Rubric for Team Guided Discussions

Here are some component criteria for the evaluation and then one overall. Do note that Professor Arvan plans to be a listener during these discussions and will try to chime in only if asked or to announce time for a break. Also note that the entire class shares responsibility for these sessions. The team leading the discussion can't and shouldn't try to do it all on their own.

1. Readings. Each of these discussions are related to some readings the class is covering. Does the discussion tie to readings in an obvious way? (25%)

2. Flow. We want good flow and good class participation. Did we achive that? Did the class feel that way (as reflected by the survey responses). (25%)

3. Leading/empowerment. This is a question of balance and is something we struggled with early. How much should the lead group frame? How much should it be the rest of the class that is chiming in? When should the discussion linger because that is profitable? When should it move on to the next point? (25%)

4. Overall. Students have been writing paragraph responses in the survey to indicate this about previous sessions. It would be useful to do likewise here. (25%)

Rubric for evaluation of reflection portfolios

Please note that I like to think of written work holistically rather than breaking it up into varying categories and analyzing the categories. I believe that the latter approach encourages mediocrity. I don't want to place bounds on your creativity that way. Nonetheless, I understand you want some sense of how you will be evaluated, so here are some categories and elaboration of what I mean for each.

Purely Writing (50%)

At root the issue is whether I enjoyed reading the piece. Of course, some of that may be me. My younger son had a few of his buddies sleep over Friday night. They stayed up till God knows when playing video games, so they hung around till late Saturday afternoon rather than going home politely in the early morning. You can't control that sort of thing. I'm mentioning it to note here that no matter how brilliantly written the piece, there can be an idiosyncratic element to the reader reaction.

With that, here are some more specific criteria that matter for reader enjoyment.

* There is a story that flows. If there are jumps in the narrative, they are demarcated in an obvious way. Otherwise sentences connect to each other.

* There is a sense of depth, of exploration, and of something gained from having made the journey. This doesn't mean you have to make some ultimate conclusion. It might be that you see two issues that conflict with one another and you don't see how to resolve the conflict. That can be the conclusion. The story doesn't need to be a neat package with a pretty bow. It does need to create a feeling of making progress in understanding the issues at hand.

* You appear in the story somehow. How did you come to the ideas in the piece? Is there some connection between these ideas and your own life? In other words, please do make it personal. Do note that personal doesn't mean intimate. Unless you feel you have a compelling reason to write about it otherwise, don't write about the connection between your subject and your boyfriend or girlfriend. Childhood experiences, however, are in bounds because they are apt to shape your thinking.

* There is a sense of craft in the telling. The order that ideas are presented matters and it appears that there has been some thought in coming up with that. (The opposite extreme of this, which you sometimes see in a student's response to an essay question on an exam, I'd call an "idiot dump," where the students does a stream of consciousness generation of every thought that might be relevant to the question at hand. Idiot dumps are painful to read.) The writing has a feeling that each sentence belongs and the word choice has been well considered. This can take years to cultivate. Here I'm noting it matters, not expecting you to be a professional writer just yet.

* There are no distractors. A claim of fact that is not supported by a reference is a distractor. An inappropriate word choice can be a distractor. (I'm sympathetic on this one especially with homophones, since I tend to read by how it sounds in my head and anticipate the ideas that will be coming up next rather than carefully worrying about the text on the screen.) Obvious misspelling can be a distractor. Errors do happen and some go undetected. But one rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel so if you've put in some serious thought on the piece do proofread to at the least purge the worst of these from your piece.

Connecting to Course Themes (25%)

This one should be pretty obvious. Part of the reason for the reflections is so you can make connections between course ideas and your own thinking. By being explicit about those it becomes more likely that you'll learn what we are studying with some depth and that you'll retain these ideas after the course has concluded. You do not have to write on the themes I suggest. You may choose your own theme. But you still need to connect back to the ideas in the course and if you do choose your own theme that becomes a larger imperative.

Growth as a Writer (25%)

There are two thoughts here. The first is about learning by doing or what one might call growth en passant. Somewhere around week 12 or 13 I'll want you to write a reflection about the prior reflections so you'll have a sense of this. The other idea is to begin to come to terms with strengths and weaknesses in your writing. Whether to focus on embellishing your strengths or improving on your weakness, some of what you try with the writing is a deliberate effort for improvement. That too should be part of the reflection on reflections and will get you to be a participant in the ideas of Ericsson, et. al. When we have our one-on-ones about your reflections, some of that should be on areas of strength and weakness in the writing, so you can be deliberate with this.

Professor Arvan Contact Info

Office: 474 Wohlers Hall

Phone: 265-7140

Email: larvan at illinois.edu or prof.arvan at gmail.com

Office Hours: Since we have some scheduled during regular class time, I'm not going to schedule others. I'm happy to talk outside of class, either individually or with your team. Just set something up.

Attendance and Academic Integrity

Class attendance is expected (except in the case of illness, where if possible please notify me by email). If a student has to miss class because of another obligation, the student should alert me in advance of the date. This is relevant for the team activities. They will be scheduled so no team member anticipates missing class.

Violations of university standards of academic integrity will result in appropriate disciplinary action. See http://www.admin.uiuc.edu/policy/code/article_1/a1_1-401.html.

Course Grades

Course grades will be assigned based on the following cutoffs:

95% A
90% A–
85% B+
80% B
75% B–
70% C+
65% C
60% C–
50% D

During the second class session, Wednesday August 26, the class will discuss how student performance gets translated into measured scores. There are some decisions that I'd like the group to make as a whole regarding this assessment.

Class Participation

(10% of the Course Grade) Though this category gets a relatively small amount of the overall course credit, it is actually quite important. The low percentage reflects my inability to monitor you well while I'm also conducting the class session and to have both imperfect perception and failing memory regarding the value of your own participation. We will try to do something to monitor overall class participation to encourage everyone to participate well, where you participate in the monitoring, but on an individual level I'm afraid we'll come up a bit short. Do note that this category also includes online participation, as you make comments on the work of other students or likewise on the class Web site.

Final Course Project

(20% of Course Grade) The grand project that the class as a whole will work on is to develop a plan for a peer mentoring program on Campus. There will be a project wiki where the plan is housed or some other technology that we choose together. The instructor will work on the gateway part of this site. Students are invited to contribute, but their contributions here won’t be graded. Students in their teams will be assigned subsidiary projects. One such project, for example, is to work through the argument whether an effective peer mentoring program can be implemented entirely through voluntary contributions of the mentors. The subsidiary projects will be evaluated on the basis of the sort of evidence that can be brought to bear to address the issue, the way the issue is framed, and the quality of the argument to support the plan.

Panel Discussion with Guests

(20% of Course Grade) After a brief introduction by me, the guest(s) will be interviewed by a pre-designated team, using a format akin to a panel interview for a TV news show. I will serve as moderator. The rest of the class will play the role of audience and may be able to ask additional question after the panel concludes. Each team will be given a rubric to guide them in coming up with their panel questions. In response to the rubric and the underlying issues that the guest has been invited to address, the team will draft a plan for asking questions, including which members will ask which particular questions. This plan is due at midnight before the panel discussion is to be held. As with the class discussions, the panelists will be encouraged to promote good flow, provide follow up questions for the guest, but also to stick with the plan.

The classrooms have the capability of recording audio for later playback. We may decide to podcast these interviews along with the other materials that the teams create. Subsequent to the inteview, the team will write up a summary and provide other relevant content to understand the issues raised.

The current slate of guests is:

1. September 30 - Some College CIOs

2. October 7 - Dean Ruth Watkins (LAS) and Dean Larry DeBrock (Business)

3. November 11, 1 PM - Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Office of the Provost

4. Unscheduled (but late October or early November) - Libbie Morely, Director of the Writer's Workshop

5. Slot not yet filled - the class can express opinions on whom to get.

Leading Class Discussion

(20% of Course Grade) At the beginning of the course, I will lead the discussions. From that students should get an idea about when discussions work well and what sort of questions or commentary the leader interjects to promote a lively discussion. Later in the course each team will have the opportunity to lead the discussion based on a reading to which the team has been assigned. The team members will construct a lesson plan for the discussion so they have a prior view of topics to cover and points to emphasize. The plan is due at midnight before the class meeting is to be held. The discussion leaders will be encouraged to promote good flow, universal participation by the rest of the class, and to embrace provocative comments by class members. But they will also be encouraged to stick with their plan. Balancing these perhaps competing objectives will be part of how they are evaluated. We may have both peer evalutation and instructor evaluation. We'll decide that as a class well in advance. The particular readings and dates are still to be determined.

Writing to Learn Reflections

(30% of Course Grade) These will be done individually and on a weekly basis. They are due Friday at 5 PM. I hope you have better things to do with your time late Friday afternoon so I encourage you to get it done early. You don't need to ask for an extension if you miss that deadline. Just get it done asap. But if you steadily miss deadlines, we'll need to have a talk.

