V o l u m e 2
An International Forum for Innovative Teaching
CONTENTS
1 Commentary
Rebecca A. Biven, Ph.D.
4
Bread Day: Appreciating
Culture and Diversity
Niki L. Young, Ph.D.
6
Motivating Students,
Chapter Two
Leah Savion, Ph.D.
9
For All the World To See:
Transforming a
Composition Course
With On-line Publication
Richard Johnson
10
The Quest: How Do We
Acquire Knowledge?
Cathy Sewell
12
Meet the Authors
• • • • • • • • • • •
C
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I s s u e 2
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April 2003
Y
“And Gladly Would
He Learn”
Rebecca A. Biven, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Anne Arundel Community College
Arnold, Maryland
Introduction
Today’s pedagogy focuses on the teacher’s
role in the learning process. In an attempt to
engage students, the professor creates activities
and provides an environment that are meant to
spark students’ interests so that they will commit
to mastering course content and skills. Yet
this hard-working, earnest professor whom
we teachers commend often becomes frustrated,
even discouraged, when all of the effort and
good will do not lead inevitably to anticipated
outcomes. What else or what more, we may
ask, can the professor do to motivate students?
One answer is to change the question: what
attitude and responsibility should we expect
the students to assume for their own learning?
Students in Charge of Their Own Learning
The successful professor recognizes and respects
students by not putting them in passive roles
that deny them the opportunity to take charge
of their learning which thereby sabotages their
ability to become independent learners. In
Getting Well Again, a book that addresses the
relationship between mind and body for cancer
patients, the authors believe that family members
should support the patients without rescuing
them: “Rescuing may look as if you are helping
someone, when in fact you are reinforcing
weakness and powerlessness” (Simonton,
Matthews-Simonton, and Creighton 252).
While “the rescuer may appear to be loving and
caring, [he/she] actually contributes to incapacitating the patient” (253). Rescuing is an apt
description of what the professor often does in
the classroom to the students. We can all recall
occasions when we have rescued our students
and assumed that we were being good teachers
in doing so.
One outcome of rescuing is rewarding
the students for being weak, which can leave
students feeling like victims. For example, they
may assert that former teachers or their current
work hours explain their failure to learn. The
unsuccessful professor will accept the students’
plight as beyond their control. But just as ill
persons must participate in their own health
(Simonton, Matthews-Simonton, and Creighton
114-26), students must participate in their own
learning. Rather than feel trapped or expect the
professor to do something, they must search for
solutions. In short, if the students want success,
they must be properly disposed; that is, they
must want to learn and be committed to do so,
accepting the limitations caused by work, family,
or weak instruction and doing the best they can
in their present circumstances.
continued on pg. 2..........
“And Gadly Would He Learn”
continued from pg. 1..........
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Those Who Gladly Learn
In the movie Educating Rita, Rita, a twentyseven-year-old English hairdresser who has
enrolled in her first Open University course,
asks her teacher Dr. Frank Bryant, “Do you
think I can learn?” He asks her, “Are you
serious about learning?” He then tells her that
she must “discipline her mind” (Gilbert) because
learning requires work, earnestness, and dedication to purpose.
These are the qualities Frederick Douglass,
in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave, exemplifies. As a slave in
antebellum Maryland, Douglass was denied the
opportunity to read or write. When the young
Douglass arrived in Baltimore, Mistress Auld
began to teach the boy his letters—until his
husband forbade it. Smitten with the desire to
learn, Douglass tells his readers that he was
“compelled to resort to various stratagems” as
he “had no regular teacher” (81). He also had
to learn on the sly. From the poor white children
in the neighborhood, he learned to read. He
would “bestow [bread] upon the hungry little
urchins, who, in return, would give [him] that
more valuable bread of knowledge” (83).
Learning to write required a more concerted
effort. He would copy the letters that ship
carpenters marked on the timbers (such as ‘L’
for larboard side), copy the words in Webster’s
Spelling Book, and reproduce the letters in the
copybook that belonged to his master’s son. As
Tom Sawyer would later do, he tricked other
boys. Douglass would claim that he could write
better than they, and “in this way [he] got a
good many lessons in writing which it is quite
possible [he] should never have gotten any other
way” (87). Finally, after many years and “a
long, tedious effort, [he] succeeded in learning
to read and write” (87).
a “regular teacher” as well as technological tools
and up-to-date methods of instruction. We
certainly do not want to deny them opportunity
and means as a contrary motivation from them
to copy Douglass’ efforts. What we do want
to do is to identify some attitudinal barriers in
the learning process and some means by
which the successful professor can break
those barriers.
One barrier, usually the first, is that the
students already think they know. They hold
what Socrates calls a false opinion. They cannot be properly disposed to learn if they think
they have nothing to learn. Meno, in Plato’s
dialogue Meno, and Sylvia, in Toni Cade
Bambara’s short story “The Lesson,” think
they know the meanings of key words—virtue
and real money. Described as “greedy for
wealth and power, ambitious, [and] a treacherous friend always seeking his own advantage”
(Grube 1), Meno has come to Athens to ask
Socrates how virtue can be acquired. Socrates
begins the lesson by telling Meno that first
they must define virtue. Meno replies that to
define virtue “is not hard”: it is “being able to
manage public affairs and in so doing benefit
his friends and harm his enemies and to be
careful that no harm comes to himself” (Plato
71e). Miss Moore, an African-American outsider who teaches Sylvia and her friends
during the summer, asks Sylvia, a poor
African-American girl in New York City, if
she knows what real money is (Bambara 153).
