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Teaching

No Magic Required

By Bonni Stachowiak | December 20, 2020 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

More than ever before, I witnessed this semester testing the limits of our espoused descriptions of what it means to be a teacher. Is it about us fostering and cultivating learning communities, or is it really more about misguided attempts to control others' behavior? Is deep learning a complex process that takes place across unpredictable spans of time, or is what we do able to be planner out in a linear way toward a rigid destination?

I received an email from Marjorie Feld (Babson College) that shares the story of her last day of class this semester. She gave me permission to share her story here with the other Teaching in Higher Ed blog posts:


November 20, 2020

On the last day of class for the semester, standing there in my mask, I talked about Harry Potter.

I was co-teaching a course with 50 students, split into two groups: a few in-person in the de-densified physical classroom; most of them online, linking into class from campus and from places across the U.S. and across the world. On this last day, only my co-teacher and I were masked in the classroom, and all of our students were on screen in tiny boxes, learning remotely. I know my colleagues drew from more classic literary works about plagues and other crises when talking to students about our present moment in the pandemic; I used Harry Potter as a way to communicate my gratitude to them.

In all honesty, I told our students, in August I hesitated before entering the classroom. Even with the masks (worn faithfully by all) and the regular testing (completed faithfully by all), there was anxiety about what it would mean to be in a room, on campus, learning together. The anxiety, though, wasn’t just about the virus, I pointed out. It was also about how we could create a learning community in the midst of all of this. Never had I taught online, I told them, and I have always relied on students’ being together in one space, seeing and hearing each other’s responses to texts and to each other.

At our best, I said, we teachers hope to help you learn from each other, to help move you a bit further on your journey toward a good job, a fulfilling life, and good global citizenship. We strive to keep our classrooms safe for you to try on, and try out, new ways of thinking. In here, I said, gesturing around the classroom, I try my best to try to accommodate everyone’s learning preferences, to shield everyone from negative forces during our moments together so that we can all feel heard and visible.

In the final book and film of the Harry Potter series, the forces of evil try to enter Hogwarts, the school where young people learn the magic they need to become witches and wizards. The teachers know that these forces are on their way, and they do the only thing they can: they summon their own magical powers as older, more experienced witches and wizards, and they cast a spell on the school to protect the young people, however temporarily, from evil.

Brimming with emotion, I told my students that this semester, though many of us wanted to protect our students from the negative forces of our moment—namely, of course, the virus—we knew we could not. I thanked them for wearing masks, for getting tested, for keeping themselves safe; I thanked them for tuning into the class, for learning and laughing and trying on, and trying out, new ways of thinking. They could not see that I was smiling under my mask when I said that we managed to create a learning community. To me, that felt like both a victory and a bit of an antidote to the bleak news of 2020. Soon after I finished saying this, they logged off of our last class together.

Ultimately, in the Harry Potter narrative, good prevails. There is incalculable loss, to be sure. But the students who remained in the protected school: they learn how to fight the bad forces together. They grow up to recognize the essential importance of communities, not only in learning, but in taking action to protect what is important. Now that my teaching is done, I hang onto my hope that this is what we are teaching all of our young people right now, wherever they are learning. No magic is required; just hope and the will and actions to protect and heal the world.

Marjorie N. Feld, Babson College


Thank you, Marjorie, for sharing your story about your final day of class with us and for getting in touch. The ways in which you remained true to your teaching philosophy and navigated these challenging circumstances is admirable and inspiring.

Filed Under: Teaching

Structuring Synchronous Classes for Engagement

By Bonni Stachowiak | October 25, 2020 | 1 Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Structuring Synchronous Classes for Engagement

I still feel a bit wobbly in my teaching this semester. Students’ facial expressions typically provide me with so many cues in my teaching. It leaves me wondering if I’m reaching them during our synchronous sessions since I have to rely on other gauges for assessing their engagement.

It has also been a tender time. Many of the students are graduating in December and wondering what life after college, during a pandemic, will be like… Some have been told that they need to leave home, not knowing where to go. Others have faced losses of loved ones or told there are only a few months left, at best.

Despite feeling like my class is less engaging than in other seasons of my teaching, the students have shared that they feel like the time we are together passes so quickly and that they are learning a lot. Here’s a look at how most of my synchronous classes are structured, in case it is helpful.

Before Class (10 minutes)

I start playing music about ten minutes before class. There will always be 3-4 people who join, but who typically leave themselves muted and have their cameras off. Sometimes, one of them will have a question, and that’s why they came on early. But it is mostly quiet, except for the music.

I run my class off of a web browser, for the most part, with the occasional .jpg graphic or short slide deck. I’m teaching a Hyflex class, which means that these synchronous classes are not required. Students have the flexibility to participate in an asynchronous activity that is not identical to the synchronous one, but addresses the same learning goals. Before class, I open all the tabs I will need during the class and place them in the chronological order they will be used. 

I have found that if I build all the asynchronous activities, first, and then adjust them to be more suitable for a synchronous class session, it becomes a lot easier. I’ll write more about how I am developing asynchronous activities in future posts, but for now, the important thing is that there needs to be alignment in learning goals. Thinking that we can have identical experiences between asynchronous and synchronous experiences is not realistic and not a helpful aim.

Examen (5-10 minutes)

Each class starts with everyone answering two questions. They can answer aloud, though most choose to answer in chat (either publicly or privately). Each question starts the same way: Since we last met… Then, the second half varies:

  1. What brought you life?
  2. What took life away?

I share my answers to those questions, as well, and comment on some of the answers that were shared with the entire group. This has helped us bring community into our learning, during a time when it is harder than usual to get to know each other in this context.

One thing I already know I need to improve for next term is to incorporate this practice into the part of our learning community that engages asynchronously. I would ideally like it to be something that could be perceived as not taking a lot of time, but would give them the opportunity to share either privately or to the entire class. I tend to move away from discussion boards, since most learners have had such awful experiences with them that there’s so much unlearning to do in order to get going with them that I often consider other options, first.

Some kind of ongoing way of documenting our collective answers to these two questions might be interesting, using maybe Padlet or some other kind of more visual tool.

Review (10 – 15 minutes)

This class has a fair amount of new vocabulary for the students. We often begin by doing retrieval practice. I have flashcard decks in Quizlet that we will work through to review by playing some of their solo games, or by doing a few rounds of their Quizlet Live game.

A listener recently recommended Quizizz, recently, and our daughter has loved getting to experiment with it (she’s playing a game right now, in fact). I have been reluctant to try it in my current class, though, since we are in a groove with Quizlet and there’s no need to change things up at this point.

Dave recorded some short videos that teach them how to memorize the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They can list them 1-7, or descend from 7-1. They instead can have a number listed off and they can tell you the corresponding habit. Or, if you state one of the habits to them, they know the associated number. Dave learned about peg words from when he worked at Dale Carnegie, though mnemonic peg systems come up in other contexts, as well. Sometimes, we get started in the larger group and then go into breakout rooms for further practice.

Main Activity (20 minutes)

The vast majority of the time, the main activity for the session is building upon something they have already learned a little bit about. For example, they recently read the chapter in the Getting Things Done book about reviews, which emphasizes a process called the weekly review. All reading assignments in this class are expressed in the form of a quiz in Canvas (our LMS). By this point, they will have uploaded their notes on the chapter inside the quiz, along with some questions that test for understanding and some reflection prompts.

I mentioned no longer being able to get as many cues from facial expressions. Instead, I structure exercises to make their learning more transparent, often through some kind of a collaborative document they work on with others, or an editable document they work through on their own. In the case of the collaborative document, I can see their work as they engage in it. When they work independently, I have them export their work as a PDF and upload it to our LMS, partially as a means for taking attendance – but mostly to be able to see their learning process more clearly. 

Most weeks, I set up a set of Google slides that have permission for edits to be made. Then, I share the entire document to the class and have them work in breakout groups on some portion of the slide deck. Alternatively, I edit the link to the document to say copy instead of edit at the end, which means that anyone who clicks the link will be given the option to create a copy of the document (instead of messing with my original).

Link with edit at the very end of it
Remove the edit at the end (including anything after the word, such as this pound sign) and add the word copy.

In this case, students started building their weekly review process in class. They are accustomed by now that any text that is highlighted should be deleted and replaced with their information. They also are used to the fact that I will often have sample screenshots of what my process looks like, which can then be replaced with screenshots of their weekly review, as they build it.

Sample weekly review

If you want to try this kind of activity, you can learn more about it from Teaching Effectively with Zoom, by Dan Levy. We talk about this approach in episode 324 of Teaching in Higher Ed and he also shares about it on the Teaching Effectively with Zoom book resources website. The most common mistake I have made so far is sharing the file with students without first changing the settings to allow for others to edit. It’s an easy fix, of course, but I would always still rather have it set up correctly to begin with…

Change permissions to allow for editing

I write more about this process in my post: How Do You Make Zoom Breakout Rooms Less Boring, if you want to learn more.

Class is officially over at this point. I only have about 20 students in the class, so taking attendance at some point along the way is relatively easy. I let them know that their participation points will be recorded and that the official part of class has concluded. I let them know what chapters we will be covering in the next segment and ask students to give some kind of indication if they’re planning on coming back after the ten-minute break, so I know about how many to expect.

The After-Party (45 – 60 minutes)

I was intrigued by Mike Wesch’s mentions of how he creates a single .MP3 of all the reading for his classes each week. Given that he is the author of his textbook (The Art of Being Human), I suspected he didn’t have as much of a challenge trying to navigate copyright issues the way some of the rest of us might. Still, I knew that especially since the context surrounding the Getting Things Done book was likely so unfamiliar to many of the students, it would be good to help them through that.

I decided to do an abridged version of the assigned reading, with stories from my life of how the concepts have impacted me. We go through the questions from the quiz, together, though in a couple of cases I ask them to still provide answers, if it turns out to be essential that I get their personal reflections on a particular topic.

The feedback from students on “the after-party” sessions has been edifying. They tell me that blocking off this optional time helps them to get a jump start on the week’s assignments. They like learning in community and appreciate the way in which I make the reading more personal by sharing additional stories.

The After-After-Party

There is almost always someone who would like to stay after the after-party to talk one-on-one. These are some of the most life-giving conversations I have had in recent months. 

Next Steps

I’m reasonably happy with the structure as I have it. I wish I had more polls populated in advance, but there hasn’t been enough time for everything I would like to try. I’m also intrigued by streaming platforms that take the possibilities beyond Zoom. One I have been experimenting with is called OBS Studio.

I also would like more times to bring the students’ stories into our learning community, from the pre-work they did prior to class. If I were going to do that, I would need a streamlined way of determining, in advance, if I had the person’s permission to share their example. When I have done things like that in the past, I would either ask via email, or one-on-one – just prior to the start of class. These days, I would need something more automated, perhaps by asking within the quiz (a question that the “right” answer could be either yes or no, potentially).

What about you? What's working for you with how you're structuring your synchronous class sessions? What challenges are you experiencing? 

Filed Under: Teaching

What Homeschooling During COVID-19 Taught Me About My College Teaching

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 1, 2020 | 1 Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

homeschooling graphic

This article is part of the EdSurge guide Sustaining Higher Education in the Coronavirus Crisis and is reposted here with permission.


While I have always wanted to be a parent, I've never wanted to homeschool my kids. At the university where I teach, a number of our students come from a homeschooling environment. This educational context, so different from my own growing up, has always intrigued me. As students would share their experiences, I often realized that the home schools in my imagination were vastly different from what these young people described.

My husband, Dave, and I have now been thrust into the role of teachers for our two kids—one in kindergarten and the other in second grade—for the past couple of months. Their actual teachers are amazing. They have been working incredibly hard to make the switch to an online environment. The best thing about the experience for us has been getting to overhear their teachers referring to our kids by name and addressing their unique challenges and passions.

What has been less fun has been trying to come up with a set of systems that work for us. As we near the end date of this school year, I have been reflecting on the lessons that these experiences can provide for how to improve my own teaching going forward.

Less Is More

I don’t like to admit this, but at first in the homeschooling experience, I was too concerned about what the kids’ teachers would think about us, as parents. I wanted to ensure that each of the boxes got checked on the kids’ schoolwork, including the optional ones for music, the library and social/emotional content. The pressure to perform to some imagined level concerned me on a daily basis.

Finally, I reached a place where there just wasn’t any room to reflect on this as much anymore. I’m on our university’s COVID-19 leadership team, which means I’m in daily meetings and making recommendations to the executive team regularly. This role also has me reading around 20 articles a day and attempting to synthesize what I learned in some meaningful way. Additionally, I am responsible for leading our faculty development team and teaching classes of my own. Increasingly, the pressures of my work overshadowed my desire to ‘perform’ as an excellent homeschooling teacher.

The kids’ teachers did a good job of telling us what assignments or activities were most important, from their perspective. There are a couple of apps that gear the lessons to the kids’ knowledge and skills and prescribe interactive content based on their performance. I eventually got to the point where I would prioritize those activities over others. And I grew to understand that If we didn’t get to everything, it wasn’t going to cause irreparable harm to the kids’ learning.

As soon as I changed my perspective on quality over quantity, everything shifted. If the kids asked if they could go outside, my answer was always yes. I would take a lawn chair out front and enjoy grading in the shade of one of our trees. The kids were always able to focus more once we returned inside for more of the formal learning. Every Thursday, we have decided as a family to do themed school days. Their most recent theme was Minecraft day. Dave, my husband, shared that when the kids asked if they could record a Minecraft podcast that morning, he quickly agreed, even though that wasn’t anywhere on the calendar. He said to me later, “I threw out the planned curriculum the moment I saw how excited they were to create something together.”

This less-is-more approach has been cascading into my teaching more in recent years. I taught a business ethics course this semester in which I had honed the learning outcomes down into the most essential ones. This meant that when the pandemic struck, the current events were able to flow much more regularly into our class discussions. I modified the final assignment to be a manifesto. The ways in which students synthesized their learning was phenomenal. Many of them mentioned feeling equipped to continue learning about what they had discovered in the class much more than in other courses they have taken.

