An Interview with Ana Benaduce and Lisa Brinn
It’s no secret that higher education has changed dramatically over the last 4+ years. Many professors feel a growing disconnect between the education they received, and the one they are asked to give new generations of students. In a similar way, students are experiencing higher levels of anxiety than ever before, and they are overwhelmed with the work demanded of them in an increasingly unstable world.
This year alone, The Chronicle of Higher Education, devoted at least eight articles to discussing ways to understand and connect with Gen Z students. Topics like why students are treating college as a transaction; why meaning and purpose (as opposed to money) should be at the center of the college experience; how to handle a student body who reads less and less; why students can’t or won’t work on their own; and how to support students’ mental health are all relevant to the modern learning landscape.
In one article discussing the broken connection with students, Kristi Rudenga, the Director of the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame, notes how familiar she’s become with the “lament from faculty members across higher education” who feel unable to connect with their students. What’s more surprising, she hears this feedback from “experienced, successful teachers who care deeply about students, as learners and as human beings,” but have become “flummoxed by a sense of acute disconnection, and by students who aren’t responding to tried-and-true teaching strategies” (Rudenga).
So, we are in good company when we ask: what can FIU Online faculty do practically to reach this new generation of students? For those who read the October 22, 2024 edition of FIU News, you may have noticed a refreshing article about a human anatomy professor named Ana Paula Benaduce and her co-teacher Lisa Brinn, who are connecting with students during group “Happy Hours” instead of the intimidating one-on-one “office hours.” I sat down with them to discover what tips they had to offer for online student engagement.
Here’s a quick summary of the tips we discussed in a longer interview, which you can read, organized by topic, below:
- Break up large groups of students into smaller groups using Learning Assistants (LAs) to guide the smaller groups and help answer their questions. You can do this with breakout rooms via Zoom.
- Motivate students to engage with the learning process using the “Flipped” classroom model.
- Facilitate a way for students to feel they belong by creating group office hours (multiple students), instead of the potentially intimidating one-on-one office hours. Include LAs in these group office hour sessions. You can do this with breakout rooms via Zoom, too.
- Empathize with students. Remember that the contemporary higher ed experience is not the same as it was even 10 years ago. Students are under more pressure, with fewer prospects. So, try to be patient.
- Whether you’re naturally enthusiastic or of a calmer disposition, create videos in your course to excite students about the content. Try to include practical ways the course’s information can help them.
- Consider creating a social media account with some simple videos/posts that include clips of the material covered in class. These videos can be very simple. Check out Ana Benaduce’s Instagram account for some ideas @wittyanatomy_
- To avoid getting overwhelmed, try not to think you have to change everything in your course at once. Make small changes throughout the semester and then from semester-to-semester.
Assistant Teaching Professor Biological Sciences
Teaching Professor Biological Sciences
The following interview questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Learning Assistants and the “Flipped” Model
Sara : Have you taught online courses with FIU Online before?
Lisa: Yes. I’ve designed six fully online, asynchronous courses since 2023.
Ana Paula: During COVID we were teaching synchronously online, like everyone was. We had to!
Sara: What was it like teaching synchronously online?
Ana Paula: I had a great experience! We used, and still use, the “flipped method” in our classes. We have our lectures pre-recorded, and for a student to be successful in our classes they need to watch the lecture video before they come, so when they come they are not raw. They already know what they should know and we go over the topic. I also try to be practical about the content that they should already know. If they don’t do their part before they come, then they are lost.
Lisa: We also use Learning Assistants. FIU is very big on active learning. Many of the courses that do active learning use LAs that help students to understand what’s being asked. On Zoom we had breakout rooms where we always had LAs that circulated.
Ana Paula: With a Learning Assistant, you have the professor there doing whatever needs to be done, and you have all these students that have taken the class before and they create a link between the professor and the new students. Sometimes the LA makes students feel more comfortable to ask questions to someone who is also a student, instead of going straight to the professor.
Lisa: There’s a lot of research here at FIU being done on “learning assistants” and “active learning.”
Ana Paula: Here at FIU we have huge classrooms, and when you have these Learning Assistants you can have students in smaller groups and they can have more individualized attention from someone. This has proven to be very successful in online synchronous and asynchronous courses as well.
Lisa: And I think one of the reasons there is this disconnect between faculty and students is class size.
Ana Paula: I teach 288 students face-to-face!
Lisa: I have 430 students in one of my online classes this semester. I’m teaching 1200 students this semester. So, the way we design the course is to teach smaller groups within the big group. We have LAs, and a lot of active learning, and students engaging with each other.
Ana Paula: If online professors have learning assistants, maybe professors can have little “happy hours” with their LAs.
Lisa: It’s important to pick the right LAs. We like to give everybody an opportunity. The students who need the most help usually think the questions they want to ask are stupid. Students who go through the LA seminar course are usually, generally more prepared.
Ana Paula: LAs need to be individuals who other students can feel comfortable asking questions to.
Be “Happy” to See a New Generation of Students
Sara: What else have you done that perhaps hasn’t been addressed by using LAs and the flipped teaching model?
Lisa: Faculty have a lot of work to do and they don’t have enough time to do their work and also see students individually. So, when a student shows up to a faculty’s office and the faculty has lots of things to do, they may not greet the student in a way that will allow the student to feel comfortable going to see them. These group “happy hours” allow us to see several students at once in the lab that we teach in, and because there are several students, they actually teach each other, and the faculty might even have some free time. And if the students need extra help, then they come to us.
Sara: Have you found that students are more enthused about learning in general from employing all these techniques?
