Knowing your students – “You want to have done your homework so you know how to walk in that person's shoes"
February 23, 2009 Usually during a flight back from a site visit, I try to work, at least, at first. But as the plane gets close to home, I put away my computer and start looking for excuses not to work. Sometimes this takes the form of staring blankly out the window, or flipping through the pages of a pointless catalog hawking Lord-of-the-Rings swords and selling shoes that are guaranteed to “put a spring in your step.” My last resort is usually the airline magazine.
When I returned from my most recent trip, I happened to read an article in the Northwest Airlines magazine (World Traveler, February 2009) in which Kevin Bacon described how he prepared for his role in the film “Taking Chance.” This film recounts the journey that Lt. Col. Michael Strobl took when he escorted Lance Cpl. Chance Phelps’s remains to Phelps’s hometown in Wyoming. Bacon plays Michael Strobl in the film, and it is a heartbreaking and powerful movie.
Having recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s claim in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of hard work for someone to become an expert, I was fascinated to read about how Bacon worked to prepare for his role. I also wondered whether there were any lessons to be learned about teaching.
According to the article, Bacon typically “writes a complete biography of his character, including small details like favorite color, favorite meal and favorite album.” Bacon said that doing so "helps in strange ways." The article goes on to state:
Bacon had a real person to study. "I met the family and hung out with Mike [Strobl]. I talked with him about his memories and his feelings. I tried to get a sense of his state of mind now and his state of mind during the journey. I saw his house, his clothes, his furniture, his walk." Bacon even took the playlist from Strobl's iPod.
"It helps me find the essence of the person," he explains. "Here's the thing: I'll do whatever it takes to study a person, but I won't necessarily know how that will actually affect my performance. But if, for instance, a prop man comes up to you—and this happens on every movie—and he opens up a box and there's 80 different watches, or pens, or rings, you don't want to be thrown by that. You want to have done your homework so you know how to walk in that person's shoes."
We visit many campuses each year, and we are always struck by the campus lore about the qualities and interests that incoming students bring to the institution. What makes the campus lore particularly interesting is that we are not entirely naive about the incoming student body when we visit. We typically review survey data from the Wabash National Study, the CIRP, or some other information before we arrive on campus. What we've found is that campus lore can be both wonderfully accurate and terribly wrong at the same time. Faculty and staff can have an acute and accurate awareness of how interested, or disinterested, their new students are in the arts or sciences, and at the same time, have no clue about whether their students come from college-educated families or are working off campus. When I say “no clue,” I don’t mean that faculty and staff are disinterested in this information. Indeed, most of the time people on campus have very strong views about the extent to which their students are, for example, interested in spirituality or in getting a graduate degree. The problem is that these views are frequently wrong.
The impact of these mistaken myths is not inconsequential. For example, at one school with which we have worked, faculty believed that a large proportion of their students were working at jobs off campus to support themselves. This belief, in turn, led faculty to diminish the extent to which they challenged their students in first-year courses. And that move had consequences on student learning.
The question, then, is whether there are easy ways to renew our sense of our students, and learn some details about what they bring to college. We know of at least one helpful exercise that we have used at a number of institutions participating in the Wabash National Study. But the technique we describe here can be used as a means of working with a group of staff and/or faculty on any incoming student survey information.
Institutions typically administer the first component of the Wabash National Study within a couple of weeks after students arrive on campus. The study includes many different questions about student’s academic goals, their values, and their experiences in high school. Rather than simply giving a summary of this information when we work with faculty or staff groups, we often start by passing out a list of the questions that students answered without any data on students’ responses (see survey and registration WNS questions). We then ask everyone to look through the questions and jot down how they think their students will answer compared to typical students at other institutions. The key here is to ask everyone to write their thoughts and assumptions down—they need to commit.
Next, we usually have a discussion about what people think the data will show. Again, the idea is to get people to say publicly what they think will happen. Once people have gone through this exercise, it’s time to pass out the real data. We then ask people to review the data and talk about where they were right and where they were wrong. At most campuses, people will get a lot of things right and a few things wrong.
Many institutions distribute information about incoming students. This is important to do, but our experience suggests that a slightly different approach might prompt more conversations about the data and your students. The approach to distributing data we describe above forces faculty and staff to be explicit with themselves and others about what they believe about their students, and then it confronts those beliefs with actual information. In essence, the exercise creates the possibility of surprise and reconsideration, which often prompts discussion.
The goal of this exercise is not necessarily to develop specific new institutional policies or programs. Rather, we see it as a kind of preparation that can “help in strange ways” to inform the countless informal discussions and small decisions that happen in our courses, departments, and programs every day—the kinds of small but important decisions that may be the learning-and-teaching equivalent to a visit from the prop man.
--CB
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