Learnings from Team Teaching Across Two Contiguous Seminars_combined - DE Oracle

DE Oracle @ UMUC An Online Learning Magazine for UMUC Faculty Center for Support of Instruction Learnings from Team Teaching Across Two Contiguous Seminars Jane Ross Professor and Director Non UMUC Published: March-April 2002 Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies Click here for the entire article in PDF format Summary While team teaching a cohort section of University of Maryland University College's (UMUC) on-line MBA program, the authors identified limitations in their students writing, research, and critical-thinking abilities. Recognizing significant opportunities for student improvements, the writers addressed the situation in three ways: They explained to the students that performance expectations in UMUC's MBA program were high. In addition, instructors in each of the remaining seminars of the program would expect to observe continuous improvement. 1. They provided prompt, extensive, and comprehensive individual feedback in response to all student assignments. From early in the seminar, and whenever necessary, instructor feedback tended to include considerable constructive comment designed to prevent and extinguish unproductive behaviors. 2. They made a concentrated effort to use operant conditioning techniques of positive reinforcement whenever students exhibited even the smallest improvement towards the expected performance. 3. It should be noted that students were not altogether willing participants in this effort. Some of them failed to understand that there was a problem. Some were reluctant to change. Some denied the problem. And, for some, changing in the direction of the higher standards, which were being put into place, appeared to require too great an effort. The authors listened to student complaints and counseled the complainers but, nevertheless, persisted in their methods. Before long, however, improvements began to be evident. Although success was slow in coming, the professors felt rewarded when they saw overall improved performance about two-thirds of the way through the seminar. At this juncture, they believed they had succeeded in raising the "quality bar" for these students, and for the most part were getting the desired student performance. However, they doubted the students' performance would be permanently shaped so as to maintain these improved behaviors by the end of a single course. Therefore, at this point, the authors requested of the MBA program director that they be appointed to teach with this cohort section again in the next seminar. Both Doctors Ross and Blank were competent to teach the new subject matter and wanted to see their "project" through. The program director agreed with their request. Through the next seminar the authors continued their positive reinforcement efforts and repeatedly noted how the performance of this group of students progressed towards the higher expectations. However, this new seminar brought its own challenges. The purpose of this paper is to report what these authors did, how they did it, and the results of their Learnings from Team Teaching Across Two Contiguous Seminars - DE Oracle Contact Site Manager Created and Maintained by the Center for Support of Instruction © University of Maryland University College Powered by ArticleMS from ArticleTrader.com efforts in hopes of providing information for other on-line instructors who expect, but may not be getting, academic excellence from their students.1 1Although this case is about the students and their developmental progress, the authors believe that it is important to note an essential element that impacts the instructors when they team-teach in the on-line environment. Doctors Ross and Blank prepared to teach, and did teach, these two on-line seminars using only on-line messages and six telephone calls. They never met face-to-face. They learned to be a team, to do their own "team work," to evaluate what they were doing, and to effect continuous improvement during each seminar. About the Author(s) Jane Ross, Ph.D. and Murray Blank, Ed.D. Rating: Not yet rated Comments No comments posted. You must be logged in and be a member of the UMUC community in order to comment. If you are a member of the UMUC community and do not have an account, please register for a FREE one. If you have a guest account but are Faculty/Staff of UMUC please send an email to the DE Oracle Site Manager (mailto:degrad@umuc.edu?subject=Please Update my DE Oracle Guest Account) so that your guest account can be updated. Learnings from Team Teaching Across Two Contiguous Seminars - DE Oracle 1 Learnings from Team Teaching Across Two Contiguous Seminars Jane Ross, Ph.D. and Murray Blank, Ed.D. ã 2002, Dr. Jane Ross and Dr. Murray Blank Summary While team teaching a cohort section of University of Maryland University College’s (UMUC) on-line MBA program, the authors identified limitations in their students writing, research, and critical-thinking abilities. Recognizing significant opportunities for student improvements, the writers addressed the situation in three ways: 1. They explained to the students that performance expectations in UMUC's MBA program were high. In addition, instructors in each of the remaining seminars of the program would expect to observe continuous improvement. 