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. 
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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.

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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.

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How to Avoid Being a Helicopter Professor

June 8th, 2015

By: Berlin Fang

For years there has been talk about shifting a professor’s role from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” But as some teachers leave the center stage, they may not move to the side as guides. Instead, they may find themselves hovering above students as helicopter parents hover over their children. While a complete lack of guidance is not a good idea, excessive guiding could turn constructivist scaffolds into new forms of crutches.
Here are a few suggestions for providing students with the proper balance of challenge and support.
Allow chaos. Students should learn to tolerate some uncertainty and vagueness in the learning process. “Figuring it out” is part of the learning. While you don’t want to be deliberately confusing, you also do not have to oversimplify some necessary complexity in order for students to learn. Some vagueness can encourage creativity. In our university, some of our professors, such as psychology professor Jennifer Shewmaker, have even started to experiment with what we call “free-range assignments.” With this approach, students are not prescribed a detailed set of assignments. Instead, they get to define what kind of assignments they will hand in, as long as the assignments illustrate their mastery of the learning outcomes.
Embrace desirable difficulty. Desirable difficulty is something that cognitive scientists believe is helpful for learning (Brown et al., 2014). Do not step in too quickly to help the moment a student appears to stumble or starts to complain that something is too hard or they “don’t get it.” Reflect first whether the task is indeed prohibitively difficult, in which case you would need to add some prerequisite training. If the task is appropriately difficult, communicate that to students and expect them to persist in seeking answers.
Increase accountability. There are things students have to learn to do. For instance, if technology is used heavily in class, students should learn to perform some tasks, such as clearing the cache of their browsers. If I argue that students should increase their digital literacy of the type of tools they will likely use in the workplace, most professors would agree. However, some professors may direct students to support professionals at the slightest suggestion of a problem. Eventually these students learn to go to others for answers rather than try to solve problems on their own. The bottom line is: help students, but don’t teach helplessness.
Reduce redundancy. Students sometimes treat the course syllabus like those terms of service agreements that are so pervasive on websites and apps. They accept it without actually reading it. Admonitions that “It’s all in the syllabus” do not help. However, just because students choose not to read the class syllabus does not mean you have to repeat an instruction 20 times in a course. You can post certain instructions (how to participate in discussions, for instance) once, quiz them if needed, and be done with it. Do not repeat the instructions every time there is a class discussion.
Remove crutches. Professors should help students learn the process of finishing a product without having to rely on constant feedback and guidance. One of our professors, Suanna Davis, recently shared with me a brilliant approach for gradually empowering students to do independent work. Davis has six major assignments in her class. Each assignment involves, say, four steps. For assignment one, she asks students to submit their work for each of the four steps so that she can provide detailed feedback to make sure they understand the process. For subsequent assignments, she gradually removes requirements for some of the steps. For the last assignment, she asks students to submit only the final paper, which she grades with a rubric. As she reduces and removes process-related requirements, the steps for the assignments are still included in the schedule until the final project, even though they are not required to turn anything in. By doing so, she teaches students the enabling tasks for completing their assignments, while empowering them to work increasingly independently.
Mix pull and push. There is certain information you want to push to students, but it is also reasonable to expect them to pull other information. You do not have to send students the syllabus again and again when they request it, especially if it creates a distraction for students who have already obtained what you want them to have. Instead, include a syllabus or orientation module online and ask students to download or view such instructions themselves when they need it.
I understand that educators walk a tightrope between supporting students and challenging them to be more self-directed learners. Yet it is not impossible to eventually find a good balance. Like building skyscrapers, you start by having scaffolds, but eventually, you want to remove the scaffolds and let students stand on their own.
References:
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., and McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press.
Deresiewicz, P. W. (2014). Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. New York: Free Press.
Berlin Fang is the director of Instructional Design at the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning at Abilene Christian University.

Flexible Faculty Development Opportunities

June 1st, 2015

By: Sabrina Johnson-Taylor, PhD

One of the most persistent challenges for instructional designers is finding a convenient time to schedule faculty development training sessions. If scheduled during the summer, the workshop is subject to poor attendance because faculty are preparing for the fall. If it is scheduled in the fall, teaching responsibilities and committee work can impede professional development attendance. The same holds true for the spring semester.
Below are examples of some of the ways I have gotten around these barriers by providing flexible faculty development opportunities.

1. Offer fully online professional development. Although not completely self-paced, because there are scheduled due dates for assignments, online training offers faculty opportunities to take part in professional development activities during times that are most advantageous for their schedules.
2. Create a professional development road show. This model caters to specific departmental needs. Last year, I suggested that my division, which oversees professional development, do a road show, where we conduct faculty training sessions during departmental meetings. This enables more faculty to receive training, because we come to them and attendance is required at departmental meetings. During these sessions, instructional developers worked with faculty to determine the needs of the department. Then, faculty can decide what specific, individual needs they want addressed. These initial sessions are followed by technology demonstrations or hands-on sessions, giving instructors opportunities to get familiar with various software applications.
3. Use a screen-sharing program. I began having one-on-one sessions in my office with an adjunct instructor, assisting in the development of a fully online course. During the development stage, the instructor moved to South Carolina. This did not pose a problem, as we were able to continue our sessions via Skype. Sometime later, I worked in this manner with another instructor who was on sabbatical. Neither of these instructors had to take time out of their busy lives to come in to work with me. In each instance, instructors were able to have their fully online courses developed in a timely manner to be delivered to students.
4. Take advantage of free time: walk-in appointments. If a student cancels a scheduled office hour at the last minute or other appointments are canceled, use that time for a walk-in appointment at your faculty teaching and learning center. Faculty development specialists can stand ready for these types of appointments by having a training needs datasheet on each faculty member. For example, last year I asked faculty to complete a training needs survey related to the school’s learning management system. While meeting with a professor, I was able to take out the results of the instructor’s survey responses and use our time together to provide training on areas where assistance was indicated. In some cases, an instructor has a different need apart from the surveyed information, which can be met during a walk-in appointment, giving the instructor an opportunity to self-direct the session, which aligns with the principles of andragogy.
5. Have blended offerings. The online portion of a professional development offering provides the flexible schedule that faculty need, while the live portion of the training session provides the immediate assistance needed when working with new technologies. I conducted a professional development seminar on the use of iTunes U and the iPad in the classroom. It was developed so that the bulk of the course was delivered online and the more challenging portion of the course was conducted during a live session. Faculty were invited to attend the live session that served as an introduction to the iBooks Author application.
   Given that faculty are at various skill levels when it comes to technology, having a live session is useful particularly for those who might have some challenges learning a new technology, tool, or application. A live session helps keep some frustrations at bay.
6. A quick Jing video. Screen capture programs, such as Jing, allow one to record actions done on a computer screen. An instructor was unable to view an online tutorial because her browser’s screen needed to be resized. I was able to use Jing, which is free, to create a quick step-by-step tutorial on how to do that, and I sent the instructor the URL to view.
7. House calls. Many years ago, doctors made house calls to their patients. I often joke with faculty about my being a doctor who makes house calls—going to their offices when they need help with their ailing educational technology.
8. Scheduled one-on-one times. Although there are times when and places where group training is the best training approach, one-on-one sessions are great for meeting an individual instructor’s needs.

There are no easy answers to faculty development. However, there are options that consider the needs of these adult learners.
Sabrina Johnson-Taylor is an instructional designer at Regis College.

Let Students Summarize the Previous Lesson

Students often think of class sessions as isolated events—each containing a discrete chunk of content. Those who take notes during class will put the date along the top and then usually leave a space between each session, which visually reinforces their belief that the concepts and material aren’t connected. But in most of our courses, today’s content links to material from the previous session as well as to what’s coming up next. A lot happens in the lives of students between class sessions, though, and if they don’t anticipate a quiz, how many review their notes before arriving in class? And so the teacher starts class with a review.
Having a quick recap is a good idea, but what about having students prepare and present that review? That’s what Professor Annie Blazer does. Each of her class sessions begins with a three- to-five-minute summary of the main ideas discussed in the previous session, and that summary is presented by a student. Each student signs up to do a summary, as this is a course assignment. Blazer leads off with the first one showing students what she expects the review to cover. Their summaries must contain the “three elements of greatest significance” from the previous session (p. 344). To identify these elements, Blazer refers students to discussion questions that appear on the syllabus, course objectives, and their own insights as to the central themes of the current unit. “To receive full credit on this assignment, a student must correctly identify the most relevant information from a class session, summarize and prioritize this information, and deliver it confidently to the class.” (p. 344)
The assignment has a number of benefits. It refreshes students’ memories—reminding them about content and topics from the previous session. It’s a low-stakes way to help students develop presentation skills. They have the opportunity to practice speaking in front of their peers, and they get feedback from the instructor. The quality of a prepared summary is better than if the instructor simply calls on a students and asks what happened last time the class met. Confronted with the pressure of having to do the next session summary motivates serious and detailed note-taking, followed by some review and analysis of those notes in preparation for leading the next review session. There’s a chance those two activities may show students the value of careful note-taking and review, and not just when they’re on deck.
Various iterations of the assignment are possible. If there’s no time for the review or it’s an online course, the student summary could be posted on the course website. It could be formatted as a single document that students could download and use to guide the review of class notes when preparing for an exam. Or perhaps what students prepare isn’t a summary, but a list of three or four ways the material presented in class relates to material in the assigned reading or content covered in the previous unit.
Different grading options could be used. Maybe this is an extra credit assignment, worth more when the summary is of a week’s worth of class sessions or of the whole unit. Maybe preparation and posting of the summary is another way to get credit for “participating” in the course. We have written before in the blog about the value of broadening our definitions for what counts as participation so that students who find it hard to speak up in class can still contribute in ways that support the learning efforts of others.
The activity is a great example of a learning task that students should be doing, rather than having the teacher do it for them. It’s nice (and easy) for them when they get a summary provided by the teacher, but that doesn’t teach them how to create a summary and it doesn’t force an encounter with the content that reveals how much of it they do or don’t understand. Teachers do learning tasks like these for students, motivated by good intentions. Most students, certainly those who weren’t in class, aren’t going to summarize the session as well as the teacher can. The teacher’s summary will be accurate, well organized, and coherent. That’s a lovely gift to give students, but it’s not as valuable or enduring as the gift that teaches students how to do their own summaries.
Reference: Blazer, A. (2014). Student summaries of class sessions. Teaching Theology and Religion, 17 (4), 344.
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Fostering Student Learning through the Use of Debates

