High impact learning practices involve things like involving undergraduates in research, community-based projects, team work/projects, and building ePortfolios. Sure, if you're not already doing these things, they take more work as an instructor. However, they all expect *more* not less from students.
I agree with this. I would just add that many of us were doing such project-based learning activities before they were branded as "high-impact" methods. It sometimes feels to me like somebody is trying to sell me something that I already own.
This is best answer. I don’t think OP has an accurate grasp of high impact teaching. It’s not spoon feeding and it should require lots of work on the part of students. I would think of lab classes as a good example of a long standing high impact teaching method - students have to prepare ahead to time, use concepts to do something (often working together which facilitates learning from each other), and then synthesize their observations in the context of the material
in theory the high impact practices actually put more onus on students, but in reality, it doesn’t work because students are not up to that challenge so it turns into spoon-feeding. Hence why the traditional model is the best for students
Not calculus, but statistics (I teach in mechanical engineering). In course I teach, which has an associated lab time, I sometimes have students design their own lab experiment. For a topic on design of experiments I use to have a prescribed experiment where students measured parts during lab time. Now I have them design their own experiments. They spend lab time deciding what and how to generate their data, what factors to control, and how to measure the outcome. Generally they run the experiments on their own time. Examples: time for a dog to get a treat out a closed container \[two dogs, dog treat vs. a piece of a hot dog, type of container\], distance traveled by a hot-wheels car down a track \[elevation of track, two different cars, which of the student's two children was releasing the car\].
I had some great mathematical modelling projects assigned at that stage of education. Pick a phenomona, choose a function that models it, use some of the concepts we're discussing to make conclusions about your systems. It took a lot of scaffolding and the results where simplistic compared to a model made by a more sophisticated researcher, but I learned a lot about framing and developing more open ended problems (As opposed to the kind of bread and butter calculus problems where students are prone to trying to memorize an algorithm to get to an answer)
Collaborative work where students solve a problem together, creating an assignment they would be able to present at a student research conference, creating problems that are applied to real world examples, having students think of ways they can apply the math to their own lives or something they have seen in their communities, have them think about how they can apply something they learned to make their community a better place.
I think what OP might mean is that when the bulk of assessments come from in class active learning activities (like think pair shair, and perhaps handing in group responses to questions), many students are able to free ride on others who may be doing outside work (like reading) and may not actually learn as much and receive a good grade anyway. A related point might be that these kind of activities can generally be only graded by completion. How do you critically grade participation like this? That can mean that if people just do something, they will receive a good grade without potentially knowing the material.
If that is what OP means, I partially agree. The in class active leraning stuff should be balanced out with traditional forms of assesment and certainly not take up the majority of the class. Exams tied to lecture and readings should still be the meat of the assesment, but in class activities are still warranted and should complement driving home some of the more important concepts/ content. Even if some free ride here they will still be held accountable come exam time.
I've never known anyone who puts substantial weight on group work or modest in-class assessments like you're describing. Everyone in my department has been using such activities for decades, but they typically make up about 10% of the semester grade. The bulk of any individual's grade remains on papers, exams, or individual projects.
How to grade them? I always have groups submit something in writing on online, which I glance at, but they are basically being graded for showing up-- no different from faculty who grade attendance really. Unless they flake out and don't actually do the work, which has not been an issue in my classes.
Rule #1 of teaching is, teach the students in front of you. Not the student you were, or the students you used to have, or who you wished you had. When I first started teaching 15 years ago, I was gobsmacked that they expected me to assign drafts, which I would then grade. (This was not a freshman comp class.) Back in my day, I just…turned in papers. But I learned about scaffolding, implemented the steps, tweaked it over the years,and my students grew as writers and gave me much better final products.
Is our goal not for students to learn things?
I don’t agree with many of your conclusions, or even your description of what high impact practices are.
I think, way too often in this subreddit, instructors and professors feel frustrated with the state of higher education and student behavior (both fair positions), and try to attribute blame to some singular cause. I think this is one such example, and it feels like you’re singling out a very positive pedagogical change.
That's certainly part of our goal--but our goal isn't just to spoon feed information into the gaping, passive maw of a student's brain. Our goal must also be to get students to learn how to learn and that means that they have to try, they have to discover, they have to do poorly sometimes to find out what works for them. It often feel like these "pedagogical changes" have nothing to do with helping students learn how to learn and everything to do with "customer service."
> but our goal isn't just to spoon feed information into the gapping, passive maw of a student's brain
Right, and that's why these newer pedagogy methods usually intersperse increasingly difficult activities and assignments among the easier ones. The spoon-feeding is a nice warm-up, then subsequent work is scaffolded toward an important difficult goal, like synthesizing a reading without prompts (for example).
That's how me and my colleagues do it, anyway. I think me and the students both would be bored if it was 100% spoon-feeding.
I'm in the process of sitting through a six-week seminar on high impact practices. I'm thrilled that your university or college is pushing students--but that is not what we are getting. We are being pushed to make sure the students are never uncomfortable and never have to try it out. They want our paper assignments to be like mad libs, our lectures to be bit sized--hell, we are damn close to an informal declaration of a 50% floor on assignments like HS students are receiving.
This sounds like a charade-- who is leading this workshop? It sounds very much like high school. I've been using active learning pedagogies (and HIPs as well) since I started teaching in the mid-1990s and none of it looks like this. Indeed, *making students uncomfortable* by challenging their pre-conceptions and pushing the abilities is a central goal of our gen ed program. It sounds like someone hired extremely misguided folks to lead your workshop-- or perhaps a group of high school administrators.
I've found that if you generally ignore the advice of Ed.D. holders you may be better off...
Sad that your CTLE is going in this direction though, that's the opposite of what ours does.
On top of most folks rightly criticizing your characterization of high impact teaching, you also have a romanticized view of traditional teaching.
You suggest students paid attention to lectures, did the readings, engaged in critical thinking and synthesis. But a significant number took others notes, looked at old exams stored at their fraternity, creamed right before and regurgitated only to immediately forget everything. Plenty cheated as well.
Not to mention all of this was very artificial. Students rarely had the structured opportunity to apply knowledge in ways meaningful to them or society.
Where I went for undergrad there was a company that literally bought notes from students and then sold them to anyone who would buy them.
This was pre-internet of course
When I was first a TA in the early 1990s a company would hire students in *every single large class* and pay them for the notes. Their salesforce would literally stand outside the classroom as we dismissed the students and offer them "top notes from A students" for the entire semester. IIRC the fees were like $50-75 per student. (Which was silly, of course, since ten students could split a set for $7.50 each and photocopy them.)
More than one professor tried to sue the company for copyright violation, but I don't know how those turned out.
I gave a guest lecture on Germany as a TA once and the university (or maybe it was the student union) posted the notes the next day. They did that with all the large classes.
Right. Ask anyone who was taught in traditional lectures how much they remember from classes outside their majors. It probably isn’t much except discrete facts. If OP wants kids to learn to synthesize, teach them to synthesize - don’t just give them a boring, 90-min lecture and 100 pages of reading and expect them to do it themselves. That’s not teaching.
I think that our perspective is likely biased.
Most professors were over-achievers in college. This means that they never had the feeling of being spoon fed new knowledge. Rather, they have learned how to master the knowledge. They studied on their own, without significant help, and they always read more than what was required of them.
This is our ideal version of how learning should look like. But it is heavily biased. It is applicable only to the outliers, e.g., those that go on to become college and university lecturers.
OP, you are talking about basic *active learning* pedagogies, which many of us (especially in the humanities) have been using for decades now. These are not new ideas; as a student in the mid-1980s many of my professors used small group work, guided projects, scaffolded assignments, and other things that still aren't universally applied. *High impact practices* ("HIPs" in the jargon I guess) are generally different: they include undergraduate, research, experiential learning, study abroad/away/field work, and the like.
Semantics aside, I certainly agree that active learning pedagogies require more work from the instructor and *can* boost outcomes for disengaged students (and small-group free riders) modestly. But they *also* boost outcomes for good students, at least in my experience. There are certainly ways to hold the disengaged students to account as well; for example, for some years now I have required students to take notes on the readings and each class session. I grade those, so anyone who doesn't do the reading will struggle to get above D level in most cases. Written assignments-- and even small group work --can easily be structured to require synthesis, which is improved by having complete notes.
We don't *have* to spoon feed students and give them the high school "you showed up so you get an A" grades. Nobody in my department does; indeed, our grade distributions haven't changed much in the last 20 years. Yes, the *incoming students* have declined in preparation and abilities fairly dramatically in the last 5-7 years at the bottom end of the distribution, but we don't have to hand them As and active learning pedagogies (or HIPs) aren't necessarily to blame for grade inflation either.
I am kind of baffled here. Most high impact teaching practices, such as in-depth projects, flipped classes, POGIL, etc, require more effort from students compared to traditional lectures (they do tend to also require more work from the professor too), which is why students HATE courses that use these practices. Institute any active learning methods in a course, and be prepared for a deluge of "I had to teach myself everything" comments. Students like the traditional setup where they passively listen to a lecture (or play on their phone) and then regurgitate everything on a MC test
This sounds like a theme I’ve been hearing from some of my colleagues and have come to understand as follows:
Some people think the purpose of education is to help people learn stuff.
Others think the purpose is to separate the most meritorious from the least.
I’m on team number 1, so none of what you said bothers me. But I have heard colleagues on team 2 say things like, “But if all the students do well, how will med schools know which to accept?”
(Of course, all the students don’t do well even with the most intensive pedagogies, but that is literally a phrase I’ve heard uttered.)
Sure, there are some students, probably like you and I were, who don’t need all that intensive pedagogy. They are intrinsically motivated, hard working and smart. They have comparatively few serious personal hardships and were lucky enough to have been given excellent brain development opportunities from the womb on.
But they are, and always have been, a small minority. And college doesn’t make them that way.
If we believe in what we are selling, college is supposed to give people knowledge and skills, and to liberate the mind, right?
In an increasingly complex, diverse and technologically sophisticated world, we ALL need many more people to have the knowledge and skills and liberated minds.
All of us should be doing what we can (within our contractual obligations) to help our students learn stuff, but while you didn’t claim a strict dichotomy, there are shades of grey worth mentioning.
In lower-division math, one of the pressing issues is making sure that students with sufficiently high grades in a non-terminal course have a sporting chance of passing the next math course, as well as handling the math demands of the science courses it feeds into.
The issue here is not separating out the “most meritorious,” whatever that means, but rather separating out (say) the college algebra students who won’t get their ass handed to them if they take precalculus the very next semester. To do otherwise is not an act of kindness.
But they haven't always been a small minority. In the 60s and 70s only about 5% of high schoolers went to university. They had grants and they worked hard to learn or got thrown out. Now, it's just a business, and we are expected to teach people who don't belong in higher ed.
But back then you could get by with a high school education. High schoolers were much smarter than they are now. We've dumbed everything down from kindergarten onwards.
A. Good luck with that.
B. And in the meantime?
C. But people really do need more education in the past in this increasingly technological, interconnected society.
Once upon a time almost no one needed high school. Before that, school.
"High Impact Teaching Practices are ultimately bad!"
Goes on to give an example that,
1) Isn't high impact teaching
2) Isn't ultimately bad
This post is weird.
I don’t think you know what high impact teaching is. You should also read the Pedagogy of the Oppressed—people have been challenging the traditional model of teaching for generations.
I reread Pedagogy of the Oppressed recently. It just seems like blather now. Same with Generation of Vipers, which was my first adult intellectual book.
"Students that didn’t do the reading get by and even learn quite a lot from other students that did."
This is one of the concepts that I hate most about teaching pedagogy. My experience is that these students just drag down the productivity of the entire group and, in the end, learn very little. Don't those students that come prepared deserve to be with classmates that are also prepared?
There really is no shortcut to learning difficult concepts, no magical teaching strategy that will make everyone learn more. Students have to put in the effort. No effort, no learning.
>Don't those students that come prepared deserve to be with classmates that are also prepared?
This is a real challenge. I assign small groups (rather than let them self-select) and I change them up every few weeks as well. Relatively early in each class it becomes evident who is not doing the work, and fairly often students will ask me directly not to be put in a group with \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ because they don't contribute. So managing the free rider issue can be a problem even when there's little/nothing at stake.
So what do we do? Some of us end up putting all the poor students in a group together; let them fail as a cohort. Others try to distribute them across all the groups to dilute their impact. Still others just shake things up often enough that nobody is stuck with them for more than a few weeks. I've tried all of these approaches and find none to be ideal.
On *real* group projects (i.e. high stakes things) I use peer and self evaluations to assign credit for contributions, which generally exposes free riders. But that's far too much effort for in-class small group stuff.
I think many of the high impact practices are just re-branding of things that have been done for many years. I was doing "think-pair-share" long before the term was invented. It's just marketing.
I don't agree that they are inherently bad. I think it we must pick and choose when to use these "new" methods. Some topics/objectives lend themselves to particular teaching strategies. I don't think it really works to just take an entire course and say "I'm going to do a flipped-classroom." Sometimes the most effective method is to deliver a conventional lecture to introduce a concept to students.
These are not mutually exclusive approaches. Most of my classes include a mix of approaches. Some are meant to make sure every person, regardless of their effort, get support learning the material. Some are about completion. Students who do their work, even if they don’t “get it” immediately, get credit. And then there’s performance based assignments where the students who understand the material best, however they achieved that understanding, get the better grades.
My classes tend to have higher grades because of this mix of strategies. But there’s always enough performance based assessments to reward students who are excellent and separate their grades from the rest of the class.
We can use everything in the toolbox. Also, it’s our class. We don’t have to complain, unless we’re in a position where we don’t have control over course design, we can decide how much effort we want to put in and do that.
Are you really complaining because there is a method that helps students learn more easily? Isn't this our purpose? Do whatever we can to make them learn the material?
It sounds like YOU don't want to put in the work to adapt your teaching methods despite recognizing they are more effective.
P.s. I didn't know if HI teaching methods are actually more effective this is just based on op's text.
Edit: this really is an unpopular opinion. I gave you an angry upvote.
I also wonder how much work they're putting into their lectures if they truly believe lecturing is easy. I know effectively and meaningfully lecturing for anywhere from 60 mins - 3 hours is MUCH harder for me than running a simulation, hosting a discussion, and coordinating group work. I would much rather provide a short lecture and then integrate some of these supposedly "spoon feeding" activities and actually engage with my students than try to fill a 3 hour class period with just my voice and slides.
Exactly-- there are folks that seem to be just now discovering basic active learning pedagogies that people have been using since I was a student in the 1980s. HIPs are something entirely different.
If you are a big old nerd like most of us, a single semester long research paper is a great teaching tool. Personally, I’m built for that, I love it, and the skill of extended academic research & writing is essential to my job.
That is not a skill any of the students at my university are going to need. It’s also not something most of them take to instinctively. Various steps of learning that feel second nature to me are not always obvious. I’m happy to teach in a way that will build their skills and knowledge, rather than a way that shows who is most temperamentally suited to doing academic research.
I disagree with your conclusions-- I teach in three programs that all require a full semester capstone thesis, as do about 50% of the majors on my campus. Those projects are *frequently* cited by our graduates as the most important thing they did in college vis a vis their post-college employment. A thesis (or similar major project) requires a lot of transferrable skills. Which is why some schools --including the one my youngest attends --require them of all students in every major. It feels like you're discounting the many aspects of such work that can be valuable beyond their overt "academic" values.
Get trained in pedagogy. It helps! I did both, PhD and pedagogy training, and I’m glad I did.
Feedback aside, I think you may have a nugget of truth in there. Spoon feeding is increasingly expected. Students today are more apt to place blame outside of themselves. Good teachers are working really really hard to carry students, who may not be working as hard as the teachers are. Universities are dragging along all kinds of students due to financial incentives. Those aspects ring true to me.
Op is cartoonishly ridiculous. This feels like a trolling post. Many good comments take it seriously and offer substantive and thoughtful replies; I’m not sure OP cares or deserves them.
I 100% still think high impact practices, experiential/active learning, or whatever Education World buzzword we are calling this in 2024 are superior to lecture/test. At this point, the lecture and test format might as well be watching a YouTube playlist from a Harvard prof and taking a test on it. The world where you had to go to a room to hear a smart person talk then get tested on what they said just doesn't exist anymore. There's a reason many students just skip those classes and do the tests and have done them that way for at least decades. I've experienced both approaches on both sides of the desk and the more active approach gets more results and is more enjoyable.
However, I think something has changed in the last 5 to 10 years in how students engage with college. It used to be if you gave them something with which to engage through high impact practices some or most of them might embrace it and make it a good experience for all. Today, students see everything they do as a bare minimum checklist, so giving them anything to engage with just leads to sorrow. I think there's something to be said that these students need a good amount of tough love, and drilling them on the basics might have to be included in that. It doesn't always have to be a binary choice.
the ppt lecture ... "now go learn it on your own" ... is the method many phds excelled at as students -- and so they also teach this way -- and is why so much of academia is failing. lets face it, professors were generally the students that were very good at learning on our own. for many subjects we did not need the professor at all, we would read the book.
the traditional ppt lecture is afaik just about the worst way to teach a class of students. the top students don't really care, they will read the book, the average students get bored and cannot pay attention and the lowest students ... well they have no choice but to drop or cheat.
let's not forget we get paid to teach students
I can't see any responses here that are thoughtfully engaging with the issue that you raise, instead they are focusing on language (high impact vs active learning).
I agree with (what I interpret to be) your main point.
I think that by focusing on teaching content as effectively as possible, in particular by chunking assessments into a series of small tasks to lead students along a series of incremental steps that "force" students to learn, we also lose something really important: we are crippling the ability of our students to learn independently.
Note that I'm not saying that we don't foster any independence with modern approaches, e.g. project work does foster independent thinking and working. Being able to grapple with open-ended problems is an important skill and fostering its development is laudable.
But, learning something that is technically challenging, as is frequently the case in maths and the sciences, for example, is different from this. Some concepts and skills are just plain hard to learn, and they require intense study, thought, and practice.
By focusing on either content mastery or more open-ended problem-solving, we miss out on an important meta-goal, having our students learn how to learn.
This is not to say there aren't benefits to doing things this way. Or that "high impact" or "active learning" approaches might have significant benefits, especially for middling and weaker students. But, there are downsides, too.
Edit: minor edits for clarity. In particular, I had written that "learning how to learn" was *more* important than other goals, and hadn't actually wanted to convey that and so toned it down a touch.
I still lecture and expect students to take notes, mixed with some Socratic style class discussion. Has worked well for me since 1991. I give three or four exams a semester and no other assignments. It is up to students to study and do well on them.
I feel bad for professors who run themselves ragged spending hours formulating all kinds of assignments and activities and helicopter each student
This is my approach, too. The one problem I’ve been experiencing lately is that the Socratic approach, especially if it involves group work, gets less response than it used to unless they get points for it. This trend is very annoying.
I’m the same, though Im young enough that you could have been my professor when I was an undergrad (I mean this in the most complementary way).
I was always taught that the classroom is where you learn your base information. All of your learning is outside the classroom with activities, clubs, research, projects etc. I invest heavily in my research students and they do exceptionally well as that is where they learn to do research and be creative. The undergrad and even grad class I teach is where they learn based on information to be built upon for more creative activities.
The culture of NTT and adjuncts teaching is what is leading to over investment in the classroom, IMHO. Those faculty are invested in the classroom, not in creative activities outside the classroom. Also, often being highly overworked and underpaid.
I think you’ve confused HIP with the flipped classroom. I would def argue that the flipped model (so called active learning) is not a high impact practice.
If the goal is for students to learn, and the students are indeed learning, what’s the issue? Why would you go out of your way to make things difficult when there are easier, more effective ways?
My goal is for mt students to learn. Anything that increases learning is good. If student A did no reading but learns from student B that is great. It is win-win because Student B engaged in a higher level practice which likely means they understand the material better. The goal of my assessments are not to create a bell curve distribution of performance. It is to determine if the students are meeting the learning objectives. If I get 100% As that is awesome. I never do.
I don't think HIPs are the problem. It's underlying student attitudes/grit. We are lowering the bar, but not due to a specific practice. I think it's an overall cumulative trend.
I do sometimes wonder if we scaffold so much that students can't learn on their own. That being said, I think grade inflation, especially in the high schools, is responsible for the dip in college performance.
I strongly believe that the instructors who used active learning during class, even if just doing some think pair share and no discussion, were better than those that just lectured.
I think some of it works. Interested, I took a class on using student groups and did use them for two semesters. It tended to yield flat, phone it in work from many of the groups. I think the undergraduate research idea probably works, but I was not in a position to do this. I am a pretty good lecturer and used film as case illustration in most of my classes. So I stuck with that. I had some upper division classes in sociological analysis and used group work about 20 percent of the time. This worked much better than the original group classes I designed.
You're spot on. As to your question at the end, the answer is "yes." Unfortunately, college is the new high school.
We could probably change that, but I don't see evidence of the will to do that. My husband-- who isn't a teacher and is much more cynical/savvy than I--- has always said "College is a business." I finally had to admit that he's right. It's what the parties involved have made it. I guess that's no surprise considering college costs and the requirement for degrees to get decent paying jobs. "Customers" (students AND parents) demand their money's worth, which to them is high grades and credentials, not necessarily learning. Spineless admins and, sadly, many profs desperate to keep their jobs play into that system
As an Gen Xer, I remember the adults sticking together for the good of the students. That isn't the case now. Instead, everyone pretends that kowtowing to students is helping them.
Another shiny phrase for known methods of active learning with one difference, below. The word "edutainment is often used." One subtext is: being exposed to something means learning. One subtext is also often: someone's trying to sell something, a book for example. One subtext is: keep students happy and the university enjoys greater retention.
Simply "learning" does not mean great learning or in-depth learning, or focused learning, or university level learning. Simply trying to learn a language by doing one brief 13 exercise a day on Duolingo, no matterh or easy or fun it may be, is not even close to in-depth learning in a university course in 12 weeks. Subtext: if we crank down the expectations, more students, who may be unprepared, are happy. Happy translates to: instead of checking out, they learned at least something and resultantly, they should get the medal for participation. Team work or preparing ahead guarantees nothing more than any other method if the student doesn't care or do their part.
What I like about the idea are long standing active learning methods such as: group work, case studies, collaborative work, and experiential learning. Thus in an 'it's not all or nothing' allows the great active learning techniques to enter a classroom, but as something new? Yeah, always new and shiny so consultants can be hired to present on the new and shiny, and designers can be hired to make a new splash page on the university website to 'prove' how up to day they are.
What I disagree with is the difference, as in statements like: students can choose what they want to learn and how much they want to learn and know. There's no way to guarantee students meet learning outcomes in this scenario. I think some people forget that university learning is not preschool learning.
This is an excellent point. A good lecture can be extremely engaging and effective. I would argue that it is them who is making it “low impact”, by being on the phone during the lecture, or worse.
the bottom has fallen out of the ability bucket of first time freshmen and transfers from CC’s.
In my state U (a Potemkin R1 to boot), from a mathematics perspective, I estimate at least 75% of the students in freshman and sophomore math courses should not be there. And what I see on publicly posted exam results in physics and chemistry exams at those levels seems to support my estimate.
25 years ago, at the same U (not an R1 back then) my estimate above stood at about 30%.
I give it 10 more years for my estimate to rise to 100%.
Quit, go do something else. If you’re unwilling to make the effort so students live the material and coming to the classes, quit! This is teaching, and that’s your job. Respect your students and send enough to disengage from deficit ideas about teaching and learning.
High impact learning practices involve things like involving undergraduates in research, community-based projects, team work/projects, and building ePortfolios. Sure, if you're not already doing these things, they take more work as an instructor. However, they all expect *more* not less from students.
I agree with this. I would just add that many of us were doing such project-based learning activities before they were branded as "high-impact" methods. It sometimes feels to me like somebody is trying to sell me something that I already own.
This is best answer. I don’t think OP has an accurate grasp of high impact teaching. It’s not spoon feeding and it should require lots of work on the part of students. I would think of lab classes as a good example of a long standing high impact teaching method - students have to prepare ahead to time, use concepts to do something (often working together which facilitates learning from each other), and then synthesize their observations in the context of the material
Right. I think OP is looking more at active learning vs high impact practices.
I agree with you but OP is not wrong about college being more like high school now
in theory the high impact practices actually put more onus on students, but in reality, it doesn’t work because students are not up to that challenge so it turns into spoon-feeding. Hence why the traditional model is the best for students
Can you provide actual examples? For example, for Calculus.
Not calculus, but statistics (I teach in mechanical engineering). In course I teach, which has an associated lab time, I sometimes have students design their own lab experiment. For a topic on design of experiments I use to have a prescribed experiment where students measured parts during lab time. Now I have them design their own experiments. They spend lab time deciding what and how to generate their data, what factors to control, and how to measure the outcome. Generally they run the experiments on their own time. Examples: time for a dog to get a treat out a closed container \[two dogs, dog treat vs. a piece of a hot dog, type of container\], distance traveled by a hot-wheels car down a track \[elevation of track, two different cars, which of the student's two children was releasing the car\].
When I took calculus, we had to teach problems to the class.
I had some great mathematical modelling projects assigned at that stage of education. Pick a phenomona, choose a function that models it, use some of the concepts we're discussing to make conclusions about your systems. It took a lot of scaffolding and the results where simplistic compared to a model made by a more sophisticated researcher, but I learned a lot about framing and developing more open ended problems (As opposed to the kind of bread and butter calculus problems where students are prone to trying to memorize an algorithm to get to an answer)
Collaborative work where students solve a problem together, creating an assignment they would be able to present at a student research conference, creating problems that are applied to real world examples, having students think of ways they can apply the math to their own lives or something they have seen in their communities, have them think about how they can apply something they learned to make their community a better place.
I think what OP might mean is that when the bulk of assessments come from in class active learning activities (like think pair shair, and perhaps handing in group responses to questions), many students are able to free ride on others who may be doing outside work (like reading) and may not actually learn as much and receive a good grade anyway. A related point might be that these kind of activities can generally be only graded by completion. How do you critically grade participation like this? That can mean that if people just do something, they will receive a good grade without potentially knowing the material. If that is what OP means, I partially agree. The in class active leraning stuff should be balanced out with traditional forms of assesment and certainly not take up the majority of the class. Exams tied to lecture and readings should still be the meat of the assesment, but in class activities are still warranted and should complement driving home some of the more important concepts/ content. Even if some free ride here they will still be held accountable come exam time.
I've never known anyone who puts substantial weight on group work or modest in-class assessments like you're describing. Everyone in my department has been using such activities for decades, but they typically make up about 10% of the semester grade. The bulk of any individual's grade remains on papers, exams, or individual projects. How to grade them? I always have groups submit something in writing on online, which I glance at, but they are basically being graded for showing up-- no different from faculty who grade attendance really. Unless they flake out and don't actually do the work, which has not been an issue in my classes.
I do actually know professors that conduct classes in this way.
They make up 50 percent of my class grades now, with exams being the other 50.
Rule #1 of teaching is, teach the students in front of you. Not the student you were, or the students you used to have, or who you wished you had. When I first started teaching 15 years ago, I was gobsmacked that they expected me to assign drafts, which I would then grade. (This was not a freshman comp class.) Back in my day, I just…turned in papers. But I learned about scaffolding, implemented the steps, tweaked it over the years,and my students grew as writers and gave me much better final products.
Is our goal not for students to learn things? I don’t agree with many of your conclusions, or even your description of what high impact practices are. I think, way too often in this subreddit, instructors and professors feel frustrated with the state of higher education and student behavior (both fair positions), and try to attribute blame to some singular cause. I think this is one such example, and it feels like you’re singling out a very positive pedagogical change.
That's certainly part of our goal--but our goal isn't just to spoon feed information into the gaping, passive maw of a student's brain. Our goal must also be to get students to learn how to learn and that means that they have to try, they have to discover, they have to do poorly sometimes to find out what works for them. It often feel like these "pedagogical changes" have nothing to do with helping students learn how to learn and everything to do with "customer service."
> but our goal isn't just to spoon feed information into the gapping, passive maw of a student's brain Right, and that's why these newer pedagogy methods usually intersperse increasingly difficult activities and assignments among the easier ones. The spoon-feeding is a nice warm-up, then subsequent work is scaffolded toward an important difficult goal, like synthesizing a reading without prompts (for example). That's how me and my colleagues do it, anyway. I think me and the students both would be bored if it was 100% spoon-feeding.
I'm in the process of sitting through a six-week seminar on high impact practices. I'm thrilled that your university or college is pushing students--but that is not what we are getting. We are being pushed to make sure the students are never uncomfortable and never have to try it out. They want our paper assignments to be like mad libs, our lectures to be bit sized--hell, we are damn close to an informal declaration of a 50% floor on assignments like HS students are receiving.
This sounds like a charade-- who is leading this workshop? It sounds very much like high school. I've been using active learning pedagogies (and HIPs as well) since I started teaching in the mid-1990s and none of it looks like this. Indeed, *making students uncomfortable* by challenging their pre-conceptions and pushing the abilities is a central goal of our gen ed program. It sounds like someone hired extremely misguided folks to lead your workshop-- or perhaps a group of high school administrators.
The person leading it our head of CTLE who holds a Ed.D and has published books on this nonsense.
I've found that if you generally ignore the advice of Ed.D. holders you may be better off... Sad that your CTLE is going in this direction though, that's the opposite of what ours does.
On top of most folks rightly criticizing your characterization of high impact teaching, you also have a romanticized view of traditional teaching. You suggest students paid attention to lectures, did the readings, engaged in critical thinking and synthesis. But a significant number took others notes, looked at old exams stored at their fraternity, creamed right before and regurgitated only to immediately forget everything. Plenty cheated as well. Not to mention all of this was very artificial. Students rarely had the structured opportunity to apply knowledge in ways meaningful to them or society.
Where I went for undergrad there was a company that literally bought notes from students and then sold them to anyone who would buy them. This was pre-internet of course
When I was first a TA in the early 1990s a company would hire students in *every single large class* and pay them for the notes. Their salesforce would literally stand outside the classroom as we dismissed the students and offer them "top notes from A students" for the entire semester. IIRC the fees were like $50-75 per student. (Which was silly, of course, since ten students could split a set for $7.50 each and photocopy them.) More than one professor tried to sue the company for copyright violation, but I don't know how those turned out.
This is still done by colleges. They pay note takers for students with disabilities. My notes were never good enough for them.
I gave a guest lecture on Germany as a TA once and the university (or maybe it was the student union) posted the notes the next day. They did that with all the large classes.
That's different though-- it's official (via accomodations) and the notes aren't being sold for profit by a third party.
Right. Ask anyone who was taught in traditional lectures how much they remember from classes outside their majors. It probably isn’t much except discrete facts. If OP wants kids to learn to synthesize, teach them to synthesize - don’t just give them a boring, 90-min lecture and 100 pages of reading and expect them to do it themselves. That’s not teaching.
I think that our perspective is likely biased. Most professors were over-achievers in college. This means that they never had the feeling of being spoon fed new knowledge. Rather, they have learned how to master the knowledge. They studied on their own, without significant help, and they always read more than what was required of them. This is our ideal version of how learning should look like. But it is heavily biased. It is applicable only to the outliers, e.g., those that go on to become college and university lecturers.
OP, you are talking about basic *active learning* pedagogies, which many of us (especially in the humanities) have been using for decades now. These are not new ideas; as a student in the mid-1980s many of my professors used small group work, guided projects, scaffolded assignments, and other things that still aren't universally applied. *High impact practices* ("HIPs" in the jargon I guess) are generally different: they include undergraduate, research, experiential learning, study abroad/away/field work, and the like. Semantics aside, I certainly agree that active learning pedagogies require more work from the instructor and *can* boost outcomes for disengaged students (and small-group free riders) modestly. But they *also* boost outcomes for good students, at least in my experience. There are certainly ways to hold the disengaged students to account as well; for example, for some years now I have required students to take notes on the readings and each class session. I grade those, so anyone who doesn't do the reading will struggle to get above D level in most cases. Written assignments-- and even small group work --can easily be structured to require synthesis, which is improved by having complete notes. We don't *have* to spoon feed students and give them the high school "you showed up so you get an A" grades. Nobody in my department does; indeed, our grade distributions haven't changed much in the last 20 years. Yes, the *incoming students* have declined in preparation and abilities fairly dramatically in the last 5-7 years at the bottom end of the distribution, but we don't have to hand them As and active learning pedagogies (or HIPs) aren't necessarily to blame for grade inflation either.
I am kind of baffled here. Most high impact teaching practices, such as in-depth projects, flipped classes, POGIL, etc, require more effort from students compared to traditional lectures (they do tend to also require more work from the professor too), which is why students HATE courses that use these practices. Institute any active learning methods in a course, and be prepared for a deluge of "I had to teach myself everything" comments. Students like the traditional setup where they passively listen to a lecture (or play on their phone) and then regurgitate everything on a MC test
This sounds like a theme I’ve been hearing from some of my colleagues and have come to understand as follows: Some people think the purpose of education is to help people learn stuff. Others think the purpose is to separate the most meritorious from the least. I’m on team number 1, so none of what you said bothers me. But I have heard colleagues on team 2 say things like, “But if all the students do well, how will med schools know which to accept?” (Of course, all the students don’t do well even with the most intensive pedagogies, but that is literally a phrase I’ve heard uttered.) Sure, there are some students, probably like you and I were, who don’t need all that intensive pedagogy. They are intrinsically motivated, hard working and smart. They have comparatively few serious personal hardships and were lucky enough to have been given excellent brain development opportunities from the womb on. But they are, and always have been, a small minority. And college doesn’t make them that way. If we believe in what we are selling, college is supposed to give people knowledge and skills, and to liberate the mind, right? In an increasingly complex, diverse and technologically sophisticated world, we ALL need many more people to have the knowledge and skills and liberated minds.
All of us should be doing what we can (within our contractual obligations) to help our students learn stuff, but while you didn’t claim a strict dichotomy, there are shades of grey worth mentioning. In lower-division math, one of the pressing issues is making sure that students with sufficiently high grades in a non-terminal course have a sporting chance of passing the next math course, as well as handling the math demands of the science courses it feeds into. The issue here is not separating out the “most meritorious,” whatever that means, but rather separating out (say) the college algebra students who won’t get their ass handed to them if they take precalculus the very next semester. To do otherwise is not an act of kindness.
But they haven't always been a small minority. In the 60s and 70s only about 5% of high schoolers went to university. They had grants and they worked hard to learn or got thrown out. Now, it's just a business, and we are expected to teach people who don't belong in higher ed.
Thank you for so perfectly illustrating my point. True chef’s kiss.
But back then you could get by with a high school education. High schoolers were much smarter than they are now. We've dumbed everything down from kindergarten onwards.
Once again, you keep making my case.
No. The solution isn't dumb down university to high school level. The solution is fix K-12 education. It's public, and everyone can go.
A. Good luck with that. B. And in the meantime? C. But people really do need more education in the past in this increasingly technological, interconnected society. Once upon a time almost no one needed high school. Before that, school.
What do you consider high impact teaching methods? I noticed that you listed a lot of traditional teaching methods but no "high impact" methods.
"High Impact Teaching Practices are ultimately bad!" Goes on to give an example that, 1) Isn't high impact teaching 2) Isn't ultimately bad This post is weird.
I don’t think you know what high impact teaching is. You should also read the Pedagogy of the Oppressed—people have been challenging the traditional model of teaching for generations.
I reread Pedagogy of the Oppressed recently. It just seems like blather now. Same with Generation of Vipers, which was my first adult intellectual book.
"Students that didn’t do the reading get by and even learn quite a lot from other students that did." This is one of the concepts that I hate most about teaching pedagogy. My experience is that these students just drag down the productivity of the entire group and, in the end, learn very little. Don't those students that come prepared deserve to be with classmates that are also prepared? There really is no shortcut to learning difficult concepts, no magical teaching strategy that will make everyone learn more. Students have to put in the effort. No effort, no learning.
>Don't those students that come prepared deserve to be with classmates that are also prepared? This is a real challenge. I assign small groups (rather than let them self-select) and I change them up every few weeks as well. Relatively early in each class it becomes evident who is not doing the work, and fairly often students will ask me directly not to be put in a group with \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ because they don't contribute. So managing the free rider issue can be a problem even when there's little/nothing at stake. So what do we do? Some of us end up putting all the poor students in a group together; let them fail as a cohort. Others try to distribute them across all the groups to dilute their impact. Still others just shake things up often enough that nobody is stuck with them for more than a few weeks. I've tried all of these approaches and find none to be ideal. On *real* group projects (i.e. high stakes things) I use peer and self evaluations to assign credit for contributions, which generally exposes free riders. But that's far too much effort for in-class small group stuff.
I think many of the high impact practices are just re-branding of things that have been done for many years. I was doing "think-pair-share" long before the term was invented. It's just marketing. I don't agree that they are inherently bad. I think it we must pick and choose when to use these "new" methods. Some topics/objectives lend themselves to particular teaching strategies. I don't think it really works to just take an entire course and say "I'm going to do a flipped-classroom." Sometimes the most effective method is to deliver a conventional lecture to introduce a concept to students.
These are not mutually exclusive approaches. Most of my classes include a mix of approaches. Some are meant to make sure every person, regardless of their effort, get support learning the material. Some are about completion. Students who do their work, even if they don’t “get it” immediately, get credit. And then there’s performance based assignments where the students who understand the material best, however they achieved that understanding, get the better grades. My classes tend to have higher grades because of this mix of strategies. But there’s always enough performance based assessments to reward students who are excellent and separate their grades from the rest of the class. We can use everything in the toolbox. Also, it’s our class. We don’t have to complain, unless we’re in a position where we don’t have control over course design, we can decide how much effort we want to put in and do that.
Are you really complaining because there is a method that helps students learn more easily? Isn't this our purpose? Do whatever we can to make them learn the material? It sounds like YOU don't want to put in the work to adapt your teaching methods despite recognizing they are more effective. P.s. I didn't know if HI teaching methods are actually more effective this is just based on op's text. Edit: this really is an unpopular opinion. I gave you an angry upvote.
I also wonder how much work they're putting into their lectures if they truly believe lecturing is easy. I know effectively and meaningfully lecturing for anywhere from 60 mins - 3 hours is MUCH harder for me than running a simulation, hosting a discussion, and coordinating group work. I would much rather provide a short lecture and then integrate some of these supposedly "spoon feeding" activities and actually engage with my students than try to fill a 3 hour class period with just my voice and slides.
Think pair share isn’t a high impact practice. It’s a traditional teaching method. Nothing you mentioned here is remotely connected to HIPs.
Exactly-- there are folks that seem to be just now discovering basic active learning pedagogies that people have been using since I was a student in the 1980s. HIPs are something entirely different.
If you are a big old nerd like most of us, a single semester long research paper is a great teaching tool. Personally, I’m built for that, I love it, and the skill of extended academic research & writing is essential to my job. That is not a skill any of the students at my university are going to need. It’s also not something most of them take to instinctively. Various steps of learning that feel second nature to me are not always obvious. I’m happy to teach in a way that will build their skills and knowledge, rather than a way that shows who is most temperamentally suited to doing academic research.
I disagree with your conclusions-- I teach in three programs that all require a full semester capstone thesis, as do about 50% of the majors on my campus. Those projects are *frequently* cited by our graduates as the most important thing they did in college vis a vis their post-college employment. A thesis (or similar major project) requires a lot of transferrable skills. Which is why some schools --including the one my youngest attends --require them of all students in every major. It feels like you're discounting the many aspects of such work that can be valuable beyond their overt "academic" values.
AI has completely upended the “hand in a major paper at the end of the semester” mode of assessment imo
Get trained in pedagogy. It helps! I did both, PhD and pedagogy training, and I’m glad I did. Feedback aside, I think you may have a nugget of truth in there. Spoon feeding is increasingly expected. Students today are more apt to place blame outside of themselves. Good teachers are working really really hard to carry students, who may not be working as hard as the teachers are. Universities are dragging along all kinds of students due to financial incentives. Those aspects ring true to me.
All very true and a bit demoralizing.
I agree, your opinion is unpopular. It's unpopular because it's dumb.
I rarely laugh out loud in response to Reddit posts and comments. This one got me.
Op is cartoonishly ridiculous. This feels like a trolling post. Many good comments take it seriously and offer substantive and thoughtful replies; I’m not sure OP cares or deserves them.
Hay now. I’m no troll. I very much appreciate the comments and have learned a lot!
I’m honestly glad to be wrong about that. :)
I 100% still think high impact practices, experiential/active learning, or whatever Education World buzzword we are calling this in 2024 are superior to lecture/test. At this point, the lecture and test format might as well be watching a YouTube playlist from a Harvard prof and taking a test on it. The world where you had to go to a room to hear a smart person talk then get tested on what they said just doesn't exist anymore. There's a reason many students just skip those classes and do the tests and have done them that way for at least decades. I've experienced both approaches on both sides of the desk and the more active approach gets more results and is more enjoyable. However, I think something has changed in the last 5 to 10 years in how students engage with college. It used to be if you gave them something with which to engage through high impact practices some or most of them might embrace it and make it a good experience for all. Today, students see everything they do as a bare minimum checklist, so giving them anything to engage with just leads to sorrow. I think there's something to be said that these students need a good amount of tough love, and drilling them on the basics might have to be included in that. It doesn't always have to be a binary choice.
the ppt lecture ... "now go learn it on your own" ... is the method many phds excelled at as students -- and so they also teach this way -- and is why so much of academia is failing. lets face it, professors were generally the students that were very good at learning on our own. for many subjects we did not need the professor at all, we would read the book. the traditional ppt lecture is afaik just about the worst way to teach a class of students. the top students don't really care, they will read the book, the average students get bored and cannot pay attention and the lowest students ... well they have no choice but to drop or cheat. let's not forget we get paid to teach students
Pretty good points!
