APPENDIX I

HASS CI Faculty Roundtable Discussion:

Fall 1998

On November 12, 1998, HASS faculty who are teaching pilot HASS CI subjects during AY 1999 participated in the roundtable discussion of Communication Intensive (CI) teaching in the HASS Curriculum. The meeting was very well attended. There was a pleasantly collegial, animated tone to the discussion. Faculty from diverse disciplines within the HASS curriculum shared stories and strategies from their classroom experiences, debated ideas, and articulated concerns.

The discussion revolved around certain themes:

1. The record of HASS-CI subjects so far.

Across the board faculty reported that the introduction of CI instruction into their subjects has been a success. Faculty shared strategies that they have used to revise their classes to be more communication intensive. These different strategies mostly concerned the number, size, and grading of papers, the ways that revision has been incorporated into the writing assignments, the distribution of paper assignments throughout the term, and different ways to develop students' oral communication skills. All faculty reported that there has been improvement, in some cases remarkable improvement, as a result of their focus upon writing and speaking. Some of the benefits of incorporating a focus upon communication skills were unexpected. For example, because their work is assessed on a more continuous basis, students' attendance and intellectual engagement with the subject is consistently higher in some classes than it has been in the past.

One serious concern persists: The CI component has caused a reduction in the amount covered in some classes. Although reduction in "breadth" has been partly compensated by improved "depth," the issue of content continues to be a concern.

2. Resources.

Teaching HASS classes communication-intensively was generally reported to place a much heavier burden upon faculty. One-on-one instruction is the most helpful, with a line-by-line response to student's papers. This burden is ameliorated in the large lecture classes where the onus of writing instruction falls mainly upon T.A.'s and recitation instructors. If T.A.'s are used more widely in HASS there is concern about what the effect would be upon the overall quality of teaching in the HASS curriculum.

Some smaller pilot CI classes presently have writing tutors assigned to them, and this is working well. The Writing Center has tutors, including subject-specific tutors, who can be helpful to HASS faculty. At the same time, some HASS faculty feel that helping students with their writing is the essence of what their teaching is about, partly because the writing is not separable from the content of students papers. Those faculty are reluctant to share the responsibility for grading papers. Enrollment in such classes must be kept small. There is concern that a Communication Requirement will overtax many of our faculty by excessively increasing their teaching obligations.

If the HASS curriculum is to introduce a Communication Requirement, we need to develop a clear conception of what additional resources we will need to do this effectively and without unhappy, unintended consequences to the quality of teaching in HASS. The MIT administration also needs to make a clear commitment to provide those additional resources.

3. The importance of reforms in the first year curriculum.

Our ability to fulfill all aspects of the educational mission of the HASS curriculum, including teaching communication skills, is severely limited by conditions that are peculiar to the MIT culture. The science and engineering subjects that students take either through the GIR's or their major departments place heavy demands upon students' time and energy, and HASS subjects generally have a low priority. The first year suffers in this regard in a particular way. Because all subjects that students take in their first year are pass-fail, many try to cram difficult science core subjects, for which they are not really ready, into their first year. Reforms of the curriculum are presently being considered that would free up the first year and allow students to distribute their energy among more diverse interests. These reforms have to do, in part, with grades: Students will be allowed to take their science core subjects pass-fail no matter when they take them. The hoped-for effect is that many students will distribute their science core subjects in a more manageable way. A further reform under consideration that would impact HASS is that first-year students will take HASS-D's for grade. This reform would make a clear statement about the value that MIT places upon the HASS-D requirement. Taken together, these reforms of the first year curriculum will bring into effect a small but significant change in MIT culture encouraging students to devote more time and energy to HASS subjects.

A second important reform concerning the first year that is presently under consideration has to do with expository writing subjects. Approximately one third of MIT undergraduates presently take an entry-level writing subject. Many of these were advised to take such a subject on the basis of their performance on the Freshman Essay Evaluation. Most, however, take expository writing late in their undergraduate careers, after they have already taken HASS (and other) subjects that require writing. Pedagogically this makes little sense. A new approach is presently being considered that would require all students who are diagnosed to be deficient in their writing skills to take expository writing in their first year.

