Teaching Thursday: Classrooms, Protocols, and End of the Semester Fatigue

This semester has not been my best in terms of teaching. My Greek history class has been more than adequate, while my history survey class, Western Civilization I, has been mediocre at best. 

Most semesters, Western Civilization I brims with energy. In fact, the classroom energy is one of the main reasons that I continue to teach the class the way that I do. I’ve found that energetic students, in general, are engaged students and the main goal of this class (beyond those associated with learning about the past) is to engage students in the process of doing history. 

This semester, the class was not energetic and consequently disengaged. It was a bummer.

I have a suspicion that part of the reason for this is that the classroom was not designed to accommodate group work. The room is wider than it is deep with three rows of long tables oriented to the front of the room. Instead of the usual whiteboards there are two screens and something called a Promethean monitor that is awkwardly situated immediately behind the teaching station. In this arrangement, students struggled to organize themselves into groups partly because they found it difficult to face their classmates physically. Moreover, it was difficult for me to float around the room from group to group to listen into their discussion, nudge them when they seemed to be straying, and engage in the kind of easy banter that is often part of group work. In short, the classroom itself created a class oriented heavily to the front of the room both physically, socially, and intellectually. In fact, I urged students to have conversations with their classmates about ANYTHING: music, sports, home towns, UND, food, classes, ANYTHING. And the students refused. 

I complained about this to my brother, who is a K-12 principal, and he suggested that I experiment with “protocols.” Protocols, in this sense, are basically prompts to help encourage and structure discussion in a group. In the past, I’ve not used such things preferring to allow students to negotiate group work collectively. When I do intervene, it has been by offering broad guidance on how to work together as a group (e.g. communicate with one another, check back in while doing work, develop an outline to organize your ideas and work, et c.) or to  offer paradigms and exempla for the final product.

Protocols offer a more granular approach to guiding discussion by encourage certain kinds of interaction that are productive and focused. I’m not sure that I want to use protocols in my normal Western Civilization I and World Civilization I classroom which occurs in rooms designed to support and encourage student discussion, but since I will likely be teaching Western Civilization I in this same ill-suited room again next spring, it seems like a good place to try a different approach to guiding discussion. 

Finally, my students are tired right now. Every year, I am slightly surprised by the level of fatigue present in my classrooms. My Greek History class which have been game for most of the semester are beginning to really struggle. Attendance is lagging, reading has become a struggle, and every engagement with the students seems increasingly fraught. 

This always brings me back to the idea that a 16 week semester is simply too long. Even the best students struggle to keep momentum and the last four weeks of the semester are often a slog rather than a productive learning environment. In the past, I’ve added some “lab days” into my courses allowing us to take a breather from the pressures of reading, writing, and engaging with course content. I also like to give students at least a week off (in addition to scheduled school breaks) during the semester. I’m skeptical that most of my colleagues do similar things (and here I’m using colleagues to describe faculty outside my department as much as inside my department). Whatever benefit students get from my efforts gets washed out by the general tendency for faculty to use as much time as the semester allows.

This isn’t a criticism, of course, because I too find it easy to get sucked into the idea that the semester much be densely scheduled or students will find it only too easy to deprioritize my class or even ignore it. As someone who lives by my routines, I also try to schedule my class to support good study, reading, and writing habits in my students. Consequently, my class tends to be as dense as most of my colleagues.

The frustrating thing is that we do this even though we know that it is not the best way to learn, not the best way to teach, and certainly not a useful way to approach life. We all understand that less is more and relentless intensity might build a kind of stamina in the short-term, but also leads to burn out and injury when it goes beyond what is healthy. I will say again here for the record: a 16 week semester is too long.