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Teaching the Truth

Small sign saying truth on pavement
Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

In recent weeks, months, and years, amidst a series of difficult political moments, I’ve found myself thinking regularly about the University of Portland motto: Veritas vos liberabit, or “the truth will set us free.” I assume it was originally selected for its overlapping meanings – referring both to religious truth, as in John 8:32 “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” and to truth as the object of academic inquiry. I also assume we can all agree in the abstract that shared truths are critical to a good liberal arts education at the University of Portland (and, as if to reinforce that value, our recently retired Provost even titled his departing collection of UP defining essays “Veritas vos Liberabit”). It is, in fact, a key value to a good liberal arts education anywhere – according to that contemporary arbiter of “truth” Wikipedia “The truth will set you free” is a motto shared by U.P. and other universities ranging from the University of Tennessee, to Canterbury Christ Church University in England, to the Catholic University of Uruguay, to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

 

But, given the current state of public discourse and the power our society has given to people who lie brazenly, dangerously, and pathologically, we can’t assume that our students will recognize the importance of the truth. Not, at least, without a collective commitment to understanding truth itself. This commitment is essential to our Core curriculum, it is essential to the liberal arts, and it may be more difficult to achieve than it first appears.

 

The president of Rollins College articulated this nicely in a 2018 essay on truth and the liberal arts for Inside Higher Education:

A liberally educated person is one who is free — equipped and empowered — to make up their own mind, not subject to the authority of others, not easily swayed by charlatans. If we accomplish nothing else, our graduates should have sufficient skills in reasoning and critical thinking to recognize the difference between a sound argument and demagoguery.

All that said, we academics have become shy about teaching facts. Because we are all so schooled in the tools of critique, there is hardly a truth claim that we cannot interrogate, deconstruct or criticize. Consequently, we have often substituted the teaching of intellectual skills and critical thinking for teaching with any confidence what is the case in the world.”

 

So how, in the face of both demagoguery and critical deconstruction, might we teach the truth? The only fair answer is probably: very carefully. It’s not easy, and there are real issues of power and privilege that too often shape what we accept as truth. The truth may also mean different things in different disciplines. In many academic contexts there are plural truths (though almost never, despite mean-spirited critiques, do academics really believe the truth is completely relative). And there may also be plural ways to weave discussions of truth into our classes and our curriculum.

 

In the revitalized Core we are going to try to start students thinking about truth as part of a liberal arts education in the new Anchor Seminar – an evolution of the first year workshop that all new students will take starting in the Fall of 2021. One goal for that course will be to introduce students to information literacy and academic integrity, which are both key topics if we want students to value truth. But it will be a necessarily brief introduction, and will require much support from the rest of the courses students take throughout their University of Portland education. Many UP faculty will already know better than I how to weave the value of the truth into other classes, but in hopes of sparking some further thinking on the topic here’s just a few ideas I’ve come across in my own recent truth explorations (several of which are derived from a good recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Teaching in the Age of Disinformation” and an accompanying teaching guide):

 

Teach truth when you talk about academic integrity and plagiarism. Students generally know that they shouldn’t just cut-and-paste other people’s words as their own. That doesn’t always stop them from doing it, but there is usually still a general sense that it is wrong. But I’m not sure students think about it as a threat to the truth – as a small lie that can aid and abet bigger lies. In my own classes I often just take for granted that students know they shouldn’t plagiarize – but I rarely take assignments as a chance to talk through why plagiarism is a threat not just to individual grades but also to shared truth claims. Our UP library has some useful resources related to helping students understand plagiarism on their web-site, and maybe sometimes our rubrics can occasionally open opportunities to discuss bigger ideas about the origins of ideas?

 

Teach truth by helping students develop information literacy. I generally find students to be really good at looking things up on the internet, and not really good at discerning whether the things they find are legitimate and truthful. Things that seem simple to us as academics, like the difference between peer-reviewed research and journalism, need unpacking for students. And we all know the proliferation of internet sources has made information literacy more important and more challenging. Fortunately, there are experts – including many librarians such as those in our UP team – who have ways of helping students sift information. As examples of sources I’ve seen referenced lately, here is a useful looking open-source book by a WSU-Vancouver scholar on Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers…and other people who care about facts, here’s The Debunking Handbook “written by a team of 22 prominent scholars of misinformation”, and here’s a guide to “Citizen Literacy” from the University of Louisville library.

 

Teach truth when you discuss disciplinary methods and “ways of knowing.” All academic disciplines have methodology courses that are central to their field of study both because students need to know those methods to do the discipline and because those methods are the way disciplines know their truths. Sometimes, however, we may focus more on the methods and results than we do on the discussion. The Chronicle article referenced above talks about this in relation to data science and discussions of things like COVID-19, where we often default to an over-simplified “follow the science” mantra. The suggestion there is that: “Students would benefit…if professors spent more time explaining how their discipline functions. Who do the experts turn to to understand how something in their field works? How is knowledge built? Describing to students how the World Health Organization comes up with its guidance around Covid-19, and how that differs from the CDC’s decision-making process, he says, is of greater long-term value for most students than understanding how mitochondria operate.” While this fits with the sciences, it would likely be useful for any faculty (and not just philosophers talking about epistemology) to have explicit discussions with students about how the methodologies we all teach are actually ways of defining the truth.

 

Teach truth when helping students make arguments and have discussions. One of the foundational things I tell students about social science is that claims have to be based on evidence. In the social sciences we are after empirical truths, and the scientific method provides the ultimate foundation for those truths. Sometimes I even make analogies to our legal system – for a legal claim to be valid, it has to have evidence. Lawyers can object when truth claims are just “speculation,” and my students should object when social scientists (or their peers) make claims without evidence. Yet I’m consistently amazed by how many students have been conditioned over time to start their claims with “I believe…” or “In my opinion…” Having beliefs and opinions are important and may constitute personal truths, but for an academic community (or any community) to function we have to have the types of shared truths that need real evidence. Evidence can come in many forms, and what constitutes evidence will vary by academic discipline. But evidence is a reason we know that the recent U.S. presidential election was not stolen (because our judicial system worked and dismissed the dozens of speculative cases that had no real evidence), and having respect for evidence is one critical way that the truth might indeed ultimately set us free.

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Blending Collaborative Learning and Learning Strategies to Enhance Online Engagement

Expand your teaching toolkit for both online and face-to-face courses

In my last entry, I explained how principles of facilitating peer-assisted learning (PAL) groups in the Learning Commons can support our own thinking as we design courses and learning plans. This blog entry is a continuation of this discussion. In the Learning Commons, designing PAL groups goes beyond the basic structure and facilitation strategies that I outlined last time. Collaborative learning techniques (CLTs) and learning strategies to two other essential components that our PAL facilitators weave into their group sessions with students in NRS 325, MTH 141, and PHY 204. As you read this blog entry, imagine how you might incorporate CLTs and learning strategies into your own online (and, eventually, face-to-face) sessions with students.

Collaborative Learning Techniques (CLTs)

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) is a derivation of Supplemental Instruction (SI), and the collaborative learning techniques that I outline below are from the standard SI training. Here’s the list that we use in our training of UP’s PAL facilitators

  • Group Discussion is what it sounds like. We all use this, but the following strategies provide alternatives to this tried and true CLT.
  • Clusters are breakout groups that many of you are already using in Zoom or Teams. In the pre-pandemic days, we used clusters for group work in classrooms.
  • Turn to a Partner is a CLT what many have long used in face-to-face instruction. Students turn to a partner to work on a task. In our remote context, we can just have pairs of students work in breakout rooms.
  • Think / Pair / Share is different that Turn to a Partner in that we allow time for individual students to process material or work on a task alone. With Zoom, we can send students to individual rooms before bringing them back and putting them in pair breakout rooms. While this has extra moving parts, the solo rooms do allow students to think alone first, where as they may be tempted just to start talking with a partner if we just put them in pairs and ask them to think alone first and then talk.
  • Individual Presentation involves groups in which the individual members present something to the group in a round-robin fashion. In our PAL sessions, we use this rarely since it can become a one-way reporting out. To be more effective, the students need to know to take notes, ask questions, and provide feedback to individual presenters.
  • Assigned Discussion Leader works best when the breakout group members are far along in their learning so that they can discuss in depth. The discussion leader will also benefit from having time to prepare, say overnight or between class sessions. Also, having some community norms around discussion in groups can invigorate the group discussions.
  • Jigsaw is a classic group learning activity in which a topic or problem is divided into parts. The class is divided into groups to work on their assigned parts. Then they come back together to share their parts of the whole. This then can spark questions and further discussion.
  • Group Survey can be used to gather students’ positions, opinions, prior knowledge, or predictions. As faculty, we can use polling platforms like MS Forms or Poll Everywhere (both available to UP faculty). After polls are taken, other CLTs can be used to engage students in group work around the responses. Group Survey can also be used as an opener to see where students stand vis-à-vis the topic of the day or to close a class meeting to assess how their thinking is changing.

In our PAL facilitator trainings and debriefings, we encourage our peer PAL facilitators to explore each of the above CLTs and not to rely on just one or two. The most popular are Group Discussion and Clusters, but all can be used to advance student learning.

Collaborative learning techniques provide us instructors with structures for student engagement. They provide students with spaces for peer interaction. Given the results of the recent survey of UP students, we know that many want more interaction in their remote classes. By adding the above CLTs to your teaching toolkits, you will likely be able to facilitate that peer interaction around that material that you want students to learn durably.

Learning Strategies

While CLTs provide a format for social learning, learning strategies provide structured processes for learning. For our PAL facilitators, knowledge of these strategies helps them to plan their sessions efficiently. They have a grab bag of strategies to try out in any session. As they explore these learning strategies by using them, they become more aware of how and when to use them.

From the learner’s perspective, learning strategies are behaviors and actions one takes to learn more effectively; they can support motivation and completion. From our perspective as instructors, learning strategies are activities that support learning, social interaction, and involvement with difficult material. For example:

  • Matrices have become popular among many in this era of remote teaching and learning, especially since we can use collaborative document tools like Google Docs, and we can effectively use matrices with the ClustersCLT. In breakout groups, the students work together to fill out part of a table or matrix in a shared Google Doc. The work to do this involves discussion, recall, revisiting and comparing notes, and asking questions. Different clusters (breakout groups) can work on different parts of the matrix which can be part of a jigsaw approach, or they can work developing their own responses to the same matrix which will then allow you to have them compare their responses.
Example of the matrices learning strategy used in a Group Discussion CLT
Example of the matrices learning strategy used in a Group Discussion CLT during a study strategies workshop in November 2020
  • Verbal Volleyball can be played in a whole group and works best after students have gained some familiarity with the concepts. The instructor asks a student to explain a concept, idea, or issue covered in class and then to give another student a different concept, idea, or issue which that student will then explain. The process goes on until the students can go no further. Repeats are not allowed. As the instructor, you can then pose questions and request students to use their resources to revisit concepts needing further work. Verbal Volleyball makes for a good opener or closer to online class sessions, but keep in mind that the students need some familiarity with the material.

The Learning Commons’ PAL facilitators have dozens of learning strategies at their disposal, and we keep adding more as we find or create them. We also use an app called SI Cards and Session Planner that offers a wide array of learning strategies for SI and PAL sessions.

The shift to remote teaching and learning has given us the opportunity to revisit how we support student learning, as we have done with the PAL facilitation program in the Learning Commons. As you consider lesson planning for the rest of the semester and plans for the spring, collaborative learning techniques and learning strategies can be part of your instructor’s toolkit for student success. If you would like to discuss any of the topics and approaches of my last two blog entries, please do feel free to contact me at white@up.edu, give me a ring on MS Teams, or leave a reply at the bottom of this blog entry.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons at UP, where he collaborates with others to supervise and support over 60 tutors, writing assistants, and PAL facilitators. He also teaches courses in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

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What Peer-Assisted Learning Can Teach Us

By Jeffrey White

In my role directing the Learning Commons, I have had the opportunity to connect nationally with practitioners and researchers in the field of peer-led course-based learning assistance (CLA), such as Supplemental Instruction (SI) and its variation Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL). Both SI and PAL focus on difficult courses, especially those in which the rate of students receiving Ds and Fs or withdrawing (the DFW rate) is high. The Learning Commons has been collaborating for the last several months with the School of Nursing to create a PAL program for NRS 325 and, more recently, with the School of Business and the School of Engineering to use PAL to support MTH 141 and PHY 204 students. Peer PAL facilitators provide opportunities for structured practice with course material in weekly hour-long online PAL sessions. Over the summer, I participated in an online SI supervisor training with the International Center for SI to improve my skills and knowledge in this field. Through my research on CLA and my training on supervising such programs, I have come to appreciate how much the practices of these programs can teach us as faculty.

When I train our PAL facilitators on the practices they will use with students in the targeted difficult courses, I develop their skills in developing structured PAL sessions, using tools to shape those group learning experiences, and focusing on assessing student learning. Here are some takeaways related to structure and facilitation techniques that may help us as faculty develop our own teaching and interaction skills in our online environments.