HASS CI Faculty Roundtable Discussion:

Spring 1999

Discussion focused on two main topics: 1) Pedagogical conflicts: the difficulty of reconciling 'content' and 'writing instruction' in HASS-CI classes; 2) Oral communication. Faculty also reported on pedagogical strategies that they had used in CI classes and evaluated their effectiveness, discussed other relevant experiences, and addressed a few additional miscellaneous topics.

1. Content versus Writing

CI emphasis displaces some content in some classes: Some faculty estimate that 20% to 33% of content is displaced; one testified that the additional writing and oral reports were added at the expense of enrichment activities and explorations that had formerly embellished the main focus of her class. Loss of content, however, is outweighed by the gain to students, both in terms of the development of their communication skills and in terms of the greater depth of coverage that the CI excercises encouraged.

On the other hand, CI classes are not writing classes as such; they are writing-intensive classes. Classes that implemented less extreme reforms than others suffered proportionately less compromise of content. It is likely that many of the faculty who volunteered to participate in the pilot phase of the Communication Requirement Initiative in HASS approached the teaching of writing and speaking with more zeal and introduced more radical reforms in their classes than the general faculty would. Moreover, if the Communication Requirement goes into effect along lines that are currently being envisaged, each class will be only one element in a four-year CI sequence. The ambition and scope of the CI component of each HASS class should be calibrated with that in mind.

The discussion of how extensive the writing component of a CI class ought to be is important because it affects how easily CI reforms might be implemented across the HASS curriculum. For example, if CI requires only a moderate change of emphasis in HASS-D's (e.g. replacing a final exam with a revision exercise and reducing enrollment caps from 25 to 18 per section), CI reform of HASS-D's could be widespread without inflicting damage to our curriculum. If, on the other hand, CI reforms need to be more radical and exact a greater toll on subject content, they will have to be implemented selectively and with great care.

2. The Oral Component

Gene Brown, co-chair of the CUP Subcommittee on the Communication Requirement Initiative, indicated that the subcommittee is beginning to focus on the issue of oral communication. While he feels the subcommittee will have a well-formed proposal as regards the writing component of the Communication Requirement in time for the faculty vote in the spring of 2000, he feels less sanguine about the oral component.

It is hard to get students to respond to student presentations in our classes. In part this reflects the MIT culture and students general lack of engagement with HASS issues. In part it reflects the difficulty of sustaining an inclusive, animated discussion in classes that have 15-18 students: They are simply too large. In a fifty minute class with 18 students, allowing say 5 minutes for the instructor to introduce a topic, each student would have 2.5 minutes in which to talk: Obviously you cannot teach oral communication skills under such circumstances.

Moreover, student presentations and informed discussion are very difficult to do effectively in introductory classes. Students have insufficient knowledge of important materials and grasp of important concepts. There was widespread agreement that the oral component of the Communication Requirement should be postponed to the second two (junior and senior) years, and the focus in the freshman and sophomore years should be upon writing.

3. Miscellaneous

· CI instruction increases pressure and burdens upon faculty. Tutors or other forms of support can relieve that pressure.

· Part of the Communication Requirement should focus upon reading. Students have difficulty extracting an argument from what they read, or even recognizing that there is an argument. This reading deficiency is symmetrical with students' writing deficiency, the difficulty they have making a coherent argument in their own prose.

· A contradiction was identified regarding the 'preliminary phase' writing requirement. Beginning next year, a student who fails the Freshman Essay Evaluation will be required to take a writing class during freshman year. If the student takes that writing class in the second semester of the first year, the student might take a CI HASS-D or HASS-E in the first semester. If the student passes that CI class with the equivalent of B- or higher the student will automatically pass the Phase 1 writing requirement. This would give rise to the apparently contradictory situation that students may pass Phase 1 but still be required to take the Preliminary Phase.