The 21st Century Conservatory

STUDENT

WORKLOAD

ACTION

GROUP

Notes from the first semester at the School of the Arts “...the biggest problem of all at the high school level is that of the balance between the academic and arts study and the exhaustion of the students¹ time and strength" Academic Dean Julia Mueller, Passionate Preference, p. 225

Subcommittee Reports, January, 2017

Subcommittee 1: Reflection

Reflection and Restoration Chair Jeff Gredlein reports major findings:

We're known since the 1940's that most learning takes place during reflection-- time spent actively considering and remembering major aspects of a learning experience as well as time spent in default/rest mode where the brain integrates new knowledge into existing knowledge. We often say that reflection is important for learning. It would be more accurate to say that reflection is learning.

Seyle’s General Adaptation Syndrome, shows how the human body eventually breaks down and the immune system can no longer protect the individual after an extended period of time without rest, under continued stress.

John Pencavel, Stanford, "he “profit-maximising employer will not be indifferent to the length of…working hours over a day or week.” He notes a substantial dropoff in productivity after 50 hour work week, as well as the critical nature of a day off.

Many studies suggest that adults can handle 5-week stretches of 60+ hour weeks, but after that they require an equal number of weeks of significantly reduced work duration in order to recover their full capacities. (ie 3 weeks of 60-hour weeks require 3 weeks of 20-25 hour weeks for recovery. 5 weeks of 70-hour weeks require 5 weeks of 20 hour weeks for recovery, for example.) More than five weeks of this kind of load is damaging to efficiency and effectiveness. We cannot find studies that focus specifically on learning or arts production on these schedules; nor can we find evidence that long periods of more than 40-hours a week are beneficial to learning or training of any kind. We have found that students at UNCSA frequently work 12-16 hour days well past the 5-week duration after which recovery is required for efficient and effective learning.

In the case of the research on Reflection, three points among many support the need to tear into the schedule:

1) A growing number of UNCSA faculty are using numerous methods of active reflection with their students in their courses, and find the various practices beneficial to the learning and teaching experience.

2) The Default Mode Network Model of brain activity shows that while humans show the highest level of neural and cognitive activity when the Attention/Control Network is being used during focused, goal-directed, concentrated tasks (the “Looking Out” activities), there is also high levels of brain activity when the Default Mode Network is in use during reflective, meditative, consolidation type tasks (the “Looking In” behaviors). – Further, these networks tend to co-activate during creative thinking tasks, and the stimulation of both have been shown to be necessary for creative cognitive functioning.

3) Reflection has long been know to be a crucial part of the human learning models of cognition, and individuals not allowed proper reflection space in their daily lives can show deficits in numerous areas related to disturbances in memory formation, planning, and problem-solving.

Role of Reflection on Creative Activity in the Brain -

“In humans, the DMN is hypothesized to generate spontaneous thoughts during mind-wandering and believed to be an essential component of creativity.”

- Default mode network: Spontaneous fluctuations in fMRI brain Jaeseung Jeong, Ph.D. Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST

Subcommittee 2: Advising

Academic Advising Subcommittee Chair Janine Hawley reports:

Advising group continued independent work to meet regularly through Fall, 2016, and met with Elizabeth White from the Digital Media team who will help to implement the Academic Advising page on the website where the new Advisor Manual, created by the Advising Subcommittee, will reside. The draft online manual should be up by March 1, and includes information for students and advisors alike. The AA Subcommittee still hopes to develop tools, together with the Registrar, to enhance communication between DLA and Arts Advisors. They are working together to remove a combined Banner/Degreeworks obstacle to clarifying communications between the two.

Subcommittee 3: Time Tally

Time Tally co-chairs Allison Gagnon and Betsy Towns Report

Major findings of the Student Workload study:

Accredited universities across the US use the Carnegie Unit to match time spent to credits received in education. For the purposes of clarity here, we use a 60-minute hour, though carnegie units are actually measured in 50-minute hours (based on fact that students need time between classes to switch gears.

2016 Time Tally Survey- Key Findings:

Note that findings apply primarily to undergraduate students unless otherwise stated.

1. Faculty typically demand far more time for performance and production requirements than the credits received would indicate. In other words, for a single performance or production credit, which regulates 45 hours minimum, a student often spends 90, 135, or even 180 hours.

