Resources

Like most of my colleagues, I’ve noticed a sharp drop in my first-year students’ writing and reading skills during the pandemic. And they are unfocused. Forget herding cats—trying to keep a classroom of first years on topic now feels more like herding bumble bees. More of them skip classes or disappear altogether. And of course, they struggle with depression and anxiety. Mental health, focus, and academic performance are interconnected, and the problems feed each other in messy and complicated ways. But I suspect that increased cognitive load plays a key role. The pandemic increased the cognitive load for all of us in three significant ways: It disrupted our routines, forcing us think carefully about tasks that we otherwise do on autopilot. Fear and uncertainty increased our anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder for us to process information effectively. It added a number of new tasks and distractions. Students are dealing with that and more: Their job is learning, and to help them do that, they have several professors. But since their professors also suffer from cognitive overload, students are getting more confusing directions, less clear feedback, and more last-minute changes than they normally would. Since students are academic novices, they are less capable of putting the intellectual skills they are learning on autopilot. They have to think about each step. And let’s not forget the cognitively, socially, and emotionally demanding task of starting college. It’s too much at once. As long as excessive cognitive load operates as a confounding variable, we won’t know what’s causing our students’ problems. We need to help students bring their cognitive load down, both because it causes suffering and because bringing it down will help us identify and address the other significant problems. So how do we do that? Not by dumbing things down. But we often unintentionally create unnecessary cognitive load for our students. They end up working on unimportant things. And so, here’s my big teaching question for this summer: What unimportant things am I making my students think about, and how does that distract them from working on what matters? To address this, I’ll focus on three different areas: Reduce anxiety and uncertainty about my course and about grading. First-year students spend way too much energy trying to guess what we want, and they often guess wrong. And that makes them spend way too much time and energy on unimportant things. I’m going to revise the rules for my classes over the summer, making them as transparent as I can. In the fall, I’m going to explain them more clearly and more frequently. I like my students to get a headache from all the deep thinking they do in my class, not from worrying about how to format their bibliography or about whether a bad paper grade will mean that they fail the class (it won’t). Use lots of routine and repetition to let my students put as many basic tasks on autopilot as possible. I’ve been resisting too much routine and repetition because it seems boring, both for me and for them. But I think it will go a long way towards reducing anxiety and cognitive load, so I’m going to use more of it this fall with my first years: I’ll consider making all reading assignments due on Tuesdays and all writing assignments due on Thursdays. I’ll use a single simple set of instructions for all papers and one for all informal writing. I’ll ask the same three questions about each reading: What is the author saying? What do you think about it? How does it connect to our other readings and discussions? I’ll start each class in the same way: How are you doing, really? Put away electronics (unless you have special permission), you need your book, notebook, and pencil, here’s the plan for today. I’ll end each class the same way: Please write down a takeaway and a question from today; here’s the assignment for next class, come talk if you have questions. Include fewer details. Eliminating course content is painful. We love our disciplines, and we want to include key distinctions and nuances, those beautiful and intricate details. So we keep packing things in. But as much as it pains me to admit this, my first years don’t need to learn the correct way of citing Plato and Aristotle (Stephanus and Bekker pages be damned). They don’t even need to know what a Stephanus page is. They need to understand basic MLA and they need to know why one cites sources. Eliminating details in our instructions is difficult because students mess up in so many ways. It’s tempting to include all the ones we’ve come across so far. But detailed instructions are counterproductive because our students simply cannot process ten unfamiliar and challenging things at once. I’ll include two or three crucial ones. A friend just introduced me to Picasso’s animal drawings. Each captures an animal with a few simple lines. There is no background, no detail, no color, but they are crystal clear and impossible to misunderstand. I want to teach like one of those drawings. [caption id="attachment_251280" align="aligncenter" width="554"] Animal Drawings by Picasso[/caption]   Further resources Jarrett, Christian. 2020. Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus. BBC. (I draw on his analysis above.) Brief overview of the differences between novices and experts here. Picasso animal drawings here. Two of my blogs: How to provide feedback on papers and how to use nudges.

At some point in one’s teaching career, perhaps every teacher is confronted by disruptive behavior from a student that interferes with the processes of teaching and learning. Many faculty are challenged daily by common disruptive behaviors ranging from using social media during class to acts of physical and psychological aggression. On occasion, faculty find themselves afraid of a student, yet rarely do teachers receive training for these situations. Many assume a “do-it-yourself” mentality, believing it to be one’s sole responsibility to handle what happens within the classroom. At most, faculty may discuss it with departmental colleagues, but often fail to report disruptive student behaviors to appropriate university officials. It is precisely this approach that Brunt and Lewis discourage in A Faculty Guide to Addressing Disruptive and Dangerous Behavior. They encourage faculty at community colleges, technical schools, and four-year colleges and universities to expand their categories of what constitutes disruptive and potentially dangerous student behavior, to manage such behavior with both sensitivity and firmness, and to learn when and how to make use of institutional resources for dealing with student conduct problems. The book is immensely practical, drawing upon the authors’ expertise as a university counseling center director and a higher education risk management professional. The issues and techniques discussed in each chapter are illuminated by case studies contributed by faculty and administrators from a wide array of institutions. Each chapter also includes discussion questions that could guide important faculty dialogue around these issues. In part one, Brunt and Lewis operationalize dangerous and disruptive behaviors, teaching faculty how to identify signs of potentially dangerous behaviors and to conduct threat assessments. The authors challenge professors’ tendencies to dismiss, ignore, or take an overly punitive approach to disruptive behavior. Yet they also recognize that contextual factors shape whether a situation is viewed as a crisis and what strategies will be effective. They introduce terms and university resources that ought to be familiar to all faculty, but probably are not. How many teachers know whether their institution has a Behavioral Intervention Team, Risk Assessment Team, Student Conduct Office, or equivalent? More importantly, do faculty know when and how to contact them? Part two focuses on student populations who present a particular challenge. This is the least informative section of the book, as the material on each population is sparse, usually two pages or less. Further, the authors’ approach is confusing. In some cases they identify nontraditional student populations with physical and mental health problems, generational characteristics, or life circumstances that may impede their academic progress and thus predispose them to acting out in frustration: military veterans, international students, millennial and older students, and distance learning students. In other cases, however, they problematize groups whom they describe as likely to be victims of discrimination: African Americans and GLBTQ students. For example, their explanation of the micro-aggressions that African Americans may experience on campuses is commendable, but they regrettably frame the problem as being occasioned by the presence of African American students rather than by the cultural myopia of White students. In part three, Brunt and Lewis advise faculty not to “reinvent the wheel” but rather to take advantage of campus resources for assisting students. They begin with a helpful description of FERPA, HIPAA, and Title IX regulations, clearly outlining the limits of and exemptions to privacy laws that faculty often perceive as obstacles to discussing student issues with colleagues. They then discuss the various resources available to faculty and how to make use of them. In part four, they review ten “core concepts,” that is, characteristics and skills that will assist faculty in managing their classrooms, reducing the likelihood of dangerous and disruptive behavior, and handling it effectively when it occurs. I highly recommend this book for postsecondary faculty. This is a book that needs to be read, but also needs to be discussed with colleagues. Many faculty will find similarities between the scenarios described in the case studies and issues confronted in their teaching experience. As a licensed psychologist, I have usually felt confident in my capacity to address most student issues, but reading this text helped me to recognize occasions when I may have missed clear student distress signals. It has prompted me to investigate the resources available on my own campus.