There are many ways to get students engaged in a classroom, but when topics are controversial or taboo, students may shy away from sharing their thoughts on the subject. In contrast, some may be so overly passionate about a topic that they proselytize their point. One tactic that helps students feel comfortable enough to speak about controversial topics is through debates that are structured and promote students’ preparedness in defending or opposing a particular stance on a topic.
Debates allow students to see both sides of a situation, topic, or story, and debates also require them to think critically and support what they say with substantive and factual information. Although emotions and biases may come out in a debate, the research-based supporting information helps give context to those emotions and biases and can foster critical thinking, especially if students argue the position opposite to their initial beliefs. The “consider the opposite strategy” may force students to set aside their emotions and biases and evaluate the evidence supporting both sides of a controversial issue (Budesheim & Lundquist, 2000).

Arguing the opposite position can be an effective strategy for challenging students’ initial assumptions.

For a Psychology of Women course, debates were used mainly to help students see past their predispositions, since it has been noted that students enter such courses with their own biases (Chrisler, 2013). Additionally, because classroom debates can foster critical thinking, considering information presented in the debates may help students move past those biases in this course and possibly change their minds about a topic or at least be more educated about the “other side.” In order to incorporate debating effectively, the following was done:

1. Participants were given a list of issues, they voted for their preferred topics, and the most popular issues were selected (e.g., Are single-sex schools and classes effective?).
2. Students were randomly assigned to one position of the selected controversial issue in the field. The in-class debate was coupled with a reflection paper that asked students to consider the strengths and weaknesses of both positions. Then, students were randomly assigned to groups so that some had to argue the position counter to what they originally believed.
3. Each student submitted a paper addressing how his or her group, as well as the opposing group, used theory and research from the course and additional sources in the literature to formulate their debate position. In so doing, students noted the strengths and limitations of their arguments, as well as those of the opposition. Students also discussed how their thinking may have changed or developed over the course of the assignment.

Some students were apprehensive about the debates and were uncomfortable displaying their emotions when debating a topic that they felt very passionate about. The following data was gathered and presented to the students to help them better understand the purpose of the debates:

1. An issue assessment was conducted at three points (i.e., pre-debate, post-debate, and in a post-reflection paper). For their issue, students indicated what side they favored. Students also indicated how confident they were that their opinions were correct on a 1 (Not at All Confident) to 7 (Very Confident) scale.
2. Students completed a post-debate survey modeled on Vo and Morris’s (2006) scale, which included statements such as: The debate makes me see the real-world relevance of this course better, the debate makes this course more interesting and exciting, and the debate teaches me to think more critically.
3. To evaluate the “consider the opposite” strategy, calculations were made of the absolute value of the difference in pre-issue assessment to post-issue assessment. This enabled a captured change, regardless of whether the student initially sided with the affirmative or negative position.

An independent sample t-test was conducted to examine differences in change scores for those assigned to a position that matched their original views or those assigned to a position that ran counter to their original views. Students who were assigned to argue a position inconsistent with their views had higher change scores on the issue assessment than those assigned to argue a position consistent with their views, t (21) = 2.48, p < .05. This suggests that arguing the opposite position can be an effective strategy for challenging students’ initial assumptions.
Students were able to see firsthand how the debates that they prepared for helped them confirm their belief in their positions and/or become educated about the other views. In addition, students believed debates helped them recognize the real-world relevance of the course material, which helped them understand that emotions and biases can cloud one’s perspective about a certain situation, topic, or story. Finally, this information helped the students understand that debating does not equal fighting but instead understanding, an idea that students could easily transfer to other courses.
References:
Budesheim, T. L., & Lundquist, A. R. (2000). Consider the opposite: Opening minds through in-class debates on course-related controversies. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 106-120.
Chrisler, J. C. (2013). Teaching about gender: Rewards and challenges. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 14, 264-267.
Vo, H. X., & Morris, R. L. (2006). Debate as a tool in teaching economics: Rationale, technique, and some evidence. Journal of Education for Business, 8, 315-320.
Laura Trujillo-Jenks is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Texas Woman’s University. Lisa Rosen is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Philosophy at Texas Woman’s University.
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