Getting Started

I am creating this blog for a spring 2009 course in Free Speech and Responsibility at California State University Monterey Bay CSUMB). While the semester is about a week and a half away, I wanted to begin blogging while I am fine tuning the course syllabus. For one thing, as a scholar of teaching and learning, I am interested in how students come to deep understanding of their learning process. Since becoming involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning, I have become even more committed to transparency in the learning process--including helping students understand how professors put a syllabus together--what choices we make in terms of content, focus, assessment of student learning, and how it "fits" in curriculum. So, in the interest of full disclosure, I thought I would blog a bit over the next week and a half about my syllabus creating process. Now, this might not be interesting reading for all of my students in the class, but it is here if they want to know. :)

HCOM 310 is one of my favorite classes to teach in the Division of Humanities and Communication (HCOM) at CSUMB. To begin with, it is a class that meets a lot of different kinds of requirements so in any given semester, students are taking it to fulfill a major learning outcome (Relational Communication--essentially a communication ethics course) as well as depth concentrations in such areas as Journalism and Media Studies, Pre-Law, Practical and Professional Ethics, and beginning this semester, Writing and Rhetoric. It also draws students who are not HCOM majors, some who are Pre-Law minors, and occasionally students from Teledramatic Arts and Technology interested in free speech and the media. So, as you might guess, each semester presents a sometimes complicated mix of students--in terms of their interests and learning styles. This presents, as teaching always does, a mix of challenges and delights.

This semester, the course is also the largest it has ever been (in many ways beyond my control due to budget issues). This has me somewhat concerned. When I first began teaching Free Speech and Responsibility, it was capped at 26 students. It is now 45. While some of my faculty colleagues at other institutions might snicker ("that's a LARGE class?") it nevertheless is when one is using hands on, outcomes based, collaborative learning models of pedagogy. As the enrollment in the course has grown, I have felt compelled to lecture more frequently, in part because of a need to ensure that students are meeting the content expectations of the course. What I once was able to observe happening in class discussion, or "small group work," has become a challenge; how do I know when students are engaging the material when there are a dozen or so small groups working around the room, when the buzz of conversation is loud and I can only be in once place at a time?

So for this first post, that's what I want to think about--what does a larger class mean for course design.

HCOM 310 is a course mostly about ethical communication in a variety of settings (from small group discussion to on-line communication). In the past, one of the ways I have assessed student learning in terms of communication ethics has been to have students explore in practice what it means to BE an effective and ethical communicator. Actually doing it, and demonstrating that you are doing it, matters the most. This has happened in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most important to the course has been having students work together in a smaller seminar embedded within the larger class. It has worked really well--students not only demonstrate the learning outcomes more clearly when they have to work with a small group, consistently, throughout the whole semester, but they also report this as such. Yet, what will happen if I organize five seminars of nine students in a class of 45? Should I retain this pedagogy, which as prior research has suggested to me, works really well with three seminars in a class of 36?

So the question of the day is whether five seminars of nine students in a room that holds 45 total will work? Should I abandon what has been the soul of this course for a more "efficient" pedagogy like lectures and exams, which might not actually assess the kind of deep understanding I am hoping students to experience? What are the trade-offs?

So far, I am leaning to retaining seminar and figuring out a way to make it work in conditions that are not of my own making, but which I find myself as an instructor, and which I can re-make to serve what is best for students and possible for me. For students to not have opportunities to develop interpersonal communication skills in this course seems impossible to imagine, especially when seminar has historically provided such a wonderful space in which students have done so. Those relationships formed with a particular group of students over time cannot be replicated by occasional small group work or a large lecture class. Whatever I choose, I will continue to place student learning at the center, but I need to be more and more practical about how that happens--not only in terms of what is best for students, but also which optimizes my abilities as a facilitator to assess whether students are learning, what, and how.