First Day of Class Activity: The Interest Inventory

July 20th, 2015

By: Jennifer Garrett and Mary Clement, EdD

The interest inventory is a simple tool to help you acquaint yourself with your students. Unlike the many icebreakers, the interest inventory is a paper-based activity and students do not have to give answers aloud in front of class. The interest inventory, therefore, helps you get to know your students privately and allows you to ask different questions than you would during oral introductions.
When creating your interest inventory, you need to consider what you need to know about your students in order to effectively teach them. The inventory is simply a list of questions about students’ interests and backgrounds, but you decide which questions appear.
The questions should always include students’ names and majors (or whether or not they have decided on a major). It is helpful to ask students their reasons for taking this course at this point in time, and what they would like to learn or get out of the class. These types of questions help you discover what their expectations are. Some fun icebreaker questions are valuable too. “What is the best book you’ve ever read?” “What kind of music is playing on your iPod?”
While the icebreaker questions might seem frivolous, they are helpful in building the classroom community and in establishing a warm, welcoming environment. Another strategy is to answer some of the icebreaker questions yourself. When you share information with students, it makes them more comfortable sharing information with you.

When creating your interest inventory, you need to consider what you need to know about your students in order to effectively teach them.

Keep in mind that although the interest inventory is private, you still want to use discretion with the questions. You don’t want to ask anything very personal or anything embarrassing. In addition, the interest inventory also needs to include questions that will provide information about students’ skills and preparedness. For example, you can have students solve some math problems or write a paragraph about a favorite book. This information will allow instructors to tailor lectures by addressing any general deficiencies or accelerating material if students are adequately prepared.

A Sample Interest Inventory

In creating your student interest inventory, ask questions that will not only help you get to know the student, but that also help you understand each student’s interest and background in the subject.
Get student background — name, major, year in school. Sample questions: How does this class fit into your major? What do you plan to do after graduation?
How do you learn best? What have teachers and professors done in the past that helped you to learn?
How many hours do you study outside of class? Where and how do you study? (by yourself, in groups, etc.)
Background in content. In this section, write content specific questions. This includes math problems to solve, or writing a paragraph about the subject matter. For example: In this field, there are many theorists. Name a theorist you have studied and describe why you are influenced by his/her work.
The fun questions that help us to get acquainted. What is your very favorite meal? Which restaurant is your favorite? List one hobby. If you have a completely free Saturday afternoon, how would you like to spend it? If I gave you $5,000 to spend on a trip, where would you go?

If You Dare

Also consider including “if you dare” questions in the interest inventory. These kinds of questions might require follow-up, so they are called “if you dare” questions because you need to be prepared for all kinds of answers and the work they might entail. However, these questions are intended to give you additional information that will help you maximize instructional efficacy.
For example, consider asking, “What did an instructor do last year that helped you learn?” Be prepared for mentions of instructors who provided exam review questions, three-hour review sessions, and pizza. You can also ask students what a teacher did that didn’t help them learn. The answers to these questions will also help you understand your students’ expectations of you.
Another valuable question is “What else do you want me to know about you?” Many times the answers will require that you take some kind of action. Some students might tell you that they have Attention Deficit Disorder or a different learning disability, that they need to see written notes to understand material, or that they need extra time during exams.
You will have to determine how to respond to the answers they provide, but it often is far more useful to have the information at the start of class so that you can work with each student appropriately. Most schools have different rules and procedures to handle special accommodations for learning disabilities, but the questions allow you to have the necessary conversations with students and to direct them to available resources.
Again, be prepared for answers you have not encountered in the past. For example, a student may request unique conditions for taking exams. Knowing the information early affords the necessary time to respond to student requests prior to any exams.
Note: Be sure to bring enough copies of the interest inventory and even pencils for the first day. While the pencils may seem excessive for college-level teaching, it is important to ensure that everyone participates. You can use it as a teaching tool and tell students that you did extra work for them on the first day of class, but that the first day will be the only time you will provide them with basic tools, such as pencils, paper, or books. Let them know that you expect them to bring their materials from that point forward. Remember to state your expectations clearly; don’t assume that your students know them.

Click here to view this at www.facultyfocus.com

Keep Calm and Teach: Best Practices for Teaching Cohorts

July 1st, 2015

By: Diana Adam-Uyder, EdD

The influx of nontraditional adult students in higher education has resulted in unprecedented institutional competition. Colleges and universities, vying for attention and increased enrollments, seek creative solutions to attract and retain students. Many degrees have been designed or modified to follow the cohort model, creating temporary cultures of students who participate in programs following an accelerated lockstep sequence. Cohorts start and finish programs as collective groups and share instructors and experiences along the way. Productive learning environments and the temporary culture of a group encourage student productivity and enhance the overall academic experience.
That’s the upside. Conversely, cohorts can also evolve into dysfunctional cadres intent on undermining authority and destroying the very learning environment established to support them. Due to its close-knit nature, a cohort has a strong potential to become a learning community whose members acquire, use, and share their collective knowledge (Brown & Duguid, 2000) in both positive and negative ways.

Cohorts can evolve into dysfunctional cadres intent on undermining authority and destroying the very learning environment established to support them.

Due to the cohort model’s reputation of encouraging collective group personalities that may be intimidating, some faculty may prefer to avoid teaching in such settings. The reality, though, is that in order to address enrollment issues and remain current themselves, faculty must adapt to new degree offerings and structures designed creatively to serve these student populations.
Teaching in cohorts is radically different from teaching open enrollment sections of the same course. Faculty may find themselves teaching several “core” courses throughout a program and serving the same group of students multiple times as they participate. Faculty who previously specialized in one particular area of content may find themselves acting as “generalists” and teaching cohort classes covering topics in which they have limited expertise. The idea of having to teach the same group over and over in courses with unfamiliar content may be daunting or even discouraging. Further, faculty who are underprepared to engage repeatedly with the same cohort groups over time find themselves at risk for student disrespect and incivility, negative course evaluations, and subsequent stress associated with feelings of inadequacy.
To encourage a positive experience for all parties, faculty tasked with teaching cohorts should consider adopting new paradigms and teaching behaviors. Here are a few best practices, derived from my own 15 years of cohort leadership experience and collaboration:

• Develop a set of explicit expectations for learners and communicate them consistently within every course and experience comprising the cohort. This common dispositional framework can evolve into a Code of Conduct enabling students to self-monitor their own and peer behavior. “All learners are responsible for the growth of every member of the community; helping one person helps the group to succeed” (Engstrom, Santo and Yost, p. 152, 2008).
• Be present throughout the cohort cycle. Even if you aren’t teaching a particular class that the cohort is taking, be “visible” to students by connecting with the other instructor(s) and knowing what students are doing and studying in their other courses. Connect concepts to the content in your own classes. Create enduring understandings for student participants through those connections.
• Stay organized. Mindfully design lectures and activities with intention and focus on specific learning targets. Students appreciate well-organized and purposeful learning experiences, and they respect the instructors who design and deliver such experiences.
• Cultivate a cohesive and supportive community. Talk to students and get to know who they are outside of the campus setting. Design initial ice-breaker activities and ongoing academic sharing experiences in such a way that they allow students to exhibit their own personalities throughout their time in the cohort.
• Use a variety of relevant and meaningful student-centered learning activities. Facilitate the learning process in the classroom rather than relying only upon lecture. Take interesting and relevant field trips into the community.
• Let students know you care about their experience and want to make it better. Ask for informal feedback intermittently throughout the cohort cycle. Prepare discussion posts that invite responses, questions, discussions, and reflections. Use digital survey tools (e.g., Survey Monkey) to gather more specific summative feedback and actually make changes to your classes or program based on the results.
• Understand and encourage the use of technology in your courses. Embrace blended learning by allowing students to complete certain parts of your course online. Incorporate student response clickers to encourage active participation during lectures.
• Plan a relevant, meaningful, and memorable capstone experience for the cohort, such as a formal and credit-bearing internship, a service-learning activity, or simply an event to celebrate the group’s achievements. It’s important to recognize everyone’s contributions and to have fun while doing so.

As competition for full-time student enrollment increases, more creative degree delivery systems such as cohort models emerge. Creating a supportive and productive environment for cohort students will result in overall student satisfaction and retention. A student’s own perceptions of his/her social and academic integration are perhaps the most predominant influences on whether they stay or leave higher education institutions (Rhodes 2004). Designing and delivering rigorous and relevant programs while providing genuine care and support for participants will ensure successful learning experiences for both faculty and students.
References
Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Engstrom, M. E., Santo, S. A., & Yost, R. M. (2008). Knowledge building in an online cohort. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(2), 151-167.
Rhodes, C. (2004). Academic and Social Integration in Higher Education: a survey of satisfaction and dissatisfaction within a first-year education studies cohort at a new university. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 28(2), May 2004.
Diana Adam-Uyder is a clinical professor and lead faculty for MEd teacher certification programs at Northern Arizona University. 
Click hrere to view this article at www.facultyfocus.com 

Loading IntenseDebate Comments...

Using Google Web Apps to Improve Student Engagement

June 29th, 2015

By: Lloyd Willis, PhD

In general education humanities courses, at least two problems seem universal:

1. How to blend the teaching of content and the teaching of critical thinking skills that are transferrable to other fields
2. How to encourage student participation and engagement

For years, my typical approach to these problems has been to “flip the classroom” and make my students more responsible for their own learning. I have minimized my lecturing and used carefully crafted discussion questions and small group in-class assignments to move my students through critical thinking processes as they unravel the complexities of literary texts.
As is always the case, however, there is never a perfect solution. Some content must be delivered to the class, some students resist buying into a course that doesn’t directly contribute to their career training, and some students resist injecting themselves into classroom discussions whatever form they take.
My most recent strategy to combat these challenges has involved using Google’s Web apps, specifically Google Docs and Google Slides, to facilitate in-class discussions and collaborative projects. There are many Web apps, presentation platforms, and collaboration tools that are more elaborate and flashy, but the Google products are easy to use, with interfaces familiar to anyone who has ever used any word processing or presentation application. They are also free, and are universally available to anyone with virtually any type of smart device.

Students in each group see what the other groups are doing, which usually improves quality across the board.

To create any whole-class collaborative assignment, the instructor merely needs to create the Google document, give it a name, and then send a link to students that will allow anyone who accesses the document through the link to edit it. Full instructions on how to do this are available here.
One of my tried-and-true teaching strategies is to present my class with a series of discussion questions that need to be answered over the course of the class. Traditionally, I have put students in groups and then talked through the topics and questions after the groups have had time to become “experts” on the issues while madly scribbling our conclusions on the board or typing them into a word processing app being projected on a screen. In this way, our discussions have some structure and students have an idea what I came to class considering important—we may add to that list of important topics, but they at least have some starting points. While this approach gives students some agency, everything still inevitably moves through the professor.
Putting my discussion questions into a shared Google document, however, opens up several possibilities. Instead of groups engaging their tasks at their naturally varying speeds and then enduring the lag time while everyone reaches a stopping point so that the whole class can engage in discussion, the class moves more smoothly as everyone simultaneously works on the collaborative document together. Students in each group see what the other groups are doing, which usually improves quality across the board. Students can insert questions and comments into the document that they may not have offered aloud in an en-masse discussion. This method even improves the experience of the small groups; instead of the inevitable situation in which several people huddle around one person who records their conclusions, each member can easily make his or her own contributions—like five students at the front of the room writing on the board instead of one person writing the thoughts of the rest of the group.

Getting started

To anyone who wishes to experiment with these strategies, I would recommend following a few simple guidelines that I have learned through trial and error:

1. Encourage students to sign in to Google with their own accounts (most of my students already have accounts, and it’s free to create one for anyone who may not) and adjust their settings so that they are not completely cloaked behind a name like “anonymous wombat.” This tends to minimize some of the tomfoolery that can ensue when dozens of people simultaneously collaborate on a project—just imagine jokes, ironic comments, and sarcasm running amok beyond any professor’s control!
That said, because some students will willingly participate anonymously but remain silent in the open, I will allow students to hide their identities if it makes them more comfortable, but by pairing this latitude with strong encouragement for the use of real names, I usually achieve a critical mass of openness that creates a more serious collaborative environment.

2. Because the online collaborative space feels so amorphous, it helps to provide clear and specific instructions for any online collaborative assignment. In a recent American literature class, for example, I asked my students to collaborate on a Google Slides presentation that provided historical context for modernist literature. The students were split into groups and asked to provide at least three slides on a topic I provided: technological developments of the period, political developments of the period, social developments, and so on. Each group was required to embed three media objects, from images to sound or video recordings.

In my teaching, I have simply incorporated Google Web apps into teaching strategies that I have already used—group projects, class discussions, and content presentations. Because of the flexibility and universality of these online tools, it is highly likely that they could be adapted to improve student engagement in classrooms and subjects that are significantly different from my own.
Lloyd Willis is an associate professor of English at Lander University.and get articles like this one delivered right to your inbox.

Click here to view this at www.facultyfocus.com

The Power of Language to Influence Thought and Action

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Language influences thought and action. The words we use to describe things—to ourselves and others—affects how we and they think and act. It’s good to remind ourselves that this powerful influence happens in all kinds of situations and most certainly with language related to teaching and learning.

Here are some big ones that come to mind.

Teachers talk about having papers “to correct.” They head into the grading process looking for errors, which they usually find, but is it valid to assume that every paper will contain errors? More significant is the assumption that it’s the teacher’s job to correct them. Students are the ones who made those errors. They stand to learn more from their mistakes if they’re the ones who do the correcting, using teacher feedback to help them identify and fix the mistakes.

Grades play a powerful role in the education experience of students, and teachers are a central part of that process. We try to correct students when they assert that we “give” them grades; no, they “earn” the grades, which they do, but we decide what they’ve earned. “I didn’t give you that grade, you earned it” recognizes the student’s contribution but implies nothing more than a recording role for us.

Often students feel (sometimes with justification) that teachers purposely make things more difficult than they should be. After passing back a quiz on which my students had done poorly, one quipped, “I’ll bet you’ll be celebrating after class.” I didn’t get it, so I asked for clarification. The response? “You really got us on that quiz.” I heard about a tactic in a session at The Teaching Professor Conference that turns that thinking on its head. Imagine a student getting this message on the first day of class: “I start out assuming every person in this class has an A. My job is to support your efforts to keep it.”

Edited by respected scholar Maryellen Weimer, The Teaching Professor delivers the best strategies supported by the latest research for effective teaching in the college classroom. If you enjoy reading The Teaching Professor Blog here on Faculty Focus, the newsletter has even more of what you’re looking for.

I have blogged, written elsewhere, and spoken regularly about the strong, authoritarian, directive language used to describe policies in our syllabus, wondering how that language affects the motivation to learn and whether it reflects a belief that the only effective way teachers can take charge is with commands. The language is more collaborative when the directive “you,” such as in “you will do the assigned reading and come to class prepared,” becomes “we.” In this case the change in voice is accurate. Students and teachers should do the reading and arrive in class prepared.

However, language that inaccurately characterizes the teacher-student relationship does not convey the authenticity needed to establish genuine relationships with students. “We” are not going to be taking the exams, writing the papers, or working in groups. Those are student activities. And “we” are not going to be a community of learners just because the teacher says we are. More accurately, the teacher can invite, but not force, students to share in the learning adventures of the course.

And then there’s the common plan that students have to “go over” their notes when they study for their exams. Most of them are better advised to “get into” those notes, as in really engage with them. Then we wish them “good luck” on their exams and projects. Are we suggesting that luck plays a role in successful academic work?

Sometimes when trying to get students to remember content from a previous part of the course, I’ve heard teachers say, “Remember? We talked about this just before the last exam.” This implies that course content is organized around exam events, which adds to the importance of those assessments and doesn’t connect content chunks in ways that showcase how they’re related.

And then there’s all the content we have to “cover.” When there’s a lot to cover, we’re usually on a mission to move through it quickly. We cover a lot of ground in most of our courses with students strung out behind us, many struggling to keep up and most missing what makes the places we’re passing through interesting and memorable. But we’ve done our job—covered the content. Does this kind of coverage conceal or reveal what we want students to understand?

Language influences thought and action. Examples abound. Please share those that come to mind so that we can use them to explore how they influence what we think and how we act.

Click here to view this at www.facultyfocus.com

---