Light Touch Interventions Improve Student Success

Want to improve the student success in your classes this spring? Want to improve your student rating as well? The same approach can help both and it is something that is probably already in your teaching toolkit. Engagement is something that provides multiple benefits and while we know that it works, there are still some of us who struggle with implementing it effectively. Colleen Flaherty provides some good information in her article for Inside Higher Ed. She notes, "Students benefit from increased faculty engagement. Yet many professors still resist more student-centered teaching. Part of the problem is that graduate schools are slow to adopt pedagogical training, meaning that some professors may want to up their interaction with students but don’t know how. Another part of the problem is that becoming a better teacher takes time, an increasingly scarce faculty resource. What if engagement wasn’t complicated and didn’t take that much time? Preliminary research called 'My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement,' presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, suggests that even 'light touch' interventions can make a difference to students." You can read the entire article here.

Colleagues at Rice University have posed an interesting topic in a post about active learning. I have written a number of posts about how and why active learning is a good teaching strategy. Many of our faculty at BRCC have adopted active learning strategies. Many of the strategies have come from the Active Learning Manual that I have published annually for almost a decade. But the article addressing active learning poses some good prompts that can help us to dig deeper into the topic. This one for instance: "For years, the term has filled a gap for us. It has functioned rhetorically as a way to contrast evidence-based teaching practices (a much better term, by the way) with more traditional methodologies, but ultimately the wide-ranging utility of this classification is also its drawback. Although, as Cynthia Brame notes, some scholars have tried to create an operational definition for active learning, they also acknowledge the category is enormously broad. This breadth is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Indeed, it means that we have a lot of options for helping students to learn. The problem is that active learning has come to mean all things to all people and essentially encompasses everything that is not passive." You can read the entire article post here. As we begin to plan for the spring 2019 semester, I hope you will consider teaching methodologies that have been proven to help students learn, many of which are active learning strategies.

"A couple of weeks ago, I did something that I have never done before in my classroom: I sacrificed invested a week of instruction to hold a one-on-one conversation with each one of my students. I had always made the excuse that it took up too many instructional minutes, and that I couldn’t sacrifice the time. And after that long-winded week the only regret that I have is that I did not start doing this much, much earlier in my career. That week, was an absolute revelation!" That is how Jeffrey Frieden starts his fascinating blog that explores what his students really think. What he did was simple. He asked them. Continue reading here.

MAYBE A NUDGE CAN HELP YOUR STUDENTS

A few years ago, Dr. Zoë Cohen noticed a troubling sign in her “Physiology of the Immune System” course: A larger number of students than usual had failed the first exam. Cohen had changed up the way she taught the course that year, part of a broader push toward active learning at the University of Arizona, where she is an assistant professor. The different style was probably a big adjustment for her upper-level students after years of taking lecture-based courses, she thought. Cohen wanted to help those students. But the course is a large one, with between 160 and 200 students, and she didn’t want to increase her workload. So she came up with a low-touch way to intervene: sending a personalized, supportive email. For a small investment of time, Cohen was able to signal to students that she cared. And she thinks the move even boosted recipients’ performance in the course. Read the entire post here.