What’s going on here?
Lindsay Masland, one of the panelists during our Keep On Teaching event last Friday, understands where students are coming from. Masland, who serves as the interim lead for transformative teaching and learning at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University, where she’s an associate professor of psychology, said much of what students are meant to learn in college feels disconnected from the uncertain future they face.
During the session, she drew a comparison that resonated. Before the pandemic, teaching was like a sweater, said Masland. “Maybe my sweater was a different color than yours, maybe it was made out of a different material, maybe it had different sleeves,” she said. “But we could look at all of each other’s sweaters and be like: Yeah, that’s a sweater.
“Then during the pandemic, though, our cat got to the sweater.”
Ever since, Masland said, instructors have been mending furiously.
“We’re trying to get the sweater back the way it was,” she said. “But maybe we’d be better served to look at the ball of yarn and be like: Ya’ll, I think this might be a potholder now.”
What might that potholder be like? Our panel offered some possibilities:
- Acknowledge the Bigger Picture. “We were brought up to just walk into the classroom and say, oh, this DNA molecule is so cool, or this new Shakespeare play is so cool,” said Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biological sciences and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. But that’s not working for today’s students, who face not only the pandemic but climate change and a host of other serious threats. “We have to stop pretending that the classroom and the campus and the online-course space are just completely disconnected to what’s happening in the wider world — and that people are walking in and just able to shelve all that chaos and just fully be present.”
- Cut Down Content. Higher education prizes knowledge creation and has often treated the presentation of content as the primary task of teaching. No one on the panel is saying to just do away with content, Dewsbury said. But it can be cut down substantially — even in a STEM course that’s part of a sequence — to students’ benefit in subsequent courses, as his research has found.
- Offer New Forms of Participation. During emergency-remote instruction, much of the discussion function of classes happened in the Zoom chat. That interlude, Masland said, changed her idea of what a class discussion can be. She’s tried to replicate that in her in-person classes, Masland said, to help students who “temperamentally don’t love contributing to a full-group discussion” or “are less rehearsed than past students because of the effects of the pandemic” participate.
- Be Yourself. “I don’t think we should be trying to perform the role of what we think an engaged instructor is supposed to be according to the Chronicle’s article on five ways to be more engaged,” said Rebecca Glazier, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the author of Connecting in the Online Classroom: Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students. “We should show up as ourselves, as our real authentic selves who care about our students. And that’s when I think our students are going to show up as themselves who really want to care about our classes.”
Does Masland’s illustration of the sweater, the cat, and the ball of yarn match your experience in the classroom? Have you found a way to knit something new? What does it look like? Or do you think it’s still possible to get that sweater back? Share your thoughts with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and they may appear in a future newsletter.
Extra! Extra!
As expected, our audience brought thoughtful and challenging questions for the panel — too many for us to get to during an hour-long event. The panelists agreed to write responses to a few more of them for our readers here:
One viewer asked about the benefits of holding fewer in-person or live synchronous class sessions and moving toward “blended -earning” courses, where students have more time to do work or connect asynchronously.
Rebecca Glazier responds: If you are going to make big changes to the format of your course, I would first think carefully about your student population, their choices in signing up for the format they did, and your campus/program needs. Once you talk things through with your program/colleagues/chair, get feedback from students who may be wanting more flexibility, and then offer the course with an explicit description as a hybrid course (so students know what they are getting in to), I think you can have the “best of both worlds” by providing students the flexibility to work and connect on their own time, while still getting the benefits of face-to-face discussions, simulations, Q&A, and relationship-building.
However, this is a pretty big lift and takes a lot of long-term planning. I think it is important to remember that we can reflect on the question “what is the value added of attending and participating in my class?” at any point. I would argue that the answer is very often connection. We learn better when we know our instructor and believe that they care about our success. We want to engage when we know our classmates and know that they are counting on us. And those are relationships we can build no matter the course format.
Another viewer highlighted the challenge of “ghosting,” noting that while most students do show up, the ones who don’t have a disproportionate effect on teaching. Is there any data on how big of a problem this is across the country?
Bryan Dewsbury responds: I certainly have not seen the kind of data that could definitively point to a clear trend. I will say however that anecdotally, my colleagues around the country do report something similar. Also, we would need to better understand “ghosting.” In one sense it could be students absenting class altogether, but on the other hand, it could also be students showing up, but not meaningfully engaged ... so ghosting maybe in the metaphorical sense.
Covid or not, it is pretty normal that when we get student responses, whether it be during the semester, or at the end, it is the few negatives that stick with us. While I cannot state for sure all campuses are experiencing the exact same thing, I do know that strategies that allow us to learn from students — how they are handling and navigating Covid and its associated worlds — are still effective in shaping our responses.
It is worth having a class with built-in surveys, reflection assignments, and other opportunities for student feedback. In different ways it can clue us in to what is driving the “ghosting” in the context-specific way, and in so doing help us have more appropriate responses.
Another instructor asked how to deal with the frustrating “chicken-and-egg” problem of making extensive investments in engaged pedagogy, only to find that students aren’t coming to class frequently enough to get the added value out of those experiences.
Lindsay Masland responds: We are working harder than we ever have and the payoff (at least in terms of student engagement) seems to be worse than it’s ever been — of course we are annoyed. Given this reality, when it comes to my own teaching, I try to focus less on “being engaging” and more on designing teaching that encourages certain behaviors and discourages others. I also try to make choices that will “scale,” meaning that they work with any class size, so that I’m never stuck with having designed some engaging thing we can’t do because people didn’t show.
For example, I use in-class group activities a lot. No matter the activity, I always have some sort of collaborative and scaffolded document (in Slides or Docs or Padlet) that includes places for students to keep a record of their work. Throughout the class, I am “in” that document as well, making comments on work, asking extension questions, etc. I start this the first week so that students expect that in my class 1) they will be asked to demonstrate their class engagement in real time and 2) I will be giving them feedback in real time.
If I structure the activity right, I will have built something that encourages all aspects of engagement (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive). There might not be any song and dance involved, but we will have engagement — I will have designed in a way that encourages engaged behaviors. And this activity “scales” because as long as I have a handful of folks show up, we can make a group and we can do the activity.
The other thing I do is ask students who miss class to complete the class activity. But they have to do it alone, in their own time. This is another example of design that encourages the engagement behavior of showing up. It is easier and probably more fun to do the activities with other people, so it behooves the students to come to class. Students aren’t penalized if they don’t come (they can still do the activity for full credit, which is also helpful from an accessibility-and-inclusion perspective), but they learn pretty quickly that they might as well come, because they are going to have extra “homework” of doing the activity if they don’t.
In short, I think engagement is like erosion — when it rains on an eroded hill, rain is most likely to run down the existing channels. I want to design my classes so that it’s easier to “fall into” channels of engagement than it is to take an uncharted (and unengaged) path.
You Can’t Keep Teaching if You Burn Out
In just a couple of weeks, Beth McMurtrie and I will reconvene our panel to discuss a challenge we know many of you are facing: How to support students without depleting yourself.
This online session is exclusively for newsletter subscribers, so now’s a good time to make sure that’s you — (you can check here) — and to recommend Teaching to colleagues you think might like it, too. When you register for the event, you’ll have a chance to let us know what topics you most want to hear our panelists weigh in on.
We hope you’ll join us on February 10 at 2 pm Eastern time. If not, registering will allow you to watch a recording at your convenience.
Do you have questions or feedback on Keep on Teaching? Ideas of how else we can help newsletter readers find the teaching ideas and community they seek? We love hearing from you: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com
Thanks for reading Teaching!
— Beckie
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