Making connections with students to enhance learning (RB)

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, 4^th 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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Teaching a New Course: Good Enough is Good Enough! (RF)

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Doing a great job of teaching a course for the first time—or even just a decent job—isn’t easy. It takes a major effort and a ridiculous amount of time to identify your course learning outcomes (the knowledge and skills you want your students to develop) and learning objectives (the things they should be able to do—define, describe, calculate, analyze, evaluate, create, etc.—that show how well they achieved the outcomes), plan your syllabus and lessons, and make up your assignments, projects, tests, and schedule. Doing all that for just one new course can be a full-time job or more. On top of that you may have a research program and (hopefully) a life outside of your job to attend to. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the stress level for faculty members teaching new courses tends to go through the roof—especially relatively new faculty members, who often have to teach several new courses at a time.

I’m not going to tell you that designing and teaching a new course can be made fast and easy; if there’s a way to do that, no one has found it yet. I am going to tell you that you can make it much faster and easier than it usually is. This post suggests three ways to do it.

Don’t go for perfection: good enough is good enough [1]

You can only be certain of one thing when you teach a new course. No matter how much work you put into preparing it, you won’t get it right the first time. Just give it your best shot—keeping in mind the next two suggestions—and accept that even if it doesn’t go as well as you’d like it to (it won’t), the sky won’t fall (it won’t). Immediately after each class session and each graded assignment and test, spend a few minutes jotting down notes on what worked well and what you wish you had done differently, and make the required changes while they’re fresh in your mind. When you teach the course again, you can again be certain of one thing: it will be better. When you’ve taught it three times, it will be pretty much the way you want it, and after that your preparation time should be minimal.

Don’t reinvent the wheel [2]

Even though a course you’re getting ready to teach may be new to you, you’re probably not the first one who ever taught it. If a colleague in your department or a friend at another university—preferably a good teacher—has taught it, ask if you can use some of her or his course materials (syllabus, schedule, lecture notes and slides, handouts, assignments, tests) as a starting point for yours. If the answer is yes (it probably will be), go ahead and use the materials, making changes when you think they’re necessary and leaving the parts that suit you alone. Doing this will save you tons of time and the course will probably be better than it would have been if you had spent more preparing it. To find out why, keep reading.

Don’t try to stuff everything known about the course subject into the course [3]

If you’re like most instructors, when you’re teaching a new course your office looks like a tornado blew through a library and dumped a large amount of what it swept up onto your desk. The course textbook is of course there, along with other books on the same subject, journals, photocopies of articles, and possibly your notes and exams from when you took that course. Just assembling that stuff took you a whole lot of time. You then spend a large portion of your life pulling information from all those sources and integrating it into your lecture notes. It’s an endless task, because there’s always more information out there and every time you add some you have to reorganize what you had previously assembled.

Yet despite all that hard labor, it’s likely to be a bad course. You’ve crammed so much material into your lectures that the only way you can get through it all is to put it on slides and flash them at a subliminal rate, leaving little time for questions, discussions, interesting digressions, and activities. Most students can’t absorb the course content at the rate you’re fire-hosing them with it and so they’re bored in class, many bomb the tests, and your end-of-course evaluations may be mediocre or disastrous. Meanwhile you have little time for everything else in your life, including writing proposals and papers if you’re involved in research, and your anxiety level steadily climbs.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Information presented in a course falls into two broad categories: “need-to-know and nice-to-know.” Need-to-know information directly addresses the instructor’s learning objectives and has a good chance of showing up on assignments and tests. Nice-to-know information is only slightly or not at all related to the objectives and unlikely to appear on assignments and tests but it’s in the course anyway, either because it’s always been in the course or the instructor believes that all students taking the course should be “exposed” to it.

It turns out that exposure is overrated. If you talk about something in an information-packed lecture and don’t give the students an opportunity to do something with it and don’t test them on it, most won’t absorb it and you’ve wasted valuable class time. Sadly, if you look at the content of most courses, you’ll find that a large percentage of it falls into the nice-to-know category, which means the time and effort the instructor spent preparing it was also wasted.

