TAC Winter Workshop Series - Workshop 1: Student Participation

The first workshop of the TA Consultant's Winter Workshop Series was on student participation. If the whole workshop could be summed up into one sentence it would be;

There are many forms of student participation that include, but are not limited to, discussion.

As a group, members of this workshop defined and described student participation as:

• Being Active, Awake, Aware
• Learning something new
• Having value --> Contribute/take away information/ideas
• Being Physical and/or Mental engaged
• Experiential learning
• Cooperation/Communication
• Meeting class requirements
• Enjoyment
• Personal responsibility

What helps students to have open, honest participation though, is to have a safe, inclusive, and supportive environment. To illustrate this point of safe, inclusive environment promoting students to think, interact, and speak we ran an experiment early in the workshop. The two female facilitators of the workshop, Sarah Augusto and I, each choose separate sides of the room to focus on. We only called on and engaged with those halves. After 20 minutes of this, Richard asked the members who they felt more engaged and connected with. For the most part those that I engaged with picked me, and those Sarah engaged with picked her.

Some ways to create a safe environment included:

• Letting your expectations on participation be known early and clearly
• Use icebreakers to help your students familiarize themselves to each other and you and you to them.
• Look at and respond to all students.
• Value wrong answers as a teaching opportunity by exploring why it’s an incorrect answer or why students may believe it’s a correct answer.
• Explore a variety of answers before revealing a correct answer, even if the question has only one right answer.
• Ask more open questions that don’t have a right answer.
• More ways to create a safe environment will be discussed in following workshops, including the next workshop!

There is a tendency for us as instructors to gravitate towards discussion as participation (this will be further discussed in workshop 3). One of the activities we had in our workshop was for everyone write about a time they felt engaged and empowered in a class. What made them feel ownership? And, on the flip-side, what made them feel unengaged?

This writing activity is also known as a free-write. It’s a great tool because it gives everyone an equal chance to contribute to an idea, concept, or discussion question. And for discussion it gives those more quite or those students that take a bit longer to think of a response time to develop an answer. You can then read these responses privately, ask students to share with the whole class, or break up into groups to share thoughts.

Some myths of participation that came out during discussion were;

1) Quite students are not participating because they aren't interested
Fact - Some students are quiet because:
They are thinking/reflecting
Cultural differences may be in works
Shyness
Peer Thought Pressure

2) Lots of talking is good participation
Fact -
Quantity vs Quality should be taken into account
Who's talking - dominate speakers?
Goal of participation - increase student learning
Talking is just one of the ways of participation

For more discussion participation tools come to workshop 3

3) Discussion is the only form/best form of participation
Fact - Discussion is just one of the ways of participation or being engaged.
Others include:
Quick or free-write
Blog
Think-pair-share
Surveys
Quiet reflection

4) Prolonged silences are bad

Prolonged silence can be good because it can take the pressure off
you and put it on the students, which makes them respond.

It also gives reflective students time to process all their thoughts

It's often a good idea to inject pauses during talks or discussion so people can process their thoughts

5) All students should be expected to participate equally
Many think fairness is treating everyone equally
But if that's true you probably aren't reaching everyone
Because:
Cultural differences
Background
Socialization of the different genders
Affects how students interpret and/or react
(Treat people the way you want to be treated)

6) It’s the TAs responsibility to create a good discussion

No. its not only your responsibility. Its every person's responsibility. This can be achieved by setting the right tone from the beginning of the quarter.

The TA's goal is to create conditions that enable students of various learning styles and personalities to contribute. To achieve this, you will need to take extra steps to encourage quiet students to speak up and, occasionally, ask the more verbose students to hold back to give others a chance.

7) If the students aren’t responding/answering correctly it’s the students fault
Fact - Sometimes we, instructors, just aren't clear enough.
Can our instructions be interpreted another way?
Was the assignment/question too hard?
Was there a "Wrong Answer"?

If the answer to all these questions is "NO" and you are still mystified, ask the students why they answered the way they did. If you set the tone early, they will answer honestly.

Also try a Mid-Quarter-Interview - MQI - through the CETL with one of us TAC’s

Many participants of our workshop asked for more time to go over difficult situations. Some scenarios include difficult students - students that text, go off topic, are dominate, and/or rude. Because of time limitations we weren’t to discuss all of these situations. But stay tuned for workshop 3 when participants will get another chance to think about, act out, and discuss difficult situations.

Below are the slides and group answers from our workshop.

Why Become a TAC

Last week at the TAC weekly meeting we discussed what about being a TAC did we as members of the program appreciate most. Here's what we came up with.

• Supportive teaching environment
• Helping others and ourselves improve teaching
• Consultations - opening our minds to thinking in different ways
• Peer-to-peer environment - both during TAC meetings and in consultations
• Goal oriented - we have a mission, whether that be organizing the TA orientation, setting up workshops, or training for and implementing consulations
• Our participation helps us grow

We hope you consider applying to be a TAC for the Spring 2011-Winter 2012 quarter.

Winter Workshop Series starts this week!

Student Engagement: Mission Possible

Winter Workshop Series for Graduate Students

Thursdays, January 20 - February 24, 2010

3-5 pm

Room 1310 Surge III

This workshop series focuses on helping instructors engage and empower their students. Participants will explore different methods for creating positive, inclusive learning environments. You will be encouraged to step outside your teaching ‘comfort zone’ and experiment with different methods for improving student learning. The objective is to provide participants with new tools and strategies to implement in their classrooms. Individuals from all disciplines and backgrounds are encouraged to attend these workshops, and those who attend five of the six sessions will be awarded a certificate from the UC Davis Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).

Register your interest and view descriptions for individual workshops at:

http://cetl.ucdavis.edu/winter-workshops-2011/.

All graduate students are welcome.

*****

Student Engagement: Mission Possible

January 20, 2011, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Beyond 'Do You All Understand?': Language, Difference, and Learning in a Heterogeneous Classroom

January 27, 2011, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Pump Up the Volume, Turn Up Their Minds! Improving Student Discussions

February 3, 2011, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

‘Everyone’s Here’ is Only the Beginning: Engaging Your Students Through Problem-based Learning

February 10, 2011, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Tech Savvy Teaching: Using Technology to Achieve Teaching and Learning Goals

February 17, 2011, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

To Test or Not To Test? Strategies for Evaluating Student Learning

February 24, 2011, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

*****

This series is brought to you by the TA Consultants and the

Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Discussion + Participation: A Preview

The Teaching Consultants are preparing for a six-part workshop series about student participation. The first session will be on January 20th form 3-5pm in Surge III.

As we prepare for the workshop series, the TACs have spent some time discussing articles about student participation (citations below). What follows are some of our thoughts about participation. We hope that our workshop participants will be able to spend six weeks thinking carefully about how they define participation in the classroom, what barriers students encounter that may prevent them from participating, and testing various techniques and teaching strategies that might be useful in our classrooms. Here are our thoughts:

• Why do we want students to participate? To improve student learning. However, to know if learning has been achieved, Teach Assistants (TAs) have to be able to measure student learning.
• We, as TAs, judge our classrooms based on who we are, and it can be challenging to think outside of our own frame of reference.
• At times we are not the reason why students are silent, sometimes students are watching each other not just the TA and do not wish to look foolish in front of their peers.
• We must be careful to not generalize about all students if we only have access to a small sample size (one of the papers we discussed has a sample size of five).
• When a TA is considered the authority by students for cultural reasons it might take a long time for students to break away from their own backgrounds and participate in a dialogue where ideas are shared, rather than received.
• What is the difference between participation and discussion: participation is when a student is actively engaged in some way (doesn't have to be talking); discussion is the exchange of ideas, usually vocally.
• TAs should be encouraged to avoid complacency in the classroom.
• TAs should be encouraged to use multiple ways to assess if students are “getting it” and give students multiple venues in which they can express themselves.
• One way to assess participation and/or learning is to ask students to write a one page reflection on their own participation and comment on other “good” examples of participation.
• Establishing a respectful classroom is key for helping students feel comfortable in writing peer-reviews
• "This is not about me, this is your classroom!" This is a mantra TAs should consider adopting.
• "Participation is good for you!" Even if it makes a student uncomfortable, the act itself can be helpful.
• TAs should justify and explain why they are doing something, or asking something of their students.
• Create an environment where students will be comfortable and not penalized for saying "I don’t have anything to say"
• However, be prepared for strong personalities who will say what’s on their mind regardless of the consequences.
• Let people know they’re going to get called on. This takes away the complete element of surprise.
• Tell people everyone has to speak once during a class period day, even a wrong answer is useful, The TA doesn't necessarily know everything. And it's also fine for the TA to show vulnerability and say "I don't know."
• There is a lot of power in doing an example incorrectly and having student “correct” the TA.

This is only the beginning of what we hope is a lengthy and fruitful discussion about student participation. We hope that our workshop participants will share their own insights and opinions with us over the next six weeks. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comment section of every blog post!

Beverly D. Tatum and Race: A summary of her Mondavi event at UC Davis

On Dec 10th (2010), Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, the author of UC Davis’ campus community book, “Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” (1997), spoke at the Mondavi Center. Dr. Tatum began by acknowledging change has occurred in race relations since her book was first published in 1997. But then noted that there is still difficulty in discussing race. Moreover, there appears to be greater incivility regarding the race conversation; we’ve moved from silence about race to hostility.

From Dr. Tatum’s perspective as a psychologist, we as a society feel a great deal of anxiety about race. She calmly explained that often, the human response to anxiety is fear. The way this fear is manifested is through flight or flight. In the case of anxiety about race, the human flight response is to “hunker down” and “tighten our circle” of those we consider us in the “us vs. them” scenarios. Our fight response is to lash out. However, Dr. Tatum pointed out, it is during those times of anxiety that we should work to expand our circle and create more inclusive relationships to dispel our anxiety.

Expanding our circles is, of course, is a difficult task, but can be eased by positive leadership. During the question-answer section of the event Dr. Tatum provided a strategy for individuals to become better allies to each other in the form of the 3 F’s – Felt, Found, Feel.

When someone says something to you that you consider discriminatory, it can often be difficult to speak up for fear of alienating yourself or offending a friend. Instead it may be easier to say something along the lines of, “I’ve felt that way before, but I found it not to be true (give example), and now I feel this way.” This gives you a chance to relate to the offender without placing blame or guilt. In cases when what a person has said is so outrageous that you cannot relate the 3 F’s can be modified to, “I know many people feel that way, I have found _____, and I feel this.” But it is important to speak up, because silence is equivalent to agreeing.

Unfortunately Dr. Tatum only spoke for 30 minutes with the question and answer section taking up the other half hour of the event. One question I’d like to explore, but didn’t get the chance to ask Dr. Tatum is, if our natural response to anxiety from the unknown is to hunker down and/or lash out, and that lashing out creates more anxiety, how do we as individuals break that cycle of anxiety? What are your thoughts?