Yes, I Agree and...

We all know the drill. We have decided to use the discussion board feature on Canvas to engage with our students and have them increase their peer-to-peer interaction. We determine the topic and issue an assignment with directions asking students to begin the topics. Once that is done, they are also asked to comment on the topics started by their fellow students. We sit back and wait and nothing happens. Well, to be fair, some students post and then other students give one to five word responses that do not move the conversation forward at all. So what went wrong? Dr. Beth René Roepnack has written a concise article on how we can improve online discussion by simply changing a couple of things. Her article appears on Faculty Focus and she offers the following suggestions. " I adjusted the structure of my online discussions from students starting threads (you know the drill, post-and-reply-to-two) to the instructor starting them, which creates a more organic discussion structure similar to classroom conversations. This simple modification, along with asking open-ended questions from the deep end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, creates discussions that support student learning and engagement with the material and each other." You can read the entire article here. If you use her suggestions, let me know if you experienced the same results that she did.

START SMALL AND SEE BIG CHANGES
In our transition from an instructor-oriented approach to becoming a learner-centered college, we have discussed the use of active learning methods quiet a bit in the past. One of the best ways to begin to add teaching methods that promote active learning is by making small changes. Asking a "big" question to begin your class is a great start. Not only does it allow you to connect that day's class with the past but you can also build for the future and link the knowledge to a student's everyday life. James Lang offers some other suggestions in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education and I encourage you to take a look as you wade into the spring 2016 semester.

CAN WE TALK
Another key to encouraging active learning is to use teaching methods early in the semester to set a pattern that allows your students to become comfortable with this approach. Using class discussion fosters active learning but there are times when it is difficult to get our students to participate. Scott Ellman has compiled some useful suggestions on how we can create a classroom culture that encourages participation. One of the first suggestions is to start with a sentence completion exercise. You can read about that and more in his post.

READY TO START
If you are looking for an easy check-list on what your first day of class might look like in order to foster active learning, Dr. Maryellen Weimer has come up with a concise top five things to do. She suggests that we be personable and adds, "Yes, you are the professor, but you are also a person. Students know that you’re the one in charge and that you’re the one who enforces the rules.Teachers shouldn't come across as the big “heavy” who lightens up only if students understand and accept who has the authority. Students want to be taught by a professor but one who acts like a person." You can find the rest of the list on the BRCC Teaching and Learning Faculty Development group on Canvas posted in the Modules under Active Learning and Teaching.

TEACH THE STUDENTS YOU HAVE
In last weekend’s New York Times opinion section, UNC–Chapel Hill professor Molly Worthen set the academic Internet ablaze with a paean to the unappreciated perfection of the old-fashioned “sage on stage” format, also known as the lecture. Rebecca Schuman has written a rebuttal that is posted on the Slate website. She writes, "I will grant that nothing about the lecture format as Worthen describes it is inherently bad. But Worthen’s elegy to a format that bores so many students reminds me of a bad habit that too many professors have: building their teaching philosophies around younger versions of themselves, who were often more conscientious, more interested in learning, and more patient than the student staring at his phone in the back of their classrooms." Read more here.

AVOID THE PITFALLS OF DEAD SILENCE
Engaging students in class conversation is not always an easy task. Even though we may make class participation part of their final grade, stress its importance in the syllabus, and give subtle (and not so subtle) reminders of this throughout the semester, there are always days when students simply do not want to participate in the class discussions. There are many reasons why students might not participate in class. Here are four situations where students remain silent, and strategies to positively engage them in conversation.

DON'T MISS THIS WORKSHOP
Join us for what promises to be an energetic and informative faculty development session, Teaching as Performance: Learning to Get the Most Out of Your Voice, on November 5 from 1:00 to 2:30 PM. Dr. Tony Medlin, assistant professor of Theatre Arts, will facilitate this session. The workshop will cover simple and easy techniques to improve projection, articulation, and preserve your chops, based on Lessac speech production. The workshop will be held in 311 Magnolia and is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center. You can register now. You can also view all of the Teaching+Learning Center's upcoming events here.

MISCOMMUNICATION, PERSONAL ATTACKS AND TROLLING
Adding a discussion component to your face-to-face or eLearning class is a great way to measure learning. The depth of a question can tell you plenty about where your students are along the learning spectrum. Having peer-to-peer discussions is also a great way to illustrate that students are part of the learning process and should not expect all of the answers to come directly from you. If you are thinking of adding discussions to your class, there are a few areas of concern that you should be prepared for and Anastasia Salter has written an article to help you out. She writes, "I’ve been teaching a large online class for the first time this semester, and as the course involves looking at a number of challenge interactive works and games I put a lot of emphasis on discussion forums and critical debate. However, discussion forums of this kind present a lot of potential problems in an online class. We only have to read the comments anywhere on the web (pro tip: don’t actually read the comments) to see that the online medium offers huge potential for miscommunication, personal attacks, trolling, and harassment–even when in the space of a virtual classroom." To see her tips click here. 

THE PAIN OF AWKWARD SILENCE
Dr. Kenneth L. Parker, Steber Professor in Theological Studies at St. Louis University, has an interesting post today about asking students questions. He writes, "At the beginning of each academic year, I have to relearn the same lesson: enduring the awkward silence after a question has been asked. At the start of my career this “skill” seemed unendurable. It felt far easier to fill the empty void of fifty or seventy-five minutes—or God forbid, two and a half hours—with the sound of my own voice and well chosen words recorded on paper. After all, students are conditioned to expect that of my guild. Yet as I began to take more seriously the need to create learner-centered classroom experiences, one of the first steps to achieve that goal proved to be silencing my own voice, and waiting for students to find theirs. Continue reading

IS PESSIMISM HURTING STUDENT SUCCESS
Some of your students may be falling behind because they suffer from a negative disposition. Dr. Travis Bradberry provides us with interventions that can help create student success through positivity. He writes, "When faced with setbacks and challenges, we’ve all received the well-meaning advice to “stay positive.” The greater the challenge, the more this glass-half-full wisdom can come across as Pollyannaish and unrealistic. It’s hard to find the motivation to focus on the positive when positivity seems like nothing more than wishful thinking. The real obstacle to positivity is that our brains are hard-wired to look for and focus on threats. This survival mechanism served humankind well back when we were hunters and gatherers, living each day with the very real threat of being killed by someone or something in our immediate surroundings." Continue reading

Do you have a no-tech policy in your class? Do you encourage the use of cell phones, tablets, and laptops during your class? There are arguments for both and more faculty seem to be taking sides. Dr. Laura Tropp has an interesting post on her blog about this topic and writes, "It seems that people tend to be divided into two camps: those that have given up (or are adapting to the new technology environment, which sounds better) and let their students use the screens, and those that enact strict rules and policing policies to prevent students from using screens while in the classroom. I have found myself sitting in both camps in the past. This summer, however, I am noticing that those in the former camp are thinking about reverting to a no-technology policy because they think it is interfering with students’ ability to focus and reflect. Clay Shirky, a Professor at NYU who specializes in emerging media technologies, wrote an interesting piece last fall about his new policy to ban all screens in his classes. He even made an intriguing analogy comparing technology in a classroom to second-hand smoke. However, many faculty have responded that banning technology does not work but only creates a deceptive culture in which students slyly sneak their technology use in class." Read the entire post here.

Are you spending part of your summer on a course redesign project or maybe you are focusing your attention on creating a master syllabus. Both of the projects, one small and the other very labor intensive, are worthwhile and lead to many benefits for you and your students. Dr. Vicki Caruana has a nice article in the Faculty Focus online newsletter about how a course map can help you remained focueds on the important outcomes. She writes, "Course mapping, as a step in the curriculum mapping process (Jacobs, 2004), offers faculty new pathways to meet shared outcomes. The five principles of curriculum design (Fink, 2003) inform the development of learning experiences that are structured in such a way that they scaffold student thinking and progressively move them toward the desired course outcomes. A course should: (1) challenge students to higher level learning; (2) use active forms of learning; (3) give frequent and immediate feedback to students on the quality of their learning; (4) use a structured sequence of different learning activities; and (5) have a fair system for assessing and grading students." Read the entire article here.

There is nothing so dispiriting for teacher or for student as a discussion section in which questions fall flat, conversation drifts aimlessly, and a small number of predictable voices predominate. That is the opening sentence of Dr. James Dawes article concerning class discussions. He offers a list of ten strategies to help you bring out the best in your students. Read the entire article here.

JE SUIS CHARLIE
The world is definitely flat, as Dr. Thomas Friedman so famously declared in his book of the same name a decade ago (can it be that 10 years have passed). The events in Paris that occurred last week demonstrated that in a tragic and vivid way. I hope that you join me in using this terrible occurrence as a teachable lesson with your students. Inserting the lesson into your class may be easier for some of us (history, political science, CSSK, art) than others (chemistry, math, welding, nursing) but there are ways to make it happen. If you decide to incorporate it into your class, maybe as part of the larger human rights project being led by Dr. Val Holliday in Philosophy, please share your experience with me so that I can post it here.