One of the students who just wrapped up my business ethics class, Hannah Clark, really exemplified these opportunities for deeper learning. Hannah and I discovered our shared love for the television show The Good Place during the first week of class. Each time I would see her after our initial meeting, I would ask if she had seen the latest episode, and we would talk about our favorite plot developments and characters. In Hannah’s manifesto project, she shared about five people she learned about in class who influenced her. Number one on her list was Immanuel Kant, who showed up both in our class content and in The Good Place TV show. Hannah was able to take what she was learning in the class into her entertainment choices, her work and her life. She regularly shared memes with me during the semester that related to the topics from our class, as well as articles and even songs.

It’s Harder Than It Looks to Avoid Transactional Approaches

When it comes to homeschooling, our kids want more than anything else to play Minecraft, Mario Kart or to watch television. When they were at their normal school, “choice time” meant they could choose from a number of activities within their classrooms. Their options always seemed to fit into something school-related. At home, it translates one hundred percent of the time to “screen time.”

I find myself slipping into transactional thinking on a regular basis throughout the day. “Once you finish your 30-minutes of iReady Reading, then you can take a break for a bit.” “Watch the video from your teacher and then come back and show me what you practiced. Then you can do something else for a while.” My ultimate desire is for them to be enjoying learning for learning’s sake. We most often get there these days on things that have nothing to do with school.

Most of us who teach yearn to have students who engage in the class well beyond the point of earning grades and checking boxes. Proponents of the ungrading approach argue that they can get there much more effectively because they remove grades from the equation all together. Jesse Stommel, digital learning fellow and senior lecturer of Digital Studies at University of Mary Washington, shares his rationale for ungrading on his blog:

“In short, the act of grading does harm to students and causes teachers unnecessary stress. Research shows grades don’t help learning and actually distract from other feedback/assessment.”

Other proponents of ungrading are make a case that grades can be, in many ways, arbitrary. The cutoff between a B and a B-, for example, seems so subjective, they assert. In her book, The New Education, Cathy Davidson describes how people in the meatpacking industry found that letter grades didn’t even adequately satisfy their needs to differentiate one cut from another, let alone trying to have grades measure something as complex as humans’ learning. While I haven’t fully adopted an ungrading approach in my teaching, I do often create assignments in which students either met the criteria, or they didn’t (known as specifications grading). This approach tends to contribute to less transactional relationships between me and my students, though I know there is still room for me to grow in this area.

Structure Matters

The most frustrating part of homeschooling for me is how hard it is to organize everything. The teachers have done a good job sending PDF documents that lay out most of the kids’ school activities. However, each of the sites they are directed to navigate to have separate logins and passwords. Our firewall that is intended to protect against any of us inadvertently visiting inappropriate sites often generates false positives for the kids’ schoolwork. This translates to them not being able to view the web pages where assignments are stored.

The school my kids attend stresses the importance of the social-emotional growth, so it sets up one-on-one meetings between kids on a weekly basis. After some parents expressed concerns about their kids spending too much time on screens, the school added some screen-free exercises to its website, which parents can print out to let kids complete them by hand.

My husband and I both work remotely, and we trade off leading remote schooling and focusing on our own job duties. So we try to set up a schedule for the kids so that they can move through a few school tasks at a time without us needing to guide them. We do our best to schedule related tasks together in the hopes that they can move from one activity to the next without us always needing to stop what we are working on to guide them. Our attempts work less than 20 percent of the time.

That means that Dave and my professional work contains constant interruptions. At least we have each other working from home, which allows us to rotate homeschool teacher duty between each other. We keep trying to tweak what we are doing to provide for less of a need for radical context shifting. I also realize part of this is the very nature of six-year-olds and eight-year-olds. Try not to laugh at me too much here.

Reflecting on the challenges my kids face in their remote schooling, I realize the students in the university classes I teach face similar challenges. The learning management system (LMS) I use allows the instructor to see the course from a student’s view. And I used to spend a great deal of time considering how to set up pages, assignments and other content from within my course, only to discover that the vast majority of students never saw the fruits of my labor. Instead, they looked at the centralized due dates from all of their courses, consolidated on the main login page. They rarely clicked sequentially through the items the way I had constructed them. I found it was more helpful to think about the cadence of due dates and breaking larger assignments into smaller tasks whenever possible.

I have also learned to think carefully about how I label each assignment in the LMS. The goal is to indicate whether what I am posting is something they should take a look at, or something that requires some kind of action on their part. I use names like: “SUBMIT: Paper” and “READ: Chapter 4,” in an attempt to make it was clear as possible what is required.

My goal is to have as much contained within the LMS as possible, too. Most LMSs can be set up to integrate with external tools, making it easy to make use of preferred educational technologies without students having to remember another login and learn an entirely different system. Quizlet, a tool for creating digital flashcards, is an example of an external tool that is also available within our LMS. Students never have to leave the LMS to review the flashcards for our class, or to play the associated review games.

Minecraft shirts - brother and sister

I mentioned our kids’ love of Minecraft and how that’s often the reward at the end of their time spent on schoolwork. This week, on the themed Minecraft day, our son decided to loan his sister a Minecraft shirt so she could better celebrate the day with him. They read Minecraft books and played a Minecraft tag game outside. When it came time to do his assigned poetry lesson, he decided to write it on—you guessed it—Minecraft. I share his poem, below, with his permission.

Minecraft day
At school
I loan
My sister
Creeper
Shirt
For Minecraft day
The best
Day.

It has been quite an experience navigating homeschooling along with helping our entire university transition to remote teaching. It has caused me to reflect on much about teaching and learning these past few months. I have felt like a failure some of the time. In other cases, I have been elated at catching glimpses of the power of learning—and its messiness.

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Keep Class Sessions from Running Short (Or Going Too Long)

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 17, 2020 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Person looking at Apple Watch display

This article on How to Keep Class Sessions from Running Short (Or Going Too Long) was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

How can I design my class sessions to fit the available time? I never see this discussed in resources for effective teaching, but it has been a big challenge for me for many years. I'm always concerned about having too much or too little material.

With any interactive or active form of learning, so much of how a class goes depends on the students. So it's not like presenting a speech where you are in complete control of the time. Any error causes problems that ripple through the semester, especially when I'm teaching multiple sections that need to stay in sync. And any change in the course coverage or how I construct the classes makes prior years' experience largely irrelevant.

—Kevin Werbach, professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania


The fears about not having enough material to fill a class, or in getting behind with what you planned, are common. Peter Newbury, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at University of British Columbia Okanagan, recalls such a time for him.

“A memorable teaching experience for me was the day I ‘lost control.’ The students were so engaged in discussions, I had no authority. It was awkward. And awesome. In hindsight, I created a safe environment, posed good questions, and gave them agency. I prepared to do nothing.”

Below are five approaches to use regarding the time-based aspects of class planning. I recommend making use of a timer, having an established end in mind for each class session, erring on the side of student engagement versus “covering the material,” having plans for extending the learning if activities are shorter than planned and leaving room for metacognition, meaning, leave time to talk about the learning process.

Begin with the End in Mind

Before we get to the details about what will be explored in a given class session, it is time to stay broad. The leadership author and speaker Stephen R. Covey always stressed the importance of beginning with the end in mind. In his case, his advice helps us to formulate personal mission and vision statements. In the case of teaching, the axiom helps us to be intentional about the most important things learners will walk away with as a class finishes.

In the book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain describes how sustaining students’ attention helps to facilitate learning. He describes how a longitudinal study explored the ways in which expert teachers keep their focus narrow. Bain writes, “Teachers succeed in grabbing students’ attention by beginning a lecture with a provocative question or problem that raises issues in ways that students had never thought about before, or by using stimulating case studies or goal-based scenarios.”

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

When we begin with the end in mind in our teaching, our class planning becomes more flexible. We have a core question to explore, or a goal to pursue. The emphasis becomes on putting on different lenses in viewing the same set of ideas. What does this concept look like in different contexts? Where might there be confusion on the students’ part?

Use a Timer

There are many good reasons to use a timer while teaching, and one is simply maintaining awareness. When I am teaching a class for the first couple of times, I print out a copy of my slide deck with nine slides per page. I write on the printout how much time I plan to take for each section of content and for each interactive exercise. Then, I set a timer on my Apple Watch, which gives me nudges throughout the class to keep me on track of when I need to be moving on.

Of course, an Apple Watch is not required for this purpose. There are plenty of smartphone apps that work just fine. Microsoft PowerPoint has a timer built into the presenter’s view. There are also physical time clocks that some faculty like to have separate and apart from their computer setup.

Another reason to keep a timer handy during class is to facilitate exercises with students. I sometimes use a timer that has numbers large enough for students to see. I give them periodic reminders regarding how much time is left in the exercise and visit with those groups that have finished early. I ask them if they had any surprises as they went through the exercises, and how confident they are in their answers.

Err on the Side of Engagement

Whenever I hear faculty say, “I am just having so much trouble covering all of the material in this class,” I know that it is quite likely that they are spending an overabundance of time strictly lecturing and not enough time assessing the students’ understanding and retention of the learning.

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

Then, I often do something to get them talking and potentially moving around the class. Sticky notes are a favorite way of mine to accomplish both of these aims at once. I describe more ways of using sticky notes in teaching over on my blog, if you’re interested. I then might lecture for around 15 to 20 minutes. But throughout that time, I am asking the students for examples and posing other questions to them about how what we are talking about fits with prior learning from past weeks. The last third of the class is spent getting students talking with each other, reinforcing what they’ve learned, and seeing where there might be misunderstandings.

One resource I have found particularly useful in dissecting the questions around what topics need to be covered comes from Maria Anderson, CEO and Cofounder of Coursetune. She has proposed what she calls a learning lens for the digital age: ESIL. As we work through examining our goals for a given course, we can ask ourselves how deep the students’ learning needs to be around a given concept. Do they just need to know that it exists (E)? Or should they be able to perform a given task or provide an answer with some support (S)? Perhaps the learners need to be able to demonstrate something independently (I), or even have a deeper understanding of the concept that will persist for a lifetime (L). The ESIL lens can be useful when thinking through how much time to spend on each part of a class session.

Determine a Way to Extend the Learning

Even if we are making use of active-learning approaches, the interactive exercises we plan can take less time than we planned. Judith Dutill, a communication educator and instructional designer, recalls a time when a lesson she had planned about words and meaning went far faster than she had anticipated. She had brought in words from different decades and had the students match the word to the decade of the dictionary entry.

“We flew through it,” Dutill admits. She then had them get into groups and asked them to create a list of dictionary entries that could be added. In her case, she did this exercise more on an impromptu basis. However, now she has it to use the next time she teaches the class, if the same thing happens.

When I am teaching foundational courses with terms that are likely new to students, I tend to make use of Quizlet, a flashcards app. Quizlet has a test feature that generates a collection of matching, true/false, and fill in the blank questions. I will often have print outs of a couple of the tests from Quizlet, for when a quick opportunity for review emerges. I also highly recommend the Quizlet Live feature, which I have written about previously on my blog. I have only played Quizlet Live games with groups of up to 40. However, the makers of Quizlet say that they have seen it played with groups as big as 150 people.

Leave Time for Metacognition

Instead of just covering material, we need to get our students to be thinking about their learning. Metacognition is thinking about our thinking. As we have our students engage in metacognition, they are more readily able to take what they have learned and apply it in different contexts. As a result, they are able to determine their strengths and weaknesses and use strategies to figure out how to adapt their learning strategies accordingly.

Having students share the muddiest, or most confusing, point at the end of a class is an opportunity for metacognition. So is having students keep reflective journals to gauge their own learning.

The author of Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt, reminds us of the importance of structuring opportunities for reflection and metacognition. He suggests that we ask our students what seems most important to them from what was addressed in class. Among the specific prompts Hanstedt proposes: “What did you struggle with and why? How does this connect to X, Y, or Z? How would you explain this to someone not in this field?”

I recently taught my first class of the semester. It was a three-hour class, which gave me plenty of time to work through a number of interactive exercises to grow the students’ curiosity. The good news is that the students were far more vocal than I am accustomed to having undergraduates be that early in the semester. I did an exercise with sticky notes and then picked a couple of students to go stand next to each sign and recap the themes that emerged. It all went well.

However, I ran out of time to do the case study I had planned. Since I am not teaching multiple sections of the class, it easy to decide to let the class out about 15 minutes early, leaving time for a handful of the students to stay back to share some connection they had made during our time together.

One of them mentioned growing up in the same town I did – and noting how much that place reminds him of his grandmother, who has since passed away. Another mentioned his love of podcasts and asked if I had any other recommendations for him, beyond the ones I mentioned in class. I asked another young woman to stay after a bit, so I could thank her for the contributions she made during class and saying how much I was looking forward to getting to know her this semester.

If I had been teaching a class session that was closer to an hour in length, it would have been more important to use a timer and to keep things more structured during the interactive exercises.

We want to be able to leave enough room in our teaching for what might emerge, but without leaving behind the essential opportunities for our students to practice what they are learning.

Photo: Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

Why I Broke My Self-Imposed Open-Textbook Writing Ban

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 7, 2020 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

stack of books

I told Dave that I was done with open textbooks. Well, at least the part of my experience with them that means I work with a group of 15-20 educational leadership doctoral students to write one in an eight week period.

When Robin DeRosa had been on Teaching in Higher Ed (episode 183), she shared about her student’s open textbook. Not to diminish the tremendous effort that it takes her to continue the work on it, but they build upon past students’ contributions over time. They haven’t written a new book each time.

I have been completely unsuccessful at convincing any of the cohorts I have worked with to go about revising and adding to the prior cohort’s books. Each group had a vision for something completely different. When I left our house to teach that Saturday morning, I mentioned to Dave that things were going to be different this term. Well, they are now definitely different.

