So Isis Artze-Vega, one of our expert panelists, encourages professors to break the student-motivation problem into discrete parts: “What are the specific behaviors in your classroom you’re seeing, or not seeing?” Professors can think about distinct strategies to solve the individual problems they’re noticing, says Artze-Vega, vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College.
During the session, I put several practical questions raised by attendees to our panel. Here’s what they had to say:
Should I require students Zooming in to turn their cameras on? If not, how can I engage them?
Our panelist Viji Sathy shared her thoughts on this question in a Chronicle article near the start of the pandemic. During last Friday’s event, she encouraged faculty members to begin by taking a step back. “I would just encourage people to think about: Why do you want the cameras on? What is the purpose?,” said Sathy, associate dean of evaluation and assessment in the office of undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
There are instances when seeing students’ faces really does help with communication, Sathy said. But it’s possible to have a rich conversation while hearing students’ voices with cameras off. Such discussion can even happen in written exchanges. Yet seeing who’s speaking can make things more comfortable, Sathy says. One workaround is asking students to post a photo that appears in Zoom instead of a black box.
If a professor really wants cameras on, said Regan Gurung, another panelist, “why not have a conversation with your students about it explicitly?” Gurung, associate vice provost at Oregon State University, where he runs the teaching center, talks with his students along these lines about classroom policies on laptop and smartphone use. And he’s done it with his camera policy, too, he says.
One student mentioned that having the camera on feels uncomfortable but makes it easier to pay attention. Gurung has shared that thought with other students to propose that turning the camera might benefit their own learning.
How can I get students to participate without calling on them?
Some professors avoid cold-calling because they don’t want to put students on the spot. Another way to reduce anxiety: Create expectations that students can pass if they don’t want to say anything, Artze-Vega said.
It can also help to give students more time to think before answering, Sathy added — or respond anonymously, whether on an index card or through an online tool.
Gurung built on that idea: “The oldest trick in the book,” he said, “is to have somebody write something down and then just read out what they’ve written.” That alone, he said, reduces the pressure students feel.
What kinds of exercises — beyond tests, quizzes, reflections, and discussion — can be in the mix?
Gurung suggested asking students to apply what they’ve learned, which can be as simple as writing a letter about it or doing an activity they might use in a future career. Professors who teach large classes — as Gurung does — can be hesitant to assign a lot of writing, because it takes so much time to grade. But writing need not be graded to be valuable for learning, he said.
If you missed the roundtable, you can watch a recording here. And stay tuned to sign up for our third installment, which will cover assessment, grading, and, yes, cheating.
Disengaged Students
As Artze-Vega said, motivation and engagement are big and vague concepts. Her comment made me think that, while Beth and I’ve heard from so many instructors that their students are disengaged, they’re not all pointing to the same evidence or explanations as to why this is happening. Some have told us of students who don’t come to class, or who come, but don’t do the work, or who do the work, but don’t do it very well. We want to hear from you: What are you seeing? And what do you think is going on? Share your observations in this Google form.
ICYMI
- Nearly three-quarters of students indicated that faculty and staff at their institution did a good job helping them adapt to the challenges of the pandemic. That’s according to the latest report from the National Survey of Student Engagement, which examines how teaching and learning have fared through the disruptions of Covid-19.
- Many discussions of good teaching seem to assume professors have class sizes in the dozens. But some have enrollments in the hundreds. My latest story delves into what we know about teaching large classes — and what responsibility colleges bear for supporting them.
- A college president shares what he learned from teaching University 101 last semester to students distracted by many responsibilities and challenges in this article for Higher Ed Drive.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
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