Three teaching things: week of September 13
Addressing anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism through teaching approaches; active learning in hyflex and online courses; and a browser-based teleprompter.
Issue # 17
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
1. The paper
Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math
I want to share this paper within the context of this week’s #scholarstrike, and Scholar Strike Canada: coming to grips with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism means considering not only who has voice in what we teach, but also how our approaches to teaching (disproportionately) impacts certain students’ success.
Results from the paper show that “active learning reduced achievement gaps in examination scores by 33% and narrowed gaps in passing rates by 45%” (p. 1). Active learning—broadly—is a suite of techniques facilitated by the instructor, or course design elements that has learners actively test comprehension and construct meaning from course material. In this paper, a key element increasing underrepresented students’ success was engaging students in deliberate practice (detailed on p.4). As important, facilitating a “culture of inclusion” (again, detailed on p.4) in the classroom was described another key component. Together, this is termed a “heads-and-hearts” approach, and while focused on STEM courses, could be incorporated into other disciplinary teaching approaches, thereby offering faculty a very direct way of adopting anti-racist approaches to instruction.
Theobald, E. J., Hill, M. J., Tran, E., Agrawal, S., Arroyo, E. N., Behling, S., Chambwe, N., Cintrón, D. L., Cooper, J. D., Dunster, G., Grummer, J. A., Hennessey, K., Hsiao, J., Iranon, N., Jones, L., Jordt, H., Keller, M., Lacey, M. E., Littlefield, C. E., … Freeman, S. (2020). Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201916903. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916903117
(You can also return to an issue of Three Teaching Things from June written in response to the Black Lives Matter action from earlier this summer for further resources related to engaging meaningfully with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism.)
2. The resource
Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms
This is a comprehensive post from Dr. Derek Bruff, Director of the Centre for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, written in June. While the June-time speculation about instruction this fall could make this post feel like reading a historical artifact, once you scroll down to the strategies (beginning with the Classwide Discussion heading), there’s more timeless stuff here, focused on facilitating active learning in a classroom where some students are in-class and others are online. If you’re teaching fully online this fall, many of these techniques are actually easier to facilitate in a fully online context.
I’ve heard about the challenge of keeping track of students working in Zoom/Webex/insert-your-videoconferencing-tool-of-choice-here breakout rooms, and the section on Group Work is especially helpful, offering a strategy of leveraging Google Sheets to monitor student progress in their breakout rooms.
3. The tool
Online teleprompter (with bonus voice-activated auto-scrolling)
This is pretty straightforward: if you’re looking for a quick and dirty solution for reading a script, this browser-based online teleprompter should fit the bill. You cut and paste your script and you’re off to the races (looking-natural-while-reading-a-script #protip: put the browser window as close as possible to the webcam, which for me means narrowing and centring the browser window in the middle of my desktop).
I would recommend using Chrome, because you get access to a special bonus: voice-activated auto-scrolling. As I’ve shown in the animated GIF below, by left-clicking on the microphone, you can read and have the teleprompter move through the script at the pace of your reading.
(I also agree with many that you can forgo teleprompters completely when creating instructional videos—that authenticity beats high production values for educational impact).
Thanks for reading!