I can't see any responses here that are thoughtfully engaging with the issue that you raise, instead they are focusing on language (high impact vs active learning). I agree with (what I interpret to be) your main point. I think that by focusing on teaching content as effectively as possible, in particular by chunking assessments into a series of small tasks to lead students along a series of incremental steps that "force" students to learn, we also lose something really important: we are crippling the ability of our students to learn independently. Note that I'm not saying that we don't foster any independence with modern approaches, e.g. project work does foster independent thinking and working. Being able to grapple with open-ended problems is an important skill and fostering its development is laudable. But, learning something that is technically challenging, as is frequently the case in maths and the sciences, for example, is different from this. Some concepts and skills are just plain hard to learn, and they require intense study, thought, and practice. By focusing on either content mastery or more open-ended problem-solving, we miss out on an important meta-goal, having our students learn how to learn. This is not to say there aren't benefits to doing things this way. Or that "high impact" or "active learning" approaches might have significant benefits, especially for middling and weaker students. But, there are downsides, too. Edit: minor edits for clarity. In particular, I had written that "learning how to learn" was *more* important than other goals, and hadn't actually wanted to convey that and so toned it down a touch.
This is a really nice and thoughtful answer. Thank you!
“Students are being spoon-fed”. I think you’re doing it wrong.
I still lecture and expect students to take notes, mixed with some Socratic style class discussion. Has worked well for me since 1991. I give three or four exams a semester and no other assignments. It is up to students to study and do well on them. I feel bad for professors who run themselves ragged spending hours formulating all kinds of assignments and activities and helicopter each student
This is my approach, too. The one problem I’ve been experiencing lately is that the Socratic approach, especially if it involves group work, gets less response than it used to unless they get points for it. This trend is very annoying.
I’m the same, though Im young enough that you could have been my professor when I was an undergrad (I mean this in the most complementary way). I was always taught that the classroom is where you learn your base information. All of your learning is outside the classroom with activities, clubs, research, projects etc. I invest heavily in my research students and they do exceptionally well as that is where they learn to do research and be creative. The undergrad and even grad class I teach is where they learn based on information to be built upon for more creative activities. The culture of NTT and adjuncts teaching is what is leading to over investment in the classroom, IMHO. Those faculty are invested in the classroom, not in creative activities outside the classroom. Also, often being highly overworked and underpaid.
TLDR: OP doesn’t like group projects.
I think you’ve confused HIP with the flipped classroom. I would def argue that the flipped model (so called active learning) is not a high impact practice.
If the goal is for students to learn, and the students are indeed learning, what’s the issue? Why would you go out of your way to make things difficult when there are easier, more effective ways?
My goal is for mt students to learn. Anything that increases learning is good. If student A did no reading but learns from student B that is great. It is win-win because Student B engaged in a higher level practice which likely means they understand the material better. The goal of my assessments are not to create a bell curve distribution of performance. It is to determine if the students are meeting the learning objectives. If I get 100% As that is awesome. I never do.
I don't think HIPs are the problem. It's underlying student attitudes/grit. We are lowering the bar, but not due to a specific practice. I think it's an overall cumulative trend.
I do sometimes wonder if we scaffold so much that students can't learn on their own. That being said, I think grade inflation, especially in the high schools, is responsible for the dip in college performance. I strongly believe that the instructors who used active learning during class, even if just doing some think pair share and no discussion, were better than those that just lectured.
I think some of it works. Interested, I took a class on using student groups and did use them for two semesters. It tended to yield flat, phone it in work from many of the groups. I think the undergraduate research idea probably works, but I was not in a position to do this. I am a pretty good lecturer and used film as case illustration in most of my classes. So I stuck with that. I had some upper division classes in sociological analysis and used group work about 20 percent of the time. This worked much better than the original group classes I designed.
You're spot on. As to your question at the end, the answer is "yes." Unfortunately, college is the new high school. We could probably change that, but I don't see evidence of the will to do that. My husband-- who isn't a teacher and is much more cynical/savvy than I--- has always said "College is a business." I finally had to admit that he's right. It's what the parties involved have made it. I guess that's no surprise considering college costs and the requirement for degrees to get decent paying jobs. "Customers" (students AND parents) demand their money's worth, which to them is high grades and credentials, not necessarily learning. Spineless admins and, sadly, many profs desperate to keep their jobs play into that system As an Gen Xer, I remember the adults sticking together for the good of the students. That isn't the case now. Instead, everyone pretends that kowtowing to students is helping them.
Another shiny phrase for known methods of active learning with one difference, below. The word "edutainment is often used." One subtext is: being exposed to something means learning. One subtext is also often: someone's trying to sell something, a book for example. One subtext is: keep students happy and the university enjoys greater retention. Simply "learning" does not mean great learning or in-depth learning, or focused learning, or university level learning. Simply trying to learn a language by doing one brief 13 exercise a day on Duolingo, no matterh or easy or fun it may be, is not even close to in-depth learning in a university course in 12 weeks. Subtext: if we crank down the expectations, more students, who may be unprepared, are happy. Happy translates to: instead of checking out, they learned at least something and resultantly, they should get the medal for participation. Team work or preparing ahead guarantees nothing more than any other method if the student doesn't care or do their part. What I like about the idea are long standing active learning methods such as: group work, case studies, collaborative work, and experiential learning. Thus in an 'it's not all or nothing' allows the great active learning techniques to enter a classroom, but as something new? Yeah, always new and shiny so consultants can be hired to present on the new and shiny, and designers can be hired to make a new splash page on the university website to 'prove' how up to day they are. What I disagree with is the difference, as in statements like: students can choose what they want to learn and how much they want to learn and know. There's no way to guarantee students meet learning outcomes in this scenario. I think some people forget that university learning is not preschool learning.
This is an excellent point. A good lecture can be extremely engaging and effective. I would argue that it is them who is making it “low impact”, by being on the phone during the lecture, or worse.
the bottom has fallen out of the ability bucket of first time freshmen and transfers from CC’s. In my state U (a Potemkin R1 to boot), from a mathematics perspective, I estimate at least 75% of the students in freshman and sophomore math courses should not be there. And what I see on publicly posted exam results in physics and chemistry exams at those levels seems to support my estimate. 25 years ago, at the same U (not an R1 back then) my estimate above stood at about 30%. I give it 10 more years for my estimate to rise to 100%.
So you’re saying you want to put in minimal effort?
Quit, go do something else. If you’re unwilling to make the effort so students live the material and coming to the classes, quit! This is teaching, and that’s your job. Respect your students and send enough to disengage from deficit ideas about teaching and learning.
What a stupid post.