responses to case study

Classrooms of the Future IV

LARA CRAFT CASE

Lara Craft is a spanking new Ph.D. with her degree in sociology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation was on the deconstruction of prison as a text. She beat out four candidates from universities such as Princeton, Northwestern and UCLA to land a job at Sweet Ivy College. Used to big city life, Lara feared the little town of Gum Stump would be a boring place to live. Nevertheless the offer was so generous and the research support so lavish that she accepted the offer.

Craft taught Sociology 43, Introduction to Criminal Behavior, to 37 students during the fall semester. She wrote and performed energetic lectures in which she conveyed her love for the subject as well as her detailed knowledge of criminal activities, argot and culture. She gave a multiple-choice mid-term exam of fifty items, assigned a 25 page research paper and a final exam of four short essay plus 35 multiple choice questions.

The lectures demanded all of her attention and she did not get a good sense of student response. When she tried to initiate discussions, a few students in the front rows participated—often by repeating what she had just said. By mid semester she noticed that attendance was down. However, her student ratings of teaching effectiveness were well above average and earned her high praise from the department chairman.

Beginning with her mid-term exams and ending with the final exam, Craft was dismayed by the students’ work. The class average on the midterm was 49 out of a possible 100 points and she had to curve the scores to keep from flunking everyone. The term papers were marked by sloppy thinking, bad writing, mechanical verbatim repetition of a few concepts and propositions plus many assertions of opinions apparently gleaned from dubious web sites, talk radio shows and late night bull-sessions. Mid term questions repeated on the final were invariable missed. She had the sneaking notion that the honest thing to do was to fail two thirds of the students. Instead Craft held her nose and used the curve to assign 59% of the students A’s or B’s. After a talk with her department head, she failed only three students who had not completed at least one exam or the paper although nine students had not made minimal efforts in the course.

Lara Craft had always been a reflective thinker. When things went wrong she had the courage to find out why. But her students’ performance was so disappointing that she wrote in her journal: "I don’t seem cut out for teaching." Dismayed by the prospect of teaching the course again, she looked around for some help. Professor Busby Binkely across the hall told her to contact the Optimistic Center for Excellence in Everything—fondly referred to as "Oh, SEE". She did and a tall handsome man with pointed ears and an other-worldly demeanor, told her that the keys to good teaching were in the latest cognitive theories of learning. Craft read the handout the creature gave her, labored through the jargon and summed up the document this way:

Teachers cannot cause learning, learning must be caused by the learner. The most important thing that determines learning is what the learner already knows. Rote-learning -- memorizing information and regurgitating it in discussion, on examinations or in written assignments -- is quickly forgotten and, indeed, makes the learning of new material harder. Meaningful learning as opposed to rote-learning happens when students choose to thoughtfully relate new knowledge to what they already know. Meaningful learning requires three things: the learner must know some things that relate to the new knowledge; the material to be learned must be organized into concepts and propositions that are relevant to other knowledge and the learner must decide to relate the new material to what they already know and make necessary changes in their models of reality. Thoughtful practice and realistic rehearsal contribute to meaningful learning.

Armed with these insights, Craft thought she should completely re-design her course. She set two goals for the course. These were to enhance students’ ability to:

investigate problems of criminal behavior as social scientists would, and
talk, write and conduct inquiry using the concepts and principles of sociology.

She planned to spend the first six weeks of the course on basics: vocabulary, concepts and principles and the last nine weeks on application of those basics to a series of realistic cases. Craft wants to do something other than lecture all of the time, but isn’t sure how to get all the material across to the students. Also, she is considering using student teams to work on the cases during the second half of the course.

She comes to you as a group of committed instructors and learners to get your ideas about what she could do to improve her course.

What does your team recommend to get her started?
Specifically, Lara Craft needs your answers to the following questions.

How can she promote meaningful learning and reduce rote learning?
What can she do to find out what students’ already know? How important are student misconceptions? What can she do about them?
How can she facilitate student learning without lecturing? How could she use information technology to reduce lecture time and increase active learning?

Your team has 15 minutes to reach a working consensus on answers to these questions. When the time is up, I will call on different teams to report on their general recommendations and their answers to Lara’s questions. Good luck!