Centering on Students Scott Evenbeck National Conference on - - PDF document

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Centering on Students Scott Evenbeck National Conference on Students in Transition

• St. Louis

November 3, 2006

Students come to campus expecting to learn and to get jobs or go on to graduate or professional school. What contexts—developed, implemented, and assessed by faculty, staff, and students working together—will foster student success? How might we think about student expectations and student learning in ways that will build on what students bring to campus and support their academic achievement and persistence, resulting in graduation? What is the student experience of our campuses? Who is listening? Thank you, Nina. It is good to be here and an honor to share thoughts with persons so committed to the success of students. IUPUI has learned so much from you and your

• colleagues. And, we have lots of stories on campus about our experiences at the

conferences. Who could ever forget the incredible buffets at the top of the residence hall in Columbia. At a recent retirement party, a faculty member recounted how Barbara Jackson had made such a big deal of that reception when pitching the conference to her—and how it lived up to the billing. And then there was the time when the international conference was in Ireland and one of our colleagues went out and bought towels because the ones in the residence hall just didn’t measure up. Our lives at IUPUI are closely intertwined with the work of the Center, and we draw great meaning from our interactions and networking and we take time to celebrate that involvement. Several years ago, Jean MacGregor recommended her “new favorite” book to me. It was

• n communities of practice by Wenger. I read that book, and it helps me understand our

work here. Persons doing the same work develop vocabularies and sets of assumptions and understandings that help them do that work. That’s what we serving students in transition are doing here. Back home, we’re often in our roles in the disciplines or in specialized roles like advising. Here, we learn from one another as we define ourselves by our commitment to students in transition.

2 That’s what we want for our students—for their lives to become intertwined with ours and for them to have interactions they value and for them to celebrate their experiences. We mainly want for them to learn. But, we are social creatures, and we need to find ways to support students in their transitions that help them connect. I come from an urban campus. About 3% of our students live on campus. Most work. Most are first generation students. Many are low income. I remember hearing Sandy Astin giving a talk several years ago where he talked about risk factors. Our campus had EVERY one, most in very significant ways—commuters, working students, first generation students, low income students, often underprepared students. We talked a lot about barriers. How can we overcome this barrier or that barrier? If you have four barriers, are things worse than if you have one barrier? I got tired of that. Let’s deal with individuals and believe each can succeed. Though it’s good for us to know about the barriers and how to address them, I think I can do better by a focus on the student. We have persons coming to campus. They are special. Why? Because we admitted them and we want them to succeed. I want to start this evening with you thinking about why you had the major you did in

• college. Take a minute. Tell yourself why you had your major in college. (pause)

Pick someone next to you. Ask him or her what was his or her major? Quick question and answer. Now, tell yourself why he or she had that major. Got it? (pause) We’ll come back to that. I want to share a bit about some lessons I have learned with transitions in college. I come from Indianapolis and for a long time shopped at the neighborhood grocery where David Letterman bagged groceries so I am going to use an Indiana way of thinking about things—a top ten list. We’re kind of in the Bible Belt so there may some unconscious connection to the ten commandments but let’s not go there. Psychologists’ research, and this is old stuff, say we have a major number seven plus or minus two that we can remember. Back when learning research was what we mainly did,

• ne prominent psychologist showed that we can recall seven things. But since things are

never simple—he could account for more if he tacked on plus or minus two. We used to tell our students in intro psych that phone numbers were seven digits because we could pretty easily remember seven digits. But, since people and circumstances vary, and since psychologists want to be right, he added that plus or minus two. So I have to tell you I am stretching the bounds here by having ten lessons learned.

3 It’s good to be here in St. Louis for the conference. How great that the Midwest underdog playing against another Midwest team won the World Series. I remember my first visit over here, thinking beforehand that the arch would be a bauble

• r something and not impressive. I was really wrong. I cac look at that arch for a long

time and think about all it connotes. Walk down there and look at it at different times of the day when the light is different. Saarinen was good. If you don’t mind bumping knees with strangers if you’re by yourself or if you have someone with whom you’re comfortable bumping knees, go to the top. Saarinen allows us to be part of the art. He allows us to experience it and make it part of us and us part of it. When our students come to campus, do we allow them to become part of the campus? Do we allow the campus to become part of them? That’s my first lesson learned. Students come as whole persons. How do we validate who they are and welcome them into the community of the campus? They are not blank slates. Do you remember the Yeats quotation? Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Years ago, after one of Stuart’s international conferences, one in Dublin, my son and his friend and I headed to the west of Ireland. We were mainly taking it as it went—which I learned was the best course with teenage boys—in that context at least—and we explored towns and the countryside day by day. One of my must-dos, though, was to see Yeats

• tower. It’s in a part of Ireland where the signs are in Irish. And, then, at least, the roads

leading to the tower were still mainly those little one-lane roads where the sheep are wandering across sometimes and where you have to stop when a vehicle comes toward

• you. We had gotten up early that morning, setting out from Galway for this one dad-

required exploration. It was really foggy and we were lost a lot. Finally, we got there, slogging through the fog. We went over a little creek. There were cows around. And we looked the direction we were driving, and the sun broke and we saw this tower. It was one of those special times burned in my memory. I have a lot invested in that statement about the lighting of a fire rather than the filling of a pail. And, somehow, all that light shining through the fog and the tower became my symbol of that statement.

• Light. Shining. Coming from within almost. Radiant.

Can we see that spark in our students? Can we see an entering student and help provide a context for the students to tell us enough about where they are headed or might have done

• r care about to let that fire catch?

4 Or do we tell them to adapt to our ways. That they are going to have to put away their identities and passions and be different people. You know, they’re not going to be different people. They’ve already had experiences and lives they’re trying to make sense of. The writing teachers know that. They’ve known for a long time what students are bringing. I remember a statewide effort in Indiana once when the persons on a task force on language arts I was convening kept fussing with one another. Can you imagine academics fussing? After a while, I think I figured it out. One set of persons thought that they would teach writing by teaching parts of speech and diagrams of sentences, making sure students learned about nouns and verbs and wanting for the good ones to move to cognate objects and the other parts of speech. I will never forget the woman who one day said in a meeting—just let them write and the rest will take care of itself. I heard her point as being to give the students a chance to get it out in writing. Then as they were drawing themselves out, over time, and in contexts with faculty and peers, they would get feedback, moving them to correct writing, maybe—for some of them—to academic writing. I have to wonder some days if academic writing is something that is bounded by the academy and that maybe it’s not the writing we do before or after

• college. But that’s another tangent we won’t go down.

The task force ended up with the second point of view. We’d try to have students write first and learn grammar later. I know it’s not that simple and I was talking with some ESL teachers about this issue this week. Like most of life, the truth is in the middle there someplace, depending on circumstances. But, the point is that students come as persons. Our contexts need to help them light those fires. Then, they will learn. They will make meaning within themselves and they will be different and our teaching will be associated with their learning. So, we have that one lesson learned: Students come as whole persons, and we should remember it’s about the lighting of a fire and not the filling of a pail. We have spent a lot of time with data at IUPUI. Surveys, focus groups, DFW rates, retention and graduation rates, program evaluations. It’s all up on the web. Lots of times, we rate ourselves as green light, yellow light, or red light—all’s on track, something is akilter, or—we better redouble our efforts. We compile a retention report, also on the web, that gives summaries of dozens of retention efforts on an annual basis.

5 Lately, though, we have trying to capture some of the richness on the student experience that we hear from Richard Light. We have a summer bridge program, and we asked students “What single event has had the most impact on forming your ideas, opinions, convictions? Any why? If I posed that question to you, what would you say? Hear what they said. Remember, these are 18-year-olds. (READ) Are these unformed blank slates? I think not. How might we light the fire for students who already have such compelling life experiences? Academic advisors know these stories. Some others do as well. How can we get a handle on the expectations of our students—some sense we can grab on to about who they are? And, what’s another lesson for students in transition. Here’s one: Contexts matter. I am a social psychologist. The person who founded experimental social psychology after World War II was Kurt Lewin. He had fled Hitler. He taught at MIT. His lab later moved to Ann Arbor. His students transformed social psychology. One of his last grad students was John Thibaut. In a biography of Lewin, Thibaut said one of his jobs was to walk along the Charles and talk with Lewin. Must have been great walks and talks. John Thibaut went back to his alma mater, Chapel Hill, to lead the social psychology

• program. He was my advisor.

Lewin said behavior is a function of the person and the environment. Well, of course. But, he devised experiments to see how the two interacted. I wish we had time to talk more about that. It’s old stuff now. It’s not rigorous anymore. But, we learned a lot from it. Here is an example from social psychology on how persons and environments are both

• important. For years, one camp said that there was a phenomenon of social

facilititation—that our behavior is improved when in the presence of other persons. People bring out the best in us. A roaring crowd helps the team. The fans are the key

• element. That’s why home games are better—more and louder fans.

6 Then another group of researchers came along and couldn’t replicate the findings in their

• experiments. They found that their subjects did worse when other persons were present.

They said that we have social inhibition. Big mess, right—sounds like a bunch of scientists. There’s no real truth. We’ll just pick the one we want to go with based on our predilictions. Well, guess what, another set of researchers came along and devised an experiment where they looked at how good students were at the task they were being asked to perform in the laboratory. Students who were good at it did better when others were present—they had social facilitation. Students who were not good at a task did worse when others were present—they had social inhibition. So, it turns out there is not one universal truth. Depending on the context and what we bring as persons, we might do better or we might do worse in the presence of other persons. Behavior is a function of the person and the environment. So—our entering students come to campus and we expect them to figure out our rules and our assumptions and our way of doing things. Let me tell you one. I was a scout leader for a long time, and I overheard a lot of

• conversations. Did you know that tents aren’t soundproof and that everyone in the

campground can hear those conversations that take place as people are getting to know

• ne another and talking—even when it’s dark out and the fire is down, sound waves still

carry. The young men I heard talk back in Indiana thought there were two differences between high school and college. Can you guess what they were?  You don’t have to go to class.  You can drink, And, you know, I didn’t like that. But, on campus, our philosophy is that students are adults. Children one day and miraculously transformed into adults the next. Really quite amazing. The military doesn’t treat them like adults.

7 Employers don’t treat them like adults. But, we have this happy fiction that they will be adults who make choices and live with consequences and then will grow up and live happily ever after. You have to go to class when you’re in high school and you have to go to work when you

• graduate. But when you’re in college you can do what you want to do because you are an

adult and we are moving you to the path of adulthood by treating you this way. I could make a good speech about how some of the is really good. But, our math and psych departments several years ago kept track of attendance. Guess what, out of their thousands of students, NOT ONE who hadn’t been to a majority of the classes the first six weeks of class ended up getting a C or better at the end of the class. So, the faculty devised an administrative withdrawal policy. After much debate, faculty council approved it. If a department votes to require attendance and it’s on the syllabus for every section, the faculty get a roster, now sent by the registrar, on which they report

• n issues to be addressed (our early warning system) and if a student should be

administratively withdrawn. Then I write letters—thousands of early warning letters and hundreds of administrative withdrawal letters. The administrative withdrawal letters go by certified mail. That’s more scary. And, you know what, we dropped the DFW rate in math courses by over 10%. The point was not to withdraw anyone. It was to move heaven and earth to get them to go to classs. Contexts matter. Our students were not bringing the habits of successful students. Our students are primarily first generation students. How can we provide contexts that will increase the probability that they will be around long enough to graduate? Vincent Tinto and Brian Pusser have a recent draft on moving from theory to action with student success. They argue that it’s time to move from a focus on the attributes of students themselves where success is solely their responsibility to the conditions or environments on campus. Those environments are in our control. They cite commitment, expectations, support, feedback, and involvement. Those are the guiding principles for all our best practices. We have know for years from Angelo and Cross that we should all be doing one-minute essays at the end of class, for example, to see what one thing wasn’t clear or what application the student will make of the work that day. What percentage of faculty on your campus do that? Contexts matter—my second one for a top ten. This is the E in B = f(P,E). Let’s talk about a specific context, a specific feature of a campus for this E, this context. The third on the Letterman list—smile and speak to people.

8 I have been on lots of campuses in the last couple years. Some of you have been on

• more. On some, the atmosphere is good. I am always getting lost. On some campuses,

persons can tell I am trying to figure out what’s up and ask if they can help me with

• directions. On others, I have felt like my existence was an annoyance.

What’s your campus like? We all know that a key transition for students is visiting a

• campus. It is powerful in attracting students. I went to IU Bloomington because I was

there as a high school sophomore and imprinted to the place. There’s still one section of campus that’s like sacred ground for me because I remember walking there when I was 15 and thinking “this is my place.” People spoke to me. Do you have offices that don’t work for students? I am in a difficult dialogue with an

• ffice on my campus now because they are calling students “delinquent accounts.” I just

can’t deal with that. These are human beings. I guess I could stand being called a delinquent account if I had forgotten to pay a bill, but I wouldn’t like it. We sometimes have disagreements about whether we are serving students or customers. Frankly, I don’t like the customer analogy. I know that students pay and that they graduate after paying a lot. But, college isn’t about buying something. It’s about learning something (even though money issues get in the way). Let’s up the ante with being a pleasant place interpersonally. I read about how cities go to great lengths to help taxi drivers be hospitable and how that has had positive impact. I haven’t noticed campuses doing this. Many are expending enormous resources to look

• nicer. I think that’s ok. But let’s get in gear with making them welcome—welcoming

them by all. What do your NSSE data tell you? Are you using those data? And—here’s a fourth for my Letterman list. Despite what I said about customers, number four is Money matters I hope you subscribe to Postsecondary Opportunity. Tom Mortenson and his colleagues are doing really good work in looking at the impact of finances and other factors in college success. Mortenson’s data are—if you come from the top quartile of family income, 73% of you will have a baccalaureate degree by age 24 What’s your guess for the second quartile? It’s 27%

9 What about the third quartile? It’s 13% What about the bottom quartile? It’s 7% Is this America? Tom says his family came here for opportunity. So did mine. So why have we become a country of inherited educational opportunity? I think we have to be part of the solution—and I think it’s about transitions. Why don’t we figure out how to have more of our students work on campus? Our Biology department launched a special program to hire first year students in the labs. They aren’t doing sophisticated work. They’re cleaning up the place and doing lab prep. But, you know, they are being retained at rates 20% and higher than our other students. They’re forming community with one another and with the faculty and staff in the department. We can’t all be Berea College with all students working. But, we sure could attract and support more students and address this financial issue for students if we got them working on campus. Campuses are often the largest employers in their towns. Let’s get out of the box and hire our students. Let’s have a targeted amount

• f our total payroll going to students.

I don’t know about your campus, but on ours, work/study sometimes seems pronounced with a smirk or something. It’s like we have our real employees and then we have these drones who we hire for menial tasks and call them “work study.” These are human beings who are our students and who are working in roles we could make more tied to their academic experiences. I am now writing all our employers of our students on work/study and asking them to report on what they’re doing to support the students’ academic success. Some of them are annoyed. But that’s ok. We all need more scholarships based on need. But, we can also employ more students. And we can make that an important part of entry into college, like Biology at IUPUI, and we can make work and study complement one another more by having the students work

• n campus.

And, that’s my fifth Letterman recommendation: Make work and study mutually supportive.

10 Some 82% of our students work 32 or more hours a week. We bemoan that. I feel like we want to tell them that they should abandon the crass world of work and enter the wonderful life of the mind—that they should bifurcate themselves and devalue the worker half. What if we told our low income first generation students and their parents that we think their interest in work is just great. What if we told them that that’s what we’re here for? What if we turned the Career Center upside down? That’s what we did at IUPUI. We moved the Advising Center and the Career Center

• together. When you come off the elevator you see a window staffed by students that has

big signs that say Advising Center and Career Center. We have employees who are half academic advisors and half career counselors. The focus of the career counselors is working with the entering students. We are trying to take advantage of their interest in jobs to make them more successful in school. It seems to be working. What if we could get the faculty to find more ways to use the students’ workplaces as places where students bring their reflections. Could they be better workers if the academic context gave them things to try or to reflect upon at work? Internships are great. But, we’re unlikely to ever reach the numbers of students we want in formal internships. Let’s figure out how students’ ongoing work can be an asset and not a deficit to academic success. And my sixth—use the powerful pedagogies I don’t know if you have read Marsha Baxter Magolda’s book on student intellectual development, but I commend it to you. She interviewed students at Miami of Ohio while they were in school and then for years after graduation. She formulated a theory of intellectual development, and much of the book is her sharing the reports she got from students. When students were asked where they developed intellectually, where do you think it happened? My reading suggested they were coming up with the following: Sorority president Habitat for Humanity project Overseas study Edgerton wrote a brilliant white paper when he was about to take over at Pew in charge