Sylvia assures Miss Moore she knows: it is
not “poker chips or monopoly papers we lay
on the grocer” (153).
When Socrates and Miss Moore recognize
that Meno’s and Sylvia’s knowledge is incorrect
or incomplete, their job is to enlighten their
students without rescuing them. Effective
questioning and an experience are two methods
that allow students to realize their error.
Dialectic, a form of questioning that draws
forth knowledge from students by pursuing
Barriers in the Process
Our students, in contrast to Douglass, are not
denied the opportunity to learn. They do have
The Successful Professor™
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
continued on pg. 3..........
2
“And Gadly Would He Learn”
continued from pg. 2..........
a series of questions and examining the
implications of their answers, is Socrates’
method. After Meno offers multiple
definitions of virtue, Socrates asks Meno
questions that should enable Meno to see
why each attempt is illogical and denotatively incorrect. So that her students may
understand the meaning of real money,
Miss Moore takes them on a field trip uptown—to Fifth Avenue’s F. A. O. Schwarz
toy store. Here they see a microscope
for $300, a paperweight for $480, and a
“Handcrafted sailboat of fiberglass” for
“one thousand one hundred ninety-five
dollars” (155). These prices for toys define real money as more than money used
to buy groceries.
If these pedagogical methods are
effective, students often put up another
barrier: they resist. Certain they know,
they cling to their false opinion because
they do not like feeling ignorant. They
do not understand that ignorant does not
mean stupid—it means “not knowing”—
and that accepting ignorance is a necessary
condition if they are to move from not
knowing to knowing. Their bewilderment
after such certainty is part of the pain
of learning. Meno describes himself as
“perplexed,” with his mind and tongue
“numb” because even though he has
“made many speeches about virtue before
large audiences on a thousand occasions
. . . [he now] cannot even say what it is”
(Plato 80b). Sylvia too is bewildered.
Staring at the sailboat, she hears herself
say, “‘Unbelievable’” (Bambara 155). She
is “stunned” and looks again at the price
“just in case the group recitation put [her]
in a trance” (155). Unfortunately, it is at
this point that a professor may want to
rescue the students from their pain by, for
example, providing answers. After his
admission of ignorance, Meno insists
The Successful Professor™
Socrates define virtue so that they can
discuss how virtue can be acquired. But
Socrates refuses to define the word for
him. Sylvia also wants answers: “ ‘What I
want to know is’ I says to Miss Moore,
‘how much a real boat costs? I figure a
thousand’d get you a yacht any day’ ”
(156). When Miss Moore asks Sylvia to
“check that out and report back to the
group” (156), Sylvia thinks that “‘If you
gonna ruin a perfectly good swim day
least you could do is have some answers’”
(156).
When the professor does not rescue
the students by providing answers, the
students’ puzzlement can turn into anger,
especially at the teacher. Meno resorts to
name-calling. In looks and acts, Socrates
is likened to a torpedo fish who numbs
people and who uses sorcery to bewitch
and beguile. From the beginning, Sylvia
hates Miss Moore, calling her a “nappyhead bitch” (Bambara 153). Sylvia
compares her to the winos, who have
ruined the children’s play areas. At the
end of the field trip, Sylvia is the only
student who will not give Miss Moore the
satisfaction of stating what they learned
that day.
At this point, the students who want
to move from ignorance to knowledge
ask the questions. Meno is not one of
these students. A man without character,
he has no desire to be virtuous, only to
appear so. He quits and thereby rejects
self-knowledge. In contrast is Sylvia, one
of those students who want to learn. As
she rides the train home, she recalls a toy
clown doing somersaults that costs $35
and realizes that “Thirty-five dollars would
pay the rent and the piano bill too. Who
are these people that spend that much for
performing clowns and $1,000 for toy
sailboats? What kinda work they do and
how they live and how come we ain’t in
on it?” (Bambara 157). Her resolute and
persistent enquiry gives her a chest pain and
“a headache for thinkin’ so hard” (157).
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
Learning is the journey,
not the destination. The
professor sets them on that
journey without necessarily
knowing who will arrive
or when.
Back home, she separates herself from
her friends so that she can “think this day
through” (157). Her pain as confusion
and anger is the foundations for her
arriving at true opinion. Sylvia knows
something is amiss. Determined to find
out what that something is, Sylvia, like
Chaucer’s Oxford student, gladly would
learn.
It may seem as if placing the responsibility for learning on the students leaves
them and the professor wondering if either
can claim success. After all, neither Meno
nor Sylvia appreciates the professor
whose persistence has made them feel
inadequate. And the endings of each
lesson seem indeterminate. W h e n
Socrates says that “the time has come for
[him] to go” (Plato 100b), no one has
defined virtue. Before the children disperse, Miss Moore looks “sorrowfully”
(Bambara157) at Sylvia who seems not
to have profited from the excursion. But
the professor who seeks outpourings of
gratitude suitable for a Hollywood movie
or measurable outcomes at the moment
misses the point. Learning is the journey,
not the destination. The professor sets
them on that journey without necessarily
knowing who will arrive or when. He or
she must accept this indeterminacy
while still providing the signposts and
the support without rescuing them.
continued on pg. 4..........
3
“And Gadly Would He Learn”
continued from pg. 3..........
Resources
Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Lesson.” The
Bedford Introduction to Literature. 4th ed.