Just not in the ways that I expected.

Cohort 11 is writing a book during our eight-week class. Tessa had a fantastic idea to take the features that you would typically find in an instapot and to create a book of essays that illustrated leadership lessons using those functions. For example, the instapot has a pressure cooker setting. Most of us have had to lead under pressure and could easily write 40 essays on the topic without running out of ideas.

The book will have leadership essays in it that all have some kind of an instapot reference. The conclusion of each chapter will contain a recap entitled: Leadership Recipe, along with an instapot recipe.

My Instapot Recipes on Pinterest

Two of the project leads from prior cohorts came on Teaching in Higher Ed (episode 225) to share about their experiences writing a book with their colleagues. Our conversation reveals some of the challenges we experienced. Yet, they each said they would do it all over again, given the choice. They also mentioned some of the digital tools that we used in creating the books.

Google docs

Google Team Drives

Pressbooks

Zoom

Canva

Why did I decide to go against my self-imposed prohibition against writing a book in eight weeks?

There are two reasons, really. First, Tessa’s vision for the book was compelling. She was ready to dive in and the rest of the cohort was, as well. Second, I removed another major assignment in the class that I predicted would enable us to have adequate time to see their ideas become reality.Book cover: Nourishing leadership

I am continually reminded of how less can be so much more in teaching. The learning deepens when we stop trying to cram so much into our classes.

We had our second synchronous video conference session the other evening. The group has been collaborating using Google docs and some members of the cohort were confused how to find things and also how to provide and receive feedback on their writing.

Immediately, Robert started reorganizing the documents so they were easier to find. We could all see him doing it via Zoom as he revamped everything. Tessa brought up Google drive and showed people how to create a new document, upload a document, and to make suggested edits.

I had removed a major assignment, which freed up the time to really dive even more into the book project. The students shared how their confidence was building using the tools they are using for their personal knowledge management (PLT) systems.

There has been plenty of time for self-directed and cohort-directed learning to occur. I made some book cover ideas in Canva and some of the people on the session got to experiment a bit with using Canva. Robert found some recipe card graphics and showed everyone how they could be placed in PowerPoint. He showed how to add text boxes over the top of where the recipe instructions and ingredients would go. The rest of the cohort was passionate about which recipe card design to select and how to display them within the book.

I enjoyed seeing what a high-performing team Cohort 11 is… At one point, Annette asked Silvia if she wanted to chime in. Silvia had been awfully quiet and Annette wanted to be sure everything was ok. It turned out that her screen name in Zoom had been inadvertently set to “user”. She had been chatting things up in the chatbox, but none of us realized that she was the face behind the person named “user”.

It was apparent, too, that they haven't allowed themselves to fall into bad habits of always going with the first idea that someone mentions. Teresa is adept at sharing her perspectives, even if they are different from what others have had to share. They all use humor well and collaborate tremendously well together.

You may not decide to write a book during one of your classes and I totally understand that sentiment. However, let me challenge you to take a different lesson away from this post. Take a look at your classes and find ways to do less. You may just find there's a whole lot more learning waiting on the other side. And some delectable recipes, too.

 

Filed Under: Teaching

What to Do Instead of Asking for Questions

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 15, 2019 | 1 Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Packed suitcase

I tend to still feel nervous when I travel. When I was in my twenties, I took a trip to London. Somehow, in the fog of the morning packing, I had left all of my nylons (back when they were often considered essential business wear for women) and every single pair of underwear for the trip, sitting on my bed in my apartment.

As most of you who have travelled will realize right away, the story has a happy ending. As Dave tries to gently remind me, even all these years later, “They have stores where you’re going. You know you can always buy things.”

It was a bit more difficult procuring my items back then, however. I first had to discover that I would need to learn that what I was actually searching for was referred to in that region as knickers and tights. The new language helped a lot. Plus, I got to discover the amazing place that Herrod’s is… and buy some items that I never would have found back home.

When students first come on our campuses, they have a whole set of vocabulary to learn, as well. Especially for those who are the first in their families to attend college, there will be strange social norms to adapt to and words to discover related both to their academic disciplines and higher education in general.

Three of my colleagues and I are in the process of earning a Hispanic Serving Institute teaching certificate from ESCALA. The founder of ESCALA, Melissa Salazar, was on episode 264 to provide us with an overview of the various ways to serve our Hispanic students. On November 27, Janue Johnson, who I met at the ESCALA training will join me to share about our respective experiences and ongoing learning.

One of the activities we did following the training was to video ourselves teaching and use a teaching self observation instrument to denote what was happening in the class at the time. We indicate who was talking during each two minutes of the recording. During those short durations, we attempt to categorize what is happening. Are non-rhetorical questions being asked? Are students discussing a topic?

While there are always things I want to improve each time I observe my teaching, I did walk away from the analysis feeling good at the fact that it was fairly even between who was talking: me or the students, with a slight bit more of the words being said by the students.

It pleased me that they seemed so comfortable to ask me what I meant by something, or to probe for me to share more. We were debriefing a speaker event that we had attended the week prior. Everyone had something to share, something that was made evident as I listened to the conversation pop back and forth between us and as noted on the classroom observation instrument that each student had made at least one substantive comment during the discussion.

I was meeting with a couple of students the other day who are planning a series of events. I inquired as to whether or not they have thought about serving refreshments. One of them stopped to tell me that she wasn’t familiar with the word refreshments. It was just like my early years of professional work when someone said they were going to have some libations… I enjoyed how easy it was for her to stop me to clarify the meaning and thought about how much more learning happens when we are comfortable enough to ask.

Some people try to create that same type of comfort level for people get clarification on a term or concept whenever they need it by periodically stopping to ask if anyone has any questions. In my experience, this technique doesn’t work very well. It’s only in the immediate moments of misunderstanding that we have the greatest opportunities for people to inquire. If I wait to ask who has questions, I have probably missed the moment that someone actually did want to ask something.

Instead, I work to reduce the power distance in my classes. Sometimes that can mean re-arranging the chairs into a more conversational structure, with no real front of the class. It can mean leaving room for silence and other voices besides mine. Much of the time, it means not taking myself too seriously, but placing that focus on the students and the learning.

I don’t get it right every time. Just like when I pack for trips, I still forget things. I’m sitting in my hotel room in Pittsburgh at the POD conference realizing that while I have my winter jacket here, I neglected to bring any long sleeved shirts or any kind of a sweatshirt.

When we mess things up, it’s time to get creative. Our students appreciate our transparency and what these experiences teach them about handling failure. And when we’re in a cold hotel room with just a bulky winter coat to protect us from the cold, marble top of the room’s desk, we can always wear the hotel room’s robe over our clothes and thank goodness for those long sleeves.


While it probably hardly seems like the right time for me to be dolling out advice, here are a few travel-related resources:

  • Episode 261 on Productive Travel
  • Pack it Up blog post (I still really recommend the Pack Point app)
  • Tools for Travel (This is one of those posts that has gold in the comments section – thanks especially to Robert Talbert. Also, I started paying for the pro version of TripIt and have found it to be totally worth it.)

Photo credit: Brandless on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Get Students to Join You for Office Hours

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 13, 2019 | 3 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

This article on How to Get Students to Join You for Office Hours was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

I work at a small institution, where the professor/mentor relationship is paramount. I know how essential it is to have students come see us during office hours, but my students just aren’t coming to visit. How do I get more of them to utilize that time with me?

—Sitting alone during office hours, anonymous


The irony isn’t lost on me that I am about to answer a question about getting students to come to office hours, when I can only remember making an attempt to do that twice in my own college years. Once, the professor wasn’t there, so that story ends with me leaving and never giving it another go.

The other example involved me actually coming face-to-face with someone I was very afraid to talk to. I was failing microeconomics and wasn’t sure what to do. One of my roommates was tutoring me, and she suggested that I stop into the professor’s office hours to get a bit more direction.

I still remember the stern look on his face. His eyes were crinkled up. His disappointment seemed so evident. “What did you say your last name was, again?” he asked. After my response, he got up from his desk and told me to follow him. He went to a large file cabinet in a back hall and removed some kind of notebook from one of the drawers.

As he sat back down, he sighed deeply. He asked what my Dad’s name was and if he had gone to the same school I was attending. (He had.) The professor then shared that my Dad had been his student and in fact had even been selected as the business student of the year in the late 60s.

While I was glad to know that about my Dad, I don’t recall getting any new insights about economics during my visit. Fortunately, my roommate’s help continued and I managed to pass the class. I never visited another professor during their office hours. It never occurred to me that it was part of their job. Or that some of them might actually enjoy the experience. Yet, here I am to offer a few suggestions of some approaches to try that might have brought me back for more when I was in college.

Start with Small Steps to Set the Stage

This first set of ideas fall into the category of what I will call Setting the Stage. None of these approaches require getting permission from anyone to try them out. These small steps can help more students benefit from the experience of office hours.

Be Welcoming

One of my colleagues, Roger Heuser, a professor of leadership studies at Vanguard University, regularly invites people to join him in his office for tea. He has a box of all these different types of teas from around the world and a set of fancy teacups. The whole experience has left me feeling like our conversation was the most important thing to him in those moments and that the time was sacred. No incoming text messages interrupted what either of us had to say. I felt welcome and affirmed.

The idea of doing something unique that shows a student we care and are here to support them helps a lot.

I have been meaning to attempt to replicate this same tea experience in my own office hours. However, I have only gotten as far as trying to find some good teacups on Amazon and considering purchasing a wooden box for a tea collection. Instead, my attempts at being welcoming involve leaving my door open during office hours, giving a warm smile and greeting the person, and moving out from behind my desk to a different seating area for conversations with students.

Show Transparency

The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project encourages professors to help students understand how they learn and pull back the veil on the teaching and learning process The model advocates using a three-part approach to transparency. Each assignment should have a clear purpose, a description of the task, and associated criteria for how the work will be graded.

We should bring that same emphasis on transparency into office hours. Be clear with students about the purpose of office hours in the syllabus and each time an invitation is extended to join you. Establish a clear and easy sign-up process. Finally, communicate what students can expect when they decide to take advantage of office hours with you.

Structure Time for Scaffolding

Consider encouraging students to use office hours as a time to “scaffold” assignments. Just as scaffolding is used in physical construction to hold the structure up as it is being built, the office hour can be a place for students to bring in their work for input before it is complete.

For instance, if you have assigned a paper, invite students to come into your office with an idea and a brief outline, so you can talk through it together.

Some professors require this as a component of an assignment, though I would caution against using coercion too heavily, as you are trying to give the perception that office hours are inherently valuable. Otherwise, you are just building in another box students feel they are required to check.

Invite Groups

It can also help to welcome groups of students into office hours. This often results in students feeling less fearful when they are in the room with others they perceive to be in similar situations. If a student is struggling in your class, it can be helpful to realize there are others also having challenges learning the material.

Or Try These Bigger Ideas

These next set of possibilities may not be common practice yet, so you may want to talk with colleagues about how to experiment with these options while still fulfilling the requirements at your institution.

Go Virtual

Stefan Still, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Washington, has shared previously on EdSurge about his success at taking his office hours online. He has been skeptical about bringing technology to teaching, out of concern that it can bring too much focus to impersonal aspects of teaching. However, he has found that having students join him virtually for office hours has extended his reach beyond what was possible with in-person meetings.

Another advocate for the power of virtual office hours is Zhaoshuo Jiang, assistant professor of civil engineering at San Francisco State University. On an episode earlier this year of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, he indicated that, “The main goal of teaching is not only to help the student inside the classroom, but also outside the classroom.” He invites his students to set appointments using the YouCanBook.me scheduling service, allowing them to not just select a date and time preference, but also to specify whether to meet in person or virtually.

Eat, Walk, Move

It can be quite helpful to remove ourselves from the office part of office hours altogether. Viji Sathy, a teaching associate professor and program evaluator of chancellor’s science scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, encourages us to be more inclusive in how we approach office hours by using different formats, times and locations. She gets herself in the contexts in which her students spend their time, instead of expecting them to come to her. She shared these approaches on her website, and also discussed them on an episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Get Yourself a Robot

At San Francisco State, Jiang has gone even further to shake up his office hours. He literally has a robot set up and ready for students to use during their virtual visits. He uses the Double 3, a two-wheeled robot that can be controlled by students via an app on their phone. It’s essentially a gimmicky way to do a video chat, with the webcam attached to the robot so that students can change their view by moving the robot around the office as they converse.

Yes, for the vast majority of us, a robot is probably not in the picture. However, the idea of doing something unique that shows a student we care and are here to support them helps a lot.

Whether you welcome someone in for a cup of tea, or meet them in the library for a chat, office hours can make a world of difference for our students.


Photo credit: Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Engage Students and Support Learning in Large Classes

By Bonni Stachowiak | September 6, 2019 | 2 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Michael Sandel teaches Justice class

This article on How to Engage Students and Support Learning in Large Classes was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

You have shared often about active learning strategies and the impact they have on student learning. However, I am dubious that the approaches you describe work with large classes. What about when you have 50-60 students in a class? Or even hundreds?

—Anonymous


In my experience, it’s true that small classes provide greater opportunities for student engagement and for professor/mentor relationships to occur. However, there are certainly those who employ methods that put this perspective to the test.

When we teach large classes, what approaches can we employ that will have a greater opportunity to engage students and help students learn more?

As I’ve been thinking about this issue, I keep coming back to two key questions:

  • What can we discover about the relationship between class size and student learning?
  • When we teach large classes, what approaches can we employ that will have a greater opportunity to engage students and help students learn more?

A study was published by IDEA, a non-profit organization that focuses on academic success in a higher education context, which explored whether class size is a factor in perceived learning. The authors—Stephen L. Benton, Dan Li and William H. Pallett—analyzed data from 490,333 classes that were tracked by the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction systems. Over 400 different colleges and universities were included in the research.

