Written by Ellie Louson / Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash
Coaching
Students need opportunities to try new things and to not be afraid of taking risks or making mistakes, as we introduced in the “Relationships” section of the GORP article earlier in the playlist. To encourage this, spend more of your energy being their coach and less time in the role of their instructor. Be a partner in their learning. This involves supporting their work and giving advice, but not jumping in to solve their problems. Be strategic about when to intervene if things do go wrong. They need to trust that they won’t be penalized for failure; encourage students to learn and try new things. Focus on their planning, progress, teamwork, and reflection.
▶️Flatten your learning environment. Students bring valuable skills and knowledge to the classroom. Physically sit with them at their level – not standing above them or “sage on the stage.” Learn from and with the students: admit knowledge gaps and allow students to fill them, and emulate a professional working relationship with them. Students may not be accustomed to being treated as your partner. Show students that they have control over their work by giving them options within the course structure, asking questions instead of giving answers, openly acknowledging when they own the problem space, and modeling professional discourse within the faculty team.
Coaching Student Teams
▶️Consider evidence-based team creation
- Build teams around projects or sub-projects
- Try to create interdisciplinary student teams, made up of students from different academic backgrounds/majors/departments
- 🔧A personality quiz can be offered to gauge student personality types in terms of how they behave as a part of a team, work/leadership styles, etc. Examples include https://superpowers.sypartners.com or https://www.mint-hr.com/smalley-trent.html
▶️Support teams in managing their own work processes and relationships. Judge when to leave students to solve their own team conflicts instead of stepping in. For example, if a student team is having difficulty focusing and making progress, a faculty coach sits down with the entire team and encourages an honest conversation about why the team thinks this is; encourage them to think of solutions to this problem. Facilitate discussion on how students can solve their problem within a team, rather than disciplining students yourself or offering/insisting on a solution.
- Help teams avoid falling into traditional hierarchies or uneven power structures within their teams (eg. Are women expected to take notes? Who leads or speaks for the team?)
- 🔧Example of gendered task division in physics lab courses and its effects
▶️Ensure teams are aware of and actively appreciate the value of diverse perspectives.
- Facilitate teams’ acknowledging the intersectional identities of group members and leverage these intersections when creating strategies of work and developings solutions to the problems each team works on
- Prompt the students to consider all perspectives and intersections of society that are affected by the problems the students are working on, and reinforce this throughout the course. Wicked problems are multifaceted and often affect many different groups of people in different ways. Effective designs for solutions to these problems depend on understanding the real needs of diverse audiences and users who will be interacting with those solutions.
- 🔧These Inclusive Teaching Strategies from Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning can support your own development as an educator creating inclusive learning environments. There are more resources for diversity, equity, and inclusion in experiential courses in our Appendix.