|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
THIS article reports on an experimental class in elementary French at Michigan State University that relied on the “master-teacher” concept, with closed-circuit television playing an ancillary role. Briefly stated, the master-teacher model entails the use of an experienced faculty member as a coordinator and explainer. With the goal of providing a single coherent set of instructions for all students, the professor lectures to the entire group enrolled in a given term. Teaching assistants serve as tutorial guides to groups of about ten students and conduct conversations, drills, and other exercises. Their tasks are overseen by the lecturer-director, who prepares the syllabus and coordinates the preparation of tests.
The concept of using a master teacher in conjunction with closely supervised teaching assistants is certainly not unique. Princeton University used the model with considerable success at least as far back as the early 1960s. I believe, however, that the use of closed-circuit television gives an interesting and perhaps a unique dimension to the experimental class that I am describing. When the experiment was conceived at Michigan State University, a new media center had just become available, along with a sophisticated closed-circuit television system that permits students not only to sit in on lectures in an amphitheater but to see graphics or the professor's notes on a number of strategically placed television monitors.
In this experiment, closed-circuit television was not thought of as a teaching device per se, as one might consider a language laboratory or an interactive computer system, but was intended primarily (1) to make graphics and the professor's notes accessible to everyone in the lecture hall; (2) to allow the taping and storing of all lectures in the university language laboratory, as a service to students who might wish to review a particular concept or watch a missed lecture; and (3) to permit later replay at scheduled hours on dormitory closed-circuit television and over public-access channels in the community, so that students absent from the live lecture could conveniently view it the same day.
When the project was conceived, the administrators of the university's new instructional-media facility were consulted about the feasibility of the idea. They responded enthusiastically and gave us their complete support throughout. The technical aspects of an undertaking of this size are formidable and would normally not have been within the reach of nonmedia specialists. I was asked to plan the course, to coordinate the work of the teaching assistants, and to give the lectures. At the same time, a similar Spanish section was set up, and a member of the Spanish faculty chosen as my counterpart. Funds for the experiment were provided by the university administration for three academic quarters. The experimental sections were to run parallel to the regular first-year sections, normally all staffed by teaching assistants. Because the experiment was begun in the winter quarter, the first course was French 102 (the second quarter of first-year French), with French 103 following in the spring. In the subsequent fall term, the TV section became French 101, the introductory term of first-year French. Enrollments in the courses were, in order of terms, 119 for French 102, 71 for French 103, and 152 for French 101. A simple publicity campaign was carried out through handbills distributed in classes during preceding quarters and posted in the building where most language classes are held. Departmental representatives at registration were instructed to tell students briefly about the experiment. Students were randomly assigned to the pilot program, but those who seriously objected to participating were allowed to select conventional sections. When students in the experimental class were later asked why they were there, some said they had opted for it because it sounded interesting, while others said they simply had no objection to their random placement in the section.
The enrollment numbers given above reveal at a glance that the second class, French 103, had only about 60% of the number of students who had signed up for 102. The conventional 103 in the same term had 39 students, versus 42 from the previous term. In a typical spring section of French 103, we reenroll about 80%. We did not survey those who had opted for the conventional sections of 103 or who had dropped French altogether. We must assume some normal attrition and, most likely, a certain number who did not like the format and chose other sections. There were appreciably more students in the beginning section the following fall than there were in either the 102 or the 103 class, but the larger enrollment represents the typical influx of beginners in first-year classes. Their numbers dwindle in the second and third terms, because of low grades and failures or a loss of interest.
Since the project was funded for only three quarters, the conclusions drawn from the experiment must be tentative, and it is on this basis that I describe what was done, report on the responses of students and participating teaching assistants, and add some personal comments on the course.
Lectures on the grammatical contents of the first-year textbook were given in the Communication Arts Building, where special classroom studios had been built for just such TV courses. The instructional-television office provided technical staff to operate the equipment. The modern and comfortable amphitheater television studio was more than large enough to accommodate the participating students.
