Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog – Page 15

Teaching and All The Feels — Aimée Morrison

This post has been reprinted (with permission) from the Hook & Eye blog.

I have that nervous feeling in my stomach again–those butterflies, or that flip-flopping feeling, a vague nausea and discomfort. It’s final paper time, and while I’m not writing any myself, I assign them. And it makes me incredibly nervous, shepherding my grad students through their projects’ various stages. I want so badly for them to succeed; I worry so much about how tired they look, or frustrated, or, worse, how silent they get.

Teaching. It’s very emotional.

Over the past ten years, as I have wrestled with my teaching persona, teaching practices, teaching goals, one thread runs constant–trying to manage my own emotions. I started out perhaps over-attached to results: if a student did poorly on an exam, say, I would take all that on as a personal failure of mine. There was a lot of crying. It was not helpful. I tried to learn to not take it as a personal affront when students were often absent. I had to learn that sometimes it’s not about me when students look bored and tired every single semester once week 7 rolls around. I was very emotional but about the wrong things and it was gruelling and ineffective.

Then, for a while, I tried too hard to swing the other way. Teaching became more contractual and transactional. I would lay out some rules and try to enframe the teaching situation as mutually beneficial but largely impersonal: trying to protect my own feelings and recover from my over investment in outcomes that were beyond my control, I tried to take my feelings out of the classroom. But even as I tried to pull away from my misguided mother hen tendencies, my students still sometimes cried, or got angry, and I was doing them a new disservice by trying to deny them that reality.

Real learning is transformative–and all transformations are fraught with fear and excitement and loss and gain. The crucible of the new self is necessarily hot; it burns. Teaching, I find, is as emotionally and personally wrenching as learning is, and I need to find new ways to incorporate this reality into my work, even as I create some boundaries for myself and my students.

For me this starts with acknowledging that I care a lot about the material I teach, and I am, actually, really invested in having students learn it. This might be an ethical and respectful methodology for research on the internet, or it might be the history of the www, or it might be the difference between technological determinism and social construction, or it might be the design theory of affordance, or it might be feminist pragmatics, or it might be how to make a daguerrotype. It really matters to me a lot that students understand these things and, crucially, see the value in them.

When I teach, I necessarily make myself incredibly vulnerable to my students, by reaching out to them with ideas and sources and methods and assignments and illustrations, and asking them to hold on. It requires, I find, an incredible outlay of empathy for me to try to find where the students are at already, intellectually and ideologically or whatever, and go to them there to ask them to come with me to where the class is designed to take us. It is rarely the case now that I teach just from what I want to say; I’m always doing this sort of dance where I try to figure out the emotional temperature of the room, poll the interests, prod the knowledge base, and figure out a context-specific approach.

The best way I can find to describe it is this: It feels like being on a first date with 40 people at the same time. Every single time I teach.

To be clear, I’m not in it to be “loved” or even liked. I’m trying to put myself–Aimée Morrison, the situated human being–behind the ideas but of course teaching and learning are human acts so I’m still there. Reaching out, trying to get in 40 heads and hearts at the same time, trying to shift something in someone’s understanding: “even though this was a required course, it was surprisingly useful.”

I begin finally to understand that this is why teaching days are so gruelling. Why if I teach in the morning, I’m not going to be writing in the afternoon. It’s the interpersonal work, the mutual vulnerability, the work of empathy, the work of caring. In my worst moments I want to withdraw–I say things like, “If they won’t do the readings, to hell with them.” But really, I am usually overwhelmed with the sheer importance of the work I’m trying to do, and how much I care and how much I care about having students come to care about what I teach as well. I’m not naturally empathetic and I’m much more inclined to try to structure the world into rule-based interactions we can process cognitively and rationally, so the empathy required of teaching is not something I come to naturally. It’s something over time I’ve come to learn is crucial: learning is transformative, and thus scary and personal. Teaching must be these things too. All the feels.

— Aimée Morrison

Image courtesy of Nic Walker.

Congratulations to Marzieh Riahinezhad, 2015 CUT Award Winner – Svitlana Taraban-Gordon

Every year, CTE recognizes an outstanding graduate student who demonstrates the highest achievement upon the completion of the Certificate in University teaching (CUT) program. This annual award, funded by an anonymous donor, is now in its tenth year. We are delighted to announce that this year’s award goes to Marzieh Riahinezhad, a doctoral student in Chemical Engineering and a recent graduate of the CUT program. Last week, Marzieh shared some of her experiences in the CUT and what she learned from it with the CTE staff.

Can you tell us what motivated you to pursue the Certificate in University Teaching?

Prior to coming to Canada to pursue my doctoral degree at Waterloo, I was teaching science for two years at a high school in Iran. I also worked as a teaching assistant at the university in my home country during my master’s degree. So, teaching was certainly of interest to me and something I was hoping to continue at Waterloo. During one of my early meetings with my supervisor, Prof. Alex Penlidis, he asked me about my future career plans and what I was hoping to do after I complete my Ph.D. I mentioned that I was interested in staying in academia and that teaching was important to me. He encouraged me to participate in the CUT program as a way to develop my teaching skills. In addition to the recommendation from my supervisor, I also had a chance to discuss the CUT program with a fellow grad student in my department who had just completed the CUT and found it very useful. After that, I signed for the Fundamentals of University Teaching program which is a pre-requisite for the CUT. I was able to complete the required workshops and microteaching sessions within one term and started the CUT program in January 2014.

Which aspects of the CUT program did you enjoy the most?

I really enjoyed working on the CUT project which asks the participants to select a topic on teaching in higher education and prepare a paper or a workshop. I had heard about the idea of a flipped classroom and decided to do my CUT project on this topic. I enjoyed reading the educational literature on flipped classroom and learning about different ways to implement it in university courses. Although it’s not required for a CUT project, I decided to also talk to instructors who use the flipped classroom model in their courses to hear about their experiences. I learned a great deal about the topic by speaking to three faculty members, two from Waterloo and another one from George Brown college. Once my presentation was ready, I delivered it as a workshop for grad students who are doing the Fundamentals of University Teaching program. I had never facilitated an interactive session on a teaching topic before, so it was a great experience for me and the feedback from participants was very positive.

Did you have an opportunity to try any ideas or techniques that you learned in the CUT in your own teaching?

I learned quite a few useful teaching techniques through workshops and observational feedback. One technique that I found particularly useful is the idea of a mid-term student feedback which, unlike the end-of-term course evaluations, is collected around the mid-semester mark. I think this is very important, particularly for grad students who are new to teaching. When I taught my first course in Winter 2015, I collected mid-term feedback from the students to get their perspective on how the course was going. Like many other new instructors, I was nervous about teaching my first course and wanted to know what the students thought about my teaching. The student feedback was positive and it helped me with feeling more confident about my teaching approach. In addition to the mid-term student feedback, I also had a chance to experiment with another technique that I leaned through the CUT program. During one of the workshops, I learned about the IF-AT cards which refer to the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique using pre-designed cards. I got the cards and used them for group activities throughout the term where students were asked to discuss questions in groups and select a correct answer from several options. Students really enjoyed it and the discussions of their answers helped them to understand important course concepts. We also reviewed the wrong answers collectively and discussed why the answers were incorrect. Both students and I felt that this teaching method helped their learning in the course.

Congratulations, Marzieh!

CTE Note: The full version of this interview will appear in the Spring 2015 issue of the CTE newsletter, Teaching Matters. More information about the CUT award and the list of past winners are available on the CTE grad student award page.

Mini-Book Review – Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching – Cassidy Gagnon

In the eternal battle for power in the classroom, instructors and students butt heads for who should hold the power when it comes to how a course is handled and taught. And both parties’ have arguments to why each side should have power.

Instructors argue that students would abuse the control of having any say in how a course is handled. Students argue that instructors are out of touch with what students want and that they forget what it feels to be a student again. Instructors have started to listen to students about these problems, but there is still a large amount of instructors using instructor-centered teaching, which is generally taught in a way that is ineffective in teaching students. And as it is, all instructors hold all the power. This, as a student, seems like a horrible thing. But there is a better way.

I decided to read “Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching”, one of the new books in the CTE library. In the book, authors Alison Cook-Sather, Catherine Bavill, and Peter Felten make the argument of allowing instructors to keep holding on to power in the classroom, but giving students a voice (besides written feedback at the end of the term). They make the argument that unless instructors make the actual attempt to listen to their audience, the students will be disengaged from the material taught. The partnership they describe rests on four main pillars: trust and respect, shared power, shared risks, and shared learning. The book also goes through many case studies and exemplars from different schools around the world, and the different methods that these professors use are also outlined as well.

The benefits are extensive as well. For one, you can control the amount of student contribution that students make to change the curriculum, whether you want to redesign how an assignment is given or want to overhaul the entire course. The ways that the students contribute are also extensive, and the ways to leverage students are outlined in the book as well. And finally, there are almost an infinite amount of ideas that students and professors can produce together.