2. Faculty typically demand less than 45 hours for credits in 'classroom' type requirements (lecture, seminars or learning labs). Few students spend the federally regulated number of hours for Liberal Arts credits, cinema studies, music history, dance perspectives, etc. Note that this violates federal standards.

Note that: There is a finite range for hours under assigned credit; Overages can be infinite

We are not using our key measurement tool to paint an accurate picture of requirements or the student experience, because far more requirements are of the performance or production type, and require far more than the credits would suggest.

Across the schools and divisions--

Lecture & Seminar style courses in all schools/divisions tend to receive too many credits for the time requirements. The exception is the high school where time demands in most cases very closely match credits. (AP classes, as one would expect, require more)
Production classes in all schools tend to receive too few credits for time demands. Often far fewer.

Additional major contributing factors to workload mysteries:

All schools credit performance/production differently, and credit it differently inside the school i.e, some curricular, some extracurricular, some carefully measured and supervised, some not at all etc
No schools offer full credit for performance/production requirements, or enough space in curriculum to accommodate these as extra-curriculars

D. What it means

Most students are required to complete more than 15 credits per term (which normal accounting would equate to 45 hours/ave per week);
Time demands nearly always exceed credits assigned; therefore most students have 50-60 credited hours per week before much performance and production are accounted for ?

Recommendations:

Accuracy in Accounting:

Move toward a model of thinking where Time is Time is Time, regardless of how it is spent-- students should receive accurate credits for the time demanded.
Work with EPC, Deans, and registrar to insure that Course demands and credits assigned match much more accurately
Determine together, at the Deans’ level, what an appropriate # of hours is; implement strategies and tools for measurement and enforcement
Create space for rest, reflection, and restoration, in recognition of facts that these are critical to learning and creativity

Performance and Production Recommendations:

Deans share strategies for crediting Performance and Production

Make the hard choice: give credits for all required hours or make space in the curriculum for extracurricular requirements.

Assess relationship between student body we have and perf/productions we plan

(Consider also the handling of the individual and the group: I’m thinking of solo juries/recitals vs. ensemble obligations in music, and I’m not sure how these are handled in other schools or if the issue exists to the same extent)

Additional Student-centered Considerations

Institute standard start-stop times across the university to allow the interdisciplinary opportunity that students & faculty overwhelmingly want
Increase opportunities for interdisciplinary immersions during intensive arts like those piloted in 2015 & 2016
Create courses in each school that welcome other disciplines
Coordinate courses like: business skills, career planning, time management, mindfulness across the campus (and even in the community), beyond this coordinate course offerings to minimize duplication and maximize cross-pollination, whether between schools, or between curriculum and production elements

A few opportunities if we fix the workload

Time for interdisciplinary, collaborative, contemporary learning experiences:
Increase opportunities for Alternative Learning experience: internship, international study, course transfer
Individual flexibility in route to degree

Swag next steps:

Survey the Students on workload?
SUMMIT: Teaching the Artist Today
Prototype alternatives
Visit schools that are doing things differently

Resources:
http://snaap.indiana.edu/

Addenda

Addendum I

January 1990

To: Faculty Council

From: Lesley Hunt, Faculty Member

Subject: A Production Trade School

As the new year – new term begins I challenge the Faculty Council and ultimately the deans and faculty to say NO – enough is enough let us stop this production trade school treadmill that we are on NOW!

We have a new society – the Giannini Society – which encourages people to support Yittorio Giannini’s Dream by supporting the school. His dream of a “conservatory” where talented young people would come to learn, to discover, to be inspired, to reflect, to research, to explore the many aspects of their chosen profession in the performing and visual arts as guided by those master artists and academicians who continue to practice their profession while sharing their knowledge and expertise to inspire these young students in a relaxed and creative atmosphere.

It would appear that we have lost sight of this dream. For we are on a treadmill that causes overwork, force feeding, non-creative non-reflective, short-sighted, pressured, result oriented products.

We claim to be about process, how can we when we only have time to “get the next show up”. We do not give students time, (and I don’t mean time off) to reflect, to day-dream, to rehearse, to relax, to read, to write, to create, to discuss, to name just a handful of the ingredients necessary to the nurturing of the creative spirit.

LET US STOP NOW AND RE-EVALUATE WHO WE ARE, WHAT WE ARE DOING AND WHERE WE WANT TO GO before next year is upon us and we once again throw together and patch up an all school production so that we can look good.

