FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Aug. 4, 2005

CONTACT: Professor Delaney Kirk, (515) 271-3724, delaney.kirk@drake.edu, Daniel Finney, (515) 271-2833 or daniel.finney@drake.edu

DRAKE PROF TO SHARE CLASSROOM COURTESY LESSONS

Delaney Kirk, a professor of management at Drake University, is bringing home her mission to bring civility and order back to the college classroom with a three-day workshop Aug. 11-13 at Drake.

Twenty faculty members from 13 states have registered for the workshop, which Kirk has taught this summer at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City and the University of Washington in Seattle. The workshop is part of the Chautauqua Short Courses for College Teachers, which is supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education.
The Drake workshop will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 11, and Friday, Aug. 12, and from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Aug. 13, in room 107 of Aliber Hall, 29th Street and University Avenue.

Kirk is helping faculty across the country wrest back the college classroom from students who have, she claims, exploited a trend toward informality in higher education and become increasingly disruptive and inconsiderate.

Kirk's "A-hah" moment occurred three years ago, during an undergraduate human resources course she refers to now as the "class from hell."

"I had been teaching for 20 years and was just dumbfounded by the behavior of the students in this class," Kirk recalls. "Coming to class tardy; having their cell phones ring during class; leaving in the middle of class to go to the bathroom. One student even fell asleep during every class period."

At first Kirk was angry at the students, but then blamed herself for not setting expectations early on.

Kirk seized control of the classroom by changing the rules of the course midstream and feared she'd be punished accordingly in student evaluations. It didn't happen.

"I found they respected me more for having set these rules," she says. "And, they learned more because I didn't have to deal with behavioral problems."

Since that course, Kirk has emerged as a pioneer in classroom management. Her work was featured in the September 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education. She's writing a book on the topic and teaches classes to other college professors around the country.
Wherever she goes, she hears enthusiastic agreement with her assessment that college students can tend to be uncivil and disrespectful, and that teachers often don't know how to deal with this tendency.

"Part of this is probably our fault as instructors," she says. "Many of my colleagues 'dress down' in the classroom as a way to relate to their students. Universities are putting greater emphasis on the student as a customer and giving student evaluations a great deal of weight in determining renewals of contracts. My colleagues say they are afraid to say no when asked to allow late papers, give extra credit or make-up tests. They have lost control of their classrooms."

Kirk does not believe today’s students are intentionally ill mannered. Rather, she believes a culture of video games, instant messaging and e-mail have made students insensitive to professional settings and polite behaviors.

“It’s something that we’re going to have to address at the classroom level,” she says. “They’ve grown up communicating one way and it’s not going to fly when they get jobs – if they get that far. We need to train them better as teachers.”

With her courses and her new book, which is due this fall, Kirk is hoping to change that, by providing specific suggestions, on everything from writing a loophole-proof course syllabus (require a student signature so students can't claim they didn't know the policy on late papers) to establishing credibility and authority on the first day of class.

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