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We all have opinions—things we love, like, admire, dislike, are contemptuous of, can’t stand, and so on. The idea behind all blogs is an assumption that someone out there in Cyberland cares about what we think. This blog is no exception. Since you found your way to our website, we assume that you have some interest in different aspects of STEM education and maybe some curiosity about our ideas. What you can expect to find on the Blog are our takes on good and not-so-good teaching methods; attributes and quirks of students, faculty members, and administrators; books and articles we think you might enjoy; and occasionally some stuff just for fun.

Following are three ways to find what the blog has to offer on a topic that interests you. If you don’t have a specific topic in mind but just want to browse, we suggest you go to Way #1.

  1. Click on Guide to the Blog, a list of frequently-asked questions about STEM teaching and learning and links to our responses. Chances are you’ll find some questions you’ve wondered about. For example, “How can I prepare a new course (lectures, assignments, exams,…) and still have time for the rest of my life?” and “My students vary all over the place in background and skills, and there’s just one of me. What am I supposed to do?”
  2. In the column on the right side of this page, you’ll find a list of categories (Active Learning, Assessment and Evaluation,…, Tips for Students). Click on the category that best fits the topic you want information about. Links to all the posts in that category will appear.
  3. Enter a keyword or phrase in the search box below the category list. Links to all the posts that contain your entry will appear.

OK, we’ll stop there. Our plan is to post at least once a month and more if the spirit moves us, with the posts ranging from quick teaching tips and quotes to longer pieces. Enjoy.

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HANDOUTS WITH GAPS

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Principal Reference: R.M. Felder and R. Brent, (2024), Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, 2nd ed., pp. 84–89. <https://educationdesignsinc.com/book/>.

When you’ve given enough teaching workshops, you start to anticipate certain questions from the participants. In our workshops, for example, as soon as we mention active learning we can count on someone immediately asking how they’re supposed to cover their syllabi if they start filling their lectures with activities.

When we get that question we trot out one or more of three responses. First, the point of teaching is not instructors covering information but students learning it. If you cover something and most students don’t learn it, you haven’t taught it. Second, you can have a major impact on learning by including just a few minutes of activity in a 50-minute class, which won’t do irreparable harm to your syllabus coverage. Our third response not only preserves your syllabus but allows you to extend it while doing all the active learning you want to. This response does double duty, since it also answers another FAQ: “How can I catch up with my class schedule when I fall a week or more behind, as I invariably do in every course I teach?”

Here’s how: use handouts with gaps. Put your lecture notes in class handouts or (if you have the complete set of notes) a coursepack, but not the complete notes. Show straightforward parts of the lecture material—definitions, facts, simple math, diagrams, and plots—with interspersed blank spaces (gaps) for students to insert answers to questions and missing parts of problem solutions and derivations. In class, give students brief periods of time to read the straightforward parts themselves, and use lecturing or student activities to fill in the gaps.

An illustrative page from a handout for an introductory fluid dynamics course is shown below. If you were conducting this particular class session, you would begin by asking the students to open their handout or coursepack to p. 35 and read the top half of the page, which contains a simple description of fluid flowing in a pipe. You would stop them when you think they’ve had enough time and ask if they have any questions. You’ve just saved a lot of time relative to a traditional lecture, since the students can read much faster than you can speak and write. Next comes a problem statement (“Derive an expression for the mass flow rate…”) and a gap for the solution. Here are three different things you can do at that point.

  1. Lecture on the material that goes in the gap. Tell the students that what they just read is straightforward but that derivation is tricky and students often have trouble with it, and then go through it as you would in a traditional lecture. The idea is to focus most of the class time on material the students really need help with, as opposed to spending a lot of it on definitions and simple calculations that the students can quickly read through on their own.
  2. Use activities to get students to fill in the gap. A more effective strategy is to tell the students to get into groups of two or three and give them a short time to go as far as they can with the derivation, then stop them and call randomly on several to report on the steps they carried out. Write correct responses on the board so everyone in the class gets them. Some students will work out the derivation and so will own it, because they did it themselves rather than just watching you do it and imagining that they understood all of it. (Few students understand complex material when they just listen passively to a lecture on it.) Others will try but won’t get the solution in the allotted time. As it goes up on the board, though, most of those students will pay careful attention, ask questions if necessary, and understand it by the end of that class
  3. Leave filling in the gap as an exercise for the students to complete outside of class. Tell the students that you don’t plan on going over the gap in class, but they should make sure to find out what goes in it before the next test. They can work with each other and ask about it in class or in your office if they can’t figure it out themselves. If you fall behind your lecture schedule, increase your use of this option for easier or less important material.

