Notes on Teaching and Learning

The importance of mental health and well-being is increasingly being recognized within the walls of the academy. In a previous post, we discussed how stress and poor mental health can affect student success in the classroom. But what about the person at the front of the room? The reality is, teachers are human too, and with that comes a need to care for one’s own psychological well-being. And yet, this is often swept to the wayside with pressing deadlines, classes to prepare, and large workloads. This post introduces just a few tips for how to be mindful of one’s own mind. We encourage you to spend some time thinking about ways to care for yourself and stay healthy during the most stressful times of the semester.

Principle 1: Time spent away from work can increase your productivity at work. While it may seem counterintuitive, spending less time on the job can actually help you to get more done. When our brains are always on the go, they tire just like the rest of our body. Breaking up one’s work schedule into reasonable amounts allows the mind to recover and return to the job refreshed and energized.

Action Steps:

• (Literally) Schedule time away from work. Planning for when you will take breaks makes you more likely to do so. A quick break every hour and occasional vacation days will go a long way towards keeping your brain focused and on track.
• Learn to say no. It is tempting to get involved in every activity and spread oneself too thin. People will understand if you can’t attend every event, and it is empowering to keep control over your own schedule.
• Maintain a healthy work-life balance. Find a hobby that you like or other activities outside of work to break up the routine of job-related brain activity. Singular-minded devotion to any subject encourages burnout, while engagement with a diverse range of interests permits creativity and exercises different components of the brain.

Principle 2: Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Not that your entire year’s schedule should be condensed into today’s agenda! However, have you noticed the times that you feel the most stressed out? For most people, it tends to be when deadlines are approaching and last-minute work (or even all-night work) is needed. To the extent that you can avoid waiting until the last minute to complete projects, your mind will thank you!

Action Steps:

• Make a priorities list. There’s a famous meme which suggests that the most effective housecleaning sessions occur when a large project is nearing due. This is an example of a priorities imbalance. Instead, divide your to-do list into a “must do, should do, could do” list, and be sure to hit your top priorities first.
• Plan out your due dates. Some dates you will not have control over. Others, like when you will be grading papers and exams or teaching particular sections of a course, you have more control over. Try staggering your assignment due dates so you do not have enormous loads of grading to do all at once.
• Practice physical self-care. Some of the first things to get cut from the to-do list when one is feeling overloaded are exercise and healthy habits. And yet these are some of the most important daily habits for holistic mental health. It is more difficult to return to a routine after pushing exercise or healthy eating back a day or two (or three), so try to maintain as much consistency as possible.

Principle 3: Perfection is unattainable. That is certainly not to say that we shouldn’t try hard and strive for excellence, but academia often appears to demand perfection when it is not possible. For those who struggle with perfectionism, it can help to have a regular reminder that the hard work you do is valuable and appropriate for the job you have.

Action Steps:

• Lower the stakes in your classroom. You have the ability to take the spotlight off of you. In your class prep, try some new active learning strategies that allow students to get involved and take on a greater role in facilitating the class. (Research shows this is actually a good learning strategy!) Break major assignments into smaller ones so that grades are less decisive to a student’s overall course grade. And try using early semester evaluations to avoid placing too much emphasis on final student evaluations.
• Remember your purpose. Remind yourself of why you do the work that you do. Hopefully you can recall the enjoyment and passion you have for your subject! Then try to contextualize how your work fits into the big picture; is this an instance where minutiae is important, or is it simply a part of a larger whole?
• Be human. Everyone makes mistakes, has struggles, fears, concerns, and weaknesses. Many students and colleagues appreciate genuineness and authenticity, so be yourself and don’t feel like you need to hide behind a mask of perfection.

One final principle and action step is to enlist the help of others if your mental health isn’t where you’d like it to be or if you want to keep improving your mindfulness. Therapists, psychologists, or medical professionals can all assist with keeping you healthy and doing your best work possible. Notre Dame has a number of resources for individuals at any stage in their teaching career; check out the resources below for more information.

Importantly, these tips cannot replace the advice of trained care providers; in a case where mental illness is a possibility or a concern, seek the individualized guidance of a professional care consultant.

If nothing else, be sure to check in regularly with how you are doing taking care of yourself. Be sure to keep your mind healthy while you are working to expand others’!

In the event of a serious crisis or if you are concerned that somebody is in a life-threatening circumstance, you should call 911 immediately.

Resources

• University Counseling Center (for undergraduate and graduate students)
• Employee Assistance Program (for staff and faculty)
• Notre Dame Wellbeing at Work
• Notre Dame Wellness Center
• McDonald Center for Student Well-Being
• Notre Dame Campus Ministry

Further Reading

• “Mental Health in Academia” – Tenure, She Wrote
• “Academia and Mental Illness: A Preliminary List of Resources” – The Professor Is In
• “Academia and Mental Health” – Dr. Nadine Muller
• “Dark Thoughts: Why Mental Illness is on the Rise in Academia” – The Guardian

Being Transparent About and Challenging Our Own Assumptions About Material

In my current Writing and Rhetoric class, we are thinking about manifestos in preparation for writing our own. The manifesto forces students and myself to challenge our assumptions about certain topics by both replicating hyperbolic rhetoric and then objectively challenging and explaining the rhetorical moves we have made. Recently, I showed the class a visual art manifesto that I had recently come upon and found to be very complicated, playful, and to be making interesting visual and written rhetorical moves. I had been under the impression that this piece was an anti-establishment piece because of its content and we analyzed it as such.

Regrettably, after we did so I realized I had made a mistake and that this piece of art was institutionally endorsed and even being sold as limited edition napkins by the same institution. I pulled up the same visual manifesto next class and explained that I had mad an assumption that was incorrect and could have led to a slightly distorted interpretation of the piece. Thankfully, our interpretation of the piece was still valid, as part of the idea of the peace was to minimize the role of the establishment and to privilege the potentially transgressive art inside. I used this as an opportunity to talk about the importance of research as a tool for challenging assumptions while also underscoring that our unique, individual opinions and arguments about a certain topic should not be replaced by research but supplemented by it. The argument we had made when we were considering the piece to be anti-establishment (an assumption he students made as well) was not overwritten by finding out something new about the piece but was only made more robust and contextual.

I tell this story to underscore the necessity of transparency and vulnerability. We, as teachers, are as fallible as our students, no matter how more informed we are. Often, we are teaching classes outside of our narrow academic specialization and are trying to form our own opinions of the material ourselves. There are going to be times when we overstep. Instead of ignoring these missteps, we should attempt to publicly acknowledge them in front of the students to demonstrate that making assumptions is a natural act that everybody makes but that everybody should also be fully aware of. Admitting and airing your own assumptions makes you feel more human to them and invites them to self-reflect with you, which makes challenging their own assumptions feel more of a communal, shared activity.

Challenging our Assumptions about Students

No matter how informed we are about the material, we have very little knowledge about our students as people beyond our classroom, especially at the start of the semester. Therefore, we must make sure that we are not projecting our assumptions onto students. I say above that my students also assumed that the piece was anti-establishment because they were the first to articulate this point. I had merely let it go unchallenged. If I had brought the point up first, the students may have just attached themselves to my interpretation because of my perceived authority and I would have no evidence of which to deduce that they actually shared the same viewpoint prior to my statement. Even now, I have no idea if all the students agreed with the statement or whether some of them were just passively accepting it as truth because I, the knowledge-holder, hadn’t challenged it.

During this same session, one student had briefly zoned out to do some quick and dirty research on the artist via Wikipedia. He found that the artist was a transvestite and had non-normative sexual experience throughout his life and started to assume what I found to be some troubling things about the piece of art based upon his findings. I felt that he was making assumptions about the artist’s choices based upon the brief, subpar, biography he had read of the author’s life. I quickly made my own assumptions about what the student’s intent might be but I decided to challenge my assumptions and to frame the next class specifically around challenging assumptions we have about identity categories. It turns out that the same student that had made the troubling comments was also the one who I heard talking sensitively and cogently about identity politics in small groups this next class. I was surprised and sobered by this reminder that my assumption about his comments were not completely correct.

Challenging Students’ Assumptions

It is important that student’s assumptions are always being challenged. Yet, this cannot be done well if we have not already challenged our own. Therefore, I think it is important for the act of challenging assumptions to be a shared activity. Starting with pointing out or investigating our own assumptions will make students feel more comfortable with the process. One activity I have tried is to present an often-debated issue and ask students to write out their assumptions about the topic on the page. I then show a well-argued, objective video on the topic and then ask the students to revisit their assumptions in a group. Finally, we share our thoughts with the full class. I participate as much as they do in this activity. This is only one of many ways to stage a discussion of assumptions. Please share your own in the comments section below.

Additional Reading:

Stephen Brookfield. Teaching for Critical Thinking: a vital resource for this topic with many suggestions for how to challenge assumptions in classroom situations.

Happy fall break from the Kaneb Center! As you prepare for the second half of the semester, we challenge you to plan one new active learning strategy for your class. Research shows that active learning leads to increased student motivation and better learning outcomes. Here are some suggestions for active learning strategies you could employ in your teaching:

• Notes compare. Take a one or two minute break from class to have students compare notes with another student sitting near them. Ask them to discuss what they think the most important parts are and why they emphasized what they did in their notes. This will allow students to think about the notetaking strategy they are using and to learn from their peers.
• One minute papers. Ask students to write for one minute on a class question, on the most important thing they learned in class, or on questions that they have about the course material. You do not necessarily need to collect the papers, but if you do, this is an excellent opportunity to assess student learning and answer lingering questions.
• Case studies. Case studies are an effective tool to get students thinking about critical issues in your course material. They include stories as short as a paragraph to longer cases describing a problem that needs to be solved and some brief context needed to solve that problem. Students working in groups brainstorm solutions using their readings, class discussion, and their own experiences to apply the subject to “real-life” problems.
• Student presentations. Have students prepare short presentations on a topic related to your lesson for the day. Students may present on noteworthy contributors to the topic, a section of the readings, an important takeaway, a current event related to the material, or many other subjects. If you have a large class, assign multiple students to a presentation topic and have students teach others in small groups.
• In-class debate. Divide students into teams to discuss a question with two or more reasonable answers. After preparing their arguments, consider following a formal debate format with students offering opening statements, rebuttals, and closing remarks. Close by debriefing the debate, especially if students were assigned to represent a certain side of the debate topic. For more information about using debate in the classroom, see this previous post.

There are hundreds of different active learning techniques that can be used in any discipline, for any course level, and for any topic. Take a look around and find one that works best for you!

Not sure where to start? Need some help deciding which technique is right for your class?

Stop by the Kaneb Center for an individual consultation. We are available to assist with all of your teaching needs!

Additional Resources

• “Active Learning in the College Classroom.” – Faust and Paulson
• “Classroom Activities for Active Learning” – UNC Center for Faculty Excellence
• “Teaching and Learning in Active Learning Classrooms” – CMU Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching

A wealth of education literature suggests that using active learning techniques in class leads to more positive learning outcomes, including greater retention of course material, higher levels of student engagement, and increased opportunities for critical thinking. In spite of this evidence, some educators may be hesitant to include active learning techniques in their courses. Busyness, comfort with other models of teaching and learning, or negative experiences when first trying active learning are common reasons for not employing more active learning strategies. While there are many very simple active learning techniques that can be paired with any teaching model, overcoming negative experiences with active learning (either as a teacher or as a student) can be much more difficult. Below are five tips to keep in mind when using active learning to avoid common mistakes and to produce more positive experiences:

• Match active learning with your class goals. Active learning works best when you have a reason for doing it, and not just for the sake of doing it or filling class time. Consider how active learning fits into the broader picture of your class: are you asking students to recall class material, learn to solve problems, apply the material to real-world problems, or reflect on their learning? Is there a certain point you want to emphasize through the activity, do you want every student to speak, or are students practicing working in groups? You may also consider briefly explaining why you are doing an activity to increase motivation.
• Explain ahead of time and give clear directions. As with any teaching activity, active learning is only useful when students know exactly what they are supposed to be doing. If directions are not clear, participants will get off-topic much easier and the leader will receive less buy-in to the activity. If the activity is complex (or even if it is not), try writing directions on the board, displaying them on the screen, or putting them into a handout.
• Don’t make activities too easy or too hard. This takes time to figure out. Avoid packing too much into a single learning exercise, but make sure that you are not giving students five minutes to do a one minute activity. Many of the best active learning strategies challenge students to work on a single question or topic. Monitor the activity by walking around the room and gauging students’ completion. If the goal is not completing an assignment, many active learning exercises do not require you to wait for all students to finish; otherwise students who complete the work early will likely tune out as others wrap up.
• Hold students accountable. To make sure students consistently stay on task throughout the semester, consider collecting students’ writing or discussing the activity with the full group. It is important to reinforce that everyone should participate in the activities, and calling on students or asking each group to share is one way to keep students focused on learning. Active learning techniques can be used to evaluate participation or informally evaluate student learning.
• Use a variety of techniques. Some active learning techniques work better than others in a given class. If one technique doesn’t seem to work, try something else! If you are unsure about whether students are learning what they need to from the activity, follow up with them to see. There are hundreds of different active learning techniques, so find the ones that work best for you.

It’s easy to get discouraged when trying or experiencing new teaching techniques. If your first attempt doesn’t go well, perhaps the activity just needs to be tweaked, or maybe a different type of active learning is more appropriate. Either way, don’t give up! If you want to incorporate active learning and need a place to start, start small. One technique in one class. Research shows that using short active learning activities every 15 minutes leads to more learning, even simple tasks such as having students compare notes or discussing a single discussion question. So if at first you don’t succeed, as the old adage suggests, try and try again.

Additional Resources

• “Active Learning” – Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence
• “Common Active Learning Mistakes” – Felder & Brent
• “An Introduction to Active Learning for Busy Skeptics” – Prince
• “Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research” – Prince
• 50 Ways to Leave Your Lectern: Active Learning Strategies to Engage First-Year Students – Staley

The first presidential debate of 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had the highest viewership of any presidential debate in history. Yet how many of us actually integrated this groundbreaking event or the myriad of currently contested political issues into our class discussions? Surely, this election season is a field day for many political scientists but it and other current events are also deeply relevant to multiple disciplines. Using current events can help students clearly understand the relevance of a certain class topic or discipline.

The following entry provides strategies for using current events in the classrooms. This entry is from the 2016-2017 Teaching Issues Writing Consortium: Teaching Tips and was contributed by Debi Griffin of the Faculty Development Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Weaving Current Events into Student Assignments and Classroom Activities

One way to help students recognize the relevance of a course of study is to incorporate current events into the mix of classroom strategies. Whether your students use actual newspapers or electronic resources, there are dozens of ways to weave current events into student assignments and classroom activities. The New York Times Learning Network posted “50 Ways to Teach with Current Events” on their website last fall and there are hundreds of other suggestions on the web.

The following list includes a few of my favorite news-related assignments and activities:

• Give extra credit for current news articles that directly relate to class content. Invite students to bring in an article, explain why it’s relevant and present a 1-2 minute summary.
• Have students closely examine one news event by comparing the coverage from different news sources. How is the coverage similar and how is it different?
• Given a particular news event, ask students to identify two credible resources and two questionable resources, and justify their selections.
• After discussing a current event, provide event photographs and ask students to develop their own captions and share in class.
• When following one issue for a full semester, ask students to write an opinion piece at the beginning, middle and end of the semester.
• With more complex current event topics, ask students to create a timeline of events.
• Invite students to look at the stories that have made the front page of a local newspaper during the last few days and to talk about why each of those stories made headlines.
• Ask students to choose an article and write about how that issue matters to them, to their family or to their community.
• Ask students to analyze how photographs are used, what they add to the understanding of the article, how they may bias the content of an article and what makes them memorable and/or questionable.
• Ask students to write a letter to the editor about a topic/issue emerging from the course content and discussion.
• Ask students to compare a current event to a historical event of their choosing.
• Help students practice research skills by distributing articles for students to use to practice summarizing, paraphrasing, using quotations, avoiding plagiarism and citing sources.

Resources

Education World: Twenty-Five Great Ideas for Teaching Current Events. Retrieved from http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/lesson/lesson072.shtml

The Learning Network: 50 Ways to Teach with Current Events. Retrieved from http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/50-ways-to-teach-current-events/comment-page-1/

Submitted by: Debi Griffin Faculty Development Center Bellarmine University Louisville, Kentucky dgriffin@bellarmine.edu

The following entry from the 2016-2017 Teaching Issues Writing Consortium: Teaching Tips was contributed by Renee N. Saris-Baglama, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Community College of Rhode Island
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Many new college students earn poor grades in introductory-level and gateway courses despite having strong confidence in their ability to earn high grades. Students often appear dumbfounded when they receive their first low exam score and may attribute their poor performance to a difficult test, instructor, or course subject matter, rather than consider the exam preparation strategies that they utilized. Unfortunately, it is not unusual for students to underestimate the amount of study time required and to engage in less effective study strategies (e.g., cramming) than more effective ones (e.g., distributed practice).

One way to help students become better learners is through self-reflection. Self-reflection promotes students’ critical thinking about how they approached a task, what worked and what didn’t and why, and how they might approach the task differently in the future. Recently Ambrose and colleagues (2010) and Lovett (2013) provided teachers with a simple and practical tool, referred to as an “Exam Wrapper,” for implementing structured self-reflection on exam performance to promote metacognition and self-regulated learning.

Exam wrappers can be easily integrated into the feedback loop that takes place when graded exams are returned to students. Typically just a page or two long (for examples see https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/examwrappers/), exam wrappers prompt students to think about their exam preparation (What did I do to prepare for this exam?), compare this to their exam performance (How did I perform?), analyze their strengths and weaknesses (What types of questions/problems did I miss and why?), and plan for how to adjust their learning strategies as needed (What can I do differently?). Students complete the exam wrapper in class during the graded exam review. Instructors can also review student responses to get a sense of whether or not students are using effective practices and provide feedback and recommendations. The wrappers are handed back to students prior to the next exam to remind them of their analysis and plans for adapting strategies. A study by Lovett (2013) found that among first-year math and science students, those who had greater exposure to exam wrappers were more likely to adopt effective study strategies.