Ed. Michael Meyer. New York: St. Martin’s
P, 1995. 153-157.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
Ed. & Trans. A. Kent and Constance Hieatt.
New York: Bantam Books, 1981. (The
phrase describes the Oxford student from the
Prologue.)
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
Gilbert, Lewis. Educating Rita. With
Michael Caine and Julie Waters. Columbia/
Acorn Pictures, 1983.
Grube, G.M.A. Introduction. Meno. By
Plato. 1-2.
Plato. Meno. Trans. G. M. A. Grube.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981.
Simonton, O. Carl, Stephanie MatthewsSimonton, and James L. Creighton. Getting
Well Again. New York: Bantam Books,
1992.
•••••••••••••••
September Commentary
Dr. Elliot Cohen, Professor of Philosophy
from Indian River Community College in
Fort Pierce, Florida, authors the Commentary
for the September issue. His article entitled
“Cultivating the Habit of Scholarship”
offers ways institutions of higher learning
can provide conditions for the cultivation
of scholarship.
The Successful Professor™
Bread Day:
Appreciating Culture
and Diversity
Niki L. Young, Ph.D.
Visiting Lecturer, Communication Studies
California State University, Stanislaus
Turlock, California
NYoung@stan.csustan.edu
“Education should not be the filling of
a pail: it should be the igniting of a
spark.”—William Butler Yeats
Introduction
The idea sprang to life one day in class,
as did Athena from Zeus’s head, fully
grown. Fortunately, in my experience, one
good idea often begets another. And many
of the best ideas come from students. The
trick or magic of teaching comes from
creating the conditions that encourage
thinking. Before I earned my doctorate in
Communication, I was certified to teach
high school chemistry, biology and physics.
I see many similarities in these two different occupations. As a teacher, I often
act as a catalyst—catalysts are enzymes
that help speed up certain reactions—and
professors often act as catalysts in the
classroom—as agents that facilitate
change. We set up our classrooms like
labs to establish the conditions that
encourage discovery. I set up certain
conditions in the Intercultural Communication class with the first assignment.
The Identity Paper
The Identity Paper asks students to reflect
on who they are and what aspects of
culture are most influential in their lives.
Students identify and write about the
three aspects that most significantly influenced their identity. Aspects they consider
include religion, social role, family (i.e.,
mother, father, sister, daughter, brother,
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
and son), region of the country or national
origin, career or professional aspiration,
and gender. The goals of the assignment
are to (1) encourage self reflection and
discovery and (2) help students recognize
diversity.
The assignment includes an oral
component as well. Students are each
given five minutes to discuss how at least
one aspect of culture influenced them and
are asked to bring an object that symbolizes this influence. Because this project
is assigned early in the semester, it also
serves as an ice breaker by encouraging
the kinds of self-disclosure that encourage
relationship formation. In fulfilling the
assignment, students tell moving and
interesting stories about their own perspectives and experiences. As a result,
students begin to form bonds with one
another, and a deeper sense of connection
begins to develop in the class as a whole.
Two Students Spark a New Idea
In one of those rare coincidences, two
students who used related symbols were
seated next to one another. Elisabeth, who
went first, wrote and shared the following:
For my ethnicity, I have compared
my experiences to my family’s Italian
bread recipe. It is a recipe that has
been handed down to at least two
generations. This shows that my Italian
ethnicity is one that values tradition
and the importance of giving. It is a
very simple recipe with very common
ingredients. The end result produces
continued on pg. 5..........
4
Bread Day
continued from pg. 4..........
an aromatic loaf of bread that will
bring a smile to anyone’s face. The
simple ingredients represent living
a simple life and in doing so create a
sense of happiness. My grandfather
always told his children that leading
a simple life would bring them much
happiness.
Elisabeth’s essay was poetic and moving.
She compared her family’s values to the
ingredients in the bread recipe, with family
being represented by flour, relationships
by yeast, love by sugar, respect by olive
oil. The entire class was enthralled with
her presentation. We were even more
amazed by what came next. Elisabeth
was seated next to Valeh, who, we learned in her presentation, was Assyrian and
had fled Iran as a young woman because
of religious persecution there. Valeh’s
tale was dramatic and gripping. Like
Elisabeth, Valeh used bread as her symbol,
but instead of a poem, Valeh had two
actual pieces of bread. She brought two
pieces, one of “American” sliced white
sandwich bread, to represent her new
culture, and Lavosh, Assyrian flatbread,
to represent her old one.
The juxtaposition of the two different
breads was powerful, particularly after the
poetic presentation on bread and family.
Here we had a simple and humble food,
an object that could represent a culture.
I realized we were on to something really
important here, and Bread Day was born.
I announced with excitement that we, as
a class, had to follow up these amazing
presentations with a day focused solely
on Bread.
Bread Day: A Powerful Intercultural
Learning Experience
Students were asked to bring a quotation
or cultural perspective on bread to share
with the class, and something to share
The Successful Professor™
in edible form (various types of breads
and toppings, along with beverages) to
our Bread Day. We loaded our plates
with homemade and bakery produced
treats and toppings and then went around
the room sharing our research. We discovered how significant bread is in many
cultures, “a staple since prehistoric times,”
according to the website Epicurious
(www.epicurious.com). We learned about
different bread traditions, in a variety of
countries. A Dutch student told us that
when a baby is born in Holland, a special
bread is handed out, much like Americans
hand out cigars, and the toppings are blue
for boys and pink for girls. We learned
different words for bread, pan, lavosh,
brot, pain, tortilla, naan, pita, roti . . . .
