-: More will be joining us.
So welcome everyone
to another event of the Faculty Development series.
I'm Jim Vigoreaux, the vice provost for faculty affairs.
And before I introduce our presenter today,
let me take a minute to thank
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
who are supporting this event today.
So our presenter is Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire,
who is the Director Emerita of the Center
for Academic Success
and retired Assistant Vice Chancellor
and Professor of Chemistry at Louisiana State University.
She has delivered keynote addresses or presenter workshops
on effective learning strategies
at over 500 institutions and 47 states and 13 countries.
And I believe we're adding another state today to that.
-: Yes, you are now 48, thanks to UVM.
-: And now 48.
So prior to joining LSU, Dr. McGuire spent 11 years
at Cornell where she received
the coveted Clark Distinguished Teaching Award
Her best selling books,
"Teach Students How to Learn"
and "Teach Yourself How to Learn"
are widely acclaimed by faculty and students.
The parent version,
"The Parents' Guide to Studying and Learning"
was released in January, 2022.
McGuire's most recent accolades include
being named a 2022 Louisiana Legend
by Louisiana public broadcasting.
I can't imagine what that entails,
but sounds pretty impressive.
Being listed in the 2020 edition
of Marquis Who's Who in America,
receiving the 2019 Commitment to Excellence
in Academic Support Award from the Commission
for Academic Support in Higher Education,
and induction in 2017 into
the LSU College of Science Hall of Distinction.
She's an elective fellow of the American Chemical Society,
the American Association for Advancement of Science,
and the Council of Learning Assistance
and Developmental Education Associations.
She received the Presidential Award for Excellence
in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring
in a white house oval ceremony in, I don't have the year,
but I think I remember. -: Well since you remember.
-: 2006, somewhere there? -: That's exactly right, yes.
How do you remember that?
-: I don't know, I keep track of them because
I do have a few colleagues who have been given them.
-: I see. -: So I'm just in the habit
to track 'em. -: I see, okay,
that's amazing.
-: Well, you're amazing too,
so it's good to remember these things.
Dr. McGuire received her BS degree, magna cum laude,
from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
her master's degree from Cornell University,
and her PhD from University of Tennessee at Knoxville,
where she also received a Chancellor's Citation
for Exceptional Professional Promise.
She's married to Dr. Steven C. McGuire,
the James and Ruth Smith Emeritus Professor of Physics
at Southern University.
And just to add to all of the accolades that I just read,
they are the parents of Dr. Carla McGuire Davis
and Dr. Stephanie McGuire,
and the doting grandparents of Joshua,
Ruth, Daniel, and Joseph Davis.
I think there's no better way to accentuate
all of those accomplishments with that final statement.
So Dr. McGuire, my pleasure to welcome you to UVM
for the second time today, the audience is yours.
-: Well, thank you so much.
Yes, and I'm still amazed that you remember the year.
I used to put the year in there,
but then when it was 10 years in the past,
I left the year out, and you're the first person
who has ever introduced me
who could conjure up the year and present it.
So thank you so much.
And yeah, I said, you know,
before we were these doting grandparents,
but I wrote that when the grandkids were a lot younger,
I think we're not quite as doting as we used to be.
But you know, when the older two
are about to graduate from college now.
But I wanna thank all of you for coming this afternoon.
It's more people than I expected,
I thought maybe around 20, 25 and we are over 30.
And I had lots of fun this morning with folks at UVM,
and so I anticipate we're gonna
have lots of fun this afternoon,
but there were so many CMS folks there this morning
that I am just wondering
if you were there this morning or not?
So Polly has been wonderful,
she put in another poll question and let's see.
Yeah, so answer that.
Actually, Polly, is that your name?
-: It's with Holly with an H.
-: I'm sorry, say that?
-: Holly with an H. -: Holly,
okay, that's a brain thing,
and I'll tell you what happened there.
Okay, yeah,
so let me know if you were in the first session because,
oh, okay, so so far,
only about a fourth of the people were not.
Yeah, so Holly,
I think my brain went to the O, L, L, Y,
but the polling feature in Microsoft teams,
I learned just a couple of months ago is Polly.
And so, yeah, did you know that?
-: Yes, the inverted icon.
Yes. -: Right.
Okay, and so then my brain is going, you know,
O, L, L, Y,
but it puts a P there, but I said Polly,
and I said, no, that can't be right,
but I couldn't figure out why I wanted to make it Polly,
and so now I understand why.
Okay, and I think that's an important point
for the presentation when we talk about how the brain
kind of makes us do crazy things.
But there's always a reason for why these mistakes come up.
And I think part of metacognition is really doing
that analysis and figuring out why our brains
led us in the wrong on direction.
So, okay, oh, this is great,
okay, so only 20% of the people were there this morning.
I was thinking it would be more like around, you know,
60 or 70, so this is great.
And I'm really happy to see the folks
who were there this morning, come back,
and I can let you know that a lot of what you saw
this morning, you'll see again,
but I want you to look at it kind of with
a fresh set of lenses.
One of the things that I tell students
when I encourage them to review their lecture notes,
as soon after class as possible.
And I say, when you do that,
you're gonna see things that you didn't see before,
and I give them the example of seeing
a movie more than one time.
And I ask them if they've noticed
that they see different things?
And they say, yeah.
And I said, well,
treat this when you go over the lecture as that same thing,
you're looking for things that you didn't notice before.
So those of you who are returning,
please approach it through those lens
and feel free in the chat box,
if I say something that's different
than what I said this morning, say,
you didn't say that this morning,
just challenge me on it,
feel free to do that.
But the thanks again for coming back for round two.
And for those of you who are here for the first time,
I have to warn you, I use the chat box a lot.
I ask a lot of questions,
there are no right or wrong answers
to any of the questions that I ask,
I just wanna know what you're thinking,
what your experience has been.
And so we're gonna be talking
about teaching STEM students how to learn.
And I say, metacognition is the key to that.
And I do want to know a little bit about your familiarity
with the work that I've done,
you know a little bit about me,
and so I want to know a little bit about you,
because as you heard in the introduction, I've done,
you know, over 500 of these,
I've spoken at PCAL events,
I've spoken at other STEM national conferences,
and so I wanted to see where you are
in terms of having oh, okay,
and most of you again are none of the above.
And typically what I like to do is when we're up to about,
oh, maybe 70% of the folks attending.
Okay, and since Zoom gives me total percent attended,
but I don't see this here.
So since we have a total of 34 people,
when we get to about 30 responses
and we're already over that,
I'll give you the five second warning,
so you can get your votes in,
and we will see what we come up with.
And unlike Zoom,
I know that you can see the results in the chat box
so we can see that, yeah,
almost 80%, none,
one person has read the book,
two people in the webinar,
and four in an in-person workshop.
Great, okay, thanks.
And then my last whole question for right now
is how familiar are you with the term, metacognition?
Because that's the framework that I present
this work to students in,
and I'll tell you why in just a minute,
and so sometimes I speak to audiences
and they're very familiar with it, sometimes not so much.
Okay, and I see a lot of folks are saying a little bit,
only three, quite a lot,
so far, nobody more than I of care to know.
Okay, and oh, we are already up to 33.
So, okay,
so we'll end it now, and I see that,
okay, so almost 90% say almost nothing or a little bit.
So this is great.
Okay, and so the faculty resource,
the book that has everything
that we're talking about this morning
and additional information
is in "Teach Students How to Learn", and the agenda,
I'm gonna talk a little bit,
I didn't say anything this morning about
what I call metacognitive equity,
but we're gonna talk a little bit about that.
And then I'll show you the impact of teaching
these metacognitive strategies to individuals,
to classes, and institution wide.
We'll talk a little bit about Bloom's Taxonomy
and the study cycle,
and then the role of mindset in student learning,
and then we'll have a conclusion and wrap up.
And so with metacognition,
the reason that I use that as the framework
for what I discuss with students,
in terms of how to more effectively study,
how to more effectively learn,
I talk about metacognition as opposed to study skills.
Very often we talk about,
we gotta teach students study skills,
but I find that students, when you say study skills,
I'm gonna teach you study skills,
their eyes kind of glaze over.
They don't wanna hear anything about study skills.
And you have very prepared students who come to UVM,
at least according to the normal metrics,
especially the ones who are going into STEM disciplines.
And so they feel that they are really prepared
for this place, they don't think they need any study skills.
And so I found that students
really weren't interested in that,
but when I talked about metacognition,
it was a term that most of them had not heard.
And so I have them dissect the word, is it simple?
Is it compound?
What does the root word mean?
What does the prefix mean?
And so we actually digest the word.
And so it really comes down to metacognition,
just a term that was coined by Flavell back in 1976,
very simply put,
is your ability to think about your own thinking.
Now, there are a lot more complicated,
involved definitions of metacognition
with different types of metacognition, etcetera.
But I find that when I'm talking to students,
if I want them to really take something away intuitively
and do something with the information I'm giving them,
it's gotta be simple, it's gotta be something
that they can really wrap their minds around.
And so I tell 'em that it's as if you have
a big brain outside your brain,
looking at what your brain is doing,
and that big brain is asking your brain questions,
and it's saying, does she understand this information?
Or did she just memorize it last night
because the test is today?
It's your ability to be consciously aware
that you are a problem solver, that when things come up,
that you don't think you know how to solve,
then you probably do have the ability to solve that.
The example I gave this morning was that students
ask questions that are on the syllabus.
And if they're not using their metacognitive brain,
then they think, oh,
I need to go ask the professor how many tests
we're gonna have in this course.
And the metacognitive brain points them to the syllabus
where they can get that information.
When I talk to students,
the example I get is procrastination,
that so many people have,
and if you are not using your metacognitive brain,
then you just accept that you're a procrastinator,
there's nothing you can do about it.
But the metacognitive brain says, no,
we need to solve this problem of procrastination.
And then your brain says,
well, what am I supposed to do?
And the metacognitive brain says, well,
I know you don't know what to do now,
but there's a bunch of stuff
you didn't know anything about that you took the steps
to find out something about.
And here's the first question for the chat,
I ask students, when something comes up,
let's say you've heard a new slang term
and you have no idea what it means,
and you wanna find out what it means,
what do you do to find out what that means?
And I can ask you, what do you do
if you've heard about something you don't know
anything about, but you wanna find out something about it,
what do you do?
And I'll see if your response is, exactly,
Google it, Linda,
yeah, that's the first thing students say.
And so the metacognitive brain says, well,
you Google everything else, so Google that.
And so if you were to Google, how to avoid procrastination,
Kristen says, I ask my kids.
Yes, and sometimes students say ask someone,
and I point out that that can be a little bit risky,
because I know Kristen, when I would ask my kids things,
they would tell me what they wanted me to know about it,
not necessarily what I needed to know about it.
So I think asking kids is the great first step,
but I'd still check on that using another source,
if possible.
And so if you were to Google, how to avoid procrastination,
you're gonna find all kinds of strategies
that are very helpful.
It's your ability to plan, monitor,
evaluate, and control your mental processing.
So you know if you're understanding something
or if you're just memorizing it.
It's your ability to accurately judge
your level of learning.
And that is huge because how many of you have ever,
just gimme a yes or no,
if you've ever had a student who got a test back,
didn't do very well, and they came to you and they say,
well, I don't know what happened
because I studied for hours and hours for that test.
Have you ever had a student say that,
and put yes if you haven't, nos are fine also.
Okay, and say yes.
And those students are typically not lying.
They did spend hours and hours studying for the test.
But what activities were they involved in during that time
where they were studying for hours and hours?
What are some of the things that they were doing?
Yeah, that's right,
Kristen, they say I knew everything,
and when I sat down for the test,
it just flew right outta my head.
Okay, John says,
including my own children.
Yeah, but what activity,
exactly, they were just rereading the book
or reviewing notes, sometimes they were highlighting things.
Absolutely, and they were memorizing stuff,
they were memorizing as they were going along.
And so if we asked questions on our task,
let's say it was a chemistry test
and it was covering acids and bases, and if we,
I had a question like define strong acids,
define weak acid, define strong base,
weak base, they're good to go,
'cause they have memorized those definitions.
But those are not the kinds of questions we ask.
We might give them a list of acids
and ask them to pick out the strong ones and the weak ones.
Or we might ask something that's a characteristic
of a strong acid, which one of these
are gonna totally disassociate when we put 'em in water?
Well, they're not prepared to do that
because all they've done is memorized definitions.
And so they're studying,
but they're studying at too low a level.
And for me, that's where Bloom's Taxonomy comes in.
So put in the chat box for me, please,
if you would say, yes or no,
are you very familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy?
And it's okay if you're not,
'cause I'm gonna talk about how I present it to students.
Okay, I'm seeing some nos.
Okay, mostly yeses, somewhat.
Okay, yeah, and so we're gonna talk about what Bloom's is.
It's basically just a hierarchy of learning levels,
where memorization is at the bottom.
And then it goes up to understanding,
to application, analysis, etcetera.
And so when I ask students,
if they've ever heard a professor say something like,
this is the university, you're at the university now,
this is not high school anymore,
you gotta kick it up a notch, all the hands go up.
But then when I ask,
who thinks you can me exactly what those professors
are talking about when they make that statement?
Almost nobody can.
And the ones that do, they'll say things like,
oh, that means that UVM is gonna be harder than high school.
They might say, that means that we're gonna have
to spend a lot more time on our courses.
Sometimes they'll say, we have to take more responsibility
for our own learning.
And I say, yeah, that's true,
but how many of you've ever heard of Bloom's Taxonomy,
and almost nobody has.
And so I think Bloom's is so important because I think
that's the lens through which students have to evaluate
that statement when we say you've gotta kick it up a notch,
kick it up a level,
because if they don't even know levels exist,
there's no way that they will know how
to kick it up a notch.
Oh, there's another question I wanna ask,
since most of us were familiar with Bloom's,
for those of us who were familiar,
have you ever explicitly taught Bloom's,
and so this will be just
for the people who said yes or somewhat,
have you ever explicitly taught Bloom's Taxonomy
to your students?
Give me a yes or no on that.
Okay, I see a couple of yeses,
but I'm seeing mostly nos.
Yeah, and I certainly understand the nos,
because I never taught Bloom's Taxonomy,
and I never taught it because
I didn't think that it was for students.
I learned Bloom's Taxonomy when I was a graduate student
because my PhD is in chemical education.
But I learned it as a construct that we
as faculty could use to target our instruction,
to target our assessments, I never taught it to students.
But when I got to LSU, the Center for Academic Success here,
they were teaching it to students with great success.
And so I started teaching it to students,
and the number one reaction I would get from students
is they would say, wow,
this is so helpful, why didn't anybody teach me this before?
I wish I had known about this in high school.
And so now I teach students to Bloom's
and it is really transformational for them.
And I do workshops for grad school students,
med school students, dental school students,
law school students,
and almost none of them have seen Bloom's.
And when they see it,
that's when the flash bulbs go off for them,
they see exactly what people are talking about
when we say this is a higher level
than where you were before.
And it's your ability to know what you know,
but you don't know.
So you don't show up at a test or a quiz thinking,
okay, I studied all night,
I'm good, I know this stuff,
I know everything, and then you sit down and it's like,
you look at the first two questions, hmm,
and this idea of, you know,
I knew everything before I set down to take the test,
and then it just flew right out of my head.
Have you heard that?
Give me a yes or no.
Have you heard that from any students?
Because students tend to think that they, okay,
I'm seeing yeses, yeah.
And so they tend to think,
they really believe in their heart of hearts
that they knew everything and they sat down
and take the test,
Laura says, just last week,
and it flew right out of their head.
And so when that happens, they think they have what?
They say, well,
it just flew right outta my head, so I think I have,
what do they think they have?
Because they knew it before they sat down to take the test
and then they sat down, it flew right out of their head,
and maybe none of your students have said this,
but I have students, exactly, Caroline,
yes, and Kristen,
test anxiety, they say,
oh, I have test anxiety.
Now I don't wanna make light of test anxiety
because test anxiety is a real phenomenon,
but most students who think they have test anxiety,
really don't have test anxiety.
People who have real test anxiety,
you will have physiological symptoms,
you'll have sweaty palms, you'll start to perspire,
your heart starts to race,
and this doesn't happen with most students.
Now they're pretty anxious, alright,
but they're anxious because they know
that they haven't mastered the material,
because when did most of them sit down
to really study for the test that's coming up?
Give me that in the chat box?
Okay, yeah,
I'm not good at tests, that's another,
exactly, last night.
And so they know that they really haven't mastered
the material 'cause they just started studying
it last night, and that's the source of the anxiety.
And so when we can teach students these strategies
and teach them that they're really preparing
for the test throughout the course,
then that anxiety tamps down and they can do well.
I can assure you if I had just started to learn this stuff
that we're talking about today last night,
I'd be pretty anxious right now.
And so I think we can help students understand
the difference between true test anxiety
and this anxiety that they get because their brain
knows they're not prepared.
Okay, I mentioned metacognitive equity,
and I've written an article on that.
But equity is related to educational equity,
looking at that discrepancy in outcomes between
different groups of students,
and metacognitive equity involves reducing the discrepancy
in metacognition or thinking strategies between students
from low income versus high income,
well resourced schools versus poorly resourced schools,
etcetera.
And I think that the biggest gap in STEM,
and other things too,
comes from this gap in metacognitive equity.
And I noticed that your division of diversity, equity,
and inclusion has invited all units to do
this inclusive excellence action plans.
And CMS has an inclusive excellence action plan.
And it is a very thorough plan,
and I think you're in years two to three,
and I noticed 'cause I was looking to see if there was
a discrepancy between
the success of minoritized students versus others,
and here it is, in our college,
students from historically underrepresented groups
have significantly lower retention and graduation rates,
which vary widely due to the small numbers.
And it is this information that we're talking about now
that I think will teach those students
the metacognitive skills that they need,
that their peers from more resource schools
have probably come to UVM with,
but they don't have these skills.
And they can learn them,
it's not that they can't learn them,
but they haven't learned them before.
And that's the source of the gap rather
than any kind of lack of ability or anything like that.
And the gap comes from the fact that children
from low income families enter high school
with lower literacy levels,
much lower than high school students,
they have less access to mentors who are gonna model
these metacognitive thinking skills.
They're more likely to be less academically challenged,
they're more likely to come from a school
where they were the best student in the class,
but when they take the SAT score, their SATs are,
you know, 400, 500,
and they have no idea that they are not
as prepared as other students,
and they're more likely to have
this fixed mindset about intelligence.
And that's where that self-fulfilling prophecy comes in,
that Alexandria talks about, yeah,
I can come from anxiety or I'm just not good at tests,
and they think that they can't get any better.
And we'll talk a little bit,
as you saw, about mindset.
Well, why is it that so many students
haven't developed these strategies?