That study concluded that there isn’t a significant relationship between the size of the class and how well the students did in demonstrating learning outcomes. It’s worth noting, though, that the courses that were large tended to emphasize knowledge-based material. In online courses, the size of the class matters less than the reasons that students cite for enrolling.

Some large classes can create a shared experience for students that will be a class that they don’t easily forget. Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, teaches one of that university’s most popular courses: Justice. It became so popular that Harvard now offers it as a free version of it on the edX platform. He is a master at the Socratic method of asking questions that get even the most passive of learners thinking. When my students watch his videos, they say they feel like they are sitting in the same Harvard classroom that is being filmed and are participating in the dialog with the other students. If you would like to see Sandel in action, the Justice videos are viewable on YouTube, without needing to enroll in the course.

Some approaches I observe Sandel using are:

  • Asking open-ended questions and having all students silently reflect on their answers before anyone shares to the broader class.
  • Inviting students to predict what will happen next in a story, or what they think will be the result if a specific choice is made.
  • Using minimalist slide decks, and therefore not overwhelming students with lots of text to digest while he is speaking.
  • Starting each class session by asking students to recall what was discussed in the previous session.
  • Calling students by name, even in such a large class. He asks each student who speaks to identify themselves, and he regularly refers back to that speaker much later in the same class session.
  • Painting pictures in the students’ heads through excellent storytelling.
  • Exploring many different applications of the same concept. For example, what does libertarianism look like in historical events, in bioethics, in compensation, and in human rights?

Another master teacher of large classes is Michael Wesch. He is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University whose expertise as a digital storyteller has won him widespread attention for his videos, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, viewed by more than 20 million people and featured at conferences and film festivals around the world.

One of his large class projects is ANTH 101. The course is designed around ten different challenges that students wrestle with during the semester. And all students, even ones not formally enrolled but who find the free course materials online, are encouraged to share their learning with others. His teaching assistants have engaged with students in the class from places such as Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Samoa and Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the memorization of a set of definitions in the discipline of anthropology, Wesch invites us to “a new way of seeing the world that can be valuable regardless of your career path.”

He challenges us to see how the structure of his course helps us to put on these new lenses. He suggests a simple truth about learning:

“You can’t just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.”


After this article was originally posted on EdSurge, Mike Wesch came out with this wonderful resource:

Teaching Without Walls: 10 Tips for Online Teaching

In a future episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, we will get to hear from Wesch, once again. Something to look forward to…


Some approaches I observe Wesch using in ANTH 101 are:

  • Centering the class around 10 big ideas and linking the assignments around those same ideas.
  • Referring to assignments not as traditional homework, but as “challenges,” and making sure that each one represents something that will be relevant to the students’ lives, both now and in the future.
  • Encouraging students to share their learning in a radically public way. Both students who are formally enrolled in the course and those joining in because they want to are asked to share their responses to the challenges on instagram, on blog posts, and on Twitter using the #anth101 hashtag. These answers are curated on the main ANTH 101 website.
  • Extending the learning from ANTH 101 out to other institutions. He offers a free set of resources for instructors who wish to use the ANTH 101 materials.
  • Telling innovative digital stories through his extensive collection of videos. What he does is not technically difficult (in terms of video editing), but he has done lots of iteration and thinking differently about how to keep viewers engaged.

Way back on episode 25 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I talked to another expert at engaging large groups of students: Chrissy Spencer, who teaches at Georgia Tech. One of her big lessons is to invite her students to become active participants—in one example she invites them to play the part of a chili pepper population in a simulation designed to teach evolutionary processes.

The big challenge of large classes is keeping students engaged. But such engagement is not just an issue in big classes. Quality Matters suggests we need to consider more ways to get our students active in their learning, and to focus on the issue no matter the class size.

For Spencer, one key strategy is having students do focused group work and reinforcing their learning through means other than strictly relying on passive listening to lectures. [link: https://youtu.be/5wg1fR6Fv2Q ]

Some approaches I observe Spencer using in her large classes are:

  • Actually having students in the class embody parts of the concepts she is trying to teach.
  • Employing prediction as a means of deepening learning through a series of interrupted case studies. These structured experiences allow Spencer to identify when students misunderstand concepts early on, before they have gone too far into the case without receiving feedback.
  • Offering team-based, low-stakes assignments to get students explaining what they are learning to others in the class.
  • Including service learning as part of course assignments, so that students can experience how what they are learning can help the local community in some way.
  • Bringing something she loves (like chili peppers) into the classroom and helping that passion spread over to the students.
  • Using tools like the CATME Team Maker to carefully construct teams that consider everything from demographics, preferences and even whether or not a student has transportation to participate in the service learning opportunities into the mix of how groups get created.

I am among those who treasure what can happen in small classes. However, when I am exposed to people who are masters at engaging students in large classes and helping them succeed academically, I am reminded that class size is not as important as I might sometimes find myself thinking that it is.

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Design Online Courses that Are Full of Surprises

By Bonni Stachowiak | August 6, 2019 | 2 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Wolf cub near flowers

This article is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak and was originally posted on EdSurge. The following is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

“Any suggestions for ‘mixing it up’ in asynchronous online courses?”

—An online educator


It is a paradox. In our teaching, we want to be consistent enough so students can easily navigate our courses and not be confused about where to find things. On the other hand, we want to surprise students and ignite their curiosity.

One way to approach a desire to change things up in our teaching is through creating what are called ‘times for telling.’ I was first introduced to this idea from Derek Bruff, director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University and author of the forthcoming book, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. On Episode 71 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, he stressed the importance of getting the students curious about something before expecting them to digest what might be perceived as the less-interesting parts of the explanation. As Bruff said: “Students first need to encounter a problem, or a challenge, or something mysterious… and then that provides them with the motivation to hear the 15-minute explanation.”

Bruff took his inspiration from a 1998 article by Schwartz and Bransford called “A time for telling’. When teaching online classes, it is all the more vital that we set the stage up front for why what we are about to share is relevant and interesting. Starting with questions instead of answers is one way to do that. The goal is to evoke emotions and get learners thinking. How did that happen? How does it align with or contradict my existing perceptions? Did I just see what I think I just saw?

Unexpected Videos

When curating videos for students to watch, or when creating your own, the goal is to find ones that are unexpected. All too often, when we watch videos designed for online classes, we anticipate that we will see what we usually see. There will be a slide deck, with around five bullets per slide and someone talking over them. We may or may not see a face to accompany the voice. Either way, the person will be taking the content and themselves very seriously and will maintain a methodical cadence throughout.

Another option for videos is to change things up and have your students create them. Smartphones offer a whole universe of possibilities for video creation. One option is to use a service called FlipGrid. Pose a question on FlipGrid and then invite students to participate in the discussion by filming a brief video of themselves with their phone or webcam. This makes it possible to have class discussions where each participant sends in their comments whenever they have time, but where everyone can see and hear each other.

Changing Up Note-Taking

Instead of leaving students to take notes individually, you can invite them to participate in some group annotating. Hypothesis is the service that I use, both for my personal note-taking, and for having students collaborate by highlighting passages of a text and note-taking together. Hypothesis essentially creates another layer on top of any web page being viewed in a browser. Most of the time, Hypothesis is tucked away as an extension (a button) on my internet browser. When I am ready to take some notes for my own records, or to engage with others in annotating, I press the button and use a set of tools off on the right-hand side of my browser to make comments.

Most of the time, I use Hypothesis for straight text notes when I want to share my ideas about a site with another person. However, you can include other rich media—including videos, pictures and links—that really brings the conversation to life beyond what words may be able to do in a given context.

Next Steps

To recap, here are three ways to mix things up in online classes:

  1. Start with times for telling and ignite the curiosity of your students (give them the why), prior to providing them with longer explanations (the how).
  2. Use FlipGrid or other video services to invite students to become content creators, instead of mere consumers of content.
  3. Try Hypothesis or other social annotation tools so that students can discuss class reading material in community, instead of the usual way of each student making notes that only they can see.

The goal is to offer a sense of the unexpected in our teaching, while still maintaining consistency around how the class is set up and what is expected from the students.

One fun example I will leave you with comes from Alan Levine (aka CogDog), an independent educational technologist. Levine teaches a course called networked narratives (#netnarr). He establishes what he calls spines, or the skeletal framework of the course. Each week largely follows a similar structure. Levine sends out a blog post each week, to let the students know what is coming. They are also warned that blogging will be a big part of them engaging in the class.

However, every week has a series of surprises. It might be an unexpected guest who joins in one of the virtual studio tours he leads. Or it might be a special project, such as creating a gif or sharing their work in a digital art exhibit. My favorite element of surprise on the networked narratives website is the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other in the upper right-hand corner) with the label: “do not click.” The curious learner will be met by a number of surprises, if they push past any rule-following tendencies and see the trail of fun left behind by Levine. He offers further reading, links to non-essential resources and even a joke for people who listened to him on an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, when I complimented him on this serendipitous opportunity to explore.

I am appreciative of the example that Levine provides to us of how to really mix things up in our online teaching.

Photo by Scott Walsh on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Demonstrate Confidence in Your Teaching

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 21, 2019 | 1 Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Skeleton photo

This article was originally posted on EdSurge and is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

Various times I get feedback from students that they find me too unsure when in front of the class. What are helpful strategies to get better at this? This is especially hard for me since I teach large classes and it is challenging to connect.

—From a professor ready for confidence


When I taught my first class at the college level, I was somewhat nervous, but not as much as I may have been if I had comprehended the magnitude of what I was about to do. The first decade of my career had been in a dissimilar context, the franchising industry, teaching computer classes, and my expectations were unrealistic as to just how different it would be to teach at the college level.

The person who had originally instructed me how to teach had ingrained in me that you should avoid telling people that this was your first time teaching a class. While never asking me to lie, he had proposed that my first-timer status should not ever be brought up by me. He said that otherwise, I ran the risk of having people lose confidence in my capacity to guide them through the day of learning a new software program.

As I began my first night of teaching in a university setting, I asked the students to take out their textbooks for the class and turn to a particular page. My secret about this being my first trip to this particular rodeo was out. It almost never happened that students would bring their books to the very first class session at our institution. My request was met with blank stares. It was time for me to begin asking some questions and learning more about this new environment. My confidence was shaken, but not broken.

Think of someone who contributed to your learning in a meaningful way at some point in your life. If we gathered all the stories of people reading this column together, we would have a tapestry of diverse people who all had unique approaches to contributing to others’ growth. But I suspect that one characteristic that would be common among all the stories is that these influential teachers had confidence in the importance of the content they were teaching, if not also some belief in their teaching abilities after having built up their capacity over some time.

Gaining confidence can be elusive to those of us in higher education, since academic culture can often subtract from our confidence, instead of building it up. Our strength may already be worn down by going through a challenging promotion and tenure process, or after years of having our research evaluated by peer reviewers who sometimes reject work without giving effective feedback; or reading negative comments from students on our course evaluations.

However, a wonderful anecdote to those encounters is to have a strong connection with our sense of meaning and purpose in our work. Regularly answering the question surrounding why we teach in the first place can build up greater protections against those factors that may detract from our assurance.

During Brittani Packnett’s 2019 TED Talk, How to Build Your Confidence and Spark It in Others, she describes the importance of knowing how your fearlessness will be used as leverage toward some broader vision. She asserts:

“For some of us, confidence is a revolutionary choice.”

Packnett connects her work as an activist with the inspiration she takes from Septima Clark. This civil rights leader knew her purpose well and connected it with all of the work she did to fight for voting rights and civil rights. Packnett shares how Clark helped her see that confidence lets us take our “most ambitious dreams” and turn them into reality. “Confidence is the necessary spark for everything that follows,” Packnett argues. “Confidence is the difference between being inspired and actually getting started.”

Dave Stachowiak is the host of the Coaching for Leaders podcast most recently an audio production project called Dave’s Journal. He also happens to be my husband. He admonishes us to stop seeking confidence entirely and recently argued that we should Stop Wasting Time on Confidence. He stresses on that Dave’s Journal episode that:

“The problem is that virtually none of us seem to be able to wish or will our way to confidence. Despite every grand intention I’ve had of being more confident, that alone has never moved the needle.”

Even after you have connected with the reasons why you teach, the concerns expressed in your question may still be a factor. We can have habits embedded in our teaching practices that cause us to come across as unsure, even as our sureness is growing.

For that reason, it can be more effective to focus on ridding myself of those behaviors that might indicate to others that I lack confidence, rather than trying to convince myself in the first place to change my feelings.

Here are some practices I use to attempt to project confidence:

Avoid apologizing for extraneous events that occur, especially ones I have little or no control over. This means that if my technology isn’t working, rather than apologizing for it, I typically change over to a backup plan that doesn’t rely on technology. This is especially important at the start of a class or presentation, when I want to be making an impression that everyone is in good hands.

Frame questions with confidence. I stay away from asking, “Does anyone have any questions?” Instead, I pose the question this way: “Who has the first question?” After that, I use the eight-second rule, which dictates that we allow for what can sometimes feel like a ridiculously long time to pass after making another query. This intermission turns out to be much shorter than we imagine. By allowing for eight seconds to pass, I can use the power of silence to demonstrate to people that I am actually expecting an answer and am looking forward to what they have to say. I use the eight-second rule regularly when asking knowledge-related or reflection questions. This prolonged pause provides ample room for learners to not only absorb what I have asked and formulate an answer, but also to weigh the risk of being wrong and looking foolish in front of their peers. People’s natural discomfort with silence (at least in many Western cultures) works in our favor a lot of the time. There’s often someone who would rather get the conversation going again and who also has the confidence that I won’t embarrass them if their answer winds up being wrong. I share more about the eight-second rule in episode 6 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Use declarative statements. When I first started with computer instruction, I had the opportunity to listen to recordings of myself teaching. I would use a lot of unnecessary phrases that made what I said harder to follow and made me sound like I wasn’t sure what I was getting at. “Go ahead and go up to the file menu and then look for the open menu and click it.” After being horrified at how this sounded when being repeated what probably added up to hundreds of times in a given eight-hour class, I made a big change. My instructions became: “Click the file menu and select open.” My teaching has evolved to hardly ever give a series of step-by-step instructions the way I did early in my computer training days. However, in the cases that I ask students to hand something in, or set up an exercise for them to work on in class, my requests are made without the verbal fluff that could easily be construed as coming from someone lacking confidence.