So don’t do that. Before you start to pull a large slug of material from those books and articles on your desk into your course, ask yourself if the students really need to know it. If the answer is no or probably not, put it aside. If the answer is yes, then put it in your lecture notes and slides, make sure to create plenty of opportunities for the students to work with it in and out of class, and include it on your study guides and tests. Only when you’re sure you can effectively cover all of your need-to-know material and there’s still room in the course, choose some (not much) of your favorite nice-to-know material and put it in. If you take that approach, your course preparation time may drop by an order of magnitude, the course and your ratings will be better, and you’ll enjoy much more of your life outside the course.

References

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 41‒43.
Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2007). How to prepare new courses while keeping your sanity. Chemical Engineering Education, 41(2), 121‒122. See also Reference 1, pp. 41‒46.
Felder, R.M. (2014). Why are you teaching that? Chemical Engineering Education, 48(3), 131‒132. See also Reference 1, p. 44.

If you have any comments or questions about this post or any suggestions of your own for streamlining new course preparations, please scroll down and enter them in the Comment box.

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My students vary all over the place in background and skills, and there’s just one of me. What am I supposed to do? (RF)

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I’m writing this from 37,000 feet on what feels like an endless flight from Doha to New York. If you’re like 100% of the people I told where I was going before the trip, you’ve probably just thought “From where???”

Glad you asked. Doha is the capital of Qatar, a small country on a peninsula growing out of Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf. Rebecca and I were there to give a new workshop for faculty at Texas A&M University‒Qatar (TAMUQ) on how to teach effectively in courses filled with students who stretch the limits of the term “diversity.” To most of us academics, diversity means mainly variations in race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. To the faculty members at the workshop, it means all those things plus massive variations in math and science backgrounds, command of course prerequisites and of English (the language of instruction in all TAMUQ courses), and interest in the course subject. Designing a workshop to address all that was an interesting challenge for us, made even more interesting by our having only 3½ hours to present it.

We love a good challenge, and a colleague of ours who had given a workshop in Qatar told us that the staff members of the TAMUQ Center for Teaching and Learning (our host) were competent and friendly and treated their guests royally, so we accepted their invitation. (All of what our colleague told us turned out to be true.) We gave the workshop once on each of two successive days. The first time we had to just wave at some of the content, since we had been much too optimistic about how much we could cover in 3½ hours. We did some ruthless cutting that night, and the second offering was better but still too ambitious. When we give this workshop again, we expect to get it right.

So, out of the almost limitless array of topics we might have covered, what did we settle on? Here are the questions we addressed and some of our suggested answers, along with citations of where in our book [Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide] you can find details on the answers. You can find even more details in references cited in the book and in papers archived on my website.

How can I identify and correct gaps in my students’ prior knowledge and understanding without spending a lot of class time reteaching course prerequisites?

Give a test on the prerequisites about a week into the course after handing out a study guide on Day 1 and holding one or two review sessions. (TLS, pp. 60‒61)
Give ConcepTests (in-class multiple-choice quizzes on important course concepts) and use them to correct common student misconceptions. (TLS, pp. 162‒163)

How can I specify what the students should be able to do if they have learned what I am trying to teach? How can I maximize the chances that those with the necessary study habits and skills will meet my expectations?

Write learning objectives—clear statements of observable tasks the students should be able to complete if they have mastered the knowledge and skills the course teaches. The objectives should include some tasks that require high-level thinking and problem-solving skills and—for programs accredited by ABET—address specified ABET outcomes. Share the objectives with the students as study guides for exams. (TLS, pp. 19‒34)
Be sure that assessments of students’ mastery of the learning objectives (assignments, projects, quizzes, and exams) are both rigorous and fair. (TLS, Ch. 8)

How can I motivate the students to work hard to learn what I am teaching?

At the beginning of the course, try to establish personal rapport with them (TLS, pp. 54‒56). Then preview the course content and outline how it relates to students’ goals, interests, and prior knowledge and to important authentic (real-world) problems. (TLS, pp. 58‒59)
Consider using inquiry-based learning, preceding coverage of each topic with a relevant authentic problem and presenting the course content in the context of solving the problem. (TLS, pp. 59‒60)

How does active learning help students who span the full range of diversity? How can I get my students actively engaged in class, no matter how many are in the room?

