Over the years, ACUE has written often about the need to place quality, evidence-based teaching at the heart of efforts to graduate many more well-prepared students, through the support and place of pride that faculty deserve. We’ve learned many things along the way, but one lesson stands out: simply offering professional development is not enough. A series of professional development workshops here, or a consultation there—as helpful and necessary as these offerings may be—are insufficient to fully engage the professoriate.
Rather, we’ve learned that a holistic plan of action is required to fully engage faculty in the student success movement. That is, one that attends to campus culture and that delivers the practical, collegial support that any professional would expect.
ACUE has put these lessons together in one place. Through generous support from Strong Start to Finish and the Education Commission of the States, ACUE is excited to share a new toolkit for campus leaders and faculty designed as a resource for self-assessment, planning, and action. The toolkit, Success & Equity Through Quality Instruction, was developed with our friends at Sova and recommendsholistic and coordinated action across five key domains:
Strategy: Specifically, to what extent is evidence-based teaching part of your strategy?
Equity: To what extent is quality instruction promoting equity of opportunity and achievement?
Approach: How comprehensive is the content of professional learning opportunities, based on their scope, frequency, mode of delivery, and scale?
Evaluation: To what extent are efforts to improve the quality of instruction evaluated on the basis of student impact?
Culture: To what extent is evidence-based teaching celebrated through communications, intrinsic and extrinsic incentives, and overall expectations?
The toolkit includes recommended resources, inspiring “practice profiles,” and also includes rubrics for each domain, across four levels from “Nascent” and “Emerging” to “Developing” and “Embedded.” These levels are meant to spur reflection of current practice and inspire ideas for new action. Rubrics are also aligned to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Institutional Transformation Assessment and were recently piloted with a group of AASCU provosts, to good effect.
We hope the toolkit becomes an indispensable resource to presidents, provosts, faculty leaders, teaching center directors, and all other stakeholders. We believe it can further our shared efforts to provide faculty the support they seek, through a holistic approach that is truly “sufficient,” so that every student enjoys the quality of education they deserve.
For KaSondra Toney, earning a college degree was anything but typical. As a single mom, she withdrew twice to focus on raising her young family. It took almost 20 years, and she often questioned if she was good enough to succeed in college, but she remained determined to finish.
Last year, she achieved her goal and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. In addition, she won USM’s Bishop Award, which recognizes students who have endured hardships in pursuit of their education.
“I used to look at my life experiences as a series of setbacks. Now, I realize they were setups to enable me to use my experience and share my story to help and inspire others,” says Toney, who is now pursuing a master’s degree in USM’s School Counseling program.
Toney credits the faculty at USM’s School of Child and Family Sciences, whose instructional approaches provided her with a foundation of support. “They really helped me through a lot of self-doubt,” she says. The relationships she formed with faculty were “transformative for me.”
Student Success Through Exceptional Teaching
Toney’s success story and the role that faculty played,are emblematic of the positive student impact that quality instruction is having at USM, where 1 out of every 6 faculty are now ACUE certified. As one of ACUE’s long-term institutional partners, 126 faculty have participated in the ACUE Faculty Development Institute through USM’s Center for Faculty Development.
“The ACUE experience on our campus has been transformative institutionally,” says Amy Chasteen, Executive Vice Provost at USM.
This summer, ACUE published a series of research papers in partnership with USM, demonstrating that students have better academic outcomes overall when they take more courses with ACUE instructors. In addition, students who completed a gateway course with an ACUE-certified instructor had lower DFW rates and higher GPAs in their subsequent courses.
Faculty-Student Relationships
For Toney, the faculty member who stands out, in particular, was Angel Herring, an ACUE-certified associate professor in the School of Child and Family Sciences. Herring began teaching as an adjunct professor while working in early childhood development and “fell in love with it.”
“We like to say we’re a school of therapists and mamas. We are passionate about connecting with our students, caring for them, and seeing them transform. I was hooked,” she says.
Herring primarily teaches online courses through which she implements instructional practices that build personal bonds with her students. She creates videos that describe her own struggles as a first-generation college student and schedules 1:1 meetings with each student to get to know them. “Online teaching does not mean there have to be no personal interactions with students.”
Her perspectives about online teaching are, in part, why she is a featured contributor in ACUE’s Effective Online Teaching Practices Course,which focuses on proven online teaching approaches that empower faculty and ensure student success.