LOOK AT ME
Are you having problems capturing and keeping your students attention in class? Mary Loyd, with the journal Prism, has written an interesting column about this issue. She writes, "Ask instructors to name their biggest challenge, and classroom distractions very likely would top most lists. Even experienced engineering educators must compete for students' attention against social media and texting. Classroom management has become so vexing that ASEE's 2014 annual conference devoted several sessions to the topic, including Shepard's panel presentation, I Did Not Anticipate This: Experiences From the Early Years. Research has documented an increase in disruptive behavior and cheating by students over the past 20 years. And it's not just among weaker students." Take a look at the rest of the post here.

USING STARTERS AND WRAPPERS EFFECTIVELY
Faculty Focus provides a great article at the right time addressing effective ways to structure discussions in the online environment. The good news is that you can use Dr. Maryellen Weimer's suggestions for your face-to-face classes as well. She writes, "The use of online discussion in both blended and fully online courses has made clear that those exchanges are more productive if they are structured, if there’s a protocol that guides the interaction. This kind of structure is more important in the online environment because those discussions are usually asynchronous and minus all the nonverbal cues that facilitate face-to-face exchanges. But I’m wondering if more structure might benefit our in-class discussions as well. Students struggle with academic discourse. They have conversations (or is it chats?) with each other, but not discussions like those we aspire to have in our courses. And although students understand there’s a difference between the two, they don’t always know exactly how they’re supposed to talk about academic content when discussing it with teachers and classmates. Would providing more structure provide that clarity and make the value of discussions more obvious to students?" Read more here.

HOW TO ASSESS STUDENT PARTICIPATION
Have you ever struggled with determining what student participation looks like and how to assign a grade for it? Carolyn Ives, Curriculum Planning and Development Coordinator at the Centre for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at MacEwan University, has written an informative article that may clarify things for you. She writes, "So, then, how can instructors facilitate student engagement and helpful participation? There are a few strategies that can help such as the creation of a supportive classroom environment that is skillfully facilitated and discussion-based, the creation of clear expectations around student preparation and student roles in the classroom, and creating student buy-in. All of these strategies are helpful, but the most useful method I have found to evaluate student participation is the inclusion of formative assessment techniques in my classes. Formative assessment may take a variety of forms (such as practice quizzes, one-minute papers, clearest/muddiest point exercises, various kinds of group work in the class, etc.), but it provides students with opportunities to practice skills or test knowledge in a “safe” way.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON SEPTEMBER 25
The next faculty development workshop sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center occurs on Thursday, September 15 at 1:00 pm. Natalie Smith, writing center specialist, will present an interactive session focused on how you can help your students improve their writing even if you don't happen to teach an English course. She is also interested in hearing from you about other issues that may occur in your classes related to student success and writing impediments. There is still time to register. This event will be held in the T+LC (room 311 Magnolia Building).

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT FOR LOUISIANA
Louisiana hasn’t made much progress in the past seven years in a national assessment of educational achievement, according to an article in the Shreveport Times. In its “Leaders and Laggards” report, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranks Louisiana as the second-worst laggard, at the bottom of all 50 states but ahead of the District of Columbia. Louisiana has grades of F in 5 of 11 categories. The most damning are Fs in academic achievement and academic achievement for low-income and minority students in its 2014 report. The state received a D for its efforts to improve overall academic achievement in 2007 and a B for its efforts to improve academic achievement for low-income and minority students. The academic scores are based on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a standardized exam administered across the nation on which Louisiana students traditionally perform poorly. The study used 2011 results.

WHAT SHOULD ACADEMIC ADVISING LOOK LIKE AT BRCC
Jeffrey Selingo's article on academic advising lists many of the same issues we are currently experiencing. In his article, he notes that academic advising "has always been one of those intractable problems on college campuses. Students rarely think about it until that frantic moment when they need someone to sign the registration form for next semester's classes. Only 4 of 10 students consider counselors their primary source of advice regarding academic plans, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual poll of freshmen and seniors. A third of freshmen turn to friends or family. One in 10 students never even meet with an academic counselor." Please remember to join us tomorrow at 1:00 pm in the Teaching+Learning Center as we continue with our discussion on creating an academic advising program of excellence.

CAN YOU HOLD THAT IDEA FOR A MINUTE
Dr. Maryellen Weimer's latest blog post offers some solid assistance for those who like to use classroom discussion. She writes, "The classroom discussion is going pretty well. Students are offering some good comments and more than one hand is in the air. Then a student makes a really excellent observation that opens up a whole avenue of relevant possibilities. You follow-up by calling on a student whose hand has been in the air for some time. Her comment is fine, but it’s totally unrelated to the previous comment. How do you get students to respond to each other’s comments? How do you get student comments to build on a key topic so that it becomes more like a real discussion?"

DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION IS AN OPPORTUNITY
Dr. Hunter Boylan's editorial on community colleges and remedial education strikes a few familiar chords. He writes, "Members of the professional community in developmental education agree with many studies suggesting that simply placing students in remedial courses is an inadequate response to the problems of underpreparedness among entering college students. They would further tend to agree that the current process of identifying and placing underprepared students is flawed and that the entire process of assessing, advising and teaching them needs reform. But if there is a 'solution' to the remediation education 'problem,' it is vastly more complex than many reform advocates and most policy makers acknowledge. It will require that community colleges change the way they do remediation. It will also require that they address non-academic issues that may prevent students from succeeding, improve the quality of instruction at all levels, revise financial aid policies, provide better advising to students at risk, integrate instruction and support services, teach college success skills, invest in professional development and do all of these things in a systematic manner integrated into the mainstream of the institution."

JOINT OWNERSHIP OF LEARNING
Robert Carroll has written an interesting opinion piece about the teacher-student relationship. At its essence, it is about engagement but he frames it in terms of an athletic performance. He asks "So why do we, as teachers, still exist? The formal education process is no longer about information, and successful teachers have come to realize this. The ability of learners to access information has increased to the point of absurdity. The role of the teacher now is to help learners effectively identify and evaluate information sources, but this alone does not justify our continued presence in the educational process." He continues, "While learning is self-directed, it is the teacher that is accountable for the learning:  accountable to the students, to the program, and to themselves. Courses flourish when the student-teacher relationship is reciprocal and includes “joint ownership” of the course. And the responsibility flows both ways–a student performing poorly is a failure on my part, and I work with them to get them to perform to the best of their ability."

GROUP DISCUSSION WITH A TWIST
We have encouraged you to use class discussion as an active learning method in your classes and we have provided teaching and learning faculty development workshops in the past to provide you with the information and tools to implement this learning experience. B. J. Brooks and M. D. Koretsky provide a twist on this active learning method in their article "The Influence of Group Discussion on Students' Responses and Confidence During Peer Instruction" published in the Journal of Chemical Education. They advocate that you allow your student to respond to a discussion question individually in writing and then have them share that answer with two or three colleagues. After the discussion, the students can change their answers, write another explanation for the answer and once again indicate their degree of confidence in their answer. The research shows that the learning experience provided a richer understanding of the answer and improved their confidence level in having the correct answer. The depth of their explanation was enhanced as well. Students spent an average of seven minutes in discussion making this an active learning method that can be used each time you meet as a class. The research also confirmed that when faced with conceptual problems, students need the opportunity to practice problem solving and the discussion improves their ability to explain why the answer is correct.

CLOSING OUT A SEMESTER POSITIVELY
A fellow faculty development colleague reminds us that the end of the semester is the time to do some assessment that will provide you with valuable feedback as you plan for the next semester. There are a number of things you can do to help your students transition to the next phase of their academic careers or workforce lives. He suggests, "Just as you discussed the syllabus on the first day of class, do so again, this time to reaffirm that learning outcomes have been met and to remind students of the material that has been covered. Of course, it is a good idea to review that syllabus a few weeks out from the end of the semester to make sure that the outcomes have been met. The review can be done as a large group discussion, or you might assign groups within the class to assess how well the course had fulfilled its outcomes, material coverage, and other goals."

MUSIC DELIVERS IN THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
When designing and teaching a course through the online delivery method, research shows that you should build in authentic and relevant opportunities for your students to interact, connect, and present themselves as real people. Students see these opportunities to socially interact and connect with others as foundational attributes of your courses. Further, research suggests that opportunities like these influence students’ perception of the overall learning experience. Joanna Dunlap and Patrick Lowenthal conducted research in this area and suggest that using music as one of a number of ways to help students interact and connect with each other can produce positive student learning results. Music offers a way to involve students in student-to-content interaction through generative learning activities—by having students compile playlists, write lyrics, compose songs, perform songs, create music videos, and so on. Music-driven, student-to-content interaction also involves students in multisensory learning, further supporting knowledge acquisition and construction. They provide a number of discipline specific active learning methods that you can integrate into your online class.