Teaching for Student Success

Grades demotivate student learning.  That is a problem.  Faculty also often spend significant amounts of time grading.  Another problem.  So, if we know grading demotivates learning and we are spending lots of our time grading, are we working against ourselves? Are we working against the goals of our courses?  Isn’t our goal to motivate students to learn, and then provide them with the resources they need to move from novice towards expert?  In this episode Dr. Jesse Stommel talks about the problems with and possible solutions for the traditional grading system in which most of us participate. 

Content isn’t enough!  The classroom environment that you create can foster learning or impede learning.  If you really are here for all of your students, and I think you are, then it is critical to ensure that the environment you provide is one the fosters learning for all students.  In this episode Dr. Oscar Fernandez discusses Inclusive Excellence at Wellesley College, an effort to create a community of faculty, students, and staff working to ensure that all students feel a sense of belonging in their higher education community and that all students are supported in their efforts to excel.

A huge amount of information must be provided to students at the outset of every course.  Enter the SYLLABUS!  A universal one-way communication tool that can set the tone for your course and for your relationship with your students.  It defines the rules of engagement - the struggle for power between student and faculty.  In this episode we talk about the syllabus; how it is used, how it can be used and how it can be abused with Dr. Matthew Cheney who has written extensively about the cruelty-free syllabus.

For decades, the United States has been trying to increase the number of STEM professionals from underrepresented groups - with limited success.  Retention and persistence at the undergraduate level, and advancement to graduate degrees continue to be problematic areas.  In this episode we talk with Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta about her fascinating long-term study on the impact of peer mentors on the persistence, retention, and advancement to graduate degrees of female engineering students.  This is an amazing study following 150 students through their entire undergraduate academic career and one year beyond! The simplicity and success of this intervention is surprising.  There are lessons here for all disciplines that experience equity and inclusivity issues.

UNGRADING! You might already implement some form of UNGRADING but it is more likely that you don’t.  Perhaps you heard of UNGRADING and dismissed it, or thought about it but decided it wasn’t the right time, or decided it wasn’t right for you or your students, or thought the whole idea was insane, or perhaps you don’t know anything about UNGRADING at all.  Perhaps this is the first time you have even heard that term.

Whatever your prior knowledge is or isn’t about UNGRADING - please listen Dr. Sue Steiner of Chico State talk about her motivations to implement and her experiences with UNGRADING.  This conversation may convince you that now is time to take the UNGRADING plunge.  

OLD NEWS: A 2014 meta-analysis by Scott Freeman and colleagues of 225 peer-reviewed studies concluded that students taught in an active learning environment significantly outperform peers taught using more traditional formats.  
CURRENT STATUS:  Most colleges and universities are still a long way from full adoption of these practices.  The reasons are complex.  Resistance comes from institutions and often from faculty, but also from students.  We have trained our students to think that traditional lecturing is THE way to learn, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
In this episode, we discuss an elegant, controlled classroom study by Louis Deslauriers and colleagues that again tests the value of active learning, but importantly then pays attention to the student perspective and provides suggestions about getting students on board the active-learning band-wagon.  This is a beautiful and important study.  Enjoy!

In higher education our introductory classes are more diverse than ever.  That’s great!  Our graduating classes?  Less diverse. That’s bad!  Faculty play a critical role in this loss of diversity and therefore have a responsibility to address the issue.  In this episode, Dr. Viji Sathy and Dr. Kelly Hogan, authors of “Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom” (2022) discuss a wide range of evidence-based practices that can help our most challenged, our most diverse students succeed, improving classroom equity.  Please listen, then take action! 

Higher education is recognizing the importance and value of diversity and inclusivity in our institutions, our classes, our majors, and in the workforce.  Along with this recognition are efforts to increase the success and graduation rates of all students with particular attention to our historically excluded, minoritized, marginalized, and first generation students.  Many approach this work from a perspective of deficits:  students aren’t succeeding because of what they are missing.  An alternative perspective is anti-deficit:  recognizing what students are doing to succeed.  For example: Instead of the deficit perspective: “Why don’t certain groups of students persist?”  One might reframe the question and ask “How do certain groups of students manage to persist and earn degrees despite any number of negative forces that are working against them?“.  Dr. Julie Stanton, Associate Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at University of Georgia in Athens Georgia talks about her Participatory Action Research project that informs us about strategies that black students use to succeed at a primarily white institution. Please listen for an engaging and fascinating discussion of community cultural wealth.

As researchers study the success of students in active classrooms, they expose new questions to ask, they generate new data to analyze.  These data put classrooms implementing active learning practices under the microscope.  In looking closely at the details of implementation, researchers are now uncovering evidence of practices resulting in inequities, in some and perhaps most active learning environments.  In this episode, we talk with Dr. Daniel Reinholz about his classroom observational analytical tool, EQUIP, and discuss how Daniel and his co-authors have used this tool to identify inequities in classrooms, inequities that may underlie differences in student performance.  Fixing these inequities may not be hard, but one has to identify the problem first.  EQUIP may be one tool we all need.