Notes on Teaching and Learning

Midterm season is fast approaching (if it hasn’t arrived already) and you may now face the challenge of designing one or more exams that will fit the students, the material, and the goals of the class. You probably touched on some of these elements when designing the course or creating the syllabus, but the actual work of crafting a satisfactory exam can still be a daunting prospect. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you plan:

• Consider the exam in light of course objectives. How will you describe this test to your students in terms of the overall goals of the course? Maybe it is a tool to measure how much content they remember at this point in the semester. Or it can be a chance to draw out students’ creative abilities by encouraging new ideas and new applications of the material they’ve learned by this time–as long as everything on the test is material they have already covered. This is not a time for surprises! In either case, use this midterm as an opportunity. It can be more than a routine checkup; it can actually work toward achieving some of the goals of the course.
• Use appropriate methods of assessment. Depending on what you hope your students will gain or demonstrate through this exam, you will want to choose the format of the test carefully. Multiple choice and true or false questions are work well if you need your students to demonstrate knowledge of discrete technical terms or other data retrieval. It is possible to measure more complex thinking with multiple choice questions, but it requires a high level of effort and skill on the teacher’s part to create these kinds of questions. (See here for more information on creating good multiple choice questions.) Typically, if you need your students to establish their ability to construct and defend arguments, essay questions demand the more complex level of thinking needed.
• Think ahead to grading. It’s never too early to start building a grading rubric! As you go over your questions, break the desired answers down into their component parts so you can decide how many points to award for each part. This will make it easier to give partial credit to an answer that still falls short. Once you make your decisions about how many parts and how many points go with each questions, distribute this rubric to the students. While this rubric should not give away any answers, it can guide their study. Not only will it help them prepare for the exam, it will make grading far quicker and easier.
• Consider how long it will take to finish. It is important to design exams that can be reasonably completed within the set time limit. There can be a disconnect sometimes between what an expert in the field can do or answer and what a student should be able to do in the same amount of time. You might consider taking your own midterm to see how long it takes you; then double or triple the time you needed to get a sense of what your students will need. Give your students a sense of how long they should spend on each section by letting them know the number of points they can earn per question. For example, if the short answers are worth 5 points each and the essay questions are worth 15 points each, they will have the information they need to manage their time effectively.
• Ask a colleague or a friend to read through the exam. As with other writing projects, it’s easy to miss mistakes or misjudge how well an exam is constructed without some outside feedback. Asking someone else in your discipline to review your questions will help you judge if the exam is an adequate and accurate tool to measure student progress. Even getting a friend a from another field to look it over can help you ensure the exam is unambiguous in what is asks of the students.

Here is a good resource for different types of grading rubrics that can prompt you ask specific kinds of questions.

We have previously talked about how to design a final exam here. There are many similar points to be made, and you may find the perspective of the final helpful here as well.

There has been a push in education theory lately, and amongst administrators familiar with the area, to make sure that educators act intentionally to be more “culturally responsive” in the way they design their courses, lessons, classrooms, and even pedagogical interactions. In this post, I’ll talk about a couple of things I’ve done via course design make my teaching more culturally responsive, i.e. to meet students where they’re at, to minimize evaluation based on irrelevant skill sets, and to remove barriers to learning that are often part of introductory college courses. While the discussion will use a philosophy intro class as a concrete case for illustrative purposes, the principles and strategies can be readily be applied to similar courses in the humanities, and, I hope, beyond.

Using alternative literacies and removing educational barriers

One way to remove educational barriers is simply to place most or all course materials online. Today’s student tends to be extremely adept at using complex technology and social media tools to navigate the world and their relationships, even — and perhaps especially — students from lower-income homes, who often have internet access, even if they live in school districts with limited or no access to libraries, print materials, etc. According to an article in Wired by Emily Dreyfuss, “The vast majority of Americans use the internet every day—88 percent according to the Pew Research Center. In 2016, three quarters of all Americans owned a smartphone, with lower-income people and people over the age of 50 accounting for much of the most recent growth.” In culturally responsive teaching terms, then, familiarity with and competence using the internet and its various social tools constitutes an “alternative literacy” which educators ought to seek to use in their pedagogy, rather than a form of illiteracy they ought to discourage. Placing course materials online both maximizes this use of alternative literacy and increases access for students with financial barriers.