2. They provided prompt, extensive, and comprehensive individual feedback in response to all student assignments. From early in the seminar, and whenever necessary, instructor feedback tended to include considerable constructive comment designed to prevent and extinguish unproductive behaviors, 3. They made a concentrated effort to use operant conditioning techniques of positive reinforcement whenever students exhibited even the smallest improvement towards the expected performance. It should be noted that students were not altogether willing participants in this effort. Some of them failed to understand that there was a problem. Some were reluctant to change. Some denied the problem. And, for some, changing in the direction of the higher standards, which were being put into place, appeared to require too great an effort. The 2 authors listened to student complaints and counseled the complainers but, nevertheless, persisted in their methods. Before long, however, improvements began to be evident Although success was slow in coming, the professors felt rewarded when they saw overall improved performance about two-thirds of the way through the seminar. At this juncture, they believed they had succeeded in raising the “quality bar” for these students, and for the most part were getting the desired student performance. However, they doubted the students’ performance would be permanently shaped so as to maintain these improved behaviors by the end of a single course. Therefore, at this point, the authors requested of the MBA program director that they be appointed to teach with this cohort section again in the next seminar. Both Doctors Ross and Blank were competent to teach the new subject matter and wanted to see their “project” through. The program director agreed with their request. Through the next seminar the authors continued their positive reinforcement efforts and repeatedly noted how the performance of this group of students progressed towards the higher expectations. However, this new seminar brought its own challenges. The purpose of this paper is to report what these authors did, how they did it, and the results of their efforts in hopes of providing information for other on-line instructors who expect, but may not be getting, academic excellence from their students.1 1 Although this case is about the students and their developmental progress, the authors believe that it is important to note an essential element that impacts the instructors when they team-teach in the on-line environment. Doctors Ross and Blank prepared to teach, and did teach, these two on-line seminars using only on-line messages and six telephone calls. They never met face-to-face. They learned to be a team, to do their own “team work,” to evaluate what they were doing, and to effect continuous improvement during each seminar. 3 Problem This six-credit seminar2 began with twenty-six students who had previously completed the first two seminars3 in UMUC’s MBA program. After the initial few student activities, the authors found that all the students shared similar problems, at least to some degree. In summary, they found that these students: · Did not answer the questions asked in the assignment; i.e., they were responding “around the question,” but not addressing the specific question. · Did only minimal research to address the questions of the assignments. The authors continually provided feedback to the students indicating, “your responses lack depth and breadth.” · Either did not know how, or were reluctant to, “push back” against ideas in the texts and/or to ideas and suggestions posed by the instructors. Instead, students tended to accept the text information without question and parrot this information back in their responses to the assignments. Appreciable levels of critical thinking were not apparent. · Did not demonstrate competence in their grammar, sentence construction, and use of references. In general, their citations and reference lists did not conform to APA guidelines.4 There was some evidence of student denial with respect to these problems which is borne out in the examples below: · A senior manager in a project engineering firm complained that the authors were holding him and his work to standards beyond that which any of his employers had ever expected. · An individual with a doctorate in a science field who was returning to academia for the management degree, which he hoped would assist him advance his career, believed that his prior academic experience was sufficient credential of his ability to write, research, and think critically. He argued that 2 “The Dynamics of Individuals and Groups at Work.” 3 A non-credit orientation seminar and the first for-credit seminar, “Management and Organizational Processes.” 4 The published standard for UMUC's MBA program. 