Dr. Ellen Yezierski is the Professor of Chemistry and Director of Teaching Excellence at Miami University. Yezierski became familiar with the challenges of actively engaging students in large classes while pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She has worked to integrate her research on the particulate nature of matter and conceptual change to improve teaching in large lecture courses. Her research interests include inquiry instruction, teacher change, and the effects of high school teacher professional development on teachers and their students.
Episode Description
Recent COVID-forced move to online instruction for both K through 12 and higher-ed has come an intense discussion of best teaching practices in digital spaces. While the focus has been on teaching online, the conversation has foregrounded long-standing debates over pedagogy and practice in education. Understanding what works in the classroom is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Ellen Yezierski.
+Timestamps
What is the Centre for Teach Excellence At Miami 1:35
What drew you into helping people teach better? 2:37
Have we gotten better? 4:10
How do people learn? 6:15
How do you define effectiveness? 7:40
What can be done about a fear of science? 11:10
How does learning change with more skill? 14:45
Online learning in the COVID-19 world 18:12
How to recruit good STEM teachers? 23:11
Building trust with students 25:40
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: With the recent COVID-forced move to online instruction for both K through 12 and higher-ed has come an intense discussion of best teaching practices in digital spaces. While the focus has been on teaching online, the conversation has foregrounded long-standing debates over pedagogy and practice in education. Understanding what works in the classroom is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me are regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami Statistics Department and Richard Campbell, former Chair of Media, Journalism and Film. Our guest today is Ellen Yezerski. Yezerski is a professor of chemistry at Miami University and received her Ph.D. in Science Education before becoming a professor she spent six years as a high school chemistry teacher. At Miami, Yezerski has served as the Director for the Center of Teaching Excellence since 2018. Ellen, thank you so much for being here today.
Ellen Yezerski: Thanks, Rosemary. Glad to be here.
Pennington: Just to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about what The Center for Teaching Excellence does at Miami?
Yezerski: Sure, the Center for Teaching Excellence has been established for about over 40 years and our goal is to work side-by-side with colleagues to improve teaching, and we do that in a number of ways. We do it through programming, we do it through faculty learning communities, we sponsor the original Lilly Conference on College Teaching, but overall, the big themes would be supporting faculty and helping them learn, and then building communities- specifically communities that practice around effective teaching. And it's been a great run so far, and we have been very busy of late.
John Bailer: So, what drew you into wanting to be- to help people teach better? I mean, you know, it’s one thing that teacher discipline as a chemist and as someone who is trying to convey science and engage learners in science, but what took you to the sort of the next level of teaching the teachers?
Yezerski: Sure, well, I've spent my whole career thinking about learning and students learning more effectively, and I would say that when I first started in higher education my goal was to support pre-service teachers who are going to be high school chemistry teachers, and also I got into research on faculty development for high school teachers. And so, it was a natural kind of transition to move to that same space in higher education. And I think what happens is that we know that what happens in the classroom and what happens in learning is all driven by what the teachers do and the teachers' choices and their expertise and their sets of beliefs and ideas about learning, and so having an influence there, I think, is the kind of the nexus to improving student learning.
Richard Campbell: So Helen, like you, I started out as a high school teacher; high school English for five years. And also and this is just a more general question on teaching, I remember when I started my Ph.D. program I had already had experience as a teacher and that was not a problem for me, but I felt like teaching graduate students how to teach- we didn't do a very good job at that. And has that improved and is that something that you tackle? I think this is part of a kind of the larger issue of teaching in science as well.
