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? 

 

Both of our kids are really into surprises these days.

They enjoy hiding (but don't do it very quietly, so you know exactly where they are). Then, they like to jump out and yell at the top of their lungs:

Surprise!

They get such a kick out of it. Their joy is contagious.

Surprise

Our kids aren't the only ones who should recognize the importance of surprises. I have had some wonderful, challenging conversations with colleagues about how students often experience their classes, the exact opposite of anything unexpected. “We come in and sit down. He lectures for 20 minutes or so. He shows a video from the same content creation company, with examples that are not current. He lectures for a few more minutes and tells us of any upcoming exams.”

It is all way too predictable. We need to infuse our classes with authentic surprises and keep the learners curious about what will happen next. Here are a few sources of inspiration:

Create Times for Telling

Derek Bruff introduced me to the idea of “times for telling” on episode #71. Ever since discovering this approach, I seek out opportunities to present problems, challenges, or something mysterious in my teaching.

Use Prediction

Another technique is to have students be presented with a situation and ask them to predict what happened next. James Lang writes about this in his book Small Teaching. One of my favorite experiences doing this was when I played the first part of a Planet Money podcast called How Four Drinking Buddies Saved Brazil's Currency. The episode starts with an explanation of how the Brazilians had lost all confidence in their currency.

For a while, inflation was so high that grocery stores were raising their prices every day. Shoppers would run ahead of the guy changing the price tags, so they could pay the previous day's price.”

The narrators then explain how Brazil's leaders brought together a group of economists together to make recommendations on how to solve the problem. I then pause the episode and have students get into groups of 3-4 and give their advice to Brazil on how to resolve the price instability. I do this early in the semester to get students accustomed to talking with each other and problem-solving in groups. It also helps them recognize that this class experience will be drastically different than professors they have had who rely primarily on lecturing in their teaching.

Bring a Prop

One of the most memorable classes in my doctoral program involved a guest speaker bringing a gift bag and setting it in the front of the class. He didn't say anything about it, at first. But, we were all captivated by it from the moment he brought it in. He brought in the unexpected. It turned out to be a $10 paperback book – one of his favorites about leadership. We valued it much higher than that because of the way in which he used it to get our curiosity going as to what was inside that bag.

Carry the Lessons Online

Having surprising elements is even more vital when we move to an online platform. When you create a video for your class, create some unexpected elements to capture the learners' attention. Give your students a taste of agency right when they enter your course. When they click on the section of your course that contains the syllabus, include a course trailer that really piques their interest in what they will learn in the class.

Go Somewhere

The feasibility of literally going somewhere will be limited by factors such as class size and campus location. I enjoy having my students meet me at Back Bay. We listen to a podcast and then gather around to discuss what we heard. Sometimes we visit local businesses or non-profits. In cases when moving outside the classroom isn't realistic, I invite guest speakers into the classroom using Zoom.

Play a Game

Another great way to create a surprise element in our teaching is through playing a game. My students absolutely love playing Ellen's Heads Up game as a review for an exam, or to reinforce some newer concepts in a class. It is available for iOS or Android. You can buy a .99 custom deck and create cards to align with your course.

Your Turn

What do you do to bring surprises into your classroom? 

I received a series of questions about open textbooks from a person who attended my keynote at the University of Georgia in October of 2017.

***

Greetings! I heard you speak at UGA about publishing open textbooks with your students and I decided that I had to do this too.

So here I am, teaching a class with 20 undergrads, and this crazy idea to have students research Confederate monuments in the state, and write up a resolution to a specific monument in Georgia that they researched over the course of the semester.

The goal of the book is to document each monuments' specific history as well as allow students to express their solutions as to how they believe the monuments should look in the future.

I know that I will get my students research and writing where it needs to be, but I am totally ignorant to this self publishing process. Looking through the different publication options, I wondered why did you choose Pressbooks over just uploading straight to Amazon?

