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.