What's Your Worst Idea?

STUDENT: I’m having a really hard time coming up with an idea for this project.
ME: Okay, give me one of the ideas you had.
STUDENT: Well, uh… None of them are any good.
ME: No biggie. Give me the worst idea you had.
STUDENT: (laughs) To tell you the truth, I didn’t have any ideas.
ME: None?
STUDENT:None.

I love assignments that have very few directions. My students last year called them “choose your own adventure papers”. I want my students to learn how to creatively solve interesting problems independently. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, check out this paper that I have my social change students do that requires them to take action to ameliorate the social problem that they’ve been researching all semester.

In my anecdotal experience, students presume that if they don’t have a “good idea” immediately after reading the directions, they feel they never will. Almost all the students who approach me for help have not brainstormed on paper, or talked out their ideas with a classmate, or any other form of creative problem solving. It seems that it never even occurs to them to do so.

What’s Your Worst Idea?

We have to teach our students to use their creative problem solving skills and remind them to employ the strategies they’ve been taught previously (e.g. brainstorming, mind mapping, etc.). I ask my students, “what’s your worst idea” to give them the space to have ideas without any expectations of quality. Then I ask them to brainstorm the idea with me, then and there. I bite my tongue and let them talk through their ideas. If their really stuck, I might ask them a question a la the Socratic method. But no matter what, I absolutely will not give them the answer. If no “good ideas” come out during our 5 minutes of brainstorming, I ask them to, on their own, mind map or otherwise write down their ideas and then bring them to our next class.

Without fail, they figure it out. They come bouncing into class to “tell me their good idea” and I can say, “see I knew you had it in you!” When we force our students to work through their creative process independently, we make a space for them to practice arguably the most valuable skill we could ever teach them; how to independently & creatively solve interesting problem.

Southern Sociological Society Meet Up in ATL! This Friday 3pm!

Attention all my Southern friends. A bunch of us from SociologySource.org, SociologySounds.com, SociologyInFocus.com, and Soc’ing Out Loud are going to get together this Friday from 3pm–5 pm at Meehan’s Public House.

It’s just a bunch of friendly sociologists hanging out. Nothing major, everyone’s welcome!

When: 3pm–5pm Friday 4/26
Where: Meehan’s Public House 200 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30303
Who: YOU! Open to all Sociologists, Criminologist, any other type of social scientist or teacher, and their friends.
How Will You Find Me?: I’ll be wearing a red t-shirt that has the Marx Is My Homeboy logo on it (see below).
Questions?: Tweet me @SociologySource or Email me at Nathan@SociologySource.org

Update on Monday, April 29, 2013 at 8:41PM by Nathan

We had a great MeetUp in ATL this last Friday. A lot of people came down to Meehan's and it was great to meet all of you. Wish you could have all been there to join us. Below are photos of SocSource editor April Schueths & Katie Slauson-Blevins from Old Dominion, then there's Brad from Soc'ing Out loud, and finally Jason Eastman (editor of SociologySounds) along with yours truly. Wish we took more pictures of everyone, sorry! We are having another meetup at ASA this year, hope to see you there! April & Katie

 April & Katie

Brad from Soc'ing Out Loud Jason & Nathan

There Is No Way I Can Fail Your Class!

In fact, there is.

It’s begging season. Around this time of year students across the country get desperate. I teach between 300–500 students every semester. So any crazy life situation that only happens to 1 in 500 students, happens in my class… every semester. Even students with mundane explanations for their poor performance can ruin your day after they tell you all of the dire things that will happen to them once you submit their D or F. It’s awful. I became a teacher to help students achieve their dreams, not to see them fall away from them. It’s excruciating for me.

If you’ve taught more than one semester, you’ve had to deal with situations like this. Given how much I hate the social awkwardness of student begging, I’ve developed a 2 phase approach.

Phase 1: Inform Them Early

Two weeks before the end of the semester I run the grades for the class in Excel.[1] Then I sort the grades and get the names/emails of everyone who has a 74% or below. All of these students get an email that informs them that they are “at risk” of earning a D or below and what they can do right now to improve their grade. See below and download the text of the email here.

Phase 2: Preempt the Begging

On the day that final grades are posted I send a class wide email thanking the students for a great semester and letting them no that there is no point to even asking for additional assignments or freebie points (or what I call “Just ’Cause Points”). I really tried to frame the email as a positive and explain that my unwillingness to change anyone’s grade stems from my desire to treat everyone in the class fairly. See below and download the text of the email here.

