Faculty Focus Live

Have you ever had a student say, "Wow, this class is so hard!" or "These homework assignments are impossible!" Many students might even do their own research before taking your class, trying to determine what the workload might be or what the level of difficulty is. For this reason, it’s important to understand how you can communicate your definition of academic rigor and ensure your goals are aligned with the expectations of your students. 

In this episode, we’ll go through the research on growth mindset. We’ll cover how you can foster growth mindset in your own course to improve learning and how you can make connections with your students to emphasize the task at hand, and then, we’ll cover specific strategies to inspire students to keep on trying even when it gets tough.

Recommended Resources: 

• Magna Online Seminar: Aligning Student and Faculty Perceptions of Rigor
• Magna Online Seminar: Building a Tougher Student: Applying the Research on Intellectual Development
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Manage the Disconnect Between Faculty and Student Perceptions of Rigor to Increase Learning?

Join us this year in New Orleans for the Teaching Professor Annual Conference from June 9 - 11.  Give yourself something to look forward to at the end of your school year: a conference to network, learn, and refocus on why you got into teaching in the first place! 

In this episode, we're going to talk about a Twitter thread that went viral. Dr. Liz Norell's thread on her night class now has more than 800,000 views. On it, Norell talks about ice breakers, her liquid syllabus, ungrading, a "punchy" Word document syllabus she created the night before, and communicating the message of care and belonging. 

When it comes to ungrading, Norell tells students that learning is change happening in their minds, something that you can't always see. "And so my hope is that by the end of the semester...students really embrace ungrading, because I find, contrary to my own expectations, they do more work because they care, because they're interested, and they're not doing it for a grade."

Additionally, Norell explains that a delightful consequence of ungrading is that students learn how to self-advocate and take ownership of the work they've done. From ungrading to a liquid syllabus to bringing snacks to class, Norell's main goal is  communicating a message of care and belonging to every person in the classroom. 

Recommended Resources:

• Liz Norell's Resources
• The viral Twitter thread: Last night, a professor walked into a night class for the first time since 2016. Here's what happened...
• Liz Norell's YouTube video: Why I Think Grades are Stupid
• Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Ungrading might seem a little daunting, right? How can you just take away grades? How can you assess students without actually grading their essays, projects, or homework? How do you prepare students who depend on grades to adapt to a new type of grading? 

In this episode, we’ll cover what ungrading actually is, some of the research behind it, and how it can be brought to any classroom by having an honest conversation with your students. And then we’ll take a few minutes to dispel some misconceptions about ungrading, because ungrading doesn’t mean you have to completely eliminate grades in all forms from your classroom. Lastly, we’ll cover a few ungrading assessment strategies that you can implement into your own course.

Recommended Resources:

• 20-Minute Mentor: What Is Ungrading and How Can It Unleash Your Students' Potential?
• 20-Minute Mentor: What Are 7 Ways to Assess Students in an Ungraded Classroom?

Don't forget to expand your love for teaching at the Teaching Professor Annual Conference in New Orleans, June 9 - 11. Give yourself something to look forward to: a conference to network, learn, and refocus on why you got into teaching in the first place!

In this episode, we’ll cover snippets from the Wellbeing Elixir course, presented by Seena Haines and Stuart Haines, on how gratitude is associated with numerous mental and physical benefits; how extending generosity to others has been shown to lower blood pressure, increase self-esteem and self-worth, and enhance optimism; and lastly, we’ll cover goal setting and how both success and failure are part of the journey – it’s important to set goals but to also know that having goals does not guarantee success, and that’s okay.

Recommended Resources:

• The Wellbeing Elixir Course

A special coupon just for YOU! Use coupon code WELLNESS and take $60 off your purchase of the Wellbeing Elixir Course.

Teaching students in the classroom while simultaneously teaching students online is hard. How do you bring students together when some are in the classroom and some are online? What tools can you use to cater to this type of Hyflex or hybrid teaching? 

In this episode, we’ll explain different tools and techniques you can use in a Hyflex setting, we’ll go over a couple of best practices to keep in mind when designing a course like this, and lastly, we’ll cover more online tools you can use to help bridge the in-person and online students together and make it feel more like a cohesive class session.

Recommended Resources: 

• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Teach with Confidence in the Hyflex Classroom?
• 20-Minute Mentor: What Are Best Practices for Hyflex Course Design and Delivery?
• Magna Online Seminar: Blended and Flipped Course Design: Tried and True Approaches
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Gauge Online Learning Through Engaging Activities and Assignments?

Today is all about the memory, from short-term to long-term. Do you still remember your childhood phone number? What about your high school fight song? Or the street you lived on when you were eight years old? We might remember some of these things, but sometimes we forget what we read this morning or what we ate for breakfast two days ago. Don’t worry, there are numerous proven ways to manipulate and develop our ability to remember! 

So, what small changes can you integrate to help students remember your content? In this episode, we’ll start with the academic research on memory and how you can create a more successful environment so that you can apply cognitive theory in your courses. Next, we’ll go over strategies that you can incorporate to improve student learning and memory, such as semantic encoding, cueing, peer teaching, and more. And lastly, we’ll cover how microactivities are a great way to check in with students and move information closer to long-term memory.

Recommended Resources:

• Using Brief Interventions to Maximize Student Learning
• What Key Concepts Improve Student Learning and Memory?
• How Can I Use Microactivities to Engage Students and Improve Learning and Retention?

How do you make your online classroom feel welcoming and safe for your students? Unlike the face-to-face classroom, you don’t always have the opportunity to greet students with a warm smile and ask them how they’re doing. So, how do you bring these in-class approaches to your online environment? 

In this episode, we’ll cover techniques on how to be culturally responsive in your online courses, we’ll provide tips on how you can format your online class to be warm and welcoming, and we’ll cover assimilation strategies for nontraditional and marginalized students in the online environment. From student testimonials to a name story exercise and community rubric, your online classroom will be a safe space for all of your students.

Recommended Resources: 

• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Become a Better Online Instructor?
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Do I Establish an Engaging Atmosphere in My Online Classroom?
• Magna Online Seminar: Online Engagement and Assimilation Strategies for Nontraditional and Marginalized Students

Lectures can be boring, without a doubt, but they don’t have to be. There are a variety of creative approaches for making your lecture more interactive and interesting for your students so that they stay tuned in and remember the content you want them to remember. 

In this episode, we’ll talk about how you can start and end your lecture with bookends, how to incorporate lecture wrappers, and different engagement techniques you can try. We’ll also cover what a microlecture is and the process of creating one, and then we’ll go over effective Q&As to help engage students, buzz groups, and a snowball group activity. 

Recommended Resources:

• Magna Online Seminar: How to Use Interactive Lecturing as Pedagogy of Engagement
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Do I Create and Implement Microlectures?
• Magna Online Seminar: Strategies for Making Lectures More Active, Engaging, and Meaningful

This episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor Online Conference – network from the comfort of your living room. 

Today’s episode is all about technology. Now, you may be tired of hearing about all the tools and gadgets you can integrate into your courses, but we’ll go through easy-to-use technologies, including the appropriate application and benefits of each. We also don’t expect you to start integrating every single one of these tools. Start with just one, or maybe two, and see how it goes.  

We’ll demonstrate the value of H5P tools and how to use them with your existing platforms from crossword puzzles to flash cards. We’ll touch on FlipGrid, EdPuzzle, and more. And then we’ll discuss how you can use backward design to help you identify and implement the best technology tool solution for your course, so that there’s intention and meaning behind the technology you use.

Recommended Resources:

• 20-Minute Mentor: What Are 5 Ways H5P Tools Can Help Students Retain Course Content?
• 20-Minute Mentor: What Are 5 Easy-to-Use Technologies that Have a Big Impact on Learning in the Online Classroom?
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Do I Align Learning Objectives with Technology Using Backward Design?

This week's episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor Online Conference. Network and learn from the comfort of your own home!

As an educator, you’ve been through some of the toughest years of teaching. Many have faced academic stressors, burnout, anxiety, and so much more. So this is your timely reminder to take care of yourself. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about resiliency, appreciative inquiry, growth mindset, and mindful self-compassion. The following tools, resources, and techniques can help you construct a more joyful mindset and will offer you a process for helping with stress and wellbeing. 

This episode is a reminder to direct an attitude of loving kindness towards yourself, using mindful self-compassion. No matter what the feeling is—anger, guilt, shame, or grief—whatever it is, treat yourself with a gentle kindness, as you would recognize common humanity with the rest of us.

Recommended Resources:

• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Apply a Resilient Mindset to My Teaching Practice?
• 20-Minute Mentor: What are 3 Calendar Hacks Faculty Can Use to Avoid Stress and Burnout?
• Magna Online Seminar: Cultivate Resilience: Six Steps for Stress Inoculation
• Magna Online Course: The Wellbeing Elixir
• Free article: Finding the Positive: Your Mental Health and Wellbeing Matter

This episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor Online Conference.