A Small Attempt to Turn Down the Volume
Guest post by Autumn Bolin McKelvey, Ed.D., Faculty Coordinator for Student Success
Writing this blog during a week in which headlines can barely keep pace with events made this month’s theme all too obvious. While we’re engaging in the heavy lift of getting our courses to take flight, and we’re getting to know our students and their respective accommodations, we’re also navigating the tightrope of emotionally and politically charged topics that pervade many classrooms and campus conversations. Life can be so very loud.
I don’t know how to handle all of that, but what I can focus on is the here and now, and what I can (try to) control. I can identify the noise (and the noisemakers) and see how I might reduce the volume in my world. I can consider ways to preserve my energy in order to do the best I can for my students and for my integrity. And to do so, I need to turn the knob counterclockwise on the many distractions that interfere with my focus. I can’t help but think if I, in my middle years, am feeling overwhelmed by noise, my students who are still finding their solid footing into adulthood must really be struggling, too.
One noisy area in my professional life would be the excess in my courses. I’m looking hard at how I can intentionally reduce the bloat in order to highlight what matters most. Do I really need three short Soft Chalk quizzes when I could consolidate to one? Do I really need five separate links in a module when I can have one page that contains links to slides and resources? These are small noises, but coming at me all at once, it’s a drain on my attention and that of my students’. Between seat time and RSI, we have a responsibility to engage in work that is quality and substantive. And I, for one, need to keep a keen eye toward determining what might be time-consuming work versus what is meaningful work.
Furthermore, I find it to be a fine line between continuous improvement and change for the sake of change. Much like social media algorithms that exist to grab our attention, trends in education pop up, and we might feel compelled to ride the wave in order to stay “current” and relevant. Change is important. Professional development is essential.
For the past several years, we’ve engaged in 4DX. Now, we’re engaging in OPX. We can hear the clambering of voices to distinguish them (alongside the grumbling of voices about another educational initiative). But let’s adjust the sound settings so that we can home in on the resounding theme of engaging in OPX. A major noteworthy spoke in the OPX umbrella would be high-impact practices, which are time-tested, research-supported practices that offer guidance for meaningful engagement in a course and college community. From American Association of Colleges and Universities, we have this list of high-impact practices:
- First-Year Experiences
- Common Intellectual Experiences
- Learning Communities
- Writing-Intensive Courses
- Collaborative Assignments and Projects
- Undergraduate Research
- Diversity/Global Learning
- Service Learning, Community-Based Learning
- Internships
- Capstone Courses and Projects
- ePortfolios
As we can see, some of these practices are beyond the purview of singular course design, but a few lend themselves nicely toward streamlining course content into thoughtful capstone projects or experiential unit work. The point: Seat time, RSI, and OPX can combine into worthwhile work for our students and for us by way of high-impact practices such as these 11 listed above. They can also be found with Universal Design for Learning (stay tuned for that online FPG course from the CTLE). One strategy that helps me not to drown in details is to look for patterns and connections so that the many different dangling threads in education might be woven together into something lovely. Or, for the sake of the current metaphor, maybe after adjusting the volume and sound settings, the noises can combine into, if not a symphony, then at least innocuous Muzak. And if not that, well, that’s where noise ordinances come in, and I stop looking at work emails after 6 PM.