Early Progress Report

My students are doing so well discussing current events article from the Wall Street Journal this semester. It has been a banner semester already. I just have not experienced the awkwardness that a new class usually exhibits. This causes me to reflect on reasons for this – I want to make sure to encourage this in future semesters.

Of course, one obvious reason could be that my classes are aberrations, just a fluke semester. Could I just be lucky this time? I just don’t think that is the cause. Sure, every now and then we all have classes that overall perform better than the rest, or a group that struggles more than other semesters. (During my first semester of teaching, I taught two sections of the same course and one was really rough. Fortunately the other was successful and an absolute joy to teach so I surmised that it was serendipity of the students, not my teaching. I would not be a professor today if I had taught only the one!)

I have been calling on students at random. Could it be that I have randomly selected the overachievers? Perhaps…

Has the student body changed over time? Not that I can see. There seems to be a mix of backgrounds and demographics very similar to those of previous semesters.

My first guess is that this semester I asked for volunteers the first few times, and so it is likely that the more confident students led the discussions. They set an excellent example for those who have followed. In other words, they set the bar for fellow classmates. Usually I demonstrate the type of preparation and discussion they model. But it seems to have worked well to have students set the example instead. I still flesh out the articles more and lead socratically some of the thought process, but not as much as in the past. These students already analyze, discuss, and present similar to other classes much later in the semester.

The other likely reason is that more of my colleagues are using the Journal in their class. And they are doing a really great job! Many students are getting practice before taking my class. Although my undergraduate accounting classes are only 200-level courses, they are seeing the Journal in some 100-economics courses and in other 200-level course, such as business law. This is a huge change from the years that I was one of the very few using the Journal. I can already see increased sophistication and reasoning in these students that I did not see in years past. The progress of the students is building as more and more instructors use the Journal.

How are your classes going? Are your students struggling, or are they enjoying reading the Journal and discussing the articles? I will talk about how my experiences could apply to your situation more next week. Also if you have any questions or comments, please free feel to email me at WSJProfBlog@hotmail.com. I will answer questions in future blogs or to you directly if you have a specific question.