by John Hawes | Mar 30, 2022 | Active Learning, Assessment, Blog, Classroom, Help Your Students, Student Performance, Teaching and Learning
Small Teaching by J.M. Lang presents methods for making small changes in your teaching practices (hence the name) that can significantly improve your students’ learning. Each chapter provides the research-based evidence behind the practices Lang proposes so you can have confidence that Lang’s ideas work. The Coulter Faculty Commons will be boiling the Small Teaching chapters down into blog posts to provide instructors with concepts they can apply to a lesson, a class, or a course.
Let’s get started.
Chapter 1: Retrieving
Every subject requires students to know some foundational knowledge to successfully engage in higher levels of learning. For example, they need to know what a line is before they can understand more complex geometric shapes or the history of the earliest immigrants to the North American continent before they can discuss the nuances of current immigration policy. For your students to be successful, they need to be able to retrieve knowledge so that they can apply what they know.
Students need to retrieve knowledge from memory, but as Lang points out, “if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory” (Lang, 2016, p. 20). How do you get students to practice retrieving knowledge? To illustrate a simple practice Lang cites studies where students were divided into three groups: one was given additional study time before a test, one given a practice quiz before the test, and one group where no intervention was taken. In one of the studies students that were quizzed prior to the test scored two letter grades higher than those that weren’t. Perhaps equally significant, students that were given additional study time scored no better than those that received no intervention. Re-reading did not improve knowledge retrieval.
Rather than just think of quizzes as assessment activities, consider them a means for your students to practice knowledge retrieval. But quizzing can take many forms. Here are the Quick Tips Lang suggests in Chapter 1:
- Give frequent, low-stakes quizzes (at least weekly) to help your students seal up foundational course content; favor short answers or problem-solving whenever possible so that students must process or use what they are retrieving.
- Open class periods or online sessions by asking students to remind you of content covered in previous class sessions; allow students time to reflect for a few moments if you do so orally.
- Close class by asking students to write down the most important concept from that day and one question or confusion that still remains in their minds (i.e., the minute paper).
- Close class by having students take a short quiz or answer written questions about the day’s material or solve a problem connected to the day’s material.
- Use your syllabus to redirect students to previous course content through quizzes or oral questions and discussion (Lang, 2016, p. 39).
by Eli Collins-Brown | Feb 17, 2022 | Active Learning, Be Present-Mindful, Blog, Canvas, Classroom, Discussions, Educational Development, Emergency Instruction Plan, Faculty Development Workshop, Pedagogy, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning
Part 2 of the Inclusive Pedagogy Series
I started teaching online in 2003 for a for-profit institution. It was two years after receiving my M.Ed. in Research and Collaboration at TCU where my focus was on online asynchronous learning. I was anxious to apply my research to my own classroom!
The realities of teaching online soon became very apparent. At that time the institution did not have an LMS. I taught the course through discussion forums. My students were lines of text on the screen, as I was to them. We didn’t have Zoom or any other video meeting software so we were confined to interacting through the discussions and email.
I realized quickly that I needed to somehow become a real person to my students; a person who cared about their experience and success. So I set about recording video introductions, using video and recorded screencasts to help them learn HTML, web design and multimedia. Soon I was asking them to post an audio or video introduction instead of text, encouraging them to share photos of pets and places they loved to travel. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was humanizing my online course.
What is humanizing?
If you google this topic, you will see quite a few results. We’ve been working on this for a couple of decades, so that doesn’t surprise me. I particularly appreciate the work of Michelle Pacansky-Brock, a community college faculty member turned faculty developer who started teaching online in 2004. She created a wonderful infographic on this topic.
“Humanizing leverages learning science and culturally responsive teaching to create an inclusive, equitable online class climate for today’s diverse students.” Brock, 2020.
https://brocansky.com/humanizing/infographic2
Humanizing your course is how you bring equity into your course design and teaching.
It also brings decades of research on instructor presence and student persistence to bear on course design and instruction. Being an excellent instructor in both the physical and online classroom in higher ed is a skill that anyone can learn. So these steps can apply to in-person courses as well.
Steps to Take to Humanize Your Course
Brock offers eight elements to use in humanizing your course:
The Liquid Syllabus: A public, mobile-friendly website that has your brief welcome video and includes “warm, non-verbal cues and hopeful language” to ease anxieties about your course and how to be successful in week one (Brock, 2020, pp107-108).
Humanized Homepage: the homepage provides a clear and friendly welcome to the course and tells the student how the course works and has a clear Start Here link to the syllabus and/or the course information module in Canvas (this is also a Quality Matters and Online Learning Consortium quality standard). Here is an example
Getting to Know You Survey: In week one, ask the students to complete a confidential survey that provides additional information about each student and helps you identify which students are going to be ‘high touch’ requiring more of your time that other students. In Canvas, you can create a survey for this purpose. If you are logged into Canvas, go to https://westerncarolina.instructure.com/accounts/1/external_tools/43?launch_type=global_navigation to see an example of questions to include.
Warm, Wise Feedback: I love this and always attempt to convey support and encouragement in my feedback to students. Brock states, “Your feedback is critical to your students’ continuous growth. But how you deliver your feedback really makes a difference, especially in an online course. To support your students’ continued development and mitigate the effects of social and psychological threats, follow the Wise feedback model (Cohen & Steele, 2002) that also supports growth mindset (Dweck, 2007). Support effort + ability + action. And deliver your message in voice or video to include verbal or nonverbal cues and minimize misinterpretation.
Self-affirming Ice Breaker: Week one of a course is full of anxiety for students and can impede their ability to start the course. Try an ice breaker that invites them to share a part of their identity. One example from the infographic is to ask them to reflect on a value that is important to them and then choose an object from their life that represents that value.
Wisdom Wall: sharing the ‘wisdom’ or advice from students who have previously taken your class. You can use a collaborative tool such as a Word file in OneDrive that students can access, or Flipgrid, which can be enabled in Canvas. You can also have studente email their success advice to you that you would add to the file, or empower students to create their own by having a link to a shared Word document by changing the edit settings to ‘Anyone with the link’. Post this link in your course to share it with your current students and then they can also add their own advice. Here is Michelle’s example of a Wisdom Wall.
Bumper Video: Short videos used throughout the course to introduce a new module or clarify a sticky concept.
Microlectures: laser-focused short videos (5 – 10 minute) that walk the students through the comprehension of complex concepts. Before you record, identify the one or two ideas you want your students to take from the video. Write a script to make sure that you are saying exactly what you want to say in the short video. Also, remember to produce closed captions for all videos. If you need help with closed captioning in Panopto, please contact the help desk ithelp@wcu.edu
All of these suggested steps are part of the best practices in online course design and teaching. They are also steps that you can take at any time during the semester.
These elements will be included in the CFC’s Online Course Design Institute offered totally online this summer. If you’d like more information about the OCDI, please contact us.
by Eli Collins-Brown | Jan 7, 2022 | Be Present-Mindful, Blog, Classroom, Event, Faculty Development Workshop, Learn, Pedagogy, Teaching and Learning
Join us for our 2nd Annual Teaching & Learning Day. We will meet from 1 – 3:30 to discuss strategies faculty can use to prevent burnout in these demanding times. We will also discuss ways in which we can encourage and support our freshman and sophomores whose academic preparation was affected by the pandemic.
We have invited an expert on helping faculty prevent burnout through self-care to give the keynote address. Dr Julie Harrison-Swartz, DNP, MSN, RN, FNP-BC, is an assistant professor in the Department of Nursing at UNC Pembroke.
In the second hour of the event, we will discuss supporting students to be successful. We had an unprecedented increase in failure rates last semester at WCU. But we are not alone in this as other institutions across the country are also experiencing this situation. We will discuss what’s happening and brainstorm some ways in which we as instructors can help these students succeed this semester.
Let us know you are going to attend REGISTRATION LINK
by John Hawes | Nov 16, 2021 | Active Learning, Be Present-Mindful, Blog, Classroom, Collaborative Learning, Cooperative Learning, Educational Development, Flipping the Classroom, Pedagogy, Problem Based Learning, Student Engagement, Student Performance, Teaching and Learning
Whether you call it inverted instruction, classroom flipping, or some other term, the concept behind this kind of instruction is basic. Students get the foundational knowledge they need outside the classroom and class time is spent on higher-level learning. Properly executed, this instructional methodology changes the instructor’s role from one of a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” (Bergmann & Sams, 2007)
How do the students get that foundational knowledge?
- Video
- If you record your own videos:
- Keep them short (7 minutes max)
- Topic focused
- Provide captions and transcript
- If you don’t want to make your own, there are plenty of sources:
- Khan Academy, YouTube, Ted Talks
- Assign specific time ranges as appropriate
- Texts
- A history, account, narrative, or case study
- From the course texts, assign specific pages if the students don’t need the whole chapter – they are more likely to do the reading
- Consider developing a reading guide to target their attention on particular concepts or ideas
- Websites
- Again, assign specific pages or parts of the website as appropriate
- Research
- Give your students a list of questions and let them find answers
How can I know they have attained the foundational knowledge?
Barkley and Major, in their text Learning Assessment Techniques, offer concrete ways to assess students’ foundational knowledge, and they fit the “blending” teaching paradigm:
- If asking them to recognize – consider an online quiz that focuses on verification, matching, or forced choice, to be taken prior to coming to class.
- If asking them to recall – consider online quiz questions that focus on low cues or high cues.
- If asking them to interpret or exemplify – consider an online quiz that focuses on constructed responses or selected responses.
- If asking them to infer – consider questions that focus on verification, matching, or forced choice.
- If asking them to explain – consider questions where students must reason, troubleshoot, redesign, or predict.
What are some effective classroom strategies to engage students in higher-level learning?
- Muddiest point
- Have your students bring a list of points they’d like to have clarified to class
- Alternatively, have them post them to a discussion board
- Address these points first before moving on to other learning activity
- Group discussions
- Students discuss/clarify muddiest points in groups
- Group presentations
- Have students teach what they learned
- Knowledge Demonstration
- Let the students demonstrate what they have learned
Is flipping right for me?
The real question is whether or not flipping is right for your students. One of the big advantages of flipping is that it gives students more control over their learning as they guide the classroom activity with their questions. Another is the opportunity it provides instructors to review their teaching methods. After considering your options, you may decide that flipped instruction does not provide any advantages. However, keep in mind that this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You may determine that some material in your course is suitable for flipping, while some still require more of a hands-on approach. In either case, you’ll have reflected on how you are teaching and that is always a good thing. (Trach, 2020)
If you’d like to talk about group work with a member of the Coulter Faculty Common, click here to schedule a consultation.
Sources
Barkley, Elizabeth F., and Claire H. Major. Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hunter-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4205832.
Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2007). Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. International Society for Tech in Ed. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hunter-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3317690
Hertz, M. B. (2012, July 10). The Flipped Classroom: Pro and Con. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-pro-and-con-mary-beth-hertz
Trach, E. (2020, January 1). A Beginner’s Guide to Flipped Classroom. https://www.schoology.com/blog/flipped-classroom
by Jonathan Bradshaw | Nov 11, 2021 | Blog, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning
In a previous blog post, I made a brief case for not using plagiarism detection software. I also argued that we could partially resolve some of our concerns about plagiarism by designing writing assignments that offer authentic writing challenges related to our fields of study.
In this blog, I want to go one step further and suggest that we can design writing assignments and processes that privilege student learning first, with the happy side-effect of also preventing plagiarism! We can even do so in ways that meaningfully integrate writing into your current courses without significant displacement of other content, or without over-taxing your already over-taxed time and energy.
Design a Process that is Hard to Fake
Copy and pasting from Google or an article isn’t the real plagiarism problem we face. The real issue is the essay mill industry that is churning out essays for students to purchase and pass off as their own (something plagiarism detection software can’t help us with, by the way). That industry flourishes because finalized writing is easy to fake.
The more generic or stock the assignment, the easier it is to fake. Likewise, the less involved the composing process is, the easier the final draft is to fake. It is difficult to reverse-engineer a purchased essay so that it looks like it went through a specific series of revisions. For instance, you can make the “Literature Review” and the “Discussion” section of a report due as separate assignments; you could have the “Methodology” section be composed alongside a series of focused activities. You can even set the expectation that students do revisions between those drafts and the final and write a reflection explaining how and why the text has changed as they worked on it.
A process-based approach also opens the opportunity to address accidental plagiarism as a moment of learning. If I see a student has dropped in a quote without attribution and we are still at the rough draft stage, it is a good point to explain both the ethics and the written conventions of attribution.
What if I Don’t Have Time to “Teach Writing”?
One counterpoint I have particular sympathy for is “I don’t have time or space in my curriculum to teach writing.” I get it. As a writing teacher, I know how labor-intensive a process-based pedagogy can be. Time and labor are precious resources to academics of all ranks.
However, keep in mind that teaching writing is teaching how to think in your field. It works best alongside the intellectual process of engaging work in your field, not as a final product at the end. If you are teaching students how to take fields notes to integrate into a larger research project, you are teaching writing. If you’re teaching students how to analyze the sections of a lab report, you are teaching writing.
Additionally, consider the following time-saving teaching practices:
Rubrics as Reflection Tools:
Teachers often present rubrics to students as assessment tools—”these are the criteria by which you will be judged.” Personally, I love rubrics and find them invaluable to teaching writing. But we miss a real opportunity when students only see them as the medium through which a grade arrives in their inbox.
A good rubric is primarily a reflection tool. Alternately, a bad rubric assigns points only to formal characteristics of the text–commas, paragraph length, thesis statement, citations, etc.— that don’t help writers learn how to write.
Instead, you can design your rubrics to name the several rhetorical goals or written conventions of a text—synthesizing research, integrating evidence, analyzing data, considering audience expectations, etc. Then the evaluative criteria in your rubric become points of reflection as students compose. Midway through a process, you can ask students to use a well-designed rubric to self-assess their own writing and identify specific places for revision.
You can also design short in-class or online modules around those specific elements of the rubric. We can even assign reflective writing, in advance of a deadline, that asks students to use our rubrics to self-assess a draft and locate specific areas for revision.
Peer Review
Sometimes the best advice comes from others doing similar work. Though detailed written or recorded feedback on student writing is of inestimable value to student writers, there are ways to center lessons on written conventions specific to your field.
One thing you might do is a model in class and discuss some of the written conventions the model is doing well; then have students work in groups to offer feedback on the use of those conventions. For instance, if there are specific conventions for writing methodology sections in your field, you can (a) assign a draft of just that session to be due on a certain date; (b) in class, point out some of the rhetorical purposes of that section that are specific to your field; (c) outline some of those conventions together; (d) briefly discuss why those conventions exist, and then (e) ask students to read each other’s drafts and give feedback along those lines.
Design Mini-Lessons on Writing
You don’t have to set aside entire class meetings to teach writing effectively.
When I am reading drafts of student writing, I often notice that multiple people are making the same missteps. In those cases, I stop commenting on it. You can really exhaust yourself by trying to give everyone the same feedback (or by playing copyeditor instead of guide).
In those cases, I tell myself: “That’s a lesson.” If you notice that a majority of students are placing a period in the wrong place in APA citations, then take 5 minutes to point it out, have them open their drafts, and look for the issue; if you notice that many students are engaging audiences in ways that would be considered unprofessional by peers in your field, design a short activity to model why that convention exists, what it looks like, then have them open their drafts (or even share drafts with each other) to look for it.
If you feel like your in-class time is so jam-packed you can’t set aside a few moments to discuss writing, then also consider designing online modules that ask students to complete distinct process steps related to the revisions you would like to see in their writing. For instance, consider creating a homework module with a short video explaining the rhetorical goals of the section that needs work, design one or two process activities that ask students to complete distinct process steps related to the revisions you would like to see, and even require a short reflection so that you can respond to questions or confusions (especially if you don’t have the capacity to respond to each draft individually).
Further Reading:
Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers (2020) Rober Harris, VirtualSalt – http://www.virtualsalt.com/anti-plagiarism-strategies-for-research-papers/
Rubrics (nd.) Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning – https://teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/improve/evaluate-course-level-learning/rubrics