Yezerski: You know, Richard, I would say that there are pockets all over the country in particular Ph.D. programs where they're focusing on how to support people in learning pedagogy. But we have to think about what a Ph.D. is. A Ph.D. is a research degree, right? And it is this opportunity for people to be taking a deep dive into uncovering some new disciplinary knowledge and it might not match, right, learning how to become a faculty member where teaching is a big part of your responsibility. And so, there's definitely a gap, but I'm not sure that it's necessarily the responsibility of the Ph.D. program to close that gap because of what the Ph.D. represents. That sounds like a cop-out but there seem to be other places, and particularly in my discipline, where professional organizations are saying all right, what can we do about the lack of readiness for people going into higher education to meet the demands, not just a research but also of teaching and service, being a good colleague and a leader in a really complex environment. You know, how can we support people to do that? And so, I think you know the American Chemical Society, for example, is stepping up to do some really valuable faculty development for new chemists who are going into faculty positions. And you know, I'm sure ASA is doing things. So it's kind of like we need to all get together and say alright, what does the whole system look like? And what are the pieces parts of that system? And who can step in and help without compromising some of the things that I think are really important, like that deep dive into building disciplinary knowledge?
Bailer: So, Ellen I have a really easy question. So just you know, so how do people learn? And then, by the way, is I just like to add a quick follow-up, you know, given the, you know, given that simple answer you're going you're going to share with us, how do you get best teach to that the to the way people learn so that that you have the most impact?
Yezerski: So, I hate to disappoint you with the really short answer. It's definitely complicated, but the way people learn is that their brains naturally do it. Like we're built for that; we go through this natural sense-making and meeting-making process in the world, and if you especially watch little people; you watch children, anybody who has had children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews around and watch people grow, you don't need to give them a really good lecture on walking, you know? They figure out how to walk and they figure out through these experiences and interacting with their surroundings and with other people, and so I think that the most important thing that we can do is recognize that people learn naturally and maybe the problem isn't that we don't understand learning, because we actually know a lot about learning. The problem is that our classrooms don't look anything like how we naturally learn. So, if we could reshape those spaces and reshape those experiences to tap into what naturally happens, maybe it's not that scary.
Pennington: So, how do you define effectiveness in a space like a college classroom or even a high school classroom which is an artificially constructed space that you're supposed to learn in, how do we figure out what is effective?
Yezerski: Sure. So, we have to decide what effectiveness means; we have to define effectiveness first. So, for example, one thing we know is that people like naturally construct knowledge from experiences, so if- but maybe not by like listening to somebody talk at slides for 55 minutes, you know? So then, maybe effectiveness kind of parameterized in that way would be- that if the students are more engaged and the students are actually doing something with the content as opposed to just listening to some expert talk about it, then maybe that could be one measure of effectiveness and the measure part is really important right? Because we have to decide, you know, what can we capture? What can we see? What can we count? What can we measure that's going on in the classroom that's going to give us some kind of indication as to the extent to which students are, you know, engaged with the content, right? So, there's a really interesting instrument out there that people have been using- it's called the COPUS- I always figure out what the acronym is. It's a classroom observation protocol for undergraduate STEM. So, STEM, you know science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And it's an observation instrument where every two minutes the person who is collecting the data is indicating what the teacher and what the student happened to be doing, or students have to be doing. And you can imagine that if you wanted to change your COPUS profile, as it were, that you would spend more time having the students doing something than the teacher doing something. And I always say she who does the work does the learning so the COPUS is, you know, kind of a neat way just to look at this very kind of I don't know… I would call it like kind of coarse-level, C-O-A-R-S-E kind of coarse, level indicator of what's going on in the classroom. Now, I think that it's a lot more complicated than what the COPUS captures, but, if you can imagine a group of colleagues deciding that if engagement speaks to assess effectiveness, then maybe measuring engagement would be a fruitful way to go.
Campbell: So, how I have a- I have a confession. So, the only D I ever got in high school in any was a semester in chemistry. So, it also kind of put me off science. I didn't think I was going to be good at science and I think this happens- we talk a lot about this with statistics and math, not so much about science. But I think- I think a lot of students who could actually excel in science go a different direction fairly early on. And I think that happens both in high school and I think it happens to college students as well. Can you speak to that a little bit and maybe more about what can be done in the classroom to sort of deal with that sort of fear of science that some students and adults have?