Rich used handouts with gaps for the last 20 years of his active teaching career. Even though he also used activities extensively, his syllabi actually got longer than they were when he felt it necessary to work through every step of every derivation and problem solution in class. The brief struggles the students had in class followed by immediate feedback saved many of them hours of wrestling with similar exercises in the homework.

Research has confirmed that handouts with gaps have a powerful impact on learning and performance on assignments and tests. (See the reference at the top of this post.) In several studies, students who got them earned higher exam grades, higher course grades, and higher marks on conceptual questions than students who had complete notes.

Faculty members sometimes raise objections to the concept of handouts with gaps.

Objection 1: Students learn a lot by taking notes in class. If I give them most of the lecture notes in handouts, they won’t bother taking their own notes and will learn less.

Response: The research says otherwise. When students are busy copying definitions, tables, figures, equations, and simple mathematical operations, they can’t simultaneously pay full attention to explanations in the lecture, and they consequently miss important material.

Objection 2: Putting my complete lecture notes into handouts with gaps will take much more of my time than I can afford to spend.

Response: What takes huge amounts of time is preparing the notes in the first place. Once you have them, it doesn’t take much additional time to add gaps by pasting physical or electronic blank rectangles over responses to questions, calculations, and drawings you want students to complete.

Objection 3: My students think I’m obliged to tell them everything they need to know. They’ll complain if I leave gaps in the course handouts, and they may completely revolt if I make them fill the gaps in themselves.

Response: Complete revolt over gaps is unlikely but you can count on some students complaining about them, just as you can count on complaints about active learning. Fortunately, you can take steps to defuse or eliminate student resistance to those and all other learner-centered teaching methods.Taking some of those steps—including offering to share the research showing that the method leads to higher grades—should keep the pushback at a manageable level long enough for most students to realize that what you’re doing is in their best interests. At that point the complaints generally stop.

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How to Create a New Course and Still Have Time for the Rest of your Life

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Principal Reference: R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn. (2016), pp. 37–43.

Let’s say it’s early in the summer, and in the fall you’re scheduled to teach a new prep–a course you’ve never taught before and may not even have taken.

As anyone who has ever done it knows, preparing a new course (or significantly revising an old one) can be life-consuming. Even if you start on it months in advance, just figuring out what topics you have to cover and what additional topics you’d like to cover can take a lot of time…and once you’ve taken your first cut at that, writing and revising lecture notes and making up assignments and exams can swallow almost every available minute you have. You usually find that you can’t do it all in a 40-hour work week so you end up spending evenings and weekends on it, times when you were planning to do other things like working on your research and spending quality time with your family and friends and exercising and eating and sleeping. The only good news is that you may someday reach a point where you’ve taught most or all of the courses you’re called on to teach, but it can take years to get to that point.

So is there an alternative to that gloomy scenario—a way to cut down on the time it takes you to prepare a new course that doesn’t sacrifice important content or compromise the quality of the course but still allows you to have a life outside of work? Yes, there is. On pp. 37–43 of Teaching and Learning STEM (TLS), there’s a section titled “A rational approach to course preparation and redesign.” What follows is a greatly shortened version of that section. Consult the book for details.

Obtain course materials from colleagues and modify them to fit your needs.

It’s much easier and faster to begin with good existing materials (lecture notes, slides, assignments, tests, etc.) and modify them to fit your course than to develop them all from scratch yourself. Many teachers will freely share their course materials with colleagues if asked. Try to identify some (preferably good teachers) who have taught the course you’ve been assigned to teach—maybe department colleagues, or faculty members where you got your undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral training. If you find any, ask them if they’d be willing to share some of their materials with you.

Use open educational resources.

Table 3.2-2 of TLS lists digital resource libraries and open courseware sites that provide free instructional materials for hundreds of courses and topics. You can also enter the type of resource you’re seeking (lecture notes, slides…) and the topic into a search engine or a large language AI model like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini, and get a wealth of suggestions.

Focus on need-to-know material in the course, and minimize nice-to-know material.

