If you are anything like me, the new year is always a time of great anticipation – new possibilities and opportunities. This year, I am really excited to focus my blog on the art and science of teaching and learning. I’m going to share with you lessons learned from my time in the classroom and as an administrator. I’ll talk about tools I have used quite successfully in the college classroom as well as techniques we have used in Academic Support Programs to create significant learning experiences. I hope you will join me on this journey and regard these posts as an opportunity to learn something new or reflect on how you might evolve your current practice to improve student learning.
The first topic I thought I would share with you is the idea of course redesign to improve student learning. K-12 educators do a good job evolving their classes to improve student learning. They are taught how to do so and why. In college, few faculty are trained beyond their discipline even if they are charged with teaching. While the K-12 system has been under the microscope for decades with respect to student success, graduation rates, and performing at grade level, colleges and universities have not been under the same level of scrutiny until recent years.
Four years ago, our institution began a course redesign project with other Michigan institutions with the guidance of the John Gardner Foundation. The project began with an assessment of our high enrollment gateway courses. We then determined which courses with high enrollment also had high DFWI rates (how many students earned D’s, F’s, withdrew from the course or finished with an incomplete grade). Alarmingly, we discovered that not only did some of our gateway courses have DFWI rates near 50% across sections, but in several of those sections the DFWI rates for first-generation and/ or Pell eligible students was as high as almost 70% in some classes. Our core project team then set out to recruit departments with high DFWI rates to participate in an analysis of the course curriculum. This process took over a year as we looked at course outcomes across sections. Several faculty volunteered to redesign their courses in an attempt to improve student outcomes.
I’ll examine the actual course redesign process, best practices and lessons learned in my next several posts. For now, I hope that you will take the time to dig into the data on the courses you teach to see if you can find areas for improvement.