Yezerski: Yeah, I'm sorry Richard that you didn't have a really good high school chemistry teacher who said, you know, you'd be inspired for my department, right? So, inspired. So, I think what happens is we kind of get these blind spots as experts and we lose touch with important things that a novice is experiencing. One of those things might be the why, I like what's the point right? I don't want to be a doctor. I don't want to be a chemist. Why do I have to even learn chemistry? And if we- and I think if you show students really like neat explosions, that's fun for that 30 seconds, but then it doesn't relate to their life, right? And that's not really the role that science plays. In fact, good chemists control reactions, you know. they don’t blow things up, unless it’s in a bomb calorimeter and they need to do it. Anyway. the key thing there is that the relevance has to be there for people to engage, and we also have to think about how do you kind of shape knowledge in the discipline? You know, how does a novice look at things? And chemistry is a great example because when you're a chemist, you get good at dealing symbols. So, see this is going to relate to statistics. It's coming. When you're a good chemist, you have all of these really convenient, shorthand ways of representing complex ideas, and you manipulate those really easily, and you can talk to other chemists in this super-shorthand, bizarre way, and they know exactly conceptually what you're talking about. But then we try to take that and do that with novices. They don't have the conceptual understanding. They don't have that foundation. They don't know what these symbols mean. So, then they just become really good at manipulating symbols to- you know, get quiz questions right and get good grades and move on, and that's- you know, that's really not desirable. So, we really need to get back to like the core concepts in our disciplines, especially in the sciences, and I'm sure this is something that in statistics education, people are focused on. I mean you can learn all kinds of rules and regs to move symbols around, right, but that's not what statistics is. You know, you have to be thinking about like, what do those values mean? And what does that mean for whatever is out in the world that you're studying and trying to make sense of, you know and use statistics to better understand, you know? And I think a lot of the chemical symbols and things are along those lines too. So, I would say that's what we need. We need to start moving symbols around and start getting into concepts.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we're talking with Ellen Yezerski, the Director for the Center for Teaching Excellence at Miami University. Ellen, you’ve been talking a lot about sort of what novices need, but I wonder how that experience in the classroom of sort of getting- what does that look like for a more advanced student, right? So I mean obviously with the novice relating it back to their life in some way you know help them understand the logic behind the symbols or whatever it is, right, but once you have them in maybe your major or maybe their minor or maybe they’re taking the class because it just sounds interesting and fits into their schedule, how does that change for those more advanced students? How does that engagement and that thinking about what effective is for them, sort of, how should it shift the way a professor or a high school teacher, or any teacher approaches the subject?
Yezerski: That’s a really hard question to answer, but I appreciate it because it really gets everybody thinking. So, you think about as you build expertise as a discipline, how do your ideas change? Like what does it mean that you can do what you couldn’t do last year kind of thing? And I can say specifically in chemistry you start to think about the world on the molecular level. And everything in chemistry has to do with what atoms and ions and molecules are doing, you know? And so, reasoning with chemical ideas means reasoning with models. It really comes down to understanding models and their role in doing science. And so, as you get more and more sophisticated you start to understand what the limitations of those models are, what the generalizability of different models are, and you start to understand that, oh, we had to over-simplify this principle so that we could make sense of it at the end of first-year chemistry. But then oh, in physical chemistry you have enough mathematical understanding that you can now put another layer onto that model, a mathematical version of this particle model, for example. And oh wow, you know, you can ramp up the complexity because we now understand. You know, we have other ways of representing this phenomenon to study or representing the ideas of what’s governing the phenomena we’re studying in nature. So yes, as we’ve built sophistication we get more tools in our toolbox, we get more complex kinds of reasoning, and if we think about how that relates to teaching, right, we have to methodically plan students’ steps up those rungs of the ladder, right? So, one of the things I always talk about in The Center is you have to really understand the structure of your discipline if you’re going to generate meaningful experiences that are going to lead to learning. And it takes a lot of expertise to do that and just because you’re really good and you have a Ph.D. or a Master’s degree, you may or may not understand the structure of the knowledge and the discipline well enough to be able to create those learning experiences that carefully scaffold one another so that students can develop expertise in a meaningful way. That’s, to me, that’s the golden ticket. If we can help faculty to do that they’re going to be highly effective and if we can get faculty to do that within departments as they sequence students courses and experiences, that’s even a golder ticket if that’s a word. More golden ticket how’s that? Sorry, Richard is giving me like a stink eye now.
