Teaching

Hello and welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, Beth reflects on what the latest strategies of ed-tech companies could mean for professors. Then Beckie distills some new research on high-impact practices, shares readers’ advice for limiting digital distraction, and asks what book changed the way you teach. Let’s begin:

What’s Next for Ed Tech?

Last week I attended the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, which included posh receptions and appearances by George W. Bush, John Legend, and Matthew McConaughey. If that doesn’t sound like your typical academic conference, it’s because GSV stands for Global Silicon Valley. Yes, lots of ed-tech companies chased lots of investor money while promising to improve learning.

So was there anything of note for our newsletter readers, people on the frontlines of teaching? Absolutely. Many of the conversations around ed-tech began with a discussion of student achievement gaps. Presenters talked about the stagnant national college graduation rate; differences by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status; and the growing percentage of low-income students entering higher education. Far from disrupting traditional higher education, which has been the standard narrative of ed tech, the industry was promising to improve it.

One education consultant called the linking of tech and student success the new “North Star,” a way to find common ground with academe. We’ll be likely to hear a lot more, in short, about how tech tools and systems can help students learn better and move more quickly through college.

To be sure, plenty of start-ups described their products in ways that seemed to exaggerate the ease with which they could solve higher education’s problems. That included apps to help students feel socially connected and thus — if only it were so simple — less likely to drop out, and programs that promised to remove course-scheduling barriers in the way that Google maps gets you on the fastest route.

But higher-ed representatives on a number of panels agreed that technology, including partnerships with tech companies, could potentially reduce bureaucratic inefficiency, lower costs, and improve the classroom experience, thus moving more students to graduation. That could include campuswide predictive analytics to quickly reach at-risk students, open educational resources to lower textbook costs in general-education courses, and adaptive learning courseware to help reduce failure rates in large introductory classes. “There is no low-tech solution out of this,” said Bridget Burns, executive director of the University Innovation Alliance, a consortium of 11 large public universities exploring promising ways to increase graduation rates and reduce achievement gaps.

I’d like to hear about your ed-tech experiences. Have you found a tool or a system that helped your students learn more effectively or plan their academic careers more carefully? Has anything you’ve tried promised more than it delivered? And what would you tell the ed-tech industry if you were in charge of product design? Send me your stories at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

Do High-Impact Practices Boost Graduation?

High-impact practices, like service learning and writing-intensive courses, have gained traction on campuses. These days, much of the conversation has shifted from whether to adopt so-called HIPs to how to ensure that they’re available to all students.

The practices, which are research-based, are meant to boost student engagement and retention. A new paper in The Journal of Higher Education, however, casts some doubt on the extent to which the practices improve student outcomes. It found that the practices had limited relationships with graduation rates at large public institutions. Eight of the 10 HIPs had no significant relationship with graduation rates, while internships had a slight negative relationship with four-year but not six-year graduation rates, suggesting they increased the time students took to finish college, and freshman seminars had a slight negative relationship with both rates.

What Are Your Must Reads?

This spring, Terry McGlynn shared recommendations of books to “improve your teaching,” with a particular focus on science and active learning, on the blog Small Pond Science. Among his picks: Handelsman et al.’s Scientific Teaching (2007) and Ambrose et al.’s How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010).

McGlynn’s post got us wondering: What book has had the biggest impact on the way you teach? What did you take away from it, and what do you do differently as a result? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and your response may appear in a future newsletter.

How to Help Students Focus

A few weeks ago, we asked if you ever ask students to practice silence — like a handful of professors I wrote about here — and what else you do to fight digital distraction. A couple of readers shared that they, too, use quiet to prepare students for the class period. Among them was Robert Petersen, a professor in the art department at Eastern Illinois University, who offered a twist on the exercise he has adopted from Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor. Petersen begins class by having students spend a few minutes drawing self-portraits on index cards. “This is how I take attendance,” he wrote, “and the students put everything away and quietly focus for a few minutes.” To shake things up, Petersen continued, “I will often suggest a theme for the day by telling them to draw themselves as magicians, or being shot out of a cannon, or as a dinosaur, or lying on the beach.” At the end of the term, he returns all of his students’ cards to them.

Holly Taylor Coolman, an assistant professor in the department of theology at Providence College, described her efforts to help students cultivate alternative habits. Among them: inviting students to her home for dinner. “This is unusually convenient for me because I live across the street from campus,” she writes, “but there would probably be other ways to support the basic idea: If we want to address digital distraction, we can’t just try to take away devices. We also have to foster other habits ... like conversation!”

At least one newsletter reader is still looking for some advice on using contemplation in her discipline. “I would love to discuss in more detail how this can be applied to my business communication classes,” wrote Heather Cooper Bisalski, an instructor of management at Dalton State College. Have a good tip for Bisalski? Send it to me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and I may share it, either in a future newsletter or directly with her.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

— Beth and Beckie