In a common teaching practice, instructors attempt to cram all human knowledge of a course topic into their lecture notes, which takes a massive amount of preparation time. The instructors then race through the lecture notes to cover all of their content, and eventually skip some topics–often including some that are need-to-know–because there’s not enough time to cover them.

To avoid that situation, ask three questions about each body of material you plan to cover:

  1. Is this material addressed in my course learning objectives?
  2. Would I ever include the material on an exam or major assignment?
  3. Are instructors of courses that follow mine likely to assume that I covered the material?

If the answer to one or more of those questions is “Yes,” that material is need-to-know and should be covered in the course. If the answers are all “No,” the material is nice-to-know. Instructors who cover much nice-to-know material may just enjoy teaching it, or they may think that even though the students won’t be held accountable for knowing the material, they all should be exposed to it. “Exposure” is highly overrated: if students are simply shown or told something and never use it, they will almost certainly not learn it.

Many courses contain large quantities of nice-to-know material. If you drop most of it from your course, nothing important will be lost except the extensive preparation time it added to your load, and the students will benefit from the increased focus of the course on the material most important for them to know.

Curb your perfectionism!

“You can spend two hours preparing a perfectly fine class session and then another six hours polishing it, endlessly revising the session plan and tinkering with slides to make them look prettier. Don’t! `Good enough’ is good enough.” (TLS, p. 41) Of the four recommendations in this blog post, this one probably has the greatest potential for keeping your course preparation time (and more generally, much of the rest of your life) manageable.

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Teaching high-level skills: Two essential conditions (RF)

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Principal Reference: R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide,    2nd edn. (2024), Chapters 9 and 10.

STEM instructors tend to have many complaints, a common one being that most of their students can memorize facts and plug numbers into formulas but most of them can’t ______________ (long list of things they can’t do). Some of the most frequently mentioned things they allegedly can’t do are think analytically, think critically, think creatively, think metacognitively, read and comprehend complex technical material, achieve deep understanding of complex concepts, do self-directed learning, speak and write clearly, and work effectively in high-performance teams.

All of the abilities just mentioned fall into the general category of “high-level skills.” When students turn in assignments requiring those skills that fall short of the instructor’s expectations, the common instructor response is to accuse the students of having all sorts of defects (they’re lazy, uninterested, unmotivated, not smart enough to be in a rigorous STEM class, etc.).

We recently had a dramatic demonstration of this phenomenon in a series of 12 monthly teaching webinars presented to several hundred experienced engineering professors. The first webinar defined and illustrated learner-centered teaching (LCT), a pedagogical approach that divides the focus of classroom instruction roughly evenly between the instructor and the students rather than placing it almost exclusively on the instructor (as it is in traditional lecture-based teaching). Learner-centered techniques include active, inquiry-based, and problem-based learning, and flipped classrooms.

In a clever first assignment devised by the webinar series organizer Professor Krishna Vedula, the participants were asked to describe an occasion when they attempted to use LCT and failed, and to speculate on the reasons for the failure. Most of the respondents’ LCT implementations involved active learning (lecture segments interspersed with brief in-class activities conducted by individual students or small groups) or flipped classrooms (course material introduced in online out-of-class assignments and then applied using active learning in live class sessions). In virtually all of those cases, the students’ assignments involved one or more high-level skills, and the failures were that most of the students didn’t participate in the in-class activities and didn’t complete or even attempt the out-of-class assignments. Many of the professors’ explanations of the failures involved the students having some combination of the defects mentioned two paragraphs up.

When an instructor says to one of us, “Most of my students can memorize facts and plug numbers into formulas but they can’t ______________” (high-level skill), our response is always “You obviously think that they were taught to ______________ before they came into your class. Where and when would that have been?” They have no answer, because they know that most teachers—usually including them—never explicitly teach high-level thinking and problem-solving skills in their classes.

Based on what we have learned from the STEM pedagogy literature and our own teaching experience, instructors’ speculations about students’ laziness, lack of motivation, and all that, might be true of some students but the true explanation of most students’ poor performance on tasks requiring high-level skills lies elsewhere. Both cognitive science and classroom research have firmly established the following rule: Two instructional features must be in place to equip most students with high-level skills—challenge and support. Challenge is provided by assignments that require the targeted skills. If you never give students such assignments, most will never engage in the repetitive practice that leads to mastering any high-level skill. Support is provided by the guided practice and feedback that all but the brightest students (who can learn by themselves if necessary) must be given before being sent out to apply high-level skills in assignments and exams.

