Faculty Council Meeting of Tuesday, 19 December 2002
President: Joe Liles; Vice-president: John Woodmansee; Secretary: Floyd Bullard
Minutes
(Minutes are by Mr. Woodmansee in Mr. Bullard's absence)
Agenda Item: Stress Reduction
Joe summarized some of the conclusions from the 1998 study of Student Workload (attached). He said that he thought overall students experienced less stress then than they are expressing now, 4 years later. He then covered the Faculty Council report on student workload in 2000 (handout), which recommended that we make systemic changes to student workload.
Steve Warshaw presented his draft of “Student Needs for Healthy living and Learning” (below). He based his numbers on research for healthy living on issues such as sleep and eyeballed other numbers based on what seemed reasonable to him. He has shared these numbers already with some students and teachers. Jerry has asked for a homework policy to be put in place by the second week of next semester. Steve thinks there should be some monitoring of workload in classes and discussions among teachers about what is expected of students in our classes so that we are aware of the total picture of what our students are experiencing in academic workload.
DRAFT: STUDENT NEEDS FOR HEALTHY LIVING AND LEARNING
24 hours X 7 = 168
8 hours sleep X 7 56
1 hour hygiene X 7 7
7 hours X 6 classes* 42*
3 hours W/S 3
2 hours meals X 7 14
2 hours physical exercise 2
.5 hour hall meetings/cleaning X 5 2.5
.75 hour travel time between activities X 5 3.75
3.75 hours “free” time Mon-Fri X 5 18.75**
9.5 hours “free” time Sat/Sun X 2 19 **
Total 168
* Excluding art, music, and special study options (SSO’s). For 3 lab courses and 3 non-lab courses, time in class is presently 21 hours per week, leaving 21 hours for homework. If a student followed the allocation of time above closely, she/he would need to devote an average of 2 ½ hours per week night and 4 hours each on Saturday and Sunday to doing schoolwork.
** “Free” time includes time for art, music, or other additional courses including SSO’s; varsity and intramural sports; clubs, shopping, laundry, etc.
Possible Homework Guidelines
• Time per class (contact time + homework) other than art, music, and special study options = 7 hours.
• At least 90% of the students in the class should spend no more than that in any one week.
End of Draft
Discussion
Special Study Options
Should we limit Special Study Options?
Discussion points:
Keep the same system of requiring students to go through their advisor to have them approved.
Add counselor to the mix.
Have a guideline that one is the expectation and students would have to advocate to take more.
Need to have an attendance/drop policy for seminars.
Have a grade requirement for signing up for more than one.
Are we lumping PE SSO’s with academic or not? What about clubs?
Review SSO and recommend that many should become clubs rather than courses.
What about students who are teaching students? They must have adult sponsors who are present at the meetings.
We should add parents to the mix, i.e. when students are an unknown quantity to us in their first semester, we could consult the parents about their child's ability to handle extra work.
Rather than a blanket rule, allow exceptions for especially capable students who are able to handle a large load
Motion: First semester juniors will not be allowed to take Special Study Options.
For 19, Against 13
Motion: Second semester juniors and seniors can take one Special Study Option with permission of their advisor; a second or more (which includes teaching a seminar) with permission of advisor and counselor and all teachers. Everyone has veto power.
For 25, Against 2, Abstentions 2
Steve will take the recommendations into consideration and respond to the faculty.
Homework Guidelines
Discussion points:
We know that students put off assignments and get backed up with large papers, tests, etc.
With new assessments and methods, we end up taking up more work, which takes more time. We compete for students’ time.
We give more assignments to make sure students don’t fail; they have more grades in their average. More assignments to turn in results in more stress.
We should compare GPA’s at the end of this semester to those of previous semesters to see if we have raised our standards.
We need to look at other schools’ homework policies.
We need to look at more than homework in producing stress at NCSSM. For example, sports take up a great deal of time. Extracurricular activities take up more time than we imagine.
We need to come together as a faculty and police ourselves on any policy we come up with.
We have more students coming in from block schedules who are not used to doing much homework.
Can we as a faculty limit the number of graded assignments? This would perhaps lessen workload.
Then again, more grades calm students; they know they can improve their averages.
If we limit the number of graded assignments, students wouldn’t so as well. Are we doing students a disservice by not holding fast to due dates? Are students learning that deadlines don’t matter?
Would students want us to be reducing their options for SSO’s, extracurricular activities, # of classes, etc? They might reevaluate their stated stress level if they knew that we are proposing to limit their choices, set more restrictions.
We need to be consistent in our policies and planning for students.
How can we help students better at the beginning of the year to prepare them for the workload.
While the average amount of work assigned per course is reasonable, the timing of assignments may not be. Control the distribution of assignments over time to avoid a crush of assignments.
Jerry believes that we have been assigning more work, taking up more graded assignments. He hears from students that having fewer graded assignments creates more stress. Students want to please us and they work hard to do that. He doesn’t have an answer now. We need to relieve the students without lowering standards, and we need to do the same for the faculty. The issue is student and faculty related. He is concerned about faculty burnout. He wants to come up with something initial to implement next semester, but will let task forces come up with longer term answers.
Steve will be collecting data from the students on their academic workload. He won’t be collecting data on other uses of their time. He thinks we need to do something now, can’t wait a semester.
Attached files: