UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

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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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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.

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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.