Teaching

Hello and welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, Beckie describes how one professor helps students recognize their political biases. She also asks your opinion on a debate that played out among instructors of a course she recently wrote about. Dan shares your thoughts on the merits of research versus anecdotes. And we leave you with an English professor’s moving remembrance of a student lost in a recent mass shooting.

A brief bit of housekeeping: We will not be sending you a newsletter next Thursday. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Also, some happy news: Beckie will be on maternity leave for the next few months. While she’s away, please send your tips, story ideas, and suggestions to Dan and Beth.

Showing Students Their Own Biases

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, you may be bracing yourself for your annual interactions with that relative. The uncle who forwards outlandish chain emails. The cousin who believes everything she sees on Facebook. The grandparent who parrots talk radio.

When it comes to misinformation, it’s awfully tempting to believe that the problem is other people. But no one is free of political biases, says Christina Farhart, an assistant professor of political science at Carleton College. “We all want to reinforce our prior beliefs,” Farhart says. The point is important enough that Farhart dedicates the second day of class in her “Misinformation, Political Rumors, and Conspiracy Theories” course to demonstrating this idea to her students.

Farhart has her students complete a survey asking whether they agree or disagree that genetically modified organisms are safe, how strong that belief is, and how certain they are.

This topic was chosen by Farhart and Joanne Miller, her dissertation adviser at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities – who co-designed a version of the course there when Farhart was a graduate student – because it’s controversial but not likely to generate deeply held opinions.

After completing the survey, students conduct an information search online for about an hour – taking note of the websites they visited, the order of those visits, and how they reacted – then write a journal entry about it. Then they take the same survey again.

Once students have finished all of these steps, Farhart provides each of them with a write-up about how their attitudes changed between the first survey and the second. They get this feedback just as Farhart introduces them to Ziva Kunda’s theory of “motivated reasoning.” It’s possible, the theory holds, for people to be motivated by a desire for accuracy. But that’s not usually what happens. More often than not, we’re motivated directionally, seeking information that reinforces what we already believe.

“We all do this,” Farhart says, “and we all do this about everything.”

Farhart then asks her students to write a second paper using information about how their attitudes changed, placing their information-search behavior and change in viewpoint in the context of the theory of motivated reasoning. Usually, students come to see that they became stronger in or more certain about their attitudes. That’s because the information search can be an opportunity to find material that reinforces their position.

Some students, Farhart says, do engage the accuracy motivation for the activity – probably because it’s something they’ve been asked to do in the context of a course. But even then, the desire to be accurate only takes people so far, Farhart says: People will put in only so much effort to get to the bottom of something.

Farhart’s class activity reminded us of a recent overview of a related concept: intellectual humility, the understanding that “one’s beliefs and opinions might be incorrect,” which a source at the John Templeton Foundation recently sent our way. The paper, by Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and Nathan Ballantyne, a philosopher at Fordham University, suggests that while it has not been directly tested, “there is every reason to assume” that intellectual humility can be cultivated.

That’s worth exploring, because the quality “may help us build better relationships, discover common ground with adversaries, and be more effective leaders,” as the authors put it in a summary of their review. “Ultimately, intellectual humility may be essential to protecting us from our most self-destructive tendencies.”

Have you created a course assignment or activity to help students confront their own biases? Do you emphasize the need for intellectual humility when you teach? Tell me about it at dan.berrett@chronicle.com and your example may appear in a future newsletter.

Committed but Concerned

Based on a recent Chronicle survey, this research brief reveals what faculty think about their profession, students, and their university leadership.

The Pros and Cons of Structure

Beckie has a new article out exploring how and why some colleges are laying out a new vision of what it might look like to educate the whole student.

The story uses as its main example a course, “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” that she observed at the University of Virginia (it’s being co-developed with, and also taught at, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison).

She noticed that the two instructors teaching the course at UVa this fall followed a pretty specific time schedule for how they used the 50-minute class period. They had a number of reasons for doing so, among them a desire to ensure they got through the material and had time to help students form connections between topics. In a course that explores a framework of what helps people thrive both academically – considering insights from the humanities and sciences – and practically, that’s no mean feat.

But structure also has its drawbacks, as one of the course’s designers and previous instructors pointed out. It can make it harder, for instance, to run a classroom discussion that gets past surface-level issues.

That made Beckie wonder how you balance the sometimes competing needs of making sure students have not only covered the material, but have time to fit it together, while also letting them take a discussion in unexpected but possibly fruitful directions. Send your ideas to dan.berrett@chronicle.com and they may appear in a future newsletter.

Research vs. Anecdotes

Many of you wrote to share your thoughts about the conversation Dan and Beckie had last week about the use of research in this newsletter. Opinions were pretty evenly split between those of you who wanted us to cite and emphasize research more and those who preferred that we focus on anecdotes from your fellow faculty members who have tried new approaches in the classroom.

Referring to research could help faculty-development efforts, wrote Linda Hodges, director of the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. “You would show faculty that teaching is a scholarly practice,” she wrote, “and not just a trial-and-error endeavor.”

That’s because professors who are skeptical of trying new things in the classroom often want to see some proof that they’ll work, wrote Brian Murphy, a professor of fisheries at Virginia Tech. “They want to see ‘evidence,’” he wrote. “So let’s give it to them.”

Grounding a discussion on teaching in the research literature of how humans learn gives instructors “a shared vocabulary and framework,” wrote Bill Goffe, an associate teaching professor of economics at Penn State. “Anecdotes do not.”

Others argued the opposite.

“I don’t mind links to research in case I want to check something out in more detail,” wrote Stephanie Masson, an instructor of English at Northwestern State University. “But I am often convinced to try new things based on stories from other educators.”

Flower Darby, a senior instructional designer at Northern Arizona University, said something similar: “I don’t think I have ever changed my teaching practice based on a piece of research on teaching,” she wrote. And in her experience, she added, faculty members don’t have much time to read research.

One reader, whose focus is squarely on teaching, urged her fellow readers to embrace a spirit of experimentation. “I find higher ed teachers’ need to see documented research chuckle worthy,” wrote Lisa Chretien, a history teacher at Hermiston High School, in Oregon. “I get it, but really, if it is a teaching strategy that looks fun, interesting, and something your students will like, do it,” she wrote. “If it works, use it; if it doesn’t, toss it.”

Many of you liked the idea of using some combination of research and anecdote, and you shared suggestions about how we might do so. We’re mulling those over and will try to incorporate many of your ideas going forward. Thank you.

Remembering a Student’s ‘Human Particularity’

In the relentless churn of events, it can be easy to quickly move past a tragedy, like the shooting at a yoga studio in Florida earlier this month that claimed the life of a student, Maura Binkley.

To her shooter, Binkley was “a specimen of the category ‘woman,’ a category he hated,” wrote Gary Taylor, who chairs the department at Florida State University, where Binkley was a student. But she was many other things as well – among them, an English major, Taylor wrote.

To an English major, Taylor writes, people are always more than representatives of a category. “What we do, in English, and in the humanities more broadly, what we teach, what we celebrate and investigate,” he writes, “is human particularity.” You can read more about Binkley’s particularities and her promise in Taylor’s moving moving tribute for the Tampa Bay Times.

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

— Dan, Beckie, and Beth