What the participants in the webinar series were all doing was challenging their students in assignments without first providing the necessary support. They were asking students to do things they had never been taught to do—critical and creative thinking, self-directed learning, applying complex concepts introduced only through passive observation of complex technical documents and recorded lectures, and so on—without first illustrating and providing guided practice on those activities in class sessions. If you do what those professors did, don’t be surprised or disappointed when most of your students can’t do what you asked and quickly abandon their attempts, and don’t blame their failure on laziness or lack of motivation. Teach them first, using active learning in class and not just uninterrupted lectures, and step-by-step instruction in online interactive tutorials (which ask the students questions and provide feedback on the responses) and not just readings and recorded lectures, and then give them the assignments. You’ll be amazed at how much more motivation and skill they will show you when you use that approach.

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What is Learner-Centered Teaching? (RF)

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Principal reference: Teaching and Learning STEM (TLS) 2nd Edition, Chapters 1, 12, and most of the other chapters

What is learner-centered teaching, and what does it look like in a classroom? Let’s start by defining teaching, which isn’t as simple a task as you might think.

  • Two definitions of teaching:

(1) To show or explain something. (2) To cause someone to learn something. Definition (1) says that if I simply present information to students I have taught it to them, whether or not they learn it. Definition (2) says that if they don’t learn it, I haven’t taught it to them.

  • Teacher-centered teaching (TCT) and learner-centered teaching (LCT).

In teacher-centered teaching (TCT), the principal focus in the classroom is on the teacher. The teacher lectures most of the time, perhaps occasionally asks questions and generally gets responses from the same small group of students or gets no responses at all. The students in a TCT classroom are mostly passive observers of the presentation of information. This form of teaching has been traditional for many centuries and is still dominant in most classrooms. It is based on Definition (1) of teaching, and it can be done just as well with and without students in the classroom.

In learner-centered teaching (LCT), the focus in the classroom is split between the teacher and the students and is based on Definition (2): If students don’t learn something I have presented, I haven’t taught it to them. Here’s what you might see in a learner-centered STEM classroom:

— Students working individually or in small groups: Solving parts of problems at their seats or on their computers or on the board; discussing possible responses to instructor’s questions; reporting on projects or research.

— Teachers: Lecturing; illustrating problem-solving methods on whiteboards or tablet computers or projected slides or with document cameras; asking students questions; answering students’ questions; circulating among students working on activities and offering help when needed.

  • What are some LCT techniques?

Active learning, collaborative and cooperative learning, inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, just-in-time learning, discovery learning, and many other techniques that share the focus of classroom activities between the instructor and the students with the heavier burden being generally placed on the students. Most of those techniques are defined and discussed in other blog posts on this website, and in Chapters 6, 9, and 11 of TLS.

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Active Student Engagement in Online Classes (RF)

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Virtual teamwork

When the Covid-19 pandemic swept in last spring, most teachers in the world from kindergarten through graduate school found themselves teaching online classes, whether they wanted to or not. You may be one of them. Relatively few had done it before, and even fewer had ever received formal instruction on how to do it. Out of necessity they learned from experience, but many troublesome issues remain for many of them. One of the most common goes something like “I always had major problems getting my students actively engaged in my face-to-face classes. It seems pretty much impossible to do it online.”

You stand on solid ground if one of your goals is to get your online students actively engaged in their learning, because a ton of research has shown that engagement promotes almost every conceivable learning outcome other than rote memorization. This post summarizes an article in the December 2020 issue of Advances in Engineering Education (https://tinyurl.com/ALonline-AEE) that surveys techniques to establish online active student engagement. The emphasis in the article is on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, but most of the conclusions are generalizable to other fields.

You could transfer many of the activities described in the article directly from a traditional face-to-face (F2F) course to any online course. Activities that would be done in F2F courses as out-of-class assignments and projects would be done asynchronously online, and in-class F2F activities (traditional active learning) can be carried out synchronously online using tools in Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, or an equivalent program. For example, if you invite students in a synchronous class session to ask you a question or to answer one you ask, you may have them raise hands physically in a small class or with a raise hands tool in any class and call on them, or submit their questions and answers in a chat window, or vote yes or thumbs up if you are simply seeking their level of agreement with something, or vote for one or more of several multiple-choice options in a poll. For a synchronous problem-solving or document generation or other extended activity, (a) tell the students what you want them to do, whether they will be working individually or in groups, and how long you will give them to do it; (b) for individual activities, tell the students to start working, and for group activities, have the program sort them into groups of any size you designate and send them to virtual breakout rooms; (c) when the allotted time has elapsed, stop the activity, call on individuals or groups to report on what they came up with, and provide affirming or corrective feedback on their responses.

Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of active student engagement strategies show that even if a strategy works well on average, how well it works may vary dramatically from one implementation to another, and sometimes the strategy may even be counterproductive. For example, if you assign online group projects in your class without providing guidance on how to deal with common problems like interpersonal conflicts and irresponsible or dominant team members, many students might have been better off working individually. In other words, how well you carry out active engagement strategies may be more important than which strategies you choose. The following general recommendations are proposed in the concluding section of the article:

  • Establish teaching presence (students’ sense that their online instructors are real people who are personally involved in their instruction) and social presence (students’ sense of being with real classmates in a virtual environment) early in an online course and maintain them throughout the course. Research shows that both presences correlate positively with online students’ motivation to learn, academic performance, persistence to course completion, satisfaction with online courses and instructors, and intention to enroll in future online courses. Implementing only a few of the measures to establish them suggested in the article can be sufficient to realize those benefits.
  • Make your expectations clear to the students. A common complaint of students in online courses is their difficulty understanding exactly what their instructors want them to do, especially if the students are new to online instruction or if the assignments and exams require skills unfamiliar to many of them. In F2F classes, they can easily get clarifications directly from the instructors and from one another, while doing so online is much less straightforward. You can make your expectations clear by (for example) writing clear learning objectives and sharing them with the students, interspersing online presentations (lecture clips, videos, slide shows, screencasts, etc.) with low-stakes online quizzes that provide immediate feedback, and conducting and debriefing synchronous small-group activities.
  • Take a gradual approach to adopting new engagement strategies. The article presents a broad range of strategies for actively engaging students online, and the total number of strategies would be enormous if all their variations were listed. The idea is not to adopt every conceivable engagement strategy starting next Monday, which could overwhelm both your students and you. Instead, select one or two strategies that look reasonable and try them. Don’t just try them once—especially if the strategies are unfamiliar to you or likely to be unfamiliar to many students—but do them enough for both you and the students to get accustomed to them. If a strategy seems to be working well, keep using it; if it doesn’t, have someone knowledgeable check how you are implementing it, try their suggestions, and if doing so fails to help, stop using it. Next course you teach, try another one or two strategies. It should not take more than two or three course offerings for you to reach a level and quality of student engagement that meets your expectations.

P.S. Some of you are struggling to plan for socially distanced face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous classes in every possible combination. Derek Bruff, director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, has put together a blog post with lots of concrete ideas for getting students engaged in that challenging environment. Click here to read it.

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A Webinar on Active Engagement in Online Classes (RB)

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The pandemic of 2020 threw most faculty and teachers into teaching online in the spring with very little chance to prepare. Now that we’ve made it to the summer, uncertainty about the fall is keeping everyone on edge trying to plan for all sorts of possible situations. In our workshops, faculty have been asking about how to get students actively engaged in their learning when classes are online (synchronous and asynchronous). This summer we’ll be offering webinars on this topic in several venues and we want to share our handout with ideas and some of the research that backs them up. Click here to get to our handout, which you can read or download.

Some of you are struggling to plan for socially distanced face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous classes in every possible combination. Derek Bruff, director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, has put together a blog post with lots of concrete ideas for getting students engaged in that challenging environment. Click here to read it.

 

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Personal devices in class: A blessing and a curse (RB)

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I don’t know a single instructor who is not perplexed about how to deal with students using laptop and tablet computers, smart phones, and other electronic devices during class.  True, technology can be used to enhance learning as students respond to concept tests, look up information, and take notes, but they are much more often distractions as students go down the rabbit hole of apps and social media that block deep thinking and learning. What can instructors do about them?

Here are two resources that may provide some ideas.

The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has an excellent short article called, “Choosing your Classroom Technology Policy.” It offers some research suitable for sharing with students about how technology affects their learning along with questions instructors can ask themselves as they decide on appropriate policies for their classrooms. I like the practical ideas and common sense tone of the piece.

If you want to consider the topic in greater depth, I suggest reading a four-article series by James M. Lang from March 13, 2017 in the Chronicle of Higher Education called, “The Distracted Classroom.”  These links take you to the introductory article and the other three pieces:

The last article gives some practical strategies and their pros and cons for dealing with technology in the classroom ranging from banning devices altogether to involving students in setting a policy for the kind of classroom environment they want to have.

If you have any strategies that have worked for you, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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Helping New STEM Faculty Members Get Their Careers Off to a Good Start (RB & RF)

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Brain surgeons, electricians, accountants, chemical engineers, and members of all other skilled professions, have one thing in common: they all received training before they were allowed to practice professionally. All but one skilled profession, that is—being a college faculty member. Graduate school prepares future faculty members to work on research projects someone else defined; however, it generally does not prepare most of them to plan research independently, get it funded, recruit good graduate students in competition with more experienced colleagues, set up a lab, build a research team, publish in top journals, plan courses, design and deliver effective instruction, make up good assignments and tests, and deal with dozens of research, teaching, and time management crises that routinely occur in the lives of all faculty members.

People are not born knowing all those things, and trial-and-error is not an efficient way to learn them. The work of psychologist Robert Boice (see reference below) has shown that most new faculty members take four to five years to become as productive in research and effective in teaching as they need to be to meet their institutions’ standards for tenure and promotion. About 5%, however (“quick starters”) do it in one to two years. Boice also showed that the 95% routinely make certain mistakes that limit their productivity and effectiveness and that the mistakes are avoidable. With the proper guidance, new faculty members can be turned into quick starters.

That possibility is just one of several important benefits of providing new faculty members with training and mentoring in teaching. It can be difficult to persuade experienced professors that they have been using ineffective teaching strategies throughout their careers and they will need to change their approach to equip their students with the knowledge and skills we all want them to have. Most new faculty members, on the other hand, know that they don’t really know how to teach–especially when they run into serious problems in their first few weeks. They are consequently receptive to suggestions early in their careers, and are much more likely than their more experienced colleagues to become effective teachers in a relatively short period of time. In addition, if the training helps them avoid many of the difficulties most new teachers commonly experience, it can also give them more time and energy to start building their research programs and to attend to their personal health and well-being.

This post briefly outlines measures that deans, department heads, and senior faculty members can take to help new STEM faculty members reach quick-starter status, and points to online resources that provide details on the design and implementation of the measures.

  • Boice, R. (2000). Advice for new faculty members. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. A practical book for new faculty members based on Boice’s experience with hundreds of them. Sections deal with teaching, research, and fitting into the university culture.

New faculty orientation and ongoing faculty development

            Two general approaches to new faculty orientation are campus-wide and discipline-specific workshops. Discipline-specific programs for STEM faculty members are recommended because (unlike most campus-wide programs) they can provide extensive coverage of teaching and research methods and illustrate all recommended methods with STEM-related examples. As a consequence, they tend to get much better attendance and reception from STEM faculty than campus-wide programs generally experience.

Mentoring New Faculty

            Mentoring programs for new faculty members in their home departments effectively complement faculty development programs at the school, college, and university levels. There are many different mentoring models, all of which may involve experienced faculty members helping their new faculty colleagues succeed in teaching, research, learning about and integrating into their campus cultures, and achieving a healthy work-life balance.

We’d love to hear about efforts to help new faculty on your campus get off to a good start. Leave comments to share your ideas!

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Making connections with students to enhance learning (RB)

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Truman State University

Several years ago, one of my colleagues told me this. He had been working on his teaching and had incorporated many of the strategies known to lead to better learning in class—writing objectives and sharing them with students, using active learning exercises in class to get students engaged with the material, grounding each new topic in real-world applications, and making sure his tests were fair. Despite all that, he was not satisfied with his student evaluations. He looked at the comments and found that many students didn’t feel that he cared about them or their learning. He really did care, and he wanted to make sure they knew it. Next semester, he made a point to (1) learn their names, (2) be available to them right before and after each class session and during office hours, and (3) let them know he was enthusiastic about the course subject and eager to help them learn it. Those were the only changes he made, but they made a huge difference. At the end of the semester, his evaluations went up a full point on a 5-point scale.

That result may be surprising but it turns out to be completely consistent with cognitive science and extensive educational research, both of which have shown that students learn better when they feel a sense of personal connection with their instructors.

  • There is a distinct network in the brain for social thinking, and we default to it when we are not concentrating on something. Whenever we pause for a moment during or after a cognitive activity, our brain turns its attention to people and our relationships to them. We are in essence hard-wired for connection to others. (Lieberman, 2013)
  • In a landmark longitudinal study, Astin (1993) identified factors strongly and positively associated with students’ learning outcomes and their attitudes regarding their college experience. The most important factor was high quality student-faculty interactions. That finding makes sense. Strong positive interactions with teachers make students comfortable about asking questions and seeking help. They also motivate students to learn from those teachers, and motivation strongly correlates with adult learning (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 2017).
  • Further empirical support for the importance of connections is provided by Komarraju, Musulkin, and Bhattacharya (2010), who found that first-year students who perceived their teachers as being approachable, respectful, and available for interactions outside of class were particularly likely to be motivated to learn and confident about their academic skills.

So if learning is promoted by motivation and our students’ perception of our caring about them strongly promotes their motivation to learn in our classes, what can we do to communicate caring to them? Following are a few suggestions. There’s no need to do all of them: just pick a couple that look reasonable to you that you’re not already doing.

  • Take time to introduce yourself early in the course. The first day is the most natural time to make sure students get to know you and perceive your enthusiasm for teaching them. Include some personal details (family, pets, travels) along with information about what excites you about what you’ll be teaching. In online courses, post a short video to introduce yourself.
  • Learn student names. Being able to call your students by name tells them that you care enough about them to make the effort to learn who they are, and research has shown that your knowing their names has a strong impact on their motivation to work hard in your class (BYU, website; Cooper, Haney, Krieg, & Brownell, 2017). Even in big classes, you can learn most names if you use strategies like making a seating chart and using it to call on students, or having the students make tent cards with what they want to be called and display the cards in each class session until you’ve learned most of the names. For more ideas, take a look at https://ctl.byu.edu/learning-student-names
  • Give an autobiography assignment. During the first week of class, have the students write brief (½–1 page) autobiographies including anything they’d like you to know about them. Use the autobiographies to help you learn their names. Try to connect course content to some of their interests.
  • Early in the course, require each student to make a 5-minute visit to your office. Use that time to find out where they’re from and what interests them. It will help you learn their names and more about them, and it will also help them find your office and discover that you want to help them be successful. They will then be much more likely to come during your office hours and seek out your help when they need it. In online classes, schedule a chat or online call to accomplish the same goal.
  • In face-to-face classes, come to class early and stay late. Those informal moments before and after class are when many students will come up and ask a question, and in the pre-class conversations you may discover something on their minds that you can integrate into the class. Ask about how they are doing and listen when they tell you.
  • Consider having some office hours in the student lounge and/or online in Google Hangouts or a chat room. Going to where the students are is a powerful technique to communicate caring about their learning.
  • Be proactive when you think there may be a problem. If students do poorly on an assignment or exam or stop coming to class, reach out to them via email or text message, letting them know you’re concerned and want to help.
  • Keep a list of campus resources handy. When you discover a student is having a personal or academic problem, you’ll be ready to help them get to the campus services that could make a difference.

Do you have other ideas about how to show students you care about them and their learning? Leave them in the comments—I’d really like to hear them!

References

Astin, A.W. (1993). What matters in college: Four critical years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

BYU Center for Teaching and Learning. (website). Learning student names.

Cooper, K. M.; Haney, B.; Krieg, A.; & Brownell, S. E. (2017). What’s in a name? The importance of students perceiving that an instructor knows their names in a high-enrollment biology classroom. CBE Life Science Education, 16(1).

Komarraju, M., Musulkin, S., & Bhattacharya, G. (2010). Role of student-faculty interactions in developing college students’ academic self-concept, motivation, and achievement, Journal of College Student Development, 51(3), pp. 332-334.

Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Crown Publishers: New York.

Wlodkowski, R. J. & Ginsberg, M. B. (2017). Enhancing adult motivation to learn: A comprehensive guide for teaching all adults, 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

For more information on these topics, see Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent’s book, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, Section 3.6.1, pp.52-56.

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