On a freezing February evening, as the snow from a recent blizzard lay in massive drifts around my campus, I bundled into a small classroom with two dozen students in Professor Cary LeBlanc's upper-level marketing class at Assumption College. I was there to observe an example of what you might describe as big teaching: large-scale, revolutionary, innovative types of courses that completely break from the mold of traditional college and university teaching and that represent the opposite end of the spectrum from small teaching. As class began, I was treated almost immediately to the kind of strategy favored by big teachers like LeBlanc. This was the second class period of the course, a seminar that met for 2.5 hours once per week. During the first class session, LeBlanc had introduced students to the course, given them a draft syllabus, and then put the students in the groups and requested that the groups come to the next class period with suggestions for how they wanted the class to run. Two groups were given the assignment of making changes to the course schedule; another group was asked to look at the assessment scheme; still another focused on how students would communicate with each other and with LeBlanc throughout the semester. The class period I observed began with LeBlanc reminding the students of the purpose of this exercise: “The intent of the discussion we will have in this particular class is to establish a more comprehensive course, one that builds on the basic foundation of the syllabus, while incorporating student changes to enhance the experience and gain buy-in and commitment.” He later noted that he expected responsibility for the course structure to be at an 80–20 percent split; he was responsible for the frame and most of the final decisions, but he wanted at least 20 percent of the final structure to come from them. The presentations and discussion began slowly, as students initially seemed unsure of how much he really expected them to contribute. By the time the class reached the 1-hour mark, though, the conversation had burst into life. Students not only had lots of opinions about how they wanted the course to run but also had thoughtful, interesting, and intelligent suggestions for how to maximize their learning within the broader framework LeBlanc had provided.
Ceding this kind of control of one's course to students constitutes one form of big teaching—but is small potatoes compared with the real big teaching that was happening within LeBlanc's course, the specific subject matter of which was microfinancing. Although it comes in many forms, microfinancing most commonly refers to an economic practice of providing small business loans to individuals in developing economies to help them gain financial independence by starting their own small businesses (Banerjee and Dufflo 2011, pp. 157–181). Targeted toward individuals who normally might not have access to capital, microfinancing programs seek to empower the budding entrepreneurs of developing economies. The low-interest loans offered by such programs may amount to only hundreds of dollars (or less) but could be used to purchase such basic supplies as sewing machines for a collective of rural women who can then begin making and mending clothes. LeBlanc had spent the past several years working toward an innovative way to teach students about microfinancing. A former business professional, with an entrepreneurial streak and experience in a variety of industries, LeBlanc eventually decided that the best way to teach about microfinancing programs would be to enlist his students to create one.
This heady prospect was made possible by the fact that the religious order that sponsors our college has members who live and work in a range of developing economies. LeBlanc reached out to the congregation in the Philippines and asked them whether they could help locate members of their community who could use such microloans and eventually could help administer the funds to those who would receive the loans. LeBlanc's class would then act as the U.S. partner in the program: students would publicize and market the microloan program on our campus and within the local community, which would help the congregation raise the funds to finance the first round of loans; the class would make decisions about loan terms and rates and other logistics of the program; finally, the class would help decide who would receive funding from the applicants in the Philippines. Students would, in short, participate in the process of launching a real-world microloan program and changing the lives of men, women, and children halfway around the world. In the process, they would educate themselves about microfinancing, hone their business skills of development and marketing and communications, and help establish a course that LeBlanc hoped would continue for many years to come.
Now that's what I call big teaching. Giving students the opportunity to make a positive difference in the world, immersing them in real-world problems and activities, and forcing them to think creatively and think together about all of the logistics of the course and the program itself—these elements have the potential to create an incredibly powerful learning experience for LeBlanc's students. If you look carefully at almost any institution of higher education in the United States and perhaps even around the world, you will find at least one or two instructors engaged in these kinds of big teaching endeavors, pushing the boundaries of what we can accomplish within the framework of a conventional college course and opening up new pathways for all of us to consider. What you will also find, when you take that careful look at the work of these instructors, is that they have devoted an extraordinary amount of time and effort to these teaching innovations, often funded by internal or external grants or with release time or other forms of financial or professional support. I asked LeBlanc, for example, to send me a one-paragraph summary of the work he had put into the course's development. With apologies, he sent me a two-page, single-spaced document describing the 2-year odyssey of creating the course, from its original conception in 2013 through his trip to the Philippines to visit possible recipients of microloans in winter 2015. Just reading his account of what he had endured and accomplished to establish the course was exhausting.
I have been arguing all throughout this book that you should not have to expend that level of time and effort to create powerful learning experiences for your students. The strategies that fall under the umbrella of small teaching can begin enhancing the learning of your students when you step into class tomorrow. I also know, however, that learning and thinking about teaching can be like popping the lid on Pandora's box and that some instructors who start small with retrieval practice or self-explaining or adopting growth language in the classroom will decide that they want to explore further and will want a glimpse down some of the pathways that have been opened up by teachers like LeBlanc. My own trajectory as an instructor has followed that model. I first dipped a toe into the literature on teaching and learning for an eminently practical reason: I wanted to figure out how I could get quiet students to participate more actively in the discussions I was having in class. I read about some great techniques for doing so, but I also discovered lots of other ways to engage students in a classroom besides whole-class discussions. Eventually I began to wonder about the purpose of holding discussions in class and how that connected to the larger purpose of students being in college in the first place. The questions raised by those reflections led me to explore some big teaching alternatives, most recently service learning, about which you will hear more in a moment. The point here is that although teaching innovation can begin small, as I have been arguing throughout this book, it can also expand. In this final chapter, then, we will focus on expanding: expanding your own view of what student learning might look like in your classroom and how you might design and conduct your courses. We will accomplish this by considering three big teaching pathways that strike me as logical extensions of what we have considered thus far and that I believe have staying power in the fast-changing landscape of higher education teaching and learning.
Since each of the following models represents an entirely different approach to pedagogy, the principles will appear just after the models rather than in a separate final section. Following the three major models and principles, you'll find suggestions for resources that will help you continue to expand your thinking about teaching big and small.
An outstanding source of pathways to big (and small) teaching is the ABLConnect database at Harvard University (http://ablconnect.harvard.edu), which serves as a gathering place of research, examples, and ideas for pedagogical innovation in higher education. ABLConnect distinguishes between two types of learning activities collected within its searchable database: active learning, a term with which you are likely familiar and that would cover just about every teaching strategy described in this book; and activity-based learning, which “involves fieldwork, public service, community-based research and internships in conjunction with in-class work” (ABLConnect). Cary LeBlanc's class constitutes an intensive example of an activity-based learning course. Such courses identify a large-scale activity that somehow connects to the discipline, the completion of which will require students to gain the knowledge and skills to be taught in the course. In LeBlanc's course, the creation and administration of the microloan program would constitute that large-scale activity. To do that, however, the students have to study marketing and development principles that will help them understand how to raise funds for the program. To accomplish that objective, they are engaging with course readings, meeting with development professionals both in and outside of class who will share their expertise with the students, and of course working under the guidance of LeBlanc, who will coach them and provide feedback and assess them along the way. The activity around which LeBlanc built the course requires them to master the core knowledge and skills of the discipline.
Activity-based learning does not have to extend throughout the entire semester, though. In my creative nonfiction course, an upper-level writing seminar, I have had students engage in an activity-based learning exercise that lasts around a week. It happens when we are working in the unit of the course that is dedicated to writing about places, with the travel essay as our model. In small groups, the students are charged with visiting some hidden places on campus—places that students might not normally think to go. They bring their notes from these visits in class, and we spend two class periods coauthoring, as a class, an essay on the hidden places on our campus for the college newspaper. I contact the editor beforehand to arrange for publication of the piece, which means that from the start of this exercise the students know that their work will appear in print and that we have a deadline to meet. We use a shared Google doc to create the jointly authored essay, with each group submitting its section and then all of us editing it together to create a smooth, consistent style. The energy and interest that I observe during those two class periods is enough to convince me of the power of activity-based learning and to continue to reflect on how it might find a place in my classes. Creating this activity was no 2-year odyssey for me; it took only an e-mail to the editor of the newspaper, a little bit of technological work to create and manage the Google doc, and a single week's worth of class time.
One connection you can see between both LeBlanc's course and my much briefer example is that our activities extended the work of students out of the confines of our classroom and into a more public space: LeBlanc's students are giving loans to real people, not connected with the college, and my students are writing for the entire campus audience. My intuitive sense is that if you can find an activity that will require students to prepare or showcase their work for a public audience, this will help them see connections between your discipline and your course and the world around them. This can help boost motivation by invoking larger, more public purposes for their course work. But creating such public connections is not a requirement of activity-based learning. You could very well create an activity that students completed entirely within the course—and even within a single class session. The ABLConnect site features an excellent example of such an activity from a course on ancient Mesoamerican civilizations from the University of Oklahoma, in which the students learned about the challenges of food gathering and preparation in ancient civilizations by preparing tortillas and hot chocolate using traditional (i.e., long and time-consuming) methods in a single class period. The end product didn't make it out of the class, as instructor Christine Warinner noted: “They ate the result of their labors.” However, they both thoroughly enjoyed the activity and learned an important lesson from it: “Students were surprised by how hard it is to grind maize into masa, and that helped put into perspective the gendered labor of ancient Mesoamerica, in which women were expected to grind maize for many hours every day” (ABLConnect). So activity-based learning can encompass small, internal, single-class activities like this one as easily as it can encompass large-scale projects like the creation of a microloan program in the Philippines.
Service learning is the generous cousin of activity-based learning and represents a pathway that I believe more and more instructors should consider for their courses. For me, service learning helps provide a convincing answer to an increasingly difficult question that students and parents and the public are asking those of us who still teach on brick-and-mortar campuses: in the age of information and connection, with the costs of traditional colleges and universities soaring endlessly out of sight, why are we still asking students to come learn on our campuses? What special benefits do students gain from sitting in your classes and living on your campus that they cannot obtain from a hacked or DIY education obtained at a fraction of the cost? One of the best—if not the best—answers we can provide to that question is that college and university campuses can provide positive contributions to the local, regional, and global communities in which they are situated. College faculty, staff, and students constitute an incredibly rich resource of intellectual capital and youthful energy, and that combination has tremendous potential to make a positive difference to the world—not just after the students graduate but also while they are on campus. Of course, the main purpose of college remains educating its students, but if it can accomplish that purpose while also providing valuable services to the community, why not? And what if it turned out that providing valuable services to the community turned out to be one of the most effective ways of educating students? We have seen already how the idea of a self-transcendent purpose to learning can prove a powerful source of motivation to students; service learning helps inspire such self-transcendent motivation in college and university courses.
Studies of community service learning have demonstrated that student benefit dramatically in a variety of ways from putting their learning in context of service to the community. Dan Butin, in the introduction to a special issue of the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2006), provided a nice overview of the many potential benefits of the approach:
By linking theory with practice and classrooms with communities, service learning provides real-world exposure and engagement with meaningful local and global issues through concrete and ameliorative practices. An ever-expanding body of research validates the positive impact of service learning upon a host of academic, social, and cultural variables. Service learning increases youth's civic knowledge and political engagement, strengthens openness to diversity and difference, and promotes a better and deeper understanding of course content… Such results appear to be sustained even years after the actual service learning has occurred. (p. 1)
Who wouldn't want these outcomes for their students? I have experimented with service learning in two separate courses now and have seen some of these outcomes in my own students. It hasn't been perfect, as I am still feeling my way through the logistics—a point that is probably true with any big teaching initiative and is one of the reasons that big teaching transformations can seem intimidating to instructors. You can almost guarantee a semester or two of feeling your way through it, waiting for the positive outcomes described by Butin to emerge.
Still, the results I have seen have been positive enough that I will be continuing down this pathway in the future—as are many instructors on my own campus and across the country. Although there are numerous possible models for designing courses with service learning, two basic ones will help give you a sense of what service learning typically entails. In both cases, it should go without saying that the service activity connects to some integral component of the course. In this way the students are learning content and developing skills both in their preparation for their service, in the practicing of it, and in their analysis of it and reflections on it afterward. The first model resembles activity-based learning in that students spend class time preparing for some large-scale event or activity—the primary difference being that this activity serves the community in some way. So students in a course on community politics might volunteer together at a Habitat for Humanity build site one weekend, for example, or participate in a daylong clean-up of a local park. Students in a special education course might work with a local school to run a community outreach and educational event for students with disabilities. In the second model, students are instead required to complete a specific number of community service hours with local organizations (selected by the instructors as relevant to the course content) as part of their required course work. The students complete these hours throughout the semester on their own. Those students in the community politics course, in this model, would be required to complete 15 hours of service with a local organization relevant to the course; the students in the education course would complete their hours volunteering at the after-school tutoring sessions.
In both cases, and in all types of community service learning, what matters the most is that class time and course assessments are tied to the service work. The service work cannot simply be an add-on to the regular course content, vaguely tied to it but not linked to it in any substantive way. If you want to encourage students to do community service, send them to the local office on campus that provides volunteer opportunities for your students. If you want to use community service learning, you have to be willing to fold it meaningfully into your course. Students should have the opportunity to analyze and reflect on their service through journals or class discussions; they should be assessed on their analysis and reflections (not necessarily their service) through formal papers or presentations or other types of assignments, and they should read or study material related to the organizations you are serving or the larger social problems those organizations seek to address. The most important word in community service learning is learning, so that has to remain at the center of your course. As long as you are following that prescription, service learning strikes me as a second big teaching innovation that has the power to inspire and motivate students and that helps both students and outside constituents—parents, politicians, the public at large—see deeper value in the colleges and universities in their towns.
In the mid-1990s Mark Carnes was teaching history at Barnard College—and by all accounts doing an excellent job of it. At the conclusion of one semester, as he tried to spark a discussion of Plato's Republic with a group of listless students, he decided that something was missing from his classes. He recounted the story in his book Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Can Transform College (2014). “Within a week the semester would be over,” he thought to himself after the class concluded, “and they would be gone. Had the class meant anything to them? To me?” (p. 18). After the winter break, he sent an e-mail to students in the class asking them to come visit him in his office; he wanted to ask them if they could help him identify the missing spark that would have fueled more energetic discussions, more commitment to the class. When one student professed in bewilderment that Carnes's class was her favorite class that semester, he responded with exasperation: “You were bored! I was bored! You could feel the boredom in the room!” The girl's response startled Carnes: “But all classes are sorta boring. Yours was less boring than most” (pp. 18–19). In the wake of that conversation, Carnes spent the next several years developing a revolutionary new approach to higher education pedagogy called Reacting to the Past. Born from Carnes's classroom experiments, the approach has been spreading quickly on college and university campuses in the United States, with instructors at now more than 300 institutions who are using Reacting games in their courses.
Reacting to the Past consists of role-immersion games in which students are put into the place of historical actors at key moments of crisis or transition in human history and, under the watchful eye of the instructor, play out their own version of those historical events to some final conclusion. For example, students might assume the roles of the different political parties who had a stake in creating an independent India after the British announced they would withdraw from the country they had governed as a colonial power for so many years. Or they might assume the roles of the different factions that sought to create a constitution for France in the wake of the French Revolution. Students prepare to take on these roles within complex historical contexts by doing extensive readings in published or working game books, which gather together primary and secondary documents that provide them with the necessary historical background; many students become so engaged by the games, though, that they conduct their own extensive research outside of the game books. The games can last anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks, which means two can be accommodated in a semester, although recently the Reacting consortium has been working on brief, chapter-length games that can take place during a single week or even a class period.
One of the most distinctive features of the games is that the “history” that plays out within them is open; all of the historical contexts and documents are real ones, but what happens in the game does not have to match what happened in the real world. Students in the games are competitors who have objectives that they must meet to turn the outcome toward their side. In the game devoted to India on the eve of independence from Britain's colonial presence, for example, some of the players want a united India; some of them want an India partitioned into Hindu and Muslim states; others want even less likely alternatives. All the students are given role sheets that fully describe their character (usually a real historical figure, but sometimes imagined or composite characters are used) and that describe what they must accomplish to win the game. A Hindu nationalist, for example, will win the India game if he can convince his fellow Indians to maintain a united India after the British have withdrawn; a Muslim nationalist will win if he can convince the group to create a separate Muslim state. After the students have prepared for their roles with extensive reading and research, they spend class time making speeches, politicking, plotting, and engaging in any other activity that will help them achieve their objectives. The instructor's role is to observe, assess, and occasionally—in very limited ways—intervene to keep the game on track. Grading stems from the written and oral work of the students, such as the speeches they write and deliver during class sessions.
Every year the Reacting consortium hosts a conference that interested or participating instructors can attend to learn how to teach with the games, preview new games in development, and share teaching ideas and strategies with each other. I had the opportunity to attend the conference one year and to play a 2-day version of one of the games as a student. It was without a doubt one of the most charged and fascinating experiences of my life. For better or worse, we humans seem to find competition a motivating factor, and the games are centered on charged historical moments that enable the students to read and argue about deep and widespread human experiences. After my experience at the conference, I spent some time interviewing Kurt Squire, professor of digital media in curriculum and instruction and games researcher at the University of Wisconsin, trying to understand how they sparked the kind of deep learning I experienced at the conference. “Games are a good model for introducing a topic and raising interest,” Squire told me, “because they situate content for learners so that they understand why it's relevant” (Lang, 2014). The games accomplish that by establishing immediate goals that players can attain only by learning and applying course content. (Recollect the importance of goals and purpose to learning, as we saw in Chapter 7.) We often spend weeks throwing content at our students, and perhaps by the end of the semester we hope to have convinced them that what they have learned is relevant beyond the classroom. In a simulation game, by contrast, you are confronted immediately with the realization that what you are learning will help achieve a goal. Even though the winners of a Reacting game usually earn no substantive prize for achieving that goal—many instructors will offer bonus points to the winners, but assessment largely depends on individual efforts—the competitive nature of the games seems to be enough to spark and stimulate the interest and the effort of students.
As I noted in the introduction to the book, Reacting is a big teaching approach in one very important aspect: it requires a substantial investment of time and energy by an instructor to learn how to run games and to use them for the first several times. Just like activity-based learning, however, opportunities exist for using games and simulations outside this very specific and extensive framework. Any instructor can incorporate simulations into a classroom—or even into online courses or in assignments—in a range of possible forms, within any possible time frame. Squire's Games+Learning+Society institute at the University of Wisconsin offers an excellent resource for instructors who want to understand more clearly how games and simulations more generally intersect with learning and who would like to explore further the possibility of using them in their teaching. Consider as well exploring the Reacting consortium website (https://reacting.barnard.edu/), where you can find information on the variety of available Reacting games. If games and simulations strike you as a big teaching initiative that might find a place into your classroom, these represent two excellent starting points to learn more and consider possibilities.
In keeping with the spirit of the book, I will make three small recommendations for how to expand your vision as a teacher after finishing this book. Make a commitment to read one additional book on teaching and learning this year (and at least one per year after that), to consult at least one higher education Web source per week (or sign up for an e-mail list that will link you to such a site), and to create a personal learning network on Twitter with your favorite teaching experts. Here are five suggestions in each category to get you started.
The field of teaching and learning in higher education has been growing exponentially in recent years, with many dozens of new books appearing every year. Keep your eye on the higher education catalogues of Jossey-Bass, Harvard University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Stylus for major new titles in the field.
I have difficulty finding the time for books outside of my field during the semester, so throughout the academic year I rely on shorter resources like the ones below. Generally I spend the first ten or fifteen minutes of my workday paging through resources like these, and will listen to the podcast while I am running errands, exercising, or doing housework.
I highly recommend the use of Twitter to establish a personal learning network that will connect you to people who are doing interesting things in college and university classrooms around the world. To get your network started, follow these frequent posters, excellent writers, and thoughtful instructors or faculty development experts:
Finally, you can also join the conversation about small teaching and continue to receive new ideas and updates by connecting with me at @LangOnCourse and using the hashtag #SmallTeaching to link other instructors to new ideas, resources, and questions.
My experience speaking with faculty audiences for the past dozen years has been that most of us like our work, believe in what we do, and want to improve. As in every field, though, the sheer number of resources available to us can be overwhelming. Don't imagine you need to master this body of research; just aim to keep yourself thinking.
I want to conclude this chapter by telling you about an exchange that occurred while I was observing LeBlanc's microfinancing course. Remember that LeBlanc had given students the responsibility and opportunity to provide him feedback on his syllabus, including his assessments and grading policies. When it came time for the group that had been assigned to critique the grading policies to make their recommendations, they essentially argued for tweaking the percentages that LeBlanc had allotted to the different assessment activities, such as a personal reflection paper or course participation. One of their specific recommendations along these lines was to reduce the percentage of the course points allotted for two major exams. In response to this recommendation, some students raised their hands and said that they didn't think the course really needed exams at all. “A course like this is really more about developing our creativity and learning how to do this project, not about memorizing information,” one student said. After several comments like this, through which I was biting my tongue very hard, a student who had been quiet for the first part of class finally spoke up. “But actually,” she said, “we probably need tests or quizzes to help us make sure we know the information really well. After all, if we're like meeting with a bunch of potential donors and they start asking us questions about how microfinancing works, we don't want to sit there and not know how to respond. We have to really know our stuff. The tests or quizzes will help make sure everybody learns what we need to know to do our jobs in the course.”
Bingo.
As that perceptive student was rightly articulating, even big teachers need to think about small teaching—to help their students master course content while they are inspiring them with creative course designs. During one of the first times I presented the material of this book to a faculty audience, a generally receptive discussion period concluded with a comment from a woman who was having none of it. “Small teaching isn't enough for me,” she said. “I want big changes in higher education right now.” She may have been surprised at my response: I love big changes. The work of instructors like LeBlanc and Carnes helps all of us in higher education blaze new pathways, and can provide powerful and unforgettable learning experiences for our students. The mistake in her objection was thinking that small teaching precludes or even conflicts with big teaching. In fact, I would argue, the small teaching strategies recommended in this book can form a part of the teaching and learning arsenal of any college or university classroom, from traditional lectures to the most innovative teaching and learning environment we can dream up. Courses like LeBlanc's, just like courses in service learning or courses run with games and simulations, will benefit from small teaching strategies as much as courses that run along more conventional pedagogical lines.
And it may even be the case that if we want the instructor down the hall to consider big changes the best thing we can do for him is to help him make a small change or two. I hope you find courses like LeBlanc's as fascinating and promising as I do. But perhaps you find yourself intimidated by the prospect of running your courses through the revolutionary wringer or wondering how in the world such innovation could make sense in light of all of the responsibilities you bear for teaching certain skills or covering certain content or preparing students for this or that future exam. Don't despair. LeBlanc, like almost any big teacher you have ever heard about, once began where you might be now. Whatever change you are hoping to make to your teaching—from livening up your lectures or increasing participation in your discussions to running better group work sessions or ceding the syllabus to your students or loaning money to future entrepreneurs in the rural outskirts of Manila—you can still reach your objective by making those changes one small (teaching) step at a time.