| Bloom's Sixth

Image of a word cloud — In addition to asking participants at the Teaching Summit how they created community in their classes, Peter Felten also asked what barriers instructors faced in creating connections with students. Felten shared this word cloud of the responses.

By Doug Ward

Peter Felten’s keynote message about building relationships through teaching found a receptive audience at this year’s Teaching Summit.

Felten, a professor of history and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University, shared the stories of students who had made important connections with instructors and fellow students while at college. He used those stories to talk about the importance of humanity in teaching and about the vital role that community and connection make in students’ lives.

As part of his talk, Felten encouraged attendees to share examples of how they humanize their classes, asking:

What do you do to build relationships with and among students?

Summit attendees submitted about 140 responses. Felten shared some of them, along with a word cloud, but they were on screen only briefly. I thought it would be useful to revisit those responses and share them in a form that others could draw on.

To do that, I started with a spreadsheet from Felten that provided all the responses. I categorized most of them manually but also had ChatGPT create categories and a word cloud. Some responses had two or three examples, so I broke those into discrete parts. After editing and rearranging the categories and responses, I came up with the following list.

Use collaborative work, projects, and activities
Humanize yourself and students
Learn students’ names
Use ice breakers or get-to-know-you activities
Create a comfortable environment and encourage open discussions
Meet students individually
Use active learning
Provide feedback
Engage students outside of class

Many of the responses could fit into more than one category, and some of the categories could certainly be combined. The nine I ended up with seemed like a reasonable way to bring a wide-ranging list of responses into a more comprehensible form, though.

Here’s that same list again, this time with example responses. It’s worth a look, not only to get new ideas for your classes but to reinforce your approaches to building community.

Use collaborative work, projects and activities

Pulling up some students’ burning questions for small group discussions and then full class discussion leading to additional explanation and information in class.
Think-pair-share in large lectures so students have several opportunities to connect with each other in different sized groups.
Group work in consistent teams.
We have a small cohort model that keeps students together in a group over two years and allows us to have close relationships with the students naturally.
Timed “warm-up” conversations in pairs, usually narrative-based, often related to lesson/topic in some way; I always partner with someone, too.
Form three-person groups early in the semester on easy assignments so the focus is on building relationships with each other.
Group projects with milestones.
Team-based learning.
Using CATME to form student groups, which allows students to work in groups during class and facilitates group work and other interactions outside of class.
Put students in small groups, give them a problem, ask them to solve it, and have them report back to the class.
Group work in classrooms and online, in particular.

Humanize yourself and students

Provide them your story to humanize your experience and how it may relate to theirs.
Make myself seem more human, less intimidating. Share about myself outside of my role as professor makes students feel more comfortable to approach me and willingness to build that connection.
I start class by sharing something about myself, especially something where I failed. The intention is to normalize failure and ambiguity. I also have a big Spider-Man poster in my office!
Casually talking to the students about themselves, not only talking about the class or class-related topics.
Being approachable by encouraging them to ask questions.
Find topics of mutual connection – ex. International students and missing food from home.
I tell my story as a first-generation student from rural America on day one. Try to be a human!
Admit my own weaknesses and struggles!
For groups that will be working together throughout the semester, I ask them to identify their values and describe how they will embody those in their work.
Multidimensional identification of the instructor in the academic syllabus.
Have students introduce themselves by sharing something very few people know about them. Each student in small classes, or triads in big classes.
I remind them that the connections they make are the best part of the school.
Sit down with them the first day of class to get to know them instead of standing in front of class.
Acknowledge that they are humans with complex lives and being a student is only part of that life.
In online classes, create weekly Zoom discussion groups that begin with a topic but quickly become personal stories and establish relationships and mutual support.
Just ask how they feel and be honest.
Make time and space in every class to collaborate and share something about themselves to help build relationships.
I often start my classes off telling humorous but somewhat embarrassing moments of mistakes I’ve made in my career and life.

Learn students’ names

Know their names before the class.
Learning all students’ names and faces using pics on roll before the first day and making a game with students to see if I can get them right by end of class.
Use photo rosters to make flashcards and know students’ names in a lecture hall when they show up on first day.

Use ice breaker or get-to-know-you activities

At the beginning of the semester, I group students and have them come up with a team name. Amazingly, this seems to connect them and build camaraderie.
I do a survey on the first day of class to ask students about themselves, what they want to do when they graduate, etc. Then I have a starting point to start chatting before class starts.
Detailed slide on who I am and my path to where I am today, including getting every single question wrong on my first physics exam.
Each student creates an introduction slide with pictures and information about themselves. Then I create a class slide deck and post on Canvas.
Introductions in-person AND in Canvas so students can network outside of class with required peer responses.
Relationship over content: Take the first day of class to focus on building relationships. Then every class period have an activity that focuses on relationship building.
Circulate, contact, names, stories.
Asking a brief get-to-know-you question each week
Online classes: Introductions include “tell me something unique or interesting about you” and my response includes how I connect with / relate to / admire that uniqueness.
I teach prospective educators. The second week of class I have them “teach” a lesson about themselves. They create a PowerPoint slide, share info, and answer questions from their peers.
On the syllabus, include fun pictures of things you do outside the classroom and share some hobbies to help connect with students.
Students introducing other students.
Ask if a hot dog is a sandwich.
Find shared experiences with an exercise—e.g., “What places have you been before coming here?”
Have an email exchange with every student, sharing what our ideal day off is as part of an introductory syllabus quiz.

Meet students individually

Student meetings at beginning of semester.
Office hours, sitting among the students.
Individual student hours meetings twice a semester (it’s a small class).
Offer students extra credits if they come to my office hours during the first two weeks of class.
Encouraging open office hours with multiple students to connect across classes and disciplines.
One-on-ones with students.
Mandatory early conference w professors.
Required instructor conference, group work, embedded academic support.
Coffee hours: informal time for students to meet with me and their peers.
Allow time for group work when the instructor can talk with the small groups of students.

Use active learning

Less lecture and more discussion-based activities.
Less lecturing; being explicit about the values and principles that connect student interests.
Active learning in classrooms to build connections between students and help them master content.
Ask more questions than give answers.
Help students connect the dots between the classroom, social life, professional interests, and their family.

Create a comfortable environment and encourage open discussions

Questions of opinion – not right or wrong.
Pulling up some students’ burning questions for small group discussions and then full class discussion, leading to additional explanation and information in class.
Not just be accepting of different viewpoints, but guide discussions in a way that students are also accepting of each other’s.
Give students opportunity to debate a low-stakes topic: Are hot dogs sandwiches?
Model that asking “dumb” questions is OK and where learning happens.
Group students for low-stakes in-class activities. Give them prompts to help get to know each other.
Encouraging them to communicate with each other in discussion.
Accept challenges (acknowledge student viewpoints rather than instant dismissal).
Role Playing.
Let them talk about their own interests.
Conduct course survey often throughout the semester.
Mindfulness activities.
Students are more likely to ask friends for help. So in class I highlight their knowledge and encourage them to share.
Food!
Each class period starts with discussion about a fun/silly topic and a group dynamics topic.
Good idea from colleague: assign someone the role of asking questions in small groups.

Provide feedback

Providing feedback is showing care and support for students.
Share work, peer feedback.
Peer evaluations to practice course skills.
Personal responses with assignments and group learning efforts.
Provide individualized narrative feedback on assignments.

Engage students outside of class

Invite students for outside-class informal cultural activities and events.
Facilitate opportunities for students to connect outside of class time.
In-person program orientations from a department level.

Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.

By Doug Ward

In a focus group before the pandemic, I heard some heart-wrenching stories from students.

One was from a young, Black woman who felt isolated and lonely. She mostly blamed herself, but the problems went far beyond her. At one point, she said:

Peter Felten explains a family picture he shared at the 2023 Teaching Summit. He uses the picture, which shows his father as a young boy, in his classes as a way to connect with students through family history.

“There’s some small classes that I’m in and like, some of my teachers don’t know my name. I mean, they don’t know my name. And I just, I kind of feel uncomfortable, because it’s like, if there’s some kids gone but I’m in there, I just want them to know I’m here. I don’t know. It’s just the principle that counts me.”

I thought about that young woman as I listed to Peter Felten, the keynote speaker at last week’s Teaching Summit. Felten, a professor of history at Elon University, drew on dozens of interviews he had conducted with students, and connected those to years of research on student success. Again and again, he emphasized the importance of connecting with students and helping students connect with each other. That can be challenging, he said, especially when class sizes are growing. The examples he provided made clear how critical that is, though.

“There’s literally decades and decades of research that says the most important factor in almost any positive student outcome you can think about – learning, retention, graduation rate, well-being, actually things like do they vote after they graduate – the single biggest predictor is the quality of relationships they perceive they have with faculty and peers,” Felten said.

Moving beyond barriers

Felten emphasized that interactions between students and instructors are often brief. It would be impossible for instructors to act as long-term mentors for all their students, but students often need just need reassurance or validation: hearing a greeting from the instructor, having the instructor remember their name, getting meaningful feedback. Quality matters more than quantity, Felten said. The crucial elements are making human connections and helping students feel that they belong.

Creating that interaction isn’t always easy, Felten said. He gave an example of a first-generation student named Oliguria, whose parents had emphasized the importance of independence.

“She said she had so internalized this message from her parents that you have to do college alone, that when she got to college she thought it was cheating to ask questions in class,” Felten said. “That was her word: cheating. It’s cheating to go to the writing center, cheating to go to the tutoring center.”

Instructors need to help students move past those types of beliefs and to see the importance of asking for help, Felten said.

Another challenge is helping students push past impostor syndrome, or doubts about abilities and feelings that someone will say they don’t belong. That is especially prevalent in academia, Felten said. Others around you can seem so poised and so knowledgeable. That can make students feel that they don’t belong in a class, a discipline, or even in college because they have learned to feel that “if you’re struggling, there must be something wrong with you.”

That misconception can make it difficult for students to recover from early stumbles and to appreciate difficulty as an important part of learning.

“I don’t know about your experience,” Felten said. “What I do is hard. But we don’t tell students that, right? They think if it’s hard, there’s something wrong with them.”

