Top ten teaching innovations

This story appeared in the Spring 2019 Letters & Science magazine.

If you graduated before 2000,chances are good that the internet didn’t figure large in your learning. Now the world is linked by technology, and professors and students are leveraging online resources and hyper-connectivity in highly effective ways. But “innovation” doesn’t always mean “high-tech.” When we polled our associate deans on the top 10 teaching innovations over the last 20 years, some answers had nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with more meaningful interpersonal interactions. If you haven’t sat in a classroom for a few years (or decades), you’ll likely be heartened that connection remains at the heart of what we do. And we are getting better at it all the time.

Flipped Classroom

No, the desks aren’t glued to the ceiling. But a “flipped classroom” does reverse the traditional method of delivering lectures from the front of the room, while students try to absorb everything in 50- or 75-minute lectures. Instead, instructors send students course material in video format ahead of time, and class time is used for questions, discussion and group problem-solving.

“Before, we would get a lot of blank stares,” says Soledad Benguria, a faculty associate in the math department who teaches an introductory calculus course. “But if you have completed your pre-lecture modules on Sunday, then it’s easier to follow what is going on all week.”

In class, Benguria uses a Think/Pair/Share strategy, asking students to work for a few minutes on their own, then share their work with a neighbor. Did they reach the same result? They hold up yellow cards. If they each got different answers, they hold up orange cards. “I get an immediate sense of how well, generally, the material is being understood,” she says.

Exam letter grade averages have shot up since Benguria flipped her classroom in 2015, and course evaluations reveal that students appreciate the approach.

—Mary Ellen Gabriel

High Impact Practices

High Impact Practices are educational experiences intended to help students become more engaged, reflective and empathetic thinkers. L&S faculty are engaged in high impact practices across the college, in courses large and small, encouraging students to connect, explore and realize their full potential.

The Undergraduate Research Scholars (URS) program is one example. Whether working alongside faculty in the lab, traveling to field sites or poring over primary sources, URS students enjoy one of the great benefits of attending a top research university: the chance to work with outstanding faculty on an exciting, rigorous project. The L&S Honors program is another example, offering challenging coursework as well as opportunities to broaden life and leadership experiences. High impact practices are not purely academic. UW-Madison has made it a priority to create a welcoming and inclusive campus community, and the L&S Summer Collegiate Experience invites accepted students from underrepresented groups to campus before school starts to offer a chance to acclimate to an environment that may be overwhelming for those who may be the first in their families to go to college.

The 2017 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), surveyed freshmen and seniors from universities across the country, and found that UW-Madison students are more likely than students at peer institutions to participate in high impact practices, contributing to UW’s high overall score for student engagement.

—Mary Ellen Gabriel

Classroom Clickers

Pop quiz: How do you engage students in a large lecture, many of whom might be hesitant to speak up in front of dozens of peers?

If you answered, “With an audience response device,” you aced this little test.

These devices, often known as “classroom clickers,” started showing up in college classes about 15 years ago. Resembling small television remote controls, they allowed students to respond in real time to questions their professor posed from the front of the room. They let both the professor and student gauge how well everyone was absorbing material.

These days, students simply download an app and use their smartphones to participate. Physics professor Duncan Carlsmith has used an audience response system called Top Hat in his large lecture courses for several years.

“Students like seeing the responses scroll in the overhead projector view, a bit like a Twitter feed,” he says. “If I simply ask for oral responses, generally just one student will raise a hand. [Now] I get close to 80 responses from 80 students rapidly.”

Throughout a lecture, Carlsmith will pause to ask a few multiple-choice, text, math or graphical-response questions. While answers display anonymously, the system tracks submissions, automatically rewarding students points for participation and correctness.

—Katie Vaughn

Sharing Experiences Across E-platforms

From basic e-textbooks to exotic interactive maps, the range of educational resources students can access online now is breathtaking. But new e-platforms, including class diaries and blogs, that enable students to view each other’s work and learn from each other are also game-changing. Students enrolled in Internships in the Liberal Arts & Sciences, a one-credit online course for students participating in internships during the fall, spring and summer terms, use a wiki website to reflect on the class’s weekly readings on workplace issues. They also rely on the friendly, thoughtful back-and-forth that unfolds there to get help with practical matters and weigh larger concerns. Whether students experience doubt, confirmation or accidentally stumble upon a promising new occupation, having the opportunity to muse honestly with their peers goes a very long way, according to English professor Russ Castronovo, who leads the class.

—Louisa Kamps

Using Data to Improve Teaching

While policymakers continue debating how big data can improve education, many instructors are already using so-called “small data”— course-level data and analytics — to build better classes. To track progress in her popular journalism and strategic communications class, Mass Media Practices, professor Kathleen Bartzen Culver downloads students’ weekly grades into spreadsheets. Analyzing and comparing data both week-by-week and across sections, she can determine whether teaching assistants are grading either too stringently or too easily, or when an assignment just didn’t land well. When students’ average scores were low on a feature writing project, for example, Culver’s analysis led her to realize that she needed to revamp the materials. Perhaps most important, Culver shares her fine-grained data with students who come in for help, so they know where to focus their efforts to improve.

—Louisa Kamps

Digital Literacy

Laptops and phones may be ubiquitous, and student spend more time on them than ever, but there is more to digital literacy than posting, surfing and swiping.

The Digital Studies Certificate was created six years ago to train students in some of the most basic skills of our age: producing and assessing communication in digital media. The program’s goal is to graduate students with more than just technical proficiency.

“It’s not about teaching students the newest app,” says Rob Howard, director of the Digital Studies Program. “It’s about offering them tools to think critically about digital media.”

Students probe how digital technologies affect the way we access and understand information. And they acquire the skills to create expressive and strategic communication content, utilizing software for video and audio editing, website design, database and information architecture design and more.

State-of-the-art labs — Media Studios and DesignLab — in College Library support students’ developing skills. Media Studios is ideal for students experimenting with “rich media” (video, audio or other elements). DesignLab offers free one-on-one tutoring with trained design consultants, who help students with everything from conceptualizing the first steps, to polishing a nearly finished project.

—Mary Ellen Gabriel

Connecting Students to the World

“We’ll find out where Professor Hawks is today!”

That’s what students often say excitedly just before they head into John Hawks’ classes. The genial anthropology professor could be there in person. But there’s also a possibility he could be beaming in, via Skype or a video feed, from a remote excavation site in South Africa, or the office of a Chinese, Russian or African colleague. Lately Hawks led students through a windswept cave in Gibraltar where the last known Neanderthals in Europe scratched a distinctive — yet oddly familiar — symbol of slashed lines known as the ‘hashtag.’

“I grew up in a small town in Kansas where I didn’t know anybody who had a career in science,” says Hawks, who co-led an international team in the 2013 discovery of a previously unknown human ancestor they named Homo naledi. “I think really hard about how I can help people recognize the importance of science and how it contributes to — in our case — everybody’s understanding of themselves. It’s not isolated in a laboratory. It really is a story of international collaboration.”

—Louisa Kamps

Large Courses as Active and Inclusive Environments

Anthropology professor Jerome Camal teaches two back-to-back sections of his department’s biggest lecture class, Cultural Anthropology and Human Diversity, with up to 450 students enrolled in each section. Luckily, a team of education and technology experts has his back. Consultants from REACH, a new university initiative designed to transform high-enrollment courses into more inclusive and active class environments, are helping Camal and others leverage online learning tools, follow standardized teaching objectives and employ pedagogic strategies proven to improve learning outcomes.

One simple yet effective strategy: encourage students to personalize their learning. When Camal introduces a new concept, he asks students to reformulate it in their own words. “They remember the idea better because they worked with it,” he says. He also uses online quizzes that offer a way for students to identify their own learning style and work as they prefer, boosting self-direction.

—Louisa Kamps

Residential Learning Communities

Students might live and breathe their major, but if they also eat and sleep it, they’re probably part of a residential learning community (RLC).

These programs bring together students, faculty and staff who unite around a theme — biology, the environment or identity — or a shared desire to form a tighter-knit community at a large university.

The 10 residential learning communities — half of which are sponsored by L&S — are set within residence halls across campus. Each has its own programming, including special class sections, seminars and volunteer opportunities, and works hard to build relationships around its mission, says John Zumbrunnen, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and faculty director of Chadbourne Residential College since 2015.

“Students know that at an RLC they will find fellow residents and staff who share their interests,” he says. “Learning occurs not just in the classroom, but on the floors and in the common social areas. Students interact with one another and with faculty and staff around shared academic interests — but they do this where they live.”

—Katie Vaughn

Career Prep in the Classroom

A liberal arts education focuses on learning and discovery, rather than training for narrow career paths. Turns out this emphasis on exploration can be a recipe for career success: Students should explore their options as early in their college careers as possible. And L&S advisors understand that liberal arts students are motivated as much by their interests and their potential impact on the world, as by specific careers.

This approach helped L&S transform the way liberal arts students think about their futures. The cornerstone of the L&S Career Initiative is SuccessWorks, an innovative career exploration center for L&S students that opened in early 2018.

SuccessWorks offers the Taking Initiative course, which guides students through self-reflection work as well as practical exercises. They learn to create resumes and LinkedIn profiles, but they also craft an elevator speech that articulates their interests and skills. e goal is to help students connect who they are with what they are learning in the classroom, and how all of it might translate to a potential career.

Students in the course also hear from alumni who share their often-very-nonlinear paths, which helps communicate that they don’t need to have everything figured out now — but it’s smart to start exploring.

—Katie Vaughn