surviving online teaching during the pandemic: what do the SRIs say?

Since the pandemic began a couple of years ago I have seriously curtailed my blogging. This was primarily the result of having to convert my courses to online delivery in 2020. Converting five lecture courses into online courses was a tall order that needed to be completed in just a couple of months. Thank goodness I was awarded a sabbatical for 2021/22 during which I have been recovering from that intense "pivot". Did we really pivot from in-class to online? It feels more like I just struggled to survive.

Anyways, for the remainder of 2021, I simply rested and tried to recover. One of the consequences of the "pivot" was that I neglected my scholarship. Now, I am trying to re-enter a scholarly life.

For this blog, first up is an assessment, a critical self-reflection of what happened last year in each of my courses. I'll use my student ratings of instruction (SRI's) as one source of data plus my own recollection of what happened last year. I am going to attempt to write each course up as a short paper for this blog in an attempt to see what it would be like if we assessed our teaching similar to how we assess our research (Haave, 2017).

Following this introductory blog post look for subsequent posts on the courses I taught in 2020/21:

• AUBIO 411 - History and Theory of Biology
• AUBIO/AUCHE 381 - Biochemistry: Intermediary Metabolism
• AUBIO/AUCHE 280 - Biochemistry: Proteins, Enzymes & Energy
• AUBIO 230 - Molecular Cell Biology
• AUBIO 111 - Integrative Biology I

Resources

Haave, N. (2017). Assessing teaching to empower learning. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 10, iii–ix. 

using personal experience

In his 9th chapter of Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Brookfield argues that our personal experience as learners can inform our own teaching praxis. The most significant influences on how we teach are those that we experienced as students. Our favourite teachers we want to emulate, our worst teachers we ensure that we never teach in like manner. He provides a number of examples that are readily available to us as learning experiences. Brookfield notes how interesting it is that graduate students who are working as TAs do not apply their own learning experiences in their graduate courses to their TAing of their undergraduate seminars and labs. What we appreciate as students we should consider implementing in our own teaching. The same can be applied to teaching development workshops and conference sessions we attend. In addition to learning content and theory, we can also reflect on how the workshop leader or session presenter is communicating their topic to you as a learner. Are they sharing something of themselves first before they ask that you share something of yourself with the class or with a nearby stranger? In addition, do they explain the rationale for using a particular activity rather than simply speaking their thinking? What is the connection to what they are presenting to what they are asking you to do? Do you do this with your own students? This is an example that Brookfield has experienced at workshops and conferences. The point he is making is to document the situation: Where and when did the experience occur? How did it make you feel? Why do you think you had that response? How can this impact your own teaching? What might your students be experiencing in a similar situation in your own classes?

Finally, a very powerful personal experience that can inform our own teaching is to learn a new skill. This reminds us of what it is like for disciplinary novices to learn our own field of expertise. Brookfield’s analysis is that teachers who have had to struggle to master the material they are teaching typically make the best teachers of that material or skill because they have had to articulate a strategy for learning it themselves. People who have found something easy to learn and master typically do not understand, cannot empathize with others for whom the skills and concepts are difficult to grasp. This gives them insight into their students' feelings and struggles and perhaps an ability to help bridge the novice-expert gap. But, as we age and become more familiar with the material, we can become distanced from what it was like to initially confront the course material. Somehow, we need to occasionally remake our courses, remake ourselves as teachers to bring us closer to where our students are when they first enter our class, enter our course and begin to engage with our material.

As a result of instructor familiarity with the material and thus distancing from novices, peers can become valuable resources for struggling students. I may be the expert in my subject area, but I may be less able to convey ideas about how to master the material. Students who have struggled but persevered may be good mediators of instruction between the teacher (the expert) and struggling student (the novice). This is a good rationale for implementing team-based learning which depends on collaborative teamwork. Brookfield suggests that we need to remember to not always cater to students' preferred modes of learning. We do need to stretch their learning abilities. But the converse is also true - if I am always challenging students with an unfamiliar way of learning (flipping the classroom) students may become fatigued with always being required to be an independent learner.

So is there anything I can do with my own implementation of TBL in my own courses? I could take aspects of TBL and implement them at different times during the term or during a class meeting. I think what many of my students have indicated on my end of term student evaluations of teaching for the last few years is that using TBL all of the time is simply too taxing - they need an educational rest while still participating in the course. This is certainly true for more junior courses. For the most part, students have the stamina and learning ability when they reach their 4th year of undergraduate studies. Even then, I do break up the active learning in our 4th-year capstone course with two or three videos throughout the term - a relatively passive learning experience but one that could be considered to be an educational resting point. I think I need to do more of this in my more junior courses.

Resources

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Using personal experience. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 153-170. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

Weimer, M. (2017, February 22). When the teacher becomes the student. The Teaching Professor Blog. 

Weimer, M. (2017, January 25). The benefits of peer learning. The Teaching Professor Blog.

Weimer, M. (2006). The lens of experience: Wisdom of practice. In Enhancing scholarly work on teaching and learning: Professional literature that makes a difference (pp. 53–90). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.

learning from colleagues’ perceptions

Chapter 7 provides some very useful techniques for when faculty learning communities gather and I will need to regularly consult it when I set up my FLC. The reflective conversation techniques range from rather simple for FLCs that are just starting to those that have developed a relationship among themselves with trust. The critical reflection conversation techniques are designed to enable participants to uncover the assumptions of power and hegemony and to initiate a conversation without judgement on those sharing their own experiences. What Brookfield correctly identifies is that all too often faculty conversations typically degenerate into complaints about our students and administration. Students “these days” don’t know how to read, focus, work, (insert your own student stereotype here). Or we often accuse our administration that they don’t understand the demands of teaching or are expecting too much from our service and research to properly attend to our teaching. There are many additional stereotypes that faculty raise when discussing teaching. The critical reflection techniques among colleagues that Brookfield reviews in this chapter are designed to consider our assumptions and what the alternative perspective might be for a given situation or experience.

The simpler ones start with each colleagues completing a particular sentence such as “I know teaching happens when…” or “ I feel like I have not lived up to my teaching potential when…” And out of these responses, a conversation develops. The more complicated techniques involve rules and roles that different colleagues play. The one I like is where one is the storyteller and explains their experience, with another playing umpire who ensures comments are nonjudgemental with the remainder being detectives who ask questions to clarify the situation and offer alternative perspectives. Only once all perspectives are considered and the situation well understood are colleagues invited by the umpire to offer solutions.

These techniques are designed to ensure that critical reflection occurs between identifying the issue and offering solutions. Brookfield’s experience suggests that faculty tend to jump from identifying the issue to providing solutions without the intervening reflection phase. This feels like how my in-class discussions of course material unfold. I have students solve a problem and then I tend to immediately jump to explaining the solution rather than letting them explain and justify their answers to each other. I have had some success in having student teams justify their choices to each other, but I tend to get too uptight during this phase of the TBL apps. I wonder if it is because I myself do not feel comfortable with the ambiguous phase of students figuring things out for themselves? I am a problem solver - I want to solve their problem for them! But of course, this is not how learning works...

But back to the learning from colleague’s perspectives, I know that jumping from problem to solution often happens when I engage in teaching discussions with my colleagues.

So, a faculty learning community is what I think I have in mind when considering creating a venue for faculty to come and talk about their teaching. This is such a great idea. I hope I can implement it both at Augustana and on the North Campus. And I think I just have to be courageous to try it without completely knowing what I am doing. But this chapter has given me a foothold - I now have some ideas of how to start.

I am intrigued…

Resources

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Learning from colleagues’ perceptions. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 115-134. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

