Teaching

I received a question from one of my doctoral students that has me embarking on a multi-part post. I will share more about her question in subsequent posts. For now, my first piece of advice to her is  about finding good partners.

All of us educators will find ourselves lacking an understanding of context in many aspects of our work, if we are honest with ourselves. I am grateful to those who have helped me understand more about teaching underserved populations.

I continue to seek out ways to better understand the learners who are in my classrooms, as well as those in the community who won’t ever set foot on a college campus.

Find Good Partners

One way I work to keep developing myself is through finding good partners. I consider every podcast guest a partner in helping us all become more effective at facilitating learning. My higher education friendships are almost all based on some sense of being in solidarity with others who are working to make students’ lives better.

A more formal partnership that I have recently established is with ACUE: The Association of College and University Educators.

You may have heard ACUE mentioned on previous episodes. They have been regularly connecting me with potential podcast guests for about a year now.

ACUE was founded in 2014 by leaders in higher education to promote quality instruction at colleges and universities nationwide.

ACUE’s comprehensive Course in Effective Teaching Practices prepares college educators to implement all of the essential practices shown to improve student outcomes. This facilitated, online Course is offered to cohorts of faculty at participating institutions.

Educators who satisfy Course requirements earn a Certificate in Effective College Instruction endorsed by the American Council on Education (ACE).”

In the coming year, Teaching in Higher Ed and ACUE will collaborate on upcoming podcast episodes, as well as more in-depth content hosted on ACUE’s site with phenomenal educators.

As ACUE shares in their announcement about our partnership:

“As part of ACUE and Teaching in Higher Ed’s new collaboration, we’ll be blogging about popular conversations, hosting follow-on expert Q&As, and adding sights to the sounds with video excerpts from ACUE’s course library. ACUE members and podcast fans alike can look forward to these free resources as part of ACUE’s upcoming Expert Dive series.”

The first of these Deep Dives will profile Paul Blowers, as he shares how he leverages active learning approaches in STEM courses. I’m excited to speak with him in November and for all the other future conversations this partnership will enable.

Next Steps

While you may not establish formal partnerships, as the one I have described here. However, you will no doubt benefit from collaborations with your students’ family members, other teachers, and members of your community.

In future posts, I will share some resources about telling compelling stories, as I continue to answer this students’ questions.

I received the following question from a podcast listener this week:

Hi Bonni, Thank you so much for the podcast. I have found it so helpful!

I am a Logistics professional in the UK but I was asked to give some courses last week and this week in English in my subject at one of the French Grand Ecoles. I was able to put some dynamic lecturing, retrieval practice, bloom's taxonomy, small teaching, etc into practice it was great fun! – yes I have listened to lots of the podcasts! I have been teaching a small group of 15 and 2 lecture classes of 100 per class.

One thing if you have any advice… Next Monday is my last session teaching in the repeated lectures ( 2 hours each ) in the afternoon. I have realised I have a large amount material to cover in this last 2 hour session – ( I went a bit slow on the first two lectures and now have a lot to get in as well as to get the students ready for a test).

Any advice on what to do when time is short in the classroom and you have a lot to get through? I can't change the deadline!

Cheers again, Michael

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I have found myself in this sort of situation more times than I care to remember. I get excited about a topic (often times because the students really got into it) and I lose track of time.

As you have already indicated, ideally we plan more margin into our class planning to allow for these sorts of fun detours. However, the reality is that sometimes, we just need to catch up.

Here are a few thoughts I have on how to approach your Monday session:

• Utilize online resources. Provide students with resources to review outside of class. I suspect you are already doing that, but if Monday can be more about highlighting essential parts of the content that students are often confused by, that's a lot easier than trying to review it all.
• Start with retrieval practice. Better yet, do some retrieval practice during the first part of Monday's session. That way, you are not required to guess where points of potential confusion might be… You will know where additional review is needed.
• Emphasize the exam review. If one task takes priority on Monday, make it the preparation for the exam. Understandably, students are less patient learning about the nice-to-know stuff, the closer that it gets to an exam. They will value the time the most, if it is designed to help them perform better on the test and doesn't contain information that might be viewed as superfluous. This topic deserves longer than what I am giving it here, but I am stressing this point specifically because you are behind in your schedule and there's an upcoming larger-stakes assignment coming next. This would not be my general advice for how to teach a class all of the time.
• Mix up the topics. Interleaving is shown to improve retention. Therefore, mix up the review to address content you have previously covered, as well as what you have not yet emphasized in person. I am assuming they have assigned reading, or other means for addressing the content outside of class time. This can provide them with a way to test themselves on how much they have understood and retained from their reading (or whatever else was assigned outside of class time).
• Share the why. When we get rushed, we can forget to explain to students why we are approaching their learning in a particular way. Remember to explain about interleaving, for example, as a strategy that helps them retain the information better for the exam. Remind them about the importance of creating those neural connections in their brains, which is why we invest class time in retrieval practice.
• Explain the test structure. You did not indicate whether or not this is their first exam. If it is, spend some time explaining the types of questions they can expect to see and why the exam is structured the way that it is… This is when I typically reemphasize the difference between memorization and being able apply the learning in a specific context.

