Ride the Active Learning Train: A Wacky Wednesday Follow-Up

At CATL’s most recent Wacky Wednesday event on September 25, we embarked on a cross-continental ride aboard the active learning train with the engaging board game “Ticket to Ride.” This hands-on session gave us a chance to “lay the tracks” for active learning strategies that can improve student retention and success in any discipline.

Active learning shifts the focus from passively receiving information to actively engaging with the materials. Research shows that engaging your students in this way improves retention, critical thinking, and success across various disciplines. Plus, active learning doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming for instructors to implement. If you’d like to get a 1-on-1 demonstration of active learning, reach out to CATL and we will be happy to meet with you.

Our Wacky Wednesday events are a fun, casual way to see these methods in action. If you missed the ride, don’t worry – there will be plenty more stops on the active learning line! We hope to see you onboard for future sessions, where we’ll continue to experiment and have fun with innovative teaching techniques.

Mark your Calendars!

Make sure to save the date for our next Wacky Wednesday on Nov. 20, 2024. More details to come.

a group of UWGB students in green t-shirts smiling and giving a thumbs up as they welcome new freshmen for move-in

Why Didn’t Anyone Do Today’s Reading? – Engaging Students by Building Relationships 

Article by Pamela Rivers

The semester is well under way. Your students have taken their first exam. Some are active and excelling. Others have stopped coming to class or are not completing the assigned readings. Welcome to the end of September.

Maybe you thought this time it wouldn’t happen. Everyone was eager and excited and answering your questions for the first few class sessions. Now, however, you are right back to encountering some disengaged students doing what feels like the bare minimum, and it’s eating away at your passion for teaching. Is this the fate for our classes, or are there more or different things we can do to reach students?

First, to be clear, engaging students is not magic, and although it should be informed by science, in many ways it’s also an art form. Like all art, some of it appeals to us and some of it doesn’t. No one can promise you a room full of fully engaged students who always turn in their homework, laugh at all your jokes, and come prepared every session. No trick or strategy works for every person, every time. There are, however, certain strategies you can employ to make it more likely your students will listen, attend, and want to do well, for you and for themselves.

Relationships Matter

In “Culturally Responsive Teachers Create Counter Narratives for Students”, Zaretta Hammond argues that relationships can be the “on ramp to learning.” She says that relationships can be as important as the curriculum. One research study cited in Relationship-Rich Education showed that alumni who had a faculty member who cared about them as a student felt more connected to their current jobs. Unfortunately, only 27% of graduates surveyed had someone in that role. This powerful research shows that developing relationships with our students not only engages them, but can also lead to their success down the road.

That is compelling research, and it can take a lot less than you might imagine to make a real difference in the lives of your students. Students want to know that you care, and they want to feel welcome in your classroom. Research suggests that colleges and universities need to invest in a “relentless welcome of their students,” (Felton and Lambert, 2020) but faculty can lead the way in their individual classrooms by integrating activities that build relationships and encourage engagement.

Getting to Know You Surveys

Before class starts, whether online or face-to-face, send out a “getting to know you” survey through Canvas. This survey can ask questions specific to your discipline, but it is also a place to show interest in your students and what might hold them back from being successful. You could ask about your students’ pronouns, how they prefer to be contacted, any worries they are having about your class, and any specific needs they have. You can find a lot out about a student by simply asking. Need a ready-made survey? Reach out to CATL to get a copy of our Canvas Template, which includes a sample survey.

Ice Breakers

When you hear the word “ice breakers,” you may groan. The truth is a silly, active icebreaker is a wonderful way to get face-to-face students moving and is a start to building classroom community (Sciutto, M.J., 1995). A people bingo game, for example, can help get students talking and will help them get to know each other. If you are teaching online, there are plenty of icebreakers you can do asynchronously, including video introductions or a game like two truths and a lie.

Class Norms

Developing a set of agreed-upon class norms (expectations or guidelines), both for your students and you, that everyone is involved in creating goes a long way toward building both trust and community. Next semester, take part of your first class session to have your students help you develop norms. If you need some ideas for what these class expectations might look like, check out the “Trust” section of this CATL toolbox article.

Make It Matter

Find ways to tie your assignments to students’ goals, lives, and futures. If you ask me to spend 2 hours every week looking up dictionary definitions for words I’ve never heard of for a random quiz that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I’m supposed to be learning in your course, I am unlikely to be motivated to keep spending my time looking in the dictionary. If, on the other hand, you explain to me the importance of the words I’m learning, how they will be useful in my next class, and even how they may show up on a licensing exam for my future career, my motivation changes.

Unplanned Conversations

In face-to-face or synchronous online courses, you can use the time before class or while students are working to chat with those students who are unoccupied. Mention something you liked about their work, ask how their weekend was, and show a genuine interest in them. You never know what you might learn in these conversations. It may not lead to anything, or it may lead to a student feeling seen. Establishing a friendly and open line of communication with students in this way also makes it more likely that they will feel comfortable coming to you if they have a question or issue in the class.

Give Your Students a Chance to be Successful

As you build up to the major coursework in your class, have small, low-stakes assignments that give them all an opportunity for success and to receive formative feedback. As students get a small taste of success, they will want to feel that more.

Use Your Students’ Names and Pronouns

Another way to make a student feel seen is by how you address them. Ask your students what they would like to be called and what pronouns they use in a “getting to know you survey” or some other activity at the start of the semester. If you are teaching a face-to-face class and are good with names, try to memorize their names and pronouns during the first few weeks and use them frequently. If you are teaching online or have more students than you can remember for a large face-to-face roster, ask students to complete the name pronunciation activity created by CATL to help instructors with names. In face-to-face classes, also consider having students create name tents that they can pull out for class use. These small steps show that you care about making them feel comfortable in class, and help students learn the names of their peers as well.

Engagement is Key for Student Success

There are no silver bullets for engagement, but hopefully there are a few things on this list that you can consider adding to your teaching practices. And the truth is, engagement matters. According to Miller in “The Value of Being Seen: Faculty-Student Relationships as the Cornerstone of Postsecondary Learning,” engaged students experience more academic success and have higher persistence rates. Keeping our students engaged gives them the best chance at success.

References

Cohen, E., & Viola, J. (2022). The role of pedagogy and the curriculum in university students’ sense of belonging. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 19(4), 1–17.

Felton, P., & Lambert, L. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hammond, Z. (2018, June 18). Culturally Responsive Teachers Create Counter Narratives for Students. Valinda Kimmel. September 12, 2023, valinda.kimmel.com

Lu, Adrienne. (2023, February 17). Everyone Is Talking About “Belonging,” but What Does It Really Mean? Chronicle of Higher Education, 69(12), 1–6.

Miller, K. E. (2020). The Value of Being Seen: Faculty-Student Relationships as the Cornerstone of Postsecondary Learning. Transformative Dialogues: Teaching & Learning Journal, 13(1), 100–104.

Sciutto, M. J. (1995). Student-centered methods for decreasing anxiety and increasing interest level in undergraduate. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 22(3), 277.

Evidence-Based Frameworks and Strategies for Keeping Students Engaged

Keeping students engaged in their learning throughout an entire semester is a challenge that exists across all disciplines and modalities. Though the ways in which you implement strategies for increasing student engagement might vary because of these factors, the good news is that the underlying principles remain the same. Below are some of the key methods and strategies that have emerged as common themes across many studies on the relationships between teaching practices and student engagement.

Foster a Culture of Growth, Trust, and Belonging

Part of a student’s engagement in a course is tied to the affective domain of learning, or a student’s thoughts and feelings about their own learning. Does the student feel like they belong in this learning environment? Are they respected by their peers and the instructor? Do they see their instructor as an ally in the learning journey, or as an adversary?

One aspect of the affective domain is whether an individual has a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. The Center for Learning Experimentation, Application and Research at the University of North Texas has a great list of growth mindset interventions instructors can implement. It is worth noting, however, that research seems to indicate the effectiveness of these interventions is contingent on the instructor’s mindset as well. Studies have shown that instructors with a greater growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset) have smaller racial achievement gaps and inspire more student motivation in their courses.

The affective domain also includes students’ feelings of belonging and trust. While the degree to which you can affect these feelings has limitations, evidence-based practices usually boil down to how you interact with students and facilitate interactions between students. A few examples include using a welcoming tone in your syllabus, modelling inclusive language, and taking the time to get to know your students’ names. Even in asynchronous classes it is important to build trust with your students. For example, you might want to consider using a week-one survey to provide your students with an opportunity to tell you about themselves.

Break Up Lectures & Add Opportunities for Active Learning

When there is a lot of content that needs to be disseminated across the duration of the semester, lectures are a common method for communicating that information quickly and efficiently. But the longer and denser the lecture is, the more instructors risk losing their students along the way due to cognitive load.

One solution is to build pause points into your lectures. Students benefit from structured pauses during lectures as it allows them space to question, process, and reflect on the information that they’ve absorbed. For pre-recorded lectures, the same idea can be achieved by breaking up a long lecture video into multiple short, topical videos (research suggests 6-12 minutes is an ideal length for maintaining student engagement). Fortunately, Kaltura (My Media) makes it very easy to trim and save video clips from right within Canvas.

When adding pauses for students to digest information, it is also beneficial to create opportunities for active learning activities. These activities can be very brief, such as using an anonymous polling tool to check for student understanding during a lecture. For more in-depth active learning, consider making time for small group discussions, written reflections, and other exercises that require students to employ higher order thinking skills. For courses with an asynchronous component, PlayPosit allows instructors to add a variety of engagement activities to pre-recorded lecture videos, while Hypothesis may be useful for incorporating annotation and reflection activities into assigned readings.

Provide Transparency and Support

When a student needs to spend a lot of mental energy figuring out the logistics of how to complete an activity, they have less mental energy left to engage with the course materials themselves. Therefore, transparency and scaffolding are both key elements to designing engaging assignments.

The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT) framework is designed to help instructors write clear and descriptive instructions for learning materials and assignments. For this framework, lay out the task, purpose, and criteria for each learning activity. If a student knows what they are supposed to do, why they are supposed to do it (how it ties to the course learning outcomes), and how they are going to be assessed, they can go into the activity more confident in their ability to engage with it.

It is common for a student to stop engaging with a course if they feel like they don’t have the means or resources to complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. Proper instructional scaffolding can help counter this issue by bridging some of the cognitive gaps and reducing the number of students that fall through the cracks. For example, if the final assignment in your course is an 8-page research paper, consider breaking up the process into several smaller assignments, such as having students submit their topic, bibliography, and outline at various points throughout the semester. Other ways to provide scaffolding this assignment might include modelling (providing examples of papers that meet the outcomes of the assignment), incorporating instructor or peer feedback for the outline or an early draft of the paper, and providing a robust rubric to guide students on how to meet the assignment outcomes.

Additional Resources

Engaging students is a broad topic that we are only just able to scratch the surface of in this post. Below are some resources for further reading if you’d like to dive in deeper.

Questions?

As always, we welcome you to share your ideas for engaging students by dropping a comment below or emailing us at CATL@uwgb.edu. If you’d like to discuss any of these methods or ideas one-on-one, a CATL member would be happy to meet with you for a consultation as well.

Guide and Recommendations for Using Digital Whiteboards

Unsplash image of whiteboard markers and a table.

Introduction to Digital Whiteboards 

Digital whiteboards, such as Microsoft whiteboards and Zoom whiteboards, provide a virtual space for both instructors and students to communicate and collaborate simultaneously about course concepts on a shared digital canvas. Digital whiteboards, alternatively called virtual whiteboards, have been a recent addition to the modern interactive, online classroom. With physical whiteboards, instructors can write out important concepts and illustrate examples to the class quickly and with ease. For students, the whiteboard presents the information in a way for them to visualize and collect key points from the lesson. Virtual whiteboards take the concepts of a traditional whiteboard and make them available online for instructors to use without changing their lesson dramatically and are easy to incorporate into a Teams or Zoom class meeting. 

In this blog post, we will explore two types of virtual whiteboards instructors can use in their teaching as well as the support available for instructors looking to incorporate virtual whiteboards in the classroom. While there are several different online whiteboards, UW-Green Bay instructors have supported access to Microsoft Whiteboards and Zoom Whiteboards. We encourage you to stick with these two whiteboard options, as students already have access to Microsoft whiteboards and Zoom whiteboards through their UWGB accounts. We will begin by reviewing these two whiteboard applications and the features available to use within each whiteboard. To broaden the discussion, we have provided instructors with a list of potential use cases, benefits, and limitations to consider when incorporating a digital whiteboard in your class.  

The Case for Microsoft Teams Whiteboards or Zoom Whiteboards 

Microsoft Whiteboards with Microsoft Teams 

Microsoft Whiteboard Cause and Effect Diagram
Microsoft Whiteboard modeling the “Cause and Effect Diagram” template

The Microsoft Whiteboard application allows instructors and students to collaborate in a hybrid or remote classroom both inside and outside of Microsoft Teams meetings. With Microsoft Whiteboards, instructors and students can brainstorm, plan, and share with others on a digital canvas asynchronously and synchronously. You can access your whiteboards through your desktop browsers, in Microsoft Teams meetings, breakout rooms, chat, and channels. You can also download the application to use on your smartphone or tablet.  

Zoom Whiteboards

Zoom whiteboard basic flow chart template
Zoom whiteboard modeling the “Basic Flow Chart” template.

Zoom whiteboards can be created and shared using the desktop application and the Zoom web portal. Instructors can share whiteboards with students before, during, and after a Zoom classroom meeting. Zoom whiteboards can be viewed and edited on a computer using the Zoom app or web browser and on a tablet or iPad with the Zoom app. If you use the Zoom mobile app on a smaller device, such as a phone, you will only be able to view Zoom whiteboards. In-app collaboration does not allow attendees to edit the same whiteboard simultaneously across multiple breakout rooms, so breakout room attendees will have to navigate between two windows (one with the whiteboard and one with their breakout group) to participate in the activity.  

Resources and Support

Considerations and Use Cases for Using Whiteboards for Instruction

Like most teaching and learning tools, there is no singular perfect way to use digital whiteboards in the classroom. One class might find it easier to incorporate whiteboards than another classroom might. If you are interested in using whiteboards, think about how you can use the whiteboard to facilitate the desired learning outcomes of the course content, activity, or assessment.  Below is a list of some possible use cases for digital whiteboards and how instructors and students can benefit from the interactive application.  

  • Annotating and visual explanations: Digital whiteboards can offer space for annotation on images, documents, text, and visualizations. Whiteboard editors and collaborators can add images and documents to the whiteboard and can write, draw, and mark up images, insert sticky notes, and connect ideas using lines and shapes.  
  • Building community: Incorporate digital whiteboards for quick icebreakers, mid-semester check-ins, or even for first-day introductions. For remote learners and instructors, digital whiteboards can be a great tool to engage with one another in the virtual classroom and outside of the class session. Students can gain and create a sense of class community as they interact with each other’s ideas and course information in a shared whiteboard canvas.  
  • Brainstorming, practice, and review: Digital whiteboards allow multiple students to contribute to a whiteboard and the whiteboard is saved for students to return to in the future. Instructors and students can share examples and study notes with the whole class or in small groups. Students can use whiteboards as a study tool to practice for assessments, track projects, and review materials from previous whiteboard sessions. This may also allow students to navigate coursework and material with more autonomy by supporting their ability to set goals, organize their learning, and problem-solve individually or in a group.  
  • Student engagement and collaboration: Students and instructors can engage in real-time collaborative editing, annotating, formatting, and more. Students can participate in the lesson or learning activity by visually seeing the instructors’ connections and explanations. Additionally, instructors and students can use multiple different annotation and drawing tools during a collaborative learning activity. Ask students to solve problems, connect points, and unpack more abstract topics by using the whiteboard’s interactive tools. Consider even making a whiteboard activity a non-graded or low-stakes assessment to gauge the progress of your students’ understanding and connection to the course content.  
  • Group projects or activities: Create structured whiteboards or guide students in creating their own for group projects.  Instructors can share whiteboards outside of class meetings with specific groups of students to structure group projects and provide students with the whiteboard space prior to class. Students can use whiteboards to track project goals, brainstorm ideas, and serve as a shared project workspace. 
  • Breaking up class lectures: If you are looking to break up a class lecture or content that might require a great deal of student concentration, consider pausing the lecture and using a quick whiteboard for a recap or lecture review. For example, you could share a whiteboard you have already created as a part of the lecture and allow students to annotate it. This allows students to interact with the lecture material in different ways, giving students the space to make deeper connections or understand difficult concepts.  
  • Use templates for structured activities: To reduce set-up time during a class session, consider using the various Microsoft or Zoom whiteboard templates available to help structure collaborative activities ranging from concept maps, project planning and timelines, to icebreakers and games. 
  • Provide students with guidance and instruction: Be intentional with your use of digital whiteboards. Students will need to learn how to gain access to and use the digital application. They will also require guidance on how you would like them to interact with it. What tools would you like them to use (sticky notes, pen, text, etc.)? Where should they add their contributions? 
  • Use “view only” for large classes: To eliminate overwhelming the whiteboard with student collaborations in a large virtual class, consider presenting the whiteboard in a view state only. This allows you to present the whiteboard and its content in a focused and structured way. 
  • Remember that whiteboards will not be recorded: If you are recording your virtual meeting using Microsoft Teams or Zoom, the recording will not capture the whiteboard collaboration. While the whiteboard session will not be in the recording, Zoom and Teams will save the whiteboards for students and instructors to view after the session is over. Alternatively, you can use external software to record your screen during the session, like Kaltura Capture.  
  • Avoid reliance on drawing tools for annotations: Drawing on a computer or phone can be difficult for students and instructors. Consider limiting the need for drawing tools and ask students to use shapes, sticky notes, or text tools instead. If the whiteboard activity requires detailed sketches or handwritten notes, consider asking students to upload a file to the whiteboard instead. 
  • Keep in mind access and accessibility: A stable internet connection is required for both students and instructors to create and collaborate on a digital whiteboard. This may exclude students who have limited or inconsistent internet access from participating in the activity. Additionally, whiteboards are not compatible with screen readers, though you can still add alt text to images, shapes, and lines to explain the visual elements. 

Questions?

CATL is here to help! If you would like to discuss Microsoft or Zoom whiteboard features and functions or learn more about how to use whiteboards in your class, fill out our consultation request form to schedule a meeting with a member of the CATL team.