Prime the Pump (What Does It Take to Become a Great Student?)

This website recently went over 146,000 total page views.  That is about 145,000 more than I ever expected when I began.    I want to take a moment this morning to thank everyone who reads these postings and shares them with other teachers.  Obviously, there is no real marketing of this site.  People tend to learn about it from other teachers.   Word-of-mouth.   So, thanks for sharing!!!  I sincerely believe that most teachers want to think more deeply about the art of teaching.   I hope this website serves as an occasional prompt for such thoughts.

This will be my 211^th posting.   Several of these essays over the years have gathered more interest than others.   In terms of readership, here are the Top Ten in case you would like to check out some of the more popular postings.

--What Do We Add?  (July 22, 2010)

--What Is the Purpose of A Final Exam? (May 12, 2010)

--Introduction—Teaching Financial Accounting (January 7, 2010)

--Great Teaching—What I Learned from My Students (March 5, 2015)

--If I Challenge You to Become a Better Teacher, What Is Your First Response? (July 30, 2013)

--Fourteen Characteristics of Great Teaching (April 23, 2015)

--Conversation with Bob Jensen (October 8, 2013)

--What the Catcher Tells the Pitcher (August 21, 2011)

--A Good Suggestion (June 1, 2013)

--What Do You Really Want to Accomplish? (August 28, 2010)

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Several of my most recent posts have dealt with becoming a great teacher.   I have always been fascinated by that jump from “good” to “great.”   I believe there are ways to make that jump successfully and I am not sure enough of us have that as our goal (in teaching as well as in other aspects of life).   Why stop at good?   Why not try for great?

But, today, I want to tell you something that you already know:   If you have great students, then becoming a great teacher is a much more manageable challenge.   Bright, energetic, and curious students are just easier to teach.   

Recently, I have been thinking about how I might get more great students.   I have almost no control over the quality of the students who show up in my class.   I cannot put a minimum SAT score limitation or a required GPA as a prerequisite for my classes.   I am responsible for teaching everyone who enrolls.   How can I turn more of them into great students?

I decided I would try to get my students for the fall to start thinking well in advance about what it means to be a great student.   I bet that few, if any, of them have ever really considered what it takes to be a great student.   If I can get them to consider the question, will that alone improve the chances that more of them will be great students during my course?  

Luckily, my students register in April for next fall and I have access to their email addresses.   I decided to try an experiment.   I wanted to encourage them to focus over the summer on what it really means to be great students.   I figured it could not hurt and it might have a positive effect on some of them.  

Below is an email that I sent a few weeks back to all of the students (I think it was roughly 60 in total) who have signed up for my class in the fall.   I have already heard back from a couple who seemed to be intrigued by the experiment.   Will this help?   I don’t know—that is why I am trying it.   If you’ve read this blog previously, you probably know that one of my teaching mottoes is:   Experiment, Evaluate, Evolve.

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Email to students who are enrolled in my class for the fall semester:

Okay, I have your first assignment for the fall semester.   And, I dearly hope that you won’t go running away in horror and panic simply because I am giving you an assignment four months before the first class.   I actually think you will enjoy this assignment.   More importantly, it might make you a bit better as a student going into the fall semester.  That is a good goal.

In addition, I don’t want you to start trembling over the upcoming fall semester like some scared and frightened cat.   About two weeks ago, I gave the keynote speech at the Richmond College Senior Recognition Dinner.   One of my comments to the group was that Richmond would become a better educational institution when more of the students stopped being so timid.   At your age, a bold challenge should bring out the very best in you and not send you fleeing to drop-add.

That is one thing that you should demand of all your professors:   “Bring out the best in me!!!”

There are three steps to this assignment.

(1) – For many years, I have written a blog about teaching, primarily about how I teach here at the University of Richmond.   Over the years, the blog has had more than 140,000 page views.   A few days ago I wrote about the characteristics of great teaching.   I want you to read that blog entry because it will explain why I do some of the weird things that I do.   Reading should take you under five minutes.   I want you to read the whole thing but I want you to focus on 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 12.   Those are the ones that will impact you the most in my class in the fall.

Here is the URL for the blog entry:

http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/04/fourteen-characteristics-of-great.html

(2) – I want you to spend some time over the summer talking with someone (your parents, a trusted high school teacher, a friend, a co-worker, a stranger on a bus) about the topic:   What is the purpose of a college course?   At the University of Richmond, you have to take at least 35 of these courses.   What are they supposed to accomplish?  Surely, it is not so that you will memorize a bunch of trivia just so that you can pass a test.  Given the cost of the University of Richmond, that would be a darn expensive test.   Surely, it is not so that you can get a first job that you might well quit within the first year.   The goal has to be longer than the first few months after you walk across the stage at graduation. 

It is very hard to put a lot of work into a college course if you are not sure why anyone even takes a college course.   You are going to be stuck with me for a semester.   What am I supposed to do for you?   What do you want me to do for you?   In many cases, your parents are paying a lot of money for you to be in my class – why are they doing that?   What do they believe is the purpose of a college course?   You ought to ask them. 