Because of that, students hesitate to ask for help and don’t want their instructors to know about their struggles. As one student told Felten, “pride gets in the way of acknowledging that I don’t understand something.”

Small interactions with huge consequences

Getting past that pride can make a huge difference, Felten said. He gave the example of Joshua, a 30-year-old community college student who nearly dropped out because he found calculus especially difficult.

“I suddenly began to have these feelings like, I didn’t belong in this class, that my education, what I was trying to achieve wasn’t possible,” Joshua told Felten. “And my goals were just obscenely further away than I thought they were.”

He spoke to his professor, who told him to go home and read about impostor syndrome. That helped Joshua feel more confident. He sought out a tutor and eventually got an A in the class.

The professor, Felten said, was an adjunct who taught only one semester. Joshua met with him only once, but that meeting had far-reaching effects. Joshua completed his associate’s degree and later graduated from Purdue.

Felten called Joshua’s professor “a mentor of the moment.” That means “paying attention to the person right in front of you and being able to give them the right kind of challenge, the right kind of support, the right kind of guidance that they need right then.”

Felten also talked about another student, José, who wanted to become a nurse. José loved life sciences but bristled at a requirement to take a course outside his major. He signed up for a geology class simply because it fit into his schedule, and he vowed to do as little as possible. Ultimately, Felten said, the class ended up being “one of the most powerful classes he had taken.”

José told Felten: “My professor made something as boring as rocks interesting. The passion she had, her subject, was something that she loved.”

José never got to know the professor personally, but the way she conducted the class – interactively and passionately – was transformative, Felten said.

“The most important thing is that this class became a community,” José told Felten. “She made us interact with each other and with the subject. It just came together because of her passion.”

The importance of good feedback

Felten also talked about Nellie, a student who started college just as the pandemic hit. In a writing course, she liked the instructor’s feedback on assignments so much that she later took another class from the same professor, even though she never talked directly to her.

“She would have this little paragraph in the comments saying, you did this super well in your paper. And that little bit of encouragement, even though I’m not face to face with this teacher at all, made a world of difference to me,” Nellie told Felten. “We’ve never met in person or even had a conversation, but she has made a huge positive difference in my education.”

Instructors can easily overlook the impact of something like feedback on written assignments, but Felten said they can be validating. He cited a study from a large Australian university that found that the biggest predictor of undergraduate well-being was the quality of teaching. The authors of the study said students weren’t expecting their instructors to be counselors or therapists or even long-term mentors.

“They’re asking us to do our job well, which is to teach well, to assess clearly and to teach as if learning is an interactive human thing, to connect with each other and with the material,” Felten said.

The importance of community

I’ll go back to the young woman I interviewed a few years ago, and how isolated she felt in her classes and how alone she felt outside classes.

“I think it’s just really interesting,” she said. “I see a lot of different faces every day, but I still feel so isolated. And I know sometimes that’s like my problem. But I do feel like I should know way more people. And I just, I want to know more people.”

Her story was heart-wrenching. She and another student – a white transfer student – talked about getting “vibes” from classmates that pushed them deeper into isolation and made life at the university challenging. Neither had gained a sense of belonging at the university, even though both desperately sought a sense of connection.

In his talk at the Teaching Summit, Felten said the antidote to that was to create community in our classes.

“The most important place for relationships in college is the classroom,” Felten said. “If they don’t happen there, we can’t guarantee they happen for all students.”

He also added later: “If we know that’s true, why don’t we organize our courses, why don’t we organize our curriculum, why don’t we organize our programs, our universities as if that was a central factor in all of the good things that can happen here?”

Why indeed.

Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Kansas.

By Doug Ward

The future of higher education may very well hinge on our skill as interpreters and communicators.

Too often, though, we never bother to define the terms we use or to help students, parents, and employers understand the purpose and significance of a college education, Ashley Finley told participants at the 2021 KU Teaching Summit last week.

Ashley Finley smiles as she listens at the 2021 Teaching Summit — Ashley Finley

“We develop language as currency,” said Finley, who is vice president for research at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, “and we communicate with each other about a shared meaning without really ever actually defining” what we mean.

Finley is a sociologist who has studied such areas as assessment, high-impact practices, equity in institutional outcomes, and student success. In her presentation at the Teaching Summit, she drew on a recent AAC&U report she wrote titled How College Contributes to Workforce Success, based on a survey of executives and hiring managers at 496 companies. That report contains both good and bad news for colleges and universities.

For instance, 87% of executives and hiring managers said a degree was definitely or probably worth it, but a smaller percentage (67%) said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education. Finley compared those results to a random sample of adults who were asked the same question. Only 60% thought a college degree was worth the time and money.

“We have to get serious about how we’re communicating out what we do,” Finley said. Colleges and universities need to do better at telling their story, she said, not only to employers but to students.

“That explicitness is absolutely for our students,” she said. “They will be our best ambassadors.”

Finley used the term well-rounded as an example of why good communication is important. In academia, we often talk about a need for well-rounded students, but we rarely explain what that means. Students create their own interpretations, though, as Finley showed with a student quote from a focus group:

“I don’t know too many jobs that the job is being well-rounded. You know, it’s not like you’re going to work at Well-Rounded Inc. or something.”

Finley said she appreciated the student’s snark.

“They’ve taken us to task for not defining this thing that we lob in front of them constantly,” Finley said.

She also said the comment was a “good reality check” for educators, in part because of the connection the student made between education and employment.

“They linked it with a job, as if to suggest what you do for me as a person, how I situate myself in a community, and what I learn about a sense of purpose doesn’t have anything to do with the work that I’ll do,” Finley said.

Defining the common good

Another term we often fail to define, Finley said, is common good. She referred to the title of her presentation – Learning for Our Common Good: The Overlapping Skills of Successful Lives and Careers – and said that we all had different definitions of common good and that we rarely shared those definitions with others. She tried to unpack the term.

wide angle picture of Ashley Finley and participants of Teaching Summit in large lecture room — Finley speaks to Summit participants in 130 Budig Hall. About 150 people joined this year’s Summit, a number that was down significantly because of the pandemic.

“When we are talking about a common good, we are talking about a greater purpose,” Finley said. “We are talking about how work influences our life, builds a sense of identity, gives our own sense of purpose in the world.”

The common good, she said, is closely tied to the overlapping skills we want students to acquire while they are in college. She asked members of the audience to offer their thoughts on those skills and on how students should be different by the time they graduate. The responses painted a broad picture of aspirations within the academy:

To critically evaluate what they read and hear
To gain perspectives on people and stories other than their own
To be problem-solvers and “realize that there’s a whole big world out there”
To be more open to diverse people and perspectives
To try new things without fear of mistakes
To feel empowered to make the world a better place

We all might add our own flavor and content to those things, Finley said, but they all sound perfectly reasonable for any discipline. She then asked:

“At the end of the day, can we in fact have a common conversation about what matters, and the standards to which we might hold ourselves for students’ learning and for their success?”

The employer view

Articulating a clearer sense of higher education will require us to move past the “false binaries” we often create, Finley said. Those include things like depth vs. breadth, and academic vs. practical skills. They all matter, she said. Higher education should be committed to knowledge, and “equally committed to the ways in which we equip students to have the skills to use knowledge, to create new knowledge, to have an imagination.”

Employers generally see the value in the many skills students gain in college, Finley said. They also value things like mindset, aptitudes, and character. The most recent AAC&U study showed a disconnect between the skills that colleges and universities emphasize and the views employers have on students’ career preparedness. When she and other researchers at AAC&U looked more closely at data from the employer survey, though, they found a stark difference in the perceptions of executives and hiring managers 40 and younger and those 50 and older. Those under 40 are more optimistic about student preparation. They also value different skills.

For instance, younger employers put considerably more emphasis on the need for critical thinking, leadership skills, empathy, and an ability to work with numbers and statistics. More broadly, they are far more likely than their older colleagues to say that a college education should encourage engagement in communities, foster a sense of social justice, focus on global issues, and emphasize the liberal arts and sciences.

“This felt like a game-changer to us,” Finley said, adding: “Hello, liberal arts. And hello, community-based learning.”

A need for articulation

If the views of younger employers offered optimism about the core values of higher education, another study that Finley brought up muddied the picture. That study showed a growing gap between the number of campuses that say they have learning outcomes and the number of students who are aware of those outcomes. She called that a “reality check of how our own communication is going.”

participants wear masks while sitting in Budig lecture hall — Summit participants were required to wear masks this year, as is everyone in KU buildings.

We have to increase the visibility of our core goals, Finley said. We have to do a better job of communicating, and we have to do a better job of projecting the type of outcomes we care about. This will require a nuanced approach to career preparation, she said, and must help students connect the dots among the courses they take and the experience they gain while in college. By the time students graduate, they should be different, she said.

“It’s not just about what they know and can do; it’s about who they are. And should they be able to persist through failure? Should they be a little more resilient? Should they have a sense of what it means to flourish?”

The answer to all of those is yes, of course, and Finley was optimistic that faculty could work through the many challenges before them.

“Good teachers are good learners,” Finley said. “You have to be humble to learn something new, and I hope that is always a point of connection we have with our students.”

* * * * * *

You will find a recording of Finley’s presentation at the Teaching Summit on the CTE website.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Ann Austin stands on stairs in a lecture hall, raising her hand and looking across the room — Ann Austin calls for a show of hands during her keynote address at the Teaching Summit.

By Doug Ward

We know the story well. We helped write it, after all.

As instructors and students and administrators, we have lived the story of modern higher education. And yet, despite the familiarity of that story – or perhaps because of it – we continue to struggle with its meaning and direction.

Ann Austin, an education professor and administrator at Michigan State, told participants at KU’s annual Teaching Summit last week that that struggle is not only natural; it is also crucial as colleges and universities adapt to a landscape that has changed dramatically over the past 20 years and is poised to change even more dramatically in the next 20.

In her Summit keynote address, Austin moved among the past, present and future as she highlighted the challenges and opportunities that rapid societal changes are posing to colleges and universities. She also challenged faculty members and administrators to think philosophically and creatively about the way they teach, interact and plan.

“What kind of vision do we have in the back of our minds as we go about our day-to-day work?” Austin asked.

“What is our vision for where our learners are going, and what is our vision for the role we play in their lives?”

That vision, after all, guides us in conscious and unconscious ways, and is crucial for the success of the university. We are doing many good things, she said, but we need to be more creative in working with students, curricula and our approach to learning.

‘This noble profession’

Austin maintained an upbeat tone as she made a case that colleges and universities must change to keep pace with society. Universities are exemplars of society, places to share ideas, to advance knowledge and to debate with respect, she said. She evoked the symbolism of KU’s campus on a hill as an indication that it is “involved in something important,” or what she called “this noble profession.”

Ann Austin turns in her seat and speaks with two women behind her — Ann Austin speaks with Lisa Wolf-Wendel and Susan Twombly, professors of education, before the start of the Summit.

Even so, those of us who teach and work and learn and lead at universities must push our institutions to adapt and evolve. We have welcomed an increasingly diverse population of students, Austin said, and we must find better ways to support those students. Right now, she said, there’s a mismatch between social needs and educational practices and outcomes. (There is also a growing political rift over the direction of higher education.) We are doing much good, she said, but we need to do more.

“How do we create environments for the success of all?” Austin asked.

She pointed to large gateway classes as an example of where universities have fallen short. Those courses can guide students toward many types of careers – or prevent them from pursuing those careers. Nationally, half of students in those courses fail, she said, and women and students of color encounter the biggest hurdles. By embracing evidence-based teaching practices and taking a more inclusive approach to teaching and learning, though, we can lower the barriers to success.

“We know that if we change the way we go about our teaching, if we think about what will support this diversity of learners, we can pretty much get rid of that gap,” she said, citing years of research about active and engaged learning.

‘Generosity of thinking’ and other any areas of potential

Gateway courses are just one area where there is a mismatch between social needs and educational practices and outcomes, she said. Another involves soft skills, or what Austin calls “human skills”: things like communicating well; discerning between accurate and inaccurate information; understanding the context of problems and actions; engaging in teamwork and collaboration; and approaching work with integrity and ethical standards.

white man in jeans, left hand in pocket, holds a lavalier microphone as he stands on the stops of Budig lecture hall and speaks — Jeff Hall, professor of communication studies, asks a question during the Summit.

She also singled out something she called “generosity of thinking,” or the ability to work with people different from yourself and to seek out those complementary perspectives on projects at work and in communities.

“We really need to cultivate that even more than perhaps we do,” Austin said.

Austin drew upon her work as co-chair of the Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. That group has highlighted the importance of a vibrant educational system and a well-educated citizenry that can join conversations on the challenges facing society. It has also focused on the needs of a changing workforce.

We know that jobs that are common today won’t exist in the future, Austin said. And in 10 or 20 years, “there will be opportunities for work that we can’t even imagine right now.”

“How do we prepare our students for this kind of world?” she asked.

What can we do?

I’ve written before about Austin, who cofounded the Center for Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning. Her work in organizational change has influenced some of the approaches we take at CTE, and she is a partner on a National Science Foundation grant on creating a more nuanced approach to evaluating teaching. She has worked with many KU faculty members on that project, which is known as Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness at KU. The multi-university project is known as TEval.

Austin provides broad insight and thought-provoking questions to everything she does, and the Summit was no exception. She also offered several concrete steps that participants could take to improve their courses, their departments and the learning environments for their students:

white man with mustouche and open collar shirt sits in audience, holding microphone, as he asks question — Robert Hagen, lecturer in environmental studies, asks a question during the Summit.

Embrace high-impact practices. These include things like service learning, internships, writing-intensive courses, and learning communities. These and other practices “link the knowing with the doing,” Austin said, and create a more equitable learning environment.
“Become more fluent in how learning happens.” Research into learning and higher education continually provides new insights, Austin said, urging participants to consider ways of applying that research in their disciplines. CTE programs and materials can help instructors do that without spending hours combing through journals.
Focus on learning, not seat time. Our courses are organized by credit hours, a system that originated in the 19^th century and focused on the amount of time instructors delivered information to students. That system is outmoded, especially for online courses, but we can still work within it, Austin said, by emphasizing learning and using effective means of assessing learning.
Seek out new ways to reach students. This might involve using technology, taking an innovative approach in face-to-face or online courses or curricula, or using new types of physical classrooms. Austin emphasized the importance of flexibility and creativity in helping students learn. Organize curricula in new ways and look for new pathways that better fit today’s students. She said that included not just degrees but ways for people to move in and out of higher education to refresh skills and share their expertise.
Cultivate new partnerships. Communities inside and outside the university help us draw on new perspectives, learn from one another, and create new learning opportunities for our students and our colleagues. These partnerships can also provide opportunities for developing and promoting leadership skills that universities need if they hope to innovate.

Even as she pushed audience members to take action, she urged them to draw on the many good things already happening at universities.

“I’m not in any way suggesting that we just jettison what we’re doing,” Austin said. “We do so much that is so good.”

Rather, she suggested committing to effective practices and ask “what is this changing world suggesting that we might do differently?”

