Mid-Course Pivot

For those on the semester schedule, March can signify the half-way point in the semester. At this stage, you may have a better feel for your students and how your class is unfolding. Hopefully, things are going well, and your carefully planned classes are proceeding smoothly. However, we recognize this may not be the case. Perhaps you’ve received feedback from students indicating that your learning goals aren’t being reached, or maybe you’re recognizing that your current students aren’t engaging in activities the same ways as prior classes. These may be signs to make a pivot.

Mid-semester pivots can range in size and can occur for both positive and negative reasons. Regardless of the reason or amount of change, pivoting can feel daunting. Yet it is normal for instructors (especially early career!) to make changes mid-course. Below, members of the ECP committee share the times they have needed to make a mid-semester pivot.   

Amanda: I teach an introduction to open science course, which is typically a small class for upper class students. In one unit, students were learning about reproducibility, and had an assignment to reproduce the analyses from a paper of their choosing. I had told students they could use any analysis software they wanted, provided they were comfortable enough to use it on their own. Most of the students opted to use R, as it was similar to the example I had shown in class. However, as I found out in their weekly reflections, they did not have the R background to accomplish this task and were becoming anxious. Rather than continuing with our syllabus-scheduled content, I decided to use the next class to discuss the concerns students had, explain some of the key pieces they would need (e.g. changing the data’s file path to match their computer), and we ended up having a nice discussion about what to look for when trying to reproduce analyses. Though we did not cover the next topic in as much detail, I think our detour helped students learn more about research workflows.

Vishal: This semester, I am teaching a graduate level course called Cognitive and Affective Aspects of Behavior. In our program, faculty administer a brief survey during Week 6 (out of 16) for an early feedback check-in on how the class is going. This semester is my second time teaching the class, so I worked on making a lot of changes from last year to this year. While I felt good about these changes, the early feedback check-in gave me a sense about how students felt. One common theme that they expressed was that the integration of research articles into the class felt a little more daunting than they thought, but this is a very important part of graduate training. To respond to this, I started developing reading guides and asking more review questions in class, so that I can get a real-time sense of how students are taking in the (somewhat denser) readings. I think that this has helped the students engage with the readings more and understand them better.

Dina: Early in my teaching of a course on Positive Psychology, I got feedback from students that the amount of material they needed to know well enough to apply for the midterm exam was overwhelming, and their performance suffered as a result. I thus gave students the chance to explain all the right answers to the questions they got wrong to improve both their learning and their grade by earning partial credit back.  This pivot was so successful that I now use this recursive assessment approach for most big assignments because it noticeably reduces students’ test anxiety and improves their performance. I have also learned to have 2 midterms to reduce the amount of material assessed in each, and typically drop the lowest score to reduce test anxiety.

Maria: I teach a third-year course called Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination. Recently, we had a class topic on Racism and one of the students was really interested in the colorblindness vs. the multiculturalism ideology. Although this is a great topic, we were not directly covering these ideologies in the class. I rave what I called the "Cliffs Notes'' in class about the history of the colorblindness approach. It was at some point believed to be a good approach. I then summarized that the literature has generally been in favor of the multiculturalism approach and added that there are caveats to the multiculturalism approach as well which have been overlooked until recently. I also told students that this is a larger discussion and that I would be happy to have a more in-depth chat one on one after class. After that class, I posted a couple of references for the entire class in the supplementary section for folks interested in reading more about what I briefly mentioned in class yesterday. I think this was an effective method at moving the class along while validating the students' curiosity and letting them know that they have been heard. I even had several other students in the course reach out to me about the resources I posted expressing their excitement about the materials (even though none of them were personally the student that originally posed the question in class)!