Category: Teaching Strategies

Addressing Students’ Beliefs about Learning – Crystal Tse

cteblog1picture

What might be some of the things that are going on inside these students’ minds in this photo? One of them might be asking themselves, “Am I smart enough? Do I belong here? Will my professor think I’m competent?”

As instructors we often focus on content: what content to include in our classes, and how to best deliver this content. However, one important factor that is less discussed in teaching is students’ beliefs and mindsets—their identities, insecurities, and beliefs about intelligence—which can enter the classroom with them and affect their learning before learning has even begun. In this post, I want to talk about people’s beliefs about intelligence and their own abilities, which have been studied by social psychologists for the past few decades.

Growth vs. Fixed mindsets

If your student excelled on a test, would you commend them for their effort, or praise them for being smart?

Research by psychologist Carol Dweck shows that people can have fixed or growth mindsets. People who have fixed mindsets tend to believe that intelligence and ability are fixed, and that people cannot change how smart they are. In contrast, people who have growth mindsets believe that intelligence and ability can change, and that anyone can improve their performance through effort.

The empirical evidence on this concept shows the positive effects of holding a growth mindset, especially in learning contexts. In their research, Dweck and colleagues found that elementary-school aged children who were praised for “being smart” after completing reasoning problems tended to have a fixed mindset about intelligence. These children had performance goals—wanting to show others that they are smart—and after failure at a challenging problem were less motivated, persisted less, enjoyed the task less, and performed worse compared to children who were praised for “putting in a lot of effort.” These children instead tended to have a growth mindset about intelligence. They held mastery goals—wanting to become skilled and seeing failure as learning opportunities. The positive effects of having a growth mindset have also been shown to extend to grades and achievement later in life.

Students may come into the classroom with fixed mindsets about their intelligence and abilities, and encouraging students to think of intelligence as plastic and fluid is one way that may help with their motivation and learning.

Stereotype Threat

There is a persistent problem in education in which there are large group differences in academic performance, such as women performing worse on some university math and engineering tests than men, or some groups of minority students performing worse in academics compared with White students—even when they have the same high school grades. Extensive research conducted at universities over the past 20 years, however, show that these differences in test scores are not because some groups have less ability than others.

An important factor is a psychological threat in the classroom environment called stereotype threat: being concerned that one’s own behaviour could be interpreted by other people as confirming a negative stereotype, which can undermine the performance of people from stereotyped groups. Have you ever felt under pressure in a high-stress situation that made you “choke” in your performance in school, or in another area that was important to you, like sports? This is similar to when a person feels stressed while writing a test—it makes it hard for them to concentrate on answering the questions right because they are so anxious. This happens to everyone, but for women in math for example, they have the extra pressure of knowing that they are stereotyped as being inferior in math ability.

Psychologist Claude Steele pioneered this work (which has since been replicated in over 300 experiments) and showed in the classic study that Black students underperformed on a verbal ability test compared with White students, but only when they were placed under high stereotype threat: being reminded of their race (and the negative stereotype that their group does not do well in academics). When this extra pressure from stereotype threat was removed, however, Black students did just as well as White students.

Students may have identities, insecurities about themselves, or negative stereotypes about their group that may lead to this extra pressure when they are completing an exam, interacting with their classmates, or presenting in front of class. This extra pressure and anxiety can hinder their performance.

Practical Strategies

In light of some of the beliefs students may have about their own abilities or about intelligence in general, psychologists and instructors have come up with strategies that can encourage a growth mindset or lessen students’ fears about their abilities. Instructors can:

  • help foster an environment where students feel comfortable making mistakes. For example, instructors can share their learning experiences and failures with their students.
  • acknowledge students’ effort when providing feedback.
  • talk about stress and anxiety with students as something that is normal, temporary, and can be overcome over time.
  • communicate to students that they have high standards for them, and assure them that they can meet these standards.
  • provide opportunities for students to reflect on their development and how far they have come.
  • provide opportunities for students to make connections with each other, such as group work and study groups.
  • give anonymous surveys to students at the beginning of or throughout the term asking about their concerns, and teach to those concerns.

Students’ fears and insecurities about their abilities, and how they conceptualize intelligence and the process of learning can hold them back from learning and performing the best they can. However, instructors can help address these problematic beliefs with an awareness of these issues, and by letting students know they are on their side.

