Category: Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset, Resilience

Endings Are Beginnings

ProvostMissy

It is the end of the spring semester and for the first time in ten years I am enjoying the wrap up of teaching a class. It has been fun to have the immediacy of contact with students for a change. Although I do participate in student events, the routine conversations that faculty can have in class, are outside of my usual experiences. It is just a matter of hours in the day, not a lack of interest. Serving as a last-minute replacement has allowed me to re-engage those routine conversations. I’ve learned a lot from the students in my class. I always do.

Now we’re up to final presentations and final grades. As I take on the evaluation of the students, I know I am really evaluating myself. What could I have done better? How might I have structured my assignments for a more thorough development of the key concepts in the course? How might I have changed my behavior to better inspire punctuality and commitment to the material? What assignments or readings might have better conveyed the value of what the students are learning? Should I have considered a few applications outside of class to build commitment to the quality of work? The list goes on.

Yes, final grades matter to students and their futures, but for me they have always been about reflective teaching. As tedious as the last round of grading can be, it has always inspired me to think about how I might do better work. This is when I build a summer reading list focused on the discipline and on pedagogy. People are always surprised that those readings are a source of relaxation for me, but they are. They always inspire.

This semester’s visit to the classroom has reminded me how much excitement I feel by the endings each year. I don’t want to let that pass unnoticed, so, I am wondering how to capture it in my administrative duties.

Well, in some ways I always do. This is the season of annual reports and evaluations. I have the pleasure of reading about so many accomplishments each year – new programs, new awards, new research – and they never fail to inspire. I also read about the less wonderful stuff – enrollment challenges, retention challenges, or gaps in funding that might keep a good idea from moving forward. Those are less fun to read about. Still, they are an opportunity for me to think about how I can do better. In that spirit, I am transforming the questions I ask of my teaching as follows:

  • How do I better communicate the value of the initiatives that start in Academic Affairs? Do I need more data? Do I need to distribute readings? Do we need more workshops? Do I need to visit all governance bodies to discuss each initiative? Do I need to visit all departments?
  • How do I better support and coordinate the initiatives that do not start in Academic Affairs? The majority of the efforts that I have been involved in over the years did not actually start with me. Teaching faculty, administrative faculty, student leaders, governance bodies, and the facilities team, are usually the inspiration for projects of all kinds. Sometimes they come to me directly, sometimes I learn about them later. This gap in timing may be an indication of a coordination problem that can undermine a perfectly good idea. How do I help these initiatives thrive?
  • How do I structure our activities in ways that better connect the university community to each other? To the community? Can I find a way to help strengthen those connections and inspire more follow through on the activities we host and the next steps they inspire?
  • What might I eliminate from our long list of priorities to allow for greater attention to the most important things? It is easy to keep adding to a syllabus or a list of goals, but that always leads to too many tasks, initiatives, and ideas. How do I shrink the to-do list so we can focus our efforts productively? How do I prioritize effectively?
  • How do I set deadlines that are achievable?

Yes, it is the end of the semester and I will grade final projects and evaluate the work of all that we do in the academic programs. The pile of things to read is tall (metaphorically, of course, things are all digital now) and the learning opportunities are vast. I am excited to get started because I always end up feeling inspired by the work completed, and, yes, a little worried about what did not get done. But inspired wins every time.

I love the endings. They bear a tinge of sadness and a feeling of loss as another year ends and another group of students graduates. But endings also inspire hope for the future, providing a perfect opportunity for reflection, and a chance to do better next year. I am grateful that education is built on this cycle. It is a cycle that builds optimism, and optimism is the best foundation for beginnings.

Evaluation, Growth Mindset

Staring at the Data

ProvostMissy

Let me give it to you straight – WCSU is struggling to improve our retention rates. As long as I have been at this university (since 2012), we have been trying to figure out why so many students leave prior to degree completion and why so many leave after the first year. We have tried numerous strategies, each time hanging our hopes on a new effort, hoping to crack the code. Here is the list, since 2012:

We had a limited FY program (not required, so only partial enrollment). Part of that program in my first two years here included cohorting of classes for FY student (they took three together). Though the idea was a good one, it did not have the desired effect. Without full community backing, the impression among the students was that they were being punished in some way. Among the students involved it had a (very small) negative impact on retention. We stopped doing that.

We now have a full FY program (required as part of our general education curriculum). Departments have developed courses that act as extended orientations to the discipline, which seems to have improved our students time to degree completion (that number has been moving up from 48.9% to 53% starting with the 2012 cohort). This, combined with published four-year plans and a general education curriculum that has fewer hidden requirements than the prior version, all seem to be moving us in the right direction on graduation rates.

Unfortunately, the FY program and the related efforts did not improve our retention rates which hovered around 73% for years, with one up-year – we hit 75.5% in 2019, only to crash to 69.9% in 2020. That is definitely a COVID impact. We’ll see how recovery goes.

I’ve been paying attention to our data, and the number one predictor of student retention at WCSU is High School GPA. Students with an 85% or higher high school GPA tend to be retained in the 80% or higher range (often as high as 85%, which is a great number for a regional public comprehensive university). That number drops immediately at 84% high school GPA (down 6-10%) and with a pretty linear correlation with each point dropped. A perfectly nice B/B- high schooler is at a 10% or higher risk of being lost in the first year than the solid B/B+ or higher. This data isn’t just WCSU, it is a national trend. This is data we can act upon.

And we have. We’ve launched a peer mentor program to address students in that B/B- category. We’re hoping just a little support from their friends will help them stay. A group of folks from tutoring, the library faculty, the first-year coordinator, academic advising, orientation, and our alternate admissions team gathered together to make a plan. They agreed on a training plan for the peer mentors and recruited a diverse group of students to do this outreach. They are now analyzing what worked and where to improve for next year, and the team is expanding. We won’t know the impact on retention until the fall, but this work has been exciting, and it feels good to take action and measure results.

With this program launched, there is more data to consider, and it is time we do so. The director of institutional research has been running some queries on a few areas variables that seem to be related to retention. The two reports he just sent my way were startlingly clear. High school GPA is predictive across majors (not just as a general indicator of losing a student): the higher percentage of students in the major with an 85% high school GPA or above, the higher the retention rate. Not surprising, based on what we knew before this point, but here is where it gets interesting. There is a striking exception to this relationship, and it occurs in a major that is organized as a very close cohort. The students who started in that cohort, and were not fully successful in their original major, stayed at WCSU even when they had to change their major.

What can we do in light of this data? Perhaps a deeper dive into the reasons why some degrees are attracting more students with lower High School GPAs and making a more specific series of supports in those majors? Maybe. Or maybe we should think about how to create cohorts in programs where they aren’t naturally occurring. Maybe this is the glue that will help the students succeed. With all of the national data the links student persistence and transparent pathways through degrees, cohorts might help us focus those pathways even further. For a majority commuter campus, cohorts might also help our students connect with peers and feel connected to the community. Cohorts provide exciting possibilities that I’m keen to explore with my colleagues.

The second piece of data was about math. Math success is not a new problem and our math department has tried numerous strategies to try to improve student outcomes. They are working hard, incorporating new technologies and trying new approaches. Nevertheless, we have a persistent problem.

A review of five years of data shows us the following:

  • A shocking number of students are placed into Intermediate Math (credit bearing, pre-general education math): Nearly 50%. This is true for students with above an 85% HS GPA and those below it.
  • Students who earn a D, F, or withdraw from any math class in their first year are retained at a rate between 63-68%. Those who happened to fail Intermediate Math with embedded remediation are retained at a rate below 50%.
  • Students who fail any math class in their first year are 20% more likely to have a high school GPA below 85% than those who pass.
  • Students who pass any math class (including the one with embedded remediation) are retained at about an 82-84% rate.
  • The retention rate for students who take no math class in their first year, drops back down to a 70%.

Given all of this, we might want to re-think our math strategies. We need to dig deeper into the patterns of who is ending up with the D, F, or W in those first courses, to see if we have a few other predictors besides HS GPA. We appear to need better placement strategies than those we are currently using. We might even need a prep-course, prior to placement testing. We probably need a differentiated delivery of our curriculum based on a combination of variables, not just our placement tests. We may need some kind of intersession process to keep students from failing or withdrawing in the first place. We’ve tried variations on each of these in the past, but like the FY program done half-way, it hasn’t worked fully. It is time to focus and develop a plan for better math outcomes. Those outcomes are so directly related to our retention rates that it is imperative that we do so.

Yes, I’m staring at the data and trying to imagine next steps. I know I have a community of colleagues who want more for our students. I know I have a community of colleagues who are eager to find better paths. I’m hoping my colleagues will ask even better questions of our data, and embrace trying new things as a result. I hope those new things are coordinated, measured, and refined as we continue to learn more about our students. I hope all of this, because one thing is certain, staring at the data is not enough.

Change, Growth Mindset, Resilience

Defaulting to Kindness

ProvostMissy

Last Friday, I had the honor of participating in a faculty session regarding our first year classes this fall. A lot of hard work has gone on, from the leadership of our FY director, to the contributions of our instructional designers, librarians, media services, student affairs, and of course all the FY faculty re-writing their materials for the fall. It was a tremendous effort and the people able to participate in our virtual meeting were enthusiastic about the materials shared with them. There was a clear sense of mutual support in this strange new world.

First-year courses everywhere are likely to have undergone these efforts. No matter what combination of online and on-ground teaching a university has selected, one thing is clear: It will not be a normal start. Our entering first-year students are tasked with acclimating to higher education in multiple modalities (online, hybrid, flex, etc.), while also experiencing the socio-emotional growth that typically takes place as they transition from high school to college. They must do all of this with COVID-19 in their minds at all time. That is a lot to ask. We have spent a lot of time working on the safety part of this equation and we will spend the rest of the year, continuously reflecting on and adjusting the teaching and learning part.

At WCSU, the FY team has strengthened first-year courses because students might not get to meet each other, or their faculty, in person anytime soon. To bridge this physical gap, they have included clear instruction about navigating the online learning environment. They developed new strategies for helping peer mentors engage students within our learning management system and there was conversation about group work designed to help students interact with each other, not just for learning, but for making friends. There was also attention to seeking routine feedback from students to try to help them stick with their coursework, and build connections when those connections feel, well, intangible. I am proud of the team of faculty and staff who engaged these questions. They are doing great work.

It is not just FY faculty who are redesigning their courses. All faculty are doing so because they are faced with being prepared for anything. This is sometimes grueling work, but the opportunity to re-imagine courses can also a blessing. When forced to design a course for multiple modalities, there is the opportunity to look at material from multiple perspectives. This gives room for new exercises, clarification of material, and even just de-cluttering. Taking a more focused, developmental path through a course might help students and faculty alike. Indeed, doing less, and being very clear about our expectations, could actually improve our outcomes, even in a world with too many new variables. While not trying to minimize the effort this requires, I do see that there is opportunity for growth in all of this, which could be very rewarding.

It is the same with efforts going on everywhere else at WCSU. We are focusing on essential interactions and learning outcomes and trying to help our community be a community in the fall. As athletics conferences decided on safety, coaches reached out to athletes to build community and find other rewarding ways to interact as teams. Career services is all in on virtual recruitment, training opportunities, and even virtual internships. Turns out, employers like that virtual recruitment option and this is likely to be our new standard after COVID-19. Our performing arts faculty have developed creative experiences for their students to perform and rehearse in virtual, outdoor, and highly spaced indoor environments. As a singer, I know exactly how hard that is, because sound is a tricky thing… the farther apart you are, the less likely to sing together. Nevertheless, good things are happening with and without technology. All over the university, we may be doing less of what we are used to doing, but we are adding new experiences and trying to make sure that those experiences are truly meaningful.

But here is this morning’s clarity: With all of this newness, and the many options that the WCSU community (and all of higher ed) has worked hard to create for our students, it is more than probable that there will be many, many mistakes. From simple errors about which technology people will use for a meeting (Teams, WebEx, Zoom, etc.), to a mistake in the set-up of a course so that the assignment due on Monday, actually doesn’t open up until it is due (it happens), to uncertainty about when and where each type of course is supposed to meet, the room for error is tremendous. And let’s not forget the potential for a random storm to knock out our connections to each other. Yikes! I suspect there will be a few tears for most of us.

Every single one of us is likely to make more than one mistake this fall. That is the nature of mass shifts in organizational structures and high levels of uncertainty. So, I offer this one bit of advice, let’s default to kindness. Forgive your colleagues for missing a meeting or being unable to log in effectively. Forgive your students for being confused about the navigation through their classes, or being unable to log in effectively. Forgive yourself for your gaffes in design, or being unable to log in effectively. And so on. You know what I am talking about. Find that well of patience and draw on it relentlessly. Remember, when you need to explode, you can just log off and have a small tantrum or crying session, some tea or chocolate or a moment of Zen, and then get back in there.

The most productive phrases we will have this fall are simply these: “Oops, I messed up.” and “That’s okay, let’s try again.” We should use these phrases often.  If we do, we can skip the anger and shame part of messing up, and focus on the getting better part that we all really care about.  Indeed, if we default to kindness, we are likely to find the fun (and the funny) in all of this change after all.

Be well everyone.

Growth Mindset, Innovative Pedagogies

After

ProvostMissy

Having made it through the launch of our virtual/online campus, with some hard work, moments of frustration, and a few tears, I can report that week one wasn’t so bad.  Every member of the Western Connecticut State University community has pitched in, and we are launched.  Week two for students and faculty will be about refining their approaches to online education, as everyone gets more comfortable with the technology.  I’m hearing lots of fun stories and I think most are approaching this experience with a problem solving mindset.

Now is the moment that I want to address a persistent rumor about this whole move – I do not want WCSU to become a majority online university.  We have all moved online to solve a problem, but it is not the ideal state for most of the students we serve, nor is it the ideal state for several of our disciplines.  Just because we can do something online (after half a semester of face-to-face work) doesn’t mean this should be the new normal.

Here is what I do hope for…

I hope that re-imagining our courses for the online environment will lead to some great insights into our face-to-face teaching. For example:

Online teaching taught me to be aware of how a small change in word choice impacted my students’ understanding of a concept.  The words were synonymous, but not all students knew that.  When I switched words from my unit summaries (lecture notes) to the weekly discussion boards, I saw the pile up.  Now this is easy to fix in the face-to-face environment, because you’ll see the confusion on students faces.  But not always. I became more thoughtful about word choices after that.

Online teaching taught me how to scaffold learning more effectively.  I think this was just because it is hard to figure out when to stop interacting online.  There is a tendency to respond way too often, which leaves everyone exhausted.  I started gave my usual number of assignments, but with the added discussion boards and clarification email messages, it was too much for all of us.  So, I went through my assignments and asked myself what the goal of each was and how it built to the final project.  This question allowed me to cut assignments in half, provide effective and timely feedback, and help my students see how they were building to the overall goals for learning in the course.  Duh! We were so much happier and, the approach greatly improved my face-to-face teaching.

Online teaching taught me the value of structuring pre-class work more effectively.  Before “flipped classrooms” was a phrase, I figured out that giving students my opening discussion question for the weekly readings, before they did the reading, helped them a great deal. They were able to read the work with a greater sense of what might be important.  Many people probably already do this in their traditional classes by giving students guiding questions with their readings, but some of us did not for important reasons.  I had a stubborn commitment to discovery (read a Socratic approach).  Unfortunately, that discovery was eluding my students. After teaching online, I started to include weekly prompts for readings in my online course shell to enhance the conversations in my on-ground courses.  It proved very effective.

I hope that teaching online helps bring into sharp focus the value of the on ground classroom. For example:

Two of my chemistry faculty reported their experiences moving to online last week. They have been inventive, but they wanted me to know that lab sciences need hands on learning.  I could not agree more.  The thing is, I do not think that is unique to the sciences. My dream is that we imagine many more of our classes with that hands-on experience.  Who knows, maybe we’ll end up with a lab model for introductory courses in every discipline!  That could be a real game changer for our students and faculty.

I know that the biggest distinction between online and online teaching lies in the difference in immediacy.  In the classroom, we can respond to questions as they arise, and we can attend to facial expressions to see where we might be losing people. Online, even when done in real-time, instead of asynchronously, there is a delay.  Sometimes that delay is beneficial.  It can give a student time to process an idea and then ask a question.  Sometimes it is not, because a question is not answered or clarified before the student tries to work with it in an assignment.  Then, it is a disaster. But here’s the thing, not everyone is really cultivating that back-and-forth conversation in the face-to-face environment.  As we work to build dialogue online, can we bring those strategies back to the classroom?

Finally, I hope that we learn that in education, one-size does not fit all.

This week, I heard from students who are still working during this crisis (often in emergency services), who really need asynchronous learning. Others were grateful for the normalcy of their online class being aligned with the original on campus time slot.  Our challenge is that they are all in the same classes. This has always been true. Part of our strategic plan asks us to get better at meeting the needs of all students — now’s our chance to figure out what that means.

We already know that for many graduate students, online is a better fit.  For some programs, hybrid is a good option, but most people pursuing graduate education are working and they need the flexibility of the online environment. So, perhaps it is time to be more thoughtful about serving our graduate students.

We already know that our returning adult learners generally need the same flexibility as our graduate students. They, too, have jobs and families to juggle.  Perhaps, we need to do something special for this group – and yes, that might mean an online lab science!

We also know that some of our students needed last minute help acquiring technology and internet access to complete their education with us this spring.  Maybe it is time for us to assess that when students enter the university, so they are not at a disadvantage from the start.

So no, I absolutely do not want to become a majority online campus.  I do want to become a better version of who we are, using this as a wonderful learning opportunity.  It is time.

 

 

 

Growth Mindset, Innovative Pedagogies

Grades?

ProvostMissy

Last week I offered a perspective on student evaluations of teaching.  To summarize, I was advocating for a much more collaborative and developmental approach than the usual bubble forms support.  This week, I would like to suggest that a similar re-thinking of our goals should take place around the topic of grading.  Let me be transparent from the start: I would like to see us give up the letter grades that have been designed for ranking students and replace them with a much more developmental approach.

Years ago, my husband and I sent our children to a high school with no grades.  After having attended a traditional (and small) public school from kindergarten through eighth grade, they moved to a small private high school full of progressive learning strategies.  For my eldest, this was an easy switch.  Alex moved from a student who earned As and Bs, to a student who asked lots of questions, argued perspectives, struggled to be a better writer, and thirsted for understanding.  The small seminars were perfect for this kind of learner and Alex thrived.

For my second child, the adjustment was more complicated. Michael was not a student who thrived in the traditional structure and the same was true in the new structure.  However, the narrative evaluations that took the place of the summaries of the A, B, C grading system, helped to identify some patterns of learning that were covered up with simple grades.  For this, the switch was a benefit, even if Michael did not love the learning the way Alex did.

At the time that this was going on, I asked my students about the idea of abandoning grades in favor of narratives.  Their response: “How will you know who is best?”  Well, there it was, as clear as could be, grades are about ranking not learning. I assured them that it was very easy to determine who was best at working with the material we were discussing, but I was not sure what the value of that knowledge was to supporting learning.  I’m still not.

So, as my faculty are reading papers, administering final exams, and trying to sum up their students’ work in simple letter grades that are effective for ranking but not necessarily for learning, I am suggesting we just stop it.  Here is what I propose instead:

  1. This student has demonstrated sufficient understanding of the content of this course to warrant the awarding of credit and proceeding to a related topic at a more advanced level.
  2. This student has demonstrated sufficient understanding of the content of this course to warrant the awarding of credit and proceeding to a related topic at the same level.
  3. This student has not yet demonstrated sufficient understanding of the content of this course to warrant the awarding of credit.

Instead of ranking students, these categories will simply facilitate progress through the undergraduate experience. We will not lose any of the rigor we currently expect; indeed, it might encourage greater integrity in the evaluation. Instead of suggesting that a D represents learning of any kind, (I’m pretty sure it just means the student attended class), the focus is on the future.  Faculty will determine a student’s capacity to participate fully and successfully in subsequent courses.

Arriving at these non-grades still involves lots of evaluation of students.  Just like in the current system, it would be best if there were many assessments on which to base this decision.  Regular feedback is an important part of nurturing learning, and that work never gets easier. However, with this system, students are incentivized to keep trying, even when they are struggling.  With grades, a few early missteps and low scores can drive a student to withdraw, or worse, give up trying.  They see the low scores as holes they cannot dig themselves out of, and they are right.  Even if they do well later, those scores will be part of their final grades. Their ranks (GPAs) will reflect the struggle more than the learning.

In the system I have proposed, the process of learning does not penalize students for struggling. In other words, if students arrive at aha moments mid-semester and start to thrive, they will not be bogged down by earlier scores.  Indeed, the changes in understanding may actually reflect the capacity to learn in ways that are more predictive of success than the “good” grades ever were. It is a truly developmental approach to assessment.

Of course, this opens the door to all sorts of next questions about time, progress to degree completion, the notion of credits, and so on.  In addition, our culture is so devoted to ranking that this will probably never fly.  Still, for just a minute, I would love for all of us to think about learning instead.  Wouldn’t that be more fun?  I’m pretty sure it would be more productive for students and faculty alike.