Why You Shouldn't Let Students Sabotage Your Lecture

I am finishing up my second semester of Anatomy & Physiology and one of the most surprising things has been the lack of student engagement. The lecture hall holds about 70 students, stadium-style seating, and students talk through entire lecture periods. It is so loud, obvious, and distracting, that I've moved around the room numerous times to try and escape the chatter. I finally found the best option in the front row, although I can still plainly hear various conversations. Not once--until yesterday--has the instructor, a 25-year veteran faculty member, called the students on this behavior. She didn't acknowledge the behavior in class, but rather sent this email rant right after class:

"I thought it was especially bad today. The GFR control mechanisms can be difficult to explain…what with afferents and efferents and glomerular pressure up and down and sideways with GFR going up and down. I know who was talking because I had time to be distracted and look…I would not be showing up on my doorstep being confused about this topic right before your lecture final exam since you gabbed all the way through lecture…much to the chagrin I am sure of your fellow students. I am beginning to feel like a stand up comic with a bunch of drunks heckling me…but I don’t get to take an exam and get a grade on my performance, do I? For you who tried to hear me above the din, thank you so much for being mature and listening…I don’t know what to do about the gabbers…it only gives them their 15 seconds in the spotlight if I yell at them in class…and they will just do it next time as well. How sad. "

I wonder if she acknowledges that she plays a role in this lack of student engagement? Don't get me wrong--students should not be talking, Facebook-ing, texting, or gaming during her lecture, all of which happens on a regular basis. But if I learned anything in my little experience teaching it's that you have to call students on their behavior, immediately when it is happening, or they will keep doing it.

Students would also leave all the time right in the middle of her lecture. She would be droning on about skeletal muscle contractions or the instrinsic conduction system of the heart, and several students would just leave, on a daily basis. One day after class she sent the following email:

"Is there some reason why people are constantly leaving the classroom suddenly this semester? In my 25 years teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology, I have never had this happen so routinely or so abruptly. Anyway, it is starting to make my mouth draw into a tight little line, so that must mean that it is irritating and distracting me. Was wondering if there was a reason for it that was known…or if not, could you please sit nearer the front of the room? It’s like people just suddenly bolt from their seats for no reason. Will try to be more tolerant, but it’s starting to strike me as being rude…which is not a good thing for my attitude while lecturing. Sorry to complain, but what in the world is going on with this? Probably some perfectly normal explanation."

I think this is really sad, that you get to a point where you are either opposed or unwilling to update your approaches in order to engage your audience. This class could be so interesting, with all the anatomy & physiology material available online that is interactive, all the ways that she could relate the topics to current health issues, and yet she lectures straight from the textbook, displays dense amounts of text under a document camera, and uses hand-drawn diagrams when she could be playing video clips or animation or any various multimedia available online. She even shows SCREEN CAPTURES of the obviously dated computer simulations that she assigns outside of class, rather than demonstrating the simulation in real-time on the computer.

Most confounding to me is her lengthy discussions of her circa 1980 published research about horses, given that this is a teaching university, not a research university, and she clearly hasn't updated her teaching practices in about 20 years. Not to mention that this is a human anatomy & physiology course.

Now, I've only had three college level science courses in the past year, but so far I have a bad impression. Science should be interactive, engaging, thought-provoking, and hands-on. So far all I know is that I will show up to a lecture and absolutely nothing will be expected of me other than to sit there passively and listen.

"It's real lullaby material," one student said to me on the way out of class one day. "Puts me right to sleep."
"It's so sad," I replied.
"I'm used to it," she said. "I'm a science major."

Patent Foramen Ovale & Fetal Circulation

When my mom was in the hospital for four months, after having an ischemic stroke that blocked blood flow to the right side of her brain, I kept hearing doctors say things about the reasons for my mom’s stroke—things like, “she has a PFO.” I had no idea what this term meant, but I later found out that PFO stands for “patent foramen ovale.” It’s a hole between the right and left atrium in the heart, which allows blood to bypass the lungs during fetal development. The foramen ovale is supposed to close on its own at birth, when the baby begins to breathe on her own, but in 20% of the population, the hole never closes, resulting in a patent foramen ovale, a hole between the atria of the heart. Since it can be hereditary, doctors recommended that my sisters and I be evaluated for a PFO. A transthoracic echocardiogram with a bubble study confirmed that I do have a PFO, and neither of my sisters do. There is no treatment and usually no symptoms, although doctors suspect that a PFO can allow blood to pool and form clots, and therefore increase the risk of stroke.

Our method of studying this in A&P involved text and a couple heart models in lab (our class is pretty much devoid of technology), but as I suspected, a search of “fetal circulation” on YouTube reveals many creative approaches to understanding fetal circulation and the changes that occur at birth. The foramen ovale is supposed to close at birth and be replaced by a flap of tissue called the fossa ovalis. And there are several other unique characteristics of fetal circulation similar to the foramen ovale, such as the ductus arteriosus, which allows blood to bypass the lungs by shunting blood from the pulmonary trunk to the aorta, and on to systemic circulation. When the ductus arteriosus closes at birth, it becomes the ligamentum arteriosum. These videos also discuss the umbilical vein, ductus venosus, and the umbilical arteries.

