Ghosts in the Classroom

On the first day of each new semester we teachers gaze out upon a sea of new faces, all of them here to make a better future. We assume that the semester will go perfectly, and the world is spinning in greased grooves. But by mid-term the sea of faces is smaller. Five or six seats are empty. The problem on my mind in this post is those few students who disappear before mid-term.

It happens every semester. On the first day, everybody in my class is on their way to success. But gradually, some redefine themselves out of the picture. I never hear from them, they never do much work, they start missing class, and by mid-term the remaining students can't remember them. Like ghosts they have floated away, dropped for non-attendance.

We all know that classroom reality is not like those cute marketing photos of overjoyed second-graders happily raising their hands. At any given moment in any given classroom, some students appear to be half-asleep, some seem twitchy, and some exhibit enough longsuffering and sorrow to make Solzhenitsyn weep. All this is fine. What preys on my mind is the ones that quietly vanish. I’d feel better about it if they’d throw a screaming fit and fling books at me. Nothing mysterious in that. But to just float through a few weeks and then disappear, this spooks me. I get the feeling they never found a way to fit in. That is what gives me the willies.

It could, of course, be something else. When I was a TA, the head honcho of First Year Comp used to tell us to tread lightly in our expectations. “Some of our students,” he’d say, “have kids, jobs, families, bills, problems…they might be one flat tire away from just giving up on college.”

But a teacher tries to make everything work perfectly for everybody, so I want to come up with a scheme that will keep more students in class all the way through the semester. I’ve got student retention theories and learning theories and composition theories. Now I am looking for a ghost theory.

My heap of theories come from a passel of theorists whose ideas resonate with my own experience and inclinations. My teaching method is a weave of these ideas.

Paolo Friere hit me hard. I want my classes to be liberating and empowering for all of my students. Counterintuitively, accomplishing this means making the work challenging. When I was a GA in the Academic Success Department, one of my tasks was to compile an overview of current trends and “best practices” in student retention. This project raised my awareness of the things that influence student success. Students need challenges in order to feel that they are really getting somewhere and not just powering a pointless squirrel cage. Without a balance of challenges and successes, they get flat academic tires, and we get ghosts. They may be undeclared, unprepared, unsure what it is that they are hungry for, but something has to at least seem filling. Low-cal, “easy-A” classes don’t stick to their ribs.

Emmylou Harris’ story of meaningless grades is only half of the big picture of education. The other half goes from teaching herself to play the guitar to landing in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Her success is an indication of what education could be. Engage, expand, and explore. Let students take their learning and run with it.

This is tricky. Nobody gets much out of an easy A. Some who are accustomed to good grades may resent being challenged to really think when that never mattered before. A task that will stretch some will snooze others. I've had students tell me they are re-taking the class because their last teacher bored them so much they finally bailed. (I myself once dropped a class because the teacher fell asleep before he even managed to hand out the syllabus.) Most students are capable of far more and could, like Nietzsche’s camel, take all the load you can give ’em. What’s needed is an approach to teaching that mediates difficulty so the weaker students are helped rather than sidelined, but that also engages the stronger students and pushes their goals higher.

To accomplish this balancing act, I developed a way of teaching that bumps everybody out of bed, a teaching style that makes them wake up. I build custom websites to deliver content. I select topic material that students know little about, and yet about which there is plenty to know. To give students a sense of ownership and to enhance engagement, I look for unexplored territory, topics that are wide open to interpretation where they can come up with their own ideas and define their own position, as opposed to topics that are so hackneyed (abortion, death penalty) that no new thought is possible, or topics where students can only repeat the well-known and politically correct lines dictated by the media. I’m always on the lookout for new, compelling subject matter, interesting, engaging, challenging material that will inspire further investigation, thought, and writing.

I make these topics current and relevant to their world, but sort of big, topics that have a sense of urgency and importance. This generates energy, makes for a very active sense of discovery, and it allows students to feel something they’ve never felt before as students, that they are participants in the larger world, first-string players, not just bench warmers. So much of school is presented as abstraction, so story-book and repetitive, learning so disconnected from direct experience it’s like life itself is just a theory to be studied from a distance, then sign your name and hand it in.

I aim for the opposite of this disconnection by immersing students in a current, complex topic. I try to put them in, make them players in the game of culture. They get to see firsthand how language functions, and also how it is a tool that, depending on context or on discourse community, must be used in the right way in order to be effective. This direct engagement in the power of language has consistently enhanced student engagement. They are stretched, they are challenged, but they also get to feel involved, and get to see exactly how their knowledge can be power, and how their voices can matter.

For example, in 2013 when Obama started pushing to bomb Syria, we studied not just the speeches of John Kerry, we also watched the debates in Parliament, analyzing the rhetoric in play around the issue while getting a broader perspective on an important current event. When Putin wrote a letter to the American people, printed in the New York Times, I sat up late preparing a presentation and lesson, so my students were kept on top of the breaking stream of arguments from allies on both sides. We were not looking at examples dissociated from context, we were immersing ourselves in the context, analyzing rhetoric in action. Situated learning is far more like experience than abstract conceptualization.

That’s what I mean about tricky. To maintain this energy level in the class, to keep a flow of work that is both accessible and challenging for everybody, I have to be flexible, aware, and creative. Ultimately, we teach what we are. But the payoff is student engagement. A student told me once that he really wanted to stay in bed that morning, but he kept wondering what “new weirdness” I’d have for the class that day, so finally he got up and dragged himself across campus.

This “keep ’em surprised” approach manages to pull together a lot of theorists in my classroom. My assignments are very student-centered, problem-based, and creative. Active learning projects done in small groups can engender an inclusive social perspective: individuals must first formulate their own ideas and then synthesize them in discussions, blending their creative personal expressions (à la Peter Elbow and Donald Murray) as they reach a consensus. Kenneth Bruffee and Linda Flower have written about the ways that group work intrinsically values process over product while the negotiation of meaning between internal and external dialogs is inherent in discussions. Problem-solving tasks done in small groups make a lot of good things happen naturally. Later, when I discuss "negotiating meaning," they have a direct experience to hitch the term to.

Finally, combining the concept of dual coding with Richard Mayer’s work on e-learning, in a technology-rich classroom I can give engaging multimedia examples and follow up with immediate opportunities for students to experiment, explore, share, and create, to burn the ideas into their understanding through direct experience. I can deliver what McLuhan referred to as “cool” lessons, examples-in-action, closer to a natural experience of the concept being demonstrated, rather than the “hot” lecture-and-chapter approach that favors abstraction over participation.

I start on the first day with group work, to instill from the get-go a sense of student autonomy and student-centered community. In fact I spend the first week on nothing else. Based on the results of a “True Colors” personality test and on students’ majors, I form small groups and have them collaborate on essays about their group, its members, and their personalities, producing a little essay written by a different mix each day. By the end of that week they all know each other, and from then on they can collaborate freely on the projects that lie ahead. Freedom to interact with classmates (as long as it is on-task interaction) helps to bridge assignments that, going in, may look huge. They know they're among friends, and they don’t have to figure it out alone.

This hints at a kind of teaching that is all about process, effort, engagement, ownership, and imagination, what Paul Torrance called the Incubation model of teaching. I only ran across Torrance’s work recently, while trying to track down anybody who might be able to shed some light on the way I teach. Twenty years ago, Torrance formalized a pedagogy for the kind of teaching I’d been exploring instinctively for years.

Always I try to build into the learning a sense of something bigger, something more that is possible, a hint at where it goes from here, so to speak, how the skills we’ve learned can become much more than just what we’ve done in order to learn them. I make each generative project flow into the next so that each product is an extension of the last, applying the ideas and the skills in larger ways that become a sort of arrow pointing out there beyond finals.

This is very much like Torrance’s method for teaching creativity, by making ideas take root, and “incubate,” and take shape, but keep incubating new ideas. I see no reason why incubation can’t work with collaborative as well as with individual projects. Either way, students are free to bounce ideas around with their groupies. Keeping in mind Vincent Tinto’s model of social and academic integration, interaction is good, as long as it is focused on class work.

