The Heart of the Matter Great teaching is at the heart of student success   When I taught introduction to archaeology would tell my students that I was inspired to become an archaeologist because I grew up surrounded by ruins. You may wonder, did Margaret grow up in Italy, or Greece, or Egypt? Let me disabuse you of these romantic notions. No. I grew up in Bay City, Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of you are too young to know this first hand but the 1970s and 1980s were not kind to Michigan and the rapid and dramatic decline of the US Auto industry left cities like mine, empty and very literally in ruins. As you can imagine this economic decline had a profound impact on the public school system. So when I arrived on campus, I was one of those students that today we would call “underprepared.”

As an underprepared student I encountered many wonderful people who helped me along. financial aid: short term loans student employment office: campus job advisors: transition from a community college to U of M And all of those people were extraordinarily helpful in my own path to academic success. But the thing that mattered the most to me, the things that were at the heart of the matter, were the things that my professors did in the classroom. My History. Instructor - poor performance on my first exam – curtly informed me- also spent the time to show me how best to study and prepare for her exams. My first archaeology professor who encouraged me to connect my lived experience with the classroom and sent me off to those abandoned buildings in my hometown to record the material culture I found there and to draw conclusions from the patterns I saw. Or my Biology professor - students should do internships and that we should aim high. And so I did. I ended up spending a summer at the Smithsonian.

So it interests me that when I go to meetings about student success I hear about Advising pathways, data analytics, orientations student clubs first year experience. All important things. But what I don’t hear about is teaching. What I don’t hear about is learning. Which leaves me wondering….how did we get here? How did we get to a place where we are talking about student success but we are not talking about what is going on in the classroom?

So, my goal today is first, to draw attention to this silence, and to get you to consider an alternative view of student success. A view where great teaching is not peripheral to student success, but rather is at the center, is at the heart of helping our students succeed. My goal here today is to highlight evidence-based practices that you can use to help your students succeed. I don’t want to focus on large scale interventions like flipping your class or adopting the use of learning assistants which are great things, but which in reality most of you will never do. What I want to focus on is what James Lang calls “small-teaching” “micro” changes that you implement not just someday but Monday. One of the joys of my job is that I get to hear about all of the fantastic things that are going on in classroom across the campus. So, I asked five faculty members to tell me in 90 seconds what they felt were the most important things that they do to help their students succeed. I want to be clear, however that the strategies suggested by these faculty members are not mere anecdotes they are strategies adopted by faculty that emerge from evidence-based best practices. Each one of these faculty members actively think about and reflect on their teaching. They participate in CFD activities where they encounter the literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning and they share ideas with their colleagues.

First I would like to thank each of these faculty members who were willing to share with me and with you. Why is great teaching at the heart of student success? Because on average our students spend 400 hours in the classroom each academic year. Average instructor with a 2-2 teaching load, with even a modest enrollment of 30 students per class, touches the lives of 120 students every year.