2021 Award Spotlight: Scholarly Contributions to Teaching & Learning Award

Alanna Gillis is a co-winner of the 2021 Scholarly Contributions to Teaching & Learning Award. The award winning article "COVID-19 Remote Learning Transition in Spring 2020: Class Structures, Student Perceptions, and Inequality in College Courses" is published in Teaching Sociology.

Nominations for the 2022 Award are due January 15th. More info here.

What was the best piece of advice about teaching that you were given?

Students are people first. I'm not sure if someone ever explicitly told me this, but my graduate teaching seminar made it feel tangible to me. When deciding any course policy, this principle helps guide me. Should I accept late work? Should I set a strict attendance policy? Should I get mad if a student emails me without a proper greeting? The answer to each of these becomes obvious when you treat your students like people. People make mistakes, people have other things come up in life besides their courses, and people have had different exposure to academic protocols. Punishing students for being people is not just going to make it harder for the student to succeed, it's also likely to reproduce inequality among students. The types of students most likely to not know how to write a "proper" email, to have outside crises occur, and to need extensions are those who have access to fewer resources outside of the classroom. Treating students like people will reduce inequality in your classroom and create a more inclusive space in which the students feel safe to bring their imperfect selves to learn--just like you bring your imperfect self to teach them.

What advice would you give to someone about to teach their first course?

Choose your course goals and build backward from there. At first, course learning objectives just seemed to me like words you had to put on a syllabus, but they should genuinely guide all parts of course creation. For instance, if I want students to analyze the impact of the education system on inequality in the US, as I do in my Soc of Ed course, then I need to create daily lesson plans, quizzes, and papers that work together to achieve this goal. It seems obvious, but we've all taken courses that seemed to have a huge misalignment between the daily course material and the tests/assessments. This likely occurs because the course wasn't built cohesively from the goals on down.

What is one activity, assignment, or feature of a course that you are particularly proud of?

I am most proud of my participation assessment. For years as a student and a TA, I was frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary and biased decisions faculty often make to determine participation grades, as well as the way that it seemed to reward students who had many educational advantages. As I discuss in a 2019 Teaching Sociology article, I shifted the framework to be about incentivizing students to build participation skills by having students set goals and plans to meet those goals. Student reflections indicate that the system works (i.e., the vast majority complete all their goals and feel like it reflects their varied kinds of participation), and even better it builds skills that they go on to use in their other courses that same semester!

What do you know in your career now that you wish you knew earlier?

I wish that I knew more about Universal Design for Learning or the idea that we should build our classrooms in ways that are inclusive for all students instead of relying on individual accommodations to allow exceptions for some students. For instance, I used to be resistant to sharing my slides. I assumed that it wasn't helpful (most slides in my courses are just discussion questions). I also assumed that it would take away from the class experience if students knew they had the slides anyway. These assumptions, though, were based on student learners like me, who had no learning disabilities and could process information quickly. I now always share my slides before each class, including my notes that I use to facilitate discussion. I now understand that I was relying on ableist assumptions about how "all" students learn. My new goal became to make all my student IEP's irrelevant to me because I would have already created structures that allowed the flexibility (i.e., flexible deadlines, 1-hour time limit for quizzes intended to take 2-5 minutes) and structures (slides available, improvement-based participation instead of strict attendance) that all my diversity of students need to succeed. This semester I succeeded for the first time: every single accommodation noted in all my 25+ IEP's were already taken care of through my standard course policies! The students literally breathe a sigh of relief when they realize this during our one-on-one meetings about their accommodations, as, for perhaps the first time, the course is built for them too.