Dr. Alison Barton is the new Director of the ETSU Center for Teaching Excellence and an award-winning faculty member from the Clemmer College. Hear her discuss the importance of faculty members seeing their courses through the eyes of their students. Dr. Barton also talks about her use of specifications grading as well as the exciting and innovative resources offered by the center.

Podcast Transcript: 

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Dr. Alison Barton

Teaching isn't finite. There is just never an end point to it, and I think that's one of the challenges with being a faculty member. Is you don't have the article that's published at the end to show you've done something worthwhile. You just have this ongoing set of activities that you do to try to get better and better, and sometimes you try something and it's a step backwards.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Hi, I'm Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academics at East Tennessee State University. From the moment I arrived on this campus, I have been inspired by our faculty, their passion for what they do, their belief in the power of higher education, and the way that they are transforming the lives of their students. This podcast is dedicated to them, our incredible faculty at ETSU. Hear their stories as they tell us why I teach.

In this episode, we will talk with Dr. Alison Barton from the ETSU Clemmer College. Dr. Barton is an award-winning faculty member at ETSU and recently was appointed Director of our Center for Teaching Excellence. Enjoy the show.

Dr. Barton, welcome to our podcast. I want to first again by congratulating you on your new role with the Center for Teaching Excellence. Sounds like you have an exciting fall coming up.

Dr. Alison Barton

Thank you. Yes, I most certainly do. This fall I've actually put, hit the pause button on teaching so that I can get my feet under me as I learn more about the role of the Director for the Center for Teaching Excellence, and as we put together several new initiatives that we're rolling out from the center this fall.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

It's great, that sounds like a good plan. I start my podcast out with the same question for every guest. Take me back to your first day of teaching at ETSU as a faculty member, and I think that was back in 2005. Looking back on that day, what is one piece of advice that you would have given yourself?

Dr. Alison Barton

That's hard to answer because there are so many pieces of advice I would give myself knowing how much I know now about teaching versus then. But probably the biggest piece of advice I could give myself at that time would be to look at my course and at my teach through my students’ eyes. Is the teaching engaging? Are the students allowed to be active in the class? Is the professor inviting versus suspicious of students? And you can see that in I'm sure syllabi that I wrote 100 years ago versus now. Are the assignments drafted in a way that feels purposeful to the mission of the class, or do they feel like busy work that are included just to feel like the course is rigorous?

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I just think that's outstanding advice. Think about looking at your course through your students eyes. That's really very helpful.

So you teach courses that are part of the general education curriculum all the way through graduate level. Are most of your students preparing to become educators?

Dr. Alison Barton

I would say probably most of them are, especially for the classes that are educational foundations level classes. We are preparing our educators to go out and become teachers in the K12 school system. But the general education course that I teach EDFN 2310 is developmental psychology, and I get a range of students in that class. Some of them are going to become educators in that class as well, but I see a range of students including a lot, and nursing students seem to take the course quite a bit as well. So I get quite a diversity in that general education class.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I imagine that means you have to think about the way you develop and deliver that course.

Dr. Alison Barton

Yes, but I have a luxury in that class. It's about human development and everybody in that class happens to be a human, so we have an easy way to apply a lot of what we're learning in there.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

That's great. So you've spent many years teaching courses in the online format. As I understand it, you're actually a pioneer of online teaching at ETSU, and you've been really successful in this. What advice do you have for faculty who are teaching in online formats in terms of keeping students engaged online and achieving their student learning outcomes?

Dr. Alison Barton

Well, I would precede my answer by saying I don't have all the answers, and if I did, I might be making a lot of money. So as with all teaching it is an iterative process and I'm continuing to learn about best online delivery methods as I continue to teach in online venues.

I would say one of the most important things to do to keep your students engaged is to make sure that what you're including in the online environment keeps your students active. Students won't be learning if they are not cognitively engaged with the material and being asked to do things with that material in some way. So it's really important that the activities are not nominal and that they're not passive. Can't just have a video and have students watch that video and then take a test on it. We want them to be working with the information that they're receiving in some way.

For making sure that learning outcomes are achieved, that's a really tricky question. I think when we're teaching on ground we have a little more luxury of captive audience there to do little activities that may not feel in the moment like they're related to learning outcomes but do eventually lead to those learning outcomes. When you're teaching online it's easy to overwhelm students with the sense that there is too much to do in that class. So I think we have to be a little more judicious about the activities we choose for students to do and take a look at which ones are going to be the most value added for meeting those learning outcomes so that whatever you assign is going to give students and you as an educator the most bang for the buck on their time that they're investing in that activity.

I think it's also important, and this actually is true no matter what modality you're teaching in, but it's really important to tell students how this activity aligns with the learning outcomes. There's really good research that demonstrates that when you're very intentional about sharing that linkage with your students, the students are much more motivated to complete the activity and in some ways that I think people are still trying to find out it actually closes achievement gaps between underrepresented students and other students in your classes.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

So I think for me what that reminds me of is that teaching online just requires a different approach and intentionality in ways that are really important.

Dr. Alison Barton

Yeah, I think you have to spend a lot more time thinking ahead and planning ahead for an entire semester to make sure that everything that's done is done with some intention.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I think that's a great way of putting it. One question that I wanted to ask you, you use a method that's called specifications grading in your courses. Can you tell us about this?

Dr. Alison Barton

I can try. It's a little challenging to explain without visuals and it's a little challenging to explain in a nutshell. But to just precede that a little bit I want to say that I have been learning that grading is actually an activity that can be placed on a continuum from something that's highly managed to something that's almost not managed at all. And that doesn't mean that there isn't feedback going on or teaching going on. This is just about the grading behaviors and grading approach that you're taking in the class.

Specifications grading goes more towards the less managed side of grading, but it's certainly not all the way at the end that's ungrad and we are talking about that at the center as well. Specifications grading is when you decide as an instructor, again this is frontend and intentional, you decide which assignments are required for each letter grade that is assigned at the end of the semester to a student. So students see what's required of each letter grade right at the beginning of the semester and you ask them to decide which grade they're going for. Now that can change. They're allowed to change their minds midway through the semester and aim higher or lower.

But this way you know that they know what they're aiming for. Those bundles of assignments that go with each letter grade will vary. The higher you go, so the higher the letter grade, the higher the quantity of assignments that are required. And sometimes you may add some qualitatively more challenging assignments for higher letter grade as well.

Each of those assignments comes with a set of specifications, that's where that word comes in, and it's a set of make-or-break criteria for that assignment. Students must meet all of the specifications in order for the assignment to count towards their letter grade. And if they don't then they are told this does not yet meet specifications.

The beauty of this grading system and what my students have really resonated with is that they are permitted additional attempts to try again. And the way that's typically done with spec grading is to give tokens to students at the beginning of the semester. They can spend a token to try again on an assignment or if they've missed an assignment deadline they can get an extension. Those are typical ways that we use tokens in the class.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Well, of course, I have so many questions, but I'm going to ask what about students who sort of, from the beginning of this process, just say I want to get a C. Is that okay? Is that rigorous enough? How do you approach that?

Dr. Alison Barton

I love that question because I actually studied this method with an eighth-grade teacher who did it in her eighth-grade class, and we talked in our article about the ethics of accepting a C. I think at the higher education level, we may want to honor that. I very, very rarely see it. It's typically in my gen ed class where they have other priorities that they're going to focus their time and energy on instead of in my class. I typically reach out and encourage them to do better, but I do try to honor their autonomy in that choice.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

It's fascinating. How long have you been using this process in your classes?

Dr. Alison Barton

I think it's been three or four years now that I've been trying it. I heard about it at the conference for higher education pedagogy up at Virginia Tech and was motivated to start trying to use it right away.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Well I love the involvement of students at the beginning in sort of weighing in on how they're going to engage with the course.

Dr. Alison Barton

Yes, I think it's a little intimidating. I've learned to do a lot of front-end education and assurances for my students because they're a little bit, they're always a little bit trepidacious about this new grading system that most of them have never encountered before. But the vast majority at the end of the semester will give very positive feedback and a preference for this grading method over traditional grading methods. The only students that don't like it are those that wanted to coast by with substandard work and not have to redo it for it to count, and that's a rare student but they I sometimes get comments about that.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Thank you for sharing that Dr. Barton. I want to talk to you now about your new role in the Center for Teaching Excellence. You've worked with the center for many years now since you've been at ETSU. Please share with us the mission of the center and how it supports ETSU faculty.

Dr. Alison Barton

Our advisory committee is actually actively working on our mission right now so it's a great question to be asking and we are still in the process of refining our mission in a more formal statement. But it's centering around the idea that education needs to be equitable for everyone here on campus. Our students learning is important and our students deserve to have good teaching and as part of that our Educators here on campus our instructors deserve to have the tools they need in order to provide that good education to our students.

So there are a number of ways the center supports our faculty learning about good teaching. We try to give them the knowledge and the tools and ongoing assistance and even encouragement to continue that teaching development trajectory. Teaching isn't finite. There is just never an endpoint to it, and I think that's one of the challenges with being a faculty member, is you don't have the article that's published at the end to show you've done something worthwhile. You just have this ongoing set of activities that you do to try to get better and better, and sometimes you try something and it's a step backwards and you have to go back to the drawing board.

But we offer a lot of things to try to support our faculty including workshops where we cover things from very the kind of the basics of what's important for good teaching there we call those the four Essentials and so those four Essentials workshops are the best place to start if you haven't done anything with the center before and we go all the way up to some Cutting Edge and innovative ideas that we like to share out with faculty who have been around the block a few times and are looking for something a little different and new to try out with their teaching.

We offer consultations and that can be with our CTE staff but we've also rolled out something I'm very excited about called TLC's or teaching and learning consultations. We spent some time in the spring training peer Consultants from across campus. These are other faculty members in how to do consultations with their peers across campus. So when a request comes in from a faculty member will assign that person to a peer and the goal is to not do an evaluation and not do something that's summative but instead focus on something that the instructor wants a little bit of feedback on and make this a really supportive informative process where the consultant will have a look at what the instructor is currently doing maybe an in-class observation it may just be looking at course materials or syllabi and providing feedback on what things are going well and where there could be additional new things that the faculty member might want to try but it's meant to be an extremely supportive cooperative process.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

That sounds like such an effective way to bring in your peers to provide some valuable feedback without it being threatening as you say.

Dr. Alison Barton

I agree. I think it's really important that our teaching is valued and supported and not critiqued all the time and so I think that's a really helpful approach. I also like that we're pairing people from across campus because I think when we cross-pollinate we get interesting takes and different ideas than if we just kind of stuck to our own disciplines.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I always heard that it's great to have someone from outside your discipline come into your class to make sure that they can understand from a student perspective what you might be lecturing about.

Dr. Alison Barton

Yeah, I think that that is definitely part of what's helpful, and the other thing is they may be doing something in their classes instructionally that feels discipline-specific but actually could transfer over into this other faculty member's discipline.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

So I'll ask you one other question about the work that you've done with the CTE. Can you tell us what do you think stands out most to you about ETSU faculty and the ways that they approach their teaching?

Dr. Alison Barton

I have seen from many of our faculty a real interest in trying to find ways to motivate their students. Really want them the desire for their students to care about their material is really prevalent among a lot of our faculty on campus and so there's a real thirst for that and I think of very very much a willingness to try new ideas and think of new ideas themselves for how they can tweak their activities to resonate with students and get them to understand the meaning the purpose behind an activity as well as to genuinely get interested in the content of what they're learning.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

I love that and it reflects for me what I've seen is just a real deep commitment that faculty have to good teaching.

Dr. Alison Barton

Yeah I think we definitely have faculty on campus who are very deeply committed to good teaching.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Well the last question that I ask every guest. What impact do you hope your students will make on the world?

Dr. Alison Barton

I think it's important, and what I want most for my students is for them to go and show how important it is to do the right thing, even when the right thing is unpopular or is effortful. And I think that can apply in a number of contexts, certainly for me, what resonates is our social justice contexts, but also teaching contexts. So I want my pre-service Educators who go out to be K12 teachers to understand that good teaching means you're going to spend more time doing it and it's going to require a lot more effort and thought, but good learning happens when you spend that time and effort, and I think that's true of course, with teaching in any context.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

That's really inspiring. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Barton. You have built an amazing legacy as an ETSU faculty member and we're so fortunate to have you in your new role. I look forward to all that you will do as you support the faculty in the Center for Teaching Excellence. I hope you have a great great fall semester.

Dr. Alison Barton

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle

Thank you for listening to Why I Teach. For more information on Dr. Barton or this podcast series, visit the ETSU Provost website at etsu.edu Provost. You can follow me on Twitter at ETSU Provost. And if you enjoyed this episode please take a moment to like and subscribe to Why I Teach wherever you listen to your podcast.

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