Asking the Big Questions in Learning Design

I’ve enjoyed having vital conversations about teaching and learning at a rich variety of educational development opportunities this May, including the New England Faculty Development Consortium conference, Duke University’s 2022 Pandemic Pedagogy Research Symposium: From Innovation to Transformation, and the Perusall Exchange, an online event for innovators in social learning.

Each of these conferences featured keynote addresses from major figures in the field of higher education pedagogy. Here are key takeaways from three leading thinkers for you to bring into your teaching practice!

Eric Mazur and Angela Duckworth

If you’re not a student anymore, what are you doing in education?

The Perusall exchanged opened with a forum led by Eric Mazur, the Harvard physicist who pioneered peer instruction and helped develop Perusall, a free collaborative reading and social annotation tool which is fully integrated with Wentworth’s Brightspace learning management system.

If you’re interested in learning how to use Perusall to engage your students in meaningful discourse about a reading, problem set, or a video, contact us at teach@wit.edu, and an instructional designer will be happy to support you.

Mazur interviewed Angela Duckworth, UPenn educational psychologist and the author of “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”

Mazur and Duckworth discussed the importance of teaching skills, not just content, in ways that empower students to apply what they learn in the real world with immediacy. Duckworth encouraged professors and student to think outside the box and try innovative pedagogical techniques to engage students, saying “nothing great in this world has been created by staying in your lane.” She also challenged faculty to be lifelong learners, asking: “If you’re not a student anymore, what are you doing in education?”

Ken Bain

If I don’t fail, I don’t learn anything.

Ken Bain’s keynote “Building Super Courses to Foster Deep Learning” drew on his 2021 book “Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning,” which the Teaching and Learning Collaborative team read together. I have found Bain’s wisdom from decades in higher education extremely useful and actionable in my course design collaboration with Wentworth faculty. Bain is also the author of the bestselling books “What the Best College Teachers Do” (2004) and “What the Best College Students Do” (2012).

In laying the groundwork for how professors can create “super courses,” Bain argued that students want meaningful experiences that authentically spark intrinsic motivation. When students truly see how a given course will positively impact their lives, they will go to extraordinary lengths to get the most out of the learning experiences that faculty create.

Bain stressed the importance of explicitly promoting growth mindset, quoting Nobel laureate chemist Dudley Herschbach, who succinctly described his research method thusly: “If I don’t fail, I don’t learn anything.” Just like scientists, students need to be able to safely try, fail, learn from their experiences, and try again in order to construct new knowledge.

Bain’s advice to faculty was to start by asking these two foundational course design questions:

1. “What are the existing mental models that your students will bring in to your course that you would like them to either question or change?”
2. “How can you put your students in situations where their existing mental models don’t work, and they care enough to investigate why?”

In such educational experiences, students become intrinsically motivated to actively inquire and seek out new ways of understanding how the world works.

If you’re interested in designing a super course, contact us at teach@wit.edu, and an instructional designer will be happy to partner with you.

Susan Blum

Students in my classes have shifted their focus from getting good grades to meaningful and authentic learning.

The New England Faculty Development Consortium’s keynote was delivered by Susan Blum, Notre Dame professor of anthropology and editor of the groundbreaking 2020 book “Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead).”

Blum discussed why grading is often the end of thinking, how grading interferes with deep learning, and how traditional grading practices are incompatible with equitable approaches to teaching and learning.

She described “ungrading” as a process of pedagogical inquiry that calls conventional assessment practices into question and continually searches for educational practices that work better to promote meaningful engagement and lasting learning.

Blum identified two keys to creating ungrading approaches to meet the needs of your unique context: student reflection and choice.

Reflection as feedback

Blum argued that “giving grades as feedback is shouting into the void.” Instead, create learning contexts in which students are empowered to ask their professors for actionable feedback on specific elements of their work that they genuinely want to improve. Additionally, build in organic ways for students to get feedback through constructive collaboration with peers. And have students give themselves feedback through structured reflections and regular self-assessment.

Make explicit how what students are doing is contributing to authentic learning. Because if a student’s goal is learning, they can’t cheat, but if their goal is merely getting a good grade, cheating is a perfectly rational strategy. If students are only accountable to you, that may not be enough to keep them motivated, but if they are accountable to their peers and to themselves, they have powerful reasons to persevere through a growth-filled learning experience.

Since you ultimately have to give students a final grade, turn grading into a formative dialogue that prompts students to make meaning out of their experience in your course. Ask them to self-assess and justify the grade they feel they deserve. Have a genuine conversation with them in which you give them constructive feedback and reach consensus on a grade based on their areas of strength and areas for improvement.

By de-centering grades and prioritizing actionable feedback and reflective practice in your course structure, you create fertile ground for lasting learning.

Student choice

People inherently love learning new things and developing new abilities, but the toxic culture of schooling and grading can beat the joy of human curiosity out of students. However, it is possible to create a classroom culture in which learning happens as an intrinsically motivated collaborative inquiry.

One strategy to promote this is giving students choice in how to show what they know. Try offering format freedom, in which students can choose a creative way to demonstrate their newfound knowledge and skills. Examples include writing a collection of letters, creating a video or a podcast, crafting a piece of artwork with an accompanying explanation.

Blum shared an example of format freedom from her Notre Dame colleague Cara Ocobock’s anthropology course: one student created dating profiles of our ancestral hominids, while another wrote and performed a song conveying the same information. These self-designed assignments are both more enjoyable for students to create, far more interesting for faculty to receive, and foster deeper, more personally relevant learning than traditional assessments like quizzes.

Blum shared that since she began incorporating ungrading principles into her course design, the focus in her classes “has shifted from getting good grades toward meaningful and authentic learning.”

If you’re interested in rethinking how assessment works in your course to promote intrinsic motivation, listen to TLC’s CoLab podcast episode: “21 Strategies to Boost Student Motivation.”

As always, feel free to contact us at teach@wit.edu, and an instructional designer will be happy to collaborate with you.

Joshua Luckens is an instructional designer at Wentworth’s Teaching & Learning Collaborative. You can reach him at luckensj@wit.edu or connect with him on LinkedIn.