What to do when Students aren't Prepared

No doubt about it, instructors want their students to come to class prepared.  They painstakingly create assignments for students to complete outside of class in order for a better in-class experience full of participation, discussions, and other activities.  But what do you do when your students aren’t prepared?

Obviously, if students are unprepared, it limits what they can do and how deeply they can engage with material during class.  This also affects the ways they connect with other students in the course, sometimes replacing potential connections with barriers as they aren’t able to discuss the material.  This ill-preparedness also challenges you as an instructor.  Do you give a quick lecture to recap the pre-class content so everyone is on the same page?  Do you give the unprepared students an alternative assignment?  Do you remove them from class?  Do you lower their grade?

Most importantly, what can you do to address the challenge of unprepared students so that they don’t continue on the path of not completing pre-class work?  Here are a few recommendations from Barbi Honeycutt, PhD, and writer for Faculty Focus.

Have a conversation.  Before reacting too quickly, take some time to consider what is going on when students come to class unprepared.  Is it the same two or three students each time?  Is it the same group of students?  Do you see a trend?  Are they only unprepared on Mondays, for example?  Are the students resistant?  Are they genuinely worried about completing the assignment?  Keep a record, and then have a conversation with the students.  Ask them to make arrangements to stay after the next class or meet you during your office hours.  Sometimes all it takes is a conversation with a student to find out what’s going on and why they are falling behind.  Then make a plan together to move forward.  Once they realize that you have them on your radar, you may not need to do anything else.

Review your pre-class assignment.  Since you and your students spend time working together in your course, it’s important to recognize that your role is to design the overall learning experience.  That makes their role to come to class ready to participate in the learning experience.  You plan, they engage. You teach by guiding from the sidelines, they learn by doing.  Make sure your assignment requirements are clear and easy to follow.  Consider the time that students will need to commit to the assignment in order to have it completed for class.  Remember that they have other class, extracurricular activities like sports and clubs, and part-time jobs aside from your own course.  Sometimes a simple adjustment to the pre-class assignments is all you need to do in order to improve student preparedness.

Proceed as planned.  Giving a quick lecture to recap the pre-class work means you are setting yourself up to give a quick lecture in every class from now on.  Instead, proceed with your activities as planned.  This will show students who are unprepared that class time will not be derailed by their lack of preparation.  Be sure to show students the value of pre-class work.  Demonstrate how they will be using it, not only during class time, but to prepare for assessments and life beyond the classroom.  Consider how you are recognizing students for their preparation. The unprepared students will see the value of pre-class work and hopefully this will motivate them to be more prepared in the future.  Utilizing small group activities is also a great way to motivate students, since most group members won’t tolerate someone being chronically unprepared.

Re-think participation grades.  If participation grades are already built in to your grading scale, then make “completing pre-class work” a significant part of the participation and final grade.  This provides you with the ability to flexibly incorporate their participation and preparedness into their final grade.  This also promotes student control over their choice in whether or not they come to class prepared.  Including this on your grading policy at the beginning of the semester demonstrates the significance of pre-class work to students, thus requiring students to acknowledge the consequences in terms of how their lack of preparation affects their grade.

Set up a corner.  As suggested by Honeycutt, consider designating a corner in the front of the classroom for students who did not complete their pre-class work to go and finish their assignment during class time.  This approach allows students to catch up, but if the pre-class assignment takes longer to complete than class time, they have to figure out a way to complete the work on their own time.  Plus, they miss out on whatever activities or demonstrations are used for interacting with the material on that day.

Adapted From: Faculty Focus

Written By: Jessica Moser 

How to Deepen Student Learning

Making adjustments to your courses can seem like an overwhelming task.  However, it may only take a few minor adjustments in order to promote a deeper level of learning within your own courses.  According to Tyler Griffin, PhD, associate professor at Brigham Young University, there are six “A” categories to consider in order to broaden student understanding a promote a healthier learning experience within your courses.

Adjustments

Most courses don’t need a complete overhaul, but instead need just a few minor adjustments for a smoother experience.  Consider the common complaints or top frustrations you hear from students year after year, then ask yourself if there are any small things that you could address that would make a big impact.  Where do students tend to struggle?  What can you do to support students through the most difficult sections?  In most cases, it’s not possible to remove every single obstacle to learning, but there are things you can do to better support student learning.

Audience

Begin getting to know your students by asking them to tell you a little bit about their backgrounds, struggles, and successes.  This could be done via a survey at the beginning of the semester or through one-on-one meetings scheduled with you before the semester gets in full swing.  Another important concept to consider is why the students enrolled in your class are taking it.  Is it to fulfill a graduation requirement?  Is it because they have a specific interest in the topic?  Have they heard good things about the course from other students, prompting them to try it out for themselves?

Learning more about your students provides a large ability to conduct your course in a way that is beneficial for the learning of all of your students.  Do they get sleepy if you dim the lights for too long?  Are they easily distracted by technology or other students?  Are there times when they zone out during class that you could choose to implement an active learning technique to keep them engaged?

Applicability

Be sure to consider how your course is going to help students not only succeed in your class, but in their life and careers.  Then, let them in on these things.  Students who are able to see relevance of a course and the content covered within it are more motivated to succeed.  Also do this for each assessment you assign, notifying your students the sort of things you hope this assessment to accomplish for them.

Adaptability

We’ve all heard the classic research that students tend to lose grasp on their concentration after seven to 15 minutes of lecture.  In fact, more recently, research has shown that the time frame for concentration may be even close to three to five minutes.  Delivering bite-sized chunks of information interspersed with appropriate active learning exercises and context builders is one way to keep students interested and engaged throughout the entirety of the class.  Griffin specifically states the importance of using the “three Ex’s” of instruction: explanations, examples (and non-examples), and experiences.

Accentuation

Providing students with the opportunity to process important information in multiple ways over a longer period of time promotes deeper learning and comprehension.  Therefore, since students are most apt to accept cramming as an inevitable way of studying, explain and demonstrate other more effective studying techniques like exposing crucial information in steps and revisiting it often to build upon their knowledge about it.  This can lead to deeper understanding and overall better comprehension of curriculum.  Griffin suggests making sure students are exposed to critical items more than once or twice in your classes for optimum retention.

Assessments

Students often see course content as a bunch of disjointed units rather than information that builds upon itself over time. Therefore, when designing your course and course assessments, consider the big picture that you’d like your students to leave the course with.  Create relevant, increasingly complex assessments in order to help them demonstrate the ways in which information continues to build upward and outward into a broader and deeper understanding of material.

Adapted From: Faculty Focus

Written By: Jessica Moser 

Using Learning Logs in the College Classroom

It’s no question that reflection is an important element in the learning process.  In order to move forward utilizing newly-learned information, knowledge has to be moved from working to long-term memory.  Reflection is a great tool to use in order to make this transfer take place.

Thus, learning logs.  Kadriye O. Lewis, a professor of pediatrics at the UKMC School of Medicine uses learning logs in order to promote student reflection in her online courses.  Essentially, a learning log is a journal-entry based learning tool that students are asked to fill out after each section of a course.  In these logs, students write about things like:

• What they learned

• What they studied

• What struggles they faced

• What they would like to know more about

• What they would like help with

• What their plans are for future work in the course

• What experiences they have had that relate directly to the discussion topic

Naturally, these are only a few suggestions and learning logs can be utilized in a variety of different ways.  Regardless of what prompt students are asked to consider, the purpose of the log is to strengthen student comprehension and retention of information through reflection on their learning experiences.  These kinds of reflections have been shown to improve students’ metacognitive ability to self-monitor their own learning, and thus, improve learning itself through this process.  Students are involved in a more active way of learning and are asked to think about the content in a deeper and practical way.

