Category: Course Design

Wren Mills, Ph.D.

Like many, I have learned a lot about myself as a teacher and my students as people through the pandemic. We all had to make adaptations, some of which will disappear when (if?) the virus eventually does.  One that I have decided to keep is my new “pause button” approach to late work.  

In March 2020, everything was panicky and confused and, well, not anything any of us had experienced. While I primarily teach online and have no kids that I suddenly found at home as many of my colleagues and students did, I was not immune to their distress their work-life balance shifted so dramatically after spring break.  And with that, I took a deep breath and let go of some control, and boy did it feel good!  This is the message I sent my students about our new “late work” policy: 

If you can’t get work completed on time, don’t panic. I want you to be happy with what you submit, and sometimes life takes over and school needs to be put on pause while we cope.  For my class, hit the pause button if you need to.  Just email me and let me know. You don’t have to share details, just “I need to hit the pause button this week” works. No penalties for late work. This lets me know you’re still out there and trying your best vs just giving up on the class completely.  I hope no one gives up.

I gave this grace to both my undergraduate students and my graduate students. My initial concern about implementing such a policy was that they’d all “hit pause,” and then I’d end up with loads of incomplete students. But that did not happen.  I had a few students per class who had to “hit pause”—some worked in health care, some suddenly had several children at home 24/7, and a few actually got sick, with 2 needing prolonged hospital care.  But you know what? Every single one of them completed their courses.  One of them needed about 10 days beyond the final exam period to complete the final paper, but everyone else finished on time.  

I received many emails thanking me for taking the pressure off and knowing that they had this option, even if they never used it.  The students who did use it said it was the difference in their being able to rest easier knowing that I meant what I said—to focus on themselves and let me know when they were “pushing play” again and what questions they had before they got started. 

In Spring 2020, even I had to “hit pause” when things got to be a little too much as I helped colleagues who had never taught online before shift to that modality way too quickly—and students let me know it was okay if I needed a break, that they completely understood.  When you give grace, you get it in return.  

I have continued this policy every term since then.  And I will keep doing it.  I still have had not even one student take advantage of it.  (I know it will happen eventually, but I’ll deal with it when it does.)

I think the one silver lining we have of this whole pandemic experience is we all had a chance to learn something—not in spare time (!!!), but from the experience of it all. I learned that a little kindness and transparency go a very long way to creating a welcoming learning environment and stronger relationships with my students, and I look forward to continuing to allow this human touch, this little bit of grace, in all of my classes.

Wren Mills is Pedagogical Assistant Professor at Western Kentucky University’s School of Leadership and Professional Studies.

This article is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Jessica Babcock

Throughout the recent semesters, as Temple and the world continued in pursuit of a “return to normal” after the pandemic, many of us found our classrooms to be anything but normal.

Sentiments that years of disrupted learning, increased mental health concerns, social unrest, and various other factors have led to a new and more seriously underprepared population of students radiated through faculty conversations.  “I’m used to students not knowing…, but now they don’t even know…” became a common phrase amongst instructors.  Attempts at improving student ability increasingly yielded lower rates of assignment completion, higher rates of student burnout, and feedback with phrases such as “unreasonable amount of work” and “pointless assignments,” thus creating a seemingly unbreakable cycle of underpreparedness and higher DFW rates.  I know that I, at least, started to wonder: is it the students who are underprepared for my class, or am I underprepared to teach this population of students?

To address this issue and hopefully find reassurance that both the current population of students and I could find success, I joined the Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Underprepared Students in the Fall 2022 semester.  Joined by twelve other faculty members representing the College of Liberal Arts, College of Public Health, College of Science and Technology, Kornberg School of Dentistry, Fox School of Business, Katz School of Medicine, and the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, our group met biweekly throughout the semester to discuss research about, experiences with, and potential solutions to underprepared students.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from our group came in one of our final sessions.  A simple change in terminology, suggested by a participant from CST–based in turn on a conversation with a colleague at another institution–managed to encompass nearly the entirety of our conversations.  When asked if there is a better phrase by which to refer to “underprepared” students, the colleague replied that the current scholarly phrase being used is “at-promise.”  This singular phrase got directly at the heart of what we had spent months discussing.  As described by a participant from CLA, this shift away from the deficit-minded “underprepared” label demonstrated that these students are working toward something rather than working without something. 

Acknowledgement of this fact changes not only the way we view these students, but also one’s view of self and sense of one’s role as an instructor.  Rather than working to “fix” what is missing with these students, our focus can be redirected toward finding ways to support these students in their pursuit of fulfilling their promise.  But to provide this kind of detailed support for each student in our classes seems like a massive undertaking!  How can we possibly take this on, while still teaching the necessary content and maintaining our professional responsibilities?!  It turns out, we had really been answering that exact question all along throughout our FLC sessions – we just didn’t know it at the time.

Our early conversations focused on identifying what was meant by the term “underprepared” and exploring what this looks like in our classrooms.  Our discussions found that while we were from a variety of disciplines, we all saw similar presentations of underpreparedness in our students.  Many of us initially thought being underprepared was largely related to content knowledge, but through deeper exploration of this, we identified that academic underpreparedness is only one piece of a much more complex puzzle.  We then explored the factors that contribute to underpreparedness, and this was perhaps the most eye-opening conversation in our early sessions.  Through research, conversation, and reflection, we identified long lists of personal, academic, economic, social, and institutional barriers to student success, causing them to appear underprepared on the surface.  Simply recognizing the existence of these challenges as an obstacle course of barriers for our students to overcome is a critical component to reframing our thoughts towards our “at-promise” students and their pursuit of success.

The other essential component of our role in helping these students is admittedly more involved than acknowledgement of barriers and was discussed throughout the second half of our FLC sessions – using strategies to create an atmosphere in our classrooms designed for all students to truly learn.  Again, this seems like an enormous task made up of sweeping pedagogical changes, but, actually, success in this venture can be found through a series of small modifications, most of which will improve learning not only for the at-promise students in your class, but for all!  Seeking out these tasks may seem daunting at first, but once you know what can be helpful to these students, there is plenty of information and support!  As stated by an FLC participant from CPH, “If I had known what to look for [before the FLC], this would have been really helpful!”

And our FLC group is here to help YOU with exactly this!  Upon realizing how valuable all of this information was, we wanted to create a resource and means to share with the University at large.  We want all faculty to benefit from the rich discussions, deeper understanding, and lingering questions we have found so important over the past several months.  In service of this goal, we have created this document containing some of the information and strategies we found to be critical in understanding and supporting our at-promise students.  In this document you will find information regarding the barriers students face, tips for classroom modifications, and related articles, blog posts, and other resources we believe to be most helpful.   

Additionally, we wanted to not only continue our conversations, but open them up to the Temple community through round-table discussions.  In these sessions, we hope to share even more insights that we have gained, as well as the questions and concerns we still have, and invite you to join the conversation with your questions and insights as well!

With the ever-changing population of students needing our support, our Faculty Learning Community hopes that these resources will serve to provide you, our colleagues, with the same sense of deeper understanding of and appreciation for our at-promise students that we have developed through these sessions and inspire changes to support these students at all levels and in all disciplines university-wide.

Jessica Babcock is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Temple’s Department of Mathematics and serves as Director of Developmental Mathematics.

Deirdre Dingman, DrPH

The premortem is an activity used by companies or their coaches as a strategy to reduce the chances that a project will fail. I first heard about it while listening to psychologist Gary Klein on The Knowledge Project in August 2022 (Ep. #144). The premortem is a twist on preventing ‘bad’ outcomes in that it assumes the project has already failed. That’s right, as Dr. Klein presents it, he has a crystal ball and can see into the future. In that future, the project has failed – it’s true he says – he has seen it. Dr. Klein then takes his participants/trainees through a process where first individually and then collectively they brainstorm all the reasons the project failed. That is part one, and its done like a nominal group process so that all the problems are listed, and the main ones are highlighted. In part two, the participants again generate a list individually and collectively. This time, they find the most likely steps to prevent the adverse outcome. According to Dr. Klein, this activity is effective in reducing failure AND building a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the project.

