Center for Teaching and Learning
Fostering open exchange about teaching and learning among faculty and staff at Hampshire College
This column from Chronicle Vitae includes some great classroom activities that help you find out what students already know and what they understand from the reading. These activities also help students make connections across readings and to be prepared for class discussions.
As the end of semester is rapidly approaching there are some things you can do to help it go smoothly. You can consider the ideas listed below. Add your own practices in comments section.
Most of us have explicit expectations for students that they participate in class discussion and we include statements about their participation in their evaluations. We know that despite our clarity and our imploring, some students participate in discussion and others are reticent. Many students receive the same feedback course after course and semester after semester, suggesting that they participate more actively. It seems clear that hoping they participate does not translate into participation. Is there anything we could be doing differently to increase the number of students who participate, the depth of their engagement, or the quality of their contributions?
Likely, a student’s degree of participation is rooted in a number of issues. Students often see a professor as the expert whose job it is to impart information; they might not realize that learning requires their participation or that participation is part of their commitment to the whole class. Alternatively, a student’s lack of participation might be related to low motivation, to shyness, to worry about how they will be interpreted by peers, or to incomplete preparation for class (which in itself is affected by many issues – time management, reading ability, etc.). We won’t know which of these is at issue for any one student without conversation.
Short of meeting with each student individually, as faculty we can consider ways to change the structure of our assignments and classroom practices in order to increase student understanding of the role of participation in their learning, to increase their motivation to participate, and to improve the quality of their contributions. Here are some ideas about how to do this:
Engaged students are agents in their own education. The responsibility for engagement is not just on the students; we can prepare daily activities to support engagement by providing a number ways students can engage and upping the ante.
Further Reading:
Kelly A. Rocca (2010). Student Participation in the College Classroom: An Extended Multidisciplinary Literature Review. Communication Education. 59(2) 185-213.
Dallimore, Hertenstein, and Platt (2004). Classroom participation and discussion effectiveness: student-generated strategies. Communication Education, 53(1) 103-115
When someone asks you a question or you have a new problem to solve, the knowledge that you bring forward into your working memory to formulate an answer or explanation is the knowledge that you have already integrated into your understanding of the subject. The greater your expertise in that domain, the more requisite knowledge you have on the ready to consider the novel question. (This, in part, explains why someone with greater expertise is more likely to consider multiple sides of an issue and come to a reasoned response than a novice).
We increase the likelihood that our students will be able to recall and use what we teach by helping them engage their prior knowledge and connect new information to their prior understanding.
Our students come to us each with their own prior knowledge, conceptual understanding, skills and beliefs. When we present them with problems or new information, their prior knowledge and experiences influence their thinking. Each student might understand what we say in slightly different ways – attending to different aspects of the question, interpreting and responding differently to the learning environment, etc. – all of which significantly affects their abilities to solve the problems we present, to reason, and to acquire new knowledge.
New learning is constructed on prior knowledge. The more we understand about what students already think, and the more we help them engage their prior understandings, the more likely they are to learn well – and the less likely they are to misinterpret the material in our courses.
Since prior knowledge varies by student, we can be misled about what they understand when we rely on class discussion to hear their ideas. Usually, only a small proportion of the class will venture a comment in whole class discussions. Engaging all students requires different techniques. We present a few below along with some resources for student-active pedagogies.
Further Reading:
From Speculation to Science in National Research Council. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853.
Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Often, we assume that students are shopping for classes on the first day of the semester. We don’t want to do too much since other students will arrive the next session and some of the students sitting before us will not return. Yet the first day is an important opportunity to set the tone for the type of communication and thinking you expect throughout the semester and to provide an overarching vision of the course – precisely what students might need to know in in selecting your course.
Share the course objectives – what you hope students understand or learn to do by the end of the course. Give students a “road map” of the course – where you will be taking them (and why they should come along). Share key information about the course and your expectations, but don’t go over the syllabus word for word – that can be deadly (especially for students who are having a number of first classes).
Consider what is most important to you and work that into your first session. Here are some possibilities – select what makes sense for you and your course:
And also, whether or not you are trying something new, expect some awkwardness. After all, it is the first day for everyone.
Further Reading: See the chapter “How Do They Treat Their Students” in Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard Press, 2004), available in our library.
Thank you Beth Mattison for posting this podcast and article on varied activity structures to increase student engagement and participation. From the Cult of Pedagogy.
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October 29th at 4:30 P.M. West Lecture Hall
Come hear how faculty across the Five Colleges are using blended learning in their teaching practices.
Presenters include our own Alicia Ellis!
For more information, visit fivecolleges.edu/blended
The Hampshire Learning Project (HLP) is an internally funded research project designed to determine the ways that the Hampshire experience contributes to students’ initiative, creativity, appetite for ongoing learning, and desire to contribute to society.
The Hampshire Learning Project has created a short video series to present some of our recent research findings to faculty, staff, and other members of the campus community. The series includes a two-minute overview video and four in-depth videos on important themes that have emerged: 1) advising, 2) critical reflection, 3) intellectual community, and 4) outside-of-classroom experiences.
If you have practices that support students along these dimensions (e.g. creating intellectual communities through cohort advising; reflecting on learning each semester, etc.), consider making a short video on your practice to share. Contact the CTL at ctl@hampshire.edu to schedule your video production.
Back to eval writing? Check out our resource page on writing student evaluations (under “teaching resources”). There are resources that might be helpful. In particular, check out the work done by some of your colleagues developing guidelines for writing Division II evaluations. It grows out of an evaluation analysis workshop in which they learned that many evaluations were descriptive and lacked evaluative comments that help students know what they are doing well and what they need to work on next.
In Megan Dobro’s Virology class, students chose a “pet virus” that they will study in depth for the semester. The first assignment was to create a physical model of their virus. She has no artistic requirements; it just needs to be accurate. Megan gave ideas such as using clay, paper mache, found objects, or origami using online guides. Students presented their models to the class and showed how they represented the virus’s symmetry, structural components, and maybe dynamic processes. More important than the product, the process of creating a seemingly silly model got students to think more deeply. Looking only at two-dimensional pictures of viruses, students may not have realized that the viral shell has a complex, beautiful symmetry. Or that there are specific ways each viral component fits together, and that tells you something about which pieces rely on each other. Or that viruses are relatively simple particles and it’s amazing they wreak so much havoc on the world. Students might spend 15 seconds looking at a picture, but in the process of making a virus, they take time with their virus, studying all of the shapes and possible ways it can be built and taken apart. They start to ask questions that introduce advanced concepts. See the results of this year’s class models.