Recovering the Joy of Teaching in the COVID Era

As we end the first day for all of our onsite classes to be delivered remotely, I wanted to share a well done essay recently published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Flower Darby, has taught using the online environment for the last 12 years and is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University. Her comments may not come into play for many of you until about two weeks and for some of you it may never appear but the advice is sage and important. She notes, "In the first few weeks of the pandemic, a lot of faculty members were rushing out of their comfort zone, moving their face-to-face courses online, and figuring out how to teach from home with kids and pets. As head of a teaching center on my campus, I am seeing many of my earnest colleagues overcome their nerves and experiment with unfamiliar modes of instruction. They are excitedly posting their first attempts at recording mini-video lectures and drafting syllabus statements of flexibility and support for students. But how long will that fizz last? After all, many faculty members are sacrificing much of what they love about their chosen vocation. At some point, they will need time to mourn the loss of spring 2020." Continue reading here.

HOW TO TEACH TO ALL YOUR STUDENTS
Dr. Matthew Wright has posted an article that is full of aha-moments. He writes, "Faculty members are generally happy to select out a few elite students who they are confident can make it all the way to the top. For these few bright and gifted students, the college experience becomes almost otherworldly. They do research projects with their professors, network with superstars in their field, travel to exotic locations, and give papers at major conferences. Their professors become role models and mentors who help them transition to greatness. But remember, most of the professors are elite folks themselves. You have to be to make it through the maze that a typical professor endures to get to the coveted tenure-track positions. So, essentially, you end up with the top five percent of educated elites teaching to the top five percent of elite students. That’s messed up." Keep reading 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.”

CAN I DO THIS?

David Gooblar writes, “No matter how much students value your course, or how supportive your classroom environment, they won’t be motivated to do the work if they don’t think they can succeed at it. And of course the solution is not about making things easy for them. As a new academic year gets underway, I’ve been thinking a lot about student motivation. Specifically I’ve been rereading a 2010 book How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, which offers a compelling chapter on the three main pillars that underlie student motivation. Continue reading here.

 

WHAT GOOD LEARNING LOOKS LIKE

This blog post by Anya Kamenetz for NPR has some pretty useful information. So print it out; get out your highlighter and take off the cap. Ready? Now throw it away, because highlighters don't really help people learn. We all want for our kids to have optimal learning experiences and, for ourselves, to stay competitive with lifelong learning. But how well do you think you understand what good learning looks like? Ulrich Boser says, probably not very well. His new research on learning shows that the public is largely ignorant of, well, research on learning. Boser runs the science of learning initiative at the left-leaning thinktank the Center for American Progress. He has a new book out, also about the science of learning, titled Learn Better.

RECOGNIZING DIFFERENCES IN LIVED EXPERIENCES BETWEEN STUDENTS AND INSTRUCTORS
As part of the first week of classes, we had our regular opening reception for adjunct faculty. It’s a combination of a social gathering, an orientation, and an awards ceremony. I sat at a table with someone who teaches in the Homeland Security program, having recently retired from the field. He mentioned his shock last semester when he referred to 9/11, and the students didn’t remember it. He did some quick math, and realized that when it happened, most of them were only a year or two old.  He remembers it so vividly that it doesn’t even seem like the past; they remember it not at all. It sneaks up on you. I remember referring to Ronald Reagan in a class, and getting back a wave of blank looks. Today’s 18 year olds may remember Bill Clinton mostly as Hillary’s husband. Jimmy Carter is about as current for them as Harry Truman was for me. From the perspective of the instructor getting older, it’s easy to perceive that as loss.  And in a certain way, it is. But it’s also the gift of fresh sets of eyes. Keep reading here.

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?

CAN YOU LEARN WHILE YOU SLEEP?
Hypnopedia, or the ability to learn during sleep, was popularized in the '60s, with for example the dystopia Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, in which individuals are conditioned to their future tasks during sleep. This concept has been progressively abandoned due to a lack of reliable scientific evidence supporting in-sleep learning abilities. Recently however, few studies showed that the acquisition of elementary associations such as stimulus-reflex response is possible during sleep, both in humans and in animals. Nevertheless, it is not clear if sleep allows for more sophisticated forms of learning. A study published this August 6 in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers from the ULB Neuroscience Institute shows that while our brain is able to continue perceiving sounds during sleep like at wake, the ability to group these sounds according to their organization in a sequence is only present at wakefulness, and completely disappears during sleep.


INTEGRATING ACTIVE LEARNING
James Salsich, writes, "During my career, I have at times struggled with the effectiveness of active learning in my classroom. But after reflecting and planning over the summer, I have always returned to school convinced more than ever of the dire need for our students to claim ownership of their learning. Active learning is student-driven, teaches students how to learn in collaboration with their peers, and asks teachers to give some portion of the authority that has traditionally been theirs over to students. Students, on the other hand, take increased ownership for the direction and progress of their learning. However, when we take a step toward this student-centered approach to teaching, we must first help our students to unlearn some problematic ideas. When we ask our students to adapt to a more complex, self-directed, self-regulated approach, we are often going against their very beliefs about how people learn. It is a process that is most successful when implemented gradually and purposefully." Continue reading here.