In one class I recently taught, I replaced the paper syllabus with a class homepage which serves as an interactive syllabus. On the site, the course is broken down into pages corresponding with each day of class. Every assigned text, and every assignment is included on the website as a distinct link, so students can confidently navigate every aspect of the course on their own terms, whenever they’d like, and with full confidence that they’re not missing any readings or assignments.

Generating and using experience-affirming content

Another valuable way to reach all of your students while removing barriers to learning is to give students leadership in discussion settings in a way that draws out and emphasizes the value of their experiences. If you’re teaching a course that would traditionally have instructor-led discussion sections, which risk introducing or reinforcing unhelpful pedagogical stereotypes and mimicking unhelpful power dynamics, you might think about replacing these with more student-led discussions, and could even implement a formal program like “Sustained Dialogue.” Sustained Dialogue is a program that was developed to help groups of students engage in meaningful conversations about hot-button issues on college campuses. One of the things I like best about the Sustained Dialogue model, which is explicitly designed to last for one semester, is that it grounds conversations about big questions in the experiences and backgrounds of those in the group, and it proceeds on the assumption that deep dialogue needs to be rooted in mutual understanding and personal relationships. In this way, then, the students’ own experiences and background become relevant content for the course. This allows me as the instructor to reflect and emphasize the value of those experiences in course materials and assignments, and in a way that doesn’t depend on my own potentially biased or misinformed assumptions about where my students are coming from or what will or should be most important to them.

By drawing on alternative (and sometimes non-dominant and non-standard) literacies, and focusing on content that reflects and affirms the value of their backgrounds and personal experiences, these design elements aim to not only enhance the philosophy classroom experience, but also empower students to use philosophical tools, like informal reasoning and argumentation, to conceptualize and collectively respond to social problems in their communities.

Often, especially at the beginning of the semester, it may seem difficult to get students to participate in classroom discussions. Below are some strategies that may help get conversations started:

1. Wait at least 10 seconds before you clarify a question or add a new one. A lot of the time, students do have thoughtful answers to the questions that instructors ask, they just need some extra time to formulate them.If no one has offered an answer after around 10 seconds, you may need to reframe your question, ask a more direct question, or move on to the strategies below.
2. Have students write down their answer to a specific question or set of questions. This approach both offers students the thinking time they need while also leveling the playing field for students who may fear speaking off the cuff or in front of a group of people. Once everyone has had time to compose an answer, they may be more willing to share with their classmates.  
3. Engage students in a think/pair/share. This activity splits students’ responses into three parts: first they answer the questions on their own (as described in #2), then they discuss them in pairs, and finally they share their responses with the entire class. Students are more likely to feel safe sharing their thoughts if they have had time to not only formulate their answers, but also test and build upon those thoughts in a lower-pressure situation before having to share in front of the entire classroom.

In my last Blog Post I mentioned Bloom’s taxonomy as a tool for building course goals. It can also help you build better questions. If you have tried all of the above methods and students are still struggling, you may want to revisit the types of questions that you are asking. Perhaps you are asking questions that rely solely on declarative memory and thus won’t generate much productive discussion. Conversely, it might be that the questions you are asking students are all higher-level questions and thus overwhelming for students. Make sure that whenever you are asking questions, you are making sure that students first have knowledge of lower level concepts pertaining to the subject so that they are able to build off these lower level concepts to achieve higher level understanding. The following chart pairs Bloom’s taxonomy with a list of verbs and is helpful for building level specific questions:

As always, the Kaneb Center is happy to hold a private consultation with you if you feel you are still having difficulty with classroom discussions.

Further Reading:

Jon Saphier, Mary Ann Haley-Speca, Robert Gower. The Skillful Teacher

Therese Huston. Teaching What You Don’t Know

In my experience, there are three kinds of teachers in college: (1) super-committed educators who prepare for courses meticulously and seem baffled that anyone else can go into a classroom without having done 20+ hours of prep, (2) educational minimalists who seemingly start thinking about the day’s material 10 – 15 minutes before class begins, and (3) the spookily productive who seem both deeply committed but utterly stress free when it comes to teaching, and who — as far as I can tell — seem to spend just a little more time preparing than their minimalist counterparts. Since you’re reading this blog, I think it’s safe to assume that you aspire to be in category (3). In the remainder of this post, I’m going to reveal and unpack a pedagogical tip that will move you one step closer to that goal.