• f education. He said that he was seeing great promise in what he called powerful

11 pedagogies in terms of enhancing undergraduate education. There is a great interview of Edgerton by Chuck Shroeder in About Campus that also addresses his thinking on the powerful pedagogies which are: Undergraduate research Problem based learning Learning communities Study abroad Internships Service learning How can we use those experiences to help students learn? Could every one of your students do at least one of these? Go look at the web site for UAB. They decided they wanted to know how they were doing with these powerful pedagogies. So each school counts them, and then they are summarized for the campus. When you’re trying to lose weight, do you keep track of your weight by writing it down? I do. And it’s a pretty continual thing. So why don’t we write down on a scorecard how we’re doing with such goals and let everyone— especially ourselves—know? We have lots of work on the first year. We have an increasing amount of work on the senior year. But what about the middle? People watching our work might assume that we think that everything is just fine once a student gets past that first year and then everything is kind of on automatic pilot and students move along the assembly line till they become seniors and then have to make a transition to life beyond college. I had a classic sophomore slump. I will never forget my dad picking me up from work from the factory in the summer after my sophomore year. That was in the days when parents got the grades. He told them they’d come. I asked him what I got, and he said

• ne of each—an A, a B, a C, and a D. He hadn’t known me to ever get anything other

than a A and a B or two. When he said that, I thought it was going to be B, C, D, and F. It was a really bad semester. What kept me in school was my newly pledged fraternity. My newly pledged fraternity might have had a bit to do with the grades also. But, my point is that the academic side of things wasn’t doing anything to keep me there. Isn’t that our job? Let’s figure out how things like internships, service learning, and other programs keep students engaged through the middle years.

12 Do you know the word “middler?” It’s used at seminaries: first year, middler, senior. I like that. I see at least one paper at this conference on the middle years and lots on the sophomore year. There’s great work going on at UTEP on the middle years. Let’s help students build on their strengths in the middle years. And—my seventh for the list— Use the summer Why do we act like the year only has nine months? We’re not out there farming in the summer any more. Some of the most successful new universities go year-round and get adults to their degrees in a lot shorter time then we do on campus. Let’s use the summer. Upward Bound and other highly successful programs helping students make the transition to successful university study have long encouraged their students to take a summer class or two before their first years of college. It’s part of the culture there because Upward Bound programs have summer programs all through high

• school. These are low income and first generation students, and in our programs nearly

all finish high school and go to college. This is in a school district where 26% of African American and 25% of white boys graduate from high school in four years You heard me right. So, Upward Bound has set the expectation that learning is year-round. We started a bridge program based on a model at Brooklyn College and it has been highly successful. The retention rate is 20% above our normal rate. Bringing new students in for a couple weeks or more—or having them take a course in the summer before college—works. But what about the rest of the college years? I just saw data that African American students who took summer classes graduated at rates above 70% relative to rates below 30% for those who did not. Adelman has had data that suggest that minority students who leave are less likely to return than are majority students. I don’t like what that might be saying about our

• campuses. I remember trying to talk with my son about his going to a particular private

high school. He had gone to a private day school for elementary school and then transferred to a public middle school. He humored me by going to the visit the open house at the private high school. But, he said he didn’t want to go through the entry process at the new school, preferring to move onto high school with his friends from middle school. Ben often knows more than his dad does. Entry is tough. For minority students, entry or re-entry may be tougher than it is for majority students. I don’t like what that may be saying about our campus cultures.

13 But, these recent data suggest perhaps that being on campus all year, including the summer, keeps students in the community, avoids the re-entry. Let’s figure out how to use summer. Let’s see if faculty loads can include summer. Let’s see if we can make summer normal rather than the exception. Maybe it could be about working on campus year-round—kill two birds with one stone. I talked earlier about working on campus. One more anecdote—the other day we had a town hall on some work going on on campus. At the end of the talk, I noticed a young man I know in a building services uniform cleaning up at the back of the classroom. Jeff used to work at the front desk in our building. I knew he had graduated. Turns out, he decided to take a custodial job because he could work on campus and get tuition

• remission. And, he will have his master’s in informatics done in 16 months. I would

rather he’d be working in a major-related job. This job, though, keeps him on campus and allows him to give full attention to studying when he’s not cleaning. Wouldn’t it have been better if our HRA department had an active program to hire students, keeping them on campus twelve months a year, studying and working? Wouldn’t it be great if we brought all of a student to campus? What do I mean by that— We need to mind our ABC’s—ninth on the Letterman list.. Psychologists say we have three things to consider A Attitude B Behavior C Cognition When we talk about school, we talk about what students know—the cognitive part. Lately, accreditors urge us to talk about what students know and are able to do—the behavior part. But what makes it all work? Values and attitudes Why do clinicals work so well in nursing education—because the students are all there— What they know What they do What they value The powerful pedagogies I talked about earlier work because the students are all there What they do

14 What they know What they value How about, when we think about student transitions, we be intentional in giving students contexts so that they’re all there. If they’re not, if we’re not building on what they bring, if we don’t give them context we are promoting the following Sit down Shut up Memorize it Take the test Do the memory dump, and Sell the textbook back That’s not what we want. Ebinghaus did research many years ago on how much we

• remember. It’s not often much.

What if we had contexts for students to be able to relate to their learning? Remember that wonderful story in McCourt’s book. He was a young immigrant teacher. It wasn’t going well. He had a mentor who helped. And, he found some old papers in a closet in his Brooklyn high school. Turned out they were written by relatives, some killed in World War II, of the students in his classroom. He got his students involved with reading the work of persons they knew or of family members now gone. Powerful connections for the students. It turned everything around. Students were engaged. I loved that book-Angela’s Ashes. He tells the story of his growing up and ends as he comes to our country on a ship. Do you remember how chapter 18 ends? McCourt recounts being out on deck with the wireless officer as they were coming into New York harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty. The officer said “Isn’t this a great country altogether?” Chapter 19 is one word: “Tis.” Well, it isn’t going to be if we don’t get our act together with students having access and success in college. When we went to Yeats’ tower, we were close by Limerick where McCourt had grown

• up. My ninth recommendation;

Remember the tower Students need a goal. Can our contexts and interactions with them help them define that tower for themselves? Why are they in school? Where are they headed? Can they see progress? We don’t want them to be lost in the fog. And, it’s not our tower. It’s their

15

• tower. They bring a lot to us, and it’s incumbent on us to find contexts for them to have

their towers. When we started, I asked you to come up with reasons why you had you major and why your other had his/her major. I remember when that question was first posed to me. I said I had the major I did because social psychology was such a great field, that it had practical applications, that I would be able to get a teaching job. The other person I described was a quantitative psychology student. I said “he likes math.” He was kind of a nerd—this was back in pocket-protector days and he had one. So, when I described myself, it was about the external world. When I described him, it was about him. Do we do that with our students? When we talk about students, do we have that bias. Do we say things associated with their success in making transitions are about them. They don’t have enough motivation. They work too much. They are under-prepared. What if it’s about us? Most likely it is about both person and environment. Like the social facilitation/inhibition example. We have to figure out contexts for students that will maximize the chance that they are drawing on their existing strengths, experiences, passions, and goals that will get them to graduation. That’s what they want to do. No one in his or her right mind would put up with the bureaucratic processes we impose on them if they didn’t want to come to campus and graduate. They made that decision. They are here. Now, how do we match students and contexts so they persist and graduate? Key to that is my #10: High expectations

16 If we don’t believe in the students, can they make it? If we don’t see them as successful, can they be? Remember the old research on how students thought to be good students performed much better than those thought to be weaker students. Do we make assumptions about potential based on how someone looks? Or talks? Or dresses? How can we see that potential in each student? Thank you.