We learned from History Magazine that
“Bread was so vital to people’s lives that
it was the subject of special laws almost
everywhere” (Moorshead, 1999, p. 41).
Some students researched bread superstitions and traditions. A Mexican American
student shared information on Pan de
Muerto or Bread of the Dead, associated
with the Dia De Los Muertos or Day of
the Dead celebration. One student gave
an engaging presentation on the history
and significance of the pretzel.
Several students talked about the
importance of bread and religion. In old
Muslim tradition, bread could not be sold
but only given or traded because it was a
gift from Allah. During Passover, Jews
eat only unleavened bread, symbolizing
their ancestors’ freedom from slavery. In
the Christian Eucharist ceremony, bread
represents the body of Christ and symbolizes
the nourishment of the soul.
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
As a class day, Bread Day marked a
significant change from the norm. Sharing
bread with one another (literally and
figuratively) made for a lively exchange
of ideas coupled with the comfort of homespun hospitality. The activity changed the
classroom atmosphere. Students remarked
on how enjoyable the experience was
and how much they learned. Food and
culture were covered in the Intercultural
Communication text as well as forms of
nonverbal communication, which allowed
for revisiting the topic later in the semester.
I even included an exam question on the
significance of food and culture.
Food For Thought
Why did this activity work so well? For
several reasons. First, it honored and
expanded on perspectives and experiences
of students within the class, a spontaneous magic that will probably not repeat
itself in quite that same way again.
Second, bread as an object is deceptively
simple: bread is something everyone can
relate to and experience, and yet it has a
suprisingly lengthy and complicated
history and role in societies. Bread is a
rich symbol, with both literal and figurative functions—which mirrors the
complexity of culture. Food and culture
are integrally related. Jeff Smith (1984)
writes in The Frugal Gourmet that “eating
as a way of understanding and celebrating
cultures and histories sounds strange. . .
but. . .we are dealing with more than
one kind of hunger when we cook. The
hunger for affection, for community, for
feasting in order to remember. . . ” (p. xiv).
Louisiana Chef Paul Prudhomme (1984)
echoes this sentiment, noting, “Food is a
celebration of life; it’s a universal thing:
shared needs and shared experiences. It
keeps us alive, it affects our attitudes, it’s
continued on pg. 6.........
5
Bread Day
continued from pg. 5..........
“Food is a celebration of
life . . . It keeps us alive,
it affects our attitudes,
it’s a social experience.”
a social experience” (p. 16). Including
a social experience in the Intercultural
Communication class had beneficial and
unexpected results. In the beginning, the
Identity Paper allowed students, after
reflection, to share experiences and
establish relationships.
As the assignment evolved, it allowed
students to explore deeper themes and
more complex questions about culture.
This assignment encouraged students to
think in new ways. As Christa Walck
(2000) observes in her essay, The Teaching
Life, “The teaching life is the life of the
explorer, constructing the classroom for
free exploration. It is about engagement
It takes courage” (p. 165). And, I would
add, it can be richly rewarding.
Resources
Moorshead, Halvor. 1999. Bread. History
Magazine. 1, 1. 41-43.
Prudhomme, Paul. 1984. hef Paul
Prudhomme’s Louisiana kitchen. New York:
William Morrow and Co., Inc.
Smith, Jeff. 1984. The Frugal Gourmet.New
York: Ballantine Books.
Walck, Christa. 2000. A teaching life.157166. In Wise women: Reflections of teachers
at midlife. Phyliis R. Freeman and Jan Zlotnik
Schmidt, Eds. New York: Routledge.
•••••••••••••••
The Successful Professor™
Motivating Students,
Chapter Two
Cognitive Components Of Motivation
Leah Savion, Ph.D.
People have an incessant, forceful need
to make sense of the world, organize facts
into causal schemes, to make plans and
predictions, and control the environment.
Understanding the world around us and
creating new ways to solve problem seem
to be marks of the evolutionarily successful animals. We educators can tap
into this inevitable tendency by making
the material they teach and the methods
of conveying it cohere with our natural
needs. We can
● Set clear learning goals for each
class and for the course.
● Limit the amount of new content
delivered in one lesson.
● Chunk the information appropriately
to accommodate the limitations of
short-term memory.
● Make abstract material personal,
familiar, and concrete.
● Clarify relevant latent beliefs and
values, and address them.
● Connect clearly the new information
to existing knowledge.
● Bring to light naïve misconceptions
and methods for amending them.
● Point out some surprising aspects
or facts; encourage the students to
find more facts and to relate them
to others outside the class.
● Allow students to research an area
of interest to them.
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Indiana University—Bloomington
Bloomington, Indiana
lsavion@indiana.edu
Introduction
Students’ success is mostly influenced
by two groups of variables, inclusively
divided into those that are essentially beyond the influence of the instructor and
those subject to modification by the
teacher and by the student. The “given”
variables may include intellectual aptitude; academic preparation and prior
knowledge; cognitive, mental and physical
disabilities; and cultural, social and
environmental constraints.
One of the most notable, changeable
factors in students’ success is their level
of motivation. If prior knowledge is the
single most influential component of
successful learning, student motivation is
a close second in importance and a definite first in being within the control of the
instructor. We have the power to detect,
mold, change and modify attitudes the
student brings and develops toward the
course, the material, and the instructor.