I hope this is helpful to you, as you consider how to plan the time together on Monday.

I also suggest taking Teddy Svoronos' advice about journaling, as he shared about in Episode 168. Give some advice to your future self who might one day teach this course again about how to structure the time better in the various class sessions. This makes a big difference in not finding ourselves in the same situation next time.

Thank you for the kind words about the podcast, Michael, and for the encouragement.

-B

 

It's been back-to-school night season in our home in recent weeks. Our son is in kindergarten, while our daughter just started her first year of preschool. There were two separate events for their respective educational levels, each of which was inspiring to me, both as a parent, and as a teacher.

The whole experience makes me ponder what it would be like, if faculty were expected to offer a similar experience to our students' families.

• What would we tell family members about our pedagogy?
• How would we demonstrate the students' learning and talk about the possibilities that are emerging for the year ahead?

Our children's school has taken inspiration from an approach called Reggio Emilia, after a community in Italy by the same name. In Reggio Emilia, learners are valued as:

…strong, capable, and resilient, rich with wonder and knowledge. Every [learner] brings with them deep curiosity and potential and this innate curiosity drives their interest to understand their world and their place within it.” – An Everyday Story

Those who have adopted a Reggio Emilia approach are quick to point out that it isn't a method. The approach is adopted to address the needs of a given learning community. The children's interests are also strongly integrated into the curriculum, thus making every classroom look different.

In higher education, we often ask questions related to why our students aren't more interested in the subject we are teaching. Instead, if we were to adopt a Reggio Emilia approach, we would regularly challenge ourselves to learn more about our students' interests and how to incorporate them into our pedagogy.

In higher education, we often bristle at the idea of needing to document students' learning through formal assessment. In contrast, Reggio Emilia-inspired settings would have us continuously:

…displaying and documenting [learners'] thoughts and progression of thinking: making their thoughts visible in many different ways… all designed to show the [student's] learning process.” – An Everyday Story

One of the most well-known resources within the Reggio Emilia community is the poem: The Hundred Languages of Children, by founder Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini). I hope you will take a moment to listen to these children share it for us in the most beautiful and articulate of ways.

Here's to hoping we can find inspiration in the Reggio Emilia approach, in a higher education context…

May we continually challenge ourselves to better serve our students' needs and help provide environments where they can thrive.

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In case you missed it, there have been quite a few conversations and resources shared in the comments section of two recent blog posts on Teaching in Higher Ed:

• Digital Reading
• Tools for Travel

Take another look and you may be surprised what you discover.

The call came a few days before the class was scheduled to start. The woman who had been assigned to teach the course needed to remain in Hong Kong longer than she had originally anticipated. They needed someone to take over their sales and sales management class with hardly any notice. I am who they called.

One of the things that had been drummed into my head when I was teaching computer application courses early in my career was that you never tell anyone this is your first time teaching a course. If people knew that, they would wonder why they had paid a couple hundred dollars to attend a class taught by someone who was only a few pages ahead of them in the manual.

The first night of the sales class, I was prepared to act as if I had been doing this for years. My first move was an obvious give away at my lack of experience. “Please take out your textbooks and take a look at page 11.”

The cat was out of the bag from the very beginning. The norm throughout my university was that hardly anyone brought their books to class on the first day. First, they would need to determine whether or not the professor was actually going to use the textbook in the course. Otherwise, it didn't make sense to spend the money.

While I didn't think it wise to admit that it was my first time teaching the course, an even worse offense would have been to lie about such a thing. They knew that I was new to teaching in a higher education context, but they were still prepared to put their trust in me to guide them during the semester. That was almost 15 years ago and I'm still in touch with a few of the students from that very first adventure in college teaching.

I had my share of mistakes in the course, but also was able to make an impact. There were techniques I could bring over from my corporate training background that were effective with this new group of learners, yet there were also those approaches best left behind.

Failure Gets a New Look

Last week, we learned of a study that looked at why a group of anthropologists had decided not to adopt particular teaching strategies, despite the evidence that they were likely to prove effective. The Fear of Looking Stupid turned out to be stronger than the hope for change.

John Warner reflected on the evolution of his teaching over the years and emphasized The Necessity of Looking Stupid. Instead of completely revamping everything about the way we have structured a course, he recommends adopting smaller changes and continually asking the students for feedback. “Let the point of the exercise be the attempt, not the outcome,” John urges.

