I ran into just such an article recently. It’s old, published in 1986, but it was the first article I remember reading where the content of the discipline (in this case sociology) was used to explain certain instructional dynamics. Actually, there’s a whole genre of pedagogical scholarship that does this, not just in sociology but also in many disciplines.

In this article, Billson compares the classroom to a small group. She applies the principles of small group dynamics as they are studied and understood in sociology to what happens in the classroom. And she does so for this reason: “Deeper awareness of small group processes can enhance the teaching effectiveness of college faculty through improving their ability to raise student participation levels, increase individual and group motivation, stimulate enthusiasm, and facilitate communication in the classroom.” (p. 143) I’d say those outcomes are still of interest to most of us.

So what principles of small group dynamics might help us better understand what’s happening in our classrooms? Billson identifies and discusses 15—four are highlighted here.

Principle 1: Every participant in a group is responsible for the outcome of the group interaction. Billson acknowledges that the major responsibility does belong to the professor, but she maintains that students share a “significant responsibility” as well. (p. 144) She recommends discussing that responsibility with students and explores the possibility of letting students plan certain segments of the course or maybe offer input as to the weight of the course’s various assignments.

Principle 4: When people feel psychologically safe in a group, their participation levels will increase. This isn’t a particularly new or novel idea, but it’s something professors often take for granted. Most of us do feel safe in the classroom. We’ve been going to college classes for years. For students, classrooms don’t feel as comfortable. They can be made to feel safer when students are known by names, when their first attempts to contribute garner positive feedback, and when the professor avoids sarcasm and ridicule.

Principle 8: The leader of any group serves as a model for that group. “The way in which professors play their role, including how they present expectations of students, carry out responsibilities, and handle privileges implicit in the professorial role, has a profound effect on how students enact their role.” (p. 147)

Principle 13: A group will set its own norms of behavior and will expect conformity to them. These norms may extend to the professor. The same policies and procedures can be used and yet classes respond to them differently. In some classes, students argue at length about exam answers. In other classes, they want assignment deadlines extended. In many classes, a designated few become the only students who participate. Professors need to be aware of these norms and if they work against course goals, they should be discussed openly with students.

Although “small group” isn’t a label that feels like it fits classes with more than 100 students, even large classes exhibit many features typical of groups. Applying these principles can result in classroom climates where learning is a more likely outcome. I’d say Billson was way ahead of her time in identifying what helps to make classrooms learner-centered.

Reference: Billson, J. (1986). The college classroom as a small group: Some implications for teaching and learning. Teaching Sociology, 14 (July), 143-151.

Reprinted from What Classes and Small Groups Have in Common The Teaching Professor, 26.3(2012): 6.

When the workshop was finished, I turned to a fellow English professor and said, “So that’s how it’s supposed to be done!”

Here’s what I learned:

Attitude matters. At the beginning of the workshop, the facilitator took the time to remind us that writing critique demands a safe environment: no one can be fearful that his ideas or her manner of expression will be put down or devalued. “Our job is to help one another say what we have to say as effectively as possible,” said our leader, looking us all in the eyes. Implicit was the message that everyone was already a writer, and a good one. The purpose of the workshop was to help everyone become the best writer possible. Despite all this, and despite my professional credentials as a writer, I still was nervous. Imagine how students in my classes must feel!

The setup is crucial. “In this workshop,” our facilitator said, “we will make ‘I’ statements only, no judgmental pronouncements. Say, ‘I was confused by the wording in paragraph two,’ not ‘paragraph two is confusing.’” The difference is one of tone: the first statement places the fault with the reader, not the writer. Further, before we writers read our pieces aloud, we were asked to describe the audience for whom we were writing, and to state any particular concerns we had about our essays. Then, the listeners were to try to be that audience, as well as to be themselves. When the reading was finished, the listeners were to converse about the paper while the writer, silent, took copious notes on everything that was said. No rebuttals, clarifications, explanations, or apologies on the part of the writer were allowed. She could, at the very end, ask the reviewers to clarify any comment that had confused or puzzled her. Most important, at the end of the workshop, when all papers had been discussed, we were to thank one another “for the incredibly hard work” we had done for each other. The facilitator’s careful directions articulated her expectations, and that shaped our behavior.

