PTSP Home

Annual Retreat Reports

Introduction

PTSP Engaged Learner Initiative

What Do You Mean by Engagement Anyway? Joshua Aronson and Uri Treisman, guest speakers

Discussion of Articles on Engaged Learners

A Conversation with Betsy Hoffman

What Do We Know About Engagement Now?

University of Colorado
President's Teaching Scholars Program
Spring 2001 Retreat Report

Conversation with Betsy Hoffman

I am really humbled by following Uri and Joshua. I have followed Uri’s work. The first person who gave me some of Uri’s work was a colleague of mine at Purdue in the early 1980s. Uri was at Berkeley struggling to get tenure and get recognized in a time when people didn’t appreciate people who cared a lot about teaching. I was struggling with how to communicate with a diverse group of students and get them to work together. A colleague of mine in psychology showed me his work. Over the years I have tried very hard to get math departments to take his work seriously. When I was at Iowa State, I could not get my math department to invite him. I was pleased when I was at the University of Illinois, Chicago that the math education program invited him to a math workshop. I am very pleased he is also here talking to this group. I hope that some of you will go back to your departments and invite him to come and talk to the unconverted.

My apologies to Joshua because I was not aware of his work. I was impressed with Claude Steele’s work, and I understand that a lot of it was co-authored with Joshua. At the University of Illinois, Chicago, which has one of the most diverse student populations, we were struggling with many of the same issues. A typical freshman class would consist of 40 percent white students, 30 percent Asian, 20 percent Latino, and 10 percent African American. One of our challenges was how to get all of these students to participate in campus programs. The Honors Program, for example, was viewed as what the Asian kids did. It was difficult to recruit Latinos, African Americans, and even Caucasian students because it was viewed as an Asian program.

So the kinds of things that Joshua and Uri have talked about are real issues that we who want true equality and true diversity have to take very seriously. The whole idea of a scholars program seems very important in that it is an opportunity to make clear to students that they are the best, and we want to do what we can to make sure they realize their potential in the best sense of the word.

I hope some of you have had a chance to read the Communiqué. In this piece I have attempted to talk about the way I have struggled over the years with trying to communicate with different audiences, to combine a teaching career with a research career, to make teaching central to what we do at a research university, without in any way diminishing the importance of cutting-edge research.

I want to share with you some of the challenges I faced, some of the successes and the failures, and then give you time to make comments and ask questions. What I say in this article is that I always wanted to be a teacher, but it took me a long time to find the right subject. And I think we forget sometimes how hard our students struggle with that. I started out as a music major until I got a D in music theory. I then switched to history because I liked it, not because I felt any great pull toward it. After having earned a B.A. in history, I went on and earned a Ph.D. in history. I then went to teach history at the University of Florida. That was the first point in my life when I ran up against a brick wall. This was a time when there were 10 new history Ph.D.s for every job; a lot of my colleagues were driving taxis. Just to have a teaching job was a big deal, and yet it was a really tough experience for me for a number of reasons. I was the first woman ever hired in the history department, and I was hired under threat of lawsuit to the university. I was the first quantitative historian, and I had just gotten a divorce from my first husband. Putting that together you can kind of understand what it was like socially to be at the University of Florida. A lot of my colleagues didn’t want to talk to me because of the way I had been hired. Those who wanted to talk to me found it difficult because I thought in terms of abstract models.

My first quarter I was assigned to teach two mega-sections of Western Civilizations, a subject which I love, but which I studied primarily in small classes. Having gone to Smith where the emphasis is on thinking and creatively analyzing theories, I was totally unprepared for the students that I had at Florida. I had never delivered a lecture. I tried the Socratic method; I tried everything. I would stay up all night writing lectures about the English civil war. All I would get back on the tests were word-for-word answers out of the textbook. The textbook appeared to me to have been written for the sixth-grade level. I was appalled at how simple-minded it was, but, no matter what I added to the class, nothing that was not in the textbook came back from the students. The best students would memorize sections from the textbook.