‘I wasn’t just a student on a piece of paper.’
What stands out most to Toney is a conversation she had early in Herring’s course. Even though the course was online, Herring insisted on one-on-one conversations to get to know each student.
“She listened to me. It helped me realize that what I had to say was important and that my ideas were important,” Toney says. “For Dr. Herring to want to have such an in-depth conversation showed me that I wasn’t just a student on a piece of paper. She cared about me and I felt that.”
Interested in bringing ACUE to your campus? Contact us today to learn how you or your institution can become ACUE certified.
As a new academic year gets underway, we asked ACUE Certified faculty to share insights and words of wisdom for faculty whose learning journey is just beginning. In their own words, here are five ways faculty can start the year strong and get the most of their experience:
Start Small
Take Risks
Cultivate a Community
Share with Students
Tips for Staying Organized
1. Start Small
Michael Wesch, Kansas State University
“If you are pressed for time, just try one new thing. Even just one new thing can create a little ‘edge’ and excitement to the day and energize your class.”
Shauntae Brown White, North Carolina Central University
“Don’t get overwhelmed. You cannot overhaul your class all at one time. Select a few things you can successfully implement at the time.”
Erin Whitteck, the University of Missouri – St. Louis
“There are so many great strategies shared in the ACUE program that at first, it may seem overwhelming. Keep a notebook or teaching journal where you can collect some of those ideas and put them into practice later. Be strategic about what you implement now and save some new ideas for later.”
2. Take Risks
Andrew Ishak, Santa Clara University
“‘It’s all practice for the next class.’ I put that thought in my head so I’m not scared of trying out new ideas or making mistakes. That mindset frees me up to make the class better through experimentation, which often leads to enhancements that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.”
Shauntae Brown White, North Carolina Central University
“Teaching is an evolving art. Some things will work for you one semester, but not another. Don’t be afraid to try new things.”
Rachel Emas, Rutgers University–Newark
“Show yourself the same grace that you show your students. Learning how to teach can be a challenge (especially for those already teaching) and we won’t get it perfect every time–but the goal is growth, not perfection.”
Amara Hand, North Carolina Central University
“Every module is an opportunity for immeasurable growth and continuous improvement toward your pedagogical craft. You have the power to create courses, assessments, and learning experiences that mean something, and ACUE is giving you the tools to build it yourself. Bask in every revelatory moment of your ACUE experience. You’re going to learn so much about yourself and your endless capabilities as an educator.”
Christina Zambrano-Varghese, Rutgers University–Newark
“When I first completed the ACUE course in Effective Teaching Practices, some of the teaching methods that I was most hesitant to try led to the most impactful learning for my students. This was also crucial for me to know how it felt to take risks in the classroom, so I could give students the same opportunity to make mistakes. With these risks, true transformation was able to occur.”
3. Cultivate a Community
Matthew Kalei Witter, City College of New York
“My advice is to take time to review the material and really get into the exercises. The students really benefit from it. Also, get to know your cohort, because they are so helpful during and after the program.”
Katie Surber, Wake Technical Community College.
Patricia Bostian, Central Piedmont Community College
“Embrace the interactions with your classmates. In taking your course, commit to chatting with other instructors. The new ideas will take root much more successfully if you take the time to listen to others and be willing to think through new strategies aloud, providing others with the benefit of your own thoughts.”
Tammy Bird, Durham Technical Community College
“Plan enough time in your week to engage with others in the discussion board. I found this part of the training extremely valuable, as we were all processing and thinking together.”
Brandon Cooper, Texas A&M
“Find someone in your cohort to connect with for accountability and motivation. You will appreciate having someone to bounce ideas off of and strategize with.”
4. Share with Students
Dale Hoffman, American River College
“Choose a course you would like to improve and try out the resources you learn about in ACUE. Share this with your class. Offer them the opportunity to give feedback on the innovations you use. They will love that you, too, are a student!”
Subhadra Ganguli, Bloomsburg University
“I recommend taking advantage of the self-reflection exercises and written assignments, like the ‘Note to Yourself’ at the end of each module, to understand how your learning can be implemented to improve your courses. These are powerful tools for self-reflection and they reminded me of additional things to execute in my future courses.”