As soon as coffee is in your stomach… Ideas begin to move – Honore de Balzac–By Jason Grove

Coffee-Making_October-8-2014“I believe that I learned more about the machine and how… [it] actually works in more detail from that one activity… than I would ever have done had I just read somewhere about how a coffee maker works in some book.”
Have you ever considered what coffee is and how to brew the perfect cup? We invited over 1200 incoming engineering students to do just that in their first week of classes, in a “pilot” activity launching the Engineering Ideas Clinic. Intended to facilitate learning by exploration, students were first asked as a class to identify the safety hazards associated with using and then dismantling a coffee maker. This proved to be both effective—identifying many hazards that we instructors had missed—as well as “a fun and exciting way… to be introduced to WHMIS”.
Groups of students were then given either an electric drip machine or a Moka pot and asked to brew a “small amount” of coffee (usually interpreted as a full pot). Further instructions were not provided and, since a surprisingly small number of students are coffee drinkers when they arrive on campus, this caused some challenges. Where does the water go in the Moka pot? Which coffee goes in which machine? During brewing, groups were asked to consider the physical processes occurring in the machine and make a list of all the components they expected to find inside. This resulted in a number of points of contention, such as whether a drip machine must include a pump.
If this is coffee bring me tea; and if it is tea, bring coffee.* Perhaps fortuitously, the laboratory venue precluded any tasting of the resulting brews, but the groups moved on to consider what “coffee” is and its desirable characteristics, such as bitterness, acidity and colour. Characterizing coffee can be achieved as a combination of sensory perception—sight, smell and taste—and analytical measurement—we provided thermometers, pH probes and spectrophotometers.
With the coffee brewed and characterized, it was time to discover whether the guesses at the machine’s internal components were correct. While the classes differed in their zeal for disassembly (most of the machines could be re-assembled), some surprises were in store inside, such as the amount of empty space, the absence of a pump, the mystery object in one of the tubes (a one-way valve) and the single heating element serving double-duty as water and hot-plate heater. While the Moka pot was much easier to dismantle, figuring out its operation was usually more challenging. Groups prepared a sketch of the machine they had and used this to explain its operation to a group with the other machine.
Finally, the instructor brought the class back together for a rich discussion, ranging across how the machines work, measurement variability and error, communication with technical drawings, constraints and criteria for design, the concept of design specifications and answering questions such as “what is coffee?” and “how is the filter basket made?”. Led by their own inquiry and exploration, this activity provided students with an opportunity to consider what engineering design is and how it is underpinned by principles of physical science. In keeping with the spirit of the activity, I will leave the last words to the students:
“Learning how a common household object required various engineering concepts to design and construct really opened our eyes to how applicable our engineering education can be.”
“The lab was a great hands-on experience. It was very interesting to see the inner workings of coffee makers and the engineering design behind them. Hopefully we can have more labs like this one”
“The ChE 102 Coffee Lab was one of the best moments of 1A so far. I liked that we students finally got to experience a hands-on introduction to the world of engineering. Taking apart an everyday object and analyzing how different parts help the machine function as a whole was a fun way to apply engineering concepts that we’ve started learning about in class. I hope they do more of these hands-on labs since they’re a nice break from just lectures and theory.”

With thanks to Patricia Duong, Partho Mondal, Gerry Shebib, Inzamam Tahir and Geethan Viswathasan from the Engineering class of 2019 for allowing me to quote their comments on the coffee activity.
*This quote is sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln, though it appears to have been an old joke even in the mid-nineteenth century.

You can’t see me — The Spotlight Effect – Sherry Lin, CTE Co-op Student

spotlightThinking back to before I can remember, my peers and educators have identified me as a shy and quiet individual: slightly inadequate in class participation, but excelling with regard to listening skills. After acknowledging this about myself and given time to reflect, I have since been challenging myself to become more outspoken and pushing to leave my anxiety-neutral condition — to step outside of my comfort zone.

Just last week, I had the wonderful opportunity to sit in on and participate in the CTE Fundamentals of University Teaching workshop “Teaching with Confidence”, facilitated by Angela Nyhout. Participants were able to reflect on aspects they were less confident about in their teaching methods, and discuss why this may be so. One of the most relatable and interesting concepts I took away from this workshop was the social psychological aspect of confidence.

I believe we have all felt it at some point in time: the feeling we’ve coined as ‘butterflies in our stomachs’. The psyche holds much more power than we think, and this reflects in our actions; it could be in the form of an uncharacteristic stutter, quivering of the voice, or an uncontrollable tremor of the hands. These behaviours are a result of what we call “The Spotlight Effect.”

