As we finalize preparations for a semester unlike any we have ever experienced, we want to highlight five strategies to consider for your classes to help our students succeed. For some, these strategies may be approaches you have already been implementing. For others, these strategies may be a new way of thinking about how you interact with students. The strength of the strategies is their interdependent nature; together, they reinforce a Culture of Care that will help our students thrive and reduce some tensions with our students. The strategies reinforce that we are all in this together. We hope you find these suggestions helpful.
As a bit of background, last May, Faculty Senate surveyed students about their experiences as learners during the pandemic. Students’ experiences, both positive and negative, hinged on two primary things: communication and ability to focus. Most positive experiences related to faculty who frequently communicated, most negative experiences related to faculty who did not communicate regularly, did not answer questions or did not communicate timely feedback. Most barriers students reported related to their inability to focus, whether due to technology, their home environment, or lack of course structure that promoted engaged learning.
As we head into another semester of crisis-based teaching, we can assume that students will again be experiencing a variety of challenges with attention, focus, stress, and anxiety. As faculty and academic leaders, we will be experiencing many of the same challenges and uncertainties. The strategies we suggest below are a few steps we can take to support student success, manage student expectations, and help mitigate student and faculty frustration with this less-than-ideal learning context.
Be a role model. Students will be looking to others for cues to handle being a college student during a pandemic. Many will look to their classmates and to their professors to determine their behavior. Instead of the pandemic being the elephant in the room, go ahead and discuss it with your students. Have a conversation about norms that include things like masks, remaining flexible while upholding standards, managing stress, and tips for staying focused.
2. Communicate with students regularly, precisely, and directly.
3. Set a schedule or a routine for teaching. Consistency helps students know what to expect – Monday morning announcements, assignments due a particular day and time, and grading and feedback completed by a certain number of days. Many students are goal-oriented. They enrolled in the course to attain a specific goal. Students appreciate organization and clearly defined assignments. Show them how your course will help them reach their goals – even the ones they do not know they have, yet.
4. Build-in time for community. We will not be able to do some of the things we often do to build and sustain a sense of community. Be creative and find ways that suit you and your students. The most effective adult educators may be unwitting neuroscientists who use their interpersonal skills to tailor enriched learning environments. Our brains learn through shared experiences. Throughout the life span, we all need others who show interest in us, help us feel safe, and encourage our understanding of the world. Brains grow best in this context of interactive discovery and through co-creation of stories that shape and support memories of what we are learning. (Cozolino & Sprokay 2013)
5. Let students know your reasoning or strategy behind various aspects of the class. Students need to see a reason for learning something new. Helping students see how they can apply their learning to their lives, employment, and other courses, helps them see the relevance of what you are asking them to do. “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” – Confucius, 450 B.C.
As I have been walking each morning, I sense changes in the air and light that ordinarily make me want new pencils or a new notebook. Late August is a time of transition – the new academic year – even though summer continues to blaze. Back to school is not a thing this year and I find myself searching for a more grounded symbol for the transition we are making. I am reminded of the Traditional Chinese Calendar (with 24 solar terms and one of the first elements identified UNESCO intangible cultural heritage). The weeks between mid-August and the end of September on the U.S. calendar correspond with Late Summer on the Chinese calendar. This is a time of transition when we return to the middle between the expansive growth of spring and summer and the more inward energy of fall and winter. We are making a big transition from meeting outdoors and virtually to meeting indoors and socially distant for class. We are focusing on being safe and healthy as part of living our Culture of Care.
This issue of the Faculty Affairs Newsletter features resources and information for you as you return to campus and begin fall semester.
-Alexis
Interested in data viz? Check out the UNESCO ICH constellation:
Compliance or Community-Building? How to Help Students Hold One Another Accountable for Covid-19 Safety in the Classroom
Description – This session will offer tips for establishing classroom community for safe and conducive learning environments. Focus will be on norm-setting and establishing expectations in which students hold one another accountable for meeting the norms (including mask-wearing and physical distancing). Strategies for setting classroom norms for small and large student populations will be shared.