Acting is important. I knew the woman who facilitated this workshop. And I knew that for her, like for me, the process was old hat. Nonetheless, I watched her perform the setup and debriefing of this activity as though she had never done anything like it ever before in her professional career. She had us convinced that the work we were about to do was fresh, new, absolutely cutting-edge. She was so completely in the moment and so committed to this work herself that the rest of us could not help but be so as well.

Finally, I learned this: placing myself (and my little essay) in the hands of a master teacher reminded me that one of the difference between a ho-hum classroom performance and a really effective one is the degree to which we throw ourselves into the role.

Excerpted from Role Reversal: Learning from a Master Teacher, The Teaching Professor, 25.4 (2011): 3.

Best and Worst Classes – I love this quick and easy activity. On one section of the blackboard I write: “The best class I’ve ever had” and underneath it “What the teacher did” and below that “What the students did.” On another section I write “The worst class I’ve ever had” (well, actually I write, “The class from hell”) and then the same two items beneath. I ask students to share their experiences, without naming the course, department or teacher, and I begin filling in the grid based on what they call out. If there’s a lull or not many comments about what the students did in these classes, I add some descriptors based on my experience with some of my best and worst classes. In 10 minutes or less, two very different class portraits emerge. I move to the best class section of the board and tell students that this is the class I want to teach, but I can’t do it alone. Together we have the power to make this one of those “best class” experiences.

First Day Graffiti – This is an adaptation of an activity proposed by Barbara Goza in the Journal of Management Education in 1993. Flip charts with markers beneath are placed around the classroom. Each chart has a different sentence stem. Here are a few examples:

“I learn best in classes where the teacher ___”
“Students in courses help me learn when they ___”
“I am most likely to participate in classes when ___”
“Here’s something that makes it hard to learn in a course: ___”
“Here’s something that makes it easy to learn in a course: ___”

Students are invited to walk around the room and write responses, chatting with each other and the teacher as they do. After there are comments on every flip chart, the teacher walks to each one and talks a bit about one or two of the responses. If you run out of time, you can conduct the debriefing during the next session.

Syllabus Speed Dating – Karen Eifler, an education professor at the University of Portland, designed this activity. Two rows of chairs face each other (multiple rows of two can be used in larger classes). Students sit across from each other, each with a copy of the syllabus that they’ve briefly reviewed. Eifler asks two questions: one about something in the syllabus and one of a more personal nature. The pair has a short period of time to answer both questions. Eifler checks to make sure the syllabus question has been answered correctly. Then students in one of the rows move down one seat and Eifler asks the new pair two different questions. Not only does this activity get students acquainted with each other, it’s a great way to get them reading the syllabus and finding out for themselves what they need to know about the course.

Irritating Behaviors: Theirs and Ours – This activity grows out of research done by D. Appleton in 1990 (The Journal of Staff, Program and Organizational Development). His findings are a bit dated now, but the idea is not. Appleton asked students to list faculty behaviors that most irritate them. He had faculty do the same for student behaviors. I’d put students in groups and have them respond to a slightly different question: “What are the five things faculty do that make learning hard?” Or, asked positively, “What are the five things faculty do that make it easy to learn?” Collect the lists and make a master list to share in class or online. Below the five things faculty do, you can also list the five things students do that make it hard or easy to teach. The follow-up conversation is about how the teacher and students can each commit to not doing what appears on their respective “hard” list and have a better class experience as a result.

Do you have a favorite activity that you like to use on the first day of class? Please share in the comment box.

Depending on the student, the content in any field can be difficult and demanding. Part of the difficulty derives from what students believe about the course and whether they think it’s going to be hard. And part of it is a function of our intellectual homes within the academy. Those of us in the humanities frequently find courses in the sciences hard. Those in the sciences struggle in courses where they have to do a lot of writing, and God help them if it’s a poetry course.

Often we, as faculty, can’t understand why students think the courses we’re teaching are hard. We forget why we fell in love with the content of our discipline. It was clear and obvious to us right from the start. Calculus was easy, essays all but wrote themselves, and we couldn’t wait to learn more about this fascinating field. How could this be so difficult for students?

As usual, it was an article that got me thinking about the question. Joel Michael wonders why students find physiology hard. Based on some background literature, he suggests three interconnected reasons—I think they might be what makes all kinds of content difficult. First, it’s hard because of the nature of the discipline—it’s characteristics, how it relates to other fields, how it is studied, how the experts think and communicate about it. Second, the ways the content is taught can make it difficult. And finally, what students bring to learning the content, including prerequisite background knowledge, relevant experiences, attitudes about learning in general and beliefs about themselves as learners, can make learning something difficult.

To explore the validity of his model, Michael surveyed 63 physiology teachers, asking them first to respond to an open-ended version of the question and then having them rate subsets of reasons. The majority of faculty responses to the open-ended question did fall into the three categories. Survey results indicated that this faculty cohort believed that the nature of the discipline and what students brought to it were significantly more important than how it was taught. Interesting. Would students agree? A lot of research would question this lower significance ascribed to teaching approaches.

What makes physiology difficult for students may not be what makes your field hard, but there is great value in knowing what it is about your content that students find challenging. Would they know if you asked them? I’m not sure. It might be wise to start with faculty, but the picture is incomplete without student answers. And the whole discussion is a bit pointless if we don’t ask an even more important question: What helps students overcome the difficult aspects of learning content in your field?

Michael answers that question with a number of suggestions that are discipline specific but he does make one recommendation relevant to all of us. “We need to spend more time finding out what our students know and don’t know, and can do or not do, when they enter our classrooms.” (p. 39) There tends to be a huge disconnect between what faculty think students should know when they start a course and what they in fact do know. Often when we ask and discover how much they don’t know, we are appalled, almost sorry we asked, frustrated and perplexed. There’s already too much content to cover and now we need to fill in all these knowledge gaps?

There aren’t a lot of easy answers here. But I do think there is great merit in teachers and students considering the questions. What makes the content hard and what can teachers and students do to address these difficulties?

Please join the conversation by telling us what you teach, and what it is about that discipline that makes it hard for students to learn.

Reference: Michael, J. (2007). What makes physiology hard for students to learn? Results of a survey. Advances in Physiology Education, 31 (March), 34-40.

Curiosity is the quest for new ideas and information. Folks who are curious aren’t satisfied with what they already know or have figured out. They go after what they don’t know or can’t understand—and that missing information can become a driving need to find out. “Curiosity’s most distinguishing characteristic is its open willingness to explore….” (p. 55)

Curiosity connects with learning in two important ways. It is a source of motivation, as these descriptions indicate, and it’s powered by questions. Small children begin life intensely curious about everything and they express their curiosity with questions—enough questions to wear out even the most dedicated parent. “What makes the car work?” “Why is the sky blue?” “Where do the chipmunks sleep at night?” But that level of curiosity doesn’t last, which brings us back to education. “Inherently, we are curious from the very beginning. Although in time, education—with its focus on the delivery of knowledge, being content versus thinking driven—causes questions to recede in favor of answers.” (p. 56)

These authors think that our focus on answers and critical, competitive learning environments have a dampening effect on curiosity. For students (maybe teachers, sometimes?) questions have come to “insinuate a lack of intelligence, whereas quick answers infer the opposite.” (p. 56) Does an emphasis on critical thinking inhibit students from asking questions they worry may not be important or good enough to ask?

How do we cultivate curiosity in our students? We can start by being openly curious ourselves, asking questions of our content, not questions we can already answer, but honest queries that we’d like to be able to answer. Can we be curious about what our students know? I was talking with a graduate student recently and I noticed a pirate patch on his book bag. “What’s with the patch?” I asked. “Oh, pirates are just my thing.” “I don’t know much of anything about pirates,” I confessed. He shared several intriguing details, the most interesting being, “I start my classes by telling students stories about pirates.” His content area? Computer programming.

The authors think curiosity is cultivated by particular kinds of classroom environments. They describe places where “curiosity flourishes” as being open places “in which the dialogue, the questioning is allowed to move in any direction, driven by students’ questioning.” (p. 57) It’s a matter of following lines of inquiry where they lead rather than being dictated by the teacher’s plan for the day or the confines of the content to be covered that class period. It may be unrealistic to imagine teaching every day like this, but if a student does ask an interesting question, one voiced out of curiosity, perhaps it’s wise to take the time to see where that question might lead.

In the children’s story, curiosity killed the cat. Most of our students don’t have that worry. They are more threatened by not having enough curiosity. My old cat nonchalantly naps through just about everything these days, unless there’s a something small and furry scurrying about the house. Then he’s up, keenly interested in what it was and where it went. We need to find and strategically locate whatever it is that wakes up students’ latent curiosity. After all, curiosity is what makes learning so much fun. To happen onto something that raises questions, to want to find the answers, to pursue the missing information, to find or figure out what you didn’t know, that’s a quest that culminates with a satisfied smile and a commitment to other questions and more learning. Isn’t curiosity what makes us fall in love with learning?

Reference: Hill, M. E. and McGinnis, J. (2007). The curiosity in marketing thinking. Journal of Marketing Education, 29 (1), 52-62.

Mazur started out teaching like most of us—he lectured, pretty much all the time, until he discovered a problem. His students had learned Newton’s third law of motion—or at least they could recite it (as all physics students can). He decided to test their understanding of it with a conceptual problem involving a collision between a heavy truck and a light car. To his surprise, his students couldn’t answer the problem or they struggled mightily, not only with this but virtually any conceptual problem he gave them.

It seems the students were memorizing the material but not understanding it, and so Mazur decided to change his instructional approach. He replaced teaching by telling with teaching by questioning. He now structures class time around short conceptual questions. He starts with the question which students must first answer individually, then they report their answers and discuss them with each other, explaining, defending and questioning their answers. Mazur (and teaching assistants) circle the classroom asking questions and otherwise guiding student discussions. He might offer a brief presentation but students are the ones solving the problems.

Interestingly, Mazur started using this method of teaching long before it was trendy. In fact, when people discuss the reform of science education, Mazur is frequently mentioned as one of the first who found a better way. And it is a better way, as documented by multiple studies conducted by Mazur and his colleagues and by other college faculty who use the approach or variations of it. Mazur writes, “Data obtained in my class and in classes of colleagues worldwide, in a wide range of academic settings and a wide range of disciplines, show that learning gains nearly triple with an approach that focuses on the student and interactive learning… Most important, students not only perform better on a variety of conceptual assessments, but also improve their traditional problem-solving skills.” (p. 51) His article includes references to this research.

Mazur admits in the article that he lectured on for some time, ignoring signs that there was a problem. Of course, the problem was not with the lectures. His student ratings (which no doubt asked whether he was organized, offered clear explanations, responded to questions and treated students with respect) were high. He lectured well, but students didn’t learn well from listening. When faced with a problem that needed understanding, what they memorized didn’t help them find their way to a solution.

Unfortunately, this continues to be a problem for many students and in many classes. If you don’t think it’s a problem with students in your classes (and it may not be), then dare to do what Mazur did: test your students’ conceptual understanding. See if they can apply what they’ve been taught and if their exam scores document that they’ve learned.

And if they can’t, you can start by blaming the students (although that’s not as easy if you teach at an institution like Harvard). Students are ultimately responsible for what and how they learn. But teachers influence that process in highly significant ways. When I took an undergraduate nonmajors chemistry course with 20 beginning students (part of a learning communities program) in which I was designated the “master learner,” I resolved not to memorize content but to truly understand it. I wanted to be a good model. But the content came so fast. It was all new and very different from anything I’d learned before. I didn’t have time to figure everything out and so started writing down things I didn’t understand on note cards. By the time the first exam rolled around, I had way more note cards than I could get through, even if I pulled an all nighter. So I memorized like mad and did just fine on the exam. Needless to say, I didn’t have much luck persuading the students that we may have done alright on the exam, but we hadn’t really learned the material. They were fine with memorizing and forgetting.

Reference: Mazur, E. Farewell, Lecture? Science, 323 (2 January, 2009), 50-51.

