Michelle D. Miller's Blog

I’ve waited a long time for this day to arrive – my latest book is finally available wherever you buy your books!

For this book, my goal was to create a coherent approach to this one common issue – name learning – that goes beyond random tip-and-trick lists, going deeper into what happens when we learn a name and tapping into these theories for the most effective strategies. I also got to talk about some special considerations that may factor in, including neurodivergence, the effects (not all bad!) of cognitive aging, and how to handle names in large classes.

Why read a whole guide on this single topic? For starters, learning student names is one move that instantly elevates your classroom atmosphere, no matter your discipline, the needs of your students, or teaching style. It is also an area where most of us can use some help. So I tried to make this book as applicable as possible across the board - whether you happen to be a thirty-year classroom veteran, or a teaching assistant just starting out.

Message me if you've got questions or want to know more, and thanks for reading! - Michelle Miller

In last week’s Chronicle Teaching Newsletter, reporter Beth McMurtrie offers a thoughtful reflection on the valuing, and devaluing, of teaching within higher education. Sparked by a conference put on by a high-profile national organization, her points echo ones I’ve heard, and seen for myself, throughout my 30-year career.

By now it’s a truism that college teachers usually have to learn what teaching skills they have through hit-or-miss self-training. Equally discouraging is the paradoxical set of institutional priorities that’s become the norm. Teaching is often the most publicly visible activity within an institution of higher education, and sometimes the biggest and most reliable source of revenue as well – and yet the money and the glory go to research. Or to sports, or to impressive new building projects, or basically anything other than the classes where students spend their time.

McMurtrie cites several signs that this devaluation dynamic is at work. Reliance on adjunct faculty is a big one, followed by institutional cultures that explicitly steer tenure-track faculty away from putting serious effort into teaching. Over-reliance on student evaluations is another, especially if those carry most of the weight in the teaching category in promotion and tenure reviews.

I heartily agree with McMurtrie’s list of red flags. But I’d add to her list a set of issues that are more granular, including quite a few you would notice as a faculty member teaching at a specific IHE or even within a specific unit.

You may be at a teaching-devaluing IHE if:

Your IHE tolerates classroom spaces that are in disrepair, are chronically too hot or cold, dirty, or just generally broken-down.This sign might not even register as an unusual thing, especially if the problem has gone on so long faculty no longer bother to complain. The point isn’t whether teaching spaces are luxurious or tastefully decorated. It certainly isn’t whether they have expensive, specialized technology over and above basic projection and videoconferencing capabilities. Rather, it’s how the overall physical quality of teaching facilities stacks up compared to research and administrative spaces at that same institution. It also hinges on whether problems with teaching spaces are seen as urgent action items, or worthy of fixing at all.Classes are routinely assigned to rooms that don’t match pedagogy. Your IHE might have a few state-of-the art classrooms  – spaces showcasing high-quality projection equipment, portable collaboration tools (mikes, whiteboards), and most important of all, furniture that can be moved around to support active learning. If so, that is a wonderful start, and such spaces do make nice settings for publicity photos. But are these high-end rooms in regular, day-to-day use? If so, are they being used by instructors who’ve expressly shown interest in using them to their full potential? If instead the rooms usually sit empty or are randomly handed out regardless of class pedagogy or instructor preferences – your IHE is devaluing teaching.Faculty are routinely assigned to courses that they’re neither excited to teach nor particularly effective at. Double red flag if sub-optimal assignments happen mainly as a scheduling convenience or to accommodate certain faculty members’ research agendas. Triple red flag if  convenience-first, teaching-last scheduling approaches also determine class format (online, hybrid and so on). I’ve heard of faculty being assigned asynchronous online courses as a perk or way of easing the perceived burden of teaching “real” classes, rather than because they have genuine interest in this uniquely demanding kind of teaching. It’s not a stretch to predict that such courses will hardly be paragons of substantive online engagement.Foundational, 100-level courses routinely receive far less support than upper-division and graduate courses. Perhaps they’re taught by less-experienced faculty, or by underpaid and overworked contingent faculty. Or class sizes might be wildly out of proportion, compared to upper-division courses in the same discipline. Or they might be beset by persistent, ongoing problems that no one ever takes the time to address. In yet another example of paradoxical decision making, many IHEs extol the importance of supporting students in the early, formative stages of their college careers, and recognize the importance of foundational, “gateway” courses to success later on. Yet the same IHEs send lower division offerings to the end of the line when it comes time to assign faculty and resources. Even worse, a stigma may have developed around lower-division “service” courses, to the point where tenure-track faculty don’t want to teach them and departments don’t want to invest in them.No one at your IHE has seriously grappled with the question of how to assess teaching quality. As McMurtrie observes, over-reliance on teaching evaluations is a huge problem, one that gets in the way of improving teaching across an institution and one that fails to fairly support and reward faculty for great pedagogy. The answer, however, is not to try to buffer data from these flawed instruments by offering vague instructions not to take the surveys too seriously come promotion time. There needs to be some other system put firmly in place of student surveys, ideally an evidence-based system for describing and assessing what goes on in an instructor’s classes. Nothing about creating such a system is easy; it requires making hard decisions about which teaching and course design practices are favored over others, and developing ways of consistently measuring whether those preferred practices are happening. I know that many IHEs are struggling to create and gain buy-in for such systems, and others are adapting ideas generated outside their walls as a way to cope. Struggle is expected, but if your IHE has simply walked away from the challenge, that constitutes a major devaluation of teaching.When your IHE does recognize good teaching, it’s in the form of one-off, low-prestige awards. Especially discouraging are the teaching awards that carry no tangible benefits. Worst of all is a pattern seen in the most teaching-devaluing institutional cultures, in which teaching awards actively drag down the recipient’s professional reputation – becoming something faculty dread receiving because it might somehow stain their reputation as a serious scholar.Scholarship of teaching and learning and educationally focused research don’t count. In some IHEs, SoTL and similar forms of research lack the cachet of more traditionally focused disciplinary research, even when the work is rigorously conducted and peer reviewed. Or this kind of work might not count at all. Downgrading scholarship tied to teaching practice is a clear message from an IHE that pedagogy is not the priority, and over time, it systematically sets back the career progress of scholars who care about teaching. Professional development programming is limited in scope and lacks grounding in learning sciences. Even today, after decades of major discoveries in how people learn, too many professional development programs fail to take advantage of this wealth of research. Worse, professional development continues to be one way in which myths about learning are spread. Great PD directors (and there are many out there) know to vet presenters and their content to keep this from happening. But at some IHEs, empirical evidence isn’t a driving factor in programming decisions. Especially when PD offices are under-resourced and under-supported, there may also be a lack of cohesion in what’s offered and, importantly, failure to emphasize following up with action. An inspiring keynote can be a great way to celebrate teaching and get faculty excited to expand their skills. But without a plan in place to actively support putting ideas into practice, the value of that keynote will fade along with the fanfare of the day. The scope of PD programming needs to include follow-up and skills development along with a range of other offerings, and ideally, this range would help engage a broader swath of faculty than just the highly-committed usual suspects.  

For colleges and universities that expressly present themselves as being teaching-focused, it’s obvious that valuing pedagogy, through actions large and small, is a matter of institutional survival. But even at bigger, more research-focused places – like the one where I teach – treating undergraduate instruction like something to be gotten out of the way, as cheaply as possible, is going to be an increasingly untenable approach. This isn’t just about the soaring costs of getting a degree, or to questions about the value of college, but it’s related. As families become more and more sensitized to college as an investment, students and their parents will increasingly perceive it as bait-and-switch to enroll and then find that your education is simply not that important in the grand scheme of things, for several semesters if not more. Families will not be content to, frankly, subsidize other agenda items with their tuition dollars.