At that point, a friend of mine from Cal Tech called me and asked how things were going, and I told him the facts. I wondered what was going to deliver me from this awful experience. My friend said, "Why don’t you come to Cal Tech?" He said he was looking for interesting graduate students. I couldn’t imagine going back to graduate school, but after going back to teach a couple more weeks, I called my colleague back and said, "What do I have to do?" I went to Cal Tech with no intention of getting a second degree; all I wanted to do was to get out of a really bad situation. One of the interesting sidelights was that Brian was at Cal Tech, but my decision to go there wasn’t influenced by that. But my colleagues at Florida constructed the story that I had left to follow my boyfriend. In fact, twenty years later, I met the chair of the history department at Florida. When he realized who I was—a full professor who had published 40 papers, done research, and won teaching awards—and that I was the person who left the department, he was flabbergasted. He told me, "People still talk about you as the woman who left to follow her boyfriend."

I finished the second degree; it was sort of one of those things that happened. I did well. I worked on a project with one of the faculty members. Before I knew it, I was close to finishing this second Ph.D. The economics job market in contrast to the history job market was much better. At meetings, I had 35 to 40 interviews; I was invited to probably 10 or 15 on-campus interviews. I got six job offers. And I was treated with respect, even though economics is a field with not many women in it. The next really big decision I had to make was whether I would accept the job offer from Swarthmore or Northwestern. I had always thought that I would end up at a liberal arts college. Teaching was what I wanted to do, despite some bad experiences I had up to that point. And I thought I wanted to teach in an environment where there were small classes with lots of interaction. But I began to realize that at Swarthmore I would never be able to develop the research career I had in mind. Whereas if I went to Northwestern I could conduct my research, and if I also paid attention to my teaching, I could always go back to a place like Swarthmore if I changed my mind.

As many of you know, at the end of the 1970s, if you cared about teaching you were suspect. I am sure that many of you who are my age or older remember how awful it was. At this point in my life, when I went to Northwestern I started an odyssey for me of exploring how to communicate with different kinds of students in different class sizes. Later on, we went from Northwestern to Purdue, and that was a high point in our teaching and research. Lots of papers and grants. Tremendous success in teaching mostly classes of 40 students or less. We published a textbook shortly after we left Purdue.

The next big challenge was moving to Wyoming, and then moving back and forth between Arizona and Wyoming. We finally stayed in Arizona for five years. It was my first experience since Florida of teaching large classes. Here I was a full professor, and I had already won an international research award, but the thought of going in again to a large class was unnerving. I still had no conception of how to deal with a large class. The first large class I taught was macroeconomics and it went relatively well, although I don’t know exactly know what I did. The second semester, I taught microeconomics, and I had about 30 percent of the same kids that took my class the first semester. The class went horribly. I lost control of the class; students in the back were talking all the time. People didn’t show up. So I asked one of the young women in the class what happened. Why was the first class so great and this one not good. She said, "You are taking us for granted. The first semester you wore a suit every day to class. This semester you’re wearing jeans."

Unfortunately for women, one of the things I learned is that dressing up in a very traditional way makes a huge difference. So I dressed up for the rest of the class, and the students were more attentive than they had been. I learned that power is important about keeping order in large classes. Power is something I have never cared about, but I came to appreciate its importance in this context. As I got larger and larger classes, I started experimenting with some of the things Mike (Cummings) talked about yesterday. I started giving a quiz every Friday on the week’s material, taking attendance and giving credit for it, like one point per day. Women can’t quite pull the power trip that men can in class. Some students resented my attempts to gain control in this way and said so on the teaching evaluations. So there was this balance to maintain—how to keep order, foster learning, and still let students know that you were approachable. I think keeping office hours is extremely important.

At Northwestern, they publish the teaching evaluations, and I think that made me a better teacher as well. Northwestern doesn’t give you any credit for teaching in the promotion process, but the teaching is of extremely high quality there. Fear of having something awful said about you is a very powerful force.

Let me just conclude by saying I have struggled over my career to do well at teaching. What I do is as much teaching as anything that I have ever done. I think about and struggle with it still, and I am always experimenting. Brian and I have a wonderful partnership because we can go home and talk about teaching on a daily basis. Or we talk about economics. Now we are talking about how to communicate with the legislature and the faculty. How to balance those two.