When we are perceived as unsure, we are held back from having the kind of impact we desire in our teaching. Packnett reminds us in her TED Talk that:

“Without confidence, we get stuck, and when we get stuck, we can’t even get started.”

Our certainty can grow as we center on our sense of significance in our teaching. We can also behave our way into greater boldness by avoiding extraneous apologies, following the eight-second rule and keeping superfluous phrases out of our statements.


Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

Addressing Students Who Neglect to Formally Request Accommodations

By Bonni Stachowiak | May 24, 2019 | 2 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

This article was originally posted on EdSurge and is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni, I’m a brand new faculty member. I do not have formal training in pedagogy, except one measly adult education class from undergrad. I have a question regarding how you and others approach accommodations for those who are reluctant, resistant, or defiant to going through official channels at the university.

How I figure it, there are a list of things I find reasonable for all students—letting them stand or wiggle when they are having problems with attention or sleepiness, taking extra time to answer questions for assignments and projects, moving at a pace that is comfortable for the slowest in the group when we are on-the-move for class, etc.

However, students who ask for extra time on tests/projects, high levels (30%+) of extra credit, or to make up work weeks or months later, without having responded to any communications or requests for updates/accommodation needs… and still do not go to the Office of Accessibility… am I being a hard ass? How much do you bend?

I have 22 students all on the exact same schedule. I do not imagine that our program is their only or top priority, but I also do not imagine that it is fair to let some make up months of past due work to improve a grade from a previous semester or give extra time on evaluations without medical justification. Am I being too much of a hard ass?

—A new faculty member wanting to do the right thing


Candidly, your letter has been taking a back seat to questions I felt more confident in answering in recent months on EdSurge. I wish I had easy answers for you. What I have, instead, is nuance. No hard and fast rules exist, when it comes to navigating these spaces. I hope my messy experiences provide some ways of thinking differently regarding these decisions about your pedagogy.

You asked a couple of times in your message if you were being too strict. In general, I have found when I begin posing those questions to myself, I am likely not looking at things clearly. More so, I am likely not recognizing how complex students’ needs are—including those who might need accommodation.

There’s still a great deal of stigma around disabilities—learning-related, or otherwise. I have, on more than one occasion, witnessed faculty expressing disdain for the accommodation notifications that are sent to them, instead of grateful for the heads-up that their help and support is needed. It makes sense to me why students wouldn’t want to disclose their challenges, particularly when they could not be assured that it would actually help them in their learning any better than trying to go it alone.

There’s an air of suspicion among far too many faculty that students are attempting to use their diagnosed learning disabilities as a way to get preferential treatment that is unwarranted. Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, tweeted about this misnomer back in March of 2019:

“I find it amazing that so many professors think access accommodations are easy excuses taken lightly by students, when the truth is that most students would love nothing more than to be see by a professor as “normal”

Caulfield then shared about a family member who has an accommodation, but does not disclose it at the start of most of her classes. She is too concerned that as soon as the professor becomes aware of her situation that she will be defined by her disability. “Every action is going to be interpreted through that lens. Even your normal behavior gets pathologized by others,” Caulfield conveys.

The implicit biases surrounding disabilities are ever-present, even if we aren’t able to see them in ourselves. Another common bias surrounding accommodations is to think of students requesting them as lazy. Devon Price, a social psychologist, writes in an essay on Medium

“if a student is struggling, they probably aren’t choosing to. They probably want to do well. They probably are trying. More broadly, I want all people to take a curious and empathic approach to individuals whom they initially want to judge as ‘lazy’ or irresponsible.”

Price’s last point about taking more of a curious approach reminded me of how important your question is to your doing just that, by reaching out. The reflecting you did around accommodations we can all make in our teaching to help students in their learning is wonderful. Getting students moving, over-communicating your expectations, and varying your pacing to reflect differing processing needs can all contribute to creating an environment more conducive to learning.

When it comes to deadlines for assignments, my approach varies widely. I found that when teaching as an adjunct in a doctoral program, both the culture of the program, along with the types of students who pursue their education in this way, contribute to me being less strict with deadlines. I have two days per week in which assignments are due (Tuesdays and Saturdays), but I let students know that as long as they are caught up by the start of each week (on Mondays), that they will be able to take advantage of the scaffolding that is built into the course structure.

The issue of stigmas I described earlier is particularly pronounced in doctoral programs. David M. Perry, writer and historian, writes in an article in Pacific Standard that while data does not exist regarding the rates of disability within U.S. doctoral programs, that there has been some research done on mental health, specifically. “The results are terrible,” Perry argues, noting the high rates of suicide, sexual harassment, depression and anxiety reported in a study involving 500 economics students.

There is no easy prescription to remedy these challenges. However, a big part of moving toward a more sustainable path is to remove the stigmas that exist and to normalize help-seeking behaviors.

My undergraduate courses have tighter deadlines. In fact, the ability to accomplish tasks by a certain date is an important measure in these classes. As an example, I teach a personal leadership and productivity course. It focuses on topics like setting goals, task and project management, email maintenance and calendaring. A big part of the class is being people of integrity to do what we say we will do—and that includes getting things in on time.

However, even in my undergraduate courses where I am stressing deadlines more heavily, I do build in some practices that allow for the occasional missing of a deadline without it having a big impact on a grade. This approach looks different depending on how I have structured a course. Sometimes, it might be to omit a couple of the lowest scores on low-stakes assignments. In other cases, when completion is more important for building a foundation for learning, I allow for a couple of instances for assignments to be turned in late (without a requirement to explain the reason why).

Each class policy we put in place should be based on whether or not it supports the students learning in some way. We also need to be humble about the fact that we lack the knowledge to always be able to make decisions that are defensible. I used to “ban” laptops, for example, not realizing the impact of this choice on all students. As Matthew Cortland, a writer, lawyer, and self-professed public health nerd, stresses, “even with exceptions for students who really need laptops, bans introduce discrimination and unfairness to the classroom.”

While I am still aware of the challenges that digital distractions can bring in the classroom, I prefer to think of the times when I propose that students put their digital devices away for a bit as an invitation I am making to them to a unique experience for learning. I also remain aware that there should be times in class when students are welcomed—and even encouraged—to use their devices.

You asked at the conclusion of your message to me: Am I being too much of a hard-ass?

From the little information I have, you do seem to be over-simplifying the choice that it can be for students to decide to seek accommodations. My advice is to become more familiar with just how much stigma still exists to seeking that kind of support and the discriminatory ways in which far too many faculty respond to these legally-mandated steps.

You are not alone in this, by the way. I used to find myself without much of an understanding of how those with learning and other disabilities are discriminated against in higher-education spaces. I found greater capacity for empathy and a greater awareness of the issues by following these hashtags on Twitter, along with the list of people I have curated to follow on Twitter, linked to below.

Hashtags:

#disabilityed

#disabilityawareness

#disabilityjustice

#a11y

Twitter List:

Disability Advocates and Educators

Extra credit goes to those who browse Dr. Amelia Gibson’s syllabus for her disability informatics course.

Update

Someone commented on Twitter that another piece of advice I could have provided this person on my original EdSurge column is to suggest that they consider using a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach. I appreciated the recommendation (there was so much to say!) and have invited this person to come on a future episode of Teaching on Higher Ed. In the meantime, this episode with Mark Hofer is a good starting point, as is episode 227 with Tom Tobin.

Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

Teaching Reflections – 2019 Spring

By Bonni Stachowiak | May 7, 2019 | 2 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

I have wrapped up another semester of teaching and am full of thoughts about what transpired. I already miss the students and am glad to be able to cross paths with at least some of them in the Fall semester.

Podcast listening at Back Bay, Newport Beach

Below are some of the ways in which I experimented in this class and what some of the results were.

Syllabus

Each time I go look at old syllabi these days, I find myself thinking I really sound like a jerk. My practice, lately, has been to remove the offending passages. Sometimes, a kinder, more edifying way of phrasing something is possible. Most times, I find the deletion stands and there is no need to add anything back in.

My Business Ethics syllabus was changed to remove the strict language about what ‘participation’ really means and the consequences of being disruptive in a class. My goal was to remove all language that sounded patronizing and to only add things back in that are written in such a way as to be likely perceived as supportive of one’s learning.

OpenTextbook Adoption

I decided to take the plunge and go without a textbook from a for-profit company. I had used a $70 text from a traditional textbook company in the past. This time, I used a combination of readings from two different open textbooks on the topic:

  • Good Corporation, Bad Corporation: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Global Economy (2016), Pulos & Jimenez
  • Ethics for A-Level (2017), Dimmock & Fisher

Both of the texts were licensed such that I could use portions of them within our LMS. I copied short sections of the text and always was sure to include the copyright information and links over to the primary sources. Also included were brief videos related to the same topics, as well as additional commentary that was written by me.

Course Workload Estimator to Get Realistic About Reading Requirements

The Rice Center for Teaching Excellence has a Course Workload Estimator, which is extremely helpful in determining approximately how long reading and other assignments will take to complete. It has regularly caused me to dial back the amount of reading I have assigned.

Anecdotally, this seems to contribute heavily to the likelihood that students complete that portion of the class (in addition to the other practices I use to build in some accountability). I also relied heavily on video content to fill in many of the gaps.

Shared Learning Outcomes

This ‘less is more’ approach also carried over into my learning objectives. I had five goals for the class outlined before we began. Then, during the first class, we discussed what the students were hoping to get out of the class. That dialog resulted in placing a slightly different emphasis on one of the goals I had outlined, in addition to adding an entirely new outcome that hadn’t been among the ones I brought to the table, initially.

I asked one of my students if I could share his reflections on part of the course here on my blog. He welcomed me to do so:

“One of the learning objectives that really impacted me and my thoughts in regard to ethics, in general, was learning to be a more conscious consumer. As a young adult, I find myself buying things that are just basically affordable. After learning about India’s sweatshop factories for “cheap fashion,” I realize how impactful my purchases can be in the long run. Knowing I have a voice and can write and communicate my thoughts towards a company has given me more confidence to stand up for what I believe is right or ethical.

My change in perspective came for the in-class film, ‘The True Cost,’ where filmmakers take an insiders perspective on the devastation of fast fashion and the cost it is taking on the workers who are the ones being the most impacted by the cheap clothing craze going on right now. This not only gave me a better insight as a consumer of clothing but also made me question other purchases that I make daily.

I now believe that this aspect of the class has given me something that will stay with me for the rest of my life and allow me to be ethical and support or vote with my money on companies I believe in.”

The True Cost was a great resource for the class (thank you, Ruthie and Kerry, for both suggesting it in the past!). Not only is it a tremendous film, but they have plenty of resources on their site for taking action on the learning that results from watching it.

My friend Jeff recommended another video series that I wound up adopting for this class: PBS Frontline – The Facebook Dilemma. The students did enjoy the videos, though I am not sure that the ways in which their personal information has been violated, through an unattenuated quest for profits quite got through for some of them. I didn’t show this one from John Oliver this time around (including his interview with Edward Snowden) – as it emphases more of the ways in which the government surveils its citizens and not as much on the profit motives that are more aligned with the course objectives. I know I have more room to grow, in terms of raising the awareness of our students about privacy and the profit motive – in as compelling of a way that The True Cost does for fast fashion.

Business ethics game
The final project was to create a game that taught some aspect of business ethics

Attendance

For the first time in my 15 years of teaching in a higher education context, not one student missed a single class session. There were a couple of times when people were late, but since it was so rare that anyone was missing, we would often text them and check in to see where they were.

One guy had gotten caught up in playing a video game in what Csikszentmihalyi would call a state of flow. We managed to break him out of his unbroken focus to remind him that we had started class. This is something that normally would have made me angry in my early years of teaching. Today, I’m glad to have gotten over myself enough to know that I am not the center of my students’ universes – and that this is something to celebrate and not to be angry about.

The other day, I ran into someone else from the class and was talking about how surprised I was that everyone had done so well on attendance. He replied, “I think we were there all the time because we really wanted to be there. We knew if we missed a class – that we would be missing out on something really good.”

We listened to a podcast as a class – and took a walk on Back Bay. This student became my podcast buddy – as she discovered this powerful way of learning and shared recommendations on what to listen to with me.

I used to spend a lot more time thinking about policies that would use punitive methods to maintain a certain minimum level of acceptable attendance rates. Now, I invest that time in creating positive learning experiences that students won’t want to miss. It seems to be paying off!

Grades

The grades for the students in this class were also quite high. I am aware that this will be frowned upon by some of my colleagues who believe that only a certain percentage of high grades should be awarded in a given class, regardless of student achievement.

Some of my fellow professors got into a discussion with a candidate a couple of weeks ago about the potential for grade inflation. They shared their beliefs about the importance of always having grades that spread across a curve of potential levels. The perspective is that if too many students earn A grades – that there are a certain percentage of individuals who won’t work even harder as they might if greater levels of granularity were identified and more grades were pushed down to the lower levels.

The conversation reminded me of when Cathy N. Davidson was on Teaching in Higher Ed, episode 169 to speak about her book: A New Education.

She shared about the history of grades and how they first started out as a means for assessing the quality of meat. The meatpackers initially opposed the system, since it wasn’t complex enough to accommodate the various qualities and characteristics of the meat they were being asked to rate. Davidson wonders if the system wasn’t good enough for the meat packers, why so many of us continue to mindlessly practice it today?