The expected flow is between 600 and 1200 words per post. If the lower limit seems daunting here's a suggestion. Go to a room by yourself and talk aloud about whatever the issue is. Just reason it out. Then go back to your computer and write that up. That will be about 80% of the battle. You can do that talking in your head instead of aloud (if you have a roommate that might be the preferred approach so your sanity is not brought into question). It is very difficult to write about something without having thought about it ahead of time. On the other hand, if it is the upper limit that appears to constrain, be forewarned that you have some of the tendencies of Professor Arvan and then seriously ask yourself whether you should indulge them or put a lid on. There is no penalty in going over, with the exception that if the reader is not quite as enamored with the subject as you are, you might risk losing him.

Subject matter-wise, I will try to give you suggestions as to a general theme, but you are always free to choose another as long as you can make a good argument that it is relevant to the class. The main purposes are to get you to reconsider the recent readings, attempt to identify the gist of the arguments being made if we haven't already hit the nail on the head in class discussion, pose questions that haven't yet been answered, and especially to flesh out where your own experience speaks to the issues under consideration.

As the course progresses some of the pieces can also tie together what has come before with the current readings and also make ties with ideas/issues that are external to the course. I will occassionally comment on your posts, but not always. I encourage you to read the posts of other students and comment on them as you see fit. Some of the connections you may make are with what your classmates have written. You don't have to agree them. There is learning in giving voice to alternative views and then in trying to reconcile differences of opinion. I do ask that you treat everyone in the class with respect and do so in your comments, as you would have them do to you. The Golden Rule is a good maxim for our class.

Writing Style

Much of this is up to you. Finding your "own voice" is very important. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes a lot of attempts at trying different approaches and doing that fairly regularly so you can see what feels right. Many of you haven't done much if any reflective writing before this course, so you won't be a pro at it right form the start. That's ok. After all, we do learn; that's an important point.

When you're not so proficient at something and you are aware of your shortcomings, there is a tendency to try to cover up. With writing, if you believe your ideas are wishy washy the cover up can come in the form of using fancy language to deflect attention from the ideas. (If you're so smart to use those words coherently in a sentence, then the ideas have to be good, don't they?) You should combat this tendency. Think of your audience as intelligent non-specialists. Jargon when used excessively confounds rather than illuminates. Please use it sparingly and then make sure to define terms in plain language ahead of time.

Here is one other piece of wisdom on writing from my prior experience teaching Econ 101 to CHP students. Their writing frequently created the impression they were making a list rather than weaving thoughts into a coherent narrative. Some of that is a consequence when students do group projects. There is a tendency to divide up the work with nobody responsible for the whole. Another part is that some of the ideas they were writing about were pretty sophisticated and they may have not yet mastered them, so producing a coherent narrative was a tough thing to do. And then there is a third part about their immaturity as writers. A writer's job is to make things as easy as possible for the reader. If the reader has to work too hard, the meaning will almost surely get distorted and the reader might give up before reaching the conclusion. Immature writers think that having produced a first draft they are done.

So after you've written something let it simmer for a bit and go back to it. Of course do a spell check, but beyond that ask how it sounds to you and whether you can say things better. I have a tendency to use passive voice in my own writing so really have to fight that. You likely have your own peccadillos. If you are aware of them, you can take appropriate counter measures. Also, providing attribution for ideas is a good and ethical thing to do. Online, you can do that via hyperlinking. There is a fascinating piece by Jonathem Lethem in Harper's from a couple of years ago talking about how we are interconnected in our ideas and most of ours are stolen (in a good sense) from our ancestors. We won't talk about that piece in the course, but it is well worth the read.

I hope you have fun with the writing. There is learning in the doing. So enjoy.

Online Writing

I would like each individual member of the class to set up a blog for the class. At a minimum these would contain the weekly reflections that are required. For students registed in 396, it will also contain the additional writing for that. The blog might also contain other formative work, tidbits of projects, and possibly reference to external items that seem relevant or interesting. A few reasons for wanting your writing to be public follow:

a) Doing so signals that you'd like commentary on your work. So it is a step toward promoting the open exchange of ideas.

b) Functionally, it is actually easier for others to be notified that you've created new work that they might be interested in.

c) Outsiders to the class can become aware of what you are up to and if they are interested in it might participate themsevles.

d) Because of (a) - (c) there is potentially a performance effect on what you produce. In other words, your apt to put in more effort to make your work appear well done, if it is publicly available.

e) You have an archive of all your work after the course concludes.

