from Chapter 12, Common Problems, in the book: On Course - A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, by James M. Lang
Q: How do I handle rude student behavior in my classroom-talking, laughing, getting up and down during class?
"No experience of new faculty as teachers," writes Robert Boice, "is so dramatic and traumatizing as facing unruly, uninvolved students-especially in the large, introductory courses traditionally assigned to newcomers" (81). Undoubtedly true; equally troublesome, with the omnipresence of laptops and wireless-enabled classrooms, are students spending class time shopping for shoes online, rather than taking notes (see following question).
Two major points here. First, rude student behavior often comes about because of what's happening at the front of the classroom. If students are talking and reading the student newspaper during the lecture, sending e-mails, or IMing their friends, your lectures may be boring. If students are chit-chatting with each other during the discussion, you may not be asking interesting questions. A well-taught class is the best preventive measure you can take to counter what Boice calls as "student incivilities." His research on this issue suggests that newcomers face student incivilities at much higher rates than highly rated teachers with years of classroom experience (81-98). Fortunately for you, you are doing the work right now to become a highly rated teacher, and following the prescriptions of this book-and other preparatory work you do for your first semester-will be the best measure you can take against poor behavior.
However students, like the rest of the population, can be just rude idiots, so sometimes your best teaching efforts won't be enough to eliminate such behaviors. You won't know always know about students surfing the internet in class, but you will certainly know about noisy and rude students. When that happens, you can either shame such students by calling them on the behavior in front of their peers, or you can find ways to discuss their behavior with them in private. My non-confrontational personality, coupled with a dozen years of teaching and raising children, have convinced me that the latter route is the better one for correcting poor behavior. When identifiable students are acting uncivilly in your classroom (however you may define such activity), you can stop them after class and give them the standard lines you would expect to give-that such behavior makes it difficult for you and other students to concentrate, and so on. You can also ask them to come see you in your office, and discuss it there, if you think they require a more serious dressing down. A third method that I have used is to append a P.S. to one of my final comments on their papers, addressing the behavior and asking them to improve it or to come see me in my office. Calling them on the behavior privately like this has always worked for me. If you try this and it doesn't have the desired effect, check with your chair; seriously persistent and disruptive behavior should be observed by a senior faculty or administrator so that you won't suffer for it in your teaching evaluations (and they may be able to intervene with the students).
Q: Students have their laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and what-have-you on in my classroom, and whenever I step out into the seats I can see that half of them are shopping for shoes or downloading music or text messaging their friends. Some students have cell phones going off in class. What can I do about this?
A: This is probably the most annoying problem we will all face in the future, so best to consider it now and decide how you want to handle it. The solutions seem to me different for different sized-classes. In small classes, twenty or thirty or less, you need to have a strong physical presence in the classroom. You should be using interactive teaching methods in classes that size, of course, and such methods give you an opportunity to move out into the seats, work your way around the classroom, and let students know that at any given moment you will be standing behind them, seeing whatever they have on their desk or laptop. Do not isolate yourself in the front of the classroom; you command the entire space of the classroom, and you need to make yourself felt at every desk. You don't need to be in constant motion, of course; student awareness of your mobility will go a long way towards keeping them on task.
In larger lecture classrooms and auditoria, you can still do some of this, but the problems will be worse here. So you have two choices, and neither of them are ideal: learn to live with a certain amount of technological distraction, or ban the technologies that are disrupting your classroom. If you choose option one, it doesn't mean you should do nothing. At the very least, you should discuss the inappropriate use of technology in the classroom at the beginning of the semester, and perhaps even include on the syllabus a technology warning like the one cited by Michael Bujega in a Chronicle essay on this subject:
If your cellular phone is heard by the class you are responsible for completing one of two options: 1. Before the end of the class period you will sing a verse and chorus of any song of your choice or, 2. You will lead the next class period through a 10-minute discussion on a topic to be determined by the end of the class. (To the extent that there are multiple individuals in violation, duets will be accepted).
Whether you use humor in such a warning or not, including an admonition on the syllabus gives you an excuse to discuss the use of technology with students in the classroom, and to help the conscientious (but perhaps clueless) students see how to comport themselves more appropriately.