Mike C.—We really love the smaller classes. Is there any way to have more small classes?

Betsy—It is really tough because of its relationship to what faculty get paid. We have a large number of top faculty who are well paid. The only way to do it is to raise more money to hire more faculty. I don’t think we could justify raising the tuition for this reason. Even the best research universities have large classes. The smaller liberal arts universities do it by having much higher teaching loads, with the average faculty member teaching six to eight courses a year. I don’t think anyone wants to do that at CU. The economics of a large, public research university are tough in balancing teaching and research. Harvard is no different; it has large classes too. If you go a small liberal arts college, the research obligation is much smaller. Very smart people can become well-respected professors at a small liberal arts college by publishing two or three articles over their entire careers.

When I finally learned how to teach large classes, I actually think that my students learned at least as much or more. And I think I became a better teacher. In fact, just judging by teaching evaluations, I received my best evaluations in classes of three hundred students or more. I once taught Principles of Economics to 300 students at 8:00 a.m. in the morning. They came to class; they paid attention. A lot of making education effective in a large class is getting and keeping their attention. Tricks to make sure they do the homework. Large classes have to be structured, I discovered.

Mike C.—I think there is a place for large classes. I lecture in Poli Sci 101 with 150 students. Of course we have 6 TAs, each with 3 sections. At Princeton, maybe because of their massive endowment, they have large classes, but then they also have preceptorials (?) of 8 students each. This seems like a great idea. Is there any way to do this at CU? No matter how good you are at the great big lectures, the intensive exploration of critical and creative ideas takes place best in small groups.

Betsy—One of the things that I think faculty don’t pay nearly enough attention to is office hours. One of the things I tried to do was give students an enticement to come to office hours. Over the years I had more and more students, and I had more and more students attending office hours. That was one opportunity. We had big classes for lectures at Smith, but then we also had small discussion sessions. Faculty can do that if they want, but with the current economic environment, we are not likely to give course credit for that. Another thing I used to do is have a review session before every major test. Students could ask me any question they wanted to, and my rule was that I would answer any question. I would challenge them to come up with what questions they thought were likely to be on the test and ask me those questions. I would answer these questions in detail, but I would not reveal whether the question was going to be on the test or not. That got students coming to an extra two or three of these sessions. Some of these sessions would be two or three hours long, and I planned them in the evening so students could stay as long as they wanted to. The students who came to the review sessions did better in the class.

Marty—(Raised the point about teaching being considered when merit raises are given.)

Betsy—It is supposed to be that way. You should be able to have a contract with your department chair that would allow you to put a little more emphasis on teaching and get rewarded for that. I suppose not all department chairs honor that as well as others. I certainly as a dean encouraged the departments to honor their master teachers but expect them to teach more classes and more large classes. But you really had to do that; you had to teach more classes and to perhaps publish fewer papers. That was a stumbling block because we still have the second-class citizen designation, which I think is really awful, for faculty who emphasize teaching. When we have really good teachers, we should give them a little more opportunity to teach and lower the expectations for their research output. I think it is good for the institution. I do think at a research university, everyone should teach and everyone should do research. I don’t think we should ever have a system at a research university where we have faculty who only teach or only do research. That really does set up a two-tiered system.

Fred—Students have become ruder, so it is tougher to teach large sections. For 18 years in a row, I have taught 800 students a year, and I have loved it. Somewhere around the year 2000, I was in my favorite class with 300 people, General Psychology; I said, "Would you please stop talking?" And it happened again, and I asked another group to stop talking and then there was yet a third group. At that point I lost it and said, I’m finished, and walked out. I got all this advice from colleagues, like get campus security. I don’t want to teach under those conditions. I have ended up not teaching General Psychology for the past two years. The new hires are asked if they want to teach the classes. My solution was that it is easier to control 150 people than 300 people. I don’t want campus security. Do you feel that it has changed?

