Episode 83: Julia Michaels on Equitable and Effective Teaching
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How can you implement evidenced-based practices for more engaging and equitable teaching and learning across research universities? What systems and process within them need to change? How can universities collaborate with peer institutions and with employers to get better outcomes? We discuss these questions with Julia Michaels, Director of Development and Strategic Partnerships at UERU, the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities.
In the landscape of higher education, the last decade has been defined by a relentless push for innovation. We have socialized the need for change, piloted countless new approaches, and started to move the needle on student outcomes. However, the true challenge lies ahead: moving from these isolated pockets of excellence to the mature implementation of evidence-based practices across entire institutions and disciplines.
Julia Michaels, Director of Development and Strategic Partnerships at the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU), joined the Connected College Podcast to discuss this pivotal moment. The conversation centered on how research universities can leverage their unique identities to create equitable, engaging, and effective learning environments for every student.
Redefining Student Success: Beyond the Degree
Often, institutions view student success through the lens of metrics that benefit the university, such as graduation and retention rates. While these are important, Julia Michaels argues for a shift toward a learner-centered definition: success as the pursuit of mastery.
A student can jump through every hoop, graduate on time, and still walk away with a credential that lacks utility if they haven't actually learned. Real success occurs when a student builds the muscle for intrinsic motivation and masters skills they can use in their careers and lives. This requires a culture that values the practice of learning over the mere completion of requirements.
The Power of Belonging and Inclusive Environments
Belonging is the foundation of the undergraduate experience. For many students—particularly first-generation students and those in STEM—the university can feel like an exclusionary space. Michaels notes that many students drop out not because they lack the ability, but because they feel they don't belong in their environment or their specific major.
Creating an equitable system means providing every student with the support they need to reach high learning outcomes. This involves moving away from "weed-out" cultures and toward inclusive environments where students see themselves as scientists, engineers, or scholars. When students connect their coursework to their identity and community, their persistence increases.
Bridging the Gap Between Research and Teaching
At large research universities, a common tension exists between the research mission and the undergraduate teaching mission. However, these two should not be in opposition. The unique value of a research university education lies in infusing the research ethos into the classroom.
High-impact practices, such as undergraduate research experiences, allow students to move from being passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in discovery. Furthermore, research universities rely heavily on graduate students for instruction. By training these "newly minted PhDs" in evidence-based and equitable teaching practices early on, institutions can ensure that the next generation of faculty is as skilled at teaching as they are at research.
Moving Toward Mature Implementation
We currently have a vast consensus on how people learn. We know that active learning, peer mentoring, and growth-mindset interventions work. The gap we must close is the extent to which these practices are used with fidelity across all departments.
Full implementation requires structural change. Faculty must be rewarded for teaching excellence in the same way they are rewarded for research. This involves reforming hiring, tenure, and promotion processes to include teaching as a core value. It also means providing robust support through Centers for Teaching and Learning to help faculty adapt their communication and instructional styles to meet the needs of today's diverse student body.
Navigating the Headwinds of Higher Ed
Higher education is facing significant challenges, from declining enrollment to funding cuts and the political scrutiny of equity initiatives. In this environment, Julia Michaels advises leaders to focus on what they can control and to collaborate on what they cannot.
The "enrollment cliff" means universities must expand their value proposition to adult learners and improve transfer processes from community colleges. Moreover, as DEI efforts face external threats, the commitment to equity must move beyond the performative. True equity is found in the hard work of improving outcomes for students who have historically been locked out of the system. By banding together in solidarity and focusing on the core mission of student learning, research universities can weather these storms and emerge stronger.
Episode 83 Transcript
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Julia Michaels: Let's make this time different. We've spent all this time innovating new approaches. We've socialized the need for change. We've started to move the needle on some of the student outcomes. All of this work has been hugely impactful. We just need to get to mature implementation of what we know is effective at universities, across disciplines.
Elliot Felix: That was Julia Michaels, Director of Development and Strategic Partnerships at You Roo, the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU). We had a great conversation about implementing evidenced-based practices for more engaging and equitable teaching and learning across research universities. We talked about what makes the learning experience special at research universities. What systems and process within them need to change for effective instruction at scale. How they can collaborate with peer institutions and with employers to get better outcomes. Let's dive in.
Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community. Their coursework and their careers. Julia Michaels welcome to the Connected College podcast. So glad to have you.
Julia Michaels: Great to be here. Thank you.
Elliot Felix: I think a great way to get started is to hear how you got started and what you're up to at uru.
