That job gets a lot easier when the previous course in a sequence was taught with active learning, which is one of the reasons why faculty developers see departments as crucial to efforts to improve teaching culture.
The math department at the University of Georgia received a university grant to incorporate active learning into its full calculus sequence. The grant will enable it to build on instructors’ earlier work in flipping precalculus and calculus I, which are coordinated courses, and providing materials instructors can use for calculus II and III.
The department’s work is featured in my latest story, which describes Georgia’s push to institutionalize active learning and suggests that, if successful, this push could be a model for other universities.
Georgia is putting more than $1 million a year for five years into the project, which serves as its current Quality Enhancement Plan for its accreditor. The project has three strands: professional development, student programming, and redesigning classrooms.
At Georgia, like many other colleges, enthusiasm for active learning exists in pockets. A lone active-learning champion can take up this form of teaching, and, if they take advantage of programs like the university’s Active Learning Summer Institute, get support to overhaul an entire course. But it’s hard to keep such a course running in a vacuum.
Two teams of math instructors went through the summer institute early on and created videos and workbooks to flip precalculus and calculus 1. Today, some 750 additional students pass those two courses — required for many popular majors — each year. Their success and active learning’s expansion can be attributed in part to supportive leadership within the department and built-in professional development.
Departmental leaders and colleagues matter here; so do students. Two of the department’s active-learning champions, Toyin Alli and Sofya Zaytseva, emphasized to me that students who’ve taken a flipped math course seek out subsequent courses taught in this format. When they end up in a more traditional section, they push their instructors for access to the videos their friends use in other sections.
You can read more about Georgia’s project in my story, here.
The example of the calculus sequence is a good reminder of how important departments are when it comes to teaching culture. I wonder: Has your department taken steps to emphasize and improve teaching culture? If so, what are they, and how has it worked out? If not, what would you like to see happen? Let me know at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and your example may appear in the newsletter.
Student familiarity
Georgia’s math department’s experience suggests that a well-designed active-learning course can inspire students to seek out more of the same.
But many students aren’t familiar with active learning. A new paper from Briana Craig, a Chapman University undergraduate, and her professor, Jeremy Hsu, analyzes nine semesters of results from a survey students take before embarking on an introductory molecular genetics course to examine students’ understanding of active learning.
The researchers found that familiarity with active learning dropped for both first-year and returning students during emergency remote instruction. As of the spring of 2022, student familiarity still had not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time — and perhaps because of the way they were taught in the early stretch of the pandemic — more students reported that they learn best from an uninterrupted lecture.
These data, while limited, underscore the need for instructors using active learning to explain to their students what it is and why they’re using it, the paper concludes.
Further thoughts on failure
Several recent newsletters have highlighted the practice of professors sharing failure stories with students, a practice meant to help students put academic struggles in context but that can have drawbacks for instructors.
Ruthann C. Thomas, associate director of teaching and learning in the Teaching + Learning Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in to share a multimedia project she led called Flipping Failure that features MIT students describing how they navigated an academic failure and sharing coping strategies.
The project also includes a metacognitive piece: “We design and lead storytelling workshops for the students who contribute to Flipping Failure,” Thomas wrote. “Last year, we made a short video of past Flipping Failure participants discussing the impact and benefits of the workshop series to codify and share some of the growth and value we witnessed from students sharing and reflecting on the meaning of their challenges.”
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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— Beckie
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