HIP Element #2 - Investing a Significant Amount of Time and Effort

Welcome back to our series, “Eight Elements of High-Impact Practices,” where we unpack practical strategies for integrating the teaching strategies that give High-Impact Practices (HIPs) their transformative potential. In our last post, we looked at HIP Element #1: Setting and Maintaining Appropriately High Expectations. In this post, we’ll look at the second of the two foundational HIP elements: Investing a Significant Amount of Time and Effort. Together, high expectations and sustained time and effort undergird all high impact practices.

Why is investing significant time and effort so crucial to high-impact learning? In short, deep, transformative learning is more likely to occur when students engage with course materials and tasks actively, consistently, and intentionally over time. Combined with the high expectations we discussed in our last post, this sustained engagement is key to lasting comprehension, skill mastery, and the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts. To support this level of sustained engagement, it’s important to design our courses in ways that break up larger tasks, provide continuous support, and maintain continuity and a sense of purpose. Let’s look at a few practical ways to accomplish this.

Complex assignments should be broken down into smaller, sequential tasks, with transitions between each piece clearly explained. This is often referred to as scaffolding, since you’re essentially creating steps to reach heights that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to reach. Here’s a very basic, high-level example of what an assignment looks like with and without scaffolding.

By breaking apart assignments like this, you’ll have many opportunities to check in on how students are doing, collect data regarding students’ progress, and provide feedback and support.

Here are some tips to begin scaffolding your assignments:

• Generative AI platforms are great at offering suggestions as to how to scaffold large assignments. To start, just share an existing assignment with your platform of choice (ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, etc.) and ask how to scaffold it. Or, if you don’t have an assignment handy, share your goals, learning objectives, or other information, and engage the generative AI in a conversation. You’ll be well on your way in no time.
• Apply Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) principles at every stage. Doing so foregrounds the purpose, tasks, and evaluation criteria for each step. Admittedly, TILTing an assignment can be a bit tedious, as can creating rubrics to clearly communicate evaluation criteria. Again, generative AI platforms can help. You’re likely to get pretty good results if you simply upload an assignment to a generative AI platform and ask it to “TILT the assignment” or “apply Transparency in Learning and Teaching principles.” If you’d rather, we’ve also created Assignment TILTer and Rubric Creator GPTs that help take the guesswork out of prompting.

We just looked at how scaffolding can provide more opportunities to monitor progress and respond to student needs.

Here are a couple suggestions on how to do that without creating a bunch of additional work for yourself:

• Schedule regular, predictable, low-stakes, weekly check-in quizzes. If you set up iCollege quizzes, they can be auto-graded and provide targeted feedback based how each student answers. Establishing a rhythm of stress-free assessment and immediate feedback makes it easy to for you and your students to identify when support is needed. iCollege quiz statistics also allow you to get a quick overview of how the whole class is doing, possibly suggesting points to pause and make concepts, instructions, or connections clearer.
• At or when nearing important transition points, have students write quick, 60-second minute papers, explaining concepts, connections, or processes in their own words. Since students don’t have a lot of time to write, you won’t have a lot to read, and the information coming from these little ditties might just be the kind of finger-on-the-pulse information you need to keep things on track. These short activities can also provide metacognitive moments, allowing students to reflect on how their thinking and actions are contributing to their success and giving you an opportunity to reinforce the importance of a growth mindset. For more tips like this, check out Katy’s posts on Small Teaching and Mindset and Metacognition.
• Informal polls are also great ways to collect information regarding what students know and how they’re feeling. If you teach in person, this can obviously be as simple as asking for raised hands, but you can also use a polling platform or iCollege surveys. Regarding polling platforms, there are many to choose from. CETLOE supports Slido, but Mentimeter seems especially popular lately. Regarding iCollege surveys, the same Quiz and Survey Statistics mentioned above could be useful. Or, if you’re collecting anonymous responses to open open-ended questions, drop all of the responses into your generative AI platform of choice and ask it for themes and suggestions.

Just remember, regardless of how you establish your regular rhythm of data collection, reflection, and formative feedback, feedback is only useful if it arrives in time for students to act on it. So, make sure that you’re finding that sweet spot where you’re getting the information you need in amounts that you can realistically process and respond to. Again, leaning into automation and generative AI (where appropriate) will help.

When students feel like they belong and that they’re part of a vibrant and inclusive community of learners, they’re more likely to persevere through the sustained, sometimes messy effort that high-impact work requires

Here are a couple easy-to-implement ways to establish that kind of “we’re in this together” feeling in your course:

• Provide a persistent community discussion board for Q&A, celebrations, and shoutouts. We mentioned this in our last post as well, but providing a community discussion board in iCollege that stays open and easily accessible throughout the semester signals that you anticipate that there will be questions and that it’s perfectly okay to ask them. A community discussion board can also be used to post fun and encouraging celebrations and shoutouts. By inviting and possibly incentivizing students to engage in these environments, you’re seeding the kinds of interactions that can grow into fruitful classroom communities.
• At the beginning of the term, structure peer partnerships by assigning “check-in partners” or groups who discuss their work and progress each week. Having peers who meet regularly to provide each other support and encouragement can sustain a can-do spirit throughout even the longest, most challenging semesters.

Whatever you decide to do, be proactive and establish these kinds of interactions and expectations before momentum wanes or fatigues sets in.

Lastly, as you know, your students are actual people with real lives, real problems, and real responsibilities that have little or nothing to do with you, your course, or their willingness or ability to master the content and competencies you’re trying to teach. Often, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. So, try to establish the kinds of empathetic policies that plan for the unexpected and prevent occasional hiccups from derailing a student’s progress. This doesn’t mean that you should lower your expectations... like we discussed in the last post, there’s no such thing as a HIP without high expectations. It just means that some flexibility in your policies regarding deadlines could go a long way. In fact, research on flexible-deadline and flexible-assessment policies shows that, when instructors trade their rigid policies for more flexibility, students report lower stress and higher persistence without any decline in achievement.

Here are a few ideas that could help build in a little more flexibility into your courses without creating a ton of extra work for you:

• Replace due dates with submission windows. Instead of, say, “Paper due Friday at 11:59 PM,” open a five-day window and offer something like an early-bird incentive, possibly a bonus point or two or an opportunity to resubmit after some brief feedback. This at least gives students a chance to deal with unforeseen events or balance other obligations.
• Embrace “best X of Y” grading. If you give eight weekly quizzes, count the highest six. This might help smooth out the occasional bumps without sacrificing high expectations.
• Offer extension tokens. Provide each student with, say, two 48-hour “tokens” to apply to any assignment, no questions asked. The policy is clear, usage is trackable, and you avoid a bunch of last-minute email pleas.
• Avoid giving zeros. Zeroes are grade killing morale crushers… the kind of setback antithetical to sustaining momentum on large projects across entire semesters. Instead of adding zeroes for missing work, consider adding a 50% to the gradebook and then accepting the work late, with a possibility of earning a maximum of 80% (or whatever you’re comfortable with) on the assignment. This maintains a significant incentive for students to submit the work on time while avoiding potentially extreme consequences of a zero in the gradebook.

These are just a few ideas to keep things going over the long haul. If you’d like more suggestions, share your thoughts with our Pedagogical Problem-Solving Partner GPT, or feel free to set up a time to talk to an expert at CETLOE. In the meantime, stay tuned for the next post in the series, where we’ll offer tips on encouraging and facilitating substantive faculty-student and peer-to-peer interactions. It should be a fun one.

Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT o3 to bounce around some ideas and provide feedback on drafts. ChatGPT also suggested the table showing a hypothetical assignment pre- and post-scaffolding, pointed me to MIT’s Teaching + Learning Lab’s piece on academic belonging, and surfaced Hills and Peacock’s article on flexible deadlines. If you haven’t used a generative AI platform in a while, see what one can do for you. They keep getting better.