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Teaching Tips

January 13, 2021 By Lars Larson

Teaching Tips from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi, our campus’s 2021 Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writer, is a History professor at Boston University, founder of two Antiracist Research Centers, and the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America). UP has chosen his bestseller How to Be an Antiracist as our “everybody reads” selection, which culminates in his March 31 campus presentation. Electronic copies of Kendi’s book can be accessed through the Clark Library here, and 400 paper copies will be available in early February to on-campus students, staff, and faculty.

Here in 2021, America’s pandemic of racism continues. Earlier this month, an armed white mob stormed the US Capitol to disrupt the transfer of power to a newly elected president who values antiracism. Part of the problem lies in our discourse. As former Attorney General Eric Holder once said, we are nation of cowards when it comes to talking about race. But courage and change can begin today, and this year’s ReadUP selection can help us hold more constructive conversations about racism’s toxic hierarchies.

Additionally, here at the beginning of a new semester, a number of ideas from Kendi’s book might assist our classes as we carry out UP’s stated mission to be “a place where diversity, equality, and inclusivity are paramount.” This essay gleans his strategies that apply to teaching: four promising ways we can take our varied curriculum toward the methods the book models. The four I explore invite us to:

I.) Rethink how we name things

II.) Envision goals through opposition

III.) Stay vigilantly self-aware

IV.) Trust that every one of your students has the potential to succeed

 

I.) One of Kendi’s strategies, which can be useful for whatever subject our courses pursue, is to rethink how we name those subjects. In his field of critical race theory, Kendi noticed how racism within ourselves can be hard for us – (all of us, regardless of race) – to see. Since we characteristically self-define with the phrase of denial “not racist” (and “[d]enial is the heartbeat of racism”), Kendi promotes the term “antiracist” (9). This word cultivates a more active stance, denying individuals the mirage of being neutral: at any given moment, our actions are either racist or antiracist. Similarly, he shifts the topic away from being applied to people’s hardened identities and toward actions and institutional policies: people or institutions cannot be inherently racist or antiracist, but their actions or policies at any moment can be (10). This rethinking of language and direction aims to unblock resistance to the subject – just as we might do in thinking through the characteristic resistance our students have toward our own discipline’s subjects.

Throughout Kendi’s book, we find him drawing upon this power of definition. Each chapter begins with a keyword defined in a concrete, simple, non-technical way. Thus readers are schooled in terms like antiracist (“[o]ne who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity”), activist (“[o]ne who has a record of power or policy change”) and class racist (“[o]ne who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes” (24, 201, 151).

Kendi subjects all terms of his field to scrutiny, finding that an increasingly popular phrase like “institutional racism” can blind us to the role of individuals in deflecting or creating change; he believes the phrase “racist policies” to be a better substitute due to its concrete delineation of power. These acts of defining are not trivial semantics, for “[d]efinitions anchor us in principles” (17). Defining can be part of reaching our goals, for as Kendi notes “the only way to undo racism is to constantly identify and describe it – and then dismantle it” (9). He models how by being innovative, strategic, concrete, and clear in the words we use to describe our discipline – rather than simply using the terms handed down to us by our field and our mentors – we can reduce our students’ resistance and cognitive load.      

 

II.) Another pedagogical strategy instructors can draw from Kendi’s book is to envision our goals through opposition. As with rethinking the labels we use, this mode draws upon the power of concreteness to keep our thinking from becoming too abstract or inconsistent. When defining his phrases, he constantly sets them against an opposite. Thus he defines antiracism against racism, across a host of intersectional forms. For example, he clarifies that a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequality between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. (18)

As another example, in a chapter on sexuality, his definition of what “queer antiracism” is comes only after a definition of what “queer racism” looks like. Chapter by chapter, Kendi uses this pattern of opposition in defining racism’s existence in such things as biology, space, colorism, gender, culture, and ethnicity, using their racist forms to make clearer what their antiracist forms look like when successfully enacted.

Through Kendi’s use of opposition, I can see how far from his definition of “activist” I fall. For while my response to the events of 2020 led me to read a great many book on race (a response our colleague Alice Gates calls “cognitive binging”), I cannot point to any policies I helped change. And as Kendi notes, “Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change” (209). It turns out learning about antiracism might feel good, but change only happens through actively re-directing human and fiscal resources (210). My path forward is clear.

Kendi reveals his book’s most powerful interventions through many such overturnings. Replace racist policy with antiracist policy. Focus on policy change rather than mental change. Violent crime arises from unemployment, not race (79). The lingering problem of standardized test scores comes not from an “achievement gap” but from an “opportunity gap” (103). We should focus our attention on power instead of people, aiming to change policy instead of groups of people. And, as he shows by tracing racism’s origins in Europe’s capitalist efforts from the 1400s-1700s, racism arises not from human ignorance but from human self-interest: “[p]owerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest… has been behind racist policies” (43). The visualization enabled through oppositions open new channels of creativity – as we see in Kendi’s recognition that if racism’s powerful engine is self-interest, we might direct self-interest toward goals of antiracism. How might opposition clarify your curriculum’s most important interventions?

 

III. A third teaching strategy Kendi’s book models is to stay vigilantly self-aware, and to use this awareness as part of your curriculum. Books on policy can be painfully dry, but Kendi’s is a vivid work of creative writing, for every definition and lesson comes by way of autobiography. From his opening chapter (titled “My Racist Introduction”) to his final one (“Survival”), Kendi, who identifies as Black, notes how “Racist ideas fooled me my entire life,” and it took decades of living to learn to abandon his own racist ideas in favor of antiracist ones (227). In this assertion, he pushes back against many theorists who argue people of color cannot be racist.

Across each reflective, deeply personal chapter, Kendi makes himself vulnerable, revealing such moments as delivering prizewinning speeches as a teenager only to recognize later how they were built on racist assumptions, recognizing in his dating practices colorism (hierarchy according to the lightness or darkness of skin), learning to overcome homophobia in graduate school through the influence of peers, and redirecting his intellectual efforts toward policy change in the wake of murders about which he felt helpless (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown). “Like fighting an addiction,” Kendi asserts, “being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination” (23). The Acknowledgements section praises all the mentors who “put up mirrors that forced me to self-reflect” (240). Kendi’s autobiographical illustrations help build the case for readers that we, too, can change, through a similar process of increased self-awareness of causes and effects.

In our own classrooms, we can demonstrate a similar courage to make ourselves vulnerable before our students: to recruit the power and suction of storytelling; to illustrate our goals through our own young mistakes, to model paths forward. Additionally, we might take up Kendi’s challenge of self-awareness to ask: is what I’m doing now racist or antiracist? Am I hiding behind a mirage of neutrality? What of my lineup of readings? My lesson plan? This may not depend so much upon our discipline itself (e.g. differential equations) as our attitudes in deploying the subject.

The dividends of such a strategy will not only include increased student attention and engagement, but also some unexpected connections. In a final chapter, Kendi finds himself bringing up the dramatic events of dealing with cancer diagnoses in his wife, his mother, and even himself (stage four colon cancer). He finds he cannot help but link the diseases of racism and cancer (“What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer?”), and discovers a way to illustrate the high stakes involved in confronting both: [t]he popular conception of denial – like the popular strategy of suasion – is suicidal” (237, 235). No matter how dry we might think our course subjects are, Kendi shows the power of the personal can help bring it alive.

 

IV.) Lastly, How to Be an Antiracist reminds us that every one of our students has the potential to succeed. We cannot afford to write off anyone, no matter their grades or group identities, or perceived hierarchies. Just as Kendi asserts there are no “racists” – only racist acts and policies, he insists on humanity’s capacity for change: “I used to be racist most of the time. I am changing” (10).

Kendi himself hated high school and had poor grades: he “tuned out teachers like they were bad commercials” (92). After all, some harassing teachers “saw my Black body not as a plant to be cultivated but as a weed to be plucked out of their school and thrown into their prison” (82). In part because other teachers chose not to treat him this way, Kendi went on to earn a doctorate, win the National Book Award, and become one of today’s most important cultural influences.

As teachers, we work within an allegedly meritocratic system. But we should remember the pattern Kendi points to in defining that order: “Whoever creates the cultural standard usually puts himself at the top of the hierarchy” (91). We cannot mistake these constructed hierarchies as a measure of students’ potential or humanity. As it is racist to regard any of our students as “race representatives” and to “racialize behavior,” we should patrol our regard for them as individuals and throw out false hierarchies. Kendi reminds us we can approach our often-misguided students not with “ideological attacks” but with “firm hugs tailored to each student’s experience, compelling self-reflection” (218). He asks, “[w]hat if we realized that the best way to ensure an effective educational system is not by standardizing our curricula and tests but by standardizing the opportunities available to all students?” (103).

Just as President Fr. Poorman asserts that “each student is a universe of possibilities,” Kendi reminds us that the horizontal – rather than vertical – view is the most humane one: “This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human” (11). Our regard for all students in the classroom will help us move closer to this essential goal.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Teaching Tips Tagged With: Ibram Kendi, Pedagogy, teaching

November 15, 2020 By Jeffrey White

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.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Professional Development, Teaching Tips Tagged With: active learning, collaborative learning, faculty development, learning, online teaching, teaching and learning collaborative

November 5, 2020 By Andrew Guest

Difficult Conversations and Liberal Arts Ideals

Conversation art - metal megaphones
Photo by Tom Hill on Unsplash

A good college education, even in the best of times, requires having difficult conversations. We can only learn and grow when confronted with new ways of thinking; engaging diverse and challenging ideas in an inclusive educational community is central to a liberal arts education and essential to the University of Portland Core curriculum. These particular times (November of annus horribilis 2020), however, are not the best – making the having of difficult conversations more fraught. And, just maybe, more important.

There is, unfortunately, no magic formula – but there are lots of recipes, and a general sense that good teaching requires thoughtful attention to creating classroom (or Zoomroom) communities that make difficult conversations healthy and educational. Michael Roth, the president of leading liberal arts university Wesleyan, writes about making “safe enough spaces” where colleges balance a careful attention to student well-being with the necessity of being exposed to different and uncomfortable viewpoints. In our deeply divided country, we need spaces where we can learn and feel a sense of inclusive community even if we don’t agree.

Some of the recipes I’ve come across are less specific to higher education, but may have relevance at this cultural moment. Organizations such as Braver Angles and Essential Partners (see also here), for example, both have guides specific to political conversations “across the red-blue divide.” James Madison University has also put out a guide for their academic community about “Facilitating Difficult Election Conversations.”

In other domains, in organizing “peer-to-peer conversations about race” last summer UP’s Office of International Education, Diversity, and Inclusion offered a “Guide to Respectful Conversations” by the non-profit Repair the World. I’ve also had psychology colleagues point me to a University of Michigan guide on “Intergroup Dialogue.”

My personal favorite, likely because it was formulated by social scientists thinking specifically about academic contexts, is the guidelines from the Heterodox Academy. The group itself tries to promote ‘viewpoint diversity’ in higher education, and I don’t always agree with all of their approach. But that, I suppose, is part of the point: to disagree, but still learn.

Their guidelines, which I do really like, include five points of emphasis:

Make your case with evidence. In my own classes I find students often default to talking about issues by prefacing “I feel that…” or “I believe that…” and those kinds of framings can be important in some contexts – it is good to have feelings and beliefs. But I tell students that in academic contexts, or at least in social science, as much as possible we want to focus on evidence – what do we know from research, observations, and direct experience?

Be intellectually charitable. This one is relatively simple: for discussion and learning, start by assuming someone you disagree with might be right. Be willing to explore a reasonable other position deeply, for the sake of understanding.

Be intellectually humble. This one is also simple: assume your position might be wrong. Be genuinely open to changing your mind.

Be constructive: This one may be the most important: don’t approach challenging academic discussions with the goal of being right or proving another wrong. Approach academic discussions as a chance to learn. As the Heterodox Academy puts it “target ideas rather than people.”

Be yourself: In our increasingly virtual lives, it can be easy to hind behind blank screens and user (rather than real) names. But we learn more when we are present with our real selves.

I’ve started sharing these ideas with my students, and keeping them in my own mind as I confront challenging conversations of both academic and non-academic types. They are surprisingly hard to execute. Respecting evidence, being charitable, being humble, being constructive, and being present are not the direction our broad cultural discourse seems to be moving. But, at least in classrooms and when trying to bring the values of the liberal arts to our students, they might help us learn from our difficult times.

Poster of the Heterodox Academy Way

Filed Under: Community Posts, Core Matters, Featured, Teaching Tips Tagged With: core curriculum

October 29, 2020 By Lars Larson

Literature’s Thoughts for Covidian Times

These are the times that try our souls.

After the year went sideways, and a fire was in my head, I went to the Wise to seek solace.

But the Prophets were occupied on Zoom. The Oracle of Delphi was working with tech support. The Village Elders were social-distancing. Buddha was doomscrolling. And Professor Google was buffering. (at 17%, her spinning beach-ball only made me more dizzy.)

So I looked instead through a shelf of books. And I found a few thoughts, which I tack here for you – 24 ideas to help us understand where we are as teachers and thinkers during the Year that Shuddered:

—————————————————————————————————

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”

-Eugene Ionesco

 

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

-Virginia Woolf

 

“In times of change, learners will inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.”

-Eric Hoffer

 

“Do we as faculty practice education as a way to free students or control them?”

-Kelly J. Baker

 

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things that I cannot accept.”

-Angela Davis

 

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.  The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”

-Annie Dillard

 

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

-Simone Weil

 

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”

-Erich Fromm

 

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

 

True freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise that kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

-David Foster Wallace

 

“The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.”

-W.E.B. Du Bois

 

“Hope is an orientation, and insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time.”

-Krista Tippett

 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

-James Baldwin

 

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

-Viktor Frankl

 

“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”

-Robert Service

 

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

-Dorothy Parker

 

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

-Charles Darwin

 

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

 

“If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.”

-Rita Dove

 

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

-J.K. Rowling

 

“The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.”

-Cheryl Strayed

 

“May I live conscious of my debt to all the people who make life possible.”

-Audre Lorde

 

“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.”

-Nikki Giovanni

 

“How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Lastly, a poem by former Oregon Poet Laureate William Stafford, which reminds us to grip tight to the thread.

 

“The Way It Is”

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change.  But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Teaching Tips

September 27, 2020 By Jeffrey White

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.

 

 

Filed Under: Community Posts, Professional Development, Teaching Tips Tagged With: assessment, helping students, Pedagogy, teaching

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