“I avoided teaching initially,” says Dewsbury, Associate Professor of Biology, Associate Director of STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. “In science grad school, you are advised to spend your time in your research lab collecting data. When I had to teach, it was a ‘road to Damascus’ moment. I learned education wasn’t just about talking about what’s in the textbook and doing lab experiments. It’s about personal transformation.”
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DFWI rates in introductory courses can tell institutional leaders and instructors, long before graduation day, the location of major barriers to persistence and completion. However, there is very little publicly available data about DFWI rates that are disaggregated by race and ethnicity (or, for that matter, by any other important identifying category such as first-generation or low-income status).
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A decision on the purchase and implementation of digital courseware for a critical gateway course can impact an institution’s ability to deal with those grand challenges—helping or hurting its enrollment, financial position, reputation, and learning outcomes for specific student populations. A deliberate approach to digital transformation can ensure that the decision is well aligned with the institution’s strategy.
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Some challenges that departments, programs, and individual instructors can encounter when implementing digital courseware for the first time are related to alignment with learning goals, collaboration with other operations, customization of course content, professional development for faculty, and making sense of data.
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Like in many gateway courses, Introduction to Communication professors lead weekly lectures, but teaching assistants meet with the students in small-group labs and build relationships with them. Morales and her colleagues wanted the teaching assistants to be a part of creating lab environments where students saw themselves reflected in the curriculum and felt safe sharing their experiences.
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Establishing and communicating ground rules may seem a simple part of getting the semester started, but many educators are asking critical questions about the assumptions behind common classroom ground rules. Seemingly “neutral” expectations based on mutual respect may assume access and experiences that not all students have. Other common ground rules may come from a deficits-based framing rather an assets-based or cultural-wealth perspective.
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Active learning classrooms, which support various formats of teaching and learning, have proven their efficiency. Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the pace of development for active learning classrooms, colleges and universities continue to create these spaces. However, infrastructure development does not always result in effective space usage or in improved learning experiences.
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