Page 15 - Campus Technology, August/September 2017

TEACHING AND LEARNING
lot of it is lecture — standing at a lectern, telling the students what they should do and what they should know, then testing them on it to know if they’ve absorbed as much as they’ve been told or read,” Stearns said. “We have to rethink this. That’s not the way young students really take information and use it. What we really want is to get them to think and to use information.” Stearns is in a continual process of tweaking his approach, but here are five ways he’s modified his instruction to reach Gen Zers.
1) Give Instant Feedback
Instructors need to “surrender the soapbox,” according to the report. All that requires, said Stearns, is working directly with students and “valuing what they do.” In his composition class, for example, instead of issuing an assignment (“Read this author, then go home and write a paper”), Stearns has students begin their writing right in class. Then he works the room. He checks in on the students and asks them to show him their progress. He has brief one-on-one conversations about what he’s seeing: “OK. You’ve got a thesis. What are you going to do now? Why don’t you think of it this way?” Stearns uses class time to allow students to do their work.
The result: The instructor demonstrates on the spot how he values what students do and they get the instant feedback they crave.
The best performers know how to get their fans to participate and not simply observe. That calls for the instructor to demonstrate a personal interest in the topic and come up with ways to engage students.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | August/Septembert 2017
2) Make the Classroom a Social Environment
Stearns said he’s seen a qualitative difference in enthusiasm for students coming to class by adding this activity on the first day of the semester: Each person writes up a quick-and-dirty résumé, “right there in class.” Then during the next one or two sessions, he pulls students into groups to share their résumés with each other. They bond over music, art and other interests. “Pretty soon,” he suggested, “you’ve created a dynamic of students who are interested in each other, and therefore they don’t mind coming to class because they have friends there — [people] they know who probably respect what they do.”
The result: Students get real-life endorsements in a social setting akin to the virtual ones they are accustomed to.
3) Create Content Kibbles
Stearns used to hand out assignments on a piece of paper, tell students to read it and consider his job done until the work came back in for grading. No more. “What I found is that it’s better for me to take little chunks and put those up on a PowerPoint,” he said. The use of bullet points forces him to explain the material and it provides his Gen Zers with
visual clues for the discussion. This isn’t the same as lecturing, Stearns insisted. It’s simply providing a paragraph worth of explanation that helps the students gain a better grasp of the topic that can’t be relayed “in one sentence.”
The result: “Chunking up” the content highlights what’s most important for the learners and appeals to their perceived shorter attention spans.
4) Put on a Good Show
The report Stearns helped produce refers to this as tapping into “your ‘rock star’ qualities.” The best performers know how to get their fans to participate and not simply observe. In the classroom, that calls for the instructor to demonstrate a personal interest in the topic and come up with ways to engage students. “If you walk into a class and you say, ‘Let’s work on the paper that we did last week,’ you’ve lost the class,” he said. “Anybody likes a little bit of entertainment, and a lot of it has to do with the enthusiasm the instructor has.”
For his part, Stearns makes the work more engaging by finding ways to relate assignments to his students’ lives. For example, he pushes for compositions in which the thesis ties