Reflections on ACUE: A Journey of Self-Discovery and Teaching Transformation

In 2023, I had the honor and privilege to participate in the first cohort of the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) Effective Online Teaching Practices professional- development certification. This program consisted of four overarching sections that were each carefully designed to help faculty design the online- learning environment (section 1), facilitate active learning and lesson structures to enhance student engagement and learning (sections 2 and 3), and assess student achievement of learning outcomes in ways that are transparent and equitable for students (section 4). All the modules shared details about research on teaching and learning that support the best practices that were recommended in each module, through videos or podcasts from the experts themselves, demonstrations of the practices being implemented, and brief excerpts from the research itself.

As a participant in this cohort, each week throughout the fall and spring semesters, I had the opportunity to dive deep into each of the best practices proposed by ACUE. I took time to learn about the research that supported each section, provided my own reflections about case studies they shared, and I ended each module by either implementing or planning to implement one of the many possible strategies in my own course. For me, the most impactful modules in the ACUE program were those that required a deeper amount of self-reflection on my prior practices, particularly when such self-reflection challenged me to think more about why, rather than how, I implement certain pedagogical practices to help students learn. Sometimes, these insights led to relatively minor edits to a prior practice that I implemented, which led to substantial improvements in student engagement and success. More often, being reflective and honest about my methods and beliefs forced me to rethink (and continue to rethink) my entire way of understanding and approaching teaching and learning. In this newsletter article, I am excited to share with you a few examples of my own insights during this process in the hope that you may decide to spend a substantial amount of time to be self-reflective on your own teaching and learning.

The first module I am sharing was titled “Developing Effective Modules and Microlectures” because it related to something I was already in the process of doing. Prior to my start in ACUE, I was beginning to develop videos because I knew having access to such resources would enable students to be able to watch a lecture as often as they needed and whenever they could best focus on their learning. What I learned from this module was that the videos I was developing were, first and foremost, too long for students to really be able to process and learn from. Furthermore, I realized that I wasn’t always clear what I wanted them to get out of each of the videos, as they often covered a textbook chapter rather than a specified learning outcome. For my statistics course, I created much shorter videos that I forced myself to limit to a maximum of ten minutes, titled based on the learning goal, and uploaded to YouTube to enable access from any device students have available. The side benefit of having such videos on YouTube was that I could track the interest in these videos and gain analytics and insight around when and which videos students watched. These analytics enabled me to ask students questions around topics that they seemed to struggle with the most and really enabled me to learn more about their study habits and struggles as well. While my micro-lectures provide one success story from this professional development, I must also share those moments where it inevitably highlighted my less successful teaching and learning practices.

The two related modules that challenged me the most were “Embracing Diversity in Online Learning” and “Explain Your Grading Practices”, because the level of honesty and self-reflection forced me to embrace discomfort. “Embracing Diversity in Online Learning” was a call to action to identify my own implicit biases and develop strategies to minimize the impact such biases inevitably have on my teaching learning practices. The module provided a link to Harvard’s set of implicit bias tests (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html), and I couldn’t resist the chance to take several of them that week. I was unprepared for what I learned and was surprised when the results were at odds with what I would have expected (which I guess is why it is called implicit bias). The test results indicated that I had (varying levels of) automatic preferences based on various demographics. What was surprising was that these preferences were different than what I had anticipated because they went against my own identity across three of these tests. Enacted in the classroom, implicit biases can show up in my classroom in a variety of subtle ways. At times, I may be privileging some voices over others (based on perceived race, gender, and/or other identities), recognizing the contribution of students who elicit behaviors I value (such as attendance, timely submission of work, vocal participation in class), and awarding attributes of success towards students (innate ability and/or hard work). To truly embrace diversity in my classroom, it is essential that I focus on the engagement and learning of students, continuously questioning what lens I am using when encouraging students to engage in the classroom and when assessing student learning.

Which brings me to the final module I want to share. “Explain Your Grading Practices” took the idea of bias one step further, alerting me to biases inherent in my own grading practices. This module highlighted the need for transparency in grading, inevitably making the case that all columns in our gradebook should directly relate to the learning of the outcomes. At the end of a semester, I would find myself debating the boundary of grades for students. For those on the cusp of a B+ or A-, do I include how the student “really worked hard” or barely seemed to “try at all.” Could I provide them with extra credit to make up for these few points? I never realized how even these additional chances, and attempts at kindness, privilege some students over others and end up prioritizing my biased view of what a “good student” looks like based on my own experiences of being a student.

Since embracing (the discomfort of) all that ACUE had to offer, I continue to pursue further learning about the best practices through the resources that were shared in this program. The ACUE experience provided me with an amazing survey view of the wealth of knowledge available about teaching and learning. I welcome all faculty members who found what I shared in this article to be of interest, to join me as I dive deeper into these resources. The next phase of my journey begins with Joe Feldman’s book, Grading for Equity (2018). I can’t wait to continue to grow as an educator and hope some of you will join me.