Define active learning (interspersing lecture segments with brief course-related student activities) and review the research that shows how well it works. Describe mistakes instructors commonly make that limit its effectiveness and outline how to avoid them. (TLS, Ch. 6)

Rebecca and I were pleased with the workshop content, as were the participants judging from their end-of-workshop evaluations. We have added the workshop to the list of programs we offer.

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Use a Prerequisite Exam to Help Get your Course Off to a Good Start (RF & RB)

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When you teach a course that builds heavily on previously-taught material, you have a dilemma. Should you assume that all of the enrolled students start out with a solid grasp of the prerequisites? You’d better not! Some students may have taken the prerequisite courses years ago and have long since forgotten what they learned, or some of the prerequisite content may be really hard or was rushed through so few students really understood it. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend the first three weeks of the course re-teaching material the students are supposed to know. The question is, how can you help your students quickly pick up whatever they’re missing without spending a lot of valuable class time on it?

An effective way to achieve that goal is to give an early exam on the prerequisites. Here’s the process.

Before the first day of class, write out a set of learning objectives that specify what the students should be able to do—define, explain, calculate, derive, critique, design,…—if they have the prerequisite knowledge and skills you plan to build on in your course. That last phrase (“you plan to build on in your course”) is critical: if you announce that the students need to know everything covered in the prerequisite courses, you’ll just overwhelm them and the exam won’t serve its intended function. Put the objectives in the form of a study guide for an exam (“To do well on this exam, you should be able to.…”). Except for facts and definitions the students should be prepared to reproduce from memory, the items on the study guide should be generic, not specific questions that might appear verbatim on the exam.
On the first day of class, announce that the first midterm exam will be given on ___ (about a week from that day) and will cover only prerequisite material. Hand out the study guide and briefly review it, assuring the students that every question and problem on the exam will be based on items in the study guide.
Hold a review session before the test date at which students can ask questions about anything in the study guide. Alternatively, tell the students that they are free to raise questions in class or during your office hours.
Give and grade the exam. Count the grade toward the final course grade. (We’ll say more about this later.)
(Optional) Give the students a take-home retest to regain up to, say, half the points they lost the first time.

When you adopt this strategy, most students will do whatever it takes to get the specified material into their heads by the exam, and you won’t have to spend more than one class session reviewing prerequisites. Students who do poorly on the exam will be on notice that unless they do something dramatic to relearn material they missed, such as getting some tutoring, they are likely to struggle throughout much of your course and are at risk for failing. If many students have problems with a particular topic on the exam, then consider additional review of that topic.

The idea of testing on course prerequisites at the beginning of a course is not new, but instructors who do it commonly make one or both of two mistakes: (1) they make the test purely diagnostic and give it on the first day of the course, and (2) they don’t count the test grades toward the course grade. What’s wrong with those practices? If the test is given on the first day, the students have no time to remedy deficiencies in their knowledge of the prerequisites and not much incentive to do so after the test. Even if the test is given after the first day, if the grades don’t count many students will spend little or no time studying for it. Either way the grades are likely to be low, indicating that extensive review is required, and the instructor has little basis for knowing what to review and what to leave for the students to relearn on their own. If you use the procedure suggested here you avoid both mistakes; your students will have time to learn or relearn prerequisite material on their own and will have a strong incentive to do so; the study guide will enable them to concentrate their studying on the material you will be building on; and you’ll easily find the sweet spot between insufficient and excessive review at the beginning of your course.

Drawn from R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, pp. 60–61. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (2016).

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How to determine course grades fairly (RF & RB)

“Is Ohm’s Law a lie?” Using provocative questions to promote critical thinking (RB)

Do your students know how to study? (RB)

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Every semester after teachers have given their first test, a wave of dismay comes over them. They lament to each other about how poorly many of their students did on material they covered explicitly in class sessions and assignments. Their pain can be particularly acute in first-year and departmental gateway courses, and they wonder if their students have a clue about how to study.

The sad fact is many of the students don’t! They got A’s in high school just by looking over their class notes and graded homework before the test and repeating it all on the test. As we know and they learn the hard way, rote memorization falls woefully short in college courses—at least in the good ones, which hopefully include yours.

So if students don’t know how to study, how can you help them without regressing to pure memorization tests? Here are a few strategies you might consider.