seeing ourselves through students’ eyes

Some very useful suggestions in chapter six for assessing how students are perceiving and coping in our classes. Brookfield advocates for doing this at the end of each week or even during class using a back channel via social media.  Using something like TodaysMeet students are able to anonymously post their questions or concerns and the instructor is able to check the commentary every quarter hour or so. He suggests that many online technologies can do this - he is not adverse to students using their smartphones to do this. I suspect that a Twitter feed or PollEverywhere could accomplish something similar to TodaysMeet. He advocates for the use of social media because it makes students’ positions and thinking public and transparent enabling introverts and students for whom English is a second language to have another venue for their voice such that it is not only public speaking that is available to them. Finally, he continually advocates throughout this book (at least for these first six chapters) the importance of democratizing the classroom. This is the basis for his other two points: social media as a back channel prevents the few students from monopolizing the classroom. I like that - give other avenues for students’ voices. Brookfield admits that there is a risk in giving students anonymous voices - it can enable crass, profane comments and risks bullying of other students and the instructor. But his experience suggests that other students will actually patrol the potential vitriol and has the benefit that the bullies or even the monopolizers may realize that their voice is not the majority opinion or viewpoint.

Clickers are also discussed. Note that he indicates that it is the discussion that debriefs the question that is most critical and useful to this technique. I still have not mastered this post-PRS question approach. I find that I am too concerned with ensuring that students understand the rationale behind the correct answer rather than having students discuss what they think. In addition, I find that students are willing to discuss the question in their teams but are reluctant to discuss their team’s thinking with the rest of the class. On the other hand, there is very robust intra-team discussion of the TBL apps (Plickers - my version of a PRS) so maybe that is sufficient.

Other suggestions made in this chapter I have heard mentioned before in other venues such as the muddiest point and the one-minute paper. The learning audit is a new one for me and is interesting. It consists of three questions:

• What do I know now that I didn’t know this time last week?
• What can I do now that I couldn’t do this time last week?
• What could I teach others to know or do that I couldn’t teach them last week?

Clearly, this is something that is done on a weekly basis and helps to make explicit to students themselves that learning is occurring incrementally/developmentally. Brookfield likes to use this to circumvent students’ feeling that they are not learning anything. Sometimes they just don’t realize that the little victories are summing up to something significant.

But the student feedback system that Brookfield likes the most and strongly advocates is the Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ). He has mentioned this a couple of times in previous chapters and I have been both interested in learning about it but have had some trepidation about what it entails and what it may solicit from students. For whatever reason collecting feedback during the course makes me uncomfortable. I think it is because solicited feedback requires a response from the instructor and I am not confident that I can respond in a way that students will appreciate. There are some things that students want (e.g. more passive learning) that I know is not in their best interests and am unwilling to acquiesce to these demands. But what Brookfield suggests is that receiving this kind of feedback allows instructors to again explain their rationale for a particular teaching strategy and why it is in their best interests to persist. Also, CIQs over a few weeks can give an instructor a forewarning about brewing revolts to a teaching strategy and thus gives instructors a heads-up to prepare a response. I guess I am not confident that I can provide a sufficiently robust response to quell a student revolt. But on the other hand, if I don’t give students a venue to voice their concerns it can boil over into distrust and disrespect of the instructor and result in class resistance to learning and worse yet appeals to administration - which has happened to me before.

However, despite my misgivings, the CIQ list of questions is quite benign and I can see how it can foster a classroom climate of communication between students and instructor. These are the questions:

• At what moment in class, this week did you feel most engaged with what was happening?
• At what moment in class, this week were you most distanced from what was happening?
• What action that anyone (student or teacher) took this week did you find most affirming or helpful?
• What action that anyone took this week did you find most puzzling or confusing?
• What about the class this week surprised you the most? (This could be about students' own reactions to what went on, something that someone did, or anything else that occurs.)

Brookfield has students write this anonymously on a paper form and has student volunteers gather them up to ensure anonymity. For large classes (>50) he has student volunteers summarize/consolidate the summaries into the top 10 comments that he then reads (e.g. 5 students each read 10 CIQs and provides their top 2 consolidated comments). For smaller classes, Brookfield simply looks at them all himself.

I like these questions. Our LMS (Moodle) has the capability to run anonymous surveys, so I think this would be a good way to collect these. Brookfield administers these CIQs during the last 5 minutes of the last class of each week. And then he changes what he can, what is reasonable, what is pedagogically sound. For the other comments, he uses those as an opportunity to again reiterate the rationale for why he teaches the way he does and how it promotes students' learning.

I can do this.

