good grades, is completely weirded out by my insistence that students have assignments very early on that are graded, and that count. Couple that with an almost limitless need for details and instructions that is a key characteristic of this generation of learners, and Pat is at her/his wits end when s/he emails me. I can practically feel the frustration and anxiety through the computer. So, I make an appointment with Pat, and talk through this problem. I believe strongly that part of my role—maybe the most important part—is helping students learn how to navigate the inherent complexity and ambiguity of any environment, whether it’s college, work, family, etc. A global workplace isn’t getting less complex, so how can I help them prepare and practice for sometimes head-exploding complications that don’t come with handouts? What disservices do I do students when I explain every single thing over and over, and give them a false sense of the neatness of learning and navigating tough questions?
I think the answer to the balance question is trust. Really. Lots of bad things go away when people trust each other. Besides the fairness that I think comes with using rubrics and delineated objectives and peer examples, if students think I am on their side and that we are in this together, I have found them much more willing to strike out on their own and take some chances. Part of that means being really upfront that there is no way to ever be 100% sure about an assignment; I can never assure them completely that subjectivity does not enter the evaluation process because that’s a lie. But I can also help them create confidence in their abilities by trying my best to behave in what Kelley called “high consistency” ways—where I don’t flip-flop or change grading criteria or be whimsical in how assignments count together.
And I have to say, the summer slide makes me forget about getting those emails from students like Pat each fall, for whom this is all new. It’s a good reminder. I think it helps keep me alert to the newness of the learning process, that we start over, really, each fall. Arthur Chickering, the student development expert, noted in 1969 that undergraduate students can be like “hogs on ice”—awkward and sliding all over the place as they try to use behaviors (like walking) that are no longer effective in their new environment (like a frozen pond). I love that analogy, and it helps me help Pat get through being that hog.
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