This being said, partnering with students and redesigning something as small as an assignment is difficult. It involves a lot of student participation and the ability of the instructor to use feedback from the student ambassadors and the classroom to modify what needs to change. Sometimes, it can take several classes and a large amount of student data to change the way an entire course is implemented. As a new instructor, this would be incredibly difficult to achieve since you are dealing with the new challenge of teaching. The final barrier is the instructor’s acceptance to change: if instructors are stuck in their own methodology of teaching, then they will have created a huge barrier of what they think the students need versus what the students want. Because of this barrier, students will lose interest with the material after the first lecture.

I encourage not only new and old faculty instructors to read up on partnerships in the classroom, but also students. Speaking as a student, it is important to remember that we have a voice in the classroom. Instructors, it is important to remember that you have the ears to listen to students. And when both parties work together, hand in hand, we can mold the future of learning.

For interested readers, this book is available at the Centre for Teaching Excellence library (EV1 325).

References:
Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., & Felten, P. (2014). Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: A guide for faculty. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

New to Waterloo? Four fun tips – Veronica Brown

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed a great discussion with some colleagues who, like me, are celebrating five years at their teaching centre this year. We were talking about what had helped us as we transitioned into our new roles. For me, an important factor was my institutional knowledge. Having completed my undergraduate degree at Waterloo, taught here, and worked in both an academic department and a support unit, there were lots of things I had learned over the years that you won’t find in orientation materials. I thought it would be fun to share some of the things I have discovered along the way. These are in no particular order!

Need some inspiration? Check out the co-op students of the year. Each year, six students (one per Faculty) are selected based on their contributions to their employer, academic achievement, volunteer experience and other criteria. Their accomplishments, such as presenting their research at international conferences, raising capital for their start-ups, and developing new tools and processes, are impressive (and humbling)! I am a huge fan of co-operative education and look forward to reading about the award winners.
Microsoft Excel is your friend. Most of my career has involved teaching or managing large (e.g., 300 – 1000+) classes. There is tremendous value in being able to efficiently store grade data and analyse it. Even in small classes, tools like PivotTables or some of the basic functions in Excel (or any spreadsheet for that matter), can help you get a clearer sense of your students’ performance. Taking a course at Waterloo through the Skills for the Electronic Workplace program, or getting some help from a colleague, are great options to hone your spreadsheet skills.
You might need to find a different place to get your coffee once exams start. Not all Food Services locations are open during exams and those that are open might have reduced hours. The same is true for the student-run coffee shops. Check the hours of your favourite Food Services location on their Hours and Locations page.
Read the Daily Bulletin. The Daily Bulletin is an electronic bulletin, published each business day. I try to read it every day because it is a neat mix of news, announcements, celebrations, events and miscellaneous information from across campus. Check out the Daily Bulletin Archive to see posts from the past 20 years!

As we head into spring, I thought it would be nice to have one final look at a snowy campus.

History and Learning of the Internaut – Cassidy Gagnon

“LO”.

Those were the first letters sent through the “Internet”, back in October 29, 1969. The first use of the ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute. The word they tried to send was “LOGIN”, but the system crashed when trying to send the “G” (a literal “lo”w). Decades later, the Internet has developed into a monster of complex links to different servers and computers that is one of the greatest accomplishments in human history.

The original purpose of the Internet (which is not, as everyone says, cat pictures) was to communicate information between the different universities to share research and information that could not be easily sent through the phone or the postal system. It was a system that encouraged learning from others’ information, and using that information to create more information, and so on. But after computers started to condense from the size of an entire room into a device that could fit onto your desk, becoming much cheaper, and connections that were starting to be created all around the world, the common people were finally given access to a large amount of information and tools all in a short amount of time. But this information, as wonderful as it was, could not be communicated properly with the masses.

First, some of the information to articles and journals were (and still are) blocked, unless you pay a substantial fee to access that information. As well, this information was made for people in the field they were in, so people from other fields of work could not understand the information that was trying to be relayed since it would be filled with jargon and complicated information.

But it wasn’t until Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, who started the Academy in 2006 on YouTube for the purpose of free tutoring lessons to friends and family in subjects of chemistry and mathematics. As time progressed however, the number of followers has grown to around 2 million and the site has broadened its focus: topics now include history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, cosmology, American civics, art history, economics, music, and computer science, with videos available in 63 different languages.

