Teaching in Higher Ed

7 Resources for Addressing Low Motivation Mid-way Through a Class

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If you teach in higher ed, you have probably experienced it.

Despite your best efforts, your entire class seems to start experiencing a huge decline in motivation. What started out well, as you watched your students' curiosities be heightened, now feels like an attempt to lift something well beyond your capacity.

You're experiencing “the dip,” and it is a common occurrence.

You may very well not have done anything wrong, to cause this to happen. However, there are plenty of strategies you can use to bring the motivation back in a course.

  1. Kevin Gannon provides resources about student motivation and learning
  2. Doug McKee describes ways to engage a larger class
  3. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation provides this handout with some active learning strategies to try
  4. Maha Bali reminds us that we can embrace a pedagogy of imperfection in our teaching
  5. Heather Yamada-Hosley prescribes some self-care through a yoga routine for people who work on their feet (the more centered we are, the more we have to offer our students)
  6. Sarah Rose Cavanagh asserts that “We don't need to coddle. But we do need to care.“
  7. James Lang gives us small changes we can make in our teaching during the last five minutes of class, or the first five minutes of class

I recommend putting together a playlist of energizing music to start each class with, not taking yourself (or your class) too seriously, and just being thankful that things are probably going better for you than they are for this guy.

How do you try to address issues of low motivation, midway through your semester/term? 

How to Increase Our Digital Literacy Literacy

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As I begin to compose this blog post, my browser has more tabs open than I think I've ever had open at one time before. I've bookmarked 30+ articles about digital literacy the past couple of years, with each post linking to a plethora of additional resources on the subject. My goal in this post is to increase our literacy about the topic of digital literacy.

My Quest

I want to write a post about digital literacy, as a means of recapping my conversation with Mike Caulfield that was published last week.

The Trouble

It is so challenging to even just begin by defining digital literacy, let alone to begin to discuss some of the criticisms of the more popular publications on the topic.

My Compromise

Instead of trying to give readers a thorough exploration of the topic (Mike Caulfield admitted on Twitter that his Digital Literacies: Which One? post was initially intended to be just a few hundred words, but before he knew it, quickly grew into thousands), I'm going to introduce a few places to get started with the subject.

Digital Literacy: A Definition

JISC defines digital literacy as:

Digital literacies are those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.”

They go on to explain:

Digital literacy looks beyond functional IT skills to describe a richer set of digital behaviours, practices and identities. What it means to be digitally literate changes over time and across contexts, so digital literacies are essentially a set of academic and professional situated practices supported by diverse and changing technologies. This definition quoted above can be used as a starting point to explore what key digital literacies are in a particular context eg university, college, service, department, subject area or professional environment.”

Lest I leave you assuming that this is the agreed-upon definition for digital literacy, there are as many definitions as there seem to be publications on the subject. Belshaw cautions us about the ambiguity that emerges, when we refer to digital literacy.

Belshaw's TEDx talk on the essential elements of digital literacy provides a wonderful overview:

Essential Frameworks

There are a few frameworks that are critical to understanding the ways in which we might think about digital literacy. Some of these frameworks focus on domains, while others are more tool/skill-oriented.

While not specific to solely digital literacy, I do think Mozilla's web literacy map is worth exploring, as well.

Domain-Specific Sites

As Mike Caulfield asserted, a big part of increasing our digital literacy is improving our knowledge within the specific domain being evaluated. Here are just a few resources to help with that endeavor:

Next Steps

There are two specific ways I plan on taking action on what I have been learning about digital literacy. I plan on sharing the ALL ABOARD digital skills framework with the faculty development committee I chair, as a means of brainstorming on possible breakouts for our annual Fall faculty gathering. I also hope to introduce students to some relevant domain-specific sites that could support them in increasing their own digital literacy. Like Mike Caulfield, I also hope that these types of sites continue to grow.

What steps are you taking in developing your own or someone else's digital literacy?

2 Persistent Myths About Teaching and Learning

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I just finished listening to a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode with Mike Caulfield on digital literacy that will air on Thursday, February 2.

Not to give too much away, but at the end of the conversation, we chat about the tooth fairy, and other childhood myths. I joke about how I have tended to stay away from controversial topics on the podcast, but that I couldn't resist sharing that my husband and I don't plan on telling our children that there is such a thing as the tooth fairy.

Since I have started down the path of breaking out of my “safe” topics pattern here on Teaching on Higher Ed, I thought I would share two myths about learning that are almost always cause for concern by people who have subscribed to them throughout their career as educators.

We all have one primary learning style that needs to be accommodated for in our learning

I bought into this myth for at least the first ten years of my corporate training career. Now, I'm confident that believing in this myth actually makes our teaching worse.

One take-away from the research that debunks this myth is to have multiple approaches for helping learners comprehend what you're trying to teach, instead of gearing the students' experiences toward their preferred learning experience. Consider ways of making your teaching visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, using more than one approach at a time.

I once posted about the learning styles myth on my personal Facebook page, having no idea the topic is as controversial as it seems to be… Please refrain from thinking that showing this myth for what it is (unsubstantiated) does not mean that people don't have learning disabilities. That's an entirely different domain. Yes, dyslexia exists, for example… and there are ways in which we, as educators, should be accommodating for that disability.

