Undergraduates are taking classes because they want to make progress towards future goals. And yet, it is easy to feel disengaged from other students and professors at a large university. I have been tinkering with ways to bring out the student-who-wants-to-be-here from each of the people that crawls into my early morning lab or my end of the day discussion. I believe that successful teaching requires thinking about the tone, environment, and social structure of the classroom. In creating and finding opportunities to build a class community centered around dialogue, failure, and feedback, I seek to engage all students in a communal quest to conquer learning goals.
I want to know where my students come from, and I want them to know where I come from. To me, the disconnect between professors and students has seemed most apparent in introductory science courses (or as we called them, “weeder” courses) I took and have taught where the professor is on a literal stage and it’s easy to feel anonymous and apathetic about the material taught. I remember specific course material from professors and teachers who were willing to break the ice and some bread with us, the students. Each semester of teaching, I start with a short introduction about myself and my research. I give students a short survey (online for large class sizes). Then, I tell them, it’s only fair they get to ask me three personal questions. This exchange of information with my students sets the stage for dialogue throughout the semester, and creates an environment where students are more likely to ask and answers questions during lecture, send emails to clarify concepts, attend office hours, and speak with me after class. Additionally, I use what students write on their surveys to get to know my audience. When teaching Neuroscience, for example, how many of the students have any background in the subject, and why they are taking the course (i.e., are they pre-med, interested in research, considering industry)? Lectures, discussion, and lab are engaging by nature when the teacher is speaking to a specific audience rather than a generic crowd of students with unknown backgrounds.
To maintain and further build this environment, I believe it’s important that students build relationships and dialogue with one another. I’ve replaced icebreakers with structured time for smaller groups of students to learn each others’ names, what TV shows they are watching, and where home is for them. I repeat this every time students switch groups. More than break the ice by hearing and forgetting details about one another, I want students to have at least a few individuals that they are comfortable with in the classroom. I like to leverage their expanding network as the semester progresses by modifying activities so students have to trade information and solve problems with previous group members. I hope that this is helping to foster an inclusive learning environment that allows all students to grow comfortable expressing their intrinsic motivation to engage with course material.
My assessments of student learning are not limited to the conclusion of the course unit or semester. My students tackle their exams with more confidence if they have been given a chance to engage the material and fail in informal environments and low-stakes assignments. Many students, myself included, carry a talent for memorization with them through their biology courses, but memorization is no guarantee of understanding (as I discovered in organic chemistry during my undergraduate years). When finishing discussion of a complex concept, I check in with the class using questions that test both their surface understanding and their ability to apply the concept in a novel situation (i.e., a Bloom’s taxonomy approach). I expect that many students will provide incorrect answers to the questions. Often, students are certain they understand material until they have to demonstrate their knowledge of it. In order to allow students to confront their own understanding of course material, the class as a whole has to be accepting of failure and understand it as a standard part of course participation.
How do I get students to help me build the community, so they feel comfortable taking chances and failing? I like to lead by example, by being facetious and by recounting several of my own failures. I’ve found that lab demos are a perfect time to make a conscious effort of doing this. A few students guide me through the procedure as if I have no idea what I’m doing, and the rest of the class is free to give input. This allows me to challenge students with what the purpose for each step is, and it usually draws a lot of laughter and shouting at me as I make every effort to misunderstand their directions and explanations (e.g., getting close to faulty pipetting, almost throwing the experimental set-up in the trashcan). I’ll tell them sincere stories such as how nervous I was when I first learned PCR, or about the time I thought I was screwing up an assay in the lab only to discover the water was contaminated. What would have been a lecture becomes a dialogue where students are engaged in the critical steps and meaning of the lab protocol by identifying and exploring errors and failure.
In leading class discussions and helping students work through problems at their tables, I’ve adopted techniques from improvisational theater to ease students into failing out loud. Instead of saying “No”, I respond with “Yes, and.” It took some time for me to practice this, and it’s helped me gain a better understanding of the reasoning behind student answers. For example, in covering a cellular cascade, which involves many molecules, a student might answer a question I ask with the incorrect molecule – one that comes later in the pathway. I might respond, “Yup, calmodulin kinase two comes later,” and draw it on the board, “and what is the intermediary we need so calmodulin kinase two gets activated?” I take this as an opportunity to rephrase my question and let the class build towards answers rather than reject guesses until they hit the nail on the head. Everyone that participates contributes to the final understanding we create. Additionally, this tends to flesh out misunderstandings that I never would have known students were harboring. This “Yes, and” discussion tactic appears to work best for the class if I’m transparent with students about what I’m doing. A month into the semester, I start getting participants that are usually silent, and I can start posing trickier questions that the class gets excited to answer. They throw their knowledge at the wall to see what sticks, and revise their understanding based on their own failures as well as the failures of their classmates.
With respect to formal exams, I’ve learned from teaching Neuroscience with Dr. Tony Stretton that though it adds some grading to my plate, giving students a second-chance optional exam for each midterm or final takes pressure off of students whose exam performances do not reflect their true understanding of course material.
The dialogue in my classroom communities creates further opportunities for me to rethink activities and discussion topics based on real-time feedback from students. To catalyze this in the current semester, I started having students complete minute papers every week, which ask them to identify what material they’re comfortable with and what’s still confusing. I’ve been amazed at how I can extract patterns from their brief statements to tweak my teaching. For example, in my Neuroscience discussion, I found that students understood the experiments and the general concepts presented in lecture, but were struggling to connect which experiments demonstrated which concepts. This small activity every week has led to large changes in my teaching that my students and I all benefit from.
Making active efforts to create community has caused me to connect with my students as people, and I believe this has been at the heart of my motivation to tinker with the learning environment, and to make changes to match the community I have in a given semester. Well-designed activities and curriculum have their greatest impact on students that want to be in the classroom, and the impact of a class in which learning was rewarding can carry over for several semesters. It makes students more resilient in the face of inevitable challenges. It gives them some tools to recreate that environment in future classes, study groups, work settings, or in more personal aspects of their lives. I find discovering these tools alongside my students rewarding, and something I will continue to pursue throughout my career.