Adjunct Spotlight

By Gayle Golden

So far, this blog has been a conversation from the faculty to the adjuncts. All well and good. 

But conversations are not one-sided. So when a group gathered for dinner at Ginger Hop at the midterm to talk about teaching strategies, I asked those who came to share some teaching strategies they've tried this fall. Here's what they said:

Back to pre-K? 

Gail Rosenblum gets her News Reporting and Writing students back to kindergarten-style fun with scissors and puzzles to figure out story structures. After discussing stories via textbook and online examples, she divides them into teams and then hands out envelopes containing printouts of fairly long news stories – all of the stories cut into separate paragraphs. 

She gives them an envelope, a glue stick, a sheet of paper and 40 minutes to figure out how to reassemble the story based on what they’ve learned about story structure.

“First, they groan. Then they get to work,” she says. “I LOVE watching them work together, negotiate, cheer when they put a quote together with the right source. When they're done, I give them the actual story, so they can see how they've done. They usually come very close. Sometimes, they hit 100 percent, which thrills them. Later on, when they're taking copious notes from a press conference or speech or interview, I tell them that their notebooks are much the same exercise. It's all about figuring out what goes where, what to leave out and what to keep.”

More than photos
Jeanne Schacht assigns a “10-day photo challenge" in her Media Design class. The concept is simple: Students take one picture each day with their phones, with each day assigned as a prescribed type of photo, such as a self-portrait or a portrait of another person or a landscape.  At the end, they assemble the photos into a slideshow for the class.

“These have been amazingly revealing to me and to the students,” she says. “Mostly they don't just shoot what would be obvious or easy. They are clearly spending a great deal of time thinking about this as a creative identity project. Every picture is well thought through, and the project is carefully put together. Somehow the students want me to understand who they are and how they see the world.” 

In the end, then, a simple assignment becomes a way of connecting. “I think we all understand each other much better,” she says.

Real world class

Jim Offerman has made two changes in his Advertising Strategy and Creative Development class. He now allows students to revise presentations for extra points, which he says empowers them to improve their work. But a big change has come from simulating the structure of an ad agency by assigning creative team roles based on the advertising job students would like to pursue after graduation. Once those roles are set, he makes sure the copywriter and art director handle the print, video and social concepts while the account planner focuses on strategy and the brief. 

“This simple suggestion, I believe, has resulted in more consistent, higher quality work, showing off the talents of each member—all of which shows that by understanding team structure and roles, a more evident symbiosis seems to be taking root,” he says.

Numbers anyone? 

In CJ Sinner’s Interactive and Data Journalism class, numbers are hardly trivial. To get students comfortable handling them, CJ will give students a small dataset that has a lot of obvious ways to produce a story – crime rates, for example, or a health disparities data. She divides them in teams of three or four and asks them to figure out the story very quickly and then write a nut graf about the finding. 

Once they do that, the groups present the paragraph to the class. The class then critiques it, focusing particularly on how numbers are expressed. Is it clear? Confusing? Just for fun, she asks the students to get out their calculators and figure out how the numbers might be written differently.

“For instance, instead of something increasing 98 percent in five years, we could say it nearly doubled in five years,” she says. “Same concept, less math for the reader, and the same general point. Usually they come up with pretty good ones and we have a good discussion about different approaches.”

A good ROI

Joan O’Fallon makes many gestures to connect with her students in Strategic Communication Case Studies class, not the least of which is driving nearly two hours from Wisconsin for the 8:15 a.m. class twice a week. She routinely brings in examples of press releases, internal communications, ethics polices and community relations programming to expose her students to the professional world. During discussions, she asks students to write down ideas on a white board. 

And at the midterm, she put them in the role of evaluators: “I reviewed the course overview and learning objectives in the syllabus to ask students if they were getting value and a positive ROI from the class,” she says. “Was I meeting their expectations and delivering good value for their time and money?  How many of us have attended a conference or webinar that doesn't live up to the course description? I don't want my class to be one of those!”

If you didn't make it to our fall adjunct dinner discussion, we hope to see you at the next gathering where more strategies can be shared and, I hope, be included in subsequent "Adjunct Spotlight" posts on this blog.

Next up: looking back
For our next and last Proactive Teaching post this fall, I'm asking faculty members to consider recent important news or issues in journalism or communications from the past months that could be incorporated into your wrap-up class discussions or as you plan for spring. So stay tuned. Resources will be forthcoming. 

And remember, Julie Golias has already emailed all of you about procedures for submitting final grades and other housekeeping details. If you have any questions about those matters, she's the one to ask. Those teaching in the spring should aim for the orientation/reorientation session scheduled for Jan. 9. 

As usual, if you have a question or a comment for ProActive Teaching, please post one below or email me at ggolden@umn.edu.