What's Your Teaching Style?

As we begin this part of week three, one of the first questions to ponder is posed above. Our teaching style is a reflection of who we are, our values/beliefs, and how we were taught as students. Students pick up on these values, and they can implicitly and explicitly affect their performance and success. For example, in the experience Joe Louis Hernandez, Project Manager for Rise Program at Rio Hondo College and formerly incarcerated student currently pursuing his Ph.D:

Joe Luis Hernandez.png

"My English teacher read my paper and she 
murdered me. But she also told me I write 
beautifully and she offered to help me with my 
writing. I will always remember her."

Additionally, Brené Brown, PhD, writes on educational shame in Daring Greatly:

"85% of the men and women we interviewed remember something so shaming from their school experience that it changed how they think of themselves as learners.

Over 90% of participants remember a specific teacher, coach, or clergy person who helped them believe in their worth and the value of their contribution."

Let us begin by learning more about our own teaching style. To facilitate this, we will refer to a brief assessment adapted from from Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain.

Please click here for the assessment: What's Your Teaching Style?

Once you have finished and determined where your teaching style falls on the chart, let's read the following article about Becoming a Warm Demander.

AWAKEN

Grading practices are a mirror not just for

students, but for us as their teachers.

Each one of us should start
by asking,

“What do my grading practices

say about who I am and what I believe?”

--Joe Feldman, Education Consultant

How Equitable is Your Grading?

It’s REALLY important to remember that these questions aren’t assessing how much you’re committed to equity, how much you care about your students, or how dedicated you are to teaching. Through no fault of our own, teachers have had almost no training or support in how to grade. That’s why this quiz simply asks about how you grade, and gives you some feedback on how much you may be supporting equity or, inadvertently, be using 100-year old grading practices that may be perpetuating inequities. In addition, the feedback includes references to specific chapters in Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman.

Please visit the following link to take a short quiz assessing your grading practices: Grading for Equity Quiz

Once you have finished, carefully read the rationale and explanations associated with each question. For a version of this feedback you can keep, please click here: How Equitable is Your Grading Results

Lastly, once you have taken the quiz and reflected upon your results, we invite you to read and article and research base for The Wise Feedback Model, which concludes with some questions for inquiry.

Transparency

Demystifying our expectations is part of being a successful Warm Demander. This can be even more imperative in online classes where students can be accessing on different computer models, tablets, or even their smartphones to view and complete coursework. Technology can be frustrating, and no one learns well when they are frustrated. If our students cannot easily find and understand what is being asked of them then their level of engagement and participation is likely to decline.

For our purposes, let's consider the applications of transparent teaching in several parts of online teaching (each point below leads to a page dedicated to that topic, witch visual aids and examples).

Clear Assignments & Rubrics

While all four components above are crucial, students often place the highest stakes on the assignments--after all that is most often what determines their grades. To that end, we ask you to engage with a reading titled: Transparency in Teaching.

Once you have read this article, please continue on to view several examples that can be applied immediately to your online classes:

The Transparent Assignment Template
Sample: Transparent Assignment Template
Transparent Assignment Template HTML (that can be copy/pasted into your courses).

Lastly, the application to the transparent assignment template to one of your actual class assignments is part of your audit deliverables. Once you have completely finished, you may submit it here: Deliverable 4 ✅ Transparent Assignments by February 22, 2021.

On Canvas Quizzes

The Canvas Quiz feature can be a useful tool for administering summative assessments in our online classes. Indeed, we can ask multiple choice, essay, matching, and other question forms much like during an on-campus exam.

There are a few things to consider carefully as we employ these quizzes in our classes. First, how can we create an equitable quiz online? Next, what of academic integrity for students taking exams at home? And finally, how can we ensure our online quizzes fit the transparent assignment protocol as modeled above?

For equitable quizzes, we will focus on the number of attempts and time-limits of our assessments. Canvas has numerous settings for these features. For example, and instructor can choose to permit students one try on a quiz, or multiple attempts (and only the highest score is counted, or an average of the scores be counted). Furthermore, we can allow students unlimited time for a quiz or set a strict time-limit, which will lock students out once they reach a certain minute mark. For a useful guide to these features, check out: What Options Can I Set in a Quiz?

But what of student equity? Reflect back to the "How Equitable is Your Grading Quiz" and "Warm Demander" Discussion. We must ask ourselves, does mandating students to take a strictly timed exam with only one chance for success serve them well? How often do we administer quizzes, and what percentage of the overall grade are they worth? Again, there is no one-size-fits-all answer here, but in the spirit of equity, we choose to lean closer to flexibility as opposed to rigidity--as explained in the Warm Demander article.

Now to the question of academic integrity. That is, if students are taking quizzes at home, what is stopping them from cheating? To answer this, we may think about employing various exam proctoring programs (such as Proctorio, which is currently being piloted). These programs limit what students can do on their computers during an exam and, if activated, can even track their head/eye movements to see if they are looking away from their computer to a presumed "cheat-sheet." While the possibilities of such technology is certainly exciting, we must also consider the equity implications. For example, what if a student does not have a quiet and private place to take their online quiz? The Online Network of Educators (@one) presents a worthwhile read on these issues: Online Proctoring – Impact on Student Equity.

Most immediately in our online classes, let us rethink the purpose quizzes serve in our class. Are they being designed as tools for learning or tools for assessing if learning has taken place? Even, how can our quiz questions be modified so as to maintain academic integrity?

Lastly on the topic of quizzes, we aim to keep them as transparent as possible. On Canvas, this means that the quiz description articulates the following details:

The purpose of the quiz
Time limits/number of attempts
Number of questions
Question Type(s)
What are students allowed to use (notes, text, calculator, etc)
Timeframe to take the quiz
Skills/Knowledge
When students can expect a grade and/or feedback (if the quiz needs to be graded manually.

These attributes, and more depending on the type of quizzes in your class, can help to demystify our online assessments. This may improve student success on the quiz itself and in the class as a whole.

Keep Learning

As we redesign our assignments and assessments, let's also continue thinking how other parts of our audit can merge with this past section. For instance, how can we integrate culturally relevant curriculum, active online learning, and effective communication into our assignments and discussions?

As previously mentioned, there is no one-size-fits-all answer here. But through collaboration, creativity, and flexibility, we affirm that every discipline can endeavor towards these goals.

To keep the momentum going on this topic, please partake in the following learning activities and supplemental resources.

Activity: The assignment and assessment planning worksheet.
Activity: Grading and Student Feedback planning worksheet
Reading: Rethinking Expectations About Assignments
Reading: Grading for Equity (Links to an external site.) by Joe Feldman

Using tabs demonstration