Structure

Both SI and PAL sessions are built on a three-part structure:

  • The opener is a 5-7 minute warm-up with the material that also provides the facilitator with a sense of where the students are in their learning;
  • The workout is an activity in which students engage in collaborative learning and practice with the material. There is usually more than one workout in a session. Workouts can allow for microlearning moments that can be chained together during the whole session;
  • The closer is a short (ca. 5 minute) summative assessment activity in which students demonstrate how much they have advanced with the material.

This structure is obvious (Don’t most things have a beginning middle and end?), but we can often forget this. Following best practices in lesson and course design, we train our PAL facilitators to design their sessions backwards, starting with the closer.

Facilitation techniques

Three facilitation techniques are foundational to our PAL sessions:

  • Redirection
  • Wait time
  • Checking for understanding

Redirection relates to student questions. Our PAL facilitators are trained to redirect questions back to the student’s own self (memory of readings, lectures, other learning experiences, and prior knowledge), resources (notes, books, websites), and other students in the class. PAL facilitators don’t answer questions directly. They avoid explaining and opt to redirect attention toward the collective whole and collaborative learning.

Many of us already use wait time in our classes after we ask questions to students or when student ask questions. This allows time for students to process information for themselves or collaboratively. The SI training this summer also showed me the power of wait time after a student gives an answer. Again, this can allow for processing time that may lead to alternative answers or other questions.

Checking for understanding is essential for us to know if students are developing skills and knowledge related to our course material. PAL facilitators check for understanding during all three stages of a PAL session and can do so at any time they think checking for understanding will help clarify or advance students’ skills and knowledge.

Applying these elements to interaction with students

As faculty, we can structure our asynchronous and synchronous engagement with students with a simple three-part approach. Keeping the end in mind through backward design also helps prevent us from getting lost in activities that go unassessed. Allowing time for an opener helps everyone to warm up and provides us with a sense of the students’ growing skills and knowledge, and a closer highlights both the learning that occurred and learning that still needs to be done.

The facilitation strategies that are shared by SI and PAL are basic to teaching, and yet they are easy to overlook. As we review lesson plans, create asynchronous learning experiences, and teach in synchronous sessions, we can ask ourselves, “Am I redirecting questions? Am I allowing for wait time? Am I checking for understanding?” and move beyond these questions by reflecting on how deeply we are applying these facilitation techniques and assessing the results.

Considering these elements of structure and facilitation can also demystify the processes of planning, leading, and debriefing a course session by breaking down our teaching experiences into manageable parts and providing tools for analysis.

We can learn still more from peer educator communities of practice in higher education. In my next contribution to the TLC blog, I’ll share more on collaborative learning techniques and learning strategies in the virtual PAL session and its application in the virtual college classroom.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in BC 163 (and online everywhere) and is an instructor in International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the past president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He can be reached at white@up.edu or through the University’s MS Teams via chat or video meeting.

 

 

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Teaching and learning resources for these trying times

We’ve all been in a crunch over the past week and a half as the spread and unknown reach of the Coronavirus sent us all on many directions. During this time, our colleagues have been learning new systems like Microsoft Teams and TechSmith Relay, and our students have been trying to adjust to our online teaching and content delivery in environments so different than UP. In the Learning Commons, we been training tutors to do their work online in MS Teams, hosting trainings for faculty, and developing content for students. As I write this first Coronavirus era TLC blog entry, I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s comment: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” But Twain didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t compress is writing by using hyperlinks like I’ve done below.

So, to be brief, here are some basic ideas that I’ve been gathering in these initial days of COVID-19:

Communicate: Be clear with your students about how you will communicate (i.e., which platforms (Moodle, Teams, Zoom, etc.) you will use. Try to use what we have available here at UP for the sake of consistency and keeping FERPA in mind. Communicate goals of task such as listening and watching lectures and doing readings and include formative assessments that help students know they are reaching those goals.

Chunk: Provide your content in chunks (by day, week, topic, goal); break things down. If you are recording lecture videos. Several 10 minute videos will be better than an hour long recording. You can provide assessment opportunities between videos. If you have students spread out in multiple time zones and want to do some synchronous meeting, hold two or three shorter meetings at different times, so that all can participate at a reasonable time.

