The instructors also emphasized the importance of growth, Melby says, reflecting on “where they were when they came into the course, and then where they ended up,” and factoring that into their proposed grades.
“If only one student emerges from this experience thinking: Huh, if I were to evaluate myself as a strong worker, as somebody who’s capable of growth, as someone who does the things they have to do, if I were to do that more often, how would that change my mind-set? Or how would that position me to accomplish the things I want to accomplish?” Epstein says. “To me, that’s a huge success.”
At St. Olaf, there’s a “culture of thinking hypercritically about things,” Melby adds. Against that backdrop, helping students move from being “negatively critical” to “positively critical,” focused on their progress, she says, helps them understand that they have something to contribute — even though they don’t know everything or produce perfect work.
After the January-term ended, Epstein was preparing himself to go back to “normal teaching,” as opposed to taking students all over D.C. Melby challenged him to carry some of the lessons from their course into that setting. How could he help students reflect and evaluate their learning in a more conventional course?
Epstein decided to have his students grade their own quizzes in the more-traditional course he’s teaching this semester, “because so much learning takes place when you identify your mistakes, and you figure out why you made that mistake, and you make a decision about how not to make that mistake again.” At the end of the term, he’ll have students write a reflection — and assign themselves a grade.
In some ways, Epstein used his community-outreach-oriented January-term course as a lab for ideas that would have been trickier to try out in a conventional course. That got me wondering — have you taught a course that was experimental in some way? And have you incorporated anything from that course into your regular courses? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may mention your example in a future newsletter.
The Will to Change
As a journalist, I find it tempting to believe — in the face of so much evidence to the contrary — that if only people knew about a particular problem, then they’d fix it. Perhaps the same temptation applies to academics.
That’s been on my mind since reading David Gooblar’s recent column for the Chronicle, which describes the evidence on how certain teaching practices, like “highly structured” courses and having students complete a values affirmation, can narrow achievement gaps. “The problem is not a lack of knowledge about what needs to be done,” writes Gooblar, associate director of Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching, “but a lack of other things: will, effective collaboration, money, luck.”
He goes on to define the stumbling blocks more specifically: “What we don’t have are institutional cultures that spread this knowledge and resources that support instructors in making these changes.”
Gooblar’s argument resonated with much of what I hear from people working to improve teaching and learning. I’m curious: What do you think would create the kind of culture Gooblar says is needed to improve instruction? And do you have examples of particular campuses or departments where this kind of change is in fact happening? If so, drop me a line: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
A Wrinkle in Connecting With Students
A while back, I asked how you show students that you care about them. One thoughtful response came from Stephen Chamberland, an associate professor of chemistry at Utah Valley University. Chamberland described taking groups of students out for lunch and to the campus bowling alley, among other strategies. He notes that students respond very positively to such meetings. Then he raised a complication I hadn’t really thought about before:
“I always stress that get-togethers are informal and are solely on a voluntary basis, yet I’ve always struggled with the power differential that exists. For example, do students feel that failure to attend will be noticed and viewed negatively? On the other hand, could they perceive that going will ingratiate themselves with the instructor?”
I’m curious whether you’ve run into this issue and if you have any advice on how professors can indicate that meeting with them isn’t about currying favor. Please share your ideas with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may include them in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us: dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
—Beckie