Category Archives: Pedagogy

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Difficulty in Academia: Limits and Benefits

How hard is too hard? Is there an optimal failure rate for learning? Robert Wilson, Amitai Shenhav, Mark Straccia, and Jonathan Cohen would say yes.  In their 2018 study, The Eighty Five Percent Rule for Optimal Learning, the researchers set out to discover the “sweet spot” for difficulty in academia. They found that the spot where the most learning occurs –one that is not too hard so as to create frustration, but not so easy so as to not warrant doing– is a 15% failure rate.  What does this mean for students?  At its most simplistic level, it means that if you get 15% of the answers on an assessment wrong the test is at the optimal difficulty. 15% wrong? Wait that is only an 85% (or a B+), won’t that mess with my GPA (and perhaps my self-esteem)!? 

While I don’t think we can go so far as to say that an 85% is the ideal grade, I do think that we can do more to design classes that both encourage and reward failure.

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3 Quick Ways to Increase Student Engagement in Your Lectures

Studies have shown that student participation in lectures leads to students having greater motivation in the classroom, becoming better critical thinkers, and ultimately, learning more effectively. For students to reap the benefits of class participation, however, they actually have to participate. This can occasionally be challenging. 

Below are three activities I keep in my back pocket to stimulate meaningful student participation. 

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Troubleshooting Common Videoconferencing Problems

With increasing technologies being used to facilitate global learning experiences (GLE) and guest participants in the classroom, technical difficulties are inevitable (as with any technology). Such unplanned technological mishaps often lie beyond the control of participants and instructors, so as with any collaborative effort to meet, it is best to prepare for common scenarios.

Consider the following scenario: You have invited a remote guest speaker in Germany for an hour-long class lecture. Since this lecture is a big deal due to the labor-intensive logistics planning (which include coordinating time zone differences, course scheduling, language coordination, appointments with the instructional technology support at your institution, and much emphasis for participation from your students), you are very much hoping that the videoconferencing tool you’ve selected will work. 

Despite your careful planning, testing, and prior use of the technologies at hand, sometimes, things just won’t work out. When things do not work out, here are some ways to save your videoconferencing event.

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Don’t Worry, it’s a Standards Feature

Congratulations, you’ve been selected to teach ABC-461 this coming quarter!  The department thinks you’re the perfect expert to update the course and a copy of the last professor’s syllabus has appeared in your inbox. Now retired, Dr. Otto Heare left you some of his notes and course materials, but seems you’re going to have to do some serious work.

Script of the word "standards"During your meeting with your instructional designer, you state that you have full freedom to modify the syllabus but note there are some pesky standards that must be included. Dr. Heare didn’t really give you much guidance on what they mean and your department chair told you there was documentation somewhere but they can’t find it right now.

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Change Agent Training: Part 2

In my previous post, I wrote about how a recent moving experience prompted me to rethink the parts of my job where I encourage colleagues to consider new or different teaching methods. Since I’m a “yes, let’s always turn over a new leaf!” person by nature, moving helped me gain some empathy for those who might not be as enthusiastic about change as I am.

Two key findings emerged for me: The first was that I needed to practice asking for help myself, something I’m loathe to do. Framing this behavioral adjustment as “practice” was especially helpful because practicing is low-stakes and friendly. On a recent Home Depot trip, I practiced asking for help finding something right away, and once again, that request paid big dividends in time not spent wandering aisles.

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Increasing Instructor Presence with Weekly Video Updates

How present are you in your classes? If you teach face-to-face or hybrid sections, you may have an easier time responding to this question than if you teach fully online. When physically present in the classroom, it’s easy to take it for granted that students are able to see you, hear you, and respond to you. But in a fully online environment, especially one that doesn’t hold real-time sessions, it can be a challenge to establish your presence as the professor. 

Enter the weekly video update. The authors of a widely cited article published in The Internet and Higher Education report that asynchronous video “made their instructors seem more real, present, and familiar… similar to face-to-face instruction.”  This finding should resonate with instructors, who despite teaching online in increasing numbers still report feeling that online learning is less effective than face-to-face teaching.  

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Review of the Best Free Quiz Games: Kahoot vs. Poll Everywhere Competitions

I’ve been using Kahoot for several years to create competitive quiz games like 21 blitz for my students. It’s a great tool for reviewing previously covered concepts and breaking up lectures with quick knowledge checks. So, when a colleague encouraged me to check out Poll Everywhere’s new Competitions feature, I was skeptical. I have students who literally cheer when I announce that it’s time for a Kahoot quiz. Even hard-to-impress faculty get caught up in the competition during workshops. They overthink their team names, agonize over answer choices, and trash talk their neighbors as points are tallied. I couldn’t possibly abandon Kahoot and run away with another quiz tool after everything we’ve been through, could I?

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Aligning Goals: Simple Structures for Student Transfer and Reviewer Clarity

Since we apply the Quality Matters (QM) rubric to the review of our courses, we typically view the interactions between the elements of the course as “alignment”—the idea that these pieces all flow through or stem from one another, allowing a reviewer and instructor to see the connection of these elements throughout the course. While we have various ways of demonstrating this alignment (numbering and sub-numbering, parenthetical reference, etc.), these tend to be used internally, mostly shared between the instructor, the instructional designer, and the review teams. Rarely do we share this full concept of alignment with students—but why? If we build for structure and scaffolding of the lessons throughout the course, wouldn’t it also be beneficial to students to see ways of connecting the various course objectives with the module objectives, readings, assessments, and other activities?

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Student-Centered Vs. Teacher-Centered Classrooms: Which and Why?

We have all seen the stereotypical version of what a lecture-based classroom looks like in television and movies. Whenever popular media wants to portray school as being dull, we are shown an unfashionable teacher standing at the front of a class speaking in a monotone voice about a dry topic. This (hopefully minus the dull, monotone, and dry parts) is what’s referred to as a teacher-centered classroom. In contrast, there are student-centered classrooms that encourage learning to be directed by the students. Assignments in this format typically involve small group collaboration and/or autonomy for the learner to choose how and what to learn. The student-centered arrangement has quickly been gaining popularity and is considered by many to be a more dynamic method of learning. However, both structures have their advantages, and I will discuss how each can be implemented in order to create an effective learning environment for all.

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Coordinating and Managing Meaning Across Cultures: Pearce for Global Learning Experiences

In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.

Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.  

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