Campbell: I like it when our guests invent new words.
Yezerski: It is- yeah, who knows, we’ll just keep working on that.
Bailer: Can I change gears just a little bit to think about where we’re living right now in terms of virtual instruction? You’ve suggested the importance of active and engaged learning. And I mean that was for me and thinking about my own journey from learner, to early instructor, to more seasoned instructor- I mean, I certainly am doing things differently. And the active learning part seems- it’s more natural in a face to face environment. Although, here we are remotely with five of us in different locations doing this and we’re able to make this work, but there’s some nuance here that’s a little tougher to build in. So, can you talk a little bit about in these days where we have this kind of distancing and isolation and a lot of virtual learning, what are some takeaways for doing our business effectively?
Yezerski: Yeah so, I don’t have a ton of experience teaching online, but I have been getting way more than I signed up for in teaching my graduate students in this remote way, as well as teaching faculty. And I would say it’s more remote than online because I’m not carefully designing and sequencing asynchronous activities for them to do on their own, like kind of like the hallmark of good online instruction, but one of the things that has been coming up over and over and over since The Center has been working really hard with our colleagues, has been that it doesn’t matter whether it’s face to face, or its online, the principles are the same. It’s all about starting with what does learning looks like? And how can we help people build expertise to be able to evidence that learning? And then it’s like okay, so what tools and spaces and strategies do we have at our disposal to make that happen? And then when we switched to remote and online, all of the tools and strategies changed, right? But we needed to help facilitate or help happen in the learner didn’t – and so because the- kind of the tools changed and the environments changed, some of the weaknesses got blown up. So, I can give you a really specific example. If you have an activity that you want your students to do and you’re in a face to face class, and you give the directions and the students start, and either the directions are poor and they don’t know what to do, or they go off in a different direction than you wanted them to go in, you can correct it right there you can say hey hey hey, can I have everyone’s attention up at the front here? Remember how I said to use model two? I need all the groups to be looking at model one data for this activity. Okay and then there’s this reset and then everything goes. And so, the instructor will have been responsive. The instructor will have, you know, kind of redirected the students in the right direction. But you can imagine that if you gave that same assignment online and it was asynchronous and the directions either weren’t good or the activity had more flaws to it, then what happens is the instructor gets, I don’t know, 100 emails complaining I don’t know what to do, and the stress you know of the instructor, like, this is not going well. This class activity that is supposed to take us from point A to point B in our learning is not happening, and there’s a lot of anxiety because sometimes the students might not offer the critiques in the most constructive way. They might not say something like I don’t believe the instructions are clear enough for me to make the most of my learning; they might not say that. They might say what the heck with number 12 this is ridiculous; I can’t do this. Or what a waste of time, you know? And so, all of those things that we take for granted, in terms of that synchronous, rapid communication and correction, they seem to go away, which really puts a bigger burden on us as instructors to design things that are a little bit more like instruction-proof. And I would say that, to me, is the hardest part because people haven’t necessarily gone through that whole thought-process all the way, you know? They’re familiar with getting those students started, right, and then being able to adjust. Now it’s like you’ve got to get them started and then you’ve got to build in all those checkpoints along the way, and then a really high-quality assessment to help tell you what’s going on and if the students really have met the learning outcomes. And so, I think that’s where we are now in just building our expertise.
Campbell: I’d like to ask you a little bit about- to switch directions again, like some of the work you’ve done on the lack of good STEM teaching, good STEM teachers, recruiting them in both middle school and high school, and I think in one of your articles I read about and, correct me if this is wrong, but only about 25% of programs- graduate programs, even address the possibility of teaching in high school or junior high school as a career option, is that right? And what do we do about that?