Besides basic facilities and resources like working HVAC and appropriate scheduling practices, what do IHEs need to have or do in order to say that they value teaching? First, there does need to be a serious commitment to defining and measuring teaching quality. If an IHE needs to borrow from the many ideas that are floating around out there, or even bring in some experts to help, so be it. But that process needs to be underway, and it needs to have some teeth – institutional backing to help ensure that standards are applied fairly and consistently. These standards also need to take into account what’s been discovered about how human beings learn, and as importantly, innovations in equity-minded teaching. Recent research has uncovered a wealth of ideas about how to reduce bias and engage diverse students in ways that ensure their success – but without policies for putting these principles into practice, they’ll be applied hit or miss, or not at all. Truly teaching-oriented IHEs will also give their PD staff what they need in order to maintain a full range of offerings, from traditional keynote-focused conferences to one-on-one coaching to skills training. In other words – programs that carry faculty from what approaches to use (i.e., preferred practices), to why (i.e., the research basis), and finally, how.

I predict that in the not-too-distant future, IHEs that deliver on the promise of truly student-centered, expert, caring, and effective teaching will be at a major advantage. And in order to do this, they’ll have to dispense with the teaching-support theater that’s all too frequently put up as a substitute for real, difficult, committed action.  

This in turn will require not just money and staff time, but courage. Maya Angelou’s famous take on individual courage was that it was the virtue that enables you to practice all other virtues consistently. I think this is also true for institutional courage. It’s one thing for leadership to stand back and applaud as a few well-informed, energetic souls knock it out of the park with classes that are effective, inclusive, and plain amazing. It’s quite another to ensure that all classes at an institution embody an agreed-upon set of standards, practices, and values. It takes courage to commit to consistently maintaining ordinary classrooms and to keeping gateway courses fresh and well-resourced, especially when the siren call of grant dollars, big-name researchers, prestigious graduate programs and splashy new projects is always wailing in the background.

As you get back into the classroom this academic year, look around you. Do you see abundant evidence that teaching is the priority? Does that evidence extend all the way down from philosophical and aspirational heights, down to the physical spaces where teaching happens? I’m guessing you may not. If you can, make noise about what you see. If enough of us do, maybe academia will finally make headway on what should have happened about fifty years ago: recentering teaching as the mission of higher education.

I sometimes tell a story about my first solo book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, involving a crisis that hit about 2/3 of the way through writing it. I forget what topic I’d originally planned to cover in chapter 8, but once I got to that section of the manuscript, I had a bad feeling. There was something missing, and although I wasn’t sure, I suspected it was this: student motivation.

After a few weeks of fretting and overly-dramatic email exchanges with my editor, I resolved to reshape that part of the book. What I ended up doing was synthesizing some classic research and theory in the area and looking at how those ideas might play out in fully online classes.

Granted, the idea of addressing the factors that move students to actually complete one’s carefully-designed course activities might not seem like a bold move. It was a big step for me at the time though, not least because – like a typical academic – I worried about staying comfortably inside of my micro-specialization in cognitive psychology.

But that wasn’t the only issue. In psychology, it’s only fairly recently that we’ve begun to really explore the relationship between the thinking-side and the feeling-side of the mind and brain, especially with respect to how the thinking-brain and feeling-brain influence and shape one another in an powerful set of feedback dynamics.

(As an aside, motivation does belong under the “feeling” side. Textbooks and courses almost always combine motivation and emotion in a single heading, not because there isn’t enough material to treat them separately, but because they are so closely intertwined. Evolutionarily speaking, the point of having emotions in the first place is to motivate, or move, us. Emotions move us away from some things and toward others, in the name of our own survival and the survival of our genes. They also push us to develop and maintain the social bonds that make all forms of human survival possible).

Ever since that experience with Minds Online, I’ve advocated in various ways for tapping into the mind’s inborn mechanisms for motivation, especially those that relate to students’ goals for what they want to get out of their own education. Years back, I even toyed with a larger-scale project about the reciprocal relationship between motivation and cognition. I went so far as to develop a book proposal, titled Leading to Water: Motivating College Students to Take Action, Invest Effort, and Own Their Learning. Looking back on it now, the emphasis I’d put on accountability, resilience, and effort come across as a bit harsh, given that today students are picking up the pieces of their education after COVID, and that in this environment, supporting student mental health takes priority over pushing students to achieve.

But even in context of the current focus on support and flexibility, there is still a lot we can glean about teaching from the study of motivation. I’m not alone in thinking this, seeing as how there’s currently a mini-renaissance of interest in exactly this. The harbingers are all there – keynote titles and webinar topics centered on student engagement, articles in high-profile media outlets. I’d count variations on the engagement theme too. Intrinsic motivation. Interest. Even growth mindset – which I’d argue is still a relevant and research-backed concept – is part of the same territory.

I’m all for this surge in interest, and it got me thinking back to the research basis for it. There are the still-around-for-a-reason classic concepts in academic motivation: Self-efficacy. Intrinsic motivation. Persistence. Self-determination theory. Feedback and its role in helping to induce flow states.

There is newer work that builds on these these classics, though. Much of it explicitly ties to cognitive processes like memory, attention, and thinking, as well as to effective study techniques such as retrieval practice.

This is all especially important because of one connection in particular, the one that hooked me into writing about it in the first place. It’s this: Without being motivated to put in focused effort, there’s no way for students to benefit from all the advances that have been made in the science of effective study.

I say this because practices like quizzing yourself, wrestling with difficult applied problems, and spacing out study are all especially effort-intensive, at least in the short run. With them, students won’t need to spend as many total hours hitting the books, but the hours they do spend will be more arduous – and in the case of retrieval practice, might give them initial feedback that isn’t pleasant to hear.

This is not to say that active study is necessarily unpleasant, upsetting, or a chore. However, it’s a big change from the pleasant-but-inefficient alternatives like re-reading that students default to. Even interleaving, in which you tackle different categories of problem in an unpredictable fashion in a single session, is commonly perceived as harder and more frustrating – potentially cutting students off from the demonstrated benefits of studying in this way.

With that, what does the latest research tell us about the relationship between motivation and learning?

Effortful study techniques are often the better ones, but unfortunately, students seem to perceive this relationship in reverse. One study found that research volunteers rated retrieval practice as harder and also, less effective as a study strategy, compared to passive review. (The good news is that with feedback, they re-evaluated and readily tacked over to study through retrieval.) Another study presented student volunteers with hypothetical study schedules they might use in the run-up to a math exam, tracking Here too, students tended to reject schedules that were high in spacing and interleaving, rating them as less pleasant as well.

I want to be clear here: nothing about this work should imply that struggling students are slacking off, looking for easy grades or worst of all, that they are inherently lazy. If all of that classic research on motivation has taught us one thing, it is that motivation is best seen as a response to a situation, not a disposition you either have or you don’t. Anyone is capable of putting forth effort, when the conditions are right to do so. But it does look like the message about desirable difficulty has a long way to go in reaching students, with many of them continuing to mistake ease for effectiveness.

There’s good news that comes out of the latest research as well. One of the most encouraging things I’ve seen, as a big fan of retrieval practice, is research showing that when students answer quiz questions about a subject, they’re more likely to want to learn more about it. The key dynamic here seems to be that building up a firmly established knowledge base triggers a type of snowball effect, stimulating curiosity and setting off that type of virtuous cycle that all good teachers treasure.

Curiosity, as it turns out, is also sparked by choice – that key component of the influential “self determination theory” of motivation in which autonomy plays a key role. Using a fairly ingenious procedure involving a sham lottery, a research team found that when people get to choose a specific prize drawing from several alternatives, they become more invested in finding out the results. 

And lastly, there’s exciting new work being done on the best ways to persuade students that active, effortful study really is the way to go. I say “persuade,” not just inform, because as in so many things, study habits aren’t a behavior that people change simply because they’re told they should. The KBCP framework – short for Knowledge, Belief, Commitment, Planning – is a refreshing alternative to traditional study skills instruction, the one where students are handed a soon-to-be-forgotten list of random-seeming tips about what to do and not to do.

KBCP does start with sharing information about better study practices – the “knowledge” component – but then pivots to persuading students that they do work, ideally through interactive demonstrations or in-class experiments. Students then internalize and carry forth the new practices, committing to using them, planning for how they will do this, and reflecting on the results.

I’m keenly interested in seeing these developments continue, and not just because they recombine concepts from psychology in ways that delight and intrigue me as a disciplinary expert. If we really are going to emerge from the crisis of the last three years stronger and better, and more committed to serving our students, we will need to balance both what we ask students to do and why they should do those things. If we are going to take full advantage of the massive and growing research base on learning, we’ll need to make our approaches appealing. If we are going to be truly transparent with students about the paths to success, we’ll need to persuasively share the best ways to study. We can’t do it without igniting motivation, engagement, and drive.  

Further Reading

Abel, M., & Bäuml, K. H. T. (2020). Would you like to learn more? Retrieval practice plus feedback can increase motivation to keep on studying. Cognition, 201(March), 104316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104316

Cavanagh, S.R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion. West Virginia University Press.

D’Mello, S., & Graesser, A. (2012). Dynamics of affective states during complex learning. Learning and Instruction, 22(2), 145–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2011.10.001

Hui, L., de Bruin, A. B. H., Donkers, J., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2022). Why students do (or do not) choose retrieval practice: Their perceptions of mental effort during task performance matter. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(2), 433–444. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3933

Romero Verdugo, P., van Lieshout, L. L. F., de Lange, F. P., & Cools, R. (2022). Choice boosts curiosity. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221082637

Shen, L., & Hsee, C. K. (2017). Numerical nudging: Using an accelerating score to enhance performance. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617700497

It was in May 2022 that I first deactivated my Twitter account. Not usually one to follow my gut when it comes to big decisions, this time I couldn’t help noticing how drained I felt after engaging on that platform. I was also getting an increasingly bad feeling about how the platform could, and likely would, change at the whim of its presumptive new owner.

At the time, it did feel like a big decision. I’d built up a following that wasn’t big by most people’s standards. But what it lacked in quantity it made up with quality, rich with connections to other academics whose work I admired.

It also went against the grain for someone whose work focuses on teaching with technology  and the impacts of technology on how we think, remember, and learn. A good chunk of my recent work has also focused on tech-related mythbusting, debunking all kinds of exaggerated claims about the ways in which technology supposedly erodes our mental capabilities. Whether it’s getting people to tone down rhetoric on taking notes with laptops, questioning the depth of generational divides around technology, or trying to put the brakes on full-fledged moral panic, I’m usually there to say that it’s not all that bad.

Social media, though, is a different kettle of fish. It’s always been a bit of an oddball in the landscape of online socializing and relationship-building, providing a stage for negative personality traits to play out and contributing to anxiety, depression, and sleep deprivation among certain demographics (most notably teenagers). And within the landscape of social media platforms, Twitter is odder still.

People use Twitter for different reasons than they use other platforms, and may even have different sorts of personalities, tilting more towards seekers and those in search of specific interests than the other ones. More research these days tells us that we shouldn’t lump all social media togetherhttps://www.amazon.com/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/1594634017 when weighing its good and bad points, especially now that newer forms (TikTok, BeReal) are giving the established giants a run for their money.

So it makes sense to apply a new critical lens every time we start making decisions about our own personal social media, asking ourselves what the particular features and affordances are, and how even subtle differences among those can lead to vastly different experiences.

It’s even more important when we’re sending other people into digital environments, such as our students. I’ve been intrigued by ideas for using Twitter for class activities, and impressed when instructors manage to make those go well. But I’ve also cautioned faculty about it being a frequently hostile environment to people of color and women, enough so that I have never advocated for making Twitter a required part of the course. Yes, there are various safeguards and settings that could help buffer the risks. But those are far from perfect, and I know I could never forgive myself if a student’s ill-considered, awkwardly worded or overly controversial tweet got them cancelled.

This is not just a concern borne of the last few years of online mayhem. Consider the case from years back of a young woman targeted for massive online scorn and harassment after a Twitter joke landed badly. I’m not going to spell out her name here, but if you want to see how the whole business unfolded, Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed offers a devastating account of it. She really did lose everything in this wrenching (and arguably the first) case of Twitter cancellation, and Ronson’s conclusion is that her gender had a lot to do with it.

That risk has been there all along, that for some reason, a student’s class related tweets would end up backfiring on them, on you, or both. But this risk is likely only going to become more of an issue as – as most experts are predicting – Twitter becomes even more chaotic and even less reflective in the months to come.

That sense of impending chaos was what finally pushed me over the edge last May. It wasn’t that I was harassed or feeling like I was about to be. It was the feeling that any comment I made, any post I tweeted, immediately became a chore, just another thing I had to check and babysit and manage in the midst of the daily barrage of tasks.

I was seeing a few other academic users cast the stay-or-go question as one of persistence, of staying in the fight for … truth, the right to use Twitter as we pleased, informed viewpoints about our shared profession? I was never sure what exactly we were supposed to stay and advocate for. But in that moment of exhaustion back in May, I became acutely aware of something I think we all know about social media, but that’s easy to forget: Used properly, it is a product that serves your needs as a consumer. When it doesn’t, you walk away. It’s not a cause that needs you to pour energy into it, it’s a commercial entity that needs to earn your business or die trying.

Courtney Heard (@godlessmom@mas.to) put it best, posting: “I think the fundamental idea Elon is missing…is that we were all on Twitter because we got something of value out of it. When you strip that value & replace it with incel edge lords with the vocabulary of a Teletubby, there is no longer a reason for us to be there. It’s not that we’re not “tough” enough to endure, it’s that it no longer provides us with value. Logging in was always a consumer choice. You have to make us want to.”

To be honest, Twitter had also become a bad fit for my own vulnerabilities and not-great habit patterns. Within the platform, it is difficult-to-impossible to avoid breaking news, leading me into unplanned scrolling binges during work time. Interspersed with all this doomscrolling was the jolt of anxiety whenever beloved figures were trending for one random reason or another (fortunately, as far as I’m aware, Dolly Parton is currently okay).

And as fun (bordering on addictive) as it was to collect praise about new articles, books, and blog posts, tweeting them out came with the risk of getting roasted instead. I realized that this issue was generating a constant, low-level anticipatory anxiety that was enough to contribute to writing block. Fortunately, I never ended up at a total standstill, but we all know that writing is hard enough as it is. Why set myself up for feeling even more anxious about what the crowd would say next? Yes, anything I put out into the world is still fair game to be dissected online somewhere, but I won’t be there for it – which feels like a big relief.

What’s next after bailing on Twitter? To sustain that need to stay in touch with others in my field, I’m falling back on an old alternative, LinkedIn. It’s all business, buttoned-up and boring as can be – which suits me just fine. It doesn’t hold out the promise of amassing thousands of reactions and comments, but it does get content out in front of other professionals in my field, people who will see it as relevant rather than as an opportunity to take pot shots at the ivory tower.  

Soon I’ll also be tweaking the way I get blog posts and research out in front of my network, most likely starting with a free Substack newsletter. I’m also checking out the new platforms explicitly billing themselves as Twitter replacements, such as Mastodon and Post. Reddit is still chugging along after all these years, and while it’s not without problems, perhaps we will see a revival of it as a way to connect with larger and more fluid audiences. I think there’s also going to be a future in bespoke, niche online spaces, such as Gather communities.

If any of those catch on, they might also fit the bill for the other thing I really like Twitter for, engaging at conferences. I’ve found that this back channel enhances the conference experience in a way that nothing else ever has, offering opportunities to share in-the-moment reactions with others who are right there in the room, and to praise speakers publicly when a talk stands out. In theory, there are ways to achieve the same outcomes via the chat and social room functions that come standard with most conference applications I’ve seen. So far though, these never seem to take off with the same momentum that’s sparked by a Twitter hashtag.

As for using Twitter in classes, I think there’s no ready substitute here either. The reasons come down to the unique features Twitter brought to the table. There was the extreme concision, which pushes writers to condense and edit thoughts. Compare this to the typical post-once-reply-twice discussion board assignment, where minimum word counts create perverse incentives to write more and say less. Twitter is public enough to encourage students to think through what they say, and enough to ensure some kind of response in a short period of time – unlike the typical academic essay assignment, written for an audience of one who usually needs a week or more to answer.

Is it conceivable that some new platform or tool could provide similar features and affordances, while protecting students from the worse of Twitter’s dangers? I don’t know, but I think that now is an excellent time for educational technology developers to start work on alternatives.

Rest assured that for now, if you’ve still got your Twitter handle, I won’t hold it against you. And I sincerely hope that your experiences continue to be good ones. But unless something radically changes, I’m out. Out, but excited to explore what comes next.

At the close of Spring 2021, I was once again so proud of my students. They worked so hard, and put so much of themselves into their coursework.

Two projects in particular stood out enough for me to ask permission to share.

The first is a slideshow by Kaylin McLiverty, a student in my Introduction to Psychology course. It is about study strategies, and how evidence-based techniques and approaches could be implemented in real classrooms. She took a particularly careful look at distributed practice, also known as the spacing effect. Check it out for yourself:

The second is a project by another student in the same class, Arielle Condes. It’s a one-episode podcast about false confessions, with a special focus on one infamous case that took place in Reykjavik:

I’m in awe of my students always, but especially this past year. They’ve dug deep, worked hard, and learned so much. Well done, Kaylin and Arielle!

For a few months now, optimists have been pointing to one upside of the pivot to online instruction: It has pushed faculty, en masse, to expand their repertoire of teaching techniques.

While I’ve pushed back hard against the silver-lining narrative of what this pandemic has meant for faculty and staff, I do see that it’s spurred the development of new, useful skills, many involving technology.

Accomplishments that once seemed like stretch goals are now totally under our belts: Faculty are more fluent than ever at using their learning management systems. They’ve become familiar with the common videoconferencing applications. Many have also mastered extended videoconferencing features such as polling and breakout groups, and a good number are experimenting with courseware and collaborative online annotation tools. Recorded class sessions are becoming the norm and might remain so from here on out.

We’ve also become conversant with entirely new (for most of us) ways of organizing a class, now that hyflex, online asynchronous, and blended models are dominating college schedules from coast to coast. We may like these alternatives, or we may not, but we’ll never again be returning to a time when most faculty simply didn’t know or care about them.

No doubt, some aspects of pandemic teaching will survive even after things return to ‘normal.’ I’m already hearing informally from faculty who’ve talked about the good things they want to keep going forward: real-time polling, flexible online office hours, short informal videos.

These are all perfectly good innovations that help people up their teaching games. For me though, the one thing I’ll keep is decidedly low-tech: No more grade penalties for late work.

By grade penalties, I mean some variation on the following. Work is due at X time on X day. Any work received past that deadline is accepted and graded in the usual way, but 10% gets deducted for every calendar day past the deadline. And so, a student who turns in ‘B’ work by the deadline gets the same grade as someone who turns in ‘A’ work late.

Granted, this change is something I’ve been moving towards for a while. But it took a pandemic for me to finally pull the plug on a practice that I’d been following for twenty-plus years of full-time college teaching.

I suspect that it’s also something that most instructors do have as part of their syllabus, because students are shocked that it is not a part of mine. In the syllabus quizzes that I’ve been running via Kahoot!  for the past two semesters, this has been the single most-missed question, with sometimes as few as 15% of students correctly picking up on it on the first try.

Whether they speed past that syllabus section on deadlines after assuming that it’s just the usual stuff, or read it but fail to really understand, I don’t know. But in every case, I’ve spent time going over that one point, more than any other, as students post comments along the lines of wait what?

Even after all that, for the first few weeks of class there’s a steady trickle of messages from students asking if they can still turn in late work and what the hit will be to their grades, tentatively exploring if I really did mean it when I said they could take the time they need  without having to first run some kind of cost-benefit analysis on their grades. 

So if I’m not enforcing deadlines with deductions, what am I doing instead? My current policy goes like this:

It’s important to keep up with your work in this course, both for your own stress levels, and so that we can all be on the same page when we’re discussing material in class and online. However, I know that life happens, and that deadlines may be especially challenging this semester. For this reason, I reserve the right to adjust deadlines in your favor if you talk to me in advance. To me, deadlines are all about communication – if I know what’s going on and how you plan to catch up, adjustments are usually just fine. I do not impose grade penalties for late work. Either you’re communicating with me about when you’re turning it in, or if not – you need to.

In sum: Keep up as best you can. If you can’t, talk to me and we’ll make a game plan. Grades I give reflect the quality of your work, not when you turned it in.

There are a few exceptions that I lay out for students as well. Anything that involves group participation or peer interaction does have a stricter cutoff; for example, the group annotation assignments I have in one course just don’t work when people are chiming in days or weeks after others have finished commenting. And then there are final project drafts and final exams, where there’s just no way I can accept them after the official ending date.

That’s the ‘what’ of my policy, but let me say a little more about the ‘why.’ Part of it is to make the syllabus itself and overall feel of the course come across as more inviting, a goal that’s always important but is especially so right now, in a time when so many students are feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, and afraid. It’s a concrete way to make clear that this class is about them and their learning, not me and my policies.

I’ve also noted that during this pandemic, excuses and exceptions necessarily function differently, or at least they should. It’s critically important that we don’t set up incentives that tempt students to come to class, or do anything else that might lead them out of their rooms, in cases where they’re feeling “just a little bit sick.” If they’re well, students are probably busy helping each other, and helping their sick relatives, and running Zoom school for their own kids, and picking up extra work shifts if they possibly can. All of this figures in as we all try to maintain a space where students can keep moving forward under truly rotten circumstances.

Entirely aside from the pandemic, this change also grows out my disenchantment with the idea of contaminating grades with what is, to me, an aspect of the work that is completely separate from performance. As a psychologist, I’m admittedly more obsessed than most with the measurement function of grades. But surely most of us can see the logical problem with combining timing and quality of work in a single number. At the very least, it means that when I’m going back and re-evaluating course grades, as when writing a letter of recommendation, I have to stop and check – did that grade reflect the actual content of the paper or exam, or was there a late penalty factored in as well?

And lastly, there is the purely selfish benefit of not dealing with as much slapdash, overcaffeinated panic work. As I tell my students when I (slowly, repeatedly) explain the system, I’d rather spend my time reading and commenting on their best work, even if it ends up in the grading box a little bit later. Who knows – it might even save me the time and stress of dealing with academic dishonesty, because students are the most tempted to cheat when they feel backed into a corner and out of options.  

I am not the first person to hit upon this idea. In 2016, Ellen Boucher, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, talked about the ways in which ballooning penalties and rigid policies contribute to the disappearance of students. Instead of tough love, struggling students need communication and support in making a catch-up plan. Boucher observes:

“The conventional wisdom has long been that punishing students for missing deadlines is good for them. Deadlines force students to prioritize their academic work over more frivolous commitments and serve to teach them valuable time-management skills.

Trouble is, that assumes most students are irresponsible or lazy rather than overwhelmed or struggling. It also ignores the fact that most working professionals — including professors — learn early on to distinguish between “hard” and “soft” deadlines, between the grant proposal that must be submitted on time and the book review that can be shelved for a week or two.”

She also points out the difference between the theory of what strict policies do, and the reality: 

“The problem with a rigid policy on lateness is that it compounds students’ stress at a time when they are already overwhelmed. It’s tailor-made to produce the sort of behavior that has frustrated professors for generations: shoddy work (submitted just to get something in), panicked cheating, or disappearing students (from the course, or worse, from the university altogether).”

It’s almost prescient, in that “overwhelmed” is pretty much the standard state of affairs for all of us in higher education today. So what better time than now to try it and see what happens?

As with any big change, there are risks. I’ve learned, for example, that it’s still important to check in with students who are missing big chunks of work, even if they aren’t losing points as they do so. In theory, falling behind should be less anxiety-inducing – and therefore less procrastination-inducing – when there aren’t compounding penalties. But the work still does have to get done, and I’m still concerned about students ending up so behind that they can’t really catch up. In practice, I haven’t had this happen that frequently, at least not yet – but if it does I’ll have to find a way to build in more safeguards going forward.

I’ve also wondered whether over the longer term, I’m setting myself up for some kind of combination arms race/tragedy of the commons dynamic, where students are consistently sacrificing my assignments for those of for other professors with more rigid policies. It’s possible. However, I think that the tradeoff is that while my assignments probably will come in later than other instructors’, they’ll be more likely to come in at all. And given that the entire purpose of those assignments is to reinforce the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be developing, I still come out ahead. 

There are some additional demands on me to field all of those timely communications I’ve asked students to send me; my email box is getting a workout for sure right now, as the first wave of negotiable-deadlines is hitting. Then again, it’s not like my inbox was empty before, and I’d rather be handling these issues now, rather than at the end of the semester when it really is too late to address the problem. I think we all know that even when there is a policy laid out in the syllabus, some students will still ask for exceptions, either out of sheer chutzpah or (more likely) because they’ve hit a truly unforeseen situation that warrants it. I’d rather systematize that process and give everyone the same shot at getting the extra time they need.

Should we faculty be looking at other enforcement mechanisms that don’t involve grades? Are there other creative ways we could be incentivizing on-time work, rather than just making all deadlines flexible? Perhaps, and I’m eager to see what other people have come up with along those lines. One very light-touch incentive I use is telling students that I grade assignments in the order they are received. It’s a nice perk for those students who are able to work ahead of schedule (or need to, because they’re planning around other big projects due after mine).

So there you have it – one concrete change to my teaching, catalyzed by the pandemic but sustained by the good results I’m having so far. It’s not the only thing I’ll keep, but it is one big thing, and I hope that as more faculty engage in similar experiments we’ll talk more about why and how we assign the grades that we do.

Predictably, now that we’ve come off the worst semester ever and are heading into one that promises to be even worse, tempers are raw and people are on edge.

It is predictable because of the titanic collision of work stress, home confinement, bad news, and grief that’s been upon us for months now. Predictable because morale on so many campuses – which was never great to begin with – is at an all-time low, with a near-total erosion of trust, appreciation, and sense of common purpose. Predictable because in academia we try to do way too much over email, and as research tells us, people are not only ruder online, messages sent in text form sound ruder to the people reading them compared how they would face to face.

I worry that as pressure builds to launch the coming semester – online, hybrid, hyflex, or however we’re now supposed to do it – basic collegiality will go out the window. Every time it does, it adds to our collective misery, misery that’s already well fueled by the extravagant goals and impossible timelines that have become normal.

It’s also predictable because our institutions so often lack systems for creating good working relationships between faculty and academic staff. I’ve observed this time and again at the schools I’ve visited over the years. Whether it’s at an elite flagship university or intimate liberal arts college, no one seems to know how these two groups are supposed to collaborate. Instructional designers, e-learning professionals, teaching coaches, developers, and librarians may all be essential to the functioning of contemporary universities, but they’re too often sidelined. Astoundingly, they’re sidelined even while faculty are drowning in work, including work that faculty are minimally trained and minimally skilled to be doing in the first place.

It’s frustrating, because this problem shouldn’t be that hard to fix. Nor should I – in the year 2020 – be encountering blank looks among my fellow faculty when I even mention instructional designers. The idea of working with IDs is not a part of academic culture or something people get exposure to in grad school, so I understand why this disconnect happens. It’s understandable, but it also is costing us.

Imagine that every time a team came together to create a feature film, that they had no pre-set system for dividing up the massive amount of work involved. Imagine that there were no commonly accepted categories of collaborators – gaffers, costumers, cinematographers and so on – and that every film set had to tackle this organization problem anew. Or, imagine that studios simply assumed that getting the movie made was the director’s problem, and left them to it with a stack of informational handouts about filmmaking and a wave goodbye. How good would the resulting films be? How many would actually get finished on time?

This is what is happening as we try to design and redesign courses using an outdated model where the faculty member, and the faculty member alone, tries to do it all on their own – or if they do accept help, they have to hash out anew all of the lines of responsibility for getting the work done. It’s resulting in a situation where there are untold numbers of credentialed, capable, smart people who could help, who are being paid to help, but who can’t because it’s unclear whether and when it’s okay for them to step in.

This mess may be predictable, but it’s also preventable. Institutions need to start thinking about ongoing assistance and faculty development less in terms of providing information, and more in terms of explaining exactly what can be delegated, and how. They can do some PR as well on the training and expertise of the staff who are charged with helping. They can explicitly lay out the roles and responsibilities of all of the people who might be working together on a collaboratively created course. If we did this, it wouldn’t take long for faculty to figure out that the opportunity to work with instructional designers – and librarians, and e-learning and pedagogy experts – is a godsend, not an affront.

And make no mistake, more courses are going to be collaborative efforts, not one-professor  shows. Courses are becoming more complex and more technology-dependent. Online programs exist in an ever-more-competitive market, and institutions’ goals for these programs are becoming ever more ambitious. Standards for what counts as good pedagogy are even going up, believe it or not. As all of this happens, it becomes even more absurd to think that we can create truly great courses with the one-professor-one-class model.

While we’re at it, we can also stop tolerating misdirected stress and frustration – perhaps not with an escalation of conflict through punishment and such, but with something more powerful: social norms. I’m reminded here of one of my favorite leadership books: The No Asshole Rule: Buiding a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t. In it, author Robert Sutton points out that we have quite a few unconscious biases that favor bad behavior. We assume that people who are abrasive and unpleasant are more competent – they must be, or they wouldn’t be where they are, right? This assumption then sets up social norms under which it’s okay to let destructive workplace behavior slide.

Sutton also points out the costs of not countering these assumptions. Being a business book, The No Asshole Rule puts this in purely financial terms; in one case study, he ballparks the price of supporting one chronically uncollegial employee for one year at $160,000, with much of that going to extra hours from upper management and the price of constantly recruiting and training new people to work with the jerk in question. In academia, maybe dollar costs aren’t quite as relevant, but we still pay dearly for needless conflict – in delays, indecision, attrition, and waste of potential.

So please make a pledge with me now: No matter how ridiculous your university’s response to the pandemic, no matter how unfair your own treatment has been, no matter how tired you are – you won’t take it out on the wrong person. Who is the wrong person? Anyone without direct power to make the decisions that you’ve got an issue with.

Granted, trying to change norms one person at a time is an individual solution to an institutional problem. But it can be a beginning, not an end, and nothing about our personal pledge should prevent us from vocally – and impolitely, and inconveniently – protesting institutional policy when we need to. And it remains critically important that institutions do set up functioning systems for pedagogical collaboration. If we’re lucky, these systems will be ones that don’t send faculty into a tizzy of territoriality, or send staff into weird gray zones where they’re responsible for outcomes they haven’t been empowered to accomplish.

As part of these systems, schools also need to make it abundantly clear where faculty can go for what kind of help. These processes will help head off conflict by setting expectations for whose job is whose in the projects we take on – especially when it’s a massive undertaking such as converting a course to a new modality, or creating a brand-new online course from scratch.

For those who do take out frustrations on people who are there to help, there are probably already more consequences than they realize. Long ago, I backed out of a grant project with a collaborator after I learned that they berated my department’s office manager over a minor misunderstanding. I would bet many faculty and staff have responded in some similar ways, subtle or not, in response to colleagues who routinely engage in this type of thing. Academia can be a refuge for bullies, to be sure, but I think on some level most of us know that constantly  rewarding them is a bad thing. After all, anyone who remembers third grade knows that appeasement just leads to more of the same.

I’m not claiming to be a perfect colleague myself. I’ve sent my share of snippy emails, although I do hope and believe that these have all gone to people above me in the hierarchy, not below. I’ve let my own impatience and time stress – occasionally fueled by my own procrastination – get in the way of being a good collaborator. Those challenges are there and they are not going to magically go away. At this point we in academia also probably do all have legitimate grievances about the way pandemic responses have been handled, which are also not going away any time soon. But even with all of this going against us, we should be able to get this one thing right. Let’s try.

About a year ago, I experienced what we all do sooner or later in the course of our face-to-face teaching careers: something terrible and unexpected happened in class. In my case, a student collapsed and became unresponsive*.
*The student was okay, in the end.

What I did to handle the situation is a story for another time. But I will say that it required me to put plans into action and then adjust them quickly as needed. In that moment, it was on me to take charge, give directions, and set the tone for how the group was going to react.

This was an emergency, in the traditional sense of the word, and the 23 minutes it took the EMTs to get to my classroom felt like a week. Today of course, our collective emergency has stretched into actual weeks and will likely run into multiple months. But despite the unique and yes, “unprecedented” nature of today’s extended crisis, I’m struck by how much of the same key elements of emergency response are present in we are doing, day in and day out, as part of remote instruction.

Some of these teaching moves are so simple and well-practiced that we might not even recognize them for what they are. Videoconferencing glitches happen; we fix them on the fly, or quickly devise a plan B. We patiently explain how to use technology that we ourselves have barely mastered. We send email after email to our classes, striving to keep everyone connected and informed. We sign these messages with chipper words of encouragement and remind students, over and over and over, that we’re here for them, no matter what.

These efforts might seem small, but they’re all part of a much grander mission, that of keeping our students afloat through confusion, disappointment, disconnection, even panic. Perhaps all we’re doing is offering reassurance: that the semester will be okay, that students’ grades will be okay, that we’ve made plans and covered bases. But beneath these little pep talks is a more consequential subtext: There is a way forward. We will get through this disaster, one way or another. There is a future, and it’s one worth fighting for.

That’s just leadership 101, after all: to exude calm, to talk people through the worst of a situation until they can get their bearings and rally themselves to action. To know when to stick to the plan and when to change it, and how to communicate plans with clarity, optimism, and grace.

It’s also a decent example of engaging in nurturing social affiliation as a positive response to stress. The social psychologist Shelley Taylor coined the phrase tend and befriend as a counterpoint to the traditional notion of fight-or-flight as the instinctive way in which we react when threatened. With that elegant revision to a long-entrenched theory, Taylor reminded us that stress doesn’t have to bring out the worst in us. She made humans under pressure look less like cornered animals and more like the altruistic, pro-social beings that we can be.

What I’m seeing right now from my fellow faculty looks a lot like tend-and-befriend, and that makes me radiantly proud to be a part of this community right now.

Another point of pride is that on top of everything else, we’re busily swapping information about what we’re learning as we go along. And this, of course, helps all of us help all of our students even more.

Before saying anything about what those emerging lessons might be, I want to absolutely sure not to make it sound like this switch to emergency remote teaching is part of a wonderful opportunity for professional growth, rich with silver linings. What we are going through right now is a tragedy, plain and simple. We’ve lost opportunities and shelved projects that we cared deeply about. We’ve been set back, permanently and in unfixable ways, on our career trajectories. Whether we’re graduating into a job market that’s freshly turned to dust, or entering a time of austerity during what should be our years of peak productivity – the damage is real, and the damage is done.

I think it’s also important to note that these lessons learned aren’t the sort that form a grand referendum on online learning as we had come to conceive of it before the crisis. As a number of smart critics have pointed out (here, here, and here), what we are experiencing right now is in no way an informative “natural experiment” for determining what online learning can do.

And lastly, there’s a big caveat that I’m speaking mostly from my own experience, in which my current remote teaching load is just one graduate seminar and two independent research courses. This is largely because I’d already been scheduled to teach a fully online course this semester; it was set up as a concentrated 5-week class, and happened to be wrapping up just as campuses began closing. So I want to acknowledge the privilege of having that relatively undemanding load, and acknowledge that those who are heroically carrying 3, 4 or more courses right now are having a different experience.

That said, now that we are this far in, what can we say about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s been a surprise?

Is asynchronous better than asynchronous? It’s complicated. One of the biggest surprises for me has been what synchronous instruction, in the form of the much-maligned Zoom meeting, is really like for myself and my students. Meaning: not that bad. Sometimes, even pretty great.

Let me add some context here. Early on in all this, my university leadership handed down some strong words steering faculty away from synchronous instruction in favor of asynchronous, non-time-locked, non-scheduled activities. I assume that advice was well-intended, perhaps as a way to dissuade faculty from plowing ahead with an hour-plus mandatory lecture as the primary means of engaging students.

Anecdotally at least, it seems like that video-lecture approach is the default for faculty who have less experience with online teaching, so I suppose it makes sense to steer people away from this practice as an initial piece of basic advice. There is also well-founded concern about students who cannot make scheduled class meetings due to new caregiving and work responsibilities, as well as those without access to reliable wifi or adequate computer equipment.

With all that in mind, I’d structured my graduate seminar so that Zoom meetings were biweekly rather than our normal weekly meeting schedule, and I made attendance optional. I signed on expecting maybe a few people to drop in, and was bowled over when 90% of the class showed up. We talked well past the time when I thought we’d be wrapping up, with students eager to share their experiences, to support each other, and to ask questions about the assignments they were doing. (Oh, and we talked about the assigned reading, too.)

The next meeting went about the same, with one student floating the idea of doing their assigned presentations in a live Zoom, rather than recording and posting them as I’d originally planned. Others jumped on the idea, and now we’ve got multiple new sessions on the schedule where I thought we’d just have one or two.

The point is, these meetings turned out to be more enjoyable, engaging, and productive than anticipated, and while I’m still loath to make them mandatory, I’ve come around to the idea that real-time virtual interaction can be a positive thing, rather than an automatic negative. Indeed, I think many of us are finding ourselves looking forward to at least some of these Zoom-fests with students and colleagues, clunky though they may be. And thus, I think we can put an asterisk by that standard advice that asynchronous is usually the better choice.
Goal-directed design still carries the day. I found that for myself, the only way I was able to “pivot” my course on such short notice was to back up and identify what I wanted students to get out of each part of it. This conceptual, top-level list of goals is what I worked from as I went through and determined what to drop, what to keep, and what those remaining pieces would look like in the new modality.

This is what experts have said for years: start with the end in mind, and the rest will fall into place. In that overwhelming moment when I actually sat down to make the pivot happen, I found it was critical to have my focus narrowed to the bare essentials: what you are trying to accomplish, and what activities and materials you need in order to make that happen. I was also more transparent than ever with my students, explaining exactly what I was trying to do – meet their needs, no more and no less – and stressing that everything was negotiable in service of that overarching goal.

This was a great reminder of time-tested approaches that, honestly, I should be using more frequently anyway. Once again, I’m not saying that this is all a magical blessing in disguise. However, it’s undeniable that emergency remote teaching reminded me of important design principles and processes, and that may turn out to make me a better teacher in semesters to come.
It really isn’t about the tools. Similar to the working-backwards principle, expert wisdom is holding up when it comes to the importance (or not) of picking a specific technology to do the job. In conventional teaching, it probably does matter more whether you go with, say, one text annotation tool over another, or one student response system over another.

But in the current situation, as many of us have found out, it’s rare that a given app or tool is going to be a linchpin of our plan. Partly this has to do with the situation-specific need to go with familiar technology that won’t add any more challenges to our already stressed-out students (or to ourselves). Partly it’s because given the depth and totality of the changes, we’ve needed to lean more on general-purpose features like email, discussion boards, and document sharing.

Zoom is perhaps a special case, as this one videoconferencing platform has taken off, to put it mildly. Even so, I think its extraordinary rise reflects familiarity and consensus rather than anything truly special or different about what it does. We could perhaps also make an exception for products that support remote laboratories and similar special cases. But overall, I think it’s clear that the switch to remote teaching has been less a shopping trip for the perfect products and more an Apollo 13-style race to survive using what we have on hand.
Summative assessment: Something’s got to give. We have reached a point – a tipping point, a flashpoint, or whatever you want to call it – involving high-stakes testing that is likely to remain relevant beyond the current crisis. On the one hand, proctoring services and surveillance are being energetically promoted as the natural solution to making assessment work at a distance, and to some faculty at least, this is an attractive proposition. On the other hand, criticism of the companies themselves, and of the entire notion of supervision and surveillance as the road to academic integrity, is becoming loud, clear, and impossible to ignore.

I think it’s too early to say whether the tide of opinion has definitively turned against online proctoring, and if so, whether the tide might turn back after this semester. But I think more faculty, and perhaps more academic leaders as well, will be asking whether we have to have the kind of assessments that require this kind of cheat-proofing, and we will hear even more calls to uphold certain responsibilities that come along with high-tech, high-stakes surveillance.

There’s a last point to consider, one that is not so much a lesson learned as an ongoing issue that’s now thrown into high relief by the demands of putting so much online so quickly. This is the question of how to best match up the skills of instructional designers and educational technology experts to the needs of faculty. I know from visiting campuses all around this country that most have offices full of brilliant instructional specialists eager to share their expertise. But few institutions have developed systems for tapping in to that expertise to the level that they could.

From what I’ve seen, there tends to be friction in the system, resulting in a chronic under- or over-utilization of the help available. With this friction now being accentuated by crisis, it’s clear that we need new models for efficiently connecting faculty need and institutional resources. Sometimes help can’t be provided because it’s not there, as is the case in smaller institutions that just don’t have an extensive instructional design and ed tech infrastructure. But in many other cases, the help is there, yet faculty don’t know how to ask for it. Or, it’s not clear who is actually responsible for identifying what needs to be done and making sure that it happens. Or, instructional design staff get mixed messages about when they should jump in to help and how they ought to be interacting with faculty.

It’s possible that there’s even confusion about what “help” and “support” mean. Is it offering lots of nicely curated information that faculty can use for guidance? Is it providing on-demand advice? Or perhaps it’s taking on part of the actual work – cleaning up captions, turning material into presentable online content, organizing and setting up discussion forums. All of these are valuable, but if it’s not clear which ones we’re talking about, it will be no surprise if the right assistance fails to reach the right people at the right time.

I hope it’s also clear that the last thing institutions should be doing right now is treating faculty as an obstacle standing in the way of progress. If institutions are going to succeed at developing solutions for now and preparedness for later, it will mean drawing on the shared purpose and willing spirit of everyone in a university community. My take right now is that in general, faculty have been displaying amazing professionalism, leadership, and dedication to duty, even as we face monumental levels of our own grief, disappointment, and fear. No, faculty are not all suddenly rising up and singing the praises of online learning, but then again, that is not what this is.

All this brings me back to the ethic of care that teachers everywhere are applying as they help students make it through this upending of their educational lives. As I type this, I’m listening to the upbeat-bordering-on-frenetic delivery of my daughter’s ballet teacher, who’s leading a lesson on Zoom. He didn’t sign up to teach dance over a glitchy videoconferencing app running on a teenager’s precariously balanced iPhone, but that’s what he’s doing, and quite effectively too. Their show is going on, as it must. Ours will too.

Here’s a story from so far back that I’m no longer worried
about calling out the people in question.

I sat in a ballroom packed with fellow conference-goers,
hearing the latest science on learning and the brain, brought to us by a
compelling, charismatic, and utterly self-assured speaker.

Amazingly, he told us, people’s underlying neurocognitive
profile reveals itself through one simple test – whether your thumbs cross left or right when you clasp hands. Delighted chatter spread through the
audience as we all tried it ourselves.

Other remarkable facts were to follow, including this one
guaranteed to inspire an audience of educators: When you engage in challenging
mental activity, like the new crop of tech-based brain games, you can actually
prevent cognitive decline in old age. This includes staving off dreaded
diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

So uplifting. So well presented. So wonderfully relevant to teaching
and learning in the contemporary age.

And almost certainly wrong, down to the last word.

I’m a fan of conferences. There is nothing like a good
keynote, or workshop, or even a crackling Twitter backchannel to reconnect you
with like-minded people, get you thinking differently, and set you on a new
course in your work.

At their best, conferences can wildly energizing, and attending
them is a privilege, one that I wish were more broadly accessible
within academia. But there’s a real problem brewing within the education
conference circuit, one that I don’t think we talk about enough but really need
to.

It’s the problem of decorative neuroscience.

You probably know what I mean, because you have probably
seen it yourself. It’s a superficial sprinkling of brain research that’s
presented not in depth and with nuance, and not really intended to convey the
main findings and remaining questions. Decorative neuroscience isn’t there to
do that. It’s there to lend an air of novelty, inevitability, and credibility
to the speaker’s message.

This is not just a problem with conferences. It happens lots
of places, on blogs, marketing materials, in books aimed at audiences of
non-scientists. I’m not the only person who’s expressed frustration with the
practice of borrowing neuroscience concepts, with varying degrees of accuracy,
to prop up claims way beyond what the science itself actually warrants. But
conferences today seem to be ground zero for wild claims, over-extension, and
mistranslation.

I don’t want to come down on the whole idea of bringing
science of all kinds to conversations about learning, or chill productive discussion
by policing what is said and by whom. I love that more people every day are
becoming excited about the science of mind and brain, and that they see it as
relevant to the enterprise of teaching and learning. It’s what I’ve hoped and
waited for my whole career, and the last thing I want to do is get in the way
of that.

I also don’t want to make things harder for people who are
doing the talking. It’s tough to be up at the keynote podium, and doing so
requires the elision of many details that one would never skate over in, say, a
piece of scholarly writing. We can’t knock speakers for trying to pack big
concepts into one short speech, or for trying to make complex ideas engaging
and broadly accessible. That is, after all, what the good ones get paid the big
bucks to do.

But I do want the people who put up their precious money,
time, and energy to hear these messages to get really good, scientifically
grounded ones.

As I talked about in an address that I gave at the 2019 POD
Network conference, it’s also extremely easy to over-interpret, over-apply,
or just flat misrepresent the science when it fits into someone’s already
polarized stance on an issue. Reputable-sounding research is a great whetstone
against which to grind our axes, but doing so simply sets back the whole
enterprise of thoughtful implementation of the best, most solidly established
findings from all the learning
sciences.

So how do you know if you may be encountering decorative neuroscience?
Here are a few red flags.

There are neuroscience-related slides – or
diagrams, or other materials – that aren’t discussed or even explained, but rather
thrown up and taken down as the speaker speeds towards a conclusion. These slides/diagrams/videos contain terms and
illustrations that are probably unfamiliar or totally incomprehensible to the
audience, and this seems like an intentional choice rather than a simple misapprehension.It’s unclear whether “findings” from “research”
refer to converging evidence from multiple studies, or just a single isolated one.There are glaring examples of common misconceptions,
such as neuromyths
or conflating causation and correlation (cognitive
activity prevents brain disease, ADHD is skyrocketing due to the spread of technology,
and so on).It’s unclear which specific studies, books, or
articles are the source of the claims the speaker is making.The speaker lacks an academic background,
publishing history, or any other identifiable credentials that are directly relevant
to the field of neuroscience.  

That last one in particular pains me to write, so I want to
say more about it.

I’m not ready to say that only people with degrees in – or
world-class research programs in, or big-name recognition within – neuroscience
should be the only people who get to talk about it. There is plenty of good
translational science communication by non-scientists out there (see here, here,
and here
for just a few examples). We should treasure the amplification of
evidence-based thinking about teaching and learning that occurs as a result.

But I do think that especially in this area, we need to be informed,
discerning, and choosy consumers. It should be acceptable – common, even – to
ask whether the person discussing neuroscience is an actual expert in the
subject. There are different reasonable levels of that expertise – everything
from having a strong self-taught background, to holding relevant degrees, all
the way up to being a bona-fide world-class contributor of original research in
the field. There’s flexibility in how much of that background we’d consider to
be a bare minimum of credibility. Asking the question, however, should be non-negotiable.

It should also be non-negotiable to have some way of tracing
back to the sources of the speaker’s claims. Talks are no place to include
in-depth literature reviews, or even standard bibliographies, but mention can
be made of key sources within the flow of the talk.

Better yet, speakers can put together a handout, web site,
heck even a Pinterest board or Padlet with
their source materials. This can be a way for people who want to do a deep dive
later to have a way to do that. It also helps nip in the bud any evidence-free
nonsense claims (such as this one about drastically
shrinking attention spans or the debunked “Cone
of Experience”). Even the most solidly well-constructed studies occasionally
have to be revisited when
replications don’t pan out or new information comes along, so it’s good to
know where the speaker is coming from for that reason as well.

Neuroscience is fascinating, trendy, at an early stage of
development, and above all,  extraordinarily
complicated. All of these things create a perfect storm in which misinformation, mythology, and
hype can thrive, even among highly
educated people. This is why we need to  vet our expert speakers, and the
higher-profile the platform and the louder the mike, the stricter the vetting
should be.

Science can be
engaging, approachable, and accurate all at the same time. We know this. It’s
time for our speaker lineups to reflect it as well.

“Compared with students in traditional lectures,
students in active classes perceived that they learned less, while in reality
they learned more.” — Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller,
Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestina, Measuring
actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively
engaged in the classroom.

That’s the conclusion of a brand new and
already-attention-getting article just published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, and a close reading suggests that the attention
is well deserved.

It reports a scrupulously conducted study of two
different approaches to teaching physics concepts: a traditional, teacher-focused
lecture, and a student-focused active learning setup involving group work on
problems supported by instructor feedback and guidance.

To most of us with an interest in such things, the idea
that active learning = good is not exactly new. So what is world-rocking about
what Deslauriers and colleagues did?

One is their use of a beyond-gold-standard true
experimental design. Individual students (not whole sections, which is usually
as good as it gets in this kind of research) were randomly assigned to control
and experimental groups corresponding to different teaching approaches. One
class was conducted in each method, then the groups were flipped around so that
each student experienced each method. Same thing for the instructors — each
used each method once, cutting out the issue of whether students were
responding to the instructional method or to the instructors themselves.

The procedures used in the classes were set up carefully
so that neither method — lecture or active learning — had an unfair advantage.
Content was the same, materials and objectives were the same, problem sets were
the same. The only difference was that in the lecture condition, the teacher,
well, lectured, demonstrating how to solve problems while students followed
along on their own worksheets. In the active learning condition, students
tackled the problems in small groups. The instructors circulated as one
typically does during this kind of activity, then at the end, they showed the
class the correct process for the solution.

Researchers gathered data from students on two separate
dimensions, first, mastery of the content (the TOL, or test of learning), and
second, subjective feelings about the lesson (the FOL, or feeling of learning).
The TOL, notably, was prepared independently of the instructors, as a safeguard
against their teaching too closely to the test.

Here’s what the researchers found.

Students in the active learning condition scored higher
on the TOL, and judging from the data distributions laid out in the article, it
wasn’t even close. And, you guessed it — they scored lower on
the FOL.

Those disparities in FOL scores are stunning, especially
on two questions in particular: My instructor was effective at teaching,
and I wish all of my physics classes were taught this way.

If, as an instructor who works hard to create great
pedagogy, that doesn’t make your heart sink, well — you’re a lot tougher than I
am.

As the teaching expert and inclusivity advocate Viji Sathy pointed out in this tweet, this pattern of
findings means that all those student opinion surveys, evaluations and the like
could well be disadvantaging exactly those individuals who are doing more to
promote student learning.

That fact in and of itself would justify circulating
this study like crazy. And while I’ve cautioned against using one study as a blunt instrument to push one’s own pedagogical agenda, this time, a
little bludgeoning might be in order.

Why? There are the pristine methods, analyses, and
interpretations of course, which all read like a master class in how to conduct
scholarship of teaching and learning. There’s also the way that the findings
neatly funnel into a conclusion that many of us have long suspected, that
students — due to being novices in a field, discomfort with the messiness and
effort of active learning exercises, or lack of insight about how learning
works — are poor judges of effective teaching.

There is also the way that the findings fit with themes
from so many other lines of research, amplifying and deepening those without
repeating them. As the authors note, their results follow on a long line of
well-established cognitive principles including desirable difficulty and the development of expertise.

They also remind me of some of my own research from long
ago, when my colleague Laurie Dickson and I were looking at the impacts of assigning practice quizzes in Introduction to
Psychology.

On an end of semester survey, many students said they
thought the quizzes helped raise their exam performance, an impression borne out
by our comparisons across sections that were randomly assigned to do or not do
these exercises as part of their graded work. But we were always puzzled by the
fact that not all of those same students said they would voluntarily do this
sort of quizzing in the future.

It’s strange to think that a student might see value in
a learning exercise but still be unwilling to do it on their own. But it makes
some sense in light of the idea that active learning can be uncomfortable, and
effortful, and seemingly not as worthwhile as sitting and watching an expert
present the material.

What I also like about this article is that it suggests
solutions, not as an afterthought but with some very clear recommendations for
how to improve teaching and learning in higher education.

One is to look at student impressions very cautiously,
or not at all, when judging teaching. This recommendation comes at a time when
reliance on student evaluations is a problem that is currently reaching a
system-blinking-red point. Disadvantaging those who use active learning is just
one of many reasons why.

Note that I said reliance, and not over-reliance.
The longer I work in academia, the more convinced I am that attempting to bring
in “balance” or “context” as a way to appropriately de-emphasize student
evaluations just doesn’t work. Those numbers and comments are a bell you can’t
unring when it comes to forming impressions of others’ work, and hard as it is,
as a profession we need to commit to developing new metrics that reflect
teaching quality, particularly those that privilege evidence-based course
design features.

The article also advocates for something that is dear to
my heart: raising student awareness about why we teach the way we do, and how they can
take the same principles and run with them as they take charge of their own
learning.

It’s easy to overlook, but the authors include an
intriguing final component documenting the positive effects of a short
presentation on the way in which active learning works and why FOL is a bad
indicator of actual learning. Struggle can be good, and teaching students this
fact can be transformative, an idea that also reminds me of the work on
belongingness and normalizing struggle in the early college career.

Of course there are caveats to how we apply and extend
this work to our own teaching practices. I hope that the attention paid to it
doesn’t trigger a wave of teacher-knows-best, adversarial pedagogy the likes of
which we’ve seen aired in the classroom laptop wars over the last few years.

If that were to happen, it could set back the current
trend towards empathic,
truly student-focused pedagogy, and that would be
a tragedy. And a needless one at that, because as I see it, empathic teaching
is perfectly compatible with the idea that our students aren’t always the best
judges of their own learning processes — not because they are students, but
because they are novices, and also because they are human beings.

I’ll be emailing this article to my colleagues and I
suspect many of you will be as well. We’ll also be seeing — I hope — some
spirited discussion about what the findings do and don’t mean for college
teaching. This time, let’s see to it that action also follows.