Not to mention, learning logs provide a great way for teachers to get to know their students.  Since students are writing about their learning processes through a specific section of the course, instructors are able to use this information in order to understand each student’s comprehension of the material and offer clarification where needed.  This is especially helpful in online communities where student/teacher interaction tends to be considerably lower than face-to-face courses.

Adapted from: Magna Publications

Written By: Jessica Moser 

Tips for Teaching Hybrid Courses

Hybrid or blended courses are defined as using the web for interacting (not just posting).  Courses are considered to be truly hybrid if the amount of online work falls anywhere between 30-70%.  There are several pros to implementing hybrid courses within your teaching curriculum, but there are challenges with employing them as well.

The first thing an instructor must consider when making the switch to hybrid is which material to present online vs. which material to present face to face.  This means considering how you are going to deliver lectures, discussion activities, projects, and homework assignments.  If this sounds daunting, never fear!  The following tips from instructors who have mastered the art of hybrid courses can help. 

1. Keep time frame in mind.  Remember that you’ll have to create or revise material to make it web-friendly, and you might have to take time to learn the ins and outs of the system you’ll be using.
2. Be sure to consider your students.  What sort of needs and skills do they have that will enhance their use of the hybrid course material?  What sorts of struggles or obstacles might they face with online material?
3. Utilize D2L for a streamlined and cohesive collection of information.  Students are going to use D2L a lot throughout their time spent at the university, so even if you are teaching an intro course with mostly freshmen, it’s still a good idea to use the D2L system so that students get used to using it as much as possible.  Plus, if you aren’t teaching classes with high freshmen populations, your students will already have the experience they need in order to work with D2L for your course.
4. As it goes with all elements of teaching, don’t try to recreate the wheel.  Reuse the materials you have already created, or make adjustments to them to utilize them as online materials as well.
5. Prepare for a longer amount of your time to be spent online.
6. Make sure to explain to students what your online expectations are during an in-class session.  This provides ample opportunity for walk-through demonstrations and questions.
7. Consider where lecture material best fits into your curriculum.  Would your course benefit from more in-class activity time and small group discussions?  Record your lectures ahead of time and post them online for students to watch before attending class.  (More information on this under the “Flipped Classroom” tag.) Would you like for students to witness your lectures face to face?  Utilize the online portion of your course for discussion and supportive readings or case studies.
8. Have students work collaboratively online.  This is the most important thing to remember when creating a hybrid course.  Students shouldn’t only use the online portion of the course to post things and forget about them.  They should be interacting with one another, discussing the elements of the subject area, and working through issues that they might be faced with concerning the material.
9. Even though your students will be working in two different environments for your course, don't expect them to complete twice the amount of work. 
10. Keep the creativity flowing!  Just because you will no longer be implementing certain elements of your course face-to-face any longer doesn't meant you have to get rid of the really intriguing and thought-provoking activities you have done in the past.  Hybrid courses just mean reconsidering how you can best implement those activities for stronger learning experiences.

Written By: Jessica Moser

What's with the Flip? An Overview on Flipped Classrooms

Podcasts, videos, live streaming, – our world is engulfed in ways to send and obtain information.  So, the question on many college teacher’s minds is, why not utilize it?

Hence the birth of flipping classrooms, a way for teachers to provide lecture information to students in new ways outside of the classroom.  That’s right, lectures would take place outside of class time, freeing up the few hours a week you have with students to complete hands-on activities, involving them first-hand in their learning.

Flipping a classroom can be done by following these easy steps:

Plan: Decide on a lesson to flip and outline key learning outcomes to put together a rough plan.

Record: Instead of teaching your lesson as usual, record a video or podcast of your lecture.  Make sure  your lesson contains all the elements you would have if you were lecturing in person.  Make it interesting and engaging to watch and listen to.

Share: Share the video with your students and explain that its content will be discussed and used in class.

