Discussion Finals
In both my classes this quarter, I had students do discussions as their final projects.
Now, someone might argue that I did this as a way to avoid grading dozens of papers over the weekend, and certainly there's a reasonable case to be made for that.
However, while not having to pore over student writing for the next three days is a benefit, I think I can safely say that wasn’t my primary motivation.
The main thing I want students to take away from philosophy courses is the ability to engage in dialogue about questions whose answers are neither readily apparent nor answerable by consulting a manual. I want people who take my classes to learn to discuss with others and develop solutions and answers that emerge from those discussions.
And I think this was demonstrated in both the Philosophical Ethics and the Business Ethics classes.
I was really impressed with how able students were to take on the discussions in groups of four or five. And it seemed like all I had to do was occasionally insert myself into their groups to keep the conversational ball rolling.
One complaint that could be lodged against this mode of final is that I didn’t create a capstone project that enabled students to pull together all of their learning in the quarter into some sort of grand cohesive whole that demonstrated to all their competence with all the material we took on.
And yet, even when I have had such projects, there’s a way in which no real surprises occur. Students who have done great work all quarter typically do better work than those who haven’t. In fact, I can’t think of any time where a student who’d been really struggling suddenly pulled himself up from the depths of academic failure via a stupendous final, and only occasionally does the converse happen.
So, I’ll probably do discussion finals again, and not just to avoid grading papers…although that’s nice, too.
Now, someone might argue that I did this as a way to avoid grading dozens of papers over the weekend, and certainly there's a reasonable case to be made for that.
However, while not having to pore over student writing for the next three days is a benefit, I think I can safely say that wasn’t my primary motivation.
The main thing I want students to take away from philosophy courses is the ability to engage in dialogue about questions whose answers are neither readily apparent nor answerable by consulting a manual. I want people who take my classes to learn to discuss with others and develop solutions and answers that emerge from those discussions.
And I think this was demonstrated in both the Philosophical Ethics and the Business Ethics classes.
I was really impressed with how able students were to take on the discussions in groups of four or five. And it seemed like all I had to do was occasionally insert myself into their groups to keep the conversational ball rolling.
One complaint that could be lodged against this mode of final is that I didn’t create a capstone project that enabled students to pull together all of their learning in the quarter into some sort of grand cohesive whole that demonstrated to all their competence with all the material we took on.
And yet, even when I have had such projects, there’s a way in which no real surprises occur. Students who have done great work all quarter typically do better work than those who haven’t. In fact, I can’t think of any time where a student who’d been really struggling suddenly pulled himself up from the depths of academic failure via a stupendous final, and only occasionally does the converse happen.
So, I’ll probably do discussion finals again, and not just to avoid grading papers…although that’s nice, too.
posted by Professor Dave at 4:27 PM
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