Innovation/Improvement

            When I first took over the class Physical Changes & Aging, I gave students the same final assignment as sections in previous semesters had been given.  This was a 5-7 page paper on a question of the students’ choice, so long as it dealt with material covered in the course.  There were many quality papers written, but students often defaulted to a general overview of a disease or disorder.  I believe that while it is important as an educator to communicate what students should know, I also believe they should critically think about why they are learning it.  As I sought to create a new final assignment for Physical Changes & Aging, I wanted students to go beyond writing review papers about what we know of Parkinson’s disease, cancer, or how we lose our hearing with age.  I felt that students shouldn’t just tell me what happens, but why our knowledge of these changes helps us understand the process of aging.  Now, I could have simply assigned this as an essay topic, but I wanted my students to engage with each other and share their unique perspectives on our aging journeys.  To that end, I drew from my own experience as an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary, namely, The Raft Debate.  The premise is simple; three faculty members representing the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities are trapped on a desert island.  To determine who gets the life raft which can take one of them back to civilization, they must debate which of their fields is most important to society.  Adapting this for the classroom, I split students into teams and assigned each team a system of the body covered during the semester.  Debates are conducted between two to three teams and each team must argue why knowledge of their system is the most important to our understanding of how we age.  Students are evaluated not just by me on their team’s performance, but also by teammates on their contributions to the group.  The latter helps to keep students engaged and accountable to their team and prevents the burden of preparation from falling on one or a few members.  It is my hope that as students collaborate with each other and ultimately, compete against their classmates, they will gain new insight on how a knowledge of aging may be applied to both their professional and personal lives.