Written Assignments

1. One-page responses

The quality of student work for these short, informal assignments varied considerably from student to student and from assignment to assignment.  The best responses engaged the texts on a personal level; students made connections to their world and offered emotional responses to the texts.  Weaker responses failed to reach such engagement and merely commented on general themes or motifs from the texts; some submissions were well written, but approximated one-page analytical papers, not responses.  In hindsight, I think these short assignments challenged students to write frequently, but I’m not sure they were an effective means of urging the class as a whole to engage the texts on a personal or introductory level.

Because of these reservations, I am ambivalent about assigning such papers next time I teach the class.  On the one hand, I could revise the assignment considerably, giving students firmer guidelines for writing responses (and teaching the skills, if necessary) and firmer due dates (so responses would be completed near the time we were handling the texts in class).  On the other hand, students will be spending significantly more time on formal essays (see below), which leads me to think that having them spend time on one-page responses is not the best use of their thinking time or my grading time.  Further, they will have ample opportunity to respond to texts and ideas in electronic form, and I think this innovation will provide a superior format for students to engage the texts or other course material on a personal or introductory level.

The most successful papers (e.g., Best Paper I, Best Paper II ) demonstrated that students were able to think synthetically, incorporating with ease ideas explicitly stated or inferred from texts, their own experiences, and their observations of the social and business world around them.  These papers also contained clearly identifiable argumentative thesis statements that went beyond merely responding to the assignment prompt; they also expressed complex, nuanced thinking vis-à-vis the course inquiry question.  Weaker papers offered thesis statements that suggested difficulty moving beyond the most facile observations.  These papers also struggled to incorporate diverse voices smoothly and demonstrated an inability to discover inferred positions in the texts we had read.  Such essays never moved beyond reporting explicit statements in two or three texts, indicating a lower level of cognition (knowledge and comprehension) rather than the desired synthesis. 

This analysis suggests that next time I teach the course, students will need some extra help with the important writing skills of crafting an argumentative thesis, inferring positions in texts, and using explicit and inferred ideas from texts to support the thesis.  These skills can be taught (or at least begin to be taught) with worksheets that are begun on the student’s own time and then workshopped in class, with innovative group work, and with help from web pages designed at writing centers such as the commercial ACI page or Purdue University's online writing lab.  As much as I resisted teaching writing skills the first time I taught the course, I have revised my thinking to the position that writing instruction will need to be added to the course if we are to fulfill our course objectives.

The most successful papers (e.g. Best Final Paper) were able to show how certain aspects of the proposed business developed directly or indirectly from the texts and ideas we had explored in class.  These papers identified a few distinguishing characteristics of the business and discussed how and why the group decided on those particular characteristics.  Explicit connections were made between ideas covered in the text, changes to the student’s way of thinking, and the consequent decisions made in developing the proposed business.  Weaker papers, on the other hand, were not able to make such connections, but rather narrated a laundry list of the innovative aspects of the business.  In these papers, texts from the seminar were seldom referenced and the narrative remained impersonal, making it difficult to gauge the level of student engagement with the material.  Hence, connections between the course material and the newly proposed business were difficult to see. 

In hindsight, I think students needed directives from me that were more clearly defined in order to complete the assignment with a higher level of reflection and engagement.  The basic concept behind the assignment is sound, I think, but I would like to see more reflection on the group process and on each student’s contribution to that process.  I would also like to see much more engagement with the course content.  Students need to be directed to limit the number of innovative aspects they choose to discuss so they can draw connections with the knowledge they constructed in the seminar in a meaningful way.  I would especially like to see students reflect more on the contributions of the humanistic texts (since these texts are a large part of the course); ideas from the social and political science texts are more directly related to the realm of business and are therefore more easily incorporated into students’ reflective work.

In addition to the changes I wish to make to the assignments as a result of my reflections, the newly-gained intensive writing status of L216 will also necessitate some changes to its curriculum and teaching methods.  Students will need to complete more formal writing assignments and engage the process of revision as part of the formal requirements for the course.  I also think that in spring 2001, students needed to handle additional content in a paper sequenced between the essay on success and the position paper on the course inquiry question.  Accordingly, formal papers in spring 2002 will take shape as follows:

• A diagnostic pre-essay to be used primarily for assessment purposes (not revised).
• A synthetic essay on success in America (revision after comments from me).
• A synthetic essay on globalization vis-à-vis the course inquiry question (revision after peer review).
• A synthetic essay addressing the course inquiry question directly (revision after peer review and comments from me).
• A final reflective essay (no revision).

