Business Essay Writing – Active Learning in Crisis

http://www.urgentcustomessays.com/blog/2011/10/business-essay-writing-active-learning-in-crisis/Business Essay Writing – Active Learning in CrisisEssay Blog

Active Learning in Crisis: The Way to Helpful Teaching

The author’s work with active learning techniques has challenged not just the hearts and heads of his students, but his feelings and thoughts as well. In his earliest experimentation with active learning, which focused on literature and philosophy classes, the author tossed caution into the wind and lecture notes out of the window to make room for dynamic groups of students whose active participation would ensure and enhance learning. Daily, he redesigned the classroom trappings: moving students and seats with equal abandon, oblivious to queries like “Should I take a seat now or are you going to move us around again today?”. His literature students were asked to form teams spelling POEM (for paraphrase, occasion, explanation and meaning) three times a week. And his philosophy students were required to form groups spelling TEAM (for tell us, example us, ask our questions and make our discoveries) twice a week. Of course, system got in the way of substance more than once a week: Students spent so much time getting ready to learn by getting into changing groups that actual active learning was delayed, even more so by the inevitable handful of late students whose presence requiring yet more chair-pushing and table-shoving became wearisome rather than welcome.
In those early experiments, the author waited expectantly and was eager to welcome learning into his classrooms of active humanities novices. Indeed, he expected that his students would learn by working together in class on readings completed outside of class. As has often been reported in the literature, however, active learning based on assigned readings does not work when students do not buy the required books or do not do the assigned readings—unless, of course (Hargreaves, 1994; 2003), the teacher rethinks old attitudes and abilities to develop unfamiliar traits and skills. When the proverbial push came to shove, he wanted to help his students learn and succeed—as much as he wanted to make a success of his position at a university that advocated what was a new way of teaching that he needed to learn and in time to re-learn: Eventually, he tossed out not only expectations regarding student purchasing habits, but also assignments assuming students’ reading habits.
While, at first, it was hard for him to feel compassion for registered students who systematically refused to purchase texts or regularly failed to read assignments, it was easy for him to rethink active learning exercises. The author immediately redesigned his in-class group assignments to focus on concepts and skills that could be developed during the scheduled class periods regardless the level of students’ under-preparation. Thus, for example, while an early active learning exercise on Orwell’s “Politics of the English Language” (1946) required that students define and give examples of terms taken from the text (e.g., “dying metaphors”, “verbal false limbs”, “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words”), a later exercise provided the definitions and examples and also reproduced an Orwellian parody of a verse from Ecclesiastes, written (on Orwell’s humorous description) in “modern English of the worst sort” and invited students to rewrite another Biblical verse applying Orwellian principles (p. 168). Similarly, an early active learning exercise on William Lutz’s “Doubts About Doublespeak” (1989) again required students to explain concepts taken from the piece (e.g., “euphemism”, “jargon”, “bureaucratese” and “inflated language”); but a later exercise included the background information (the definitions and examples) and asked students to write emails using and then eliminating doublespeak to address specific audiences (p. 185).
The author’s efforts to address and rethink his own disapproval of students’ attitudes and behaviors have resulted not only in a more dynamic classroom of happily engaged participants, but also in a more helpful body of active learning exercises better able to meet the needs of his students, who, like others of their generation, have expectations about learning and living unlike his own. Many of his students participate actively in the green movement: For them, it matters that every college student buys about one tree’s worth of books per semester. Similarly, many of the author’s students, members of the first native online population, prefer reading virtual texts to reading actual books: For them, it means that every college class should acknowledge the expanding online resources (from academic e-books to social book-renting sites) available to students who spend more time engaged with the Internet than glued to the TV. Finally, most of his students who can expect to change jobs upwards of 20 times in their lifetimes, spending only about one year on any one job (Krayewski, 2009) as they search for “meaningful work and a solid learning curve” (Kane, 2009, p. 2), expect to graduate from college with enormous debt: For them, it makes sense to cut corners when and where they can.
While the author is glad that his students no longer cut classes because they fear the consequences of not having bought the assigned book, the author still can not say that he approves of students who come to class under-prepared. Admittedly, he would still prefer that all university students bought all texts, required and optional, and completed all readings, required and optional. Reading and writing are interconnected activities: For many years, the author has helped his humanities students learn to dialogue with texts by creating interactive gist notes (in-text marginalia on the form and content, the what and how, the subject and rhetoric, of each paragraph)—something that can not happen when students lack books. But the author has learned to see the textbook issue from the optimistic perspectives of his students (Krayewski, 2009; NAS, 2009), who, typical of their generation, do not think twice about questioning authority or attacking convention (Kane, 2009), and he has learned to construct active learning exercises that help students master needed concepts and skills whether or not they do the assigned readings before coming to class 4.
Some students, like some teachers, come to the writing class burdened by fear: All of the author’s humanities classes develop thinking skills and so, challenge students. But literature and philosophy courses include demanding reading assignments, writing courses, from “Modern Rhetoric” (for freshmen and fresh women) to “Advanced Composition” (for juniors and seniors), which integrate provocative reading assignments as well as challenging writing assignments. Provoking discussion more than two decades ago, Pattison (1988) noted that “Anyone who has taught Freshman English has encountered something more than mere stupidity in his or her classroom he or she often encounters a visceral resistance to the whole notion of education” (p. 5). For the students enrolled in a writing class in a university of Pattison’s day, the natural response to education was not reverence, but suspicion. Nowadays, to recast Pattison (1988), “Anyone who has taught writing has encountered something more than mere suspicion in his or her classroom—He or she often “euphemism”, “jargon”, “bureaucratese” and “inflated language”); but a later exercise included the background information (the definitions and examples) and asked students to write emails using and then eliminating doublespeak to address specific audiences (p. 185).