(3) – Some time before the first class in the fall, I want you to write a short essay and email it to me.    Be sure to put your name on it and which class you are in.   In one paragraph (or more, if you wish), I want you to tell me what you believe are the characteristics of a great student.   You might well be a great student but, if you are not, you surely have known great students here at Richmond or in your high school classes. 

For you, what are the characteristics of a great student?

You’ve got four months.   I hope all three steps in this assignment intrigue you a bit.   I hope they tickle your curiosity. 

  

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!!! 

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I am not sure what I am going to get from them.   I am not sure how I will use those essays.   But we will do something and maybe, just maybe, it will push a few more of my students to become great.   That would be fabulous.   I guess I will just have to wait and see what happens.

HOW WOULD YOU HAVE ANSWERED THIS QUESTION?

I think college education would improve rather quickly if students would start asking more questions about the process. For most of them, it is their one and only shot at a college education. What they learn and then know for the rest of their lives is dependent on how well that process works. It is not something that they should take lightly. The efficiency of the process might be important to the teacher but it is essential to the lives of the students.

Personally, I believe transparency is a good idea. Plus, what a teacher does should be able to withstand a little scrutiny from the students that are involved. If I cannot explain why I am doing something, I probably need to rethink it.

However, we tend to train our young people to be very obedient – to do what their elders tell them to do without asking any questions. I have often speculated that I could walk into a college class and start giving nonsense assignments about Martians and the North Pole and most students would fall right in line and do exactly as they were told. Obedience is nice but I’d prefer for my thinking students to start asking questions.

Of course, some faculty members treat student inquiries as rude behavior much like W. C. Fields’ famous retort: “Go away kid, ya bother me.” That type of response will train any student to sit and be quiet.

I was pleased, therefore, to get a question recently from a college student about the educational process. Here is the question that was sent to me and below that I will give my response. However, before you read my response, stop reading and determine how you would have answered this question? I’ve got my answer but what is your answer?

From the student:

Dear Professor Hoyle, I am a 3rd year accounting major at University of Florida. I love reading your blog and even though I am not a teacher, your writings have tremendously helped me improve, both as a person, and as an accounting major.

I remember a story I read a long time ago and it gave me an idea which I want to share with you. “The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 lb. The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.”

At UF, most of our accounting courses have 3 exams; 2 midterms and 1 final, thus each exam covers around 4-5 chapters. I understand that our accounting professors want to improve our critical thinking abilities during the course of the semester but I feel that bombing the first exam puts many students at a disadvantage and they have to end up dropping the course (even though they still might be able to bring their grades up eventually).

Wouldn't it be better if there were more exams and each exam was incremental? Hypothetically, the first exam covers only 1 chapter, the second covers 2 chapters, third covers 3 chapters and so on. Do you think this approach would still be useful in developing the critical thinking ability of students? Or is it going to defeat the purpose of “uncertainty” and just train the students on how to get better at taking the exam?
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Okay, that is a very legitimate question. I think every teacher has had students who bombed the first test and then either dropped the class or just gave up. However, there are many reasons why a student might do poorly on a first test. They might have had one or two other tests on the same day. They might have been sick or a personal matter could have come up as a distraction. Most importantly, maybe they just needed that first test to gain an understanding of what the teacher wanted from them.

Given the importance of grades, how much emphasis should we put on the outcome of that first test?

Stop and think about it – this student clearly seems troubled by the approach that most of us use.
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Here’s my answer to this question. When I initially got the email, I responded with a slightly different version but I’ve thought about it since that time and have done some editing. In truth, though, I’m actually much more interested in your response.

To the student from Joe Hoyle:

Thanks for the very insightful question -- and I really love the story of Milo. It is amazing how well a story like that can make a person's point so clearly.

You are obviously right -- a student can be devastated by a first test grade and either drop the class or stay in the class but just give up. Neither reaction is what a teacher really wants.

From a practical side, the problem is that the student and teacher often have different views of a test. For a student, it is extremely stressful and the grade is tremendously important -- potentially impacting careers and jobs and the like. One bad test grade can literally change a person's life. That is not an overstatement.

For a teacher, a test is a pain in the neck. They can be difficult to write and they are time consuming. Grading can be excruciating and coming up with a precise grade is hard to do (unless a teacher just has infinite confidence in their testing and grading abilities). Plus, every day that you give a test takes a day away from the learning process.

And, after the teacher gives the grade, he or she may have to endure student after student arguing about the validity of the grade.

Any time you have an event that is essentially important to one side but painful to the other, you have the potential for a problem. My bet is that most teachers would prefer to give no tests at all. Even if your suggestion is better for the students, it puts more work on the teacher -- time the teacher probably doesn't have because of other class work, research, and committee assignments. (If you are a student who has bombed the first test in an important course, that justification probably does not seem very satisfying.)

Isn't this a strange world where the good of one side is often a problem to the other?

I have friends who give periodic quizzes for just the reasons you mention and that seems like a reasonable approach. However, again, how much class time do you want to allocate to testing? And, how much time does the teacher want to allocate to writing and grading and discussing tests?

