Teaching

Hello, and welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:

• Beth reflects on what some of our best-read newsletters say about teaching in 2018.
• She also describes the newsletter topics that prompted the most reader reaction.
• We share one of the stories we received when we asked you to tell us about an experience that changed the way you teach.

The Hit List

Everyone loves a list: Most-read books, top-grossing movies, best-selling albums. We here at Teaching aren’t immune to the appeal of the popularity contest, so we ran the numbers to find out what grabbed your attention this year. Following is a distillation of our most-read newsletters, and what we think that says about the state of college teaching.

Of the top issues, one thing seems pretty clear: You care about your students, and you want practical advice about how to become better teachers. One of our best-read newsletters, from August, focused on a professor’s effort to connect with students who had just failed the first exam in her large, upper-level course. Rather than passing the information along to an adviser, she sent out a personalized, encouraging email to each of the students who had failed, pointing them to places on campus where they could find academic help. This idea builds on a concept you’ll find sprinkled throughout our newsletters and stories this year: the idea of the nudge – interventions that encourage but don’t force, behaviors that help students navigate the often complicated path through college, from dealing with financial-aid paperwork to course registration.

On a related note, you also liked reading about sneaky learning. In this example, which I wrote about this month, one university is teaching students that what they think are good study strategies – like cramming before a test – are actually demonstrably worse than less intuitive approaches, such as spacing out studying over several days. Like nudges, sneaky learning builds on the idea that if you help reorient students’ perceptions of themselves, and their responsibilities, you can encourage productive behaviors.

And, of course, everyone likes tips: those magical strategies that promise, if not a quick fix, at least some concrete ways to improve student grades and retention. In May, we wrote about five approaches introduced by one college, which then saw its retention and graduation rates jump. Those five tips include giving frequent quizzes, providing early interventions, and passing out course evaluations early in the semester so that instructors can improve their teaching while the course is underway.

Two other popular newsletter topics focused on self-reflection. In each case, a faculty member wanted to learn how he or she could improve as a teacher. In one instance, a former astronaut was finding his footing in the classroom and reflecting on how much time it takes to prepare a strong lecture, even on a subject – spacecraft exploration – with which he was quite familiar.

In another instance, an engineering professor took a scientific approach to studying his classroom. Fed up with high rates of D’s, F’s, and Withdrawals in an upper-division course, he invited social-science colleagues to help him analyze the student experience and design interventions. He was pleased to report that the DFW rate dropped from one-third to 11 percent in two years.

It wouldn’t be 2018 without a nod to difficult classroom conversations. In our politically polarized times, the big question is, how can we get people to see beyond their own point of view? You liked a newsletter we ran back in July on a strategy called Reflective Structured Dialogue, a form of highly structured discussion that opens up space for students to really listen to one another and understand how others reached their opinion.

Finally, revamping the core curriculum was also a popular topic. In this case, I wrote about what Notre Dame is doing to reform general education. That likely drew in a lot of readers because higher education as a whole is paying more attention to these core courses. Colleges are trying to better integrate them into the student’s major, incorporate interdisciplinary teaching, and encourage professors to use introductory courses to teach students how to think like scientists, historians, or philosophers. The checklist approach to gen-ed, in short, is falling out of favor.

This will be our last issue of 2018. We look forward to seeing which Teaching topics draw your interest next year!

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We Wrote, You Reacted

Because we love lists so much, we created a second, albeit shorter one: Newsletter topics that prompted the most reader feedback. We have three for you, and if they inspire you to write in with more thoughts, all the better.

First, readers had a lot to say about the idea of replacing an exam with an unusual or creative assignment. That was prompted by this story of a science professor who asked his students to write a children’s book. The assignment builds on two big ideas: getting students engaged in their own learning, and helping them understand a concept by asking them to explain it simply.

Second, teaching evaluations. Those two words are guaranteed to spark intense reactions, and they did. We wrote about one professor’s argument that these evaluations would be more meaningful if colleges waited well beyond the end of the semester to give them, on the idea that sometimes you don’t fully appreciate the impact of a course until you’ve had time to process it. That notion also prompted Dan to do a deeper dive into the topic, based in part on reader observations on the pros and cons of delayed evaluations.

Finally, Dan and Beckie responded to reader feedback on how to balance our coverage of research and teaching. Yes, a discussion of a particular teaching reform could be enhanced with a nod to related research. At the same time, they noted, this is a newsletter, meant to be conversational, and not an academic journal. That got them wondering about how our readers think about research when it comes to their teaching. You were more than happy to chime in.

Collectively, most of this year’s popular newsletter topics paint a picture of instructors who very much want to understand the student experience and learn from it. That marks a shift in how higher education approaches student success, as we’ve noted in much of our teaching coverage over the past few years. The “sink or swim” attitude is fading in higher education, replaced with the belief that teaching and learning are a complex processes that benefit from reflection, research, and continuous innovation.

Sometimes You Need to Listen Before Lecturing

We asked our readers to tell us about an experience that changed the way they teach. James W. Loewen, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont shared this story:

“Teaching a course, ‘Race Relations Through Feature Films,’ I showed the 1988 Alan Parker movie Mississippi Burning. Ostensibly about the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss., it becomes a formulaic ‘good cop / bad cop’ picture starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. After we watched it together, I was ready with a 10-minute diatribe deconstructing the film historically, sociologically, and artistically.

“Luckily, just in time, I remembered my practice of asking students to write down their initial reactions in their journals and gave them five minutes to do so. Then I diatribed.

“Later, reading their journal responses, I realized that the movie had considerable power and had conveyed the powerlessness and terror of black life in Mississippi accurately. (I had lived in Mississippi during this era.) So although it got some things wrong, it also got some things right.

“More to the point of my future teaching: I realized how valuable (to me!) it is to learn students’ reactions and interpretations before conveying or imposing my own, whether to a movie, course reading, guest speaker, whatever. Once the teacher has spoken, those reactions are forever changed.”

If you’d like to share a pivotal teaching experience with us, click here. Your story may appear in a future Teaching newsletter.

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 receive your own copy, you can sign up here.

—Beth and Dan