Keystone Concepts in Teaching: A Higher Education Podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning

S1 E2: Teaching for Everyone

• Stearns Center • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Dr. Shelley Reid returns for a follow-up conversation about how we create a classroom that supports all students – and the instructors – to create an environment of educational success through policies, procedures, assessment, and more.

Reality, equity, equality, and justice figure:  https://www.bu.edu/diversity/resource-toolkit/inequity-equality-equity-and-justice/ 

Stearns Center resource – Designing for Flexibility:  https://stearnscenter.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/21-Course-Design-Flexibility-ALL-Policies.pdf 

 Stearns Center Face-to-Face and/or Hybrid Teaching Resources (see Course Design & Organization Basics section for Life Happens Pass):  https://stearnscenter.gmu.edu/knowledge-center/hybrid-teaching-resources/ 

 Fast Learner/Slow Learner news article:  https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2023/march/the-myth-of-the-fast-learner 

 Fast/Learner Slow Learner original research article:  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221311120 

 Example Exam Wrapper from the American Psychological Association:  https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/topss/teaching-resources/exam-wrapper.pdf  

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Rachel:

Welcome to Keystone Concepts in Teaching, a higher education podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, where we share impactful and evidence based teaching practices to support all students and faculty. I'm your host, Rachel Yoho. In this episode, I'm joined again by Dr. Shelley Reid, the Executive Director of Engaged Teaching at the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning.

Shelley:

Thanks, Rachel. It's great to be back and talking with you again.

Rachel:

In our previous episode, we talked about active learning and engaged teaching, as well as some teaching techniques to support all students. In this episode, we'll dive a bit more into how to teach to support all students, as well as the instructors, and focus also on aligning with university initiatives. So when we're starting our conversation today, we want to talk a little bit about equity and equality. These are often

incorrectly

Rachel:

used interchangeably. So when we're talking about equity, we're really talking about two things here: fairness and justice, particularly in the practices and policies that are ensuring all campus community members can thrive. So this might be applied in the classroom, in policies, and practices that we're doing to support our students and help our classes continue throughout the semester. And so when we're talking about equity, equity and equality are actually different things because equality implies that we're treating everyone as if their experiences are exactly the same, that they're coming into the learning environment from exactly the same ways, and they're having all of the same experiences. And so when we're talking about equity and equality in teaching and learning, what might some of the topics we want to start thinking about, Shelley?

Shelley:

So I really like the way you set this up, and part of what we talked about earlier is that inclusive teaching has to do with recognizing the nearly infinite ways that a group of students can be diverse in their identities, their situations, and also their preparation or resources for any given learning situation. You know, Faculty often say to me,"You know, the hardest part about teaching my class is the students are all over the place in what they know and how ready they are to do the work." And I often say back,"You know, I think that's actually the hardest part of teaching in general." There might be like this mythical class out there where all the students are equally prepared and equally energetic and ready to show up at exactly the same day. But I've never seen that class.

Rachel:

I haven't seen it either. I imagine it probably doesn't exist.

Shelley:

I think it's a myth, but I also think that that's for me the most fascinating challenge. It's what keeps me coming back to the work of teaching. If it were easy, everybody would do it, right? So, I think we can meet the idea of giving equal treatment by pitching our class somewhere at that middle level of preparation, keyed to the average student, and then saying, everyone has the same assignment and the same criteria and the same deadline, so I've done my best. But as you say, Rachel, that gets us equality, but maybe not equity. And so I think we can ask,"Are there ways that I can still hold high standards, but I can consider how to enable the most learning for the most possible students?" And that's really how I see equity. The path that enables the most learning for the most people.

Rachel:

That sounds like a great goal, but honestly, it seems like another tricky balance in a place where instructors are balancing a lot of values, of their own values:"Well, I want to do this, I want to do this in this other way." So really looking at consistency and flexibility. So can you expand a little bit and give us some examples of maybe how we can do that?

Shelley:

Sure, so we might look at a couple of different places where this shows up. So, for instance, we could look at course policies like a due date for an assignment. Contrary to what we tell students, not all deadlines in the real world are firm. Lots of them are sliding scale deadlines, and that means that, you know, some people can get extensions, and some extensions have more consequences, but some extensions have fewer consequences. I think it helps us to ask,"Would using a different deadline policy enable more people to learn without either limiting other students or sabotaging my ability to stay organized and keep them learning?"

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely, because when we're thinking about some deadlines, I mean, some of those deadlines are important to us for our workload. They're important for the students for scaffolding their learning. And sometimes deadlines are, like you said, more or less flexible. So I know if I submit a grant to the National Science Foundation late, they're not going to review it. But other things in life aren't quite as firm, perhaps. So how do we balance that?

Shelley:

Right. And so I think that we want to keep thinking about how those balancing acts work. And maybe we can talk a little bit later about how that works with particular late work policies. I think those same kinds of questions come up as we start to look at the way we structure or the way we give out steps to an assignment. And we can wonder, is giving students more topic choices or more ways to complete the assignment, is that going to help show what they've learned? Is that going to help motivate them or help them feel that it's relevant or connected to the way real world experiences really happen? Sometimes it makes sense to provide just one way to do one assignment for everybody, but what if changing the assignment would enable more students to have and to show more learning? And I think a third space where this comes into play is thinking about grading, right? It's another space where we're trying to think about being as fair as possible. So if we have an assignment and it's worth 30 or 40 percent of students grades, we might wonder what happens if this assignment comes during a week where several students are struggling with life factors beyond their control. And so maybe they struggle or fail at that assignment even though they might actually have the knowledge or skills. And so again, there aren't a lot of real world professional situations where we succeed or fail based on a single day's or a single hour's performance. So I think we can ask, did having one high stakes assignment for a group of very diverse students living very diverse lives, did that enable more learning to happen? And did it reveal all the learning that did happen? Or is there something that we can adjust and still find a way to balance the needs of all students and our own workload?

Rachel:

So again, what we're really looking at here is how we have some structure and some challenge and how having those are a good thing, but really not trying to create unnecessary barriers to learning, right?

Shelley:

Yep, exactly.

Rachel:

Yeah, so that matches really well with one of my favorite images illustrating the differences between some of these key terms. For instance, like equality and justice. So in this figure that we'll link in the show notes, we see three people trying to watch a baseball game over a fence, and the three people are of different heights. And in reality, one of them's standing on a bunch of boxes. We can't even see the person there anymore. And one of them is standing on one box to see over the fence, and one can't see over the fence at all. So when we think about equality, we're giving everyone the same number of boxes, and so two of them can see over the fence because of their heights, and one of them still cannot. And then if we continue that out, we think about applying equity in this, in this space, we're giving people the exact number of boxes that they need to be able to see the baseball game. So we see one person standing on two boxes, one of them doesn't need a box at all. And so now they can all see the game, which is great. But then we can also think about, if we think about justice in this space, is really thinking about these systemic barriers. What is the barrier here that's creating this? And in this case, it's the fence. So we don't need any boxes at all if we just take away that fence. And so when we're thinking about this, we often hear about instructors trying to be fair in their policies and practices in the classroom. And it's really quite a struggle. It's an ongoing conversation that I have with a lot of people of, well,"What is fairness? I want to, I want to be fair here," or"I want to be, you know, equal or equitable." And so Shelley, what do you consider to be some of the considerations for instructors about creating overall fairness? Or basically considering equality and equity in the classroom?

Shelley:

I think it's a really interesting question, and there's never going to be a single answer, but I think that the equity equality balance maps onto some really interesting conversations about distributive and procedural fairness. And so fairness can be what gets called procedural. That's the same policy for everyone. This has an advantage of being really straightforward. We go back to that idea of a due date. If an assignment is due on the 22nd of the month, everyone knows the expectation, and everyone's asked to complete the task in the same number of calendar days. It's equal, it's the same, but fairness can also be distributed, adapted so that everyone has a fair result, which is an approach that aligns more with that idea of equity. So if you've ever given an extension to a student who had a documented health crisis, you've acknowledged that there are some cases where giving the same deadline to everyone It isn't really fair, but that kind of one at a time justice can bring about a lot of stress in trying to determine fairness on a case by case by case basis. It's stress for the student, it's stress for the faculty member, it's not always clear to the rest of students what's going on, and it can require students to have to reveal more about their personal lives than they might want to do in a learning situation.

Rachel:

Yeah, that's a great point and what, what students feel compelled to share in different situations. We also see sometimes instructors going all the way the other direction, that they say they throw out all of the, the deadlines or, or expectations or all of these things. So we're really looking at a whole spectrum here. So Shelley, how do we negotiate this without just giving up on any kind of common expectation?

Shelley:

That's a great question. One approach I've been using is a kind of standardized flexibility. So in my case, one of the things that I use, I call a Life Happens pass because we know life just happens sometimes. And in my class, this is an automatic, no questions asked extension. Depending on the class, it might be for 48 hours, or it might be for 3 or 4 calendar days. So, I often give my English 101 first year students two 48 hour Life Happens passes for the semester. I see this as inclusive because of all the reasons that somebody might be running late, all of those are included. So that might be family issues, it might be illness, it might be workload overwhelm, it might be students who just need a little bit more time to master a concept. It can even be just a bad hair day and everybody has access to that. They're making their own decisions within this area that I've set out. But it's also a really manageable process. Two or three days, catches the vast majority of student level needs for more time. It allows everybody to do a little bit of an adjustment if they need it. But it doesn't usually disrupt my grading schedule very much. I don't usually sit down right the moment all those essays come in and start grading all of them. And, it doesn't put very many people too far behind in the class. And so being able to schedule that as a policy helps me manage both the equality and the equity that I'm aiming for.

Rachel:

So this also sounds like it's, it's not just about the students, it's about everyone in the space. So it's about the instructors as well. So not only managing their workload, but also looking at workload in terms of how many maybe emails you're getting, asking for individual extensions and things like that. So there's a lot of maybe more broad inclusion going on here in the space.

Shelley:

I think absolutely, and in fact, I have to say that I started this policy in part, entirely for selfish reasons. I just found it a real struggle to have to determine which version of a student's situation was worthy of an extension and which one wasn't. And there's a lot about student lives that even if they want to tell me, I don't, in fact, need to know. I don't need to have a forescreen email explaining that they need 24 hours. I just need a one line that says,"I'm using my life happens past this date, Professor Reid." And I say,"Great, we're good," moving on.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's where a lot of instructors get a little, a little bit stuck, what you were talking about there in worthiness. You know, what's worthy of the extension. It sounds like a great policy, a great approach. Really, you're exploring different kinds of fairness, then fairness in a standard policy and fairness of enabling students to succeed, even when they don't all have the same resources. And so it kind of makes me think about other maybe different scales. And so I wonder if that approach would work at a larger, you know, course wide level. So if we're thinking about courses as a whole, for instance, we often hear about what are called like weed out courses or gateway classes into a specific discipline where the sentiment is really just seeing who survives, making it as challenging as possible, making it as obstacle filled as possible, if you will, and seeing who's still there, who's getting a decent grade at the end of the semester. So how do we shift the conversation or focus then into, instead of these maybe weed out courses, but into more responsibly enabling learning?

Shelley:

You know, there's a really nifty 2023 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, and it documents that at least in some areas of learning, the idea that there are fast learners and slow learners might be a myth. And in the study, the students were provided instruction and then asked to work problems in math and science and languages. They got feedback on how well they did and then option to keep trying again until they passed. Although individual students had different initial rates of success, so say one student scored 55 percent correct on a quiz, and another scored 75 percent on the same quiz. The students tended to improve their accuracy at the same rate. So each student got about 2. 5 percent more accurate each time they took the quiz. So it didn't matter, the 55 percent student wasn't a slower learner, they just came in with less knowledge. And so if all students are capable of getting better at a similar rate, then one implication of this study is that a weed out approach to a course isn't really separating good or smart students from poor or incapable students, that these courses separate less prepared students from more prepared students. And they may also cut out students who are having a bad week or a bad month, or who are facing other barriers to successful schoolwork.

