Edward Hinck, Department of Communications
In the last two years, I have been struggling to connect with all students in my classes and finding ways to ensure they are engaged over the entire semester. With the advent of technological changes making social media more prominent in students’ lives, I have found it difficult to keep them engaged with my immediate teaching activities in the classroom while their friends, family, and the rest of the world is calling to them on their cellphones. As much as technology has advanced to engage students in the college classroom, I can barely text on my cellphone.
I had been striving to deliver my classes in the same way as I had before, and it seemed to be working. My students recognized my enthusiasm for teaching, that I cared about the subject matter and the enterprise of teaching. However, despite my enthusiasm for teaching, despite relying on strategies that had worked in the past for my students, during 2019-2020, [SOS] scores showed I was not reaching them with my instructional strategies. What I was doing was not helping them learn as much as I had hoped; they did not appreciate my choices in organizing the course experience, and they perceived that the course material could be presented more effectively. Regardless of whether the students had changed, or I had changed, the end-of-course surveys indicated I needed to address issues of instructional design, at least in relation to the organization, presentation, and student engagement. I decided to pour myself a big cup of humility, open myself up to the possibility that I needed to reflect on my teaching, and seek the necessary resources to improve.
To improve student engagement, I enrolled in an Office of Curriculum and Instructional Support’s Summer 2020 session, Engaging Learning: Instructional Planning. I hoped to explore ways to improve instructional design and seek ways to engage students so that they felt that my teaching helped them learn, could appreciate the organization of the course, and that my presentation of course material served their needs as learners. I revised my graduate class, COM 750 Rhetorical Criticism, with the strategies for student engagement that I gained from the workshop in mind.
I also enrolled in the Fall 2020 workshop series: Adjusting and Achieving with Emerging Teaching Methods. These workshops helped in the Fall and in the Spring semester when I took on a class I had never taught before, COM 365: Persuasion. Based on my experience in the CIS workshop and the helpful suggestions and CoursePro review provided by CIS staff, my teaching evaluations improved dramatically, even though I delivered my classes through the Hyflex modality for the first and second time under the conditions of a pandemic.
I think I’m improving my sense of instructional design based on clearer intentions of what I’m trying to accomplish at the different organizational units of a course covering a semester, in each week, and in each class session. All that work on thinking about and crafting student learning outcomes pays off! These considerations begin to address questions about optimal organization of course material that might have caused students to lose sight of how the week-by-week pieces of the class fit together over the course of the semester. I’m also looking for ways that the technological features of Blackboard, combined with enhanced learning gained from CIS materials and training, can help me reach all of my students with strategies for engaged learning. I think the student evaluations from the last year and a half support my claim that my skills as an instructor continue to improve.
While I have no idea what challenges we will confront this year or if my teaching will be effective this year, I want you to know that the work CIS does, makes a difference in the lives of our students.