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Oral Assignments

1. Individual Oral Presentations

This strategy worked reasonably well in asking students to take responsibility for learning in the seminar and in giving students a forum for practicing the oral presentation skills.  Students often surprised me with the level of professionalism that they achieved in delivering their oral reports.  Several student led discussions were most engaging and pertinent to the course topic.  On the other hand, too many students were regrettably very poor at speaking in front of the class and several merely read data they had gathered from the internet the night before their presentations.  Class discussions sometimes flagged and were sometimes unproductive.  I fault myself for these problems, since I gave students essentially no directives about my expectations for this part of the course.  This type of teaching was new territory for me and I was reluctant to over-determine the contributions of students to the seminar discussions.

Next time, I intend to require students to do one formal oral presentation (report) in which they research a topic in the library and prepare a professional presentation on what they learn.  They will be coached on the basics of oral presentations, including particulars such as how to dress, how to avoid distracting filler sounds (uhhh, like, um, etc.) and how to give the highlights of their research without getting bogged down in the details.  At the suggestion of peers from the I.U. Course Portfolio Workshop held on May 15 and 16, 2001, I will ask professionals in speech communication for guidelines for public speaking and disseminate them to the students.  They will be given index cards with feedback on their performance and an evaluative mark immediately following the class period in which they give their presentation. 

Students will also be required to lead one class discussion during the semester.  Early in the term, however, I will spend some time teaching students some of the fundamentals of leading a discussion, based on the research and recommendations of experts such as William E. Cashin and Peter Frederick. (note 7)   Students will receive feedback akin to the feedback given for oral presentations immediately following the class period in which they lead a discussion.

In many ways, the group presentations at the end of the semester represented the culmination of the seminar’s intellectual work.  Student performance on this project exceeded my expectations by a wide margin.  All prepared exceptional presentations with interesting powerpoint graphics, and in some cases, with other types of media as well.  Although unsolicited, each group developed a complex mission statement and most were able to present their ideas succinctly and professionally.  One group developed its own web page; another dressed in Wall Street professional attire; a third consulted with an attorney after the semester to explore the possibilities of opening the business they had proposed!  Everyone, including me, had fun with the project, but best of all, I realized once I had heard each group, that L216 had been a success:  students had, in fact, reflected a great deal on the course inquiry question and had begun to see that there were indeed alternatives to conducting business in the typical over-rationalized American fashion.  It was heartwarming and refreshing for me to see and hear such evidence of student learning. 

For spring 2002, I would like to keep the assignment essentially as is, but give the students more preparation time and clearer, more specific directives on how to proceed.  A look at the Final Project assignment sheet will reveal some of the difficulties I experienced as I tried to settle on a plan for the final project.  I had told students early on that they would solve a real problem that related to the course material.  I thought problem-based learning would be appropriate here.  Later, however, I changed my mind after I observed several entrepreneurship classes at the Kelley School of Business, where students proposed businesses with absolutely no regard for the social or environmental impact of those businesses.  I decided it would be interesting and worthwhile for my students to invent and develop a new business that did take environmental and social aspects seriously and at the same time engage the course content very closely.  When I finally assigned the project, however, I was ethically obliged to offer students the option of doing what I had told them verbally in the first place.  Fortunately, they all chose option 2, which gave the final project coherence and made it possible for me to grade fairly, but the options were confusing to students and won’t be repeated.  In spring 2002, students will be given only the business with a conscience option and they will be mentally “prepped” for the assignment much earlier in the semester. 

Students will also be told more explicitly how much attention to give to the business side of the project (proportionally little) and how much attention to the ethical side of the project (proportionally much).  They will receive a score sheet well in advance so they will know how to structure their presentation, and I will provide a set of basic presentation guidelines that indicate what students should wear, how they should deliver their presentation, and so on.  These structuring aspects were missing from the assignment the first time, and although all students reported that they enjoyed the final project, many also reported confusion and frustration over not being sure what was expected of them.

7. William E. Cashin and Philip C. McKnight, “Improving Discussions,” IDEA Paper No. 15 (Kansas State University:  Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development, 1986); Peter Frederick, “The Dreaded Discussion:  Ten Ways to Start,” Improving College and University Teaching 29:3.