Betsy—There have been some articles in the paper recently about unruly students. How many of you routinely teach classes of 100 or more? Of those of you who do so, how many of you would agree that students have become more difficult? Probably about half. I suspect it is probably true that student behavior is becoming worse. As you can tell from the comments that I’ve made, I had some pretty unruly students early on, and Brian actually did have to throw a student out of class fifteen years ago.

Fred—Perhaps one possibility is that they are not aware it’s rude. They haven’t been taught this by their parents. So on the first day, I said here is a politeness policy. It is not acceptable to talk in class. Maybe they just don’t know. Maybe it’s not that they have temperamentally become meaner.

Jim C. –I don’t like it. They may chat but I have a right to stop it.
Dennis—I don’t think students are talking out of meanness. They don’t know what they should do so they talk. I stop the class and say, "Imagine you are making love to someone and your partner is reading a magazine. How would you feel about that? Embarrassed and ashamed and it hurts really badly. That is exactly how you make me feel. I am not a TV set. I am sentient." I tell them, "You are breaking my heart."

Mike C.?—Thirty years ago students may have had better socialization skills. I feel a need to get to know the students, what their stories are, and where they are. I don’t think they are getting meaner.

Clayton—On the other side of that, I am working with computer science students on a bunch of projects related to Mary Ann’s Faculty Teaching Excellence Program. We are trying to make it easier for faculty to get pictures of all the students in their classes. One of the students who is going to do some work on this asked, "Why would you do that? I have seen no evidence that any of my teachers want to get to know me." We have to recognize that we are not the only experience these students have.

Dennis—I walk the entire perimeter of the class and try to make contact with everyone. I walk to the back of the room and teach.

Betsy—The new technology makes this much better. I do that now when I give talks. I wear a portable microphone and can be anywhere in the room with the clicker for slides. We aren’t forced to be at the blackboard all the time the way we used to be.

Jim S.—I’ve found that learning the students’ names is so vitally important. Once I can call on a student by name, it changes the way that student looks at me. I’ll usually have a couple of students write on the class evaluation form that this is the only class where the professor knew their name. I’ve decided to be very up front about the fact that I am trying to get the name with the face and will start connecting with four and five each time. I have clues to help me remember their names. The fact that they know that I am making that effort in the first two or three weeks of class seems to make a difference.

Tom H.?—My daughter went to Smith. What the professors did was get a picture of their students so that they knew them in advance. They walked in the room and the professors knew them.

Uri—The University of Texas gives faculty a photo roster of their students.

Mike Grant?—TAs often know students’ names and they can help you.
Jim C.—In a class of 150, when it is difficult to remember names, I remember their stories and characteristics.

John T.—If I had just somewhere to look up the students’ photos for reference that would help me learn their names more quickly.

Betsy—In the M.B.A. program, we had a photo roster for all of the classes. It’s an incredibly effective way to remember students. Some faculty give students assigned seats. You could set up your photo roster according to your seat assignments.

Mike C.—My solution is potentially a problem. I meet with every student twice during the semester. I require it. It’s a problem because it doubles my contact hours, but the quality of the interaction is so greatly improved. It’s made a tremendous difference. They’ve always said how impressed they are with the fact that I want to get to know them.

Betsy—Many times you have an elaborate point system for these big classes. I used to give three midterms, and for students who had accumulated at least a 90 percent average, they didn’t have to take the final exam. So that was an incentive to do really well throughout the class. Also I gave a point or two for coming to class and giving five extra points for coming to office hours. It’s amazing because you think that these are artificial devices, but as several people have pointed out, the students we have today would not have been in college thirty years ago. They don’t come from families where they got socialized to respect the authority that comes with a faculty member or respect the intellectual life that comes from going to college. A lot of what we have to do, unfortunately, is what the high schools were supposed to do, which is socialize these kids to be effective members of adult society. We have to give them little carrots for coming to class, participating in class discussions, coming to office hours, all of those things. We wouldn’t be where we are today if we didn’t learn for the love of learning, but we have to remember that most of our students don’t feel that way. We have to come up with devices and tricks to get them to that point.