Resources

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Seeing ourselves through students’ eyes. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 97-113. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

clarifying the benefits of critical reflection

Brookfield explains in chapter five the reasons for being critically reflective. And they are many. It helps prevent burnout and boredom because examining our teaching through the four lenses (peers, students, theory, personal experience) helps us to see the variety and diversity in our classrooms that underlies the lessons and activities that we re-use year after year. The content and exercises may be the same but the different sets of students’ experiences and backgrounds breathe new life into our teaching - if we are open to viewing through the lens of students’ eyes. What this requires is constant anonymous feedback from students in what Brookfield calls a CIQ - critical incident questionnaire - which he explains in a later chapter. This enables teachers to see what is received and what is misunderstood in their teaching.

Critical reflection also helps teachers to avoid self-flagellation. One of the things that Brookfield pointed out in an earlier chapter is that the impact and influence of teachers is limited. Sometimes learning happens despite our best intentions: learning can still happen when we seriously mismanage a situation or concept. What is important, thinks Brookfield, is that teachers be honest with their students about why they are using a particular teaching strategy or assignment and why the sequence of content makes sense. This is something I have read elsewhere - that teaching and learning are enhanced when we make explicit our reasons for teaching what, why, and how we do. Brookfield makes the case that being transparent this way inculcates student trust in the teacher and this is crucial to the teacher-student relationship. If students do not trust the teacher, they will not attempt the activity or deeply consider the material. They have to believe that the table the instructor has set is worth ingesting and digesting. This requires trust in the teacher’s ability to curate both the content and available teaching strategies. One of the issues that I think students were distrustful of me in 2nd-year cell biology this past year is that they could not believe the amount I was expecting them to learn. Yet, this is what students have always learned in cell biology. This year I actually winnowed the content from previous years. I think students just have such a difficult time understanding that learning this material takes such time, focus and effort. This was true of cell biology when I was an undergrad and it is still true.

What else did Brookfield provide as a rationale for being critically reflective? Being critically reflective helps us justify our actions, our instructional choices. How we teach is based on theory, experience, and student learning. As noted above, critical reflection enables us to make informed instructional decisions.

Resources

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Clarifying the benefits of critical reflection. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 79-95. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

the lenses of critical reflection

In this 4th chapter of Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher Brookfield reiterates what he wrote in the first chapter briefly describing the four lenses of critical reflection: students, colleagues, personal experience, and theory.

Brookfield explains that the student lens has been critically important to his own development as an instructor. He makes the argument that unless you know how your students are responding to the material and the instruction, you cannot have any idea whether or not your teaching is having an impact and whether the instructional approach needs to be adjusted. He states that student mid-course feedback must be anonymous for students to be able to provide it honestly. But he also explains that instructors must keep the promises they make otherwise the instruction and the request for feedback will be perceived to be inauthentic. But note that although not all student feedback may be justified, all feedback must have a response from the instructor. If students’ feedback is mistaken or unjustified, instructors must still explain to students why the suggestions are not being enacted.

The lens of our colleagues helps us to compare or check our experiences with others. Is our experience unique or is it shared by others? Trusted friends are able to listen to us and carefully describe the experience and our understanding of its significance before explaining how they see it from their perspective. This can result in useful suggestions for interpreting and responding to our own experiences.

Brookfield suggests that personal experience tends to be discounted in our Enlightenment-influenced culture in which only objective data and analysis are acceptable pieces of evidence. Anecdote is valid evidence. It may be specific and applicable to a particular circumstance or context. But that does not make it invalid - it simply means that it may not be broadly generalizable. It doesn't mean that our own anecdotes may not be pertinent to our own development as instructors.

Finally, the theoretical lens is explained to be the most difficult to cultivate and incorporate, but that it can be the most powerful. Difficult because it requires seeking out the journals and browsing the articles and perhaps taking the time to work through difficult ideas. But the ability to use a cogent framework of analysis to understand our own teaching experiences, unstated biases, and automatic responses can help us uncover what underlies our instructional choices and illuminate alternatives. I think it can help you avoid path dependency or perhaps switch trajectories by seeing if we are comfortable in particular frameworks, ideologies, or philosophical schools.

What all of these lenses do is to help us uncover our unstated biases and assumptions and indicate alternative approaches to our teaching and students.

