Cornell Engineering Tutors: Exemplifying the Benefits of One-on-One Support


Dhruv Sreenivas

 

“I enjoyed helping other people out, and tutoring also helped me get a stronger hand on the material, which actually helped me in courses I took later on in college.”

We are sending off seven ‘21 graduating Engineers with our utmost gratitude for their exceptional support mentoring students in the Engineering Learning Initiatives (ELI) tutors-on-call program.  Thank you Acacia Tam, Dhruv Sreenivas, Lynn Jeannoute, Michael Richardson, Sijia Liu, Stephie Lux, and Veronica Nobrega for your talent and compassion and a combined 32 semesters tutoring and 852 tutor appointments!  These ELI tutors supported engineering students in 14 challenging core engineering courses.  They participated in 3 tutor trainings and small group check-ins each semester to prepare for and grow in their role as one-on-one peer educators.

Tutor Training

Sijia Liu will move on to work in New York City as a software engineer!

Trainings focused on active learning strategies for tutors to use in their meetings with tutees.  Tutor community building is important, so when shared dinner during tutor trainings was no longer possible due to transition to online- tutors made connections in a smaller group training format and formed bonds in break-out rooms using the online zoom platform. Throughout this transitional time, ELI tutors relied on one another for support and shared best practices.  Even with success mastering online tutoring, it will be exciting to be back to in-person tutor appointments in the fall.

“I like meeting people and sharing my studying strategies with those eager to learn and improve. I really enjoyed the time being an ELI tutor.”

Benefits for tutees and tutors:

Acacia Tam will pursue a Master in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.

A key component of all of our peer education programs is the focus on evidence-based practices. Peer education is no longer something that happens on the margins of higher education where ‘at-risk’ students enroll in or are assigned tutorial support.  These days peer education is an opportunity for all learners who anticipate or discover the need for a little more clarity on a particular topic, or a longer-term investment of time to deepen understanding of challenging conceptual or technical knowledge (Latino and Unite, 2012). These opportunities happen with groups of learners, typically associated with a certain course, or as one-on-one interactions through tutoring.

“I loved tutoring for ELI! It was always so rewarding to see that I had helped a student better understand a concept or prepare for an exam. Additionally, it made me happy to see that I could pass on some of the tips and tricks I had learned while taking the class to other students. Finally, I loved meeting new people whether in person or online! It made me feel more connected to the Cornell community!”

Tutoring requires all the components of other student academic support including collaboration, retrieval (pulling information out of students rather than putting it in) and open-ended questions to generate reflection, metacognition and critical thought.  There are some unique opportunities in this valuable type of support.

The Role of ‘Coach’

The very personal nature of a tutor session creates a great opportunity for tutors to mentor and coach students regarding practices that generally improve student outcomes. Research has shown that helping with study behaviors was a significant factor improving student outcomes (Gurung and McCann, 2011).

Lynn Jeannoute

“The classes I tutored were geared towards mostly freshman year students and I know how hard it can be transitioning from high school to college, so I especially valued not only being able to assist in their coursework but being able to give them general advice on how to study for exams and stay on top of their work and things like that.”

As coaches, our undergraduate tutors: keep a growth mindset, listen to student challenges, and suggest various ways to overcome them. They ask the right questions, inquire about preparation for evaluations, suggest study practices, encourage, and give specific feedback. Research on the role of peer coaching in higher education suggests that some effective strategies are: being nonjudgmental, listening, shared accountability for the interaction, and asking questions (Ericksen et al 2020).

Stephie Lux is headed to the National Institutes of Health, where she accepted a Cancer Research Training Award to study tumors with a surgical oncologist.

“I can very effectively help others break down an academic problem, and I have also found new ways to be creative when communicating and teaching. Beyond developing my teaching skills, I made several lasting friendships with students I tutored and with  other tutors. ELI Peer Tutoring was a very important part of my Cornell Engineering experience.”

As peers, tutors help build community one student at a time by developing acquaintances and friendships, finding common ground, sharing empathy, working together on a level playing field, and sharing academic and social challenges.

The quotes shared by these tutors exemplify the practices that make tutoring a very powerful form of academic support.  Mentoring students who are just learning to navigate busy schedules and challenging assignments, building community, and breaking down complex ideas using active, collaborative learning, are practices that benefit both the tutor and tutee.  We are so grateful for the hard work of these graduates.  In the past year tutors had to become comfortable working with their peers remotely due to COVID-19.  We are so proud and grateful for the difference ELI tutors made for students finding their way during this very unusual and difficult past year!

Sources used and further reading:

Eriksen, M., Collins, S. Finocchio B., and Oakley J. 2020. Developing Students’ Coaching Ability Through Peer Coaching. Journal of Management Education, 44: 9–38
Gurung R.A.R. and McCann, L.I. 2011. How Should Students Study? Tips, Advice, and Pitfalls
(https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-should-students-study-tips-advice-and-pitfalls)
Latino, J. A. and Unite C.M. 2012. Providing Academic Support Through Peer Education.
New Directions for Higher Education, 157:31-43. DOI:10.1002/he.20004

 

WISDOM FROM UNDERGRAD PEER EDUCATORS: Hard-won tips for online teaching

One and a half semesters of mostly online teaching down, and at least one more to go in this COVID-altered academic world. As a growing part of the team supporting student learning outcomes, undergraduate peer educators have worked very hard, received training, and honed their skills as facilitators of engaged, compassionate, and student-centered online learning.  EVERYONE has had to shimmy up the learning curve to make this last 9 months ‘work’.

At Cornell Engineering, our Academic Excellence Workshop (AEW) facilitators began their transition mid-spring semester when they were asked if they wanted to stay on as undergraduate educators and do their work in the online environment.  All 44 of them agreed that they wanted to stay on and help in the most difficult time one might imagine as a college student.  By the end of the spring semester 2020, these dedicated young educators had learned so much, faced challenges, and had made a difference for their peers!  By the end of Fall 2020, some with 2 semesters online facilitating and training under their belts and some with just one, they used the tools of this new trade – breakout rooms, whiteboards, annotations – to share their hard-won trusted tips.  This post will share their sage advice, simply copied from the whiteboard, collated and briefly annotated.

The most common bit of advice was about being comfortable saying “I DON’T KNOW”: 

The first rule of collaborative learning facilitation  – the teacher is not required to hold the answers to everything. As peer educators, knowing this allows the time to reach out to other teaching staff on matters of specific process or content. Even more importantly, and this takes some degree of confidence, not knowing the specific answer frees up space to develop ideas together, to involve the group, brainstorm processes and different possibilities with your students. And yes, ultimately we want to provide the right set of details, so a follow up with the group or class after consultation is always the way to end. In the online environment, an online discussion board is a great way to get that closure and feedback when the answers come after the synchronous session is over.

A close  second category of advice was related to CREATING a WELCOMING, OPEN and FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT:

Peer educators, who have been on the other side of the screen more recently than some of the more experienced teaching staff, know exactly how crucial these bits of advice are! This is even more true in the online environment, where it is easier to be anonymous, harder to feel connected, and where students can be easily distracted away from what you are facilitating.

Learning student names, doing activities to get to know them and help them get to know each other, goes a long way to creating a space where they want to be, feel noticed, and hopefully begin to trust each other enough to be part of the discussions you want to facilitate! While it carries its own different set of challenges, one of the most powerful things about being a peer educator is that you are one of ‘them’. As such, you are approachable and, should be, compassionate.

A little note of self-care here:

Even though your energy goes a long way to creating a climate, ‘checking in’ includes you.  This whole time period is extremely energy demanding, and so while you try and bring your best game as a peer educator, give yourself an out when YOU need it.  Ask for help and think of ways to take the pressure off yourself as well.

The third most offered advice was about how to “WORK THE ROOM” in a zoom session:

In the online environment you can’t just look across the room and see who needs your help, or interject a helpful question or hint.  Being present and moving from breakout room to breakout room as students are working in groups, lets you intervene and redirect, or even invite others into the conversation. It goes without saying perhaps that these spaces have to be clearly structured before you move your students into them so they don’t spend time spinning their wheels!

Reminding about expectations for teamwork, taking turns to contribute, and the idea of ‘take time, make time’ just before sending your students off to breakouts is helpful. The online environment can create some useful anonymity for shy people (working through the chat and asynchronous discussions) but breakout rooms can be stressful for shy people and frustrating for all, if they are not structured.

A fourth bit of advice: Don’t assume your students are all on the same page and following everything you are facilitating.  GET FEEDBACK:

Just as improving learning outcomes requires giving students regular and honest feedback, so becoming a better peer educator (or any educator) requires getting feedback about how it is going for students.  Feedback can be general – about the perceived success of activities you try- and it can be more specific – about whether they understand what you are trying to get across to them. Feedback can be solicited in the middle of a class, at the end, or in the interim between when you see each other using online discussion boards.

Active learning strategies like ‘think-pair-share’ (using chat in a small class online) as well as polling or clicker questions, can be used at any moment to get students sharing and asking and answering each other’s questions. Asking students, in teams (breakouts), to apply a bit of lecture material to a problem or question helps the group move closer to the same level of understanding. They can also share group feedback afterwards.

Asking students, in teams (breakouts), to apply a bit of lecture material to a problem or question helps the group move closer to the same level of understanding. They can also share group feedback afterwards.

The 5th and last piece of advice from our experienced online peer educators (there is more…..) is FACILITATE COMMUNICATION and THINKING, DON’T JUST GIVE THE ANSWERS:

This is one that is at the crux of collaborative, student-centered learning. Being comfortable with silence is hard in the classroom, but at least you can watch to see if the wheels are spinning. Reading body language and facial expression is so challenging online, and if cameras are off, so are all bets.

But it is even more critical to be comfortable with silence with the lag time time that occurs on zoom, and with the difficulty of knowing whether students are thinking and preparing to answer. Give time for answers to come into the chat.  Give time for students to figure out the technology for how to annotate the whiteboard or your presentation when you ask.  In breakouts, really encourage cameras on (knowing there are legitimate reasons in some cases students aren’t comfortable with them on) so that you can make eye contact and have a better sense of the level of understanding, and so that you can support at the correct level (a question? a hint? maybe sometimes even the answer). If you end up giving the answer, ask them why the answer you give is the/a right one.

Remembering to enact this set of 5 tips in your classroom will take any educator a very long way to being successful in the online environment. Bravo peer educators, we could not do without you! And best of luck in Spring 2021!

UNPACKING “ENGAGEMENT” IN THE CLASSROOM and some practical suggestions for turning theory into practice ( PART 1 – Individual student engagement)

(Vivienne Liu, Cornell Engineering PhD Candidate and TA Trainer Consultant, contributed strongly to this reflection by bringing the paper to our summer development workshops and sharing her ideas for classroom application)

‘Engagement’ is a term used a lot these days in discussions about successful education experiences.  Learning occurs in a complex matrix which makes it sometimes challenging to understand the outcomes of our practice.  It doesn’t help that we toss around terms of the trade like engagement as if everyone – including ourselves as educators – understands them, particularly out of context!!

This post about individual student emotional and cognitive engagement, is the first in a series of three.  This is the logical start to unraveling some of the mechanisms influencing what happens in classrooms – virtual or face-to-face.

Stay tuned for more about how these two aspects of engagement interact with group dynamics to create the more familiar ‘behavioral engagement’ (Part 2) and, ultimately, trouble shooting some of the complexity that occurs in peer-to-peer and interactions in this complex ecosystem (Part 3).

The Glossary of Education Reform defines engagement this way:

“student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education. Generally speaking, the concept of “student engagement” is predicated on the belief that learning improves when students are inquisitive, interested, or inspired, and that learning tends to suffer when students are bored, dispassionate, disaffected, or otherwise “disengaged.””

While the term is so broad as to be considered not useful by some researchers, Ashwin and McVitty (2015) maintain that it has many ‘faces’ and is extremely valuable once we, 1) define the context in which engagement is occurring and 2) articulate the goal of creating engagement.  For our purposes, lets limit our discussion to engagement by students for the goal of improving learning outcomes in online and face to face classes.

Many who have spent years teaching in the face-to-face environment have an intuition that teaching online will not illicit the same learning outcomes that we believe occur in in-person classes. In this time of emergency remote teaching for so many, understanding something about creating engagement in general and specifically in the online learning environment is important.

Engagement is influenced by factors both within and outside of our control as learning facilitators. Knowing a little bit more about what results in variation in student engagement will, at least, help us better understand why there can be so much variability in learning outcomes and, at best, suggest some of the strongest empirical connections to learning outcomes so that we might gradually apply them (or, if they are negative, avoid them!). The summary of results from a paper shared here examines the influence of course delivery mode, and does a nice job of incorporating many of the potentially explanatory factors related to engagement.

Manwaring et al, 2017 conducted a multivariate analysis in face-to-face and hybrid model courses to try to understand the factors that influenced the two major components of engagement: cognitive and emotional.  Emotional engagement (EE), is the way a student feels about aspects of the learning process (the affect), and cognitive engagement (CE), is the amount of effort a learner expends on the task at hand.  One study does not the truth make, particularly one with such a small sample size!  But this study trades-off large sample size and examining a few controlled independent variables and indicators, for a detailed look at just about every variable but the kitchen sink!  They survey a smallish group of students (68), but ask for their responses for a large number of individual class meetings the students attended within a semester. Many of the outcomes are corroborated by other research.

Figure 1. Adapted from Manwaring et al 2017. The model the authors used to survey student engagement.

In a nutshell this figure, adapted from the study, illustrates the complexity of the learning environment and names many possible components of ‘engagement’.  Another important point is that level of student engagement is a result of factors specific to individuals (individual level), as well as those influenced by the context (class design and perceptual levels).  Appendix 1 in the publication includes the entire survey instrument, but as an illustration some of the questions on the 5-pt Likert-scale instrument include: How well were you concentrating? Did you feel good about yourself? Were you learning anything or getting better at something? Did you have some choice in picking this activity? How hard have you worked to keep up with this class? How much time have you spent on this class? What else were you doing?

