Applying Course Content within Specific High Impact Practices

The list of the 11 High Impact Practices belies the complexity of the design and application of one or more of these HIPS in a specific course.  Take Service Learning, for instance.

Many faculty focus on the ‘service’ part of the term as if this HIP involves one of the kinds of donation of student time in service of some sort rather than what the HIP actually means—the integration of course content/disciplinary content during the service component. Hence, the learning part of the term should govern what forms of service are being performed to meet the definition of a High Impact Practice.

In a literary memoir course then, the disciplinary content involves life writing genre and the decisions a writer makes to tell her story.  A service learning project in the memoir course should involve some aspect of the disciplinary content to provide students with experience of writing in this genre as they perform the service learning.  Hence, interviewing senior citizens to produce an essay on the life of individual seniors is a HIP project in service learning.  At Emory, my students took on the perspective of the interviewee to produce biographical essays similar to the point of view in a memoir. We put these essays together in a self-published booklet.  They were proud, even euphoric of the new friendships and essays.   In fact, each High Impact Practice that is well done is anchored in course content which in turn emerges from the disciplinary content.  In the same mentioned memoir course, an undergraduate research HIP could focus on the primary issues in the Life Writing genre as applied to one or more of the memoirs read during the semester.  A UGR project should address a key question that arises from the genre and the discipline.

In a similar way, a course receiving the Writing Intensive (at Oxford College the term used was Writing Rich) designation is not simply dedicated to a word count or page count.  Rather, these courses offer really powerful opportunities for students to develop their thinking through writing on an important topic in a fundamental area of the discipline.  Hence, short writing assignments dovetailed into longer assignments, culminating in a research project that is presented to the class or a larger audience.  Done well, the writing intensive course, according to George Kuh, is one of the early emergent HIPS in the early data of his 2007 study.

Note: A special thanks to my former colleague Dr. Satu Rogers for leading the project that became the book How to be a HIP College Campus.  This book involved dozens of interviews with Oxford College continuees at Emory regarding the best practices that occurred in their first and second-year courses at Oxford College.  What emerged from the study clearly indicated that students treasured most specific practices that the college prized.  High expectations (Chapter 1), classroom and assignment rigor, faculty and student interactions (Chapter 2), effective classroom strategies (Chapter 3), collaborative learning (Chapter 5), among others.

So when I learned of AACU’s creation of the 8 Key Elements for a HIP ‘done well’ I recognized most of them from our research study.  Indeed, every High Impact Practice should be enriched with consideration and inclusion of as many of the 8 Elements as fit into a given HIP course.

Selecting an individual High Impact Practice that accords with your course and disciplinary content and intentionally taking into consideration as many of the 8 Key Elements as possible really ensures that you are creating a HIP done well.