The Spotlight Effect phenomenon refers to the tendency to overestimate the attention you are receiving from the audience you are interacting with. One is left with the constant awareness brought on by a glaring forehead zit, or the paranoia about whether or not there are pieces of spinach stuck in between the teeth. Were your hands too clammy when you shook the ones of your future employer? What about the possibility of a mustard stain on your shirt, when giving an important speech in a sea of attentive eyes? If we take a moment to think about it, each and every one of us can probably recall a situation where self-consciousness took over and the impulse to fold into yourself and self-destruct, or run away, arose.

Speaking to a few participants in the workshop, I realized anxiety and self-consciousness is a trait we all hold – it’s just that some people have it to a greater extent than others. Regardless of whether you are far skewed on the extrovert side of the scale, or a shy and introverted individual, feelings of anxiety and self-consciousness are universal, and do tend to occur now and again. I also learned that, to my dismay, anxiety will likely follow me to postgraduate studies and beyond. Fortunately, through taking this workshop, I have discovered ways to combat this predicament. The key, as I had always known but had trouble acknowledging, is practice and experience. More practice will provide one with more experience. By accumulating more experience, confidence will naturally be boosted through familiarity and routine. Other tips and tricks include eating something small or chewing a piece of gum. This will trick the mind into thinking that if one is eating, there is no imminent danger. Without the threat of danger, it will rid the mind of the “fight or flight” adrenaline response that may kick in.

Narcissistically speaking, we are the centres of our own universes and therefore we are apprehensive of judgment from others. Unfortunately, we are also our own worst critics. In the clashing of these two fates, we tend to beleaguer ourselves regarding our letdowns, and overlook or make light of our achievements. We subconsciously believe that the only way to feel accomplished, that we did a job well, is to please everybody. I think something we often forget is that we spend so much time worrying about ourselves that we do not have time to worry about others. The figurative double-edged sword runs both ways, in that others likely do not find the time to worry about you. Thus, it turns full circle. You can’t see me; so I can be confident, because there is nothing to worry about.

Integrated Testlets- What are they?–Samar Mohamed

IF-AT
Sample IF-AT card

Last month I attended the annual Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) 2014 Conference that was held in Queens University, Kingston. It was an excellent opportunity for me to learn from colleagues across Canada and exchange ideas with them. One of the workshops that attracted my attention was facilitated by Aaron Slepkov and Ralph Shiell from the Dept. of Physics at Trent University. In their workshop, Ralph and Aaron focused on their newly developed testing technique: “Integrated Testlet (IT)”. The presenters started by talking about the benefits of Constructed Response (CR) questions, a common term for questions where students must compose the answer themselves, and how these types of questions enable instructors to gauge their students’ learning. CR questions also allow instructors to give part marks to partially correct answers. The presenters also commented on the trend to switch from CR questions to Multiple Choice (MC) questions in the field of Physics due to increasing class size and the resulting contraints on time and personel resources. However, traditional MC questions don’t allow for part marks or, more importantly from a pedagogical standpoint, enable the instructors (and students) to know where the students went wrong. The integrated testlet method is different in that not only does it allow the students to keep trying each MC question until they get the correct answer, “answer-until-correct question format” enabling the granting of partial marks, but student do not leave the question without knowing the correct answer enabling them to move on to the next integrated question. The method presented changed complex CR physics questions into IT questions. The IT method is based on a traditional testlet, which is a group of MC questions that are based on a common stem (or scenario). In an IT, an answer to a question (task) leads to the next task procedurally, and in this way the students’ knowledge of how various concepts are connected can be assessed. Therefore, items in an integrated testlet are presented in a particular sequence in which the answer for part (a) is used to solve for part (b) and so on. The IT rely on the use of an “answer-until-correct response format”, where the students can keep on making selections on a MC question until the correct response is identified and can be used in subsequent related items. The presenters used the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IF-AT) to allow the students to do several attempts and to get part marks for their response. For more information about IF-AT cards, see Epstein Educational Enterprises website. Moreover, for a sample application of the IF-AT cards at the University of Waterloo see the CTE blog by my colleague Mary Power, The faculty of Science Liaison. In their published paper, the presenters explain the method they have used to transform CR questions to IT questions and analyzed the students’ responses for both question types; it is a very useful and interesting reading that I recommend for instructors thinking about this method.