Doing so helps us move from story – a beacon on a hill in a volatile, changing world – to action.

“That’s the story we are part of,” Austin said. “We need to think not only in a philosophical way – that’s part of the story – but in a real practical way. What do we do in our departments, in our programs and in the university to actually let us make the best contributions to our learners and to society?”

A whiteboard with Welcome to KU, new students written in blue — A whiteboard at the School of Engineering

A cloudy day with lots of sunshine

The Summit took place on the same day that hundreds of students moved in to KU’s residence halls. Chancellor Doug Girod, dressed in khaki slacks and a blue KU polo shirt, said at the beginning of the Summit that he always looked forward to helping with the move-in and talking with students and their families.

The day was cloudy, and the sky threatened rain, but school had yet to start and a shiny eagerness and a positive energy permeated the campus.

“This is one of the few days of the year when everybody smiles,” Girod said.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Robin Wright has a clear vision of the future of education.

Understanding that future requires a look 6,000 years into the past, though. It requires an assessment of the technological wonders that have promised revolution over the years. It requires an understanding of literacy rates, which have reached 90 percent worldwide. It requires a look into the chemistry of the brain, which reacts to emotion and stress but also to action and interaction. It requires a look outward at the students in our classes. And perhaps most important, it requires a look inward at who we are and who we aspire to be.

Robin Wright spoke about the human side of teaching and learning in her keynote address at Thursday’s Teaching Summit.

Wright made it clear that if we can do that, we, too, will have a clear vision of education’s future. (More about that shortly.)

Wright, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Minnesota, was the keynote speaker at KU’s annual Teaching Summit on Thursday. She shared with the summit’s 400 participants some of her research into active learning and student development, along with personal experiences in teaching undergraduate biology courses. Some of those experiences involved her own challenges as a teacher, including times when students simply weren’t understanding what she was teaching.

“This is where I made a big mistake,” Wright said. “If my students weren’t performing well, I just worked harder. That wasn’t a problem for them; they weren’t working harder. I wasn’t putting the burden on them.”

That is, she wasn’t following the key principles of learning. Here’s how she described those:

Every brain is different.
The person who does the work does the learning.
You can only make memories by connecting them to older memories.
People almost always learn better when they work together.
Making memories requires repetition, feedback, elaboration and sleep.

Until students do the hard work that learning requires, it doesn’t matter how many times instructors go over course material or how much effort they put into making classes active and engaging, Wright said. Mastery requires time and effort.

Don’t get the wrong idea from that. What instructors do has an enormous impact. Teaching and learning require concerted efforts by both students and instructors. That effort works best with human interaction, though. That was the message that Wright delivered again and again: that in a technology-fueled world, the human elements of education are more important than ever.

“The most important way we can be human is to teach,” Wright said.

Wright’s keynote address and workshops she led later in the morning tied into the summit’s theme, Teaching the Whole Student. That theme evolved from recent research suggesting that a holistic approach to education helps students succeed. We can’t just teach content. Nor can we throw students into that content and expect them to learn on their own. Rather, instructors and universities must engage students in education and help them gain a sense of belonging; support them in their educational endeavors and help them overcome barriers; and provide mentoring from staff members, faculty members and students’ peers.

Wright takes a question from Candan Tamerler, professor of mechanical engineering.

After the summit, Wright said that her message would not have been well received just a few years ago. Even now, critics berate universities for coddling students and encouraging hypersensitivity rather than pushing them to harden themselves for an unforgiving world. Wright steered clear of the political hyperbole, grounding her arguments in science, history, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Even so, she acknowledged her role as provocateur as she made a case for what education is and what it could be.

Naysayers have tried to displace in-person education for centuries, she said. The first known correspondence course – one for shorthand – was offered in 1728. In 1906, a correspondence degree program in Pennsylvania attracted a million people but had a graduation rate of 2.6 percent, about the same as today’s massive open online courses. Thomas Edison promoted the phonograph as a great educational tool. Broadcasters did the same with radio and then television. MOOC creators promised a revolution – one that fizzled before it barely started.

Despite all these other opportunities and all the new technological tools that have emerged, we still have in-person education. Furthermore, Wright said, 90 percent of the world’s population can read and write. More and more of that population has access to the Internet and its vast universe of information, meaning that people can learn just about anything and anywhere on their own. And yet year after year, students and instructors still gather in classrooms to learn.

Why? she asked, quickly providing her own answer: Because the way we learn hasn’t changed since the days when people gathered around campfires, shared stories, and helped each other understand the world.

“Our brains are still the same as they were 6,000 years ago,” Wright said. “We still learn in the same way, the same basic way. That has not changed at all.”

Teaching to hundreds of brains

Wright explained the importance of brain chemistry and the role that stress, emotion, and sleep play in our ability to learn. She touched on social theory as a means of explaining learning, and the way that such factors as pedagogy, classroom climate, focus, motivation and metacognition influence individual performance. Our growing understanding of those factors continues to improve teaching.

“The challenge, though,” she said, “is how do you teach a whole class about mitosis when you have 400 different brains you have to interact with?”

That is, the same strategy doesn’t work for everyone.