The author’s efforts to address and rethink his own disapproval of students’ attitudes and behaviors have resulted not only in a more dynamic classroom of happily engaged participants, but also in a more helpful body of active learning exercises better able to meet the needs of his students, who, like others of their generation, have expectations about learning and living unlike his own. Many of his students participate actively in the green movement: For them, it matters that every college student buys about one tree’s worth of books per semester. Similarly, many of the author’s students, members of the first native online population, prefer reading virtual texts to reading actual books: For them, it means that every college class should acknowledge the expanding online resources (from academic e-books to social book-renting sites) available to students who spend more time engaged with the Internet than glued to the TV. Finally, most of his students who can expect to change jobs upwards of 20 times in their lifetimes, spending only about one year on any one job (Krayewski, 2009) as they search for “meaningful work and a solid learning curve” (Kane, 2009, p. 2), expect to graduate from college with enormous debt: For them, it makes sense to cut corners when and where they can.

While the author is glad that his students no longer cut classes because they fear the consequences of not having bought the assigned book, the author still can not say that he approves of students who come to class under-prepared. Admittedly, he would still prefer that all university students bought all texts, required and optional, and completed all readings, required and optional. Reading and writing are interconnected activities: For many years, the author has helped his humanities students learn to dialogue with texts by creating interactive gist notes (in-text marginalia on the form and content, the what and how, the subject and rhetoric, of each paragraph)—something that can not happen when students lack books. But the author has learned to see the textbook issue from the optimistic perspectives of his students (Krayewski, 2009; NAS, 2009), who, typical of their generation, do not think twice about questioning authority or attacking convention (Kane, 2009), and he has learned to construct active learning exercises that help students master needed concepts and skills whether or not they do the assigned readings before coming to class4
Some students, like some teachers, come to the writing class burdened by fear: All of the author’s humanities classes develop thinking skills and so, challenge students. But literature and philosophy courses include demanding reading assignments, writing courses, from “Modern Rhetoric” (for freshmen and fresh women) to “Advanced Composition” (for juniors and seniors), which integrate provocative reading assignments as well as challenging writing assignments. Provoking discussion more than two decades ago, Pattison (1988) noted that “Anyone who has taught Freshman English has encountered something more than mere stupidity in his or her classroom he or she often encounters a visceral resistance to the whole notion of education” (p. 5). For the students enrolled in a writing class in a university of Pattison’s day, the natural response to education was not reverence, but suspicion. Nowadays, to recast Pattison (1988), “Anyone who has taught writing has encountered something more than mere suspicion in his or her classroom—He or she often encounters a palpable fear about the whole process of education” (pp. 3-10).
At Graceland, students usually register for the author’s writing courses because his classes meet general education requirements. And his students come to these classes with fears, particularly about the process of writing to find expression in an active learning exercise called as “3, 2, 1”—He administers at the beginning of the semester and (in a slightly altered form) at the end of the semester. In this early exercise, students are asked to identify three things they want to learn (in the class), two things they want to ask (about the class), and one thing they want to say (about the topic of the class: e.g., business writing, essay writing, technical writing, etc.). Students’ responses like those following reveal the sorts of concerns that worry some students at the start of class, from small issues like life before semi-colons to big issues like life after Graceland: “I want to learn how to write like a professional”, “I want to learn to write a decent resume so I can get a good job”, “I want to become a better writer so I can go to graduate school”, “Is this class hard?”, “Are you a hard grader?”, “Do you grade down for sentence fragments?”, “Are you the kind of teacher I can talk to if I have personal problems?”, “Why does a business major like me need a writing class?”, “How will taking this class help land me a better job?”, “I’m not a good writer, so I took this class instead of essay writing”, “I don’t know the difference between a comma and a colon”, “I don’t know how to write a summary”, “All of my teachers have told me that I suck at writing”, “I never liked reading and writing—and I’m really slow”, “English has always been my worst subject”, “I never had an English teacher who liked my writing”, “I don’t know anyone in this class—maybe they’re all English majors”, “I wish there were no English classes”, and “I don’t know why I have to take this class”.
Knowing the concerns of his writing students at the outset of a class (and the variations that occur from semester to semester, from class to class, from student to student) allows the author to customize by constantly rethinking and changing, his active learning exercises and thus to better help his students learn. Further, learning about the fears his students face and it is noteworthy that Millennials are often described as “confident” and fearless continuously challenges how the author thinks and how the author teaches. And for some thinkers in education, this is how it should be: In fact, recent literature on preparation for the constant changes of the 21st century includes research on the roles not just of students, but of teachers as well. Thus, for example, in Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity, Andy Hargreaves (2003) argued that “In their preparation, their professional development, and their working lives” (p. 2), teachers must develop a skills set responsive to the needs of knowledge-society-bound students—a new professionalism characterized by eight defining behaviors including, for example, a commitment to continuous learning and a capacity for change and risk. In language reminiscent of Pattison, Hargreaves insisted that to best help students thrive in the knowledge society, “Teachers must take their place again among society’s most respected intellectuals—moving beyond the citadel of the classroom to being, and preparing their students to be, citizens of the world” (p. 24).

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