Student Experience

The unplugged classroom: No midterms or finals, just lots of writing and creativity

The first thing you may notice about Jim Coan’s intimate class is that every student is writing. No one is typing on a laptop or tablet. No phones are out.

It’s very analog.

The professor of psychology is in his 20th year at the University of Virginia, and his teaching style has undergone a complete makeover.

A candid portrait of Charly Beasley (left) and a photo showing a hand cutting a paper clip.

Charly Beasley creates collages to remember the day’s lesson. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

Gone are the midterms and final exams that scaffold a typical college course. “What I really thought about was, ‘How do I create a learning experience that’s likely to stick? That people are going to remember?’ And I just started applying some human psychology,” he explained.

That meant making the learning experience meaningful. “How do you make it meaningful? Make it personal. How do you make it personal? Have people write stuff by hand, draw pictures, make art, make poems,” he said.

Candid portrait of psychology professor Jim Coan mid-shout, with a student laughing in response.

Psychology professor Jim Coan mimics the face animals make when they are about to attack, eliciting laughter from his students. (Illustration by Meredith Michael Smith, University Communications; photos by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

In his neuroscience of emotion course of 25 students, writing is the backbone. Each student buys a notebook, preferably an old-school, black-and-white-marble composition pad. They come to the Tuesday and Thursday class sessions having already read their assignment, ready to talk about it and ask questions. You can hear the scratch of pencils on paper the entire class, the last 15 minutes of which are reserved for more note-taking, drawing or collaging about the day’s topic.

Charly Beasley is taking her second course with Coan. “I took his (January)-term Neuroscience of Social Relationships this January, and it was truly, without a doubt, the most important class I’ve taken at UVA,” she said. “I took the most out of his J-term class that I’ve ever taken out of a class. I think mostly because he didn’t have exams or quizzes, so I didn’t feel pressured to learn something just to know it for the exam short-term.”

Four illustrated notebook pages with collages and text exploring emotions, identity, and human vs. animal behavior.

Beasley’s collages are becoming an artifact of Coan’s class, “Affective Neuroscience.” (Collages contributed by Charly Beasley)

“Midterms and finals … don’t correlate really well with a lot of retention and learning,” said Coan, who instead grades students on their journals and class participation. A 2014 study, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” supports that theory. The study found students who took notes with laptops were engaging in “shallow processing,” while note-taking by hand required deeper engagement with the material.

Last Tuesday, the topic in Coan’s class was facial expressions and how it was once thought several emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise – spanned species. The conversation was spontaneous, unscripted and lively, with Coan mimicking several of the expressions, to the laughter of his students.

“How can they be consistent across species if the anatomy of species is different?” asked one student. Exactly, Coan responded. It was a flawed theory.

Beasley brought colored pens, scissors, glue and some assorted magazines to class and began to create a collage depicting the word “disgust” as Coan taught.

“We do reflection homework based on what we talk about in class, and he says that you can do them however works for you, whatever makes you remember what you learned,” she said. “So for me, that was collages, just because I wanted to have something that I could put my creative outlet into that I don’t get the time to do otherwise.” The practice has, she added, been “really, really influential.”

“Knowing this class was with him over the semester, I couldn’t not be in it.”