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 

Using Online Writing Platforms

Online writing is becoming more and more prevalent as computers take hold of our pens and paper, making them seemingly disappear.  Whether spending time on social media, carefully crafting words of only 140 characters or less, or emailing home to let their parents know they are surviving and have even been to the grocery store this month, students are no doubt using online spaces to communicate and project their own thoughts and ideas.

With this established norm, it only makes sense to consider how best to utilize discussion boards, social media, and other online writing platforms to further extend the use of technology within your courses, as well as strengthen comprehension and conversation on topics with your students.

Before jumping headlong into cyberspace, consider the following elements that will no doubt be included in your course along with blogs, discussion boards, and the like.

First, structure your grading so that online writing is built in.  Adding online writing requirements into your grading structure not only stresses the participation in the format, but also the importance that it will contribute to the learning within your course.

Second, consider and acknowledge the time that will be spent on online writing within your course.  Just because online writing can be approached with a sense of ease and convenience doesn’t mean that it won’t add to the work load of your students.  Consider what other elements in your course to drop or modify in order to make time for the addition of an online component rather than simply tacking it on.

Third, build recognizable connections between online writing and other course content or activities.  Students respond well when they are able to make connections between the tasks they are asked to complete and other broader elements of the course.  Make it clear how they should treat this online space and that they should look at it as an extension to the course rather than a separate element.

Generally, I think you will find that the majority of students are comfortable with digital technologies, even with platforms that they haven’t used previously.  Therefore, feel free to ask students to consider the technology as a learning process in and of itself, as you work together in order to create a sustainable way to continue and strengthen learning conversations outside of the classroom.  Allowing students a way to access further discussion and information regarding class themes and concepts will allow them to be able to see how these aspects can fit into their everyday lives, even after graduating from your course or the university.

For a list of current online writing platforms with explanations, click here. 

Adapted from: Vanderbilt University

Written By: Jessica Moser

 

Five Better Practice Tips for Spicing Things Up

Daily grind of teaching got you down?  Finding it difficult to put spring break behind you?  Try these five teaching practices by Roben Torosyan to improve outcomes and liven up your classes.

Wait—Most teachers know that they should wait after asking a question in class, but they don’t accurately perceive how long they wait.  Often, teachers wait less than a second before calling on someone, pacing nervously, or rephrasing the question.  Consciously taking the time to wait three to five seconds will allow students adequate time to speak up, answer more fully, and ask better questions themselves.

Kick-start your opening; shout before you walk out—Be sure to start and end your classes with something memorable.  Drama and action can motivate learning in class and after it’s over.  Kick-start your opening with an especially dramatic example, an unobvious questions, the answer to a difficult homework problem, a relevant cartoon, or some intriguing background music.  End by having students shout out a one-word takeaway.  Or ask the question you’ll start the next class with.

Do less and do it more deeply—Imagine a list of 12 learning objectives.  Next, imagine that you need to rate each as essential, important, or of minor importance.  Now, what if you were challenged a little more to select no more than five objectives as essential and important?  Most faculty would find this difficult to do, but it is a significant thing to consider when creating your own curriculum.  With doing more things comes spending less time on each thing.  Therefore, consider the fact that each daily plan should include no more than three to five vital takeaways that students will understand, be able to do, or think differently about.

Grade smarter, not just harder—It’s no question that a large portion of an instructor’s time is spent grading.  They take the time to write comments only to discover that students continue to make the same mistakes in future assignments.  Instead, try returning problem-sets marked only right or wrong and have students find and correct their errors before points are assigned for work.  Only mark one page of a draft, noting the problems that students can look for in the rest of their paper.  Challenge students to correct their mistakes for further revisions.  Offer more clarifying feedback.  Rather than mentioning that something is “unclear,” guide the student to “expand, explain, and give examples.”  Lead and end critical comments with strengths.

Mix it up—It’s an easy thing to find yourself falling into ruts and using the same activities over and over.  Consider switching up your usual “think/pair/share” exercise with a small group activity or a large group debate.  Don’t just mix up activities, but also presentation modes (visual, aural, kinetic) so that the content comes to students in a variety of different ways.

Adapted from: Roben Torosyan for Magna Publications

By: Jessica Moser 

Staying Relevant

“Why do I need to know this?  Why are we doing this?  Why are we spending so much time on this?”

Students sometimes struggle to see the connection between class content and activities of a course and the ways in which it can remain relevant in their future lives.  This leads to them wonder about, or sometimes even question aloud, what the purpose of an activity serves.  Research also confirms that perceived relevance is a critical factor in maintaining student interest and motivation and contributes to higher student ratings on course evaluations.

In order to keep relevance strong in your course, consider implementing the following three practices.

1. Regularly share and discuss the learning outcomes of the course.
   Often times, course learning outcomes appear once on syllabi, and then are never referenced or heard from again.  Reiterating outcomes help clarify what students will know and do when they complete the course, keeping them on track from completing assignments and participating in class.  However, don’t stop at just listing the outcomes, discuss the relevance of these outcomes with your students.  This discussion stresses the need to know why the knowledge and skills listed as learning objectives will come into play in students’ future lives, helping to keep them motivated.
   
   
2. Clearly tie learning outcomes to the required activities and assignments.
   Once you’ve had the discussion about the importance of the learning objectives you’ve set for the course, it’s important for you to make direct ties to them when assigning new work.  Often times, faculty may think that the links between learning outcomes and activities are obvious to students, but that’s not always a valid assumption.  Each assignment should be justified by answering questions like, “How does this assignment relate to the course outcomes? How will this assignment help fulfill them? What should the student know and be able to do after completing the assignment? Why was this particular assignment chosen to achieve the learning outcomes?”  When students understand what the assignments are helping them accomplish, they see the assignments’ utility and find the work more meaningful.
   
   
3. Orient students at the beginning of each class period by discussing the “What, Why, and How” of that day.
   Some instructors already help establish each class by providing an outline of the day’s material for students to follow along with.  This is a great way for students to stay on track, but is even more effective if students are able to place the items on the agenda into the context of their lives.  Try adding a brief explanation of the what, why, and how of each course to get students on track, motivate them, and help keep each day’s content specifically relevant.

What?: What are we doing in class today?  What questions will we try to answer?  What concepts will we address?  What activities will we do?

Why?: Why are we studying this?  How are today’s content and activities tied to the       course learning outcomes?  What should I know or be able to do after today’s class?      How can the information and skills be used in everyday life?

How?: How are we going to address the content?  Will we use lectures?  Activities? Discussions? How will different learning styles be accommodated?

Keeping students in the loop as to the value, purpose, and procedures for course activities helps maintain a healthy level of relevance within your courses.

Adapted From: Jeff Fox for Magna Publications

By: Jessica Moser 

A Note-Taking Refresher

Thinking back, I can’t even begin to count how many times I was reminded as a student that taking good notes involved thought.  I remember teachers putting up PowerPoint presentations and warning us that if we simply record what is written on each slide word-for-word we would never truly understand the content.  Despite this, we were rarely told why or shown ways to improve note-taking as an approach to learning.

What students often don’t realize is that taking notes requires strategy, organization, and personal connections.  Taking notes is a way for students to actively listen and engage with the material that is being presented.  This is especially true if students attempt to put what the instructor says into their own words.  Among the piles of research on note-taking, essentially the same message can be found: students need to be working with, writing down, or keying in this information for themselves in order to gain the deepest form of understanding.

Therefore, rather than providing all information needed on slides for students, consider including skeletal concepts for them to build off of themselves.  List some key words (especially those that are difficult to spell), charts, tables, graphs, diagrams, and links to other references or websites.  That way, when posting these presentations online after class, students can still review these basic notes without fully relying on them as a singular source of information.

There is a chance that students will struggle with these notes, claiming that they are too vague or don’t contain enough information for them to remember anything.  If this happens, encourage them to develop note-taking skills and motivate them to take notes by showing them the value of a good set of notes.

Need some help on where to start?  Here are some short activities that you can use with your students:

• When you say something important, provide students with a slightly elongated time to write it down (word for word if they like).  Then ask them to take a moment or two and look at what they’ve written and write it again in their own words.  Studies show taking time to write things in your own word strengthens understanding and overall retention of information.

• Usually, students are focused on listening for main points and jotting down as little as possible to stay on track with the tempo of the lecture.  After a larger chunk of information, provide students with a few moments, encouraging them to look back on what they’ve written and add more if their understanding of the concept has increased.  Ask probing questions like, “Where do you need more information?” or “What’s the most important thing you’ve got in your notes on this topic?”

• Start off your class by asking a question students should be able to answer using their notes from the previous class.  What do they have written that relates to that question?  Ask them to talk to the person sitting next to them about what they have in their notes on the topic.  Then provide them with the opportunity to revise or add to their notes if needed.