Presenter: Jennifer Waddell, PhD, Director, Institute for Urban Education, Sprint Foundation Endowed Professor in Urban Education, Interim Chair- Undergraduate Programs, Associate Professor, Teacher Education & Curriculum Studies
After signing up for this event, you will receive an email confirmation. Prior to the event, you will receive a second email containing the Zoom invite link.
The need to design our courses as format flexible this fall is bringing anxiety for many. Format flexible adds intentional online elements to the course structure, so should there be a need to transition, we teach and students engage in online learning rather than remote learning. Join us for a conversation on the challenges that faculty are facing in preparing format flexible courses and some ideas to make the transition easier.
Message from Provost: “Many courses will be offered as hybrid/blended or hy-flex in the fall semester as a means to increase accessibility, flexibility, and reduce classroom demand. Both hybrid and fully-face-to-face courses must be designed as format flexible so that if we need to make a quick shift to remote instruction, it will occur as a seamless transition to an online experience for students that continues to be highly engaging and continues to meet all of the student learning objectives for the course.”
Presenters:
Lorie Holt, Associate Professor and Director of the Dental Hygiene Degree Completion Program
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Collaboration and online interactions. Learner to learner interaction can be achieved by assigning small group projects, by requesting responses to discussion board postings and by engaging students through peer-evaluated assignments or critiques (QM Standard 5.1). In this session, we will discuss our experiences with a variety of interactions and online engagement, such as peer-evaluated assignments, oral interviews in foreign language, VoiceThread, and Canvas discussion boards (inviting the audience to share also). Finally, we will discuss our collaborative engagement in messaging with students, providing feedback on the assignments and setting productive communication guidelines.
Event Details
Presenters: Kelley Melvin, Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Viviana Grieco, Department of History and Latin American and Latinx Studies
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I will present my emergent strategy for facilitating collaborative `active learning’ in a large-enrollment, asynchronous online course utilizing Canvas, Panopto, and Zoom. I will briefly share my motivations and guiding principles for fostering active learning (it’s what the students do that matters, fundamentally) in my courses at all academic levels as a means to achieving high-quality and more equitable education. I utilize this approach because there is over 30 years of compelling evidence that active-learning pedagogy increases content mastery and reduces performance gaps, which matches what I experience in my courses. My face-to-face approach has long been ~50% of lecture time devoted to activities designed to engage students in practice and rich discussions with peers related to problem-solving, concept synthesis, and other higher-order cognitive skill development. I find that active-learning implementation that is authentic, frequent, inclusive, and encouraging is key to achieving a high level of student buy-in and active engagement in their learning. This can be achieved through any number of specific methodologies. For large enrollments, I utilize Think-Pair-Share discussion questions which can be easily adapted to asynchronous, collaborative Canvas Discussions.
Session objectives: participants will be able to
Recognize and understand the importance of active learning as a high-impact teaching practice.
Implement the use of Think-Pair-Share questions in face-to-face and online courses.
Implement the use of Discussions, Groups, and Quizzes in Canvas.
Event Details
Presenter: Daniel H. McIntosh, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Director of STEM Education Research
Academic Unit: College of Arts and Sciences; affiliated faculty, Missouri Institute for Defense and Energy
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This session will feature a small panel of faculty describing the lessons they’ve learned about students, and the tips and tricks (or words of wisdom?) these faculty wish to share with those preparing to teach online this fall. The panel presentation will be followed by a Q&A period and the opportunity to brainstorm ideas for how faculty might address specific needs in their own classes.
Event Details
Presenters:
Kati Toivanen, Professor, Studio Art, College of Arts and Sciences
Joe Parisi, Curators’ Distinguished Professor, Instrumental Music Education, Associate Director of Bands, & Director of IPhD Program
Stephanie Van Rhein, Lecturer, College of Arts and Sciences
After signing up for this event, you will receive an email confirmation. Prior to the event, you will receive a second email containing the Zoom invite link.
After signing up for this event, you will receive an email confirmation. Prior to the event, you will receive a second email containing the Zoom invite link.
Project-based learning (PBL) is a teaching and learning method that fundamentally develops 4 C’s of 21st Century Learning: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. In this interactive presentation, I talk about PBL strategies to transform classroom teaching into a high impact educational practice.
Event Details
Presenter: Majid Bani Yaghoub, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
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It is an uncomfortable time. We can resist this discomfort or embrace it. In choosing the latter, might we experience a greater sense of presence, creativity and connection in the classroom? Might we find that masks have the potential to reveal rather than hide our authentic selves? This session braves our new reality as teachers and offers perspectives on reading and reaching our students so that we might meet them where they are.
Presenter: Carla Noack, Associate Professor of Theatre in Acting
After signing up for this event, you will receive an email confirmation. Prior to the event, you will receive a second email containing the Zoom invite link.
After signing up for this event, you will receive an email confirmation. Prior to the event, you will receive a second email containing the Zoom invite link.
As educators, we have many rich experiences that will help us connect to the 21st-century student in ways we may not have seen. Students have needs that we don’t understand. We have to realize that we, too, have to learn something new every day to help us understand the needs of those we teach. This course will hopefully help us reveal teaching tools we never thought we had. This course will offer insight into how professors can tap into their lives outside of the academic environment to glean information about how to work with the 21st-century student during this COVID-19 long-distance learning period that confronts us. Ideas about reaching students can come from raising children or taking care of elderly parents, or growing a garden, or singing in the church choir, for example. Connect with what engages you to find ways to engage students.
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In this session the experiences gained in transitioning from face to face classes to a fully online format for a required sophomore Engineering class will be presented. The challenges faced and steps taken to overcome them and the benefits derived will be presented.
Event Details
Presenter: Thiagarajan Ganesh
Academic Unit: School of Computing and Engineering
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Join us as we discuss teaching strategies developed by Conservatory faculty in response to COVID-19. Topics will include integration of contemporary issues in music history classes, pivoting research/bibliography courses online, pros/cons of Canvas Chat vs. Zoom, teaching applied music/aural skills online, and overseeing GTAs with varying access and experience in online instruction.
Event Details
Presenters: Christopher Madden, Alison Desimone, and Owen Belcher
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The Teaching Evaluation and Teaching Enhancement Task Force asked students and they told us how faculty communicated, offered support, continued to provide the structure of courses amidst uncertainty. This qualitative survey has had over 500 responses where students told their stories. The survey closes at the end of the week.
Representative quotes:
“3 of my professors were very successful in making transitions to online learning. They tried to find the best way to deliver lectures online and kept making positive changes. They bought or brought devices to their remote work location and used them efficiently. They were always open to questions and quick to respond to emails. Though it was hard for everyone to make such transition those professors didn’t complain about how hard it is on their end.”
“A lot of my teachers have been very gracious and supportive during this time and as a student, I really needed that. My most positive experience has been seeing how much some professors truly care about their students and their well-being, rather than grades and success.”
“A lot of the lectures are being held on Zoom. This is very helpful for me because I have the confidence to speak up now that we have the option to post our comments, questions, and concerns in the chat bar rather than having to speak up in front of 100 students in a lecture room. Also, for one of my classes, the lectures are recorded which is so helpful in referring back to when completing assignments.”
In higher education, our first responders are the faculty. With a day (and a weekend … and spring break) you moved courses completely online. Faculty figured out new technology, took apart courses, and put them back together in the best way possible for our current context. Daniel McIntosh, associate professor of Physics, shares how he redesign and rethought his Intro to Astronomy course.
Last March, Daniel McIntosh, associate professor in the Department of Physics, moved his teaching online for the first time. Over Zoom, I interviewed Dan about what the move to online entailed, what he learned, and how he is planning to build on his experiences for fall.
AP: In general, broad terms, how did the shift to online teaching go for you?
DM: It was a big challenge. I never taught online at all and was actually opposed to the practice in terms of the impact on the students’ experiences. I have taught and designed my classes to be highly interactive where students are spending on average 50% of the time in lectures doing higher-order thinking and collaborative learning problem-solving together. Faced with the facts – there was no choice, my students didn’t sign up for an online class, and we are all stuck at home – I felt super invested to make that experience as high-quality as possible.
The first couple weeks I felt pretty down about what was happening in the world. I paid close attention to the news and the projections and then I could see where the death rate was going was obvious. So I was feeling really bummed out. I basically just threw myself at it [online teaching]. ASTR 150, Introductory Astronomy – Motions of the Cosmos saw the biggest change. The class had over 70 students and among those students included eight high school students from A Bridge to the Stars and five Propel students. I focused on how to make that class as active as possible – it consumed weeks. I was staying up until 2 o’clock 3 o’clock in the morning trying to finish things. [Through that process,] I completely rethought what I was doing.
AP: What changed for Introductory Astronomy?
DM: My class was highly active and I weighted participation, you know, it was worth 20% of the course grade. Most of the course grade consisted of several high risk exams. I was teaching in this active way to help students master the content and build their skills. Students love it – the evaluations are always good. Many students have shared that they didn’t think they could understand science or do well in science before Intro Astronomy. I had positive remarks because the active learning helped students master the material.
In the last year, I’ve been going to conferences, meeting with different groups, and learning about equitable education. The shift to online gave me the opportunity to incorporate what I have been learning about equitable education and culturally responsive teaching. I realized that the Introductory Astronomy class had 60 percent of the grade based on high-risk tests. What I really care about is do students learn the material, how do they learn the material, and what should I grade students for effort. I decided to shift my focus from the high-risk tests to the effort students put into learning the material. I set up online learning with discussion sections. Students watched a video lecture – basically a narrated slideshow. Then students joined a discussion group for collaborative learning that they completed with their peers, online, asynchronously. This way I could see their effort and I could grade their effort. I then set up mastery quizzes that were worth a lesser fraction of the grade.
AP: Aside from shifting your focus, what else changed for you?
DM: I had to stop worrying about things like do students cheat. That’s not what I care about.
We get indoctrinated into the system of caring about is it fair or not? Are they going to cheat or not? Rather than what I really care about is did they learn or not? I had to figure out how to teach online in a way that encourages effort and recognizes that students learn at different rates. Spring semester, some students got really bummed out, fell behind, and then got completely discouraged. I’ve been doing all kinds of work and lots of communication to encourage them.
AP: How did you encourage students?
DM: I sent announcements with encouraging language with messages like “I understand how you feel.” “I can understand how tough it is.” The students who really were struggling with engaging online, and had 0s, I let them know there was still an opportunity to get their work in. They can still pass or better in class. Students started responding. They popped up and started getting their assignments in. They always started with an apology for being behind. I always responded that I was so happy to hear from them, no need to be sorry. They then were excited and happy that I gave them that opportunity and said they would try their best.
AP: Yeah, that’s great. How do you set up your quizzes?
DM: Students get multiple efforts and they get a big window. This worked better than setting up the exam from four o’clock to five o’clock and if students ran out of time, tough. This is what I realized from looking at all online blogs and listening to people talking about their concerns about cheating…. I realized that there are issues with access. Some students might not have the same access to computer at the same time, or maybe they’re sharing the computer. Maybe they have an old computer with discouraging technical problems. I want the students to have a chance to show me what they learned.
I set up the quizzes so students get two chances to take them. So, a student takes the quiz the first time and then sees which questions were wrong. I encourage the student to go back and study and then take the quiz again. I give students a 12-hour window to take their two attempts. Sure, some students could figure out which ones they got wrong, call their friend, and look around for answers. They’re basically spending the same amount of effort as they would to look at the slides, and most students figure that out. They go focus their study, look at discussion questions and comments.
AP: What does active learning look like in your class?
DM: I decided I would do a bunch of mini lectures with a lot of interactive content integrating all the lectures together. It created a lot of work for me. I could no longer keep my active learning format I had built over several years. Now I have to carry each topic through like a normal traditional lecture, giving them all the content very clearly explained. I was worried about what the student experience would be like, as well as worried about access.
It was clear that asynchronous was the way to go. I broke my hour and fifteen-minute lecture into mini-lectures. I decided to focus on one key topic to make short little units. The units ideally would be 8 to 10 minute long videos. Basically students watch the video and they click that they’ve done that. The slides are posted from the video. The next thing is they have to join a group. Step 3 is to participate in the discussion of the group they joined. That’s worth a huge amount of their grade – 40-50 percent. The rule for full credit is that they enter their own response to the question. To get the full credit they have to give at least a one-sentence description of why they think what they think is the answer. When they hit submit, they see their group’s answers and their group can see their responses. Students then have to select another student who has fewer than two responses and respond. They have to say they agree or disagree and a one-sentence explanation of why. Now, of course, some students could game it. They could not watch the video. They can just say it’s done. They can go to the discussion section and you know to type in something and see other answers. But this is collaborative learning and it’s asynchronous collaborative learning.
AP: Are you going to continue teaching online?
DM: Yeah, I’ve had a complete phase change in my thinking about it. A lot of students want it for increased access – but it also creates access issues. Clearly a lot of people want online learning to happen. I don’t know about entire online degrees I think students would lose a lot of experiences. At the same time I can see where a lot of content can be delivered in an active way. I got excited thinking maybe there’s something here about this facilitating active online learning. Maybe that’s what online learning needs to be really good. I’m even thinking about blended courses.
AP: Has there been anything that you didn’t anticipate that has come out of your move online that’s been really positive?
DM: Well, personally yes. I have experienced growth for myself. I was a little bit troubled with my complete opposition to online learning because I felt sort of like a Luddite I was missing something or being resistant to change. My resistance all had to do with the student experience. But you can still do active learning online. It’s like I want to do whatever I can to make learning online a really positive experience for the students. It was worth all the effort.
AP: What’s your favorite feature of Canvas?
DM: Oh, wow. There’s actually a lot of good features on campus. I like the modular feature where you can set up steps and make them connect to each other to force things to be done sequentially. I like the discussion feature that makes it so that students can’t see the other people’s responses until after they contribute. The gradebook – I like how I can select a certain assignment and can send announcements based on how the students performed. And the speed grader is cool.
AP: Anything else you want to add that we haven’t covered?
DM: My big advice is communicate with students – repeated, repeated communication. That was one of the most important piece of advice that I read repeatedly in the beginning before I even set up a single class. I always valued communication, but making sure to have plenty of encouraging communication is important.
I think it was well-timed to learn how to do online education with learning about the equity. My tendency before was to have hard lines. I think that’s the indoctrination that we went through in education. It’s easy to get caught up in fairness and in exams or more judgment, right? Since I’ve been learning about equity, what has helped me the most is being 100% empathetic and flexible with the students. Even a year ago I would be very empathetic but I wouldn’t be as flexible. It’s easy to be caught up in this cycle of fairness and judging. We are trying to assess students’ abilities. We think that with our standard exams with the set time limit, it’s not fair to give other people more time. That is missing the whole point of trying to help people learn and reach a goal of knowing something. One analogy might be apprenticeship. Let’s say someone wants to be a plumber and they apprentice with an expert plumber. Some of the apprentices pick up the skills fast and others take two, three times longer. But if they eventually master the skills, they still get to be a plumber. The goal is not to decide who’s the genius; the goal is to help people learn and grow.
AP: Thank you so much.
DM: You’re welcome. I can talk about this stuff forever.
Daniel McIntosh, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Director, A Bridge to the Stars Pipeline Program Provost Fellow (2018-2019) Norman Royall Distinguished Professor (2017-2019) UM President’s Award for Innovative Teaching (2016)
