Am I The Only One With Students Like This?
Cool new active learning activity? Flipped classroom? Meta-cognitive exercise? I’m just trying to get my students to come to class and show some signs of life.
I recently attended a faculty development conference and felt like something wasn’t quite right. As I was sitting in a seminar watching a sharp young professor talk about the innovative teaching techniques she was using in her class — and listening to others in the audience talk about their successes with various new teaching techniques, my heart sank. It sounded to me that all of the other professor’s students just needed a trendy new teaching method and voila, every one of them was transformed into engaged geniuses becoming poster children for their respective college’s institutional learning outcomes.
If there is one thing I have learned from my students over the years, avoiding eye contact with others and sinking low in my seat can be a successful strategy for sending a signal that I was not interested in participating. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to join in the conversation with other faculty members, but I had a bigger fear — I had a few clueless students — and I didn’t want to admit it. Was I the only one? Sure I had a percentage of coeds with potential, but I also had the apathy contingent — the ones that I knew at one point would be on the wrong end of our retention statistics. This is the kind of thing you don’t want to admit in front of other professors because as soon as you do they look at your name badge and make a mental note of the institution you are affiliated with. Not good.
Regardless of where we teach, at one of the elite universities or a small private college, we are going to have some students who just aren’t engaged. As professors, we have to accept that there is not a magic technique that can force every student into the fold. It is common knowledge that the desire to learn is either intrinsic — that is the student is self-motivated because they are passionate about their education — or it is extrinsic, the student is motivated by the fact that their parents will be unhappy if they don’t do well (1). For those students with some smattering of motivation, we have something to work with, the unmotivated ones are the challenge.
We all have students who have not found their passion — perhaps their interest in the college socio-party life is more powerful than their interest in academics or they have other external pressures holding them back. Even the cool profs presenting at the big teaching conferences have a few of these students, and they may not admit it, but all of the flipping and active learning techniques one can muster will not always help. As an instructor, my primary motivation is wanting to help all of my students to find their passion, but failing that, I hate to see anyone waste their money or permanently lower their GPA.
Unfortunately, some students just don’t have the skills to succeed, and I can try to get them through, but I think at some point we have to admit that there might be a lost cause or two. For misplaced souls, I do everything that is reasonably possible from extended office hours to tutoring referral. I used to think it was my job to save everyone, but occasionally there will be the student who is just not going to make it in my class at this point in his or her life.
For others, who just need a jolt of introspection to find their purpose or motivation, I try metacognitive techniques. Not one to throw another academic buzzword into the ether, all I mean is that I like to use methods that help students think about how they learn. Just having students keep a record of how many hours a week they put into my class is helpful. This can be as simple as asking students to keep a log in the notes app on their cellphone or keep a simple written record. Just the act of asking students to track their study time gets them thinking about it. Sure, when your doctor asks you how many drinks you have a week you’re not always honest, and this can be the case with student logs as well — but in both cases it causes us to think about what we are doing.
I also try to do “extra-substantive grading” with struggling students. By this, I mean that I make sure I give the student insightful feedback and I invite them to get into some introspection. In some cases I’ll ask something like “do you think this is college-level writing?” or “do you think you could do better if you had a chance to re-submit this assignment?” We have to be careful here because negative grading feedback can easily cause a student to disengage even further (2). I like to address students by their first names when I grade and practice some mildly tough-love such as “Nicole, I know you can do better than this so if you want to try the assignment again, I will allow you a second chance, I want to see you succeed.”
The other technique that I have tried is to tie in the importance of success in class to some real-world scenario to get students to think about why what they’re doing in class is essential. This isn’t always easy — especially when I am teaching a class like world history from 1500. Recently, after reading more than a few sub-standard short history essays, I asked the class why they thought their assignments were important or unimportant. I know I am going to get a response like “I just don’t see why Napoleon is going to be relevant in my nursing career.” It’s a fair point, knowing that Napoleon Bonaparte was part of a coup that successfully overthrew the French Directory in 1799 may never come up when working on a patient care plan. The writing of the assignment, that is, the ability to write clearly and with proper grammar, is however essential. (3). I tell students all of the time that writing skills — even in the digital world — are of the utmost importance. Now more than ever, writing is the first impression, whether it is a job application, a LinkedIn profile, or a student portfolio. Regardless of the path modernity takes us, communication skills are the one human attribute that artificial intelligence will not replace.
Recently, I discovered that a student of mine was passionate and proficient in the making YouTube videos of his video gaming play-throughs. I asked if he could relate a gaming video to eras of world history we were studying in class in place of a few assignments — he is now totally engaged. For my pre-med students, they can do an assignment that relates to the history of medicine in the period under study. I have had engineering students work on historical assignments about invention or technology. I can’t customize every essay for every student, but I can, especially for the non-motivated student, mold a task to something that fits their interest.
Again, none of these techniques can rescue a student who is lost or totally un-engaged, but they can turn around one or two stragglers along the way. All of us learn differently and teaching, above all, is a people business, and often it has to be personalized (4). So, about those shiny new techniques from the profs at the conference? They are worth a listen, we can always take bits and pieces from what works for others, but good teaching is personal teaching, and that will always be the case.
(1) There are grey areas when it comes to differentiating intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation but my interest here is motivation in general, not a precise classification of the specific types of motivation.
(2) Deci, E. L., Cascio, W. F., & Krusell, J. (1975). Cognitive evaluation theory and some comments on the Calder and Staw critique./Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31/(1), 81–85.
(3) There are a good number of colleagues who contend that it is not the history professors job to teach grammar and composition, my personal position is that it is the responsibility of all of us in liberal arts to improve the communication skills of students.
(4) See the great article by David Brooks in the New York Times: Brooks, D. (2019). Opinion | Students Learn From People They Love. The New York Times.