Familiarity with the major emotive and
cognitive components of student motivation is a pedagogically robust and necessary
tool.
Part I of this article published in the
February issue of The Successful Professor,
focused on emotional components of
motivation. The following lists several
major cognitive elements of motivation
and the pedagogical suggestions relevant
to them.
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
Natural Curiosity: A Desire To
Understand And Create
Natural Tendency To Develop
And Mature
Higher education can have a highly
positive effect on students’ attitudes,
values, and personalities. Research
indicates that students become more
confident, more liberal, less dogmatic,
continued on pg. 7..........
6
Motivating Students, Chapter Two
continued from pg. 6..........
Be appreciative, at least
tolerant, of students who think
“outside the box.”
less prejudiced, and better able to handle
problematic situations and personal
impulses as a result of a few years in
college. There are also indications that
college students tend to develop a richer
moral code, intellectual values, autonomy,
interpersonal relations, and purpose
(Feldman & Newcomb, 1976; Chickering,
1969). Students who adopt the belief that
they are experiencing “growing up” and
becoming more rounded and mature are
more motivated and energized in and out
of class. To enhance that aspect of motivation instructors can do the following:
● Treat education as an instrument
for personal growth, not just as job
training.
● Encourage reflective discussions
on creativity, independent thinking,
and academically acceptable
argumentation.
● Respond to and foster personal
pride.
● Express respect and emphasize
positive change of attitude.
● Welcome new ideas and
perspectives.
● Have many diverse grade
opportunities and make the
students responsible for their
choices.
● Create teaching experiences for
students: have them teach
students of a lower level class,
their friends, their roommates,
their siblings, or their parents.
Extrinsic Awards And Career Goals
Whether in a materialistic culture or not,
students’ motivation is strongly affected
The Successful Professor™
by their perception of the usefulness of
the material covered in class to their shortterm goals or long-term career aspirations.
Some of our students’ motivation is connected to progress toward a goal. The gap
between their current level of performance
and expected performance induces in them
a desire to better themselves. They also
observe the positive benefits of others who
have achieved their goals. To help students
to link the material covered in class to their
ultimate professional success we can
● Link course objectives with
personal lives.
● Create “class” space for discussing
personal goals and means for
obtaining them.
● Find practical applications whenever possible.
● Expose students to the professional
publications in a field.
● Take students to conferences;
bring a successful practitioner to
share insights.
● Incorporate pragmatic elements in
suggested paper topics.
Metacognitive Knowledge And Skills
Metacognition consists of the knowledge
we have about our cognitive operations,
such as problem solving, learning, remembering, perceiving; the awareness we have
of the devices and strategies we employ in
these operations and of our limitations;
and the deliberate means for monitoring
and controlling our cognitive processes
and their outcome. Metacognitive skills
develop naturally to a limited degree, but
the domain specific skills could and need
to be taught in the classroom.
● Teach explicitly how to reflect
and monitor learning.
● Tell the students about the
heuristics and biases that
participate at each stage of the
learning process: acquisition,
retention and retrieval.
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
Treat education as an
instrument for personal
growth, not just as
job training.
● Allow opportunities for selfassessment.
● Analyze past personal performance:
encourage keeping a “performance”
log.
● Use the strategy of “scaffolding”:
transfer the role of the critic to the
student, by providing a model,
sharing the task, and allowing
mutual and self-criticism.
● Give a workshop on study skills
and their relative effectiveness.
● Ask about and discuss resource
management: time, effort,
environment, outside help, eating
and sleeping habits, and how to
establish a better control over them.
● Require an analysis of the students’
test preparation and test taking and
make suggestions.
● Ask students to (a) evaluate the
difficulty of different portions of
the material, (b) predict their level
of effort to master the material, and
(c) guess their relative grade for
these portions; continuously
compare these written prediction
with the actual levels of effort and
outcome.
Self-Attributions
Students’ cognitive reaction to their level
of success can be classified inclusively
according to what type of sources to which
they tend to attribute their success or
failure.
Luck: performance depends on the
whimsical nature of natural or supernatural
events. Examples: “I was sick the day we
covered the stuff.” “I didn’t study the
continued on pg. 8..........
7
Motivating Students, Chapter Two
continued from pg. 7..........
right material.” “The dog ate my home-
work.” “The teacher hates me because
I’m white/black/tall.” “My roommate is
noisy.” “I don’t have a comfortable place
to study.”
Ability: performance depends on
genetic endowment of skills. Examples:
“I’m not good at math/logic/thinking/
writing.”
Task: failure/success is attributed to
the teacher/unreasonable demands. For
instance: “The instructor is lousy.” “The
test was unfair/too difficult/boring/ambiguous/irrelevant.” “The grader is too
tough.” “The test covered the wrong
material.” “The teacher grades me without reading my papers carefully.” “Grading is completely arbitrary: my girl friend
copied from me, and got a better grade.”
Effort: performance is correlated
with hard work, so success is within
control. Examples: “I didn’t study enough.”
“I realized why I failed the last time, and
I will study properly for this test.” “I was
determined to ace the final in order to
bring my final grade up.” “I consulted last
year’s tests/previous students/the instructor to know how to study.”
