Teaching Tuesdays@CSU
Teaching Tips & Links for SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
Issue 55 - Know your students, support your students
The Charles Sturt University (CSU) purpose is defined as
Yindyamarra Winhanganha – to create a world worth living in.
How do we help our students create a world worth living in?
This week's bulletin includes hints, tips and resources for you to share with your students to support their learning journey.
- How Does Grit Team with a Growth Mindset to Cultivate Lifelong Learning?
- How Can Students Use Self-Compassion to Reduce Test Anxiety?
- CSU resources to support your students
The PROFESSIONAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES AND RESOURCES section below has details about how to get FREE access to our Magna Publications quality Learning & Teaching resources subscription to Academic Leader, Mentor Commons, Magna Commons and The Teaching Professor.
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1. How Does Grit Team with a Growth Mindset to Cultivate Lifelong Learning?
By: Lolita Paff
Source: https://www.magnapubs.com/mentor-commons/?video=14252
Reading Time: 3 minutes (21 minutes for original video)
Grit and Growth Mindset are the focus concepts that Dr Paff highlights as the keys to engagement and retention that support the development of lifelong learning characteristics in our students. Teaching strategies that encourage preparation and effort and a long-term focus promote engagement and retention. They help students with content learning now and self-directed learning long after they graduate.
Grit (Duckworth et al., 2007): “working strenuously toward challenges, and maintaining effort and interest over years despite failures and adversity and plateaus in progress.”
Grit describes students who approach learning with a long-term focus. These students endure; they view challenges as temporary setbacks. Mistakes are perceived opportunities, not failures
Growth mindset (Dweck, 2007): “in a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work.”
Growth mindset is consistent with the belief that effort improves results. Students with fixed mindset focus on performance measures like grades, not learning.
Why Should Teachers Care?
- Self-directed, intrinsically motivated students want to learn, instead of feeling they have to learn.
- When goals are meaningful and relevant culturally, professionally, personally, students are more likely to persevere.
- Research suggests teachers can influence traits like grit and mindset.
The Three-Pronged Approach to cultivating grit and a growth mindset
- Perseverance: helping students persist to accomplish goals in the face of challenges and setbacks.
- Effortful control: helping students focus on long-term, higher-order goals.
- Building metacognitive skill: helping students to define the task, know what they already know, what needs to be learned, identify the goals and make plans to achieve them, execute those goals, monitor their progress and reflect on it.
Instructional Strategies (for developing grit)
Align learning outcomes, assessments and learning activities and strategies
- Consistency and knowing what’s expected increases motivation/engagement.
Identify an appropriate level of learning challenge
- Demotivation can accompany work that is too easy, or too hard.
- Incorporate lots of low-risk practice with just the right amount of challenge.
- Then increase amounts of challenge and complexity, while decreasing amounts of scaffolding over time.
Articulate expectations
- Define the characteristics of high-quality work and your expectations for student outcomes. Provide examples of high-quality work.
- Involve students in self-assessment and peer assessment so that they can begin to identify what is quality in their own work and the steps toward achieving it.
Provide specific and timely feedback
- During learning, not just after major assessment tasks.
- Promotes student self-regulation of their learning.
Incorporate reflection
- Encourage students to reflect on progress over time and future learning goals.
- Give students the opportunity to see the value in the process itself, not just in the output.
Acknowledge the student perspective
- Explain why the hard learning and hard thinking is worthwhile. Helping students to see the bigger picture is motivating and engaging.
Class Environment & Framing
Students are going to engender intrinsic motivation more when they believe that they’re treated fairly and with respect, when they are held to high expectations.
Mistakes should be framed as an act of learning
- A fixed mindset, with an emphasis on grades over learning, sees mistakes as a bad thing.
- Students need opportunities to have practice without significant consequences so that they’re not afraid to make mistakes.
Praise should be directed at effort, not ability
Empathise
- A fixed mindset can cause students to feel like they do not have what it takes.
- Encourage a growth mindset by pointing out where they are making progress, what the incremental steps are that they can take to show improvement over time.
Downplay perfectionism
- Promote grit and the growth mindset by emphasising process over product, and helping students set realistic and realisable goals, ones that have definitive steps toward achievement.
- Identify those learning outcomes that stress development and give students time to reflect on their process in achieving those outcomes.
Adapt circumstances to students, as appropriate
- Assess prior knowledge at the start of a subject, or at the start of a lesson.
- Working from where your students are can foster growth and grit.
Explicitly teach grit and growth mindset
- The supplemental materials for this webinar have some links to free online resources where students can evaluate and gain some insight about how gritty they are as learners and whether they have more of a fixed or growth mindset.
An article released this week in The Teaching Professor further explores the strategy of learning through failure: Teaching the How: Three Ways to Support Failure, by Paul Hanstedt.
References
Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.
Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. NY: Ballentine.
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2. How Can Students Use Self-Compassion to Reduce Test Anxiety?
By: Kristin Roush
Source: https://www.magnapubs.com/mentor-commons/?video=13601
Reading Time: 2 minutes (21 minutes for original video)
Test anxiety is a contaminating variable that yields invalid results.
Dr Roush is a psychology lecturer who also spent several years in private psychology practice. The approach outlined in this webinar draws on that experience and the reserch literature. She defines test anxiety in the first part of this webinar and describes its signs and symptoms. After discussing the techniques employed in traditional test anxiety workshops, she outlines the alternative approach of "mindful self-compassion".
The major takeaway message from the presentation is:
What is learned at an emotional level cannot be unlearned at a cognitive level.”
QUOTE: This mindful self-compassion approach does not try to change a thing. There is no effort to be exerted, nothing to be done, nothing to be undone.
The student merely notices what is and then directs loving-kindness toward the self. This approach is founded on research into the effectiveness of using self-compassion to address anxiety. The analogy used for self-compassion is to treat yourself the way you would treat your own best friend who is going through a tough time.
The self-compassion break strategy
Place your hand on your heart
- This is a moment of suffering - Purpose: to bring mindful awareness to the present moment.
- Suffering is part of life - Purpose: a reminder that this is a part of the human experience; everyone goes through this now and then.
- May I be kind to myself - Purpose: to focus a feeling of caring concern toward myself.
- May I give myself the compassion I need - Purpose: to set the intention to treat myself with loving compassion.
How can I apply mindful self-compassion to reduce test anxiety?
- Develop a mindful lifestyle
- Practice self-compassion on a daily basis
- Plan for simple pre-test preparations
- Incorporate mindful self-compassion while taking the test
The talk then outlines:
- Tips to improve testing performance
- How to detach from the fearful thought
- Metta - a prayer wishing happiness for self or others.
The supplementary materials that accompany this webinar include a long list of academic articles on Mindful Self-Compassion Research and links to online resources.
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3. Resources to support your students at CSU
Reading Time: <1 minute
Students are offered access to a network of services and support, available through student or staff login. For initial access, go to the CSU home page and login through the Student Portal on the right hand side at the top of the screen. We encourage you to familiarise yourself with these resources so you can share relevant support with individual students.
Here are some of the links you will find from the list offered to students:
- Access to our network of services https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support
- Academic support https://student.csu.edu.au/study
- Equity https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/equity-diversity
- Disability services https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/disability
- Indigenous support https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/indigenous-services
- Health and well-being services https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/health-wellbeing
- Counselling https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/health-wellbeing/counselling
- Career support https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/careers
- Religious support https://student.csu.edu.au/services-support/health-wellbeing/spiritual-support
Some of the other categories of support that students can access from the links above:
- Elite athletes
- Study while caring for children
- Legal advice
- International students
- LGBTI Ally program
- Student Liaison Officers
- Financial support
- IT services and support
- Scholarships and grants
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Implementing the CSU Value INSIGHTFUL in your teaching.
In living the value of Insightful we act respectfully and perceptively to seek to understand why people think and behave in the ways that they do. Digging deep to understand the why in addition to the what, we shift beyond taking words or actions at face value.
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Follow Teaching Tuesdays on Twitter.
Our Twitter feed includes links to further hints, tips and resources in the broader field of teaching in higher education.
https://twitter.com/TeachingTuesday
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PROFESSIONAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES AND RESOURCES
1....Teaching support resources at CSU
2....CSU Professional Learning
3....Bonus CSU resource - Lynda.com
4....Magna Publications Subscriptions
5....Links to previous bulletins
6....Subscribe
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1. Teaching support resources at CSU
You have access to a range of quality CSU resources to help you incorporate educational resources and techniques into your teaching. Check out the following:
- Teaching at CSU - the Division of Learning and Teaching website with links to resources for Teaching Staff, Online Learning, Assessment, Curriculum, Indigenous Curriculum, Workplace Learning, Technologies, Feedback and Analytics, and Learning Spaces.
- Professional Development and Teaching Resources - topics are listed alphabetically to make it easier to find what you need.
- Resources for Learning and Teaching Academic and Professional Staff - searchable CSU database.
- Learning Technologies - the starting point for a range of learning design options
- CSU Learning Exchange: Technologies in Context - a searchable database to promote online learning and teaching strategies.
- The CSU Wiki - a faculty-based source of learning and teaching information and strategies.
- The CSU Learning Spaces Portal - how to use your learning environments to promote learning.
- DOMS Learning and Teaching Shared Resources - CSU login needed to access more than 750 resources uploaded for CSU staff to use.
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2. CSU Professional Learning
The monthly bulletin lists available Professional Learning opportunities from CSU Division of Learning and Teaching (DLT).
Teaching-related topics are listed on the
DLT Professional Learning Calendar
DLT Calendar
Online Drop-in session
Wed 5 June 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
3. Bonus CSU resource - Lynda.com
This online subscription library provides high-quality instructional videos to teach the latest business, creative and software skills, as well as an extensive range of teaching tips.
Example:
A search for "Growth Mindset" returned 236 results for both Courses and individual Videos.
Mindfulness course (1 hr 16m)
Mindfulness Practices course (2h 3m)
All Lynda.com courses are broken into manageable short videos of 1 to 5 min duration. All videos are accompanied by complete transcripts and many also have exercise files for you work through.
... and plenty more topics to choose from in the Lynda.com Library
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4. Magna Publications Subscriptions
All staff with a CSU email address have free access to our annual
CSU subscription to the four different high quality resources for enhancing practice.
Video seminars: Mentor Commons (20 minutes) and Magna Commons (40-90 minutes) also include the presentation handouts, full transcripts and supplementary resources that are available for download if you don't have time to listen to the seminar.
Text-based resources: The Teaching Professor (for teaching staff) and Academic Leader (for those in academic and administration leadership roles).
How to subscribe
There is a single CSU subscription code to access all four of these resources.
Staff with a CSU login can obtain the code and subscription instructions from this What's New link.
Alternatively, contact
Ellen McIntyre elmcintyre@csu.edu.au or
Matthew Larnach mlarnach@csu.edu.au
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5. Links to previous bulletins
Upcoming Teaching Tuesdays issues...
Share your own teaching tips article.
Contact Ellen McIntyre elmcintyre@csu.edu.au to offer your suggestions.
6. Subscribe
click on the orange Follow Teaching Tuesdays @CSU button (below, or at the top of the bulletin)
Teaching Tuesdays@CSU Contacts
Learning Academy, Division of Learning & Teaching, Charles Sturt University
Lecturer, Academic Development in the Learning Academy at Charles Sturt University
Email: elmcintyre@csu.edu.au
Website: https://www.csu.edu.au/division/learning-and-teaching/about-us/learning-academy
Phone: +61 2 6933 4726
Twitter: @TeachingTuesday
Kogi Naidoo
Email: knaidoo@csu.edu.au
Website: http://www.csu.edu.au/division/learning-and-teaching/about-us/learning-academy
Phone: +61 2 6933 4804