UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

helping students

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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.

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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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Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy

In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom and other researchers collaborated to create what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes. This has been revised over the years and includes today six cognitive dimensions:

  • Remember: recall facts and basic concepts (e.g., define, list, state)
  • Understand: explain ideas or concepts (e.g., describe, explain, summarize)
  • Apply: use information in new situations (e.g., solve, complete, change)
  • Analyze: draw connections among ideas (e.g., contrast, categorize, connect)
  • Evaluate: justify a stand or decision (e.g., criticize, defend, prioritize)
  • Create: produce new or original work (e.g., design, modify, write)

The accompanying verbs can be used to develop and organize learning goals and objectives for our curricula, courses, and daily lesson plans. Many UP faculty already use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide for planning, but we can enhance the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy by considering our objectives through the lens of knowledge dimensions that Anderson and Krathwohl added to the taxonomy in 2001. The four dimensions are:

  • Factual knowledge (basic elements to learn in the discipline)
  • Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements within a larger context)
  • Procedural knowledge (methods in the discipline)
  • Metacognitive knowledge (awareness of how learning work in relation to one’s self)

Anderson and Krathwohl developed a matrix for combining cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions that can be adapted when planning courses and lessons. As faculty, we can adapt this matrix in our own lesson planning. Here’s an example from a 300-level applied linguistics course that I teach in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

Basic concept: Individual differences in language learning

Knowledge Dimension: Factual knowledge

Bloom’s Taxonomy Cognitive Process: Remember (Related actions verbs: define, list, state, recall, identify)

Learning Goal: Students can accurately define individual differences and list examples.Writing assistance working with student

Assessment: Students take a low-stakes quiz in which they define individual differences and provide examples they recall from the reading and group work activity.

Learning Experiences: 

  1. Students read section on individual differences in How Languages are Learned respond to reading prompts before class.
  2. In class, students work in groups to identify individual differences in written profiles of learners and present their findings.

Intersecting with multiple knowledge dimensions

As faculty, we can also run concepts and theories we teach through both multiple knowledge and cognitive process dimensions as we plan instruction. Let’s take, for example, the social cultural theoretical perspective of second language acquisition from the same applied linguistics course

Factual dimension / Remember

Instructor provides learning experiences so that students practice recalling definitions of terms and characteristics and elements of the theory.

Conceptual dimension / Understand

Students participate in learning experiences that guide them to start explaining principles and models of the social cultural perspective. It’s important to note that at this level, the students are not just restating an author’s or instructor’s explanation; that would be remembering. Rather, they are using concepts, terms, and paraphrasing to explain the concept or theory.

Procedural dimension / Analyze

Eventually, students point out passages in a research text that indicate the linguistics researcher is writing from the social cultural perspective of second language learning. They are using their knowledge of the theory as an analytical tool.

Metacognitive dimension / Apply

Finally, the instructor can work with students to develop and apply motivational and language learning strategies that are based on a social cultural perspective of second language learning.

The above processes can also be reorganized into a class lesson planning tool.

Application in your teaching

The combination of Bloom’s Taxonomy and knowledge dimensions create a powerful approach for your faculty toolbox in support of our efforts to provide the excellent undergraduate education opportunities to our students. For more about deploying Bloom’s Taxonomy and the four dimensions of knowledge, check out Laurie Richlin’s Blueprint for Learning: Construction College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning (2006), one of the sources of today’s TLC blog entry. If you would like to explore in more detail using dimensions and Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs in a lesson planning form, download this MS Word version.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in the Shepard Academic Resource Center in Buckley Center 163, where he trains tutors to reach Level 1 of the International Tutor Training Program Certification. He also teaches German, an applied linguistics course, and a preparation course for study abroad in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey is currently the president-elect of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He is happy to meet over coffee or lunch to discuss course and lesson design, training, and teaching in higher education and can be reached at white@up.edu.

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“…and I was happy not to finish what I had intended.”

Last week, Lars Larson challenged us to integrate interleaving into our courses, basing his proposal on principles found in Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s Make it Stick (2014). One simple approach to interleaving is to bridge the introduction of material over two classes while also working on a different topic or concept. Although I know to do this, I sometimes fall for trying to package an important concept into one class session. This occurred last week in my Maximizing Study Abroad course. I had planned to have students explain and apply material from a book chapter on Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) through discussion and in-class group work. Since we had just returned from spring break, I also used the beginning of the hour for students to recall what they had been learning prior to the break. This took a bit longer than I expected, as did our group work, and by the end of the hour, we were not done with my lesson plan. As I gathered my things at the end of class, I realized how happy I was not to have finished my intended plan. I could now interleave the material by having students read over the week for the next topic on making cultural inferences and then guiding students the next week to recall Bennett’s DMIS and continue committing it more deeply to memory through elaboration and application.