Well, it just hasn't been necessary before.
These are data from
the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute
who every year surveys first year students,
I don't think they've done it since 2019,
I haven't seen any data.
I don't know if it's because of the pandemic?
But they ask a lot of questions,
but I'm particularly interested in the answers to two.
One is how much time students spent doing any homework
at all in 12th grade and the grade that they had,
their average when they graduated from high school,
and you'll see that in terms of the percent spending
a minimum of six hours a week on homework,
that is it hovers between the upper 30s to the low 40s,
but the percent who graduated from high school
with an, A average,
that number crossed 50% in 2013.
And in 2019, it was almost 60%.
So what that means is our students are coming to us,
not having done any work in high school,
but they graduated with A, or in some cases,
A+ averages,
and so they think they're good to go
and they won't need to do anything different at UVM
to maintain the kind of academic success
that they had in high school.
So I always say that our students
are really just being good scientists,
they're just taking all of the data
that they have accumulated in their 12 years
before they get to us,
and they are basing their decisions of how to behave,
based on those data.
And those data tell them, you don't need to do any homework,
you're still gonna make an A in this class.
And so that's why it's such a rude awakening
when they get that.
And I always encourage us to give our first test or a quiz
within the first two weeks,
the first quiz within the first week, if possible,
because students of the caliber who come to UVM,
they know they're all that and the bag of chips.
And so they will not know that they're not headed to an A
or A+ in your class until they get that wake up call.
And the earlier they get the wake up call,
the more interested they are in hearing these strategies.
So it's important to let them know that this is different.
Now college STEM courses are harder
than high school courses,
but the students have never taken
a STEM college course before,
so they don't know this to be the case,
especially those students who've taken AP and IB courses,
they think they are so ready.
But you know, the course moves a lot faster,
more conceptually difficult material,
more involved problems, less straightforward tests,
where they have to apply a lot of concepts at once,
and most students are just not familiar with that.
Now here's a question,
and so those of you who were there this morning,
you'll know the answers to a lot of these questions,
so please don't put it in the chat box for now.
But I'm gonna ask everybody else,
when I worked with students,
I would ask them to reflect on a lot of questions,
and this is the important part of the approach that I take.
I don't tell students, you need to do this,
you need to do that, which is what I used to do,
but I don't do that anymore.
What I do is I ask reflection questions to get students
to think about their past behavior and to analyze why
that might not have been working
and what they need to do in the future?
And you'll see those as we go through the discussion.
But I was asking these questions
because I wanted to get more ideas
about students' experience,
and I wanted to give 'em some advice based on
what I thought I was gonna hear.
And so the first question I asked is was
what did most of your teachers in high school
do the class period the day before the test?
So put in the chat box, what you think students said,
'cause I was not at all, exactly,
review, that's what they said,
review, that's exactly what I was expecting.
And so then my next question was, okay,
so what did they do during the review?
And so tell me what, okay,
so Kristen said, review the material
that would be on the test, okay.
I'll take a couple of more responses
and I will see if anybody repeat what they'd already said.
Okay, I'll see if anybody I hit the highlights.
This is so interesting because usually
when I ask this question at institutions,
and as you heard, I've spoken at,
you know, about 500 so far,
and usually there's at least one, hmm, there it is,
I was gonna say, there's at least one person
who gets exactly what they do.
But this morning nobody said that, but Joanne says,
they would almost give the test,
and you're actually close,
it's worse than that, Joanne.
Students told me, which shocked me,
they told me, well,
they gave us the test questions
and we went over the answers.
Now I was shocked by that, put in the chat box,
yes or no, if you knew that's
what was happening in high schools.
And when I asked that question, at most institutions,
there will be people who say yes.
Okay, yeah,
so Mary Ellen knew, but I didn't know,
'cause see, I thought they were gonna say,
well, they reviewed the information
and went over outlines or whatever.
And I was all prepared to say yes,
but we don't do that at the university,
you have to do that yourself.
But that's not what they said,
when they told me what they did,
I said, oh, okay,
well, and so then I made up a third question.
I said, okay,
well if you'd never gone to class,
just the day before the test,
and you went to class that day,
and you paid really close attention that day,
what's the lowest grade you would have made?
Oh, okay, actually I gotta respond to this,
yeah, Jim is saddened by this.
And Jim says, yes,
I was the evil school board member who railed against this.
Yeah, and I'm glad you put that in Joanne,
because I always like to say, it's not teacher's fault.
Teachers have been put in this untenable situation
where their livelihood, I'm gonna say,
whether or not their school is gonna be taken over
by some external force is dependent upon the scores
that their student make on these standardized tests,
and I'll call them evil.
And so a teacher told me once that,
because there's so much riding
on how students perform on these tests,
that many of them think that if they go over the test
and give 'em the answers the students will do well.
But of course we know that that really doesn't happen.
And so when yeah, because of funding,
all kinds of things, and so yep,
we want you to make up a review sheet,
then we're gonna talk about that, so, nope,
'cause I have some advice about that
that I think satisfies students,
even though you are not gonna make up
a review sheet for them.
And so I asked them,
well, if you hadn't gone to a class a single day,
except just the day before the test,
and you went to the class that day,
and you paid really close attention,
what's the lowest score you would've gotten
on the test that day?
And put in the chat box what you think the lowest score
they said they would've gotten
if they skipped every single class except the one?
Okay, so I'm seeing B's,
I'm seeing 50, 75.
It was B, there were a few students who said A,
a few students said C, nobody said less than a C.
Most of them said B.
And so that helped me understand why so many times
our students didn't do anything until, you know,
before the first test, because they thought,
okay, well I'm gonna get the review,
or at the very least, I'm gonna get a review sheet.
And somebody already mentioned that students ask
for a review sheet.
And so I don't advise giving review sheets,
but what I advise is having students make their
own review sheets, because review sheets are very helpful.
And so we can show students how to make a review sheet
and tell them that they should make their own review sheet,
and you could have them share review sheets
in small groups or whatever.
But this is very important.
Okay, Judy says,
is this attention economy, I guess I'm not surprised.
Yeah, but you know,
the good news is that even though students
have had these experiences before they get to us,
we can make a difference here.
And that was surprising to me,
I did not have any idea that I could take a student
who learned almost nothing in high school,
teach them these strategies,
and let them know that it starts now.
It doesn't matter if you never had chemistry,
it doesn't matter if you've always had test anxiety,
it doesn't matter if you didn't learn anything in math,
I'm gonna teach you the material,
but also the strategies that you need
in order to be successful.
So basically what we're saying,
that we as faculty have to help students make
that transition from whatever they're doing now
that's not lead leading to the learning and grades
they're seeking, to a productive behavior
that's gonna lead to that.
And so what I wanna do is share with you
some very powerful strategies,
but by way of students who have used those strategies,
I'm pretty sure I hit the sound.
So Holly, if you can't hear anything,
then unmute your Mike and tell me you can't.
But Dana was a student in physics,
she was about to drop out of physics when she made the 54.
And she was an A student from high school.
She was at LSU on
a very prestigious American Physical Society Scholarship,
'cause she'd always wanted to be
a medical physicist since 10th grade,
'cause her mom worked in the MD Anderson Cancer Center
in Houston, she's from Houston,
and she talked with the medical physicist there,
and that's what she wanted to do.
But when she made the 80s, she was alarmed,
because she'd never made anything less than A's
in physics, in high school.
And then when she made the 54,
she was gonna be out of there.
And so I met her at a change your major work shop.
I wasn't teaching the workshop,
I just went to see what they tell students
at a change your major workshop.
And I'll never forget this,
the counselor who was teaching, the advisor,
I should say, professional advisor,
who was conducting the workshop.
The first thing she did was she asked students
to introduce themselves, tell what they were majoring in,
what they wanted to change to.
And Dana stood up and she said,
well, I'm Dana, I was majoring in physics,
but that's just not working out well.
And the advisor immediately said, oh yes,
I understand because physics is hard.
And she said, just like that,
she said, we'll find you something that you can do.
And so I took note of that,
and as Dana was leaving the room,
I met her at the door and I said, Dana,
do you have about an hour to talk with me in the office?
I said, I'm gonna talk to you
about some learning strategies.
And I said, look,
I'm not gonna try to talk you out of leaving physics
because if you really wanna do something else,
that is absolutely fine with me.
But I want you to know you are leaving physics,
not because you can't do it,
but because you chosen to do something else.
And so she came to my office,
we talked for about an hour and these were her grades after,
she made an A in that physics course 4.0 that semester.
And you will hear from her in her own voice what she did.
But before we had the discussion,
she was memorizing formulas,
and then she was using online homework programs.
And when she told me that, I said, Dana,
that's cheating, you're cheating.
She said, oh no, Dr. McGuire,
she said, I would never cheat,
she said, I'm just using those to get
a hint about how to start the problems.
And I said, yeah,
but when you get to the test,
do they give you a hint about how to start the problems?
And so she realized that that's what was derailing her.
So then she started solving problems,
not using any external aids.
And so I am going to allow you to hear Dana,
let me turn this all the way up,
and I'm going to, when I hit play,
you may or may not be able to hear her,
with Teams, it seems that some people can hear her
if I hit play, but you may have
to hit the play button yourself.
So I'm gonna tell you when I hit start,
if you don't hear anything within like a couple of seconds,
then hit the start on your slide so that you can hear her,
what she's saying.
So here is Dana now, she's just started.
Okay, I'm gonna stop it because Veronica
says I don't see or hear anything.