If we have learners “practice by doing,” they will retain 75% of what they're “taught”

This learning pyramid has also been propagated across multiple educational contexts. It is meant to encourage us to move up as high as we can on the pyramid, lest we leave people only remembering 5% of what we said. This is not to say that there isn't ample research to illustrate the effectiveness of active learning pedagogical approaches, but doesn't the “tidiness” of these numbers make you a bit suspicious?

Active learning can help motivate students and help them retain more information. However, the process of learning (and teaching) is far more complex than a diagram like this could ever convey.

Your Turn

What teaching and learning myths have you observed that have persisted for too long now?

How to Create a Pencast

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Pencast

I've found pencasting to be a tool that is aligned with my pedagogy and valued by my students. Many of you have asked for me to share about my process, so I've created a How to Pencast video.

How to Pencast Video

In the pencasting video, I describe:

  • What pencasting is
  • Why it is vital to my teaching and instructional design
  • Essential tools for pencasting
  • My pencasting toolkit
  • How I record and publish pencasts

Additional Resources for Pencasting

 

Lessons in Curation from Maria Popova of Brain Pickings

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This post is written to my #edd703 doctoral students, though the contents apply to all of us who are practicing what Karl Weick coined as sense-making… 

Maria Popova. Photograph by Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

We're starting to get further down the path of establishing a personal knowledge management system (PKM) for ourselves. One part that often gets struggled with the most is the sense-making piece.

I find people often want to spend much more time using Baskin Robbin's taster spoon style approaches to try to find another app that they can add to their PKM mix, or even decide to do away with one of the pieces of PKM, completely.

As Peter Senge and others explain:

Weick likened the process of sensemaking to cartography. What we map depends on where we look, what factors we choose to focus on, and what aspects of the terrain we decide to represent. Since these choices will shape the kind of map we produce, there is no perfect map of a terrain. Therefore, making sense is more than an act of analysis; it’s an act of creativity.”

Previously, I proposed that one way we can rid ourselves of the anxiety around sharing is to think of ourselves as curators. Today, I want to introduce you to a person who prefers not to think of herself as a curator, but whose life's work would fit well with what we have been talking about, in terms of PKM.

Maria Popova started her blog as an experimental email sent to seven of her coworkers. She eventually moved her content online and started Brain Pickings. Popova says that her blog:

…is a cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces spanning art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, anthropology, and more; pieces that enrich our mental pool of resources and empower combinatorial ideas that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful. Above all, it’s about how these different disciplines illuminate one another to glean some insight, directly or indirectly, into that grand question of how to live, and how to live well.”

Popova is held up as one who is massively “productive,” in terms of the amount of information she consumes, makes sense of, and then shares on a daily basis.

In an interview with Krista Tippet for On Being, she was asked about the ways in which her work has been quantified by others.

Tippet inquires as to whether or not the rumors are true that Popova invests 450 hours on a monthly basis in her work. She also asks if Popova truly reads 15 books on a weekly basis, or writes between three and eight hours a day. Popova responds:

I think it’s actually a gross underestimate. I read and write from the minute I wake up to the moment I go to sleep at night and everything in between. Even those — I get around on bikes, so I commute. And whatever I listen to, that feeds in. That’s part of the reading. And so I would say the hours are probably a lot more.” [laughs]

It's tempting to get caught up in the numbers. I read 23 books in 2016, which felt like it required tremendous effort on my part. It's hard to fathom reading 15 books per week, even if it was what “paid the bills.”

It would be easy to glance at Popova's story and move on, since clearly we could never be her, in terms of her productivity. That's why what Popova says next in the On Being interview is so paramount:

…I want to say something important about that. Even if it’s factually true, I think the framing is a little bit misleading because it’s framed as a sort of productivity thing. Look at how much some random person in the world gets done, you know? And for me, it feels very purposeful. And I think what’s funny is that I used to marvel for a long time why my best ideas — and I don’t mean — by ideas, I don’t mean the ideas that — about what to write or all of that, but just insights on the truths of my experience, of the human experience, whatever.

Those ideas, the best of them came to me at the gym or on my bike or in the shower. And I used to have these elaborate theories that maybe there was something about the movement of the body and the water that magically sparked a deeper consciousness. But I’ve really come to realize the obvious thing, which is that these are simply the most unburdened spaces in my life, the moments in which I have the greatest uninterrupted intimacy with my own mind, with my own experience. And there’s nothing magical, at least not in the mystical sense, about that. It’s just a kind of ordinary magic that’s available to each of us just by default if only we made that deliberate choice to make room for it and to invite it in.”

Those of us who are more achievement-oriented can easily turn PKM into a numbers game. When we look to people like Dave Pell or Maria Popova, it's easy to tell ourselves that we won't ever be able to produce that much content, so this whole process must not be for us.

When I'm able to back away at the quantitative aspects of my own engagement online, there's a rich story being told about the opportunities I have had to be invited in to the human experience. As you continue to refine your own PKM systems, I encourage you to think about doing far less, but to make a “deliberate choice to make room for” the gifts that curiosity and reflection can bring.

I hope you'll carve out some time this week to listen to this conversation between Maria Popova and Krista Tippet for On Being. There's so much more than what I've posted here, in terms of “[Popova's] gleanings on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.”

Ultimately, I pray you'll “build pockets of stillness” into your days this week, even if it seems impossible.