The premortem can be used in the classroom even when a group project isn’t involved and with similar success. It’s true, I have done this! In this post, I provide two examples of using the premortem with students. And if you’re like me, you will start to see the many ways that you can apply this in your own classes.

At the beginning of each semester, instructors consider ways to set the tone for an engaged classroom (e.g., Ep. #41 of Faculty Focus Live). Many of us ask our students to consider the best and worst classroom experiences they’ve had, or what they think an instructor could do or bring to the classroom and what they, as students, could do or bring to the classroom to make it one of those ‘best’ experiences. The first time I used a premortem in class it was meant to do this. Specifically, I wanted to set the stage for a successful outcome with students in a two-semester course. This particular course is a requirement for the Public Health major. Students must receive a minimum passing grade of C in the first semester in order to progress to the second. If not, they must wait until the following fall to repeat the course. Thus, the stakes are pretty high.

On the first day–after I spoke to the students about the course and we did a few ice breakers to get to know each other–I explained that I put a lot of thought into how I teach the course and I care deeply about each student’s progress. I told them I knew the class was demanding and I wanted to do everything I could to help students succeed. But it doesn’t always work out. And just like Dr. Klein, I told my students I had a crystal ball that could see into the future. It was December 2022, and a student was not going to pass the course. I emphasized that the student was NOT passing and then asked them to first spend a few minutes writing down all the things that went wrong for this student. I told them to think broadly on causes, for example, the students actions or inactions, the instructors actions or inactions, and other life or contextual events. Once the students had time to write their thoughts, we went around the room (about 20 students), with each person stating the first item on their list, or the first item that had not already been stated. The white board was filled with responses such as did not come to class, did not turn work in on time, took too many courses, poor time management, instructor didn’t give clear instructions, had to work full time. We repeated the activity on what the student and instructor could do to keep the student from failing and closed the activity by highlighting the top 3 things students could do to ensure they would earn at least a 73 this semester (i.e., coming to class, asking for help, turning things in on time). I shared what I would do as well (i.e., preparing for class, providing rubrics and feedback and grading their work within days of submission).

My second use of a premortem was embedded in a case study and supported by a Poll Everywhere up vote activity. I created this activity after for a different course on the topic of people who use drugs. Before starting the activity, I got to know the students a bit and highlighted a few things about substance use, dependency, and addiction. The premortem began with a story about a person named Jackson. Jackson is a 30-year-old Black cisgender male. One week ago, Jackson was arrested for possessing 2 grams of heroin. He was released from jail this morning to await trial. A few hours ago, he died from an opioid overdose. 

After pausing for the story to sink in, I asked students, “how did we get here?” and told them to make a list of all the things that might have happened in this man’s life to get us to this point. Some additional prompting was given, for example: think immediately and distally, think about this persons actions and interactions with people, institutions, and society.  Students then wrote their reasons on a poll everywhere thread and upvoted the reasons that were most important. Students then made a list of ways we could prevent deaths from drug overdoses and upvoted the most important ideas. The details about the person in the case study can also be altered to see what different problems students might identify. Because this was the first time I tried this activity, I included a brief exit survey with the following questions.

1. What do you think was accomplished by the activity we did today?
2. What suggestions do you for how today’s activity could have been improved?
3. Is there anything else about today’s activity or topic that you’d like to share?

I was pleased with both premortem activities and believe the activity itself can be adapted for use in any course and any topic. I am happy to brainstorm ideas for you classroom and can be reached at deirdre.dingman@temple.edu.

[And, as always, the CAT is available for one-on-one consultations on this or any other learning activity you are planning for your Temple students. -Ed.]

Deirdre Dingman, DrPH, MPH, CHES is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Chair of the Collegial Assembly of the Temple University College of Public Health.

Cliff Rouder

Congratulations! You’ve put in the time and hard work to think meaningfully about course design for significant learning. You’ve considered your course’s unique situational factors and then developed meaningful learning goals, authentic assessments that measure students’ achievement of those goals, and learning activities that enable them to get practice and feedback to prepare them for your assessments. Everything is in perfect alignment. You’re totally psyched to begin the semester now that you’re armed with, if you do say so yourself, a course designed to help learning take off. Nothing much left to do except hit autopilot and watch the magic unfold. Well…not so fast.

In this last blog post of the Course Design Summer Series, we now look at how to implement the design for maximum impact. To keep your course humming smoothly, here are four key ways to successfully implement your course design.

1. COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE. 

We want students to be excited about the course, realize its value, and feel like they can meet your high expectations. One way we can do this is by making transparent why you’ve selected the learning activities and assessments, and how both align to the learning goals.

Communication is key. When and how should we do this? Early and often is the mantra, and here are some ways to do it:

• Send a pre-semester welcome email or video. Start piquing students’ interest by telling them why you’re passionate about the course, your hopes and goals for them, and how you’ll support their learning.
• Include messaging throughout the syllabus. Take that (usually) boring course description that is required on the syllabus and give it a face-lift. Whet your students’ appetite by telling them what big and meaningful questions this course will answer, what important ideas or issues they’ll grapple with, and what valuable skills they’ll be equipped with for future courses (and for life)! Explain their role as active learners in the course and why that’s of value. Be transparent with your high expectations as well as the things you will do to support their learning. 
• Include messaging throughout the semester. At every class period, you can articulate the value of what they’re learning and the purpose of the activities they’re doing in and out of class to aid their learning. Better yet, ask them to articulate the value! Same goes for why you’ve chosen the types of assessments you’re giving them. Keep connecting the activities and assessments to the course goals so students can see the big picture.

2. KEEP A LOG.

Take a moment right after class (or as soon as possible) to reflect on how the day’s activity or assessment went. “Was it a hero or a zero?” as Laurie Grenier from the TV show Shark Tank asks. If it was a zero, don’t let that dissuade you from trying again next semester. See if you can determine what went awry and find ways to tweak it. Were students adequately prepared for the activity? Were the directions and prompts clear and did they hit that sweet spot of being challenging without being too far above your students ability? Was there a tech fail? If you do notice something not working in the moment and aren’t sure why, remember that you could always ask your students.  

3. SOLICIT COURSE FEEDBACK. 

After students get their grades on the first major assessment, think about getting formative course feedback from them. What elements of the course are working or not working for them? What can you be doing differently to help support their learning? What could they be doing differently to support their learning? Be sure to address the feedback in your next class session. Tell them what you’re going to keep doing and what you’re going to change (and why!) and be sure to follow through. If you’d prefer to call in an educational developer from the CAT, we can do a mid-semester instructional diagnosis. We would meet with your class without you present to get consensus feedback and then prepare a report to review with you and discuss strategies for implementing any changes you’d like to make to the course.

4. TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. 

At semester’s end, incorporate an activity that asks students to review their body of work and let them self-assess whether they believe they’ve met the course goals (and why or why not). You could also ask them to write a letter to future students about the design of the course and what advice they might have for maximizing their success in the course.

* * *
So, take pride in the work you’ve done to design (or redesign) your course, make the design elements transparent for your students from the start, be open to self-reflection and student feedback on the design, and have the best fall semester ever! And remember that you are not alone. As always, the CAT is here to help you design and implement your course via 1-1 consultations, teaching observations, and mid-semester instructional diagnoses.

Cliff Rouder, Ed.D., is Pedagogy and Design Specialist at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Jeff Rients

Along with a set of significant learning goals for your students to achieve and an array of assessments that allow you (and they!) to know they’ve met them, you also need to develop what the students actually are going to do in your course. These learning activities include anything that prepares the students to succeed at the assessments and gain the practice (and feedback) needed to achieve the learning goals.

We often think about learning activities in terms of  ‘delivering content’, e.g. lectures, readings, videos, etc. But instead of thinking about these items as the things we the teachers deliver to students, it helps to flip the script and start thinking about what students will do in the course to learn more deeply.  This shift in thinking about learning matters–because once you take the emphasis off of you delivering the content and put it on them interacting with it, you are then in a position to ask yourself this key question: what else can the students do (besides consume more content) in order to achieve the goals of the course?

That’s where active learning techniques often come into play. These techniques give students an opportunity to engage with course material directly and authentically while affording them a chance to practice the skills they will need to succeed at your assessments. Some courses come with readymade activities that you may already be using, such as students working on problem sets in a math course, group critiques in an art course, or role-played client interactions in a therapy course. However, a wide variety of active learning techniques exist that will work in nearly any classroom. These techniques are designed to go beyond the flawed idea that students will simply absorb the content like sponges (which we humans aren’t really that good at, cognitively). Rather they put students into the position of interacting with the content, and each other, in order to gain a deeper understanding of course concepts and content.

Here’s a simple active learning technique that we love at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching:

Think-Pair-Share

• Students are given a prompt (a question or problem) relevant to the learning goal and course for the day. Students silently think (and perhaps write) individual responses to the prompt for a minute or two. Then the students pair up for five or ten minutes to compare their responses. Finally, the instructor facilitates a whole class discussion as pairs share their results, such as any insights they discovered or areas where they got stuck. This last phase typically takes between ten and twenty minutes.

Among other things, the Think-Pair-Share helps make space for students who would otherwise be reluctant to speak up in class. The period of individual reflections followed by the comparative discussion with a peer gives them the opportunity to test their own understanding and hone their ideas with peers, helping the students to feel more confident in sharing their own thoughts to the whole class. It also gives students a chance to help them solidify their own understanding by requiring them to articulate it to a classmate.

Many, many other techniques exist for students to wrangle with content in your class. You can get started with this CAT handout, but you might also want to check out Elizabeth F. Barkley’s Student Engagement Techniques (Jossey-Bass 2010) and Discussion as a Way of Teaching by Brookfield and Preskill (Jossey-Bass 2005). Both books cover a variety of classroom learning activities (and we have them available for Temple faculty to borrow at the CAT).

As you plan your learning activities–whether they be classroom activities, homework, readings or whatever else the students need to succeed–it can be useful to plot out the activities using a three-column table, and how they align with the learning goals and assessments. Below is a sample excerpted from a literature class course design, with the readings omitted from the Activities column for brevity.

With all of the elements of a sound course redesign – goals, assessments, and learning activities – thus aligned, your course will make sense to your students in a new way. As a result, they’ll be far less likely to assume that any task you ask them to perform is mere busy work. Instead, your students will be able to see that you want them to achieve great things and you are providing the practice and support they need to achieve them.

Don’t miss our last installment in the Summer Course Design Series: Pulling It All Together!

Jeff Rients is an Assistant Director at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Meg Van Baalen-Wood

Early in my first semester of grad school, a mentor introduced what was then a counterintuitive teaching strategy: Activity Before Content, or ABC. The strategy is simple: have students explore concepts and ideas before presenting them with new content. For example, before introducing a new concept, ask students to define it, drawing from their experiences and expectations: What do they think it means? What does it remind them of? How have they encountered it in previous situations?

ABC can be used with equal impact in both face-to-face and virtual learning environments.

Why use ABC?

ABC has many advantages. Among them, it

• Engages students in active learning 
• Enables students to retrieve existing information and make predictions about new information
• Provides opportunities for students to review what they know, or think they know, before piling on new information 
• Creates a preliminary foundation for new content
• Encourages students to share both knowledge and questions with their peers
• Fosters a classroom community that values socially constructed knowledge
• Positions you as a collaborator and member of the classroom community, rather than a sage on the stage 

How does it work?

Many familiar teaching strategies lend themselves to ABC, for example, 

• Write or project a question on the board for students to answer before class begins. Using a polling application (e.g., PollEverywhere), share responses as they accrue in real-time or immediately after everyone has responded, so students can see what their classmates are thinking. As a class, discuss the responses; be sure to explore any misconceptions/outliers as well as correct responses.
• Start class with a one- or two-minute freewrite. Discuss students’ responses as a class or in small groups before sharing them out with the entire class. In online classes, leverage asynchronous discussion threads for these small group explorations.
• Create a low-stakes quiz that students complete in small groups at the beginning of class. Provide a few minutes at the end of class for groups to revisit/revise their answers after you’ve presented and discussed the content.

Once you get started, you’ll think of many more ways to pique your students’ curiosity, engage them in active learning, and create a vibrant classroom community with ABC. 

Meg Van Baalen-Wood is from the Elbogen Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wyoming.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).