These four major sources of attribution can be distributed along a continuum
of control one has over such sources. One
may consider Luck as the least influenced
by the performer. Some take Ability as
the innate, given variable, mainly under
the influence of the “fixed entity” concepion of intelligence. Others may view
the task as determined by the arbitrary
choices of the dictatorial teacher and
graded by the vicious assistant as ranging
completely beyond their control. Regardless of the position of the Luck, Ability,
and Task sources on the “helplessness”
scale, Effort stands on the opposite side
of them. The level of deliberate learning,
The Successful Professor™
Teach explicitly how
to reflect and monitor
learning.
perseverance, and diligence as the major
reason for success or failure is, by all
accounts, the most controllable component
of performance. Obviously, students who
believe that their performance is the
result of uncontrollable factors are likely
to generate either negative or unrealistic
expectations, which have an undesirable
effect both on the emotive and the cognitive components of motivation. After a
quiz, asking students to group the reasons
they passed or failed—according to the
four attributions above—creates a remarkable teaching moment for them to view
themselves. Academic maturity and long
exposure to university learning tend to
move students from helpless attribution to
the empowering one, and explicit instruction and illumination of the general
tendency can make it conscious and
enduring. Enhancing our students’
motivation is not merely a feasible task,
but an obligatory one. Expressing enthusiasm and providing a role model of
a hard-working academic is bound to
influence students who resemble us,
the college professors, in motivation,
learning skills, and built-in curiosity.
Helping the other 99% of our students
requires exposure to recent findings in
educational psychology and in cognitive
science that illuminate the how the mind
work. Familiarity with the major emotive
and cognitive components of students’
motivation and implementing practical
suggestions they entail provide a pedagogically robust and necessary tool. This
two-part paper offers a framework for
understanding the emotive and the cognitive components of motivation, and the
educational implications they can have
on educators.
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
Resources
Chickering, A.W. (1969). Education and
identity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Dweck, C.S., & Licht, B.G. (1980). Learned
helplessness and intellectual achievement,
in Seligman & Garber (Eds.) Human
helplessness: Theory and application,
Academic Press.
Dweck, C.S. (2002). Beliefs that make
smart people dumb, in Sternberg R.J. (Ed.)
Why smart people can be so stupid? Yale
University Press.
Feldman, K.A., & Newcomb T.A. (1976).
The impact of college on students. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Fincher, C. (1981). Higher education as
a stage of transition. Research in Higher
Education, 15, 377-380.
Forsyth D. & McMillan J. (1994). Practical
proposals for motivating students, in
Feldman & Paulsen (Eds.) Teaching and
learning in the college classroom, Ashe
Reader Series.
Gardner, Howard (1983). Frames of mind:
The theory of multiple intelligences, New
York: Basic Books.
Moldoveanu &Langer. (2002). When stupid
is smarter than we are, in Sternberg R.J. (Ed.)
Why smart people can be so stupid? Yale
University Press.
•••••••••••••••
8
For All the World to
See: Transforming a
Composition Course
With On-line Publication
Richard Johnson
Assistant Professor of English
Kirkwood Community College
Iowa City, Iowa
richard.johnson@kirkwood.edu
Introduction
Sixth grade. That’s the first time writing
really mattered to me. Once a month our
teacher helped us to publish our own
class magazine of poems, drawings, and
stories. It was a homegrown affair, really
nothing more than some stapled-together
packets of dittos with that fresh purple
ink we all loved to sniff. And yet, we
eagerly awaited every new edition. I still
remember carrying that first magazine
home from school, whispering to myself,
“I’m published.”
Early in my own career as a teacher
of writing, I experimented a bit with
publishing my students’ work in a little
magazine; I wanted them to write sometimes for an audience other than just
their teacher. Ah, but the trouble, the
expense, the sheer size the magazine had
to be to include even just one piece by
every student: I soon abandoned the idea.
But in my heart I never abandoned the
hope that someday, when I was a perfect
teacher, teaching my perfect classes in
an infinitely-supportive school, I would
provide my students with opportunities
to publish their words. Someday, when
expense was not an issue, when copying
and collating and binding were no hassle
at all. Someday.
Last year a student paid me the deep
honor of receiving the web address of his
personal on-line magazine. He wanted
The Successful Professor™
me to see what his “real” writing looked
like—as opposed to the school writing
he had been doing for me all semester. I
accepted the gift, of course, in that awkward way one always does with such
things—never expecting to keep it but not
quite tossing it away either. I ignored the
web address on my desk for a few days
but then, during a bored snack break, took
a peek. Raunchy, scruffy, belligerent: his
´zine was perfectly, well, his. The perfect
expression of who he is.
And then it struck me, as these things
always do, with its why-didn’t-I-see-thisbefore simplicity. My composition class
could publish its own on-line magazine.
With some easy-to-use webpage software,
I played around with a cover page design
and a table of contents. Students would
simply hand in their polished essays on a
diskette or email them to me as attached
files. I, in turn, would save their essays as
html files, then link those to the table of
contents. Voilà: a class magazine. It was
that simple.
The Ralston Creek Review we called
it, named after a derelict trickle of drainage that meanders across the back of our
campus and through the neighborhoods
(and childhoods) of many of my students.
I had envisioned the magazine as little
more than an end-of-semester gift to my
students: “Here you go, look what we
made.” But what I never saw coming was
the degree to which the class ´zine would
fundamentally change the way I teach
composition.
Every essay assignment
became a kind of letter
to the world.
A Letter to the World
They stopped writing for me. I don’t mean
they stopped writing. I mean, they stopped
writing for me. Because this magazine
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
would actually be posted on the Internet
for all the world to see, my students’
audience-awareness shifted dramatically.