Providing Authentic Learning Experiences – Katherine Lithgow

ideas start hereThis past May, I had the great pleasure of presenting at Laurier’s Integrated and Engaged Learning Conference with Jill Tomasson Goodwin (Associate Professor -Faculty of Arts teaching in the Digital Arts Communication (DAC) specialization program; Scott O’Neill (Associate Director, Marketing and Communications within the Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment (MUR)department and  Madhulika Saxena (a student in the W2014 DAC 300 course and a recent graduate from uWaterloo’s Arts & Business program).

We wanted to explore how we might bring high quality high impact practices (HQ HIPs) into the classroom.  Our presentation focused on DAC 300’s collaborative project that provided students with an authentic experiential learning opportunity where the students worked in teams to address an on-campus community partner’s real world need.  Our goal was to highlight how a course might embody the characteristics of HQ HIPs and what can be done in terms of course design and course delivery to make a course a high quality high impact practice. Using DAC 300 as an example, throughout the presentation, we provided ‘tips’ which we hope will help others incorporate high quality high impact learning opportunities into their classrooms.  

Experiential education has always been important in education, and it is of particular importance at uWaterloo.   We say it is in our DNA. We’re known for our co-op program; experiential learning is one of our Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations and our strategic plan promises ‘Experiential Education for All’.  We know that when done well, that is, where learning is “as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as abstract,” and emphasizes both judgment and exploration, experiential education helps students better absorb, retain and transfer knowledge (Lombardi, 2007). 

So… what are the characteristics of a high quality high impact practice?

  1. Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels
  2. Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time
  3. Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters
  4. Experiences with diversity
  5. Frequent,timely and constructive feedback
  6. Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning
  7. Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications
  8. Public demonstration of competence

(Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S., 2013)

You can view our presentation here to see how these characteristics came to life in DAC 300.

A lot of things came together to make the DAC 300 course a great learning experience.  A couple that I want to highlight centre around 1) collaboration and 2) the impact on the instructor and students.

Experiential learning opportunities often bring students into meaningful contact with future employers, customers, clients, and colleagues. What struck me about the DAC 300 project was the extent to which Jill collaborated with an on-campus ‘community partner’ (Scott O’Neill and the MUR department) to provide her students with this real-world, relevant learning opportunity. In turn, Jill’s students collaborated together to provide MUR with a solution to address their real-world need. If we want to make more of these high impact practices available to our students, we will likely have to collaborate with campus partners -campus partners from writing centres, student affairs, living learning communities, residence life and librarians are just a few examples of who these campus partners might be. More important, the collaboration has to benefit all parties.

The role of the instructor often changes when you provide authentic learning experiences to your students. Prepare to learn along with your students.  Incorporating authentic learning experiences into your course can be disorienting and uncomfortable for you AND your students.  Your role shifts from ‘instructor’ to ‘coach’.  Students will come up with solutions or approaches that you have never thought of.  That can be a good thing, but it also means relinquishing a certain amount of control, being flexible, and adapting to circumstances- just as we do in the real world.

Jill Tomasson Goodwin has kindly created and shared these 6-Tips-and-10-Tricks-to-Facilitate-Classroom-based-Experiential-Learning. Jill encourages you to adapt them to your needs and invites you to email her (jtomasso@uwaterloo.ca)   to chat with her further about how these choices worked in practice.

DAC 300 is a 12-week reflexive theoretically-informed, practice-based course in User Experience Design (the art of understanding, designing, and creating an ‘end-to-end’ experience of technology for users).  The course design choices are based on a very real-world application of knowledge — facilitated inside, and tested outside, the classroom, for an actual client, with a pressing need.

During the W2014 offering, Professor Jill Tomasson Goodwin and her third-year Digital Arts Communication class consulted with UWaterloo’s MUR department to design an augmented reality version of a tour brochure. To complete the project, teams of undergraduate students drew upon their knowledge of user experience design, interviewed high school students, and then iteratively prototyped a range of augmented reality experiences, all designed to engage and inform students as they visit and explore the campus. The project and technology have been so successful that UW will use augmented reality to enhance other recruitment publications.

