By Jody Greene

When the University of California, Santa Cruz started the campus’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) in the summer of 2016, UC Santa Cruz had not had a teaching center or any systematic support for faculty development since the last CTL was eliminated in the budget cuts of 2008. Notwithstanding UC Santa Cruz’s core identity and history as a research university committed to great teaching and to bold educational experimentation, there had been uneven exposure to fundamental concepts in higher education pedagogy, such as learner-centered course design, active and inclusive pedagogy, a research- or evidence-based approach to teaching and assessment, and universal design for learning. Some instructors had expertise in these areas, but there had been no mechanisms for sharing these approaches with the faculty as a whole, let alone with our graduate students.

In recent years, discussions about the need to prepare graduate students to teach have become more widespread. Graduate students are often taught the content-specific knowledge of their disciplines and how to conduct research, but frequently they aren’t exposed to pedagogical training or research on learning that will help them motivate, engage, and retain students when they lead classes. Graduate students are not only future faculty members; they also serve as current teaching assistants and instructors, which makes this issue all the more pressing. At UC Santa Cruz, we’re committed to developing our graduate students’ pedagogical skills to support both their professional development and our undergraduate student success.

The CITL leadership was approached in spring 2017 by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) with a proposal, and then Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Tyrus Miller generously agreed to fund a pilot for graduate students. We enrolled 20 doctoral candidates in a pilot of the Course in Effective Teaching Practices that ran from January to August 2018 and began imagining ways these ACUE certificate holders could become a resource to other graduate student instructors and help us expand our reach. Around the same time we were talking with ACUE, we were asked by UC Santa Cruz’s Summer Session to develop programming to support the more than 100 graduate students acting as Instructors of Record in the summer. When putting out the call to participate in the pilot of the ACUE course, we focused on graduate students slated to teach their own courses in the summer in order to begin to respond to this need for teaching support.

We supported the first ACUE cohort with two facilitators familiar with our university’s graduate student culture. One, Kendra Dority, was a recent UC Santa Cruz PhD, who was then working as the CITL’s only full-time professional developer. The other, Mecaila Smith, is currently a UC Santa Cruz doctoral candidate in Education, who had been working as a Graduate Student Researcher for the CITL and has a strong background in higher education pedagogy.

“The graduate students in the ACUE course at UC Santa Cruz creatively adapted the course content for the variety of teaching contexts they work within, from running discussions as Teaching Assistants to designing new courses for Summer Session,” said Dority. “They brought to the course their commitments to classroom equity and their interest in increasing student engagement, and left with practical tools that they said they will continue to use. Especially as a former UC Santa Cruz graduate student, I was honored to work with some of the most creative educators on campus and help to bring new professional development opportunities to graduate students.”

We identified a third doctoral student in the UC Santa Cruz ACUE cohort, Kirstin Wagner, who was tasked with researching and developing peer mentoring techniques that could be shared with anyone selected to serve as a Summer Graduate Pedagogy Mentor in 2018.

“Working to develop the Summer GSI Mentorship program,” Wagner offered, “allowed me to draw on my previous pedagogical training while expanding my UC Santa Cruz community to include others on campus working to bolster graduate student teaching support and enrich undergraduate student learning.”

In June 2018, 12 Summer Graduate Pedagogy Mentors were hired from the ACUE cohort and a Graduate Pedagogy Fellows “train the trainers” program for TAs that was borrowed from UC Irvine. These 12 local experts reached out to every graduate student teaching in the 2018 Summer Session with an offer of support and mentorship from someone in the same or a nearby academic discipline, forging new relationships with peer collaboration.

Alongside plans underway to introduce workshops in course design for all of our summer instructors next year, our Summer Graduate Pedagogy Mentors will continue to build UC Santa Cruz’s depth in graduate professional development in a way that supports undergraduate student success, develops our graduate students as outstanding instructors and leaders, and continues to make good on the university’s longstanding commitment to educational excellence and equity.

Jody Greene is Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning at UC Santa Cruz. She is also a Professor of Literature and Feminist Studies.

By Amanda Hurlbut

You probably remember at some point in your childhood having a parent or adult ask you to do an errand, task, or chore that you didn’t want to do. My first thought when my mom asked me to do something was “Why do I have to do this? What for?” The analytic part of my brain wanted a purpose for the time and energy that I devoted to seemingly meaningless tasks. (And it never helped when my mom said, “Because I said so…”)

Students want the same answers to these questions. If we ask them to complete a learning task or assignment, many will ask or think, “Why do I have to do this? Why is this important? What does this have to do with the learning concept? How is this going to help me achieve my learning goals?”

In one of the courses I teach, an introductory course in our teacher education program, students have to spend 15 hours in a field environment. The purpose of this time requirement is simply to allow students to get acquainted with the many roles of teachers in schools today, especially knowing that many aspiring teachers do not know much about public education other than what they can remember from their own experiences. This field time gives them the opportunity to observe and discover if this is really the path they want to take. At the end of their time in the field, I ask students to submit a written reflection on what they learned. Repeatedly, students shared that they didn’t really know why they had to do the field hours and they felt it was just “busy work.” I immediately knew that while I had clearly thought out the purpose of this assignment, I failed to actually communicate this to my students. I learned just how important communication is to creating a meaningful and purposeful learning experience for students.

I decided to implement a new approach to my class assignments. I used these guidelines to help me establish deeper meaning and purpose to the tasks I was asking my students to complete.

1. Ask yourself first: Why am I having students do this? What is the purpose? What knowledge or skill do I want to transfer? If you cannot come up with good reasoning, then the assignment or task is probably not worth students’ time.

2. Clearly explain the assignment’s purpose (along with other important details). Connecting an assignment’s purpose to the class learning goals and objectives helps students to see meaning in a learning task. It is also important to provide students with real-world examples of how the learning task will apply to their future academic and/or career goals. For example, I tell future teachers in field assignments to look for classroom management and assessment strategies that teachers use with students.

3. Provide students with written instructions. Unless they pay attention to every word and detail that comes out of your mouth, there is a good chance that they won’t remember what you shared later when they are actually completing the assignment! I used Mary-Ann Winkelmes’s transparent assignment guidelines from ACUE’s module on aligning assignments and activities with course outcomes to help me establish written guidelines and articulate the purpose of each activity and assignment. On the major assignments, I included brief statements that described the learning objective and the learning purpose (The purpose of this assignment is to…). I also wrote out short, specific, step-by-step directions to help guide students toward completing the assignment or task.

4. Provide examples, both good and bad, of student work from previous semesters. This allows students to see exemplars of excellent work and begin to draw conclusions about work that does not meet the standard.

5. Give clear grading expectations. Use rubrics and measurement tools that focus on mastery learning and allow students to self-assess their performance against a clear standard.

6. Consider using a graphic syllabus as a road map to synthesize and provide a big picture of the course assignments and how they fit together as a whole.

I was amazed by the quality of work submitted this semester, as I noticed a difference in both the quality of student reflections and the quantity of written work, details, and examples used in their reflections. Additionally, after modifying how I introduced the field observations assignment, one student wrote,

I wanted to let you know I went to my first observation today, and I 100% understand its purpose now. I get how important it is for us to experience some classroom time to decide if we like teaching. I have never been so excited, scared, nervous, and happy at the same time. I believe I experienced all the ranges of emotions from doubt to awe at how much teachers handle but got to see how worth the work is when kids thanked and hugged their teachers at the end of the day. With that being said, I just wanted to thank you for how well you introduced the focus of observations in our introductory class meeting at the beginning of the semester. I definitely kept your suggestions in mind to soak in as much as I could and use it to make a wise decision about the career itself.

Establishing a clear purpose for the course and all related assignments is a vital aspect of creating a meaningful and deliberate learning experience for students.

Amanda Hurlbut is an assistant professor in the teacher education department at Texas Woman’s University. Her research interests include teacher education, 21st-century learning, assessment strategies, and online education. Her article “Checking for Understanding” was published in the June/July issue of The Teaching Professor, and she currently sponsors a new teaching blog for novice teachers. She earned her ACUE credential in effective teaching practices in spring 2018.

By Jonathan Gyurko

Earlier this month, ACUE joined the Council of Independent Colleges for its fall institute, which brought together chief academic, financial, and enrollment officers to explore the intertwined issues of recruitment, retention, and completion through quality education, and the associated and positive impact on an institution’s finances.

The three-day convening of over 600 leaders opened with a powerful call to action from Roger Ferguson, president and chief executive officer of TIAA-CREF. Ferguson, who co-chaired the commission that produced The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, spoke about the imperative to deliver a quality college education and help many more students earn a degree. In revisiting many of the Commission’s major findings, which ACUE discussed last year with Ferguson’s co-chair, Michael McPherson, he emphasized the impact of college completion on our nation’s economic and social prosperity. In an endorsement of the work of faculty and good teaching, Ferguson also noted, in response to a question about educational technology, that technology should free educators’ “relative strength” to do the work that only educators can do: promote empathy and foster communication, enhance teamwork, provide historical context, and deepen compassion and critical thinking. We could not agree more!

Dr. Gyurko with CIC President Richard Ekman and Tresmaine Grimes, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Bloomfield College

We were also inspired by an address from Marcia Chatelain, the provost’s distinguished associate professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University. By intertwining her personal story and how attending the University of Missouri “rewrote her family history” with an examination of the major political, social, and educational events of 1968, Chatelain demonstrated the “power of diverse voices” to take higher education forward. Case by case, she argued that we can better serve the nation, demonstrate our value, and serve as a force for upward mobility by constructing opportunities to hear and heed the voices of students who are veterans, activists, first generation, low income, athletes, and others, as well as the voices of college and university employees. In doing so, we model the deliberative society, with conversations “in pursuit of truth and accountability” that students will enter and can inform. One of the more famous critiques of our democracy is that the pluralist chorus “sings with an upper-class accent” (E.E. Schattschneider), and Chatelain’s refrain to embrace more voices was clear.

Members of the ACUE and CIC inaugural Consortium for Instructional Excellence and Career Guidance also met over lunch to discuss our work to date. At present, over 550 faculty across the Consortium are earning their ACUE credential in effective college instruction with a concentration in career guidance. CIC President Richard Ekman and Vice President David Brailow shared their impressions of how well the program is going, and we were delighted to be joined by Paul De Giusti from Strada Education Network, which provided generous support to form the Consortium. I also delivered brief remarks (below) on how so much of what we seek to do to improve higher education happens at the “locus of change” between faculty and students, that moments of powerful teaching and learning is when higher education’s very value is created, and that one of the most important things we can do is to prepare and equip our faculty to make the meaningful connections with students that help to build community and make sense of the many issues we all face.

ACUE congratulates CIC on a successful conference and is honored to be CIC’s partner in such important work.

ACUE’s Executive Director of Academics Melissa Zantello with Andrea Bucklew, associate provost, and Joan Propst, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, both of Alderson Broaddus University

Remarks:

“Thank you and good afternoon. ACUE is delighted to be working with CIC and to receive such generous support from Strada Education Network. Most importantly, we’re very grateful for the opportunity to work with all of the members of our CIC Consortium for Instructional Excellence and Career Guidance and for the trust that you’ve placed in ACUE to work with your faculty. We don’t take that trust lightly. 

“My colleague Melissa Zantello is going to provide you with a report on the progress of the Consortium, and I think you’ll be pleased by the early data and findings. So instead, I thought I would share three very brief observations from some of the discussions and sessions we’ve heard over the past few days here at the CIC conference, and how I believe our work together is relevant.

“First, it strikes me that, as an enterprise, higher education is very good at describing ‘what’ we need to do, and want and should do, to see our institutions and students succeed, be it described as a new ‘initiative’ or a new ‘center’ or the like. And we’re pretty good at ‘how’ we might go about doing these things. But often, I find that these discussions are rarely framed in terms of the ‘who’—as in who will ultimately bring these efforts to life. We know our students spend more time with faculty than with any other college professional. We also know that this time is our best, sometimes only, opportunity to make a difference. The joy I find in ACUE’s work, and the joy of our work together with you through this Consortium, is our ability to really zero in on those moments between students and faculty, to make them as meaningful and powerful as they possibly can be—to make the change we seek. 

“Second, there’s been a lot of discussion—a lot of concern—over the past few days about ‘communicating higher education’s value,’ given polls and findings that our value is misunderstood and underappreciated. But as I listen to these calls, I worry about an implication that we all need to have marketing and public relations strategies and communications plans. There is certainly a place for this work, but it feels a little top down. Now I’ll admit it might be the former community organizer in me, but at ACUE we take a bottom-up view. We believe that every time students and faculty are learning together and having a powerful experience together—that’s the very moment when we’re creating value. And as these students are retained and graduate in numbers higher than might otherwise have been the case because of the power of great teaching and learning, we’re sending into the world ambassadors and champions of our value, in ways that I think are more authentic, in discussions with family and friends and their community, than even the best marketing campaign can achieve.

“Finally, as academics we’re pretty cerebral—you could call it an occupational hazard. But as we think about all the challenges facing our institutions and our faculty and our students—all of the issues that they’re trying to make meaning of—I believe one of the most important things we can do is to help and equip our faculty to take the risks to make really meaningful connections with their students. These are the connections and relationships and the true sense of community that our students want and need to bring some order and sense to what is a complicated world. It’s a privilege to be able to do this work with you, and we look forward to continuing it. Thank you.”

