Can This University Change Its Teaching Culture?

Tim Samples could tell that his students were stuck. Earlier this semester, Samples, an associate professor in the legal-studies program at the University of Georgia, was teaching students about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in an upper-level course. The questions they were asking revealed to Samples that the class wasn’t quite getting it. So he had his students work together in small groups to organize information into a pro/con grid. Creating such lists, Samples has found, is a good way to identify and clear up misconceptions during class time — and students like walking out of class with a study guide, too.

Samples says he’s long used active-learning techniques in his teaching, even before he knew that’s what he was doing. But working with the university’s teaching center has helped him grow more sophisticated in his approach. This summer, he went through the university’s Active Learning Summer Institute, an intensive program in which professors get stipends and support to redesign a course. That process pushes them to think through not just what they’re doing in the classroom, but why.

The University of Georgia is trying to establish itself as a place where teaching the way Samples does — deploying active-learning techniques in a thoughtful way — is the norm. Active learning, an approach that aims to get students to construct rather than consume knowledge, is supported by evidence that it improves student learning over all and can also reduce performance gaps for underrepresented students. It’s a teaching-focused answer to the big question of how to support this generation of students, many of whom bring with them work and family responsibilities and mental-health challenges, and whose educations were disrupted by the pandemic.

To that end, the university has budgeted more than $1 million a year for the project’s five years to work on three fronts: expanding professional development like the summer institute Samples attended; offering programs to help students better understand and succeed in an active-learning environment; and redesigning classrooms so that they’re better suited for collaborating with classmates rather than listening to lectures. The overarching goal is “to create an environment in which our undergraduate students can’t help but encounter active learning somewhere across their curriculum,” says Meg Mittelstadt, director of the teaching center, “and hopefully many somewheres across their curriculum.”

The initiative serves as the university’s latest Quality Enhancement Plan, which UGA’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, requires members to produce as part of the reaffirmation process. While all such plans must lay out a path for improving student outcomes, teaching experts at other universities say that Georgia’s focus on teaching culture is ambitious and unusual — especially for an R1 university. It’s much easier to add a new program for students or emphasize a core skill in the curriculum.

While support for active learning among teaching-oriented instructors, faculty developers, and scholars who study teaching and learning can almost be assumed, no one has quite cracked the nut on how to reach the many people teaching college students who don’t fall into one of those categories. If Georgia’s project is successful, it would demonstrate that a college can, in fact, encourage professors to embrace more-effective teaching approaches, provided the institution is willing to invest the necessary resources. And it could offer other colleges a playbook for doing the same.

Marni Shindelman signed on to the university’s Active Learning Summer Institute several years back, hoping to pick up some tips and tricks to make the large introductory course she’d be teaching for the first time in many years as engaging as the small studio courses she taught.

The “tips and tricks” approach is pervasive in faculty development: Much of the discussion about how to improve college teaching is focused on contained, incremental changes that instructors can make on their own. That’s probably less because reformers see individual efforts as the most effective and more because they’re the most achievable; they can be done on the shoestring budget faculty development often receives.

What’s more, the experts who advocate trying something hope — and often find — that one change leads to another: Professors who start tinkering with their teaching and see some positive results often keep tinkering. Eventually, some of them figure out how to build something that really works.

Most colleges, then, offer a variety of quick-fix, short-term faculty-development programs. Georgia does that, too. Quick-hit trainings are like grocery-store samples: They whet the appetite for more. They’re not meant to serve as a substitute for comprehensive faculty development. That’s where more-intensive programs come in, like Georgia’s summer institute.

Study after study has found that students taught with an active-learning model perform better than those taught in a traditional lecture course, though this top-line finding does come with some nuances: Many instructors use a mix of lecturing and individual or group exercises, and instructors’ knowledge of how to employ active-learning approaches varies considerably, which can lead to uneven results.

Trying active learning is challenging, and sometimes humbling. Professors must leave behind a teaching approach that was comfortable and had the appearance of success for a new method. Students are sometimes initially resistant, and learning outcomes might get worse before they get better.

Shindelman, an associate professor of photography and extended media, was surprised to find that the summer institute changed her teaching approach on a fundamental level. “We did so much work breaking down assignments and kind of doing a lot of engineering of coursework,” Shindelman recalls, “and that just ended up flowing into everything.”

Her other courses already had a lot of activities. They are intended to encourage a creative process, to help students see how to set themselves up for the kind of idea-generation that can feel like magic. But she never really explained that to her students. Since completing the institute, she says, “I’m a lot more transparent in everything I do.” Before, she says, she was taking her students on a mysterious journey. Now, she gives them a map.

That shift in her teaching, Shindelman says, has changed the way students behave in her courses. They’re driven to seek out more knowledge and opportunities on their own. They’ve formed a community — something she hadn’t seen happen since photography students stopped spending all their time in darkrooms. They’re having more fun, and so is she.

Getting students in a photography course to exercise their creativity is one thing. But active-learning advocates have also argued that the approach can help solve one of higher ed’s most stubborn problems: Getting more students through the foundational courses that have historically weeded many out. Teach those courses differently, research has shown, and students won’t just learn more — more of them will pass, and be able to keep pursuing their degrees.

But teaching those core courses differently is logistically complicated, with often hundreds of students enrolled and multiple instructors teaching sections that are more or less aligned. These courses are high stakes for students but also for departments since subsequent courses are designed on the premise that students have already learned particular content and skills. And there’s no way around it: Overhauling a foundational course is just a lot of work.

With the right support, though, it’s possible. Take, for example, the experience of the instructional team that teaches Elements of Physiology, an introductory course that enrolls some 300 students.

Until this past fall, intro to physiology followed a standard lectures-and-exams format. Then one instructor who’d taught the course for many years and another who was new to it were accepted into the summer institute.

The instructors, Karen Wells and Dax Ovid, designed a new, weekly rhythm for the course, with “Muddy Mondays,” (going over the most confusing point from the previous week), “Working Wednesdays” (doing activities to practice applying the material), and “Freaky Fridays” (reviewing the most-missed quiz question). The idea was to give students lots of collaborative practice to deepen their understanding of the material.

Many students come into college expecting to be tested on problems very similar to the ones they completed in homework or during class. College-level work, though, often requires applying concepts to a fresh problem. Giving students lots of practice on the hardest concepts, the instructors figured, would provide better preparation.

Early results suggest they were right. The last time Wells and another instructor taught the old version of the course, its “DFW rate” — the percentage of students who received a D or an F, or withdrew — was 19 percent. In the redesigned version, with the same two instructors plus Ovid, the DFW rate dropped to 11 percent. In a class of about 300, that translates to roughly 25 additional students passing the course.

That’s a pretty striking change to see from one semester to the next. So what was behind it? As is often the case in an active-learning course, the instructors emphasized the importance of practice by giving students more points for it. This can complicate measuring the success of a new model, though, because even if students did the same on the exams, more of them would likely pass simply because the additional points would lift their grades. But after the physiology redesign, the instructors found, students also scored higher on the exams.

Put it all together and the redesign of this introductory course suggests that it’s possible for professors to make substantive changes in their teaching and see significant improvement in student performance in short order. But without the stipends and dedicated time, Ovid says, “we wouldn’t have been able to pull off what we did.”

But Georgia’s goal isn’t revamping a bunch of courses. It’s culture change. What would that look like?

The math department offers a glimpse of how early successes can snowball, given the right conditions. Two pairs of math instructors, one focused on precalculus, the other on calculus I, were early participants in the Active Learning Summer Institute. Both courses were flipped so that students would go over new material, using videos and workbooks, before class time, and use class time to practice doing problems, including collaboratively. Because those are coordinated courses — in which students are supposed to be given a similar experience from one section to another — other instructors are, to varying degrees, using the new materials.

And there were lots of other instructors involved: Georgia had capped sections of these math courses at 19 students in an effort to improve student success. Even with some instructors teaching multiple sections, there are dozens of people teaching these courses in a typical semester. And because some of those instructors are graduate students, there are frequently new instructors in the mix.

For many students, getting through precalculus or calculus I is the biggest hurdle on their path to an intended major in business or in biology. A significant part of the challenge, instructors say, is the way students view math and their math ability. When math is taught differently, it can chip away at those perceptions.

While the other courses in the calculus sequence are not coordinated — meaning professors have more autonomy in how they’re taught — an instructor created a flipped version of calculus II and made it available to colleagues; there are also some materials for flipping calculus III.

Now that students are used to taking the new versions of precalculus and calculus I, some of them are seeking out flipped sections of the more-advanced courses. “The students request it,” says Toyin Alli, a senior lecturer who helped lead the initial push to redesign the introductory courses. “If the professor is not teaching with the flipped materials, they will ask if they can get the videos as well. Because their friends have videos.”

One way change can spread, in other words, is student demand.

The department has seen major gains in student success, with a combined 750 more students passing precalculus and calculus I — allowing them to stay on track for their intended majors — each year. The project dovetails with other ways in which the math department emphasizes teaching, like a formal mentorship program for graduate-student instructors, a biweekly seminar series on teaching, and bringing teaching-center programming into the department.

Having supportive leaders was also key, Alli says. When calculus I was first flipped, she says, the department head at the time tried it out. The next head went through the summer institute to redesign one of his upper-level courses.

The department won an active-learning change grant, one of the first half dozen awarded by the university, to weave active learning throughout the full calculus sequence.

With so many math instructors using active learning, and multiple ways for them to collaborate, a professor who runs into a challenge or has a question has many places to turn for support.

Most faculty developers would be overjoyed with a fraction of the energy around teaching culture that Georgia has drummed up. But that energy still lives in pockets. Some departments, like math, appear to have a critical mass of instructors who are all in on active learning. In others, interested faculty members remain isolated.

Culture change requires fixing that.

Faculty development is an investment, and it’s a long game. No one expects a new professor to have fully arrived as a researcher, Mittelstadt, the teaching-center director, points out. But that is kind of how universities often treat faculty members in the classroom — they waltz in and do it well right away, or there’s something wrong with them. Georgia’s project recognizes that individual instructors respond to institutional incentives (it’s worth noting that the university isn’t forcing faculty to participate). It assumes that teaching culture is something a university can and should change in the interest of student success.

Teaching is complicated, and improvement is iterative, and it’s never done. Even a professor who’s successfully overhauled a course still needs further support and departmental encouragement to sustain and build on those changes. But colleges often expect professors to do professional development in their own time, says Mittelstadt. “At the end of the day, I want to work at an institution where educational development is viewed as part of your 9-to-5 gig, and not something you do quietly at 10 o’clock at night when you have five extra minutes.”

The other project here for Mittelstadt is recasting the idea of becoming a better teacher as a core part of a professor’s job. But for that to be true, offering meaningful professional development in teaching has to be part of a university’s responsibility. Georgia’s active-learning push demonstrates that it is possible for colleges to build out that support, that there are professors eager to take advantage of it when they do. The next question is whether enough of those professors will change the way they teach.

When will active learning have truly arrived at Georgia? “When faculty and departmental and unit leaders stop asking, ‘What is active learning?’” Mittelstadt says, “and start asking, ‘How and when do we do active learning?’”

And Leah Carmichael, who began a new role as director of active learning in 2022, has a measure of her own. Carmichael doesn’t think her position should be a permanent one. “Ultimately, I want the office of active learning to go away,” she says. “I want it to just be learning at UGA.”