Event Follow-Up: Planning for Our Pedagogical Futures

Below is the recording of the presentation and discussion with Christin DePouw “Planning for Our Pedagogical Futures” from Thursday, Apr. 21, 2022. We’ve provided the video as a PlayPosit bulb so that you can engage with questions from the workshop facilitator.

To view the bulb, type your first and last name, then click “Save.”

Additional Sources & Reading

Event Follow-Up: Culturally Sustaining/Responsive Pedagogy in the “After” of the Pandemic

Below is the recording of the presentation and discussion with Christin DePouw “Culturally Sustaining/Responsive Pedagogy in the ‘After’ of the Pandemic” from Thursday, Mar. 31, 2022. We’ve provided the video as a PlayPosit bulb so that you can engage with questions from the workshop facilitator.

To view the bulb, type your first and last name, then click “Save.”

Resources on Dual Domain Pedagogy and Growth Mindset

Recently Dr. Angela Bauer, former UWGB instructor and current Vice President of Academic Affairs at High Point University, visited our institution and presented her research regarding the equity gaps in introductory science courses. We invite you to engage with the readings and videos below to learn more about dual domain pedagogy (both cognitive & affective) and its relationship to equity gaps in the college classroom. If you would like to talk more about how you might use this information in your teaching, feel free to request a consultation with a CATL member. Please remember as you consider these resources that growth mindset interventions should not be used to de-legitimize real structural, systemic, economic, etc., obstacles that students face.

  • On Mar. 4, 2022, Angie Bauer visited the Green Bay campus and gave a presentation on her research titled Tapping into the Affective Domain of Learning to Close Classroom Performance Gaps. View the recording by clicking on the link and then logging in with your UWGB credentials.
  • You can also read the study that Dr. Bauer contributed to, Fostering Equitable Outcomes in Introductory Biology Courses through Use of Dual Domain Pedagogy. The article describes Dr. Bauer’s work at High Point, including growth mindset interventions and the impact on equity gaps.

A great place to start learning about growth and fixed mindsets is with the work of Carol Dweck, who is the psychologist best known for research on this concept. Watch this 50-minute talk on YouTube which Dweck gave in 2019 at the Annual Convention of the American Psychology Association, or, for a shorter watch, check out her TED Talk from 2014. You can also read the first three chapters of her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, online for free. These are, of course, just a starting place—to dig deeper, check out the research articles in other sections of this guide.

  • For a good overview of growth and fixed mindsets, including specific examples, research findings, and even videos illustrating educators using growth mindset language in class, check out this guide from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab.
  • Also found on the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab site is Dr. Elizabeth Canning's 1-hour talk about growth mindset and research surrounding the impact of instructors’ mindset on student success. There’s also a written summary of some of the relevant research on this site. Note some of her full articles are included in the "Influence of Instructor Mindset on Students" section of this post.
  • Academic Affairs at the University of Arizona has a series of "Learning to Learn" strategies for teaching and learning, including an overview of growth mindset with videos and practical tips for instructors.
  • One potential growth mindset intervention, if used well, is normalizing struggles and even failure. Read about Stanford University’s institutional attempt at reinforcing this idea and watch brief videos from the project.
  • Transforming Education has some sample strategies for supporting students' growth mindset, as well as a growth mindset toolkit. Although intended for K-12 educators, these sites provide some helpful, practical tips about encouraging growth mindset as an instructor that could be adapted for higher education, as well as video clips, PowerPoint presentations, and graphics.
  • Dr. Bauer referenced the affective domain of learning in her "dual domain pedagogy" intervention. The affective domain is an extension of Bloom's taxonomy created by psychologist David Krathwohl, one of Bloom's colleagues. We are typically more familiar with the cognitive domain, but this document by Indiana University provides a nice overview of the affective realm.

A critical research finding is that instructor mindset influences multiple factors for student success, including students' motivation, academic performance, and whether growth mindset interventions will be effective on them. These results are important to consider as we transition to becoming an access institution. If we expect students will be less capable as we embrace that mission and believe that ability is fixed, will we produce the poor results we expect?

  • It is vital to remember that growth mindset is not about telling students to “think positive” and expecting it to achieve miraculous results. For one thing, growth mindset is not the same as “thinking positively.” For another, students may experience a number of obstacles to academic success, and no one is suggesting mindset will overcome issues such as poverty. Living in poverty, for example, can be associated with a greater fixed mindset, for understandable reasons. That said, a national study suggests that children with a growth mindset had some buffer against the effects of poverty on their academic performance.
  • For another interesting read, these authors explored how the mindsets of 875 organic chemistry students changed across a semester. In their analysis of students' responses, they found that students attributed their own beliefs about the malleability of intelligence to five main factors: academic experiences, observing peers, deducing logically, taking societal cues, and formal learning.

Growth mindset research is one of those areas that has endured some criticism as part of the social science “replication crisis.” For those of you interested in really digging into that, the articles below are good resources. We also include them because they do point to some of the nuance involved in this work. For example, the success of growth mindset interventions on a student's academic performance may also be tied to the student's trust in their instructor, as indicated in the third article.

Event Follow-Up: Culturally Sustaining/Responsive Pedagogy (CSRP) and Moving Beyond Guest Speakers

Below is the recording of the presentation and discussion with Christin DePouw and Lisa Poupart “‘Culturally Sustaining/Responsive Pedagogy (CSRP) and Moving Beyond Guest Speakers” from Thursday, Feb. 17,  2022. We’ve provided the video as a PlayPosit Bulb so that you can engage with questions from the workshop facilitator.

To view the bulb, type your first and last name, then click “Save.”

Event Follow-Up: “What Will You Carry Forward?”

We will all carry literal and figurative things forward from the experience of teaching in the last year. Often, these two blend together. For example, perhaps an instructor re-worked an attendance policy to accommodate a student who had to return home to attend to a family member. The policy and the memory behind the policy will both linger. Or, perhaps an instructor created a series of virtual labs and now has videos, supporting data, and Canvas assignments which they can use to help students who are not able to attend a lab in-person. Last spring, the Center hosted a discussion and posted a blog article called “The Things We’ll Carry” which prompted a lot of reflection about the literal and figurative items that instructors will carry with them from teaching last year. At the end of the discussion, there was interest among instructors for a practical workshop in the fall where instructors could see how their colleagues had adapted the lessons of the pandemic to their preparations for the new school year.

With apologies to Tim O’Brien for the continued use of his metaphor, the Center responded by hosting another workshop called “What will you carry forward?”. This workshop featured four instructors who did a “show and tell” about how they incorporated lessons from the pandemic into their teaching. They then fielded questions from the audience.

Now, through the magic of video technology, we are extending that workshop to those who were not able to attend the live event.

Below you will find the “show and tell” portions and, importantly, you will be able to interact with the videos as well because they are streaming through a service called PlayPosit, which allows instructors to add interactive elements to videos.

Please interact with these videos on multiple levels. First, learn from what the presenters have to say. Second, use the interactions in PlayPosit to engage more deeply with the content and with other people who have watched the videos. Finally, if you would like to use PlayPosit in your own class, please contact CATL at dle@uwgb.edu to have it added to your courses.

First presentation

Breeyawn Lybbert, who teaches in Natural and Applied Sciences, discusses her four-point plan for increasing equity in her science classes.

Second presentation

Next, Praneet Tiwari, who teaches in the Cofrin School of Business, discusses multiple strategies for incorporating students who participate in-person, at home, and asynchronously.

Third presentation

Third, Nichole LaGrow, distance education coordinator in CATL and associate lecturer in English, discusses how she extends G.R.A.C.E. to herself and students (Guided autonomy, Resources, Authentic assessments, Community, Expectations).

Fourth presentation

Finally, Jillian Jacklin, who teaches in Democracy and Justice Studies, synthesizes the previous presentations and discusses how she balances all the tips within the realities of teaching a heavy course load.