Monthly Archives: February 2022

Pandemic Adaptations for PECOP and the 2022 ITL!

The American Physiological Society (APS) Physiology Educators Community of Practice (PECOP) and Institute on Teaching and Learning (ITL) were created to build connections among physiology educators and to promote the sharing of evidence-based teaching practices in physiology education. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 ITL and other PECOP activities were shifted to a virtual format. Virtual ITL Week included daily two-hour interactive sessions. Session topics and speakers were selected from the original conference schedule, with emphasis on topics that would assist educators during the pandemic. Registration was free, attracting nearly 500 registrants, a five-fold increase over normal ITL attendance. International educator participation was more than double that of previous ITL meetings. Long-term impacts of this unplanned “experiment” include plans for virtual components at some future ITL meetings, a PECOP webinar series open to the public, and an online professional skills training course for new physiology educators. An editorial describing these outcomes has recently been published in Advances in Physiology Education (https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00245.2020). Please join PECOP for free by registering your email at the LifeSciTRC (https://www.lifescitrc.org) and select “PECOP Member” in your user profile. The 2022 APS Institute on Teaching and Learning will be June 21-24 in Madison, WI (https://www.physiology.org/professional-development/meetings-events/itl-2022?SSO=Y). The institute will engage educators in interactive sessions on best practices in teaching, learning and assessment. Whether you are an experienced educator or new to teaching, ITL will challenge you to gain the skills needed to design and implement educational research in your classroom and learn how to share your findings with colleagues. The institute includes plenary talks, concurrent workshops, poster sessions and time to network and connect with your colleagues. Please keep checking the website to see when registration is ready!

Barbara E. Goodman, Ph.D., Professor of Physiology

Fellow of the American Physiological Society

Editor-in-Chief, Advances in Physiology Education

Division of Basic Biomedical Sciences

Room 224 Lee Medicine

Sanford School of Medicine of the University of South Dakota

Flipped and Distant Multi-Section Teaching: An A&P Course Director’s Perspective, Pandemic Plan, and Transition Back to the Classroom.

Historically, flipped classrooms have been around since the mid-2000s and began as bottom-up pilot experiments in a single classroom or section of a course at the will of an inventive instructor. With a robust body of literature deeming these modern content delivery models effective in achieving student success in the classroom and beyond, many educators in the sciences have adopted this approach to active learning. However, I doubt very few decided the pandemic-forced transition to distance learning was the right time to pull the trigger on flipped classroom implementation at the course director level in a multi-section course. I’m happy to share my wild idea and the wild ride we (myself and the A&P faculty at Jefferson) have been on while we were “building the plane as we flew it” over the past 2 years.

I direct A&P undergraduate courses at Thomas Jefferson University and manage a large staff (12 faculty) consisting of myself and a largely part-time adjunct workforce serving about 300 undergrads spread across 12 sections of lecture and 20 sections of lab. Since 2019 when I took the job at Jefferson we have been ballooning with growth and the demand for A&P courses has nearly doubled in the past 3 years. I was just getting used to the new course director role, when we were all challenged in March of 2020. Overnight I went from settling into my new job, to calling upon every skill and resource I had in my academic tool bag.

This unique choice to flip at the director level was borne out of pandemic-generated necessity for a means to deliver a single series of digital content of core A&P concepts, remotely, to all students to ensure an equitable experience across sections. The A&P courses at Jefferson have historically been face-to-face only with the exception of a few “snow days” with “take-home” assignments across the Spring semester during hard Philadelphia winters. The decision to flip a classroom in general aligns well with Jefferson’s active (Nexus) learning approaches, however a flipped distant digital classroom taught in a course director-led multi-section, multi-instructor course is something only a pandemic makes one crazy enough to dream up.

Additional rationale for the implementation of the flip in Fall of 2020 was to seize the day, using March of 2020 as an opportunity to fully revamp a dated class, albeit in a very stressful crisis mode. At that very infamous time, during widespread lockdown, emergency recordings of A&P lectures over slides were the go-to tool to preserve the integrity of the course. With a small amount of course director forethought and rock star faculty teamwork, those initial post-spring break A&P II content videos were recorded with the thought and intention to not waste any effort as the entire sequence would in all likelihood need to be converted to a digital format to carry the FA20/SP21 rising cohort of students though the standard 2 semester A&P sequence.

While I can currently say from the perspective of the course director/major course designer that the goal of generating a flipped classroom that works both at distance and in person was absolutely, successfully, met. I cannot yet speak to the experience of the faculty members who were handed the curricula and directed to teach in a new modality adopted over a short summer break in July of 2020. In hindsight, the A&P faculty ended up being tested much more than the students with little prep time, and direction to teach in a way they may be unfamiliar with, the flipped classroom, online. A plan for reflection and a revelation of the faculty member experience is in the works.

To better describe the design, active learning is implemented both equitably and autonomously across sections. All sections share the same assignment types, but not necessarily identical assignments nor the same instructor. All students must give two “teach-back” presentations where the student is tasked with becoming an expert on a single learning outcome (LO), and then “teaching-back” that learning outcome to a classroom audience of students. “Teach backs” account for about 25-30% of synchronous class time. The other 70-75% of synchronous class time is devoted to reviewing core concepts, demonstrating study strategies, and facilitating active learning activities. The active learning activities are curated by the course director with the intention that the individual instructors modify and adjust activities as they go, but have a safety net of resources to deliver the course as is.

Noteworthy, not all activities were totally unknown to the faculty with institutional knowledge when the new core curricula materials were shared. There were some upcycled former laboratory activities that were really “dry” classroom friendly labs. For example, basic sensory tests could be done at home with any willing quarantine mate. Activities requiring materials did have to wait for in person days. The future goal is to add more in-house generated collaborative work to the shared instructor pool to elevate each iteration of the course. However, “not fixing anything that wasn’t already broke” was deemed a resourceful jumping off point.

The course, now, is robust and both A&P I & II lab and lecture have run online in FA2020/SP2021. The course is now mid re-test during our first in person semester back, FA2021/SP2022, with the same content and resources generated in crisis mode March 2020-Summer2020-Fall 2020. We, transitioned synchronous lecture back to masked-face-to-masked-face in person learning in Fall of 2021 and the course is running as planned. No major changes needed to be made to Canvas sites housing core lecture content to make the shift back to in person. Courses were relatively easy to share and copy over to individual instructors prior to the start of the semester to allow time for autonomous course personalization.

The story is still in progress as we have only just begun to experience Spring of 2022. The course is being tested in another way now, with a virtual start and a mid-semester transition back to in person as the pandemic distance learning challenges keep coming. At this point I’m very grateful to say the course can also seamlessly transition with little notice from remote-to-face-to-face and back again. Collaborative drawing activities on white boards work on digital white boards with screen sharing. Paper worksheets can also be completed digitally and collaboratively in small digital break out rooms. Not every activity will transfer perfectly, but that is what makes a growing pool of shared instructor resources important and valuable. The flipped classroom does not have to be grassroots anymore. A growing body of generous teacher networks, education organizations, and professional societies continue to share and widely make active learning resources available to all and often, free. And finally, there is also nothing like a global pandemic bearing down under uncompromising deadlines to force a little creativity and development of new ideas to share back to the community.

**Illustration by Andrea Rochat, MFA

Dr. Nanette J. Tomicek is an Assistant Professor of Biology in the College of Life Sciences at Thomas Jefferson University, East Falls where she has been a faculty member since 2019. Currently, she directs the undergraduate introductory A&P courses serving a variety of basic science, and clinical-track majors. Dr. Tomicek specializes in large lecture course, and multi-section course management and has previously done so at both Penn State (2006-2017) and Temple Universities (2017-2019). Her current work focuses on pedagogy, active learning, laboratory, and excellence in biology education. Dr. Tomicek is also an adjunct faculty member for Penn State World Campus in the Eberly College of Science. She has been teaching a special topics course, The Biology of Sex for almost 10 years and is an expert in reproductive physiology and digital course delivery. Past doctoral work at Penn State and research interests include developing targeted cardiovascular therapeutics for aging women, examining downstream estrogen receptor signaling pathways in the heart in an ovariectomized rat model of aging and estrogen deficiency. Dr. Tomicek earned her Ph.D. in Spring of 2012 at Penn State in the Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Physiology, and is a proud active member of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society.

Pourquoi? Course Redesign: A Story of How and Why.

This is a story of why and how my courses underwent an all-encompassing course redesign.

Why?

Once upon a time, early during my tenure at Heartland Community College, the nursing faculty invited the A&P instructors to lunch to discuss what was covered in the A&P courses because the nursing students were replying that they “didn’t learn that” in A&P.

The dialog went like this: “Do you teach the autonomic nervous system?”

“Yes, we do!”

“The students say they didn’t learn that. Do you teach the cranial nerves?”

“Yes, we do!”

“The students say they didn’t learn that.”

Etc.

After that meeting, I had a revelation that rocked my world: I wasn’t teaching, and the students weren’t learning!

Then the question was what to do about it? Retirement or Remediation? Well, shortly after my revelation the economy tanked so retirement wasn’t an option. Remediation, on my part, was the only course of action to take. I went back and hit the books.

I found and used many excellent resources and used parts of all, but it wasn’t until I was searching for how to assess conceptual understanding that I found methods that were used for the major redesign of my courses.

How?

When I hit the books, I read that third graders could learn to do physics. So, I thought there should be no reason that the method developed by a physics professor/research scientist at Harvard, couldn’t be used for A&P courses at Heartland. Therefore, I chose to redesign my courses using a combination of Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT), Peer Instruction (PI), and Concept Questions (CQs) that are assessed with clickers, in a manner described by Eric Mazur.

It is very important to make expectations known. In the first week of class, students are asked to complete an anonymous, on-line introductory questionnaire (Mazur, 1997). This helps to make sure that the student’s expectations conform to what will be taking place in class. The results of this questionnaire are compiled into a handout and discussed in class. This questionnaire is followed up with another questionnaire (Mazur, 1997) during the fourth week of the semester to identify is there is anything I can do to improve the in-class experience to help their learning and to address any expectations that are contrary to what we are doing in class. The result of using these questionnaires is an improved sense of cooperation.

The first week of the semester is also used expressly to help students get acclimated with the flow of the course and the technology used in class with several non-graded assignments and assessments completed just for practice. Students must become familiar with the Learning Management System (LMS) and the classroom response system (CRS).

Basically, how it works is students are given pre-class reading assignments and are required to take a pre-quiz following the completion of the reading assignment which are posted in the LMS. In one way, the quizzes are used to check for reading comprehension. In another way, the pre-quizzes allow the students to identify and verbalize areas of confusion. This emphasizes that knowledge acquisition occurs outside of the classroom so that in class, based upon their input, the focus is placed on what students are having difficulty with.

The last question of the pre-quizzes is the JiTT part of the pre-quiz. “Please tell me briefly what single point of the reading that you found most difficult or confusing. If you did not find any part of it difficult or confusing, please tell me what you found most interesting.” (Mazur, 1997) Many times students tell me something they found interesting when they didn’t answer any of the questions correctly. So, they indirectly tell me they don’t know what they don’t know. In either case, their feedback determines the topics for discussion the next day.

Generally, there are about three topics that are identified from the pre-quizzes. CQs to be used in class are written for those topics. The following flow-chart demonstrates how it works in class. This process forces students to think through the arguments being developed and provides a way to assess their understanding of the concept.

Questions can be written to begin easy and progress to more conceptual content such as application and prediction questions, etc. This allows for scaffolding of knowledge to occur. It is important to monitor discussions to keep students on task, find out how students are thinking, and to identify possible sources of confusion.

The CQs are assessed with the classroom response system. Sometimes technologies fail so it is good to have a back-up plan. I have letter cards available in such situations. The CQs and are graded upon completion, not on correctness. Doing so encourages cooperation among students. Students must be continually reminded that it is okay to get questions wrong and by just committing to an answer will help produce more durable learning.

Tangible benefits from the redesign include:

For most of the CQs asked throughout a semester the percentage of correct responses after PI were greater than before PI. Students were able to convince their classmates what the correct answer was. Occasionally, the percent of correct responses following PI was lower than before PI. This was usually due to a poorly worded or ambiguous question, or a discussion between a student who was confidently wrong and one who was correct but not confident.

Persistence after the redesign was greater than before the redesign. Before the redesign 18% of students ended up dropping the course; after the redesign only 12% of the students ended up dropping.

Students liked using the classroom response system and student discussions. Students responded to open ended questions on anonymous, end of the semester surveys: “Discuss your thoughts on the use of clickers in the classroom”; “Please discuss your thoughts on the ‘convince your neighbor’ portion of the course.” Numerical value to their responses were assigned on this Likert scale: 4 = really liked; 3 = liked; 2 = disliked; 1 = really disliked. The mode/median for the responses regarding using clickers was 4; and 3 for responses regarding the ‘convince your neighbor’ portion of the course. In their responses, students also raised some concerns: “my partner never did the readings, so he wasn’t a lot of help; but it did help me to try to explain things to him;” “convincing your neighbor never really helped me mainly because my neighbor was never sure.”