I first started thinking about drawing on existing educational resources when my wife, who is a second grade teacher, introduced me to “Teachers Pay Teachers,” a platform where primary and secondary school educators sell and share resources they’ve created for their own classrooms. My first thought was, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was such a platform for college educators?!” Well, it turns out, there is something like it — platforms that collect and curate “Open Educational Resources,” materials that have been created for college coursework with the idea that anyone anywhere can access and use them for free. (Thus, these resources don’t include things like trademarked images, and use Creative Commons or public domain materials.) Merlot II is one such platform. Other, similar sites, include OERCommons, OEConsortium, Open Textbook Library, and OpenStax.

A second type of online resource that can help you cut down prep time is what I’m calling “educational reviewers.” There are a number of people who spend vast amounts of time and effort sifting through all the technological educational resources that are being released on an almost daily basis, and their reviews can introduce you to effective new tools and help you avoid wasting time on ineffective or glitchy tools. One of my favorite educational reviewers is EduFlip, which also has a YouTube channel devoted to helping educators use technological resources to create “flipped classrooms” (a concept they also introduce on their website if you are unfamiliar with it). Similarly, ProfHacker is a blog that regularly hosts discussions of up-to-date pedagogical tools, techniques, and theories.

The teaching tip above is a example of the generally good idea to “work smarter, not harder.” There are only so many hours in the day, and you’re just one person with certain pedagogical strengths and weaknesses. It helps to remember that you can leverage your strengths and help neutralize your weaknesses by finding and utilizing resources in the broader community of higher-ed.

Thanks to Chris Clark for pointing me toward several of these resources, and to Chris and Kristi Rudenga for suggestions on a draft of this post.

At the start of the semester, we give our students a lot of information to help them succeed in our courses.  We distribute and explain syllabi, we introduce ourselves and our academic backgrounds, we share helpful outside resources with our students, and many of us distribute tips for success in the course.  But communication at the start of the semester should go in both directions.  What can you do to learn about your students academically and personally?

1. Collect surveys

Collect surveys to learn information about your students.  One question you should always include is “Is there anything else you’d like me to know about you?” This space allows students to share their particular experiences, circumstances, or struggles with you, if they so wish.  In addition, you might ask about students’

• Personal background
• Past experience in the discipline
• Expectations for the course
• Interest in the subject or discipline
• Concerns about the course
• Career or personal goals
• Outside interests or hobbies

Tailor your survey to target the information you find useful.  You can find an example student survey on p. 11 of this handout.

I read through my surveys on a few different occasions, with my Online Photo sheet out in front of me.  (Find Online Photo on InsideND or ask the primary instructor of your course if you do not have access).  This strategy of matching students’ names and faces with some personal details is one of the best ways I’ve found to learn student names.  See more of our suggestions on learning student names here.

2. Ask what students expect from you

I make talking about expectations a two-way conversation when I introduce my syllabus. I begin by asking what students expect from me.  (Hint: The most common thing I hear is the desire for clarity in my expectations and communication.)  We then talk about what I can do to meet those expectations.  Often, I can explain how I then explain how my policies address their concerns.  Occasionally, it requires us together thinking about how we can address a problem. Be transparent with your students about what you can and cannot change.  Be willing to experiment or make small changes.

Even if you have already talked about your syllabus, you can still ask students about their expectations.  You might plan to address or re-address student concerns at timely moments in the upcoming weeks, such as before the first exam or the first time you have a difficult discussion planned.

3. Collect written work

Collect a short piece of low-stakes or no-stakes work, such as a pretest, short paper or written reflection, from students in the first week or two of the semester. Choose an assignment that incorporates the kinds of skills students will be using and building on throughout the semester. Seeing what the students produce will help you diagnose common strengths or weaknesses, allowing you to target later lessons to your students’ needs.  In the event any of your students have major problems, such as missing requisite skills for the course, you can get them connected to the necessary resources immediately.  For more on the benefits of assigning work early in the semester, check out this previous post on the topic.

Learning about your students not only provides you with information you need for a successful semester, but it also helps your students feel welcomed and valued in your classroom.

Once the semester has ended and you have had time to rest and recover, go back to any notes you have made throughout the semester, as well as student comments on the course. Make sure to make any necessary changes to assignments or other documents as soon as possible so you don’t forget to do so later.

When you being to plan the next semester’s course, use the feedback you have collected to think more consciously about your course goals. Make sure that your course goals are clear and realistic, and that they are varied in terms of skill level. Bloom’s taxonomy (featured below) is a helpful tool for creating a diverse set of course goals.

