Two professors describe ways instructors can promote students’ learning in lectures, and award-winning faculty weigh in on what good teaching looks like.

Capturing Students’ Attention in Lectures
Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek suggest ways to help students avoid distractions and focus on learning during lectures, such as explaining the negative effects of multitasking, pointing out the big ideas within a lesson, and using a 90-second exercise to draw students in. (Inside Higher Ed)

Video: What Does Good University Teaching Look Like?
In this video, top instructors weigh in on the components of effective teaching. Responses include demonstrating enthusiasm for the material, partnering with students, and being flexible with lesson plans. (Times Higher Education)

Making the Invisible Visible
Two instructors describe their approaches for teaching students to grapple with diversity and develop critical thinking skills and empathy. Katharine Covino asks students to connect children’s literature with current and personal events, and Kisha Tracy looks at the biases in history in her medieval literature courses. (Digital Pedagogy Lab)

Teaching With the News
Conversations on current events foster critical thinking and analytical skills, Michael Harris writes. He advocates a method he calls “In the News,” in which instructors cold-call on students to describe a news item or current event, providing fodder for class discussions and showing how course content is relevant to current issues. (Higher Ed Professor)

The Life-Shaping Power of Higher Education
Reflecting on how the landscape of academia has transformed, Marvin Krislov emphasizes the importance of higher education, explaining how college can shape students into innovative thinkers and lifelong learners, preparing them to succeed in multiple careers. (Inside Higher Ed)

Partner News

University of North Carolina: UNC innovation office promotes student, faculty entrepreneurship (Education Dive)

Connecticut State Colleges and Universities: Proposal Opens CSCU Classes to Students Affected by Hurricane Maria (NBC)

In a provocative new report, AAU President Mary Sue Coleman calls for a “new normal” in which “all faculty members will both use and be rewarded for using evidence-based approaches to instruction.”  In the paper—a progress update on AAU’s Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative—Coleman calls for quality instruction, noting “we cannot condone poor teaching of introductory STEM courses because we are trying to weed out the weaker students in the class or simply because a professor, department, or institution fails to recognize and accept that there are, in fact, more effective ways to teach.”

Acknowledging the increased responsibility carried today by colleges and universities, Coleman asserts that “failing to implement evidence-based teaching practices . . . must be viewed as irresponsible, an abrogation of fulfilling our collective mission to ensure that all students . . . are provided with the maximum opportunity to succeed.”

Launched in 2011, AAU’s Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative aims to “influence the culture of STEM departments at AAU institutions so that faculty members are encouraged and supported to use teaching practices proven by research to be effective in engaging students in STEM education and in helping students learn.” Over 30 institutions are active in AAU’s STEM Network. Eight were selected as project sites, and more than 450 faculty members have participated in the initiative. Project sites have reported learning gains, decreased failure rates, improved persistence, and narrowing achievement gaps, providing yet more evidence that effective teaching matters.

AAU’s leadership represents a candid, and courageous, admission that even the most distinguished universities must, and can, do better. But with the majority of the nation’s undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities that are not AAU members—and with 1.5 million educators in STEM and other fields—we are left with a question of scale. The report advocates finding ways to “spread the use” of research-based approaches.

Heeding the call, ACUE answered the question head on. ACUE worked closely with faculty members at The University of Arizona and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, two AAU project sites, to document their extraordinary use of evidence-based teaching approaches. ACUE’s Course in Effective Teaching Practices includes video demonstrations from inside of John Pollard’s chemistry class, Zoë Cohen’s physiology class, Paul Blowers’s engineering class, Roger Miesfeld’s chemistry class, Kelly Hogan’s biology class, Thomas Freeman’s chemistry class, and Viji Sathy’s neuroscience class. As a result, ACUE-credentialed faculty have had the opportunity to learn about—and implement—the proven approaches identified through AAU’s important project.