Every essay assignment became a kind of
letter to the world. And I began to notice
some unexpected changes. The phony
sort of writing students sometimes do
just to please or to appease the teacher
seemed to lift from them like a morning
fog. The writers’ workshops I have always
used transformed from grudging groups
of “why should I do the work of helping a
classmate get a better grade?” to genuine
helping circles of “let’s make this magazine and every essay in it as high-class
as we possibly can.” Even the fussy proofreading of drafts transformed from an
English teacher’s annoying exercise in
anality into an important step to avoid the
dreaded embarrassment of letting a silly
error slip by uncaught.
My students were, after all, no longer
just writing their compositions for me.
They were no longer merely attempting
to meet my private English-teacher
standards. They now had a much bigger
audience to satisfy. Ironically, students
began to ask me for more advice about
writing than they had ever done before.
For the first time, I believe, they actually
felt a need to know what the English
teacher knows because, for the first time,
the shame of possibly not knowing would
be witnessed not merely by that lonely
teacher but by the whole wired world.
continued on pg. 10..........
9
For All the World to See
continued from pg. 9..........
So instead of letter grades
on their papers, from me,
the students received from
their classmates a kind of
thumbs-up, thumbs-down
peer review. . . .
From Writers’ Workshops
to Editorial Boards
Most of all, though, the very idea of
grading student papers changed. Although
I am, of course, still required to assign
students grades for the course, the
very idea of grades on individual papers
became—well, academic. The point was
no longer to revise a paper enough to get
that “B” or even the coveted “A.” The
point, rather, was to help each other whip
their drafts into publishable shape. And
so that’s the word we started to use:
“publishable.” I stopped needing to
assign letter grades at all. The writers’
workshops evolved into editorial boards,
sending drafts back to authors with suggestions (and sometimes even insistences)
for improvement. “Good enough” no
longer meant “good enough for the
teacher;” it now meant “good enough to
appear in print alongside our own writing.”
Students began to vet each other’s manuscripts, just as we professors do in our
own publications. Banal workshop
comments like “Nice job; good use of
description” gave way to a new editorialboard urgency of “Look, we won’t approve
this for publication until you resolve the
problem in paragraph four. Now let’s talk
about your options. . . .”
So instead of letter grades on their
papers, from me, the students received
from their classmates a kind of thumbs-
The Successful Professor™
up, thumbs-down peer review: a draft was
considered either “publishable” or “still
needs work.” At the students’ request,
one other mark of quality emerged as well:
on the table of contents of The Ralston
Creek Review a select few student essays
were distinguished with the words
“Readers’ Choice,” like a proud calf
wearing a blue ribbon at the county fair.
Assigning students a letter grade in
the course became no longer a matter of
adding up the letter grades I had assigned
to all their essays. Instead, I established
contract grades in which x number of
publishable pieces and y amount of
service to the editorial board equaled
such-and-such a grade in the course. My
role as sole evaluator dropped away and
I became, instead, a resource.
The day finally came, at the end of
the semester, to post our class ´zine on
the Internet. I took my students down the
hall to the computer lab, where they all
raced to look up their own work first, the
way you do when the new phone book
arrives; within a few minutes they settled
into reading and rereading each other’s
words.
I have never been in a quieter classroom on the last day of a course. “Hey,
gang,” I said, interrupting their reading.
“We’re published.”
•••••••••••••••
The Quest: How Do We
Acquire Knowledge?
Cathy Sewell
Editorial Assistant, TSP
csewell@chesapeake.edu
At my college, the interdisciplinary course,
IDC 201:The Nature of Knowledge, is
designed to challenge students to use the
critical thinking skills they have acquired
throughout their college career. The
course’s readings, journal writing, and
projects focus on three disciplines—the
natural sciences, the social sciences, and
the humanities—with the goal of helping
students synthesize the processes we use
to acquire knowledge within and across
the disciplines.
Two faculty members from two
different disciplines team-teach IDC. For
example, my partner, George Wilson, has
a law degree and heads the paralegal
department; I am an associate professor
of English and serve as coordinator of the
Academic Support Center. We facilitate
discussions, but the students must carry
them on. Some students are initially
frustrated because they expect us to
provide answers, while others may be
reluctant to share their thoughts; so we
spend time building community within
the classroom to help all students feel
more comfortable and free to contribute
their thoughts. One method is to pose
questions and give students time to
think and write down their answers. Then
they share in pairs or small groups before
returning to the large group setting. As
Brookfield and Preskill (1999) point out
in their book, Discussion as a Way of
Teaching, students need to build discussion skills through planned activities.
Class time spent building community and
continued on pg. 11..........
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
10
The Quest
continued from pg. 10..........
discussion skills pays off as students work
in ever-changing teams on a number of
group projects. Discussions soon become
lively and challenging!
Besides taking part in discussions,
students role-play and debate issues,
sometimes from a perspective that they
might not agree with. They look for news
items and web sites that relate to the
readings and journal writings. And as we
complete a discipline, they fill out a chart
describing who people are in that discipline
(for example in the humanities, writers,
artists, ethicists, etc.), what they study,
how they acquire knowledge, and why
they want that knowledge. The chart is
useful when students must make decisions
about the final project.
Several years ago, a group of IDC
instructors were brainstorming different
ways to approach the final project. Dr.
Herb Ziegler, Professor of Social Sciences,
asked what might happen if students had
to come up with a way to explore a totally
unknown object, employing the techniques
of natural scientists, social scientists, and
professionals from the humanities. We
were intrigued and decided to design a
project based on his idea. The next few
paragraphs describe the assignment, the
procedures, and the results that we have
seen.
