Excitement and the first class
Take time to remember why you are excited about the subjects you will be covering, and try to show your enthusiasm to the students. In particular, the first class is the place where everyone’s imagined interests and hopes for the course start to converge on the actual subject matter. Use that opportunity to explain what the class is about, and why you find it interesting.
One way to do this is to open the first class with an illustration or story: “Here’s an example of wearable technology I really love, and it illustrates some of the themes we’ll be working on this semester…”, “Here’s a recent museum exhibition that shows what’s possible with mobile tools and interactive displays…”
These examples don’t need to be too complex or conceptually rich, nor do they need to be things that require a lot of time to explain, but it can be helpful to show them something that gives everyone something to talk about.
Emergencies
If there is an accident or someone falls ill in your class get help right away by calling 911 and or security at 212-998-2222. More important numbers are on the back of your ID card.
Class Structure
You are the expert on the content of the class; what follows are observations about opportunities and pitfalls, given the nature of the student body and the structure of ITP.
Each class will be a mix of one or more of the following elements: you talking to the students, the students talking to you, the students talking to each other, the students working on a problem while you observe. It is up to you to decide how and when to use each of these modes of interaction, as best fits your subject area and style.
- ITP has a very diverse population. The interdisciplinary advantages of this are obvious, but the disadvantage is that there are almost no universally shared cultural or technological experiences among the students. Our students are in general quick studies, but be prepared to give brief background information on issues or themes you may consider obvious, but aren’t to people coming from a different tradition.
- Don’t try to jam so much into the class presentation that you don’t have time show how it fits into the structure of the class. You really can’t go wrong taking 5 minutes at the start and end of class with the syllabus on the screen and going over what is happening and what is coming up.
- Leave time for questions. It is far better to cover a bit less material well enough to have it integrated, than doing a too-rapid overview of concepts or techniques the students don’t really internalize.
- A semester seems like a long time, but you will be in front of the students for only 35 hours — in many ways the hardest work of making a class work is figuring out what to leave out of the syllabus.
- Our students tend to prefer to learn by trying things. On the spectrum of learning from “I’ll do it when I understand it” to “I’ll understand it when I do it”, our students cluster strongly around the latter. Feel free to assign work that invites students to try things they don’t completely understand yet.
The Syllabus: Communicating course content, goals, and structure
The syllabus is the key document in helping the students understand the structure of the course as a whole. Especially at the beginning, when the students do not yet understand the basic insights of the course, they need a guide to help them orient themselves. The syllabus is this guide.
A syllabus should have a brief overview of the subject and goals of the course, a description of the work they will be expected to do during the semester, and a brief week-by-week breakdown of the classes, including readings and assignments. This document is a contract of an informal sort — what you expect of them, and what they can expect of you. You should hand out a paper copy on the first class, and keep an up-to-date version online.
You should have some indication about how their work will be judged, for example On-time Attendance and Participation 20% Blogging 20% Assignments 30% Final Project 30% (your percentages will vary). Given ITP’s Pass/Fail grading, this is in practice setting the parameters for the conditions under which you would fail them.
Our students are experimentally minded, and take fairly readily to new tools, physical, virtual and intellectual, but new tools introduced early in the course will feel more fundamental to the students, and they will treat them that way
If you change the class structure during the semester (and you may have reason to do this, especially if it is a new class), then you should explain the change to the students AND change the online syllabus. Students can tolerate not understanding the material, but a course can really go down in flames if they don’t understand the overall shape of the course.
Public/Private
Establish a policy for public use of posts and class conversations. Should students or guest critics be able to blog publicly about what is said in class? Should members of the press be invited to look at work before the end of the semester?
Time Management
You may be quite brilliant but if you can’t do the math to divide up 140 minutes (2.5 hours – 10-minute break) into useful chunks, you may introduce a lot of stress into the class. It may be difficult giving 16 projects the depth of critique it deserves in 8 minutes but that is the reality of the class. Of course encouraging groups and scheduling presentations over two weeks can help. It is usually better to announce the schedule of presentations at the beginning of class so you don’t save time for someone who turns out not to be prepared (but does not say so until called on).
Attendance
On-time attendance is required to pass a class. More than 3 missed classes should probably be a fail.
Waiting lists
You can’t change the order of the waiting list; it is handled in strict student order. You should leave the management of the waiting list to Dante.
People who do not come to the first class are dropped from the waiting list, so we will need you to relay to Dante who came to the first class. Most of the time we would prefer that you do not make your class bigger because then it may throw other classes out of balance. If someone is absolutely determined to get into your class and risks hanging on until the third week, another student may drop out, and the determined student will get in.
Laptop/device use
The general policy is that students should have their laptop lids down unless they are taking notes or performing exercises with the class. Professors are welcome to adopt a more permissive policy in their class. One popular policy is “lids down” when a fellow student is presenting, do what you want when the professor is presenting. It feels a little bit like grade school but walking around and looking at their IM screens keeps it to a minimum.
ITP Grading
We use a pass/fail system where a student either does good work (A – B-), or they fail. Once you give a grade, it will be final unless there was a clerical error. After we changed to a pass/fail system, the most common appeals (A- vs A) are gone but the remaining ones are more serious. We have a few failures every semester where students would have previously gotten a C or D. This means that the student gets no credits for the class and has to take (and pay) for another class (and for foundation courses they have to re-take the same class).
