Notes on Teaching and Learning

Designing a semester long course is challenging enough in itself, but deciding how much time to spend preparing for each class presents a particular problem for graduate students and new teachers still managing other academic responsibilities. Keeping certain guidelines in mind can help manage that precious time while also preparing the teacher to be maximally effective in class.

Learning objectives. The most important step to take in preparing for any class is to remind yourself what the learning goals for this session are. Specific learning goals allow you to focus your preparation for the class and provide your students with the most helpful information. Keep the course as a whole in mind while you do this, so that each objective directly contributes to the course’s overall purpose. In addition, make sure that your objectives are manageable within the time given; if you try to cover too much in one class session, you will only frustrate yourself and your students. See the Kaneb Center’s handout on learning goals here.

Variety in the classroom. The general structure of a class should always have a beginning, middle, and end, with the appropriate amounts of time blocked for each part. Within this structure, however, you are free to consider a wide variety of teaching methods that will keep you and your students engaged in the material. Now that the semester has started and you have had a chance to begin to know your students, consider the different ways in which they are participating and responding. Different combinations of mini-lectures, class discussions, in or out of class reflections, or more active learning, can all be used to help you design the most effective class session for the learning objectives you have set.

Be flexible. Once you have your learning goals and teaching methods for the day in hand, you might well feel completely ready for class. But the truth is that classes rarely go exactly according to plan, and it is always advisable to be ready for changes. If you plan a discussion that ends much earlier or much later than you expected, think of back up plans for the remaining learning objectives that will still cover what you need for that day. This might mean adding a discussion to a mini-lecture, or asking students to write a reflection on that final point that they can turn in at the next class. Thinking ahead to these kinds of contingencies will keep you calm and confident in the classroom.

Physical and mental readiness. Give yourself time before class begins to be fully alert, warmed up, and ready. Recollect your learning goals, plans, and backup strategies for the day, but also revisit your hopes for the course as a whole and your interest in teaching it. Not only will you avoid the forgetfulness and disorder that comes with being rushed, but you will also come to class more energized and enthusiastic, creating a better experience for you and your students.

It is important to think about the first few weeks of class as not only initial content days but also ways to create a community in the classroom. Doing so will build trust between the students and yourself and likely boost student performance on in-class activities. Below are some strategies on how to successfully build a rapport with students straight off the bat.

LEARN YOUR STUDENTS’ NAMES

Learning your students’ names, especially if it is a larger class, is an easy way to demonstrate to your students that you value them as people. If you are bad at names or if you have an extremely large class in which learning names is a daunting task, you can make use of the Online Photo App through Inside ND to help memorize student names outside of class. You may also be transparent about your trouble remembering names and have the students help you out. For example, you can have them create paper signs with their names on it that they display at their desks or have them say their name before they speak after raising their hand. Be aware that it might take students longer than you to remember each other’s names, so it is a good idea to either make sure you begin using the student’s names out loud as soon as you learn them or continue whatever activity you are using until you are confident that most people know each other.

LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR STUDENTS AS PEOPLE

Learning students’ names is only the first step toward making them feel valued not only as students but as people in your classroom. You can do this in a number of ways: arrive early and chat with them before class starts, take the first five minutes of class to discuss something of interest to them unrelated to class (you can have students choose the topics), or collect unofficial survey information after specific class periods. Just do what feels comfortable for you as a person. Please note that if you are going to collect responses from students at the end of a class period, be sure to follow up on their responses. You can do so individually or collectively, depending on the nature of what you want to address.

REVEAL SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF AS A PERSON

Having student’s know something about you as a person will help them identify with you better. For example, if you are teaching a film class, you might want to tell the students about your favorite movie, or chat about a new movie coming to theaters that you are particularly excited about. Expressing your opinion on a topic and allowing students to openly challenge or disagree with your statement in a respectful, evidence-based, dialogue can also go a long way in establishing yourself as a person with your own unique and informed positions. Don’t feel pressured to reveal anything that you are not comfortable with. Simply demonstrating your passion for the topic will reveal quite a bit about you and will make you more relatable as a teacher.

HAVE A META DISCUSSION ABOUT CLASS CONDUCT

One of the most important ways to build relationships with students in the classroom is to emphasize that the classroom is a safe space. You want to therefore emphasize and set guidelines for appropriate and respectful behavior. This is especially important if you are going to be dealing with controversial topics in class. The best way to set boundaries is to get students involved in the drafting of this guidelines so that they feel safe and empowered in the classroom.