My plan isn’t fool proof and I still get a fair amount of emails from students that start with, “I know that you said you wouldn’t give out any extra makeup points, but I just can’t fail your course!” But, I get a lot less with my proactive approach.

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1. To make this grade book double useful, create 4 columns using Excel to calculate how many points it would take each student to earn an A, B, C, and D. That way if a student asks, "Is it possible for me to get a(n) _ grade you can quickly look and tell them.  ↩

4 Ways Your Classroom is an Airport

What if we designed our courses like they design airports? Everyone gets where they need to go even if they don’t speak the language.

— Nathan Palmer (@sociologysource) April 11, 2013

I posed this question on Twitter last week and it’s been reverberating around my head ever since.

If you think about it, your class has a lot in common with an airport:

1. Airports want to help travelers reach their goals (i.e. get to their final destination or to Cinnabon). Teachers want to help their students reach their educational goals (i.e. skill mastery, knowledge acquisition, etc.)
2. Just like the airport we have no control over who comes through our classes. We are expected to serve all comers.
3. Travelers and students both come to us with varying levels of skills, competencies, knowledge.
4. Some travelers are thrilled to be in the airport (i.e. “I’ve made it!”) while others see the airport as nothing more than a means to an end. This also holds for our classes (Substitute travelers for students and class for airport).

My point here is simple: How we design our courses is where most of the biggest opportunities for improving student learning reside.

It’s easy to discount this as a quant idea, but a great deal of SoTL research is comprised of ways that teachers can change the design of their courses to achieve pedagogical aims. Furthermore, what other lever is there to pull here, other than course design?

The Sociological Imagination is a Skill

The sociological imagination is the holy grail of soc 101 (and all undergraduate sociology). When asked, “what do your students gain from your soc 101 course?” the answer is almost always a sociological imagination. But I challenge you to stop reading this and answer the following questions:

1. What are the component skills that a person with a sociological imagination employs?

2. How do these component skills have to be integrated to use the sociological imagination?

3. When do you know it's appropriate to apply the sociological imagination?

I found answering these questions harder than I anticipated, how ’bout you? I think many sociologists treat the sociological imagination like Justice Potter Stewart treated obscenity, “you just know it when you see it”. Thinking back the way I was taught the sociological imagination was through repetition. Almost every class I took featured a prof explaining how situation after situation could be understood from a sociological perspective. As an undergrad I tacitly picked it up through watching my profs use theirs.

Most 101 textbooks aren’t much better; almost all of them quote Mills and then provide 4–5 sentences of analysis from the author. Undergraduates can’t learn the sociological imagination by reading Mill’s quotes! The sociological imagination is a skill. No one picks up a skill simply by reading the quotes from a practitioner.

In How Learning Works Ambrose et al. (2010) discuss the science on skill/knowledge acquisition and mastery.

“To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned” (Ambrose et al. 2010: 95).

Reading this set my hair on fire and I knew I had to break down the sociological imagination. I searched Teaching Sociology and found a number of studies that discussed pedagogical interventions and assignments that would encourage students to use their sociological imagination, but I couldn’t find anything that generalized the sociological imagination.[1] So I set off to do it myself. So far, I’ve got the component skills mapped out.

The Component Skills of the Sociological Imagination

I broke up the sociological imagination into 3 main component skills.

1. The ability to identify social contexts
2. The ability to identify historical contexts
3. The ability to understand the interplay between agency and structure

To help my students see each of these I put together a mind map.

Click on Mind Map For Larger Image

This is far from perfect. First, the skills aren’t mutually exclusive; social contexts overlaps with many social structures is just one example. Second, there is a Russian doll issue in that each of these component skills are themselves comprised of component skills. Third, it’s hard to model all of the interplay between every piece/node on the mind map. Lastly, I sense I’ve left off a few component skills and I know I’m missing pieces. For instance, I’ve left off some forms of social hierarchy.

Two Takeaways

1. We need more SoTL research on the Sociological Imagination as a skill and more resources for helping our students master it.
2. If we struggle to put into words the skill that we call the sociological imagination, we should have no trouble finding empathy for our students as they work toward mastering it.

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1. Please don’t read this as a knock on Teaching Sociology. I simply could not have more respect for a journal. Not to mention, I may have missed it; I gave up searching after only 30 minutes.  ↩