And one more post about teacher-student relationships: a summary of “Faculty matter: So why doesn’t everyone think so?” by Kezar & Maxey (2014).
You might have noticed that I am exploring different concepts of what makes a good teacher-student relationship recently: belonging, caring, and most recently, trust. Why am I not just picking one? Short answer is that teacher-student relationships are really complicated, and those three are only some of the facets that are important, but there is no understanding yet of how they overlap or interact. Below I am writing a review of two articles that show just how many other factors are involved and how complicated it is to understand what’s going on.
For a couple of months now I have been skating dangerously close to where workload becomes unhealthy, but I recently had a really good experience planning out work (i.e. generating TONS of great ideas of what we definitely want to do) and negotiating priorities (i.e. cutting ideas back to what is realistic(ish)) for both myself and in a team, and this is how we did it: By articulating
Welcome to #WaveWatchingWednesday with updates from my Insta! A lot of ice dipping this year, it’s wonderful! :-)
When I was teaching the emergency “how to teach online” courses online during the pandemic, I used to refer to an article by Rapanta et al. (2020) a lot, where they talk about teaching, cognitive, and social presence, which I want to link to in another post I am working on. But either I cannot find things on my own blog, or I was too stressed out to write a summary back then, so here we go.
After having read about “trust moves” that teachers report making (Felten et al., 2023), and currently working on figuring out what makes students trust their teachers (Persson et al., 2023), I now really need to sort out my reading of “trust” literature, which means putting it in my external memory, aka my blog. So here we go…
As we are getting ready to officially launch our new blog on “teaching about sustainability”, I am revisiting posts on this blog and rewriting them for the different outlet. And one of the first ones I wrote was about the “head-hands-heart” framework. I’m reposting what I wrote for the other blog below, but then I am adding a reflection on how I am actually applying this framework in planning my own course on “teaching sustainability”, starting this spring. Jump to NEW NEW NEW if you are only interested in that part! :-)
Yesterday, a colleague pointed me to Microsoft Reflect, “A well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”, and I had a quick play. It’s a tool to support reflection in educational settings (something that I am thinking about a lot in the context of teaching sustainability). Since it is not designed specifically for use in higher education it feels a bit unconventional in my context, but on the other hand, many of the tools offered in there are similar to what I do anyway, but now they are all collected in one place and can (allegedly, I
haven’t tried yet) be easily integrated with for example Canvas (our learning management system) or Kahoot (an online voting/quiz tool), which we use regularly.
I have written about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) before, and from those posts it is clear that I did struggle with the concept quite a bit before I got the point and it slowly grew on me. Before I came across the “office analogy” for brain functions, I found it difficult to understand the structure of the UDL framework, and many points seemed redundant. That they show brain areas to make the point of “there are different processes involved in learning” is still weird to me, it looks like something I would expect in one of those magazines the pharmacies give to you, or an ad for headache medication; very pseudo scientific. Anyway, instructors struggling with the framework is very common in my experience as instructor and as academic developer, and also Cumming and Rose (2022) find in their review of current literature of UDL in higher education that that is one major obstacle. They also find, however, that UDL is well supported by theory about how learning works (something that I often hear questioned, even though nobody can actually point to where it goes against the currently accepted understanding of learning), and also that implementing UDL leads to very high satisfaction in both students (who don’t have to disclose disabilities any more, and aren’t being singled out) and instructors (who don’t have to spontaneously and individually accommodate students). So reading this review, I feel even more confident that we should continue working with UDL (at least until we find something better, and if you find something, please let me know!) and that we need to put more effort into “selling” the framework to instructors.
Cumming, T. M., & Rose, M. C. (2022). Exploring universal design for learning as an accessibility tool in higher education: A review of the current literature. The Australian Educational Researcher, 49(5), 1025-1043.
Welcome to another #WaveWatchingWednesday!