Max. Classroom Capacity: On Updating Your Classes

Dear readers,

Who’s excited about SIOP in Denver? I am! Every time I attend SIOP I come home with new ideas that I am excited to play with, either in my research or in my teaching, or both!  This got me thinking about how we make decisions about whether and how to update our classes over time and how such a seemingly simple decision can be quite a challenge.

Many experienced instructors have stretches where they teach the same courses for several years in a row. During those times, I was often faced with a conundrum about how much I should change the course from one semester to another. Typically, instructors put a huge amount of time into prepping a course for the first time, which leads to various disincentives (and some incentives) for making subsequent changes.

In my first year as a full-time faculty member, I was asked to teach a social psychology course. I really liked Steven Franzoi’s text and ended up structuring my syllabus to align with the sequence of topics in the text. I was advised to use multiple choice exams because the class size was 115 students, and there were no TAs to help with grading. So, I painstakingly wrote items for three multiple choice format exams (I’ve never liked the question banks that come with textbooks). Over subsequent semesters, I refined the exam questions, removing items that were redundant, unreliable, or did not discriminate well. It took several semesters to reach a point where I had developed exams that worked well both psychometrically and practically.

However, the more time and energy I devoted to developing and refining exam questions, the more resistance I felt toward changing the content of the course because of the ramifications such changes would have on the composition of exams. For example, when I realized that I was rushing through certain units because I was trying to cover too much content, I was reticent to remove anything because I didn’t want students to be underprepared for the exams (Yes, this thinking is completely backwards!). Similarly, I was resistant to adding topics because doing so would require me to develop new exam questions and to replace existing ones to keep the exams the correct length. By correct length, I mean that there were enough items to be reliable, to cover the content that I felt was important, and to occupy students for most of the 75-minute class time (which I thought would reduce the incidence of cheating), but not so many items that students would run out of time to complete the exam. Such revisions to the course content would entail identifying any content that was removed from in-class presentations that are not addressed in reading materials and removing exam questions based on this material. Similarly, new exam questions would need to be designed to assess understanding of new course content. As noted above, it is difficult and time consuming to write exam questions that are clear, reliable, and valid. At that time, as a new assistant professor, I was frequently advised to spend as little time as possible on my teaching so as to focus on my research because research was a much more important criterion for tenure at my institution. Consequently, my laboriously developed exams acted like an anchor that restricted movement in my teaching—a process like the concept of escalation of commitment (Staw, 1976).

A quick aside on the idea of minimizing time spent teaching to get tenure:

1. Focusing on research may not be the best way to get tenure at your institution, though a lack of research output is almost certainly the most common reason for failing to get tenure.¹ Nonetheless, most tenure-track faculty are not at R1 institutions, and a more balanced portfolio of research, teaching, and service may be more typical of tenure at nonresearch-focused institutions—if you are an assistant professor, ask for advice from colleagues and review relevant documentation about tenure at your institution!
2. I would never advise faculty members to neglect their teaching because I believe we have a responsibility to our students to provide them with competent instruction and that there are costs to doing your job so poorly that you feel like you are perpetually failing. Plus, if you enjoy teaching and find it meaningful and important, then it’s OK to spend time on it, provided you aren’t neglecting other important aspects of your job. Finding the right balance is key!
3. For some people, it can be tempting to neglect research in favor of teaching because student feedback in class is immediate and plentiful, whereas feedback on research output is infrequent and delayed. However, reducing effort in teaching does not necessarily lead to a corresponding increase in effort toward research—a lack of time may not be the problem! Also, effort devoted to teaching can lead to new research ideas, collaborations, and energy and enthusiasm for work that improves productivity across the board.
4. If you really are running out of time to do your research, I would suggest looking into opportunities to teach fewer classes (e.g., via release time), seeking help (e.g., try asking for TA support), and streamlining administrative aspects of work (e.g., email!).

Although resistance to change based on escalating commitment to fixed exam questions is not a good reason to avoid updating courses, there are some benefits to teaching classes the same way over multiple semesters. For example, I got much better at presenting difficult concepts in social psychology in ways that students could digest via a trial-and-error process that unfolded over multiple semesters. I also developed some good jokes related to the material and was amazed that retelling them semester after semester didn’t seem to make them any less funny (Most of these jokes were guaranteed to get at least pitying laughter from students!). Finally, after years of teaching certain courses, I got to the point where I needed very minimal preparation before any given class session because I would remember, almost word-for-word, how to teach each concept from prior semesters.

