Category: leadership

Last Fall, the senior staff in my Centre for Teaching and Learning suggested we should take a look at our mission. Other units at UBC Okanagan have been updating their “Mission, Vision, Values” – perhaps to align and synchronize with the new UBC Strategic Plan.

I have to admit, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the “MVV” exercise but one of my Centre colleagues volunteered to take the lead, so we went ahead with focus groups, summaries, drafts, and follow-up discussions.

In the end, I’m really glad we did it. As expected, it bought us all together, helped us identity what we care about, how we want to enact it, and lets our campus partners know what they can expect from us.

Here’s the result, with a description and commentary below.

Mission:

To promote, inspire, and support
excellence, leadership, scholarship, and technologies
in teaching and learning.

Guiding Principles:

We advocate for and support evidence-informed approaches to teaching and learning.
We provide ongoing and valuable professional development for all those who teach.
Our approach is based on respect, inclusion, equity, and compassion.

About the Mission

One of the biggest changes to our mission is what we left out. The mission used to say we’d lead and support teaching excellence, scholarship, and other components of teaching and learning. The new mission very deliberately takes a step back: demonstrating educational leadership is required for merit, tenure, and promotion for a stream of teaching faculty at UBC (and it certainly contributes to promotion of faculty in the research stream.) There are projects and tasks the people in my Centre are entirely capable of leading, like reviewing papers, leading faculty learning communities, or organizing parts of our annual conference. These are excellent opportunities for faculty in the teaching stream to have impact beyond their classrooms, though. So rather that us doing it, we’re promoting these opportunities to our community and then supporting them.

It’s natural and expected that we’ll “promote” and “support” components of teaching and learning. From the focus groups and our own discussions, we recognized something we love to do: “inspire” those in our teaching and learning community. We have the privilege of interacting with a lot of people and projects, so when we’re consulting with course instructors, we can weave exciting and creative opportunities into our discussions. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get a faculty member inspired – it’s not that they’re not creative, curious, or enthusiastic but they just don’t have the time to survey what’s out there.

This promote-inspire-support strategy definitely applies to the scholarship of teaching and learning, too. While there’s nothing stopping Centre staff from writing and publishing SoTL, it’s not required for promotion (none of us are faculty members.) We’re thrilled to spark projects and be co-investigators and co-authors. It’s critical, though, that we support educational research done by faculty members.

One other addition to our mission: the Centre has a strong reputation for supporting learning technologies, like the learning management system, peer instruction / clickers, video capture/integration, etc. Focus group participants were surprised we didn’t mention that in our old mission so it was a no-brainer to add it to the new mission. Well, almost a no-brainer:

Do we promote, inspire, and support “learning technologies”? No, we don’t need to say “learning”, especially when the mission would say, “…learning technologies in teaching and learning.”
“technology” or “technologies”? There isn’t just one technology and technologies (plural) gives us more flexibility.
Wait, do we really “…inspire…technologies…in teaching and learning”? What does that even mean? We decided to let that one thread of the mission slide. Recasting the sentence to eliminate it would make things worse.

One funny thing emerged from our focus groups. The old mission statement talks about supporting teaching and learning excellence, scholarship, and innovation. Some people interpreted that to mean we support

teaching and learning excellence
scholarship
innovation

“Oh, what kinds of innovation do you support?” they wondered. “Um, innovations in teaching and learning.” “Oh, I get it now…”

So, we recast the mission statement to better communicate there are many aspects of teaching and learning that we promote, inspire, and support. This is why you include focus groups in developing these things!

About the Guiding Principles

People typically talk about their organization’s mission, vision, and values. After we were happy with where the our new mission statement was heading, we turned to vision and values. And quickly concluded we couldn’t say much about how we envision the Centre promoting, inspiring, and supporting teaching and learning without a set of values to build from.

Moving on, then, we quickly realized we were all a bit uncomfortable with “values.” Who’s values, the Centre’s? (Can a Centre have values?) And what if someone’s personal values conflict with the Centre’s values – we certainly don’t want to exclude a Centre staff member because their own values are different!

At some point, I said supporting evidence-informed pedagogies has got to be one of the principles we follow. I think that’s when another senior staff suggested we have guiding principles instead of values. Everyone immediately agreed, and all the anxiety and hesitation around “values” disappeared.

