Matthew Witter wanted to start the spring semester off on the right foot.

For the licensed clinical psychologist, it had been a bumpy first semester of teaching in fall 2019 CUNY’s City College of New York. He wasn’t planning to teach at all until he heard about a last-minute opening for an introductory course in clinical psychology.

“I was like, ‘let’s do this.’” Witter recalled. “They said, ‘Can you start tomorrow?’”

With no experience and little time to prepare, Witter made it through a “nerve-wracking” first few weeks filled with PowerPoint glitches and insecurities about his ability as an instructor. Witter was an expert in the course’s content, but he felt unprepared to teach it effectively. Then his department chair invited him and other faculty to enroll in a new year-long course in effective teaching practices offered through the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE).

Again, Witter didn’t hesitate to jump at the opportunity.

Now, with more time to prepare and after completing ACUE’s module on Leading a Productive First Day, Witter was determined to have a strong start to the spring 2020 semester. On the first day, Witter’s students completed a syllabus reconnaissance activity where they reviewed the course syllabus, discussed topics of personal interest and set individual learning goals for the class.

“I could just feel the energy in the class from students talking to each other, writing down questions,” said Witter. The activity, he said, helped set the tone and establish a supportive learning community that would sustain itself through a semester of unprecedented challenges as the campus closed and classes went virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’m glad that ACUE was there at a time when I was so new to the teaching profession,” Witter says. “It was a perfect opportunity to sharpen my skills.”

CUNY’s Priority on Quality Instruction – for the Pandemic and Beyond

Witter was part of two inaugural faculty cohorts to pilot the ACUE program at CCNY, supported through a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. By the end of the 2019-2020 academic year, Witter and more than 50 faculty colleagues had earned nationally-recognized certificates in effective college instruction.

“CUNY is one of the most powerful engines of social mobility that we have in this country. Investing in the faculty who teach these students, through support and high-quality instructional training, will have a significant and long-lasting impact on student success,” said Farhad Asghar, program officer for Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Pathways to Postsecondary Success portfolio.

The successful launch has generated momentum across City College and CUNY as part of a larger focus on effective pedagogy to improve student achievement, close equity gaps, and support faculty. Quality instruction has always been a key priority for CUNY, but the pandemic has shown the need to support faculty has never been greater.

“If we invest in our most important asset, faculty, we’ll get faculty that are happier and more motivated, and we’ll achieve better outcomes,” CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez said. Numerous and independently validated efficacy studies confirm that students are more engaged, learn more, and complete courses in greater numbers—more equitably with their peers—when taught by ACUE-credentialed faculty.

Scaling Across CUNY

This year, City College enrolled six new cohorts of faculty into ACUE’s microcredential courses for online teaching. The CCNY pilot was also a driving factor in CUNY’s decision to participate in a national “Scaling Instructional Excellence” initiative through the National Association of System Heads.

And a second grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York was funded to support 14 faculty cohorts across CUNY’s seven community colleges in the 2020-2021 academic year.

When the pandemic hit, Asghar said, “there was an immediate realization that the most underserved students would be disproportionately affected.” As CUNY quickly pivoted to online teaching and learning models, expanding the foundation’s support for the CUNY ACUE grant, to reach more faculty in the system’s junior colleges, was a “no brainer.”

“The grant’s initial impact is expected to reach up to 80,000 students, but we believe it will have lasting benefits,” he said. “Once the immediate crisis passes, those faculty will carry their learning and experience forward to benefit students in the future, too.”

Once again, participating faculty have shown a hunger for professional learning opportunities and a shared passion for helping students achieve their goals.

“I’m so thankful to the Borough of Manhattan Community College for allowing me to work toward my #microcredential in Creating an Inclusive and Supportive Online Learning Environment,” wrote Brielle Buckler on her LinkedIn page.

Community college teachers across Ohio will hone their online teaching skills in 2021 through ACUE’s 25-week program focused on online college instruction, thanks to a collaboration between the Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC) and the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE).