Yezerski: Yes. Right so you’re talking specifically about, I believe, an editorial that was in the Journal of Chemical Education about a project that I’m involved in called Get the Facts Out, and that project is a really great collaboration between the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, American Mathematics Association, and we’re trying to change people’s ideas about middle and high school teaching, specifically, chemistry, physics, and mathematics are the areas where we’re trying to, you know, kind of fire-up interest and do that by you know combatting some of the myths that are out there. I think one of the things that we’ve worked on in that project that’s interesting is- sometimes faculty in those disciplines they have a really awesome student who’s really successful and they say yeah, I want to be a high school chemistry teacher. Maybe some of those faculty- instead of saying awesome, I want to connect you with the right people to help you develop your skills so you can kill it as a teacher, they say things like oh, you could do so much more. Why don’t you go to graduate school? Why don’t you go to industry where you can make a lot more money? Or you know you’re so bright you’re better than that. And these are embarrassing messages, right? But unfortunately, people have inaccurate ideas about secondary teaching and the excitement and the challenge and the salary and the benefits that people can experience. So yeah, I think we have a lot of different prongs to that project. One is to help educate faculty about STEM teaching. And maybe some of them aren’t against it, but maybe not promoting it is a problem too, and having it be on that list of viable careers. Like if you’re a chemistry major or, you know, if you’re a physics major. So just getting the word out there and it’s been a really fun project I love the idea of you know confronting ideas and people- it’s like spicy, it’s fun. I like being the contrarian for that.
Pennington: So, one thing that I keep thinking about in relation to my own teaching and as I think about this issue of teaching effectiveness and helping students learn is this issue of trust, which you can’t capture really with a quantitative measure, but seems to be the foundation of all of this. So, how important is it to build trust and are there ways that you have seen in your work at the Center where the instructors can think about how to approach that and make their classroom spaces where trust can be built? So that the student- that when you lead them down this path that seems terrifying, knows that they’re safe exploring the topic with you?
Yezerski: I think that the work that Carol Dweck, who is a psychologist out of Stanford on mindset, on gross mindset versus fixed mindset, are the pop-science words that is used to describe that- becomes a really cool framework for thinking about how do we encourage learning? And are there things that we say and do as faculty that really sends a message that our role is not to develop people, but just to sort and select the people who really already look like me, or have whatever it is- I’m doing air quotes now on the podcast. So, you know, unfortunately a lot of disciplines the sort and select thing has worked for a very long time, and we’ve kept people out of our disciplines that could be, I don’t know, winning Nobel prizes, making the most giant contributions, and, at the very least, just getting us to see things from different perspectives. And so, for us to encourage in our students that we believe that they can learn. I think we also need to help them believe that they can learn. I can’t tell you how many students say you know I’m just not good at math.
Pennington: Yeah. I was one of those as an undergrad. I hated math and then I went to grad school and was like I actually really love math.
Yezerski: They say I can’t do math, or I can’t write, or all these kinds of things, and it’s like hold on a second, you absolutely can grow in that area; let’s figure out how to do that. So, there are some messages that faculty unintentionally send that might say that it’s fixed. I know that for me one of the things I stopped doing in my classroom is I stopped using the word study. Study is just a dirty word in my class; I don’t say study because what I’ve learned is that when I think of studying and when my students think of studying it is not the same activity. So studying to students meant memorizing something, and not working through problems and figuring out patterns and analyzing data, and you know, making sense of things and writing explanations; it doesn’t matter what the homework questions looked like, it seemed, they- studying – learning outside of class and studying were not the same thing to my students. So, I figured that out and I took the word studying out of my syllabus and I don’t talk about studying; I talk about learning outside of class. And when I say learning then, oh okay, well learning is different. My students told me, and this is not original this is Sandra McGuire who is from Louisiana State University, she’s retired now. Sandra- I got the idea, I asked my students like are studying and learning the same thing? And what do you think of when you hear studying? And what do you think of when you hear learning? And when I asked a really really large class that and got some insights and I went oh, maybe I should change my words. So, the message is really important.
Bailer: You know, you’re listed on that grant that you just described as a change agent. I love that as a title and Ellen, it’s pretty clear from the passion in your interests you certainly are bringing that to people’s teaching and learning, so thank you for that.
Yezerski: Thank you. I’m glad you noticed that.