My beliefs about grades are all over the place these days, as I continue to be challenged by conversations I have been able to have on the podcast, such as:

  • Episode 217: How to Ungrade with Jesse Stommel
  • Episode 209: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies with Asao Inoue
  • Episode 29: Specifications Grading with Linda Nilson
  • Episode 228: How to Create Engaging Online Classes with Laura Gibbs (only a portion of the dialog is about grading – but well worth a listen)

Business ethics games - created by the students

Your turn

How did your teaching go this semester? Did you experiment with anything new? If so, how did it go?

Filed Under: Teaching

5 Tips for Teaching Live Online

By Bonni Stachowiak | December 18, 2018 | 2 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

5 tips for teaching live online classes

This article was originally published on the EdSurge website. 

The following is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column. You can pose a question for a future column here.

Dear Bonni: I'm wanting to learn about best practices for virtual courses that are “live” (e.g., using a platform like Zoom). It differs both from face-to-face classroom learning and traditional (asynchronous) online courses. I'd love to know about resources addressing this learning format. —Keith Johnson. director of theological development at Cru. My team facilitates and teaches graduate-level theological courses for a non-profit.

Teaching a class by live video conference is quite different than being in person with a room full of students. But there are some approaches we can draw from traditional classrooms that work quite well in a live, online environment.

Here are some recommendations for virtual teaching:

Prepare Your Environment

I have witnessed some cringe-worthy moments when other professors try video conference sessions without thinking through their set-up in advance.

One rookie mistake is to have the light source behind the professor’s head, which makes it look like the person is having some kind of out-of-body experience. Being sure that the light source in your room is originating from somewhere in the room that is behind your webcam and shining light on your face is essential.

Another common error is for a person to sit in front of the camera in a way that makes it look like the top of their head is cut off—which can look distractingly comic to students.

It often helps to raise your laptop or webcam up high enough that it is at least eye-level, if not slightly above that. I have a picture on one of my Teaching in Higher Ed blog posts that illustrates the difference it makes when you get the camera at an appropriate level, versus how much chin and nostrils are exposed when you don’t.

It turns out that eye contact is important, even in an online setting. So it must be simulated by looking directly at the camera on your device, or at least somewhere close-by.

This video has a bit more information about how I prepare my environment to hold an online class.

Get Good Equipment

Until I invested in some high-quality equipment for online sessions, I didn’t realize it made that much of a difference. The essential items for hosting sessions include a webcam with at least 1080p resolution, an external microphone and a headset.

Alternatively, a more-sophisticated headset might include both a microphone and a headset. Below are the products I typically use when facilitating live classes:

  •  Webcam: Logitech 1080p Pro Stream Webcam (video input)
  •  Microphone: Blue Yeti USB Microphone (audio input)
  •  Headset: Apple AirPods (audio output)

My absolute most preferred (and adored) video conference tool is Zoom. When I am leading a Zoom session, I can indicate which webcam, microphone, and audio output source to use. The camera that is integrated with my monitor doesn’t have as nice of video output as the Logitech does, so I hook that hardware device onto the monitor and it actually winds up covering the other camera up completely. All sorts of headsets would work in terms of being able to hear what others have to say on the session. Since I carry my Apple AirPods with me pretty much wherever I go, they make the most sense to use for that part of my set up.

Even though your computer likely already has speakers and a microphone, having other hardware to accomplish those feats make it that much less likely that you will have any issues with feedback noises during the session (at least coming from your end of things). When sound comes out of a speaker and is then fed straight back into a nearby microphone, you get that awful feedback noise that for most of us is like giant fingernails scratching across a chalkboard.

A headset that has both sound input (coming in your ears) and output (a microphone included on the headset) will mean you do not require two separate devices (a microphone and headphones). Since my BlueYeti is also always sitting on my desk and has superior sound input to the Apple AirPods, I typically select it as my microphone during a Zoom session.

Set Norms

One of the norms I used to set for all my synchronous classes was to ask everyone to leave their webcam on the entire time and to not mute themselves. In a conversation with Maha Bali, associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and teaching at the American University in Cairo, I discovered that I was being pretty culturally inflexible with that requirement. She shared about how sometimes people in her classes might not want to show their faces at all, or may even prefer to engage purely through the chat function.

Since receiving Bali’s cautions, I now talk through the downsides to keeping ourselves muted while we are participating in these online sessions. It is so easy to forget to unmute yourself when you have something to share. I suggest that we may be able to best simulate an in-person conversation if we leave our webcams on and avoid muting our microphones, but I do not insist on everyone adopting these norms.

Another norm I attempt to instill in all my synchronous sessions is to regularly encourage people to share their screens. Zoom has a setting where you can allow attendees to share their screen during a session and that is the option I use. If someone were to inadvertently share their screen, or if I ever had some renegade screen sharer, it is easy enough to take control back from anyone who is currently sharing their screen. I have never had any issues with allowing for quick sharing of screens from attendees and it becomes an established norm with most of my classes that people will be prepared for a little “show and tell” at any moment during the session.

Mix it Up

The most important way I have found to engage learners during online sessions is to regularly be changing what we are doing. One minute, I might have them in breakout rooms discussing a topic. After that, I may have individuals post on a virtual whiteboard one takeaway from their dialog.

I hardly ever have student presentations take place with the entire class. Instead, I ask each group to designate a timekeeper and have short presentations take place in breakout groups of three to four people, maximum. Then, when people rejoin the full class, I ask what surprises came out in their conversations, or what we should be sure gets shared with the larger group.

Online polls are another way to break things up. If I do wind up doing a short, five-minute lecture during an online class, I still break up that duration with at least one or two polls, asking students to answer either a fact-based or opinion-based question about what I have shared.

Practice Interacting Online

If you really want to get good at leading online sessions, it helps to be a participant in them regularly. I find great benefits to engaging online at conferences that I am unable to attend in person through Virtually Connecting.

I am also finding more and more that people enjoy even one-on-one meetings to be held over Zoom, in order for us to easily be able to share our screens and see each other’s non-verbal cues.

Ultimately, I find people get more out of our online sessions when we talk less and get the participants to engage more.

Filed Under: Teaching

The Best kind of Feedback You’ll Ever Receive

By Bonni Stachowiak | December 5, 2018 | 1 Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

My first job out of college was teaching computer classes. The plan was that each of us would go through a week of “train the trainer,” when we would discover how to avoid saying filler words (like umm, ok, so, and like), where to stand when we were teaching (best spot was the back of the room, in order to spot whether someone was having difficulty following the steps), and how to have good dry erase board penmanship in order to display the topics for the day.

I never did get to complete my train the trainer program, however. I was in there long enough to have a service bell rang each time I said umm and to erraticate that filler word from my vocabulary. During my second day, my manager came and asked if I could teach a class the following day on an application I had never used before (Word Perfect for Windows). Trying to learn a new application was hard enough, but I hadn't ever used Windows before, making my first day of teaching quite eventful.

Because I wasn't actually teaching (David Merrill would have called what I was doing demonstration, I would later learn), the students were happy with the class and gave me straight tens on the course evaluations. Neither the students or I knew what we didn't know. We remained blissfully unaware of just how little we still knew about using Word Perfect for Windows, or even Windows in general.

The Word Perfect class was held offsite, so there wasn't anyone to observe me or provide feedback. Over the course of the next few weeks, I taught a combination of offsite and classes held at our main facility. After one of the local ones, my manager caught me as I was heading home and handed me something.

“Take this and give it a listen. You will learn a lot,” he said.

It was a cassette tape of me teaching a beginning Excel class. It felt strange to hear the sound of my own voice. Little did I know I would listen to myself at least once per week for four and a half years for the podcast, with no sign of stopping.

It didn't take too many minutes before I noticed the most irritating habit. I kept repeating the phrases “right now” and “go ahead” before each and every step I guided the students through.

“Right now, we are going to go ahead and go up to the file menu and choose open.”

“Go ahead right now and click insert-row.”

It drove me nuts to hear this repetition, but I couldn't stop listening to the recording.

It's hard to adequately describe how hard this was to hear. I used to sing on our former church’s worship band and used to dread whenever a certain guy would volunteer to do the sound on a given week. He just didn't have it down enough to prevent the loudest feedback noise I've ever heard in my life. I was already slightly hard of hearing during that time, but I pictured the additional loss that was occurring each time my weeks for singing were matched up with his weeks to run the sound.

Those cringe-worthy experiences were similar to the horror I felt at hearing my verbal repetitions of ‘right now’ and ‘go ahead.’ I vowed to do what I could to stop those patterns. Eventually, I did rid myself of those verbal tics, but new ones would take their places.

After some time, I finally figured out two approaches that resulted in more permanent change. First, I got used to shorter, more declarative sentences, which had been socialized out of me in my training to be a girl (side note – huge recommendation for episode 56 – part 10 – of the Scene on Radio podcast – The Juggernaut, which has me thinking about my own socialization as a young girl and my difficulties in being assertive). After intense practice giving more declarative commands in my classes, “Click file-open,” no longer felt like too abrupt of a statement.

Also, I let silence become more of a friend in my teaching (well, in my demonstrating – it would be many more years before I was really doing what I now think of as teaching). I didn't need to rely on catchphrases to fill the silence. It was ok to let people think and reflect.

That one cassette tape changed my teaching far more than anyone’s feedback might have who had sat in my first few weeks of teaching. Today, I have similar feedback mechanisms built into my practice with regularity. I listen to each episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, where I pick up on bad habits that have snuck into my interviewing. Also, I regularly see myself on video when recording panels, screencasts, or other video projects.

I was disappointed when I listened back to my interview with Peter Kaughman about compassionate teaching. I don't want to spoil the episode, if you haven't listened yet, though his life should hardly be thought of as a potential spoiler alert. After he so beautifully shared of his diagnoses and subsequent health challenges in his blog post, I didn't want to wind up asking a question that didn't facilitate the telling of his story in a way that would honor that incredible piece of writing.

I knew how much pressure I was putting on myself at the time, though I suspect only those who know me deeply would ever be able to spot the signs of these feelings. I heard it, though, in my repetition of the phrase, “I wonder if you would…” over and over again. “Stop wondering, Bonni – and just ask the question!” – I kept thinking as I heard my problematic phrase.

As I listened to this week’s episode with Josh Eyler (which had been recorded before my conversation with Peter), I realized that this new pattern had been around for at least a month now. It wasn't as evident in the dialog with Josh, but I still heard myself saying it two or three times. I've got something new to work on.

I'm thankful for these opportunities to always be getting better at what I do, both in podcasting and in teaching. If it weren't for the constant feedback that comes from self-observation, I would no doubt have an abundant collection of distracting habits by now that would be much harder to change.

If you aren't regularly exposed to opportunities to watch or listen to yourself teach, I highly recommend you find a way to incorporate that practice into your professional development. It can start with something as small as recording some screencasts for your classes and viewing those to get used to watching yourself.

It does get easier to hear or watch yourself over time if you commit to doing it regularly. After the shock wears off, there's no finer form of feedback that I've ever experienced. It's raw and so very real. What you're seeing isn't filtered through anyone’s biases – except your own.

A more formal way of doing this kind of observation is to do some in-class recording. My colleague uses a tool called Swivl that she says is highly effective. I haven't tried it, yet, but am in the process of watching this video series on the research they have conducted on this practice in educational contexts.

If you want a more systematic way of setting goals toward personal change (including teaching), you may want to check out Michael Hyatt’s free goal setting video series, which is an introduction to his paid 2019 paid Best Year Ever course*. They also offer a “free” lifescore assessment that can help you identify the areas in your life most in need of some goal setting. I put “free” in quotes, since both of these options require that you provide an email address. They do comply with all anti-spam laws and make it very easy to unsubscribe in the future, should you no longer wish to hear from their organization. At least that has been my experience always with them…

An Update

I’m so sad to report that after I wrote the earlier portions of this post, I learned that Peter Kaufman (episode 320) passed away on November 19, 2018. I reflect more on this in a future podcast but wanted to also share the news here. Thank you to Alex for letting us know in the comments section for that episode. I share this now because while there are ways we can always be getting better as teachers, if we aren’t willing to run the risk of the failures we will make along the way, we won’t be able to have the kinds of transformative relationships that are possible.

I am glad I didn’t wait to be a perfect interviewer to speak with Peter, or I never would have had the opportunity to learn from him in the powerful way in which so many of us did through that conversation. May we all continually find ways to receive the needed feedback to improve our teaching, yet not wait until we are where we want to be before we experiment and take risks.

Also, in memory of Peter, may each of us find ways to be more compassionate in our teaching. Perhaps even starting with the approaches shared in his book (co-authed by Janine Schipper), Teaching with Compassion: An Educator’s Oath to Teach from the Heart*?

Filed Under: Teaching

Supporting Students in Developing Their Writing Skills Across All Disciplines

By Bonni Stachowiak | October 23, 2018 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Bonni Stachowiak EdSurge Column
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

The following article was originally published on EdSurge. It is part of my new Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours with Bonni Stachowiak column, which you can learn more about in my first article for EdSurge, where I articulate my vision for the project.


How can I best support students with very poor writing skills when the class is not one specifically focused on writing? I'm already encouraging them to use the Writing Center and giving feedback that highlights one or two specific grammar/ clarity issues to focus on. Yet I fear that those who enter college with major deficits in this area will struggle in every class, without sufficient resources available to catch up. Thanks Bonni!

—Kerry Moore, assistant professor of social work at Vanguard University of Southern California


Let me start by saying that I hear this question frequently. We professors sometimes misjudge the skill level students will start from on the first day of class on a variety of fronts. And these students vary in which courses they have taken or plan to take before they finish, so there is a bigger picture of their progression to consider.

“The engine of learning is labor.”

—Asao B. Inoue, director of the writing center at the U.of Washington Tacoma.