Let us examine the QUALITY of the training, of the process, of the product not simply live by how many productions we can “put on”.

“LESS IS MORE” & “QUALITY TIME” – are two well known sayings that we might want to adhere to before we become known as a “Trade School” providing students with a packet of survival skills and commercial glitz.

A new school a little further down south, namely Miami, has a dream and it just may resemble Giannini’s a great deal more than we currently do.

Cc: P. Nelson, R. Trotter, P. Neary, B. Francesconi

Addendum II

Excerpt from Leslie Banner, passionate preference, the relevant quotation: "the biggest problem of all at the high school level is that of the balance between the academic and arts study and the exhaustion of the students¹ time and strength"

Addendum III

Quotes from SWAG process

The most important skill UNCSA teaches how to strategically drop the ball

If you can survive UNCSA, you can survive anything

If we’re going to be a production company, shouldn’t we follow union rules?

Just because we’re at UNCSA doesn’t mean we don’t have to follow the rules of physics as governs time.

Shouldn’t we tell the Truth?

Do the curricula drive the production calendar or the production calendar drive the school?

Contact/Outside Work/Credit Hour Ratio

Definitions

UNC schools, like all accredited institutions of higher education, use the Carnegie Unit to measure credit hours. Very roughly generalized, the unit indicates that students earn one credit for 2250 minutes of work. Commonly, that's: 150 minutes of class work plus individual work per week for 15 weeks. That means 150 minutes of lab time, 50 minutes of lecture/discussion plus 100 minutes of outside work, 150 minutes of ensemble, field trip, practicum, studio etc. (For purposes of clarity, I fall back in part to hours here, rather than 50 mins. We will have to minutes, ultimately.)

This plays out in different ways:

I. Lecture (seminar, discussion, recitation) (1credit= 1 contact hour +2 hours homework)

A one credit-hour course meets for fifteen 50-minute sessions of classroom instruction (or equivalent) with two hours of outside study for each class session. A 3 credit-hour course meets three 50-minute sessions or two 75 minute sessions per week for fifteen weeks, with six hours outside work per week.

II. Self-Containted Laboratory Activity supervised as a group (ensemble, studio, laboratory, field trip, practicum, workshop, group studio) (1 credit =3 hours lab time + no extra work) Non-self contained labs have less lab time and more outside expectation, to varying degrees.

One credit hour earned for the equivalent of fifteen 150-minute periods of such activity, with little or no outside preparation expected. Forty-five 150-minute sessions would earn three credits

Lecture/lab combinations also exist, with various distributions of Contact time and outside work.

III. Experiential Learning (to my knowledge, we do not us this schedule.)

At its discretion, an institution may award credit hours for learning acquired outside the institution which is an integral part of a program of study. When life or work experience is to be credited as a concurrent portion of an academic program design, as in an internship, one semester credit hour will be awarded for each 40-45 clock-hour week of supervised academic activity that provides the learning considered necessary to program study.

IV. Short Sessions

Credit hours may be earned in short sessions (block study, summer sessions, intersessions, etc.) proportionately to those earned for the same activity during a regular term of the institution, normally at no more than one credit per week of full-time study.

Voluntary Credit Analysis for Individual Faculty

1. Course_______________________________ Credit Hours Assigned ___________

Course Type ___________________________

(lecture, lab, ensemble, studio, workshop, practicum)

Contact Hours (per week) ____________ Average homework expected _________________

Comments _______________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________

Schedule Visualization Mock-Up: First Draft (please send feedback to Betsy Towns)

I quote the below regulation from UNC-CH registrar, but you can find the exact text on university sites around the country.

FEDERAL DEFINITION OF A CREDIT HOUR

For purposes of the application of this policy and in accord with federal regulations, a credit hour is an amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement that is an institutionally established equivalency that reasonably approximates:

Not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time, or;
At least an equivalent amount of work as outlined in item 1 above for other academic activities as established by the institution including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours.

From our Trimester to Semester Conversion Guide:
"Credit Hour Minimum for 4-year program is120 and 140 hours "

Combined with the above regulation, this translates to workload like this: 15hrs. per term= 45 hours per week/15 weeks and 140 hours 17.5 hours per term= 52.5 hours per week/15 weeks. These maximums protect students, faculty, and budget from overwork.