Resources

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). The four lenses of critical reflection. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 61-77. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

uncovering assumptions of power

The second chapter from Brookfield's Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher is his own critical reflection on his underlying assumptions of the learner-centred classroom. The assumption that learning occurs best when the classroom is democratized and students are empowered to be self-learners results from when the classroom is arranged in a democratic way (a circle) and the instructor sets up class discussion (whole or in groups) such that the teacher is out of the way of students’ learning. Brookfield thinks this approach or understanding of learner-centred teaching is too simple. It assumes that students trust the instructor to not judge students for making mistakes and providing wrong answers to questions. It also assumes that students accept the instructor as a co-learner when, in fact, they place their own unstated assumptions of power and authority on to the instructor. An instructor is carefully watched by students for any indication of expectations of answer quality or routes to problem-solving.

These are issues that have been boiling to the surface for me as I have been developing my implementation of Team-Based Learning in my classroom. The assumption that students can always figure things out on their own is false. Students do need some direction and facilitation. Instruction requires careful attention to the verbal and non-verbal cues from students about what they need (but not necessarily what they want). Walking around the class during group discussion may be viewed as surveillance rather than making oneself available for consultation. The teacher may be removed from immediate dialogue but must always be prepared to intercede when it becomes apparent that an intervention is necessary. This is where an instructor’s intuition cultivated over years of experience comes into play. Teachers need to listen to their inner voice and integrate it with the lenses of colleagues, students, and theory.

My own intuition, informed by theory, experience (students and mine), and colleagues voices, suggests that active learning produces the best learning outcomes, but that it must be tempered by instructional intervention and pedagogical design. This takes work and close analysis (reflection) on our teaching praxis as experienced class to class, course to course, and term to term. Teaching is not the simple implementation of teaching tricks, tips, and strategies. It is a responsive action that is informed by theory, experience, and context. That context is the particular course, term, student cohort, and instructor.

Circles of learning and getting out of the way of students’ learning does make sense - the theory and evidence indicate this. But it does not mean that we should be slaves to technique. How we implement our teaching praxis must be informed by what the students in front of us need at that moment. In addition, as many have written in the SoTL literature, we are more inviting to students’ learning when we explain to them our reasons for implementing the teaching strategies we use in the classroom. I certainly explain this at the beginning of every term, but many of the problems I experience in my TBL classrooms I suspect result from my failure to regularly remind students why I have designed my classes the way I have. We all suffer from cognitive overload and need to be reminded why we structure teaching and learning the way we do.

Resources

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Uncovering assumptions of power. In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 21-37. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

Finelli, B. C. J., Nguyen, K., Demonbrun, M., Borrego, M., Prince, M., Husman, J., … Waters, C. K. (2018). Reducing student resistance to active learning: Strategies for instructors. Journal of College Science Teaching, 47(5), 80–91.

Seidel, S. B., & Tanner, K. D. (2013). “What if students revolt?”—Considering student resistance: Origins, options, and opportunities for investigation. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 586–595.

Tharayil, S., Borrego, M., Prince, M., Nguyen, K. A., Shekhar, P., Finelli, C. J., & Waters, C. (2018). Strategies to mitigate student resistance to active learning. International Journal of STEM Education, 5(1), 7. 

Weimer, M. (2013). Responding to resistance. In Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed., pp. 199–217). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.

what is critically reflective teaching?

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). What is critically reflective teaching? In Becoming a critically reflective teacher, 2nd ed, p 1-19. San Francisco: CA, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand. pp xvi, 286.

I started reading this book a few weeks ago and will be blogging each chapter as I work through it.

From the preface, it appears that his first edition from 30 years ago was wildly successfully speaking to many people. This 2nd edition has been entirely re-written taking into account the impact of social media on teaching. He advocates for using four lenses to critically reflect on our teaching praxis: students’ eyes, colleagues’ eyes, theory, and personal experience. What I am going to find interesting is how critical reflection will apparently reveal whatever assumptions we hold about ourselves and our teaching and also what ideas in our environment/culture hold hegemony over our thinking, actions, and teaching. As a result, he apparently will help the reader avoid cultural suicide by inadvertently threatening colleagues as a result of challenging the culture and hegemony of current teaching practice. This is something I believe has been happening to me this past year as I continually challenge the hegemony of the lecture and passive learning. I have been experiencing this with my colleagues but of course also with my students - the instructional strategies I implement in the classroom challenge the hegemony of the lecture in students’ understanding of what it means to learn and be taught.