Recently I had a bit of a wake-up call regarding my thinking about developing writing skills. In talking with Asao B. Inoue, director of the writing center at the University of Washington Tacoma, for my Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, he stressed the importance of finding out from students what their goals were around writing, prior to attempting to provide them with feedback. I realize that sounds completely obvious, but it was not something I have always remembered to integrate into my own teaching.


You can submit your challenges and questions here.


One example we talked about was all the time we might spend emphasizing a particular citation style (e.g. APA, MLA), when the individual has absolutely no intention of ever pursuing graduate school. Yes, I realize that many of us never had the idea of going to graduate school until well beyond finishing undergrad. I also recognize that in some disciplines, teaching students to use particular citation styles is essential, even at the undergraduate level. However, starting by identifying what goals our students have will allow us to provide far more powerful feedback than if we never are aware of them at all.

Inoue also articulated the importance of spending more time writing as vital to growing these skills. He stated that “The engine of learning is labor.” The more we write, the better we will get at it. This is particularly true if we have someone giving us useful feedback who is aware of our broader goals and aspirations.

John Warner’s forthcoming book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, addresses this question directly. We might just be “teaching writing wrong,” he argues, by conditioning our students to perform “writing-related simulations,” which are too sterile to help them develop in ways that are most relevant to them.

I reached out to John to see what advice he has for us in these pursuits. He shared:

“I always like to remember and remind students that writing is thinking. If they're having trouble with the writing, there's likely an underlying problem with the thinking, and often it's rooted in them not being sure what they're supposed to be thinking about. I go back to trying to decide what kind of thinking I'm trying to privilege with the assignment and then helping students get started on that path.”

I asked others on Twitter for their advice and received far more responses than I ever would have anticipated. J. Scott Self, assistant professor in the school of educational leadership at Abilene Christian University, joked in a tweet that learning more about growing writing skills was the number one thing he was planning on asking Santa for this year, since it is such a challenge to help struggling writers make improvements.

I completely understand the frustrations, yet there is hope. We can look to those who have been able to address the realities while still challenging themselves and their institutions to change their approaches. I will weave the guidance received from Twitter in with my own advice and will link to the recommended resources.

Remember Writing Skills Fall on a Continuum

One paradigm that can be especially helpful is to think of developing writing skills as falling along a continuum. Ideally, we model for our students that we continue to grow our own writing skills and this quest is a lifelong pursuit.

“I always like to remember and remind students that writing is thinking.”

—John Warner

Shannon Riggs, executive director for the division of Extended Campus at Oregon State University, stresses the importance of reading the kinds of writing styles we wish to emulate. That has been such a helpful practice for me—each time I have entered into a new form of writing in my work. It is also beneficial to employ this approach when it has been a while since we have written in a particular style.

Align with a Team

One challenge I have experienced at different times in my academic career is the feeling that I am trying to develop skills like this as a solo player. The more we can connect with others who are teaching in our program and across disciplines, the more we can brainstorm and share advice on improving our students’ writing together.

Approaches and resources that were recommended by people on Twitter include:

  •  Writing Across the Curriculum: This is a movement that works to build effective writing assignments into courses well beyond English, composition and literature classes. There are several well-crafted books on the approach, including Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen.
  •  Writing Across the Disciplines: Jason Ferguson summed up this approach best in a 2014 essay: “Every academic discipline requires writing of some kind and most of them require it frequently.” He provides an overview of the distinct goals and writing products within various areas of study.
  •  Encouraging Active Learning: One recent book focuses on making sure writing assignments are done in way that promotes active learning, where students learn by doing rather than passively receiving information. It’s called Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, by John C. Bean

Thanks to Josh Eyler, director of the Center for Faculty Development at Rice University, and Matt Salamone, associate professor of mathematics at Bridgewater State University for suggesting that. Salamone also recommended the Writing Across the Curriculum Clearinghouse, which looks fantastic.

Building a relationship with your university’s writing center can also be foundational in aligning with a team. They often have far more knowledge than we do about resources to support the writing-related learning goals we have for our classes. They are also able to develop relationships with students that extend beyond a given course and can provide individuals with a place where they can see longer-term growth opportunities.

If your institution does not have other departments you can rely on as part of your team, there are online repositories that can support you and your students’ learning. Anthony Schmidt, an educator and Ph.D student, tweeted his recommendation for Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) website, which is one of my all-time favorite resources for my growing my own writing abilities over the years.

Give Plenty of Opportunities for Practice and Revision

If we want to develop better writers, opportunities for practice and for gaining an understanding of the importance of the revisions process need to be emphasized. Laura Gibbs, an online instructor at the University of Oklahoma, shared:

“Exercises on writing can help up to a point, but in the end, writing is a skill that needs practice, and it is a complex skill which means that feedback from a skilled writer is essential. My main job in [my classes] is giving students feedback.”

Riggs, of Oregon State University, also recommended regular practice as a means for improvement. She tweeted that getting three pages down each morning can help all writers become more fluent and to reflect more on our writing.


EdSurge Column - Bonni Stachowiaki

Thanks for being among the first to write in with a question for my new EdSurge column (I should note that I work with Kerry at Vanguard University).

The fact that you are inquiring means that you care about supporting your students in developing these vital skills. I wish you success in these pursuits. I was going to ask you to let us know how your efforts are going, but now I’m thinking we should read Bean’s Engaging Ideas together and report back to each other on how it helps our teaching evolve.

Filed Under: Teaching

My New EdSurge Column: Toward Better Teaching – Office Hours

By Bonni Stachowiak | October 7, 2018 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

EdSurge - Bonni Stachowiaki

I'm excited to announce that my new column is now live on EdSurge's website.

The purpose of this column is to:

  • Recognize that teaching is both an art and a science. Share the scholarship of teaching and learning that is helping to inform our teaching practices, while recognizing that our experiences are diverse and unique. Just like an artist, sometimes we learn the rules, so that we can then break them for a given purpose.
  • Focus on the joy and the pain that can come from the pursuit of good teaching. Celebrate with you when things go well and mourn with you when they do not turn out as you wished.
  • Provide guidance from my experience as a teacher and faculty developer and reach out to others when my expertise is lacking.

You can read more about my aims for the project and the ways in which the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast has inspired me to take this on by checking out my first EdSurge column, which came out in mid-August:

  • Teaching Is Both Art and Science. How to Work Toward Improving Your Instructional Practice

I also answered my first question for the Office Hours column, having to do with developing our students' writing skills:

  • How Can Profs Support Students Who Come In With Poor Writing Skills?

If you would like to submit a question for consideration, my Office Hours are open at:

  • Facing a Thorny Teaching Issue? Ask Bonni!

I will occasionally post past EdSurge Office Hours columns here on the Teaching in Higher Ed blog, once it has been out for a week or two on EdSurge's site.

But your best source for the latest columns is on the EdSurge Office Hours guide. Special thanks to Jeff Young at EdSurge for the opportunity and the collaboration.

 

Filed Under: Teaching

Starting Anew

By Bonni Stachowiak | August 11, 2018 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Starting Anew

This time of year is always both exciting and terrifying for me. Maybe the fear isn’t quite as bad as terror, but I definitely experience some anxiety thinking about the start of a new academic year.

Overall, these nerves mostly seem normal and perhaps even healthy in some ways. I care about our students and want them to have a transformative experience in my classes. As I am now spending more of my time in a faculty development capacity at my institution, I consider it a sacred responsibility to also be working to help us all collectively be becoming more effective in our teaching.

Lawrence M. Lesser posted a beautifully written piece for Faculty Focus this week:

Opening Intentions for the First Day of Class

Lesser has clearly done ample reflection on the role we play as teachers in serving our students well. He was motivated by reading a poem in a Jewish prayer book that described the ways in which we might enter a place of worship. It stressed the intentions that those who gathered might emphasize. Lesser decided to write his own intentions for what he hoped those who entered his classroom experience.

He writes:

May the door of this classroom be wide enough

to receive all who seek understanding.

May the door of this classroom be narrow enough

to keep out fear or closed-mindedness.

May its threshold be no stumbling block

to those whose knowledge—or language—is shaky.

May the window of this classroom inspire us

to connect our learning to the world beyond these walls.

And may this classroom be, for all who enter,

a doorway to growth and purpose. Welcome!

That’s only a portion of his poem. I encourage you to read the entire thing. Thank you, Lawrence, for inspiring us for the new beginnings that are upon us. May this spirit of welcome be present for all of us, as we embark on our respective learning journeys.

A favorite recent musical discovery of mine comes from Brandi Carlile, as she invites a young musician (Benicio Bryant) to join her to sing her song, The Joke, on Late Night with Seth Myers. It’s a beautifully written and performed song, with Carlile showing her joy in mentoring this young talent who is accompanying her. It also reminds me of the important work we must do to welcome everyone into our classes, particularly those who may not feel like they belong there.

The lyrics are powerful, as Carlile shares two stories of individuals who are feeling marginalized and discouraged. The website Genius offers further insight into her intentions in writing the song. Carlile has shared that she wrote the first part of the song for boys feeling marginalized and forced into these kinds of awkward shapes of masculinity that they do or don’t belong in.” She also extends the invitation for healing to girls who have had the dirt kicked in their faces and been called weak.

The chorus powerfully asserts:

“Let ‘em laugh while they can

Let ‘em spin, let ‘em scatter in the wind

I have been to the movies, I’ve seen how it ends

And the joke’s on them”

Any nerves I may have about these precious first impressions within my learning environments could very well pale in comparison to how the people I meet there might be feeling. The faculty I work with may be wrestling with how to respond to last semester’s devastating course evaluations and not feeling like they are able to live up to their teaching ideals. The students I encounter may be struggling to balance all the priorities they already feel pulling on them as they enter our classroom.

May we transform any sense of fear we have into empathy for those we are so fortunate to teach this year. As we encounter those who are embattled, marginalized, and feeling like their joy has been stolen, may we listen to their stories without judgment or unrequested prescriptions.

We also must guard our hearts and minds against the toxicity that can come from engaging too frequently with those who have an antagonistic attitude toward their students. Christopher Emdin reminds all of us in his book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood:

“The kind of teacher you will become is directly related to the kind of teachers you associate with. Teaching is a profession where misery does more than just love company—it recruits, seduces, and romances it. Avoid people who are unhappy and disgruntled about the possibilities for transforming education. They are the enemy of the spirit of the teacher.”

Let’s do this, friends.

With humility, grace, patience, love, hope, and a strong sense of purpose. Let us challenge our students and encourage them along the way. I look forward to being in community with you throughout it all.

Filed Under: Teaching

Igniting Curiosity and Imagination

By Bonni Stachowiak | July 5, 2018 | 2 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Our kids have started their summer camp routine. They won’t wind up going every week, but there will be times when I can tackle those things that are hard to keep up with during the academic year.

They did such a wonderful job of making the transition that I wanted to reward them. I shared a number of possibilities of what we might do to celebrate. They picked the place I least wanted to go – but such are the chances we take when we let them decide.

That’s how I found myself at Chuck E Cheese earlier this week.

How I found myself bawling at Chuck E Cheese involves Sean Michael Morris’ keynotes at the University of Warwick:

Imagination as a Precision Tool for Change

Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

Sean writes about agency in such a powerful way. I know that my understanding of it is childlike and immature. He writes about how some of us might think we are giving our kids agency when we get them a car for their 18th birthday. He shares:

“The car is a symbol of freedom without being freedom. In offering that car, a parent also offers with it an indoctrination into the world of car insurance and car payments, into the world of traffic violations. Cars are not themselves free from policing, and therefore neither will the teenager driving one be.”

I wonder how many times in my feeble attempts to give my students agency in my teaching, I have actually given them a car. I’m also pretty sure that give is the wrong verb to use when talking about agency. Is it something I can give to someone else?

When I teach doctoral students, they can resist taking risks and experimenting far more than my undergraduate students ever do. I make clumsy attempts at fostering an environment that might facilitate greater agency, while they ask for more specifics on assignments and where they might find the rubrics. Sometimes I get hopeful when learning from people like Sean, while other times the existing system and culture feels too massive for me to ever hope to have any impact on (particularly as an adjunct, which I am in the case of teaching doctoral students).

As I sat in Chuck E Cheese, I was being hammered by cognitive dissonance. I subscribe so wholeheartedly to what Sean was advocating in his talk, yet I felt so incapable of breaking free of the oppressive systems my work is often embedded within. He talked about how we get tempted to perform “what Freire might call an adaptation, a shift in behavior designed not to alter the status quo, but to maintain it, even within a slightly altered framework.” I suspect I regularly do this, sometimes being aware of my failed attempts, while other times thinking I “succeeded.”

I managed to get myself together after a rather unexpected event took place within the walls of Chuck E Cheese. If you have been there, you know that every hour or so, this giant mouse (well, it is a person in a mouse costume, but you’re probably with me still) comes out and parades around the restaurant. All the kids follow the character as if he were the pied piper until they all get to the front of the restaurant.

This parade was like none other I have ever seen at Chuck E Cheese. About 20% of the kids were under five years old and the other 80% appeared to be at least high school age. A basketball team was celebrating one of their players’ birthdays and they seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as the younger kids were.

I was expecting them to show that they were attempting to be ironic. Instead, their smiles seemed genuine and this sense of pure joy continued as they began to dance. The mouse led everyone in the movements and every person joined in without reluctance. The young men modified the moves only somewhat to better let them express their more advanced dance abilities. I even found myself grooving a bit, never having recognized that the Chuck E Cheese theme song was so danceable.

When I sat down, my tears were completely dry and I was back to celebrating with the kids as they brought over fists full of tickets and a raw sense of delight. When they ran off to play other games, I would go back to Twitter, this time with a renewed hope that no, I can’t do this, but we just might be able to do it together.