Rachel:

That's really an interesting study. And so one of the things that it makes me think about is in some of these professions that are, or disciplines that are more known for having these weed out courses, for instance, the STEM fields, but certainly not only the STEM fields, that we're really just looking at perpetuating who's in the profession based on who's already a little bit more prepared coming in. And so can we avoid just maintaining the unequal experiences that students have had?

Shelley:

I think that's a key focus for people in higher education right now. We can't go back 12 years and fix what happened to students before they got to us. But I think, you know, while it's true that while sometimes students poor performance is maybe related to their effort or to their commitment, for me it's game changing to enter a class knowing that with support and time, every student in the room could fully succeed at learning the material. And so maybe it's not that there are C students because of their intelligence or their capability or even their dedication, but that there are C students because of poorer prior learning experiences. And that shifts the challenge back to me. What if there's a C student that I think of based on the results of the first exam or the first assignment who could be super successful in the profession with just a little extra help? And it helps me start to think, what can I do, still given my time and my resources, to help more students reach a little bit more of their potential?

Rachel:

That's a great point, but it also sounds a little bit overwhelming. It sounds like, you know, I can't make an individual course for all 75 or all 300 of my students in the class, right? I mean, if it's shifting a lot of that over to the instructor, we see some potential workload issues there. We see some potential concerns there of individualizing to a really huge extent that might not be scalable. So how do we, how do we navigate that as an instructor?

Shelley:

Absolutely, we don't want to take all of the burden of learning and put it back on the instructor's shoulders. This is still a partnership between the instructor and the students. But I can use some low investment strategies on my part that are designed to help all students. So, let's imagine an exam or maybe another kind of major assignment. And I can talk about kind of three parts where I might be able to provide a little bit of extra support for a lot of students without putting a lot of burden on my own shoulders. So first, leading up to the exam, I can take 15 or 20 minutes of class time to coach students about study skills, or if it's an assignment, we can work together on one of the preparatory steps. What we know from research about students is that the skills that most of them think are useful for studying for exam, like rereading the highlighted parts of their textbook, or going over their notes, those aren't nearly as helpful as the more active strategies that research shows really help aid memory and comprehension, like making and using flashcards, predicting and answering sample questions, or even writing out their own study guide. And so right around the exam, I can take another approach. I can use what's called an exam wrapper technique. That's wrapper with a W, not wrapper with an R. I can ask students to start the exam by answering a few questions about how they studied and what they think they know best or know least well. And that puts them back in that frame of mind of owning this. Because then I can come back at the end of the exam, this is how it wraps around the exam, and I can ask them to identify what actually went well and what they could try differently next time based on the results. And this helps foreground that whole arc of learning. So it's not just the exam. It's how you study for it. It's how you prepare for it. And simply by making that visible to students, I'm engaging them in that process. So finally then after the exam, maybe I could reach out personally to invite, say, the 10 percent of students who struggled the most to come into office hours if they want some more strategies or help. Now, they should do this just on their own, but we know that students still are a little freaked out by instructor office hours. They're not quite sure why they would go. They're pretty sure they don't want to feel ashamed of their performance. And so, giving out the invitation here is a great way to help them is a strategy that's inclusive. Now I don't want to write personalized emails to 75 or 150 students but I could write the same kind of email and personalize just the start and finish of that for 15 or 20 students just to see if I can put some time or energy right where that's going to be most helpful. Sometimes I hear faculty say these kinds of efforts feel like they're giving out too much help to the students or maybe you know,"That's not really my job," but when my job is not only to deliver the content, but to enable the most learning, these kinds of steps create opportunities for students to gain the knowledge, confidence, habits, and skills that they need to succeed.

Rachel:

That's great. Thanks, Shelley. I mean, these are some great strategies that we can consider and really think about what's scalable, what applies, what works for our individual courses. And so since there's not one, say, template on how to teach, and not every strategy is perfectly scalable, how might instructors go about considering different things like enrollments or other factors or influences, like, for instance, teaching one section of a multi section course?

Shelley:

Right. So now we're back to thinking about those multiple kinds of fairness and balancing all the diverse preparation of students with that need to have that manageable workload without a wild hodgepodge of policies and timelines that really nobody can keep track of. So, in a small graduate course, I might be able to help five or six of my master's students each create a timeline of due dates that makes sense for their final project. And that makes sense to me because they're on their way to being independent learners, and with a small class, I can adapt to allowing that much variance. In a large enrollment introductory course, though, I can't give five or six different final exams, and that wouldn't really help novice learners if they were all over the place, right?

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. That seems like we're, we're really thinking critically there about what's working not only for us as instructors, but also for our students as learners, and even just the logistics of the, the enrollments there.

Shelley:

Yeah, so, but I can still consider a course design, even in that undergraduate course that balances that high stakes final exam with a few more shorter mini exams or quizzes, so that there isn't just one big cliff that students might fall over if they're having a bad day, and grading several shorter exams or quizzes shouldn't take me more time than grading one great big huge one. And so I can figure out how to balance that time out. I'm investing my time in shorter bursts, but I'm really trying hard not to invest a lot more time overall. Or maybe if I'm teaching one section of a course and I don't have any control over the exam or assignment structure, I might still be able to change the ways I help students prepare for the exam or an assignment. Let me give you an example of that. Several years ago I taught two discussion sections of a 300 person course. And all of the final grading was set and common across all 300 students, except I had 15 percent of the grade that I could use for my discussion section. And a lot of my colleagues used that 15 percent for a single, long essay assignment. And that was pretty typical. Instead, I broke my 15 percent into five 1 percent weekly tasks that I quickly graded, complete, incomplete. And then 5 percent for students who participated in writing a short draft early and peer reviewing it. Again, with a lot of some really quick feedback, but not extensive grading for me. And then 5 percent for a slightly shorter essay. So, my students grumbled a little bit about having all the extra work assigned to them and three points for this and two points for that. But I could sit down and explain to them why what I was doing was giving them credit for the usually invisible uncredited work they should already be doing. And so it's helping them build better habits and supporting their success. In the end, I didn't have to grade 25 long projects, and I enabled more learning for more students, and the students still showed me that they could write interestingly about our class questions.

Rachel:

That sounds great, Shelley. It sounds like it was a great approach for you and the students once they, they maybe understood the approach there, even with that thinking it was extra work, for instance, or more work than their, their colleagues were having in other sections. So with this, I, you know, I appreciate your time. And as we wrap up for today, I was wondering if you could just kind of give us a little bit of recap here. So how does this conversation represent a keystone concept in teaching to you?

Shelley:

So, any discussion of fairness seems to me to connect really strongly to assessment. That's really where the rubber hits the road, where we feel somebody has treated us with respect and with fairness, or we feel that that hasn't happened. A key concept for doing assessment well is to be assured that you're assessing students on the most important learning. So, if being exactly on time, or getting something right on the first try, from memory, with no help, is the most important learning, and maybe for like an emergency room nurse, it's absolutely important that that happens, then we want to measure that. But often professionals in a field succeed in projects or tasks that they have by trying it a couple of times, by having multiple tasks, by performing in multiple areas of their workspace. And even more importantly to me, in a learning situation, even those ER nurses need some safe spaces to try things out, to struggle with it, and maybe even fail, where it's not a life or death situation. So when we're learning, creating spaces for that opportunity to try, to be flexible, to experiment in ways that balance out with what the students are doing and the instructor's own workload are really important. That's why I like the idea of that standardized flexibility, along with supporting students in achieving the goals that I've set for them, as a way of having that teaching that I'm doing be inclusive and fair, and just successful for as many learners as possible.

Rachel:

That's great, Shelley. And we see not only so much success for, like you said, as many learners as possible, but for as many instructors as possible. You know, a lot of the things that we're doing that are good for our students are also great for us as instructors. So I really appreciate your time. You know, thank you for your input and your expertise and joining us for this conversation. And I look forward to connecting with you again in the future.

Shelley:

Thanks, Rachel.

Rachel:

Please join us for our next episode where Dr. Crystal Anderson from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning joins us to talk about actionable and practical strategies of teaching for everybody.