I do not want to charge any money for the book as I am fearful that my students may think that I am profiting from their work–which I know will not be the case–but that still nagging feeling in the back of my mind. I would love any and all advice that you might have for me regarding the process. I am hoping to include photographs (taken by my students) in the book as well.

Also—I love your podcast in every way imaginable. It re-energizes me daily.

***

Thank you for the edifying words about the podcast. It is inspiring to learn that the keynote I gave at UGA has inspired you and that you have embarked on this journey.

At the end of 2017, I wrote up some details on My First Experience Co-Writing an Open Textbook, in case you haven’t seen that post yet.

You pose some questions that I didn’t address in that post, however. Here are some thoughts about what you asked.

Why Pressbooks?

My experience with Pressbooks has led me to the belief that it is probably the best option out there for creating open textbooks. That being said, I am very new to this process and haven’t done an exhaustive search or extensive comparisons. This open textbook about how to write an open textbook is a good guide and happens to be written using Pressbooks. Another similar and excellent resource is A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students.

Options like using Github or Gitbook to get started with open textbooks seem daunting for those who are less familiar with those tools, already. Since Pressbooks is based on WordPress, people who have done some blogging in the past are likely to feel quite comfortable in that environment.

For those who aren't ready to write their own open textbook, it is well worth exploring the many sites that offer open textbooks that you can adopt as is, or customize. To name a few such sites: Open Textbook Library, KPU's resources and links, and Harvard DART.

What you are describing seems like a perfect use case for Pressbooks. You could create a book on Pressbooks and have a digital version available at no charge to you (or your students).

Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers gives you a look at how this works. His book is available on any computer or device that has a web browser. His book is an example of what’s available with the free version of Pressbooks.

Why Amazon (CreateSpace)?

If you wanted to make a copy of your book available in print, the free version of Pressbooks would not be a good option. There are many options for print-on-demand services and I have also not done too much investigation in this area.

I went with the advice from a guy I met who works for Pressbooks. He said that if I didn’t have any ethical issues with using an Amazon-owned company, that CreateSpace had some good options.

Most of my “heavy lifting” happened in Pressbooks. I used their cover creator and one of their templates for all my design and formatting. Then, I used CreateSpace to distribute hard copies across various publishing platforms (most namely, Amazon).

Charging Students

I completely understand your concern about charging students for a textbook that you would potentially profit from. If I were teaching undergraduates and writing an open textbook with them, I would likely keep everything in digital form via Pressbooks.

My class was a group of doctoral students who were thrilled with the potential of having something they wrote in printed form. As of January 16, 2018, I have made half of what I paid for a Pressbooks paid book. I suspect that I won’t likely make all of it back, but don’t mind losing money on this kind of an endeavor.

I shared with the students that there was a potential for me to eventually make a small sum of money. I had them sign an online document indicating their understanding of that possibility.

What helped me with the potential ethical challenges in this process was that students were not bound to purchase a copy of the book. It was an option that they had if they wanted to buy one. Transparency was essential. Everyone understood my costs and how I was attempting to reduce them or eliminate them in this way.

Many Questions Remain

I know I still have so much to learn about open textbooks. As I was researching your questions, I came across Ingram Spark, a self-publishing platform that uses Pressbooks as its content editor, that looks like it could potentially save me money with having a print and ebook created of my doctoral students’ books in the future.

I wish I would have documented more of the steps that I had to go through in generating all the needed information for the printed and ebook editions. I suspect that come March (the next time I will be co-writing an open textbook with students), I will be scratching my head, trying to remember what I selected the last time I was in Pressbooks and Createspace.

“Mommy. I don’t ever want to die,” our three year-old said to me as we were eating a picnic lunch in our backyard today.

This may seem like a heavy topic for a Monday afternoon, especially for one so young. I understood the context of her question, though. The night before, she had been as close to death as she ever had been, in her short life.