“People look at things in different ways because their brains are different,” Wright said.

That’s where the human aspects of teaching must take over.

“We have to consider the whole person as a living, breathing, complicated, annoying, wonderful human being,” Wright said.

To emphasize that, Wright told of a high school teacher who once told her she was a good writer. Decades later, Wright still remembers that praise fondly, and she urged attendees to make the most of human interaction with their students.

“If you can do one thing to improve the effectiveness of your teaching and your learning, it’s to give people a chance to interact,” Wright said.

Adding a human touch to education also helps shape the future, she said.

“Being able to put your arm around a student and say, ‘You are really, really good at biology. I think you could have a career in it.’ That has enormous, enormous impact,” Wright said.

That doesn’t mean we should shy away from technology. Not at all. We should use it to its full potential to personalize teaching and learning, she said. In the end, though, the future of education lies in its humanity.

“There’s power in you as a living human being interacting with other human beings,” Wright said.

That power has kept education alive for millennia. And if Wright’s vision is correct, it will propel higher education into the future.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

Alma Clayton-Pedersen offers this vision for higher education:

“Imagine what a nation we would be if students really took away everything we wanted them to have,” she said at last week’s Teaching Summit in Lawrence.

Problem is, they don’t. Much of the reason for that, she said, has to do with their background, the quality of the education they received before college, the way they are treated in college, and the connections they feel – or don’t feel – to their peers, their instructors and their campus.

We talk about college readiness as students being ready for college, she said, but “what about our colleges being ready for the students we have?”

Clayton-Pedersen is a senior scholar at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, a former administrator at Vanderbilt University and the chief executive of Emeritus Consulting Group. In her keynote address at the Teaching Summit, she spoke to more than 300 faculty members, staff members and administrators on Aug. 18 about the importance of combining excellence and inclusivity into a single goal.

“There is a disconnect between how we think about diversity and how we think about educational excellence,” Clayton-Pedersen said.

In fact, she said, faculty, staff and administrators too often see students’ diverse backgrounds as something that needs to be overcome rather than something that could serve as a frame for learning. Even students take that mindset, she said, explaining that well-meaning students often volunteer in disadvantaged areas with a mindset of “saving” people from their circumstances rather than recognizing that they are part of a living community.

That same disconnect shows up in universities in such forms as weed-out classes; an unwillingness to adapt teaching to the ways that students learn best; low expectations based on the types of students enrolled; and even preconceptions about students that lead to anger and frustrations among faculty and students.

“We need to be focused on all of our students,” Clayton-Pedersen said, “and we are not doing as well as we’d like – in all categories.”

Most of the enrollment growth in higher education is coming from students that colleges and universities haven’t served well, she said. When universities lose those students, they lose both money and reputation, she said.

Disparities in graduation rates between white students and underrepresented minorities “not only is it a travesty for those students, but it goes to the heart and vitality of your institution,” she said.

“You lose dollars every time one of those students walks out of your door,” Clayton-Pedersen said. “You lose reputation every time one of those students walks out of your door. Remember, they go back to their homes and say, ‘I had a bad experience.’ ”

She followed with a provocative question – “What does that do to you in the long run?” – and a sobering answer:

“If we don’t attend to this now, and do so rapidly, our institutions are at peril.”

Alma Clayton-Pedersen on the steps in Budig Hall, speaking with KU faculty members — Alma Clayton-Pedersen speaks with faculty during her keynote address in Budig Hall

A way forward

Even as she sounded alarm bells, Clayton-Pedersen offered suggestions for how to make the university learning environment more inclusive. Her suggestions drew heavily on research-based strategies and high-impact practices for teaching and learning that increasing numbers of faculty have been embracing. Among them:

Help students make connections. This involves creating meaningful, relevant curricula that allow students to see a clear path toward learning, that allow them to apply the knowledge they acquire, and that allow them to see connections among discrete ideas and concepts.
Encourage interaction. Students need meaningful interactions with instructors who accept their differences, mentor them, help them gain a deeper understanding of the world and the many cultures it offers. They also need instructors who see them more than just marks on a page. “Take a moment before handing that paper back and tell that student that I believe in you and will help you succeed,” Clayton-Pedersen said.
Create safe havens. Students need safe places “where they can go and relish in their identity,” Clayton-Pedersen said. They also need opportunities to move beyond those safe environments and interact with people different from themselves. Providing support systems and places where students feel like they belong, though, “matter as much as what you are teaching in a class because if they feel like they belong, they will listen differently.”
Embrace high-impact practices. These include first-year seminars, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative projects, service learning, internships, and courses that explore world cultures. They emphasize active learning, group work and similar practices that allow students to work hands-on with course material rather than have it recited to them in lectures. That is, the best courses work at application of information rather than the transfer of information.
Make learning relevant. Encourage students to propose solutions to social problems, take on open-ended questions, integrate ideas from disparate courses, and reflect on their own learning. This helps them learn to learn on their own, and to understand that learning is never a static process. It also helps students see the relevance in their coursework.

An emphasis on equity

In her keynote address and in her later sessions with faculty, Clayton-Pedersen stressed the importance of equity. She challenged the faculty to define both equity and equality, saying that we often misunderstand the terms.

