Vol. 20 - Encouraging deep reading (by turning a class into a grant panel)
Learn how I'm transforming my class on ecological networks through student-led discussions and research proposals, aiming for deeper understanding and collaboration.
Every fall, I teach a class about ecological networks to undergraduate and graduate students.
Rather than lecture for 40 hours (which I can totally do — ask me about networks, and you’ll see for yourself!), I organize the class around units, each of which has a handful of papers that one student must read, present to the class, and lead a 35 minutes long discussion about.
After each unit, the students set up groups and must present a research proposal that involves concepts and methods we discussed during the unit.
From my observations of the discussions (but also of the proposals the students turned in), this leads to a good understanding of the concepts; but I still think we can make adjustments to turn this into an even deeper reading of the papers.
What do I mean by deep reading?
It depends. My version of “deep” as an active researcher is “I will carry a printout of the paper with me everywhere I go for three weeks, it will balloon up to 20 pages of handwritten notes, and I will see it in my dreams”. That happens to about one paper every year.
But for students, my expectation of having deeply read a paper is a little less manic: I want them to be able to distill the pros and cons of the approach, and to show that they understand how the purpose of the research ties with the methodology that produces the results.
Perhaps more importantly, I want students to understand that we can have differences of opinions about the merits of a paper, and that the “opinion” of our peers is often nuanced, and at times conflicted.
This got me thinking — this sounds suspiciously like a grant panel!
As I am currently updating my syllabus, I am going to tweak the basic formula a little. Rather than a single person being responsible for the article, there will be a pair of students reading it independently. They will get to each present their opinions before forming a consensus and opening the discussion with the rest of the group.
To really drive the point across that despite differences, we need to end up at some form of consensus, the pair of students will need to write a blog post about each paper, summarizing what the paper does, what they agreed on, what they disagreed on, and what the rest of the group contributed.
There is a hidden purpose to this change: the point of reading papers is not to hoard knowledge for ourselves — it is to build upon this knowledge, incrementally, to contribute to the dialogue within our field. My reading of any article only makes sense in the way it interacts with the way my colleagues are reading other articles. The sooner we can establish reading as an essentially collaborative process, the better!
And with all that said, stay tuned for Vol. 21 next week, for something I have been meaning to write for a long time: what can we learn about teaching from playing video games?