We know that identifying evidence-based practices is just the start. As Coleman shares, we must provide “faculty members with the encouragement, training, and support to effectively employ these instructional approaches.” Nothing less than a systematic commitment to great teaching is “needed to ensure that we have the STEM-literate workforce and general population required to propel the nation forward into the 21st century and beyond.”

This week, instructors share methods for engaging different types of students, from non-majors to introverts to students in large lectures.

Helping Students Persist
Heather Tinsley, a biology professor, engages non-majors by drawing on their interests and career goals. For instance, she posits questions like, “Should genetically modified foods be labeled?” to demonstrate how students might encounter biology in the real world. (The Chronicle of Higher Education Teaching Newsletter)

Teaching at Scale
Maintaining student engagement in large lecture classes is challenging, Heather McQueen writes. She combats this disconnect by using “quectures,” a type of flipped classroom that asks students to formulate questions before attending lectures and drive discussion during class, encouraging greater understanding of course content. (Teaching Matters)

In One Tech-Filled Writing Class, The Class Clown Is the Professor
Mark Marino uses humor and nontraditional exercises to encourage students to take a deeper look at the world around them. (EdSurge)

How to Be Political
Rather than pretending to be apolitical, reasons David Gooblar, instructors should disclose their beliefs and help students develop critical thinking skills by acting as equal participants in discussions—while making it clear that their personal opinions don’t influence their evaluations of students’ progress. (Vitae)

Recognizing the Differences Between Shy and Introverted Students
Since introverts may find group discussions exhausting, Adam Chapnick recommends encouraging quieter students by reminding them of how their participation benefits their learning and their classmates’ learning. (University Affairs)

A Listener Question: Catching Up
When time is short and content is long, especially before a final exam, Bonni Stachowiak suggests instructors direct students to online resources they can consult independently. She also advises mixing up the topics and explaining the thought behind teaching approaches to support retention of the material. (Teaching in Higher Ed)

Partner News

Miami Dade College/Broward College: South Florida colleges offering in-state tuition for students in Puerto Rico (Sun Sentinel)

Impacting student success requires a commitment—from every administrator, staff member, and faculty member—to change culture and practice, says Rebecca Karoff, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at The University of Texas System. The Texas System is uniting members toward this end “to generate wider engagement with and shared responsibility for student success so that everyone at an institution sees their role, regardless of title or office.”

Convening student success teams was one goal of The University of Texas System’s Second Annual Student Success Summit, held in Grapevine last month. Karoff, who organized the meeting, sat down with ACUE to discuss how the summit advances the system’s goals and to share the importance of including faculty in strategic success initiatives.

Why was the summit established?

We held the first summit a year ago to launch a new system-wide student success initiative. We were charged by our incredible chancellor, William McRaven, to make a quantum leap in student success outcomes by being data-, quality-, and equity-driven, and by focusing on three pillars—finances, advising, and belonging—framed as commitments to students.

Who attended this year?

We hosted almost 125 people, including institutional teams of 10 to 13 people and comprising a variety of leadership and support roles in academic and student affairs, enrollment management, teaching and learning centers, career services, and diversity and equity offices, a few students, and even two of our system’s newest presidents.

How does the summit relate to your system-wide goals?

The convening of institutional teams is critical to meeting the goals of our student success initiative and advancing campus work. We are working to amplify data-driven and equity-minded culture and practice, and to generate wider engagement with and shared responsibility for student success so that everyone at an institution sees their role, regardless of title or office. While this culture exists at UT institutions to some extent, the whole endeavor requires deeper intentionality to be nurtured and sustained.

Summit presenters spoke about a variety of success initiatives (e.g., predictive analytics, course redesign, high-impact practices). Do you see effective teaching as foundational to these initiatives?

That’s an obvious and emphatic “yes.” The question is one of context and culture and how, in a large system like The University of Texas—with its beautiful diversity of student populations and institutional cultures—we can make visible, build capacity, and scale the role of effective teaching in student success. 

How does effective teaching relate to the system’s three pillars of student success?

To demonstrate how effective instruction supports our three pillars, let’s focus on advising and belonging. The research could not be clearer that faculty relationships and mentoring impact student success, and that includes faculty advising. We’re also focusing on academic belonging, not only in terms of whether students are prepared to do the work, but also by looking at how we design syllabi, deliver content, integrate technology, develop assignments, assess student learning directly and authentically, and embed high-impact practices in curricula in ways that will facilitate belonging and, by extension, gains in retention and completion. We’re beginning to do a deep dive into academic belonging data and have uncovered clear connections to student success, including retention and graduation. The faculty role in this is enormous.

What key takeaways did participants have from attending the summit?

We need to engage faculty more intentionally in our student success agenda. Every team at the summit named this as a takeaway.

Secondly, we have to ask ourselves the question that Chancellor McRaven has posed: “What are we doing that, however unintentionally, puts barriers in front of our students?” Our campuses are really starting to internalize this question, which often leads to a willingness to overturn some orthodoxies entrenched in institutional practice and culture that may be impeding our students’ progress.

Another takeaway is that we need to break down silos for how, where, and by whom student success work is being done at our institutions. Time and again, I hear institutional teams at conferences say they have rarely, if at all, met to discuss the work they’re doing on their campuses. It’s often extraordinary work that happens in isolated places and not understood as making a collective impact. Breaking down silos matters, and it can be transformative.

In this week’s news roundup, a professor suggests methods for mitigating the disconnect some students feel in large lectures, and a university president calls for institutions to create a diverse faculty to better support students’ needs.

Class Size Matters
Deborah Cohen suggests methods of combating the anonymity some students feel in large lectures. Group projects, inviting individual students to office hours, and asking students how she can best support their learning are among the techniques that mitigate the sense of disconnection large classes engender. (Inside Higher Ed)

Teaching Inspiration From the Reggio Emilia Approach
The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education calls for educators to learn more about their students’ interests and incorporate them into their pedagogy. As Bonni Stachowiak notes, instructors can apply this approach to higher education by challenging themselves to better serve their students’ needs. (Teaching in Higher Ed)

A Diverse Faculty Is Key to Creating a Culture of Inclusion on Campus
Elsa Núñez, president of Eastern Connecticut State University, describes how instructors from different cultural backgrounds can help students learn about other perspectives and prepare them for life beyond school. She notes that a diverse faculty may be the most important factor in creating and supporting a diverse student population. (The Evolllution)

How the Humanities Can Train Entrepreneurs
In light of declining interest in humanities majors, McMaster’s DeGroote School of Business has developed an interdisciplinary program weaving humanities courses into their business program. These courses help provide the skills many employers in the field are looking for, such as problem-solving, communication, and a cultural perspective. (The Atlantic)

Improving the Quality of Higher Education
With proficiency declining among college students and new graduates lacking basic skills, Derek Bok recommends improving the quality of teaching across the board by more intentionally preparing graduate students for teaching and creating a teaching faculty. (Inside Higher Ed)

Leaders Wonder How Fast Colleges Should Change
Higher education leaders from across the country met at Stanford University last week to discuss academic innovation and share techniques for reinventing their respective institutions. (EdSurge)

Seeing the Essay Again for the First Time
P. L. Thomas explains how he regularly considers ways to improve his writing instruction and why it is more important to think about an essay’s purpose than fit the ideas into a prescribed structure. (Radical Eyes for Equity)

Partner News

Goucher College: Goucher College President José Bowen was focused on retaining students, and it paid off in recruitment (Education Dive)

Northern Arizona University: How ‘personalized learning’ can put college in reach for nontraditional students (PBS NewsHour)

Sam Houston State University: Sam Houston State University appoints new associate vice provost (KBTX)

West Virginia University: WVU president commits to economic leadership (Williamson Daily News)

American Council on Education: Registration for ACE2018 is now open (ACE)