Hello, and welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week Beth tells you about a reader who says that, contrary to a recent newsletter, short workshops can be effective at changing teaching habits — and she offers a couple of tips. Dan shares some ideas that can help you kick off the semester, and a recent debate about how expertise can be a double-edged sword in teaching. And Beckie lets you know about some coming events to consider putting on your calendar. Let’s start.
Short but Effective
We like it when our readers argue with us. Really. It means that we’ve touched a nerve, or that you have a different perspective and want to share it. Case in point: This month I wrote about an eight-week, active-learning institute for faculty members at the University of California at Irvine.
Rebecca Brent, a seasoned teacher of active-learning strategies, primarily for STEM professors, wrote to tell me that she was “a little dismayed” that I seemed to dismiss the value of short workshops. “I completely agree that most faculty would need more than a single workshop to really learn all the ins and outs of, say, students working in teams,” she wrote. “But a well-designed workshop can go a long way toward persuading faculty to try nontraditional teaching approaches and helping them acquire the basic skills to get started.”
That got me curious: How can you run a short, effective workshop on something so complex? In one day can you really persuade professors to change their teaching? A former associate professor of education, Brent has run, by her estimate, more than 500 short workshops through her consulting firm, Education Designs. I figured she’d know, so I gave her a call. Here are some takeaways from our conversation:
Show AND tell. Don’t just talk about active learning. Do it. Brent and her partner, Richard M. Felder, a professor emeritus of chemistry at North Carolina State University, take participants through various active-learning exercise so they can feel what it’s like to learn through collaboration and open-ended problem solving. That, she says, starts turning on the lightbulbs.
Give concrete suggestions. Many workshops err on the side of theory, Brent says, and assume professors know how to apply it to their classroom. “It’s often not that easy,” she notes. Two favorite techniques she shares: At the end of every class, ask students to write down short answers to two questions: What was the main point of class today, and what was the muddiest point? Their responses can tell you what you need to work on. Another basic technique is to group students in twos or threes, and get them to do something together — explain a concept they just learned or describe how they’d get started on a problem. The act of talking, then reporting out, immediately livens up the class.
Get concerns on the table. Everyone believes that students hate active learning and that evaluations will suffer, right? And that you won’t be able to cover everything in your syllabus? So address those concerns. Brent calls it giving them a “huge dose of take-it-easy. Don’t try to transform everything you do overnight.”
Brent agrees that longer-term training and continuing support are needed for “massive change in achievement.” But the techniques learned in short workshops can lead, she says, to increased energy in class, more engagement, and more questions from students. “It’s a great way to start,” she says, “and then people need to find their own comfort zone.”
For more ideas, turn to the book Brent and Felder wrote, which is also a favorite of this newsletter’s readers: Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide (Jossey-Bass, 2016).