Group: Consider implementing discussion groups in your class in order to get students working with the topics for that day.  Give each group a task and a goal to work towards.

Regroup: Reconvene as a large group to share findings that students have discovered through their discussions.  Ask questions, offer opinions, and encourage discussion.

Then, Review, Revise, and Repeat!

While you might be thinking, “Well, that sounds great! Let’s do this!”  I do have to caution you on some of the issues that you might face if you do decide to give flipping a try.

Firstly, it requires a lot of extra preparation on your end.  Teachers have to set aside extra time in order to record, edit (if need be), and upload videos or podcasts of their lectures for student access, or finding supplementary materials and activities for students to work on outside of regular class time.  It is recommended that you don’t include your entire lecture in one video, but instead upload separate videos on each key term you’re covering so students may easily go back and re-watch specific content if they are confused or have questions.

Another thing to be aware of is the issue that students might have adjusting to the idea of a flipped classroom.  Because the concept of a class time used for lecture has been ingrained in their expectations, students might resist the change--questioning why they attend class at all.  You are also entrusting a large responsibility to them, trusting that they will take the time to watch or listen to your lectures outside of class.  And if students do complete the lectures outside of class, they might also believe that they don't need to attend class for the hands-on/activity-based portion.  Therefore, it's important for your to show research on how effective flipped classrooms can be when students put the effort forth.  Click here for 10 published results supporting the benefits of flipped learning.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Got a Minute? The Pros of One-Minute Papers

Looking for a quick and simple way to collect written feedback from students?  Try implementing the minute-paper!

What is a minute-paper?

Designed by Berkeley physics professor Charles Schwartz, a minute-paper is actually exactly as it sounds: a paper that you ask students to write in just a minute or two.  Instructors provide a question or two that is focused on class content that has been discussed or assigned, the students hand in their papers before leaving class for the day, and the instructor then has written feedback from students providing insight on student understanding, confusion, and active listening.  Because minute papers are quick to administer and easy to analyze, they are perfect for use in large classes.

When can I use the minute paper?

Really any time during the class period is a good time for minute papers.  You might start the class off with a question about what they thought was the most significant point in the assigned reading for class that day.  You could take a break in the middle of class for students to critically think about the content you’d been discussing.  Some instructors like to end class with minute papers to gauge overall student understanding on the lecture from that day.  Whenever you choose to implement minute papers, they all serve the same purpose—to seal ideas in students’ minds, provide you with an idea of where they are in their learning, and help them develop critical thinking skills.

What should the questions look like?

Your questions can be a large majority of things.  You might choose to keep your questions the same each time you assign a minute paper, like these:

1)      What is the most significant thing you learned today?

2)      What question is uppermost in our minds at the end of today’s session?

Or they could be more content-specific, like these:

1)      Explain the relationship you witnessed between today’s readings and the readings we discussed last week.

2)      We’ve just talked about the scientific flaws in Jurassic Park III.  Write for one minute on which you consider to be the most serious.

Or they could have some fun with them by using questions like these:

1)      You are going to make a movie of Galileo.  Cast the major characters using contemporary actors.  Provide a two or three sentence rationale for your casting choices.

2)      Dear Abby: My high school teacher said I could never use “I” in an essay.  Now I’m at UW-Eau Claire and I’m being told the most horrible things, like I can use “I” if it’s appropriate.  What should I do?  Is that true?  And if so, when is it appropriate?  Signed, “I” am confused in Eau Claire”

Are there other perks to using one-minute papers?

Yes!  If you choose to have students include their names on their papers, you can also use these as attendance trackers.  Otherwise, it’s perfectly acceptable for answers to remain completely anonymous—often an encouraging aspect for introverted students.  You can have students create tables, graphs, or other graphics in place of written answers is you prefer.  Plus, according to several studies at universities including Berkeley, Indiana, and Nebraska-Lincoln, students consistently find the use of minute papers fun and engaging.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Adapted from: Berkeley University 

Teaching Large Classes: Pre-Class Assignments

Time flies when you’re having fun.  Maybe this phrase is to blame when you realize week after week that your classes have flown by, and you didn’t have nearly as much time as you thought you would.  And if that weren’t troublesome enough, this challenge only increases with the number of students per class, forcing professors and students alike to feel rushed through material.

