Hear from Science Prof. Prosanta Chakrabarty

Transcript

Transitioning my courses to C-I really challenged me to look at my syllabus in a way that I would be meeting the benchmarks for C-I certification, obviously, but also thinking of ways that I would be evaluating my students in a fair and equitable equitable way so that each student would have the opportunity to really hand in assignments that they were proud of instead of, you know, just the one-time first draft thing they would get to really evaluate why I gave them the grade that they got the first time around.

You know, I used to teach where, you know, you hand them an assignment, you get the assignment back, grade it and you give it back to them. And you know really what you get in that scenario is a first draft. And so what I do now is, with the CI certification, is that they're handing in that first draft, and I grade it and then I give it back to them with an opportunity to redo it. And redoing it doesn't mean that you can halfass the first time, but it does mean that they better understand how I will be grading and understand what I want. And I think that's really helped. It's a little bit of more work but, honestly it's much better for me and the students to see that they actually understand what I was getting at and in my instructions.

After transitioning my course to C-I, I noticed that you know, compared to previous years that the students were actually—it seemed like on paper—that they were getting much higher grades in the end, by the final. And in fact, what was happening was the students were handing in papers that were better and giving talks that were better because they've already gone through peer review, they've already gone through my evaluation. And because they got a chance to look at those assignments again the grades were better. And they were happier students, too. And why wouldn't they be happier, they were getting better grades, and they put more time and thought into the final graded assignments, so I found that the positives were from the student side better grades, but also from my side I got to see that they were actually learning the things I wanted them to learn.

You know I actually, and this is honestly true, I just prefer teaching the C-I style. I can't imagine going back to not reevaluating students' work and not having the opportunity for students to do written or spoken communication in the class. You know, honestly, when I first started teaching at LSU, you know, maybe I thought I was a good teacher, but now that I've taught C-I, I know that I'm much better. In the past, you know, all they had for being graded was some multiple choice questions. And I found that you know the grading of exams is not the most important thing anymore in my classes. The exams are our secondary to these communication module tools, so the communication modules or you know whether it's written or spoken that's the things I look forward to, and I think the students do too. They don't look forward to the exams; I don't look forward to the exams. It's these other modules and such a large part of the grade is based on these modules that you know, frankly, I can really tell if they understand the subject from those and I'm reducing the amount of how many points they get from the exams just because I don't find them as purposeful in evaluating them and that's certainly true for my larger core courses, where you know, like something like 100 students are taking evolution. You might be intimidated at first to change your syllabus or to make a syllabus at C-I. I think it was an early convert if not one of the first converts for C-I, and I, too, was like, you know, “why...why do this more work?” But it's really just a better course overall for your students and for yourself if you integrate these modules and really follow the CxC mindset, by making it a class where you know the things that you're asking the students become crystal clear after.