• A similar activity can be done when you are debriefing an exam.  Ask students to spend some time looking through their notes concerning a question that a lot of students missed on the exam.  If they have a hard time locating the information, slowly begin giving them hints like what date the content was covered.  Do they have the content they needed in that area?  What should they have written down?

• Don’t spend too much time telling students how to use their notes.  Remember that each student learns differently and while one technique may work really well for some students, it could cause great frustration for others.  Instead, consider asking questions on how students utilize their notes before taking an exam.  Ask questions like: “What’s gained by rewriting your notes?” “Is it valuable to highlight, underline, or otherwise mark key ideas in your notes?” “Should you compare notes with somebody else in the course?” “Do you use your class notes when you’re reading the text?  Should you?” “How often should you be looking at your notes?”

• Consider the idea of letting students use their notes during a quiz.  It doesn’t have to be all or nothing—you might only let them use them for one quiz, or for only a few minutes on each quiz.  Providing students with the possibility of using notes will likely motivate more note-taking, which in turn, means more listening and engaging with the material.  It also provides students with a realistic approach to learning as in most careers, professionals do have access to information when they are preparing answers.

Adapted from: Magna Publications

Written By: Jessica Moser

Student Experiences: A Great Learning Tool

By the time I was seventeen, I had been on two separate trips to rural Mexico where I worked in week-long intervals building houses, digging irrigation ditches, assembling concrete walls, and pouring roofs.  I stayed with Mexican families, sat at their dinner tables, slept on their living room floors, and I learned to speak conversational Spanish faster than I ever would have thought possible.

There is no question in my mind that these experiences have shaped my life in an extreme way.  I learned more about the world than I ever had living in a small town in central Wisconsin.  These experiences meant I was exposed to racism and poverty, cultural differences and family dynamics, ethics and morals that were different from my own.

With this came a large variety of instances in which I was able to draw on my time in Mexico and the things I was exposed to there to think more deeply about the world in new and interesting ways.  While reading a novel for a literature course, completing a purification experiment in chemistry, or sitting in a psychology course, discussing theories of behavior, I could think back and relate my experience to the content of the course.  When asked to share my own experiences and opinions related to things, I was not only able to help strengthen connections I made personally using these stories, but then illustrate those real-world connections for other students in the course.  (And they did the same for me!)  It became a lot easier to understand a new concept when I could see it fit together with something I had experienced first-hand.

Asking students to draw on their experiences and express their opinions provides opportunities for learning that can deepen understanding and involve collaboration.  Setting up discussion boards or allowing time for personal sharing in relation to a prompt provides pathways for students to consider that they may have otherwise overlooked.  These pathways equivocate to personalized learning that requires little to no extra effort for you, but that has a big impact on student retention and understanding.

Provide students with plenty of opportunities to recall their own experiences and discuss them with classmates or yourself.  You may be amazed at the sort of connections that can be made.

Written By: Jessica Moser

Cultivating Learning Relationships

Take a moment and consider who your best teachers were growing up.  Now, list the qualities that made you think of them in such a positive way.  What made your list?  Knowledgeable?  Caring?  Attentive?  Kind?

When asked this question, most people tend to answer in similar ways.  Your own list might include “cared for me as a person” or “actively interested in my learning” as traits you admired in your best teachers, and you aren't alone!  These qualities are among the most common when people are asked to consider what they deem significant about their teachers. 

 

In fact, according to a study completed in 2011, when 17,000 students were asked to list the qualities of an effective teacher, “respectful” and “responsive” topped their lists.  Not surprisingly, students responded best to teachers who exhibited these characteristics and seemed to genuinely care about their success.  But what are the best ways to show students that you care about their learning?

John Orlando, the associate director of training at Northcentral University, offers some helpful tips for developing learning-centered relationships with your students.

An Emphasis on Feedback

Firstly, research has proven time and time again that students crave feedback on their work.  They look for written feedback that tells them what could use work, and then also how to make the best improvements.  Providing this sort of feedback rather than a laundry list of things that their work did or didn’t have is much more beneficial for them as well as for yourself.  Taking the time to provide this sort of feedback shows just how much you care about their work and efforts as a learner, and then offers them ways to improve for the future.  What must the student know and be able to do in order to improve their work?  Tell them.

Why are we doing this?

It’s the age-old question that students begin wondering as early as elementary school.  Take some time in your courses to explain why the skills you are teaching are important.  “It will be on the test” isn’t motivation enough for students to actively involve themselves in the class.  Since motivation is generated by seeing value in a task beyond the grade scale, provide the information required for students to understand what the big picture is and how it will benefit them in the long run.

Just Checking In

Take the opportunity to periodically check in on your students and ask them how the course is going for them.  Ask them to write a paragraph about how they think they’re doing, whether or not they are learning the material, and what struggles they’re experiencing.  This interest in student progress encourages students to focus on their understanding of the class material and to come to you for help when they need it.  Doing this two or three times during a course can improve learning, attitude, and motivation.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Adapted from: Faculty Focus (Magna Publications)

Some Notes on Breathing

Recently, Cindy Albert, a wonderful CETL staff member whom many of you already know, brought an article to my attention that had been published to the Chronicle Vitae.  In this article, Aimee Morrison, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, wrote about her comparative experiences between being a yoga instructor and being a university professor.  This article, entitled “Let It Breathe” made several good points about teaching to the fullest with a ‘less is more’ attitude.

Morrison writes about her experiences as a yoga instructor and her reminders to her students to take time to breathe when they are struggling with a particular pose or are falling out of sync with their stances.  She states, “At the front of the university classroom, by contrast, I am the one who sometimes needs to be reminded to breathe.”

Morrison reflects on her stance as a teacher, the ways in which she was used to preparing classes by over-assigning projects, papers, or reading assignments.  She used to feel that the more she assigned, the less likely she would run out of material to discuss.  She filled empty lecture pauses with more handouts, PowerPoint slides, or explanations than were necessary, and watched as her students began to check out during class, much too consumed with the overwhelming amount of work load they had been assigned to think about much else.

“It didn’t work,” she stated in reflection.  “I was exhausted and tense, and my students were baffled and overwhelmed. […] No one had room to breathe.”  Morrison realized that she needed to be willing to take time in her university courses to become a more present teacher.  One who was involved in the learning process of her classes with her students, utilizing a more mindful way of teaching rather than keeping everyone busy. 

It’s been an interesting transition for Morrison, but the positive results from these changes can’t be overlooked.  “Sometimes we follow a tangent, or we might spend 20 minutes working through one important paragraph in one important article.  Class time finally became student-centered time, and students responded by being more interested and more active.”

It's beneficial to consider Morrison's technique, whether you are a yoga-lover or not, for your own classes.  Think about the ways that you've been implementing workloads, whether your lectures are student-based, and what you can do to more actively involve real participation and thoughtful engagement from your students--not just a scrabbling for answers or spouting off statements read from the hundred pages of reading they'd been assigned.  Simply focus on the centered main ideas you'd like your students to gain from their involvement in your class, and remember to breathe.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Why Frequent Exams are Better

Implementing exams throughout courses is a necessary evil, and it has been widely accepted by students and instructors alike that the times of midterms and finals are times of panic and disarray.  However, this anxiety might be less about the fact that students are required to take a test and more about the lack of test-taking they’ve experienced previously in the class.

In 2007, a study was completed in which a control group was set to have students only complete two midterm exams and a cumulative final throughout the semester.  This was in turn compared to an experimental group that required the completion of biweekly exams (six in total) as well as the same cumulative final as the control group.  The findings from this study proved very interesting indeed.

Students a part of the experimental group with biweekly exams scored, on average, about 10 percentage points (or one letter grade) higher on exams throughout the semester.  Plus, they scored about 15 percentage points higher on the final than students in the control group.

This wasn’t the only thing that had shown to be different between these two groups.  The control group experienced a decline in student enrollment when more than 11 percent of the students withdrew from the course.  Not a single student withdrew from the experimental section.  The improvement frequent exams made on the course was also seen in course ratings, as students who were a part of the experimental group rated the course and instructor higher overall in each.  In fact, 71 percent of students in the control group rated their instructor as “one of the best” they’ve had, vs. just a 36% rating from the control group.  (Note that both of these courses were taught by the same professor.)

So why was so much improvement seen between these two groups?  What is it about frequent exams that make the class more valuable to students?

Students are consistently exposed to information.  This paired with less material to learn at a time for the biweekly exams helped contribute to overall retention and understanding of course material.  This also amounted to receiving feedback more frequently and earlier on in the semester, allowing students to gauge what they should change about their learning habits in order to improve their scores.

Tip Provided By: Jessica Moser

Myers, C.B., and Myers, S.M. (2007). Assessing assessments: The effects of two exam formats on course achievement and evaluation. Innovative Higher Education, 31, 227–236.