Guest Blogger - Stephanie Melick "Sheer Determination"

Author Stephanie Melick

   

  "Stories are the single most

powerful tool in a leader's toolkit"

-Howard Gardner

As an adjunct instructor for an accelerated continuing adult degree program, I often wonder who is learning more: the students or me. Every day, the media provides stories of amazing determination, designed to inspire and motivate me; and they certainly do. Yet, I have come to realize that there is an entire group of individuals whose stories are not touted, tweeted or texted. These are the adults who have decided it is time to become a college student; some for the very first time. I teach their first course: Academic Foundations (AFC), with the major objective to reacclimatize the adult student to college and academia. It is through this class that I am privileged to hear the backstories that brought about the return to school. Each individual student offers a unique saga of determination and inspiration. 

It is a story of the student, who after an unsuccessful college experience directly out of high school, in which bad choices resulted in multiple run-ins with the legal system, now appreciates the learning experience. He is so proud to say he is a 37-year-old sophomore.

It is a story of the student who is returning to school after 20 years as a single parent raising two children, juggling home, work and academics, now bringing a life-perspective born out of struggle and deprivation. Once disenfranchised, she now believes she has been given the opportunity to make a difference.

It is a story of the student who was denied higher education due to her immigration status, though she graduated 7^th in her high school class, now with a green card that allows her the opportunity to obtain her college degree. Having known bigotry and bias, she now seeks to become a role-model for those still denied access to education.

It is a story of the student who is working three jobs to support his family, having decided he needs to set the example for his five children, he is now standing out in the classroom with his intellect and leadership skills. This man fully understands the true meaning of the word “challenge.”

It is a story of the student who has experienced years of domestic violence, finally accepting that she has worth, intelligence and a voice. Now she seeks to prove not only to those who once demoralized and degraded her, but most mostly to herself, that she can succeed.

It is a story of a man who witnessed corruption on the job and reported it. He now wants to make a difference in how companies do business by learning how to implement values and integrity into the day-to-day operation and organization of Corporate America.

And it is a story of a returning veteran, who after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan is a single parent, trying to raise a two-year old while dealing with traumatic stress. She is now proving herself in the classroom, just as she did on the battle field.

Every one of these students has the desire and motivation to succeed, yet they will need support and guidance to do so. Encouragement may come from family and friends; yet the learning institution and instructors, such as me, also have an obligation to the adult student. I believe that my role as an AFC instructor is to provide the adult students with not only the academic benchmarks and skill-sets needed to make the grade, but also with a set of values that will be applicable in every aspect of life.

These skills and values will be learned through clearly stated parameters and transparency of school policies set forth in my syllabus. There needs to be accessibility not only to the learning but also to me, in a non-judgmental and trustworthy approach, while I patiently providing meaningfully relevant lessons and topics for discussion. The adult student also needs my empathy which enables me to understand without condescension. And finally, institutions of higher learning and I need to provide the adult student with the guidance to navigate through the all-important, yet exasperating, minutiae. This last has caused many students to thrown in the towel at their first attempt in college. I believe that if I can implement this people-oriented humanistic approach that student will succeed in obtaining their dreams.

But how do these core values translate into the classroom lesson? Well, many of my students still aren’t sure what they “want to be when they grow up.” They are struggling to find work in an economy that suddenly will fill a menial position with a PhD. Or my students just have a gut feeling that there has to be something more meaningful in their 9-5 existence. Therefore, the former guidance counselor in me uses a variety of self-assessments, inventories and surveys selected to help students identify strength and weaknesses; interests and motivators. The results enable students to create a personality and skill-set profile; a picture of who they are both in and out of the classroom. One of my students dubbed them the “Cosmo quiz of the week,” but at the end of the course confessed that if he had known himself this well 20 years ago he probably would have made it through his first attempt at college. 

We also compare and contrast the level on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to roles one takes on in a groups ~ personal, professional and academic. This particular lesson focuses on why we may not demonstrate leadership qualities in a business setting because we are fearful of rejection or possibly do not feel safe in the job. This leads to a discussion regarding how one’s metacognitive awareness and regulation can determine job satisfaction. In fact, after every assessment we then examine the results in terms the student’s current personal and professional life. 

But it is not all “fun and games.” The assessments are interwoven with the benchmark skills necessary to continue on in the Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree programs; most importantly focusing on comprehension, critical thinking and writing skills. All this leads to a Career Analysis Research paper, that not only helps the student learn more about his or her dream job, but refreshes and/or introduces the student to information literacy, data base research and a formal research paper. While these academic skills can baffle and frustrate my students, the question that inevitably stymies them is: “Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?” This is not surprising, considering the average age of my continuing education students is 35-40 years old.

Two specific stories come to mind: The first is about one of my students who stated that her dream was to become a CEO of a hospital. Currently working as an office manager in a doctor’s office, she believed this was a natural progression. She was able to identify the business courses necessary to achieve a BA and eventually an MBA. Academic or peer review articles on the qualifications and responsibilities of a hospital CEO were relatively easy to find in our library databases. She even had two people that she could interview and/or shadow. After setting up her paper, addressing all the bullets of the assignment, she interviewed a CEO. Then she called me in a panic.

In doing all the research and interviews, even shadowing the CEO one afternoon, she realized that she did not have the personality traits for the job. How did she know this? She compared the results of all the inventories and surveys she had completed during AFC and realized that her results were antithetical to the traits needed to run a hospital. For example: There is quite a bit of administrative paper work required and that wasn’t even a blip on her career-interest survey results. She also realized that she needed strong leadership skills and her results from the team work inventory indicated that she was much stronger in compromising. The only assessment that would have supported this future career choice was the results from her learning style survey, which indicated she is a physical reflective learner; both learning styles that would be needed when one are in charge of an entire hospital.

Of course her panic was that the submission date was less than three days away! What should she do now?

My advice: Finish the paper explaining what she discovered and how this assignment saved her years of course work that she would not benefit from. What a wonderful example of the process of learning.

And as an endnote: After realizing that she was more interested in the qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of a business, she changed her major.  She is now part of the Bachelors of Sociology: Organizational Studies rather than the Bachelors of Science Business Administration program!

Another one of my students was currently working in the high paying, high stress job of sales. The 10-hour days were really wearing on him; however with a growing family he could not walk away from the steady paycheck. A former Marine, he was used to hard work and long days; but he was uninspired and bored.

He could not answer the question: Where do you want to be in five or ten years? He just knew it wasn’t in his current job.

The career-interest survey indicated he would make a good crossing-guard! Seriously, that was his top “career.” We all had a good laugh at that; but the reality was that there was validity in those results. His learning style was a physical social learner. His team work skills were strong in leadership and evaluation. Yet he was the first to acknowledge that the results from the organization-skills assessment were spot on: he lacked organizational and time management skills. Crossing guard was looking more and more viable!

In the end, it was his love of food that won out. After interviewing a couple of friends who owned their own restaurants, he realized that the day-to-day minutiae of a restaurant were exactly what he needed to keep his interest; keep him moving while allowing him to kibitz with people. He was also wise enough to realize that he would need a partner who possesses the organizational skills that he lacks. No worries: he would be the host, the face the restaurant and his partner could be the brains. He knows just the right person for the job…

Stories like these are the reason I teach. Yes, my role as the instructor is to encourage and enable efficacy in the academic world. But I also urge my students to embrace the learning ~ not the grade. In every course my main objective is to embolden my students to focus on their strengths and to have the courage to ask for help, which is often extremely intimidating for an adult learner. So as an adjunct in an accelerated adult program, I must embrace the core values that foster endurance and resiliency; essentially, I must develop and earn my students’ trust. I can present the activities and be the cheerleader, but it is the student’s desires and belief in the learning that make the difference. 