I don’t know if you know what a test bank is but test banks have become popular because they allow the teacher to outsource the testing process to someone who knows little or nothing about your class. The test is just as important to the student but requires less thought and work by the teacher.

Here's what I do. I teach 50 minute classes three times per week. Although this schedule has become much less popular over the years, I think having more repetition makes for better learning. In addition, having more classes makes it is easier to set aside additional days for testing.

I give three tests during the semester and a comprehensive final exam. In my Intermediate Accounting II class, I also require three short papers. With this system, each of the hourly exams counts 20 percent of the student's final grade.

When we come to the first test and the students are beginning to panic (some seem ready to have a nervous breakdown), I try to reassure them – “Whether you do great or whether you do awful on this first test, it is only 20 percent of your grade. This is just a first step in showing you what I want you to learn. If you have a problem, you've got plenty of time to make adjustments and get the grade up.”

I want to give my students a chance to see how I test. The grade on that first test is still important -- it is 20 percent of the overall grade -- but I don't want to crush their spirit if they have a bad day. I want them to focus on a longer term goal. I want each student to be great by the last class. I have no other objective. I think having a first test that counts 20 percent is a good way to push my students toward that goal.

But it is important for them to realize that if they do not do well on that first test, then they must make adjustments. If a student makes a 59 or 67, that better be a wakeup call that changes are necessary.

Every semester I will have students who bomb the first test but still make an A in the course because they wake up and say “this old guy is not kidding, he really does expect me to think about this material and learn it.” And, they immediately become better students and save their grades.

Those are often my favorite students because they didn’t quit or give up. That made adjustments and learned what I wanted them to learn.   They had time to do that and they made good use of that opportunity.  I wish I had more students like that.

Starting to Reprogram Your Students - Part Two

A few weeks ago, I wrote about sending out an initial email to start reprogramming my students to be the type of students that I wanted them to be.  Below is the second step in this process.   It is my second email to the students for the fall semester.   I emailed this note to my students this morning.


To: Accounting 302 Students

From: JH

Okay, I’m sending out a bunch of material to you folks occasionally over the course of the summer. You already have the course outline and I assume you have looked over that pretty carefully by now.

Attached is something entirely different. Everyone knows this class is challenging and that making an A takes an excellent effort. I want to help you understand (before we get started) what you need to do in order to do well in this course. So, every semester, I ask the 11 – 25 percent of the students who make an A to write a paragraph or two to explain how they managed to do so well. I cut and paste all the student responses into a single document and it is attached to this email. I firmly believe that these words can serve as a road map to help you understand how to do well in my class. I hope you’ll read and think about what they have to say. Success is not a secret.

From my experience, everyone seems to enjoy a good sports story. In sports, winning and losing is always more apparent so it is easier to see what leads to some people winning while others lose. So, here’s a sports story for you (and, unfortunately, I don’t recall the details exactly but close enough for the point I want to make).

I was watching ESPN a few years back and the announcers were talking with a retired pro basketball coach about a championship team that he had coached a few years before that date. Apparently, his team got locked into a real battle in the final playoff series. The announcers asked the coach when he knew that his team was going to win the championship. His response went something like this:

“In one of the key games, we were behind by a point with just a few seconds to play. I called timeout to set up our last shot. It was a shot that would lead to either a victory or defeat in that game and possibly for the entire series. As soon as I called timeout, all five players on the court came running to the bench yelling ‘give me the ball and let me take the last shot; I can make it.’ A lot of times when you get to a truly critical moment, no one wants to make eye contact with you. Players start staring around or looking into the stands because they don’t want to take the risk of missing that final shot. When all five players on my team were begging me to take that last shot, I knew I had a team of winners and that we would win. And we did.”

Everyone knows that I ask scores of questions in my class. That is surely no secret. Rapid fire questions based on the homework assignments. When I get to the tough areas, it is amazing how often students begin to stare at their papers or look at the ceiling. They become deeply engrossed in checking their calculators – anything other than making direct eye contact with me.

Here’s my one piece of fatherly advice. On the attached sheet of student advice, the first student says “I wanted to be called on for every question.” That is exactly what I want from you. I want you to be so well prepared each and every day that you literally sit there and pray to get called on for every single question. I cannot promise you that this attitude will get you an A but I do promise you that it will make you the kind of student who succeeds.

Okay, then the obvious question is: How do you get to where you want to be called on for every question? The second student on the attached list says “If you prepare for the class like you would for a quiz/test, then you will be successful.” Virtually all students under prepare for class. That is a given; that is nearly 100 percent. The reason is that humans don’t have much self-discipline. They don’t do real work unless they see the urgency. They prepare just enough to get by. And, then they wonder why they are just able to get by. If you want to succeed, there has to be a genuine sense of urgency (not panic or dread but urgency) in your preparation. To do that, you need to prepare each day like you expected to have a tough quiz when you walked in to class. If you can be ready for a quiz each day even though there is no quiz, you will be the student that I want in my class no matter what your grade turns out to be. You will be ready to become the kind of student that you are capable of becoming.

I know this all sounds a bit frightening but it really is a great class that you will enjoy.

Hope you are enjoying your summer. Work hard but make sure to take time to see life outside of work.