Teaching

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:

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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

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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.

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).

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.

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…

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? 

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.

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.

 

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.

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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

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.

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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

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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.

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.

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Photo credit: Christopher Gower on Unsplash

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.

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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

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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.”

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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…

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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.

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

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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.

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Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

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.

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.

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.”

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)

Your turn

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

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*?

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.

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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

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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.

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.

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You can submit your challenges and questions here.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

 

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.

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

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?

 

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

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.

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

“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. 

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 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 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.”

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.

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?