2007 will soon end. This year slipped away from me very quickly but this semester didn’t. For many of my students the semester lasted longer than necessary. I’ll explain why later but first imagine this.
One late August morning a stomachache awakens you. The pain increases by mid morning so you ask a loved one to drive you to an emergency room. A doctor examines you and finds you have a mild case of food poisoning. She gives you some medicine and within two hours you feel fine. The doctor then tells you she won’t release you until one week before the Christmas Holiday. No matter the illness all patients at this hospital must complete a 16-week stay. Whether the patient has an ingrown toenail or a brain tumor it doesn’t matter. All patients who arrive at the hospital that day must leave the same day 16 weeks later. Does this sound illogical? It does to me.
This scenario doesn’t make sense to me the same way our academic semester no longer makes sense. I have students who need more than one semester to master the skills I present in my course but some master the skills after four weeks. Why should student B have to wait for student A before she can move on to a more advanced course?
At our college we’ve played around a bit with schedules but remain locked into the semester hour mentality. Whether students take 16, 12 or eight-week courses they must sit for a set number of hours-usually 48. We penalize students who need more time to master the skills or understand the material in a particular course. They earn an F and must repeat the course. We also penalize students who learn more quickly. They have to wait for their classmates before they all move to the next course together.
I don’t know how or why we use the semester hour system but the more I think about it the more I dislike it. Perhaps it exists because it makes life easy for those who schedule courses, or for professors or for economic reasons or perhaps we still do it because those who came before us did it this way- a case of bad convention. I don’t care what the reason. I care that we can do much better. How much time a student must spend in a course seems arbitrary. We have the creative people and the technology to do better.
Through innovative and some old practices and our advanced technology we can individualize instruction for all students. We can give professors the freedom to certify students ready to go on to the next course whenever said students master certain skills or prove knowledge of certain materials through tests, projects, reports, presentations or other exercises. Professors can certify their students as ready at any time and students can start new courses at any time. We don’t have to invent a new system just adjust some of what we already do. We can adjust the independent study model, a lot of what we already do in virtual courses or the old correspondence course model.
I have students in ENC 1101 who haven’t taken a composition course in many years. They just need to remove some mental rust. Within a few weeks they write good sentences and paragraphs and well-developed compositions. I deem them ready for ENC 1102 by October but I can’t give them their A until December. In an individualized system those students could get their grades when they master all the ENC 1101 required skills then learn to do and present research and finish ENC 1102 by late December or early January. Those students in ENC 1101 who struggle to master the skills could continue to work with me until necessary without penalty.
This requires a new approach to how many of us teach. It requires rejection of the lecture method, less note taking and memorization. It requires more tutorials, more student-teacher conferences, more field-based work, more service learning, more active learning, more trial and error exercises, computer tutorials and constant guidance and evaluation.
Above all it requires innovative, creative, courageous administrators who can see how our current system penalizes all students and how our current system doesn’t consider each student’s strengths and weaknesses. It requires a mental shift. Many companies now individualize their products and services for their customers. Henry Ford used to say customers could buy his cars in any color as long as they bought them in black. Today customers on the Internet can build their own model. We still deliver and schedule most of our instruction the same way they did at the University of Bologna 1,000 years ago. We can do better.
Copyright Bert Lorenzo, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment