Center for Innovative Teaching & Learning – Page 69 – Just another way we support innovative teaching and learning practices

Use CATME to take some of the headaches out of group work

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Madeleine Gonin

Do you suspect some of your student teams are not performing at their best? Are your students reporting that they cannot find a time to meet with their group members? Are some complaining that not everyone on their team is doing their fair share of the work? Perhaps CATME software can help you address these issues.

CITL purchased a license to CATME that allows all IUB faculty to use the tool for free through Summer 2018. Here are some of the CATME tools that can help you take care of some of the administrative headaches of group work.

CATME Team-Maker
This tool allows you decide what student information to collect so that CATME can help you create teams. You choose the criteria to be used and how these are weighted when the system creates teams. You can decide to create heterogeneous or homogeneous groups based on demographics, overall GPA, majors, ability to use a particular software, tool, or language. You can also create teams based on compatible schedules or preferred leadership roles and styles. Other criteria include anticipated grade for your class, earned grade from a previous course and time commitment to the class. You can even create your own questions or select questions from a long list of community-generated questions.

CATME Peer Review screenshot — CATME Peer Evaluation Tool

CATME Rater Practice & CATME Peer Evaluation
CATME allows students to provide structured peer evaluations of their teammates. But students need practice if they are to accurately and consistently rate their peers based on teamwork-related behaviors. CATME Rater Practice gives students practice using descriptions of fictitious team member behaviors and contributions.

Once your students have had this practice, they can provide one another feedback on their teamwork. You can choose questions related to team member contributions to work, interactions between team members, whether a member is keeping the team on track, whether members have the knowledge and skills to help the team, and many other questions about behaviors that helped or hindered team work, as well as overall team functioning. Student also have the opportunity to leave confidential comments for the instructors. Once students submit feedback about their teammates, instructors can release the results to students, and CATME will provide the student with research-based suggestions for improving their team effectiveness.

CATME Meeting Support
Many students may not have experience being in structured meetings and/or know how to run these. Using CATME Meeting Support can help team meetings be effective by providing templates for team contracts, meeting agendas, and for taking meeting minutes. By helping students learn how to run effective meetings you might eliminate problematic team behaviors that are limiting team effectiveness.

If you are interested in hearing more strategies to create and support your students teams, consider attending out upcoming workshop, Fixing Group Work: Tools and Practices for Student Collaboration, on Thursday, December 14, 1:00- 2:15pm. We will discuss these CATME tools as well as ways to use Canvas and other tools to support and simplify group work. Please register at https://citl.indiana.edu/events.

Making Assignments and Syllabi Clearer to Students

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Greg Siering

Back in September, we hosted a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) talk by Mary Murphy (Psychological and Brain Sciences) on her work on stereotype threat and student success. That concept is based on the idea that students can struggle when they don’t feel like they belong—e.g., they are a first-generation college student, don’t see people like themselves in their classes or professions, or are told women cannot succeed in the sciences. Confronting and overcoming these stereotypes can lead to anxiety and reduced performance.

One of the challenges Murphy noted for students from underrepresented groups is their inexperience—both personal and familial—within higher education and/or particular disciplines. That can run from navigating our complex enrollment systems to understanding how assignments and course structures work. Struggling with these barriers not only takes away mental energy from learning, but it also impacts the sense of belonging that is important to student success and retention.

Following up on Murphy’s research, we are working to help IUB instructors reduce these barriers to student success by adding clarity to their assignments and course structures. Later this week, we are offering two workshops that seek to make our teaching more transparent and understandable to students.

The first event is “Designing Transparent Assignments that Promote Student Learning” (Thursday, 11/30, 10:00-11:30). This workshop introduces a model for creating more understandable assignment descriptions by establishing clear purpose, tasks, and criteria for success. This approach has been shown to have significant impact on students’ confidence, sense of belonging, and retention… all with minimal effort on the instructor’s part. If you join us in the workshop, you’ll leave with at least one rewritten assignment, ready to implement in your spring courses. If you want to learn more about the model, watch an interview with its creator, Mary-Ann Winkelmes (UNLV), in the Teaching.IU Great Conversations video series.

The second event, “Creating a Graphic Syllabus” (Friday, 12/1, 2:30-4:30), explores how to organize a syllabus to be more approachable by students. Because we know our topics well, we see the interconnections in a syllabus that tie a course together, but these documents can get long and disjointed, making it hard for students to see those broader connections between course concepts and assignments. This workshop will help you turn your syllabus into both a learning tool and an organizational tool, making the course clearer to students and likely reducing the amount of questions you receive.

Both of these approaches are relatively simple to implement, and they can go a long way to helping reduce the “cognitive overhead” that can be a barrier to student learning. While they have particular benefits for students from underrepresented groups, they are proven to increase the success of all students in our courses, making them an easy win all around.

We hope you can join us for one or both of these workshops, doing a little preparation for the spring semester that is just around the corner.

Gratitude in Teaching and Learning

Posted on November 20, 2017 by Greg Siering

With many of us taking time off this week for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I wanted to post about some thoughts about thankfulness or gratitude within higher education.

One of the most powerful experiences I have had with gratitude in a professional context came last year at a conference for educational developers—the field to which many of us at the CITL connect. Prior to the organization president’s address, the conference organizers placed thank-you cards at each table setting, and we were prompted to write a note of gratitude to someone in the organization who had helped, motivated, or inspired us over the years. What followed in the next few hours was moving—hundreds of people walking up to colleagues, handing over a note with a smile, and then walking away. Some people took cards home for colleagues not at the conference, and others asked for extra cards so they could thank more colleagues. I still have a few notes I received on my desk, and they continue to inspire me to be the best colleague I can be, knowing the potential I have to make an impact on others’ work.

In reflecting on my current work in the CITL, I realize there are many people to be grateful for, including campus administrators who are supportive of innovative teaching at IUB, dedicated instructors who give back generously to our community and the CITL, a talented staff of consultants who exhibit amazing intellectual creativity on a daily basis, graduate and undergraduate employees who add valuable perspectives and insights to our work, colleagues in other offices that collaborate with us on projects big and small, and countless support staff that make our work possible by keeping the lights on and the bills paid. And many, many more.

What does gratitude look like to you in your work at Indiana University? Who are you grateful for—who makes your work easier, more rewarding, and more meaningful? Is it the graduate assistant who graded a mountain of assignments for you? The departmental secretary who prepared materials for your class or who got you assigned to that classroom you really prefer? The department colleague who gave you feedback on your syllabus or an assignment? The mentor who provides useful career advice or perspective? The student whose insights made you remember why you love teaching? Or even the barista who hands you that first cup of coffee in the morning?

It’s good for us to remember those people who help us excel in our work at IU, whether their contributions seem profound or mundane. Take some time to reflect on all these people—especially those behind the scenes—and consider finding a way to thank them. If you are willing, add a comment here and tell us about the people who make a difference for you at IU.

Taking the Equity Pulse in the Classroom

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Katie Kearns

Pt. 1: Gender Equity in Student-Teacher Interactions
A special guest post by Katrina Overby, Katie Kearns, and Maureen Biggers

Gender-equitable classroom practices allow an inclusive range of perspectives to be presented, and they can positively impact the individual and collective growth of students. Yet several nationwide studies report that faculty members exhibit subconscious gender-biased behavior that can have a lasting negative psychological impact on women students and can lead to issues of retention. A few of these behaviors include:

male students are called on more frequently;
male students speak longer and more frequently in discussions;
male students receive more eye contact after questions;
male students have their names used more often; and
female students don’t have their points elaborated on as frequently.

Female students in STEM programs at IU have also experienced gender biases from faculty members in the classroom (see quote). ALL instructors are capable of gender biasing; the issue isn’t solely between male instructor and female students.

Understand how the dynamics of your classroom can impact the student’s willingness to actively participate in discussions. Take time this semester to “take the climate pulse” of your classroom to ensure that you are being fair and impartial.

Tip 1: Solicit mid-semester feedback. Have students anonymously answer three specific questions about your teaching style and methods in the classroom. Specially ask questions regarding equitable and inclusive teaching. Encourage them to provide you with honest feedback that will specifically be used to improve their learning experience in your classroom for the remainder of the semester.
Tip 2: Invite a consultant or peer faculty member to observe your classroom. Provide your observer with information you are seeking to discover about your classroom instruction and what goals you have for the semester in terms of equitable teaching. Encourage them to pay attention to specific elements to provide you with critical feedback.
Tip 3: Pay attention to who you call on to participate in discussions and answer questions. Take note of which students talk predominantly and evaluate whether you are giving equal time, acknowledgement, and feedback to women and underrepresented students.
Tip 4: Vary your classroom structure. Find other ways to get students to participate, such as: writing responses in class or online; working in pairs and small groups; and class activities that engage every student in the class. There should be encouragement of collaboration as well as competition and debate.
Tip 5: Increase wait time and encouragement. After posing a question to the class, look around the room to give all students eye contact and give at least five seconds of wait time for responses. Nonverbal encouragement is more likely to result in more equitable participation by women and underrepresented students.
Tip 6: Do not make students the “spokespersons” for their identity groups. Do not assume that they all have the same ideas, experiences or attitudes about topics discussed.
Tip 7: Learn the names of your students and use them. Provide positive encouragement and feedback to all students in your class that will encourage them to make comments.

