New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Mary Deane Sorcinelli

New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Mary Deane Sorcinelli: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Mary Deane Sorcinelli: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
It is such a pleasure to be with you. My name is Mary Deane Sorcinelli. I'm here to offer my brief take on building a culture of teaching and learning.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
In the session, we're going to touch on three overlapping goals. First, I want us to think about what we mean by a culture of teaching and learning. Teaching culture has not been a topic of extensive scholarly study, but it's something all of us have had experience with and have thoughts about.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
Second, I'll propose a framework for thinking about the culture of teaching and learning that I have found to be especially helpful, and especially in identifying what it takes to strengthen that culture. And finally, if we can say what we mean by this notion, then how do we build it? What are the strategies needed to deliver on the promise of a culture of teaching and learning? And here I suggest some promising possible strategies.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
In preparation for this session, I came across an article by Pat Hutchins, a scholar, at that time, at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and it's an article called "Building a Culture of Teaching and Learning" and opens with a discussion of pedagogy and the array of new pedagogical approaches available like active learning, problem-based learning, and a whole host of instructional technologies. Hutchins then posits that the list makes one point clear. The search is on for new and more powerful ways to engage today's diverse students. But campuses need more than new techniques.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
They need to build a culture where these new approaches can take hold and thrive. The first thing to note is that this article was written over 20 years ago. Yes, we've made progress, especially in measuring the effectiveness of various pedagogical approaches. But here we are 20 years later, still talking about building a culture of teaching on our campuses at the same time, this is no time for cynicism. I've been in higher education a long time and I can't recall a time when there's been so much attention to teaching and learning to improving the quality of undergraduate education and not just by the academic community, but by many external stakeholders as well. We just need to turn our attention from attending to teaching and learning to valuing it. And Pat and I have written on that topic more recently. So what's it all about? It's about pedagogy and there's a good reason for that, we now have two decades, more than two decades of empirical and practice-based research on how our students learn. We know that teachers and teaching matter greatly, and we know there is an abundance of approaches and strategies for educators who want to transform from a teacher-centered to a more learner-centered approach. But that's not enough because it's also about scaffolding. Lasting pedagogical change requires more systemic approaches. We now recognize this. So for decades, the National Science Foundation-funded individual course transformations. And while faculty designed incredibly innovative courses, many of the projects fail to result in widespread adoption or dissemination.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
Because one thing that was missing was scaffolding. Learner-centered teaching practices are only useful if faculty know about them, choose to use them, and experience support and success. And that is true for our students as well. And ultimately it's about culture. At the core is pedagogy bolstered by scaffolding. But departments, colleges, and institutions need to cultivate richer, more productive cultures of teaching and learning. And that's why we're seeing funders calling for more systemic change and investing now not in individual course transformation, but with what they are calling institutional transformation. So what brings about larger cultural change and what transforms institutions here, I'd like to move us from indicator's to levers for change. The question now is not what we're talking about, which is where we started, but how do we build it? How do we weave it? Cultivated and bendat because of course, there is an "it." Every campus has a culture, maybe more than one. What's exciting right now in this moment is that there are now conceptual frameworks to help us structure our thinking about change in higher education. And in this vision, you'll see there are multiple factors that affect faculty decisions about their teaching practices, suggesting that change needs to happen at multiple levels and all levels need to be connected. I really like this because it puts students in the center. It's about teaching focused on student learning and success. The next circle are our faculty members.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
There are a number of variables that affect or encourage or discourage faculty from being involved in learning, there's passion for their discipline, for their career stage, and perhaps more than anything else, it's their natural interest in teaching and in students as learners. Then there are the middle circles, and these are department and institutional factors that can discourage or encourage faculty learning, such as encouragement from senior colleagues or a chair. And finally, there's an outer circle and that affects teaching and curriculum employers, government agencies, accrediting associations. Many are calling for more access to college and more learning achieved by our graduates. And the white boxes you see here show key levers of change. There are four of them faculty, professional development, resources, leadership, and incentives and rewards. And importantly, each of them intersects all the circles, pointing to the value of approaches to culture, change the breakdown silos and build community across boundaries. So with this framework in mind, I'd like to turn to each of the four levers and after a few strategies, each lever might point to. And these are examples that I found particularly impactful. I hope you'll find one or two relevant to your work and also be thinking about others. You would add to this list. And the first is faculty professional development, the most powerful form of professional development starts with good conversations. Good conversations about teaching and learning, however, don't happen automatically. What's needed is time and space and a sense of permission in which educators can share what they're doing as teachers, what they care about, what they sometimes find disappointing.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
The importance of these conversational spaces is a lesson I've learned close up as a facilitator of many faculty learning communities. In my first year as a teaching center director, I had a group of early-career teaching fellows who are meeting with their mentors, one of whom was a senior distinguished professor who had won every teaching award on campus and research award and national awards in both arenas as well. So he began his talk about teaching, and then he paused and he literally teared up as he told the group, I have lost count of the times. I've been asked to talk about my research, but this is the first time I've been asked to talk about my teaching. And then that moment for me, a big bell rang. Good talk about good teaching has been now a cornerstone of my and other centers for teaching and learning and for the National Learning Compact as well. So creating venues, whether face to face or not virtual, in which groups of like-minded peers can engage in pedagogical knowledge and enlarge that knowledge, take risks, make small changes and see success. And the research suggests the groups that meet multiple times, such as learning communities, teaching circles, can have significant positive effects on many aspects of teaching development. My second point is that conversation is great, but if it's just a random sharing of opinions, it can go wrong.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
The lever here is making sure that there is evidence at the table. It might be from reading an article. It might be from reviewing your own outcome data. And I'm now working with faculty, faculty, learning community and learning analytics. They're asking some great questions. Can we predict which students are going to require additional support where students not persisting in our major, where are their bottlenecks in our curriculum? The culture of teaching and learning is one that's continually asking how well are we doing? How do we know? What can we use as what in terms of what we learn for improvement? And the third point I'd like to make is the faculty time spent in professional development needs to be efficient and functional. We need to emphasize evidence-based practices that are low risk, that are easy to use, that don't take up the whole classroom. Time could be classroom assessment techniques like a minute paper, five or 10 minutes of classroom online learning activities, reading checks. We're now talking somewhat less about major course transformation and more about small teachings, such as the book written by Jim Lang. Which I refer to you, our faculty have really appreciated it. Another lever for change is that of resources, it takes resources to build and weave a culture of teaching and learning quality, learning spaces, tools, technology and again, the issue of time. I've been struck by how the lack of time is often identified as the biggest obstacle to greater attention to teaching.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
In fact, in a large-scale study of resistance to reform among faculty in the STEM disciplines, the most significant barrier to adopting new teaching strategies was the amount of time faculty believed they needed to learn new pedagogy is to learn new tools and to implement them. So we need to consider strategies that attend to time as a resource. Campuses are finding course design and such institutes or incentives like the New Learning Institute that you have an incentive and have become very popular. For that reason, you're learning with peers. You're getting advice from teaching consultants and some of it you're doing on your own time. For example, of course, Design Institute may take two or three days, but you're leaving with concrete, usable product, a learner-centered syllabi, student assignments, student assessments, and teaching practices. Other campuses are allocating time and teaching schedules to experiment with new pedagogies. Others are assigning minimal courses, perhaps, or a service spring semester to free up time. A newer mechanism is that for gaining resources to engage our students in reform and make them as partners in our change. For example, at one institution I have visited small student teams partner with a faculty member to study and revise the course in which they were previously enrolled. On another campus. Students are working as provost scholars and they're conducting interviews with their peers to better understand the student experience. These roles are powerful in another way as well.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
When students have the opportunity to become aware of their own teaching and learning process, they learn better and more. When an undergraduate in a teaching project reported to me, I had a class where we studied how we learn. It flipped a switch and once it's been flipped, it can't be turned off. Visible leadership commitment is another factor. Research on faculty motivation concludes that a supportive teaching culture includes strong and perceptible support for teaching that comes from leaders at all levels of the institution. In a culture of teaching and learning, leaders look for opportunities to make visible pedagogical innovations and improvements. They tell stories. They share data. They understand the value of symbols that highlight an institution's commitment to student learning. And from the bottom up, instructors need to see that institutional leaders have committed to student-centered teaching, not just through their words, but through their actions. Leadership and department matters to our early career. Faculty and our physics department created a grassroots mutual mentoring, learning, mentoring, and learning community supported by our teaching center and hear departments from lectures to full professors. Convene once a week for an hour over pizza and salad to discuss appropriate pedagogy for active learning classrooms, how to assess student preparation, and how to use new teaching tools. In my experience, the leadership sweet spot occurs when faculty-led and administrative-led initiatives converge. For example, on my campus, our provost led initiative to renovate and pilot to active learning classrooms in the library and in turn, our Center for Teaching our library and our academic computing units partnered to help faculty increase their skills and using these rooms.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
This project became such a generative space for cross-unit collaboration. It also maximized our available resources. And finally, we come to the reward systems, as noted earlier, what happens in the classroom is only part of the picture. Also essential are institutional policies that support and encourage more effective instruction. And this brings us to the topic of incentives and rewards. Well, one place to begin is what might be called the low-hanging fruit, the forms of incentives. They're already familiar and valued by faculty. For many, faculty grants are an example. Their value not often lies in how much money, the amount of money that's involved, but that the awards are made based on a peer review, the gold standard, and academe, and similarly, faculty value recognition for their accomplishments. When you're highlighting effective teachers, good teaching and learning is seen as more valuable. It's important to showcase our effective teachers, whether they are serving on panels, facilitating seminars, poster sessions or any other kind of celebration of teaching. But attention to incentives and rewards also brings us to the high hanging fruit, most notably policies and practices that shape hiring, promotion, and tenure or continuation contract. Several campuses are making space for new kinds of evidence of teaching effectiveness. For example, some have added a section on their annual faculty review that encourages faculty to include evidence of innovative teaching, pedagogical risk-taking and reflective practice.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
Others are developing frameworks and benchmarks to support better methods for reviewing documents and evaluating teaching. And still, others are making the plays for the scholarship of teaching and learning. And I want to note here that recognition and rewards don't have to be monitoring. In my teaching center, I handwrite a congratulatory note to each campus and college-level Distinguished Teaching Award winner, and they are grateful and sometimes tell me I am the only person who took time to recognize their accomplishments, not their colleagues, their chairs, or their deans. And certainly, this is a place where all of us could begin. So as these examples suggest, we all play a role in advancing a culture of teaching and learning, making teaching visible, providing resources to guide faculty work, bringing together people across departments, roles, and responsibilities to collaborate in ways that create more purposeful pathways to learning for students and to making good teaching count. We're all beautifully positioned at the intersection of all kinds of instructional strands to help weave a robust, more holistic culture of teaching and learning that supports ongoing improvement.

Mary Deane Sorcinelli:
And so, as I close, I would ask you what levers for change speak to you in your role? Because we all lead from where we are. And how can you help use these levers to build a culture of teaching and learning on your campus? And I thank you for your attention.

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