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Teaching Tips

March 11, 2021 By Lars Larson

The Lesson in Question

As a mid-career academic, I find myself struggling. So much has changed in the time since I was the undergraduate my students are now.

After three decades, the texts that were so buzz-worthy then are no longer abuzz. Thinkers and theorists that my field taught me to worship now feel outdated (their underlined pages grow yellow on my shelves). Platforms of the past have been replaced by a flood of ed-tech novelties, each one more popular than the previous. The sand-castle of my expertise feels washed smooth by these tides – still salient, but no longer an interesting use of silicon.

Of course, there’s nothing new here: innovation and creativity demand change – require the exercise of the brain’s open architecture. Every thinker before me – all who’ve been privileged to live a good long while – has felt their expertise curdle within the tight containers of their training.

This condition has led me to wonder: given the natural, river-like flow of knowledge and wisdom across the years, what does not change? What should not change?

If answers inevitably shift and evolve, I wonder if well-formed questions do not.

Sure – many questions asked in the past are no-longer worth asking. But perhaps there are a set that are remarkably resistant to age and change. Maybe we can build our expertise on this long-lived set; to be doctors of curiosity, rather than curators of answers bound to grow stale. Perhaps this is the way we can stay relevant in our field – through questions as the best legacy we can leave our students, as they live their lives across an exponentially changing 21st century.

As philosopher Susanne Langer states, “If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.” And UP’s own mission statement asserts our university “addresses significant questions of human concern…”  Given how humility is a surprisingly powerful tool of persuasion, in the classroom questions might turn out to be quite muscular.

It won’t be long before yet another polished orb of our understanding gets Pluto-ed. But maybe we can still be steadied by the illumination and gravity provided by a darn good set of questions.

.  .  .

And so I wonder: could we build an entire higher education curriculum out of questions?

Or more specifically, can I imagine teaching tomorrow’s class using nothing but questions?

For as professors, isn’t our job to teach students how to learn rather than just what to learn?

Within the ruthless economy of attention, might a powerfully-framed question be our best weapon for provoking millennial curiosity?

After all, aren’t we ourselves riveted to attention by something as simple as a sharp question? (e.g. How can I get my parents vaccinated? Can I travel this summer? Am I actually going to wear this tie/blouse with these sweatpants today? Seriously?)

As UP serves a broader set of undergraduates, might the humbling stance of asking questions serve our university’s quest to be more inclusive, and further the Holy Cross charism of welcome?

As an opening ritual, is there a daily related question with which I might start each class, fielding a few answers, before getting directly to the curriculum?

How might I draw upon the power of koans – those paradoxical riddles that startle listeners into a state of wonder?

Is there a place on my syllabus, alongside the rules and course texts and Outcomes, that articulates the kinds of questions they’ll be pursuing in class and – even more importantly – that I hope they’ll ask across the arc of their lives?

What might James Baldwin have meant in 1962 when he insisted that the artist’s purpose is to reveal the questions hidden by the answers?

How do we discern questions most worth asking?

Amid lessons in creating confident proofs, write-ups, reports, or theses, have I ever taken time to teach students themselves how to frame really good questions?

Might we frame our disciplines not as self-justifying entities, but as ways of solving problems?

Are their drawbacks to teaching through questions?

Finally, (not a rhetorical question) How have you used question-based learning in your teaching?

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Teaching Tips

February 7, 2021 By Jeffrey White

Practicing What You Teach

The power of peer educators to help your students practice

We worked hard to become experts in our fields. We faculty work hard to plan and teach our classes. And now a pandemic has us working hard to continue and refine the shift to remote teaching. As professionals in teaching within higher education during trying times, we can leverage the Learning Commons’ peer educators to facilitate students’ practicing what we teach. Here’s both why we should make the benefits of trained peers helping peers visible to students and how we can best connect them with the Learning Commons’ highly trained peer staff.

The value of practice

Durable learning requires practice. In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel explain how the practice of mentally retrieving information supports durable learning. Deliberate practice involves effort, failure, and renewed attempts; it is necessary for acquiring, understanding, and applying new knowledge. Varying and spacing out practice also support learning, recall, and the ability to discriminate between different problems and techniques for solving them.

The Learning Commons offers opportunities for practicing a variety of tasks and content associated with classes that most faculty teach. Our trained peer educators tutor math, natural sciences, languages, and  a variety of business, economics, and nursing courses. Our peer-assisted learning (PAL) facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for specific courses in math, nursing, and physics. For faculty who teach courses that require written papers and oral presentations, our Writing Center and the Speech and Presentation Lab provide opportunities to practice writing and presenting. We also support students who want to develop more effective study strategies. Many faculty use group projects to support learning. The Group Work Lab offers students the opportunity to practice how to work well in a group to enhance learning and performance.

As students connect with our trained peer educators, they enter a relationship that involves practice with content, problem solving, and the written and oral communication of new knowledge. Our peer staff have been trained in deploying processes that involve initial assessment of student needs and abilities, the demonstration of strategies, and ample time to practice that is capped off with summative assessment and planning for success in both learning and presenting new material and big ideas. Students also experience and identify with a more knowledgeable peer who can listen and respond to their needs.

Image from Zoom training on community building with PAL facilitators
PAL facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for historically difficult courses.

When you leverage the Learning Commons to support student learning in your courses, you are also supporting yourself as a teaching faculty. Students who practice the material you teach will be better prepared to process actively the learning that you are working hard to facilitate. They will be more likely to retrieve concepts and problem solving approaches and with greater accuracy. Initial data from our PAL facilitation program reveals that students who participate in weekly PAL collaborative learning sessions are more likely to receive A and B grades and less likely to receive C and D grades or withdraw.

Attitudinally, students will likely be more confident and motivated to learn in your class, if they utilize our trained tutors and PAL facilitators. Our surveys of students using Learning Commons’ programs show that overwhelming majorities feel more confident with the tutored material (between 93% and 95% depending on the program) and more motivated to continue learning it (between 84% and 92%). Between 84 and 86% of respondents attribute improvements in course grades to their work with our peer educators. Based on our Writing Center surveys, 98% of respondents report feeling more confident with the writing assignment, 95% report feeling more confident with writing in general due to their work with writing assistants, and 91% report feeling more motivated to complete the assignment.

How you can support students practicing what you teach

A class culture develops in every course we teach, and we faculty can weave practicing with the Learning Commons’ peer educators into that culture. Means of doing so include:

  • Normalizing practice of the taught material and the use of peer educators as facilitators of learning and practice by promoting the Learning Commons and its programs that are relevant to your course;
  • Including a link to the Learning Commons on your Moodle page and with all or specific assignments;
  • Adding links to our Bookings Scheduler and our Writing Center Scheduler to your assignments, your Moodle page, or in your Zoom chat window during synchronous online sessions.
  • Inviting to your class a writing assistant or tutor who can explain how easy it is to connect with our peer educators. Use our visit request form to invite one of our peer staff to visit your class virtually;
  • Verbally encouraging students to use the Learning Commons. You can do this during class, when working with breakout groups, or during office hours;
  • Actively directing students to the Learning Commons’ information that is available in the most current syllabus statement.

There are many ways to connect your students to the Learning Commons’ peer educators. Most importantly, explaining how deliberate practice supports learning (and grades) along with your repeated encouragement and endorsement of continued practice with our trained writing assistants, tutors, PAL facilitators, and peer consultants will go a long way toward helping students reach higher levels of performance, confidence, and motivation. Now, as we are still in the early weeks of a new semester, is a good time to start encouraging practice as a learning strategy and the use of the Learning Commons as a place where trained peers can support your students’ deliberate practice of the material you teach.

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. Currently, Jeffrey is the immediate past president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Professional Development, Teaching Tips Tagged With: helping students, learning, learning commons, mental health, moodle, teaching, tutoring

January 21, 2021 By Andrew Guest

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.

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

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

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