Of course, your goals will vary widely depending on the type of class you’re teaching.  A general rule of thumb is to articulate  one or two course goals corresponding to the lower tiers (remember, understand, apply) of Bloom’s taxonomy and one or two course goals at the higher levels (analyze, evaluate, create).  Below are some examples of course goals from two different disciplines:

• Intro to Chemistry: Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Identify components of chemical formulae
2. predict simple chemical formulas and geometries.
3. understand the reasoning for the periodic table’s structure as well as be able to predict trends involving ionization energies, electron affinities, and other chemical properties.
4. be able to describe and solve problems involving the ideal gas law and simple thermodynamic relationships.

• Writing and Rhetoric: Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Identify rhetorical strategies and understand the way they are used in our everyday lives.
2. Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of textual and visual arguments.
3. Create your own visual and textual arguments that demonstrate an awareness of your audience and effectively construct a truth about yourself and/or the world using rhetorical techniques.

The idea is to make sure that students are being challenged to tackle difficult problems and questions but that they also have basic knowledge provided by the lower level learning goals in order to accomplish these higher level tasks. After you have created your course goals, you can begin planning lesson plans and assignments around them.

This blog post is a preview of what will be covered in The Foundations of Teaching workshop series next semester. If you are not already on our mailing list, please email kaneb@nd.edu in order to sign up so that you are notified when workshops are open for enrollment.

Further Reading on Backward Course Design

Jo Handelsman, Sarah Miller, and Christine Pfund, Scientific Teaching

Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don’t Know

Adapted from the Kaneb Center workshop titled “Building Better Bookends: Making the Most of the First and Last Days of Your Class”. This workshop was offered by Kristi Rudenga, Assistant Director of the Kaneb Center on November 15, 2017.
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“For many, the last day of class comes and goes without ceremony, yet it provides an opportunity to bring the student-teacher experience to a close in a way that students appreciate and enjoy” (Lucas and Bernstein, 2005).The last day of class is the favorable time for students to reflect on what they have learned so far. So it’s important to have a good closure for courses so that students can synthesize and retain the knowledge they have gained thus far.

Below are a variety of useful techniques that can make sure that the last class day is a finale and not a fizzle.

[1] Reinforce long-term learning

• Revisit course goals
• Suggest strategies for effective studying for final
• Activity:
  • Working in pairs, have students answer: “You’ve got an interview for your dream job. The interviewer, who may become your boss, is looking at your transcript and says, ‘Oh, I see you took “insert course name”. Tell me what you learned in that course.’”
  • Refine your answer together and share as a lead-in to a class discussion and review of important concepts

[2] Reflect on content and process

• Ask for some reflection as preparation for last class
  • Activity: ask students to share a “Performative Reflection” (Hull), in any format other than an essay, with the rest of the class.
• Have students write letters to future students
• Collect feedback for yourself: Discuss aspects of the course that were most and least conducive to learning.

[3] Make large-scale connections among course topics

• Spend time explicitly building connections
• Activity: Minute thesis:
  • Develop brief theses connecting different aspect of course content
• Activity: Connections Web
  • As a class, determine 3-4 main themes that ran through the whole class.
  • Distribute a circle of course topics; Have student pairs draw and label as many connections as possible on paper circle
  • Take turns sharing connections on a blackboard with brief explanations
  • Have each student write a way they saw themes play out on a color-coded sticky note
  • Stick notes on the topic they refer to.

[4] Make large-scale connections with other classes, life, and careers

• Ask students to situate skills and content from your course within their larger curriculum and goals
• Point them to resources that may serve them well in the future
• Activity:
  • Have students create concept maps of what they know in their major so far, highlighting contributions of the current class

[5] Bid Students Farewell

• Thank them for their engagement
• Acknowledge what you’ve learned from them
• Don’t be afraid to show emotion if you’re so inclined
• Time of celebration and ritual

Citation
Lucas, S. and Bernstein, D. (2005). Teaching Psychology: a step by step guide. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Further Reading
[1] Love, B. (2013). Finishing Strong: End-of-Class Review to Improve Relationships, Measurement, and Learning Outcomes. College Teaching 61: 151-152.
[2] Uhl, C. (2005). The last class. College Teaching 53(4): 165-166.
[3] Maier, Mark H. and Ted Panitz. “End on a High Note: Better Endings for Classes and Courses.” College Teaching 44.4 (1996): 145-148.