But why interleave learning? The authors of Make it Stick cite studies that indicate the benefits of interleaving for retrieval of past learned material and developing the ability to discriminate between different kinds of concepts and problems. Interleaving our subject matter also supports effortful learning and what they refer to as “distributed practice” or learning that is spaced out over time. The opposite of distributed practice is massed practice, which includes trying to learn material in one block, as in my original lesson plan, or through cramming, which unfortunately is likely to happen on campus for some students in about a month. James Lang (2016) also discusses interleaving in his recent Small Teaching and cites supporting research findings from math and language learning. He suggests models for shifting from blocked class sessions to interleaved class sessions. Again, the key to interleaving is not finishing a topic or concept before introducing another. For example (Lang, 2016, p. 79):

From Blocked Class Sessions

Monday: Topic A, Problem-Solving Session

Wednesday: Topic B, Problem-Solving Session

Friday: Topic C, Problem-Solving Session, Quiz

To Interleaved Class Sessions

Monday: Topic A, Problem-Solving Session, Topic B

Wednesday: Topic B, Problem-Solving Session, Topic C

Friday: Topic C, Problem-Solving Session, Review or Quiz

Lang notes that students may perceive interleaved learning as moving more slowly, but he cites both laboratory and classroom research that indicates better retention and recall among learners who practice interleaving. Applying interleaving also promotes relating concepts to each other in the classroom and through assessments.

Like the authors of Make it Stick, Lang also promotes frequent low-stakes quizzing and other retrieval practices, such as the following quick classroom assessment techniques:

  • Opening questions that prompt students to remind us what we were working on in the last class session;
  • Closing activities such as a minute paper in which student list key take-aways or their own questions from the day;
  • Closing a session through a short quiz or solving a final problem;
  • Eliciting responses that connect the new topic to some other aspect of the course material.

By engaging students in retrieval practice within an interleaved classroom, we will increase the likelihood of their ability to recall and discriminate concepts, connections, and applications of the material we teach into the future.

As we embrace Lars’ challenge from last week, we can use some of the above approaches to integrate interleaving into your course and lesson plans. For example, when I meet with my Maximizing Study Abroad class next, we will (1) finish some work on Bennett’s intercultural sensitivity scale, (2) interleave it with questioning how it might connect to stages of cultural adjustment, and then (3) move on to the first stage of learning about making cultural inferences.

If you would like to discuss interleaving teaching and learning, please feel free to contact me at white@up.edu.

Jeffrey White is an instructor of German and the Learning Commons administrator in Buckley Center 163. To discuss with Jeffrey how your students can practice and enhance their learning the Learning Commons, contact him at x7141.

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Student Athlete Mental Health: Are Sports Special?

a basketball hoop seen from below and behindThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

Do student-athletes tend to have more mental health problems than the general student population, fewer mental health problems, or similar mental health problems? In the Spring of 2017, when introducing a speaker talking to UP student-athletes about the particular dynamics of mental health for athletes, I asked a version of this question to our UP varsity athletes. The question is one I also discuss in my PSY/SOC 453 class on ‘Psychosocial Aspects of Sport and Physical Activity’ and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer with research.

Most basic data finds athletes report fewer mental health concerns than comparable non-athlete populations, but researchers generally assume that athletes underreport mental health concerns because of sports culture – high-level athletes are often socialized to be tough, competitive, and averse to admitting what could be perceived as a ‘weakness.’ Though sport culture is changing some, we are still much more likely to hear about famous athletes taking time off for physical injuries than for psychological ones.

So I was both surprised, and somewhat impressed, when a large proportion of the UP student-athletes I surveyed by show of hands last Spring thought athletes were more likely to experience mental health concerns than the general population. I was impressed because our athletes were willing to admit that the pressures and cultures of sport are not always as healthy as we might hope – and that the path of athletic excellence can indeed involve significant mental health challenges.

I was reminded of this experience recently while reading a 2017 book by ESPN journalist Kate Fagan titled What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen. The book tells that story of Madison Holleran – a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania who tragically took her life as a 19 year old first-year college student despite many external appearances of ‘having it all.’ The book, and a thoughtful long-form article on the ESPN web-site titled ‘Split Image’, discuss ways Holleran devoted so much of herself to excellence in athletics, academics, and with friends (at least partially through a carefully cultivated social media presence) that when she achieved her dream of becoming an Ivy League athlete she decompensated in isolation. She made tentative efforts to reach out to friends, family, counseling services, and coaches – but mostly she started to feel as though her inner turmoil and despair were unredeemable failures. To an outsider it seemed she was good at almost everything she did, but inside she didn’t feel good enough.

Madison’s Holleran’s story is not just about sports, but it does say important things about the relationship between sports culture and mental health. Student-athletes often invest massive amounts of their selves and their identities in being good at sports. Those who succeed get many benefits from that investment, but they also experience costs – they often feel a constant pressure to get better and be the best, they sometimes lack the autonomy to make their own decisions and change directions in their lives, and they don’t always have opportunities to explore identities outside of sports that might actually balance their development into healthy adults.

Over the last few years at UP I’ve learned about several ways our athletic department tries to care for the mental health of student athletes who may have concerns (some of which are discussed in a follow-up post). Here, however, it is worth emphasizing to UP faculty and academic staff who interact with student athletes that mental health concerns can affect even those who seem the strongest. Student athletes often have to fight against the stigma in sports culture against openly acknowledging mental health concerns, but many should and do take up that fight.

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