Resources

Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are. Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter.  Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Kuh, G. D. (2008). Excerpt from “High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter”. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm

Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S. (2013). Ensuring quality and taking high-impact practices to scale . Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Lombardi, M. M. (2007). Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. Educause learning initiative,1(2007), 1-12. http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/authentic-learning-21st-century-overview

Integrative and Applied Learning Value Rubric (AAC&U) http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/integrativelearning.cfm

Storytelling as a Teaching Tool – Angela Nyhout

Storytelling isn't just for the young. Your undergraduates may appreciate it (almost) as much as this crowd.
Storytelling isn’t just for the young.

Take a moment to think about the number of stories we encounter in an average day; think about the anecdotes told by friends, the prime-time dramas we watch, the mini stories on our Facebook news feeds, the advertisements we see. It’s a wonder we get any work done at all. The human mind loves stories. Even where no “story” exists, we often make one. For example, most people will tell a selective account of the events in their lives that led to their chosen career or educational field.

Given the human propensity to tell stories, and the equally fascinating desire to consume them, I want to discuss why stories belong in the classroom and how they can be an effective teaching tool. Earlier this year, CTE co-op student, Zahra Razavi discussed the role of storytelling in the classroom from the perspective of a student. In this post, I want to talk about storytelling from the perspective of the teacher. My research is on the psychology of narrative, and there are some intriguing findings that have come out of labs around the world on the topic recently that speak to the power of stories to move us (almost literally).

The neuropsychology of story processing

On uWaterloo posters around campus, you may see the Benjamin Franklin quote, “tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” As Mr. Franklin alluded to and as more and more evidence is suggesting, direct lecturing isn’t the most effective way to teach our students. However, many instructors are faced with large class sizes and limitations in time and resources that make methods like demonstrations or debates difficult to implement. Stories, however, are a quick and simple way of involving your students.

Through neuroimaging studies, researchers have found that when we read or hear about a particular action, corresponding motor and perceptual areas of our brain are activated that would also be activated if we were actually carrying out the described activity (here and here). So if we read a passage like the following,

“There was no sign of the bus and the instructor was going to be late for her first day of class. She knew she wouldn’t make a good impression with the second years if she arrived 15 minutes late. She started sprinting for the lecture hall. She breathed in the crisp, autumn air as her feet struck the sidewalk. As she neared the university, her bus passed her by.”

our mind really plays along. Motor areas corresponding to running and olfactory areas perhaps corresponding to that crisp autumn smell will be activated in the brain. This activation isn’t strong enough to actual get our legs running, but is more of a simulation of running.

Other studies, not involving brain imaging, have also shown that our minds do become active participants in events we read about or hear. Adults are faster to respond to a blurry image of an animal when a character sees it through foggy goggles. Children process a story more slowly when the main character is walking compared to driving.  Adults’ pupil diameters adjust in response to imagined luminance or brightness.

For these reasons, stories have been described as a flight simulator for the mind. Although students would undoubtedly get a richer experience by going out into the field and collecting soil samples, for example, hearing a story about another individual collecting soil samples (and potentially encountering an unexpected obstacle) is a sort of “experience lite” for the budding soil scientist.

A quick and relatively simple way to involve your students, then, is to tell them a story related to the content they are learning.

How stories may be used in the university classroom

Many instructors inject the odd story into their teaching, whether intentionally or not. However, most academic writing, presentations, and lectures do not include stories. Anecdotes are often contrasted with evidence; fiction with fact.

As I’ve described above, when we hear or read a story, our minds play along. The consequences of the engagement – much greater engagement than one would see when just presenting facts or data – are deeper processing, and often greater retention. Experimental studies (here and here) have found that undergraduates’ learning from stories can be quite robust – a pro if the story information is correct, but a con if the information is truly fictional.

Here, I present three possible ways in which instructors may intentionally incorporate storytelling into their teaching:

Story as example. The instructor may decide to use a story as a way of introducing or reinforcing concepts. In Teaching Economics with Short Stories, Philip Ruder suggests using stories such as Proulx’s New Yorker piece, What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick? to help reinforce economic concepts of supply and demand, and externalities. In this respect, stories can be used to contextualize abstract concepts. Story types include anecdotes, fictional short stories, current or historical events, and analogies.

Story as evidence. In some cases, the instructor may be able to use events in the world to get students to build hypotheses or refute prevailing or previous theories. This may be by telling students about the story of a scientific discovery (an aha! moment), or by recounting a historical or current event. In psychology courses, instructors often present the news story of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese to get students to generate hypotheses about why, even though so many witnesses were present, no one acted or intervened. Story types include current or historical events, personal experiences, or science stories.

