This is another of those “information supercollider” sort of posts, where a few different things that crossed my feeds seem to me to be in conversation with one another in ways that I find interesting. The first was a Twitter thread from Brian Skinner about “active learning” in which he worries that it can provide cover for a particular kind of bad teaching:
(Click through to read the whole thing; it’s worth the time.) This prompted a bunch of interesting responses, and also a tweet thread from me. Brian also followed up to one of these response threads later.
My take off from this, fleshed out a tiny bit from the thread two links back, is that “active learning” techniques are a tool to be used by people who are teaching, but the effectiveness of that tool is going to vary from situation to situation, and from user to user. That’s why there’s a whole wide range of stuff that fits under the “active learning” umbrella— clicker questions, “just-in-time” teaching, flipped classes, inquiry based classes, etc.— after decades of education research. Any one of these methods can produce big learning gains, but won’t necessarily work in any particular class because getting there requires a significant level of buy-in from both the faculty teaching the course and the students taking it.
On the faculty side, that buy-in requires a certain level of comfort with the technique being used, only some of which is rooted in knowledge of the methods and practices as defined by the people who developed the method. A big piece of it is going to be personal— what kinds of things are the individual faculty who have to use the method comfortable doing. That’s going to vary a lot from person to person, and sometimes a given technique will just not be a good fit for a particular professor.
To make this simultaneously more personal and more vague, when I was starting out at Union, I didn’t have a lot of classroom teaching experience, so I went around to all my new colleagues and asked their advice on what to do, and then tried to incorporate that advice. One colleague in particular told me that in the intro classes, he always made a point of “breaking the fourth wall” by moving out away from the blackboard into the middle of the class, getting closer to the students.
I gave this a try, but quickly abandoned it, because it was a disaster. Not for any fundamental flaw in the technique, but because he and I are very different people— he’s below average height for a man, and I’m two-and-a-bit standard deviations above, and heavy to boot. When he walked out into the room of seated students while lecturing, it seemed friendly and approachable; when I did it, I loomed in a way that seemed terrifying. I noticed students physically cowering when I’d draw near their seats while speaking, and as a result made the tactical decision to stay back by the board, a safe distance away.
Without getting too deeply into the merits of specific active learning methods, I think some similar things come into play. Different faculty will have different personalities and aptitudes, and some of them may not find particular teaching techniques congenial enough to have success with. There’s almost certainly some form of more-engaging teaching approach that will be useful, though, so good teaching at scale will involve a bit of picking and choosing, mixing and matching, to let individual faculty adapt to what works best for them.
This also requires buy-in on the student side, of course— nothing crushes an attempt at active learning pedagogy more effectively than a group of students who resolutely refuse to engage at all. Sometimes this reflects stubbornness or misplaced expectations about what teaching “should” be; other times it’s about individual factors they can’t necessarily control, more like the size mismatch problem I had back in the day. That’s the second of the things that collided in my feed, in the form of this Inside Higher Ed piece about an over-the-top negative reaction to an active learning technique in a writing course. The issue in this case has to do with students who feel overextended, and experience the requirement to actively engage during class time as an additional burden.
There’s something to this, and it’s definitely an obstacle to getting the student buy-in needed to make active classes work well. The author comes around to seeing this as an equity issue (because in 2023 everything is an equity issue), but that seems a little excessive to me. I’m not without sympathy for the student side of this— I have a visceral negative reaction any time I show up to a faculty event and find that I’m expected to do “active learning” style things rather than simply listening to a presentation, for more or less the same reason. At the same time, though, the people who are putting these things on, like the faculty teaching a curse, have good and valid reasons for doing it that way, and the fact that I’m annoyed by “free writing” and “breakout groups” doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be used by people who find them useful.
There’s definitely a strong argument here for cutting students some slack when it comes to participation, and I think there’s maybe a case for offering course options to suit different styles, and clearly labeling the different offerings. But at the same time, I think it’s entirely reasonable to require students to adjust to the faculty’s professional judgement about what how best to run their classes. Not every class will work for every student, in the end, but that’s part of life.
Which brings around the third piece, a “Dean Dad” column about using “secret shoppers” to investigate campus processes, which includes a couple of examples relating to naming of things, one of which has become very familiar:
Say what you will about for-profits, but when I worked at one I was struck by the differences in language. The office most colleges called the bursar was instead called the cashier. Students who were the first in the family to attend college had probably never even heard of a bursar before, but everyone knows what a cashier is. That’s the person you go to in order to pay. It had deans, but it didn’t have a provost. For folks who work on campuses, if you get a chance, ask a group of first-year students how many of them know what a provost is. It’s just not a word that exists in most contexts.
A few years ago, a faculty colleague wrote about the differences in student perceptions when she started calling office hours “student hours.” For someone from outside higher education, “office hours” could mean time when someone is available, or it could mean time when they’re supposed to be left alone to do whatever it is that they do in there. But “student hours” are clearly intended for students. A simple name change made the practice more legible to students who had never seen the term before.
Again, this is not without merit, and the change from “office hours” to “student hours” or whatever is pretty trivial. At the same time, though, I wonder if this kind of push isn’t doing students a disservice in the long term.
That is, basically every established organization or industry is going to have some sort of idiosyncracies in their operation— roles given quirky names, or non-obvious bits of jargon. Navigating these is an essential skill for functioning in the world, both as an employee and as a customer, and one of the first places young people encounter this is in the context of college. The concept of “office hours” was new to me when I got to college— I didn’t go to high school in a place that had regular outside-of-class times to meet with teachers— but it wasn’t all that hard to figure out what the term meant. “Bursar” likewise— it’s an unfamiliar word, but not that difficult to figure out from context.
And figuring things out from context is a useful life skill. I don’t think that removing any one of these minor linguistic obstacles is going to be the thing that leads to a comprehensive failure to impart that lesson, but at the same time, I’m not convinced that the benefit of removing any one of them is all that great, either. Again, there’s absolutely a case here for extending a considerable amount of grace to students who may stumble on one or another of these, and especially for building the sort of community that helps people navigate through these. But at some level, I think it’s reasonable and even beneficial to expect students to navigate a bit of unfamiliar territory and terminology in the context of college education more generally.
But then, maybe that puts me in the role of one of those lazy and cynical professors Brian was complaining about back at the beginning, doing a bad job and blaming it on “active learning.” So, you know, it all comes back around, and everything fits together seamlessly…
So, yeah, that’s some pretty typical academic wibbling. If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:
If you feel so moved, the comments will be open: