Author Archives: Matt Skillen

About Matt Skillen

Matt Skillen is the Director of the Etown Teaching and Learning Design Studio. He has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Kansas State University. Previously, Matt served as an English/language arts teacher for Maize USD #266 in Maize, KS.

Revising your Syllabus with The First Day Toolkit

In a recent article posted to Inside Higher Ed Maria Carrasco features a new resource that provides instructors and professors set of tools one can use to create syllabi that are more inclusive and supportive. The resource featured is The First Day Toolkit, which is a free online course developed by The Student Experience project. The course covers matters like: developing a growth mindset in your course design, normalizing challenges, and communicating care to your students.

While late-April is not the ideal time to review and revise syllabi for the upcoming academic year, we invite you to bookmark this resource so that you can return to it when the timing is right. If you decided to embark on a syllabus revision project and you would like to partner with someone in the process, please let us in the Studio know.

The Student Experience Project is a collaborative of university leaders, faculty, researchers and national education organizations committed to innovative, research-based practices to increase degree attainment by building equitable learning environments and fostering a sense of belonging on campus.

Creative Connections 2022 Recap

On Thursday, January 6th 70 faculty and staff gathered on campus and online to celebrate excellence and innovation in teaching at Elizabethtown College. The event kicked off with a discussion on “Mindful Scaffolding,” an original framework for course design developed by Crystal Donlan, Instructional Designer and Online Learning Specialist.

Presenters shared their insights, perspectives and teaching tips in panel presentations, workshops, roundtable discussions and poster sessions. The program featured presentations from full-time professors, instructors, and college staff members. Click here to view the program.

Throughout the day, the studio team collected resources and handouts from the presenters and archived them here. You can also view three presentation videos we’ve uploaded to the archive folder.

Let’s continue the conversation. If you’d like to learn more about the content that was shared at Creative Connections 2022, reach out to us at studio@etown.edu.

Book Review: RESCUING SOCRATES by Roosevelt Montás

Periodically, we like to share more about what are reading in the Studio. If you’d like to find a good book, you can peruse our lending library. We are routinely refreshing the lending library. Bookmark the page and let us know if you can’t find a title you are looking for. This book review is on a title that we don’t have in our library yet, but it is one that we think you will really like.

Roosevelt Montás, a professor in American Studies at Columbia University, recounts his time as an undergraduate at Columbia University in his book titled Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. The book focuses on those initial opportunities he had to read and discuss great books like The Confessions by St. Augustine and Homer’s The Illiad. Each chapter in this concise autobiography explores the timeless lessons found in the work of Freud, Socrates Gandhi and the aforementioned St. Augustine. With powerful imagery, readers join Montás on a journey relived as he unfolds his experiences as a Dominican immigrant in New York City, a candidate in the Higher Education Opportunity Program of New York, a graduate student and a college professor.

Embedded in Montás’s personal stories of academic setbacks and success is a serious and pointed conversation about the challenging questions facing higher education in our deconstructionist, post-postmodern era. Montás’s guidance is steeped in his experience as an immigrant in the American collegiate system as well as his profound love for the humanities and a crystal clear sense of the power found in education. In distinguishing this power he believes our understanding of education is, perhaps, misplaced. Teaching isn’t, in his words, “putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.” Instead, Montás suggests “Education takes for granted that sight is there but it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look and tries to redirect appropriately.” Students in all contexts can “see,” and we have a tremendous honor and opportunity in educational settings to shed light on new perspectives and introduce students to new directions. 

In Rescuing Socrates, Montás outlines the importance of a general education frameworks that equip students to first understand the world as it is in order that they may navigate it with confidence and improve it.

If you’d like to read more, you can find Rescuing Socrates on Amazon or Audible.  

Culture of Coaching Blog Series Post #3: Questions to Ask When Coaching

Dr. Katie Caprino, Assistant Professor of Education and Teaching & Learning Design Fellow
You can contact Dr. Caprino at caprinok@etown.edu. 

In my earlier blog posts “What is Coaching?” and “Connections between Design Thinking and Coaching,” I provided an introduction to coaching and some ideas about the links between design thinking and coaching.

In this blog post, I will share some questions, prompts, or moves that may help coaches and coachees as they engage in a coaching cycle informed by design thinking. I offer a few questions that align with each element of design thinking. (And even if you do not take a coaching cycle from start to finish, you may find these questions helpful when engaging in meaningful conversations around campus.)

Empathy. During the empathy stage, your goal is to learn about your partner. Your goals here are to build trust and get to know more about your partner as a human. This stage may take more than one session, as the relationship you build here will set the foundation for the work you and your partner do together.

Here are some questions, prompts, moves that may help you engage in empathy building:

  • Meet for coffee, a walk, or a meal.
  • Share your roles at the College.
  • Ask about their hobbies, learn about their favorite books / shows / movies, and their dream vacation.
  • Ask open-ended questions.
  • Listen carefully.
  • Inquiry about best communication methods (e.g., face-to-face, Zoom, text, email)
  • Schedule a teaching observation (if it makes sense) or share artifacts that may be helpful during coaching cycle.

If you would like additional resources, this piece from EdTech Team has some great ideas about this trust-building stage. Researcher Brené Brown has a great digital short on the idea of empathy.

Define. In this stage, you want to set a coaching focus. Here are some questions, prompts, moves that may help you do this:

  • Share why coaching cycle was attractive.
  • Reflect on noticings and/or wonderings of teaching observation or other artifacts.
  • Discuss the area of focus and goals or the coaching cycle. Avoid a deficit or correction-based perspective. Colleagues may want to further develop an effective practice, too.
  • Frame focus in the form of a clear question.
  • Consider timeframe of coaching cycle.

Iterate. You want to review resources during the iterate phase. Here are some questions, prompts, moves that may help you do this:

  • Share resources (e.g., articles, websites, mentor texts) with one another.
  • Discuss what stands out in these resources.

Prototype. This is the part of the coaching cycle in which you decide on a plan.  Here are some questions, prompts, moves that may help you do this:

Make a plan of action using the resources shared during the iterate stage. This could be co-designing a lesson with one another, drafting up a conference proposal, or role play an advising session.

Test. The plan is enacted in the test phase. Here are some questions, prompts, moves that may help you do this:

  • Try out the teaching strategy.
  • Submit a grant or conference proposal.
  • Have the advising meeting.

Then …

  • Reflect
  • Commend what went well
  • Set goals for further action
  • Decide to continue coaching cycle or end here.

Please stay tuned for additional resources on the Studio’s webpage to help guide you through coaching conversations! A special thank you to Matt Skillen, who has helped my thinking on this project, and Christine Walsh, a fellow literacy teacher educator at Slippery Rock University, who was instrumental in helping me frame some of the shared questions and prompts.

Culture of Coaching Blog Series Post #2: Connections between Design Thinking and Coaching

Dr. Katie Caprino, Assistant Professor of Education and Teaching & Learning Design Fellow
You can contact Dr. Caprino at caprinok@etown.edu. 

Honestly, I had not heard of design thinking before I arrived at Elizabethtown College. I was introduced to the idea at a design challenge workshop during one of my first few years at the College. I must admit my team did not have the “winning” design, but the experience led me to think about design thinking and incorporate it into my work in a multitude of ways. I introduced the concept in my creativity methods course and did a SCARP project in which a student researcher and I thought about how design thinking functioned in contemporary picture books.

But as I was completing my instructional coaching endorsement, I began to find connections between design thinking and coaching.  I shared my ideas with a literacy colleague Dr. Christine Walsh at Slippery Rock University, and we had some intriguing conversations. In this blog post, I’ll share the results of these conversations and ways design thinking elements can help us as we think about a culture of coaching at Elizabethtown College.

Empathize. When designing, empathy is the starting point. Knowing the users for whom you are creating is key. The same is true with coaching. As we think about engaging in coaching relationships, we must build relationships with those we coach and those who coach us. Have a cup of coffee. Take a walk. Chat about your work at the College but also about yourselves as humans. Share hobbies, interests, and favorite restaurants. These relationships are central to coaching partnerships, which may flip (i.e., the coachee may become a coach in another cycle), and are a key component of what makes our campus community special.

Define. A problem-solving framework, design thinking looks to define the problem. We can think more broadly about this in terms of coaching on our campus. We can certainly work with our coach or coachee to articulate an area of growth in a myriad areas (e.g., advising, teaching, scholarship, conference presentations, work-life understandings, etc.), but we can also think about how to help one another intensify a strength or more deeply engage with an area of strength. Sometimes this is an area that is identifiable right from the beginning of the coaching cycle; other times an observation of teaching practice or analysis of other artifacts (e.g., conference proposals) may be helpful.

Ideate. This is the brainstorming component of design thinking. In this step, many ideas are thrown out and tossed around. This is The Sticky Note Part. The coach may bring in resources (e.g., teaching articles, videos, or book chapters; sample conference proposals; or a list of a few strategies). Time is then spent discussing the ideas and an area of focus is decided upon. It is important not to overwhelm the coachee with too many ideas. A narrow focus is key here. 

Prototype. This is where the models are created and analyzed in design thinking. When applying this step of design thinking to coaching, you can think about coming up with the plan for addressing the narrow focus from the last step. Here, you may plan for how the coachee will implement one of the agreed-upon strategies in their classroom. Sometimes, the coach may come to the coachee’s classroom and demonstrate a lesson strategy. If a coachee is receiving assistance on submitting to conferences, here is where the draft of the proposal may be composed and reviewed.

Test. This is where the test drive happens. The coachee may teach the lesson with the new strategy or submit a conference proposal for the first time. This is the step where all of the defining, ideating, and prototyping pays off.

Will it always be perfect? Of course not! Design thinking and coaching are recursive practices. Although demonstrated here in a linear process, there may be some messiness. You will, for example, focus on empathy throughout – not just at the beginning. And you may have to return to the defining stage as you move throughout your coaching-coachee relationship. And that is okay. You’re designing!

Stay tuned for the next post in the Culture of Coaching Blog Series: Questions to Post When Coaching.

A special thank you to my literacy colleague Dr. Christine Walsh at Slippery Rock University for engaging in meaningful conversations and writing with me about the connections between design thinking and coaching. 

Culture of Coaching Blog Series Post #1: What is Coaching? 

Dr. Katie Caprino, Assistant Professor of Education & Teaching & Learning Design Fellow
You can contact Katie at caprinok@etown.edu.

One of the recent projects out of our Design Fellows Program is about creating a culture of coaching on campus. Whereas the project focuses on facilitating a faculty coaching program and there are already plans to pilot the program with new faculty members, the opportunities for coaching on our campus can extend beyond faculty coaching. For instance, in what ways can coaching be used when advising students? How can coaching be used to help campus community members advance in their careers? How can we help our students learn about coaching so they can embody it in their future professional roles?

Knowing more about what coaching is and is not may be a good place for us to start. Aguilar suggests “a coach helps build the capacity of others by facilitating their learning” (p. 19).

According to Aguilar in The Art of Coaching, coaching is not a way to ensure a particular program is enacted, it is not a way to fix people, it is not a way to provide therapy, and it is not consulting (p. 19).

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development at Kent State University suggested ways in which coaches differ from mentors. Mentoring-mentee relationships may be for a long period of time. The mentee sets the agenda and often asks the mentor questions. There are shifting and changing outcomes (Kent State University, 2021).

The coach-coachee relationship is a bit different. Often, it is a short-term relationship in which a coach with a specific expertise is partnered with a coachee. These partners co-construct the agenda to best meet the coachee’s specific and measurable performance goal. The coach asks specific questions, and the coachee makes decisions about next steps (Kent State University, 2021).