I could see that one elevator was on the third floor and the other on the fifth, but neither was moving. Well, maybe someone else would come—not likely, it was just after 8 a.m. and not the time you’d expect to see a lot of student traffic in the library. The call button had to be somewhere … I must be losing my mind. Why couldn’t I see it? I was going to have to ask. Reluctantly I walked over to the check out desk and heard myself saying, “I know this is an incredibly stupid question, I’m sorry I have to ask, but where is the call button for the elevator?” The person pointed it out. I never felt more senile.

The experience reminded me of Stuart Karabenick’s (and colleagues’) excellent work on help-seeking. We often complain that students (particularly those who need it) don’t ask for help. Karabenick’s research and my experience make clear that it isn’t always easy to ask for help, and the stupider you feel or the more confused you are the more difficult it is to ask. In my case, I had to ask a student working at the check out desk. If you’re a student, you often have to ask the teacher, that venerable source of information who knows everything in the world about the material and thinks it easy! It takes courage to ask and we shouldn’t forget that.

Karabenick’s work (which includes a variety of studies, books and edited anthologies on the topic) verifies what we all suspect. The students who most need the help are not the ones most likely to ask for help. But his work establishes other interesting aspects of help-seeking. For example, the nature of the classroom itself affects the decision to ask for help as well as the kind of help sought. If it’s a classroom that emphasizes mastery goals, as in learning the material so it is really understood, students are more likely to seek help and they want help that goes beyond finding out the “right” answer. On the other hand, if it’s a classroom where students are regularly compared to and with other students, then students are less likely to seek help and what they want is not focused on understanding the material but finding the answers they need to out perform other students.

Of course, how the teacher raises the issue of getting extra help also makes a difference. Struggling students don’t need to be confronted in public. Embarrassment doesn’t make it easier to seek help. Better to convey the message privately with a note on the back page of the paper or exam, in an email or when you can talk to the student without others present. It also makes a difference when the teacher presents extra help as something beneficial for every one. There is always more to be learned and more ways to learn it. If you’re doing something well or have the potential to do it well, get some help and you may well excel.

Is sugar coating the message necessary? Yes, because it’s not about what you have to say; it’s about how you say it. Teachers have a responsibility to let students know that they are doing poorly in a course and need help. But that message can be delivered in ways that increase the likelihood that students will stop avoiding the issue and start getting the help they need. Just like bad tasting medicine, the sugar on the outside makes it much easier to take.

Here’s references to a couple of Karabenick’s studies of help-seeking in college classrooms.
Karabenick, S. A. (2004). Perceived achievement goal structure and college student help seeking. Journal of Education Psychology, 96 (3), 569-581.

Karabenick, S. A. (2003). Seeking help in large college classes: A person-centered approach. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 23 (1), 37-58.

For example, it’s one thing for physics students to know how to apply the equation F = ma when they’re studying the chapter on Newton’s Second Law. It’s quite another when they’re taking a cumulative exam and need to know when and how to apply the different formulas swirling in their heads based on the various problems presented.

Taking these students from a rather superficial knowledge structure to a richer, more meaningful knowledge structure requires an instructor who truly understands the learning process and then works to create the optimal climate for learning, says Michele DiPietro, PhD, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Kennesaw State University.

During the recent online seminar 7 Learner-Centered Principles to Improve Your Teaching, DiPietro distilled more than 50 years of instructional research into seven key principles, and explained how understanding each of those principles can enhance teaching.

The seven principles are:
1. Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.

2. How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.

3. Students’ motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.

4. To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.

5. Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning.

6. Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.

7. To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

If you’re just getting started with learner-centered teaching, DiPietro offers the following advice.

“My first suggestion is to start where the bottlenecks in the discipline are,” he said. “What topics in your course are harder for the students? Why is that? Are students lacking requisite prior knowledge? Do they need more practice of certain basic skills? Do they bring misconceptions to the table? If you don’t know, collect some data. Once you get a handle on the reasons why, start bridging those gaps with appropriate interventions. Work incrementally. Get comfortable with a few changes in your teaching first, and then expand to others, until you reach a tipping point. … Becoming more learner-centered inevitably means giving up some of the control in the classroom. This can be daunting, but it can also free up opportunities for more personal and meaningful learning for the students.”

