Tip: Floors and Ceilings
A delicate balance of expectations, support, and calibrating activities to challenge all students to grow.
Last week I shared thoughts about student engagement, inspired by a Twitter thread on lecture-based classes versus more activity-based classes. There were two criticisms from students in the thread that really made me pause and reflect.
I am SO SO SO tired of professors trying to use various tricks to make students who do the reading & are engaged carry students who didn’t do the reading or don’t seem to care. I get that it helps them. But I don’t WANT to help them.
[I] 100% preferred lecture to interactive activities, because the latter was always calibrated to the weakest students in class.
These criticisms focus on how students experience group work and peer interaction in class, and in this narrow context are important criticisms to consider. But they also point to a larger concern about our expectations of students.
Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine utilize a metaphor of floors and ceilings in their book, In Search of Deeper Learning, to articulate how the minimum expectations we have for students - the floor - and the limits we impose on how challenging and creative our teaching can be - the ceiling - shape the experiences of students. Using this metaphor to examine our own teaching: How often do we calibrate our class activities to meet the lowest-performing students where they are, rather than the highest-performing students?
I’m not sure there’s a good answer here. If we design our learning activities to be at the level appropriate for the middle 80% of students, and then spend our remaining time supporting the bottom 10% of students, that leaves very little time or energy to consider the needs of the top 10% of students.
While the challenge of meeting the needs of all our students isn’t new, the concern that instructors’ capacity is depleted beyond what we have experienced in the past is. Assuming we are not able to truly differentiate instruction* for each student, how can we - effectively but realistically - best help our students? I have three thoughts about strategies that might help.
#1: Focus on the most important goals & learning outcomes
Thinking about what is practical to accomplish within the time limits of the course, and with the resources available to students. I think part of focusing on the essentials can include offering students choice in how to organize and communicate what they’ve learned. This focus on essentials must acknowledge your time and capacity to support students. Are you able to hold supplemental study sessions each week for students who are weaker in the fundamentals or prerequisites? Are you able to provide feedback on more than one draft of a paper? If no - which, let me be clear, is more than fair - then accept these structural constraints on how much you can do.
#2: Articulate what students should already know
Communicate the expectation that if they do not already feel confident with this set of skills and content knowledge, it is up to them to learn it more or less on their own. Provide a set of supplemental resources, even if just links to online activities, that students can work through at their own pace. I’ve tried for ages to communicate this help to students in advance of the semester, and it’s never been successful - my students just do not check their email or log in to the LMS before the first day of classes. But when we created a week-long “ramp up” to college writing prep course that focused on technology skills, academic support skills, and English fundamentals, students attended and benefitted.
#3: Identify high-impact course activities
Complex, challenging tasks require peer interaction, build on prior knowledge, or need more instructor interaction (i.e., feedback) for students to be successful. Make sure these activities are aligned with the (pared down) course goals, provide transparent guidelines for students, offer a variety of ways students can meet the learning outcomes for each activity, and scaffold* the work so all students have support and a push to aim just a bit higher with each assignment.
To return to the concerns about active learning activities being designed to help underprepared or struggling students more than the strongest students, I think one unresolved point is getting students to buy into the activities and see them as beneficial, even if they are one of the strongest students in the room.
How do you make course activities appropriately challenging for all students? And how do you convince students these activities are worthwhile?
For more reading…
*Differentiating instruction, or adapting instruction to individual students’ learning styles and levels of readiness, asks instructors to consider changes to the content breadth and depth, the process students engage in, the product they create, and/or their learning environment. Resilient Educator has a great article on differentiation with examples & strategies for different content areas. The challenge with differentiation is that you can end up devoting enormous amounts of time to tailoring course activities and evaluating student work products. Here are some other resources from Vanderbilt on differentiated instruction.
*Scaffolding is providing structure and assistance in the learning process that is gradually removed as the learner becomes more skilled and more confident. Harvard Graduate School of Education: The Novice to Expert Shift