On
Friday morning, April 8, 2016, I will be speaking at the Ohio region meeting of
the American Accounting Association on the topic of “Perspectives of
High-Quality Teaching.” If you are in
the Cleveland area, I hope you will show up.
I would love to meet you and chat about teaching. Here’s the URL.
**
I
am teaching three classes this semester—two Intermediate Accounting II classes
and one Financial Accounting class. I
have 78 students. I realize that some
of you teach hundreds but, for me, 78 is a fairly large number. That provides some challenges when trying to
get each student to do outstanding work.
I
always give three tests every semester and a final exam. I believe that gives the students a chance to show me what they have really learned. After the
first two tests, I usually have a good group (50-60 percent) who are doing well
and have an excellent chance of getting an A or a B (hopefully). They are strong and talented students who
put in the work consistently for every class.
But
I have another group (40-50 percent) who do not seem able to break
through. In some cases, the students are
simply not working. In other cases,
accounting does not come easily to them.
We all have different talents.
In truth, though, a vast majority of my students are working relatively
hard and seem more than capable of making an A or B. Well, then, what assistance can I offer this
second group of students to help them move from C’s and D’s to A’s and B’s?
In
many ways, isn’t that one of our most important jobs—helping students who are
struggling to figure out how to become outstanding? And, isn’t that where the victories are the
most satisfying? Getting a bright,
hard-working student to make an A feels good but I always realize that they
could have probably done it without me. I
don’t deserve too much credit. Getting a student who has a C or a D with only
3-4 weeks left in the semester to make an A or a B seems like teaching at its
best.
So,
I take it as a personal challenge to get my “under B” group to do better. First, you have to get them out of a “C”
mentality. After two low test grades,
it is easy to become discouraged and start to think of yourself as no better
than an average student. That’s
nonsense. That’s absolute baloney. Everyone can do better. I am convinced of that. I like to remind them that they still have
well over half of their grade to be determined. In my classes, the last regular test and the
final exam make up approximately 57 percent of their overall grade. Although the semester seems to be drawing to
a close, they are not even at half time yet as far as their grade is concerned. They still have plenty of time left to make
an A or B but they do need to make some adjustments and they need to make them
immediately. I need to impress on them
that they can do better but there is some urgency. Without urgency, change is tough.
As
probably everyone who reads this blog knows, I use the Socratic Method. My class is filled with questions that the
students work to answer. I am training them
(I hope) to learn how to “figure out” answers for themselves. My giving them answers and information is not
nearly as beneficial as them getting the information and figuring out the
answers for themselves.
When
a student comes by to ask for help here in this last month, I like to ask that
person to start writing one test problem after each class. I want to see one problem that they think I might
ask on a test based on the material we covered. I want them to start focusing on how the
material can be turned into questions. In
the book Make It Stick, the authors
assert that students often over-estimate what they have learned. I think that is probably true. I also think it is true that students focus
on answering the questions they have already seen and not on the questions they
are going to see.
What
I find fascinating is that, even after having two of my tests, students often
write poor questions. For the most
part, they simply take the questions that I ask in class and change a few words
or numbers. I think that is how many of
them have been trained in high school.
The teacher says something. The
student writes it down. The student
hands it back on the test. The student
gets an A. That does not work in my
class. I ask them to take material and
do something different with it. I
sometimes think that the reason they are not making an A or B is that they
don’t truly understand how they are going to be tested.
When
they send me their questions, I often point out “that sounds like what I asked
in class. I’m probably not going to ask
that same question again. What would
that prove? How could I twist the
question to make it different and see what you really understand?” Usually, on a second (or maybe third)
attempt, the questions start looking like one of my test questions. The student starts making a break through—not on the
answer side but on the question side.
At
that point, when they start to understand the nature of the questions they are
going to see, then coming up with legitimate answers becomes a more realistic
goal.
If
you are having students who do not seem to be able to “break through” into the
A and B range, you might try that.
After every class, ask them to write a question that you might ask on a
test. Then, if they do not do a very
good job of that, help them see what more you might be expecting from them. Get them to focus on the questions before
they worry too much about the answers.
I
sent my Financial Accounting students a practice problem this morning. Sure enough, I took what we had done in
class and added something a bit different.
I challenged them to “figure it out.”
And then I tried to make the point more clearly: “And, as you are getting ready for the third
test start asking yourself two questions:
(1) Can I do the standard problem?
(2) How can the problem be extended to make it more challenging? That's when education gets exciting.”
Maybe
focusing on the questions will help your C and D students move up to A’s and B’s
here in the last few weeks of the semester.
That’s a victory for everyone.