It is important that you plainly state your expectations as described above in the section on the syllabus. It is also important that you give warnings to a student who is at risk of failing. A failing midterm grade does not go on any record but it can be an important message to the student. If the final project is failing, a warning may not possible to give, but you should contact the student if the case is that you did not receive the final project. (This contact should not become an opportunity for the student to change your opinion of the work you have seen).
Incompletes are only used in cases where there has been a death or serious illness in a student’s immediate family.
Because we encourage students to risk failure by stretching to make bridges outside their known interests and aptitudes we cannot, in general, hold them to an absolute level of achievement in any area. Instead, you are graded on effort and progress in the quality of your work. There are some objective measures of effort, such as missing more than two classes, being chronically late, missing two interim assignments or presentations, or one large assignment or lack of in-class participation. These examples might be clear indicators of a failure in effort from the student. Classes are structured differently so professors will provide a syllabus indicating the requirements and their relative importance. Ultimately the progress in the quality of your efforts is usually a subjective judgment by the professor but students will be given notice when the quality of their work is marginal or failing.
The binary pass/fail system leaves lots of room for other forms of feedback. You are not required to write a narrative for each student but it is a good idea to offer it to any students that want more feedback. For special students, short messages in the email at the end of the term saying “I wish I could have given you an A+” or “you only passed by the skin of your teeth, I would have liked to have seen better,” are both appreciated by the students.
IMA Grading
IMA is graded on an A-F scale. How these grades are determined should be outlined in your syllabus and followed.
Many IMA faculty members are proponents of a form of “labor based grading” or “contract grading”. There are a lot of discussions to be found about this online and a somewhat recent TeachTalk from NYU faculty about it.
In general, the belief is that, labor based grading which is based on effort rather than quality, in an environment where students come with a variety of different backgrounds, skills, and previous knowledge is more equitable.
This is not to say that quality of work isn’t valued – it most certainly is and quite often, especially in project development, effort and labor yield higher quality.
Conflict of interest
Faculty should avoid business relationships with students that you might ever have in a class. If such a relationship arises, out of fairness to the student and the other students in the class, it needs to be brought to the attention of the Chair.
Using students ideas
Much of the key to using one of your student’s ideas is attribution. A faculty member has a greater ability to execute and publicize the idea so they should overdo it on the attribution. The best way to keep the ideas openly flowing at ITP is if credit openly flows. And you will get credit for crediting.
Personal relationships
You should not date any student.
Concerns about students who are underperforming
From time to time, you might encounter a student who seems to be unengaged, underperforming, or might be disrupting the class in some way. When this happens, it would be great to utilize NYU Connect.
NYU Connect is a great resource where faculty, advisor and student services can find and share information in one place, allowing for more effective support to the student. If you have a concern about one of your students (ie. non-responsive, excessive absences, other academic issues), please utilize this guide to learn how to raise a flag which will notify the student’s academic advisement team. You can also give Kudos to students who are doing a great job!
If it is an ongoing or complex situation and you want to do more, please contact itp-advisement@itp.nyu.edu in the case of an ITP student or ima-advise@itp.nyu.edu in the case of an IMA student. We can review if the student has a similar history from other classes or other ongoing concerns and allows us the opportunity to help the student, and at the same time give you better guidance on how to navigate the situation.
Class schedule
There is a certain rhythm to the weekly schedule at ITP and it can be important to keep in mind when scheduling the day and time that your course will meet. For instance, classes that run on Wednesday evening in the Fall semester conflict with a course that all of the first-year ITP students are required to take (Applications of Interactive Technology). Also, Friday morning classes are sometimes passed up by students due to a Thursday night socializing tradition (Thursday Night Out or TNO).
A few good tips from Tom
Remember to do in class:
- Start each class by referring to what the last class covered and giving a bullet-point summary of what you want to do that day.
- Before you start explaining something new, ask if there are any questions on what you’ve covered already or on what the homework assignment was.
- After answering any student’s question, finish your answer by asking, “Does that answer your question?”
- Never talk for more than five minutes without checking if the class has any questions.
- Never use a new term without defining it or asking the class if they’re familiar with it.
- Sometimes, when introducing a new idea, it helps to start with an opening sentence and then ask “Were there any words in that last sentence that you’re unfamiliar with?” I’ll admit I rarely do this, and should probably do it more.
- After introducing any new concept or term, stop to let the class ask questions.
- When introducing a new concept or term, ask what they know about it first. if you can start your explanation by confirming or correcting their existing understanding of the concept, then you’re starting on common ground.
- Check for positive, negative, and confusion after you explain: “Show of hands: who understands what I mean by ‘energy’? Who definitely *doesn’t* understand? Who’s not sure either way?”
- Constantly look around at facial expressions. Ask the ones looking confused or looking away if they’re okay, do they have any questions.
- When you ask for questions, wait a long time to give them time to articulate a question. examine faces during that time. If someone looks confused, ask them by name if they have any questions.
- If no one has any questions, ask someone who looks confident to reiterate the concept.
- When you ask them a question and someone answers, ask them to repeat it in a full sentence, e.g. you: “Can anyone explain how motion pictures work?” Student: “persistence of vision?” You: “Yes. Excellent. Put that in a full sentence please.” When the student then explains it, you have a chance to check the accuracy of their understanding.
- Before changing the subject, tell them you’re about to change the subject and ask for any last questions on the previous subject: “Okay, next we’re going to talk about hammers, but before we do, and other questions about screwdrivers?”
- At the end of class, summarize in bullet points what you *actually* covered, and what’s coming in the next class.