The following post is by Michael O’Hare, and it was posted on April 6, 2016 on the Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning website http://teaching.berkeley.edu<http://teaching.berkeley.edu/> . This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License 2013 (may be reproduced with credit for non-commercial purposes.<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en_US> Michael O’Hare’s blog: http://www.samefacts.com/

Adapted from “Tomorrow’s-professor” Digest, Vol 113, Issue 2

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This note describes a method for critiquing student work that greatly increases the efficiency of the process compared to written comments.  I discovered it by accident, when I graded a bunch of papers on a portable dictating machine while traveling, back in the day when professors didn’t have laptops but did have assistants. I gave the tape to my assistant to transcribe. I asked the next day whether she had finished, and she said “Are you kidding? Do you know how long this is?” The updated system described here has the advantage of using a technology familiar to students (mp3 audio).  An intermediate stage involved cassette tapes that were tedious to keep track of and exchange.

Process:

(1) Obtain a headset such as you would use for Skype (earphones and a mic).  Also get this software http://stepvoice.com/index.shtml   (windows only) or this  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ <http://audacity.sourceforge.net/%20%0D (mac or  windows).  The voice recorder that comes with Windows is pretty rudimentary and makes only .wma files, which are less widely used than mp3?s. Here is a page of options for Mac audio recording – http://techchannel.radioshack.com/make-voice-recording-mac-1621.html

(2) Invite submissions in MSWord (or on paper); pdfs are quite tedious to annotate and almost impossible to edit (unless you use PDF Annotator<http://www.pdfannotator.com/> or an equivalent, with a tablet screen you can write on).

(3) Start a memo of general comments, with numbered entries.  It should begin with “Comments on your paper are on the attached mp3 files and keyed to letters on your original.  Listen to file 1 first. GN refers to something in this memo, RN to the Rhetoric Note distributed earlier.”

(4) Open student Smith’s paper and turn on Track Changes.  Under Track changes/Change tracking options, switch the colors for inserts and deletes to blue or green, anything but red (grownups do not write on other grownups’ work with a red pen,; it’s affectively very bad).  (Option: if you like to work from a paper draft, you may of course just write on it, edit with proofreader’s marks, etc.)

(5) Set the recording software to mono and a low bit rate, for smaller files.  Start a new file, which will be called  smith2.mp3 . Say  “Hi, Georgia. These are thoughts on your paper draft that came to me as I read it”, then pause the recorder.  Annotate the student paper with edits to the text as you see fit, to illustrate rhetorical issues and the like. But when you want to make a substantive comment, just put a key letter in the student paper (A, B, C, etc.) and dictate “At letter A: this is an interesting insight. Can you apply it also to your second alternative policy?”, “At letter B: shouldn’t the predominance of poltergeist manifestations  have been mentioned earlier?” etc.

(6) After a few papers, you will have found that some comments apply to many; put these in the general comment memo, and then you just have to highlight or circle text and write “GN3”

(7) When you finish a pass through the paper, you have three options; the important thing is to be sure the student hears your general comments, which must begin with something positive, first.  Your passim observations will mostly be critical or questioning. Of course if you can catch students doing specific things right and (i) say so  (ii) say what it is, not just “good” in the margin, It’s valuable; I don’t do enough of this and am trying to  teach myself to do more.

1. Type or write a few lines of overview evaluation at the beginning of the draft.
2. If using Stepvoice, which doesn’t allow you to insert, start a new file, called smith1.mp3 and dictate overview comments.  End it with “now listen to the other mp3 file for specific comments keyed to letters in your draft.”
3. If using Audacity, you can insert the general comments at the beginning of the mp3 file.  You can also open the first-pass mp3 file from Stepvoice in Audacity to do this, but then you have to resave it as an mp3.      

(8) Return the annotated Word file (or the scribbled paper copy) and the mp3 file[s] to the student, the mp3s as email attachments.  Students are quite accustomed to dealing with mp3 files.

Technical notes:  Stepvoice has VAS, which starts recording when you speak and stops when you are silent. This saves a lot of mouse clicks recording and pausing, and avoids long silences when you forget to pause;

Compared to comments on a final paper at the end of the course, I’d say it’s about twenty times as valuable per minute invested, especially effectively, because negative comments on a finished paper are just lost chances for the student to regret, but on a draft they are opportunities to seize.