Last night, we were finishing dinner and our son had found the glow stick bracelets that Dave had bought for the Fourth of July a couple years ago. When our son went out into our atrium to see the brightest possible glow, a small bird flew into the house. The bird flew all around our downstairs, as we frantically opened all the doors and attempted to shoo it out to freedom.

During our scurrying about (as the bird eventually made it up to the third story of the house: my loft home office), I kept coming up with a list of people who probably would know how to get a bird out of a house:

• My Mom
• Sandie’s husband
• Maha Bali (I have no idea why she came to my mind in this instant – our minds are mysterious things)
• And (eventually) – the internet

I wanted to call them (or, in Maha’s case, send a Twitter DM), but it seemed a ridiculous thing to do in the middle of the chaos.

Thinking back now, I wish I would have consulted at least the internet, as it would appear that maybe the fate of the bird could have been different. I don’t want to say exactly what happened in the flurry, lest I share parts of the story that others would rather I not share.

Let’s just say that my office is now covered in tiny bird feathers and our kids are asking a lot of questions about death.

The whole experience reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books from my childhood: About Dying, by Sara Bonnett Stein. Our kids got to share how they felt about the bird dying in their own unique ways, including our son’s deep desire to reincarnate the bird and both kids’ description of what they think it is like when people (and animals) die.

Why am I writing about this experience on a blog about teaching?

Because I keep going back to my conversation with Robin DeRosa and my experience writing an open textbook with a class for the first time. Talking with Robin, I was sharing how often I still wrestle with wanting teaching and learning to be more predictable, even though I no longer believe that to be possible in my intellectual mind.

Robin spoke about not thinking that learning is ever happening until things get messy (my word; not hers). She celebrated the sense of agency that comes when students begin to advocate for their own needs and go against what may be prescribed for them within a given learning context. Robin said, “Push back against a teacher is a win for open [education].” Later on, she emphasized that all of this unlearning of the traditional means of “learning” helps students become:

…shapers of knowledge, not consumers of it.”

Open Textbook – Beginnings and Endings

This past weekend, I just finished my doctoral class in which we “threw away” the traditional textbook for a class like this and wrote our own. I cannot tell you that it wasn’t anything but messy throughout the eight weeks of collaboration. Miscommunication happened. Mistakes happened. Misalignment of strengths happened. I invested more time in this class/project than I ever have in all the times I have taught it before, sometimes to my detriment.

You know what else happened?

• Tremendous learning. For every single one of us.
• A book that is the start of a conversation that I hope continues for many cohorts to come after this one.
• Something that everyone who was a part of this project can be proud of (and is proud of) – knowing that they made a contribution to a book that turned out great.
• While the book isn’t perfect, it is more than any one of us could have created in that amount of time (75 pages strong) and is the combination of over 100 years of collective teaching experience being expressed in written form.
• Multiple reports of individuals who recognized through this process how much their voices matter and that they are capable of doing something that they didn’t realize they could do.
• Plenty of dreams and goals being expressed about how individuals can now take these skills and use them in other contexts.

I plan on writing more about the specific learning I am taking away (What tools we used? Suggestions for others who want to attempt this, etc.).

In the meantime, I hope you will mourn with our family that sometimes things happen that you really wish wouldn’t have occurred. But, also celebrate that they give us opportunities to talk about hard topics and be open to what we can learn from our children’s perspectives.

I also hope you will celebrate with a group of doctoral students who gave so much of their time and talents to create a resource for preservice and new teachers, looking to use technology in their teaching. I am especially grateful to the project lead for the book: Matt Rhoads. He was such a gift to me – as well as to the entire cohort.

I will share links to the book in future posts, so you can check it out online, as well as on its own Amazon listing for buying hard copies or Kindle editions. I want to give the students authors a chance to go check it out and share it with their friends, first, and will pass it on to you soon, too. If you want to read more about others' experiences writing open textbooks, Robin's post: My Open Textbook – Pedagogy and Practice is the best resource I have found.

Your Turn

What unexpected things happened for you this term/semester that you are celebrating now, or mourning over and learning through?