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Category: Director’s Corner

While we can hope that this Tuesday won’t bring “something awful,” we must recognize that it will likely feel even more charged than 2008 or 2016. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about how to best support my students following this year’s election.
Published on Leave a comment on So Restless Indeed
The title for this blog post comes from Arcadia's song "Election Day," which has nothing whatsoever to do with the American political system. However, a 2021 study suggests that listening to 80s pop music can be an effective means of lowering anxiety.

Election Day in the U.S. is Tuesday, November 5—and it’s safe to say that most Americans are not only well aware of that fact but are also bracing for the emotionally charged days likely to follow. I’ve been reflecting on how to approach those expectations in my class next week.

I began teaching at Xavier in the fall of 2007, so I recall teaching on Wednesday, November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected; I also remember teaching on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election. On both occasions, I was unprepared for the strong emotions expressed by my students. Both times, I ended up setting aside my planned activities to give students an opportunity to share what they were feeling. Was that the right decision? I’m not entirely sure. But in both instances, students seemed to appreciate my willingness to create a space for discussion.

According to Huston & DiPietro (2007), when responding to a stressful event, “an instructor’s response need not be complicated, time intensive, or even personalized.” Their study focused on faculty responses to collective tragedies, but their findings apply to other situations that bring up intense emotions. Students in their study often reported frustration when faculty ignored a major event and gratitude when instructors acknowledged that something impactful had occurred.

While we can hope that this Tuesday won’t bring “something awful,” we must recognize that it will likely feel even more charged than 2008 or 2016. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about how to best support my students following this year’s election.

The Center for Teaching Excellence at Boston College encourages faculty to consider several factors when planning post-election classes:

  • Your comfort level: What are you comfortable discussing with students? Self-care is essential. Avoid engaging in topics that may elevate your own stress.
  • Student burnout: Are students able to engage in discussion? This has been a long, complex election year. Students might not have the cognitive or emotional energy to process the results immediately.
  • Connection to learning: How does this fit with the course content? For some students, discussing the election results might be more meaningful if there’s a clear link to course objectives.
  • Classroom community: How might this fit within your classroom’s culture? By now, you probably have a good sense of how your students engage with one another and their comfort level in discussing sensitive topics.

If any of these factors lead you to decide against dedicating an entire class to the election results, the team at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan suggests a few smaller steps faculty can take:

  • Acknowledge the situation. By openly recognizing the election, we show students that we understand its impact on them. Huston & DiPietro (2007) found that students felt more unsettled when faculty didn’t respond to significant events at all.
  • Make learning adjustments. When students are stressed, their ability to learn can suffer. Consider temporarily easing your expectations. As Jin (2017) points out, external stressors can greatly hinder a student’s capacity to engage and retain new information.
  • Share campus resources. Most faculty aren’t trained as therapists, as Field (2023) reminds us. Sometimes the best support we can offer is to connect students with campus resources.

This election year, I won’t be in class on Wednesday, but I’ll let students know that they’re welcome to stop by my office for coffee and a friendly conversation. I’ll also be reducing the workload for the week, to give everyone a little more space to process the results—whatever they may be.

References

It’s only mid-October, but many of us are already thinking ahead to the end of the semester. Students may be anticipating Final Exams and tickets home, but I’m thinking about something a little different—course evaluations.
Published on Leave a comment on Take Control of Your Course Evaluations

It’s only mid-October, but many of us are already thinking ahead to the end of the semester. Students may be anticipating Final Exams and tickets home, but I’m thinking about something a little different—course evaluations.

You might remember the old days of carbon-copy forms, sealed envelopes, and drop boxes in the Old Convent. Thankfully, we’ve moved to Brightspace for evaluations, saving us from those logistical headaches. No more setting aside class time, reading out scripted instructions, or finding that one student willing to trek across campus with a stack of forms. Now, it’s just a matter of reminding students (again and again) to log into Brightspace and click on the evaluation link.

But why am I thinking about this now, in the middle of October? At Xavier, not every course is evaluated every semester. Only first-year faculty have all of their courses evaluated; non-tenured faculty, after their first year, have two randomly selected courses evaluated each semester; tenured faculty only have one randomly selected class evaluated each year. However, faculty can request evaluations for any or all of their courses.

We recently received a reminder from the Provost that the deadline to request additional evaluations is Monday, October 21. You can submit your request here.

Why You Should Consider Requesting Evaluations

Since earning tenure, I’ve requested evaluations for most of my classes. Why? There are several reasons:

  • Consistency: If one class is being evaluated, why not all? Having evaluations for all my courses provides a clearer, more comprehensive picture of my teaching performance.
  • Certainty: What if my best class of the semester isn’t randomly selected? By requesting evaluations, I ensure I capture the most insightful feedback.
  • Depth: The more evaluations I collect, the more data I have to work with. This richer dataset allows me to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement over time.

Course evaluations offer valuable insights into our teaching. The more data we gather, the richer the story we can tell about our teaching journey. While I’m no data expert, even basic visualizations help me make sense of patterns. For instance, this chart compares my positive and negative responses over the years.

A horizontal bar chart displaying various evaluation categories related to a program or service, rated from Poor to Excellent.
Fall 2007 to Spring 2022. This chart offers a comparison between positive (Excellent or Good) responses and negative (Fair or Poor) responses.

In addition to quantitative data, tools like ChatGPT can help summarize qualitative feedback. For example, I recently used it to analyze student comments on my strengths as a teacher. One recurring theme? Supportiveness and understanding. Students often appreciate how I listen to their concerns and adapt based on feedback.

What you do with the data is up to you, but one thing is clear: You can’t benefit from feedback you don’t collect. Whether you’re in your second year or your 18th or your 42nd, consider requesting evaluations for one or more of your classes this semester. The insights you gain might surprise you.

Established in 1994, CAT+FD is one of the older centers for teaching and learning (CTL) in the country. This is perhaps not surprising considering Xavier's commitment to excellence in teaching. Over the coming year, we will be posting a variety of reflections about the evolution of CAT+FD on this blog.
Published on Leave a comment on CAT+FD at 30, Part 1
The 30th anniversary version of the CAT+FD logo
A special logo for our trigintennial!
Original by Jim Rose.
Adapted by Bart Everson.

By now, everyone at Xavier knows that the university will be celebrating its centennial in 2025. Not everyone may realize that CAT+FD is currently celebrating its
30th anniversary. (I think it's a shame we've let a word like trigintennial fall out of common use.) Since this is my first year as director, I thought I'd use this space to reflect on how things have changed over the past 30 years.

Established in 1994, CAT+FD is one of the older centers for teaching and learning (CTL) in the country. This is perhaps not surprising considering Xavier's commitment to excellence in teaching. Over the coming year, we will be posting a variety of reflections about the evolution of CAT+FD on this blog. If you're interested in a deep dive into the history and evolution of CTLs in general, pick up a copy of Mary C. Wright's excellent Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Page one from the CAT News Report, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1994
The first edition of the CAT News Report. Click the image for a PDF of the newsletter.

CTLs came about, in part, through the recognition that while graduate programs were doing excellent work developing their students into expert scholars in their disciplines, they were not always doing a good job of developing their students into expert teachers. However, because of the timing, the earliest CTLs placed a lot of emphasis on what would eventually become know and educational technology, or EdTech. In the inaugural issue of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching News Report, Dr. Ann Barron, then interim director, explained that the the new Center was committed "to advancing the art of teaching — at ALL levels — in a technological age," an interesting and significant distinction. That issue includes an article about the first Kellogg Mini-grant awards, which supported faculty interested in revising one of their classes, and an article about using Apple's HyperCard to create "multimedia courseware".

The link between CTLs and technology should not be surprising. Consider the year CAT+FD began (for newer readers, CAT+FD was originally just CAT). 1994 was a particularly significant year in terms of publicly available technology. That year, Netscape Communications released Netscape Navigator, which would become the first widely used web browser; Sony released the PlayStation, which, now in its fifth generation, is still one of the most widely used gaming consoles; Sun Microsystems introduced the Java programming language, one of the most influential programming languages; and Kodak released its DC40 camera, one of the first consumer-level digital cameras. The world changed that year, and CTLs like CAT+FD stepped up to help faculty adapt to those changes.

Thirty years later, CAT+FD continues to be true to that original committee, even as the scope of our work has expanded. We are committed to supporting faculty in all aspects of their career in this ever-evolving technological age. Whether faculty want become expert users of our LMS, Brightspace, or improve their student mentoring, whether they want to learn how to incorporate artificial intelligence into their classes or ways to embrace a pedagogy of kindness, CAT+FD continues to provide faculty with the resources they need to shape their professional lives at Xavier.