4 that his professors should accept his work as satisfactory, regardless of its inadequacies in a managerial academic environment. Three military officers also participated in this seminar. Each of them also had a particular rationale/conviction about the acceptability of his skills and class performance: · One believed that his rank (in a manner similar to that of the doctorally prepared scientist discussed in the last paragraph) was sufficient. · Another repeatedly provided similar answers each week to the assigned question, “How would you apply to your job what you learned this week from the reading in the text?” even though the subject matter of the reading differed week-to-week. · Another individual appeared to feel that his schedule and deployment should excuse what Doctors Ross and Blank found to be sub-standard skills. Early in the term, the authors decided that immediate action was necessary to defuse this denial, so that the seminar could proceed, and proceed well. They suspected that, if untended, the conditions could destroy the class. In addition, they noted and discussed the fact that the five students posing the major challenges were males of relatively high professional status. That is not to say that the female students did not exhibit some of the same types of problems. In fact, they did. The authors agreed, however, that their problems were not as extensive. In addition, the women seemed to accept the critical feedback, and began demonstrating improvement almost immediately. As the professors confronted this challenge, the need for clear program outcomes and course learning objectives became increasingly apparent, as did the need to put corrective actions into place. They concluded that by drawing on their combined backgrounds and professional experience, they had significant expertise from which they could draw in confronting their dilemma. 5 The male of this instructing team, Dr. Blank, agreed to conduct separate on-line “counseling” sessions with each of the five male students who were demonstrating the most problematic behavior. Dr. Blank was in a good position for this task, since he could identify professionally with all five – along with previous military experience, he also had extensive experience in industry as a middle manager, both before and after attaining his own doctorate. Dr. Blank drafted separate email messages to each of these students, which, prior to being sent, were reviewed by Dr. Ross to ensure that the tone was right and the content clear. In these messages, he stressed the need for introspection and acceptance of the feedback. In addition, he emphasized that past performance was not sufficient for this program, nor could rank stand in the place of good work. The important differences between each of these messages were the wording and the manner in which they were presented. To illustrate, “it’s not so much what was said, but how it was said.” Senior managers and military officers, doctorally prepared scientists, and junior military officers expect messages to be communicated in the manner they have previously experienced. Therefore, academic or military titles were used in these messages.5 While these sessions alone did not eliminate the problems, they did identify related causes, open channels of more transparent communication, and contribute to eliminating disruptive online behaviors. The Cause The authors were concerned about the cause of these problems from the outset of the course they taught together. They felt that mature MBA students with prior academic and professional successes should be beyond these problems. Additionally, they believed the 6 academic socialization provided in the first for-credit seminar should have eliminated any “left-over” behaviors from the students’ undergraduate lives. After about four weeks into the course, and several written communications from the students, the writers decided not to invest more energy in causal analysis, but to confront the issues and find solutions.6 The Solution The professors felt that standards could not be lowered regardless of student denial of appropriate graduate level work. As a consequence, the instructors began to make their feedback more extensive, including examples of appropriate work and partial assignment rewrites to demonstrate correct assignment construction and writing form. As getting high grades was of particular concern to these students, the professors on specific and limited occasions offered students opportunity to rewrite and resubmit their assignment responses for potentially better marks. As the improvement process developed, some students “caught on” quickly and began to submit work of higher quality. This higher-level work could now be used in peer education as examples from which others could learn. On at least two occasions, the teachers posted especially well-written responses in the online classroom for the other students to examine. In some instances, students who were still struggling with their assignments were encouraged to consult with specified 5 Thereafter, both Doctors Ross and Blank addressed these students with their academic or military titles. 6 It seems appropriate to mention here, that Dr. Ross had earlier experience with another UMUC MBA section. She had not found similar problems with that cohort. The authors considered that the problems could be unique just to this cohort, or that the experience of an additional seminar may have matured the previous section. Upon reflection, the authors now believe that every cohort has a different personality and different characteristics. They adopted the term “cohort culture” as a convenient way of referring to these variations. This cohort had a peculiar set of problems, and a reluctance to address them. 7 peers who had overcome a particular issue. Those students most in denial about the quality of their work tended to refuse these various kinds of assistance. The authors found that providing such comprehensive feedback was extremely time consuming and labor intensive. Early on in their seminar, they divided between themselves the tasks of marking student responses and providing feedback. But, to assure that they were being consistent, they both read every student’s assignment. Frequently, and especially for problematic papers, one of the instructors would request that the other instructor review his or her feedback to an assignment for concurrence, or for the opening up of other issues. When students requested further feedback on an assignment, the instructors ensured that additional feedback was provided on a collaborative basis. To reduce the instructor workload, the professors developed a fairly simple, but unique, template (Figure 1). They used this template as the basis for their weekly feedback. Although this template is simple, the authors found it helped them to identify for students the elements of graduate level work. In turn, the template showed students how they could learn more from their own interactions with individual assignments, the course and the program. Other instructors could modify it to fit their particular situations.7 7 Another UMUC MBA faculty person, Dr. Rosemary Hartigan, simultaneously developed a similar template, which the authors believe could be quite useful. Two versions – Dr. Hartigan’s original and one modified by Dr. Blank – are attached. 8 Week: Six -Virtual Teams Grade: 8.5 out of 10 1. Integrate learning from the current week with learnings from previous weeks. You could have been more explicit in this regard. I can "intuit" you are doing this, but you need to learn/show how to do this on “paper”. 4. Incorporate information learned from assigned literature Well done. There might have been an opportunity to retrieve some thoughts from Lewin to strengthen the breadth of your paper. 5. Incorporate information learned from literature beyond that which was assigned. Yes, you did include several references beyond the text; however, I would caution you on citing People and Popular Psychology as being terribly learned sources. I’d suggest that you not forget some of the material you had in 601. 6. Built on your own opinions and did not automatically accept the authors’ points-of-view. Push back. You certainly indicated how you would handle situations based on authors’ ideas – Work harder at “pushing back”. Try rereading your work for this week and assess for this point. Think about whether you pretty much went along with what the authors had to say, or if you went beyond to provide new and better insights. Your style could use some lightening up – forget about the undergrad term papers and cut loose with your own “creativity” – go further next time in developing what you expressed in your email message. 7. Writing skills under control: Editing, Spelling, Grammar, Sentence Structure, etc. Yes-and-no. Nice improvement in the spelling and editing. I suggest that you work on your use of the passive voice. In business writing, if you use the active voice, your work will be dramatically more forceful. General comments: Nice work in general. Your “voice” is coming through better – but it still sounds like some old “driving” teachers may be in the back of your car telling you how to “drive your car”. Forget about those voices – Now you might want to try “spicing” up your work with a little more immediacy. Think about ways you can make your accounts more lively and interesting. Why not try adding some real-life reaction and talk? Thanks again for nice work. Keep on raising your own quality bar. Figure 1 – Sample of a Completed Feedback Template8 In addition to their use of an evaluation template and feedback messages, the instructors added new feedback each week to their previous messages to maintain a continuous “feedback stream.” In this way, they felt that both the students and the instructors had an easy-to-follow record of what had preceded and the progress being made.9 As the course progressed, the writers found that by using the methods they had developed within the course situation, they were making progress with these students. However, the end of the seminar was fast approaching, and this required certain methodological and 8 The bolded information is the permanent template, while the non-bolded is typical feedback. 9 They did not continue this practice in their second seminar with this same cohort group. First, it was somewhat unwieldy to accomplish in the on-line environment they were operating. In addition, it increased the uploading time for the instructors and the downloading time for the students. 9 response-time adaptations. Although they continued their feedback efforts, they had to dilute their overall effort somewhat to deal two situations: one, a student who was not performing satisfactorily10 and required more of their time, and two, a substantial end-of-course research assignment from each student which had to be read and graded. In order to carry their improvement efforts further, the authors decided that they wanted to continue with this cohort of students into the next seminar. Their program director concurred, and they were assigned to remain with this group for the next seminar11. Other Problems During the second seminar, the authors experienced two new problems with these students. The more major problem involved an undercurrent of student complaint about the amount of work required in this course versus what they had experienced in previous seminars. The second problem, involving team composition, was of the instructors’ own making, and one that did not take on significance in the ways anticipated.12 10 Students must maintain their grades at least a