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CETL in the News – November Round-up

· Dec 1, 2023 ·

Want to listen to CETL staff talk about teaching and learning topics they’re passionate about? This November, our Josh Eyler and Liz Norell were guests on four different higher education podcasts!

Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support, appeared on the long-running Tea for Teaching podcast, hosted by John Kane and Rebecca Mushtare, in episode 313, “Supporting Neurodiverse Students and Faculty.” You may recall Liz facilitated two workshops on teaching neurodivergent students this fall at CETL, and the resources she shared from those workshops have gotten some attention. After guesting on Tea for Teaching, Liz appeared on the Student Success Podcast hosted by Al Solano in an episode titled “Supporting Neurodivergent College Students.” We’re glad to have Liz’s expertise on this topic at CETL, and we’re glad she’s sharing her expertise with the wider teaching community!

Meanwhile, CETL’s director Josh Eyler made the podcast rounds, too, in advance of his forthcoming book on grades and grading called Scarlet Letters. First he appeared on the Centering Centers podcast from the POD Network, our professional association, in an episode titled “Scarlet Letters & Storytelling” where he talked with host Lindsay Doukopoulos about grades, grading, and his writing process. Then he was a guest on the Dead Ideas on Teaching and Learning podcast hosted by Catherine Ross in the episode with the lively title “Ready to Find Out What Research Tells Us about Grading and Grade Inflation? Buckle Up!” Josh has a lot of very strong (and research-backed) opinions about the notion of grade inflation!

In the land of the written word, Liz authored a guest post for John Warner’s Inside Higher Ed blog in which she reflected about the role that writing plays in how the CETL team functions. In her post titled “Writing as a Tool for Teamwork,” she conjectures that the kind of writing our staff members do, that is, reflective writing about our work, helps to foster a kind of psychological safety among the CETL staff. In contrast to the general academic culture that leans toward critique, Liz writes that at CETL, “We take risks, we cook up unconventional ideas, and we trust one another to give honest and supportive feedback.”

One outlet for CETL staff writing is Emily Donahoe’s Substack newsletter Unmaking the Grade. Emily is CETL’s other associate director of instructional support, and she describes her newsletter this way: “A blog and reflective journal chronicling one educator’s experiences with ungrading and other progressive teaching practices.” That description was cited by James Lang in his Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “Adventures in Substack,” where he offers advice for academics interested in starting their own newsletters. Emily’s newsletter made quite a splash this summer when she launched it, and it continues to be an example of the reflective writing that Liz praises in her guest post.

CETL Goes to POD: A recap of our time at the 48th annual POD Network Conference

· Nov 29, 2023 ·

The week before Thanksgiving, four members of the CETL team—Josh, Liz, Derek, and Emily—attended the POD Network conference in Pittsburgh, PA. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the POD Network, it’s an organization dedicated to advancing the research and practice of educational development at colleges and universities. In other words, it’s where teaching center staff and folks dedicated to improving teaching and learning go to connect with one another and share new approaches to supporting good pedagogy on our campuses.

More than 800 people attended POD’s onsite conference this year. We met lots of educational developers doing great work to enhance teaching and learning at colleges and universities across the country, and even the world. We also attended a wide range of sessions that will inform and inspire the work we do at the University of Mississippi in the coming year.

Here are a few of the big conference themes that we’re thinking about now that we’re back home:

Connecting across roles: It takes a village to educate a student. Yet, instructors often feel isolated in their teaching lives, and institutional offices are frequently siloed, walling us off from our most important collaborators in promoting student and instructor success. One throughline of the POD conference was how to cultivate connections and communities across many different roles on our campuses to accomplish shared goals.

An important part of this work is collaborating with students as partners to enhance teaching and learning. Student partnership programs have grown in popularity in recent years and are now fixtures at many different kinds of institutions. Multiple POD sessions explored how teaching centers are bringing student voices, and students themselves, into the work of educational development.

In one concurrent session, Corbin Cambell made clear that at many institutions, it’s rare for faculty and other instructors to observe each other teach outside the context of personnel evaluations. And yet instructors can learn so much from other instructors about teaching, even and perhaps especially across disciplinary boundaries. Teaching centers can facilitate this kind of professional learning and help a campus see teaching as a community endeavor.

Another essential aspect of this work is creating teaching centers that can serve as hubs for meaningful relationships. As Isis Artze-Vega and Peter Felten argued in their work and in their POD anchor session, relationships are the “foundation of learning, belonging, and achieving in college.” Artze-Vega and Felten prompted us to think not only about how teaching centers can value, model, and encourage relational teaching but also about how they might center relationships in program and curricular design or partner across our institutions to support student connections.

Supporting wellbeing: There’s a general sense in higher ed these days that many of our students are not thriving as they should—and we have lots of data to back that up. Instructors are struggling to adapt their teaching as mental health worsens among college students and as we become more aware of the barriers marginalized students, especially disabled and neurodivergent students, face in our classrooms. At POD, we attended several workshops on how we might create more welcoming and supportive environments for these students and close the equity gaps they encounter in the course of their schooling—gaps that higher education often maintains and even exacerbates.

But students aren’t the only ones struggling: instructors and educational developers also need support. Many sessions at POD focused on wellbeing more broadly, considering, for example, how to create more inclusive spaces for our colleagues with ADHD or how to center equity in our work with, and advocacy for, instructors at all levels.

Teaching amid crisis and disruption: Speaking of instructor support, the conference also advanced conversations about how we can help instructors navigate increasingly difficult teaching circumstances. This includes mitigating the harms done by, for example, unsustainable working conditions (especially for adjuncts) or biased student evaluations.

But we also thought a lot about challenges that affect our teaching circumstances more broadly, like the climate crisis, the ongoing effects of the pandemic, and rapid advances in generative AI. Because this was the first POD conference since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, many sessions focused on how to help faculty respond proactively to new AI technologies and how such technologies might change the work of teaching centers.

Many sessions also recognized the burnout and overwhelm that higher ed faculty are experiencing. In light of this exhaustion, presenters offered a variety of frameworks that might help instructors navigate complex pedagogical research and make teaching decisions that are well-informed, appropriate to their unique contexts, and aligned with their values as educators. Teaching centers can be excellent partners with faculty in exploring pedagogical innovations that are both meaningful and sustainable.

Becoming disruptors ourselves: Finally, the conference focused much attention on ways that we, as educational developers, might disrupt the unjust systems that have created these ongoing crises and that continue to thwart the connection and wellbeing we so desperately need to cultivate in higher ed.

This was especially evident in Dr. Lorgia García Peña’s keynote address on the topic of “community as rebellion.” Drawing on the fields of Black feminism and critical pedagogy, her talk challenged us to recognize the ways higher education has exploited and tokenized students and faculty of color and to work toward liberation through radical acts of community-building and freedom-making within our classrooms. This session, and others, inspired conference-goers to use their unique positions within teaching centers to disrupt the status quo when necessary and direct the collective power that we have toward obtaining justice for marginalized communities.

These are just a few of the things we’re taking away from the most recent POD conference. But there were many, many sessions we weren’t able to attend. If you participated in POD onsite or online, tell us what we missed! And if not, let us know what you’re thinking about as we look ahead to supporting teaching and learning at the University of Mississippi in 2024.

Recap: Student Belonging in STEM

· Nov 15, 2023 ·

by Derek Bruff, visiting associate director
Last Friday, CETL hosted the third event in our STEM teaching lunch series. This conversation was focused on student belonging with a presentation by Rebecca Symula, instructional associate professor of biology; Susan Pedigo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry; and Jessica Osborne, principal evaluation associate at the Center for Research Evaluation (CERE). The presenters are all part of a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to understand, promote, and evaluate inclusivity in STEM education.

As part of the grant work, Jessica and her CERE colleagues conducted focus groups with undergraduate students using a World Cafe approach and surveyed STEM faculty members to get a better understanding of student belonging and the actions that can foster it. At the Friday lunch, Jessica shared some of the results of that research while Rebecca and Susan connected those results to their individual teaching practices and invited discussion among the faculty, staff, and graduate students in attendance.

What is student belonging? Rebecca Symula shared a definition from researcher Terrell Strayhorn: “Sense of belonging is a basic human need, and at the most basic level, is whether or not a person feels respected, valued, accepted, cared for, and included.” I’ve often cited the research of Geoffrey Cohen who studies belonging in education, and in a recent interview he described belonging as simply the sense that we are a valued part of a community. Cohen has a new book out called Belonging: The Science of Creating Connections and Bridging Divides, and it’s on my desk ready for me to read soon! There’s also a model developed by Zumbrunn et al. (2014) specifically for science education which situates belonging as a pre-condition for self-efficacy in a course and a valuing of course tasks, both of which in turn lead to motivation to learn and the development of a science identity.

During the presentation, Jessica shared a few instructor behaviors that were identified by study participants to help foster belonging, including opening up the class to discussion, encouraging students to help each other, sharing what’s happening in the department, and providing consistent due dates and reminders. She asked those of us in the audience to guess whether each behavior was identified by a student participant or a faculty participant, and we generally got the answers wrong! Jessica made the point that there’s a lot of overlap between what students and faculty say about fostering belonging, which our guesses demonstrated in a way.

From the list of instructional approaches identified by study participants as fostering belonging, we drilled down on a couple of practices during the discussion. Knowing student names was a hot topic because it helps students feel valued and encourages them to seek help (Cooper et al., 2017), but it’s hard to pull off practically, especially if you have more than 20 or 30 students. CETL director Josh Eyler pointed out that using student names what matters, not memorizing student names, which means that having students use name tents during class can help with belonging. I have a standard discussion rule that the first time someone speaks up in class they should introduce themselves, which is another way to actively use student names. There was also a recent graduate in the room who added that names aren’t entirely necessary; just recognizing a student you pass on the sidewalk as one of your students can help that student feel they have a place at the university.

We also talked about what I like to call “first week of class work,” that is, what we say in our syllabi and how we talk about our courses to students early in the semester. Students are more likely to see instructors as approachable when instructors use warm and welcoming language in these settings (Hamish and Bridges, 2011). Susan Pedigo mentioned that her syllabus used to read like a legal contract, but as she’s learned more about this line of research, she’s adopted a much more invitational tone in her course documents. Other lunch participants talked about the importance of helping students understand what they’re likely to get out of a course so that they see value in participating actively in the course. And I’ll recommend a resource I just learned about today, a “Who’s in class?” form developed by educational developer Tracie Addy and colleagues that’s useful for learning about your students and also communicating to them that you care about them as people and as learners.

One topic we didn’t dive into was the ways that students’ social identities (gender, race, first-generation status, neurodivergence, and so on) can affect their sense of belonging. This is a big topic and an important one, and I hope we’ll explore it at a future STEM teaching lunch. For now, I’ll point to some of Geoffrey Cohen’s research showing that a relatively brief intervention can have lasting effects on college student success. The intervention helped students see that worries about belonging are normal and tend to improve over time, and just thirty minutes of this was enough to improve first-year completion rates by two percentage points for students in groups that historically persist at lower rates. Using students’ names and adopting a welcome tone the first week of class are useful moves to make, but there are many more strategies instructors can leverage to help students develop a sense of belonging.

Thanks to our presenters and to all of those who came and participated in the discussion. And stay tuned to the usual CETL channels to hear about our spring semester slate of STEM teaching lunches.

Recap: Beyond ChatGPT – New Tools to Augment Your Research

· Nov 10, 2023 ·

by Derek Bruff, visiting associate director

Earlier this week, I had the chance to host another event in the series on generative AI organized by CETL and AIG. Wednesday’s event was titled “Beyond ChatGPT: New Tools to Augment Your Research,” and it featured speakers Marc Watkins, academic innovation fellow and lecturer of writing and rhetoric and someone who seems to always be three steps ahead of me on generative AI, and Kellye Makamson, lecturer in writing and rhetoric and formerly reluctant adopter of AI in teaching. Marc provided some updates on generative AI technologies available to UM instructors, and Kellye shared examples of her use of a particular AI tool (Perplexity) in her writing courses. Below you’ll find a few highlights from the session.

First, Marc’s updates, which you can also find on this Google doc:

Bing Chat Enterprise is now available to UM faculty and staff. This version of Bing Chat runs on GPT-4, which is noticeably more powerful than the earlier version that powers the public version of Bing Chat. It also has an integration with DALL-E for image generation and, since it’s available through UM’s agreement with Microsoft, comes with Microsoft data protection. This means you can use it to analyze data that you shouldn’t share with other tools for privacy reasons. To access Bing Chat Enterprise, visit Bing.com and sign in with your UM credentials.
UM’s Blackboard Ultra now has an “AI design assistant” available to UM instructors. This assistant can quickly build out your course shell with modules and descriptions and images, and it can generate quiz questions and rubrics based on your course content. Anthology is the company that provides Blackboard, and you can read more about the new AI design assistant on their website. Marc said that the
folks at the Faculty Technology Development Center (better known as FTDC) can assist instructors with getting started with this new AI tool.
Microsoft will soon be releasing an AI assistant called CoPilot for their Office 365 programs, which includes Word and Excel and lots more. In the demo video, CoPilot is seen reading meeting notes from a user’s OneNote files along with a Word document about a proposal that needs to be written. Then CoPilot generates a draft proposal based on the meeting notes and the proposal request. It looks like CoPilot will be able to do all kinds of practical (and sometimes boring) tasks! UM hasn’t decided to purchase CoPilot yet, since there’s an additional per-user charge, but Microsoft will be on campus to demo the new AI tool as part of Data Science Day on November 14th.
Just this past Monday, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, made a bunch of announcements, including a cost decrease for ChatGPT Plus (the pro version of the tool that runs the more powerful GPT-4), a new GPT-4 Turbo that runs faster and allows for much more user input, and a way to create your own GPT-powered chat tools, among other things. One of the sample “GPTs” purports to explain board and card games to players of any age! We’ll see about that.

Marc also recommended checking out Claude, a generative AI chatbot that’s comparable to ChatGPT Plus (the one that runs on GPT-4) but (a) free and (b) has a large “context window,” that is, allows greater amounts of user input. You can, for instance, give it a 30,000 word document full of de-identified student feedback and ask it to analyze the feedback for key themes. (Note that Claude is provided by a company called Anthropic, which is a different company from Anthology, the folks that make Blackboard. Don’t be confused like I was.)

After these updated, Kellye took us on a deep dive into her use of the AI tool Perplexity in her writing courses. See her slides, “AI- Assisted Assignments in Student Learning Circles,” for more information, but what follows is my recap.

Kellye attended the AI institute that Marc organized this past summer. She came in hesitant about using AI in her teaching and was a little overwhelmed at variety and power of these technologies at first, but now she is actively experimenting with AI in her courses. She has also become accustomed to feeling overwhelmed at the pace of change in generative AI, and she uses this to have empathy for her students who are also feeling overwhelmed.

Kellye uses a small-group structure in her courses that she calls student learning circles. These are persistent groups of 3-5 students each that meet during class time weekly throughout the semester. She called these class sessions “authority-empty spaces” since she encourages the students to meet around the building without her. She’s available in her office and by email for assistance during these class sessions, but she’s encouraging student autonomy by removing herself from the front of the room.

One of the AI-supported activities in her first-year composition course involves “stress testing” claims. She opens this activity by considering a common claim about learning styles, that each student has a specific way of learning (verbal, visual, and so on) in which they learn better. She’ll ask her students if they know their learning style, and most report being visual learners, with verbal learners in a distant second. Then she’ll ask Perplexity, a generative AI tool like ChatGPT but with better sources, “Are learning styles real?” Of course, there’s piles of research on this topic and all of it refutes the so-called “matching hypothesis” that students learn best when the instructional modality matches their learning style. It becomes clear from Perplexity’s response, replete with footnotes, that the claim about learning styles is questionable.

Then Kellye turns her students loose on a list of claims on various topics: crime rates, campus mental health, pandemic learning loss, and much more. First students work in their groups to analyze a given claim. What do they know about? Do they agree with it? What assumptions are baked into the claim? Then the student groups ask Perplexity about the claims, using whatever prompts they want. Then Kellye provides students with specific prompts for the claim, ones aimed at uncovering the assumptions the claim makes. The students enter these prompts into Perplexity and then analyze the results.

Here’s an example. One of Kellye’s claims reads, “With record crime rates across the nation, cities should invest in robust community programs designed to increase awareness of prevention methods to keep residents safe.” One group of students noted in their pre-Perplexity analysis that there are already a lot of such community programs that don’t seem to be lowering the crime rates, so the claim needs more work around the types of programs to be launched, perhaps matching them with particular kinds of crime. When the group asked Perplexity about the claim, the bot said something similar, noting that such programs need to be targeted to types of crime. But then Kellye provided the group with her prompt: “Are crime rates at an all-time high?” Perplexity quickly provided lots of data indicating that, in fact, crime rates are far lower than they’ve been historically. There was an assumption baked into the claim, that crime rates are at record highs, that neither the students nor Perplexity picked up!

I find this activity fascinating for a couple of reasons. One is that it shows how hard it can be to “stress test” a claim, that students need opportunities to learn how to do this kind of work. The other is that the AI chatbot wasn’t any better than the students in identifying faulty assumptions baked into a claim. Perplexity did a great job backing up its statements with real sources from the internet (that students could follow and analyze for credibility), but it only answered the questions it was given. What you get from the AI depends on what you ask, which means it’s just as important to be asking good questions with an AI as it was without an AI.

It’s possible that other AI tools might be better at this kind of questioning of assumptions. Bing Chat, for instance, will often suggest follow-up questions you might ask after it answers one of your questions. On other hand, I’ve found that the quality of sources that Bing Chat uses are often low. Regardless, I love Kellye’s activity as a way to teach students how to think critically about the claims they encounter and how to think critically about the output of an AI chatbot.

I’ll end with one more note from Kellye. She was asked how her students react to using generative AI in her course. She said that several of her students had a hard time believing her when she said it was okay that they use these tools. They had received clear messages from somewhere (other instructors?) that using generative AI for coursework was forbidden. But once these students started experimenting with Perplexity and other similar tools, they were impressed at how helpful the tools were for improving their understanding and writing. Kellye also noted that when students are working in groups, they’re much more likely to question the output of an AI chatbot than when they’re working individually.

This week’s event was our last in series on AI this fall, but stay tuned for more great conversations on this topic in the spring semester.

Recap: Getting Started with Alternative Grading Approaches

· Nov 6, 2023 ·

by Emily Donahoe, associate director for instructional support

Last week, Josh Eyler and I facilitated a reprise of our workshop on “Getting Started with Alternative Grading Approaches,” a topic we’re both pretty passionate about. You can review our slides here. What follows are some highlights from this workshop.

We’ve defined “alternative grading,” in contrast to “traditional grading,” as a set of practices designed to center student growth through some combination of revision, multiple attempts, significant feedback, student reflection, and mastery of skills and dispositions. These models strive to decenter the grade itself and instead prioritize learning.

Because grading touches so many areas of our practice as teachers, and because implementing new models requires a significant time investment, we thought it was important to consider three things before deciding what kind of alternative grading approach might work best for you:

Your beliefs about learning: How do people learn best? What conditions are most conducive to learning? What student and instructor actions best promote learning? What roles do student agency, failure, metacognition, etc. play in learning?
Your desired outcomes for student learning: What competencies or dispositions do you most want students to develop? Agency and autonomy? Metacognition? Self-motivation? Love of learning? The possibilities are endless.
Your teaching contexts: What are the expectations of your colleagues? What are your social identities? At what career stage are you? What are your typical class sizes? What time do you have to devote to new teaching methods?

Answering questions like these can provide a strong foundation for making decisions about your grading system.

We also introduced some common features of alternative grading models, as delineated by Robert Talbert and David Clark, authors of the new book Grading for Growth. Talbert and Clark suggest that grading for growth is based on four pillars:

Clearly defined standards
Helpful feedback
Marks that indicate progress
Reattempts without penalty

You can read more about these pillars in Talbert and Clark’s book or on their Substack.

Finally, Josh and I introduced four different alternative grading approaches:

- Labor-based contract grading: A system in which student grades are based on the amount of labor they undertake in the course rather than evaluations of the quality of individual assignments, with expectations laid out at the beginning of the semester through a grade contract.
- Specifications/Mastery/Standards-based grading: Three closely related systems in which student grades are determined by demonstrations of competency on specific outcomes, through multiple attempts and continuous feedback across the semester.
- Ungrading (or collaborative grading): In which students engage in supported self-assessment and determine their final course grade collaboratively with the instructor, often by presenting evidence of their learning in an individual conference.
- Portfolio grading: In which students continuously revise and improve their work across the semester for inclusion in a final portfolio, the overall quality of which determines their final grade.

These approaches aren’t necessarily “plug and play”: instructors should feel free to take the elements of each practice that work for them and leave the rest. And if you’re not ready to jump feet first into a new grading system, there are plenty of things you can do to start minimizing grades in your courses: assign work that receives feedback but no grade, for example; build in opportunities for self-assessment; or allow revisions and re-takes when possible.

To help instructors learn more about these practices, we also put together an alternative grading bibliography with lots of great resources. You can also read about these practices in our workshop slides. If you’d like additional support in developing a new approach to grading in your course, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at cetl@olemiss.edu to schedule a consultation!