Okay, so everybody should be seeing the slide
that has Dana's picture in the middle.
Are you seeing that?
Okay, yeah,
so you gotta click the button on your screen.
-: There's no presentation. -: There's no presentation?
That's very interesting. -: Oh, it says,
reload to display, maybe it's me.
-: Hmm.
Okay, is anybody else,
give me a yes or no if you're seeing the slide
with Dana's picture?
Okay, yeah,
so I think, yeah,
you've gotta do.
-: I was able to push the play button in.
-: Okay, so most people are seeing,
yeah, I'm getting hands up.
Yeah, okay, seeing and hearing fine.
Yeah, so Holly,
if you can tell the people who are not seeing
what they need to do,
'cause I don't know how to tell 'em what to do.
Holly: It may be their connection, Saundra,
so if you're still not seeing the slide,
you might wanna leave our meeting and come back
or restart Teams.
-: Okay, yeah,
and I'm gonna start her again, and again,
if you don't hear anything,
then hit the start button on your screen,
'cause I do hear people saying
that they had to hit the volume button,
so hit that to hear her, but here she goes.
Okay, and Veronica,
I'm sorry, you're still not seeing any thing,
I don't know what's going on.
But Susanmarie said that she is going to transcribe it,
so you'll hear Dana's story.
But I think everybody else was able to hear it.
Now Dana did get a couple of things,
well, you might get the wrong impression,
she said that we worked together the whole semester,
which is true, but I only spent one session talking
with her about learning strategies, I became her mentor,
and so we did work together,
but not with the learning strategies.
When she got the information and she started implementing
the strategies, then she was on her way.
And that's what I find,
it happens with these strategies for
the types of students that you have at UVM,
they haven't thought about this,
it's a whole new paradigm for them.
And when they understand how it works,
then they implement it and it makes a lot of difference.
Now the other thing she said was I'm phenomenal.
I'm not phenomenal, it's the strategies that are phenomenal.
She said, you know,
she has the golden ticket and the strategies really are
what consider the golden ticket
because it just makes so much difference.
Now the strategy that I find is so important
for STEM students, especially,
is the problem with what they're doing
is they're doing the homework all wrong.
Put in the chat box for me, please,
if you've ever had a student
who does really well on the homework,
but then they don't do well on the test, have you seen that?
Okay, yeah,
oh, and the session is being recorded, Veronica,
so if you can't see or hear anything,
then you probably could spend better, you know,
your time and then watch the recording, I don't know.
I just feel bad that you can't see yet,
but yeah, all the time.
And so the reason is because
they're doing the homework the wrong way.
And so I'm gonna ask you to think back
to the last time you were doing any homework at all.
And if you ever did this, put yes in the chat box,
if you never did it, put no.
Do you ever remember reading a problem that you had to work
or reading a question that you had to answer,
and then flipping back in the chapter
to find an example of the problem you had to work
or a discussion of the question you had to answer,
did you ever do that?
And I'm seeing some yeses already.
Yeah, and so I ask students this
and they all say absolutely, yes.
And I tell 'em, unfortunately I did that too,
because I didn't have a me telling me that
that wasn't gonna work.
And so they all did it, and so I said,
now when we did this, I include myself,
'cause I tell 'em I did it,
I said, when we did this,
were we working the problem?
Was our brain working the problem?
And I'll ask you, when we did that,
was our brain working the problem?
Give me a yes or no?
Yeah, and students say,
no, absolutely.
And then I'll say,
well, what was working the problem?
'Cause they'll tell me no, yeah,
our brains weren't.
So what was working the problem?
Put that in the chat box for me, please.
And students are, you know,
they get it immediately.
Exactly, the textbook,
sometimes they'll say the textbook,
sometimes they'll say the author,
sometimes they'll say the example, but absolutely.
And I said, yeah,
and you're really, really smart people.
Although I may say that,
although I don't really believe in the concept
that some people are smart and some people aren't anymore.
But you know, I say you're really,
really smart people, I was very smart,
how many of you remember thinking when you looked
at the way the example was worked
or the question was answered thinking,
oh yeah, I got that,
oh yeah, I understand that?
And all the hands go up.
They said, yeah,
I thought the same thing,
but when we got to the test or quiz,
if they changed anything at all around a little bit,
then what happened?
And then sometimes they'll shake their head.
One young man said, oops, I don't got that.
And so the homework strategy that so many of our students
have said makes a difference,
and this is actually the one thing,
most of this stuff we're talking about
I did not know when I was at Cornell,
but this is the one thing that I did learn.
The number one reason that my students in general chemistry,
organic chemistry were making C's, D's, F's,
or okay, hi Linda, go Big Red.
Yeah, on the exams that they could
have been making A's and B's was because of that.
And when they stopped that one practice and implemented
what we were talking now, they turned it around.
So you gotta study the material first
before you look at the first problem or question,
and then when you get to an example,
just read the problem statement.
And if you've studied the information,
then you will be able to work the problem,
at least you'll be able to start it.
And so when you get to the example,
work the problem until you get to an answer.
And in fact, even if you don't know exactly what to do next,
just power your way through until you get to an answer,
pretend it's a multiple choice question,
you gotta come up with an answer.
And then when you get the answer,
compare that answer with the answer in the book.
If you got the same answer,
then you can look at what author did.
If you didn't get the same answer, don't look yet,
try to figure out where your mistake was.
And I asked students at this point in the process,
do you think making a mistake is good or bad?
And so I want only the people who haven't read the book
or who were not in the first session
or at any other presentations,
'cause you'll know the answer,
but only other people say,
do students say that making a mistake
at this point is good or bad?
What do you think students say about making
a mistake at this point?
Okay, and so I'm seeing mostly bads,
and I saw two goods early on,
and it was, I think,
Mary Ellen and Janet.
So Mary Ellen and Janet, please unmute your mic.
Had you read the book or seen this at all before?
-: No, this is Janet. -: No?
-: I haven't. -: And I'm Mary Ellen,
and I haven't. -: But I figured when you
doing homework. -: Mary Ellen,
hold on one second and Janet's gonna finish.
Go ahead, Janet.
Janet: Yeah, when you're doing home work,
that's the time to make the mistake,
instead of on the exam or the quiz.
-: Yeah, and the question was,
'cause this happened this morning and somebody put good,
but he said, I put good
before I realized that you were asking,
would students say making a mistake at this point
is good or bad.
And so would you that students would say making a mistake
is good or would students say making a mistake is bad?
Holly: I guess it depends on the age,
but I guess most of them would say bad,
because they never wanna make a mistake, right?
-: Okay, and thank you,
and so that's Janet.
So Mary Ellen, what were you gonna say?
Mary Ellen: I was gonna say that, you know,
according to like Carol Dweck's work and Joe Bowler's work,
mistakes are when you learn.
-: Well, yes,
and so do you think students would say good or bad?
-: My students would've said good
-: Excellent. -: Because I taught them
that the only way you learn is when you make mistakes.
-: Fantastic, and what do you teach, Susanmarie?
-: I was a math teacher for about 20 years.
-: That's right, okay,
yes, oh, but you're my CTL director, right?
Susanmarie: Well, I work in the education department
now at UVM. -: Oh, okay,
gotcha, okay,
yeah, and so I wanted to do that
because most faculty say bad and very few faculty say good,
I always like to know why faculty said good.
But students always say good.
Most faculty groups always say bad
and students say good and I'll tell 'em,
yep, you're right.
And I said, but don't get me wrong,
I'm not saying it's bad
if you don't make a mistake at this point,
it's fantastic if you don't make a mistake at this point.
But why is it good if you make a mistake at this point?
And they say exactly what we've just heard,
they'll say, well,
you learn from your mistakes is the number one answer
I get from students.
And then the second thing they say is, well,
now I know where my brain has a tendency to go wrong.
And then the third thing they'll say is, it's not the test,
and you can correct it before you get to the test,
which then gives me the opportunity
to ask this question to students.
And I'll ask students,
have you ever gotten a test or a quiz back,
and you looked at it and you saw your mistakes and you said,
ah, I made so many simple mistakes,
I would've done so much better,
but I just made simple mistakes.
Have you ever heard a student say that?
You know, oh,
I just made so many careless mistakes on this test.
Oh, I have new messages,
that's right, 'cause I scrolled up and you are answering me.
Okay, yes, I see the yeses.
Yeah, and so that's what students think,
and I tell 'em yeah, you know,
I used to think the same thing, that I made simple mistakes.
But I say now my philosophy
is that there's no such thing as just simple mistakes.
Said, mistakes only look simple in retrospect.
Once you know what the right thing is,
your mistake looks so simple,
but mistakes are things that have to be made.
And I'll ask students either you're gonna make 'em
during this process or where are you going to make them?
And put in the chat box
what you think they tell me when I say mistakes,
they have to be made.
And someone said, you know,
that they tell students that, you know,
mistakes are good.
There's a term fail forward, 'cause you learn from those.
Yeah, on the exam,
that students will say on the exam.
And so the good news is,
I'm not telling them, you better do this
or you're gonna screw up on the test.
They're telling me that if they don't do this,
they're gonna make the mistake on the test.
And this is, I've learned,
a crucial part of this approach.
The less we tell students and the more we ask them questions
so that they give us the information
that we would've told them,
the more likely that that's gonna stick
and they're gonna do something with it.
So check to see if it's correct, if it's not,
figure out where your mistake was,
and that's just the examples.
When they get to the actual homework problems,
they tell 'em, treat it as if it's a test or a quiz,
and you heard Dana say she was doing that,
work two or three problems, try to speed it up,
work it a little bit more quickly,
because that's what you're gonna have to do
on a test or a quiz, because many students lose points
because they don't finish.
And they don't finish because
they are not trying to go faster,
they're slowly and carefully plotting through everything
like they did on homework,
'cause there are no time constraints on homework.
But they can practice speeding it up
and it makes a big difference.
And so I also like to share with my STEM students
and really in all students, I ask them,
is this resource the culprit?
And Chegg, and when I'm talking to students,
I ask them, I say,
I'm not asking about you,
I'm just asking about a friend, about your friends,
how many of you have friends who use this Chegg?
And so sometimes they'll do a laughing thing
and they'll put, yes.
And then, you know,
'cause Chegg has the solutions for everything in the book,
and 94% of Chegg customers get better grades,
well I guess so 'cause they're acing all the homeworks,
but then I hope students understand
that they can learn this information, they don't need Chegg,
and if they take this approach,
then they'll be able to learn it.
And the other thing found is that students
really appreciate motive.
And when I tell them that I'm teaching you this
because when you get out into the real world, you're STEM,
so you probably have a lot of students
who are interested in graduate school,
or health professions, or the things like that.
When you get out on the job, in professional school,
you have to know something.
And so Chegg is not going to cut it
and you can learn this, so you don't need Chegg,
but that is a culprit.
Now the next strategy is a reading strategy that I taught
this young man who had made a 47, 52 on the first two tests.
And then talked with him 30 minutes by phone
the night before the third test, 82,
then 86 on the next one.
So I took him out to lunch and I said, Travis,
what are you doing?
And he said, I'm just doing this stuff you told me to do.
And with Travis, he was having trouble,
he was doing the reading, he said,
but he wasn't retaining what he had read.
And when he got to the test,
he would recognize the terminology,
but he didn't actually remember what he'd read.
And so the strategy that I taught him,
this is kind of a summary of it, it's called SQ5R.
But the first thing is to preview the reading
before you start to read so you can get a big picture,
and then come up with questions that you want
the reading to answer for you.
So for example, if I were reading a chapter in chemistry
on acid and bases, I would see strong acid,
weak acid, strong base, weak base,
either in bold face printer or italicized words.
And so then I would say, well,
I wonder what this thing is gonna say is the difference
between strong acids and weak acids,
does one burn you more than another?
So I've created my own interest in the reading,
and then when you start to read,
just read the first paragraph, stop,
put that information in your own words,
and then read the second paragraph, stop,
put that information in your own words,
trying to fold in what was in the paragraph before,
and read subsequent paragraphs the same way.
And when I teach this to students,
I always stop at this point and I say,
does it sound like, and I'm gonna ask you this question,
does it sound like if I gotta do all of that,
it's gonna take a long time to finish the reading?
So put yes or no in the chat box,
does it sound like if I use this,
compared to what I was doing before to do my reading,
it's gonna take a long time?
Yeah, and all the students say yes.
And so I tell them that,
yeah, it sounds like it,
but students love this.
I've had a lot of students who come back and they say,
Dr. McGuire, I love that reading strategy,
I'm getting so much more out of my reading now.
And then I say, oh, that's fantastic,
is it taking you longer to do your reading now than before?
And to a person, they say,
well, no, actually I finished the reading sooner,
doing it this way than what I did before.
And so you might not get this,
'cause I didn't set it up as complete as I do for students,
but I'm gonna ask you,
why do you think it would take less time to finish
the reading going through all of these steps
than what they were doing before?
What do you think?
And again, you might not get it because I didn't set it up.
Okay, yes,
you got it, yep,
those are the top two,
students say you don't have to reread,
and now you are interested and your focusing, yes.
Because with the old way you would read a little bit,
but your mind would wander and you'd have to go back.
Read, go back, read, go back,
read, go back.
With the new way,
you are moving more slowly through the reading,
but you get to the end point sooner,
'cause you're not doing all that back and forth.
And the other neat thing about this is you actually speed up
as you go along.
Because when you get to the 11th paragraph,
you can imagine how much faster
you're gonna be able to read it
if you've understood everything
that was in the first 10 paragraphs.
And so it makes a huge difference.
And so this is the summary of it, do that survey,
come up with questions, and read the paragraph at a time
where you are recording, I'm sorry,
you're reciting to yourself.
You can teach 'em how to record or annotate in the margin.
And then the next R is for review,
when you get to the end of a section,
you can review what just happened in that section.
And then the last R is for reflect,
are there any other views?
Is there anything that got your attention?
For STEM courses, maybe did the author do the problem
a different way than you would've done it?
Because we all know that there's lots of different ways
that you can do problems in STEM.
And if that was the case, then what's the relationship
between the way you did it and the way the author did it,
or if you were gonna write the author
and ask them to rewrite a certain section,
because it wasn't as clear to you as you would like,
what section would that be?
So just having them reflect on the information,
it's called active reading,
and that has made such a difference with so many students.
And so now what I'm gonna do
is I'm going to put a passage on the screen,
and I'm going to give you a few minutes to read it.
Then I'm gonna take it off the screen and ask a question.
And the question will only be for people
who were not in the first session this morning.
So let's read this.
Okay, you may not have finished the whole thing,
but I will take it off the screen.
And so for people who are not there this morning,
give me a yes or no in the chat box,
could you do this, if I asked you to unmute your mic,
and summarize the information in that slide to the group,
would you be able to do that, do you think?
Now look for a couple of responses, okay,
I'm seeing some nos.
Yeah, I certainly would not have.
Okay, but let me ask this,
if you had known before you started to read
that this passage was about flying a kite,
now I want you to reread that and let me know if it makes
a lot more sense to you now
that you know it's about flying a kite?
Okay, and I'm seeing some yeses,
and I've kinda asked Alexandria,
because you said you could have given a general idea.
Alexandria, did you know that
it was about flying a kite when you read it?
-: No, I had idea. -: Okay.
Alexandria: But I'm also one of those people blessed
or cursed with, I did a lot of speech in theater
as a younger person. -: Got you.
-: And then, so. -: Right.
And so you could take in the text
and then kind of process it and okay,
yes. -: Yes, the ability
to take in process and then semi memorize large blocks
of text relatively quickly is.
-: Got you.
Okay, and everybody else says that now
it makes a big difference that you know what it is,
because now you have a context
and you can actually visualize these things happening.
And so I like to give students examples proof
that what I'm recommending will work.
And there's another example in the book,
but once they see that,
just knowing what the thing is about,
makes such a huge difference in understanding,
then that will give them the motivation to maybe spend
that five minutes or so doing that overview
before they start to read.
And here's the reference for that,
and there's a link to that.
Oh, and you're gonna get this whole PowerPoint presentation,
I dunno if I said that, but you're gonna get that.
So you can pick and choose any slides
you want to share with your students, and so you'll have it.
Now, this is an email I got from a high school teacher
about his son, who was the student who might end up
at a UVM, he's in honors classes
at a very selective high school, he has a GPA of 4.2.
I was talking about reading strategies in a workshop
that his dad was in and he was in the room with his dad.
So his dad had his headset on,
but when I started talking about the reading strategy,
he disconnected his headset
so his son could hear the strategy.
And so three weeks ago, his son had gotten a 72
on his test for honors biology and was devastated,
I'd learned, and so he had the next test coming up
on Monday, the workshop was Saturday.
So evidently he was studying for his test that Sunday night
and Darien talked to his dad, I think he was,
you know, very concerned,
and so his dad told him to just follow the strategies
on his test that was coming up the next day
that he had heard me talk about.
Well, it was 4:34, evidently Darien had gotten home,
and he gotten 86 on his test.
So his dad dashed off this email to me,
he was so relieved and grateful for the advice.
And this is what happens to students
that when they don't think that
they don't know what to do to make it better,
and we give 'em strategies,
they use those strategies, they're successful,
and they are really, really grateful,
as you heard Dana was, and it just makes a big difference.
And this is a somebody who already had a PhD,
that was in the social sciences.
And he decided that he wanted
to teach himself calculus and physics.
And so he said, the methods that I outline,
especially active reading,
created a learning experience for him that's interactive,
even when you're studying the material alone.
And he said, you know,
when I met him, he was trying to learn calculus and physics,
and it was a struggle, but he said,
now it's progressing smoothly,
this process is the ultimate divide
and conquer approach to learning.
And he says, he hadn't mentioned it before,
but it makes the subjects way more interesting
and even intriguing, like being on a journey of discovery.
And so I think that students really do find
that this reading strategy allows them
to get so much more out of them.
Now, reflection questions, again,
are really key to developing students metacognitive skills.
And two of the ones that I ask,
and normally I will ask you to give me
your responses to that, but in the interest of time,
I'm gonna tell you the top three responses
I get from students, and you can,
you know, think if you were thinking one of those,
or if you were thinking something else,
then certainly put that in the chat box.
But the first question is, what's the difference,
if you think there's any difference at all,
between studying and learning.
And typically, students have not been asked this question,
but when we ask it, they think about,
and I have 'em do it as a think, pair, share.
So they get their own answer,
then they share it with a partner.
And the number one response I get is they'll say,
aah, studying is just memorizing information for a test
or a quiz, but learning is when I understand
that information, I can relate it to what I already know,
I can apply it to things that I haven't seen before.
And sometimes they'll say studying is short term,
learning is long terms.
Sometimes they'll say studying is tedious,
learning is fun.
But recently I've been getting more students,
I used to only get this from high school student,
but now I'm getting a lot more college students who'll say,
aah, studying is when I go over what I've already learned.
And the first time I heard that I was struck
by that response, it was a group of high school students.
And so I asked them, when did you learn it?
Since they said studying was going over,
what they already learned?
I asked, when did you learn it?
And put in the chat box, if you haven't read the book
or attended any of the other sessions,
when do you think the students
said they learned the information?
Because if they're studying,
they're going over what they already learned,
so they obviously think they've learned it at some,
exactly, Veronica.
in class when the teacher taught it.
And so then I realized that I had to help students
understand the difference between learning about something
and learning something,
in class you learn about a lot of things,
but you haven't really learned it to the extent
that you would be able to explain it to someone else,
you gotta do something with that information later on,
because without having that perspective, students,
and I tell 'em, you know,
unfortunately I'm guilty,
I would study the night before the test
because I too thought I had learned it in class
and I just need to go over it before the test.
And of course I couldn't start going over it too soon,
'cause I started going over it too soon, what would happen?
I'd forget it before the test.
And so then I helped them understand that, no,
when you learn it, it's not a matter of forgetting it
before the test, and you really haven't learned it in class,
you learn it by employing these strategies
that we're talking about.
And then the second question is for which task
would you work harder, if I told you you had to make an A
on the next test or if I told you that, okay,
in this particular class,
we're having the second test coming up next week,
and everybody in the class kept asking me
before the first test, can we have a review sheet?
Are you gonna give us a review sheet?
And I said, no,
we don't give review sheets at UVM, that was so high school.
So no, not gonna give a review.
And so I didn't give a review or a review sheet
and the class did horribly, the average was 65.
So I see now I'm gonna have to offer
a review before this upcoming test.
So I'm gonna offer a review the class period
before the test and you are gonna teach that review.
I'm gonna have you come up to the front of the class
with no notes or anything,
and you're going to go over all of the important concepts,
paying particular attention to the more difficult concepts
to make sure everybody is prepared for the test
the next day, would you work harder for A or B?
So put that in the chat box for me, please.
Okay, and that's what students say.
And I think it was Veronica who said that, you know,
when I do the example in class, they think they know it.
And actually I talked with students
about this when I was still teaching,
I'm retired, and I've forgotten to tell students recently,
so thank you for me reminding,
I told him that when we do problems on the board,
when we explain things, we're going to make it very,
very clear because we understand it very well,
we know how to explain it so that students understand it.
So it makes perfect sense that they're gonna understand
it totally after they've heard us explain it,
but that is doesn't mean they've learned it,
they've gotta do something with it.
So even though they think they totally understand
these examples, before they go through the chapter
and do the examples in the chapter
without looking at any of the solutions,
then they won't know that they have mastered this.
And so students say they would work harder
to teach the material.
When I ask why, they'll say things like,
oh, I gotta really know it if I have to teach it.
Sometimes they'll say,
I don't wanna look stupid in front of the class.
And then sometimes they'll say,
the more empathetic students say, well,
I wanna make sure everybody in the class knows
it well enough to do well on the test.
So that means that I'm going to make sure
that I can explain things more than one way.
I can use charts and diagrams for people
who like to see it visually.
And so they realize that they would work harder,
and when I ask them up to this point,
have they more often been in study mode or learn mode?
Of course, most of them say study mode,
and for A or B, what mode have they been in?
They've been in scenario A mode.
And at that point, and I say,
wonderful, I love it when you're doing everything wrong.
Because that means when you change what you're doing,
you are more likely to see a big improvement.
Because I never want students to feel bad
about what they've done in the past.
And sometimes I think we as STEM faculty, particularly,
if a student comes and they're not using the book
and we say, you're not using the book,
well, how'd you think you were gonna learn
not using the book?
Oh, I'll ask this question for the chat box.
Do you think that there are any faculty at UVM
who say to students, you don't really need
to buy the book for this course?
Give me a yes or no in the chat box,
if you think any of your colleagues tell students,
you don't really need to buy the book for this course?
Okay, yes, absolutely.
'Cause when I ask students and they all say yes,
and so there's an example in the book that I use
with students to show them why
this is not accurate information.
So I said, well,
that's not actually accurate,
but don't get mad at faculty for telling you that
because they think they're helping you out.
I'll ask students, what do you think those faculty members
think they're doing when they say you don't really
need to buy the book for this course?
And students will say, saving us money.
I said, absolutely,
that's what they think.
But what's more expensive, buying the book
for your anatomy and physiology course
or getting a C in the course
that's gonna keep you outta medical school?
I said, yeah, books are expensive,
but not having the book is way more expensive.
And so there are so many things that students don't know
that we think that they should know,
that they don't know because nobody's told 'em
what they really need to do, and worse than that,
people have told them things that were counterproductive
to their learning.
And so I want students to know, I know it's not your fault,
so I'm gonna teach you what you need to know.
And I also like to give examples of students
who've used the strategies and what the results have been.
This young man, Ty,
when he heard about the teaching strategy,
he said, ah, I have a betta fish in my room,
I'm gonna teach this stuff to him.
And he told me this September 17th,
and the within the next month, he showed me the impact
of teaching to his betta fish,
66 to 98, 62 to 83, B in both courses.
And so now I ask students to send me an email
telling me what they did, and excuse me
if I already said this to this group,
I talked to so many groups,
I'd forget what I've said and what I haven't,
well gimme a yes or no in the chat box,
did I already ask you to ask students to email you,
the students who've come to you having difficulty,
and then they increase their performance,
to send you an email to tell you exactly
what they did differently, did I ask you to do that already?
Ah, okay, thank you.
Yeah, I'm gonna ask you to do that.
This is something I wish I had done
at the beginning of my teaching career,
but I didn't think to do it.
And so when we ask students to tell us exactly
what they did differently,
then it will add to your repertoire of strategies
you can share with other students,
and keep the before and after scores
so that if a student comes in and says, oh well,
well, it is me, I made a 65 on the first test.
You can say, oh,
don't worry about that,
here's a student who made a 42 on the first test
and hundreds on everything else
when they changed what they were doing
to what we're gonna talk about in this session.
And when we do that, students are much more attentive
because now they know that somebody who was
in their very same situation was able to turn it around
based on the information
that we are going to share with them.
And so he started going to more of the SI sessions,
and now, as opposed to before,
when he wouldn't prepare for the sessions,
he would prepare for them,
see what he needed to really focus on.
And then afterwards he would go back to his room
and teach the materials to his betta fish.
Anything he couldn't explain, he'd study more.
And then he continued that cycle until he could explain
every thing in the notes.
And Janet says, I've asked the top 10 students
in a class how they were studying for immunology
to try to find the most useful methods.
Okay, I think that's a great strategy
to ask students how they study.
But I would ask everybody, because I have found that
some students who are in the bottom 10
are using strategies that the top 10 students
would not have thought of using.
So I think that's a great question to ask
and even have them, you know,
share strategies or even compile a list of strategies
for the whole class of,
these are things that people have done.
So I think that is an excellent strategy,
but I would just broaden that to include everybody.
Because what I find is when I present
this information to honor students,
there are a lot of things that they weren't using
that other students were, so great practice.
And so when I did this presentation to a group of students
at Howard University, before I got back on the plane,
a student had sent me a picture of the betta fish
that they had gone out and bought.
And so I tell students, no,
you don't have to go and buy your own pet.
If you have stuffed animals, if you have,
excuse me, empty chairs in your room,
if you have imaginary friends, if you have any audience,
either real or imagined that you can pretend
you're teaching this stuff to,
it makes all the difference in the world.
Because when you get stuck,
you know that's something that you need to go back
and look at again.
And then I thought about,
I wonder what happened this student, this fish rather,
'cause this was back in 2019.
So I texted this young lady
and I wanted to find out what happened to him,
did he end up being flushed down somebody's toilet?
But he is still, excuse me, alive and well,
and living with Makayla,
one of the students who was in the program.
So the other thing I like to do is show students,
give them an experience that shows them why I am
so confident that even if they made a 40 on the first test,
they could make 80 or higher on the next test.
And so I'm gonna have you do,
there's a different exercise in the book,
but the one we're gonna go through now involves,
I'm gonna show you a bunch of numbers,
all jumbled up on the next screen,
I want you to locate the number one,
and then after that locate the number two,
then locate the number three, etcetera,
find them in order.
And then when I take 'em off the screen,
just put in the chat box the last number you saw
when you were finding them in sequential order.
So let's start,
and only the people who haven't seen this before,
put that number in the chat box, please.
Okay, so let's start finding the numbers now.
And stop.
Okay, so put in the chat box
the last number you saw when you find, okay,
13, 7, 4, okay,
yeah, you're like most audiences,
usually it'll be very low double digits,
but mostly single digits.
Now I'm gonna have us look at it again
and with a vertical line, a horizontal line,
in the position of the number one indicated.
So now I'm gonna ask you,
what do you notice about how the other numbers are arranged?
What are they arranged according to?
Yes, clockwise by quadrant or by box,
absolutely.
And so, 'cause the one is here,
the two is there, the three is there,
the four, the five, the six, the seven,
the eight, the nine, etcetera.
And so now I'm gonna give you another 15 seconds
and ask you to put in the chat box,
how many you saw this time.
So let's start fighting the numbers now.
And stop.
Okay, so put the highest number you saw this time.
Okay, 19, 24, 18, 20.
Yeah, it seems like most people got
at least twice as many the second time as the first time.