The analysis for this study used Hierarchical Structural Equation Modeling (HSEM).  Here is a link to a fairly short but useful video that explains the way SEM works.

Using the outcomes of this paper, the remainder of this post will be spent creating a paired down, tangible picture of:

  • Which factors appear to create or discourage the two aspects of student engagement?
  • Which type of engagement seems more complicated to achieve?
  • Where is the overlap in factors that seem important for both types of engagement?

and suggesting practical strategies we can apply in our online, face-to-face, and hybrid model courses using this information.  Having said that, in the interest of transparency, the table below is the main outcome of the analysis in all of its detail for those who want more information and to draw their own conclusions.

Figure 2. Table 6 from Manwaring et al, 2017. Presented for full disclosure of all the interesting results including some we won’t discuss in this blog.  This is for those who love data! For the Gender variable 0 = male, 1 = female.

‘Big picture’ outcomes jump out of the complex table above in answer to our questions. Note that the statistical strength of the relationship of each individual variable for ‘cognitive engagement’ on the left and ‘emotional engagement’ on the right are represented using asterisks (*) in the columns labelled ‘B’. More asterisks = stronger relationships.  Of the 17 total factors represented in the table, asterisks appear next to 12 variables for emotional engagement, and 11 for cognitive engagement.  The larger difference comes in the strength of the relationships. Emotional engagement is highly significantly associated (***) with 9 of the listed factors, while cognitive engagement has only 4 variables that show this level of significance.  Finally, the most significant relationships with respect to emotional engagement are quite evenly distributed across individual, class design and perceptual categories, while cognitive engagement is more a function of factors that are associated with class design and student perception.  The bulk of strong influencers appear to be in the perceptual category for both emotional and cognitive engagement. With respect to the role of mode of learning (online or face-to-face), this study does suggest that cognitive engagement is enhanced in the face-to-face environment, while ‘mode’ has no effect on emotional engagement.

In summary:

  • Both emotional and cognitive engagement are influenced by many factors – they are complex!
  • Emotional engagement may be more challenging to achieve because there are more individual factors with which it is associated.
  • Both types of engagement are most strongly affected by the aspects of student perception
  • The mode in which learning is happening (online or face-to-face) appears to be less associated with how engaged students are than some of the other variables in the study, and is only significant for cognitive engagement

It appears that getting and keeping individual college students feeling interested in a class and motivated to learn is more complex, and less under the control of the teacher, than is getting students to do the work of thinking and learning.  In this study, face-to-face learning was more cognitively engaging than online learning, however, there are many variables that we can work with to combat any loss that occurs either online or face-to-face.

Clearly these two aspects of engagement interact and there is overlap in variables that influence both forms of engagement, particularly in the area of perception (Figure 3).

Figure 3. The overlap in class design and perceptual factors that influence both emotional and cognitive engagement. Intentionally excluded are individual aspects associated with students because they are more difficult to control. Note: Class design variables are bold and perceptual factors are Italicized (this figure displays outcomes from  Table 6 from Manwaring et al (2017) as a Venn diagram to illustrate the most fruitful opportunities to apply in practice to increase ind. student engagment.

Linking research outcomes to practice: What practical strategies can we apply to increase individual student engagement in our online, and face-to-face courses.

The low hanging fruit for practical applications are those factors that exist in the overlap between cognitive and emotional engagement.  Let’s start with the one factor strongly negatively associated with both forms of engagement:

Multitasking

A challenge of online teaching is that it’s hard, maybe impossible, to know what students are doing on the other side of the screen.  In both environments we can apply these practices:

  • At the start of the semester and in each class share your expectation for an atmosphere of mutual respect. Initially sharing yours and asking students to share their ideas of what this means and developing a list of agreed upon behaviors can act as a verbal contract. Refer to the contract at the start of each class when you ask them to please be ‘really present’ for your time together.
  • Studies have shown that sharing research information about why you use certain teaching practices (providing an evidence-based rationale such as Manwaring et al, (2017)) will help with buy-in from students, particularly when you show that it influences their performance and ultimately their grade.
  • Requiring/encouraging/providing regular expectation that students participate in simple (polling, commenting in the chat, annotating on the shared screen) or more complex (think-pair-share , group work, worksheets associated with presented materials) active learning during class (online or face-to-face) will reduce time that students can be multitasking
Ways that one might try to encourage both emotional and cognitive engagement include activities that:

make the materials seem important, help students realize that learning is happening, are more social in nature, and seem related to their lives and situations

  • Provide real-world examples in lecture and/or in homework to show the importance of what they’ve learned and create examples students relate to.
  • Ask students to provide examples of applications for what they learned in the class.
  • Require brief ‘reflection pieces’ (written or audio recordings) either during or at the end of class or in asynchronous discussion threads. Prompts can be broad: “What was the most valuable concept or skill discussed in todays (this weeks’) class?” or specific: “What aspect of (a concept or process) did you understand the best? or where did you get confused?” These are sometimes referred to as ‘1-minute papers’. These can be done by student pairs and include brief discussions, or by individuals.
  • Provide practical examples after concept/theory learning and allow students to work with concepts/problems and demonstrate to themselves what they can do after the learning activity. Such practices can help students see what they are learning.
  • Promote interactions among students by providing chances for group discussions, team-working tasks, peer review process etc.
  • Create group learning activities (with clear roles and scaffolding) that can add a social aspect and support students who are challenged with materials.
    • Note this aspect includes group dynamics explicitly which has its own challenges but still worth it!
  • Begin a class period by asking students to recall and share knowledge gains from previous lectures. This allows students to acknowledge that they are learning (don’t choose obscure factoids but rather large focal concepts😊)
  • A recap from previous lectures related to the material you are going to teach gets students engaged right away just like the recap you might need for your favorite TV shows. Try to help students connect the material with old knowledge or daily life just as this suggestion did:-)

It is worth considering the ‘second tier’ of important factors that relate significantly to one or the other form of engagement as well.  Some of the ideas presented above already hit these topics: such as, provide active learning opportunities interspersed in your course (for more ideas see: Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater…); and, when possible, give students ‘choice’ in:

  • activity
  • form of expression,
  • rules of engagement.

While “challenge” was identified as being negatively correlated with emotional engagement, other studies have suggested that high expectations are necessary for successful learning, thus working to support challenging topics through scaffolded group work, paired activities, or individual feedback and intervention where possible are good alternatives.

Unpacking individual student engagement makes it easier for educators to understand why great pedagogical ideas don’t always work as well as we expect.  It helps us pinpoint what we can work with to get ideas across and create critical thought. We now have some understanding of why, on any given day, those implemented practices may leave us feeling satisfied, even elated, about what happened in our online or face-to-face classrooms – or alternatively frustrated and disheartened.  Optimistically, ‘mode’ of teaching (online versus face-to-face) is NOT nearly as strong a correlate with engagement as other measured variables over which we have some control. There are many ways to continue to work with our own personal strengths and challenges as we strive to improve learning outcomes. As a final note, and an enticement to look for our for the next post in this series, individual student choices, behaviors, and motivations are further complicated by the ‘dynamic’ in the class among members. This is likely particularly true when one makes good evidence-base choices at the course level to facilitate long or short-term collaborative learning experiences.  The plot thickens… But in the meantime…

Happy experimenting!

Manwaring, K. C., Larsen, R., Graham, C. R., Henrie, C. R., & Halverson, L. R. (2017). Investigating student engagement in blended learning settings using experience sampling and structural equation modeling. Internet and Higher Education, 35, 21–33. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2017.06.002

 

PRIMING THE CANVAS: Creating inclusive learning environments online

Be even more cognizant of diversity in your online students.

Consider all the ways in which learners can be diverse.  Diverse identities typically come to mind first. Remember also that there is a diversity of ways in which learners process incoming information and a large percent of challenges to learning for students in your classroom are ‘invisible’ (read more on invisible disabilities here).

Even for educators that are as present as it is possible to be in their online learning environments, the nature of the virtual classroom is that it is harder to ‘see’ even the diversity that would be ‘visible’ face-to-face, not to mention the invisible diversity in our students. This reason alone is all the rationale needed to argue for putting scaffolding and guidelines in place at the outset of your course meetings to ensure a welcoming and inclusive online climate.

One of many strengths of Cornell Engineering is its diversity. The College is the most culturally diverse at Cornell and is approximately 50% women at the undergraduate level.  Other important aspects of cultural diversity in the classroom, face-to-face or online, are individual identities such as sexuality, or socio-economic situation.

Each of these aspects of diversity enriches our community. Thoughtfully considering and integrating the experience of a diverse student body into your learning environment will result in the greatest gains, but is not easy. Thus, the care you take in creating a respectful, integrated socially and intellectually inclusive classroom, online or face-to-face, is the key to facilitating great learning!

Opportunities accompany online inclusion

Working online may take some of the pressure off a student whose first language is not English. The online environment can help to equalize participation and allow shy or reserved, or socially anxious students to respond in writing and through asynchronous tasks. The online environment allows expression with some autonomy. If we, especially those of us who are new to online teaching and learning, can focus on the opportunities, we will likely be more successful and convey that positivity to our students, many of whom are unwilling participants in this global experiment as well.

Recognize and avoid ‘Microaggressions’

Caution must be taken to avoid unconscious biases in our wonderfully diverse classrooms. Even subtle unconscious biases can lead to detrimental outcomes for self-confidence, learning, and motivation for those who are on the receiving end. For more reading on respecting and valuing diversity and inclusion in our community and learning environments please visit Cornell CTI – Building inclusive classrooms. Here you will find resources that include practices for inclusivity, suggestions for how to respond to an incident that includes bias or other behavior that influences the teaching environment and students in it.

Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults that potentially have harmful or unpleasant psychological impact on the target person or group” Sources: Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000.

To avoid microaggressions:

This link will take you to an excellent pdf about microaggressions and how to avoid them.

This link will take you to an article that has excellent advice for responding to microaggressions in the classroom.

Here are some practical reminders to help create an inclusive climate in the online learning environment:

  • Re-read carefully your written instruction and scenarios: the written medium (as in online posting) is one that is more open to interpretation than speaking to students in a face to face environment where body language and eye contact can be critical cues.
  • Know students’ names and how to pronounce them. Review your class roster. You will have more difficulty seeing your students online, and thus it will be even more valuable to review the roster with pictures of the students. Avoid slang and idiomatic expressions in written and spoken language for improved understanding.
  • Beginning of your semester, and regularly thereafter, provide opportunities for students to get to know each other online through activities that are intentionally structured for that, or through opportunities for students to work in ‘breakout rooms’ on constructing knowledge, and ask that they begin with a fun introduction of themselves.
  • Breakout rooms are inherently social. Some students with social anxiety may find them stressful.  Encourage camera use so students can see each other, but also allow cameras not to be used if it feels uncomfortable for any participant (this can apply to all synchronous zoom meetings).  Additionally, allow participants opportunities to respond in writing rather than speaking in breakouts if it will reduce anxiety.
  • Speak clearly and naturally, at moderate speed. Remember, some students are taking notes as you speak, just as they do in face-to-face class. Remember that English is not the first language of all your learners.
  • Deal with issues of disrespectful behavior (and microaggressions) in any student interactions ‘off-line’ but immediately, e.g. the instructor may choose to email a student with concerns.
  • Keep your own tone clear, concise and polite during written and oral feedback to students.
  • Provide students the opportunity to work in mixed groups (with respect to language differences) to help each other as often as possible.

Remember compassion for yourself, your students, and the whole community

No one saw this coming, and you are not expected to be an immediate expert in online teaching and learning!  Setting the stage by creating a welcoming and inclusive environment is the key to being able to try some new engaging techniques using online tools and practices.  Remember too: always keep a growth mindset for yourself as you grow your skillset, and the learners in your class. Help them keep that same mindset for their own challenges!

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water: How to use lecture effectively and make more space for active learning (face-to-face and online)

All the focus (and accumulating data) on the value of “active learning” and “student-centered” practices for retention and higher order thinking skills, could leave the majority of educators with a more traditional experience feeling frustrated and confused and at a loss about how to change things up. This frustration might be compounded by the fact that for the near future, this will, to some degree, need to happen in a new environment – online.

While times are gradually changing, lecture is still the dominant mode of information delivery in higher education.  For most faculty members, teaching assistants and peer educators, an entire educational experience has been spent sitting in lectures.  Sometimes we listened with rapt attention to an excellent lecturer, and sometimes we nodded off early in the morning or fought with our closing eyelids when we didn’t sleep enough the night before, or were listening while a not-so-excellent lecturer droned on like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

Success in our traditional education systems has been essentially synonymous with success in the lecture environment.  Faculty and teaching assistants might reasonably ask:  If it worked for me, why change it? However, US Census Bureau numbers in 2018 state that only 13% of Americans have a degree beyond the bachelors level.  The point is that ‘we’ in higher education represent a fairly narrow slice of the population.  More and more studies show that learning is a complex psycho-social-neurological process and there are broad norms of reaction for what motivates and engages learners and what results in retention and integration of information into knowledge and skills.  Improving learning outcomes for all students takes a toolbox with a variety of tools to choose from.  Lecture is one of these tools. Universal Design for Learning (UDL https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/designing-your-course/universal-design-learning) is the overarching directive for creating inclusive and successful learning environments. In simple terms it means considering the broad array of learners’ needs, mixing it up, and strengthening our strategies to get ALL students feeling welcome and involved. This creates equity and improves overall learning outcomes.