Story as practice/experience. The instructor may wish to use stories to engage general skills, such as problem solving, or more discipline-specific skills.  The website sciencecases.org contains a wealth of case studies from various disciplines that can be used for this purpose. In addition to case studies, story types include role play, videos, or any form of story with reflection/discussion.

A cautionary tale…

A few things to consider in the selection and delivery of stories in the classroom:

  • Be careful with the types of stories you present. If any incorrect information exists in them, students may integrate it into their knowledge-base. Integration of knowledge is often robust.
  • Stories can be more compelling than facts and data. Certain psychological biases often cause us to use anecdotal evidence to refute factual statements (e.g., “Well, all the people with younger siblings that I know have really good social skills!”). Students may approach stories less critically and cynically
  • Selecting the right stories can be difficult/time-consuming. Delivery can also be time-consuming.

Whether telling a story to encourage students to generate hypotheses, or simply to provide a comic aside during an otherwise dry lesson, stories are an effective way to captivate one’s audience and engage them in ideas and practices in the field from the “comfort” of their seat.

Darth Vader: teaching method in disguise? – Josh Neufeld

Every year, I teach 600-900 students a “Fundamentals of Microbiology” course (Biol240). Three years ago, I wore a skull-print tie to class on October 31st. Afterwards, a student expressed disappointment that I had not worn a costume. The following year, I decided to wear a more… *impressive* Halloween costume to my lectures. I rented a replica Darth Vader costume and gave both of my back-to-back lectures fully suited. The reception for these lectures was nothing short of extraordinary. The university promoted the costume (http://www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2012/nov/01th.html), students’ photos went viral (even making the front page of reddit; http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/12eqaz/my_microbiology_professor_did_the_entire_lecture/), and I posed for many pictures with thrilled students after both class sections. Last year, I rented another replica costume: The Dark Knight. Again, student photos of the lecture circulated widely through social media and the costume was profiled in the Daily Bulletin (http://www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2013/oct/31th.html). In a completely unexpected way, these costumes seem to have left their “viral” mark on Biol240.

Josh Neufeld in costume
Josh Neufeld darkens the day on two Hallowe’ens

But why? Many students wear costumes to campus on Halloween. Why is it so worthy of comment when a faculty member dresses up? 

Student appreciation of these Halloween costumes reminds me of other classroom responses that I’ve noticed at seemingly unrelated moments. For example, when I show a picture of my kids and quote them in relation to the course, the room responds warmly and audibly (“awwwwww”). When I told the class how a particular episode of Swiss Family Robinson (involving a creeping white mat spreading over the island and killing its animals) instilled a lifelong phobia of fungus in me, students sat rapt on the edge of their seats. When I recorded a message for students in my basement and as part of a narrated video animation of a class concept, course evaluations tell me that this was very much appreciated. 

It occurs to me that all of these teaching elements are linked. They convey unique messages to the class. These personal moments communicate that “I trust you”, and that trust is strong enough for me to be vulnerable in costume and risk looking silly, enough to show you my kids, enough to share my quirky personal foibles, and enough to let you see what my basement looks like (i.e., not pretty). In addition, I suspect that the simple personal things that we do send another message that is possibly even more important than trust, they communicate that we *like* our students. Our actions reflect that we like them enough to let our guard down in the classroom, just a little more than they would expect. 

In some ways, building rapport with a class is very similar to relationship building. When we trust and like someone, we do extra things for that person, we even act silly at times. And, if all goes well, we end up… learning about microbiology. We enjoy the classroom experience that much more. We want to keep coming back. Could this be the very spoonful of sugar that makes course content go down?

Importantly, this isn’t about parlour tricks for simple entertainment, it is about building trust and relationships as a precondition for effective learning. I am thrilled that students respond positively by cleaving to course content and exploring microbiology with enthusiasm in the classroom. These in-class experiences may also influence future course selections and career choices, steering interests a little closer to micro than they might have done otherwise. It’s a win win. 

Although wearing a costume can help foster trust and mutual appreciation in the classroom, there is an important unanswered question that lingers for me… what to wear for Halloween 2014?!

Josh Neufeld (Twitter: @JoshDNeufeld) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology, studying the microbial ecology of terrestrial, aquatic, and host-associated communities. For several years, Josh has taught a large second year course (600-900 students) as well as a small upper year course (18 students).