When we got home, I had our son watch one of the Playing for Change songs: Stand by Me. If you’re not familiar with them, they create songs using musicians from all over the world. They combine the audio tracks that were recorded with gifted artists from Indonesia, France, Japan, Brazil, Morocco, India, England, the United States, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Australia, and beyond.

The first musician starts out reminding us:

“No matter who you are. No matter where you go in your life. At some point, you’re going to need somebody to stand by you…”

Stand by Me | Playing for Change | Song Around the World

I’m thankful for people like Sean Michael Morris for pushing us to be better at what we do. He does that on a collective basis through his writing, his talks, his workshops and his collaborations. However, he also has done this for me on a personal basis for agreeing to be on the podcast twice and for engaging on Twitter regularly.

At some point, we are going to need someone to stand by us. And despite the evils of Twitter (and there are plenty) – there are also phenomenal opportunities to connect with others in solidarity.

Just some of the people who I feel standing by those of us who teach in higher ed include:

  • Sean Michael Morris (website; Twitter) – critical instructional design
  • Maha Bali (website; Twitter) – intercultural learning
  • Clint Smith III (website; Twitter) – spoken word poet, contributor to the Pod Save the People podcast, Harvard PhD student
  • Jesse Stommel (website; Twitter) – co-founder of Digital Pedagogy lab and Hybrid Pedagogy
  • Robin DeRosa (website; Twitter) – open education, interdisciplinary eduction
  • Chris G. (website; Twitter) – Digital redlining and privacy
  • Pooja Agarwal (website; Twitter) – Visit Pooja’s Retrieval Practice website, if you don’t already have it bookmarked
  • Laura Pasquini (website; Twitter) – Digital pedagogy, eclectic higher ed interests and experience
  • Isabeau Iqbal (website; Twitter) – Coaching, faculty development
  • James Lang (website; Twitter) – writer, faculty development
  • Viji Sathy (website; Twitter) – Inclusive active learning
  • Josh Eyler (website; Twitter) – His new book, How Humans Learn is available for preorder.
  • Laura Gibbs (website; Twitter) – If you use the Canvas LMS, check out Laura’s Canvas blog
  • Laura Gogia (website; Twitter) – Recently published a fascinating look at competency-based medical education
  • Jacinta (website; Twitter) – PhD student, inclusive teaching and learning
  • Angela Jenks (website; Twitter) – Anthropology professor
  • Annemarie Perez (website; Twitter) – Inclusive teaching and learning
  • Kevin Gannon (website; Twitter) – “History, teaching, and technology with a custom paint job”
  • Asao Inoue (website; Twitter) – Writing theory, antiracism, teaching, race theory, writing assessment
  • Katie Linder (website; Twitter) – Writer, podcaster, “learning like it’s her job”
  • Alan Levine (website; Twitter) – “Barking about and playing with the web since 1992 – and sharing it all openly”
  • Derek Bruff (website; Twitter) – Teaching and learning, faculty development
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh (website; Twitter) – Psychologist, professor, writer, and faculty development
  • Peter Newbury (website; Twitter) – Teaching and learning
  • Stephanie Lancaster (website; Twitter) – “Occupational therapist, learning scientist, teacher, and an activist at heart.”

Twitter List compilation of all the above individuals and others

Your Turn

Who has been someone who has stood by you as an educator and encourage you to keep growing and changing?

Filed Under: Teaching

Teaching Techniques – Reflections on AAC&U’s Webinar

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 28, 2018 | Leave a Comment | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

 

On June 19, 2018, I had the opportunity to attend an AAC&U Webinar entitled:

Teaching Techniques to Improve Learning and Ensure Classroom Success

It caught my eye because of the presenters, as fantastic people who have important things to say on the topic of teaching techniques and because of the quality of everything I have ever seen AAC&U produce.

The presenters were as follows:

  • C. Edward Watson (moderator)
  • Elizabeth Barkley
  • Jośe Bowen
  • Claire Howell Major

AAC&U webinar presenters

They each started out with an overview of how they see teaching and learning.

Barkley sees college teaching techniques as a way to make learning about teaching and learning more digestible. She recommends we consider breaking these big ideas and extensive research into bite-sized chunks. She used a recipe metaphor in thinking about how to grow our skills and knowledge about teaching.

The Rules of Engagement in NEA Higher Education Advocate, by Elizabeth Barkley

Bowen said that we need to look for ways to design our instruction in such a way that our students do the work, instead of us taking on the entire burden. He showed us a picture of a really buff guy and compared that to how we think about our own research. We may love doing 200 pushups at a time, while our students may just be tackling their first few and experiencing challenges we have long since forgotten.

“We are content experts and students are on the outside.” We have to think about the entry point for them into our subject matter.

Bowen's model for where to begin
Bowen's model for where to begin

Howell Major shared how complex teaching is… We need to consider how we:

  • Analyze learners
  • Set goals
  • Select content
  • Choose approaches
  • Identify assessments

“To be able to do these base level things and to be able to do them really well, teachers have to have a special kind of knowledge.”

Pedagogical content knowledge

venn diagram of content meets pedagogy

“Where really great teaching happens is in the middle part, where the two things come together.”

How do faculty learn how to teach more effectively?

  • Observation
  • Trial and error
  • Conferences
  • Classes

Another way to deepen that pedagogical knowledge is through educational research.

Interactive Lecturing: A Handbook for College Faculty 1st Edition, by Elizabeth F. Barkley (Author), Claire H. Major (Author)

Q. Is there a particular technique for student engagement that you have seen work in a lot of different contexts?

A. Barkley – Teaching and learning is more complex and is a larger task than a single technique. I introduce techniques with a framework that refers more of a design approach. Have to attend to many elements, including: motivation, active learning, create tasks that were challenging – but not too hard, valued as a part of a community, and addressing cognitive and social emotional elements.

One technique that works is the contemporary issues journal. Connect them to the themes within the course.

Contemporary Issues Journal

Q. What would you say is the most valuable thing that higher education has to offer students in terms of learning and how can we ensure that students can have access to that learning?

A. Bowen – “We are in the change business.” Great teachers should want to make themselves obsolete. Most of what they need to know, we can’t teach them anyway. Learning how to change is vital. Learning how to change one’s mind. This happens in a course, and across a campus. How do students become more self-regulated in their learning, how to change themselves?

Neuroscience helps us think about teaching. The flight or flight reflex impacts our ability to learn. The techniques we are talking about help more at-risk students. There’s a disproportional benefit to transparency, for example, to at-risk students.

Q. Lecturing has been demonized. What are your thoughts on the research on active learning vs lecturing.

A. Howell Major – All lecture (100% lecture) is compared to lecture plus active learning. That’s what is most often being compared. What happens if you add active learning to your lecture? Straight lecture benefits more traditional white male students, but even those students do better with active learning. More marginalized students benefit even more.

What the research helps us see is not what works (for sure), but what could work. Collecting data helps us see who these approaches are working best for…

She spends a lot of time thinking about both what she is doing as the teacher and what the students are doing, as learners. When she is lecturing, for example, she offers guided note taking tools for her students to use to help them stay engaged.

Bowen recommended using a cognitive wrapper to promote metacognition, in class, and handing back the papers with ten minutes to go… and asking them to read the feedback on the assignment and reflect on it.

Cognitive Wrapper Template

Q. How do you address students who don’t care as much about our areas of expertise as we do, as researchers?

A. Barkley – “Caring is something that we really want students to feel.” This is a normal desire to have. The digital story technique is one approach she has used to help students care more about the content. The immigration story is one topic they tackle and create a short video.

Digital story

Bowen – Stressed how this applies in online environment, as well. He encouraged a digital presence as a means for demonstrating that you care, even in a class that is in person. Facebook groups, video profiles of ourselves, getting to know our students.

“Transparency helps students understand why we are doing things.” When we do discussions, for example, it is important to talk about why we are asking students to undertake that effort and to engage in that way.

Bowen recommended:
Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Loediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel

Q. How to you address differentiated instruction (the need to address learners of all levels of knowledge and motivation?

A. Barkley – teaches at an open institution in the community college system. “We take the top 100% of students who apply.” She looks at her learning goals and identifies different ways that students might address that particular goal. Another technique drawn from the K-12 system is to set aside 30 minutes in her online sessions for students to do the differentiated work to do what they need to do at their particular level.

Q. With the recent challenges that have come up in areas of psychological research (Stanford prison experiment, marshmallow study, etc.), what areas of educational research do you feel like could use more of a critical lens to be applied to it?

A. Barkley – stressed that there hasn’t been enough research on techniques that are not effective. Group work is supposed to be good, for example, but what about when it doesn’t go well. Can it undermine learning?

Howell Major – stated that this kind of research does have flaws. Typically done at one institution, doesn’t take different variables into account. Researchers attribute causation to something that is only correlation. We have found out some techniques that do work well in some contexts that we can then try out in our teaching. She also stressed the importance of the questions being asked in this body of research. “If we ask more nuanced questions, that can take us to the next level.”

Bowen – “20 years ago, we were all about learning styles and now we know, uh, not so much.” We all learn in varied ways and no one learns how to play tennis by just watching, as an example.

Q. These techniques take time. How do we address that as a concern?

A. Bowen – “Do you want to cover the content, or do you want students to learn the content?” He revisited the gym analogy and encouraged us to design workouts that students can do when they aren’t in the gym – more able to connect with them in their contexts. Read chapter 2 vs find a relative who has a disease that is mentioned in chapter 2. The way we frame what students will do out of class is vital in our teaching.

Howell Major – shared about some research on students who got 80% of the content for the class and how they did as well as those who got 100% of the content.

Thanks to AAC&U for an excellent webinar and to all the presenters. I was more engaged during this session than I have been in a long time when participating in something while sitting in front of my computer with its many potential distractions. 

Filed Under: Teaching

Active Learning Resources

By Bonni Stachowiak | March 19, 2018 | 4 Comments | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash

Each time I have been able to talk with an expert about how they are making learning active in their classroom, I have walked away from the conversation inspired.

I have been contemplating putting some guidebooks together that curate content from Teaching in Higher Ed (past podcast episodes and blog posts), as well as from other sources. Rather than waiting until I take action on that, I put something together in a blog post.

Here are some ways to leverage active learning in your teaching:

Learn About Learning

Before attempting to modify how you teach, it is well worth spending time discovering what the research says about how we learn. When Saundra McGuire was on the show to share about her book: Teach Students How to Learn, she reminded us that “Learning is a process, not an activity.”

Episode #132 with Saundra McGuire: Teach Students How to Learn

Saundra Y. McGuire on Teaching in Higher Ed #121

Saundra also stressed how important it is for us to believe in our students' capacity. When we believe that they are capable of great things, it translates into our teaching.

Another resource that has been recommended many times on the show is:

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel

Get Started

It can be overwhelming to think about completely altering how we teach. Instead, think small and start with a few approaches that can yield big results. In James Lang’s Small Teaching, he provides ample techniques we can use. One of his many approaches that keeps rattling around in my brain involves prediction. I try to regularly ask in my classes now, “…and what do you think happened next?” – “…what do you think would happen if…” – “…when this company did that, what results do you think they saw?” and so on…

Episode #92 with James Lang: Small Teaching

James Lang on Teaching in Higher Ed podcast #92

James also wrote a series for The Chronicle on the first five minutes of class and the last five minutes of class as other ways to do small teaching.

Cathy Davidson gives us even more ideas for getting started with her post:

What I Wish I Knew When I Started Doing Active Learning

Gather Your Tools

You don't have to use technology to get learning more active in your classroom. Even something as simple as a sticky note offers plenty of opportunities to engage. One approach often used in STEM classes (but one that works in any kind of class) is called peer instruction. Peter Newbury shares about peer instruction on episode #53. Another method is known as retrieval practice. Pooja Agarwal recently came on Teaching in Higher Ed to share about the science behind retrieval practice. Here are some tools I use for both peer instruction and retrieval practice in my teaching:

  • Quizlet (including Quizlet live)
  • PollEverywhere
  • Glisser
  • Sli.do
  • Kahoot
  • Ellen's Heads Up game

I also use a lot of pen and paper activities, as well as sticky notes and even have experimented with Plickers (a digital and analog combo).

Build a Structure

Making a shift from more passive to active learning can be challenging. After you have worked through a few “small teaching” approaches, it helps to build a structure into your course.

Paul Blowers described his environmental science class structure in vivid detail on episode #179.

Chrissy Spencer also has great advice for how to structure large classes to make them interactive on episode #25.

A structure might look something like:

  • 00-05 – Activate learning from prior class, create “time for telling” and/or current news related to concept
  • 05-10 – Retrieval practice for current module
  • 10-15 – Mini lecture
  • 15-25 – Mini case or game/puzzle
  • 25-35 -Debrief case or game/puzzle
  • 35-45 – Mini lecture
  • 45-50 – Next steps

Break the Structure

The reason for the structure is to get accustomed to talking less in our classes. Once we have made that shift, we don't necessarily have to structure each class session the same. In fact, it is in the unexpected where opportunities for learning can emerge.

Ainissa Ramirez provided such inspiration on making challenging subjects fun in episode 66. When we attempt to do that, things are likely to get pretty messy. But, Ainissa reminds us: “It's the messy stuff where you learn.”

Ainissa Ramirez on Teaching in Higher Ed episode #66

Be Patient

Some have accused me of making all of this messy teaching stuff look too easy. Teaching requires celebrating the small steps that might one day lead toward greater learning. It means vulnerability is essential and failure is inevitable.

When Yale’s Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Meg Urry, visited Teaching in Higher Ed, she shared just how challenging it can be to correct mental models.

Episode #69 with Meg Urry: Correcting mental models

As she says on the episode, “Real learning takes time.” This is true when we are talking about our students, but especially so when describing our own learning.

Meg Urry on episode #69 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

Another resource to help you with active learning comes from Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching.

Your Turn

What other advice or resources do you have for people looking to implement more active learning in their teaching approaches? 

 

Filed Under: Teaching

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