I have to start by saying that this was one of the strangest classes I have ever taught. We were continuing my series of collaborations with the David Owsley Museum of Art, and as I wrote about in July, I had a great meeting with them to set up some tighter constraints around how we work with the students. There were only nine students in the class, which I thought would be really exciting: small team, a couple of graduate students, working with a partner on exploratory software to enhance the visitor experience. It seems like the recipe for an excellent learning experience, but in truth, this was one of the most frustrating classes I have ever taught.
I have never had a class where I have to "pull" so hard to get them to do, well, anything. On the very first day of class, there were about ten people in a room that seats over thirty. When I walked in, they were all sitting apart from each other, staring into their phones. I commented on how quiet it was, and I encouraged them to move in toward the front. Nobody moved. We repeated this ritual basically every class meeting. It became something of a joke after a while—a sad, sad joke. On a few occasions, I forced them to rearrange the furniture so that we could sit in a circle for discussion, and these meetings were always better, but they didn't seem to have any impact on the de facto standards. One time, I came into class, and two or three students were talking to each other. I heaped praise on them in hopes of some positive reinforcement. I got a few smiles, but again, no real change.
When we moved into working as one big team, I let them follow their own path for the first two week sprint. After a structured reflection, I told them that I would be scaffolding their improvement by providing a methodology. I used one based on my immersive learning teams, which have been roughly the same size. One of the rules of the methodology is to work in pairs whenever possible. They ostensibly read the methodology and we got to work... everybody working silently at their own laptops. I paused for a minute or two, then I interrupted, pointing out that they were all in violation of the methodology, and that they should pair up. Some of them still did not. At that point, I feel like I just have to throw up my hands.
With only nine people, attendance irregularities are easy to notice, and many people missed many class meetings. It's not like it didn't hurt their grade either: they had work to complete and then discuss almost every class meeting. I think it's fair to say that it's disheartening for everybody in the room to look around and see that only five or six out of nine people are there. In the latter part of the semester, we worked as one consultancy, and there was work for everyone to do; even here, people missed critical planning and reflection meetings.
The point of this writing is not just to complain, though. We did have some real stand-out meetings. In one of them, we talked honestly about their past team experiences. They acknowledged that none of them had ever really been on a non-dysfunctional student team before, and also that they didn't really know what a successful team looks like. This is invaluable to me as an educator, because it makes me realize that it's not just enough to give them guidance: I think we have to work harder to show them examples of successful teamwork to model. I am still not sure how to do that, except maybe by filming one of my high-functioning immersive learning teams. Another important part of this discussion was their acknowledgement that in the prerequisite course (CS222), they learned to fear feature branches and pull requests and, generally, GitHub. That is, they saw these tools as impediments to their success rather than what they are: critical parts of a healthy and productive work environment. This again points to some specific actions, to make sure that the prerequisite course is not accidentally teaching counter to its purposes. Conveniently, I've been assigned to teach CS222 in the Spring, so I will be able to pilot a few interventions here.
One of the frustrating outcomes of this semester is that I am not really sure whether the students learned anything or not. We studied some of my favorite theories of HCI during the semester, always embedded within the context of our collaboration with the art museum. My plan was, near the end, to return to those theories and frame our work within them. We ended up having to declare a failed sprint a few weeks from the end of the semester in order to produce a barely-testable digital prototype. This ate up the time that I was hoping to use to close the loops. Looking at the work that the students did on the project at the end of the semester, while technically competent, I didn't see any consideration for any of the theories we discussed earlier in the semester, like Don Norman's action cycle or Gestalt vision principles. Instead, I saw what it looked like they would have done if they had never taken the course. This is disheartening.
In our final meeting, our museum partner was kind to point out that the prototype these students created was the highest quality of any that students made in the previous semesters. I generally agree, and this is in large part because we had one group and one consistent series of conversations. From a teaching point of view, it's a completely different thing to have one team of students to engage with than it is to say, "Get into your groups and talk about this." Also, because we all worked together, I could give more direct guidance on some of the technical issues of the implementation as well, which prevented them from getting caught in amateur's dead-ends. For example, there's always someone who thinks copying and pasting code will do no harm, and then you end up with an unmaintainable mess that collapses under its own weight; I was able to work with students to refactor such solutions, teaching both process and techniques for refactoring along the way.
Although our partner was positive and right to be so, I remain concerned at how it seemed the students didn't really think about what they were saying or doing—they were not critical. For example, they liked to mention that they used journey maps, but they didn't do this well. I graded all the journey maps and provided feedback about the parts that were good and bad, but in their presentation and final essays, they wrote about their journey maps as strictly virtuous. I mentioned Falk's theories of museum visitor motivation in class, and the students latched on to parts of this; in the presentation, though, they made it sound like they had actually studied and applied these theories. In fact, they had done the equivalent of a standard contemporary undergraduate practice: hear of something, Google it, put some buzzwords in, and call it satisfactory. Truly, their presentation of their knowledge of Falk's model bordered on lying to the client, and I just wasn't prepared for how to react.
If you got this far into this essay, you can understand why this class that seemed like it should be so good would actually be so frustrating. I'm still not sure about the root cause, but I'll share the best thought I have. I don't know why the department administration thought this was a good idea, but we've offered HCI as an upper-level elective for something like five straight semesters—including summers—when it used to be a biannual course. The number of students in my classes has gone down each time, and with only nine completing this time, I have to think that a majority of this small group didn't really want to be there. I don't think they had any motivation to either take HCI or to take a class with me. (Not to toot my own horn, but there are some students who just want to study with me, regardless of the course.) In the absence of motivation, the course is perceived like the methodology I wrote up for them: a hurdle to be cleared rather than an idea to explore. I suspect I could have just given them readings and assignments, and they still would have skipped a bunch of classes and earned their C and B grades, and I would have been able to sleep at night. But you know, that's not how I roll.
I had one day where I was feeling particularly frustrated as well as low on physical and mental energy. I don't remember where we were on the project, but I asked the class to give an update on their progress. Nobody in attendance had made any. It was one of those times when I had to seriously think about just leaving the room, just walking away and letting them do whatever it was they thought they should be doing instead of contributing to the class. I even said out loud, "I have done more work on this project than you have collectively," which is probably not exactly true with a class of nine people, but I think it was dangerously close. I took a minute or two to collect my thoughts and, with some grace, turned it into a discussion of how to move forward. After this, one of the students—one with whom I had some struggles earlier in the semester but with whom we grew into mutual respect—started occasionally thanking me for my work. He would say something like, "Thanks for taking the time to put this collaboration together," and he really meant it. This may seem like a small thing, but it wasn't. It's possible that some of the students still see faculty generally as some kind of automata. I think this student saw that I cared, and because I cared, I hurt. We talk about helping students build empathy, and here's a case where it actually worked, not in some abstract social justice sense, but in a very concrete, local-community sense.
This post is a bit long, but I have had a strong desire to try to capture these stories. In truth, I'm not even entirely sure why, because in conclusion, when I consider what I would do differently next time, I honestly don't know. One thing I would do is absolutely put my foot down on the "nine people spread around a classroom" on day one, though. That was just ridiculous.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions. The next one will be more cheerful, I promise.
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