R3 1.10 May 25, 2023 Transformative Professional Development to Advance Equity in Online Teaching; Learning to Learn Student Names

Summary and evaluation of an innovative online faculty professional development course designed to promote equitable, inclusive features in fully online STEM courses.

This issue of R3 takes on an innovative online faculty professional development program designed to promote equitable, inclusive teaching in fully online STEM courses. It was built on Michelle Pacansky-Brock’s influential “humanizing online teaching” framework, and addresses several areas of pressing importance in educational access and academic success among minoritized student populations.

In other current news, I’m rolling out a new idea in my own faculty development work. It's a short, highly interactive workshop focused on one key teaching skill: learning students’ names. It’s part of a new project I’ll leave a bit mysterious for now – suffice it to say that it’s been an exciting way to combine my background in psycholinguistics and memory with the work I do with faculty and instructional designers.

I’m thinking that this new offering would make a nice addition to something like a keynote talk, providing a way to expand the impact of a campus visit or online teaching workshop. In case you’re not familiar with the topics I speak about, here are the top three:

-       Connections between motivation, attention, memory, and learning (with themes you can see woven throughout this blog post and also in this interview I did with the Tea for Teaching podcast)

-       Why memory is still important in college-level learning, and what faculty can do to help students build knowledge (with themes from this interview I did with the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and this short article in the Teaching Professor newsletter)

-       How faculty can tap into cognitive psychology and neuroscience to accelerate learning (reinforcing major themes from my book Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology)

I’m excited to see how this new material lands! (And of course – shoot me an email if you’d like more details anytime.)

In Search of Belonging Online: Achieving Equity Through Transformative Professional Development

Citation:

Pacansky-Brock, M., Smedshammer, M., & Vincent-Layton, K. (2023). In search of belonging online: Achieving equity through transformative professional development. Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 12(0), 39–63.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5590/jerap.2022.12.0.04

Paywall or Open: 

Open

Summary:

This article offers a detailed explanation of a newly created six-week-long asynchronous online course for faculty, focused on advancing equitable and inclusive course design in online STEM instruction. The “Humanizing Online STEM Academy” is based on the Humanized Online Teaching framework, which seeks to promote belonging, and thus support student success, through four major avenues: equity mindset, psychologically inclusive design, culturally responsive teaching, and digital fluency. Other key features of the Academy program included modeling supportive “warm demander” pedagogy and high social presence within the Academy course itself. The article provides a substantial amount of background and context for the program, along with detailed description of the objectives. Results of a faculty survey (including both quantitative and qualitative items) are reported, with a focus on capturing elements that faculty found particularly helpful, positive impacts of the program, and directions for future iterations.

Research Questions:

• Did faculty have positive perceptions of the Humanizing Online STEM Academy course?

• What was the typical time commitment associated with completing the course?

• What major themes emerge in faculty feedback on the course?

• What insights emerged from this initial implementation of the course?

Sample:

Seventy-nine higher education professionals (86% STEM faculty and 14% faculty support specialists) were recruited from community colleges and universities. Recruiting was limited to those who had previously taught at least one fully online course. Participants received a stipend for completion.

Method/Design:

Participants completed the six-week Academy course then submitted feedback via an exit survey. The course was structured around eight “humanizing elements” introduced via six modules, which included assignments and discussions. The eight elements were as follows:  Self-affirming Ice Breaker; Wisdom Wall; Getting to Know You Survey; Humanized Course Card & Homepage; Bumper Video; Microlectures; Wise, Warm Feedback; Liquid Syllabus

Key Findings:

Time per week spent on the course varied a great deal, with most participants reporting that it either took 11-15 hours (41%) or 6-10 hours (27%). Quantitative ratings of impact and course interactions (e.g., responsiveness of facilitators) were high overall.

Themes that emerged from qualitative feedback included positive impressions of interactions with facilitators, increased digital fluency and ability to competently use digital tools in teaching, valuing research-based/evidence based professional development that focused on the “why” behind different recommendations, and increased self-awareness, e.g., of missed opportunities to address equity within their courses.

Overall, the implementation of the Humanizing Online STEM course was successful. Future directions for the project include increasing opportunities to interact with fellow participants, and increased emphasis on the equity element, which received relatively lower ratings compared to other course features.

Choice Quote from the Article:

Equitable online education is a field ripe for research and poised to disrupt the traditional “weed out” culture in higher education and STEM, in particular. Yet, much of the existing discourse about online education serving students from minoritized groups is cast in deficit-based thinking, which frames diverse students and online courses as inherently lacking. This rhetoric has translated into skepticism and reluctance among faculty and institutional leaders. The emergency move to online education in 2020 has exacerbated negative faculty and administrator mindsets about online classes. The sentiment heard on campus is often, “we need to be in person to connect and build community.” To change this paradigm, research needs to focus on the question, “what can be done to enable the success of racially minoritized students online?” This question reframes the cold, disconnected environment students often experience online as a factor that exacerbates equity gaps in online courses (Jaggars & Xu, 2016) and illuminates positive instructor–student relationships as the “connective tissue” (Pacansky-Brock et al., 2020) that will advance equity through distance education.

Why it Matters:

Effective professional development is the lifeblood of teaching innovation. The Humanizing Online STEM Academy represents an important new offering in this realm. I particularly appreciate the focus on mastering specific techniques and following through on actually using those, as opposed to just talking about the techniques in a more superficial way. It’s true that adopting values and understanding the research background associated with equitable teaching is important – but so are tangible skills, and the most powerful development experiences are ones that address both.

This project also provides another yet another example of what I believe to be a core principle in faculty development: the superiority of evidence-based, approaches explicitly designed to align with research. Faculty simply have better impressions of the value of this type of programming, and it’s my hope that offerings like the Humanizing Online STEM Academy will continue to push the faculty development field further and further toward evidence-based approaches.

Their findings also drive home the importance within faculty development programming of modeling good teaching practices (especially those that happen to be the focus of the programming in question). In my experience, this modeling factor is especially important in online faculty professional development. Even those faculty with some experience in online teaching are frequently unsure of the full range of tools and techniques available to them, and so having the opportunity to see those in action has an outsize impact.

I also gravitated toward the authors’ point that humanizing is a particularly needed concept in STEM instruction, which even today tends toward what the authors call “delivery-based instruction” – which I take to mean prioritizing content coverage over supportive engagement with students. Overall, the article provides a meaty and concise review of important current concepts in the field. Just the overview on page 47-48 of the “eight humanized online teaching elements” alone makes the article well worth bookmarking.

Most Relevant For:

Leaders responsible for online and digital learning; instructional designers; faculty professional development directors; faculty designing/redesigning online courses with a focus on DEIJ; anyone designing or leading online professional development courses.

Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:

Keep in mind that this article is not an experiment or primarily a hypothesis-testing or theory-building project. It is instead a substantive report on the implementation of this new program. This isn’t a bad thing of course, just something to “know before you go.” Similarly, the article presents a fair amount of background, context, and critique, mostly front-loaded toward the beginning. I see this as a valuable resource, but readers more focused on the impacts and other quantitative findings might want to skip around. Like most investigations of its type, it also focuses more on the short-term impressions and impacts, rather than on long-term shifts in outcomes, mindsets, or practices. Perhaps as the Academy takes root and grows, these will become possible to track.

If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:

Artze-Vega, I., Darby, F., Dewsbury, B., & Imad, M. (2023). The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. W.W. Norton.

Dewsbury, B., & Brame, C. (2019). Inclusive teaching. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-01-0021

Fensie, A., St, T., Jennifer, P., Asli, J., & Barrie, S. (2023). Engaged learning during distraction: A case study of successful working moms in distance education. Journal of Computing in Higher Education. Springer US.

Hogan, K.A., & Sathy, V. (2022). Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press.

Kelly, K., & Zakrajsek, T. D. (2020). Advancing online teaching: Creating equity-based digital learning environments. Stylus Publishing.

Miller, M.D., Koch, R., & Dickson, K.L. (2019). Empowering faculty to support academic persistence through a blended, scholarship-based faculty professional development program: The Persistence Scholars Program. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 19.

 File under: 

DEIJ; online course design; belonging; mindset; faculty professional development