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Brought to you by the MSU Center for Faculty Excellence.

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I'm your host, Michael Babcock.

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In this episode, we are joined by Ken Silvestri, an instructional designer here in the center.

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Thank you for joining us today, Ken. Thanks, Mike. It's good to be here.

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Great. Well, Ken, could you share some of your top tips and advice for faculty new to teaching?

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Of course. One thing I often see with new faculty they're coming into teaching for the first

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time is they approach it as if all their students are experts in their field.

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They're used to interacting with other experts in their fields and used to explaining, communicating their knowledge and expertise to other experts.

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They're laymen. They're very novice learners.

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that you can get at some of that information at the beginning of the course by surveying your students,

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doing maybe a little pre knowledge check on what they already know and where they're at different skill levels.

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But then you can use that that information sheet strategically by pairing up the students that are more

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advanced with students that have a little bit less knowledge and skill level and they can help each other.

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That sounds like a great strategy for sure. So what else?

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Have some other ideas? Yeah. Two things they often see might sink.

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A new instructor when it comes to teaching is a course that's a little bit disorganized.

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clear directions, be very transparent with what they need to get out of that.

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Whatever skills, what type of knowledge, what are the goals of the assignment, how they're going to be assessed.

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They get frustrated. They get stressed out that you're not caring about how other you thought we needed it.

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So I know you've created a lot of content on the CFP website or website around syllabi and and language.

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And and I've heard you tell groups that, you know, in addition to put it on your syllabus,

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it's really important to communicate that during class right at the beginning of your class.

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Yeah, I think at the beginning of the class you really want to communicate how you're teaching,

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teaching philosophy, how what, how you're going to teach.

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What are your goals for the course? And I think that can still be explained throughout the course to how you're

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going to use brain space because each instructor uses bright space differently.

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Are you going to use it for communicating with students?

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Are you going to use it to post content or are you going to use it for them to submit assignments and quizzes?

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So just being very clear on your teaching strategy intentions at the beginning of the course, but also down into your assignments.

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So being clear to the students why they're doing that assignment, what are they going to get out of that assignment?

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What skills and knowledge, How is it going to benefit their careers? And then step by step task instructions.

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And you don't want students wondering what they have to do for something because that creates a lot of

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anxiety and stress which can negatively impact their learning and then how they're going to be assessed,

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like what criteria are they going to be assessed by?

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What are the expectations They're modeling what looks like a good exemplar for students to

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see so they can kind of model and see what would meet your expectations and what doesn't.

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Hmm. Well, and you also mentioned empathy for students. And I've heard you also speak about this as trying to make that connection,

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giving students some agency feeling like they're a partner with you in the learning process.

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And can you tell me about a an instructor that would do sort of a check in, like with students, like, how's the course going?

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And then use that feedback to go back and tell the students, hey, you know, I'm hearing you're liking this or or this isn't working.

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And we're going to we're going to pivot a little bit. Can you talk about that a little bit?

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Yeah, I think that's a good strategy to target your teaching to what's working for students.

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What's not working for students gives them some conformation of what's working well in terms of supporting their learning.

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So you could survey your students every so often.

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You know, it doesn't have to be every day or every week. It could be every month.

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You know, once a month you kind of survey, you know, is too much work.

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Is it too much reading, Is it not enough activities in class?

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So getting a sense of what's working for them, what they need,

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and showing them that you're responsive to their their learning and you care about their success will go a long way with them.

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if you don't get that empathy aspect right and that that organization aspect right, they won't forgive some of those things.

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And if you're going to pay attention to how your students are coming to class, you know, keeping track of that,

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if they're keeping up with the work and if they're not, and reaching out to them in a very empathetic way,

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not a way that's kind of accusatory and making assumptions about why they're not doing the work and coming to class,

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that they're just lazy, that, you know, they don't have the discipline, they don't know what's going on in their lives.

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It could be like a family issue.

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They could be working two jobs. You just don't know. You don't want to make those assumptions.

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So reach out to them, make an intervention an empathetic way.

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Hey, I see. And then come to class. You know what's going on?

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Maybe there's something I can help with, and you do it more in a way of, Hey,

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we're going to work together to get you back on track because I care about your success.

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Yeah, I think other ways you can ease student anxiety about about the course is how you name things.

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Like if you name your stuff office hours, they may think you're busy during that time.

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They don't want to bother you, but if you tell them, I explained to them how they can use those office hours,

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that they can come and ask questions and and get help or maybe student support hours, you could call them.

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If you call something a quiz, it creates a bunch of anxiety, you know,

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instead of something like a practice opportunity or knowledge check might reduce that.

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And that idea about taking quotes, that's really good and good advice.

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We are I think we've talked about this hidden curriculum and for some students, they don't know what office hours, what that word means.

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You should call them student hours or something. Yeah, I think a better definition of what that is for the students will help,

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especially your first generation students that don't have access to your parents who've gone through

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college before and they know to go to see the professor during those hours to get extra help are great.

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Well, these are really good tips. But I think another aspect of teaching that you really want to do well and be

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intentional about is engaging students and be intentional about how you engage them.

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One way you can do that is make the learning relevant for students and find ways to make it relevant to their lives.

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Connect that abstract, theoretical content and knowledge to real world applications by bringing in real world problems to solve.

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Real world examples. Stories of you in your research and industry.

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That shows how that knowledge was able to help you be successful in those areas.

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starting your class with a big question that's related to your field and then spend the rest of that class.

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I got curious question that that gets them motivated to learn why And to get to that answer of an open ended question,

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You can also provide multiple ways to learn,

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and this is part of what we call universal design for learning the brain freeze variety when it comes to learning variety.

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So the brain craves variety when it comes to learning.

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So building in that into not only how you're delivering the content, but also how students demonstrate what they know then their skills.

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So you can add in little videos, a podcast, for example, to deliver the content in multiple ways.

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Can be a recorded lecture just breaking up beyond just having to read boring textbook all the time,

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a dense textbook to get the content that way or listen to a lecture for 45 minutes in class.

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But when it comes to demonstrating what they know, you can give them some variety there.

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But they also have that option for doing a paper. It can be something as simple as having a short answer question on a multiple choice exam,

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So you're giving them a little bit of extra opportunity to demonstrate what they know through writing.

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Well, these are all great ideas. And I know the center, you in particular have offered workshops on active learning.

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So really, I want to encourage our listeners to to take advantage of some of the workshops at the center offers around these topics,

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because they really are powerful ways to make your class more interesting and more effective.

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That really doesn't work as well as is getting getting students involved in their learning.

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Yeah, that's a very good point, Mike, because there's people who are more applied learners like myself,

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Write about it and and do analysis and comparison versus just memorizing a bunch of content and regurgitating it for a test.

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Not everybody learns that way or well that way. Well, Ken, we're about out of time.

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So what should people do if they want more information or need more consultations?

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I mean, what are some of the things the center can offer our faculty?

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Sure. Yeah. We we tried to support you in your teaching in multiple ways, and we offer multiple formats, depending what you're looking for.

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We can do, you know, one off workshops on a topic related teaching such as active learning, formative assessment,

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or we do counseling one on one consultations so we can sit down and take a look at your course,

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take a look at your syllabus, see ways that we can enhance your courses with, you know, theories of learning and how to engage students and so on.

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Or you can join a small group of faculty learning community.

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We often offer those a lot on different topics related to teaching where we we facilitate those.

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But we we really want faculty to share how they're doing things so they can learn from each other and what works.

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but from from each other and how those things get implemented across disciplines too.

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Well, can't. Thank you so much. This is really some great tips for all of us as we go into the classroom.

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And thank you for listening. And we we're looking forward to hearing more about what you're doing.

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Thank you. Thanks, Mike.