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Case in point: active learning. Not so long ago in a workshop discussion, I asked for definitions. I gave participants a couple of minutes to think or jot notes. Here’s some of what I got, “students doing” “activities that engage students” “passive learning is an oxymoron” “teaching that gets student involved with the content” “when students participate or do group work.” Although similar, I would say that all those descriptors are different. None of them are bad or wrong; most of them are pretty superficial when compared to a definition like the one for active learning that appears in The Greenwood Dictionary of Education.

Greenwood defines active learning as “The process of having students engage in some activity that forces them to reflect upon ideas and how they are using those ideas. Requiring students to regularly assess their own degree of understanding and skill at handling concepts or problems in a particular discipline. The attainment of knowledge by participating or contributing. The process of keeping students mentally, and often physically, active in their learning through activities that involve them in gathering information, thinking and problem solving.”

I’m not proposing this as the “right” “best” or “only” definition for active learning, but I am proposing that it’s a good deal more specific than most of us would offer. Now, if we sat down and thought about active learning, if we talked about it with colleagues, I’m pretty sure that the definitions we’d develop would rival this one. But my point is we can regularly use terms like this without having done that careful thinking.

Carefully crafted learning experiences
There are some things about this definition that I do like. Sometimes we think active learning is “activity for the sake of activity” without being mindful that it’s equally about what students are doing. According to this definition they are engaged in activities designed to encourage reflection, designed to confront them with their knowledge and skill levels and designed to get them interacting with information. That’s not just any old activity—that’s a carefully crafted learning experience.

Most faculty know that active learning is important even though many still lecture pretty much exclusively. Most will even go so far as to admit that students learn better when they are active, not passive. And almost all faculty report that they use active learning. But I’m hoping this discussion is making clear that there is active learning and then there is active learning.

Student engagement exists along a continuum. I think the Greenwood definition is active learning at a highly engaged and highly effective level. The nice thing about a continuum is that things can be moved along it. So, if you don’t have time at the moment to create one of those carefully crafted learning experiences, you can take an active learning strategy you currently use, say participation, and make it more active. You can do that by asking a good, thought provoking question, following it with 30 seconds of silence and follow that with two minutes during which students share their thoughts with each other before discussing the answer with the whole class. Or, you could pause after presenting a chunk of content and tell students you don’t intend to proceed until they’ve asked at least two questions about the material. You might jot those questions on the board, type them into the computer and then let the class take a crack at answering. Write down the essence of their answers and then discuss the merits of their various replies.

Now it’s your turn. What are some ways you promote active learning in your classes? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.

Often it happens when two people are very much alike or have lots in common. That’s one of the reasons it isn’t always easy for professors to establish rapport with students—sometimes there’s a big age difference; others times it’s having few (if any) shared interests. However, there are good reasons for faculty to work on establishing rapport with students. The article referenced below lists outcomes, all established by research, that result when rapport is established.

Here’s a selection from the larger list that does seem particularly relevant and that is supported by some research involving teachers and students.

• Higher motivation—When students feel rapport with their teachers and feel that their teacher’s personalities are something like their own, motivation is higher.
• Increased comfort—When there is rapport, students tend to answer more freely and with a greater degree of frankness.
• Increased quality—In a degree program, when students feel rapport with faculty, their perceptions of the quality of that program increase.
• Satisfaction—Rapport leads to satisfaction—supported by much research, including research done in classrooms. When students report having rapport with the instructor, their satisfaction with the course increases.
• Enhanced communication—As rapport grows, so does understanding and comprehension. Teachers and students understand each other better when there is rapport between them.
• Trust—Sometimes trust is necessary for rapport to develop. But trust can also be an outcome. Once rapport has been established, trust between parties grows.

Rapport does not result in learning, but it certainly helps to create conditions conducive to learning—things like higher motivation, increased comfort, and enhanced communication. Teaching doesn’t always result in learning either, but, like rapport, it is one of those factors that can contribute positively to learning.

Five factors for building rapport
The researchers in this article queried business faculty about their perceptions of rapport—what must a teacher do to establish it with students? Five factors appeared almost twice as often as others.

1. Respect. Teachers and students must show respect for each other, for the learning process, and for the institution where it is occurring.
2. Approachability. Students have to feel comfortable coming to faculty and faculty must be willing to speak with students, after class, during office hours, via email, on campus.
3. Open communication. Faculty must be honest. There needs to be consistency between what faculty say and what they do.
4. Caring. Faculty must care about students; they must see and respond to them as individuals. They also need to care about learning and show that they want students to learn the material.
5. Positive attitude. Faculty should have a sense of humor and be open to points of view other than their own.

Rapport is not something developed by announcement. Rapport is developed by actions—it results from things teachers do. The good news, as demonstrated by the content of this article, is that we know empirically what teachers can do to establish rapport. The even better news is that the actions required aren’t all that difficult to execute.

Reference: Granitz, N. A., Koernig, S. K., and Harich, K. R. (2009). Now it’s personal: Antecedents and outcomes of rapport between business faculty and their students. Journal of Marketing Education, 31 (1), 52-65.

Reprinted from Rapport: Why Having It Makes a Difference, The Teaching Professor, volume 23, number 6, page 2.

The rationale behind this approach rests on the assumption that if a teacher loses control of a class, it is very hard to regain the upper hand. In these cases, student behaviors have compromised the climate for learning so seriously that the teacher has an ethical responsibility to intervene and reassert control.

But these examples are also extreme and, in my experience, rare. Far more common are classroom environments where the teacher is so in control that students passively perform what look like learning tasks (taking notes, feigning attention, etc.). Lately I’ve been wondering how much control is necessary to set the conditions for learning and whether that amount of control doesn’t need to be offset by a certain amount of freedom so that students can make the learning experience meaningful to them. And then there’s the question as to how teacher control affects the motivation to learn? Do students learn more or learn better in classrooms that are rule bound?

More fundamentally, I’ve been wondering if those assumptions about needing to establish control at the outset are supported by evidence, experiential or otherwise. What happens if you don’t? Do students automatically rise up and take control? Why do I have such trouble imagining students doing that? They seem so beaten down already.

More sinister are questions of whether teachers don’t benefit more from the control they assert than students do, even though most faculty I know would go to their graves arguing that they only control for the students’ sake. A tightly controlled classroom environment certainly makes for safer, saner teaching. If all potential challenges to authority are headed off at the pass, then the teacher can devote full attention to the content, and isn’t that where the teacher’s expertise really shines? And so the classroom becomes a place that showcases teaching more than learning?

My suspicion is that most teachers overreact to potential threats. Why? Do they question whether they can respond successfully to challenges? Are they in denial about the vulnerabilities that are inherently a part of teaching? Do they like this feeling of control? Depending on the teacher, all these answers may be possibilities, but I think for more teachers, it’s a matter of not trusting students or having lost faith in all of them because of the actions of a few.

It is true that students unused to the rigors of college learning look for the loopholes. They opt for the easy way—so if the teacher stands idly by, they will not demand much of themselves or their classmates. Most of today’s college students aren’t going to do well in an environment where there are no rules, little structure, and low expectations, but the question is how much do they and their teachers need and how is the learning environment compromised when teachers err on the side of rigid control?

Excerpted from How Much Control for How Much Learning? The Teaching Professor, March 2008.

The problem, of course, is that regardless of the classroom management technique you try, it is virtually impossible to prevent cell phones from ringing in class. They ring despite strongly worded statements in the syllabus, regular announcements in class, and threats of various sorts. Well, they don’t actually ring, they beep out jingles, tunes, and other electronic sounds.

Ringing phones in college classrooms are distracting, and faculty, probably because we didn’t grow up using cell phones, seem particularly annoyed when they do go off in class. If you want to generate discussion in the faculty mailroom, ask several folks standing there what they do about the problem. For many, there’s something of a power issue involved here. Despite policies against cell phones in the syllabus, or announcements by the teacher that they must be turned off, right in the middle of an important point, one goes off. Every one hears the phone and watches as someone (who is usually quite embarrassed) retrieves and silences it.

So what should a faculty member do when the inevitable occurs? Confiscate the phone? Accost the offender? Wail and carry on about how students show no respect? The problem with these loud and powerful responses is that most of the time they don’t prevent the problem from recurring.

It seems more prudent not to make a mountain out of a molehill. That doesn’t mean molehills have to be tolerated. Their offensiveness should indeed be pointed out. But when the distraction occurs, perhaps there is silence and then an attempt to regroup. “Now, where were we?” “What’s the last thing you wrote in your notes?” “Do you understand what I was trying to explain?” The disruption becomes an opportunity to review and connect with what students are (or are not) understanding. This prevents the disruption from doing even more harm when it not only distracts but results in an unpleasant exchange that threatens the climate for learning.

Editor’s Note: On Thursday, we’ll highlight one professor’s creative response to cell phones ringing in class.

Reference: Campbell, S. (2006). Perceptions of mobile phones in college classrooms: Ringing, cheating, and classroom policies. Communication Education, 55 (3), 280-294.

Excerpted from Cell Phones Do Distract in Class, The Teaching Professor, March 2007.

He also notes the lack of objection raised by students to these harshly stated demands. “Students don’t seem to be offended by being ordered around in course syllabi.” (p. 52) Could this be because they don’t read course syllabi?

Troubled by the rude tone and detailed legalism apparent in so many syllabi, Singham searches for the cause and concludes that “it is likely that the authoritarian syllabus is just the visible symptom of a deeper underlying problem, the breakdown of trust in the student-teacher relationship.” (p. 52)

Among the likely causes of the breakdown, he credits the creeping intrusion of local and national legislation into the classroom—things like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act as well as many institutional policies and rules. He recognizes the need for both but believes that common sense and judgment should be the driving force behind making classrooms civil places conducive to learning. “My concern is that trust, respect, and judgment are being squeezed out by an increasingly adversarial relationship between teachers and students.” (p. 53)

His analysis leads him to another likely culprit: the amount of power a faculty member typically wields. No one questions their right to set the rules for every aspect of classroom decorum and everyone expects students to live by those rules. The power is nearly absolute and, as has been wisely observed, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unfortunately, many faculty use their power not for the benefit of students, but to protect themselves against any and all potential challenges to that authority. Singham now gets personal in his analysis. He looks at the syllabus for his large 200-student physics course and recounts how the list of rules grew year by year, driven by their own internal logic. A student violated an unstated rule (by not proofreading written work, for example) and the next year a rule demanding careful editing was added to the syllabus.

Singham describes where this process took him: “I began to think that I could create a rule to achieve whatever I wanted.” (p. 54) But his analysis led him to quite a different conclusion. “I discovered that there were important things that I just could not do with my syllabus. I could not make students care about the work, be creative and original, be considerate of others, or write or speak well. All I could do was force them to do very specific things.” (p. 54) And from this discovery, he made his way to the most important insight: “I realized what I should have known all along, that learning is an inherently voluntary act that you can no more force than you can force someone to love you. Authoritarianism and fostering a love of learning just don’t go together. If they did, the best learning should occur in prison education programs, where the ‘students’ can be coerced to do almost anything.” (p. 55)

So when the opportunity to teach a small seminar course for sophomores presented itself, Singham decided to try teaching it without a syllabus. He recounts how he and the class jointly created a kind of de-facto syllabus several weeks after the course began, and how well it worked. He acknowledges when colleagues query him about how he would handle students who consistently turned in late papers (no one in the class did) that he has to face those problems individually, resolving them on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis. The approach he took with this class does not produce a fail-safe system.

But Singham believes it creates a better climate for learning—one that prevents faculty and students from becoming adversaries. This is the relationship he proposes instead: “…good neighbors in a small community. The classroom works best when students and teachers perceive it as a place where there is a continuing conversation among interested people…A sense of community is not created by rules and laws but by a sense of mutual respect and tolerance. Good neighborliness cannot be legislated—it can only be learned by example and experience, and it flourishes in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance of difference.” (p. 57)

What makes this article so good is Singham’s honest appraisal of the all the issues. Are his students ready for this much freedom and responsibility? Will they take advantage of the situation and avoid doing serious work? “The possibility that my students may not be ready for democracy worries me a little, but the thought that they should be ready for and accepting of authoritarianism troubles me a great deal more.” (p. 57)

Reference: Singham, M. (2005). Moving away from the authoritarian classroom. Change, May/June, pp. 51–57.