Julia Michaels: So how did I get started in higher education, I don't have a really great origin story like some people do in this field who are working in this space. But I fell into it almost by accident. It's not something I thought I would be working on. If you'd asked me in college or even graduate school, I, if I would be working in higher education, I would've not said that. But I was hired by APLU, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities back in 2012 to work on a project that was related to health workforce development, which was really quite interesting. Urban Universities for Health is the name of the project, and I learned a lot about what qualities were important in the healthcare workforce, but as we started to dig into it so much of the problem and what really drives me as a, as an individual and as a professional is problem solving and trying to get to the root cause of things so that we can fix these systemic issues. When we dug into it so much was around the pipeline of undergraduate STEM students and how do you build the pipeline, and really the root cause is students feeling like they don't belong in their math course. They can't keep up with the material. They're swimming in all the new college stuff, particularly if they're first generation, they're trying to navigate the environment and so they drop outta the major or they drop outta the field or of college itself. And I'm a STEM major who quit myself. So I'll tell you that calculus is a hundred percent the reason I changed my major from computer science to political science.
Julia Michaels: When I think about student success, I really think about it as learning and learning towards the ultimate goal of mastery rather than competence as compared to others. So if a student is seeking to master a skill or learn the material through their own motivation, their desire to use that skill or knowledge. That's ultimately what success looks like is building that muscle for the student so that they are really, truly mastering the material and able to use those skills once they leave the institution rather than I think we often tend to think about success in terms of outcomes that are important to the institution like graduation. And certainly students aren't successful if they haven't graduated with a degree, but you can jump through all the hoops and graduate and you have a useless credential if you haven't learned anything. So I think that learning and ultimately the practice of learning and mastering things is really important to the concept of student success. And I don't know that we're really telling students this when we tell them to go to college it's more about the degree that they're gonna get, oh, you need this rather than, the skills that you develop there is being important for workforce success or in your life.
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Julia Michaels: So now I'm at uru which stands for the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities. Uru is a group of 130 give or take a few research universities, so R one and R two universities. So the research university piece is very important to our identity. But what's special about this association is the people that we engage. So we usually engage your vice provost for undergraduate education or similar. These are people who are a step below the provost, so they still have that direct line to leadership and can make larger institutional change efforts happen. But they're also more steeped in the work and really laser focused on the undergraduate education experience, which at many research universities is not the top priority. It's the research. At some schools, like some of our members undergraduates, a really small percentage of the student population. So we're really focused on undergraduate student success and making sure that we have an equitable and excellent experience for them at the research university. And not trying to take away from research, but really balance things like, how do you infuse that research university identity and the strengths that it brings into the undergraduate experience. So undergrads benefit from that, and then they're getting really excellent instruction throughout the course of their education.
Elliot Felix: I love that. Getting started on belonging and seeing belonging as the foundation and then taking it forward and seeing teaching and research, not in opposition, but in complimentary in so many ways. I think those are two great things. And did a project for a research university that wanted to understand, they had a donor who really wanted to understand like why don't students of color persist at the same rates in stem? And it's all the things you mentioned. And the other thing is, it's also the advice that they're getting along the way. And we heard story after story of, some students encounter calculus and they talk to an advisor and they hear yeah, calculus is hard. Everybody struggles with it. But other students struggle with calculus and they talk to an advisor and the advisor says something like, maybe you want to try Latin American cultural studies.
Julia Michaels: And then, who knows if that would've been suggested to someone else. I think like linking the linking, focusing on belonging, I think is so critical and I love the idea of bringing together teaching and research, not in opposition, but to compliment each other and what does that look like? How do you get research institutions to focus on teaching and learning? And have them compliment each other or infuse teaching and learning with the research ethos and culture. That's the question and I think we'll talk a lot about that today because there's a number of strategies that have really risen to the top. But I think the first thing is really taking your strength as a research institution and bringing that into the classroom in ways that enrich the student's experience. So we know, for example, there's a wide body of research on undergraduate research experiences and that's a high impact practice. And if you can get students to do those at scale, you're gonna improve their outcomes. And that's particularly important in stem, where learning to do the inquiry giving them an opportunity to do it for themselves rather than teaching at them or just trying to transfer knowledge from instructor to student, which is the old way of doing things. Engaging them actively in the process of actually doing science is what will strengthen learning and will position them for success in the field.
Julia Michaels: One of the gaps that we are working on at Uru is the extent to which these evidence-based practices are actually being used by faculty and how well are they being used? Are they being used with fidelity? And we know that full implementation hasn't happened because if they were then every student would be successful. So it, it's not clear that every student is learning. We haven't gotten to the goal and we still obviously have equity gaps that we need to work on. And that's the supply side of things, what the institution can look at.
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Julia Michaels: There's the demand side of it too, which is what students are asking for or screaming for. In many cases we hear all these headlines about how the value of higher education has been lost. No one sees the value anymore. Students are choosing not to go to college because they don't think that they're gonna get anything valuable out of it. There's this sort of denigration of higher education as being elitist and not for everyone. And students are just demanding that they get quality teaching. They're demanding that far more than other things that you would think, obviously they care about affordability and cost. But there's excellent data like public polling data on, teaching excellence being something that students believe makes a college a good college or a university, a good university. And this isn't really reflected in rankings or anything like that but that's what students want. And they want to get a job afterwards. But there's plenty of job training programs out there. They're choosing college. They're choosing to go to a research university because they want that type of comprehensive education so that's what students want and we are trying to fill that gap of between where we are now, where we've got a lot of knowledge about what works, but we haven't done everything that works, there has been a lot of progress that's been made, but we aren't there yet.
Julia Michaels: There's a lot of change happening right now. It's coming at us fast. There's a lot of fear and concern about university budgets about research funding cuts and all of the things that are happening. And it's hard to know where to put your focus because it's like there's 10 fires happening at the same time. So I would say, as an institutional leader, really focusing on the long term and not getting distracted. I know it's easy for me to say because I'm sitting here from my armchair at Uru but you do have to focus on the long term. Like the headwinds that have been here all along are still gonna be there when the dust settles with some of the stuff that's happening right now. Like we're still gonna have to contend with declining enrollment because the high school age population is peaking right now, and it's not gonna ever be that same again. You can't make more high school students. So you are gonna have to think about expanding your value proposition to adult learners and to, to thinking about how to improve the transfer process from community colleges.
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Julia Michaels: University leaders really need to cut out the noise and focus on a, what's within the scope of their control, and then finding people who control what they can't and bringing them into the circle. So that collaboration piece is really important right now. I think that's why Uru members say, when people tell me why they joined Uru and what they find valuable about Uru, they say this is where I find my people. This is where my people are and who I can go to for help and for connection and to problem solve because they're dealing with the same things I am. And everyone brings a different perspective to it. because every institution is different and every individual brings something to the table. But that collaboration and banding together in solidarity is gonna be super important, particularly right now if we're gonna weather some of these storms. So yeah, you're never gonna have all of your, your ducks in line to, to make change happen. If you're leading change, you have to just start, you have to start somewhere. But if people start collaborating towards a shared goal, even if they have different approaches or ideas on how the change should happen, I think change will happen more quickly.
Elliot Felix: As we wrap up, I wanna ask for your final advice as folks try and create more equitable and effective teaching and learning experiences as they adapt to these kinds of changes in funding and financing and demographics and technology.
Julia Michaels: Well, it's focus on the mission focus on the goal. I think, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that DEI is kinda under threat right now. And that concept of equity and using the word equity is now more taboo. My most positive and generous take on this is that efforts that were performative will probably fall away, but those who are serious about achieving equity, about doing what works not using certain language or words, but doing what's actually gonna improve outcomes for students who have historically been locked out of higher education who haven't had the same advantages. We'll find out quickly who's committed to this and if you are committed. We need to work together in solidarity. Because this work is more important than ever. There's no better time than now to do it. This is not the time to back away from it. We need to be doing the work and don't back down out of fear. Focus on what you can control and who can you bring into this circle to expand your way of working so that we can, so we can get this done.
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Julia Michaels: How do you know your faculty are using these things? And what structures are in place to get that feedback besides student evaluations, which we know are just not really gonna give you the full story. And then how do you hold faculty accountable for doing this work for doing evidence-based teaching activities in the classroom, and do they need additional professional development? Centers for teaching and learning don't exist at every university where they do. They're really helpful. But you've gotta put in place the resources to get faculty aware of these and practice using them, which they may not have done in graduate school. Hopefully they would, but not necessarily. And then how do you hold them accountable and how do you make sure that they have space to value teaching and to improve their own teaching practice. You can't just tell faculty, just they should desire to value teaching more. You have to actually make it possible for them through reform of these structures and what they're rewarded for and what they're incentivized for in not just that like the hiring and tenure and promotion processes, but in, in how they're evaluated. That's very important too is thinking about these entrenched structures that aren't, they're hard to move. If it were easy to fix, then universities would've done it already. But everyone acknowledges the need, but it's just hard to move those things.
Elliot Felix: I appreciate that. I think you've done great work. I think that the Boyer 2030 report providing a vision for the future and the National Academy's report you're referencing and the convening you did on it is chock-full of great insights. Some of them are big picture and others are more detailed. I really appreciate the mix. A couple of the things I took away—the big picture stuff like a culture of teaching and looking at rewards, incentives and evidence-based practices and more high impact practices, I think as all makes a ton of sense. But like some of the more detailed things like acknowledging that there are a lot of undergrads that are part of a teaching team. Or attention to what you call the vital faculty—visiting TAs, adjuncts, lecturers. Going through what are the courses where you have high DFW rates and sitting down with faculty and problem solving on that. I thought that was all really great stuff.
Julia Michaels: Yeah. And just to be clear, we're not the only ones working in this space, right? There are so many discipline specific efforts. There's so much happening in this space, which is why I think this is really a great time to say let's do it. Let's make this time different. All of this work has been hugely impactful. We just need to get to that mature implementation of what we know is effective at universities, across disciplines.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the connected college podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter for insights and excerpts from my upcoming book, tools you can download, and special offers. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.