What an interesting 1st chapter. I started to become elated and uncomfortable at the same time. Elated, because I began to recognize issues of hegemonic thinking in my own employment as a university professor - I recognized what Brookfield was analysing. But also began to become uncomfortable at the same because, well, for the same reasons I became elated at being able to recognize in myself the issues he was describing: the hegemonic power of seeing teaching as vocation and how that creates a sense that as instructors we have to say yes to our students, say yes to service requests, yes to publishing another chapter, article or book, yes to another conference presentation. This hegemonic assumption of teaching as vocation takes over our lives and we begin to think that unless we are exhausted at the end of each and every day, then we have not attended to our teaching vocation as much as we could have and thus have let down ourselves, our students and our institutions.

Of course, Brookfield is advocating that we critically reflect on this hegemonic assumption. Is the assumption of teaching as vocation good for our students? Good for ourselves? Good for our institution? In his experience, being slaves to the hegemony of teaching as vocation leads to burn out and collapse or becoming dulled to the needs of our students, ourselves, our friends and family.

I wonder if this is specific to Western culture, in particular, North American culture or if there would be a different understanding of teaching in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. My suspicion having spoken to colleagues teaching in other cultures is that teh USA and Canada are different and this may arise from what Brookfield identifies as the dominant ideologies of the US: positivism, democracy, militarism, capitalism, white supremacy & patriarchy. I am unclear how these would lead to teaching as a vocation, but it feels right to me. I have to think about this some more.

So that is what jumped out for me in this chapter: the hegemony of teaching as a vocation and how that co-opts our best intentions for students that ends up being what is best for the institution and not for ourselves and thus not for our students. If we don't take care of ourselves how can we care for our students?

This examination of the hegemony of teaching as vocation models how Brookfield wants his readers to understand critical reflection. Critical reflection examines the nature of power and hegemony and that is done best by considering our actions and thinking through four different lenses: our personal experience, students' voices, colleagues' voices, and theory. These different points of view or perspectives help to triangulate the issue being examined to reveal the underlying issue that is producing a particular behaviour or way of thinking.

The other thing that Brookfield considered while discussing the ideology of positivism in American culture is that it manifests itself in our teaching when we apply rubrics during our marking and grading of student work. Some things in student learning are not measurable in this way and are why I have so much trouble using rubrics. It is difficult to produce a rubric that really captures everything that you are looking for students to achieve and accomplish in the assignments we design to facilitate students' learning. Part of it I think is that students are able to surprise us with learning something valuable and insightful that we didn't plan or anticipate. This is what makes teaching and learning such an interesting and exhilarating process - there is always the possibility of students surprising us and teaching us, the teachers. Such fun!

Sometimes when students ask me for the guidelines for what they need to accomplish on an assignment or exam, what I really want to say rather than giving them the rules is - surprise me! I want students to cultivate their own curiosity and creativity. How does a teacher do that? I am hoping that developing my ability to be a critically reflective teacher will help me develop that instructional ability in myself.

One last thing to consider from this chapter. Critical reflection enables us to tease apart and examine the assumptions that we carry into our classrooms and I appreciate how Brookfield catalogues three different types of assumptions: paradigmatic, prescriptive, and causal. Paradigmatic assumptions are those that essentially form our worldview. I think these will be influenced by hegemonic ideas of our prevailing culture. These are foundational assumptions. Prescriptive assumptions are all of those that include "should" in the statement. These are the assumptions we think we should have and enact but do not necessarily arise from our worldview but rather may be externally imposed (e.g. professional conduct). Finally, causal assumptions are those ideas of how things are achieved: if I do this, this will happen. If I teach this way, students will respond in this way. I think this will help me to better identify what my own unstated assumptions are coming to bear on my own teaching.