Out of sheer determination, these adult students walk into classrooms every day anxious at the impending challenges, yet eager to absorb and share the learning. They may not be the current sound bite who gets their 15 minutes of fame, but they are superstars in the eyes of their families, friends and especially me. As a wise man once suggested to me, anything I can do as a teacher “to nurture and strengthen this determination will pay wonderful dividends, helping students complete their dreams for a better life.”

Stephanie A. Melick, MA, is a Program Advisor and also an adjunct instructor for Centenary College's School of Professional Studies.  This article will be published as part of an anthology titled "Moments of Clarity:  Anthology of Stories from Faculty Who Teach for Success" (John H. Shrawder, Editor).

Josh Ritter, Editing as Writing, and The Death of Winter

The real reason for this post is that I want to play you a song.  Weighed down by the immobility of winter and stupefied from never-ending hibernation, I want to post a link to Josh Ritter’s cathartic vernal anthem “Snow is Gone” (“long time coming/but now, the snow is gone”) and move on with it.  This being an educational blog, I’ll proceed, however, using a Josh Ritter article on writing and editing as clever pretext.  Just play along…

All instructors can teach writing.  We may not all be grammarians, but most of us can recognize sound or unsound employments of structure, thesis statement, source evaluation, source citation, and evidentiary support.  The SPS writing-across-the-curriculum philosophy thus presses us all into duty for the cause of better writing. [FN1] 

If we each hold certain lines, it will be easier for our students to develop better habits along them.  We could debate what those habits should be, but perhaps the best umbrella habit for good writing, after the author has uncovered something  valuable to say, is a willingness to proofread vigilantly and edit mercilessly.

Peter Matthiessen, author of the indispensable The Snow Leopard, says that writing is a slog, until it isn’t.  It takes commitment and persistence to achieve eloquence:

“[I]t’s plain hard labor, hunting the right way to express that thought that had seemed so penetrating, even beautiful, before you had to reduce it into words. I liken the donkey work of the first draft to the booster apparatus of a rocket—the terrible labor of those energies lifting this reluctant mass against the force of gravity, slowly, slowly, until marvelously—on the better days—the thing achieves its own momentum, and the dead weight of its booster falls away. Effortless, it enters into orbit—in short, ‘the zone’—sailing free and clear and light and sun-filled, opened wide to the flow of imagination, unobstructed.”

True, I do not expect the business law case studies I grade to be rocket-like in their elegance, but I do expect that the student has spent some time with the paper, organizing thoughts, getting them down, and then editing them into a neat, coherent, flowing whole.  A first draft of decent ideas handed in as a final product offends assertively, like stinky cheese left oozing in the sun.  It is something good, mishandled.

In some cases, the unedited piece results from lack of care or laziness.  Josh Ritter, singer-song writer extraordinaire, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal which highlighted the emotional/defensive mechanisms which, too, can create editing aversion.  [FN2] He tamed his own youthful distaste for editing with this realization:

“Doing good work and having creative thoughts means very little unless you're able to express that work and those thoughts to others in as straightforward a way as possible. To edit yourself isn't an admission of lack of talent; it's sticking up for that talent by taking the time to make sure that everyone can understand what you're trying to say.”

After the exhausting “donkey work” of the first draft, the surgical work of fixing it can lack enticement.  Our students need to be motivated to take that next step.  

Course by course, assignment by assignment, we each can encourage students to revise, edit, and proofread.   We can emphasize that taking these latter-stage steps demonstrates pride in the work to which their name is attached, making the writing clearer, tighter, more economical and precise, easier to comprehend, and better structured.  Then, we must hold them accountable for those very things, primarily through our feedback and grading process. 

 

When grading writing and providing useful feedback about it, perhaps we can use the framework below as guidance:

We can tell if they revised by evaluating the structure, organization, quality of analysis, relevance of evidence cited, and general content management (these are the big picture items).  

We can tell if they edited by evaluating the style, flow, economy of language, and sentence structure (this is where we look at the means of communication used).

We can tell if they proofread by evaluating the cleanness of the submission (this is where we look for errors in spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure).

If, together, we are going to make Centenary students better writers, we each must help our students understand the maxim Mr. Ritter extols in his article:  to write is to edit.

Here is a link to the Josh Ritter article:  Seeing Red:  To Write Is To Edit

Here is a link to an Oxford Guide on the subject:  Guide to Editing and Proofing

Most importantly:  Winter is gone; play the song loudly.

[FN1] Notice that APA citation is part of the puzzle, not all of it.  We want our students to cite consistently and clearly, but that is not the end game of our assessment of their writing.  This is another blog entry for another time.

[FN2] I saw Josh Ritter play at Monmouth University last fall.  At one point, he engaged a somewhat quiet crowd by unplugging his guitar, perching on the lip of the stage, and playing a full-hearted version of the song above.  He did not play to the mood; it being his room, he grabbed the audience by the collar and brought them into his joy by means of his passion.  Teaching lessons abounded.  That too is another blog entry for another time, though.

Steve Valvano: He knows business and he knows the Beatles

Drawing connections between the things that we know, see, and experience – unleashing the broader ecology of things -- often fuels deeper learning and personal growth.  Our colleague Steve Valvano  has published a fun and interesting article in Fast Company Magazine which does just that.   

Steve knows business…and Steve knows the Beatles.  Hence his article:  “What the Beatles Inadvertently Taught Us About Business.” 
 

Congratulations to Steve on publishing this piece!  

  

You can find the article here:  What the Beatles Inadvertently Taught Us About Business  by Steve Valvano, Adjunct Instructor at Centenary College's School of Professional Studies and Vice President of Human Resources at Panalpina Inc.-USA

Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Our Core Values - The Final List

Although different in who we are and how we teach, common threads bind us in our joint endeavor as SPS instructors educating SPS students.   If we are to fulfill our promise to those students, if we are to give them the opportunity to grow profoundly, there are certain things we each must embody in our relationships with our students, each other, the College, and the community.  If we are to be truly unique in offering something not available elsewhere, if we are to achieve excellence consistently, a common set of Core Values must animate our craft, daily and vigilantly.  Below is an articulation, compiled with input from you and the Faculty Services team, of the Core Values of an SPS Instructor.

THE CORE VALUES OF AN SPS INSTRUCTOR

Authenticity – Teach from who you are.  Open real Dialogue (see Martin Buber) and accept the honesty, humility, and vulnerability that requires.

Quality – Establish high performance standards and, with courage, consistently hold yourself and your students accountable to them.  Expect greatness.

Responsibility – Recognize your responsibility – to students, colleagues, and the College – to uphold and foster academic integrity.  Each class we teach is an extension of the greater whole.

Academic Rigor – Challenge students with a rigorous academic journey in a supportive and collaborative environment.

Empathy – Patiently meet the student where the student needs to be met; remember what it was like to not know what you now know.

Respect –Appreciate the life experience and existing knowledge of your adult students by giving them a true voice in the course.

Passion – Share openly your passion for the subject matter and the learning process.  Inspire by showing students why the content is important to them. 

Curiosity – Put the subject in the center of the class and, along with the students, inquire about it from every angle.  Experience together the awe and wonder of new Knowledge and meaningful connections.

Learning – Measure success by what the students learn, not by what you teach and “cover”.

Feedback –Let students know where they stand (and how they can climb higher) by creating a culture of feedback.  Provide timely, frequent, and constructive guidance for improvement.

Self Efficacy – Seek to empower.  Model good practice, provide opportunities for mastery experiences, and coach students to be persistent and resilient in the quest for excellence.

Accessibility – Be available and meaningfully engage students both inside and outside of the classroom.

Legacy – Create transformative learning experiences that will benefit students for life.

This list creates common expectations to which we can hold each other and those who later enter our ranks.  What do you think of the list?  Does it ring true?  I invite your thoughts and comments below.

Thomas Keller, Core Values, and the Desire for Excellence

Photo by Barbara Charalambidis

Sometimes when I read about Thomas Keller it makes my heart ache with feelings of inadequacy.   He is a chef who oversees some of the world’s greatest restaurants.   But read Grant Achatz’s account of how Mr. Keller taught him to prepare tripe, tending the item for weeks, showing up early morning when the process so dictated, creating an unlikely magical dish through knowledge and persistence, and you see that Keller also is a teacher, if not some sort of eyes-wide-open, every-leaf-in-the-forest-accounted-for Zen master.   He makes great food AND he makes people greater in the process. 

From consistency of accounts one might conclude, without having met him or tasted his food, that excellence reigns in every crevice of Mr. Keller’s world.  He does the right things, for the right reasons, in the right way.    

•  He preaches awareness, demanding that his staff understands what is going on around them, what divergent forces are impacting their processes, and what can be learned from the causes and effects witnessed;
• He is consistently great while being consistently innovative; there are things that must stay the same and things that must change, and those things must exist in tandem;
• He makes those around him better by demanding excellence – he asks that his cohorts desire to be better today than they were yesterday;
• He understands people and their reference points and what creates the timeless keepsake of a memorable experience;
• His principles rule the day; he knows which things are beyond compromise and must remain for all seasons (in the Sir Thomas More way, I mean, not the menu-rotation way);
• He is both smart and thoughtful;
• He works hard and works humbly;
• He cares about more than just himself;  he is committed to uplifting the entire dining industry, not just himself or his own business interests; and
• He is a true believer who invests his staff in organizational goals that consider all stakeholders. 

It is not hard to see why his reputation as a teacher and mentor adjuncts to his renown as a world class chef. [FN1]
 

As any great leader does, Mr. Keller has deeply held values and principles.  New employees do not simply enter a kitchen upon signing with Mr. Keller; they enter a philosophy.  Literally.  Each newbie receives a list of “core values” which are expected to be “imbued in [their] core” as they work “tirelessly and fearlessly” towards the common goals of the organization.  Through this philosophical fulcrum of character unity, consistent excellence can be achieved in all of Keller’s kitchens and enterprises while creativity remains intact.

Here at SPS, we too strive for consistent excellence, with each classroom being a separate enterprise linked to a broader, common goal and held to common expectations.  As such, we continually are in the process of redesigning the orientation/workshop for newly hired adjuncts.   Drawing from Mr. Keller’s inspiration, I think it would be advantageous if we had a list, similar to Mr. Keller’s, outlining the core values that each SPS instructor must possess and embody.   We all teach in our classrooms from our own authentic, creative selves.  But there are common denominators that make SPS instructors great and that set apart the educational experiences we provide. 

In an effort to capture those commonalities, we would like to make a list of “The 10 Core Values of an SPS Instructor” and we would like your input in the process.  You do not have to make a list of 10 things – by all means do so if you have the inclination – but it would be great to hear what each of you consider the most important core value an SPS adjunct can honor and hold.

After reviewing your feedback, we will compile a list, circulate it to all, and make it a critical piece of our new adjunct orientation.  Perhaps the best way we can orient a new instructor to SPS is to let them know with clarity and conviction those common things for which we each uncompromisingly stand.

Please reply to this post and share your preeminent core value(s). 

[FN1] Here is a clip of Mr. Keller teaching Adam Sandler how to make "The World's Greatest Sandwich" for a movie scene.  If ever the Chef's genius is in doubt, realize that he invented a sandwich combining the greatest elements of the BLT, grilled cheese, and the Fried Egg Sandwich into ONE mouth-carnival-between-two-slices-of-bread sandwich.  The recipe is included in the clip.  You are welcome.