One major takeaway for several professors was the prominence of blockchain. Smith, who is also a professor of entrepreneurship, came back from the January trip convinced he needed to teach more about the technology, a cloud-based distributed ledger replicated across computers, immediately. So Smith quickly adjusted the social-entrepreneurship course he was teaching that spring to focus on how blockchain can be used for social good. To do so, Smith drew on experts from the university, the local community, and the Bay Area who visited the class in person or virtually to share their expertise.
Inspired by Smith and other colleagues, several Miami professors are adding that subject to their courses, too.
Helping students get up to speed on an emerging technology offers a good template for the future. “I’m never going to be able to teach them everything that they need to know 30 years from now,” Smith said. But if he can demonstrate how to figure out new things, he said, they’ll be well equipped to keep learning on their own.
Skip Benamati, a professor of information systems and analytics, hadn’t been to Silicon Valley since the late 1990s, and he was struck by how different its corporate culture was from the more-conservative Midwest. The time he spent on the trip, he said, will help him advise students who want to work in that environment.
The faculty trips have been expensive to run, said Glenn Platt, director of interactive media studies, who helped organize them. But the professors have another plan for spending time on the ground. Platt is working with Smith to start a new master’s program to be based in San Francisco, he said. The program will include a faculty fellowship for a Miami professor to spend time on site teaching with an industry expert. The fellowship model, he said, will allow the business school to keep infusing the latest developments into the classroom.
What does your college or department do to help professors stay current in fast-moving fields? How do you bring the latest developments back to your students? Share your examples with me, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and they may appear in a future newsletter.
Creative Ways to Train Instructors
Last week I wrote about an initiative at the University of California at Irvine that helps train faculty members in active-learning methods, and asked if your campus offers in-depth programs on active learning or other innovative teaching techniques. Here are some reader responses:
- The University of Southern California this year started three new teaching institutes designed to help graduate students, new faculty members, and senior professors. The last group will receive training on how to spread good teaching practices across their school. Also in the works: institutes for online, part-time, and off-site faculty members.
- Skyline College, part of the San Mateo County Community College District, in California, runs an equity-training series that focuses on pedagogy and “cultural fluency.” Workshop topics include supporting men of color, Latinx student success, and disability in higher education.
- North Dakota State University is in the middle of a five-year project, funded by the National Science Foundation and called Gateways, to help STEM-faculty and instructional-staff members make their classrooms more focused on learners and to improve student outcomes. So far, 110 people have been through the program, and instructors who changed their practices saw failure and withdrawal rates decline.
Colleges Recognized for Assessment Efforts
The Excellence in Assessment program, which “recognizes institutions for their efforts in intentional integration of campus-level learning-outcomes assessment,” announced its 2018 designees last week. They are: Bowie State University, in Maryland, Harper College, in Illinois, Mississippi State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The program is sponsored by the Voluntary System of Accountability, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
A Long-Remembered Push From a Professor
We recently asked if you’ve ever used a “nudge” to help students succeed in your course. In addition to the many responses we got from instructors describing how they support students — some of which we shared last week — one wrote in to tell us about the difference a professor’s intervention had made when she was an undergraduate.
Melinda K. Duncan, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Delaware, was a first-generation college student. Back in high school, she wrote, “I was that kid who was a very good student who did not really do much work, and seldom had to study.”
Duncan stayed close to home for college, attending Lafayette. It was her “hometown college,” but she didn’t realize that most of the other students there had gone to elite high schools, or that few of them were holding down jobs, as she was. When she found herself facing a big deadline for a class project in biology at the same time as her first exam in chemistry, her major, she worked hard on the project, but barely studied for the test. After all, she said, “I always got high 90s in all of my science courses in high school with no effort.”
The strategy backfired. “As a chem major,” Duncan said, “I earned the absolutely lowest grade in my class of 80 or so students — and this was my very first grade in my major course.”
Her professor, Duncan wrote, observed her in lab, which she was doing well in. “At the end of that lab,” she said, “he pulled me aside and talked up my talent in the lab while encouraging me about the lecture portion with some tips on how to succeed.” When Duncan got a B on the next exam, the professor wrote a supportive message in the margin: “Welcome back! I knew you could do it.”
While it took some time to turn around her performance, Duncan wrote, “this intervention was all-important.” Decades later, Duncan still has both tests, she wrote, because “it reminds me that there is a huge difference between ability and academic preparation.”
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 and Beth