On the other hand, it’s easy to start feeling bored with repeatedly presenting the same topics every semester or feeling boxed in when it comes to making changes to the class material. As I noted at the start, I would often come home from the SIOP conference with new ideas that I wanted to integrate into my classes but felt that the amount of revision to exams and other materials that this would require just wasn’t quite worth the effort. Or I would simply forget to make the changes by the time the next semester rolled around.

Part of the value that we bring to education as PhDs is our ability to conduct, understand, and translate research for our students. Research progresses, albeit slowly, and addressing relevant new findings in our classes is something we should be doing.² Also, although teaching the same content in the same ways may give you the “reps” to build competence, you might also miss out on new and exciting topics or approaches, which may stunt your development as a teacher. Finally, students often love to discuss news and current topics, which may be difficult to do within a very rigid course plan.

So, what are we to do with this dilemma of how much and how often we should update our classes? Here are some ideas:

1. Don’t get tied down by your assessments. Yes, writing exams (and other assessments of learning) is a lot of work, but replacing a few exam items once in a while is manageable. Also, not every topic in your course must be represented in your assessments of learning. Assessment items usually sample from the set of topics covered in a course. Similarly, making incremental improvements to grading rubrics for written assignments can actually save you a lot of hassle if your rubric doesn’t work well. I can’t tell you how often I’ve graded 20 papers, realized that parts of my rubric don’t make sense, rewritten the rubric, and then had to regrade those first 20 papers—effort that could have been averted had I revised the rubric at the beginning of the class! If you need even more motivation to free yourself from the shackles of your existing assignments and rubrics, in the age of AI chatbots, finding new ways to assess learning that does not involve student writing will become, in my opinion, more and more of a necessity.³
2. Build in flexibility. Reserve one class meeting in your syllabus for “special topics” into which you can insert new material that you find relevant, exciting, or interesting. You can also reserve places in your assessments for new material (e.g., one exam question, one part of one written assignment, etc.). You might also consider building one more learning assessment than you need. I often do this to try out new assessments. The way I structure this is I tell students that they can choose to take the extra assessment, at their discretion, to replace a lower grade they had received on a roughly equivalent assessment.⁴ For example, I developed optional paper assignments that require students to self-evaluate based on a set of self-report assessments of personality, et cetera. I have also developed optional presentation assignments. Students tend to love these because they give them a chance to replace the exam that they bombed because they were sick, or whatever the reason may be—they get to erase the effects of having a bad day! Some of these optional assignments end up as required assignments when it becomes clear that they work better than the originals.

3. Take notes. Each semester that you teach, write down which aspects of the class worked and didn’t work and things that you would like to change the next time you teach it. I have a working document for each course that I teach titled “What to Change Next Time” that I review before each semester. I usually only change one or two things at a time, but even that can be enough to keep the course fresh and fun to teach or to avoid headaches encountered in prior semesters. Near the end of each semester, I ask students what parts of the class impacted them the most. I keep their answers in mind whenever I contemplate making changes to the course.
4. Teach new courses every few years. Even though there are lots of obvious reasons not to take on too many new preps, this can be a very intellectually stimulating way to build new competencies and interests that can benefit your teaching, research, and consulting practice. For example, I know a lot more about strategic planning now by virtue of teaching classes on organizational behavior, knowledge that has enabled me to feel more comfortable consulting with organizations on their strategic planning.
5. Observe other instructors. Almost every semester throughout my career, I have been fortunate to evaluate other instructors as part of adjunct and full-time faculty peer evaluation processes (I have written about this here). I encourage each of you to observe other instructors (with their consent!) as inspiration for new teaching ideas.

As always, please email me your questions, concerns, and reactions! Loren.Naidoo@csun.edu

Notes

¹ I started looking for empirical evidence to support this statement and instead found a blue whale-sized rabbit hole of tangential research on the tenure process in academia. Therefore, no citation offered—take this with a grain of salt!

² One potential downside to including very new research findings in your classes is the possibility that the findings have not yet been replicated, as highlighted by the ongoing replication crisis in social psychology and management.

³ For more on this topic, please read the MCC column on Chat GTP.

⁴ FYI, I track and calculate students’ grades in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s relatively easy to develop formulas that take the best n grades out of n + 1 assessments to tell students what grade they would need to get on the optional assignment to increase their overall course grade, or whatever else you need to do. However, learning platforms like Canvas or Blackboard are much less flexible when it comes to calculating students’ grades in this way.

Reference

Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90005-2