Is Linking Learning and Work a Must Do for Faculty?

The latest white paper from the American Council on Education (ACE) is creating a healthy discussion about what is and isn't part of a faculty's responsibilities when it comes to their students. The ACE paper suggests that having students career-ready should be something that faculty should be doing. The paper's authors acknowledge that both community college and university faculty influenced the work. Working at a community college and teaching a course called College Success Skills (CSSK) may be influencing my opinion on this matter but in talking with employers, local chamber members, and students themselves, many see it the same way. Our CSSK course provides knowledge about the obvious college success issues (test anxiety, taking notes, engaging with faculty, study habits) but we also spend time on what some would call soft skills (communication, netiquette, time management, critical thinking). Having worked previously at a flagship research-intensive university as well as a regional doctoral university, I will be the first to tell you that each mission was different. But at the end of the day students are attending college/university to get a job. This white paper comes at a really important time as the financial support from government continues to shrink and the public seems to have lost their faith in a college degree. Having a constructive conversation to reset our priorities is a useful thing to do and I welcome your feedback on this issue as well.

Aren't We All Math People?

Working in higher education for the last 36 years (how did that happen?) has given me a lot of opportunity to hear lots of opinions about developmental education (formerly remedial education, etc.). Nothing causes a life-long educator more pain than to see a student come to you underprepared. How can this happen when they have been duly approved to graduate from an accredited high school? But I am not here to argue that point, I would rather talk about this nonsense of math versus non-math people. We often say things like "Everyone should be able to read; how are you going to function in life without learning how to read." Shouldn't we be saying the same thing about math? How would you function without understanding math? That is why I was excited to read Sarah D. Sparks' piece on the matter. She writes, "My 2nd grader finishes his math enrichment, then gleefully creates blank versions for his dad and me to try: a subtraction-based, number-placement logic puzzle, intended to be challenging. My husband withdraws for 10 minutes or so, returns and hands over the completed puzzle. I stare at my blank triangle. Mom, aren’t you done yet? my son asks. Are you struggling? A dull pressure starts to thud behind my eyes. I’m thinking, I say, a little too sharply." Did reading that make you feel a little uncomfortable? It certainly made me remember when I sat in Ms. Sparks place with my children. I encourage you to read the brief, concise article and join us who say we are all math people.

Are We Really All In?

Student attrition has been a primary focus among higher education institutions for nearly 50 years, yet overall retention and graduation rates continue to be of significant concern. Despite increased attention, ongoing struggles of colleges and universities to effectively address potential barriers to student progress are well-documented. Part of the challenge lies in garnering widespread organizational commitment that establishes student progress as an institutional priority. Along with leadership commitment, broad institutional involvement and adherence to a systematic approach to testing new, innovative solutions are necessary to better position the institution to make clear, evidence-based decisions that improve the student experience. Jobe, Spencer, Hinkle, and Kaplan explain how one institution did it in their research study The First Year: A Cultural Shift Towards Improving Student Progress.

Teacher Empathy Key to Student Engagement

Photo from Smithsonian.com

There is a lot of discussion in the social media-stratosphere about anxiety, depression, and other stress-related issues being experienced by larger numbers of students than in the past. There has been research related to many of those topics but not so much on how we as faculty can respond. But there is a recent article by Sal Meyers, Katherine Rowell, Mary Wells, and Brian C. Smith, who teach and work at community colleges, about what they call 'teacher empathy." They note it is a term first used by Psychologist Carl Rogers in Freedom to Learn. Teacher empathy, according to Rogers, is the most potent factor in bringing about change and learning in the relationship between students and teachers. Leading with interpersonal empathy, which is described as the "processes whereby one person can come to know the internal state of another and can be motivated to respond with sensitive care, the research cites the theoretical work of Batson and Segal. Meyers, et. al. note that because we are dealing with groups in our courses, social empathy comes into play. They note "the ability to understand people by perceiving or experiencing their lived situations and as a result gain insight into structural inequalities and disparities" is equally important for teacher empathy to exist. The paper goes on to offer a number of suggestions on how to become a more empathetic teacher. Read the entire article here.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STUDENTS GONE?