Rather than a focus on replacing lecture, this post will discuss situations in which lecture may be exactly right teaching tool, share some of its limitations, and suggest ways it can be introduced or followed by active learning practices that allow students to take ‘transmitted information’ (from lecture or reading or video) and interact with it and with each other.  Finally, we will provide some practitioner ideas and tools, and share some resources for making this happen in the face-to-face and online environments.

The best use of lecture

Lecture is one important option for disseminating information to large audiences, and covering the most information in the least amount of time. It does not allow processing of information for higher order thinking, nor the reflection, application, and linking of concepts. Here are some great uses for lecture:

  • Introducing new concepts for the first time.
  • Just-in-time lecture chunks can be used as an intervention to clarify complex topics or explain difficult ideas when it is clear learners are not getting the right ‘take-home’ message.
  • Summarizing a topic or showing a ‘synthesis’ of various bits of information from multiple sources.
  • Providing a rationale and/or learning objectives for the material and topics being studied, linking it to current or relatable topics of personal interest for the learner audience.
  • Helping prioritize topics or ideas in terms of importance.
  • Engaging, passionate lecture chunks can build interest. Enthusiasm goes a long way to generate interest in many learners: it is contagious.
(Some ideas adapted from https://ctl.iupui.edu/Resources/Teaching-Strategies/Tips-for-Making-Lectures-More-Active)

Why are lectures alone, not terribly effective for retention and development of higher order thinking skills?

Even teaching assistants and peer educators find the allure of sharing their knowledge as lecture irresistible. Among other reasons for this are that they 1) have been personally successful in this familiar format, and 2) that they really learn the material by explaining it to others (lecture).  The first of these rationales underscores the need for sharing peer-reviewed research outcomes with larger sample sizes and greater diversity of learners to help underscore that personal experiences, while important, are anecdotal and should not be the basis for our pedagogical choices as educators. The second is the strongest argument possible for incorporating active learning into classrooms.  Active, student-centered learning creates situations where learners explain what they know to other learners or to the professor and, in doing so, they learn better. For many learners, studies have shown that the information retained from lecture compared to interacting with course materials in other ways is significantly lower.

This quote from Schmidt et al, 2015, pg 14, is one basic explanation for why lecture may not be as effective as we would like it to be as a teaching tool:

“Implicit to conventional lecturing is the idea that information can be directly transmitted from one person to another. The other person then stores the information as communicated by the sender, and what is transmitted is remembered, provided the receiver pays attention. This is a misconception because the human mind does not work as a receiver. Students have to do something with the information to enable them to remember and use it in the future.
 They have to be able to elaborate upon the information using their prior knowledge, to rephrase the information in their own words, to discuss the information with other students or with the teacher, to explain what is learned to others, to apply the information to a problem. All these activities help students storing the information in memory for long-term use. This is because our memory is constructive.” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpe.2015.11.010

Lecture is a tool in the toolbox, though more and more studies show its limitations for inclusive learning.  Let’s consider how lecture can be reduced, ‘chunked’, and integrated with an array of active learning tools.

Engaging students while introducing or summarizing topics or concepts

  • Before a lecture chunk – Ask students to access their notes from last lecture and review concepts, complete a calculation if that is the nature of the material, and be prepared to share brief summaries, answers, and ideas (follow up with lecture clarifying the concepts, solving the problem, before moving on).
  • Before a lecture chunk – Create a prompt for students to discuss to generate ideas or determine their pre-existing knowledge about a new topic (follow up with asking pairs or groups to share out their ideas and then summarizing with a short lecture on the new topic)
  • Between two lecture chunks – Use an electronic or other sort of anonymous poll (low stakes) to get students thinking about a topic, or reviewing old material. These can be used at several points in a class but best not to overdo any one thing
  • After a lecture chunk or set of short lectures – Have students create mini-concept maps using topics and terms to help them articulate the connections among ideas discussed.
    • Best done with pairs or small groups (sitting next to each other, or in breakout rooms online) to share what they remember. This creates a learning opportunity.
    • Time for this will vary depending on how deeply one wants the learners to go, or how large the topic.
    • In the online environment, breakout rooms on zoom or other venues take a bit more time to get into and out of, so one must account for that. (Follow up with prepared lecture and take-home points.)

Creating buy-in from students and incorporate their interest and feedback into the learning environment

  • Before starting a class – Invite students to share their interest or lack of it in the topics you will cover. Challenge them to share their reasoning. Be sure they differentiate between things they enjoy, and things they believe will have value to them.
  • Before you begin a course or the set of topics –  Share the course learning objectives explicitly with learners and have them read, discuss and share their own additional goals that might be ones you could also facilitate (this can be done online between synchronous classes early in the semester or on an objective by objective basis .