1. Use study guides to make your expectations clear. It’s hard for students to prepare effectively for tests when they aren’t sure what kinds of thinking they’ll be expected to do. Clear learning objectives can help a lot. If you give objectives to students in the form of a study guide a week or so before an exam (To do well on this test, you should be able to define…, explain…, calculate…, derive…, critique…, formulate…, design…), students can make sure they’re studying the right things.
  You may worry that giving students study guides is spoon-feeding them. It isn’t—not if it’s done right. Study guides just clarify instructors’ expectations, including expectations of high-level thinking and problem-solving, and make it clear that rote memorization won’t be enough. You can make your expectations as high as you want (within reason); when you make them clear to the students, you’ll maximize the chances that the students capable of meeting them will do it. For ideas about to write learning objectives and use them as study guides, click here.
2. Tell students explicitly about study strategies supported by cognitive science. Tell them about retrieval practice (self-tests) for material they may need to recall, spacing out their study sessions instead of cramming at the last minute, and setting up problem solutions from memory to be sure they really understand how to solve the kinds of problems you may ask on the test. Warn them against just re-reading lecture notes and old problem solutions, which can lead to “illusions of competence” and disappointing exam grades. For more details, click here.
3. Give spaced retrieval practice in class. All of the strategies listed in the previous suggestion can and should be modeled in class. Give students periodic short quizzes so they can test their understanding of the material before a higher-stakes mid-term exam. Use individual and small-group active learning exercises in class so they can practice the skills you’re teaching and get immediate feedback on their attempts. A step-by-step process for using partially worked-out problem solutions effectively to promote learning can be found here. For a brief tutorial on active learning exercises, click here, and to see narrated videos that illustrate active learning in STEM classes, click here (12 minutes) and here (35 minutes).
4. Help students think about their study practices (metacognition) by using exam wrappers after each test. When you hand back the tests, have students reflect on the results and ask themselves: (1) How did I prepare for this test? (2) Am I happy with my performance? (3) What might I do to prepare more effectively for the next test? For more details on exam wrappers, click here.
5. Promote a growth mindset. When students have a growth mindset, they believe that they can improve their performance with hard work. This attitude contrasts with a fixed mindset, a belief that performance is based on a talent you either have or you don’t, as in “I’m just bad at math.” Research has shown that compared to a fixed mindset, a growth mindset generally leads to a better academic performance. You can have a profound influence on your students by regularly suggesting that even if the material you’re teaching seems difficult, they can master it by working hard and using the strategies you’ve taught them. You might also note that some of the same material was also hard for you when you first encountered it. For more information on helping students develop a growth mindset and on the supporting research, take a look here.
To find out more about these strategies and many more you can use to help your students’ performance, check out Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide (Ch. 2 on objectives, Ch. 6 on active learning, and Chapters 9 and 10 on helping students develop high-level thinking and problem-solving skills). Another good resource is Teach Students How to Learn (McGuire, S.A., 2015).

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Ten Habits of Highly Ineffective STEM Instructors (RF)

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Does your class frequently look like the one on the left? If it does, some of the ideas in this post may be worth thinking about.

There are no recipes for good teaching. For almost every teaching tip you can find in our book and other references on effective pedagogy, you can find someone well known as a good teacher who doesn’t do things in the recommended way. The same thing is true of bad teaching: we can strongly caution our readers not to do something and you can find excellent teachers who do it with no evil consequences. There are, however, certain teaching practices that may not guarantee poor learning or low student evaluations but definitely push classes in that direction. Here are ten of them.