A lot of other educators who wanted to provide free education to everyone followed suit, and more websites and YouTube channels popped up. For instance, my favourite educational channel on YouTube is CrashCourse, which currently covers subjects in literature, chemistry, world history (my favourite), biology, ecology, big history (as in the history of our universe), psychology and US history. Current sessions are going through the subject of anatomy and physiology, astronomy and US government and politics, while forecasted ones are going to be in intellectual properties and economy. Basically, everything you wanted to learn about a multitude of subjects in a very friendly and open matter that also brings up real world issues in the lessons.

As free and easy-access education is becoming more available, with different teaching styles, languages and subject matter being used, the future of online education is a bright one.

Getting The Most Out of Your Studying – Kelly Stone, CTE Co-op Student

Most people view lecture and lab time as the largest part of learning; however, it’s not what students spend the most time on. For me, studying takes up the majority of my time and I’ve been learning how to optimize it. Throughout my education, I’ve been introduced to different ways of studying, all of which I have tried at least once; you never know what works best for you until you do. Since midterms are currently in full swing, and exams are about one month away, I thought I’d share my opinion on these various types of study methods.

During first year, living in residence meant study buddies were available at all times. Having other people to study with can be quite valuable, especially in courses that are heavy in memorization. By talking through concepts with other people, you become aware of topics you are unsure of. Becoming aware of the materials you haven’t memorized allows you to refocus your efforts for better use of your time. Afterwards, I find meeting with your study buddies again the night before the midterm or exam is extremely beneficial – especially when you introduce food incentives. In first year I took Introductory Zoology, a course that required a lot of memorization regarding phylum names. Two roommates and I created our own study game the day before our final exam. We purchased Smarties and separated them onto a plate based on their colour, which we gave phylum names, producing eight groups with nine per group; therefore you could choose a question from a phylum up to three times. By introducing food incentives, and categorizing those incentives, my roommates and I ensured we reviewed materials from all of the relevant phyla we needed to know.

Despite the benefits of studying with other people, some courses are difficult to collaborate on, such as Chemistry or Mathematics. For courses such as these, working through practice problems is the typical method. But there are other ways to ensure you actually understand the problems, instead of memorizing numbers. Whenever I have to use equations to solve problems presented to me, I break down the process instead of focusing on the numbers. For this I write an equation on my whiteboard that I am expected to know. I then isolate each component and talk out loud about what it is and how to recognize what piece of information from a question would be used. After talking through what is used in an equation, I work through step-by-step how the numbers are used, especially in classes such as Mathematics. By breaking down the process for solving problems, I am better able to answer questions on exams because I understand the steps I need to go through, not just the numbers from practice problems.

In addition, I have tried other study techniques for when I am unable to study with other people. The first way I have tried, and still use to this day, are flash cards and – what I have called – flash tables. The benefit of these mainly comes from making them. For terms, making flashcards ensures I cover all those discussed in lecture, with a definition worded in my own way that makes sense to me. For concepts or groupings, such as phyla, I create “flash tables” where I write a profile for that concept; this includes the name of the concept, a general explanation, how it’s used, how it’s related to other concepts, and any defining characteristics. The process of creating these “flash” papers helps me to determine what I know, what I sort of know, and what I need to focus on.

Along with creating these “flash” study resources, I incorporate mnemonics into my studying. During Introductory Zoology, we were expected to memorize reproductive cycles of various phyla; that meant we had to know the names of the life stages. For example, the jellyfish lifecycle consists of five distinct stages – Planula Larva, Scyphistoma, Strobila, Ephyra, and Mature Medusa. With help from my roommates, we created a mnemonic to remember the stages, based on the first letters: People Love Seeing Stars Even Monday Morning. Needless to say, I still haven’t forgotten the life stages of the jellyfish!

Of course, with every successful discovery, there are always some failures. A high school teacher suggested I record myself saying my lecture notes. Then, with these recordings, suggested I listen to one lecture each night before falling asleep since short-term memory is transferred into long term overnight. Since I was still determining the best study method for myself, I decided to give it a try. I found saying my notes out loud as if I were presenting the material to be quite helpful; however, listening to my recordings later was not as beneficial as I thought it would be. Personally, by the time I reached my bed, I no longer had the concentration to absorb the material. But it was an interesting experience that led me to talking out loud instead of simply reading my notes.

In the end, studying is different for everyone and we all gravitate towards methods that might not work for someone else. I have learned that verbal studying is extremely beneficial and to never be afraid to ask someone else to explain an unclear concept. Collaboration helps you determine the topics you may have missed or perhaps interpreted incorrectly. With all that said, happy studying and good luck on your midterms and exams!