I would be remiss if a discussion of small modifications in our teaching came up and I didn't once again recommend James Lang's Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning. If the fear of failure is holding you back from considering experimenting with something new, Jim guides you through what approaches are worth trying and how to get started.

I just finished reading The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, with interviews between the Dali Lama and Desmond Tutu. They both speak of fear as having a natural existence within their struggles for justice.

Manuela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Archbishop Tutu said something very similar: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act despite it.”

In order for us to overcome the fears that are holding us back from taking risks in our teaching, we first need to identify what is there. Name the feeling – and then dig deeper in to why it is present.

Worthwhile Failures

In an upcoming episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I share reflections on what I learned from my most recent set of course evaluations. You will hear the pain in my voice, as I describe ways in which I let my students down.

I hope you will also hear the absolute joy. I don't believe we are able to find such rich joy in our teaching, without the sorrows that come from not realizing our aspirations.

Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say,” Archbishop Tutu added, “save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”

Encouragement

The antidote for fear or sorrow is joy. I burst with gratitude as I consider those who “teach out loud,” stressing The Importance of Being Bad at Something.

While a quest for perfection in teaching will never be attained, we celebrate the milestones we hit along the way toward more spectacular successes and failures.

And so I would say to everyone: You are made for perfection, but you are not yet perfect. You are a masterpiece in the making.” – Archbishop Tutu

There's been a lot I've had to unlearn, since transitioning from the corporate world to academic environments.

I worked in the franchising industry for the first decade of my professional career. It was a computer training company and we had locations in 40 countries around the world. As I took on various roles, I became increasingly responsible for researching and documenting the successes and failures that various franchise locations experienced, in an effort to propagate the learning.

McDonald's has documented for their franchisees the precise amount of time to cook the french fries. We ran a far more complex business and inputs hardly ever equaled predictable outputs. However, our eccentric founder relentlessly attempted to quantify every aspect of the company that could possibly be documented, and tried to pass the lessons on with little room for variation.

When I transitioned into an entirely new context, it quickly became apparent that certain phrases that were captivating in the franchising business were considered revolting in higher education.

Best Practices

The phrase that has been most regularly disparaged in academic circles is “best practices.” Sean Michael Morris writes:

The worst best practice is to adhere to, or go searching for, best practices.”

Sean goes on to document what he has found to be most effective in his teaching, but is careful to caution us about thinking that his lessons will work for us in the same ways. He continues to offer wonderful guidance for our work, such as: being ourselves, creating trust, grading less / differently, and leaving room for silence.

Another recent caution against best practices came from John Warner, on Inside Higher Ed. He reflects on his discovery that his quizzes were not accomplishing his goal of getting students to do the reading prior to class. However, he also recognizes that in other instances, aspects of what he had tried might have worked. He concludes with:

This is why I have little faith in so-called universal “best practices.” There is never a one-size-fits-all technique or assessment. What works well in one context might not in another. Asking students about their experiences with reading quizzes reinforced that for me, teaching must be rooted in a collaborative process.

While there may not be best practices, I have come to believe there is a “best process,” and that process involves always being open to questioning what I’m doing.”

Inspiration

Instead of looking for best practices, I now seek seeds of inspiration. The majority of the ideas that I hear about when conducting interviews for the podcast are far too overwhelming to consider feasible at my institution. However, I try to break them down into their smallest components and see if I can't experiment with some aspect of the source of inspiration in my own teaching.

• I can't ever imagine being as incredible at making video and audio content as Mike Wesch, but I can certainly observe his creative outputs carefully and decide to draw inspiration from just one way in which he crafts stories.
• Gardner Campbell's eloquence is far out of my reach, but I can try administering an APGAR for class meetings and see what can be learned from the experience.
• No one would recommend I try to emulate Ainissa Ramirez's use of blow torches to illustrate key points, but I can think as failures more as data collection to help them “lose their sting.”
• Using extensive role playing games, like Mark Carnes' Reacting to the Past may be out of reach for the time being, but I can experiment with a making a game using Twine, like Keegan Long-Wheeler recommended.
• While my institution may never pull off a public sphere event as magnificent as Chico's Great Debate, as shared about by Thia Wolf, I can still experiment with poster sessions and look for opportunities to collaborate with others in different disciplines in my teaching.

I'll admit that my franchising experience leads me to wish we could read a book, or take a workshop – reduce it all to a set of best practices, and suddenly the grueling work of developing as a teacher would be over. However, when I look for inspiration from phenomenal educators, they continually show me that the work of becoming a teacher is never over.

John Warner ended his piece on best practices as follows:

As soon as I think I have it all figured out, it will be time for me to stop.”