A pass-fail option — for profs?

Alison Byerly reports on a very intriguing way to encourage pedagogical innovation that has been adopted at Middlebury: an option for faculty to select courses to be evaluated by students on something akin to a 'pass/fail' option:

The new course evaluation policy is simple: all faculty members who have completed two full years of teaching will have the option of designating one course every two years as "course response form-optional." In such courses, the standard evaluations will be distributed to students, and collected, but returned to the instructor only (who may then stipulate whether or not they should be included in their central administrative files). Like the student who chooses to take a particular course pass/fail in order to mitigate his or her fear of exploring unknown territory, an instructor who is trying something new now has the option of teaching an "ungraded" course.

Dead blogging the AAPT, part I

I returned a few days ago from the biennial conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT). If you've never attended one of their conferences, I recommend it. The energy and commitment to education you encounter among the AAPT members is remarkable — I have little doubt that our profession would benefit if the typical philosopher had even a fraction of the same energy and commitment to effective teaching.

Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for two of the three main days of the conference. Furthermore, there were usually at least five concurrent sessions in any particular time block, so I obviously saw only a small sample of all the work on teaching that was presented at the conference. 

Nonetheless, I thought I'd post some quick overviews and comments about the sessions I attended, just to provoke thought and encourage you to attend the conference in future years.

Today, I'll describe what I saw on day 1, and I'll post next week about day 2.

Teaching Philosophy, 35.3

The newest issue of Teaching Philosophy is now available. Abstracts and contents follow below.

The point(s) of getting students to talk

Most philosophy instructors think that in-class (or online) discussion is vital to philosophy education. Philosophy is a discursive inquiry, so how could students possibly become skilled at it without discussing philosophical positions and arguments?

At the same time, though, discussion is a frustrating component of teaching, as our previous discussions of discussion suggest. For one, it can be hard just to get discussion going. Second, it's a genuine challenge to figure out how to make discussion a worthwhile learning experience. Presumably discussion is not an end in itself: We're trying to teach students something via discussion. But what is it, and how do we teach it?

A reminder: ISW for Kindle

For the tech-savvy: You can subscribe to In Socrates' Wake for your Kindle here. As best I can tell, a couple of dozen of you have done so -- I'd be interested to know you like it!

No sympathy for those devils?

Like all of us, science professor Steven Dutch can get cranky when he hears the lines students use for which he has no sympathy. It's a roster of the fairly usual suspects: this course covered too much material, "but I studied for hours," I should get a B for coming to class, etc.

But two of the student lines he listed —Do I need to know this? and This course wasn't relevant —don't strike me as just 'making excuses'. I'm even a bit sympathetic to them!

Should we teach writing?

We’ve just finished a round of assessment of our Introduction to Philosophy course that involved going through a large random sample of papers from 10 or so sections mostly taught by our great adjuncts. We examined each paper using rubrics for writing skills, critical thinking skills, and information literacy. Those are the three skill sets that the General Education requirement expects our course to advance. As expected, we found that though students were apt at summarizing the reading, understanding and focusing on the philosophical issue at stake, they needed a lot of help writing a critical paper that defends a thesis. It also became clear to us that instructors often didn’t explicitly require that students take a position and defend it in a paper.