It’s our honor to announce that the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) and the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) have formed a major collaboration to further advance faculty and student success through quality instruction at community and technical colleges nationwide.

Community and technical college faculty will have the opportunity to earn credit toward ACUE’s Certificate in Effective College Instruction through new seminars offered jointly by NISOD and ACUE. The first set of credit-bearing seminars will be announced in the coming weeks. Credentialed faculty and partner institutions will be recognized at NISOD’s annual conference. Other benefits and special offerings will also be available to NISOD member and ACUE partner institutions.

We formed this collaboration out of a mutual appreciation for each organization’s mission, work, and complementary strengths. For over 40 years, NISOD has brought to its members exceptional benefits and resources that promote teaching, learning, and leadership excellence. NISOD’s workshops, webinars, and conferences are valued resources to countless community college faculty, staff, and administrators. ACUE’s Effective Practice Framework is recognized as a leading statement of the teaching skills and knowledge that every college educator should possess. ACUE’s courses of study uniquely prepare faculty across all of the Framework’s competencies and lead to the only nationally recognized credential in effective college instruction endorsed by the American Council on Education.

Our collaboration is based on our shared conviction that every college student deserves an extraordinary education and that all faculty members deserve the preparation and ongoing support necessary to teach well.

This week, learn how community colleges can promote student learning and career readiness through faculty guidance.

Focusing on Relevancy and Flexibility: Solidifying the Place of the Community College
Community colleges need to be vehicles for student success, according to Miami Dade College Executive Vice President and Provost Lenore Rodicio. Equipping faculty with teaching practices that promote student learning and prepare students for their careers is key to remaining relevant and meeting students where they are, she notes. (The Evolllution)

Amid College Success Push, the U.S. Overlooks the Fact that One in Four Students Are Parents
Increasingly, parents are enrolling in postsecondary education programs, write Allison Dulin Salisbury and Michael B. Horn, but support for them is often lacking. Salisbury and Horn suggest solutions such as offering career guidance, courses designed to better use mobile technology, and more support services. (Forbes)

The Either/Or Paradigm: Short-Term Training in Higher Education
Institutions need to create clear pathways for students to earn credentials as steps along the way to completing their degrees, according to Eric Heiser. Instead of seeing short-term training programs as an alternative to a degree, he writes, colleges can blend the programs to meet the immediate career needs of students while offering a bridge to the end goal of a degree. (The Evolllution)

Why One Science Professor Has Students Write a Children’s Book
For the past seven years, Stan Eisen, a biology instructor, has been offering his students a choice of taking a final exam or writing a children’s book about the course content. The book option, he notes, is a form of experiential learning: “If you can make a 7-year-old understand it,” he says, “you’ve accomplished something.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education Teaching Newsletter)

To Teach or to Entertain, That Is the Question
It is possible to balance course content and maintaining student interest, Terence McLean suggests. Ultimately, he writes, the focus of teaching should be on course content and student success, but sharing our personality can help facilitate the teaching and learning process. (University Affairs)

Partner News

Eduardo Padrón: Padrón inducted into American Academy of Arts & Sciences (Community College Daily)

Miami Dade College: MDC Professor and North Campus Food Pantry Founder Named a TIAA Difference Maker 100 (MDC News)

Rutgers University: Making a liberal arts education relevant again (Working Nation)​

By Stephen Brookfield

A couple of years ago I was having dinner with a good woman friend who had spent a career of 40 years engaged in literacy work in New York’s Harlem and Washington Heights. She told me she had been to a workshop on racism and that the first thing the workshop facilitators did was to ask every white person in the room to stand up and take turns saying “I am a racist”. As she recounted this event her voice shook with anger. She couldn’t believe that her four decades of anti-racist endeavors had been discounted by these facilitator-strangers who didn’t know anything about her. My friend was so profoundly insulted that she left the workshop immediately.

I can make an educated guess what the facilitators were trying to do.  They were probably trying to ask the white participants to recognize how they are caught within a racist system that they benefit from and to recognize how they have learned deeply racist instincts and impulses. I’m assuming that the workshop facilitators’ view was that nobody escapes the unearned privilege they enjoy because the racist institutions of civil society work to advantage whites. To that extent, to be white is to be racist.