So what that means, and I tell students,
so this is proof positive that you could have made a 50
on the first test and hundred next one,
'cause in the book, the example that I give there,
usually students get three times as many right.
But now there was a major difference between
the first attempt and the second attempt,
and what was that difference?
Why could we do so much better the second time around?
What was the major difference?
The second, yeah,
we had a strategy, we knew the pattern,
we knew that they were divided into quadrants,
and so we could focus on a smaller area of material,
which I think, and we had a guide,
and I never had used this before,
I never thought about this,
but now I'm thinking about that also could be evidence
for students that you need
to study small chunks of information at a time,
you can't let it all pile up and study it just
before the test, you gotta break up big tasks
into smaller chunks.
And so yeah, we knew how the information was organized.
Now "How People Learn",
when I first started learning about this,
when I got to LSU,
and I've been teaching for 30 years before I got to LSU,
didn't know any of this stuff.
When I found out it was possible,
I started reading everything I can get my hands on,
And "How People Learn" was one of the first things I read,
and it is excellent, it talks about metacognition,
metacognitive strategies in different areas.
And they came out with another volume in 2018,
"How People Learn II",
and it more focuses on the context of the learner,
the cultures that the learners come from,
so both of these are excellent resources.
Because we know a lot about learning now
that we did not know before.
We know that active learning
is much more lasting than passive learning.
Pat Cross says that passive learning is really an oxymoron,
your brain has got to be actively engaged to learn.
And metacognition is important.
Now we know that teaching students about metacognition,
teaching them the word metacognition is really important.
So they know what their role in the learning process is
and how to understand that role.
And we know that the level at which learning occurs
is important and that's where Bloom's Taxonomy comes in.
And this is the form of Bloom's that I like to share
with students where remembering is at the very bottom,
and just memorize, straight memorizing definitions,
go definitions and formulas.
Understanding, you can explain that information
in own terms to your 80 year old uncle
or your eight year old niece in words
that they understand, giving them examples
and analogies from their life.
If you're at applying, now you can use the information
to solve problems and answer questions
you've never seen before.
If you're at analyzing, you can now take any concept up,
breaking into simpler terms,
and explain how they fit together.
At evaluating, you could look at any two ideas,
two theories, two concepts,
and determine whether one is more likely
to be accurate than another.
And at creating, you can come up with your own ideas,
your own thoughts, your own ways of doing things.
And here's another form of it that has now some verbs
that are associated with each level.
And I find that when we teach students
about Bloom's Taxonomy, they get it.
And so here's the next poll question,
and I want you to tell me what you think students said,
how you think they answered, when I ask them to think back
to high school and tell me what was
the highest level that they had to operate in order
to make A's and B's in their high school classes.
What was the highest level you think they told me?
Okay, wow,
and we still got about 30 people,
so when we get to about 25,
I'll give you the five second warning.
Okay, we're there, five seconds.
Okay, and as you can see,
yeah, you're right on target,
76% of us said, remember and understanding,
then another 20% applying, and a few creating,
and there are a few students who say creating
if they've had AP courses or IB courses,
but you are right on,
most of them say remembering, understanding.
So then when I asked, well,
now that you know about Bloom's
and you've seen what we do here at UVM,
what's the lowest level you think you'll have to operate
to get the level of learning
to consistently get the grades that you made in high school?
'Cause you're not any less smart than you were then,
you're totally capable,
what's the lowest level you think you're going
to have to operate in order to do that?
And we'll see what you think students say about that.
Okay, I see so far applying has the edge.
Okay, I'll give you the five second warning.
Okay, and we'll stop.
Now the big bump here was at applying.
I think you're gonna be very pleasantly surprised
to see what students do.
And I do want you to ask this to students in your class,
and you could make it in,
what's the lowest level you think you need
to operate to make A's in this particular class,
to master the concepts in this class.
In this group, a big bump was at one for high school
and it was at evaluating for college.
This group, oh, okay,
only showed you one year data.
Yeah, so most groups will go from being clustered
around the ones, two, threes
to the 4, 5, 6.
But once I had a group that said mostly threes, you know,
kind of like you said, and I said,
okay, I see what you're saying,
but how many of you have either research papers
that you have to do for the end of the semester,
or research project, or a presentation,
or a research paper?
All the hands went up and then I asked them, okay,
if you've gotta do that, what level do you think that is?
And put in the chat box, what level is that,
if they've got to do research papers,
or research projects, or term papers,
what level would you say that is?
Okay, yeah.
Okay, so I see you saying fives and sixes.
Students say six and Jenny says,
creating with an exclamation!
I've actually only had students say six,
they don't even say five anymore, they say six.
And I said, yeah,
because the difference between an outstanding project
or paper and one that's mediocre
is the amount of creativity that goes into it.
And so then when they see that, aah,
I need to be at creating.
Then I said, okay,
so we have a tool for that, we call it the study cycle,
and there are different forms of it.
You'll see a different form of it that I did this morning,
but all the same steps, preview information,
before you go to class,
go to class, review as soon after class as possible.
And then it only takes about 10 minutes to do these,
but you have to do more than that.
And we call 'em focused study sessions,
we show them how to organize those.
And then they can check to see if they know
it well enough to teach it,
if they have time to do another focused study session,
etcetera, choose then.
And students love of this,
they love it because, especially STEM students,
you probably heard students say, well,
you know, I just really don't know how to study.
They tell us this all the time and they tell us
because I never had to study in high school
and nobody taught me,
and so they love this because this is a very structured way.
And our students call it that preview review thing.
Here's an email from a young lady who's now,
she's about to get her PhD probably in 2023 at Emory.
And this was when she graduated, she said she got an A+
on three out of four of her finals,
using that method of studying.
It's important to use it every day before finals week,
but she said it really benefits students during finals week
because it's a great time management tool,
when you schedule in these sessions.
So that's helpful.
There is a paper on how metacognition,
how it enhances the efficacy of active learning.
Now, another email,
I thought I'd put it in here, but evidently I didn't,
this was an email from an engineering professor
at North Dakotas State who gave just
the information about Bloom's and the study cycle
to a student who was not doing well at all.
And about three weeks later, he sent her an email,
he'd made a hundred on the first test,
I think it was 115% on the first and only graded homework.
And she said, then she started inviting students
to co-teach lectures with her.
And she found that they poured their passion
into the lecture and they got a lot out of it.
And so that was very helpful.
Okay, so actually I see where we are,
we are now at about 2:57,
and I know we're supposed to end at 3:00,
but I probably will go over about five to seven minutes,
but I never do that without getting permission
from my participants.
So is it okay if I go over about seven minutes or so after?
Okay, I'm seeing a thumbs up, a yes.
And I know some of you will need to leave
because you may have a class coming up,
but there is gonna be a tape of this, it's being taped,
and then you can just go to the end of the tape
if you have to miss it.
But okay, so thank you.
Oh, okay, Jim has to head out.
Okay, great, thank you for coming.
Yeah, and anybody who has to leave,
no problem, you'll be able to see the tape.
Now there's an article in the proceedings
of the National Academy of Science
that active learning narrows the achievement gaps
for underrepresented students in undergraduate science,
technology, engineering, and math courses.
And so I think knowing that if we use active learning
in combination with teaching students about metacognition,
it has great potential.
Students typically don't like active learning.
This study found that students thought
that they learned a whole lot more
if the lecture just gave them the information,
rather than having them spend their time
talking to their next door neighbor, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I don't have it,
every time I need to get to it, I just Google.
Yeah, I just Google the title and then it comes up.
But Beverly, if you don't get it,
then just email me and I will certainly be happy
to send it to you, because it is something that
I think is important for everybody to know,
and this article about how students feel
about active learning is extremely important
for students to know that even though you might think
you're not learning while you're doing active learning,
you are learning a lot more than if you are gonna
just get a straight lecture.
And we can teach this to an entire class,
and I was just gonna show you some results here.
I only do this after the students get
the results back from their first test or quiz,
because I find that if we try to do it before then,
most students will think, I don't need this.
You know, I don't know why she's talking
to me about this stuff.
I got my A's, A+ from high school.
Oh, wait,
she must be talking to all the dumies in the class
who need this stuff, but not me.
But then after the first test or quiz, they see that,
hmm, maybe I need this too.
And so the average on the first exam was about the same,
but on the second exam, these folks went up to 77,
these folks went down to 69, end of the course,
whole letter grade difference.
And we published this
in the "Journal of Chemical Education".
Next year we did it in second semester
and there was a two letter grade difference,
and here you see the big difference was in homework total.
Once students understood the value of homework
and how it helped their learning,
then they changed their behavior, and it paid off big time.
And then this year, we only gave them the information
after they'd done the first three exams.
And the average in the class was less than a C,
it was at a D, and this time the people who attended
had an average lower than the people who were there.
But by the end of the course,
these people were still a letter grade higher,
exam four, average,
and the final exam, 81 versus 75.
So it makes a big difference.
And I like to show students these data
to help 'em buy into it also.
These faculty members figured out how
to do a face to face format of the study cycle,
and they published their work in this article,
which you can find.
And so in a couple of minutes,
I'm just gonna talk about mindset,
and that is the idea,
Carol Dweck's work, put in the chat box for me,
yes or no, if you're familiar with Dweck's work on mindset.
Because it has to do the attitude
that people have about intelligence.
Okay, a lot of people are,
some people are not, so briefly,
I'll say what Dweck found was that most people
have one of two ideas about intelligence.
Either they think that you were born
with a certain amount of it,
it's not gonna change very much,
and she calls that a fixed mindset.
The other view is that you can grow
your intelligence with your actions,
you can make yourself smarter.
And this is very important because your reaction
to a lot of things are based on your mindset.
People with a fixed mindset avoid challenges,
they give up very easily when they get to an obstacle,
they don't even expend any effort because
they think effort is fruitless,
'cause either they they're smart enough to do it
without trying or they're not smart enough to do it at all.
They ignore constructive criticism
and they find the success of others very threatening.
Whereas people with a growth mindset, embrace challenges,
they persist through obstacles,
they know that effort is the path to mastery,
they learn from criticism,
and they're inspired when they see others succeed.
And this is just a little diagram that shows how,
if you have a growth mindset, you're gonna grow,
but with a fixed mindset, you're not.
Now last two poll questions,
what mindset about intelligence
do you think most students at UVM have?
Do you think they have mostly a fixed mindset
or a growth mindset?
And I'll see what you're saying.
Oh, this is interesting.
So far everybody says fixed, okay,
here's one that says growth.
Okay, but most of us, 94,
okay, now it's 85%,
but still the vast majority of us think fixed.
And I actually find that that's the case,
especially for students who've done really, really well.
They've always been told they're very smart
and they're smarter than everybody else,
and they know that they were born that way.
Now, oh yeah,
exactly, I've always been bad at chemistry,
I just don't have the chemistry gene.
I see it a lot in math also.
What mindset about student intelligence
do you think most faculty have?
And tell me if that's fixed or growth, you think?
And we will see, I didn't ask this question earlier,
in the session this morning with general faculty,
but I find that typically general faculty say
that STEM faculty have a fixed mindset,
but STEM faculty always say that they have a growth mindset.
And so yeah, I'll stop it now.
And I'm sure that most of you on this line
do have a growth mindset, but I had a very fixed mindset.
It changed once I learned this information,
but I thought that if a student flunked my first three tests
in organic chemistry and came to the office
and said they wanted to be a neurosurgeon,
what could they do?
I would say, let's talk about your backup plan.
I repent of that now, I'm sorry I said that,
but I had no idea that this was possible.
And okay, so we did that,
and oh yeah, here's an email from a student
who obviously had a fixed mindset,
he wanted me to tutor him.
He said he wasn't doing well in chemistry,
not he wasn't doing well, he wasn't good at chemistry,
and his grade was reflecting that.
He wanted me to tutor him,
I spent not one nanosecond tutoring this guy,
gave him one session like this,
to share the strategies I'm talking about.
And these was grades after and his grades before.
And he sent me the email that he ended up earning a 90, A,
and he said, I think what I did different
was make side notes in each chapter,
and as I progressed to the next chapter,
I was able to refer to these notes.
I would say that in chemistry,
everything builds from the previous topic, who knew?
Now, I'm glad he figured that out
because we actually talked about that in the session.
And I think that his faculty member thought
that by April 6th, of a course that started in January,
he would've figured out by now
that everything built from the previous topic.
But he didn't, and he didn't even have the book,
and I think I tell that story in the book.
But he didn't even know that there was a book
for the course before we met.
There's a study that links faculty attitudes on intelligence
to student success in STEM
with a large impact on minority student success.
What they found was that all students in the class
of a professor with a fixed mindset, I mean,
with a growth mindset did better, these did better.
And the white and Asian students,
the difference, the gap between their performance
and the performance of black, Latino,
and Native American students, that gap was cut in half.
And so I know one of your strategic goals in CMS
is to get rid of the discrepancy
between the success rates of those two groups,
and that's one way to do it.
Here is an interview with
a Princeton neuroscience graduate student
who came from a public high school
and she was making B's and C's her freshman year.
And she and her colleague thought that coming
from a public school,
that's all they were gonna be able to do.
'Cause they saw all these kids
from the private schools making the A's.
But she said the growth mindset in the book was so,
so important because before that I thought,
if you're smart, you're smart.
You came from a private high school, you're all set.
You came from a public high school, you can't even grow.
But then she learned that she could
and she got a C in her first neuro class,
the professor asked, why are you even majoring in neuro?
You having a C in my class.
But she stayed in, she got an A+ on her senior thesis,
she had all A's her senior year,
her last year taking all neuroscience courses.
And she said, if it wasn't for the growth mindset,
I wouldn't be here.
I now know that just because you're from
a public high school doesn't mean
you can't thrive at Princeton.
And you probably don't have a lot of students
who are leaving UVM because of a fixed mindset.
But I bet you have a lot of students
who are leaving STEM majors.
And if they have this information,
they will know that they can succeed.
You can read this later,
but this was a professor in California.
She had a student who had failed the first time
and she thought she was bad at biology,
but she liked this information on strategies and mindset.
She's getting an A this semester,
highest grade on the final exam.
She said, it gets better,
she wasn't doing all an intro physics,
the professor gave her the test back and said drop.
But she decided that she was good at physics too,
with this new growth mindset.
And she ended up with a B in that class also.
And so I like to share these stories with strategies.
HSTEM, I noticed one of your college goals
is to make students feel more included,
and this is a wonderful project that was started at Amherst.
And if you just Google that,
and this is actually the website for that,
this is a great space for students
to feel that they can bring their authentic selves
to the STEM arena.
And so, as we end,
I wanna end with this student
who was not passing any of his cums, almost none,
he passed one of his cums the first year.
We give eight a year,
they have to pass six within their first two years,
or they're kicked out of the PhD program.
He only passed one his first year,
but he learned the strategies and passed all five
the next year out of seven exams,
he didn't even need the eighth one.
And people in chemistry thought that
there's no way he was gonna pass five out of eight
if he only passed one out out of eight, but he did.
And he learned the strategies.
This is he, Dr. Algernon Kelley,
take a good look at this guy.
He's the only person I know on the planet
who has a PhD in chemistry now,
his is in analytical chemistry.
But he started every single college course
at the remedial level.
And so now he teaches these strategies everywhere he goes,
and he gets lots of emails, as you're gonna start getting,
as I get from students.
And I'd like to end with these three,
October 17th, the student writes,
I'm struggling, really wanna succeed,
but everything is just ending with a decent grade.
He was pre-med, he was getting C's.
I was hoping you could mentor me and guide me down the path
that will help me realize my true potential.
One week later made an 84 compared to 56
on my chemistry exam.
November 3rd, increased bio from 76 to 91.5.
I've honestly gained a sense of hope and confidence.
And that's what students lose
when they come with all the confidence in the world
that they're gonna take UVM by storm,
they're gonna be successful.
Then they get that first set of tests and quizzes back
and they are sunk.
But then this information can give it back to them.
My family and I are really grateful
you've taken the time to get me back on track.
And you see the difference in his attitude,
in his mood, I should say.
He goes from hello, Dr. Kelley,
hey Dr. Kelley, hey Dr. Kelley!
And so when students have that level of enthusiasm
about their courses, then it really makes a big difference.
So in conclusion,
we really can close this metacognitive equity gap,
we can help our STEM students be more successful
by teaching them how to learn, making the learning visible.
We can't judge their potential on their initial performance
and we can't let them do it either.
We gotta encourage them to persist,
even when they initially fail,
we gotta encourage them to use these metacognitive tools.
And these are some references,
these are some acknowledgements,
this is the faculty resource.
And if you really wanna increase the chances
that students are gonna use the strategies,
then please suggest that they read the book.
In fact, this is the first day I've ever
had this slide in here like this,
because I didn't want it to seem
like I was hawking my wares, you know,
trying to push students into reading the book.
But I've had faculty say, you know,
I need you to talk to my students.
And there were faculty who said, you know,
well, I told students, you know,
I saw that great workshop you did,
and I told the students the strategies,
but I can't get 'em to do it.
And it finally dawned on me only about six months ago,
that the difference may be that the faculty
are hearing it from me,
you're seeing all these wonderful examples,
but then students are getting it from you
where you don't have time to put in all this other stuff.
But when they read the book,
it starts off with my experience.
I was a memorizer and I give lots of examples
and they find it motivational,
'cause I get emails from students.
And so now I am unabashedly suggesting
that you have students read the book,
and actually what I would love,
I don't know if I have any takers,
but if there's someone who could have this book,
maybe as a resource, you could recommend it,
or resource, or whatever for a class,
'cause I'd like to see if reading the book,
if a class reads the book, if it makes a difference.
This is the one for parents
and I am going to now I think that's the end of it.
This is interesting, I guess that really is the end,
because it will not let me, and oh yeah,
that's the end, and no wonder won't let me.
Okay, so I'm gonna stop presenting and I will end this,
and I just wanna a thank you to everyone who has come.
I know there's a lot of other things
you needed to be doing with your time this afternoon,
but you decided to spend this time with us.
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
And I will turn it back over to CTL.
-: Well, we just wanna thank you so much for being here,
Dr. McGuire, this has been wonderful.
And you can see with the enthusiasm in the chat
that other folks got so much out of this as well.
-: Oh yes, and I see a lot of thanks to me.
I wanna thank you because you are
in the trenches doing all the hard work.
I just sit in my study and talk
to wonderful people like you, so thank you.
And on behalf of your students,
they are very fortunate to have you.
And when you have this additional set of tools
in your arsenal where you can teach them, aah,
100 outta 10 stars, aah, Alexandria. (hums)
And I loved the feedback that I got from everybody,
so thank you, thank you, thank you.
And I can hang on in answering other questions
if anybody has them,
but please don't feel compelled to stay on.
I've enjoyed you, have a great rest of the week,
and have a wonderful rest of the semester.