Gender Bias in Student Evaluations of Instructors – Stephanie Chesser

As instructors, our gender doesn’t matter to students when it comes to their evaluations of us…does it? Students care about our knowledge of course content, about the passion that we bring to the process of teaching, about that ‘x-factor’ that teaching greats are able to bring to their classrooms…don’t they? While I have no doubt that students do care about the proven qualities that contribute to great instruction it would seem they also, to a certain extent, evaluate an instructor’s ‘x-factor’ in the context of xx or xy chromosomes. In studies dating back decades, we can see evidence of a gender bias with regard to student evaluations of instructors.

The reported ways that this gender bias might make its way into course evaluations have been numerous in published research studies. They include everything from the expected gender of an instructor in the discipline in which they teach, to the degree to which an instructor’s personality and teaching style fits with traditional gender stereotypes (e.g. students may expect female professors to be ‘friendly’ and ‘competent’ in their teaching role, but may be fine with male instructors simply being ‘competent’) (Kierstead, D’Agostino & Dill, 1988). Even the gender of the student completing an evaluation has been reported to influence the rating that they might give to an instructor (e.g. some older studies have suggested that female students rate female professors more highly than male professors) (Bachen, McLoughlin & Garcia, 1999; Basow, 1995).

Recently, the popular millennial-targeted news site BuzzFeed jumped on this gendered bandwagon though its promotion of a 2015 study examining instructor evaluations on the infamous website ratemyprof.com. BuzzFeed’s article is based on research conducted by Dr. Benjamin Schmidt (Northeastern University) which examined the number of times various adjectives were used to describe male and female professors across 25 academic disciplines among the 14 million or so entries available on ratemyprof.com. Interestingly, Schmidt appears to have unearthed a gender bias with regard to the use of certain adjectives and has created a fascinating interactive chart that allows readers to investigate this suspected bias for themselves. My interactions with the chart unearthed that the term ‘unfair’ can be found to occur more commonly in evaluations of female instructors in 23 of 25 disciplines, while the term ‘brilliant’ appears to occur more commonly in evaluations of male instructors in 24 of 25 evaluations. I found that ‘funny’ was used far more frequently in male instructor evaluations, while the term ‘boring’ produced decidedly mixed results.

So why should we care about gender bias in instructor evaluations? One important reason might be the negative impact such bias has been shown to have on instructors (in particular, female instructors). Sadly, poor teaching evaluations have been found to increase burnout rates among female faculty (Lackritz, 2004) and may interact with other demographic factors such as age or race to further complicate student perceptions of female instructors (Arbuckle & Williams, 2003; Basow, 1998). Given the weight that student evaluations can carry in the assessment of faculty early in their careers, it seems prudent that universities examine the process of evaluating their instructors.

While the complete removal of gender bias from evaluations might be a challenging goal, several strategies have been suggested to mitigate some of its impact (Laube, Masson, Sprague & Ferber, 2007). For starters, universities can exclude any student evaluations that contain sexually or physically explicit comments. Additionally, increased emphasis can be placed on teaching portfolios and peer evaluations to allow for a more comprehensive evaluation of an instructor’s activities. Finally, changes could be made to the questions contained in the teaching evaluations themselves to reduce the room available for gender bias. For instance, global measurements (e.g. _____ was an effective teacher) could be replaced with questions that directly address specific traits related to teaching quality and effectiveness (e.g. ____created a classroom environment that made me feel motivated to learn)

These types of changes, though small, are a step in the right direction towards reducing gender bias in the ways students assess their instructors. Perhaps once we have this started, we can work on the whole red hot ‘chili’ ratings on ratemyprof.com (sigh).

References:

Arbuckle, J., Williams, B. D. (2003). Students’ perceptions of expressiveness: Age and gender effects on teacher evaluations. Sex Roles,49(9-10), 507-516.

Bachen, C. M., McLoughlin, M. M., Garcia, S. S. (1999). Assessing the role of gender in college students’ evaluations of faculty. Communication Education, 48(3), 193-210.

Basow, S. A. (1995). Student evaluations of college professors: When gender matters. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87(4), 656.

Basow, S. A. (1998). Student evaluations: The role of gender bias and teaching styles.

Kierstead, D., D’Agostino, P., Dill, H. (1988). Sex role stereotyping of college professors: Bias in students’ ratings of instructors. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(3), 342.

Lackritz, J. R. (2004). Exploring burnout among university faculty: incidence, performance, and demographic issues. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(7), 713-729.

Laube, H., K. Masson, J. Sprague, and A. L. Ferber. (2007). ‘The impact of gender on the evaluation of teaching: What we know and what we can do. National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 19 (3): 87104. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v019/19.3 laube.html Link, A. N., C.