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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The Tutoring Cycle as a Tool for Active Learning

Considering a tutoring approach for working with students during office hours

The Learning Commons at the University of Portland has made strides in professionalizing our tutors through training. Our syllabus includes 11 hours of live face-to-face training modules. In our training, trainees learn how the tutoring cycle provides structure for our tutoring sessions. As a faculty member, I’ve also adapted the tutoring cycle as a strategy for helping students during office hours.

Six basic steps make up the tutoring cycle:

  1. Greeting and setting expectations: In the peer tutoring session, it’s important that the tutor let the student know that she or he can expect to work at the whiteboard or think aloud while working with material. We train our tutors to state their roles in a first session with a student and to remind students of their expectations in subsequent meetings.
  2. Assessing the student’s needs and identifying tasks: While a student may say, “I want to work on my homework,” it’s important for the tutor to identify more precisely what the student is struggling with and what their goals are for the course. The former can be done by asking more probing questions or even having the student show how they’ve approached a specific homework problem or prompt. Drafting with the student a specific agenda for the session by using a checklist on the whiteboard (or on paper) is a handy way of making the tasks visible.
  3. Recommending and demonstrating strategies: Our peer tutors usually have strategies that they can share with students. These can range from reviewing concepts or processes in their notes or the book to specific approaches or rules of thumb to use when working on a problem or task.
  4. Formative assessment: Having students practice problems or tasks and apply demonstrated strategies offers the tutor and student the opportunity assess progress. We train tutors to give implicit feedback through questions and other means of highlighting student thinking and misconceptions. Notice that from the diagram that tutors can shuttle back and forth between formative assessment (practice) and demonstrating strategies.
  5. Summative assessment and planning for learning: Every session needs to end with some sort of summative assessment. This can be a final problem or prompt, or the tutor may direct the student to teach the material on the agenda or checklist back to the tutor. When in a rush, the tutor can have the student list three takeaways, two ways he or she will use the takeaways, and one question about the material that the student wants to pursue in the coming week, also called a 3-2-1 assessment technique. The tutor also works with the student to sketch out a plan for learning for the next week.
  6. Setting up a follow-up meeting: If needed or desired, the tutor invites the student to set up another time to meet.

How might this work in an office hour interaction?

  1. Letting students know that they will be actively thinking and working when you ask the student questions and direct them to elaborate on something or work at a whiteboard (or on paper).
  2. Taking time to dig deeper into what the student knows and doesn’t know can help you and the student to plan the office hour visit. You can separate between what is needed and what might be nice to know and then focus on the needs. Asking questions and having the student do some work will reveal areas needing your attention.
  3. Once you know the students needs, you can share strategies for working with the material, ways of conceiving of it, or even methods for keeping track of learning (e.g., effective note-taking strategies that you’ve learned over the years).
  4. Allowing time for the student to practice with the material gives you time to assess her or his progress.
  5. A simple teach-back or 3-2-1 technique offers you a sense of how effective the office hour interaction was.
  6. The invitation to return or to ask questions in class can help the student to feel a sense of belonging and added motivation to participate in your class.

As you practice these steps, you will learn ways to vary them and apply them to groups during office hours. Faculty office hours needn’t be about students coming in to be retaught the material. We can instead apply tools like the tutoring cycle and other student engagement approaches to support active learning, metacognition, and higher order thinking.

Jeffrey White is an instructor of German and directs Learning Commons in Buckley Center 163. For more information on the Learning Commons’ certified tutor training program, contact Jeffrey at white@up.edu or (503) 943-7141.

The Learning Commons is a program of the Shepard Academic Resource Center and offers trained peer support in writing papers, math, foreign language learning, biology, chemistry, physics, managing group projects, speeches and presentations, along with hosting tutoring for several nursing courses and business courses. 

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Making thinking visible through questions

Two young women sit at a table and look intently at a document. It is clear they are working together.Before we initiated tutor training in our programs in the Learning Commons, it was common for peer assistants to do more explaining and less asking. Nowadays, questions increasingly play a major role in our peer assistance sessions. While our trained peer assistants may know by heart that the role of the tutor is to facilitate students’ development of active and self-regulated learning in a higher education setting, making the shift to deploying more questions takes time, observations, and debriefing. Our peer assistants are learning more than ever through their experience and training that inquiry can uncover the ways students think and the gaps in student learning.

One framework in this year’s training for using questions has been the “6PQ Method of Discovery Learning” (Tracy & Showers, 1986). The approach involves six phases, each of which includes a variety of questions that engage students’ recall of material, thinking, and the uncovering of misconceptions. The process also involves revisiting notes and materials, the tutor paraphrasing the students’ thinking, and the student paraphrasing the key takeaways of the whole session. This model may be useful to faculty in our office hours and with individuals and groups while teaching. Below is an outline of the method with sample questions that we use in tutor training:

1) Preface (Identifying the issues)

  • “What is it exactly that I can help you with?”
  • “What are you having trouble with?”
  • “In what way can I help you?”
  • Paraphrase what you heard the issues to be.

2) Pace (Caution! Take your time here.)

  • “What can you tell me about ______________ now?”
  •  “What have you read about? What did the professor say about it in class?”
  • Paraphrase

3) Probe (Spend most of your time here)

  • “Why? Can you give me reasons?”
  •  “What makes you think so?”
  •  “Would you tell me more about ______________? Can you give me an example?”
  • Paraphrase

4) Prod (Implications & consequences)

  • “If you had to guess the impact of X on Y, what would you say?”
  • “I understand that you don’t know, but what do you think it could be?”
  • “What is your gut instinct? Why would that be true?”
  • Paraphrase

5) Prompt (For dealing with uncertainty)

“You told me earlier that ______________, so how could ______________?”

  • “Would it be ______________ or ______________?”
  • “What is the first step in this process? Second step? Third step?”
  • Paraphrase

6) Process (Connecting to other concepts)

  • “Now that you understand this concept, how would you compare it to another concept?”
  • “How do you see this concept fitting into the entire course?”
  • “So, now, what can you tell me about______________?”
  • Now have the student paraphrase the highlights of the whole session.

We can naturally substitute questions that fit the context at hand and one is not bound to this exact sequence. The key is to use questions that move through elements of Bloom’s Taxonomy (from identifying and explaining to applying, analyzing, and making connections to other concepts).

Sometimes students struggle to answer initial questions, but even here, we can use questions to direct students to resources (“Where in your book or notes might you find this out?”) and to support methods of retaining and recalling information (“What methods might you use to remember these concepts?”).

The 6PQ Method for Discovery Learning falls under the rubric of critical thinking approaches in teaching and tutoring alongside, for example, Socratic questioning. In our many interactions with students, whether in class or during office hours, we can intentionally use a variety of questions to further cognitive processing, learning, and critical thinking. As we move from explaining to questioning, we let students make their thinking visible to us, and from there, the deeper learning can truly begin.

Jeffrey White is an instructor of German and the Learning Commons administrator in Buckley Center 163. He can be contacted at white@up.edu.

Featured Image: Students Collaborating by Greg Anderson Photography used via CC 2.0

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The excitement of academic learning

Last year 1,180 UP students worked together with peer assistants in the Learning Commons to support and improve their learning for a total of nearly 4,600 visits. Wouldn’t it be great if even more students came early and often to the Learning Commons to support their thinking, learning, and the application of new concepts in the classes we teach? Imagine students engaging even more in our classes with more authentic questions, presenting course material with greater depth, and more actively working together in groups on projects after visiting one or more of the following programs in the Learning Commons in Buckley Center 163:

  •  The UP Writing Center
  •  Math Resource Center
  •  Speech and Presentation Lab
  •  Group Work Lab
  • Chemistry Assistance Center
  • Biology Assistance Center
  • Nursing tutoring
  • Language Assistance (for French, German, Mandarin, and Spanish)
  • Economics, Finance, and Business Law tutoring

The Learning Commons’ peer assistance programs not only support students; they can support faculty by increasing student awareness of learning processes involved in mastering course material.

Our students write many papers, give presentations, and work in groups on projects during their undergraduate careers, and mathematics spans many disciplines on our campus. In addition to supporting students in content areas, we are now training our peer assistants to work with students on general study skills such as time management, reading difficult texts, and note taking. Greater student use of the Learning Commons can increasingly lead to positive consequences for you as a faculty member:

  • More frequent student engagement with thinking and writing about the course material;
  • Improved quality of written assignments, presentations, and group projects;
  • Enhanced retention and recall of course material through added practice with peer assistants;
  • More genuine questions during discussions and during office hours.
  • A greater sense among your students of belonging to a community of academic.
  • So what can you do as a faculty member to support student learning through use of the Learning Commons? The following list is just a start:
  • Model how your students can find the Learning Commons online though the UP website and on Moodle via the Learning Resources link;
  • Recommend that your students use the Learning Commons early and often as a habit of mind.
  • Encourage or require struggling students to visit the Learning Commons;
  • Focus your messaging about the Learning Commons on the positives: the excitement of learning together with a peer, saving time by learning to approach assignments more effectively, improving grades through a social learning interaction with a more accomplished peer;
  • Personally recognize the effort that any students put into working with peer assistants in the Learning Commons;
  • Invite students who have benefited from using the Learning Commons to explain how the experience supported their learning.

By taking such steps in your class, you will also gain the satisfaction of knowing how you are supporting students’ active efforts to learn more outside the classroom for your course.

As you encourage your students to improve their learning through work with peer assistants in the Learning Commons, it’s important to avoid:

  • Requiring that all of your students use a specific program for the same assignment. This can overload the system, as we have only so many peer assistants. Requiring visits should be used judiciously.
  • Equating peer assistants with TA’s. The role of the peer assistant is to support the development of active and self-regulated learners. Our peer assistants are trained not to teach the material beyond the selective use of explanations. They will use questions and seek to have students use resources from classes (books, notes, Moodle page, etc.) to learn the material.

The vision of the Learning Commons is one of an evolving community of active learners at UP. To help fulfill our vision, the Learning Commons has initiated 11.5 hours of general tutor training of all peer assistants who work for us. This is on top of the content-related training that peer assistants receive from their discipline-specific coordinators. We are also applying to be able to certify our peer assistants through the College Reading and Learning Association’s International Tutor Training Program Certification process. We are piloting our Level 1 training this year. Our goal is to certify all of our peer assistants in the Learning Commons and to provide training and certification for peer tutors who work in various departments and schools within UP. I invite you to learn more about how the Learning Commons can support your students by contacting me at white@up.edu or (503) 943-7141 to arrange a time to discuss how best to make the Learning Commons work for you and your students. The Learning Commons’ trained peer assistants can also come to your classes to present how the Learning Commons can support your students’ learning.

Many thanks go to our discipline-specific coordinators and collaborative partners: Dr. Cara Hersh (Writing Center), Dr. Carolyn James (Math Resource Center), Dr. Dan Foster (Speech and Presentation Lab), Dr. Vail Fletcher (Group Work Lab), and faculty and staff in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, the Pamplin School of Business, the School of Nursing, and the Shiley School of Engineering.

Jeffrey White, M.A., M.S., is the program administrator of the Learning Commons within the Shepard Academic Resource Center, and he teaches third-year German, Maximizing Study Abroad, and training courses for interning foreign language peer assistants in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.