A (Missing) Culture of Teaching Visits

One of the sessions I attended at the POD Network conference in Pittsburgh last month was led by Corbin Campbell, professor of education at American University and author of the 2023 book Great College Teaching: Where It Happens and How to Foster It Everywhere. Campbell led a team that observed over 700 college courses at multiple institutions, and the book shares their findings on where and how effective teaching is practiced in higher education.

Campbell shared some highlights from her study at the POD session, but what caught my attention was something she has learned since going on the road to colleges and universities talking about her work. During her talks, she will often ask all the faculty in the room to stand up (or raise their hands if standing isn't practical). She'll then ask faculty to remain standing if they have ever observed another faculty member teach. Most faculty remain standing at this point.

Then Campbell asks faculty to remain standing if they have ever observed another faculty member teach outside of a formal teaching evaluation process. At this point, a large portion of faculty typically sit down. She goes on to identify a number of contexts in which teaching observations might happen--observing someone outside of your department, observing someone who teaches very different students than you, observing someone at a different institution, and so on--with more and more faculty sitting down at each stage.

By the end of this activity almost every faculty member has sat down and the message is clear: Faculty, by and large, don't observe other faculty teach that much. This is a problem, Campbell noted, because watching other instructors in action is one of the best ways to develop your own teaching skills. An observation can provide ideas and inspiration for new (to you) approaches to teaching and the motivation to put those approaches into practice.

Mary Wright, past POD president and current director of the teaching center at Brown University, noted during the discussion that observing a peer teach is typically meant to provide feedback or evaluation to the instructor being observed, but it's also incredibly useful for the instructor doing the observation. I shared a story I heard years ago about a junior faculty member in a chemistry department who used "clickers" in his classes for student engagement. All the senior faculty members in the department had to observe him as part of his tenure process, and seeing him use clickers effectively motivated most of those senior faculty members to start using them, too!

These benefits of teaching observations for the observers are why the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching ran an "Open Classroom" event every year, arranging a dozen or more teaching visits that were open to the campus teaching community. The CFT had been hosting one-off teaching visits for years, but we made it a coordinated event after we saw my current boss, Josh Eyler, and his team do that at Rice University a while back. See my 2018 blog post, "In-Class Activities for Teaching Writing," for some of my takeaways from one Open Classroom event. The CFT also built teaching visits into our other programming, especially our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows program, where fellows had the chance to see each other teach as well as more senior colleagues.

I remember the conversations among observers and the observed at the CFT teaching visits were always incredibly rich, but finding one, two, or even three hours in a row for an observation and a conversation was challenging for most faculty. That said, I think Corbin Campbell is right: teaching visits can be one of the best ways for faculty and other instructors to develop as teachers. Are there departments or campuses that have successfully created a culture where faculty observe each other regularly--to learn from each other? What does it take to create such a culture?

By the way, when my POD Network colleagues participated in Campbell's stand-up-sit-down-activity, almost all of us remained standing the entire time. One of the best parts of working at a teaching center is getting to see so many different instructors in action!

An AI-Enhanced Polling Experiment

Last week, I blogged about a couple of potential uses of generative AI in teaching and learning. One of those ideas was to have an AI tool like ChatGPT quickly summarize responses to free-response polling question during class. For multiple-choice and very short answer questions, a bar graph or word cloud can give an instructor a good sense of the aggregated responses, but questions that require a sentence or more can be hard to use in a live session given the time it takes to read through a lot of lengthy student responses. But that's exactly the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good at, so this seemed like a promising use of AI to enhance in-class polling.

Just two days after I wrote that blog post, I had the chance to try out this idea during a workshop. I was invited to be the "community scholar" at the psychology teachers' section of the National Council for the Social Studies conference here in Nashville, Tennessee. I went with a version of my "Teaching in Stereo" workshop, focusing on ways to use different media and different activity structures to engage more students in learning. This presented a perfect opportunity to experiment with this AI-enhancing polling idea.

About midway through the workshop, I used Poll Everywhere to ask “What strategies have you found useful for broadening student participation in your courses?” of the roughly 50 psychology teachers in attendance. I tabbed over to the response history and downloaded the responses as a CSV file. Then I copied and pasted the responses into ChatGPT 4 (that's the version that comes with the Pro subscription) with the prompt “Tell me what four trends you see among this list of teaching ideas.” ChatGPT gave me four trends (active learning, student engagement, etc). Each identified trend came with a description and examples from the responses. Here’s the output:

In the list of teaching ideas you’ve provided, there appear to be four main trends:

1. Active Learning: Many of the ideas involve students physically moving or interacting with the material or each other, such as in a gallery walk, “Vote with your feet,” or “split the room” debates. Activities that require students to get up from their desks, engage in small group discussions, and use tactile methods for learning fall under this category.

2. Student Engagement: There’s a strong emphasis on making students feel valued and heard, fostering civil discourse, and creating engaging activities. Strategies like think-pair-share, small group discussions, and using gamification techniques are designed to increase student investment in their learning.

3. Use of Technology and Innovative Methods: The incorporation of AI for research, the use of platforms like Padlet, and online discussion boards suggest an integration of technology to enhance learning and discussion.

4. Inclusivity and Diversity of Expression: The ideas listed support diverse methods of expression and inclusivity, such as allowing for written or drawing responses, using whiteboard markers on desks, and varying activities to cater to different learning styles and interests.

I read the ChatGPT output aloud, then asked the participants to put their hands up if their response wasn’t captured by one of the four identified trends. No one did! ChatGPT did a good job of categorizing the 45 responses to my open-ended question. For 15-20 responses, I probably would have just let them scroll on the screen via Poll Everywhere, but for 45 responses, I needed help summarizing them. Some of ChatGPT’s “bucketing” was not great, but good enough for use to guide a discussion.

Glad to know this is a viable technique! Please let me know if you try it out!

Predictions for Online and Professional Education in 2024

UPCEA is the online and professional education association and the sponsor of the Intentional Teaching podcast. I recently agreed to serve as a Strategic Advisor for UPCEA, part of a team of experts available through UPCEA for consulting with institutions of higher education. That team was invited to share our predictions for online and professional education in 2024, and those predictions, along with some from the UPCEA senior leadership, are now available in a new report. It's a fairly short read and worth the time for anyone interested in this space. I appreciated that there was a lot of alignment among our 16 predictions!

Following is one of my predictions, to give readers a taste of the report:

As Beth McMurtrie reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, classroom walls are shifting. That is, there is both an increasing need and an increasing capacity for colleges and universities to offer learning experiences in a variety of modalities.

Adult students have been pursuing modalities other than the traditional on-site synchronous course for decades now, and now traditionally aged college students are increasingly looking for online and asynchronous options. That is partially a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which opened students' and parents' eyes to non-traditional modalities, but also a response to the growing skepticism of the value of higher education. This is leading students, both traditional and otherwise, to pursue more workforce-focused educational opportunities.

A key part of the capacity to offer alternative modalities (as well as alternative credentials) is faculty readiness. Recent data indicates a growing interest among faculty in teaching online, a trend that was undoubtedly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. I've talked to numerous faculty who "flipped" their classes in one way or another back in 2020 and are now far more comfortably using technology in their teaching and teaching in non-traditional modalities and/or using technology in their teaching. Where many faculty in 2019 would have scoffed at the efficacy of an online course, many of those faculty now have firsthand experience teaching effectively online, particularly at institutions that prepared faculty well for the 2020-2021 academic year.

The combination of the need and the capacity will lead many colleges and universities to experiment with a variety of course modalities and course structures in 2024, building on recent experiments across higher education in these areas. For some institutions facing the coming "demographic cliff," these experiments will help them face existential crises.

See the new UPCEA report, "Predictions 2024: Insights for Online & Professional Education" for more thoughts on the year ahead.

Thanks for reading!

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