FURTHER READING

A Short Article from the Social Psychology Network on Creating Rapport on the Classroom : http://www.socialpsychology.org/rapport.htm

The spring semester has drawn to a close and the summer is upon us! Although there are fewer classes to teach in the summer, that doesn’t mean one must forget about teaching for three months. As you prepare for fall classes and continue your professional development as a teacher, consider taking advantage of the many resources the Kaneb Center has to offer this summer:

• Reading Groups. The Kaneb Center purchases books on teaching and learning for small informal reading groups. Faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars are all welcome and invited to sign up for a prearranged group or to propose their own group. These groups are a great place to gather new ideas on teaching and to meet colleagues from across the university who are interested in teaching and learning.
• Graduate Courses on University Teaching and Learning. Short credit-bearing summer courseson teaching and learning in various fields are available to all graduate students. Enrollment is now open, and be sure to submit a tuition waiver Contact Joanna Sherbun with any questions.
  • Course on Teaching and Learning Online. Whether you are on campus or off, consider taking a four day course in July on teaching an online course, appropriately, taught entirely online. This course is especially helpful for graduate students on the job market who may be asked to teach online courses at their new institutions. Learn more here and sign up by following the links above.
• Teaching Well Using Technology Certificate. The summer is an excellent time to complete one or all of the badges required for the Kaneb Center’s Teaching Well Using Technology certificate – available to all graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and staff at Notre Dame. If you are available in May (the week after finals end), consider attending one of our hands-on sessions to jumpstart the certificate. Contact Chris Clark with any questions about the certificate.
• Individual Consultations. Schedule a one-on-one (confidential) consultation with a member of the Kaneb Center staff to discuss any teaching needs. We are happy to help you review CIFs, discuss your course plans for the fall, develop new types of assessments or other learning activities, or consider the integration of technology into your course.
• Kaneb Center Library. The Kaneb Center library holds hundreds of books, videos, and other materials on a variety of teaching and learning topics. Visit our library and check out some great selections for your summer reading!

From all of us at the Kaneb Center, best wishes for a happy and productive summer! As always, let us know if we can assist you with any of your teaching needs.

During the summer, it’s easy for teaching to take a backseat to the research duties that have been piling up all semester while you have been busy grading. Taking a break and switching gears is healthy and can bring you fresh focus upon return to teaching, but it is also important to schedule some time for reflection and fall semester prep. Don’t add stress to your fall by cramming all your planning into the week before the semester starts!

Most importantly, reflect on your semester as soon as possible. Doing so while the semester is still fresh in your mind will enable you to pinpoint more accurately and honestly what did and did not work for you this semester. If you have time and need to make relatively small changes, make sure to get to them right away. Nothing is worse than having an assignment not meet expectations, only to remember that you had a fantastic idea for solving this issue last semester but forgot to implement it. At the very least, jot down a to-do list and place it in a spot that you are sure to check when prepping for the next semester. Place it on the fridge next to your kid’s finger-paintings, add it as a google calendar event in August, or add a document to your class folder with a prominent title.

It is best to complete this self-reflection before you receive your course instructor feedback (CIFs) from students. This way you can focus solely on your own instincts and then supplement your initial reactions with those received from the CIF reports. CIFs can never provide a full picture of a class, nor do students always appreciate your pedagogical intentions or their own significant learning. Reflecting before and after the CIFs can help you better understand and contextualize the feedback that students provide.

Next, make a schedule that paces out your workload and stick to it, even if you can only afford a day a month in June and July. A consistent schedule will make sure that you don’t leave everything until the last minute. Spacing out future semester planning will provide you with time to reflect on your choices in between planning sessions so that you can be as intentional about your pedagogy as possible. We discourage students from cramming and should always follow our own advice. Come fall, you will be grateful for your proactive reflection and early planning.

The end of the semester has a reputation for sneaking up on teachers and students alike. While the students are busy with finals and term papers, teachers can be equally preoccupied with finishing the course, submitting grades, and filing paperwork. But we shouldn’t forget to stop and try to make sense of all the ground we’ve covered in the last few months. Here are some tips on making the most of the last week of classes:

• Engage students in reflection: Take the last class to reflect on the syllabus with your students.
  • Ask them how well each topic was covered, what they were most interested in or excited about, and what they noticed in their own learning. Focus on the large concepts and goals of the course. Ask students how they feel about where they are now compared with the beginning of the semester.
  • Push them to articulate the connections they’ve found between topics within the course or between the course and their other coursework or their lives.
  • Share what you’ve learned from teaching this course with the students; have they changed any of your outlooks in the course of the semester?
  • You might consider asking some of the students to write letters to future students in this course. How can they get the most out of it? What was the most challenging aspect and how could they best benefit from this?
• Point to the future: help your students understand that their learning and benefit from your course need not end after the final.
  • Remind your students, as they continue working on those end of term papers and projects, to think of these assignments as potential portfolio material for themselves. These assignments could have a future beyond the grade they’ll receive in this class and go toward their future professional development.
  • Encourage them to learn from this semester; not just the goals of this course, but from the habits they’ve discovered as students, so they can apply what they’ve learned about themselves as students to courses they take in the future.
  • For those interested in continuing their education in this area, compile a suggested reading list from your own bookshelf on the materials covered. Encourage interest in pursuing the questions you’ve been asking.
• Celebrate: You and your students have bonded over this last semester, and it can be fun and satisfying to discuss what you’ve all learned in a more relaxed setting. Whether you go to a meal together or bring treats to share in class, this is a nice final touch for a course. Don’t forget to thank your students for their contributions and engagement with the course!
• Think ahead: It might be the end of one semester, but this is the perfect time to plan for your next course.
  • Set aside 30 minutes to reflect and write yourself notes on changes you’d like to make next time you teach this course, while it’s still fresh in your mind.
  • Mark up your syllabus – or better yet, update it now – to reflect those classes and assignments that worked best, and those that could use revision.

In the days when teaching evaluations involved filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil on the last day of class, evaluation response rates were entirely dependent on who showed up to class on a given day. Now, Notre Dame and many other colleges and universities collect student feedback online, meaning response rates are no longer based on attendance, but on whether students are motivated to complete the online surveys. Online surveys have many benefits – a streamlined process, easier-to-interpret results, flexibility to add your own questions, and reduced paper use, to name a few – but raise concerns for some about reduced response rates. Evaluations are one of the primary means to get feedback on one’s teaching and are also valuable for career development, so generating an appropriate response rate is an important task, and one which instructors have some control over too! Administration of online Course Instructor Feedback (CIFs) at Notre Dame begins soon (April 25^th – May 7^th for Spring 2017), so now is a good time to consider implementing a strategy to increase CIF response rates. Whether you are teaching at Notre Dame or elsewhere, try mixing several of the following techniques to ensure an adequate response rate:

• Demonstrate the importance of evaluations. The number one thing instructors can do to increase response rates and ensure students take evaluations seriously is to communicate (and demonstrate) to students that they personally value the feedback, intend to use it, and that it is important to their career.
  • Create a feedback-oriented environment. If you seek feedback from students throughout the semester, such as by administering an informal early-semester feedback form, it signals that you value student opinions and are willing to change elements of your course based on the feedback you receive. Building a general rapport with students also encourages them to care about you and the course.
  • Discuss previous evaluations. Mention to students something you have altered in the course based on previous semesters’ evaluations, or discuss something that previous students have commented on as being valuable (like a difficult assignment that turned out to be especially fruitful).
  • Add your own questions (and tell students you did). Encourage student participation by actively gauging opinions on something that is important to you. To reap the full benefits, be sure to tell students ahead of time that you are specifically asking for their help with these questions.
  • Tell students how evaluations are used. Academic hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions are a mysterious process even to some in the world of academia, and even more so to students. Explain to students that administrators weigh student evaluations in personnel matters and that they will be seen and taken seriously by others too – not just the instructor. Remind them too that they are completely anonymous and not tied to their grades in the course.
• Give frequent reminders or include CIFs in your course design. Students are busy people, and even if they intend to fill out evaluations, the activities and stress of the end of the semester may move CIFs to the low end of the priority list. By personally reminding students on top of the reminders they receive from the university, it will be less likely that forgetfulness will be the cause of low response rates. Even better, consider building CIF completion into your course.
  • In-class reminders, email reminders, personal reminders… As long as done within reason, any type of personal reminder will signal to students that you take evaluations seriously. If only 1/3 of the class have completed their evaluations halfway through the CIF administration period, thank the 1/3 and kindly ask the remaining 2/3 to fill them out.
  • Note it on your syllabus. Place the dates of CIF administration on the syllabus, or even list CIF completion as an “assignment.” For example, make the last problem on the homework assignment to fill out CIFs and provide instructions on how to do so.
  • Devote class time to completing CIFs. Just like the old days of #2 pencils and paper evaluations, set aside the first 10 minutes of class to go to a computer lab and have students fill out their evaluations. (Doing so at the start of class instead of the end ensures that you have their full attention.) For privacy, be sure to step out of the room as they fill them out.
• Explain the benefits…or provide additional ones. Evaluations can benefit a number of people: the students themselves (expressing their opinion, seeing grades earlier), future students (seeing basic info on the instructor, improving their class experience), the instructor (improving teaching, using evaluations for job advancement), and the university (ensuring instructors are doing their jobs effectively). Remind students of these benefits, and consider whether you are willing to provide additional nominal benefits for completing CIFs.
  • Offer additional benefits. The most controversial method of increasing response rates is to offer students additional incentive to fill out evaluations, either individually (by having students print confirmation of their evaluation submission) or collectively (if a certain percentage of the class completes their CIFs). These nominal benefits might include a bonus extra credit point on a homework assignment, the ability to use an index card with notes on the final exam, or doughnuts on the last day of class. If you are concerned about walking the fine line between incentive and bribery, you might also tell students they will receive a personal thank-you note if they confirm that they filled out their evaluations (as an added signal that you care about their thoughts on the class).

Students can tell throughout the whole semester whether instructors value their opinion, and one need not wait until the last minute to frantically email students encouraging them to evaluate their teaching. Look for ways to signal that you value feedback, to demystify the evaluation process, and to explain to students why evaluations are important. Once you have received the results of your CIFs, check out our resources on interpreting your scores, or make an appointment to stop by and discuss them with a Kaneb Center staff member.

For Further Reading:

• “The Effect of Incentives and Other Instructor-Driven Strategies to Increase Online Student Evaluation Response Rates” – Goodman et al.
• “Online Course Evaluations Response Rates” – Gudder & Malliaris
• “Response Rates in Online Teaching Evaluation Systems” – Kulik
• “Response Rates and Accuracy” – from the University of Oregon Registrar

The Kaneb Center fully encourages thinking of your class sessions and course schedules in terms of digestible blocks that employ diverse engaged learning exercises and techniques and are transparently connected to course goals. However, in practice it is sometimes difficult to ensure that each separate block of content throughout the semester connects not only to course goals but also directly to each other. In his 2016 book, Small Teaching, James Lang uses the term interleaving to demonstrate how one might best put these smaller chunks of information disseminated throughout the semester in constant conversation with one another so that students experience a consistent flow of information and better understand how each piece of the class fits together.

Interleaving is most easily understandable in the context of courses or situations that require memorization of a large body of knowledge.  Lang successfully introduces the concept of interleaving through a personal anecdote about learning Spanish. He underscores that he did not truly start learning Spanish until he abandoned the linear model of trudging forward toward more advanced vocabulary terms and grammatical concepts and replaced it with a method that combined this forward progression with consistent review of older material. Doing so meant that he moved much more slowly through new material but ensured that he retained the information he was learning. Lang defines such a learning method as interleaved learning and suggests that implementing this mixture of review based and new concept based learning will dramatically increase student retention of material.

Since interleaving necessitates constant reinforcement , there may be some anxiety about it taking time away from learning new content. That said, more complex ideas or information are not necessarily valuable if it is not properly understood.  Many of us are guilty of trying to cover as much new material as possible, sometimes at the expense of remembering to provide proper context. Perhaps we are already implementing best practices such as previewing material at the beginning of class, using different teaching methods throughout class-time, and spending time on a direct review of class material. But do we spend enough time reinforcing previously-taught material in later class periods, or do we just expect students to have a handle on it thanks to our excellent scaffolding of the material when we taught it? Lang argues that “If you want them to learn content or skills that stretch across the entire semester, and even beyond the confines of your course, interleave” (56). Retention is increased because students are able to directly make connections between each part of the course. If, per Lang, we increase the scaffolding to include frequent review of older material, we might have to spend less time on each individual concept because students will be able to activate their prior knowledge and directly apply it to new information and ideas.

Interleaving can even work in a course that is not linearly constructed, such as a humanities class that might focus on process more than product and may not necessarily require a direct progression of ideas in the same way a math or science course might. In a more process based class, one may revisit frameworks for thinking about issues or specific discussions that uncovered faulty assumptions about course material. I normally frame my courses with a chapter from Bell Hooks’ Teaching to Transgress that develops a theory of performative and transgressive pedagogy that emphasizes student engagement and encourages students to think more deeply about their agency in the classroom. When reading future texts, we continually return to an interpretation of Hooks’ work that functions as a lens through which to contextualize our conversations and interactions and therefore leverage student participation. The result is that students feel more involved in the work as they are continually encountering Hooks’ pedagogy as a frame for interpreting and interacting with texts and one another. As I hope my experience demonstrates, interleaving does not just benefit information consumption but also “mastery of complex skills like writing, speaking, and problemsolving”, as students are asked to make connections across units of the course and synthesize their thoughts throughout the semester (56).

For those of you who would like to hear Lang speak in person, please check the Kaneb Center website or join our mailing list for updates on his upcoming (rescheduled) appearance this spring at Notre Dame.

Further Reading:

Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge, 1994.

Lang, James. Small Teaching. Jossey-Bass, 2016.

James Lang’s Blog