Those are all good reasons. However, owing to government regulation about student privacy, notably FERPA, you have the right to keep your identity in the class private to those outside the course. So if privacy is a concern of yours you can take a modest step of identifying yourself by first name and last initial. If you want more privacy than that, I can make a site in Compass for you where you can do your course work.

The approach we'll take is that you opt into having a blog, in which case you send me the url for that and then I'll include it in the Student Blogs section on the course site, or notify me that you want a space within Compass instead.

On the technical issue of how to make a blog, two free sites for doing this are Blogger or WordPress, and another popular host though it charges a modest fee per month is TypePad. If you have trouble with this, I'm happy to lend a bit of tech support if I can.

Teams

Students will be placed in teams with 3 or 4 students per team to perform much of their project work. Team members will receive a common grade on the project work. If all teams seem to be functioning smoothly membership will remain intact for the entire semester. If there is mutually agreeable swaps across teams, that can be done but only with instructor approval. Students are otherwise encouraged to work through team problems. This page might be helpful for that. The instructor will meet with teams regularly during the in class office hours period and get some sense of team function. If there are irreconcilable differences between team members the instructor will make some adjustment, but do so only reluctantly and after other attempts at reconciliation have failed.

Readings

Required Books: These have been selected not because they are comprehensive on their respective subjects but rather because they are well written (several could readily be enjoyed for pleasure reading outside the scope of this class) and because they articulate a strong point of view on their subjects. Students should purchase these books, though we’ll try to have a copy of each on reserve. It would be fine for students to share the books so each student doesn’t have to purchase them all. Below they are listed with links to their Amazon.com pages and current price quotes.

Better Atul Gawande $11.20
The Process of Education Jerome Bruner $17.10
The Essential Drucker Peter Drucker $12.21
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization Peter Senge $16.17
Declining by Degrees Edited by John Merrow $10.17
The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell $8.99

Other Readings: These are there either to supplement or contrast with the books, to acquaint the students with other contributions in the area, and to encourage a multiple perspective view on the underlying issues. All of these should be available online, either through the Library or because they are generally available, and hence are free to the students.

Microcredit - Muhammad Yunus (Enterprising Ideas on PBS, NPR pieces, Charlie Rose Show, Nobel Prize site) Microfinance New Yorker Article
How People Learn – National Academy Volume (Chapters 1 – 3)
The Role of Deliberate Practice – Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Romer (Pyschological Review)
Facilitation of Autonomy and Intrinsic Motivation – Ryan and Deci (American Psychologist)
An Institutional Framework for Change – Douglass C. North
The Executive Mind and Double Loop Learning – Chris Argyris
Dealing with the Future Now – Guskin and Marcy (Change Magazine)
What We Are Learning about NSSE – George Kuh (Change Magazine)

And other readings that come up during the offering of the course.

Course Approach/Goals

About three quarters of the course will be devoted to foundational material. The remaining one quarter of the course will be a class project done collectively. The belief is that irrespective of the field these students will ultimately find themselves in, many of them will devote a significant amount of their work time to design for change in their field of endeavor. The course aim is to provide the students with frameworks in which to consider that challenge. The final project is meant to ground those frameworks in an actual design for change.

The foundational material itself will be partitioned into three parts, each with some defining questions. Part 1, meant to serve as motivation, considers some examples. What does effective change look like and can it be contrasted meaningfully with other practices that are less effective? Part 2 focuses on learning of the individual. What do we know about learning, how can we encourage students to learn and think about their own learning, and what are the main impediments to deep learning? Part 3 focuses on the organization and management of the organization. How does learning happen in an organization and in the community that the organization serves, how can such learning be encouraged, what needs to happen culturally to promote this type of learning, and why do some organizations not learn and hence fail?

The project we’ll consider is the possibility of implementing a Campus sanctioned program of peer mentoring, aimed at encouraging students to immerse themselves in their own learning and at countering the alienating effects of large class instruction. We’ll consider the case where more experienced students mentor their junior peers and eschew the alternative where the mentoring happens between students taking the same class. We’ll ask how this might work for the benefit of the mentees, how to elicit participation of the mentors, how the program integrates with the planned instruction, and what will it take to get it started. Timing-wise, we’ll start in on some of the project content about midway through the course, while continuing with the foundational material till the course concludes.

Dummy Post for Syllabus Tag

Just a quickie here to get this up.