Although students were encouraged to attend the live lectures, so that they might ask questions, there was no attempt to control attendance. A number of color monitors were available in the lecture hall, enabling students to see televised written texts and graphics. The lectures were simultaneously broadcast to other TV-equipped classrooms on campus and to a number of dormitories. Later in the day, they were televised on local cable channels. Students were encouraged to watch the rebroadcasts and especially to use the language-laboratory facilities to review certain materials before tests.
The university language laboratory reran the lectures at specified hours during the day and evening, reserving a number of the laboratory monitors for use by interested students. The reruns were intended to give students the opportunity to hear the lectures again, or for the first time if they had missed the original delivery. We assumed that some students would not come to the live lectures but would see them later in the day. The question of making this assumption rather than requiring attendance was never taken up directly. In after-class chats, however, a number of students told me that they much preferred being present at the lectures, because—despite the somewhat “remote” atmosphere in a television classroom studio—they at least felt they were in a class with a professor. Each day time was allotted for questions from the student audience, and students were encouraged to come forward after the lecture if they wished to ask questions privately. Obviously, students who heard the lectures only in the language laboratory or on cable television could not avail themselves of the opportunity to clarify difficult points by asking questions.
The lectures explained grammatical concepts and commented on the potential difficulties the professor perceived in preparing for the class. The department acquired a “primary” typewriter with print large enough to be legible on the television monitors. Although illustrations are certainly not required in lectures of this kind, I chose to illustrate some of the grammatical examples with cartoon-like drawings—a personal approach designed to enliven the fifty-minute lectures.
In the tutorial sections, the teaching assistants used the textbook's question-and-answer exercises, drills, and the like to get the students to “talk.” TAs were emphatically instructed not to allow themselves to be sidetracked into explaining grammar; students were asked to reserve their questions either for the TAs after the tutorials or for the professor during office hours. Several students told me that the TAs did not always adhere to this policy. When asked directly why this was so, some TAs replied either that they felt an immediate explanation might be helpful or that they could not resist the chance to “teach.” In addition to conducting the tutorial sections, TAs held office hours, as they would if they taught conventional classes, and participated in “help sessions,” which were scheduled at various hours during the week to be available to all first-year students. TAs took turns in staffing these sessions.
At the outset, we tried to recruit TAs rather than to assign them to the program arbitrarily. We wanted TAs with at least a year of successful teaching experience and thus a known record, but we made clear that those who chose not to participate would suffer no prejudice. Some of the TAs were reluctant, when first approached, to give up their classrooms to take part in an experiment, and there were a few polite refusals. Those who willingly accepted, however, seemed to find sufficient motivation in the assurance that they had been chosen for their past performance and that the experiment promised to be interesting. As a result, all participants were cooperative throughout the project.
Supervision of the TAs involved meeting with them informally on a fairly regular basis to discuss the progress of the course and participating with them in the writing and grading of major tests. Although new, inexperienced TAs might need considerable guidance at first, well-prepared and professionally serious teaching assistants do not require continual watching. They do need to stay in contact with the lecturer-director and with the contents of the television presentations. This contact can be achieved through formal or informal meetings, depending on the number of assistants and the information to be shared. Because relatively few TAs were involved in this class, they did not need the formal supervision usually required for the fairly large numbers of TAs employed in the conventional sections, who spend years under the direction of a professor-coordinator.
TAs were consulted in the planning stages of the syllabus but were given no direct responsibility for planning. In regular classes, TAs are responsible for virtually everything except the elaboration of the syllabus, and many seem as jealous as professors of their autonomy in the classroom. In a long-term project, the question of inviting TA input might be of considerable importance, both to get the best cooperation from the participating assistants and to benefit from the fresh insights they might provide.