Shortly after mid-term, the final
project is presented. The class is divided
into groups of four to six students each.
We base the groupings on individual
learning styles, observations of which
students work well together, and realistic
acknowledgement of who copes best with
peers who are not the best team players.
The project has five phases:
1. Developing a scope and sequence
of steps with a time line for
accomplishing those steps and
assignment of responsibilities;
2. Evaluating team members on three
separate occasions;
The Successful Professor™
3. Preparing a group paper;
4. Planning and giving a presentation
on the group’s findings; and
5. Individually writing an abstract.
Students receive an assignment sheet
presenting the purpose and goals for the
project, due dates, and a description of
the requirements for each phase of the
project. Then we show them the unknown
objects around which they will build the
project.
We have collected an assortment of
odd, unique, puzzling, objects like the
one pictured above. After groups select
their object, each member assumes the
role of natural scientist, social scientist,
or scholar of the humanities. The way
the work is divided is up to the group
members. More than one member can
represent a discipline, but every group
must have at least one representative for
each of the three disciplines, and every
member must be actively involved.
Students can choose a specific role within a discipline. For example, within the
natural sciences, a student may opt to
be a chemist, a geologist, or a medical
researcher. The team members come up
with questions based on their discipline’s
perspective, find ways to answer those
questions using the discipline’s processes
for acquiring knowledge, and design a
presentation to share their discoveries
with the class on the final night of the
semester. We caution students to avoid
trying to find out what the object really is:
its identity is not the quest. Designing
the process to acquire the knowledge is
THE QUEST!
What results have we observed?
One student interviewed the physics and
chemistry professor to learn about metal
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
testing. Others designed surveys and
questionnaires to obtain people’s opinions
about how the object might be used.
Groups developed PowerPoint presentations, wrote plays, or created charts, film
clips, or brochures in order to share their
findings. Documentation in the group
papers demonstrated just how deeply
students delved into their roles, but perhaps most revealing are the comments
students made in their individual abstracts
and on the lengthy course evaluations:
● “I learned to eliminate the influence
of preconceived ideas and see the
learning process as a whole.”
● “Regardless of its origin, properties,
or purpose, studying the unknown
object allowed us to expand our
existing knowledge and acquire
new knowledge from the studies
of other disciplines.”
● “Working with others in different
professions or disciplines is a great
help in understanding what you
are researching; you can find out
things you perhaps never thought
about.”
● “I have a clearer understanding of
how each discipline works to get
an ultimate conclusion.”
The final project in IDC challenges
students to become involved, interact, and
assume responsibilities. They must make
decisions, research, and then communicate findings both orally and in writing.
Pre-conceived notions often are discarded
as they look at the world from a new
perspective. If they leave the class questioning, viewing life in a new way, and
continuing the QUEST, then my peers
and I have the pleasure of remembering
why we chose teaching as our profession.
References
Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (1999).
Discussion as a way of teaching: Tools and
techniques for democratic classrooms. San
Francisco: Josey-Bass Publishers.
•••••••••••••••
11
Meet the Authors
Rebecca A. Biven, Ph.D., is Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland. She
received her doctorate in literature with a concentration in rhetoric from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas.
She has taught for 32 years, including seven years at the University of Texas in Arlington. She currently teaches
British and World literature, composition, and (in the philosophy department) critical thinking.
Niki Young, Ph.D., currently a Visiting Lecturer in Communication Studies at California State University,
Stanislaus, has taught Communication courses in Oregon, Louisiana, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma
and California. She received her Ph.D. in Speech Communication from Louisiana State University, her
master’s degree in Rhetoric and Communication from the University of Oregon, her B.S. in Education from
Southern Oregon University, and her B.A. in Economics from Macalester College.
Dr. Leah Savion has been teaching for 30 years, the last 14 in Bloomington, Indiana. Her specialty is
analytic philosophy (logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, rationality theories), cognitive science, and
pedagogy theories. She is also teaching the only campus-wide pedagogy course offered at IU by the Graduate
School. She gives numerous workshops and talks about teaching-related issues, such as metacognition,
motivation, heuristics and biases in learning, models of human inference, and the components of effective
teaching. She also teaches international folkdance, swing and Latin dance, and Israeli singing.
Richard Johnson studied English Education at the University of Iowa. Before accepting his current
position at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa City, he taught in both public and private high schools.
At Kirkwood he teaches a full spectrum of writing courses, including developmental writing, English for
non-native speakers, and first-year composition and rhetoric, as well as a literature course in creative
nonfiction. Professor Johnson also directs the Writing Center on Kirkwood’s Iowa City campus. Last year
in The Successful Professor he published an article entitled “An Approach to Grading in a Process-Oriented
Composition Course.”
Cathy Sewell, Editorial Assistant, TSP, has broad teaching experience, extending over a twenty-four
year period. She has served as a director of a nursery school, taught grades one through three, and acted
as an assistant principal in public education. Currently she is an associate professor and the Writing
Center Coordinator at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills, Maryland, where she also teaches classes in
writing, literature, and critical thinking. Cathy holds a B.S. and M. Ed., and she is currently completing a
dissertation in a doctoral program. She has extensive experience creating workshops and presentations and
has published writing in relation to her many community volunteer activities.
The Successful Professor™
VOLUME 2 • ISSUE 2
12