You may seek out a coach for a specific reason. Perhaps a colleague has a lot of conference experience, and you want to know more about how to submit conference proposals. Perhaps you want to enhance the way you incorporate asynchronous elements into your face-to-face classes, and you have heard that a colleague is an expert in this area.

Or maybe you have expertise in a particular area and you want to be a coach. You might have a unique pedagogical approach that you want to share with your colleagues. You may be able to create a warm, nurturing classroom environment, and you want to share how you do it.

The opportunities for a culture of coaching are limitless.

We would love to hear more about what you think about a culture of coaching here at Etown, and stay tuned for the next blog in the series: Coaching through a Design Thinking Lens.

References

Agular, E. (2013). The art of coaching. San Francisco: Wiley.

Kent State University. (2021). Know the difference between coaching and mentoring. Retrieved from https://www.kent.edu/yourtrainingpartner/know-difference-between-coaching-and-mentoring

Want to See Better Writing from Your Students? Try This!

Tara Moore, Director of the First Year Writing Program, mooret@etown.edu

You expect students to bring their best writing game to your coursework, but they might need a compelling nudge.

Students sometimes fail to transfer the great writing skills from EN100 to your classes.  Back in EN100 your students learned process writing skills—that just means writing in stages.

Process writing gives students time to rethink their approach to every aspect of an essay.  Believe me, you want them to think through that paper more than once!  You’ll see better results if you can arrange your class so that students have to start work far in advance of the deadline.

Your upper-level students also learned research skills, including citation styles and how to use the handbook required for all EN100 and FYS sections.

Do missing words, wonky paragraphs, and terribly vague intro paragraphs make you question your existence during long bouts of grading?  If so, your students need encouragement to put more energy into revisions.  The EN100 program taught flexible revisions strategies. If you remind students to use these, you should see better writing.

Want to see better writing in your classes? Try these steps:

Assign Drafts

Require submissions of early stages of writing. Provide feedback on drafts if you can. If you can’t add another evaluation like that to your workload, try assigning drafts anyway. You can award points for a submission and then tell students to turn their attention to revision.

Peer review assignments tend to improve submission outcomes.  You can require students to conduct the peer review as homework, or they can do it in class.  Peer reviews work best if students trade essays ahead of time and spend class time talking through how to improve the drafts.  Give them targeted items to review for the most useful results.

Require students to incorporate the feedback you gave them on prior submissions.  You can do this by including a “summarize the feedback you received” assignment in Canvas. Make the assignment worth points.  The sad truth is that students need enticement to read your feedback.

Clarify Expectations

Exhausted by the work of deciphering fuzzy arguments? Tell student to write for lazy readers. Yes, we’re paid to read to the end of the essay, but students won’t always have that luxury.  Most readers resent hazy arguments and winding sentences. Students need to do the work of connecting all the dots in their document—that way the reader doesn’t have to.

It can help to talk about your response to a piece of writing as a reader.  Try this: “As a reader, I had to read the first paragraph three times to understand the purpose there.”  That’s a more understandable comment then the next-to-useless marginal note of “awkward!”

We know faculty want to see mechanically flawless writing. Research shows that an over-emphasis on mechanics disproportionally affects students from underrepresented backgrounds.  Be thoughtful about how you project your authority over a student’s writing.

All Etown students have access to grammar technology.  Tell students you expect them to use Editor or Spellcheck in Word.  Encourage—or require—reading the essay aloud before submitting it.  When you do see mechanical errors, consider how much grammar feedback that particular student can hear in that moment. One grammar tip at a time is probably plenty.

Most importantly, remind students to apply what they learned in EN100 to your course projects.  Tell them that writing-in-stages, responsible source use, and revision skills matter to you. They learned it already, but they need to hear it reinforced from you before they can master these skills.

Want tips about how to add a few simple, time-tested writing activities to improve the writing you grade?  Be in touch!

Flipping the Classroom for COVID and Beyond–Dr. Tara Moore

To accommodate some of the challenges of COVID-19 teaching, I flipped my composition course.  Now, two semesters in, a study of my students’ reactions indicates that COVID-19 might have introduced me to my best teaching self, at least for EN100.

My research indicates that it’s not unusual for a professor’s lecture tangents could eat into active learning time. I can relate!  Now my pithy, pre-recorded videos introduce new material, and we spend class time on deepening activities.

When flipping a class, I learned to make sure every assessment and activity align with the Student Learning Outcomes. I based my approach to the flipped classroom on Talbert’s Flipped Learning and Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design. If you’ve taken the Studio’s Teaching Online course, you have already seen the course design matrix that guided my flipping process.

Fortunately, after all of this effort, my first year students expressed positive feelings about their flipped classroom. Here’s one take on it:

“[It’s] not a bad way of doing things, actually I like it more[.] It makes the work load seem easier. The videos and before class assignments aren’t too long so it usually will get done, and the in class activities are easier [than…] doing it on your own without a professor[‘s] help.”

A small number of students felt that the lure of their personal devices made it hard to focus on video lectures at home. A larger number claimed the opposite, saying that focusing during in-class lectures posed the greater challenge.

Overall, my study found several benefits in the flipped model:

  • greater student agency in learning new materials
  • more time to mentor student writing
  • noticeable student and instructor enjoyment of the course design

My personality fits well with the balance of labor needed to flip a classroom. I prefer front-loading the work of preparing videos, which allows me to focus class time on individual or small-group mentoring.  I can see that not every personality will find flipped learning to be a good fit for their instruction.

I write about the process and my students’ opinions on the design in the upcoming collection Go Online! Reconfiguring Writing Courses for the New Virtual World from Peter Lang.

About the Contributor: Tara Moore teaches writing courses and Young Adult literature at Elizabethtown College.  Her books include Christmas: The Sacred to Santa and Victorian Christmas in Print.

Teaching Sociology Webinar: Podcasts in the Classroom

Podcasting is a powerful teaching tool. The vast catalog of interesting and informative podcasts, available on a variety of digital platforms, allows students to engage with perspectives and points-of-view outside of those they may encounter in a college course. During an August 18, 2021 virtual meeting hosted by the Teaching Sociology editorial team–including Michelle Kozimor, Editor and Barbara Prince, Deputy Editor–scholar-teachers from across the country shared their insights on using podcasts as a resource in their courses.

The meeting included the following presentations:

  • Being Able to Listen Makes Me Feel More Engaged: Best Practices for Using Podcasts as Readings
  • A Review of Podcast “Ear Hustle”
  • A Review of Podcast “Code Switch”

And many more. To watch the virtual meeting, click here.

 

New Horizons

In everything we do at Etown we believe we are always improving. We invite students to find their best lives here, and we encourage everyone at Etown to invest in themselves to continually develop and improve their lives. Through every interaction with our students, in every period of inquiry, with each new opportunity to engage in our vibrant learning community, we are always in the process of improving.  

The Etown Teaching and Learning Design Studio launched at a significant time, in the context of a global pandemic, when our entire industry pivoted to 100% remote and online teaching and learning. Our work focused squarely on equipping and supporting professors and instructors in the creation of memorable and lasting learning experiences in online and hybrid formats. As we now set our sights on the next chapter, the Studio will continue to be an important site on our campus that promotes and supports a relationship- and learner-centered culture of instruction, advising and scholarship. 

Our emphasis on design remains intentional as we seek to create opportunities for research, theory, and practice to inform our methods to meet the needs of our students and achieve our institution’s mission. We invite you to join us in these efforts and the Studio team looks forward to working with you. 

Meet the team:

Matt Skillen, Studio Director
Sharon Birch, Assistant Director of Instructional Technology 
Crystal Donlan, Instructional Designer and Online Learning Specialist
Jill Kleis, Program Support Specialist & Administrative Assistant