Intangible benefits of the redesign include:

Students are conversing using the language of the discipline and are provided with an opportunity to identify and verbalize what they don’t know. Answering the CQs is a form of forced retrieval which leads to more durable learning. Students must formulate arguments to support their position when “convincing their neighbors.” And lastly, by listening to student discussions instructors can identify confusing questions, misconceptions, students with clear answers, students with faulty logic/reasoning or who are confidently wrong, etc.

The following are recommendations to address issues of concern identified by students and the instructor.

Recommendations:

To reinforce the importance of pre-class reading assignments, in addition to the reading assignments posted to the LMS along with the pre-quizzes, give the students a hardcopy of all the reading assignments in the first week of the semester and post it to an informational page in the LMS.
Explicitly tell the students that work outside of class is expected. The following chart is provided to the students so that they can visualize the general layout of the course.
To reduce knowledge voids and the influence of confidently wrong students, encourage students to seek advice from classmates all around them rather than those sitting next to them. If you use Learning Catalytics (LC) as a classroom response system, it can be set to run the class automatically which will tell each student who they should consult with. The instructor sets up the parameters (i.e., three students, with different answers, within a certain number of seats or if it is in a small class – anywhere in the room) but LC uses a sophisticated program to reduce the influence of confidently wrong students. Having diverse permanent/fixed teams and having students discuss the CQs with their teammates also addresses this issue.
To alleviate some anxiety from this non-traditional format students are given lecture notes. Traditional lectures aren’t given, but students are given the next best thing – the lecture notes.
To help motivate the students and to reinforce the importance of meaningful learning and moving away from rote memorization exams should have 50% conceptual questions.

So, there you have it – the why and how I completely redesigned my courses. Is that the end of the story, you ask? Of course not. Teaching is an iterative process and with anonymous, end of the semester input from students, self-reflection, and professional development, the changes have been continual. Perhaps, in a future blog, I will write the tale of why and how this course redesign evolved and changed overtime.

References for Redesign and Remediation:

Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., Cocking, R.R., eds. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Broida, J. (2007). Classroom use of a classroom response system: What clickers can do for your students. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bruff, D. (2009) Teaching with classroom response systems: Creating active learning environments. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Bybee, R.W. (ed.) (2002). Learning science and the science of learning. Arlington, VA: NSTA Press.

Duncan, D. (2005). Clickers in the classroom: How to enhance science teaching using classroom response system. San Francisco, CA: Pearson Addison Wesley Benjamin Cummings.

Ellis, A. B., Landis, C.R., & Meeker, K. Classroom assessment techniques: ConcepTests. http://www.flaguide.org/cat/contests/contests2.php

Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Finkel, D.L. (2000). Teaching with your mouth shut. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Herreid, C.F, ed. (2007). Start with a story: The case study method of teaching college science. Arlington, VA: NSTA Press.

Mazur, E. (1997). Peer instruction: A user’s manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Michael, J. A. & Modell, H. I. (2003) Active learning in secondary and college classrooms: A working model for helping the learner to learn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Novak, G. M., Patterson, E. T., Gavin, A. D., & Christian, W., (1999). Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending active learning with web technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Sullivan, W.M. & Rosin, M.S. (2008). A new agenda for higher education: Shaping a life of the mind for practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Woditsch, G.A. & Schmittroth, J. (1991). The thoughtful teachers guide to thinking skills. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

After a post-doctoral fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine, Jane began her academic teaching career at Benedictine University in the graduate programs in exercise physiology. After that Jane taught in the Physician Assistant Programs at Rosalind Franklin University and the University of Kentucky. For the past 18 years Jane taught Anatomy and Physiology at Heartland Community College in Normal, IL, where innovative, student-centered instruction is encouraged. For the last decade, Jane employed Just-in-Time Teaching with Peer Instruction and concept questions assessed with a classroom response system. Recently, permanent, fixed teams were used in her classes, along with team-based summative assessments, as well as with in-class and post-class forced retrieval activities. Jane is a Professor Emeritus of Biology and had served the Anatomy and Physiology course coordinator.

Jane received her B.S. from Eastern Illinois University, her M.S. from Illinois State University, and her Ph.D. from Marquette University.