So, the first guiding principle was pretty easy:

We advocate for and support evidence-informed approaches to teaching and learning.

We chose “evidence-informed” rather than “evidence-based” to allow for experimentation and innovation. Limiting ourselves to approaches that have conclusive evidence and peer-reviewed literature would be, well, limiting. We’re definitely not saying anything goes, though. For example, if a faculty member comes to us for help creating a syllabus or curriculum based on their students’ learning styles, we’ll be having a frank conversation with them. The “meshing hypothesis” of learning styles – that an instructor tailor their instruction to individual student’s learning style (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) – is not a valid pedagogy. Would we refuse to work with that instructor? No. We’d let them know that learning styles are not a valid model, we’d inform them of the valid research about how people learn that shows all students benefit from seeing the same concepts in more than one context, and help them develop lessons where every student sees concepts more than once and in more than one format.

The second guiding principle informs the kinds of programs and support my Centre offers to the university:

We provide ongoing and valuable professional development for all those who teach.

Here’s some of our thinking:

this is “professional development” not “training”. It’s not that we train course instructors how to teach – it’s way too complicated for that. Instead, we provide opportunities for these professionals to develop their skills and practices, if they choose to pursue those opportunities.
I regularly remind my campus colleagues that the Centre is not in the business of providing summative evaluations of faculty members or teaching assistants that are used for tenure and promotion or personnel decisions. We are not the teaching police or teaching judges who declare someone fit (or unfit) for teaching. We’ll provide honest, critical feedback, sure, but for formative purposes: here’s what I see, here are some alternatives, let me help you integrate a more effective approach, and then give you feedback on how you’re doing. To avoid the jargon of “summative” and “formative”, we chose the word “ongoing.”
I’ve been to enough workshops and, yes, led enough workshops where participants get nothing valuable out of the time and effort they invested in coming and participating. Here’s the typical scenario, something all Centres for Teaching are struggling with: You promote and prepare a 1-hour workshop on learning outcomes. And no one comes. Why not? Because the content has so generic – to not exclude any particular discipline – that nothing is applicable. That’s not a valuable hour. By demanding our programs be valuable, we’re thoughtful about discipline-specific content, even if that means running the same learning outcomes workshop in 4 different Faculties, altering the context and examples to their disciplines. We also work hard to deliver workshops in their spaces – if someone is looking for an excuse to skip the workshop, having to trek across campus in the cold or heat is enough. Our goal is to offer workshops down the hall from their office. We also work hard to collaborate with the Faculty, rather than parachuting in. This includes enlisting the support of the Dean, Director, or Department Head to promote the opportunities. First, when the message comes from the Dean, it carries more weight than spam from the Centre. Second, potential participants know that their Dean, Director, or Department Head recognizes this is a valuable opportunity and it’s a legitimate use of the participant’s time to attend the workshop. This guiding principle helps us make decisions about what, where, when, why, and how to offer workshops. Instead of doing things “the ways it’s always been done,” we question and revise.

Our final guiding principle affirms my Centre needs to treat all those who teach the same way we treat the students in our classrooms:

Our approach is based on respect, inclusion, equity, and compassion.

I could write a entire blog post about each of the words respect, inclusion, equity, and compassion. Maybe I’ll do that someday. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts that drove us to select these values.

Nothing gets my hackles up like deliberate disrespect for students. Punching down, starting from an assumption that students are dishonest or lazy, intolerance of anything but full and unwavering attention. I think it’s easier to identify disrespectful actions, so I need my team to be vigilante about being disrespectful to our colleagues.
Everyone in higher education knows how complex titles and ranks can be. As soon as we try to list people invited to participate in an event, it gets real messy, real fast. Students may talk about their “professors” but I can’t invite “professors” to an event. Does that include assistant and associate professors? What about Instructors or Senior Instructors? What about Sessionals, Adjuncts, Post-docs, and Teaching Assistants? What about staff members who coordinate labs or the curriculum / program maps? To be as inclusive as possible, we talk about “course instructors” and aim our programs at “all those who teach.” We’ll use specific titles and ranks only when necessary (like a peer mentoring program for professors and a teaching credential program for teaching assistants.)
We need to be compassionate with our colleagues and the complicated lives they lead. If we’re running a series and a participant has to miss a session because of, well, life, that’s fine. If workshop participants need to keep their phones handy because there’s a sick kid, fine. Need to eat your lunch during our meeting because this is the only hour you have all day, sure, no problem. I deliberately and honestly express my gratitude that they’re making time to participate in our programs even if, especially if, they can’t fully participate.
All these values – respect, inclusion, equity, compassion – need to extend to the students in the courses we’re supporting. For example, I struggle to support course instructors who want to implement reading quizzes at the beginning of each class because that’s how they punish students who don’t attend or arrive late. I’m 100% behind reading quizzes as part of a flipped learning model because they help students prepare for class and reward them for that effort.
This guiding principle means we’re committing to have difficult conversations with course instructors when their teaching practices appear to be disrespectful, to exclude any student, to treat students unfairly, or to show a lack of care.

Making our mission and guiding principles visible

As we were finalizing our mission and guiding principles, I was reading “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle. Great book – I highly recommend it for Centre directors and others in leadership / management positions. He tells powerful stories about the importance of making an organization’s mission visible. Not (just) to the public but to the employees. If the employees don’t know what their organization stands for, how can they possibly support it?

That’s why I put our mission and guiding principles on the wall at the front entrance to my Centre. It lets visitors know this is what we stand for and what they can expect from us. More importantly, Centre staff – including me – see this every time we walk in and out. We’re reminded, many times each day, what we stand for and what we expect can from each other and from ourselves.

Our Mission and Guiding Principles are at the main entrance of my Centre where everyone – visitors and Centre staff – can see them. (Photo – Peter Newbury CC-BY)

Was is worth all the effort?

Yes, yes, absolutely yes.

There isn’t a day that I don’t refer to the mission and guiding principles when chatting with Centre colleagues about projects, initiatives, or opportunities we could be involved in. The mission and guiding principles give us a shared language and a simple but powerful tool for evaluating and assessing what we can do to promote, inspire, and support excellence, leadership, scholarship, and technologies in teaching and learning.

If you’re a Centre for Teaching director and you’re thinking about establishing a centre mission, vision, and values, feel free to contact me – I’m happy to elaborate on anything here.

Open Classroom pop-up thank-you card

November 14, 2018

Peter Newbury

Every Fall, I follow along as Derek Bruff @derekbruff tweets out inspiring stories from the open classroom event his Center for Teaching runs at Vanderbilt. Course instructors from across campus volunteer to open their classrooms and welcome their peers to come observe. While we may have 25, 60, 300, or more students in our classrooms, it’s rare to have a colleague, and open classroom events provide an opportunity for all the educators in the room – the ones at the front and the ones at the back – to share some formative feedback.

We hosted our first Open Classroom Week at UBC Okanagan October 1-5, 2018. Twelve course instructors from across the campus, across disciplines, and from 1st-year to 4th-year invited their peers into their classrooms.

Opening your classroom to your colleagues takes courage and confidence and demonstrates educational leadership. So, I wanted to thank those twelve course instructors. Sure, I could send SW-S, RT, RP, WSM, CL, RF, GD, TE, TF, NL, CS, and AK a letter (or a letter to their Department Heads) on Centre letterhead, formally thanking them for participating in the event. But I wanted something they could put on the shelf in their office so remind them, and any visitors, that they did something valuable. Combine that with my obsessi–, er, interest in pop-up cards and you get this:

The pop-up thank-you card I made for the UBC Okanagan course instructors who opened their classrooms and welcomed their peers and colleagues to come and observe. A template and instructions available below so you can make your own. (Photo: Peter Newbury CC-BY)

Do it yourself

Want to make one for your Center? Here’s the PPT file I used to create the card, plus a set of directions for editing the text, printing the card, and making it. I think the instructions are clear but by the time I wrote them, I’d already made 5 prototypes and then the dozen cards I gave to my UBC Okanagan colleagues so I could pretty well do it in my sleep. If you get stuck, feel free to tweet me at @polarisdotca. And then send me a picture of your finished card (and permission to share it)!

Anatomy of a 400-seat Active Learning Classroom

June 27, 2018

Peter Newbury

leadership UBC Okanagan No Comments

(This is adapted from a poster I presented at the 2018 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) Conference, Université de Sherbrooke, June 20-22, 2018.) Updated 2019 to include the first results of the impact of the design on student success and course instructor teaching strategies (presented at International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms, Minneapolis, MN, 7-9 August 2019.)

(Photo courtesy of Ashlyne O’Neil. Thanks @ashlyneivy!)

Designing a Large, Active Classroom

As class size increases, instructors face an increasingly difficult challenge. There is clear evidence that more students are more successful in classes with active learning.[1] Yet the work required to facilitate active learning – logistics, providing feedback, supporting and interacting with individual students – increases with class size. And despite the importance of the design of learning spaces,[2] large classrooms often impede student-student and student-instructor interactions.

At UBC’s Okanagan campus, I was invited to advise the architects and campus planners on the design a new 400-seat classroom.

Design Principle:
Eliminate everything that hinders
student-student collaboration and
student-instructor interaction.

My poster uses a giant 6-page “book” (you can see it drooping slightly in the center of the poster in the picture above) to highlight different features and characteristics of the design:

Student flow: Main entrances to the classroom are at the middle of the room. Students flow in and downhill toward the front. Sitting at the back takes deliberate effort. Students can discretely enter and exit without disrupting the class or the instructor.

Main entrances to the classroom are at the middle of the room. Students flow in and downhill toward the front. Sitting at the back takes deliberate effort. Students can discretely enter and exit without disrupting the class or the instructor.

Accessible seating: Fully 20% of seating – roughly 90 locations – are accessible to students using wheelchairs. They can sit in groups with their peers at prime locations, instead of being isolated or confined to designated seats.

Fully 20% of seating – roughly 90 locations – are accessible to students using wheelchairs. They can sit in groups with their peers at prime locations, instead of being isolated or confined to designated seats.

Network of aisles: A network of aisles throughout the classroom allows instructors and teaching assistants to get face-to-face or within arm’s reach of every student. Wireless presentation system allows instructors to teach from any location and project any student’s device.

A network of aisles throughout the classroom allows instructors and teaching assistants to get face-to-face or within arm’s reach of every student. Wireless presentation system allows instructors to teach from any location and project any student’s device.

Group work with whiteboards: Students on narrower front desks swivel around to work with their peers on wider desks. With 150 whiteboards scattered throughout the room, groups can be collaborating within seconds of their instructor saying, “Grab a whiteboard and…”

Students on narrower front desks swivel around to work with their peers on wider desks. With 150 whiteboards scattered throughout the room, groups can be collaborating within seconds of their instructor saying, Grab a whiteboard and…

Lighting: Separate front, middle, back lights create smaller classrooms for 250 and 100 students.

Prep room: Prep room is accessible from outside the classroom so instructors can prepare before and after class. Includes sink, glassware drying rack, storage cabinets, lockable flammable solvent cabinet, fume hood, chemical resistant countertops, first aid kit, demo cart.

Prep room is accessible from outside the classroom so instructors can prepare before and after class. Includes sink, glassware drying rack, storage cabinets, lockable flammable solvent cabinet, fume hood, chemical resistant countertops, first aid kit, demo cart.

Design Features Promote Collaboration and Interaction

The classroom is gently tiered so students farther back can see the front. There are 2 desks on each tier. The front desk is wide enough to hold a notebook and laptop. The rear desk is nearly twice as wide, allowing the front student to swivel around and work with their peers in the rear desk.
Swivel chairs on wheels allow students to easily move and work with others around them.
The front desk on each tier has a modesty screen. There are deliberately NOT modesty screens on the rear desks, allowing students on the front desk to swivel around to the rear desk without smashing their knees or having to sit awkwardly.
There are power outlets for every student under the desktop, leaving the work surface unbroken and smooth for notebooks, laptops, and whiteboards.
When the instructor or teaching assistant stands in the aisle in front of the front desk, they can speak face-to-face with the 1st row of students, and are within arm’s reach of the 2nd row. From the aisle on the back of this set of four rows of desks, the instructor or teaching assistant is face-to-face with students in the 4th row and within arm’s reach of the 3rd row.

And here’s what it actually looks like!


(left) Students focus their attention on the front of the room when the instructor is lecturing and writing on the doc cam. (right) At a moment’s notice, students can swivel and gather on the wider, rear desks, grab a nearby whiteboard, and work together.

Optimizing Visibility of the Screen

A slightly curved screen at the front of the classroom is large enough to display two standard inputs. A third projector can display a single image across the screen. The screen is about 7 or 8 feet above the floor, so the instructor at the front does not cast a shadow on the screen or look directly into the projectors (housed in a 2nd floor projection room at the back of the classroom.) The size and curvature of the screen ensure all but the very front-left and front-right seats have views of the screen within UBC’s guidelines.

Here’s what it actually looks like! I’m running two PPT presentations, one through the left projector and through the right, to fill the entire screen with one 32:9 image:

Does the Design Enhance Learning?

We are studying the impact of the design by comparing data collected before and after course instructors teach their courses in the 400-seat classroom, including

distributions of final grades and grades on in-class activities like peer instruction (“clicker”) questions and group work sheet
drop, fail, withdrawal (DFW) rates
locations of the course instructor and teaching assistants at 2-minute intervals throughout the class period
what the instructor is doing (lecturing, writing, posing questions,…) and what the students are doing (listening, discussing peer instruction questions, asking questions,…) using the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS)3,4

COPUS captures what the instructor and what the students are doing during the class. There is a clear difference here between a traditional, lecture-based course and a course that uses active learning. (Graphic by CWSEI CC BY NC)

Update: Summer 2019

During the Winter 2018, Fall 2018, and Winter 2019 Terms, we used the COPUS protocol to record what John, Steve, and Tamara were doing, and what their students were doing, both in the active learning classroom and in other, more traditional lecture halls.

Spoiler: I was hoping for an obvious uptick in the kinds instructional strategies they facilitated and increase in students marks when they moved to the active learning classroom. We didn’t find it. And we think we know why: they need to teach for a term in the new classroom to discover what it enables and how they can revise their materials and lesson plans for the next time they teach there.

The COPUS protocol records what the instructors are doing during the class. Here’s what John, Steve, and Tamara do in the traditional lecture halls (blue) and what John and Tamara do the active learning classroom (green). There’s no obvious change in the three most frequent instructional strategies, lecturing, writing on the doc cam, and asking clicker questions.

The COPUS protocol records what instructors are doing in class. These instructors regularly switch between lecturing, writing on the doc cam, and asking clicker questions. They did not appear to change their instructional strategies when they moved to the active learning classroom.

With no significant change in what the instructors are doing, it’s no surprise there’s little change in what their students are doing:

The COPUS protocol records what students are doing in class. In both the traditional and active learning classroom, students spend almost all their time listening to the instructor, problem solving, and discussing clicker questions.

It’s also not surprising that are big changes in students’ final marks. While it’s true physics marks are different than chemistry marks, there are no significant changes in students’ physics marks or students’ chemistry marks between courses taught in traditional lecture halls (blue) and the active learning classroom (green).

While there are differences in final marks between physics and chemistry, neither physics marks nor chemistry marks changed significantly when the courses moved from traditional lecture halls (blue) to the active learning classroom (green).

Conclusions:

Instructors may need to teach for at least one term in the active learning classroom to observe and experience the features that enable more active learning instructional strategies before they make lasting changes to their teaching.
Instructors should get an orientation to the features of the active learning classroom as soon as they’re scheduled to teach there, so they can get a head start on revising how they teach.

Update: Fall 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all courses online. The active learning classroom, sadly, is quiet and empty. Only a few COPUS observations were made in the Winter 2020 Term before the emergency pivot and no observations have occurred since.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Dora Anderson, Heather Berringer, Deborah Buszard, Rob Einarson, W. Stephen McNeil, Carol Phillips, Jodi Scott, and Todd Zimmerman for the opportunity to help design to this learning space.

Blueprint and visualizations by Moriyama & Teshima Architects. Used with permission.

References

1	Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111
2	Beichner, R., Saul, J., Abbott, D., Morse, J., Deardorff, D., Allain, R., … & Risley, J. (2007). The Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) project, a peer reviewed chapter of Research-Based Reform of University Physics. College Park, MD: Am Assoc of Physics Teachers.
3	Stains, M., Harshman, J., Barker, M. K., Chasteen, S. V., Cole, R., DeChenne-Peters, S. E., … & Levis-Fitzgerald, M. (2018). Anatomy of STEM teaching in North American universities. Science, 359(6383), 1468-1470. doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8892
4	Smith, M. K., Jones, F. H., Gilbert, S. L., & Wieman, C. E. (2013). The Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS): a new instrument to characterize university STEM classroom practices. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 618-627. doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-08-0154