What I believe was missing from the workshop my friend participated in was any extended modeling by the facilitators of their own struggles in recognizing and confronting their own racism. The underlying assumption was that by teaching self-reflection the facilitators could help people learn to work in ways free of racist undertones. The workshop was something done to the participants by experts who had cracked the code of cultural misunderstandings so could now teach others how to think and work in non-racist ways. Yet one of the most common themes in educating about race and racism (Brookfield, 2018) is the crucial importance of teachers and leaders kicking off the process with a narrative modeling of their own continuing struggles with this process.

For example, I’ll typically begin any class in which I’m trying to raise awareness of racism by talking about how I’ve noticed my own learned racism framing my perception of a current event, or how I caught myself in a micro-aggression earlier that day. The same is true for any faculty development effort I’m leading. There is such shame in the word ‘racist’, such power to humiliate, that I’m wary of beginning a conversation by asking that white students and colleagues declare themselves as racist. Instead I need to ‘normalize’ racism, to show that because most Whites are constantly immersed in racist conditioning, it would be strange if they didn’t have learned racist impulses, instincts and perspectives lurking within them. So I need to show first how racism is embedded in my worldview and how I enact racism. I need to earn the right to ask them to consider their own racist identity by first exploring mine.

Does this approach pay too much respect to white fragility, to the alarm and subsequent retreat from confrontation that stops so many of us from looking squarely at our own racism?  I go back and forth on this question.  My teacher voice says, “You have to start where people are. Starting with your own agenda without having built a connection to their world is self-indulgent. Get over making yourself feel righteous and take the time to know them”. My activist voice replies, “Here you go again, copping out and backing off from necessary danger. Don’t be so cowardly – tell it like it is”.

Searching honestly for the learned racism and privilege at the heart of white identity is hard given that bearing witness to experiences of racism typically prompts whites to show solidarity with people of color. We want to protest that not all whites are their enemy and that they can count on some of us for support. Speaking for myself, I know that part of me desperately wants the approval of people of color.  I want to be told I’m one of the good guys who’s exempted from blanket condemnations of white racism.  I want to be told I’m an exception and to feel a flush of self-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory pleasure when saying to myself “you know what, my mother was right, I am a good person.”.

One of the hardest lessons I have learned as a white person, and therefore as a representative (in the eyes of people of color) of white supremacy, is that I must expect to be mistrusted. I must also anticipate white colleagues accusing me of politically correct reverse racism. When this happens, I need to remember that this is not a sign that somehow I’m failing; it happens to every white person in this work.  So I tell colleagues getting involved in anti-racist teaching or other activism for the first time that for different reasons they should be prepared to be called a racist both by people of color and by Whites. It comes with the territory.

I remember in the early 1990’s teaching a class in which a student of color declared “I will never trust a White person”. I responded by saying, “that’s completely understandable, I don’t see why you would”. But the white majority in the group were shocked and demoralized by his comment and spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince him that they were humane, enlightened and worthy of his trust. It has always seemed to be that completely valid suspicion, skepticism and hostility will inevitably accompany any white person’s attempt to work alongside people of color in an anti-racist effort.  This is no comment on you personally. It’s a comment on how the history of white supremacy has conditioned people of color to expect whites always to pursue their own self-interest and bolster their own power.

The judgment of whether or not you are an ally to people of color is completely in their hands.  You should never expect to be told that you are one, and shouldn’t get hung up on gauging your anti-racist virtue by whether or not you receive that designation.  Of course, if you do hear that term applied to you by people of color you should take it as a sincere recognition that you’re doing something important and worthwhile. And, for a moment, it’s fine to be proud of yourself.  We all need moments of recognition and affirmation to keep our energy up for the tough stuff.

But repeat after me; never declare yourself an ally. No matter how strongly you are committed to that identity, keep it private. A White person saying “I’m your ally” comes across as condescending and inauthentic. You don’t become an ally by saying that you are.  You become one by consistently showing up in support of people of color.  You become one by losing something. Instead of worrying about getting approval for being heroically anti-racist, you should be putting yourself on the line. You should be risking institutional condemnation by doing and saying the things that people of color will suffer even more harshly for doing and saying. Your job is to lose friends, colleagues, money, employment, perks and prestige by calling out white supremacy in yourself and other Whites, and then not to have anyone notice or thank you for it.

Brookfield, S.D. and Associates. 2018. Teaching Race: Helping Students Unmask and Challenge Racism. San Francisco: Jossey Bass/Wiley.

Stephen Brookfield is the John Ireland Endowed Chair at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul.