Teaching

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

• Dan explains what a community-college instructor has learned about her students by being a tutor.
• Steven shares your responses to his article last week about a professor who stopped giving students deadlines.
• We point out some recent stories on our site that you shouldn’t miss.

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A Space for Them’

Like many instructors, Shana Cooper calls on various aspects of her life to help her students. For her, that often means drawing on her experience as a tutor.

Cooper, an adjunct English instructor at Harold Washington College, part of the City Colleges of Chicago, also works there as a tutor in the writing lab. On a typical day she helps students get unstuck on, say, a sociology or biology assignment.

She’s found that tutoring and teaching are very different. With tutoring, she says, “there’s a lot of personal connection that comes in.” It’s not uncommon, she says, for her or her fellow tutors to escort students to the college’s wellness center. Sometimes a writing prompt, about race or a seemingly innocuous personal statement, dredges up intense feelings. “You have to read what someone needs,” she says.

While she’s not supposed to tutor her own students, she says that on busy days it’s often unavoidable. And when it happens, she says, it can be a good thing. Sometimes it changes her relationship with them, and they start speaking up more often in class, increasing their confidence, and taking on leadership roles with their peers.

It can also give her insights into her assignments. For example, she has seen that her students can struggle getting started and organized. So her instructions have changed, and she makes her expectations clearer. “It’s structured my teaching and changed classroom-management time,” she says.

Part of the value of tutoring, she thinks, comes from its informality. To mimic that dynamic, she builds a similar one into her courses. Cooper sometimes includes a question-and-answer period in class, so that she can ask students how an assignment is going and check in on their learning.

The informality and lack of hierarchy in tutoring is also made manifest in physical space. A tutoring center is different than a faculty office, another space where students typically seek help. The tutoring center, she says, is egalitarian, with learners and teachers clustered around tables. “It’s a space for them,” she says. “The guard comes down.”

During office hours, however, the professor usually sits behind a desk, often in a bigger or nicer chair — clearly on the professor’s turf.

As pedagogical sites go, office hours might not be all they’re cracked up to be. One study, published in College Student Journal, found that faculty members tended to slightly overestimate, relative to students, how regularly professors staffed their office hours. The researchers also observed how often faculty members actually showed up for their own office hours. One in four of them didn’t.

That might be one reason students report that they seldom interact with their professors beyond the classroom. According the National Survey of Student Engagement, about three-quarters of freshmen and two-thirds of seniors say they “never” or only “sometimes” discuss course ideas or concepts with faculty members outside of class. There seems to be a lot of potential for growth.

Have you tried to do something to increase the educational impact of your office hours? What did you do, and how did it work? If you email me, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, it might appear in a future newsletter.

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Do You Drop Deadlines?

Last week we told you about Tobias Rush, who dropped deadlines for his assignments and allowed unlimited do-overs. We asked for your thoughts. You sent them!

A few of you have tried something similar, with good results. Frederic Svoboda, an English professor at the University of Michigan at Flint, has “flexible” deadlines. He doesn’t allow unlimited rewrites — he’d rather have students focus on the next assignment — but he sometimes permits a one-week extension, or an exemption of one assignment from the final grade. Some flexibility makes sense on his campus, “where most students are adults with multiple job and family responsibilities beyond the classroom,” Svoboda wrote.

Joel Whitaker, an adjunct professor of communications at Prince George’s Community College, in Maryland, does exactly as Rush does in his two speech classes. But for his news-writing course, “I do enforce deadlines,” he wrote, “because deadlines are absolute in journalism.”

Others were less enthusiastic. “I can’t tell you how many ways this is a really bad idea,” wrote Vicki Greshik, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Jamestown, in North Dakota. Grading and returning homework, with clear feedback and expectations, are critical for students to prepare for future assignments and the exam, she wrote. College students are already coddled by do-over cultures in grade school and high school, she added. Finally, “and this is the BIG one,” she said, employers won’t stand for lax deadlines. Missed work means lost clients means lost revenue, Greshik wrote. “Higher education needs to be a training ground.”

Steven S. Volk, an emeritus history professor at Oberlin College, in Ohio, once tried a system like Rush’s for the papers he assigned in his Latin American history class of 50 students. “I had planned to run the experiment for a year, but stopped after one semester because the results were so disastrous (and probably predictable),” he wrote. He explained how in a blog post: Top performers’ grades got better and better; laggards missed out on feedback and, in some cases, withdrew from the class halfway through. “Caveat emptor!”

Some of you were curious about the research on this approach. Relevant studies vary widely in scope and sample size, and many deal with online learners. Is removing a deadline associated with higher motivation, as an influential 1976 study suggested? Or do frequent deadlines improve students’ study habits and learning? More structure, after all, can help students “distribute their practice” — the long-studied idea that leaving a certain amount of time between learning sessions can improve retention. Perhaps structured guides, like checklists on your learning-management system, can help. On the other hand, flexible deadlines may be especially important for distance learners. Hat tip to Linda DuHadway, an assistant professor of computer science at Weber State University, in Utah, for some of the research.

On Chronicle.com

• Every couple of months, a controversy flares up over whether students should use laptops in class. One piece of research, from 2014, is often cited as a reason to enforce a general ban on the machines. But a new paper, which failed to replicate the original study’s findings, raises questions about that conclusion, and about which note-taking strategies work best. Beckie has more on this story.
• For many years, conventional wisdom has held that certain highly prized skills, like written and oral communication, can be taught across a range of disciplines. One of the most commonly cited of those skills is critical thinking. But, as Elizabeth Oljar and D.R. Koukal write in this week’s Chronicle, critical thinking doesn’t just happen anywhere. The skill is deeply grounded in philosophy, which means that philosophers are uniquely equipped to teach it. “The teaching of critical thinking as a life skill,” they write, “requires teaching students the underlying grammar of rational thought.”

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or steve.johnson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive your own copy, you can sign up here.

—Dan, Beckie, Beth, and Steven