When I entered Fayetteville’s hallowed halls, we didn’t interact or integrate. We sat in rows, in silence, in isolation, incommunicado, and in fear of the draft if we flunked out. Viet Cong AK-47's pointed at our heads was the only thing keeping them from hitting the desk. I do not want my classes to be like that, so I have dragged all these theorists’ ideas into the real world and made them play nice together, to try to build a learning community in my class.

All this is fine and large, but my present problem is about keeping my seats filled, hanging onto those soft-focus students who seem to not engage, students who are apparently unfazed by my glittering pile of theories. I’m trying to prevent the ghosts in the classroom from drifting away.

If we look at the intended learning outcomes for first-year students in college writing programs, published by the Writing Program Administrators (WPA), we can pull out a list of key words and phrases they seem to value:

variety, analysis, development, understanding, critical thinking, inquiry, diversity, evaluation, interpretation, integration of ideas, flexibility, collaboration, processes...

There is an arrow here. It points toward learning as a process. Far from being a rigid list of performance requirements, these terms are qualitative and personal in nature, not a set of products or facts or numerical expectations. The kind of learning they promote grows out of experiences, and ultimately shows up as characteristics that will be apparent in a student’s writing. In short, the WPA's arrows are not aimed at the easy-A crowd. These outcomes require students to have a real connection with their work, in order to develop the deep skills that will stay with them out there beyond finals.

What surprises many of my students is exactly this. I’m not just dragging them from product to product. I plug them into a process where the skills learned in each assignment will be used in the next, building toward a final creative task that lets them choose how to use all those skills in the creation of multimedia projects, films, and research-based websites. They do not crank out a wad of paper to be handed in, but instead create websites, up and running on the internet for the whole world to see, where future students might do research for their own assignments. Their work isn’t disconnected or play-like. They are closer to being part of the big world.

But many students have never before been challenged to think about new material, have never been pushed past the warm walls of routine, out to the cold, dangerous edge of originality. They’ve only had to repeat the obvious and crank out another essay just like the last one, with grades based on little more than good grammar and overall correctness. One student thanked me at the end of the semester, for pushing him to really think instead of (as he colorfully put it) "just pulling another essay out of my ass."

American students sometimes tell me the work load is horrific, but foreign students invariably report that the pace and load of my class is about what they are used to, so I choose to err on the side of challenging. But for all of my students, this intense involvement in a topic is treading new ground. I tell them there are no right or wrong answers, but there can be effective or ineffective expressions of those answers. Years ago, a young man in my Developmental Reading class told me that he had got all the way through high school and had never once heard the word “analyze.” “In your class,” he said, “we hear that word ten times every day.” A British exchange student, at the end of a semester of my online Comp II class, wrote in a reflection essay “this wasn’t like any composition class I ever had. It was more like a class in how to think.”

Over the door to good writing are the words “tibi aliquid dicere:” have something to say. We open that door when we push students to think, to analyze and to involve themselves in material to the point they have something of their own to say about it. We’ve all waded through pages filled with big fancy words but not much real expression. Slinging facts and syllables around does not make good writing, any more than using absolutely correct grammar does. What’s needed is engagement. The difference is easy to recognize: writing that shows real engagement is alive and expressive. It conveys a feeling, a stance, a position on its topic that can sometimes rely more on pathos and ethos than pure logos. It has an ephemeral quality of personal caring about the issue in question.

I tutored Academic Success students as a GA. One non-traditional student brought me a story that had been marked-up by her Comp teacher. She was supposed to “clean it up.” In the story, she told about a personal experience, a car wreck in which her two-year-old daughter was killed. She described searching in the dark rain, her car upside down, and finally finding her daughter half-floating in a ditch. It was written in a sharp, choppy style, no doubt much the way it was experienced and remembered. If Hemingway had tried to write that story he would have killed himself sooner. I could not imagine a teacher telling her to “clean it up.” She had invested herself in that task. She needed encouragement and empathy and input and praise. She sure didn’t need red ink.

Engagement, involvement, personal caring, social and academic integration, process over product… this is another list of terms that, taken together, form an arrow. They all point in the same direction. We want our students to gain those characteristics that the WPA outcomes enumerate. We want them to stay in school and come out prepared to succeed. They need involvement, engagement, participation, Tinto’s “integration.” But the key to all of these lies in each student’s sense of self-efficacy. Everything else, all those great-sounding personality traits and characteristics, all of that comes only if this one attitude is present. Attitude is everything.

I think we can all agree that, in all likelihood, the perceived self-efficacy of a ghost is pretty hazy. They probably have a vague sense of not fitting in. So this gives me an idea, something I can try that might nail them to their seats for a semester. Every time I give a new assignment, I will make students look into a mirror and reflect on what they see... by filling out a “self-efficacy questionnaire.”

Self-efficacy is the action end of what Confucius called “true knowledge.” It is our reflexive sense of ability, our way of knowing what we are capable of. It has the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have low self-efficacy when it comes to skydiving, for example, the chances are strong that if you were to try it, you would fall flat. But if you take lessons (and survive) you can gain confidence and re-write your prophecy. The psychologist Albert Bandura has done extensive work on the connection between students’ perceived scholastic self-efficacy and their college success. He advises educators to make measures of self-efficacy a part of their teaching toolkit.

So let me put on my thinking cap and ask myself what layout, what format, what design, and what questions will tend to make a ghost come face-to-face with his or her (or its) own uncertainties? How do I create a form that will cause phantoms to recognize their own nebulous qualms?

And the answer is....

I decided to set questions in paired opposites, to double-up on the issue each pair is getting at and give the student two directions to come at it, two chances to realize how they feel. Of course all these questions come down to a single issue, but I suspect the more ways that issue is pointed out, the more chance it will make the students recognize and come to grips with their feelings, and that is the real target this form aims at. If left un-faced, feelings of inadequacy become the corks that plug students' potential.

It’s not that I am secretly recruiting for the Merchant Marine Academy. Call me strange, but my teaching style involves a lot of strange humor. I could make this form all serious and dry and self-important. I just don’t have it in me. I use humor a lot in class, in an ongoing effort to defuse tension and short-circuit any notions that they need to be worried about "doing it right." I think students learn best when they feel free to play around with concepts, experiment, explore. Experience has not proved me wrong yet, so in spite of the serious intentions that inspired me to write this questionnaire, I soon sank to wry wit.

But the function remains the same. The task of filling out this questionnaire will force students to stop and think about the assignment – something they would never do without force. Then they are expected to discuss the results of this little survey with the members of their group. This fine-print, non-threatening requirement creates an opportunity to think about, put into words, and share (rather than hide) their misgivings about the task at hand. Discussing these doubts with others will tend to undo isolation and allow the learning group to function also as a support group. I bet they can work out most uncertainties among themselves. Finally, if the entire group does not understand something, they can make a strong argument that it’s not their fault but mine, at which point they either (A) ask questions or (B) use the handy link and go off to sea.

I have to assume those ghosts of semesters past didn’t have enough confidence to ask for help. Their sense of self-efficacy warned them they would fall flat so they didn't jump in, didn't try, fell behind, until finally their self-prophecies were fulfilled and while the rest of the class charged ahead, they stopped showing up. If this is their story line, then this self-efficacy questionnaire scheme might help.

It has the glorious advantage of keeping things student-centered. Rather than bringing the teacher into center stage, this tends to empower the students as an inclusive team, a learning community unto themselves. It moves the low-confidence student closer into the class, where probably everybody will have some uncertainties, misgivings, and qualms to share. Instead of isolation, if this works students might discover affinities. If I start it early in the semester, it can add cohesiveness to the class, mediate the more challenging assignments and strengthen the small-group learning community atmosphere I want to generate in my classes. It might help the ghosts to get back in the game.

If it fails, I know who to call.