Joel Schwartz

This is the fifth (and final?) post in a continuing series of posts on reflections from the Spring 2011 semester of teaching.

Given that the goal of the class was to get the students to understand the material, rather than being able to regurgitate it, I wanted to do something for the final that would give the students an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding gained beyond regurgitation.  I also wanted to give the students an opportunity to do philosophy in ways beyond writing a paper.  These desires led me to design this final project assignment.

The students were expected to do and present a final project that demonstrated philosophical understanding, but could be done in ways that are atypical for a philosophy class.  I gave them some general ideas, but I wanted the students to be the source of how they wanted to do this project.  I made it clear that a paper was just as acceptable as any other project, but that they could engage these philosophical ideas in creative and artistic ways as well.

In order to give each student the leeway they needed, I met with each student over coffee or lunch in groups of 2 or 3 students.  (Given that I had less than 25 students between the two sections, this was feasible.  If I had more students and/or more sections, the groups would have to be larger in order for this to be at all feasible.)  These meetings took place at least two and a half weeks before they would be presented in class.  I had each student present what they were thinking for their project and then have their classmates give them feedback and direction, before I said too much.  After seeing where they were going, I tried to verbalize to them what I understood their project to be, and then mapped out the things I would be looking for in grading the assignment.  There had to be significant philosophical content and the vast majority of their grade would be based on that content and how well they expressed that.

I was amazed at the ideas that the students had for their final projects.  A couple students wanted to write short stories, one wanted to write a fairy tale, a few wanted to do art projects, a couple wanted to do videos of some sort, and there were a handful that wanted to do papers.  However, even the students who were doing papers often wanted to do something integrating philosophy with something in their majors.

The students then had at least two weeks to prepare something for a presentation in class the final week of classes, with the final presentation being due at the time of the final a week later.  The in-class presentation was designed to give the students an opportunity to get feedback from me and their classmates on their project to help them better prepare for the final submission at the end of the following week.  Given the amount of time to present., some students could not play their entire videos or read their entire short story, so for those students, it was really a presentation for which they had to make some editorial decisions.  Some students had solid drafts of their projects that they were able to present, while others were conceptually still near where they were at when I met with them a couple weeks earlier.  Much like with the portfolio projects, the more one had done at this point, the more feedback they received, and the better the final submission ended up being.

I received some amazing projects from the students that demonstrated to me they were thinking about these things on a deep level.  As we spent the last month of the class talking about philosophy of mind, many projects related to issues in that area of philosophy.  I have shared (with permission) a couple of the projects with colleagues who were incredibly impressed with the work done.

On the whole, the final project assignment was an excellent way to tie the class together for both me and the students.  When coupled with the portfolio project, the students were able to see all the material they had learned, but also find that they had learned how to integrate the material with life at a deeper level.  The feedback I received from students on the final project was similar to the feedback I received for the class.  The students felt like it was a good amount of work, but the work was worthwhile as they felt they had learned a lot from the process.  This assignment, along with others in the class, made the students take responsibility for their own learning, but I was also willing and available to help them clear the high bar I set for them.  This required a high time investment on my part.  Without a dissertation to work on, it is possible that I could make that investment with more students, but I would need to figure out ways to be more efficient in order to do these assignments if I had a significantly  larger number of students.

If you have any questions about any of these assignments, leave a comment or send me an e-mail (joel_schwartz [at] baylor [dot] edu) and I’d be happy to share my handouts with you and/or discuss some of the successes and failures of these assignments in more detail.

This is the fourth post  in a continuing series of my reflections about the Spring 2011 semester of teaching.

The idea for doing a portfolio project is something I shamelessly stole from Jim Stump (who I believe shamelessly stole it from someone else).  The basic idea was to have the students submit essays (up to one a week), I give them a bunch of comments (with no grade) and return the essays to the students.  Then, at a point later in the semester, the students will resubmit a certain number of essays to be graded, having already been given comments on those essays.

When I set up the course schedule, we had six readings, and so it made sense to require six essays in the portfolio in order to be eligible an A on the project (the honors section had to do seven), and each author had to be written on at least once.  I allowed for a couple comparison essays that would count toward the different authors.  For each essay less than the required number for an A, the eligibility would drop a letter grade.  They had twelve opportunities to submit essays for comments (not counting the first week).  They were to write 3-5 page essays (final draft length; the initial draft could be shorter) where they make an argument that goes beyond (or develops or disagrees or synthesizes in an interesting way) with what we talked about in class.  The initial draft could be rough, and I would use comments to help guide them, giving them questions to think about that would help them write a better essay.

I gave them a handout with some guidelines for the essays, wrote a sample essay, and set them loose, asking them to submit their essays for the week to me by midnight on Sunday night for that week.

As students could only submit one essay a week, they had to use some foresight in order to be eligible for an A on the assignment.  I would remind them at least weekly how many more opportunities they had to turn in essays in hopes that the final five or six weeks would not include lots of grading for me.  However, that was not the case.  Each of the final five weeks I had at least 75-80% of the students submitting essays, meaning I spent a lot of time commenting on essays each of those weeks.  Since about the second or third of those five of weeks, I’ve been debating about how to keep that from happening, encouraging a relatively even distribution over the twelve weeks without becoming overly complicated, yet still not penalizing a student for having a couple crazy weeks in a row.  I would appreciate any insight that anyone has on this.

In my naive idealism, I had hoped that at least some students would write seven or eight essays and choose their six best for the portfolio.  This did not happen.  I realize that was my overachieving-undergraduate-self speaking in that idealism. In something that should not have been a matter of idealism, I realized how many students do not know how to write a thesis statement, or at least do not know how to use them in an essay.

One thing that I’m wrestling with is how to give comments to students without them looking at the comments and trying to “fix” the problems by changing a word or two, or a sentence, when the comment offers a devastating critique.  A handful of students would make the necessary changes, but other students didn’t seem to understand that the comment should make them rethink their essay.  I’ve read some professors who primarily give general comments for the class, putting the bulk of the responsibility on the students.  However, I recognize that students are usually unprepared when they enter an intro to philosophy class to be able to responsibly make those corrections.  I would like to think that general comments would encourage students to come to office hours to ask questions, forcing interaction on the concerns if they want to do well.  It seems like that move would work better if they were resubmitting them for a grade before the end, so they would have an opportunity to realize they need to come talk to me.  Again, any insights that anyone has on this would be appreciated.

On the whole I received good feedback on the project and would unquestioningly do it again.  Many students appreciated that they were required to turn them in beforehand and found the comments largely helpful.  Some students admitted that without the required initial submission, they likely would have waited to start writing the essays a day or two before they were due.  Some students wrote excellent essays that were of incredibly high quality that were a delight to read.  While it did require a good amount of work on my side of things, the results on the whole accomplished the goal of getting the students to think carefully about each of the readings and engage the readings in ways that went beyond what we talked about in class.

While this semester was not the first time I’ve taught an intro level philosophy class, it was the first time I taught an intro level class using only primary texts.  For the class, I ambitiously chose six primary texts.  While this number was high, given the goal of the class, I don’t think any of them could have been excluded.

The title of the class was “Faith, Truth and Philosophy: Questions for Inquiring Minds.”  The goal of the class was to spend time diving into texts with the students, looking at the way that different thinkers asked questions in pursuing truth, with the idea being that students would develop their own way of asking questions in pursuing truth. We started with a contemporary book that discussed the value of asking questions, followed by four historical texts, and concluding with a contemporary introduction of a “big question” in philosophy.

The first book was The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark.  I’ve been a fan of Dark’s work, and when I read this book a couple years ago, it stood out to me as an excellent book for an intro class at a Christian school like Baylor.  The main idea of the book is that as Christians, we’re called to seek truth, not merely accept what we’re told.  A nearly-essential part of seeking truth is the willingness to ask questions, especially when you don’t understand or something seems to be missing.  Dark’s goal is to motivate us to ask the questions for ourselves, although he has a tendency to give his answers to the questions without clearly acknowledging that he’s giving those answers.  However, I’d like to think that Dark would encourage his readers to ask questions about the answers he’s giving, and the students were all too happy to do so.  In retrospect, I may have had them read one or two fewer chapters than I did, but this book definitely got discussions going and encouraged lots of questions, so I don’t regret spending as much time on it as we did.

We then moved onto the Apology and Phaedo by Plato, First Meditations on Philosophy by Descartes, Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche, and Philosophical Fragments by Kierkegaard.  Each of these readings provoked discussion by the students, sometimes trying to understand  what was being said, but often pushing against the ideas.  In these works, I tried to make sure we were giving charitable readings to each thinker, trying to make the most sense of their ideas before criticizing what they said.  We focused on the idea of the human person that was at work in each of these thinkers.  Each thinker had a different idea of what it meant to be human, and using the previous thinkers as a contrast with the thinker being discussed helped the students understand what was going on in each work.  By using that question as the framing question in approaching the reading required us to overlook other important parts of the works, but the class only allows for so much depth, especially in an intro class.  I think the students got an introduction to the material, but more importantly, to philosophical thought, giving them tools to approach other texts in the future.

The final reading of the semester was Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction by George Graham.  This book gave the students a basic understanding of some of the big questions related to what we fundamentally are.  Again, the students demonstrated a willingness to ask questions, often trying to understand what Graham was saying, but also pushing back against some his ideas with good questions concerning ethics and epistemology, even if they may not have initially called the epistemic questions by that name.

While these books contained a lot of material to get through in a single semester introduction class, each book played an important role in shaping the class and raising questions for us to consider and wrestle with.  For the most part, students demonstrated a willingness to question some of their longstanding ideas.  The goal was not to convert them to a particular ideology, but to push them to understand why they hold the beliefs they do, especially when they held beliefs, simply because it was what someone had told them was right.

While these books played an important role in the goal of the class, the assignments may have played an equally (if not more) important role in accomplishing the goal.  The next three posts in this series will deal with those assignments.

This spring I tried a few things that I had never done before in the classroom.  In addition to some of my normal methods (Friday Fun Fact, Allowing the class to decide the homework component of the grade, etc), I arranged the intro class in a way I have never done before, including adding three different types of assignments that were new to me.  These three assignments were:

• Facebook Group/Blog posts as the reading check/comprehension portion of the grade
• A portfolio assignment of essays submitted previously in the semester as the major component of the grade
• A student-chosen project demonstrating philosophical understanding and learning as the final for the class

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be posting a blog on the general format of the class, as well as each of the different new assignments I tried this semester.  On the whole, I think it was a real success, and I know some of the students read this blog, and I am sure they’ll comment if they think otherwise.  As I discuss these new assignments, please join the discussion with any insights you might be able to add!