More resources for inclusive educational practices can be found at:

“Diversity and Inclusion.” Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana University.
“Teaching to Promote Gender Equality.” Center for Teaching Excellence of the University of Virginia.
“Gender Issues in the College Classroom.” Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center of Columbia University.
“The Remarkably Different Answers Men and Women Give When Asked Who’s the Smartest in the Class.” Danielle Paquette. Washington Post, February 16, 2016.
“The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM.” Joan C. Williams. Harvard Business Review, March 24, 2015.

But, I Don’t Know HOW To Do SoTL Research.

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Shannon Sipes

Undertaking a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project is much like undertaking disciplinary research. Like other forms of research, SoTL follows the broad steps of the scientific method. Applied to SoTL, these steps are as follows:

Identify the research question
Design the study
Collect the data
Analyze the data and draw conclusions
Present and publish your SoTL project

Variations arise in the applied rather than empirical nature of SoTL work and the disciplinary perspective of the researcher. Both of these influence what the details of each step look like in any given project. The accompanying infographic provides a sample of questions to consider at each step to help you think through your project.

Let’s explore an example of what this variation might look like. Consider two faculty members who independently ask “Can student engagement in class be raised by requiring pre-class reading responses on the discussion board in Canvas?” One faculty member from English may do a thematic analysis of the discussion responses and have an graduate assistant code the in-class discussion using the same themes. The second faculty member from Statistics may count the number of times a student asks a question or volunteers an answer to large class problems and then compare those responses between students who complete the discussion post versus those who do not. In both of these cases, the research question is the same, but the approach to answer the question is directly impacted by the researcher’s disciplinary research methods and instructional strategies.

So most instructors really do know how to do SoTL research, since the methods grow out of your own discipline. It just takes some time to transfer those methods to the study of your students’ learning.

If you would like to talk through your own SoTL idea or need additional SoTL support, please contact the CITL for an individual consultation. Subscribe to the blog to be sure you don’t miss the next post in this SoTL series. As always, if you have suggestions for SoTL topics you would like to see discussed in the blog, please leave a comment below.

Are Your Students Getting It? Use Quick Check in Canvas Content to Find Out

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Madeleine Gonin

If you are teaching a face-to-face class, you can easily find out whether your students are understanding course concepts. At minimum, you can ask students to self-report their comprehension by raising their hands or by using a classroom assessment technique that asks them to write down the muddiest points of the lecture. Alternatively, you can use student response systems (clickers) to gather more direct evidence of their understanding. But what if you want to gather information about student comprehension outside of class—either as part of a fully online course or in a flipped/hybrid setting?

When students are expected to access course content on their own, how can an instructor know what the students are doing and whether they are understanding the materials? In Canvas, there is no built-in tool for this type of formative assessment, presenting a barrier for online instructors. Canvas Quizzes are fundamentally high-stakes, and cannot be presented in-line with course materials. Canvas Assignments allow more flexibility in how the content is presented, but they can’t provide the quick and automatically-graded feedback that is important for students to understand their progress. To fill this gap, Quick Check was developed here at IU.

What is Quick Check?
Quick Check enables instructors to almost seamlessly integrate frequent low-stakes assessments into course content in Canvas, giving students ongoing feedback on their learning and encouraging engagement with course content. Presenting questions as part of the content can be less intimidating to students than a more formal quiz. Several question types are available, including

Multiple choice
Multiple correct
Matching
Matrix
Text match (i.e., fill in the blank)
Multiple drop-downs
Numerical

These questions can be graded, with grades sent directly to the Canvas gradebook. Instructors can customize the feedback provided to students, pointing out common misconceptions or errors, or referencing content the student might need to review. In addition to grades, instructors can also view detailed information about each student’s performance—e.g., the number of attempts and the results from each one—as well as broader information about the performance of the entire class. This data can enable instructors to help individual students as well as tweak upcoming lectures or assignments for the entire class.

Screen shot showing analysis of student responses — Available information about student responses

Who is using Quick Check?
Ben Motz uses Quick Check in his introductory Psychology class that is fully online with over 300 students. He wanted questions about content to be viewable within the content, so that students are not directed away from the materials that they are currently engaged with. Ben wanted summary statistics about the performance of his whole class on a particular question, as well as detailed information about how each student performed on particular questions. He found that Quick Check was able to do all these things, while being secure, reliable, and fully integrated into Canvas.

Start using Quick Check
If you are interested in using Quick Check, sign up for the pilot or view the overview video. You can view a recorded webinar about the tool in the Teaching Centers’ Kaltura channel.

Thank you to Ben Motz and Sue Hathaway for their assistance with this blog post.