Christine Neubert, Indian River State College
“Be open with your students that you are in ACUE and will be trying out new things with them. My students responded positively to being my ‘test subjects’ even when a technique did not go quite as planned because they felt included in the process and important contributors to my own learning journey.”
5. Stay Organized and Manage Your Time
Robin Willoughby, Indian River State College
“You will have so many new tips, tools, and other resources available to you. You don’t want to miss any of them. Be sure to look at the resources listed at the end of each module. Before you even begin, designate a storage place for all of these amazing ACUE materials.”
Kara Finch, Stanly Community College
“Be patient. Take your time. Understand that while there are so many excellent practices that you can implement to make your courses better, you can’t do it all overnight. Keep notes of each of the new practices you want to implement and work on them one at a time in your courses.”
There is no doubt that traditional prerequisite remedial education is an academic dead end. A decade ago, over 1.7 million students were being enrolled in non-credit-bearing courses each year. The offerings were full of unintended and counter-productive deficits thinking about what students ‘couldn’t do’ and how they ‘weren’t ready,’ for college-level work, with fewer than 1 in 10 going on to graduate.
The problem was undeniable. Fortunately, a decade of reforms led to positive changes in how college students pick a program of study, are placed into first-year courses, and supported along the way. Yet in a recent and major survey of higher education leaders, over half report that they still rely on traditional remedial sequences from which students stop out from college, without credit and with plenty of debt. The negative effects are particularly pronounced for Pell-eligible and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students. One recent study by the State Higher Education Executive Officers found inexcusable institutional performance gaps: “gateway” course failure rates were twice as large among Black students as compared to their White peers.
These and other important findings are summarized in No Room for Doubt: Moving Corequisite Support from Idea to Imperative, an impassioned call-to-action published in April by Complete College America (CCA). The report summarizes evidence that the corequisite model—with students enrolled in credit-bearing, well-designed, and well-supported first-year courses—leads to greater persistence and completion. It also makes a compelling case for colleges, universities, systems, and state agencies to take a holistic approach by:
Making the corequisite model the rule, not the exception
Changing policies in ways that create awareness, understanding, and momentum in support of reform
Setting clear goals so that progress can be measured and celebrated
Resourcing efforts, with adequate funding and aligned incentives, mindful that greater student persistence and completion is likely to generate a net positive financial return-on-investment
Creating the right conditions for change through consistent and affirming communications, use of data, and inter-personal engagement
Integrating corequisite reforms with other efforts, to foster coherence, and
Designing effective learning experiences with “pedagogical best practices tailored to the needs of corequisite students.”
CCA’s call-out of effective and equity-promoting pedagogy is notable. In the short history of developmental education reform, many efforts are focused outside of class.
For example, three of the four ‘pillars’ of the ‘guided pathways’ model focus on i. defining a clear path of study (design), ii. helping students select the path that’s right for them (onboarding), and iii. helping students stay on the path, often through advising and other out-of-class resources (support). The fourth pillar, to ‘ensure learning,’ has been under-addressed. By emphasizing the importance of, what CCA calls, “just in time” instruction that is “student-centered and culturally-responsive,” the report honors the unique impact that faculty have on student success and equity.
This past year, ACUE experienced as much with developmental English faculty in Arkansas in Ohio. Through generous support from Strong Start to Finish (SSTF), a national network dedicated to the reform of developmental education, ACUE is credentialing faculty in Effective Teaching Practices for in-person, online, and blended corequisite instruction. Well over 90% found recommended practices relevant to their corequisite courses and helpful in refining their instruction. Participating faculty learned about and implemented dozens of evidence-based and equity-promoting practices shown to close institutional achievement gaps among students of different race and socio-economic status. As faculty developed proven instructional practices, they also gained more positive mindsets about their students’ ability to learn and their own ability to impact this change.
The holistic approach recommended by CCA will be complemented in a forthcoming toolkit by ACUE and SSTF, “Success and Equity through Quality Instruction: Engaging Faculty in the Student Success Movement.” Designed as a resource for self-assessment, planning, and action, the toolkit shows how faculty bring all seven of the core principles of developmental education reform to life and how institutions should support their efforts.