Community: Keep a narrative of support going. We’ve all be drinking from a fire hose this last week or so. Encourage your students to be kind to themselves, to build community with each other, and to use some of the strategies for adjusting to online learning that the Learning Commons published last week.

Connect: Provide opportunities for your students to connect with each other and you. This can be done through Teams, but also through other means, like social media, chat, texting, etc. Connect your students to the Learning Commons tutoring which is now all online. Connect yourself to opportunities for learning how to use Teams, TechSmith Relay, and other UP platforms by joining the Faculty Training Sandbox in Teams where training is ongoing or checking out the excellent support documentation that our colleagues in Academic Technology Services and Innovations have developed. You can also link to this from the top of your Moodle page under “Moodle Support.” Also, you may want to turn on your notifications in Moodle, Outlook, and Teams during these days of transition and an increased need for connection.

Kindness: Take care of yourself and be a comfort to your students. These days of COVID-19 are trying times. Our students report feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Remind yourself and your students that we are all growing in the face of difficulties. Things may take longer to accomplish in the coming days and weeks, but we are all learning to create meaningful learning that is central to the UP experience.

I invite you to explore the links above as we re-imagine this semester and our roles as faculty and innovate for the future of our students and our great institution.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in Buckley Center 163 (and now everywhere online). He is a faculty member in International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey welcomes the opportunity to help faculty practice and become comfortable with UP’s tools for online teaching and learning. He can be reached at white@up.edu or via Teams in the Faculty Training Sandbox.

 

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Imagining the World Factfully

UP aims to cultivate world-citizenship in its students. We see this in Vision 2020’s push to foreground opportunities and curricula that support internationalism, our robust study- abroad programs, the 69 Fulbrights students have won, as well as CISGO’s set of outcomes for Global and Intercultural Learning.

Part of such student learning depends on faculty possessing a quantitatively accurate understanding of the modern world.

Have you tested yourself lately?

An enjoyable opportunity can be found in Hans Rosling’s 2018 book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think – a book I devoured over spring break.

Rosling was a quirky Swedish TED-talk and global affairs speaker (one known to punctuate talks with displays of sword swallowing). He died from pancreatic cancer in 2017, just as he was finishing this career-capping overview of the true state of the world, as supported by numbers.

Readers start the book confronted by a 13-question multiple-choice quiz on such things as how people are distributed across the planet’s continents, the amount poverty has decreased, rates of girls’ education, access to electricity, and global life expectancy. Sad to say, you and I will achieve a predictably bad score (as Rosling’s three decades of audience testing has determined) – a score likely worse than if we had merely guessed the answers.

Most Westerners’ concept of the world, as Rosling explains, comes from a patchwork of outdated assumptions, unfamiliarity, media sentimentality, fear of the foreign, and a natural instinct for negativity. This leads us to operate with an “overdramatic worldview.” His solution is to cultivate a factful worldview – one based on numbers, proportions, and comparisons, gathered from across our planet’s 200+ countries.

And so we learn that the majority of the world lives in middle-income countries (just 9% live in extreme poverty), 80% of humans have access to electricity, girls worldwide spend an average of 9 years in school (boys spend 10), and 80% of people around the world have had at least one vaccination (on this planet, anti-vaxxers are decidedly outnumbered). This is not a bunch of global trivia but rather the shaping of a worldview – one lit with possibility. Amid the good news, he prioritizes things we should worry about: global pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.

Along the way, Rosling reminds us of basic strategies for avoiding being fooled by data (e.g. getting proportionality with your information, avoiding urgency to maintain clear thinking, questioning categories). He presents helpful charts for visualizing the world and its (often confusing) data, and offers a concrete, four-level way to categorize countries by income (to replace the long-outdated “first/third-world” mode).

While lies inevitably travel faster than facts, Rosling’s data helps fight the War on Error.

In the right course, Factfulness would be an eye-opening inclusion. Knowing that in 2100, 80% of the population will most likely live in Asia and Africa would help our students keep their eye on the future’s true continental leaders (a recognition not given by most Western popular culture). Knowing that world population is not spiraling out of control would help calm fears. Recognizing how the past century has radically reduced global poverty and increased world health and safety would offer hope as we work on more intractable problems of our planet. And re-committing to truth would help keep us from bending it amid the panic of the day’s urgencies (as Rosling insists, “Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intention”).

Faculty can prepare the next several generations of global citizens by first ensuring our characteristically inaccurate and overdramatic worldviews are better tethered to Factfulness.