The following YouTube clips show fetal circulation in a creative and interesting way. I think it also says a lot for how audio and images can be paired with text to demonstrate a process or complex concepts in ways that are easy to understand. These are relatively simple projects that involve still images and audio, and no actual video footage. It’s exciting to see that some educators are taking advantage of technology-based assignments that students will enjoy much more than sitting idly in a lab and identifying numbers on plastic models. These projects would also help students learn about processes and how different parts of anatomy are related, rather than just focusing on identification and rote memorization. Do you think my A&P teacher would be offended if I sent her links to these YouTube videos?! Probably.

Negativity or Reflection?

I am a proponent of education. I have several degrees, with a possible third degree in progress. As a student, college was a transformational experience for me, which I would not trade for anything. My experience as a teacher and as a tech support person in higher education, has been, like any job, surprising, challenging, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes rewarding...sometimes in complete opposition to the values of a liberal education.

It is my liberal education that taught me to always question, critique, and analyze the world around me. And so I do not accept this world I experience at face value. I will always be wondering why and what if and for some reason, I guess I will always see the irony in things.

I hope that I can share my view of the world without being negative. I hope that I can critique and analyze without being negative. I have high standards and believe we can always be better, but we'll never get there without reflection and analysis. This is the core of what my education was all about.

An Impending Pandemic = Suddenly We Care About Technology?

For years we have offered technology workshops to students, faculty, and staff. We publicize these workshops on the web, via email, in brochures that are sent campus wide. Even during a significant upgrade, like switching from Office 2003 to Office 2007, we were lucky to get five people attending each session. There simply has never been any push from the administrative level, or from department heads, for staff or instructors to advance their technology skills.

Our new teaching & learning center, formed to encourage professional development, does not address technology. There are no plans to employ an instructional technologist, even though instructors are struggling to integrate technology into their curriculum. They see technology as the domain of the IT department. This means that our people who understand assignment design and pedagogy don’t understand technology, and our technology people don’t understand assignment design or pedagogy. People who train others on technology, and who are sometimes invited to classrooms to teach technology, get caught in this conundrum.

The attitude here is that curriculum is one thing and technology is another, separate thing, and if instructors want to assign students to create a website or make a video, they just order up the technology training and have someone else teach and support it, and patch it into their syllabus like a band aid. The problem with this is, for many disciplines, there is no division between technology and curriculum. Take journalism for example. The instructor is the only person who can provide a meaningful context for the technology. As an IT person, I can teach the technology, but I cannot teach how a journalist or a market analyst or someone in another discipline would use the technology. It is the instructor who has the potential to blend the mechanics of the technology with the best practices of their particular discipline.

And this is where the anti-technology sentiment is most troubling to me. Instructors ask me to come to their classrooms and teach beginner students who are not computer science or information systems majors to design and develop websites, after receiving one short training session. We just provided two full weeks of instruction for three sections of a three credit course because the instructor can’t support his own technology-based assignment, but he is also unwilling to modify his assignment. Because departments are at risk of losing their accreditation because they haven’t incorporated technology into their curriculum and they are looking to me to fill that gap, rather than learning the technology themselves, even though that technology has become a core component of their discipline. We’re asked to teach old technology, advanced technology that isn’t appropriate for beginners, and things that seem pointless.

Integrating technology into curriculum is a struggle, an after thought, no one’s responsibility but that of the IT department, which just received almost three quarters of a million dollars worth of budget cuts.

But suddenly, now that this institution is worried about an impending flu pandemic, about the possibility of having to GIVE BACK TUITION MONEY, now they are concerned about instructors’ ability to maintain communication with students, and continue sharing course content in a pandemic situation. Because guess what this means??? That you’ve learned how to put your course content online. That you’ve learned to use email. That you know how to access your files from home. That perhaps you have even experimented with new, online tools for communicating with students, such as instant messaging, and an abundance of free online tools for holding virtual meetings. Above, all, that you've TAKEN OWNERSHIP of your skills and your ability to teach and learn and communicate in the highly virtual twenty first century.

Emails were even sent out from administration about using new “social distance” tools to keep courses running if your class can’t meet face to face—things like instant messaging and virtual meeting tools. I found this announcement to be extremely out of touch with the technology skills of instructors. Do administrators seriously think that, when stricken down by the swine flu, instructors will finally be motivated to learn to use new technology tools? That after we have cultivated an anti-technology attitude, now, when faced with a pandemic, people will suddenly be interested in advancing their technology skills?

Now, they are concerned about this.

Maybe if technology had been a priority all along, most of our course material would already be available online right now, instead of a small fraction of it.

I can see the official press release already: “We had a comprehensive pandemic preparedness plan in place and took systemic measures to provide training and support for these procedures.”

I wish I had no opinions about things. It would make things a lot easier. I would just go to work, complete tasks, not think about them, and leave. But I think it’s really sad that this is what it takes for people to care about technology.