By Kristal Leebrick
Active learning. Discipline-based best practices. Innovation.
That’s just a small list of tasks Katy Guthrie brings into her classrooms as an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. Her most important effort, however, may be meeting the students where they are.
As she talked about her work teaching undergraduates during a recent visit in her Borlaug Hall office, Guthrie held up the book Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps, and Teaching in Today’s Classrooms by Richard Milner, chair of education at Vanderbilt University. Milner’s premise is that “everyone comes in with a set of lived experiences that are valuable,” Guthrie said. “You take students where they are at, and you help them meet your learning goals by meeting them where they start.”
It can be easy for educators to start with a deficit mindset, she said. “We might find ourselves saying, ‘Students lack critical thinking. Students lack writing skills. Students can’t do math.’”
Rather than focus on things students can’t do, Guthrie looks at “what can they do right now, in this moment in time, and how do we give them the tools to take them where we want them to be when they graduate.” She calls that teaching with a growth mindset.
Guthrie came to the University of Minnesota in August 2023 after working as a postdoctoral active-learning researcher at Cornell University in New York. Teaching undergraduates is “the exact job that I wanted when I decided to apply to grad school,” she said.
Guthrie has been teaching in some capacity since high school. She taught after-school art classes to elementary school students as a teenager and moved onto “paint-and-sip” art classes (those classes often held at community centers, breweries, or pubs where an artist walks participants step-by-step through creating a painting while they drink wine or other beverages), which took her through graduate school. As an undergraduate at Northwest Missouri State, she was a supplemental instructor in a botany course.
When a professor asked her what she wanted to do after college, Guthrie told him, “I want to be you,” and he counseled her on what she needed to do to be a teaching professor in higher education.
“And that’s what I did,” she said. “I literally went to grad school to get the job I have now.”
As an active-learning researcher for the School of Integrated Plant Sciences at Cornell, Guthrie developed and evaluated the efficacy of individual active-learning activities, evaluated individual instructors and courses, provided recommendations on school curricula, and helped develop a rubric to evaluate student writing to find out where students are struggling. That tool is part of her practice here.
Many current college students are lacking the writing skills that students had a decade ago, she said. Today’s incoming students were middle-schoolers during the COVID pandemic shutdown and missed out on in-person instruction at a time in their schooling when students are tasked with learning foundational writing skills. “That’s when you learn how to paraphrase, you learn sentence structure, you learn how to review literature with a critical lens,” she explained. “Students at that time were doing virtual learning. They may have had really good online instruction or really bad online instruction, but a lot was missed.”
That brings her back to meeting students where they are: “Part of our job is not to penalize people for the things that have happened in their education.”
Teaching as research
As a trained researcher, Guthrie views teaching as research. “There are so many things we can do throughout the semester to pull data on students to figure out what their needs are,” she said. “I think a lot about writing instruction because writing is a thing that students need more support with. Are they struggling with paraphrasing? Are they struggling with an introduction or are they struggling with interpreting literature?”
In a plant science class that she taught previously, students were tasked with coming up with a project, identifying research questions, developing a hypothesis, getting the results, and writing a standard lab report. Using a rubric developed in tandem with the University’s Center for Education Innovation, she was able to identify where specifically her students' writing needed help. In this case, students weren’t collecting data that matched their question or their hypothesis. “We found a lot of times students were struggling with just asking the right questions. … They didn’t know how to connect the dots,” she said.
By critically evaluating their writing, she could see that students were just regurgitating facts they had learned previously in class, rather than creatively thinking about a method to research something. This information helps plan out future lessons that can specifically address the student’s needs, she said.
Guthrie brings “teaching as research interventions” in her courses, including mid-semester evaluations similar to the Student Rating of Teaching (SRT) tool in the middle of the semester. I specifically ask them, ‘What is helping you? What activities do you find most confusing?’ Or I have them do reflective writing. If they do an exam, I have them reflect on ‘How did you study for this exam? Did you get the grade you wanted? How much will you study in the future? Or what aspects of this exam were most challenging?’”
Most university instructors do this, she said, but sometimes it’s at the end of the class. She likes to approach this throughout the semester to understand student skill sets.
Leveraging student’s curiosity
“Active learning” is a current buzzword in education, but many professors claim they don’t bring active learning into their classes, Guthrie said. She counters that: “All teachers have some semblance of active learning. If you are using iClickers, you are doing active learning. If you are asking questions in class, you are doing active learning. If you are having any sort of student choice assignments, you are doing active learning.”
Guthrie defines active learning as students taking responsibility for their own learning: “Instead of you standing up there lecturing, you leverage students’ innate curiosity to ask questions and find the answers.”
Guthrie has a few tools to help spark that curiosity. She and Tessa Pailey created a board game for the Agroecology Ecosystems of the World course they co-taught to non-agronomy majors last year. The game is fashioned after the classic real-estate game Monopoly and Catan, which like Monopoly requires trading and acquiring resources.
Students in the class are typically political science, arts, or history majors, and many aren’t coming from farm backgrounds. “The game walks through every season as a farmer,” Guthrie said. “You have to plan your crop. It has associated monetary values. They play through this Monopoly-Catan hybrid to plan and deal with all of these things that arise throughout the season. We do this at the start of the year as a way to get students to start thinking in systems. A farm is a system.”
Game-based learning engages students’ interests and teaches a lot of skills, she said. It makes it fun but also relies on using nonverbal cues, teamwork, and thinking in systems, all while incorporating core course content.
Guthrie also likes to build fun competitions into her classes. In the Science of Cannabis course she co-teaches with Peter Morrell, she made trophies for a semester-long writing project. Students had to present proposals to a panel of professors, who evaluated each proposal. The winners received plastic trophies that Guthrie painted herself.
Not everyone likes bringing competition into a classroom, but when she compared a writing project in that class with one in another class where no trophies were involved, she found more students in the cannabis class asking questions and incorporating feedback. “They took it seriously,” Guthrie said. “They had that incentive to win. They wanted the trophy.”
Guthrie is developing a freshman seminar course based on a popular video game to teach introductory systems thinking. “I think it’s going to be fun,” she said, and could have the added benefit of recruiting undeclared freshmen into CFANS. “[They] may like what they see and transfer over into our college.”
Engaging student interest is important, Guthrie says, and so is building community. “If you have a supportive community, you are more likely to stay in your job or stay in school,” and she looks for ways to get students to interact with each other. She sometimes gives points in her classes to students who lead study sessions to encourage them to meet with each other outside of class. Last semester, she began holding her office hours in a conference room, but she called it “study hall.” She initiated it so that students could develop a community of peers to work with and ask her any questions they may have. She was surprised to see that students who weren’t in her classes began to come.
Study hall is back in session this semester. It’s open to all Plant Science and Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems students and will meet every Tuesday, 3:30-5:30 p.m. in 213 Borlaug Hall. This semester, a rotating list of faculty will be in the room to help students as needed.
It’s too early in her teaching here to gather enough data to know what is working and what is not, she said, but when she sees students engaging in community-driven spaces or signing up for another class of hers, she feels pretty good about what she’s doing.