Ana Paula: Yes! With “Thank a Prof” students can submit a little comment to someone inside FIU that they would like to thank. Every semester I have hundreds of them. And one of the things I always see is comments like, “I did my best, more than what I ever did before, because I didn’t want to disappoint you. Your enthusiasm makes me want to do my best.” That comes with the professor’s personality. That shifts the way they are normally behaving in classes. On the first day of class I always ask, “Who goes to office hours?” And they just look at each other. And I say, “I don’t have office hours, I have happy hours! Because I’m so happy to see you there!” So they start laughing. And the first happy hours that they come to, I say “I’m so happy you are here!” We talk about everything in the happy hours. We can talk about the content, go outside of the content, and go back to the content. So, it’s a different environment where they feel they belong.
This new generation, they are not like before where we would just focus and learn. They need to have more things happening at the same time. Everything is so fast-paced. Even the videos that I record, I believe I talk fast, but they speed it up, because for their brain it needs to be faster. And they need for everything to happen at the same time and, basically, that’s what they get at the “happy hours.” They are talking to one classmate about this question, and another one asks another question and they talk about that. So everything is happening in a way that is normal for them. They do many things at the same time.
Lisa: I think that another thing here is that there’s a lot of disconnect between the students because they’re so culturally diverse. When we changed the name from “office hours” to “happy hours” we thought that’s what was bringing the students in, but we realized it was so much more than that. Students become friends, and that’s lacking at school, at work, everywhere. This gives them an opportunity to find people that they can relate to that are not just the professor. So, they realize they will like the professor, and also get extra friendships.
Ana Paula: They come because they’re curious, and they stay because of the connections with the classmates. When I first started teaching, I thought, “Oh my goodness this is crazy the way students are getting treated by professors! Why would that happen?” Maybe from time to time we need to take a class to see how overwhelming it is to take like seven different classes with different deadlines, have a full-time job, take care of kids. It’s a lot! If you forgot, please give them a break!
Lisa: When I was a student, I never had to do as much as they have to do. I think the students that don’t want to put in the effort are a very small percentage. Most students, if you give them an opportunity, will reach for it. Also, it’s important to set expectations from the beginning. Our courses are not easy, but most of the students pass the course.
Professor Personality
Lisa: I do feel that students who are more quiet, migrate toward a professor with a personality like theirs. You always have to behave in a way that students don’t feel threatened by you. Find a way that students will feel like going to you. In an online setting, I always start my messages with “Dear [Student’s name]” and in my signature I put “Kind regards.” I make sure I always say, “Let me know if you’re still confused and we can meet over Zoom.” They usually don’t really like to meet over Zoom. You have to insist usually. I also do an introductory video, and that helps. This semester I broke down my introductory video for each assignment that I made.
Social Media
Ana Paula: During the pandemic, I was teaching via Zoom and the way you see me was the way I was teaching. I was enthusiastic. And students were asking me, “do you have social media accounts?” And I said, “no!” And they said I needed to do it because they wanted to keep learning from me. They felt they could learn so much from Zoom, and they wanted to keep hearing me review and explain things. They said to post the lectures I was giving them in small clips, making connections with the real world about anatomy. That’s basically all I did. Then I started posting quizzes. Basically, they keep studying this way. Now I say, “You guys don’t have any excuse to not be studying anatomy 24 hours a day. When you have your phone, you need to go to Instagram and keep reviewing and taking those quizzes.” Now I have a YouTube account, a TikTok account, and an Instagram account.
Small Changes Over Time
Sara: How long can a person reasonably expect to take when making these kinds of changes in a course?
Lisa: Sometimes faculty are intimidated because they feel they need to do big changes in one semester, and you don’t have a lot of time to do that. You have to make small little changes each semester. Sometimes a small change might make the difference, and sometimes a small change can backfire. If you make a lot of changes, you won’t know what made the difference. It doesn’t have to be huge changes.
Both try to respond to emails from students within 1-2 days. In Ana’s case she sees her students regularly, they speak to her after class, and in “happy hours.”
Concluding thoughts
Hopefully, some of the tips these devoted professors offer help others in the FIU Online community make small changes to connect more fully with their students, and help students connect with each other. And for those who may need a little more inspiration to remember how much their work matters on a societal level, here’s a practical closing thought from an assistant professor of public policy and sociology at Cornell University: “This is the next generation. These are the people that I’m going to depend on to lead us…I see it as one part being my duty. They don’t have the skills that I think they need. I have 16 weeks with them and I can try to do what I can. It’s not that I have to change any content, really. It’s just making my assignment be useful in many ways” (McMurtie).
Read more about Learning Assistants at FIU by clicking here.
To see some of Ana’s social media clips, and maybe get inspired to make some simple videos/posts of your own in your course, or on social media, you can find her on Instagram @wittyanatomy_.
Sources
- Benaduce, Ana and Lisa Brinn. Personal interview. 14 Nov 2024.
- Calvo, Christine. “Professor serves up a new kind of office hours.” FIU News, 16 Oct. 2024, https://news.fiu.edu/2024/anatomy-professor-serves-up-a-new-kind-of-office-hours. Accessed 22 Oct. 2024.
- McMurtie, Beth. “Teaching: Connecting with Gen Z through course design.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Sept. 2024, https://www-chronicle-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/newsletter/teaching/2024-09-12. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.
- Rudenga, Kristi. “How to Rebuild a Broken Connection with Students: What to do when they aren’t responding to your tried-and-true teaching strategies.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 Sept. 2024, https://www-chronicle-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/article/how-to-rebuild-a-broken-connection-with-students. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.