Empathy and Teaching

TJ Dumansky

In the Innovations blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Kahlenberg asked: “In higher education, should colleges affirmatively seek to teach students empathy or is doing so inappropriate because it is unrelated to academic achievement and might be overtly political?”[1]  His question responds to a study by a team of social psychologists that suggests that empathy among college students is declining.[2]  The two aspects of empathy that the study identifies as exhibiting the greatest decline are “perspective taking” or “the ability to imagine others’ point of view,” and “empathic concern” or the “tendency to feel and respond to others’ emotions.”[3] 

I teach in the Religious Studies department and in the Divinity School at Yale, and so I am often faced with questions about how students’ desire and ability to understand one another’s diverse religious experiences impacts their learning.  However, I think that the importance of empathy extends to any discipline, given that diversity in terms of economics, race, gender and ethnicity impacts learning in any classroom (note the recent press about gender bias and success in the sciences at Yale).[4]  In this post, I’d like to briefly review some strategies for cultivating empathic practices as a teacher and in one’s students.

One of the big reasons that empathy and education is a hot topic is because empathy is understood as a learned habit, something that can develop through training and practice.  Sara Konrath, one of the authors of the study about declining empathy, links the practice of empathy with better learning outcomes:

“Besides the obvious social benefits, research also links empathy in students with better academic outcomes. Just as empathetic doctors and therapists have patients with better outcomes, empathetic instructors get better results from their students, even on objective measures such as multiple-choice tests.”[5]

Two of the techniques that Konrath suggests using in the classroom to develop empathy are role-playing exercises and exposure to highly empathic role models. 

I’d like to highlight three strategies that feature prominently in the YTC teaching workshops that might already implicitly serve as tools to teach empathy, or could be utilized as empathic teaching tools.

Two of these tools relate to the critical first week of the semester: the policy sheet and the student survey.

First, the policy sheet (or syllabus).

The policy sheet is meant to communicate basic information about the section, frame how the section fits into the class, and set the tone for section.  The analogue for the policy sheet if you are a professor and not a TF is the syllabus.  Both policy sheet and syllabus are key opportunities to communicate expectations for classroom dynamics in addition to standards for things like handing in work on time or grading rubrics.  For example, you might articulate standards for discussion that foster more empathic interaction.  Such as:

•   Emphasize listening as a core skill in achieving disciplinary excellence. 
•   Define what counts as respectful, open and safe dialogue.  For example, it starts with something as simple as learning the names of your classmates.  It might also mean interpreting others’ arguments as charitably as possible.
•   Practice asking clarifying and follow-up questions in response to others, rather than jumping to offer your own opinion or solution.

You might also consider offering a brief written rationale for why these behavioral standards matter for student learning.  This rationale itself is a way of asking students to practice empathy by considering their role in impacting their classmates’ learning.

Second, the student survey.

Before or on the first day of class, or section, it is a good idea to survey your students about their prior experience with the subject, their expectations for discussion, and their reasons for enrolling in the class.  This information can help you craft activities and navigate different learning preferences.  A way that this tool can be utilized to cultivate awareness about the importance of empathy in the classroom is to use it to introduce students to the challenges of accommodating diverse intellectual histories, learning preferences, and motivations for taking the course.

For example, if half the class loves small-group work and the other half loathes it, how often should you assign activities that put them in small groups?  Offer this conflicting data to the class and express your understanding of both preferences; follow this up with an acknowledgement of the challenge that this presents for you as the discussion facilitator and tell the students that you will attempt to make this a good learning experience for all of them but that their patience and understanding are part of the equation.  In this moment, you are explicitly asking the students to practice empathy by seeing themselves and their classmates as both learners and co-teachers, and considering how they might better appreciate the learning preferences of other students.

Third, the mid-semester review.

Typically, the mid-semester evaluation gauges your effectiveness as a teacher thus far in the term.  It is a short, anonymous survey of students’ assessment of various exercises and strategies that you have used in class. 

As a way of teaching empathy, include the opportunity for self-reflection in the mid-semester review.  This can be as simple as one or two questions about the students’ work habits and interpersonal interchanges in the class.  The ability to identify their own work habits and responses to classmates can help them better understand the experiences of others. Questions might include:

•  What percentage of the time have you completed the reading?
• Has your understanding of a problem/concept/reading ever been improved by input from a fellow student? When?
•  Do you feel that your views or suggestions are valued during discussion?

The point of these sorts of questions does not have to be an accurate measurement of students’ feelings – it is, rather, to build into the class an opportunity for them to reflect on the types of empathic communication that promote cooperation and improve learning, and to identify modes of communication that instead foster conflict and isolation.  If it turns out that there is consistency in student answers – positively or negatively – it is also instructive for you as the teacher in determining what empathic learning strategies might be working, or falling short. 

An important component of this process is following up after the reviews are submitted.  Here, you as the teacher have a great opportunity to demonstrate practicing empathy in the classroom by summarizing, paraphrasing and expressing appreciation for student responses, and telling them how you will respond to their concerns in concrete ways during the rest of the semester.  This is a moment for the teacher to model understanding of the students’ experience and engage with them in discussion about what might be the deeper concerns that students have about learning.  If time permits, you could also ask the students to give suggestions for how the learning environment could be improved through better communication practices. 

It is also important to articulate for students what empathic habits they are already doing well: if you notice that students are interpreting one another charitably, asking good follow-up questions, or demonstrating appreciation for another person’s preferred learning style, name these habits out loud.  This practice can take place after the mid-semester review, but you can also do it at the end of any class; it takes less than a minute to do.  The more you point out the sorts of specific empathic practices that foster learning, the better chance you have of fostering these habits in students.

It must be noted: defining empathy is not a straightforward task – for example, there are questions about whether it is primarily cognitive or affective, how it might be distinguished from sympathy, and the differences in studying it whether one is a psychologist, neuroscientist, or ethicist.  Here, empathy has been understood as the disposition that enables one to put her- or himself in another’s place, or to be able to understand and share the feelings of another person.  In conclusion, I’d like to reiterate that it is helpful for teachers to view empathy as a practice, as a way to emphasize it as a skill that can be developed (in oneself and in students), and not merely to see it as an emotion that some people naturally possess more than others.  Because it is a practice, teachers can develop concrete strategies to employ in the classroom to increase learning outcomes by fostering empathy.  We’d love to hear about some strategies that you have tried related to empathy and education.

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[1] “Should We Teach Empathy in College?” August 9, 2011, http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/should-we-teach-empathy-in-college/30044 

[2] Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O'Brien and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, published online August 5, 2010, http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/eob/files/konrathetal2011.pdf

[3] Paul Anderson and Sara Konrath, “Why Should We Care?—What to Do About Declining Student Empathy”  July 31, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Should-We-Care-What/128420/

[4] See: http://news.yale.edu/2012/09/24/scientists-not-immune-gender-bias-yale-study-shows and http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/10/22/yale-scientists-probe-gender-gap/

[5] http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Should-We-Care-What/128420/

Using Teaching Tools in a Research Talk

Hi, my name is Ross Boltyanskiy, I am a PhD student in physics and a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center.  This is my first blog post ever!  Here we go...

In a way, I feel like I'm "the teaching guy" in my lab and I am often told that no matter what I do, it sounds like I'm teaching.  Some of you may have had similar experiences.  While normally that's not always a compliment, to my ears it often is.  I think this attitude stems from a desire in teaching enthusiasts to share a bit of knowledge, a bit of understanding, and a bit of appreciation with our audience, whoever the audience is.  I have especially enjoyed incorporating elements of teaching in my research talks.  Here I'll mention a few practices I learned from pedagogy that I think make presentations both more effective and more enjoyable.  What follows are mostly my opinions bolstered by some feedback, not proven theorems!  I will categorize these opinions into four very fundamental concepts we think about when teaching a class.

I. Prior knowledge

This is one of the most important aspects of giving a talk: know your audience!  One may say that the audience in a research talk is just researchers, right?  While true, it's similar to saying that the audience in a class is just students.  We usually appreciate that students are different - they have varying levels of preparation, different interests, and different expectations.  Understanding this is perhaps even more important in preparing to give a talk.  Here are a few aspects of our audience that are particularly important to keep in mind:

(a)  Background & Expertise 
My field is biophysics and I'm always thinking about my audience's mathematical background and area of expertise.  Are they mainly biologists? Are they physicists?  Engineers?  Are they mathematically inclined?  The answer to each of those questions should significantly affect the talk.  Given their area of expertise, what kind of language are they used to?  It might be very different from the language I'm used to in which case I have to work hard to adjust.  I imagine the situation is similar in other sciences, in the humanities, and social sciences although in some cases the differences in audience backgrounds might be more delicate.

(b)  Interests
It is comparably important to think of what piques the curiosity of your audience.  This question might take us back to the previous point of their area of expertise.  However, it's also worth thinking about what brings your audience together at the given meeting - is it a common topic, a common technique, a common approach?  With each group, it's essential to figure out what questions will motivate them.  Sometimes it's tough to acknowledge that those might not be the same questions that motivated you to pursue your project!  That's ok.  Our talks are geared at engaging our audience, so the focus should be on them.

(c)  Goals 
This one I find a bit tricky.  The audience might have an agenda in being present at the meeting. They might be eager to learn about a cutting edge technique, they might want to adapt aspects of your research in their projects, or they might just be there for entertainment.  I think it's important to think about their goals in order to best engage them.  Having said that, we should not sacrifice our goals for theirs.  We should have an agenda as well - perhaps it's getting feedback about our work, perhaps it's getting ideas about future research, or maybe it's spreading the word about our awesomeness.  In any case, our goals should be prioritized and kept in mind.

(d)  Context
The level of formality of the talk is an important knob to adjust. Giving an informal talk at a formal meeting is unprofessional. Giving a formal talk at an informal meeting is often an ineffective way to resonate with the group and get feedback.  Formality is a fun degree of freedom to explore, there is lots of room to play here as long as we are thoughtful about it.

I'm sure there are other relevant categories, but I hope you get the idea.  With this perspective, one should never give two identical talks!  It's more work this way, but it's more effective and much more interesting.   

II.  Active Learning

I remember thinking that active learning is not relevant to talks since talks are most passive lectures.  While talks are mainly lectures (and we may not be able to really change that), they don't have to be passive.  Lecture can be very active and engaging.  Here are a few tips I learned form teaching that I try to adapt to my talks.

(a)  Pausing
This may seem trivial, but please pause in your talk for your listeners to think!  In a class, this is my favorite type of active learning.  It's the easiest, most risk-free one to employ and overall I believe it can make the biggest difference.  When we make an important statement, let's pause for significantly longer than it would take us to internalize the point.  This is not because our typical audience is less intelligent, but because they haven't thought about our point before.  Pausing for longer also allows them to think of the ways the point you made does not make sense thus offering an opportunity to ask questions.  I put "pausing" in the category of active learning because it can force the audience to think, to integrate knowledge, and to look for gaps in understanding.  It gets them engaged.  As a ball-park value I recommend trying to pause for 5-7 seconds.  This may seem short, but it can feel like hours on stage.

(b)  Asking questions... AND pausing
This is my second favorite type of active learning.  Asking question can be an amazing way to both motivate the audience and to channel their thinking.  This practice only belongs in the active learning category, however, if you leave enough time for actual engagement.  Next time when you want to make a strong point in a talk, consider asking the question first, leaving the listener a bit puzzled, perhaps in a contradiction, and leave him/her with a opening that you will soon fill with the answer.  This is often a much more effective way to get the point across. 
Now let me ask you something: suppose you pose a question that has a relatively accessible answer that someone in the audience may know, should you wait for an answer?  I'm pausing here for you to consider this...  Think about it for 5 seconds.  Now comes my answer: I think it very much depends on the context of your talk.  If it's a large research meeting where it's too scary to answer, don't wait for the answer.  In that case, it's enough to leave time for each person to answer the question for himself/herself.  If it's a smaller, less formal meeting, it might make sense to really wait enough time for someone to answer.  This can takes minutes!  Please be ready to persevere the awkwardness that may ensue...

(c)  Soliciting the audience to interpret, analyze, predict, and make suggestions
In a smaller, less formal setting such as group meeting, journal club, or a discussion group, I've had a lot fun trying out different kinds of active learning.  Here I'll mention a few anecdotes of things I've tried that I found effective.  Please consider these merely as examples of ways to experiment.  I made them specific only for illustration purpose.  I do apologize, these examples are exclusively from science, but I think many have accessible analogues in the humanities and social sciences.

• Asking to observe & hypothesize.  For two years I was using a movie of a bacterium interacting with an immune cell as motivation for my talk. After showing the movie, I would explain what I found interesting or unusual about it and what I think a good physical model for the interaction is.  Essentially no one has ever stopped me to mention any other observations or ideas.  Finally, I decided to try something new - I showed the movie and asked members of my group what they thought was happening and what they thought was interesting.  It generated an exhilarating discussion with 7 or 8 ideas of what could be going on and with hypotheses that I never thought about.  They noticed aspects of the movie I never noticed!  It was fascinating.  If you have a provocative, interesting piece of data, I strongly encourage you to ask your audience to analyze it and think about it first.  It will get them engaged and invested in learning about the problem in addition to possibly generating ideas for you.  Your audience will probably not volunteer their analysis right away just because so few people try this in a talk, but eventually ideas should start flowing.

• Asking to brainstorm.  I had a problem of a material failure (cracking) that I could not explain.  I showed the cracks, described the setting under which it was happening and asked my group to help me identify the possible factors that could cause this.  On my own I may have come up with 4 factors, together we came up with maybe 6.  I thought this was very good not only because I got 2 more ideas to try, but also because my group was totally with me when I explained my experiments with regard to the other 4.  Following that discussion, I also asked my group to suggest solutions to this problem. This question didn't produce much during the meeting, but one lab mate followed up with a thought afterwards. At least I knew my group was engaged.

• Asking to analyze.  I was preparing a paper and wanted to present a draft of the abstract and the figures in a small discussion group.  At first I thought I will read the abstract so that the audience knows what the paper is about and then go right to the figures to defend the claims in the abstract. Upon second thought, I decided to ask the group members to read my abstract first and tell me what they think this paper is about.  It worked beautifully.  The group brought up points I intended to be in abstract, points that were misleading as well points that were not emphasized enough.  All of these were both useful for me and prepared the audience for the figures I was about to show.

• Asking to predict.  Several times in different meetings, I have shown a piece of initial data and asked my audience to predict what the rest of the data show (especially data following a perturbation).  I found this useful in a few ways: (a) sometimes they would predict the right outcome which would confirm that it's expect, (b) sometimes they would predict the wrong outcome, often for good reason, which can suggest possible phenomena to be ruled out, (c) sometimes this prompted a question admitting that something earlier on didn't make sense and there is confusion about what to expect. All of these could be very useful.  In all cases, it's essential for the speaker to leave enough time for someone to muster up the courage to say something.  That time is often longer than we would think.

• Asking to interpret.  Once in a while I like to show a full plot and ask my group members what they think this means.  What are the implications?  What could be an underlying mechanism?  Sometimes I do that because I don't know what the answer is.  Sometimes I do it because I want to hear if there are suggestions other than what I thought of.  In any case, I found that it can draw the audience in and can provide useful feedback.

Above are just a few examples in a few categories.  There are so many other ways to try it.  Please experiment!

III.  Diversity of Learners

I'll try to make this section short.  Just as in a class, it's important to be aware that our audience, despite all being researchers even in a narrow field, may pick up information in different ways.  There are many, many ways to characterize learning styles.  Someone should probably write a blog post on that... I'll just mention the simplest, most overused one described here and will point out a few tips I learned about how these apply to talks.

(a)  Visuals 
Clear, simple visuals are a must, at least in science talks.  Cartoons and schematic are extremely helpful!

(b)  Aural/Speech 
Both in lesson plans and in talks, it helps me to memorize basically two things which I'll mention here.  I don't memorize the entire talk although some people do find the need to do that - it depends on the speaker.  I memorize the following:  (1) The introduction: the first two or three sentences are crucial and I tend to think about those a lot.  They should be enticing, they could be bold, could be funny, could be provocative - that too depends much on what the speaker is comfortable with and what the context of the meeting is.  (2) Transitions between points or slides.  Those are essential for a coherent story.  I like transitioning with a question that the next point or slide addresses, that's my preference.

(c)  Read/Write/Text 
Most often I think we err on the side of too much text on our slides, so less wordy is probably my main suggestion (someone must be thinking the same of this blog post...).  Having said that, I strongly encourage having key points written on the slide for those who really pick up by reading and not listening.  I learned a wonderful tip from my adviser to put the main point of the slide or the main question the slide addresses right in the title.  For example a title can look something like: "Protein X misfolding causes disease Y" or "How does the concentration of X affect the dynamics of Y." Short sentences and large font usually work very well. 

(d) Kinesthetic
I'll mention three ideas here: (1) If you bring a toy to your talk, you are already a rock star.  (2) If you bring a toy for everyone in the audience to play with, you are a hero.  A wonderful example of this was a physicist I recently saw give a talk about protein filaments in a cell.  She gave everyone twizzlers to help us discover some properties of twisted filaments.  It was beautiful!  (3) If you have a cool movie, play it and replay it.  Make sure to tell your audience what the movie is showing and it can be a great way to engage and entertain your group.
  
The main point here is that, just as in a class, it's often worthwhile to communicate our ideas in as diverse set of ways as possible.

IV.  Feedback

I'll try to make this section really short.

Getting feedback from research talks is often difficult.  Sometime we can gauge at how the audience interacts with us and what they are doing as we speak, but those cues I find harder to pick up on in a talk than in a class.  Sometimes being sensitive to what questions people ask can point to a focus of the talk that we either intended or did not intend to have.  To get more of those I encourage my audience to ask questions, give comments, and provide suggestions from the very start. 

If you don't get explicit feedback, I'd ask for it.  I often ask my lab mates, friends, and mentors to tell me what they thought the talk did well and push them to tell me how it could be better.  Tell them ahead of time that you are interested in feedback and ask them to observe your talk.  I'm lucky to have a very helpful group and adviser who often give great feedback in practice talks too.  Try to give a practice talk if you can and try to do it as early as possible.  I'm always impressed with the number revision I end up making after practicing...

Being on the topic of getting feedback, I want to encourage everyone to give (especially positive) feedback to the speaker.  If you find the speaker did something well, let him or her know!  It makes a world of difference especially for those of us who are still learning how to give a good talk.

In summary:

I.       Learn as much as you can about your audience before your talk.
II.      Try to engage your audience's thinking as much as possible.
III.     Keep in mind the diversity of your group and try to reach as many of the members as you can.
IV.     Find out if the things you tried in your talk were effective!


Final comment: This may be a bit off topic, but I want to make a suggestion about public speaking.  I am certainly no master at this, but I came across an interesting method I'm experimenting with.  I always get a rush of excitement that often comes along with fear before delivering a talk or teaching a class.  I'd like to keep the excitement but lose the fear.  One tip I learned (interestingly, from an ancient Jewish source) is thinking about helping your audience or your students right before you start.  Our anxiety often comes from being too focused on ourselves, too self-centered, too self-conscious.   Instead, try thinking about giving your audience a chance to learn something cool, appreciate something new, find out something useful.  Focusing on giving to them can be very inspiring.  Give it a try!

I hope this post is helpful in building bridges between teaching and giving talks.  I think there is naturally so much in common between the two.  If you agree or disagree with anything I wrote, please comment!  I'd love to hear your thoughts and I would love to have a chance to learn from you.  Thank you!

Flipping the Classroom

Looking to add some variety to your teaching routine?  Maybe it’s time to think about turning your classroom upside down!  Not literally, of course, just in the way content is presented to your students.  Flipping the classroom, a hot topic in pedagogy thanks to several high profile articles, takes the standard instructional model and turns it on its head.

To tease out what exactly flipping the classroom is, this blog post will address 3 main questions:  1) What is flipping the classroom? 2) Does it work? 3) How can I begin to flip my classroom?

1) What is flipping the classroom?

First, as I’ve already hinted that flipping the classroom is a complete inversion of traditional teaching, it is important to think about what has been the status quo in many classrooms. This standard method of instruction involves students doing assigned reading before coming to class, listening to a lecture during class time and then going through problem sets or producing another form of assignment for homework.  Flipping the classroom encompasses a change where what students would normally do in the classroom is now what is done at home, while the homework will be done in class. 

To elaborate, students would watch a video of a lecture or voiced over PowerPoint before coming to class.  To ensure that students complete the preparatory work some incentive should be in place whether it involves a quick on-line quiz before coming to class or having to turn in some form of written work.  The real value of this flipping technique comes from what happens next.  Rather than students passively learning through their teacher lecturing during class, they will be actively engaged with hands-on projects, lab experiments or problem sets that would normally constitute their homework.  The presence of the teacher during this process allows for immediate feedback, mini-lectures when necessary, and question and answer time for anything students found unclear in the video lectures.

As you can see, the theory behind flipping the classroom is that in-class time will become much more active which will result in better learning outcomes for our students, a topic covered earlier in the semester by another of our fellows, Ashley.  For those of you familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy, it might also be clear that the lower levels of Bloom’s are accomplished outside of the classroom while higher order thinking skills are developed and nurtured inside the classroom. 

This leads us to our second question.  Does it work?

In short, most evidence would point to yes! One test of flipping the classroom, performed by Carl Weiman and colleagues in a large enrollment undergraduate physics class, examined the benefits of flipping the classroom by assessing student performance after a unit was taught in a flipped classroom style¹.  For their experiment, they chose two large introductory Physics lectures that had approximately 270 students each.  The courses were taught with an identical approach (i.e. our standard lecture model) for the first 11 weeks of the semester. During week 12, however, one classroom was flipped while the other retained the standard lecture model of instruction.  In the experimental classroom, students were assigned readings on which they took a short true/false quiz before coming to class.  During class time, students were answering clicker questions with peer instruction and working in small groups. 

Having baseline data on student attendance, engagement and academic performance during the first 11 weeks of the semester provided evidence that the student populations in both classes were roughly equal in all categories assessed.  After the flipped classroom test, however, measurements of attendance and engagement dramatically increased for students in the experimental course while student attendance and engagement remained steady in the standard lecture. As a final measure of learning outcomes, the instructors gave an identical multiple choice exam to students from both courses.  The scores showed that students in the experimental section did twice as well as their counterparts in the standard lecture course.

There is evidence that flipping the classroom works in K-12 education levels as well.  Take for example, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit². Andy Scheel, a social studies teacher, was the first to attempt flipping the classroom at Clintondale. He ran two parallel classes that covered the same content and used the same assessments for student performance.  One was traditional and one was flipped. The only notable difference between students in the sections was that students in the flipped classroom had a history of struggling with the material as several had failed the course at least once.  At the end of the semester, no student in the flipped classroom received a grade less than a C+; a marked improvement from previous semesters.

After this initial experiment, every class in the school is being transitioned to be taught in this flipped manner.  The success of their students is evident in the numbers now passing standardized state wide exams.

Now that we have looked at some evidence that flipping the classroom is beneficial for student performance, what are some tips for flipping your own classroom?

As with any pedagogical change, starting small can be a good thing!  Try out flipping a specific class that covers a concept that you know is challenging for students or that you have a great activity planned for that would be rushed when planned for the same class as a longer lecture. Also start small with the media that you supply your students for the at home lecture viewing.  Many people use instructional lecture-based videos as the new prep work for class, but this does not mean that you need to find a way to film yourself giving a lecture.  Thanks to ample online resources from the Kahn Academy, YouTube, TED, and recorded university lectures including Open Yale Courses; you can likely find a previously taped lecture that will serve your purposes.  The main criteria when choosing media should be that the content covered in them provides the background your students will need to  meet the learning goals set for the next class.

When contemplating flipping your classroom, even if only for one session, it is important to make sure to communicate with your students about what is happening.  For many students, this will be a new experience and understanding what to expect and the benefits that flipping the classroom has for them is incredibly important.  After explaining the new process to students, hold them accountable for completing tasks assigned to be finished before class!  The shape this takes is up to you but one common form is a quick quiz. 

After all the prep work to make the flipped classroom a reality, the actual instructional time is your moment to enjoy the fruits of all your hard work!  Use a variety of active learning strategies from the use of clickers to group problem solving exercises.  If looking for more information on active learning ideas for your classroom, make sure to check out other resources from the YTC-active learning is something we are all proponents of here!

I hope you found this blog post on the flipped classroom useful.  As flipping the classroom is a broad topic, of which only the surface has been skimmed in this post, check out the links below for more information.  In particular, UT at Austin’s Center for Teaching and Learning has an excellent page on how to flip your classroom with some video interviews of faculty from a variety of disciplines that have taken the plunge and flipped entire courses.  

1 DesLauriers L, Schelew E, and Wieman C (2011). Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class. Science 332: 862-864.  

 2  http://www.flippedhighschool.com/

Helpful Links:

NY Times Opinion Piece on Flipping the Classroom: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/turning-education-upside-down/

Vanderbilt Center for Teaching page on Flipping the Classroom:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/teaching-activities/flipping-the-classroom/

Flipped Learning Network: http://flippedclassroom.org/

UT at Austin Center for Teaching and Learning on Flipping the Classroom: http://ctl.utexas.edu/ctl/sites/default/files/7%20Things%20You%20Should%20Know%20about%20the%20Flipped%20Classrooms%20EDUCAUSE%20%C2%A92012.pdf

Crafting a stronger teaching statement

Erica De Bruin

The teaching statement (or teaching “philosophy”) has rapidly become a required part of the job market packet for aspiring assistant professors. Of the 62 positions I applied for in political science this year, 47 requested a teaching statement or portfolio. Yet even for those who have prioritized developing their teaching skills, writing the teaching statement is no easy task. (Just ask Miti, a former YTC fellow, who blogged about the challenges of writing the statement last fall).

In writing a teaching statement, the aim is to convince a search committee that you are an effective and engaging teacher whose approach to teaching fits with the institution’s. This is, of course, easier said than done.

When I sat down to write my own statement, my first instinct was to start cataloguing all of the nifty instructional strategies I use in the classroom to facilitate student learning and organize the statement around these strategies (e.g., “I use group work! And peer instruction! And cater to my students diverse learning styles!”).

The result was less than inspiring. For example, an early draft of my teaching statement contained the passage:  

While explaining the concept of “conditional independence” to students, I described it in words, illustrated it visually, worked through a sample few problems, and finally pointed students towards written explanations of the concept in the professor’s lecture notes and in our text.

Now, these are all reasonable approaches to teaching students about conditional independence in an introductory statistics course. But my litany is dry and unmemorable -- certainly not something that would stick with a search committee member wading through hundreds of teaching statements.

I decided to follow the advice of a Teaching Center colleague, who suggested focusing on a smaller number of more detailed examples. In reading through others’ teaching statements, I realized that it was these longer stories that ended up sticking with me. Consider the following excerpt from a teaching statement written by Celia Paris, a former YTC fellow and PhD Candidate in Political Science at Yale:  

I had my Introduction to American Politics students split up into four groups, with each group drafting a two-sentence explanation of the interpretation of the commerce clause in a particular Supreme Court case and then sharing it with the class. Immediately after each presentation, the case was handed over to students in another group, who had just five minutes to apply the interpretation of the commerce clause from this second case to the details of the first case. (Students who had struggled with keeping their interpretation to two sentences began to see the value in succinct communication as the room buzzed and the seconds ticked by.) After a second presentation, groups switched cases once more and used the interpretation of the commerce clause in the third case to make an argument for whether or not “Obamacare” should be considered constitutional. Not only did this activity get students engaged in interpreting multiple court cases and holding each other accountable for explaining the material effectively, but by the end students were startled and intrigued by the variety they saw in interpretations of the Commerce Clause.  

There are three aspects of this anecdote that I found particularly effective in showcasing Celia’s teaching. (Her full statement can be found here). First, the writing is vivid (the classroom “buzzed,” the seconds “ticked by”). Second, the story is discipline-specific. Celia provides enough detail that another political scientist is likely to understand the context of the assignment. Finally, it is student-centered. Throughout, the emphasis is on what students were doing, how they reacted to the assignment (they “struggled,” “began to see value,” “were startled and intrigued”). Framing the story in this also way allowed Celia to connect the activity to specific learning goals (“interpreting multiple court cases and holding each other accountable for explaining the material”).

With these considerations in mind, I took another stab at it the statement. I began by thinking back to class meetings in which the discussion was particularly animated or I tried a new activity and thought it paid off, or times when I got particularly positive feedback from a student. For each, I wrote down both what I did and how the students responded. I also made sure to set the stage by including details about the topic or readings under discussion.

In the end, I had a set of short, colorful stories that (I think!) better advertise my strengths as a teacher. For example, to illustrate how I incorporate students’ prior knowledge in my classrooms, I included the following vignette in my revised statement:

In a recent seminar on the causes of civil war, I began by asking students to spend a minute jotting down whether there had been a civil war in their country of origin or current residence, and if so, what they thought caused it. Students were shocked at the sheer number of different causes they identified, as well as the extent of disagreement they had over conflicts many knew a great deal about, such as the U.S. Civil War. I used these observations to set up a lively discussion about what we, as social scientists, mean when we say that one thing causes another.

And in demonstrating the utility of peer learning, I offered this anecdote:

In teaching a seminar on emerging security challenges in Central Asia, for instance, I broke students into small groups and had them research the answers to a short series of questions about the politics, economics, and demographics of a particular country in the region. They input their responses into a Google Document that became a shared resource for the class. In subsequent discussions, students were able to bring their country-specific knowledge to bear on questions ranging from the role of Islam in the region to the prospects for political reform, successfully avoiding the kind of broad generalizations about the region that had plagued prior discussions. They also clearly relished the opportunity to become an expert on their adopted country (one exclaimed after the seminar concluded that it had been “seriously the best seminar ever!”).

If you faced similar challenges in writing your own teaching statement and adopted similar or differing approaches, tell us about it in the comments!

Teaching Students with Diverse Religious Backgrounds

Hi Everyone! My name is Sara Ronis and I’m a fifth-year PhD candidate in Religious Studies. Modern classrooms are global and cosmopolitan spaces, and our students represent a diversity of race, class, gender-identities, sexual orientations, and religions. Today I wanted to talk about an issue that comes up in Religious Studies, but also in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities more broadly: the diversity of religious traditions and faiths that our students bring to the classroom.  

Talking about religious diversity is not just an issue of minimizing conflict or damage control. It’s a powerful opportunity to bring different perspectives and values in conversation with each other and improve everyone’s learning. 

Religious issues come up when we as teachers are not familiar with the needs or expectations of our students (for example, religious clothing, prohibitions, holy days, and times of fasting).  Students may ask for a test to be moved, or an assignment deferred, for a religious event.  They also may not be comfortable with activities that involve specific food items, or have certain modesty restrictions that affect dress or physical behavior.  A great resource here at Yale is the Chaplain’s office, which puts out a calendar with all religious holidays, and is happy to talk through religious issues with any student or teacher.

Religious issues also, and perhaps most prominently, come up when students may not be comfortable with our fields’ approaches to issues that touch on religion and religious values (whether that is in a course on the Hebrew bible, a course on evolutionary biology, or a course on politics or history). 

But religious issues around student expectations can for the most part be avoided with a little reflection and planning before the semester even starts.  In order to shape informed, engaged students in a classroom marked by open inquiry and mutual respect, we need to understand where our students are coming from and make sure not to come across as flippant or dismissive. While issues may come up over the course of the semester, a little prevention goes a long way.

1.  Know your audience. Are your students mostly religious or not? Do they come from a particular denominational background?  Are they a diverse group of people, or a relatively homogenous group? What does authority look like to them?  Ask colleagues in your department who have taught at your institution before about the demographics of their courses.*  
2.     Know your institution.  Are you teaching at a public college, a private college, or a divinity school or seminary? Does your institution have particular religious expectations of faculty?  Read the university websites and talk to administrators to find out. 
3.   Know yourself. Are you someone who is comfortable sharing their own religious affiliations and journeys, if you’ve had them? Can you use those experiences in ways that enhance student learning without missionizing?  Would you prefer not to talk about religion at all?
4. Know potential issues that might come up. What are some of the common conflicts that come up in your field? How prepared are you for addressing them as they come up? How would you react if a student said something offensive or inaccurate about another religion in class? Talk to mentors and colleagues in your field for ideas.  

So, if you’re teaching political science at a small private religious college, your approach to various issues in political theory might be different than if you were teaching at a large public state university. But this is not to suggest that you should ever censor yourself or your field! That is worth repeating: You do not need to censor yourself. But you do need to plan ahead to be able explain to students the stakes of the disagreements in your field, and why the scholarship has taken the shape that it has. If your work disagrees with a particular religious tradition, you need to be able to explain why your scholarly approach differs, and what it has to offer.   

Bottom line: don’t be afraid to teach religiously diverse groups. Different perspectives will make you look at your work in different ways, and articulate why the work you do is important.The rewards of having a broad range of students with their own passions getting engaged in the subjects you teach far outweigh the time it takes to prepare to teach such a diverse cohort of students.  

Feel free to share concerns, experiences and ideas in the comments section below!

*Note: According to a lawyer I spoke to, it may be illegal in some states to ask students about their religious backgrounds in a public classroom setting. So don’t do that.

Active Learning in the Science Classroom

Hello and Happy Halloween!  My name is Ashley and I am a 6^th year PhD candidate in the Genetics department. I came across a great video that takes you inside an active learning classroom at the University of Minnesota and I wanted to share it with you!

http://www.youtube.com/v/lfT_hoiuY8w?autohide=1&version=3&attribution_tag=4dqkMYubkhLg3WJpy7ZprQ&autoplay=1&feature=share&showinfo=1&autohide=1

Still to this day most science classes are lecture-based and rely on transmission-of-information. This traditional way of teaching is not always effective in fostering critical thinking or scientific reasoning.  There has been a new push to reform science classroom dynamics to include active learning strategies and to engage students in the scientific process.  Concept laboratories, or active learning classrooms, as shown in this video are a wonderful example of how a science classroom can be transformed.

 

There is growing literature that shows active learning strategies in the science classroom reaches diverse students and achieves better results than lecture along.  Why then hasn’t there been a rapid movement at universities to revamp the science classroom?  It is possible that professors are unaware of data that demonstrate the effectiveness of active learning strategies.  It is also possible that professors are intimidated by the challenge of learning new techniques and the time it would take to implement these changes.  In any case, it is important that we, as the next generation of teachers, recognize this challenge and hit it head on.  

Reforming science education may not only benefit science majors, it may also help send nonscience majors into society knowing how to ask and answer scientific questions. By participating in a concept laboratory, all students will be capable of confronting issues that require analytical and scientific thinking.  In addition, as noted by several students in the video, this type of classroom environment facilitated teamwork and peer learning.  Instead of passively listening to a professor lecture, these students were working actively and collaboratively to solve problems and answer questions. Dr. Wright, the professor in the video, also noted that she is able to more easily interact with small groups of students and observe how the students use technology and discussion to come up with quality solutions to problems.

 

 

As an aspiring science professor, I hope to contribute to the reformation of science education and I challenge you all to do the same!

Using Piazza to Facilitate Peer Instruction

Peer instruction is a popular active learning technique. But how to implement it? Can it only work in small classes? How about in the sciences, where notation and jargon can really tangle things up. I'm Alp, a PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering, and this week I'm writing about Piazza, a free web-system that can help overcome these obstacles! 

Piazza is a relatively new startup founded in 2009. But what does it do? To quote from their main page:

Piazza is an online platform where students and instructors come together to learn and teach. It offers a refined Q&A environment along with key features for effective course collaboration. [...] Piazza uses the power of community to increase collaboration through wiki-style editing, endorsed posts, student-to-student learning, and instructor feedback.

The primary function of Piazza is a web forum, where students can post questions to the class. The nice thing is that the student can choose to appear anonymous to the rest of the class, while you (as the instructor) can see their real identity. Other students are encouraged to respond to see if they themselves have understood the topic well enough. 

Once a student has responded, another student may choose to edit and/or expand that answer. All changes are tracked in real time as the answer increases in length (and hopefully in depth, too)! At any given point you may choose to "endorse" a particular edit to guide the discussion in particular direction, and/or also provide your own answer which is separately highlighted as coming from you.

The best way is to play with Piazza yourself! I encourage you to visit http://piazza.com and check out some of the public classes that are being taught at schools like MIT, Stanford, and Columbia. While you may not be able to make edits, you can quickly see how the system works on a variety of different topics, ranging from Mathematics to Psychology, from Biology to Economics.

Piazza also functions as a course management system, thereby allowing you to post relevant updates, homeworks, and assignments, and also send emails out to the entire class¹. The web-system also has a statistical report interface that allows you to quickly identify commonly asked questions and topics that the class may be struggling with. Finally, it has polling functionality built right in, so you can gather feedback from your students and track how you are improving as a teacher yourself.

It is exciting to see the new and creative ways of integrating state-of-the-art technologies into higher education. I believe Piazza is a promising step in this direction and would be fun to try in the classroom. What do you think about Piazza? Do you see any shortcomings that worry you? Any features that look awesome?! Share them in the comments below!


1 Piazza even connects to current systems that you may have at your institution, such as Blackboard and Moodle! See here.

Moving Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: Transformative Aspects of Contract Grading and Pedagogy

Moving Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries:

Transformative Aspects of Contract Grading and Pedagogy

Stuart Paul Duncan

It does not surprise me that within academia, at least here at Yale and in my previous experiences that we live in a world defined, to a large extent, by fairly well set disciplinary boundaries. From my perspective, graduate students tend to respond to these boundaries in one of three ways: there are some who prefer to live closer to the liminal spaces between discrete “subjects”; there are those who like to keep more centrally located, away from such boundaries; and then there are those who like to take a leap of faith, crossing the border fully into uncharted territory.

While this may seem oversimplified, and I do admit to a radical generalization, my experience as a teacher here and at Cornell has led me to personally experience the Ivory Tower mentality with its series of entrenched and well-marked disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries are often fiercely guarded and promoted on grounds not limited to tradition, politics, and gender. My task here is not to argue the extent of such disciplinary boundaries, their level of entrenchment, or their validity—although I'm sure you can infer my position on such matters. Instead, my concern is over how such boundaries promote a content-based mentality that overwrites broader educational concerns and, more importantly, how this presents challenges for the Yale Teaching Center.

It is while reflecting on my initial experience at the YTC—both as a participant and as a facilitator—that these disciplinary boundaries come to the fore The prevailing mentality reveals an active majoring holding fast to disciplinary exclusivity; i.e., that “my” subject is special and these broader pedagogical ideas (active learning, backwards design, etc.) do not directly address issues within “my” discipline. This resistance is understandable when one considers that new graduate student teachers have been immersed in their discipline for several years of coursework, if not longer, harkening back to their undergraduate years. Such immersion serves to reinforce disciplinary exclusivity.

            There seems to be some unwritten expectation that as graduate students, we are already fully equipped to teach or lead a class. Yet, if we had wanted to teach at the pre-college level, many of us would have had to complete a teaching certificate, backed up by extensive assistant teaching, or even a master’s degree in education, before being allowed to lead a class. Perhaps at the university level, because it is assumed that we are “experts” in our field, this educational training is not necessary. I would question that, although we may be proto-experts at our fields, we are not equipped to teach beyond a “content” mentality, a mentality that reinforces disciplinary discreteness. Without prior teaching experience, or a pedagogical framework within which to shape our teaching, we become passengers in the passive act of transmitting disciplinary content, rather than active agents that enable and shape our student’s learning process.

            The YTC’s Fundamentals of Teaching courses, often not obligatory in many departments, can only scratch the surface of many of the pedagogical challenges we face as instructors. One of complex challenges faced by the YTC is aiding new graduate teachers in their transformation from a content-only subject-defined mentality—instantiated through disciplinary territoriality—to a broader pedagogical perspective. Such a perspective brings a deeper understanding of non discipline-specific pedagogy that makes us more effective teachers.

            This is not to say that there isn't value in the content of our subject areas. Broadening my knowledge of Bach’s cantatas, Beethoven’s sonatas, Wagner’s operas, and Radiohead’s fascinating metric idiosyncrasies has provided and will continue to provide a source of inspiration. Yet, as much as I enjoy teaching what I love, my most profound teaching experience came not from a successful semester of well-structured course content, but from the act of grading while teaching at Auburn Correctional Facility, an all-male maximum security prison in upstate NY.

            Grading? Seriously? How can the topic of grading provide the basis for a more profound teaching experience than the bread and butter of my training, i.e. music? What was so profound, then, you may ask? The act of grading is one of several power dynamics that separate instructor and student, and often acts as a form of a judgment. In a prison environment, those interred are ultra-sensitized to power dynamics. Being stripped of their individuality through the clothes they wear and the personal freedoms that are suppressed, inmates are constantly reminded that others hold power over them. It is with this context in mind that I was particularly sensitive that the act of grading held power over them in the same way that the guards held power—inhibiting, rather than enabling student learning.

            In order to avoid the association of grades and judgment, or perhaps more clearly, to avoid the association of grades with my assessment of the student, I decided to try a form of contract grading. Rather than setting a midterm exam, I met with each student individually during class time and went over his progress during the semester. After establishing the goals they have already achieved, we discussed what their aims were for the rest of the semester in light of my original course goals. Together, we came up with a tailor-made roadmap that took into account the needs of a course grade (reflecting the skills and goals deemed necessary for the course) and the student’s own personal goals. These goals were tiered into the traditional grading format of As, A-, B+, etc. Then after agreeing that the various grade-level goals were both fair and achievable, the student signed the contract the following week. This was the first stage in giving them an identity and control over their learning process. At the end of the course, I asked all the students to go over their contracts and grade themselves based on the contracts that they had signed. All students, except one, graded themselves exactly as I would have, to within one half-grade.

            It wasn't until after the final class that the power of contract grading hit home when one of the students said that, for the first time, he had felt like a human being. Holding back my emotions, I asked him what about the course had helped him to feel this way. He said, “everything in here is about taking away our identity. Music has helped me to find myself again, and the ability to take responsibility for my own learning has given me a power and confidence I thought I would not see before I die.” Though music no doubt played an important role as the subject content, it was the simple employment of contract grading that had a profound effect on the student, one that could have been achieved regardless of subject content.

            It is this experience that has led me to write this blog post. It is not my intention to critique the current state of academia, with its eclectic nature of subject-boundaries, but to encourage the benefits of thinking about how we teach, not what we teach, and more importantly to highlight how we want our students to leave our courses transformed. Although a maximum security prison may present an environment where there is more to gain from employing non-subject specific pedagogical approaches, all students, regardless of the function of the walls that surround them, benefit from a course primed to ask how they want their students to think differently by the end of the semester. It is in this vein that the YTC programming has the potential to enable both new and experienced instructors to move beyond the subject-specific content reinforced by disciplinary boundaries and to infuse their teaching with the hows rather than the whats.