A private, nonprofit institution founded in 1875, Park University resembles a lot of traditional liberal arts colleges, with a flagship residential campus just outside Kansas City in Parkville, Mo. But over the past 25 years, Park has emerged as “an innovator in distance learning and online curriculum,” developing over 650 courses online that serve nearly 80% of all enrolled students. With 40 additional satellite campus centers spread out across the country, Park pursues its mission to provide a diverse community of learners, including adult and military students, with greater access to a high-quality education.
“Expanding outside of our flagship campus to serve adult and military students very much grew from a commitment to the founders’ goal of providing access to a high-quality liberal arts experience to anyone who had the hunger for that experience, removing barriers related to cost, time, and location for students,” says Emily Sallee, associate provost at Park University.
In 2017, Park University and ACUE partnered through a KC Scholars Postsecondary Network grant, supported by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, to train and credential 300 faculty members across Kansas and Missouri. Led by Amber Dailey-Hebert, who directs Park’s teaching and learning center, called the Faculty Center for Innovation (FCI), the inaugural cohort thrived.
“Our faculty were really impressed with the ACUE experience,” Sallee says. “We had excellent completion rates and the level of collegiality and community fostered among full-time and adjunct faculty had a positive impact on our culture.”
At the time, ACUE was developing a new certificate program for effective online teaching practices. Laurie Pendleton, ACUE’s executive director of content, said that Park University’s history with online learning and faculty’s deep knowledge of online pedagogy was immediately apparent. ACUE interviewed and filmed several Park faculty and students to showcase and demonstrate effective online teaching practices as part of its course development.
“Park University’s faculty provided practical and thoughtful strategies and their contributions have greatly enhanced the course,” says Pendleton. “Their knowledge of effective teaching and the care and concern they have for their students’ success was very evident.”
Watch: Jennifer Whitley, a lecturer of mathematics at Park University, discusses how to develop students’ study skills in online courses.
Investing in faculty
When ACUE officially launched Effective Online Teaching Practices in early 2020, Sallee said she believed Park University’s faculty could once again benefit.
“Park University believes in investing in our adjunct and full-time faculty,” said Sallee. “We remembered what a fantastic experience ACUE was the first time around and knew that enrolling a new cohort through the Effective Online Teaching Practices course would be valuable as well.”
Still, questions remained. Some enrolled faculty had over 20 years of teaching fully online and hybrid courses. Sallee couldn’t help but ask: “Would this be able to meet our faculty learners at different levels of their development as online teachers?”
‘ACUE raised the bar’
One measure of impact was that nearly 90% of faculty completed the course and 96% of faculty found the content relevant to their work. “ACUE’s value was reinforced in spades,” Sallee said. “We had faculty who were dealing with really significant issues caused by the pandemic, both professionally and personally, but they still persisted in completing the course – because they saw the value in it for themselves and, by extension, their students.”
“We’re focused on providing continuous learning opportunities for all our instructors and ACUE has been such an essential part of that,” says Dailey-Hebert, who facilitated ACUE’s inaugural cohort and has earned credentials both ACUE’s Effective Teaching Practices and Effective Online Teaching Practices programs.
Emily Grover, who also completed the online course, said that ACUE changed the way she thought about connecting with students in online courses.
“ACUE raised the bar for how I approach building relationships with students in my asynchronous classes,” Grover said. “I used to assume that I couldn’t get to know students that well online, and so maybe it wasn’t that important to know their names. ACUE provided so many specific examples and strategies for how to create the kind of environment where you can have relationships with students.”
For example, Grover now utilizes short videos into her online courses. “I used to think that the only point of video was to supplement my lectures, but ACUE pointed out that videos are how students actually know who you are and a way to put more of my personality into the class.”
‘A Lightbulb Moment’
At an institutional level, Sallee believes that the ACUE experience will be even more transformative. Working with ACUE’s impact and evaluation team, Park’s facilitators noticed that faculty were implementing fewer of the course’s recommended techniques than expected. That led to meaningful conversations about the university’s online course design.
Faculty in the ACUE cohort reported that implementing many techniques required permission to make changes to the pre-populated content on the university’s learning management system.
According to Sallee, faculty were bumping into a decades-long tension within the field of online teaching and learning that tends to prioritize content consistency and scalability. Establishing shared learning outcomes, high-quality content, course design, and assessment standards across all online offerings is critical to ensuring consistent quality learning experiences for students. It’s also helpful for instructors teaching accelerated online courses, who often have limited time to develop new content. The downside is that a pre-populated ‘course shell’ can leave limited room for individual instructors to make changes during a given term.
