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What Peer-Assisted Learning Can Teach Us

By Jeffrey White

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

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

Structure

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

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

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

Facilitation techniques

Three facilitation techniques are foundational to our PAL sessions:

  • Redirection
  • Wait time
  • Checking for understanding

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

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

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

Applying these elements to interaction with students

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Teaching and learning resources for these trying times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Imagining the World Factfully

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

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

Have you tested yourself lately?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Sticky Skills

Recently, UP’s College of Arts & Sciences held its annual book-club reading of a work on pedagogy. This year’s title was Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning (P. Brown/H. Roediger/M. McDaniel, 2014), and Jeffrey White led faculty in a discussion.

If you were among the participants, did the book’s methods “to learn better and remember longer” actually stick?

Whether you are new to the book or not, here’s a quick overview of a few of its lessons for the classroom.

Make it Stick was published the same year (2014) as Benedict Carey’s How We Learn. It contains similarly counterintuitive lessons that were derived from research in the cognitive psychology of learning (my two-page overview of that book can be found here).

The book’s epigraph comes from Aeschylus: “Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” Make it Stick insists that human learning primarily originates not through new information but through remembering what you have already encountered. (For so often, it takes this kind of reflection to recognize – often for the first time – the value your experiences hold.)

The authors point to data showing how our classic learning strategies of cramming, underlining, highlighting, and repetition simply do not have long-term value for remembering.

They would have us replace these ineffective methods with tools that actually work: ones that are more effective in disrupting the natural process of forgetting. So, for our purposes of teaching at UP here are six challenges drawn from the book:

How might you integrate “interleaving” into your curriculum? As the book explains interleaving involves practicing different topics or skills in a series – rather than focusing long and hard on just one. Learning at different times, in different spaces, and with different subjects helps multiply “retrieval cues,” fostering better access to our memories.

How might you integrate forgetting into your curriculum? Students should remember to forget in order to exercise the muscles of retrieval. Make it Stick suggests we honor the fact that “learning is an iterative process that requires you to revisit what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge” (21-2). While “the amount of study time is no measure of mastery” (10), a more dependable criterion for mastery involves the number of times you forget and then remember a topic or skill. Time and interleaving can foster the crucial practice of forgetting. (They suggest, for example, deliberately employing days between classes to forget, so that we then start our classes by having students try to remember what was covered in the last meeting.)

How might you add more quizzes to your course? The book champions an increased number of low-stakes quizzes across the semester, to help foster the practice of self-quizzing. This simple activity gives students a more accurate understanding of how much they know and don’t know (for overconfidence in what one knows is all too common). And it helps interrupt forgetting.

How might you integrate the habit of “writing to learn” into your course? A regular habit of low-stakes, informal writing in your class (journal entries, freewrites, targeted reflections) provides cognitive variety in a lecture-based class, and fosters personal connections necessary to unite students with new concepts. By thinking on paper, students are practicing “retrieval, elaboration, and generation” – internal activities that no lecture can provide.

How might you integrate the “concrete and personal” into your curriculum? We remember things best when they matter to us. Make it Stick urges that instructors not be shy about weaving personal anecdotes into the content of their lessons: “Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal” (11). While it might seem self-indulgent to bring yourself into the picture, serving as a model to students of how to integrate a subject into our everyday lives helps clarify the stakes involved.

How might you make learning more difficult in your class? This wildly counterintuitive strategy suggests we stop streamlining our curriculum for ease – for the best, most long-lasting learning happens when the learning is hard. Students do better when we give them the room to struggle with difficulty. Forms of such “desirable difficulty” include adding to your class more puzzles, problems, and riddles than you currently do: “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution” (88). So if we truly want to learn (and remember) a concept, we should turn off that pleasurable TED talk, and reach instead for the textbook.

(In other words, stop reading featherweight, short-form reviews like this one, and crack open Make it Stick!)

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Dept, 2018