Tag: reflections

Reflecting on our teaching with gratitude and compassion

June 13, 2023 / Linda Strubbe

Taking some time to reflect on our teaching — before and/or after we teach a lesson or activity, at the end of each week, during and after the teaching term — is a beautiful way for us to connect with our own Inner Knowing about our teaching and our students, and to continue on our journeys as developing teachers. We can take a mindset of curiosity and self-compassion, seeking Joy in trying something new and learning from the experience. We can discover new insights, spark new questions to pay attention to next time, and feel inspired to try new ideas. It can also help us to see places where we want to keep improving and growing, and give ourselves grace as we keep learning. And it can help us to see our growth and celebrate our successes. These are all part of our beautiful teaching journeys <3

I’d like to share some ideas for ways to reflect on our teaching.

Start with a grounding practice at the beginning and/or end of your reflection. You can take a deep breath, maybe light a candle, and say words like, I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my practice. I’m grateful for the teaching journey that I’m on, working on developing different parts of my practices over time. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from my experiences, and from feedback from my students.
Set an intention: For example, I seek to understand my students better. I seek to look at my practice with compassion (for myself and for my students) and courage. I seek to approach my reflection with openness, curiosity, and creativity. I’m grateful to myself for taking the time and space to do this reflection practice.
Choose a medium that you like for recording your reflections. Try mixing it up if you’d like. For example, typing in Evernote/Google doc, writing a blog post, writing in your slide deck, writing out long-hand in a beautiful teaching journal, recording voice notes, adding drawings. (For voice notes: it’s helpful to transcribe these later so you can browse them more easily.)
Try different spaces for reflecting: in the classroom (if it’s available), in your office, in a lounge, in a coffee shop on campus, outside under a tree. Try for somewhere friendly and inviting where you feel comfortable.
Try reflecting with a buddy, someone you feel safe and comfortable with. You can reflect with them and they can reflect with you. You could speak out loud for 5 minutes and they take notes, then they speak out loud for 5 minutes while you take notes, and then you can reflect on and give feedback on what each other said (as invited).

Before and after teaching an activity

Before you teach an activity, write notes to yourself about what aspects you’d particularly like to reflect on afterwards.
Reflect right after the activity while it’s fresh in your mind. Consider also reflecting a few days later when you’ve had a little more space to process it too.
Free-write for 5-10 minutes after the activity, anything you noticed or felt, etc. Look back at these at the end of each week.
Choose a theme to focus on each week in your reflections. For example: anti-racist teaching, connection to everyday life phenomena, encouraging student collaboration.
Similar to choosing a theme: Choose a framework of teaching and learning as a lens for your teaching. For example, you could pay attention to how today’s activity addresses teaching principles from the book How Learning Works, or a framework of equitable and inclusive teaching (e.g., Universal Design for Learning for accessibility), or a framework of supporting student agency.

Ideas for reflection prompts

How did I feel during today’s teaching activity?
What were my goals for today’s teaching activity? How do I believe the activity went, overall, and towards my specific goals?
What evidence / indicators am I using to inform my opinions? Why are those important? Brainstorm broadly: What other indicators might be relevant?
How can I gather feedback from others about today’s activity? Are there students whose voices and experiences I’m foregrounding and others I’m paying less attention to? How can I make sure I understand the experiences of all my students, not just the more privileged students?
How does today’s activity acknowledge barriers to access that some of my students have experienced and are experiencing?
In what ways did my teaching today align with my values? In what ways did it not?
What felt surprising to me? What felt scary or risky?
What would I like to know more about? How can I educate myself further?
How does today’s activity draw on my students’ resources and motivations for learning?
What suggestions do I have for myself for my future teaching (next class, next week, next year)?
What aspects would I like to pay attention to / reflect on next time I teach this or a similar activity?
How does my identity / positionality influence how I taught this activity, and how I’m seeing it as I reflect?
What was challenging, and how did I address those challenges? What might I do the same or differently next time? Where did I feel uncomfortable, and how can I breathe through any difficult feelings?
Did the activity reveal places that I or my students need to heal? What support would help our healing?
What were moments of joy during today’s activity?
What would I like to celebrate in myself? Where are some places to give myself a high-five?
What aspects of today’s teaching would I like to share with others? Are there colleagues I might like to discuss it with?
What action would I like to take for my future teaching — next class, next week, next month, next term, and beyond? What resources do I need to work on these actions?

Reflecting as a student

We are often both teachers and learners; we can develop our own teaching by reflecting as a student as well. Here are some ideas:

Free-write for 5-10 minutes about any thoughts and reactions to today’s learning activity.
How did I feel during this learning activity? Did it evolve over the course of the activity?
What did I learn?
What questions do I still have? What would I like to learn further about this topic? What resources can I draw on to learn more?
How did today’s lesson connect to my values and goals?
What was my favorite part? What would I suggest changing for next time?
What opportunities were there for me to connect or collaborate with other learners? How did those interactions feel?
What were moments of joy during today’s activity?
Focus your reflections through a framework of teaching and learning. For example:
- Supporting student agency: How did this activity connect to my values and goals? Support my self-efficacy? Support my self-reflection?
- Principles of teaching and learning: How did this activity connect to my prior knowledge? How did it support my metacognition?
- Equitable teaching: Was this activity accessible to me? Do I think it was accessible to others? Were there multiple ways for me to demonstrate my understanding? Did the activity make me feel like a scientist?
How might I have taught this activity the same or differently?
How do I think others in the class may have experienced the activity, similarly or differently to me?
Why do I think the instructor made particular curricular design choices? What were some other possible choices they could have made? What would I choose?
What does the design of this activity say about the values and goals of the instructor? What assumptions were implicit in the activity design? How do those align/not align with my own values?

I hope some of these ideas may be helpful in your reflections as a teacher.

I’d love to hear your ideas — How do you like to reflect on your teaching? What insights have you discovered? What’s hard? What’s something new you’d like to try?

Thanks for reading. I wish you much love and joy on your continuing teaching journey <3

Working With(out) Students

May 11, 2023 / Christine O'Donnell

For this post, I wanted to share a contradiction in my work that I’ve really struggled with. I got into the work that I do – managing education-related programs with a focus on US college/university physics departments – because I wanted future physics/STEM students to have better experiences in physics and related fields. As I briefly mentioned in my last post, I was lucky to have a fairly privileged upbringing which enabled me to pursue a career in physics and astronomy. One consequence (in my opinion) is that I have a responsibility to use my position to contribute to and to empower efforts that transform and redefine STEM so that STEM can be co-created by and for more diverse communities.

However, I’ve found that in my pursuit of a career to improve student experiences in physics/STEM, I now no longer directly interact with students. I had a few conversations about this contradiction with colleagues at the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network Conference in November 2022, and those conversations have continued to rattle around in my head. For those not familiar with POD, the organization’s primary audience are staff who work in centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) or similar structures in higher education. These centers often provide faculty development, e.g., workshops to encourage instructors to use evidence-based pedagogical practices in their classrooms.

In these conversations, many of us talked about wanting a career where we could have a larger impact on STEM education than what we could do as an individual instructor. Speaking for myself, I was always troubled by the thought that if I became a professor, I could do my best to make sure the students who were in my class had a good experience, but (1) that effort didn’t ensure my students wouldn’t receive messages of exclusion from other classes or settings and (2) it meant that the students I could impact would only be those who were “lucky” enough to be in my class. I wanted to do more.

Working at a CTL often means that staff do not have direct interactions with the students in their university. Instead, CTL staff often work with the faculty and instructors in workshops, books clubs, and other activities (sidebar: some of my colleagues are involved in “students as partners” projects, but that still seems to be fairly unique). By working with faculty and instructors, CTL staff have the potential to influence entire departments. Of course, individual professors can have a department-wide impact too. As a postdoc, I had the opportunity to co-chair a Committee on Inclusive Community in my school (large interdisciplinary department, in the context of the university I was at), and we were charged with finalizing and implementing a strategic plan for the whole school. I really enjoyed this work, but was frustrated by the fact that if I did become a professor, that kind of service work often isn’t “valued” in the same way as publications for tenure and promotion.

In my current position, I do get to focus on that kind of service work on a national scale. My job involves submitting proposals and managing programs that empower people at colleges and universities across the country to do things that improve their (physics) programs. Working at this “meta” level allows me to multiply the impact I can have, but it does mean I rarely interact with the students who are the heart of our motivation. I’ve found other outlets for that motivation by volunteering with education activities and events, but it still strikes me as incongruent that those interactions aren’t a more regular part of my work.

I will also add that in a couple of my projects, we have talked about how to solicit and incorporate the students’ perspective more directly. For example, when we do site visits to departments that we fund, we often schedule a meeting with only students to hear their input. So, the students aren’t completely missing, but in the conversations I had at that POD conference, we were all intrigued by how you “lose” some of those connections in order to increase your impact.

I don’t have a specific “call to action” in mind with this post, but I’d like to invite readers to engage in these conversations. How do we weigh increasing impact versus wanting specific activities (like working directly with students) to be a part of our work? How can we design projects to try to address and/or minimize the disconnect – but perhaps more fundamentally, should we? Do you find this trend in your own careers, and did it influence your choices in which career opportunities to pursue?

Ungrading on my mind

March 30, 2023 / Rafael Palomino

When I was introduced to the practice of ungrading, I was drawn to a simple description provided by Jesse Stommel. The practice itself isn’t simple at all, but it was described, simply. I don’t even remember a super specific definition, just what it made me think about.

I remember that this description prompted me to reflect on how it felt to be graded, which was mostly bad. And when it felt good, the grade itself was still the focus of my pride, not the curiosity or problem-solving I did. I also have great memories where I don’t remember the grade, just the experience of doing good, challenging work, and the relationships with teachers who took away some of the power of grades on me.

I also remember how ungrading challenged ideas about assessment I thought I was comfortable with. I wasn’t ready to think critically about learning objectives or rubrics, as I had “already learned” how to use these tools to improve learning and set clear expectations, not just for summative assessment. But it was so worth it to examine how grades still unconsciously influenced my thinking about assessment.

This was all especially rich to ponder as I was part of a professional development program that gave people a chance to design and teach, in environments where grading wasn’t necessary.

I’m thinking about ungrading again because I recently read an article with a call to the ungrading community to be more specific about the term. It laid out a definition of ungrading that included creating student portfolios, and collaborative assignment of grades when required.

This definition was certainly more specific as an approach. But it didn’t elicit any desire for reflection and curiosity that I had when I first was introduced to the ideas. I went back to a recent definition from Stommel:

“Ungrading” means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply “not grading.”

That felt much better. Beyond a general mindset, I think the ungrading community has done a lot to also drive the discussion around the context, details, and examples that are so important to put these ideas to work. There are articles about specific topics like rubrics, collections of FAQs and bibliographies to elaborate and prompt thinking, trials and lessons learned like Clarissa Sorenson-Unruh’s reflections on applying upgrading to chemistry, and collections of teacher experiences like Ungrading, edited by Susan Bloom. Again, being defined simply doesn’t mean it’s easy work. But I can raise my eyebrow at how grading influences me in many contexts. I think that’s more useful than worrying if I’m doing ungrading “right.”

I felt satisfied to be pulled back into this topic after not having thought about it for a while. I also realized that I never paid much attention to the “distinct from simply ‘not grading’” part in the definition above.

I don’t hear the word “grades” in my world anymore. I don’t have to grade in the way it’s done in higher education. And because of that, I think I resonate with ungrading even more, or at least in a different way.

What does grading leave behind when you don’t have to grade?

I’ve needed to reflect on this for a while, and I’m glad something came up in my feed to prompt me. I want to think through this more.

Even without grades:

Am I doing anything that can pit learners and trainers against each other?
Do I value “objectivity” in measurement over good feedback and the learning process itself?
Am I not questioning definitions of assessment enough? Advocating for formative assessment? Letting assessment be shorthand for grading?
Am I looking hard enough for how negative aspects of grading are laundered through requirements like compliance?
Who does my approach to assessment work for? Who doesn’t it work for? How does it feel to be assessed and what are the impacts?

I think there’s more, but it’s an ok list coming from a simple call to action. And I don’t think I’d ask these questions if ungrading was a strictly-defined best practice.

The value of being a student when you are an educator

March 2, 2023 / Anne Metevier

I’ve been teaching at the college level for many years. My goal is for my students to learn more than they thought they could in my courses, and to be empowered by that experience. I push them to work hard and to show me what they’re learning. I have had many, many students who have impressed me with their learning, and it is a joy to see their growth. But sometimes, honestly, my students’ work disappoints me. Maybe they didn’t follow the instructions or look at the rubric (that I worked so hard on) when they were doing an assignment. Maybe they copied someone else’s work. Maybe they put ideas together in a creative but surprisingly illogical way. Maybe they asked me to tell them what to do rather than trying something out by themselves before asking for my input.

I think about these students a lot, because I want to support and encourage their growth. However, with increasing experience as an educator, I’ve found it increasingly easy to settle into my position as a subject area (astrophysics) expert. Over time, I remember less about what it was like to struggle to learn a topic or skill in my field, or to challenge misconceptions I held with new, evidence-based ideas. I work hard to improve as an educator. I am hard on myself and I don’t always get it right. But I still have a level of confidence in my subject-area knowledge that is different from that of my students.

So I thought I’d share how valuable it has been to me to become a student again. (Here I want to acknowledge several of my colleagues who post here on TMV are also students as well as educators, and they will have important and individual insight on this, too.) A few years ago, I began taking weekly classes in drawing and painting. While I have always been interested in art, I had little formal training in this area and did not consider myself “good” at art. The experience of studying and practicing drawing and painting has been extremely rewarding, often humbling, and overall very instructive (beyond painting), and it has fed into my practice as an educator.

A progression of expertise, a progression of expectations

A picture of Anne in her art class, standing next to her large drawing of a hammer. — Me, in art class circa 2018, happily accepting
critique of my drawing of a hammer.

When I began taking art classes, I didn’t expect much of myself. I experienced the simple joy of finding out that I could paint something recognizable. I wasn’t too hard on myself if my composition wasn’t perfect, or if I chose the wrong background color. I was receptive to my instructor’s corrections. I was a beginner, after all. Over time, however, I began to expect more of myself. Recently, I decided to try a new medium and was frustrated by how hard it suddenly felt to mix colors or hold a paintbrush. I wanted instruction but also wanted to be able to successfully paint on my own. I’ve realized that it now takes much more bravery to begin each painting. I worry that the new painting won’t turn out well, and I go so far as to imagine that if that’s the case, it might prove that I’m not really an artist. I now have a lot of attachment to the idea of being an artist, where I didn’t before.

At these times, I can remind myself that I may be experiencing something akin to what my students feel when they are taking a test or beginning an assignment or project: if they don’t get positive feedback on this test/assignment/project, how will that reflect on them as a learner? How will their peers and instructors (like me) judge them? How will they judge themselves? How can I help them approach their learning with open-mindedness to the subject and to the outcomes of their work, especially as their expectations for themselves grow?

Bravery and the potential for failure

Sharing something you’ve worked very hard on can be an act of bravery. There is uncertainty about how it will be received; it is always possible to misunderstand the instructions or what is expected. It is possible to fail. Putting myself in the position of being a student has helped me experience for myself why a student might not try hard on an assignment or might act like a topic (or whole subject, like math) isn’t important. Among other things, this may be because they are avoiding the potential, terrible feeling of failure in the wake of hard work.

Experiencing this has made me think harder about how to make space for students to make mistakes and, occasionally, fail. How can I help them take risks? How can I help them use their mistakes, challenges, and failures to learn more? How can I make space for mistakes and failures in my own teaching, and learn more from them, so that I can get better at supporting my students?

Learning as a not-quite-linear process of growth

Although my continued art practice has improved my ability overall with respect to technique, composition, and working with color, every so often I start a painting that doesn’t come together the way I’d hoped, or I work on a painting so much that, honestly, it gets worse rather than better. These paintings are still a part of my learning process, and they have taught me a lot about learning itself: learning is not necessarily a linear process. I cannot assume that each painting will be better than the last, or that each time I use a painting technique I’ll show improvement. However, I have to practice, experience challenges, and overcome both failures and failure avoidance to become more skilled.

Similarly, I have to be cognizant that my students may experience setbacks in their learning. They may get stuck on a concept and have a hard time getting “unstuck”. Like me, they may procrastinate because it’s easier to think about the nice grade they got on the last assignment than to start all over with a new assignment. Or, also like me, they may be discouraged by a past grade or outcome they’d hoped would be better, and need some time to approach the task again.

Caveats and conclusions

I want to emphasize that experiencing these things is much more instructive than conjecturing or writing about them. Directly experiencing the uncertainties involved in learning something new has given me deeper insight into what my students’ experiences might be. A major caveat here is that I cannot assume that my experiences directly mirror those of my students.

What are some strategies and considerations for better supporting students?

It is important to let students know that we do not judge them as whole human beings based on the outcome of one test, one project, one assignment, or one course grade.
Students may feel more like we see them as whole human beings if we give them ways to let us know a little more about themselves, including what is important to them, their responsibilities outside of classes, and what their relationship is with the subject matter of the class. One way to do this is to give students surveys, and read and respond to what they write.
It can be important to give students constructive, critical feedback at times, to let them know how they can improve. This can be a sign of our respect for what they can achieve, and we can let them know this comes from a place of respect.

What are some strategies and considerations for becoming better educators?

Acknowledge and work with our positions as students and practitioners of education itself. It’s worth noticing the parallels between the fact that we are constantly learning about teaching while our students are learning about the subject we are teaching.
We can always consider ourselves students with respect to addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion in the classroom. As we aim to improve in these areas, we can keep in mind that our growth may not be linear, and may include high expectations, hard work, and failures, as well as successes.
We can remind ourselves that the point of this work is to support the incredible, whole human beings that we teach. It’s a side benefit that we get to grow alongside them.

Thank you to the many colleagues and students that I have learned from at the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (UC Santa Cruz), Sonoma State University, and Santa Rosa Junior College. My sincere thanks to my art teacher, Mary Fassbinder, and my fellow art students.

Everything is different, things never change.

February 2, 2023 / Rafael Palomino

First blooms of the winter from Arctostaphylos densiflora 'Howard Mcminn.' — *First blooms of the winter* from Arctostaphylos densiflora ‘Howard McMinn.’

My first professional transition happened when I went from being a graduate student to working in educational development at UC Santa Cruz. I loved the teaching part of grad school, and it felt natural enough to move into a role focused on helping others develop their teaching, and collaborating on university teaching and learning projects.

When the time came to look for another career opportunity, I turned to industry. I knew my skills and experience could be applied to learning & development, especially in the field of instructional design. But I was much less confident about making that transition, and when I got the opportunity to move into corporate instructional design, I braced myself for a steep learning curve.

Almost three years into the new gig now, I’m happy about what I was able to bring to this new environment, and how much I’ve grown. So, I thought I’d take this post to reflect on three things that surprised me the most about moving from teaching and learning in higher ed, to corporate L&D.

The business context doesn’t change the learning challenges like I thought it would.

To be clear, the business context changes everything. But I thought the world of KPIs, corporate values, regulatory requirements, and other aspects of being in a business instead of a school would fundamentally distort the stuff I like most about being a learning professional. But over time, it mostly just started to feel like different requirements and constraints that any professional feels. I remember being at a POD Conference while I was at UCSC and hearing instructional designers talk about how the accreditation process affected their work. I couldn’t relate to those specific experiences, but I could see how accreditation influenced everyone’s decisions, approaches, limitations, and priorities.

It feels like I’m playing a teaching and learning video game, and I’ve dropped into a new world map and rules with my same core actions. At the core of my job, I still think about how to help people learn things, and how to help people instruct things they’re really passionate about, that they want others to learn. Whatever is going on with that other context stuff, I appreciate that the core of what I enjoy is still very much intact and has room for growth.

School experiences and practices permeate learning in industry more than I expected.

I was really interested in how learning practices, language, tools, and environments would look outside of school systems. I remember starting to “build a network” with industry L&D professionals online, and being surprised at how much discussion there was about classrooms, corporate “universities,” and how to set “passing grades.” Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, but school experiences really impact how we think learning should look outside of it. I guess I thought those experiences would be more of a starting point than a template.

This does mean that people are a little more open to discussing things like assessment. On the other hand, it can be hard to get passed ideas like, there must be a quiz to pass for it “to count,” for example.

Reading Erin’s post on positionality, I also got to think more about why I always feel some kind of way when employees in corporate training are referred to as “students.” In grad school, I really struggled with the sudden switch from student to instructor in the teacher-student power dynamic, but it was also incredibly useful to think through any time I made an instructional decision. But outside of the school or university context, it feels so weird to bring in this dynamic when working colleague-to-colleague. There are plenty of other power dynamics to consider.

Most of the time, the use of “student” is just an innocuous word choice because people are used to it. But I also notice when this becomes an unexamined dynamic that influences assumptions about colleagues, their prior knowledge, facilitation choices, how and why we assess learning, what kind of environment supports learning, and how tools are discussed and marketed.

Sometimes, we don’t actually care about learning.

A few years ago, I was on a team developing a lab activity for general chemistry students. We wanted them to tinker with physiochemical properties and decided to use software that scientists use to simulate drug interactions. It let students create and design at a molecular level, and get quick feedback on what they’d done. They only were going to use a fraction of the program’s features, so we made a cheat sheet of the commands and functions they’d use most to help them jump in.

I agonized over this cheat sheet. Were we taking away their agency? Were we shutting down productive paths of learning just because we didn’t think it was part of the learning goals? Scott told me to chill, probably. We used it when we taught the lab, and it was fine. We didn’t notice any resistance, the students used it to create some pretty cool molecules, and they made all kinds of connections and explanations about the program’s simulations. All without having to do a long and boring module about how to use the software.

Now, I realize we just made a nifty job aid. And that sometimes, it’s less important that someone learns something than it is to reference something, in the moment of need, to successfully complete a task. That’s performance support, sort of. While not new at all, this was new to me, and now I see it everywhere, from Ikea furniture assembly to flight emergency checklists.

And while “corporate performance” sends off all sorts of alarm bells and whistles in my head, I’ve loved having this approach opened up to me more, and in obvious ways, since I’ve left higher ed. If I’m really advocating for learners (performers?), sometimes the most helpful thing is to do everything except train. Depending on the context of the job, a sound learning experience may be less learner-centric than making useful stuff for people to use when they need it.

I could probably figure out how to better connect these three areas, but more than anything, they’re the things that continue to surprise me in my new environment. There have been plenty of other changes, and some of them easily fade into my new world map and game rules. But I know not to get too comfortable with new environments, and I’m glad there’s so much to explore and challenge my thinking, decisions, and actions.