“That was a light bulb moment,” Sallee says. “This ACUE experience is helping us reflect on our policies around what instructors can and cannot change dynamically in the standardized online content. We want to make sure that our institutional practices aren’t unintentionally working against nimble, responsive teaching.”
Adjunct Perspectives: Demonstrating Innovative Strategies in Online Courses
Through the FCI’s Teaching Innovation Fellows Program, faculty are selected each year to lead special interest groups that research, discuss, and share new ideas about their instructional practice. As one of three fellows selected for the 2021-2022 academic year, Grover is preparing to lead an adjunct faculty learning community at Park University to study how to leverage instructional agency and implement ACUE techniques within Park’s course development model.
“I realized after taking ACUE that there are a lot of ways to innovate within any course structure,” said Grover. “The goal is to get a community of online adjuncts to discuss what we can do to personalize, innovate, and have a space where we can share those resources.”
“Movement determines, in a lot of ways, how our brains work,” says Susan Hrach, author of Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. In her book, Hrach shares findings from evolutionary science and research in cognitive psychology, kinesiology, and phenomenology, and calls for learning experiences to honor the brain-body connection.
In this interview, Hrach shares how movement, physical space, and sensory learning affects learning.
Dr. Susan Hrach (rahk) is director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and professor of English at Columbus State University in Georgia.
Learn to Move, Move to Learn
Evolutionary science researchers theorize that our brains have developed, primarily, to harness the different ways our bodies can move. Movement optimizes, in a lot of ways, how our brains were designed to think.
So how can we get students moving around in the classroom? Here’s a recommendation I like to think of as Think-Pair-Share 2.0.
Move-and-Think: Give students a prompt for students to think about as they are on the move. You might send students out in small groups, to give them a chance to move around the halls of the building. Better yet, encourage them to go outside if possible because natural light and fresh air help students release stress that they bring with them to class and restore their bandwidth.
Meet-and-Pair: Have them gather in different parts of the classroom space and meet with different partners as they take turns discussing the question.
Stay-and-Share: Have students stay in whichever part of the room they’re gathered in to share out to the rest of the classroom.
Physical Space: Optimizing the Classroom
How human brains process information is really affected by the physical space we occupy. Ceiling height, colors, and natural light are all factors. One small way to optimize your physical learning space is something as simple as making sure the window blinds are always open to let in more natural light.
Another factor is being exposed to different areas and perceptions of the same physical space. In a classroom, for example, what if we, as instructors, challenged ourselves to get students to move around to different parts of the room two or three times per class? It will look different for every discipline, but you might have different walls representing different workstations that students can move around to. Or you could use mobile whiteboards or incorporate giant sticky notes into class so that your students are moving around and processing different pieces of the content in different parts of the room.
Sensations: Interrogate Sensory Perceptions
Neuroscience tells us that the brain is always trying to conserve energy, and one way it does that is by making predictions based on past experiences. So when we encounter a new idea or concept or object, it requires a lot of bodily energy, conscious attention, and exposure from multiple perspectives to ensure our brains accurately perceive that information.
The more opportunities we have to practice a skill or interact with a concept, the more our brains will actually begin to enjoy the experience. When you’re able to place new information inside a familiar context, your brain literally releases a chemical reward. It’s a pleasure response. Faculty should think about this in the context of their classes. Hands-on activities with an object, or observing a concept in different ways, such as through audio recordings, are ways to channel bodily energy and add perspectives. The sciences and studio arts are fortunate in many ways because they have an experiential model built into their classes. It will be more challenging for other disciplines, but worth the effort.
Inclusivity and Movement
Any conversation about movement must recognize inclusiveness as an important part of any physical learning activities. We all operate with different levels of mobility. I may be living with a permanent disability or a temporary injury that limits movement, while someone else might be in her third trimester of pregnancy. There are all sorts of reasons why your mobility is different on different days and in different times of your life. Above all, I think it’s important to approach movement in the classroom with a sense of respect and kindness for everybody’s place on a given day.
References
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2017. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Paul, Annie Murphy. 2021. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Williams, Florence. 2017. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wolpert, Daniel M. 2011. “The Real Reason for Brains.” TEDGlobal. https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.
