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Teaching

Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

May 10, 2018
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From: Beckie Supiano

Subject: How Your Office Could Inspire Student Collaboration

Happy Thursday, and welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week’s newsletter was compiled by Beckie. First up: Some thoughts on how improving faculty offices might encourage professor-student collaboration. After that, I’ll share a few thoughts from my new article on inclusive teaching, summarize a new report on near-completers, and pass along a book recommendation from a reader.

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Happy Thursday, and welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week’s newsletter was compiled by Beckie. First up: Some thoughts on how improving faculty offices might encourage professor-student collaboration. After that, I’ll share a few thoughts from my new article on inclusive teaching, summarize a new report on near-completers, and pass along a book recommendation from a reader.

Where Students and Professors Meet

Private faculty offices have long signified prestige. But they can also intimidate students, especially if they’re first generation, and discourage them from knocking on the door to seek help. And so some colleges are rethinking the use of these spaces, or creating new ones, to foster learning and student-faculty collaboration.

The move is part of a broader effort to improve student success, as Jeffrey J. Selingo, a former editor, recently wrote for The Chronicle. One idea is putting “huddle spaces” outside of classrooms, so that students who want to talk to a professor before or after class can do so more privately. Another is providing a neutral location, beyond faculty offices, where students and professors can meet.

Given professors’ ability to work from just about anywhere, some colleges are questioning whether private offices still make sense. But even private offices can be designed to expand student-faculty interaction. Jeff’s article describes how Richland College designed its Science Corner with a tutoring and advising center ringed by professors’ offices. The college says that visits to faculty offices jumped 57 percent the year after the space was finished. That reminded us of the math department’s space at Hamilton College, which we wrote about in this newsletter in the fall. When its building was redesigned, the department’s faculty offices were placed around a study area, which they open into. In addition to making faculty members more approachable, the arrangement can change students’ perceptions of math, Hamilton professors told us, showing them that the discipline is collaborative and attracts diverse students.

Even if their building wasn’t designed with collaboration in mind, individual professors can take steps to encourage it. Years ago, Jim Friedman, a clinical professor of creativity and entrepreneurship at Miami University’s business school, replaced the desk in his office with a round table. It comfortably seats five, Friedman said, but sometimes seven or eight students can be found working there — even when he’s away from the office.

The setup fits Friedman’s teaching philosophy. Too often, he says, professors tell students the answer, which does little to prepare them for a world in which “you never get a job and the boss tells you exactly what to do and how to do it.” His students know, he says, that if they ask him what they should do, their classmates have been trained to respond by asking them what options they’ve thought about so far.

Friedman offers office hours in 10-minute blocks. Signing up for a time means a student will get a turn to ask a question, he says, but typically other students will be in the room, too, and may weigh in if appropriate. If a student needs to speak with Friedman privately, he or she can indicate that, and the professor will either ask the other students to leave for a bit or take the student on a walk.

What are some things you do to encourage students to visit your office? And how do you try to put them at ease and foster conversation once they get there? Share your strategies with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and they may appear in a future newsletter.

Structure vs. Hand-Holding

This spring, I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to observe and talk with Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy, two science professors who are working to spread inclusive teaching. My article is out this week, and you can read it here.

Hogan and Sathy see inclusive teaching — which entails putting more structure into a course and thoughtfully facilitating classroom conversations — as a way to mitigate inequality, and they’ve had some success persuading other professors to use the techniques.

Still, any effort to give students more guidance is likely to be seen by some as hand-holding. Shouldn’t college students be able to figure this stuff out on their own? Hogan’s response: The need for direction is a basic human impulse. We all like to have clear expectations in our relationships and at our jobs, she told me. “Why do we treat learning,” she asked, “as something different or special?”

Lots of Credits, No Degree

Retention efforts often focus on students near the start of their college experience. But close to a fifth of students who don’t graduate have actually completed 75 percent or more of the credits needed for a degree. That’s a major finding of a new report examining more than 50 two- and four-year colleges released this week by Civitas Learning, an education-technology company. The report suggests colleges use targeted outreach — which the company’s tools can help tailor — to help such students finish, and points to successes at its partner colleges.

Another Must-Read

We’ve been sharing some recommendations — books that readers like you told us have made them better teachers. This week’s suggestion comes from Christina Heisser, an associate professor of history at Los Angeles City College. Heisser recommends The College Fear Factor, by Rebecca D. Cox, which she read in a faculty-development program put on by her district. The book details the challenges facing first-generation students, Heisser wrote. “It helped me to see that if I wanted more students to succeed I had to convince them that they could do so,” she wrote.

After reading the book, Heisser added more low-stakes assignments to build students’ confidence and gave prewriting exercises to guide students toward better essays. “I also built in an extra essay and dropped the lowest score,” Heisser wrote, “both to reduce the cost of failure and to allow for the very real work and life conflicts my students faced.”

Have a must-read of your own? It’s not too late to share a book recommendation — and explain how it changed your teaching. Just send me a note at 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.

— Beckie

Teaching & Learning
Beckie Supiano
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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