“Let’s go exploring!” –– Limited choices for course content

• Why offer choices?
• When teaching and learning online
• When teaching and learning in a physical classroom

Why offer choices?

Today’s blog post isn’t about a specific digital tool I use, but a mindset I leverage.

I’m a big fan of the “growth mindset” (check out the cats in the sidebar, and if you like it, here’s how to add your own!) Another mindset, if that’s the right word, I’ll call the Explorer Mindset.

My #4wordpedagogy is “Let curiosity lead learning.” I don’t like the approach where I alone determine in advance everything we will cover in the semester: every group is unique, every student brings their own interests to a course, and together that means that each time I teach “the same course”, new things happen. You can’t step into the same river twice, you can’t teach the same course twice.

To me, curiosity is what keeps students engaged in a course. It’s the magic thing that makes them care enough about a topic to keep showing up with their best work, when they start going down that rabbit hole, driven to know the answer. I’ve seen amazing work when students start off their journey of learning about premodern China with the question “I wonder what X looked like/ if X…” and they go exploring.

But there is a lot of East Asian history, and to many of them it’s all new and overwhelming, and that can be a problem when it comes to learning, and bringing your best game to a course. In my first post in this series I talked about decision fatigue, and suggested that randomly rotating content could help with that particular problem. I see analysis paralysis as a very close cousin. Too much information and too many choices lead to a situation where making the right choice is just impossible. “I don’t know, why don’t you decide?” is often the response. But as a teacher it feels disingenuous to say I value a student’s curiosity and then still end up telling them what to do.

The solution I found is to provide limited choices. When students don’t know where to start in completely new territory, limited choices offer them starting points: the playground is ready and waiting, with a few pointers where the fun stuff is; “if you like X, try A. If you like Y, try B.” This prevents them from getting lost in the details, but still gives them the chance to pick something they like over another option. For me as an instructor, it solves the problem that there is way more material in East Asian history than I can ever fit into a single semester for each course. I can offer more material, and I am always surprised how in each iteration of a course students pick different paths, so that keeps things fresh for me, too. It’s never the same river, never the same course.

For projects and portfolios, it’s easy enough to let students roam around freely early in the semester, and help them narrow things down (if you’d like to hear how I do it, let me know and I’ll write up in more detail), but it’s not exactly how you can run an entire semester with a group of twenty, as I found out.

Enough with the abstract, let me show you how I apply that in online and mask-to-mask courses (I haven’t taught properly face-to-face since I started using this in earnest, so…)

When teaching and learning online

I first started leveraging the Explorer Mindset with fully asynchronous courses in AY 2020-21. I’m currently teaching a hybrid format (sync/async online, to transition to mask-to-mask later in the semester), and applying aspects of it again, since it’s very flexible.

For most weeks I provide a “Basic Set”, which all the students work through. Often it’s a set of texts, sometimes a podcast or video, or a combination of materials. This means the entire group has a common understanding of the topic at hand.

Then, students pick one of two or three options, which I called “Exploration Packs” in my Modern China course –– We were on a journey of discovery, after all. Check out for instance this Week 6 webpage. All of the options connect to the main topic (time period, object under study, theme,…) but from a different perspective. In the online courses, students write in their weekly blog post about these course materials.

By the start of the next week, I create a randomizer with all the blog posts. Students then read three or four blog posts of their fellow students, straight from the assignment’s webpage which contains those random blog posts. They provide feedback with Hypothes.is in our group, so the writer can easily interact with their readers if they choose to continue the dialogue.

This means that students revisit the course content from the previous week (reviewing), but they also often encounter new content from the Exploration Packs they did not choose (expanding). Students comment in reflections how reading others’ posts on the same Exploration Pack helped them dig deeper and find new meanings they themselves had overlooked on a first reading. Sometimes, seeing others’ posts gives them a boost of confidence: they’re not doing as bad as they thought because they can see others are also struggling to make sense of a particular reading. Sharing is caring!

When teaching and learning in a physical classroom

When we can meet mask-to-mask, we don’t interact through blog posts in the first instance. I set up the class as a jigsaw-like activity. After a brief check-in and perhaps mini-lecture (“lecturette”) from me to emphasize the main points of the Basic Set, students first consolidate their knowledge with others who chose the same option. Often this is the moment when they realize they can deepen their understanding of a text through conversation with a peer, or I can jump in to guide them through a thorny patch, or set them on their way with a few questions.

When they are satisfied they can explain the material to a peer in class but outside their group, I re-mix the groups so all the Explorer Packs are represented in each group. This was sometimes tricky last semester when only 1 or 2 students picked a Pack that appears more difficult or just doesn’t seem as interesting, but then I jumped in to represent that option in one of the other groups. We made it work!

In that second stage, students teach each other about the content of their Exploration Pack, but if all goes well, they also see connections, sometimes contradictions, and new questions can appear, which we then bring into the final “plenary discussion” to conclude our time together. At the end of the week, I often ask them to write a blog post reflecting on what they learned that week, and that is a good chance for them to think about how they moved their understanding of the course materials forward through collaboration. (“What do you know now that you did not know at the start of the week?” is a powerful question.)

Everybody learns something –– including me: what appeals, which connections are made (or not), and which materials need more background than others for these activities.

Outcomes

Many times in end-of-semester check-ins or even informal conversations throughout the semester I heard from students that they like the ability to make these (small) choices. Perhaps none of the options available were something they were really interested in, but then they liked having a choice about what not to engage with in the first instance (they knew they’d encounter it in the second stage anyway). Some students also expressed in reflections they wished they had time to read more of the other Exploration Packs; it certainly showed them how big and varied the study of East Asian history is.

Not all students liked the jigsaw initially, but some told me they came to realize that it did force them to really understand the material, and thus that they retained it better and longer.

A few people who were initially skeptical about the asynchronous online format have also since let me know they learned a ton, and in fact returned for another semester with me –– online or in the classroom. It always feels like a vote of confidence in my pedagogical approach when that happens!

For me, providing these limited choices helped to assuage my guilty conscience of being the sole director of the students’ journey through history. I had to let go of my focus on specific content as the main course goal, and move toward skills, but that’s ok. I now focus more on teaching how to find information and what to do with it: assessing, drawing from different sources to get more perspectives, and not just summarizing. Instead, they analyze and use the information to really build an answer to the question they started with. Many students provide specific examples at the end of the semester how East Asian history has amazed and surprised them in so many ways, so the content is still getting through!

This more modular approach means that as a group we get to cover a whole lot more ground, even in a “regular” survey course like I set up my online Modern China course, without assigning more work than is reasonable.