The Center for Teaching & Learning

Like many of the readers of this newsletter, I have a few different titles and responsibilities at Hood, and it’s hard sometimes to keep the plates spinning. I was talking to a colleague recently about wanting to bring a chill, "C+ energy” to a particular task: fulfill the requirements and go no further, to be cool with just getting it done. But I’m the kind of person who got out of school, then chose to go to more school, then thought, hey, wouldn't it be great if even more people could grade my work?, then went to more school, then chose to work at a school. (Does this sound familiar to anyone?) All of this to say: it can be hard for me to shift into just getting it done.

Teaching is a helpful antidote to the perfectionist: sometimes you spend forever creating the perfect activity and it tanks; other times, you let go of your plans and something magical happens. As we’re hitting mid-semester, it’s a good time to take a breath, check in with your students, let go of some of the wild ideas you had in August, and recalibrate. As for me, August Jessica had a set of goals a mile long that included such gems as “completely revamp the CTL website.” October Jessica knows better. October Jessica wants to be more present with students, to enjoy the unexpected thing, and to flow with the messiness of mid-semester.

Speaking of mid-semester check-ins, in this issue, you’ll find examples of strategies you can use to get feedback from students to help guide the rest of your semester. Ashley Coen updates us on collaborations in education that led to the definition of "effortful thinking." Kelly Esposito shares an example of how active learning can have lasting impacts on students. There's information about Open Access Week, teaching during the 2024 election, and the reading habits of Gen Z. And for those of us who are starting to hit a pre-midterm wall, Jessica McManus shares practical strategies to avoid burnout that I, personally, will be incorporating into my day.

I hope everyone is making good choices and enjoying the end of a very eventful Fat Bear Week! Join us at an upcoming CTL event--we'll have snacks and conversation a-plenty.

Are you interested in removing the barriers of expensive textbooks? Join the Center for Teaching & Learning and the Beneficial-Hodson Library in a discussion about the impacts of open access and open educational resources on student success.

Facilitated by Emily Belknap, Jessica Hammack, and Kathryn Ryberg

Friday, October 18, 2024, from 2:30 - 4 PM (program starts at 3)

Whitaker 220

Pizza, wine, and N/A drinks provided!

RSVP here: www.bit.ly/ctlrsvp

Join the Center for Teaching and Learning in a discussion about Open Pedagogy, the teaching and learning practices that invite students to move from consumers to creators of information and knowledge. In this session, Beth Kiester and Adelmar Ramirez will share the ways they've used open pedagogical practices in their own teaching.

Facilitated by Beth Kiester and Adelmar Ramirez

Thursday, October 24, from 1-2 PM

Library 2028

Lunch provided!

RSVP here: www.bit.ly/ctlrsvp

Join us for an informal forum to share and explore creative ways to integrate AI into teaching and learning. This collaborative event is an opportunity to exchange ideas and practical ways to use AI in our teaching and how students can leverage AI to enhance their learning.

Facilitated by Ashley Coen, Sangeeta Gupta, and Kathryn Ryberg

Friday, November 1, from 1:30 - 3:00 PM

Dreiling Seminar Room, Coblentz Hall

Snacks and drinks!

RSVP here: www.bit.ly/ctlrsvp

There are two ways to see CTL events on your calendar so you don't miss out on the fun:

RSVP to CTL events.

Use this form to RSVP to CTL events. If you RSVP yes, we'll send you an Outlook invitation to the event so you'll see it on your personal calendar.

Add the CTL calendar to your Outlook view.

The CTL Outlook calendar is public! To view it, navigate to your Outlook calendar and do the following:

1. Click "Add calendar" from the left panel.

2. Click "Add from directory."

3. Search for "Center for Teaching and Learning."

4. Choose where you want the add the calendar, then click "Add."

From there, you'll be able to click into the CTL calendar and see what we've got planned for the rest of the semester.

Want to read about some of the topics CTL is covering? Find CTL on Zotero.

View the CTL Library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/5620207/hood_ctl/library

Help us build the CTL library! Email ctl@hood.edu to be added as a contributor.

For the second consecutive year, faculty from the Department of Education will collaborate with administrators and teacher leaders from Frederick County Public Schools and researchers from the education non-profit Deans for Impact as part of a Learning Science Consortium. This initiative is designed to support the incorporation of research-based teaching practices in K-12 schools and teacher preparation programs.

Last year, our work focused on prompting students to engage in effortful thinking. Effortful thinking draws upon research demonstrating that “how hard we think about something influences how well we actually learn it” (Deans for Impact, 2023). To prompt effortful thinking, teachers should ask questions that explore the relationships between ideas and ask those questions in ways that engage all students. For example, rather than asking a question and calling on one student to respond, teachers can post a question and ask all students to record a response before sharing with a neighbor.

This year, our efforts will center on developing a shared understanding and common language around prompting connections to prior knowledge. As a member of both the consortium and the CTL advisory board, I look forward to sharing more about our work with the Hood community this year and hope to see these high-impact practices enrich teaching across our campus.

You’ve likely heard of psychological burnout and have heard the phrase used as it pertains to careers in academia. Burnout, a phrase coined by psychologist Christina Maslach in the mid 1970s, has gained increasing attention in academic spheres. The World Health Organization considers burnout an occupational phenomenon of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and is characterized by “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy” (WHO, 2019). If you are like me, you’ve not only have heard of burnout, but experience it nearly every semester. I’m teaching four courses this semester along with a handful of independent study students; this means I see about 100 students a week in addition to maintaining an active research program and participating in service commitments. I started this semester with a few small goals to help me avoid the feelings of burnout. I’m sharing them here to inspire you to also take steps to avoid burning out this semester.

1. Work on a high priority task for a certain amount of time before opening my inbox. If I start my day by opening my inbox, my to do list is hijacked. The papers and exams that I intended to grade in the morning get set aside and I end up grading over the weekend (which makes me grumpy). Instead, I’ll grade for 30 minutes to an hour before opening and responding to emails.

2. Time blocking exercise. After putting classes and regularly scheduled meetings on my calendar, I was able to then schedule times to exercise throughout the week. On the days when I have earlier classes, I head home for strength training exercises and lunch before heading back to campus for the rest of the afternoon. On the days when I have a later start, I do a cardio workout before coming to campus. By scheduling, I’m now exercising Monday through Thursday for about 20-30 minutes a day.

3. Be flexible. As I’m writing, it’s week 5 of the semester. I’ve been able to maintain the workout schedule and I’ve been mostly on track with working on a high priority task before opening my email. I know that as the semester continues, I might need to rearrange my schedule or adjust my plans. I’ll continue to keep these priorities in mind and do my best to maintain a schedule that includes times for things that are important to me and to my work.

What changes can you make to your schedule this semester, and in future semesters, to help you make progress on important work-related tasks while also making time for your personal health and well-being? I hope this article inspires you to try to integrate at least one small change into your days that will have a lasting benefit!

Related Readings:

Gonzalez, S. (2010). Burnout in academia: The impact of academic workload on burnout levels and the need for sustainable workloads. VDM Publishers.

Maslach, C. (1976). Burned-out. Human Behavior, 5(9), 16-22.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central

Publishing.

Pope-Ruark, R (2022). Unraveling faculty burnout: Pathways to reckoning and renewal. Johns Hopkins University Press.

World Health Organization (2019, May). Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International

Classification of Diseases. Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

As an undergraduate, I enthusiastically anticipated my humanities classes and dreaded the required science class and lab. I wanted to major in anything but science. Science was hard and boring. So, I begrudgingly dragged myself to my first class and my second class and my third class. I was there only because it was a requirement, and it showed. After the first few classes I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had an engaging professor who was excited about sharing his love of biology. Sure, he wasn’t winning over everyone in the class, but he was winning over a few of us with his enthusiasm and tolerance alone. He answered our ridiculous, mostly off-topic science questions with a calm respect and put obvious effort into his daily lectures. Generally, we enjoyed his class but most of us still disliked the topic.

One morning as most of us struggled to understand the basics of DNA, he gave each of us a paper to represent a nucleotide and asked us to get out of our seats to create a strand of DNA with our classmates. After a bit of groaning, grumbling, and groupwide fumbling, we got it and then in that class I realized that this challenging topic was accessible even to me! Sure, we spent an entire fifty-minute class discussing a very elementary understanding of DNA, but the lesson wasn’t just about a biology basic. It was also about making us feel like all knowledge is within our grasp.

I am still thankful to my professor, whose name I can no longer remember after 30 years. His lesson opened up a whole field of study that I thought was beyond my reach and interest. He made it so accessible that I went on to earn a degree in biology. It was a single engaging lesson that changed the course of my life.

Like so many other students, I never thanked my professor, and I never let him know that I ended up with a biology degree. I do occasionally think of his lesson when I find things challenging to grasp or difficult to explain to others. So, when you begin to doubt the usefulness of that active learning project because you know it will take twice as long to prepare and will probably put you behind on your syllabus, please reconsider. You aren’t just passing on knowledge, you are forming people, and your impact will ripple on for years.

If you are interested in challenging your thoughts about the traditional lecture model I recommend the articles “5 Ways to Ease Students Off the Lecture and Into Active Learning” and “A Manifesto for Active Learning” from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"When asked what makes a difference, students who have struggled with motivation often point to the same thing: having someone who is invested in their success."

"Is This the End of Reading?" is a fascinating article from The Chronicle of Higher Education covering assigned course reading and why students are struggling with it.

Don't have time to, ahem, read that long article? Listen to Beth McMurtrie discuss her reporting in the College Matters podcast: "Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?"

According to the website Education Data Initiative:

• Hard copy books can cost as much as $400, with an average price between $100 and $150.
• Most of the postsecondary faculty do not know the cost of course materials when they select them for their classes.

Hanson, Melanie. “Average Cost of College Textbooks” EducationData.org, November 3, 2023, https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-textbooks

If you are interested in looking at your teaching with different eyes, "When to Resist Rule-Bound Teaching, and When to Embrace It" in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a great place to start. Take a look at what schoolishness is and where it might be showing up in your classroom.

Checking in with your students in the mid-semester can be a helpful way for you to gather feedback, course-correct, or understand certain classroom phenomena. In addition to asking students questions about how you might make the class more accessible to them, encourage metacognition by asking them to articulate how they're approaching the class, and what they want to do to stay engaged and stay learning.

Yale's Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning suggests the following questions:

• What is working well for you in this class? What are you struggling with?
• What is helping you learn? What is not working?
• What could the instructor change to improve your learning experience in this class?
• What could you do differently to improve your learning experience in this class?

If you collected information from your students at the beginning of the semester, take a moment to review those responses at mid-term. And make sure you follow up with your students about the responses they gave and the changes (if any) you'll make for the second half of the semester.

Check out Hood's CTL Zotero library for more resources on mid-semester check-ins.

Celebrate International Open Access Week with Hood's Center for Teaching and Learning and the Beneficial-Hodson Library! This October 18-27, Hood joins institutions across the globe in putting "community over commercialization."

Open Access Week was created by SPARC, a non-profit advocacy organization that promotes the idea that everyone should be able to access and share the knowledge that shapes our world. Here at Hood, we'll be hosting two workshops: the first: an introduction to open access and open educational resources (10/18 at 3 PM); and the second, a conversation about open pedagogy in practice (10/24 at 1 PM). Check out the events at the top of this newsletter for more information.

With tensions high, misinformation swirling, and the clock ticking, you may be worried about how to handle challenging classroom conversations about the upcoming election. Check out Barnard's Center for Engaged Pedagogy's "Election and Post-Election Conversations in the Classroom," a guide to navigating difficult conversations, promoting inclusive dialogue about contentious issues, and balancing students' varying interest in discussing politics.

You might also encourage your students to participate in some of the Hood Votes programming below. The mission of Hood Votes is to not only make sure all students have a plan to vote, but to encourage meaningful connection and productive dialogue about the issues that divide us.

Visit hood.edu/votes to learn more.

Thank you to those who attended the faculty sessions on the new undergraduate core curriculum following the Fall Forum. For a recap of each session, please review the Overview and FAQ document. For more core-related resources, please visit the Core Implementation Group folder (under Ad Hoc committees) on the Faculty Senate Blackboard site.

Important Reminder: October 15th is the last possible date to submit Heart and Mind course proposals for AY 2025-2026!

Want unlimited access The Chronicle of Higher Education? Access it through the library.

The library also has a section of books dedicated to teaching on the second floor.

• Jessica Hammack, Head of Research and Instruction, CTL Director
• April Boulton, Associate Professor of Biology, Associate Provost, Dean of the Graduate School
• Cathy Breneman, Assistant Professor of Social Work
• Ashley Coen, Assistant Professor of Education
• Sangeeta Gupta, Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Bridget Humphries, Director of Accessibility Services
• Beth Kiester, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Jessica McManus, Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Heather Mitchell-Buck, Associate Professor of English, Coordinator of Digital Learning
• Nicole Pulichene, Libman Professor of Humanities
• Adelmar Ramirez, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
• Kathryn Ryberg, Research & Instruction Librarian
• Sandra Thomas-Lalmansingh, Assistant Professor of Nursing
• Kristen Tzoc, Assistant Professor of Sociology
• Jeff Welsh, Director of Instructional Technology in the IT division
• Kelly Esposito, CTL Graduate Assistant

Email: CTL@hood.edu
Website: www.hood.edu/CTL
Location: Hood College, 401 Rosemont Avenue, Frederick, MD
Phone: (301) 696-3397