On Day 1 of a course, assume the students remember and understand everything in the prerequisite courses and jump directly into material brand new to them. Whenever you start a new topic, again plunge right in, without bothering to mention what it has to do with anything the students are likely to care about, be interested in, or know anything about from previous coursework.
Devote most of your course to theoretical principles and mathematical abstractions. If students ask why they need to know all that, tell them that they need to master the “fundamentals” before they get to the practical applications later in the curriculum or after they graduate.
Put your lecture notes on PowerPoint slides and spend all of each class session reading the slides to the students, word for word. No activities—assume the students will learn how to perform complex analyses or solve tough problems just by watching you do it.
Occasionally ask questions during class and either call on individual students immediately or give the answers yourself if no one answers in two seconds or less. Ridicule students who give “dumb” answers.
Assign homework infrequently or not at all. If you assign it, make sure it takes a lot more than two hours out of class for each class hour, and let many weeks elapse before you grade and return it.
Give straightforward problems on assignments and complex or tricky problems on tests. If students complain, tell them (a) they have to learn how to think for themselves, or (b) you’re curving grades so it doesn’t matter.
Make up your tests the night before you give them and don’t bother working out the solutions. If you or the students discover a glitch during a test, tell the class (a) to correct the problem statement and start over, or (b) you’re curving grades so it doesn’t matter.
Give tests that only the top students in the class have time to finish. If students complain, tell them (a) if they really knew the material they wouldn’t have had any trouble finishing, or (b) you’re curving grades so it doesn’t matter.
When your class average on a test is 43 (out of 100), take it as proof that the students are incompetent or lazy or both. Share that opinion with them. Never consider the possibilities that either you did a poor job of covering the test content in class or it was a poorly written test.
If you get dismal course evaluations, assure yourself that it’s because (1) you set higher standards than your colleagues, or (2) you’re not an “entertainer,” or (3) students don’t know enough to evaluate teaching. Add that even though they don’t like you now, in a few years they’ll recognize how good you really were. (Note: Research says that’s possible but highly unlikely.) Never consider the possibility that the evaluations may be justified.

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Eight Ways to Defuse Student Resistance (RF, RB)

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When learner-centered teaching (LCT) methods, such as active, cooperative, and problem-based learning are well done, strong student resistance is uncommon and usually short-lived when it occurs. Here are some strategies that minimize or eliminate it [DeMonbrun et al., 2017; Felder & Brent , 1996; Nguyen et al., 2017; Seidel & Tanner, 2013; Tolman & Kremling, 2016; Weimer, 2013].

Ease into LCT.

If you’re new to active learning, start with one or two brief (10 s – 3 min) active learning exercises in each class session, and continue doing it until both the students and you become accustomed to the approach. Gradually increase the frequency of activities until you get to a level you’re happy with. After a semester or two of that, you may choose to move into other LCT methods such as inquiry-based and cooperative learning. When you feel comfortable with those approaches, if you want to do full-scale problem-based learning (nothing says you have to), go for it. If you jump directly into PBL without getting experience with gentler methods, the student resistance could overwhelm you and you might decide never to try LCT again, which would be a loss for both you and them.

Before you start to use an LCT method, learn about it.

All LCT methods have pitfalls—common mistakes instructors make that limit the effectiveness of the methods and aggravate student resistance to them. The education literature offers lots of guidance on what those mistakes are and how to avoid them. Weimer [2013] provides an excellent general discussion, active learning is addressed by Felder & Brent [2016, pp. 122–127, 243–244], cooperative learning by Felder & Brent [2016, Ch. 11] and Oakley et al. [2007], and inductive teaching and learning by Prince & Felder [2006, 2007]. Find out about the mistakes before you make them rather than learning about them by trial-and-error.

Form good relations with the students and motivate them to learn, starting Day 1.

Felder & Brent [2016, pp. 52–62] suggest a number of techniques for the first week of a course that serve those purposes. They include learning as many of your students’ names as possible, setting up mechanisms for easy and effective communication with them, and helping them understand the connections between your course and their interests and career goals. If students believe that you care about them and their learning and they feel motivated to learn in your course, they’ll be less likely to rebel against a teaching practice they don’t like at first [Weimer, 2013].

Explain what you’re doing, why, and what’s in it for the students.

When you start doing something in a class that makes students more responsible for their own learning than they are used to, they are likely to push back, thinking that you are either avoiding your teaching obligations or running an experiment with them as the guinea pigs. Explaining what you’ll be doing and how it’s in their interests before you start doing it can lower their resistance long enough for them to see that you’re telling them the truth. Part of the explanation should be an offer to show them research demonstrating that students taught the way you’ll be teaching get higher grades. See Felder (n.d.) for an illustrative Day 1 sermonette that introduces active learning to a class and cites Freeman et al. (2014) for the research, and Felder & Brent (2016, pp. 243–244) for sermonettes aimed at students working on assigned project teams.

Model and give practice in unfamiliar methods.

If you assign students to do high-level analytical or critical or creative thinking or technical writing or oral reporting, or to tackle a problem before they’ve been taught how (which is what happens in inductive teaching and learning), there’s a good chance that many of them won’t understand what you’re looking for. Their frustration can be intense when that happens, and resistance is a likely outcome.

To avoid it, first show some concrete examples of the kind of thinking you’re looking for, and then have the students critique other examples and try to do similar things in active learning exercises. Then, and only then, give them assignments and tests on the targeted skills. For some concrete examples of tasks that call for a variety of high-level skills, see Felder & Brent [2016, Ch. 9–10].

Interact with students while they are engaged in LCT activities.

If your students are working on activities in class that take more than a few seconds, circulate among them and be ready to provide help and encouragement. If several students raise a question or point of confusion, share your response with all of them, either in class, by email, or by posting it on the course website or a discussion forum. Encourage students to contact you in live or virtual office hours.

After several weeks, survey students regarding their LCT experience.

After enough time has elapsed for the students to get used to an LCT method (say, 2–4 weeks), given them an anonymous survey that asks whether they believe the method is helping them learn, hindering their learning, or having little effect on their learning, and solicit their comments about what they do and don’t like about the method.

A probable outcome is that many students will believe that the LCT method is helping them learn, many others will be neutral, and a handful will think they are learning less than they would if you taught traditionally. If that is indeed what happens, report the results in the next class session. As a rule, students who are hostile to LCT after a few weeks of it believe that they are the vanguard of a mass movement. When they discover that most of their classmates are either enthusiastic about it or could take it or leave it, their overt resistance usually fades away. On the other hand, if the survey shows that many students are still hostile to LCT, look back at the literature, see if you were violating any recommendations for how to do it, and look for patterns in the students’ comments about what in particular bothers them about it. Decide what, if anything, you’ll change in the future, and announce it in the next class session.

Learn from your first try, and try again.

The first time you teach a course traditionally, you can be sure that you won’t get it right. You’ll learn from that experience, make changes, and the course will be much better the second time. By the third time, it will start to look like what you initially had in mind.

It’s no different with learner-centered teaching. Give it your best shot the first time, figure out how you could have done it better, and do it that way the second time. It may take longer than three iterations to get it where you want it, especially with a challenging method such as problem-based learning, but if you have patience and an open mind you’ll eventually start to see the learning benefits that the LCT literature promises.

References

DeMonbrun, M., Finelli, C.J., Prince, M., Borrego, M., Shekhar, P., Henderson, C., and Waters, C. (2017). Creating an instrument to measure student response to instructional practices. Journal of Engineering Education, 106 (2), 273–298.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (1996). “Navigating the bumpy road to student–centered instruction.” College Teaching, 44 (2), 43–47.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016, 2024). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide, Jossey-Bass, Section 3.6.1.

Felder, R.M. (n.d.). Sell active learning to your students before doing it [Blog post].

Nguyen, K., Husman, J., Borrego, M., Shekhar, P., Prince, M., DeMonbrun, M., Finelli, C. Henderson, C., and Waters, C. (2017). Students’ expectations, types of instruction, and instructor strategies predicting student response to active learning. International Journal of Engineering Education, 33 (1A), 2–18.

Oakley, B.A., Hanna, D.M., Kuzmyn, Z., and Felder, R.M. (2007). “Best practices involving teamwork in the classroom: Results from a survey of 6435 engineering student respondents. IEEE Transactions in Education, 50(3), 266–272 (2007).

Prince, M.J., and Felder, R.M. (2006). Inductive teaching and learning methods: Definitions, comparisons, and research bases. J. Engr. Education, 95(2), 123–138 (2006).

Prince, M.J., and Felder, R.M. (2007). The many faces of inductive teaching and learning. J. Coll. Sci. Teaching, 36(5), 14–20.

Seidel, S.B., and Tanner, K.D. (2013). “What if students revolt?”—Considering Student Resistance: Origins, Options, and Opportunities for Investigation. CBE Life Sci Educ, 12(4), 586–595.

Tolman, A.O., and Kremling, A. (2016). Why students resist learning: A practical model for understanding and helping students. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2^nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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