Paving the Way for Powerful Learning

Welcome to the Fall 2017 semester! On Monday, thousands of students will arrive on FIU’s campuses, eager—and a little nervous—to meet their professors and learn from your expertise. And for about 2800 of these students, this semester will be their first time in college. The more we know about our students, the more effectively we can support their learning. What do we know so far about this year’s incoming class of first-year students? 

For starters, that they’re an impressive group: The average high school GPA and SAT score for our entering students are 4.13 and 1199! This includes 5 National Merit Scholars and 21 National Hispanic Scholars. About 600 entering students are first-generation college students, and more than half are eligible for Pell grants. 

Whether you too are new to FIU this semester, or you’ve been here for decades, most faculty also greet the first day of class with a mix of excitement and nervousness. While we might take comfort in spending the first class session distributing the syllabus and reading it aloud, the first meeting or first time students see your online course presents an invaluable opportunity to make a positive first impression—one that will likely influence how your students respond to the course, to you, and to each other!

In How Learning Works (2010), Ambrose et al. remind us that as instructors, “we have a great deal of control over the climate we shape, and can leverage climate in the service of learning” (p. 180). Especially on the first day, you can create the kind of learning environment that motivates students to excel. Here are two strategies for using the first day to pave the way for a productive and supportive learning environment:

Showing Your Passion for the Discipline. Our passion and enthusiasm for our subject matter can be incredibly powerful and contagious. Though students may not be particularly interested or invested in a course at first, experiencing the palpable enthusiasm you have for your discipline can foster their motivation, engagement, and curiosity, all essential to learning.

On the first day, help students get to know you. What excites you most about your subject? Why? How did your learning shape or change you? What particular skills (which they will be developing in your class) served you in your professional life? Give them a glimpse of the possibilities. Let them see the connections between the content of your course, other courses to come, and the world beyond the classroom.

Making Uncertainty Safe. Our college courses can be intimidating spaces. Although risk-taking is essential to intellectual growth, and students are enriched by the diverse viewpoints surrounding them, they might resist new or conflicting knowledge and will need support navigating ambiguity and embracing complexity.

Making uncertainty safe entails creating a learning environment where students are encouraged to actively participate in productive dialogue and discussion and to ask questions that can lead to more meaningful understanding of complex concepts. As faculty, we might forget that asking questions can be difficult or frightening for students, but we can encourage them to overcome their fears by inviting their questions and responding generously. We can also give students a few minutes to write before they participate, so they can gather their ideas and examine their own thinking before they attempt to share it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we can model and encourage active listening, for example, by inviting students to paraphrase their peers’ points of view. In this way, we can demonstrate that we value our students’ thinking, and we expect them to value one another as well.

We hope you enjoy meeting your students and helping them get to know one another next week! 

How else do you use the first class session or first online course experience to pave the way for an engaging, supportive, and challenging semester? We’d love to share your strategies with your colleagues. Please send them to [email protected].

Pre-term Prep: 4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Grading Scheme

With only ten days until the start of the fall term, we hope you had the opportunity to relax, recharge, and reflect this summer! We, in turn, asked ourselves: Which aspect of instruction is so integral to students’ overall success that it warrants a full pre-term tip? And we decided on the course grading scheme, because grading is such a powerful lever for student motivation and learning—and because for many of us, it’s the most tedious part of teaching!

What’s feasible within the next ten days that could be most beneficial to your students and to you? We scoured the research and isolated four potent practices:

1.    Aligning your syllabus grading section with your course goals.

“The list of graded items [in your syllabus] should reflect as much as possible the full range of learning goals” (Fink, 2003, p. 142). This may seem intuitive, but we tend to have multiple and varied learning goals per course, yet we’re limited by the number of assessments we can evaluate. A lack of alignment between our grading structure and learning goals leads to the angst many of us feel knowing that students’ course grades do not effectively represent their learning. This divergence also leaves us vulnerable to the critique that we’re not upholding high academic standards, in that we often fail to evaluate the more cognitively complex course goals such as analysis and evaluation.

Improving this part of your grading scheme can entail adding a few individual multiple-choice test questions, or designing a new graded exercise to measure student attainment of the course goals you’re not currently assessing. The links embedded above can help with each of these.   

2.    Aiming for multiple and varied items in the grading section.

Multiple. From the perspectives of measurement, psychology, cognitive science, and pedagogy, the number of elements in your grade calculation matters a great deal. At the most basic level, we tend to have multiple learning goals, so effectively measuring them requires multiple assessments. Plus, the fewer the assignments in a grading scheme, the higher the stakes for students—which results in increased anxiety and a greater likelihood students will cheat (Lang, 2013). Behavioral economists Shireman and Price (2015) describe grades as “behavioral devices invented as tools to send signals to students about what is important” (p. 132)—such that we want to direct students’ time and effort toward the multiple ways to learn and demonstrate mastery of our course goals. Research indicates that having students actively recall content better promotes long-term retention than simply studying the content, as more exams and quizzes may actually lead to more (and better) learning. Finally, with more graded course activities, students –and you!—will have more and timelier information about how they’re doing, and where they’re stuck.

Varied. Fink (2003) advocates varying our assessments to reflect the multiple representations through which content and skills can be communicated. If our grading schemes only account for essay writing, multiple choice questions, or presentations, we penalize students who can better show their knowledge and abilities in other ways.

Where might you begin? Identify important behaviors your students are failing to sufficiently engage in and consider “whether the behavior should be linked directly to, or more effectively, with a grade,” advise Shireman and Price (2015, p. 132). Think about which course activities will lead to the most learning— whether it’s reading and annotating the textbook, writing, solving novel problems, completing a group project, etc. If they’re not currently part of the grading scheme, consider adding them. Administering additional quizzes online (or using i>clickers) can help you do so while preserving precious class time.

To minimize the additional time commitment from you when grading larger assignments, consider using a rubric or awarding credit based on a clear set of criteria or “specifications,” the basis of Nilson’s grading innovation.

3.    Revisiting how items are weighted.

From a measurement perspective, the relative weight of each assignment (or assignment type) should reflect its relative importance. The ones tied to your primary learning goals, or items that measure a greater number of learning goals, should carry more weight. Consider how much weight your grading scheme allocates to each course activity: Does it encourage students to devote sufficient time to the crucial activities? Where might you reallocate points or percentages to encourage students to devote more time to the ones you consider critical to their success in the course?

Lang (2016) offers a powerful suggestion rooted in the literature on growth vs. fixed mindsets: “Consider how you are weighting the sequence of your assignments and what your first graded assignment will convey to students about the prospect of learning and success in your class,” he writes. His advice: “Weigh later assignments in the same sequence more heavily than the earlier ones. In other words, if you typically give three exams or three papers and a final…, work your way up to that final exam, and divide up the percentages in a more graduated fashion… The student who bombs that opening exam still can make a decent grade in the course if the stakes on it are low enough. And all students receive the message that it’s OK to fail a little bit in the beginning because they will have plenty of opportunities to [continue learning and] make their grade later in the semester” (p. 207).

Alternate strategies include exam wrappers, which give students the opportunity to learn what they had not mastered by exam time and earn back points, and “resurrection” finals, in which the final exam grade replaces the lowest test grade.

4.    Clarifying purpose, tasks, and expectations.

After you refine your grading scheme for the course, you can plan ways and times to discuss your rationale with students, especially how the main assignments and their weights reflect your priorities. Students appreciate understanding not only the required tasks, but also why the course is designed that way.

With major assignments, providing clarity about the purpose of each, the task itself, and expectations for success can motivate students and make it more likely they earn the grades they want. For more on transparent teaching, we encourage you to explore the Transparency in Learning and Teaching project, an award-winning national educational development and research project. The project website includes an assignment sheet template, plus samples from across disciplines. In the case of exams, we can also provide additional transparency by demystifying the format and content, ideally by sharing samples from previous terms and giving students ample practice with the types of questions they will encounter.

In class, keep the focus on learning, not grades

We hope the four strategies above will be helpful as you reflect on your grading practices and make some adjustments, where you deem necessary and useful. Grades are powerful levers for motivation and learning, and they affect students in both tangible (i.e., financial aid or graduate admissions) and intangible ways. That said, we also recognize that placing too much emphasis on grades in our course materials and discussions with students could backfire, reinforcing students’ existing preoccupation with grades and performance.

We might strike a balance by focusing on the feedback function of grading, and by providing what is known as “wise feedback.” This could entail writing brief descriptive comments before returning graded exams, or offering verbal feedback to the whole class—so students know what they did well, and have guidance on how to improve their future performance.  

Wise feedback consists of assuring all students we have high academic standards and also that they are capable of reaching the higher standard. “Successful interventions continually convey the message that students can succeed through effort and persistence,” explain Cohen, Steele, and Ross (1999). “In a sense, the message is that academic ability, or even so-called intelligence, is not fixed or immutable. Rather, it can be enhanced through effortful practice and the cultivation of specific skills” (p. 1303).

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds often interpret bad grades as proof “that they do not belong in this strange culture of higher education” (Nilson, 2015, p. 9). Wise feedback offers all students a validating counter-narrative, helping them view grades as measurements of their coursework at a given point in time, not as absolute judgments of their belonging, worth, or intelligence.

We look forward to supporting you with grading or anything else you’re working on to prepare for the Fall! Feel free to drop by PC-237, or email us at [email protected] to set up a consultation.

How do you design your course grading scheme, assign weights, and/or discuss grades with students in ways that promote motivation and learning? We’d love to share your strategies with your colleagues. Please send them to [email protected]

 References

Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, p. 1302-1318.

Dee Fink, L. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating Lessons: Learning from. Academic Dishonesty. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press.

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Nilson, L. (2016). Specifications Grading. Stylus.

Shireman, R. M. & Price, J. A. (2015). “Prepare for class, attend, and participate!: Incentives and student success in college” Decision Making for Student Success: Behavioral Insights to Improve College Access and Persistence. Taylor and Francis Inc., p. 124-142.

7 Tips for Teaching Summer Courses

Also known as “compressed” or “intensive” classes, coursestaught in condensed time periods—like summer-- can present both opportunities and unique challenges. In a 2009 study, Kops explored the experiences of faculty teaching compressed classes and identified best practices for teaching compressed format courses. The 8 tips below are distilled from his study. 

1) Restructure the course: As opposed to simply stacking or cramming their “traditional” class topics, activities, and assessments into the shorter time frame, the high-performing instructors in the study made significant adjustments to the course structure, emphasizing learning outcomes instead of  content delivery. In other words, they realized that their students should still achieve the same learning goals, but that they would have to reach these goals in different ways. 

2) Reconfigure assignments: This includes deconstructing longer assignments into shorter ones, all while providing frequent feedback that helps students keep up with the class. 

3) Maintain expectations and standards: In contrast to the myth of the “easier” summer session, faculty must establish and maintain high expectations for all students. 

4) Organize and plan for the term: Even more than other semester formats, summer courses require detailed planning of the entire class from the start, which requires anticipating requirements, student questions, etc. 

5) Focus on teaching: Since teaching compressed classes can be extremely time-consuming, and indeed draining for faculty, the most successful faculty in Kops’ study focused their attention on the course by teaching only one at a time, for instance, and/or not over-committing themselves during the summer term. 

6) Capitalize on continuity, smaller classes, and variety of students: Seize this opportunity to get to know students, determine the extent to which they are learning, and vary your approach based on their individual interests, goals, and/or learning styles. 

7) Maximize support to students: In addition to making yourself available to students (through longer and frequent office hours), it’s useful to provide students with reading and study guides, class notes, recommended links, etc. given the fast-paced nature of these classes. Additionally, encourage your students to use campus resources like the Center for Excellence in Writing(Monday-Thursday 9:00-8:00 and Friday 9:00-5:00)https://writingcenter.fiu.edu/ and the Center for Academic Success(Monday-Thursday 8-8 and Friday 8-5. Tutoring assistance begins at 9:00 each day on both campuses) http://undergrad.fiu.edu/cas/learning-center/index.html 

8) Keep students active and use a variety of teaching techniques: As Terry Doyle reminds us, “the one who does the work does the learning,” and in an extended session it’s all the more critical that your students do the work—not you. Medina (2008) reminds us that the human brain can maintain attention for about 10 minutes at a time (Fralick, 2016). This means that using class time for content delivery (like lecturing) will overtax your students’ cognitive resources, AND exhaust you. It will be more productive to structure your daily lesson in small segments, using a variety of teaching techniques that offer students the opportunity to move around, discuss course material and problem solve with their classmates. 

For additional summer course design best practices we’ve attached From Lecturer to Facilitator, chapter 4 of Doyle’s book Learner–Centered Teaching: Putting the Research on Learning into Practice. We also suggest this page from USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and this page from USF's Academy for Teaching and Learning Excellence.

Tackling Test Anxiety

It’s that time of year: we’re starting to feel anxious about test anxiety.

All over campus, students will be scanning their exam sheets with sweaty palms and racing hearts, which means we may miss the chance to gain an accurate picture of how much they’ve really learned. In our research we’d call this a validity problem.

While it’s normal to feel some nervousness (especially if an exam is high-stakes) many students are so petrified that, instead of measuring their learning gains, their exam scores are compromised by their anxiety levels. This is frustrating for faculty, if we’re looking for evidence of our own effectiveness—and of course it’s dreadful for students, who may lose confidence in their ability to perform at a college level.

What can you do to help? It’s useful to reassure students that the exam is not a chance to trip them up, but is carefully designed to gauge their mastery and/or the effectiveness of the overall course (it’s also important that this be true.) Especially in fields where some groups are under-represented, it helps to reassure them that the exam is fair, and has never shown a correlation of performance to gender or race (Steele, 2010).

On a well-crafted exam, each question has a purpose and is tied to a significant learning goal, so encouraging students to self-assess their learning as a major part of their studying should also help assuage their fears. Practice exams are a fantastic study tool, and can also help students avoid the cognitive overload that arises when they expend too much energy familiarizing themselves with the sorts of questions you ask.

We may never be able to make an exam environment stress-free, but we can avoid inadvertently adding to the stress. For instance, we need to be aware of the things we do that may heighten students’ fears.

Reminding students of the high stakes and pressure is counter-productive: it’s more useful to remind them that the exam is only an exam, and in no way measures their intelligence or worth. On the day before he gives his final, one of our colleagues tells a hilarious comedy-of-errors story of an exam disaster from his own college years, to help students put things in perspective.

Others have students stand, stretch, raise their arms in a “Victory!” pose (check out this TED talk on power poses!), or breathe from the diaphragm before they begin the exam.

Ligia Collado-Vides, of FIU’s Biology department, includes reassuring messages at intervals between exam questions. “Relax, breathe and enjoy: you are well prepared for this test,” takes the place of question one. “You’ve made it half way!” and “Hey, you’re doing well. Smile: you’ll release stress!” encourage students as they work through. Dr. Collado-Vides is delighted to see students actually stopping to smile, and get back to work looking calmer.

Often we’re uneasy during testing, too, and anxiety is contagious—so reviewing these tips for administering tests should help. Make sure you breathe, too, and smile, and listen to your tone: your confidence and encouragement will help to put your students more at ease.

In addition to these just-in-time strategies, when the semester concludes and you've recovered from grading, we encourage you to use the information on this site and James Lang's insights on exam stakes to think about how you might re-design or adjust your overall course design, so that it not only minimizes test anxiety; it increases student learning!

Making the Grade

With only two weeks left until grades are due, it may seem pointless to read a tip about grading, but there’s still a great deal you can do to make the process more effective and less painful—for your students and for you. 

In Specifications Grading (2015, a recent CAT faculty reading group book, summarized here, starting on page 6:https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/COMPLETE_1411Advocate.pdf), Linda Nilson describes many of the flaws in our traditional grading practices, most notably that students’ course grades tend not to map neatly onto their learning. She also recognizes that lately what we ”reap for [our] endless hours of grading are more grading protests and conflicts with students than ever before” (p. 6). No wonder so many faculty call grading the worst part of our job! 

In Effective Grading (2010), Barbara Walvoord and Virginia J. Anderson suggest our contentious relationship with grading stems from “three common false hopes that belie the context and the complexity of the grading process: 1) The false hope of total objectivity in grading; 2) The false hope of total agreement about grading; and 3) The false hope of a one-dimensional student motivation for learning” (p. 10). They encourage us to abandon these hopes and offer 12 principles for managing the grading process (described here, on pages 2-4: http://cla.auburn.edu/cla/assets/docs/assessment/Summary%20of%20Walvoord%20and%20Anderson%20Effective%20Grading.pdf).  

Since you can’t switch to Specs Grading or reflect on 12 principles in the next two weeks, we’ll offer one suggestion that could make an enormous difference: conduct “reasonableness testing” on your grade calculations vs. posting them blindly. 

First, calculate course grades as you would normally. Then ask yourself, to what extent do students’ grades—especially low and failing grades—reflect their attainment of your course goals? Can these grades be attributed to other factors within your control? 

Faculty often visit us after posting grades, visibly distraught about the number of students who failed or performed poorly in their class. And they often indicate that many students didn’t really “fail” the class, in the sense that they didn’t perform at unacceptably low levels and/or make minimal progress toward the goals. Yet they posted a failing grade nonetheless because it was the output of the grading formula in their syllabus. 

Grades that don’t reflect student attainment of course goals and conflict with your expert judgement are what we’d call flawed measurements. As with a post-exam item analysis that corrects for faulty test questions or a re-calibration of a new rubric, we have the right—indeed the responsibility—to review students’ grade calculations and use our professional judgment to make adjustments. Of course, these adjustments should be made uniformly, not just for select students, and only in students’ favor. 

We’ll end with Nilson’s reminder, crucial to us at FIU, that grades have a profound impact on students in both tangible (i.e., financial aid or graduate admissions) and intangible ways. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are inclined to interpret bad grades as proof “that they do not belong in this strange culture of higher education” (p. 9), she writes, underscoring Walvoord and Anderson’s 10th principle that we must “Be a Teacher First, a Gatekeeper Last: Understand the student, believe in them, figure out what they need, and help them learn no matter their background; provide all students an equal chance to learn.” 

If you're interested in thinking more about grading, please sign up for the John G. Gardner Institute webinar (link below) facilitated by FIU's own Isis Artze-Vega.

The Sense of an Ending

Somehow it's April already, and there are only two weeks remaining in the semester. January seems like yesterday to many of us; it probably seems like the distant past to many of our students. To make sense of the time you've spent together this term, you'll need a plan for wrapping up. A good finale to the course is important for learning, but also for social, emotional reasons.

As Boettcher (2012) points out, asking students to look back at what they’ve learned so far helps them to synthesize and consolidate their learning. A good closing exercise “provides opportunities for reflection and integration of useful knowledge. It is also a time to wrap up positive social and cognitive experiences.” 

Taking time to "‘tie up loose ends’ and put the finishing touches on new perspectives” is important for learners because genuine learning requires identifying and building relationships among ideas and concepts within our existing body of knowledge. 

In other words, this is a good time to ask students to try to remember January; it's also important for us to revisit the goals of the course, to help students see how much progress they've made. You might ask yourstudents to identify the central course concepts or list their take-awaypoints. You could then compare your sense of the key points to theirs. You might ask students to look for patterns or themes, or speculate on future questions or challenges related to the class topic (this is fruitful either as a class discussion or in writing). You can ask them to write headlines, or class closure cards.  

Elisabeth Beristain, of FIU's Marketing department, asks her students to write a letter offering advice to future students of the class. This exercise requires students to reflect on the course, the ways in which they studied, and the effectiveness of these strategies; it also provides valuable feedback on what aspects of the course work best for students. Many facultyactually share these letters with future cohorts, who often trust their peers’ advice on how to succeed in the class more than ours.    

We all want a closing exercise to reinforce our learning goals, but it may be even more important to acknowledge that our classrooms have become communities, social units in their own right. Many of us experience a sense of loss (along with the relief) at the ending of a semester, and-- believe it or not--our students share this sadness. Just trailing off, never to see each other again, contributes to the disorientation. Some faculty take a moment to thank students for their hard work, and to congratulate them for their achievements; some shake hands with each student on the way out of class. There are many rituals that can provide a sense of closure. Eggleston and Smith suggest a "parting-ways" approach to the ending of a course.  

This is a crucial time for us to reflect, too, and take ownership of what we’ve learned this semester. All too often we half-formulate plans for adjusting future incarnations of our courses, only to get busy, forget, and fall back into routine. Now is the perfect time to take stock of what worked this spring, and what could be better, so you can build an even more effective learning experience for your students this coming fall.

Study Prescriptions

Believe it or not, we're past midterm, and exams are on the horizon. We hope that your students have already had many opportunities to get feedback on their learning, and many opportunities for success, so that they won't be terrified by high-stakes final exams. But regardless of how many exams, quizzes, or assignments they still have left to complete, most students can always use a little help in expanding their repertoire of study skills, so we think it's a good time to revisit Samford professor Dr. Stephen L. Chew's series of videos. The 5-part YouTube series, How to Study Long and Hard and Still Fail, or…How to Get the Most Out of Studying," represents both the latest in cognitive research on how people learn and [his] many years of experience teaching undergraduates,” writes Dr. Chew. “My approach is different from the popular collections of tips, gimmicks and folk wisdom one sees in most books and videos on studying. I present basic principles of how people learn and I try to correct counterproductive misconceptions so that students can improve their learning by devising their own effective study strategies." 

"These videos should help students identify effective and ineffective study strategies so they understand that, although there is no magic bullet, they can learn to get maximal learning out of their study time.” Below are the links and an overview of each installment. We encourage you to share them with your students and take a look yourself when you have a chance. 

To read Dr. Chew's advice on how else to help your students get the most out of studying, see his chapter in the attached piece (which starts on page 215--220 of the pdf). 

Video 1: Beliefs That Make You Fail…Or Succeed.

The first video examines common mistaken beliefs students often possess that undermine their learning. The video tries to correct those misconceptions with accurate beliefs about learning.

Video 2: What Students Should Understand About How People Learn.

The second video introduces a simple but powerful theory of memory, Levels of Processing, that can help students improve their study.

Video 3: Cognitive Principles for Optimizing Learning.

The third video operationalizes the concept of level of processing into four 

principles that students can use to develop effective study strategies.

Video 4: Putting the Principles for Optimizing Learning into Practice.

The fourth video applies the principles of deep processing to common study 

situations, including note taking and highlighting while reading.

Video 5: I Blew the Exam, Now What?

This video addresses what students should and should not do when they earn a bad grade on an exam.

You don't need to show these in class: you can put them on your blackboard shell, or email the links; but it's not a bad idea to make watching them part of an assignment, and to ask your students to develop study plans for the end of the term. Students can do this individually, or work in groups to assess a group study plan.  These videos will not only help your students finish the semester strong in your course, but will give them habits and tips that will help them study for the long haul.  

Why Should I Care?

We hope you and your students are returning refreshed after the break; but we know that spring term can often feel especially grueling. Assignments are starting to pile up (for students to complete, and for you to grade). And this year has felt unusually taxing, fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Many of our colleagues are emotionally exhausted. Many of our students fear for their futures, or their families.

At a time like this, how can we keep students engaged with our courses? How can we even feel justified in asking them to care? We can make our assignments and activities feel more meaningful if we design them to help students practice empathy. Empathy requires us to be curious about the experiences of others; it requires us to suspend judgment. It emboldens us to care. This means it’s a powerful motivator—the sort of motivator that can nudge students to do the intellectual stretching that grows them developmentally. But we often forget that empathy is a skill, not an attribute, so it needs frequent practice. This work isn't exclusive to service-learning classes: we can all benefit from it, whether we're teaching literature or history or ecology, and practicing empathy will serve students well in their future careers, since it's critical to collaboration.

In 2016 FIU was designated an Ashoka Changemaker campus. Ashoka, a collaborative of social entrepreneurs, identifies teaching empathy as “the most important teaching skill in the history of the universe.” Empathy, they explain, “plays a crucial role in innovation, changemaking, and solving systemic problems. We need the skill of applied empathy—the ability to understand what other people are feeling and to guide one's actions in response—to succeed in teams, solve problems, lead effectively, and ultimately to drive change.” 

Students can practice empathy in many ways, from role-playing to identifying counter-arguments in persuasive writing. Humans love and learn from stories: they allow us to inhabit a new point of view, so reading or watching stories can be transformative, especially if you ask students to reflect on the experience. Students can practice active listening, write character biographies, play simulation games, or solve challenging problems in a group. You don't have to invent new assignments in order to incorporate this focus on empathy: you can reframe existing questions and prompts to encourage empathetic thinking; ask students to reflect on their assumptions about individuals or groups, before or after reading assignments or videos; or highlight unfamiliar cultures and traditions in the examples you provide. This is a good time of the semester to check in with students about how their learning is going, and the questions you ask them to reflect on could be gauged to foster empathy.

Empathy facilitates many of the meaningful learning goals we have for students, and is itself a valuable learning goal. It also generates a sense of connectedness that motivates and sustains. In focus groups conducted by the Office of Retention, many of our students report feeling isolated and disconnected. When we ask students to listen to each other, interview neighbors or strangers, work with community members, or any of the myriad tasks that help them to engage in new ways, they learn far more than content. They develop a sense of efficacy that motivates them to work harder. They become better students, and more engaged citizens (Zins, Bloodworth, Weissberg, & Walberg, 2004; Sparkman, Maulding, & Roberts, 2012). Their success, in turn, sustains us.

If you're interested in learning more about related issues, please come to hear Dr. Joshua Aronson's talk, "The Elevation Education: The Art and Science of Helping Students Become Smarter, Nicer, and Happier," next Friday at the first FIU Faculty Innovation Showcase for Student Success. Details are below!  

More Efficient Feedback

We know you’re swamped right now—the papers and assignments are pouring in—so we hope this tip will save you some time and stress. Since your time is limited, we have suggestions for using it wisely when you're giving feedback on students' work.   

When responding to student work, it’s easy to get sidetracked by the surface features (formatting issues, small errors, a misused word…the list goes on). You’ll use your time more strategically—and cultivate more learning—if, before you begin providing feedback, you reflect on why you gave the assignment. What’s the instructional purpose of the assignment? What did you want students to get out of doing it? What kind of conceptual knowledge did you want to see? What reasoning skills were you asking students to practice? 

Once you’ve clarified the purpose of the assignment, the goals should guide your feedback. Did your students accomplish the most important goals of the assignment? Good feedback lets students know what they are already doing well and what they need to keep practicing in order to accomplish the goals. But you can absolve yourself of responding to minor details, or issues that aren’t pertinent to the goals of the assignment. In fact, students will learn more if you don’t respond to everything, but instead give targeted feedback. 

Learners (especially novice learners) can process only a limited amount of feedback at once, so we must stick to the essentials. What’s most important? What needs most work? What’s working best? Novice learners are not yet able to distinguish the most important feedback from minor details, so we have to help them prioritize. We can do that most effectively by resisting that temptation to focus on minutia. 

For more great advice on giving targeted feedback, you can consult chapter 5 (Dealing With Issues of Grammar and Correctness) or 16 (Writing Comments on Students' Papers) of John Bean's fabulous resource, Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. It's available free online through the FIU library: just click here.

Peer Learning

When we sent out Phillip Carter’s fantastic teaching tip on heritage languages a few weeks ago, your responses prompted us to reflect more on teaching at an HSI. How do we practice “culturally-responsive” teaching at FIU?

First of all, we maintain the highest standards and expectations of our students: culturally-responsive teaching should never be misunderstood as condescension. But, as Hammond (2015) explains, we pair our demandingness with warmth and humanity. 

We may also need to recognize that more collectivist cultures prize community over individualism. Since we also know that collaboration and peer instruction can be powerful enhancements to learning, we have undeniable inducements to have our students work together, to use collaboration instead of competition. (For example, grading on a curve encourages competition, and encourages students to gauge their performance against that of others, rather than encouraging them to self-assess their learning). We serve our students better when we ask them to work together, pool their knowledge, and ensure that everyone succeeds and learns.

FIU is becoming a national leader in peer instruction. Our LA (Learning Assistant) program is the largest in the country. But you can make use of peer instruction whether you have LAs in your class or not. Here are a few strategies that our colleagues on this campus use: 

Peer instruction with clickers. Many faculty already use clickers to give students practice and formative feedback during class. But pairing clicker questions with peer instruction enhances the potential of this activity. Students can answer a question first individually, but they learn more if they then discuss their responses with classmates. When students explain whythey answered in the way they did, they are making their thinking visible and engaging more deeply with course concepts. Some faculty poll again after discussion; others give points for team answers, after the peer instruction. 

Guided peer review of writing. Since writing also helps students to engage with course concepts, and make their reasoning visible, many faculty assign writing even when they themselves can’t provide feedback to every student. In order to facilitate guided peer review, faculty generate questions that guide students’ attention to the relevant aspects of the assignment. Guided peer review works well both inside and outside of class, since students can readily give feedback online. 

Group problem-solving: To challenge students with a problem that’s too complex for a single one of them to solve individually, faculty often organize students into teams, where students bring different sets of knowledge and skills to the problem-solving process. Inviting students to solve problems in teams is also a great way to build community. 

When representatives from the Gates Foundation visited FIU in December, and again a couple of weeks ago, they were astounded at what they saw happening in our classrooms. They visited Sat Gavassa Becerra’s Biology class during exam week, and instead of a silent, angst-filled room, they were stunned to find a hum of collaboration. Sat’s students take their exams in two stages: first individually, and then again in their teams, where they discuss the questions to make sure that everyone understands and has learned. A Gates representative visited Uma Swamy’s class in January, and called it “one of the best Chemistry classes I’ve seen. A flipped classroom, high engagement, and lots of peer learning.” 

Congratulations on all of your great work! If you’re using peer instruction in a way we didn’t mention here (and there are tons of other examples) please tell us about it, so we can share your ideas as well. Thanks for all you do!

Dogfooding

Guest Teaching Tip by Patty Delgado, Assistant Director, Online and Hybrid Teaching and Learning

With midterm around the corner, our students will start handing in major assignments, so this is a good time to test the exercises you’ve designed. Do they provide students with the right types of practice? How long do they take to complete? To find out, we suggest that you “dogfood” them. Dogfooding is a term borrowed from the tech industry: it’s the practice of testing out your own products before they’re put on the market.  Dogfooding allows developers to identify any bugs, glitches, poor instructions, or potential communication breakdowns in their products before they go to production; it’s easy to see how dogfooding can work with the assignments we create for our own students. 

So... before you assign that paper or project, try completing it yourself. This will give you the opportunity to test out your product (assignment) before it goes to the market (students). Try to put yourself in the student’s place, and think about where to start. You may be surprised by how long it takes you to finish the assignment (and even to decipher the instructions) but keep in mind that students will take even longer. It’s easy to under-estimate the time an assignment will take our students to complete because we’re approaching it as experts. We inhabit a state of “unconscious competence” where, according to Ambrose et al, we “exercise the skills and knowledge in our domain so automatically and instinctively that [we] are no longer consciously aware” (How Learning Works, 2010.)  Our students, on the other hand, may still be in the stage of “unconscious incompetence” where they don’t know what they don’t know.  Doing the assignment yourself, and trying to follow your own directions, will help you put yourself in the shoes of a novice learner, and more clearly identify the necessary reasoning steps they must go through to successfully complete the project.

Another benefit of finishing the assignment yourself is that you’ll have a good example share with your students.Even more important, dogfooding can help with aligning your assignment(s) with your goals. You may find after working on your own assignment that it’s not actually measuring what you want it to measure, or it is not providing your students with the right kinds of practice to be successful at the goals you want them to achieve. Maybe it’s not leading them through the sort of thinking you want them to practice.  As David Gooblar reminds us, “an assignment is not merely an instrument to measure learning; it’s a way to engender it.” 

How are your students doing?

If you’ve been reading these teaching tips for a while, you probably already know what to expect this week. Yes, it’s time to check in. How are your students doing so far? How is their progress toward your (and their) learning goals?  

A recent article in Faculty Focus gave us a fresh idea for an effective early-term check-in. Christina Moore’s assignment asks students to reflect on their own progress, so it encourages self-regulation and helps them plan for the rest of the semester. Here’s what she asks her students to do:

Report their overall grade in the course

Report their attendance record

Reflect on their performance, i.e. whether it meets their expectations

Provide goals for the rest of the course (either grades or learning outcomes—we recommend that you ask them to think about learning first, and grades after)

Provide feedback on the class and ask questions

Moore assigns this reflection online, but it’s also a worthy use of class time if your class meets face-to-face (the only proviso is that students need to keep a copy, so if you pick these up, you might want to scan and return them; you might also ask students to take photos of their own assignments with their phones.) 

As you may have intuited, one condition for making this assignment meaningful is that students must have some formal feedback (some graded, returned work!) to reflect upon, so that they can begin to form an accurate idea of their progress. This means that if we haven’t yet provided students with feedback, we need to do so as soon as possible. 

Without this feedback loop, we don’t know how we’re doing, either, so this is also a good time to think about how the class is working. If the student feedback and question-gathering in the reflective assignment don’t get you the information you need, you might also want to schedule a midterm feedback session from CAT. We can visit your class to hear from your students about how the learning experience is going so far, and what they think would help them to learn more effectively. It only takes about 20-25 minute of your class time, and it’s followed by a confidential meeting with our staff to convey what we heard and (if you like) help you think about how best to respond. Students appreciate the opportunity to chime in, and are grateful for the care this demonstrates.  

Let us know if you’d like to schedule a visit!

On the Front Lines Against Fake News

When we’re assailed every day with “fake news,” when it’s becoming increasingly tricky to decide what to believe, our responsibilities as college faculty have never been more pressing: if we don’t teach our students to think critically, who will? 

We have a duty to teach our students to evaluate evidence, to probe sources, to demand substantiation. Such complex skills develop over time and need to be practiced in a variety of contexts, so each one of us needs to prompt students to do this work. Every discipline emphasizes different ways of knowing (Bean, 1996, 2011). Since we make different sorts of claims, we must teach our students how we know what we know in each field. What counts as evidence to a historian? To a sociologist? A biologist? An engineer? 

Critical thinking isn’t a quick or easy skill to acquire: it requires time and practice. In other words, watching us think critically isn’t going to help our students much: we need to devise repeated opportunities for them to exercise and develop fledgling skills, and to get constructive feedback on their performance. 

And what are we teaching them? Critical thinking actually demands a portfolio of skills, and each assignment or activity exercises a different combination. But if we want to help students weigh evidence and sources, we’ll need to help them determine what sources are most credible, and why. (Here’s a quick guide to internet research that you can offer, but this kind of thinking must be part of long-term disciplinary training.) 

Most students do not graduate from high school with these skills. William G. Perry’s famous theory of student development (1970, 1998) posited that most students embark on their college careers in a stage of dualism, seeking right answers and expecting authorities or experts to be the source of these answers. Most leave college at the next stage, multiplicity, accepting that there can be many truths, but not yet able to prioritize amongst them. The following stage, to which we aspire to bring students, is relativism, where they see that evidence is necessary to help us weigh a range of interpretations, arguments, or narratives, and select the best. Very few undergraduates arrive at the stage of commitment within relativism.   

The purpose of a college education is to attain these later stages of development: we want our students to have criteria by which they can evaluate competing interpretations of reality, and practice in using these tools, in the university and beyond.  

Valuing Students' Language Diversity in the Classroom

Guest Teaching Tip by Phillip Carter, Assistant Professor of Linguistics in FIU's Department of English 

We don’t talk about this distinction often enough: FIU is the nation’s largest Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). Given the size of our undergraduate student body, this means that FIU is also home to the largest student population of Heritage Language speakers of Spanish in the United States, likely in the world. 

A Heritage Language (HL) speaker is someone who has some proficiency in, or a cultural connection to, a language through family, community, or country of origin. Without formal education in the language, heritage language speakers may feel comfortable listening to and speaking it with people they know, but not writing it or using it in academic settings. In a recent survey, 73% of FIU students reported speaking a language other than English at home, either exclusively or often. However, most primary and secondary schools in Miami-Dade are English-only, so many of these students cannot write fluently in their home languages, and they have limited professional or academic vocabulary in these languages. The international jobs they might otherwise land after college usually seek candidates who are bi-literate, so our students can be ill-prepared to compete. 

Research in psychology, education, and linguistics shows that a break in the transmission of Spanish from parents to children may result in negative psychological and educational consequences for Latina/o adolescents (e.g.Tseng & Fuligni 2000; Oh & Fuligni 2009 ). So what can we do to validate our students’ bilingual or heritage-language identities in our classrooms? 

First, we can remove the stigma from bilingualism and remind students that it has sociocultural, educational, cognitive, and economic benefits. We can also affirm local languages by using them ourselves when we are able, and by licensing our students to use them. We can encourage students to use heritage languages when doing group work, when taking notes, and in writing assignments. They may otherwise assume that the use of HL is off limits at all times. 

Since students’ heritage languages are valuable, we can also support their continued acquisition of these languages. Many of our students lack vocabulary in their HL in the content areas we teach, but we can encourage them to learn disciplinary vocabulary in their HL. On quizzes, students might write answers in English and their HL. On homework assignments, students can look up, write down, and submit all the new words they learned in English that they didn’t know in their HL (e.g., atom, neutron, electron: átomo, neutrón, electrón). In my course, “Languages and Cultures of the World,” students have to label every country on the globe on weekly geography quizzes; I encourage them to write the country names in English and Spanish. (Latvia : Letonia; Poland : Polonia; Belarus : Beilorrusia). A little effort on my part demonstrates to them we do not assume English-only in the classroom and that their bilingualism is relevant and valuable. A little effort on their part helps them learn important content in their home language. Así ganamos todos!

A Day of Oaths

On this day, marked by the taking of oaths, it strikes us that, just as doctors vow to uphold the Hippocratic Oath, as educators, we, too, have solemn duties to the students whose lives we hope to enrich. Though we may not hold lives in our hands, we have an humbling amount of power over students’ futures.

In his course Teaching Fast and Slow, our colleague Paul Feigenbaum asks his graduate students to read the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath and develop their own versions that articulate the ethical responsibilities of teachers to their students. Learning about this powerful assignment prompted us to read the modern version, which we think is worth citing here in full.

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant: I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug. I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery. I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God. I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick. I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help. Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in many medical schools today.

As you continue to prepare students for a future that is yet to unfold, we’d like to challenge each you to create your own Hippocratic Oath for educators. We’d love to see them if you’re willing to share.

Where Do We Start?

We hope the first week of the new semester was a good one, and your classes are off to a promising start. Since add/drop is still underway, this is a great time to find out what your students already know. We usually have a good idea of what we think they ought to know when they arrive in our classes, but do we check to see what they really know, before we move on? 

We should. The first principle of learning, in How Learning Works (one of our favorite resources) is this: Learning must be built on prior knowledge. Learning is a process of “interpreting incoming information and… perceptions through the lens of…existing knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions.” To learn effectively, students must connect what they learn to what they already know—so if we want them to make good progress over the course of the semester, we need to know where they’re starting. 

Once we’ve identified useful prior knowledge, we can help students to activate it, make the right connections, and build new learning effectively; on the other hand, incomplete or inaccurate prior knowledge or assumptions can hinder learning instead of help it, so we need to root out misconceptions and correct them. As Gooding and Metz (2011) explain, "the brain files new data by making connections to existing information. If this new information does not fit the learner's established pattern of thinking, it is refashioned to fit the existing pattern... Brain connections are strengthened when revisited or rehearsed, so each false practice fortifies the misconception--making it even more resistant to change." Merely presenting the correct information does nothing to dispel misconceptions, so it's critical that we help students identify gaps, errors, or alternative understandings, and work explicitly to adjust them. 

Once you’ve identified what prior knowledge students need in order to succeed in your class, you can determine the best way to gauge your students’ fluency with these concepts. You might try a quiz, a concept inventory, a self-assessment probe, diagnostic writing, or many other strategies. It’s important that these be non-graded, however, and that students know they’re non-graded. They can even be anonymous—and it’s useful if they’re easy to quantify, so you can see where the class as a whole is starting. 

And there’s an added benefit to grounding your semester in what your students already know and do well: it gives you the opportunity to help them recognize their strengths, and build their confidence. As this recent Faculty Focus article suggests, that positive reinforcement may in turn enhance their engagement with the course.

Resolutions

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to take your class? Is it inspiring, daunting, engaging, dreary? How do you feel teaching it? This isn’t an idle question: the way you and your students feel about the class and each other will shape what and how much they learn. 

As we start a new year and a new semester, we have the opportunity to pause, and begin this spring thinking more intentionally about the affective dimensions of the learning experiences we’re crafting for our students. The learning goals you set are critically important, of course, and you’ve heard us mention them many times. But classroom climate also shapes the learning experience, and students’ memories of their time with us. As the letters to our Thank-A-Prof program remind us, students find your excitement (or boredom) contagious, and they are motivated by your care. Students will work harder, and learn more, if they trust you and their peers; if they feel supported to take intellectual risks; and if they’re swept up in the thrill of discovery. 

Although a strong sense of classroom community may not have characterized our own undergraduate experiences, we now know that a sense of belonging—a social sense of security—is almost a precondition for deep learning. Zaretta Hammond (2015) explains that “the brain experiences social pain—not connecting with others or being rejected by them—in the same way it experiences physical pain” (p. 76). The resulting flood of cortisol impedes reflective thinking, and inhibits learning. But “trust… frees up the brain for other activities such as creativity, learning, and higher order thinking” (p. 76). Almost all college students feel alienated or insecure at times, but it’s especially easy for first-generation-in-college students, or non-native speakers of English, like many FIU students, to doubt whether they belong. This means it’s all the more important that we communicate care along with our high expectations. The teachers Hammond characterizes as “warm demanders” approach the human dimension of instruction in a particularly effective way: They “earn the right to demand engagement and effort” by building rapport and trust (p. 99). 

So how can you cultivate a warm learning environment? It doesn’t hurt to start by humanizing yourself. We’re often startled to learn that students perceive us as invulnerable automatons, just by virtue of our positions, but a small gesture can help; admitting that you struggled as a student, or still miscalculate sometimes, can make you seem a little more human. Some faculty mention their kids, or show pictures of their cats, or laugh at their own quirks. In order to build trust, you also need to demonstrate that you see your students as individuals, worthy of concern and attention, rather than as anonymous numbers. In a huge class where you have no hope of learning all their names, you can still be thoughtful about the language you use to communicate with students, as well as the way you listen and respond to their questions or confusion. Patience and respect go a long way. Students also need to have faith that their efforts will result in learning, so making your instructions and expectations transparent; explaining why you ask them to do certain tasks and what it takes to succeed; and providing scaffolding and feedback are all fundamental aspects of building trust.  

For ideas on fostering a community of learners, where students develop trust and respect for one another, please consider joining us next week (or online) for a webinar on teaching empathy. We'll be hosting a viewing and debrief in GL 156 (see below for details). And stay tuned for upcoming workshops on dealing with classroom micro-aggressions! 

As this new semester opens, we encourage you to think more about the human dimension of the classroom, and ask yourself two questions: How do I want my students to feel as they progress through my course? How can I create a learning environment that will foster those feelings? 

We’re excited about supporting your teaching this semester, and we hope you had a restorative break and much happiness with your loved ones. Welcome back!