Applying Course Content within Specific High Impact Practices
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 remembered best the experiences of their learning, the HIPS that called for them to experience and reflect and move toward disciplinary expertise.
Learning begins in the classroom, is applied within the context of one or more specific High Impact Practices, and then deepens through intentional reflection. These two contexts–the classroom and the experiential application with reflection–can enhance learning of students. The High Impact Practices provide students with immersive experiences and when done well, the HIP experience includes intentional integration of the learning through reflection.
Examples. Students in a writing course conduct service learning interviews of senior citizens and write nonfiction essays portraying key experiences in their lives. For a biology class, students team up with younger students from an area school and examine water quality of area streams. The same integration works well with the many courses. Classics students studying ancient war, for example, team up with area veterans to better understand the experience of war.
When the course content is vitally integrated with one or more of the high impact practices—study abroad, internships, writing, service learning—then the two work in tandem for deep learning. When feedback, communication with the faculty, opportunity for presentation, and reflection are all involved the HIP is an enriching learning experience across the disciplines from biology, chemistry, social sciences, and the humanities.
Classroom Pedagogy
A key idea to highlight is the integration of the classroom time with the HIP experience. Many courses have a service component, but there is little or no disciplinary information connected to the service component. In HIP courses, the classroom minutes and the HIP experience are intentionally integrated in such a way as both feed off each other. Connecting classroom minutes to the ‘field’ of the HIP are essential. Class presentations provide one way to intentionally integrate the HIP into the minutes of the class.
How to maximize learning during the minutes of each meeting in the classroom or laboratory or field involves the selection of activities that encourage learning in these moments. Taking course content into the field is the progression described above. Learning can also be enriched within the classroom by using specific evidence-based practices.
Telling has been the default practice for centuries. Combining interactive lectures with clear TiLted assignments, with group work, peer instruction, undergraduate research projects, presentations, student facilitated discussion, and staged assessments can all augment and enrich learning within the classroom.