Beginning the week of Jan. 11, 168 faculty members from 22 Ohio community colleges dove into the program, Effective Online Teaching Practices, through which they are learning about and implementing a comprehensive body of evidence-based teaching practices shown to improve student achievement and close equity gaps. ACUE programs in effective teaching practices are based on more than three decades of research that demonstrates effective teaching improves learning for all students.

“Our mission is to support Ohio’s community colleges, ensuring students get the education they need to ensure rewarding, successful future careers,” said Laura Rittner, executive director of the Success Center for Ohio Community Colleges. “To that end, we face an urgent need to prepare our faculty through professional development in online instruction. The response to our call for program applications was so strong that we expanded the program to offer more seats.”

The opportunity is offered free of charge to faculty through a partnership between ACUE, the nonprofit Achieving the Dream, and the OACC’s Success Center.

“It’s an honor to be able to partner with the Ohio Association of Community Colleges and help faculty strengthen their online teaching skills,” said Jonathan Gyurko, president and co-founder of ACUE. “Together with the Success Center, we’re helping college students persist and engage in their studies, learn more deeply and graduate fully prepared for rewarding careers and meaningful lives.”

Equity-promoting teaching practices are among the hundreds of recommended approaches that faculty learn about and develop in ACUE courses, as demonstrated in ACUE’s Inclusive and Equitable Teaching Curriculum Crosswalk.

Jack Hershey, president and chief executive officer of the OACC, said the training will teach faculty ways to keep their online courses fresh, interesting and impactful by using technology and other resources. Each participant will be part of a faculty learning community sharing experiences, learning from each other and bouncing ideas off of one another during the course.

Faculty will be teaching classes at their colleges while taking the course, so they can use what they learn immediately. Those who complete the program requirements will earn the ACUE Certificate in Effective College Instruction, awarded in collaboration with the American Council on Education (ACE).

“We are working hard to better engage students in their learning and to level the playing field to close equity gaps among Ohio students,” Hershey said. “Offering this course to faculty is one more way to do that.”

Since 2012, the Success Center has been a leading member of the Student Success Center Network (SSCN). Managed by Jobs for the Future, the SSCN works to scale proven practices to help more students earn credentials that lead to good jobs. The Success Center’s partnership with ACUE is offered as part of the Every Learner Everywhere (ELE) initiative and was made possible by Achieving the Dream (ATD), an Every Learner Everywhere network partner.

The OACC represents the presidents and trustees of the state’s 23 public two-year institutions that work to advance community colleges through policy advocacy and professional development.  For more information, please visit OhioCommunityColleges.org.

What’s it like to teach an online class with 1,500 students?

For Steven Mintz, a leading educational innovator and award-winning teacher and author, it takes a coordinated team of well-trained teaching assistants and interactive courseware that he’s been developing for years. The transition to online learning in Mintz’s self-described “mega class”–an introduction to history at the University of Texas at Austin–came with many challenges, and also some silver linings.

“The great irony is that the change to online allowed us to do things that we couldn’t do in the past,” Mintz said. “In some ways it made it a better educational experience for the students.”

In this interview, Mintz also shares why teachers should think of themselves as “learning architects”, and the significance of teaching history in unprecedented times.

Higher education’s ‘liminal’ moment

SM: You often hear that a crisis is an opportunity, but I think this time is different. It’s forcing us to face up to some very difficult issues involving cost, staffing, instructional design, and student engagement and learning. Institutions are dealing with program consolidations and cutbacks, they’re making really difficult decisions about replacing faculty with nontenured faculty. We would have had to deal with some of these issues sooner or later. It turns out we need to deal with them now.

But this may be a moment to embrace the challenge. Anthropologists would say we’re in a liminal moment when transformational change is possible. That window will close, but this is a moment to think in new ways.

Focusing our ‘intellectual firepower’

SM: My understanding is that about 35 percent of our undergraduate enrollment is in about 25 classes, and we all know what those classes are. They’re the U.S. history, freshman composition, Bio 101, Psych 101, et cetera.

Some of these classes have very high DFW rates. The equity and achievement gaps in these courses is glaring. Some of our classes have very inequitable distributions of grades–often more along student profile lines than should exist.

We need to make these classes unbelievably great. That means we need to put every bit of our intellectual firepower into making sure students have great activities, great assessments. And it’s certainly worthwhile, I think, investing really serious resources into these 25 key classes. That’s not outside of our realm of possibility.

‘Professor as learning architect’      

SM: This notion of the professor as learning architect or learning engineer, I think, is a goal we need to cultivate.

And that changes the professorial role. You’re not a transmitter of knowledge. And you’re not just a guide on the side. It’s a lot more of a hands-on role to design learning experiences. It’s a very demanding role. But it’s a role that can pay off because then you can better engage them, guide them, mentor them, and inspire them. You can help your students construct their own knowledge.. That is a kind-of constructivist vision of education, a John Dewey-esque vision of education.

In some ways, that is what ACUE is doing. It wants teachers to rethink their role to be more guided by learning objectives, and then aligning everything–their activities and assessments–to those objectives.

The ‘real success’ of teaching history online to 1,500 students.

This semester [fall 2020], I taught approximately one-fifth of all the new students at UT Austin. So that’s 1,500 students.

Now, the great irony is that the change to online allowed us to do things that we couldn’t do in the past. In some ways I think it made it a better educational experience for the students.

The backbone of the class is this interactive courseware that I have been working on for several years. I am convinced that the next iteration of the textbook are asynchronous online activities that are multimedia-rich, contain simulations and animations and podcasts, but above all are inquiry-based. And they have embedded frequent assessments so that I can figure out what students are learning and what they aren’t.

So I had been working on this for many years and now I have the chance to do it at an incredible scale, for many students.

It turned out that the breakout sessions were the real success of the class. I had 18 teaching assistants who all ran the breakout sessions, and I was amazed by what they did in those sessions. They focused on student writing skills, on developing the students’ analytical skills, and providing students with opportunities to work with primary sources and do history.

At UT Austin, it is very difficult to have breakout sessions in large classes because there isn’t enough space. But online? It’s no problem.

Teaching history in unprecedented times

SM: Not since the late 1960s, or early 1970s, has history seemed so relevant. The issues that we’re dealing with right now–statues, inequities in our society, racism–these are the issues that a history class deals with. So it was crucial for me to connect past to present and to really center the class around issues that students are pondering outside of class.

Inequality is right at the top of the agenda, and having a class that’s dealing with those issues, I think, struck many of the students as deeply meaningful. And they weren’t doing it all by themselves, they were doing it with a big chunk of their classmates. That did create a community in ways that I have not seen prior to this.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Solution Tree and ACUE have partnered to improve student outcomes through Redwood Learning, a new professional development initiative to prepare and credential K-12 educators in evidence-based teaching practices for online learning. You can view the full announcement here.

The first course offered by Redwood Learning is Foundational Strategies for Distance Learning, specially designed for secondary educators.

“We are thrilled to partner with Solution Tree to support positive outcomes for students nationwide through proven, research-based teaching strategies,” says Susan Cates, CEO of ACUE. “Our first course is designed to address the extraordinary need among teachers to effectively educate their students in virtual and blended environments. We look forward to making a difference through Redwood Learning for many years to come.”

The new professional learning brand will debut at REMOTE K12: The Connected Teacher Summit, hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) on Jan. 9, 2021.

Learn more about Redwood Learning

Read the full press release

The resilient educators behind every resilient student.

What’s left to say? 2020 was unprecedented. Time and again our partners persevered, got creative, worked tirelessly, and were fonts of inspiration. Among them all, we’re so proud of:

• The University of Colorado Denver, which strengthened the quality of their online and introductory “influential courses”
• Amherst College, which ensured that faculty could provide the personal, dynamic, and rigorous experience student expect, online
• College of Lake County, whose faculty adopted and reflected on the impact of evidence-based practices
• Vance Granville Community College, which became North Carolina’s first community college ACUE partner, quickly followed by the NC Community College System
• Salt Lake Community College and Norfolk State University, whose faculty sustained meaningful connections with students
• OpenStax, which continues to provide a wealth of open educational resources to educators and students, including free access to homework and courseware
• Our friends Flower Darby, Mike Wesch, and Kevin Kelly, who freely shared their online expertise in our Online Teaching Toolkit. They were joined by Kevin Gannon, April Mondy, Viji Sathy and others, along with 12,000 faculty across 1,500+ institutions globally for Effective Online Instruction webinars
• Active Minds, which published a valuable resource on student and faculty wellbeing and mental health
• Our podcasting colleagues at Teaching in Higher Ed and Tea for Teaching,  who kept showcasing stories of quality teaching, inclusion and equity, faculty resilience, and student success.
• ACUE faculty Andrew Ishak and Benny Ng capturing national attention with ‘viral’ videos

Equity

Our partners redoubled efforts to create inclusive and equitable learning environments, to ensure every student, including Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, have the opportunities necessary to succeed. For example:

• MSU Denver linked effective teaching practices with anti-racist pedagogy,
• California State University Los Angeles math faculty closed equity gaps through evidence-based teaching, use of OERs, and a redesigned co-requisite math curriculum,
• NC Central University’s Shauntae Brown White discussed how she helps all her students thrive,
• The University of Missouri-St. Louis co-developed our Inclusive Teaching Practices Toolkit, which was amplified by inclusive online teaching webinar series, delivered in collaboration with AASCU, APLU, CIC, NASH, ACE, Every Learner Everywhere and Strong Start to Finish, and
• ACUE’s Inclusive and Equitable Curriculum Crosswalk, which makes clear links between great teaching and equity, showing the hundreds of equity-promoting practices recommended in ACUE courses.

Impact 

We all know that quality instruction leads to stronger, more equitable student outcomes. We also know how important it is to make the proof plain, with compelling evidence. This year,

• A study with Broward College found that students were more likely to complete and pass courses when taught by ACUE-credentialed faculty, with the impact significantly larger on outcomes for Black and Pell-eligible students,
• Broward’s Provost, Marielena DeSanctis, discussed these findings to a national audience on ACE Engage,
• Laurell Malone, NC Central University’s coordinator of faculty development, emphasized the value of impact data on institutional decision-making,
• The University of Texas System’s Rebecca Karoff discussed with the American Council on Education how the system prioritized quality teaching and faculty development to meet student success goals during a crisis,
• Change magazine featured six years of ACUE research on the links between effective teaching, improved academic achievement, and closed equity gaps, among students taught by ACUE-credentialed educators, and
• EdWeek’s Rick Hess discussed the importance of demonstrable impact, and why investment in faculty matters, with ACUE’s Jonathan Gyurko and with historian Jon Zimmerman.

Scale

Plus, our partners won’t rest until every faculty member has the support they seek, to deliver the evidence-based instruction that every student deserves, in person or online.

• CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez penned a forceful opinion about the need for effective pedagogy and practice, across CUNY, now and beyond the pandemic. He emphasized his vision in a talk with ACE and the importance of funders like the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
• Strong Start to Finish helped to bring support to developmental education faculty across Arkansas and Ohio
• Every Learner Everywhere partnered with Jobs for the Future, ACUE, and ATD to support faculty and strengthen online instruction delivered by faculty across North Carolina and Ohio, and
• The National Association of Systems Heads (NASH) is leading “Scaling Instructional Excellence for Student Success,” through generous support from the Charles Koch Foundation. System and campus leaders have embraced this opportunity, and the program is empowering nearly 1,500 professors with the evidence-based teaching skills they need and want to be more effective educators—in person and online. Their students are receiving a better education, with particular benefits for first-generation, low-income, and underserved students. 

Our 2021 Resolution

As an unfathomable year ends, we’re so proud to share that nearly 15,000 ACUE faculty members across more than 200 colleges are making a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of students.

Our catalog of offerings continues to expand, with courses in online teaching and career guidance, delivered through full and microcredential courses to cohorts at institutions and through open enrollments to individual faculty.

And more is on the way, with new courses focused on guided pathways, equitable learning, and digital courseware.

Your passion and commitment invigorates our work, and we promise to remain steadfast in our pursuit of student success and equity.

Happy holidays, from all of us at the ACUE team.

Brandon Cooper is a Senior Instructional Consultant in the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M University.

When I committed to becoming a facili-taker – facilitator and participant – for ACUE’s Effective Teaching Practices course, I worried that I may be taking on more than I could handle during an already challenging semester. But I discovered that the ideal time to change my instructional practices is now.

The upheaval that we’ve all experienced these last 10 months has left no arena of our lives untouched, including our learning environments. Indeed, aspects of post-secondary education have been fundamentally altered, some of them for good. So, when I realized that I would be doing a lot of new things this semester (ahem, blended synchronous instruction, ahem), an overhaul of my teaching practices didn’t seem all that risky by comparison with, say, venturing out for toilet paper. Participating in the Effective Teaching Practices course supplied me with a seemingly innumerable supply of new things to try.

Here are a few of my favorite modules so far and a description of some of the practices that I tried and will continue to use going forward (whatever my learning environments look like).

Promoting a Civil Learning Environment

There was so much to glean from this module that I couldn’t limit myself to just one practice to implement. But I believe that what’s done on the first day of class does more to promote a civil learning environment than any number of corrective measures later. For this reason, I opted to use a community-based approach to the creation of classroom norms, guidelines, and netiquette on the first day of class – “syllabus day.”

Naturally, my students and I spent some quality time unpacking key points of my syllabus statement on inclusion and equity. We then segued to small groups so that students could work together to generate proposals for the norms, guidelines, and netiquette that would guide us toward our goal of cultivating an inclusive and equitable learning environment. I used Zoom breakout rooms to create small groups with each group member having a clearly defined role, and the group completed a Google Form to record their proposals. We discussed these proposals as a class before wordsmithing and making decisions about which norms, guidelines, and netiquette we would adopt.

In the past, I’ve simply put this information in my syllabus, but I found that the community-based approach increased student agency and promoted a sense of ownership in addition to other benefits. I’ll make some changes the next time around, but I was very pleased with how this turned out. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever had a better “syllabus day.”

Connecting with Your Students

We all agree that meeting one-on-one with students during office hours is beneficial for students and instructors alike. In the past, I have even “cancelled” classes in order to meet with each student individually. But this module encouraged me to require my students to attend one-on-one conferences during the first few weeks of the semester, which I did by using a scheduling app that interacts with my calendar and allows students to set up Zoom meetings with me.

Like many of you, I have been teaching in a blended synchronous context (with students attending in-person and online), so one thing that I realized right away was that this was the first time that my students had ever seen my face (outside of my directory photo and a few random personal photos provided in my Canvas profile). And it was also the first time that I had seen many of their faces. These meetings were informal and focused on getting to know my students, why they chose their major, why they chose our university, and what aspects of the course were “working” for them (and which were not).

Meeting with students one-on-one early in the semester really helped us to forge a personal connection, and it afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate my commitment to their learning. Moreover, I think it helped my students feel less anonymous (especially in an age of social distancing). My impression is that students were more willing to reach out later in the semester because we had already “broken the ice,” and they knew that their success was my priority.

No doubt, in the future I’ll continue to require early one-on-one meetings.

More than Practices

I’ve focused a lot here on teaching practices. But undoubtedly the most beneficial aspect of the Effective Teaching Practices course has been its cohort-based approach. All of us who have built a course know that we must limit ourselves to certain content even though we’d like to cover everything, so only the narrowest of topics can be presented exhaustively. When we place that carefully curated content in front of learners, however, it’s like shining a beam of light into a prism. Discussions inspired by ACUE course content have inspired so many more ideas for enhancing my instructional practices, and the cohort-based approach has connected me with a community of instructors to commiserate, collaborate, and create with. I needed to try something new this fall (like many of you), and my cohort provided a supportive place to experiment and reflect.

Rather than being the worst time to try something new, I have found this present moment to be the best time to do so.