Getting students working with each other and the content, on the content

  • After a lecture ‘chunk’ – Have Students Apply or Restate Content (can be done individually, and are very strong in small groups or pairs)
    • Ask students to write down at least one possible, real-world application for what they have just learned.
    • Ask students to create an explanation of a concept in their own words
    • One Sentence Summaries. At the end of the discussion/lecture chunk, have students summarize the overall concepts in a one-sentence format: Who did what to/for whom, when, where, how, and why?
  • Before or after lecture chunks –  there are so many ways to do this, with and without providing prompts or materials.  There is overlap here with the first part of this blog section ‘engaging students while introducing or summarizing…’.

For more specific suggestions, access this great link with some additional, detailed tools for getting student working together in various ways. No sense reinventing the whole wheel here. https://ctl.iupui.edu/Resources/Teaching-Strategies/Tips-for-Making-Lectures-More-Active)

Collecting feedback from your learners

All the following are versions of the ‘minute paper’ that asks students to reflect and share what they learned, what they did not quite learn, and how they felt about what they learned. At the close of the class time, ask students to share (either on paper, or on a discussion board of the LMS or other communication media) before they leave the class:

  • Something they learned
  • Something they need clarification on
  • What was most interesting for them and why
  • What is a question you have about the material
  • How well did we meet the stated learning objectives for this class? (Likert-scale with required rationale)

(Some ideas adapted from https://ctl.iupui.edu/Resources/Teaching-Strategies/Tips-for-Making-Lectures-More-Active)

Transferring these practices to online 

The COVID epidemic and new education models (both online and hybrid courses) make it imperative that we also discuss these course design planning opportunities for online teaching and learning. Remembering this emergency situation means faculty are working to adapt the materials in place for face-to-face courses so that they can be delivered remotely and in some cases in a hybrid version of the same. This is not the same as taking months to fully develop all the structure that supports an online course.

The best things about face-to-face learning are what make the best remote teaching and are even more critical in the online environment.  More than face-to-face teaching, facilitators should prioritize:

Clearly stated and consistent expectations

    • What do you expect of students with respect to showing up, engaging in discussion boards, working in groups or participating in online chats, breakouts, polls or other tools. (the caveat here is that for those still working from family homes or other living spaces, flexibility and compassion are paramount – this is not an easy balance, but really matters).
    • What are the learning objectives for the semester, and for each topic or class meeting
      • Studies have shown that sharing learning objectives with students help them know where they are expected to go, and what they are expected to learn.
    • What can be expected of you as the learning facilitator
      • When will synchronous lectures or discussions be held.
      • What options are there for make-up times.
      • What are the options for learners in different time zones.
      • When will assignments will be posted and due.
      • How different activities and participation will be incorporated into the grade.

Varied options to communicate, listen and reach out – the human component is harder to get across in online learning and is what students who choose face-to-face learning miss the most!

    • Let student know when you will be available
      • Be sure students know when and how they can reach teaching staff and be sure that teaching staff adhere to being there.
      • Have both synchronous and asynchronous options regularly for learners to check in, and for you to reach out and ask how it is going
      • Prioritize this more than you might do in a face-to-face scenario, when students can stop after class, come early or find you more easily to ask questions.

Opportunities online for providing feedback, challenges, and ideas

  • Feedback can be about
    • Content – how well learners are understanding different topics
    • How they are doing with the online environment.
    • What learners are having trouble with and what might help them (accessible google docs work well for this, as long as they are monitored weekly)

A variety of ways to be active and engaged during synchronous zoom or other real-time teaching platform

  • Here is where we circle back to the middle of this post “Planning for active learning in your course” and put them to work as you chunk up the lecture portion and add these options in using zoom tools (chat, breakouts, annotating, white boards) or other add-ons like poll everywhere (easy download and links to power point).

This blog (link below) has excellent and practical tips and elements for structure of your online learning environment. https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/4/student-centered-remote-teaching-lessons-learned-from-online-education

If active learning is new to you, remember, there are many ways to include simple practices.  Start slow, try one, see how it goes.  Once you find out what works for you, add another.  Don’t give up.  Study after study has shown the value of including opportunities for engaging students through active learning. This engagement is even more critical for online learning. Be warned that quite a bit of research has shown some students are resistant to it, while at the same time showing that it promotes higher scores and deeper learning!  The change to active learning is as challenging for students at first as it is for facilitators. Ultimately, we know that lecture is tried and true and has value.  Adding in these other pieces will improve student learning and can happen gradually.  So, take baby steps and there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater!

The College of Engineering at Cornell has webinars and helpful tools as well (https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/MTEI/information-teaching-remotely) as does the Center for Teaching Innovation ( https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/engaging-students). Don’t forget the Zoom website as well.