Equality, she said, is the outcome of equity. If we give people what they need to succeed, she said, we can move toward equality.

“Everyone is part of diversity,” Clayton-Pedersen said, “but not everyone is treated equitably.”

Providing more opportunities for people to learn will only grow in the future, she said. Already, the number of jobs that requires people to work with information and to solve unstructured problems dwarfs those that require routine tasks and minimal training. If we are going to be a country that employs all our people, we need to make sure that all have at least some college, she said.

“How many times do we need to have to belabor the point that all students need to learn in an economy that is going to require a lot more skills?” she said.

“Money isn’t the issue,” she added. “It’s the expectation that every student can learn and succeed.”

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

By Doug Ward

After a session at the KU Teaching Summit last week, I spoke with a faculty member whose question I wasn’t able to get to during a discussion.

panorama of new classroom in Anschutz Library — A new classroom in Anschutz Library will offer a flexible approach to active learning. It will force faculty members and students to think differently, as there is no front of the room.

The session, Classrooms and the Future of Education, focused on how KU is working to create and renovate classrooms for active learning. Universities around the country are doing the same, putting in movable tables and chairs, and adding nontraditional furniture, whiteboards, monitors, and various digital accoutrements to make collaboration and hands-on learning easier, and learning environments more inviting.

The faculty member at my session said rooms alone would accomplish nothing unless instructors changed their approach to teaching. I agreed with him wholeheartedly. Effective pedagogy must come first, and many faculty members have created active learning environments in classrooms build solely for lecture. The redesigned classrooms are simply a means of providing flexibility in the environment and of allowing students to work together more easily.

Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus at Stanford, made much the same point about technology earlier this month.

Technology, Cuban said, is simply a tool, and its power to effect change is only as great as the person using it. Its ability to enhance thinking, engagement, learning or a host of other things depends largely on how it is used.

He drove that point home by explaining how technology companies have starting using “engagement” as a code word for student achievement. In pushing schools to buy new digital tools, companies rarely promise that technology alone will lead to improved learning. Rather, they say that digital devices and software will improve student engagement, as if engagement alone were a magic elixir.

It’s not.

Engagement matters, Cuban says, but it works alongside elements like classroom structure, student-instructor relationships, varied teaching techniques, and student grit. To those I’d add instructor and student preparedness; informed pedagogy; students’ willingness to learn about and engage with challenging ideas; and meaningful assignments, among other things.

“Anyone who says publicly that student engagement triggered by new hardware and software will produce higher achievement is selling snake oil,” Cuban writes, citing a litany of studies rejecting the idea that more technology leads to improved learning.

We need to help students learn to use technology to search for and analyze information; to solve problems, and to convey ideas. We need to provide more flexibility in the physical spaces of our classrooms to inspire collaboration and creativity.

None of those things matter, though, if instructors ignore the needs of their students, fail to engage them with challenging questions and course material, focus on information delivery rather than learning, and disregard the pedagogical lessons we have learned about a new generation of students.

Learning requires hard work from instructors and their students. Classrooms matter. Technology matters. But neither provides a magical solution.

Another take on classrooms

Edutopia recently published three articles that offer additional perspectives on remaking classrooms. All focus on K-12 education, but they offer valuable perspectives on the types of classrooms our future students will be used to using.

At Albemarle Public Schools in Virginia, students can sit at a table, on a couch or on the floor. They can stand if they prefer or even lie down. Teachers often furnish their classrooms with inexpensive furniture they buy from Goodwill or from college students moving out of town. Parents donate furniture, and some teachers have even used crowdfunding to raise money for furniture. (I’ve never seen those approaches used in higher ed, but I like the idea.)

Heather Wolpert-Gowran, a middle school teacher in California, writes about her switch to a new classroom, saying she moved everything except the tables and chairs. She plans to experiment with various types of seating, and she writes about her journey toward finding the right mix.

Finally, Todd Finley, a regular contributor to Edutopia, writes about concepts and research on classroom design. He also provides links to many examples of redesigned classrooms at elementary schools, middle schools and high schools.

Doug Ward is the associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Tag Archives: KU Teaching Summit

From summit poll, a list of ways to create community in classes

Use collaborative work, projects and activities

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Learn students’ names

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Meet students individually

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Create a comfortable environment and encourage open discussions

Provide feedback

Engage students outside of class

As the academic year begins, think community and connection

Moving beyond barriers

Small interactions with huge consequences

The importance of good feedback

The importance of community

What does higher ed do? Our answer may determine its future.

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Moving higher education from storied past to innovative future

‘This noble profession’

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Use collaborative work, projects and activities

Humanize yourself and students

Learn students’ names

Use ice breaker or get-to-know-you activities

Meet students individually

Use active learning

Create a comfortable environment and encourage open discussions

Provide feedback

Engage students outside of class

Moving beyond barriers

Small interactions with huge consequences

The importance of good feedback

The importance of community

Defining the common good

The employer view

A need for articulation

‘This noble profession’

‘Generosity of thinking’ and other any areas of potential

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A cloudy day with lots of sunshine

Teaching to hundreds of brains

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