However, if you are teaching in a large wireless classroom, facing a sea of laptops, and you are convinced that the vast majority of the students are not listening to your scintillating words, then don't hesitate to ban laptops, either outright or for specific parts of the session. No student has a constitutional right to bring a laptop to class, so you have every right to forbid them (you might announce that you will make special provisions for students with disabilities, however). Don't feel bad about it; students have been taking notes with pencil and paper for many hundreds of years; it won't kill them. A less stringent option would be to allow or encourage laptops for specific activities in class-asking students to join you in reviewing a website or program you have scouted for them in advance, or working with them on a program or problem-but then asking them to close the laptops for the fifteen-minute lecture module you have planned for the end of the class, when you will be summarizing the main idea of the day.
Remember-you are in charge. As Bujega concludes at the end of his essay on inappropriate technology in the classroom, "despite digital distractions, large classes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology."
Q: Students are not coming to class, or they come late. Do I leave those choices up to them, since they are adults, or do I become an enforcer and start each class with a daily quiz?
An article on poor attendance in college and university courses, which appeared in the spring of 2007 on insidehighered.com and provoked a massive outpouring of responses, offered a bleak picture of this issue. The article included the following statistics on attendance and tardiness patterns:
A 2005 survey of first-year undergraduate students by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles showed that while a majority of college students spend 11 or more hours in class per week, 33 percent reported skipping class and 63 percent said they come to class late "occasionally" or "frequently."A similar survey showed that the proportion of students who report coming late to class has jumped from 48 percent in 1966 to 61 percent in 2006 - evidence, one could argue, of a growing indifference to class in general.
I'm going to start sounding like a bit of a skipping CD here, but the first principle is to ensure that you are creating a classroom experience which students could not duplicate by copying someone else's lecture notes, or by listening to a recording of your lecture. Students, in other words, should play a role in the classroom. If you are giving students a role to play-through discussions, group work, in-class writing, problem-solving, and so on-then you have every right to say that the success of the course depends upon the presence of the students, and to require that presence. If you are standing in front of a podium and lecturing for fifty minutes, then I'm with the tardy and missing students on this one-why should they come to class, when they can get the same material more efficiently, and in the comfort of their dorm rooms, from other means?
As long as you are offering a class worth attending, which depends upon students for its success, then you should not hesitate to drop the hammer on late and absent students. Take whatever measures seem appropriate to you, from locking the door at the start of class to giving daily quizzes at the opening of class, from calling tardy students to the carpet as they walk in the door to penalizing students who miss more than three classes on their final grade. Consult the article on insidehighered.com for more ideas on combating this problem, and especially the responses that follow.
Q: I have trouble remembering the names of my own children; the prospect of remembering the names of several sets of twenty or thirty or forty undergraduates each year just seems impossible. Can I call on them as "red baseball cap" or "kid who plagiarized" or "crewcut" just to keep things simple for me?
A: I did know a teacher who managed this successfully, actually. At the beginning of the semester he hit upon some aspect of a student's appearance or mannerisms, gave them a nickname linked to it, and then referred to him or her in that manner in class. He pulled it off because he was eccentric and had a great sense of humor, and did not use offensive or embarassing nicknames (i.e., no one was nicknamed "baldie" or anything). The potential ways in which this practice could go bad are so numerous, though, that I really wouldn't recommend it.
Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who counsels academics on career issues, addressed this problem in an essay for the online academic news site insidehighered.com, and described there more than a dozen techniques for learning the names of students-her list is worth consulting, and is available online for free (see below for reference). The one that I like best, number twelve, may be the simplest. Every time a student asks a question or speaks in class, ask them for their name; repeat the name somehow in the answer-"Jane asks an important question here . . ."-and if that question or your response to it comes up in class again, associate it once again with her name: "You'll remember that Jane asked us this question last week . . ." The more times you repeat the name, the more likely you will be to remember it. This technique has the bonus benefit of affirming the importance of student contributions in your classroom, making visible to them how their ideas are woven into the fabric of the lectures and discussions. Classes of fifty or more obviously do not require you to learn everyone's name, but don't abandon names altogether. Learn any names you can, but don't fret about not having comprehensive coverage.
- University of Oregon, Teaching Effectiveness Program
"No experience of new faculty as teachers," writes Robert Boice, "is so dramatic and traumatizing as facing unruly, uninvolved students-especially in the large, introductory courses traditionally assigned to newcomers" (81). Undoubtedly true; equally troublesome, with the omnipresence of laptops and wireless-enabled classrooms, are students spending class time shopping for shoes online, rather than taking notes (see following question).
Two major points here. First, rude student behavior often comes about because of what's happening at the front of the classroom. If students are talking and reading the student newspaper during the lecture, sending e-mails, or IMing their friends, your lectures may be boring. If students are chit-chatting with each other during the discussion, you may not be asking interesting questions. A well-taught class is the best preventive measure you can take to counter what Boice calls as "student incivilities." His research on this issue suggests that newcomers face student incivilities at much higher rates than highly rated teachers with years of classroom experience (81-98). Fortunately for you, you are doing the work right now to become a highly rated teacher, and following the prescriptions of this book-and other preparatory work you do for your first semester-will be the best measure you can take against poor behavior.
However students, like the rest of the population, can be just rude idiots, so sometimes your best teaching efforts won't be enough to eliminate such behaviors. You won't know always know about students surfing the internet in class, but you will certainly know about noisy and rude students. When that happens, you can either shame such students by calling them on the behavior in front of their peers, or you can find ways to discuss their behavior with them in private. My non-confrontational personality, coupled with a dozen years of teaching and raising children, have convinced me that the latter route is the better one for correcting poor behavior. When identifiable students are acting uncivilly in your classroom (however you may define such activity), you can stop them after class and give them the standard lines you would expect to give-that such behavior makes it difficult for you and other students to concentrate, and so on. You can also ask them to come see you in your office, and discuss it there, if you think they require a more serious dressing down. A third method that I have used is to append a P.S. to one of my final comments on their papers, addressing the behavior and asking them to improve it or to come see me in my office. Calling them on the behavior privately like this has always worked for me. If you try this and it doesn't have the desired effect, check with your chair; seriously persistent and disruptive behavior should be observed by a senior faculty or administrator so that you won't suffer for it in your teaching evaluations (and they may be able to intervene with the students).
Q: Students have their laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and what-have-you on in my classroom, and whenever I step out into the seats I can see that half of them are shopping for shoes or downloading music or text messaging their friends. Some students have cell phones going off in class. What can I do about this?
A: This is probably the most annoying problem we will all face in the future, so best to consider it now and decide how you want to handle it. The solutions seem to me different for different sized-classes. In small classes, twenty or thirty or less, you need to have a strong physical presence in the classroom. You should be using interactive teaching methods in classes that size, of course, and such methods give you an opportunity to move out into the seats, work your way around the classroom, and let students know that at any given moment you will be standing behind them, seeing whatever they have on their desk or laptop. Do not isolate yourself in the front of the classroom; you command the entire space of the classroom, and you need to make yourself felt at every desk. You don't need to be in constant motion, of course; student awareness of your mobility will go a long way towards keeping them on task.
In larger lecture classrooms and auditoria, you can still do some of this, but the problems will be worse here. So you have two choices, and neither of them are ideal: learn to live with a certain amount of technological distraction, or ban the technologies that are disrupting your classroom. If you choose option one, it doesn't mean you should do nothing. At the very least, you should discuss the inappropriate use of technology in the classroom at the beginning of the semester, and perhaps even include on the syllabus a technology warning like the one cited by Michael Bujega in a Chronicle essay on this subject:
If your cellular phone is heard by the class you are responsible for completing one of two options: 1. Before the end of the class period you will sing a verse and chorus of any song of your choice or, 2. You will lead the next class period through a 10-minute discussion on a topic to be determined by the end of the class. (To the extent that there are multiple individuals in violation, duets will be accepted).
Whether you use humor in such a warning or not, including an admonition on the syllabus gives you an excuse to discuss the use of technology with students in the classroom, and to help the conscientious (but perhaps clueless) students see how to comport themselves more appropriately.
However, if you are teaching in a large wireless classroom, facing a sea of laptops, and you are convinced that the vast majority of the students are not listening to your scintillating words, then don't hesitate to ban laptops, either outright or for specific parts of the session. No student has a constitutional right to bring a laptop to class, so you have every right to forbid them (you might announce that you will make special provisions for students with disabilities, however). Don't feel bad about it; students have been taking notes with pencil and paper for many hundreds of years; it won't kill them. A less stringent option would be to allow or encourage laptops for specific activities in class-asking students to join you in reviewing a website or program you have scouted for them in advance, or working with them on a program or problem-but then asking them to close the laptops for the fifteen-minute lecture module you have planned for the end of the class, when you will be summarizing the main idea of the day.
Remember-you are in charge. As Bujega concludes at the end of his essay on inappropriate technology in the classroom, "despite digital distractions, large classes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology."
Q: Students are not coming to class, or they come late. Do I leave those choices up to them, since they are adults, or do I become an enforcer and start each class with a daily quiz?
An article on poor attendance in college and university courses, which appeared in the spring of 2007 on insidehighered.com and provoked a massive outpouring of responses, offered a bleak picture of this issue. The article included the following statistics on attendance and tardiness patterns:
A 2005 survey of first-year undergraduate students by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles showed that while a majority of college students spend 11 or more hours in class per week, 33 percent reported skipping class and 63 percent said they come to class late "occasionally" or "frequently."A similar survey showed that the proportion of students who report coming late to class has jumped from 48 percent in 1966 to 61 percent in 2006 - evidence, one could argue, of a growing indifference to class in general.
I'm going to start sounding like a bit of a skipping CD here, but the first principle is to ensure that you are creating a classroom experience which students could not duplicate by copying someone else's lecture notes, or by listening to a recording of your lecture. Students, in other words, should play a role in the classroom. If you are giving students a role to play-through discussions, group work, in-class writing, problem-solving, and so on-then you have every right to say that the success of the course depends upon the presence of the students, and to require that presence. If you are standing in front of a podium and lecturing for fifty minutes, then I'm with the tardy and missing students on this one-why should they come to class, when they can get the same material more efficiently, and in the comfort of their dorm rooms, from other means?
As long as you are offering a class worth attending, which depends upon students for its success, then you should not hesitate to drop the hammer on late and absent students. Take whatever measures seem appropriate to you, from locking the door at the start of class to giving daily quizzes at the opening of class, from calling tardy students to the carpet as they walk in the door to penalizing students who miss more than three classes on their final grade. Consult the article on insidehighered.com for more ideas on combating this problem, and especially the responses that follow.
Q: I have trouble remembering the names of my own children; the prospect of remembering the names of several sets of twenty or thirty or forty undergraduates each year just seems impossible. Can I call on them as "red baseball cap" or "kid who plagiarized" or "crewcut" just to keep things simple for me?
A: I did know a teacher who managed this successfully, actually. At the beginning of the semester he hit upon some aspect of a student's appearance or mannerisms, gave them a nickname linked to it, and then referred to him or her in that manner in class. He pulled it off because he was eccentric and had a great sense of humor, and did not use offensive or embarassing nicknames (i.e., no one was nicknamed "baldie" or anything). The potential ways in which this practice could go bad are so numerous, though, that I really wouldn't recommend it.
Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who counsels academics on career issues, addressed this problem in an essay for the online academic news site insidehighered.com, and described there more than a dozen techniques for learning the names of students-her list is worth consulting, and is available online for free (see below for reference). The one that I like best, number twelve, may be the simplest. Every time a student asks a question or speaks in class, ask them for their name; repeat the name somehow in the answer-"Jane asks an important question here . . ."-and if that question or your response to it comes up in class again, associate it once again with her name: "You'll remember that Jane asked us this question last week . . ." The more times you repeat the name, the more likely you will be to remember it. This technique has the bonus benefit of affirming the importance of student contributions in your classroom, making visible to them how their ideas are woven into the fabric of the lectures and discussions. Classes of fifty or more obviously do not require you to learn everyone's name, but don't abandon names altogether. Learn any names you can, but don't fret about not having comprehensive coverage.
- University of Oregon, Teaching Effectiveness Program
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