New year's resolutions are a great way to refocus on your teaching. Nothing like the class schedule and preparing for a new semester to get us started in a new direction. It is also a good time to incorporate the idea of resolutions into your classes by having your students make resolutions for the semester. One of the areas I will be focusing on this semester is listening more and speaking less. Having my students dive deep into a stimulating classroom discussion is always such a joy. You can actually see the creativity and discovery happening right in front of you (or virtually if you are teaching an eLearning class). But beginning a new "habit" and having it stick requires effort and planning. So I plan to begin on the first day; perfect for more listening as I am trying to learn the names of my students, their aspirations and motivations. Of course we all dread the point where the students stop sharing and there is silence. We feel compelled to fill every second with "sound" but should we? Dr. Kevin Gannon shares his tips for encouraging engagement in the classroom in the latest post on the Faculty Focus blog. He writes, "I’d like to suggest that a flagging discussion, or one that fails to launch entirely, is most often the fault of something other than our students. Sure, there are some students who haven’t done the reading or who refuse to participate come hell or high water. But most of our students are receptive to at least the idea of engaged, active learning. The key is to turn that general willingness into specific practices. Here are some strategies and methods that have proven effective for me across survey and upper-level courses, small and large classes, in rooms that may or may not allow any deviation from the regimented rows-and-columns arrangement." Take a look at his specific tips here. Welcome to the beginning of what I hope will be a successful semester for you and your students.

Every now and then, someone posts a blog about their undergraduate experience. It is usually written by someone who is now an instructor in college. Sometimes the post is more about reminiscing rather than providing good ideas built on their experience. Susan Shapiro, who is an instructor at Columbia, has written one of the latter. She looks back on her undergraduate experience and regrets that she was the kind of student that currently gives her problems. She writes, "I enjoyed going to college at the University of Michigan, an hour from home, but my secret humiliation is: I was the type of mediocre student I now disdain. As a freshman, I cared about my friends, my boyfriend and my poetry. Or, I cared about what my boyfriend thought of my friends, what my friends thought of him, and what they thought of my poetry about him. Here’s what I wish I’d known and done differently." You can read the entire article here. More importantly, I encourage you to share this with your students.

Do you have students in your classes that never participate although you know from their work that they are bright and articulate? Maybe they are introverts? Karen Costa has written a terrific article about her college experience as an introvert. She provides some really good questions that we should be asking ourselves on this topic. She even suggests that maybe introverts are better built for elearning courses. She writes, "While critics will argue that extroversion is the ideal mode of existence and that as higher educators, we are therefore bound to press all students into a life of extroverted servitude, let us return to where we began, in the work of Susan Cain, whose 'quiet revolution' made the leap from a book to a movement. Cain has dedicated her life to remedying what she calls the 'grave mistake' of idealizing extroversion and argues that we must stop treating introversion as a 'second-class personality trait.' One of Cain’s model introverts, Rosa Parks, is a reminder that quiet can also be powerful. Isn’t it our job, after all, to help all of our students claim their power, even if that means letting go of our deeply held beliefs about primacy in learning modalities?" Read the entire article here.

Sarah Jones, a doctoral student at Michigan State, reminds us in her insightful post that giving more low-stakes assessments has a multitude of benefits for our students. She writes that providing your student with low-stakes testing will "produce large improvements in student final exam scores, help narrow the grade gap between poorly prepped and highly prepped first year college student, and might even result in more positive course reviews." She cites research by Scott Freeman, David Haak, and Mary Pat Wenderoth (Published in the Life Sciences Education edition of The American Society of Cell Biology) who wrote "We found no evidence that points from active-learning exercises inflate grades or reduce the impact of exams on final grades. When we controlled for variation in student ability, failure rates were lower in a moderately structured course design and were dramatically lower in a highly structured course design. This result supports the hypothesis that active-learning exercises can make students more skilled learners and help bridge the gap between poorly prepared students and their better-prepared peers." Some may be worried that their already heavy workload will be further burdened by more assessment. But the use of Canvas can actually reduce the amount of grading you have to do if you set up the quiz or analysis using the LMS. You can also use peer review, a great active learning tool that enhances learning for all students.

Anyone reading this blog knows that I am big proponent of active learning. You should also know that I believe that students have a lot to learn from their peers and I try to infuse my class with opportunities for them to review their peer's work. A recent article by Tiffany Potter, Letitia Englund, James Charbonneau, Mark Thompson MacLean, Jonathan Newell, and Ido Roll (University of British Columbia) entitled "ComPAIR: A New Online Tool Using Adaptive Comparative Judgement to Support Learning with Peer Feedback" provided me with a new appreciation for student interaction. One of the concerns of using peer review is that students, especially early in their college career, may not be able to properly evaluate someone else's work. What the folks from UBC found through their research is that using a comparison option alleviates some of that effect. Better yet, the process help students learn more deeply, improves their ability to assess their own work, and improves their capacity to provide feedback on the work of others in a collaborative learning environment. You can read the entire article here.