One of our most-read newsletters focused on the challenges facing first-generation students in the classroom and how instructors can better support them. Some of the mistakes first-gen students make are common to undergraduates: They focus on re-reading and memorizing, for example, rather than summarizing material in their own words. But many also have trouble figuring out how college works or suffer from imposter syndrome. I spoke with a former lecturer who believes that instructors should teach students study skills, including incorporating tips into the syllabus and reviewing them in class. She also suggests tracking down struggling students and making time to talk. For many students, she says, having a conversation with an instructor brings relief, because they no longer have to suffer in silence.
Another well-read newsletter focused on how calling randomly on students could hurt women in class. Beckie pointed to research which shows that when women are in the hot seat, they are more likely than men are to feel embarrassed if they don’t know the answer. That could affect their confidence and thus their performance in the course. A better approach, one researcher suggested, is to expect participation but give students some control over when and how they contribute. One example: Ask students to raise their hands if they agree with a statement, and then follow up with a more detailed request for explanation.
Speaking of problematic teaching strategies, readers tuned into a survey from Educause, which asked 40,000 students their classroom-technology preferences. Beckie highlighted some common complaints, including professors who read PowerPoint slides word for word off the screen, and instructors who ban laptops in class. “For all the discussion around student-centered education in higher ed,” Beckie noted, “students are sometimes left feeling like passive recipients of content who can’t be trusted to crack a laptop during class.”
Another hot topic: Can the lecture be saved? That one tapped into the guilt that many instructors feel about lecturing, when the benefits of active learning are well known. I talked to one professor who felt that the lecture had gotten a bad rap. The key is knowing how to use it, she said: judiciously, and blended with active-learning strategies. In other words, keep the lecture brief, then design activities that reinforce what students have just learned. She called this “interactive lecturing,” something, she argued, professors do a lot of anyway.
If there’s a theme to all of these pieces, it’s this: Readers want to know how to teach more effectively, engage students more deeply, and help those who are struggling. Other popular newsletters along those lines included one on using test review to improve study habits, asking students to write their own exam questions, and ending class with a “hotwash,” or debriefing.
I’d be remiss not to mention another newsletter that was a hit with readers, focused on those ever-controversial student evaluations of teaching. You all wanted to know what millions of student evaluations said about gender bias. If you missed that one, be sure to read it to find out some interesting patterns, like which professors are more likely to be called brilliant, boring, or funny.
Teaching Through Lab-Based Work
I recently wrote about a new project at the Johns Hopkins University that revolved around a lab for humanities students, who often felt left out the university’s STEM-oriented culture. And I asked readers if they had worked on similar open-ended projects.
Joe Vukov, an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, started a philosophy lab this semester, with the help of a graduate student. The lab is extracurricular, he writes, and focused on undergraduate students. So far the group has published two commentaries in academic journals. Next semester they hope to expand that work to include at least one full-length article and to start making connections across campus to make the lab sustainable.
“I’ve been excited about the lab,” Vukov wrote, “as I believe it is helping construct and promote a more collaborative model for research in the humanities (in philosophy, at least, sole authoring is standard, co-authoring (by two authors) happens but is still uncommon, and authoring with teams of faculty, grads, and undergrads is rare).”
Vukov and his graduate student will be talking about the lab’s pedagogical vision at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers’s Teaching Hub at the American Philosophical Association meeting in February.
Mary Anne Lewis Cusato, an associate professor and the director of the French program at Ohio Wesleyan University, taught a course on immigration that integrated oral history and digital humanities. Her students did a lot of work to prepare for an interview with a local refugee, and Cusato related how the group navigated road bumps throughout the semester. “The result was a very collaborative, evolving course in which there was constant dialogue between my students and me about how to move forward, what to focus on, and, when we encountered obstacles or surprises, what to do next,” she wrote. “This was a highly interactive and collaborative model for learning, it was imperfect, and I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
The University of Dayton runs a “test lab” called the GEMnasium where students from different majors work on a grand challenge each year, like democracy or food insecurity. Last year, 500 students from 17 courses tackled the opioid crisis, a big problem in Dayton, Ohio. And they helped create a work-force development program for recovering addicts. “The interesting thing we’ve learned by creating this fluid learning space is that people in general tend to think innovation equals engineering, entrepreneurship means business and creativity is equivalent to arts,” wrote Brian LaDuca, the executive director of the Institute of Applied Creativity for Transformation, who created the lab. “But college students today don’t abide by those traditional definitions. They’re just as likely to move easily among the three, and higher education needs to catch up.”
Happy holidays from all of us at Teaching. We will see you back here in 2020!
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, or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beth