Dale—I give one day a week, the whole day as an appointment day. I switch the days around. Students can make appointments via e-mail in 15-minute blocks. I will look at my schedule and it will be 100 percent filled. Also 100 percent of my students will come to office hours at some point. Students need to get used to the idea of scheduling appointments because that is what they are going to have to do in real life.

Mimi—I do see disengagement among students, and I do try to find ways to get students to understand the joy of engagement. Here is something that works sometimes. I use the students’ names, which is very important, but I also assign student names to the ideas that they have. I give them the sense that they are beginning to participate in some kind of scholarly community. If I were conducting a session, I might refer to the "Coolidge hypothesis" and the "VanGerven solution." One thing I have noticed is there is some remarkable power of associating a name with an idea. The other students get the idea that their peers are some kind of experts, and they will go up to them after class and ask them questions. It ends up that they are all explaining things to each other because they come to believe that they are creating the ideas instead of having ideas fed to them.

Betsy—It took me awhile to get used to the devices and tricks that I was using because intrinsic motivation was so important to me. I worried that these devices might beg the question of education. The thing that really surprised me is how much students appreciated these techniques. They would write on their teaching evaluations that they learned how to learn. They learned how to learn a little bit at a time. In an odd sort of way, some of these tricks actually eased students into intrinsic motivation.

Bill B.—I asked the rhetorical question yesterday about the ranking of universities. I mentioned our ranking in terms of external funding. Are there mechanisms for ranking universities by teaching excellence?
Betsy—Actually there are but they are not very good. US News and World Report ranks universities on undergraduate education. Even though it is a flawed ranking system, I would like to see CU much higher in that ranking.

A lot of you have talked about names, and I thought I might end this portion of the program with just a few comments. People have a view that I have an extraordinary memory for names, which is absolutely not true. I have a bad memory for names, but because knowing names as a teacher and administrator is so important to connecting with people, I have learned all kinds of tricks for either remembering people’s names, identifying people by their interests, or making them feel I know them when I really don’t. It’s important for people to feel this personal connection in class. Students have said to me over the years, "You are the only professor who knows who I am." And sometimes I don’t know who they are, but somehow they are convinced that I do because I make contact with them—because I answer their questions and talk to them at office hours.
Dennis—I read the Steele article several years ago, and one point that I have used from that article talks about how education has to become a source of self-esteem. This point needs constant reinforcement even with the best students. They have the idea that if they don’t let education matter, then it won’t hurt them. And everything we are talking about—their behavior in class—shows that they don’t want to get attached to education. It’s too mercurial. We might pull the rug out from under them. We need to build an environment for them where they feel that education is a source of self-esteem.

Rick V.—The underpinnings of intellect are greatly influenced by emotion. So when you connect the student’s idea to the student’s name and carry them in your memory that form of intellectual validation seems like a way to build the highest levels of self-esteem. What it says to the student is that their contribution belongs here, and it is memorable. Along the lines of engagement, the feelings students bring to a subject ought to be acknowledged as well. There is a third kind of validation we don’t talk about in the academy at all, and I don’t mean it in a religious sense but there is spiritual validation.

Parker Palmer talks a lot about it. One of the things for us to think about too is to find ways to validate the spiritual lives of students. When we talk about students seeking a connection, I don’t know if that is to the larger world we live in or why we got into the law or whatever discipline we are in the first place. It seems we should spend a lot more effort on this.

Uri—When students come to my office, I always ask them about their other classes and whether they like them or not. I give them the task of figuring out why they really like that subject. Because they did well in it? There is an art to understanding why someone does something and loves it. It is a path to help undergraduates understand their own choices.

Betsy—One of the things I tell students is that college is a time to find a combination of what you love to do and what you are good at. As I discovered, I loved music, but I wasn’t good enough at it to make a career of it. I was good at history, but in the end I discovered I didn’t love it enough to make a career of it. For me, economics has been the subject that I loved and I was good at. But students struggle with that. They don’t think of using their college time for exploring that intersection in what they love and what they are good at. For every person on this planet, there’s something where the intersection is true. To the extent to which we can help our students find that intersection, we are doing so much for the next generation of leadership in this country.