Teaching and Engaging the millennial learner

1. Teaching and Engaging the millennial learner Faculty Workshop with Cara Meixner, Ph.D. January 16 & 17, 2014

2. Today we will…. • Learn the characteristics of the Millennial Generation that distinguish them from other generations of college students. • Identify strategies that assist in successfully engaging these students, in the classroom. • Reflect on how knowledge about this generation can influence our work.

3. But first… a note on stereotypes • The Gaussian Distribution • Most research sensitizes us to what’s happening around the mean of a normal distribution. What about the outliers? • False Precision (Pew Trust) • Level of arbitrariness in setting chronological bounds • Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson) • The risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a stereotype about one’s group.

4. Your turn Using the materials in front of you, please answer the questions below. Feel free to list, scribe, draw, or mind map your answers! • What characteristics do you believe apply to most of JMU’s traditionally aged undergraduate students? • In what cases or scenarios are these characteristics misapplied or inappropriately stereotyped? You have 10 minutes to complete this activity!

5. How others see this generation… (for better and for worse) Photos from Millennials Rising, Strauss & Howe

6. Characteristics and Stereotypes (n=50) • Techno-connected and dependent • Majority female • Entitled • Lack interpersonal skills • Everyone gets a trophy • Service minded • Residential • Compartmentalization (work-play) • Culturally aware • Not (all) tech-savvy • Not all party • Not all extraverts • Don’t all want to be spoon fed • Disconnectedness in the connectedness • Not all wealthy • Not all focused on grades • Overcoming barriers to be here • Some work 8 to 5 • Not all from NOVA and NJ MOST LEAST

7. How millennials describe themselves • Confident • Self-expressive • Liberal • Upbeat • Open to change

8. generation gap Generation differences are due to 1) life cycle effects, 2) period effects like recession, war, 3) cohort effects like trends within young adults (Pew Research Center, 2010) From When Generations Collide by Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman; and Pew Research Center

9. Testing our assumptions:So…Who are our students? The series of statements comes from the work of the Pew Research Center, which sampled a representative cadre of 2,020 adults within the Millennial cohort. Data were also drawn from other Pew surveys on changing attitudes toward work, gender differences, technology, and political ideology.

10. Motivating millennials M = E * V – C Motivation is a product of what students expect and what they value, minus the cost.

11. Motivating millennials Flow Theory, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

12. Free-write and Discussion • How can these and other data influence or inform our work with learners in the classroom? • What is one concrete strategy you might enlist to engage millennial learners in a new way?

13. Motivating millennials Excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, by George D. Kuh (AAC&U, 2008)

14. Thank you! meixnecx@jmu.edu

15. JMU Facts and Figures • Enrollment (Fall 2011*) Undergraduate: 17,900Graduate: 1,822Full-Time: 18,166Part-Time: 1,556In-State: 72.9%Out-of-State: 27.1% Total enrollment: 19,722 (20,032 for 2012) • Average SAT = 1,147 Gender 40% male, 60% female Please see this Factsheet for more information. Check out diversity trends here.