New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Peter Felten

New Learning Compact Institute, A Conversation with Dr. Peter Felten: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

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

Laura Gambino:
Hi everyone, and welcome. I am here today... Well, first of all, I am Laura Gambino, I am a vice president with the New England Commission of Higher Education and one of the co-authors of The New Learning Compact, along with my colleagues, Bret Eynon and Randy Bass. And today I am joined by Peter Felton, who was one of the contributors to the New Learning Compact. Peter is a professor of history and the director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University. He's also been an author and co-author and his most recent book was sitting on my bookshelf. It's called Relationship Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, which he co-authored with Leo Lambert. And today, Peter is here. And we're going to talk a little bit. We're going to focus on the core principle of learning from and with students. So, first of all, welcome, Peter.

Peter Felten:
Thanks, Laura.

Laura Gambino:
OK, so I have a few questions here. So this is how this is going to work. I have some questions. I'm going to ask them and Peter's going to answer them and we're going to see how this goes.

Laura Gambino:
So my first question is: One of the principles from the framework, as I just said, is learning from and with students. So you've also co-authored a book on engaging students as partners in learning and teaching. So I'm curious how you understand what it means to learn from and with students?

Peter Felten:
Great question, Laura, and thanks for having me here. You know, part of this, I think, is thinking about words, and it means one thing to teach to your students and it means another thing to think about teaching with your students. And I think that distinction actually makes a great deal of difference. The key and the new learning framework does a nice job with this is if we're approaching teaching, learning as an act of inquiry, as a way of trying to explore what's actually happening in our students, with our students, in our classrooms, etc., and we're thinking about students is bringing assets and not just deficits to our campus, then what? What becomes apparent is that faculty and staff have lots of expertise, but our expertise also has limits. So, for example, for myself, I've had a Ph.D. for longer than I want to think about. So when I'm teaching an intro U.S. history course, it's hard for me to remember what it means to be a novice, what it's like to be a novice thinking historically. You know, Students bring identities that I don't have or have that I don't fully understand in the classroom.

Peter Felten:
And then you have issues like Pandemics. I never took a class during a pandemic. I don't know-how, you know, there weren't cell phones when I was an undergraduate. So students bring perspectives and experiences and identities that I can't have, that I don't have. And so the idea of thinking about with rather than two is not to replace my expertise, but to say what we're trying to do together. You students and I, have you learn as much as you can. So what do you bring to that equation that can help me understand your learning process? And what do I bring that can help shape where you're going? And the research on this book that Kathy Bovill, Alison Cook-Sather, and I wrote or published in 2014. Since then, there's been a ton of additional research that just keeps showing that thinking about with rather than to really has positive outcomes for student learning, actually has positive outcomes for faculty teaching and faculty well-being too. So lots of good reasons.

Laura Gambino:
Yeah. I mean, and I agree 100 percent. You know, I was when I was teaching, I was teaching information systems, as, you know, computer information systems. And so, you know, my degree was ten years ago so that I do have my students were bringing ideas and we're coming with things and we were figuring things out together. This was very much relevant in my experience. And I'm wondering what that looks like for individual faculty or individual student affairs educators as they're thinking about this. And I'm a new faculty or even an experienced faculty. What might that look like? How would that change? How could I change and think about doing things differently?

Peter Felten:
Yeah, well, Laura, I think student affairs professionals often think about this way to begin with and faculty, because we come out of disciplinary training so much, we think about our discipline sometimes before we think about our students. So I think we might have different stances there. And I'll give you a couple of examples, but I want to point you to some resources that will be available because there are lots and lots of really good disciplinary examples for how to do this in lots of different institutional contexts. So I'll point you to the towards those, but tell you two examples of things I've learned to do based on research that both have ended up working really well for me. One is sort of small and discrete. I do it in class. I do it the first, before my first big assignment. And what I've done is I've adapted research that's called the transparency, come out of the Transparency in Learning and Teaching Project. The Tilt Project Tilt was a project on the studying first-gen students and my first-gen students was done mostly with Latinx students. Why they sometimes struggle in intro courses? And what the Tilt research suggests is First Gen students often don't understand some combination of the purposes of an assignment, the tasks they're being asked to do, or the criteria that they could use to judge whether they're doing an assignment well or not. And so I've adapted that for my own classes. And in the first assignment in every class, first meaningful assignment I have in every class a week or so before that assignment, I give a draft of the assignment out to my students, get them in small groups and say read this and talk about it and then be ready to explain back to the whole class what's the purpose of this assignment? What are the tasks you have to do to do this assignment? Well, and how would you know if you're doing it? Well, and what happens is often students do a pretty good job of explaining the assignment back to me in ways that I want to hear it, but sometimes not at all.

Peter Felten:
And it's immensely helpful for me and for them to have that conversation when we have plenty of time for me to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're misunderstanding what I'm asking you to do or how I'm asking you to do it. And so sometimes I revise the assignment, sometimes we just talk it through differently. But they. I'll leave that conversation feeling better, feeling clearer about what they're trying to do, and honestly, I get less weird, fewer weird answers on that first assignment where I just can't even figure out where the students are coming from. So that's small, discrete.

Peter Felten:
A broader thing that we've done a lot of in Elon and a number of institutions are doing now. It's more time-intensive, but it's even more powerful is what we call here, of course, design teams. So let me give you an example from a colleague who did this in music theory. And my colleague, Henri Shimron, teaches a year long intro to music theory course. And this is a hard course for students because they tend to come...

Peter Felten:
Students studying music tend to come to college, you know, because they love band or singing or, you know, America's Got Talent or one of those, you know, something like this. And they want to be a performer and they don't know much about music theory. And Henri, my colleague, is a brilliant musician. He was raised outside. The U.S. is a classically trained musician. He doesn't really understand students' musical knowledge or motivations and anything like this. And there's disciplinary skills in this course that are just wicked hard for students to learn. The one Henri worked on with his students, is ear training; the ability for students to hear music and be able to notate, right. Know what it is, sounds hard, is super hard. Henri, for years and try to teach students this. They just couldn't get it. They couldn't get it. They couldn't get it. So he worked with our teaching center and spent a semester working with three of his students who had taken the year-long course before. And they those three students looked at all of Henri's materials. They talked about how we taught ear training. They actually interviewed students in the current course. They watched students do homework, and together they redesigned how he teaches in your training. And if Henri were here, he would say what he does now isn't perfect. But most of his students get beyond where his best students used to get because his he better understands what it's like to be a novice at your training and how to build both the skills and the confidence the students need to be successful.

Laura Gambino:
That's great. Those are both great examples. And what I love about them is they show that there are little things that you can do, simple little activities that can really transform. And I can imagine that when you were doing that assignment activity, the way it builds students kind of ownership of the assignment and their engagement with it. And so they're they're probably, you know, actively and more deeply thinking about the assignment itself, which is just like a bonus right on top of like having this better assignment right? And they're understanding it.

Peter Felten:
Exactly.

Laura Gambino:
It can also be this larger kind of redesign, right. Where you're rethinking things. And I love that you touched on it on how, that was Henri worked with the center, right? So I'd like to think about that a little more like how are good students being engaged in the community of faculty and staff involved in professional development and professional learning?

Peter Felten:
Yeah, and Laura, I wrote an article about this that I'll link in the references, and I read this with five students from five different institutions a couple of years ago where they'd all been involved in professional learning and educational development in different ways as undergraduates or as grad students. And we're trying to think together about what would it mean to reimagine the place of students in this kind of work. And one of the things they help me see is that a lot of what happens in educational development, professional learning right now is faculty and staff sitting around trying to imagine what students are thinking or understanding and all this. So we talk about them a lot. And what my student colleagues in the set is, we talk about them like they're objects or data sources or sometimes we talk about them like they're consumers. Right. We said what we what I and my colleagues really got me thinking, these student colleagues is we need to think of them as partners in this, as agents and actors in educational development. So, what can that mean? A simple-ish example of that is this assignment design example that we were just discussing. We adapted something from a group called NILOA, an assessment group. They have this thing called a charrette. It's sort of like a workshop, except you get to feel pretentious. I believe it's how it is. But so, yeah, well, there's maybe more to it than that. But in our design assignment design sharette and we do this always with new faculty and we invite all faculty but encourage new faculty to do this right before the first semester.

Peter Felten:
We bring in a few experienced students, from different levels. So sometimes first year students or second-year students, but relatively recent first year and seniors and whatnot. And so faculty come into this and they sit at a table. This is pretty covid, but you could do it in the same room with one or two other faculty from different disciplines. And two or three students who fit the profile, roughly, of students in their class and then faculty present their assignment, they're not supposed to describe it very much. They say this is the course I'm teaching. Here's the assignment description and the faculty and students around the table read the assignment description and then the students go first describing what they think the purpose is. The task, the criteria are then the other faculty, not from the discipline, weigh in on their thinking. And then finally, you, the professor, get to talk about. And by then you sometimes feel beaten down. But the point is not to defend it, but to understand. So what in this assignment made you think this or that? So it's a really helpful way to do this. And this kind of work can make you feel somewhat vulnerable. You know, you're putting something out there and getting critiqued by students. And our new faculty, in particular, love this for two reasons. One, they're doing it together.

Peter Felten:
Right. So it doesn't feel quite as vulnerable because everybody's doing it. And then the other thing is they're saying these are mistakes I would have made my first semester and I'm catching them before we began. So one way to do this is, you know, sort of one-shot deals like this assignment, as I'm sure it's a much more elaborate way that is so powerful. And I really want to point people towards is a program that I learned first about. And I think the best program is at Bryn Mawr in Haverford College outside of Philadelphia. And there's a program called Students as Learner-Teachers there where students are paired with a faculty member. A consultant is paired with a faculty member for a semester. And the faculty consultant visits class once a week and has a one on one with the faculty member about what they observed in class once a week, and the student and the faculty member determine sort of what should be the focus of the partnership and everything. They develop a lot of trust and the faculty member gets a lot of insight into what's happening in their class that they wouldn't get. Already a number of schools have started to adopt tha, like Bryn Mawr, and Haverford do, where all new faculty do this. And it's just a really powerful way to have an insight into your classroom in a sustained way of some of the faculty member comes to trust and the student comes to understand teaching in different ways.

Laura Gambino:
And I think that's great. I have used the assignment charrette format a number of times. And it's really powerful. I love the idea of adding students to it. And we will put the link up to the NILOA website with those materials because there's a really great set of materials related to that. And I will say in when I was at Guttman Community College and we were a brand new institution and community college. So, you know, serving urban, underprepared students we had when we were beginning our online courses. And it's hard to imagine how we were just starting. Faculty were just starting to teach online. We had some of our e-portfolio managers, but they were also kind of crossing over in and supporting online courses. And they actually said it wasn't a formal charrette in that sense, but they sat with the faculty and the faculty talked about their assignments and these students who were, you know, had recently either on the verge of graduating from Guttman or recently graduated and returning as soon as we're really there giving them great ideas about ways they could make this more engaging, you know, bring in social media, interactive and the faculty walk away feeling like they had such a better assignment that the students that were in their class were going to be more engaged with than if they had just done it themselves.

Laura Gambino:
And with that idea of like collectively, we're all smarter than individually and our students have something that they can contribute to, all levels of students like you were saying, I think is really important. And I think we often think of the center, the Center for Teaching Learning, Center for Engaged Learning, whatever you call it, at your position in that place where faculty go off. Right. Right. And not where like students and faculty and student affairs folks can come together because that's another way we can kind of bridge and bring students and student affairs folks together in that center. That really does become an engaged learning space. And I think the bonus is that students learn things from that.

Peter Felten:
Yea.

Laura Gambino:
Right. It's great. So, OK, we're going to have enough of that because we don't have all day that we can do that all day is we think about who can have a little bit larger lesson about how we can move from class. I love the way we're kind of moving very subtly. If people haven't noticed through the levels of the framework, what might be some possibilities for engaging students as partners in institutional change initiatives.

Peter Felten:
So, Laura, let me answer that partly with a caveat to begin, which is one of the things I appreciate about the framework is it emphasizes respecting people's time. And I think sometimes what we do with students or to students in institutional work is actually wasting students' time. You know, you put one student on a committee and don't give them any training or support or anything else and then expect them to be able to really engage with a group of 20 people who are intimidating and et cetera. And that's not a great use of students time or expertise or perspective. So thinking really hard as you go into this with what can students contribute to this and which students are the ones best positioned to contribute? So we give you one example of that and then we'll tell you about a new example that I think is really cool. With a different institution.

Peter Felten:
So down the road from Iran is North Carolina, A&T State University, a historically black college. And they have this really cool program called the Provost Scholars, where they get a small cohort of students and they work with institutional assessment. And so they come to learn how assessment works and they help answer questions. And almost we adapted that on my own campus in a way that was really powerful. We noticed in our assessment data that first gen students on our campus weren't engaging in some experiences that we wanted them to engage with in the same ways that other students were, right. And so what our assessment office and Gen Ed program did is what we all do. They sent a survey to first Gen Ed students saying, why don't you do things right? And guess what? They didn't answer the survey because it's a terrible question to ask.

Peter Felten:
So some students actually suggested... They heard us complaining about this. We hired some first gen students and together they created we created an interview protocol and then they interviewed 75 first gen juniors and seniors on our campus about their experiences and their attitudes towards these perspectives, towards these experiences. And we weren't things we didn't know from this. And I'm convinced we learn them partly because the students were talking to peers. If I sat in on a couple of the interviews when one of the students was sick and the students tended to tell me what they would expect, someone who looks like me would want to know. And so they were more honest conversations. So we learned a lot from that. So thinking about are there ways to bring students and sort of cool researchers in on these co-inquirers in this work.

Peter Felten:
And then one other example, and it's from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, but they're doing really fascinating partnership work there. And they have this big university-wide initiative called the Twenty-First Century Curriculum Project. And what they're doing is they have these partnerships among the faculty staff of the university, students at the university on business, partners in the community, community agencies in the partner in the community and community partners, you know, neighbours and whatnot of the university, all working together to think about what the University of Western Sydney University is right now and what it should be for the community, for the students, for the economy, for the democracy in Sydney. It's really fascinating. And they have teams of students embedded with each of these inquiry groups. And I think it's a really impressive way of thinking about systematically working with students to think about the future of the university.

Laura Gambino:
That shows, those are great examples, and I just, you know, so helpful for the institutions are helpful for advancing the strategic initiative. Also, let's refill high-impact practices for our students. Right. Imagine what our students are learning through that undergraduate research. Right. And then also helping make the process of assessment more relevant to them and to the other students, too. So, so much there to learn from everyone. So I think that's great. Thank you for sharing these examples with us. We're out of questions and out of time, but we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. And like I said, we'll have those resources that go along with this posted up with this recording. To Peter Felton, thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today. Thanks for having me, Laura.

Peter Felten:
Take care.

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