A teaching assistant with a single appointment owes the department twenty hours a week but actually spends five hours in the classroom in a conventional class. The rest of the time goes to preparing classes, writing and correcting quizzes and tests, reading student journals, and holding office hours. With the master-teacher concept, a teaching assistant can be asked, at least theoretically, to take two or three tutorial or conversation sections, on the assumption that other duties—preparing classes and correcting tests—will be less demanding: the TA will be responsible for conducting exercises and drills but not for teaching grammar. This assumption may be valid for a seasoned instructor, but it is not, in fact, for a TA with little experience, who may see every class as requiring considerable preparation. Some TAs did indeed say that a lot was expected of them, citing especially the time needed to correct written assignments. A long-term experiment of this sort would need to address the question of relative workload to avoid inequities and consequent staff dissatisfaction.
As for the lecturer-coordinator of this instructional model, the requirements include dedication, forethought, and precise planning. Although the subject matter of the lectures is relatively simple as college courses go, the presentation must be made to fit into the allotted week and into the rigid television-lecture format. All graphic materials must be prepared with enough lead time to ensure that they will be ready to accompany the lecture. Exposure on television indeed has a way of making the lecturer think seriously about the effects of giving a slipshod class in public, and although the preparation for the lectures in no way approximates that for a formal television program, it does in fact require considerable forethought.
Although our experiment made no provision for granting course credit to the general public who watched the lectures on cable television, this possibility exists in colleges and universities where such credits are available.
After the three-term run of the pilot model, we made an informal survey of the grades of students in the conventional classes and in the television section. The two sets of averages are shown in the table below, with the differences between them indicated by the figures in parentheses.
| Term 1: French 102 | No. of Students | Average Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Regular classes | 42 | 2.9 |
| Television section | 119 | 2.4 (-0.5) |
| Term 2: French 103 | ||
| Regular classes | 39 | 2.74 |
| Television section | 71 | 2.43 (-0.31) |
| Term 3: French 101 | ||
| Regular classes | 71 | 2.7 |
| Television section | 152 | 2.3 (-0.4) |
It is immediately apparent that the average grades of students in the television sections were consistently lower than those of students in the conventional sections (on average, -0.4). Given the short exposure to the pilot model, it would seem inappropriate to correlate these differences to the teaching models. I am inclined to attribute the disparity to the different tests used in the conventional and television sections and to the grading standards in the master-teacher class, which might have been marginally higher than those applied by many of the teaching assistants in the conventional classes. It has been informally observed here that young teaching assistants tend to grade somewhat more leniently than do established professors. Continuing the experiment for three or four years and coordinating testing in the conventional and master-teacher sections would give us a better idea of how the teaching model affects student performance. Clearly, this could be an interesting and informative experiment for both language and education departments. Professors proficient in educational measurements might be asked to participate in a joint research venture in which a valid statistical model would be set up for comparing the long-term results of this model versus the conventional program. Follow-up studies should certainly include the use of the same tests for all classes as well as an attempt to assess the reading and aural comprehension, grammatical knowledge, and speaking ability of students in both traditional and master-teacher classes. Close records of comparative costs should also be kept for the final evaluation of the two systems.
As stated earlier, one goal of the experimental class was to give a single, coherent set of lectures to all students in a given term. Large language departments that employ many teaching assistants often have a problem with the quality of teaching in introductory classes. A fair number of new TAs are recent college graduates, inexperienced in teaching and, not infrequently, unsure of themselves in the language they are suddenly called on to teach. Their knowledge, in fact, may not be adequate to ensure that they can clearly and correctly explain grammatical and syntactical points. The master-teacher plan is meant to avoid this difficulty. Teaching assistants can be expected to attend the lectures or watch them on closed-circuit TV. This helps to guarantee the continuity of the program by keeping the TAs up-to-date on what the lectures cover. They can also be expected to learn from the lectures, if only something of the difficulties that undergraduates have in approaching a foreign language. At the same time, the assignment of TAs to small tutorial sessions provides students with valuable experience in speaking the language in a carefully controlled, comfortable context.
Since a large number of students will be exposed to only one lecturer, the master teacher must obviously be chosen with care, not only for classroom charisma but for accurate knowledge of the foreign language. First-year students are not taught the complexities of the language, but the explanations of grammar and syntax that are given must be correct and clear.
At the end of each term, we asked for student comments on the course, as we do in all classes. The responses to this system were as varied as they are for any conventional class. A number of students said that the pilot program was an interesting way to learn a language and that the frequent contact with their TA, in very small groups, was wonderful. These appeared to be the same students who asked questions in the lecture hall, during or after class, and who did not hesitate to avail themselves of the professor's office hours or of the help sessions with the TAs. They apparently did not find the size of the class or its “remoteness” to be a handicap. On the other hand, some students expressed their dislike of the “impersonal relationship” with the professor that they felt was imposed on them. Since the instructor was available to them for indefinite periods after the class and during a generous number of specified office hours and since TAs were likewise available for a substantial amount of time each week, this complaint seems to me more perceived than justified. The alleged “impersonality” of large lecture sections in universities is a commonplace among undergraduates and should be evaluated in the same light as other stereotypes.
The TAs who participated in this pedagogical experiment were asked to give written evaluations. I personally supervised three TAs, but I also had access to the comments of the three TAs of my counterpart in Spanish. Since the pedagogical model was basically the same for both French and Spanish, differing only in the professors' varying approaches to their lectures, it should be instructive to see the comments of all six TAs. In the following summary of their comments, some by individuals and some shared by several assistants, I use paraphrases as well as direct quotes and sometimes add my own remarks.
1. “The ‘creativity’ of TAs as teachers was impaired.” All assistants felt that they had been removed from teaching and relegated to the roles of drill instructors. Regular faculty members, who in the course of their careers may become more and more insulated from the teaching of beginning language classes, may not be sufficiently aware of the importance that many TAs attach to being in charge of their own sections and of having a substantial input into what goes on in the classroom. Many experienced TAs are excellent teachers and attach great importance to their performance. The sensitivity of virtually all the TAs to being “taken out of the classroom” is probably not an anomaly and should serve as a lesson to faculties that might be considering changing the role of assistants.
2. The TAs' questioning of students in their tutorial sections revealed that a fair number felt put off by the size of the lecture class and by the presence of television cameras. One TA even suggested cutting the lecture group in half (apparently without regard for the cost of such a step).
3. Teaching assistants said that they put in more hours with students than they did in a regular class (8 or 9 class hours per week as opposed to 5, plus a substantial amount of consultation time). It would seem that the additional contact hours required in the TV section should have been no problem, given the supposed simplicity of the TAs' work in the tutorials, but since written homework was expected of the students, several TAs believed that they had an excessive number of exercises to correct. One of the “problems” that I perceived with the system was, as I suggest above, that some of the TAs involved had great difficulty letting go of the image of themselves as teachers and thus continued to prepare classes with the same thoroughness that they would in a conventional course. Another reason they may have done so is that, despite the theoretical separation of the functions of lecturer and tutorial leader, students sometimes felt freer to ask grammatical questions of their TAs than of the professor; the TAs, in turn, may have felt that they needed to prepare to answer these questions, as they would if they were charged with teaching grammar.
This is a difficult problem insofar as it involves more than rule making. It is, in fact, something of a psychological issue. One obvious solution is to modify the course to allow TAs at least part-time teaching or reinforcement of the lecture concepts in the tutorials.
4. “The course moved too fast, leaving shocking gaps in students' knowledge.” In fact, the course moved no faster than conventional sections, but students met the lecturer less often than they would have in a conventional class. Consequently, lectures had to cover larger segments of subject matter and thus may have seemed to “move too fast” to students who were used to working with small daily doses of grammar and vocabulary in conventional high school or college classes. If two lectures a week do require too large a “bite” into the subject matter, then the only remedy is more lectures. The effect of this option on both costs and the scheduling of lecture and tutorial sessions would have to be carefully considered.
5. “A lot of time and paper was wasted in communication.” Coordination between the professor and the TA is absolutely essential; the alternative to written communication is meetings, which are not always popular, either.
6. “Beginners should not be exposed to this system; the size of the large lecture is intimidating, especially to freshmen.”
7. Students told the TAs, and sometimes me, that scheduling is a problem, because both twice-weekly lectures and thrice-weekly lab sessions had to be worked into the normal university program. Some students found that these odd-hour sessions conflicted with their other classes. This administrative problem might not have an easy solution in a large university where students take courses in many disciplines.
8. “Students asked grammatical questions in drill sessions, especially when they perceived the lectures as too difficult.” This possibility was not foreseen in the original planning. As mentioned earlier, either TAs felt that they had to answer or their desire to teach led them to expand on the main lecture. Consequently, some drill sessions were devoted to activities other than those intended.
1. “The small drill sessions allowed close following of a few students. The atmosphere was pleasant.” A number of students found the personal contact, which sometimes included coffee in the cafeteria, an exhilarating experience and a strong motivation to study.
2. “Students are exposed to more than one teaching style: that of the professor and that of the TA.” This seems an obvious plus in any term.
3. The availability of tapes of the lectures was considered a good thing for students who missed the lectures or who wanted to review an explanation. Curiously enough, a survey revealed that very few students reviewed lectures in the language laboratory, although, according to the teaching assistants, a number of students felt that they had missed something in class. We can only assume that few students saw a trek to the laboratory from a dorm or an off-campus apartment as worth the effort, especially in the cold months. A small number of students said that they took in the televised reruns of the lecture, which could be seen during the late afternoon and evening on the local university cable channels.
4. “Small drill sessions allow students to speak more than they might in a large conventional section.” Well-structured tutorial sessions should, in fact, give students a great sense of accomplishment, since, over the course of a year, they provide infinitely more opportunities to speak than would a conventional class.
5. In response to inquiries from both the professor in the large lecture group and the TAs in the individual sections, many students said they enjoyed and profited from the lectures. Others, as noted above, were put off by the size of the group or by the perceived difficulty of the class. While it is easy for teachers to downplay students' criticism of large classes as “just another student complaint,” the negative attitude held by many students in this regard actually affects the success of classes and needs to be taken into consideration. While some countries (e.g., France) are notorious for the impersonality of their education, American education leans heavily toward personal contact between teacher and student. This is generally true both in the public schools and in colleges and universities. It should not be surprising that our students strongly oppose large lectures. In the context of an experiment like this one, it may well be that an almost instinctive dislike of large lecture classes will tend to prejudice students against giving such a system a fair chance.
1. On costs. Because of the short life of this experiment, we were unable to do cost-analysis studies, but trials with this teaching model could show economies through the use of a regular faculty member—presumably of junior rank and thus at the lower end of the pay scale—and several teaching assistants, each of whom can handle a number of smaller sections. The costs of using instructional television would need to be factored in if the departments offering courses are billed for these services.
2. Pedagogical and methodological considerations. A department contemplating a master-teacher course would probably attach considerable importance to the suitability of this approach to language teaching in the light of some of the methods now in vogue. There is no ready-made answer, although a long-term comparative study of this approach and other pedagogical models could go far toward providing something other than opinion on the matter. It appears to me that the master-teacher model, with careful planning, could be integrated into virtually any kind of teaching, especially because it gives considerable importance to small-group oral practice in a comfortable setting. One of the goals, and an accomplishment, of the program was to provide students with a great deal more oral and aural experience than they would get in conventional classes of twenty-five or thirty students.
A true assessment of the master-teacher model can probably be made only through a trial of several years, both to work out the inevitable bugs and to gauge as objectively as possible the administrative problems, comparative costs, and pedagogical results. Frequent testing of both the television sections and the conventional sections would permit evaluation of results in speaking, reading, writing, and understanding. I believe that this model, in conjunction with instructional television, has distinct and perhaps exciting possibilities but that its true strong points—and weaknesses—can only be ascertained through further experience.
The author is Associate Professor of French at Michigan State University, East Lansing.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
