Interdisciplinary Inquiry: Participation

BLS 300: Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Prof. Michael Goldberg

Criteria for In-class Collaborative Learning Assessment

Consistent, frequent, and thoughtful participation in class discussions/activities is a requirement of the participation grade. You should contribute one useful comment each large class session, and you work in small class sessions should reflect a roughly equal degree of participation by all members. Those who abstain from discussion will not fulfill the requirements of the course, and and will be graded down significantly. The matter is fairly simple: your presence in the room, while important to us, does not in itself mark a contribution to our process. If you normally have trouble speaking up in public, please see me to discuss strategies. We will work together to develop the crucial skill.

Although your contributions as a class member can not be measured with a turnstile, it is difficult to demonstrate your understandings or refine them without constant dialogue. The class meets twice a week. To avoid missing announcements and interrupting class discussions, you should come to class on time. Class discussions relate directly to the writing you do. Keeping up with the assignments will enable you to learn from the discussions, and participating in the discussions will help you in responding to the assignments. To keep up and to meet your responsibilities to the rest of the class, therefore, you'll need to be on time and prepared. It will also be your responsibility to get assignments and make up any classwork that you've missed. To anticipate this possibility, I advise you to establish a peer partner at the outset of the class: exchange contact information, establish mutually agreeable terms for supporting one another in such situations, and begin with this person if you find must miss class. For reasons I trust are or will become evident, it is not good practice to contact an instructor after an absence and ask "Did I miss anything?" The answer to this question is always affirmative, and you should make every effort to address what you've missed by working first with your peer partner. It is not possible for me to reconstruct or recap class sessions on an individual basis after your absences, although I am available to answer reasonable questions after you have consulted your peer partner.

Participation is not merely a matter of how often or at what length you speak in class. What you say (and how you say it) matters greatly. Your comments should reflect careful reading, thoughtful response, and the making of creative course connections. Well-developed questions are sometimes as valuable as statements or conclusions.

You must, then, recognize that participation in discussion is a skill which can be practiced as diligently as one’s writing skills. What follows is a list of some elements of this skill:

Listening is surely the most important aspect of discussion. You must be keenly aware both of what individuals are saying and what direction the whole class is heading. You should listen so well that you can re-state classmates’ remarks so that they can recognize and accept your restatements. Only if you have heard others can you fit your own observations into the flow of the whole discussion, only then can you sustain the flow rather than disrupt it.

Reading is crucial to effective participation in this class for every discussion in the course is inspired by texts. Students who have not done the reading simply cannot contribute to the discussion and the sense of community among discussants. You must not only read through assignments, but you must actively prepare for discussions as well. This means listing page numbers of important passages that might need to be cited, jotting down questions that ought to be raised in class (and later seeing to it that they are raised), and beginning to formulate an interpretive thesis about the book that might be defended in class. Students who do the reading but wait to get "turned on" by the discussion leader’s questions are probably too passive to do a class much good.

An atmosphere of supportiveness must exist in a successful class. You can encourage other students by your questions, your attentiveness, your responses, and your expressions of appreciation. On the other hand you can discourage others by showing contempt or indifference, talking to neighbors during someone’s remarks, or responding rudely. No one wants to take personal risks or pursue a discussion of delicate human questions in that kind of atmosphere.

Rigor in judgment is necessary as a group improves its understanding of a text. This means that you must make stern critical assessments of everything classmates say, and you must express your disagreements clearly and forcefully. It is possible to disagree with classmates and still express respect for them. The falsest kind of respect, after all, is the kind that is uncritical.

Participation in and attentiveness to each session is an expectation. This is so because, as we have seen, good discussions are cumulative-- everything builds upon what has gone before. Students who do not participate or attend to others can add very little to the progress a class is making, for they have missed important developments along the way.

Recognizing the text precedes answering humanistic questions. Our discussions should be informed by careful and engaged reading, not the reader’s casual impressions. Answers to questions should be based upon the text or relevant research. This means that you must bring your materials to every class, have those books open before you, and refer to them to illustrate your points.

Finally, speaking is the most obvious kind of participation. Students who never open their mouths contribute very little to their classes. Your goal should be to become a regular and effective participant in discussion. Some class discussions are quire informal, so you may use English in a much more relaxed way than you do in your papers. You should, nevertheless, speak loudly and clearly. You should not address your remarks to the discussion leader(s) alone, but to the class as a whole. You should speak precisely and forcefully. There is no maximum or minimum number of times that you should speak during a session, but you should neither dominate nor drop out of a discussion.

This sounds difficult, and it is. Effective participation is a special skill that requires continual work and thought. You should not lose sight of the fact, however, that discussions can be stimulating and fun. You can delight in the company of classmates as well as the company of the text.

It is important that we remember that texts are, by their nature, communal. Writings are efforts of individual human beings to communicate to other human beings. One of the unfortunate developments of contemporary culture is the fact that we do most of our reading alone in our rooms. While reflection is best carried on by oneself, the ideas that result from reflection need to be tested and shared with other people. We deflect a book from its communal purpose if we let it be a purely private experience-- if we never speak of it to others.

A group of people really can achieve a sense of a text that is richer and fuller than the sense of that book brought to the discussion by any one person. If this were not true, there would be no point in having discussions. Each conversation emphasizes different aspects of a book, raises different objections, discovers different delights. The harder a group of people works at developing discussion skills, the more discoveries there will be and the more profound the experience of the text and its issues will be.

Good discussions are cumulative experiences. Compared to the final version of a paper, in which every word may be a polished gem, most statements in a discussion are partial failures; that is, they are attempts to "get at" a feature of a text and they are attempts that fail. But, if you are patient and keep trying to explain yourselves and encourage others to explain themselves, then those "unsuccessful" statements will culminate finally in a group insight, a shared understanding, a class resolution that really is a gem (albeit an unpolished one). This will only happen, however, if you trust the process and do not insist that every moment of class be ineffably thrilling, that every utterance be breathtaking in its brilliance or final in its truth and certainty. Discussion is a trial and error process in which errors are gradually eliminated through mutual criticism and correction. A discussion is a chance to encounter other minds and personalities and share great words and images with them. That opportunity is seldom found after college, even though discussion skills are necessary throughout your life.

This page adapted from Linda Watts' BLS 300 syllabus. Used with permission by the author.

There is no "recipe" for conducting or evaluating class contribution, but we can isolate some of the characteristics of relatively successful or unsuccessful performances in this category. What follows are profiles, or composites, of characteristics within graded performances in class contribution. In other words, these are lists of attributes frequently demonstrated by class members earning various contribution grades. Not all must be uniformly present in a given class member or across every class session, and conduct of individual participants over the weeks of a term frequently will combine attributes from multiple performance profiles. Therefore, while these profiles begin to speak to criteria at work in evaluating class contribution, they are not offered here as definitive benchmarks (hence not made to coincide exactly with numerical scales or grade equivalents), and are furnished only to dramatize some nuances in class contribution behaviors, as well as distinctions made in assessing performances.

In the end, I score contribution using a combination of three modes of assessment: individual assessments (a student's development and progress during the term), comparative assessments (what members of the same section, or class, demonstrate is possible), and contextual assessments (what students whose work I have evaluated over the years suggests about the full spectrum of class contribution performances). You may not agree utterly with my scoring of your performance (and I do not ask you to agree), but I want you to have clarity about how I understand the process of assessing class contribution.

"A" Profile