Jill Barshay’s reflections on what the declining birthrate means for colleges and the students who hope to get a college degree a decade from now may be a wakeup call for us in higher education. She cites research provided by Nathan Grawe, an economist at Carleton College in Minnesota, who predicts that the college-going population will drop by 15 percent between 2025 and 2029 and continue to decline by another percentage point or two thereafter. Grawe’s forecasts for the number of students at two-year community colleges and four-year institutions are published in his book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, with updates on his website. He breaks the numbers down not only by type of school, and how selective it is, but also by geographic region and race/ethnicity. “Students are going to be a hot commodity, a scarce resource,” said Grawe. “It’s going to be harder during this period for institutions to aggressively increase tuition. It may be a time period when it’s a little easier on parents and students who are negotiating over the financial aid package.”

THE STUDENTS SPEAK
Harry Brighouse shares instructional practices that undergraduates say they have rarely encountered and think should be more widely shared. The first recommendation of the American Academy’s recent report "The Future of Undergraduate Education" is simple: we should work to improve undergraduate instruction. But how? In many disciplines, we don’t have rigorous measures of learning, so we cannot easily identify the best practitioners and simply copy what they do. Undergraduate students, however, experience numerous teachers and a lot of instruction, some good and some bad. They are a source of valuable information about what constitutes good practice. So, at a recent event co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Education, the University of Wisconsin at Madison College of Letters and Science, and the American Academy, we asked five undergraduate students at the university to describe instructional practices that they’ve encountered rarely but were especially effective -- and that they think should be more widely shared. Of course, some strategies work in some disciplines better than others, in some kinds of classes better than others and for some instructors better than others. Here’s what the students at the event told us.


WHAT IS TRADITIONAL?
Popular culture tells us that college "kids" are recent high school graduates, living on campus, taking art history, drinking too much on weekends, and (hopefully) graduating four years later. But these days that narrative of the residential, collegiate experience is way off, says Alexandria Walton Radford, who heads up postsecondary education research at RTI International, a think tank in North Carolina. What we see on movie screens and news sites, she says, is skewed to match the perceptions of the elite: journalists, researchers, policymakers. Today's college student is decidedly nontraditional — and has been for a while. "This isn't a new phenomenon," Radford says. "We've been looking at this since 1996." So, what do we know about these "typical" college students of today?

Before adult learners will learn something, they often need to know why they need to learn it. That sounds really easy right? Just like you and me, understanding the relevance to our lives will cause us to focus more deeply on something. So translating that to our classroom makes great sense. Just develop and deliver learning experiences that have direct applicability and relevance to our student's lives. The other important concept to remember as we develop our curriculum is that adult learners are autonomous and self-directed. Now this may be where some of our student persistence issues begin to occur. If most of your students are first-timers and recent high school graduates, they are very much set in something we like to call the 80/20 model. Eighty percent of everything that happened to them in high school was delivered by their teachers. Books are free. The bell rings to change classes. The bus picks you up and takes you home. You get a study guide for all tests. So it is understandable that many of our students are expecting the same thing from us. But college is not high school in so many ways. So getting our students to not resist the college experience begins with that simple statement. Turn 80/20 on its ear and tell your students that it is time for them to begin to write their own future. Asking them questions like "what do you want to do with your life or what type of job are you hoping to find once you earn your academic credential" (degree/certificate/etc.) can begin to help them understand that college is the beginning of their adult life. Then have them create goals for themselves. Suggest they do this for each class, for the semester as a whole, and for the next 5 years of their lives. You should also remind them to revise them as the semester progresses. It is a subtle thing but it helps them to begin to understand that becoming a self-guided learner is the optimal goal. After all, once they complete college, they will still need to continue to build their knowledge base on their own. Holding this type of conversation during the first class session will certainly help our students to begin the semester moving in the right direction and should also improve our student persistence rates.