 This week, I thought I’d share a thought from a presentation I’m doing next week at a conference. It’s a simple thought, but one I’ve become passionate about in my last few years of teaching: one of the most important things we can do to help students learn more is to prune our lessons, or thin the number of concepts we try to cover.
Years ago, my wife and I bought a couple of apple trees. At first, we were thrilled to see the tree loaded with blossoms and then apples. But we soon discovered that if we didn’t thin them, what we ended up with was lots of very small, nearly inedible apples. If we wanted great fruit, we had to thin. Most of us have made the mistake of trying to cover too many concepts in one lesson. We enthusiastically sprint through all sorts of wonderful ideas, only to realize our students retained almost nothing. Through experience, we learn the myth of coverage--the mistaken belief that coverage equals learning. It doesn’t. For real learning to take place, ideas need space to breathe, to be nourished, to be savored, and to be processed. When it comes to how much we choose to cover in a lesson, as with so many things in life, less really is more.
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A Simple Way to Get More Students to Visit You in Your Office Studies have consistently shown a myriad of benefits from students feeling more connected to their professors, including learning more and being more likely to graduate. That’s one of the reasons I try hard to be accessible and get students to meet with me in my office. I don't want them to think of me like the stern professor below.
This term, I’m not requiring such meetings in any of my classes. Instead, I decided to conduct a very informal experiment. Near the top of my syllabus for both sections of the course I’m teaching, I included my usual invitation: “I’d love to meet with you anytime my schedule is free. Just use link to schedule an appointment with me that best fits your schedule! We can meet by Zoom or in person, whichever you prefer.” But in one of my two sections, I spent about one minute in class to ask students to open the syllabus, find the link for setting up an appointment, and click on it—just so they’d know exactly how to do it. I added that I love meeting with any students, and I’m especially eager to meet with first-semester students, first-generation students, and anyone who might wonder whether they really belong at our university. The result? In the section where I made my short pitch, 9 out of 55 students have signed up to meet with me. In the other section, despite the invitation in the syllabus (on which students are quizzed), no one signed up. A simple investment of 60 seconds or so seems to go a long way to lowering psychological barriers of entry to meeting with me individually.  Becoming a High-Love, High-Expectations, High-Resource Teacher or LeaderYears ago, Kim Clark shared a simple matrix with teachers at BYU-Idaho, with one axis representing the level of love or concern teachers have for their students and the other axis representing the level of expectations. He invited us to be teachers in the high-love, high-expectations quadrant. I’ve found that counsel to be simple yet profound, especially since as an administrator, I found that most of the professors who created some real challenges with students fell into the low-love, high-expectations quadrant.
But here’s a simple twist on that analysis. Why not make the model three-dimensional by adding another axis that represents level of support? I’ve found my most effective coaches, teachers, leaders, and mentors not only have high concern for me and high expectations of me. They also show my how I can rise to the level of their expectations. Personally, I’ve never been especially motivated by, say, a basketball coach who says shoot better or a leader who encourages me to produce better numbers, even if I know they love me. On the other hand, if they can show me how to change and improve my approach or point me to valuable resources in my effort to improve, then I’m motivated and empowered to improve. So as my TA grades my students’ capstone projects this week, she is kindly giving them feedback and pointing them to resources (e.g., the campus writing center) that can help students rise to their capacity, if they choose to resubmit their essay for additional credit. It’s my simple way of trying to be a high-love, high-expectation, high-resource teacher. |
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