Campus Connection

School year kicks off with conference on teaching and learning at UWL

All you need to do is Google "hardest college courses" to see how much people dread taking organic chemistry, says Heather Schenck, associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Look inside a college literature course and you’ll find students with a similar degree of angst about interpreting a poem, notes Bryan Kopp, assistant professor of English. Schenck and Kopp used research to better understand and help students succeed in their courses. They were among the 53 UWL instructors who presented posters or led breakout sessions on topics related to teaching and learning during UW-La Crosse’s 18th Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning Tuesday, Aug. 30, in Centennial Hall. [caption id="attachment_46646" align="alignnone" width="685"] The Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning was Tuesday, Aug. 30, on the third floor of Centennial Hall.[/caption] Schenck shared her research related to mindset and motivation in organic chemistry students. “If students’ mindset, or other traits like dread and anxiety may be hindering how well they are doing in a course, instructors should be aware of that." she says. They can then adapt teaching practices to improve student learning, she adds. Kopp and co-instructor Kate Parker shared a process for understanding poetry that they developed to help students find more meaning in what they were reading. Brett Townsend, associate lecturer of mathematics and statistics, was among the crowd of faculty there to learn. “Sometimes strategies they are talking about in a specific subject like psychology are not directly applicable to my algebra course, for instance, but the broad-level questions they are asking are relevant — like ‘are my students getting the most out of their time in class?’ and ‘is my teaching effective?’” he says. Motivation for organic chemistry In addition to organic chemistry’s reputation for being difficult, student-reported motivation for the subject is lower than nearly all other chemistry courses at UWL, notes Schenck. Schenck wanted to know whether students experience in class changes their mindset or motivation for learning organic chemistry during the semester, including whether grade outcomes affect mindset or motivation. While Schenck theorized that anxiety would decrease during the course of the semester, she found it actually increased, particularly for students who were earning the highest grades in the course. “That was the biggest change I saw during the two semesters of the study — not what I expected — but very important for me to know as an instructor,” she says. Schenck will be exploring some new instructional methods in coming semesters to see if they improve student mindset, motivation and test anxiety. No fear for poetry Who hasn’t been in a literature class where no one wants to speak up about a poem’s meaning? Poems are ambiguous in nature and use figurative language, making them confusing for many college students. Parker and Kopp, who co-taught a 200-level literature class spring semester, did a collaborative research project to help students overcome the hurdles they encounter in the process of understanding poetry. As avid readers of poetry, the two found that their personal reading habits weren’t what students were doing in class. “Students feel the need to have the right answer when reading poetry as part of a class, but as a reader, you never do that. You let the poem reveal itself,” notes Kopp. Kopp and Parker developed a five-step process for students to use when reading poetry. They found steps like taking notes as they read, re-reading, discussing the poem with others and reflecting on it, collectively helped students find meaning in poems. As students practiced mindful reading strategies, they reported an average gain of 59 percent in their sense of the overall meaningfulness of the poems they read, notes Kopp. Top five ways to improve evaluations As a department chair and inclusive excellence coordinator for the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning, Deb Hoskins has seen a lot of student evaluations. She did a secondary literature review of studies of comments on student evaluations of instruction (SEIs) and shared the top five proven strategies for raising them during the conference. The strategies target what students most commonly identify as barriers to learning. Main areas faculty can improve in include: enthusiasm, rapport, supportiveness, clarity and organization. Those strategies are outlined in a teaching improvement guide on the CATL website.  Teaching tools  Alison (Ray) Harris, with UWL Academic Technology Services, showed faculty how new classroom technology can be used to enhance instruction. She had a room set up to demonstrate technology that allows faculty to add notes to PowerPoint or other visual presentations. Faculty can use their finger or a pen attached to a smart podium to outline and add comments as they present. Equipment with annotation technology is becoming increasingly available in UWL classrooms. Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning The annual Conference on Teaching and Learning is one of many conferences organized by UWL’s Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL). The center supports improvement of teaching and learning at UWL. Learn more about CATL, as well as future conferences, at https://www.uwlax.edu/catl