Teaching

Hello and welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, our colleague Katherine Mangan describes some tips to improve student success that she heard at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges, in Dallas. Then Dan spotlights some recent opinion pieces on course evaluations, previews some upcoming meetings, and shares one reader’s favorite books about teaching.

Setting Up ‘Guardrails’ for Students

When it comes to doling out teaching advice that’s backed by results, few can rival the rapid-fire, folksy delivery of Tony Holland, a special assistant to the chief of staff at the Alabama Community College System.

Holland, former dean of instruction at Wallace Community College, kept an overflow crowd of community-college educators here entertained as he spelled out five strategies for improving student success and closing socioeconomic achievement gaps. They’ll work, he said, for seasoned instructors as well as those just starting out.

“Are you going to take a brand new adjunct with a busload of students and send them down a windy mountain road and say ‘hope you make it’?” he asked in a variation of a talk he’s taken on the road. “Why not set up some guardrails?”

Wallace credits the approach, dubbed I-CAN (it stands for improvement, constant and never ending), with increasing by 67 percent the number of associate degrees awarded between 2010-11 and 2014-15. Retention rates there jumped 27 percent over that period. Minority students experienced, by far, the greatest improvements.

Here are the five tips Holland, who taught chemistry for nearly three decades, swears by:

• Pass out course evaluations early in the semester and focus on making sure students can tell you care. If you wait until the end of the semester, struggling students may have dropped out and you won’t have time to adjust your teaching style.
• Set clear learning objectives for each unit so students know exactly what to study and feel more in control of their learning. Without those, “We were training students not to show up for class, wait until two days before the test, and then cram,” Holland said. “We wondered why students didn’t retain any of the information.”
• Create 10-minute videos for each objective that students can watch and show up to class prepared to discuss. When it comes time to review, a student can read the unit objective and watch the corresponding video.
• Give frequent quizzes, essays, and group work so both the instructors and students know where they stand and students stay engaged.
• Provide early, intrusive interventions like meeting with every student who scores below a 70 on the first test.

Such support could give struggling students the confidence they need to continue, Holland said, especially “when no one within a rock’s throw of their home has been to college and they have no one they can turn to.”

ICYMI: Student Evaluations

• Karen Kelsky recommends taking advantage of course evaluations — and their many flaws. How? By engaging students to think critically about, say, the cultural, philosophical, and measurement dimensions of evaluations. “Depending on what you are teaching,” Kelsky wrote in The Chronicle, “you might even be able to connect the topic to something you are studying in class. That might work, for example, if you are teaching sociology, psychology, research design, or critical theory.” Other professors have suggested taking advantage of similar classroom obligations — like tapping the pedagogical potential of your syllabus.
• If colleges place too much weight on student evaluations when making employment decisions, Michelle Falkoff writes in The Chronicle, then perhaps they should adopt more holistic approaches to evaluating faculty. It could include things like watching faculty members teach, “reviewing their course materials, reading faculty self-evaluations, and meeting with them one-on-one to discuss performance.”

Calendar

• The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development’s International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence meets May 26-29 in Austin, Tex.
• The annual meeting of the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (Ncore) convenes May 29 through June 2 in New Orleans

Your Must-Reads

Last week Beckie asked you to share the name of the book that’s had the biggest impact on how you teach. Taryn Vian, a clinical professor of global health at Boston University’s School of Public Health, offered four. Here they are, along with her reasoning:

• Teaching Interculturally: A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Intercultural Development, by Amy Lee. “Great ideas for how to engage students in ways that encourage and use their diversity as a part of the learning process, and how to assess student knowledge and skills in ways that acknowledge and honor diversity. Includes first-person case studies from several professors.”
• Evidence-Based Training Methods: A Guide for Training Professionals, by Ruth Colvin Clark. “This book summarizes education research findings for a practitioner audience. Each chapter starts with a test of your knowledge of the science of teaching, e.g. Do interesting visuals promote better learning? When teaching two topics, is it better to group practice questions by topic or to mix the questions for both topics in the same session? Then the author presents the evidence and provides guidance for applying the science to your own teaching and training. Very readable.”
• Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups, by Joanna Wolfe. “Helpful ways to think about helping students work in teams and the role of written communication on teams. It discusses lots of ways things go wrong, and provides tools and suggestions for avoiding problems. There are links to some videos, and scripts of those group interactions to analyze.”
• Successful Beginnings for College Teaching: Engaging Your Students From the First Day, by Angela Provitera McGlynn. “Small exercises with instructions, tips for how to create a welcoming environment and promote student participation. I reread parts of this each year, at the start of the fall semester.”

We’ve gotten a lot of thoughtful feedback to this question, but we’d love to hear more. Please keep your suggestions coming! You can email them to beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

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. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here.

— Katherine and Dan