When I recently incorporated structured exam reflections into my teaching, the vast majority of community college students enrolled in my general psychology classes (n=65) reported benefits (see Table 1). Students’ open-ended comments suggested that this activity improved self-awareness and self-regulated learning (see Table 2), benefits that were achieved with minimal use of class time (approximately 10-12 minutes).

Exam reflections promote metacognitive skills such as planning, monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting learning strategies, skills that are transferable beyond your particular classroom. If you want your students to adopt more effective learning strategies, exam reflections offer a simple way to quickly get your students thinking about how they approach learning and how they may better manage their learning.

Table 1. Student Perceptions of the Benefits of Exam Reflections

Table 2. Sample Comments on Changes Made as a Result of Exam Reflections

Resources

Ambrose, S., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., and Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Emberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Education Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/examwrappers/

Lovett, M. C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade: Using exam wrappers to promote metacognition. In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. LaVague-Manty, & D. Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy (pp. 18-52). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Submitted by:
Renee N. Saris-Baglama, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Psychology Department
Community College of Rhode Island
400 East Avenue
Warwick, RI 02886
rsarisbaglama@ccri.edu

In the second session of the Kaneb Center’s Foundations of Teaching series this fall, questions regarding the purpose and efficacy of quizzing came up during the discussion of a sample lesson plan that included an ungraded quiz at the end of a class period to measure learning. While some participants appreciated the low stress of such a quiz, some others were worried that the lack of a grade may decrease student motivation. Below, I will discuss reasons and strategies for using ungraded quizzes and provide suggestions for when grading might better reflect the goal of the quiz.

The Most Important Question: What is the Learning Goal of the Quiz?

The use of a graded or ungraded quiz should be tied to what you expect the student to learn from the specific quiz. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a useful classification of educational objectives and can help you evaluate what types of questions you are asking students and what level they are working at.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Higher Level Learning Skills are always more nuanced and therefore often require complex argumentation rather than a single, correct answer. If you are testing for higher level learning, ungraded quizzes will enable students to focus on application, analysis, or another more complex skill without them having to worry about being penalized for being incorrect. Quizzes testing higher level learning skills can be used to generate further conversation on the given topic.You can discuss the answers to the questions afterward as a class, or even have students first discuss their answers on their own in pairs or small groups. A quiz testing higher level concepts will develop students thinking rather than just testing it. A grade on a quiz might not sufficiently capture the student’s thought process and might discourage them from taking a risk in their analysis, providing instead what they think they want you to hear.

If you are going to grade higher level learning skills, it is best to provide a clear rubric so that students know exactly how they are being graded. This more complex grading system is probably better left for a formal exam than a quiz.

If you choose to test higher level learning skills with a quiz at the end of class, students may be inclined to be more honest with you about areas where they are confused or lost. You can then use the quizzes to decide what overall lessons you might have to review in the class.

Lower Level Learning Skills are often more focused. If the quiz is administered primarily to confirm whether or not students have done the work, it would make sense to grade the work so that students are held accountable. That said, you want to be careful not to make the role of the quizzes and their grades seem primarily punitive. If you are merely testing for the completion of assigned work, ensure that the questions are relatively straightforward so that the prepared student in guaranteed to pass.

Still Worried About Motivation?

Make the ungraded quizzes part of their participation grade.

Grade the quizzes but keep the stakes low by having the quizzes account for only a small portion of the overall course grade.

Have the students create their own quizzes. In order to create their own questions, students have to have a good grasp of the material. If each individual student creates their own quiz, you can pair the students up and have them take each other’s tests and discuss the answers with one another afterward. This way each student is critically thinking about the material both when designing their own quiz and taking that of the peer. Students will also learn from each other’s shared knowledge of the topic.

Further Reading:

https://www.nactateachers.org/images/The_Student-Developed_Quiz_or_Exam-__Scaffolding_Higher-Order_Thinking.pdf

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/educational-assessment/frequent-low-stakes-grading-assessment-for-communication-confidence/

http://www.humber.ca/centreforteachingandlearning/instructional-strategies/teaching-methods/classroom-strategies-designing-instruction/activities-and-games/ungraded-quiz.html

https://tips.uark.edu/using-blooms-taxonomy/