Professors at Vanderbilt university propose a way to alleviate these time constraint stresses by getting students engaged in class material outside of scheduled class hours, and then using in-class hours for discussion, collaboration, and debates.  Here's how they do it.

Students are assigned a pre-class bit of homework (much like the already are in most classes).  These homework assignments are more about involving students in contemplating the content rather than formulating structured responses, so the style of responses may vary throughout the semester.  Some examples of this pre-class homework are:

• Watching a video

• Responding to a news article

• Developing an argument based on a reading

• Choosing a quote from a reading that stood out to them

• Reading a case study

• Listening to a podcast

Even though the design of this pre-class work can look different each time, the goal is always to get students to begin thinking critically about the content on an individual level before arriving for class. 

Once class time does roll around, your students will have prepared an understanding of the content you will be covering.  It is suggested that you take some time to explain to students that being prepared for class includes: being able to make claims about the reading and use examples to back up those claims, make connections between the things they've read about and their own experiences, and be able to work with the text in a knowledgeable and insightful way.  (Asking them to create lists, annotate their texts, or write a summary of their arguments are all useful ways for them to prepare.)

Vanderbilt professors then utilize these developed ideas by arranging students into groups of no more than six students.  Ask your groups of students to discuss the responses that they came up with on an individual basis about the homework, and consider how their individual responses compare to one another.  You might even choose to assign another shorter reading for them to delve into as a group in order to stir up some new ideas.

Later, choose groups to share what they discussed concerning the main elements of class that day.  This may spike mutual agreement over a text, but it could also transform into a debate of ideas between class members, forcing them to decide on ways to structure their argument based on facts and ideas they have constructed themselves from the course material.

It's recommended to alternate using pre-class homework strategies like this one and regular lecture class days on a weekly basis so that students are able to interact directly with the material they are learning, and still gain insight through direct instruction.  Or, a daily combination of pre-class work alongside interactive lecture would work just as well.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Teaching Large Classes: Using the Exit Ticket Strategy

Due to the vast amount of students in large class settings, many professors face the same challenge of how to gauge what your students have taken away from a particular session.  Did they truly understand the main ideas of the lecture?  Did they have any questions that weren't answered?  These issues can be eased through the use of exit ticket strategies

An exit ticket is something each student hands in before leaving at the end of class.  On it, students might answer a question, state the main point of the lecture, or ask a question that they have about the content that had been covered.  The ticket can be a note card, a scrap of notebook paper, or a sticky note.  The only real requirement of the ticket itself is that it must be able to serve as a way for students to convey a message to the professor.

Here are some ways to utilize an exit ticket within your class:

1. Ask students to take the last few minutes of class to write about what they believed was the most important point in class that day.

2. Have students write a question they still have regarding the material.

3. Ask students to answer a specific question that you come up with regarding the material that was covered in class that day.

After this has been completed, simply provide a space for students to hand in or drop off their exit tickets before they leave, and viola!  You have instant feedback on your most recent lecture.

This strategy enables you to reinforce concepts that were confusing to students, and to see what main concepts students left class knowing.

Other ways to include the exit ticket strategy include:

• Requiring post-class discussion posts on D2L to see if students have questions about the content covered in class each day.
• Instead of handing in their tickets, students could use the last few minutes of class to discuss the things they wrote about on their cards with their peers around them.  Often, this leads to clarification through discussion with each other.
• Exit tickets don't necessarily need to used at the end of class.  If you'd like to implement them at the beginning or middle to evoke discussion or problem-solving, go for it!

 Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser