Teaching and Learning--Recent Articles

Now that the semester is well underway, news articles about teaching and learning have been hitting my desk.  Let me share some significant reading material with you. 

When faculty ask for help engaging today's student, I frequently mention Eric Mazur's process of Peer Instruction.  When we want increase engagement and learning in class--particularly larger classes of 50, 100, or more--Mazur's approach can be very useful.  His process begins with giving students questions about the assigned reading that they answer before class.  Students also submit questions about concepts that they found difficult or confusing.  In class, the instructor addresses these questions and provides time for students who are now "getting it" to talk to each other.  

A recent article and video,"Don't Lecture Me," posted by American Radio Works (public media) gives one of the clearest explanations of this process and sets it in the context of teaching trends today.  Mazur's story of how he started to develop peer instruction is very interesting.  He describes a phenomena of student interaction that still amazes us.  When we ask students to turn to their neighbor and explain or discuss a problem or concept, the energy level in the room just explodes.  Just yesterday, a faculty member remarked on the noise level as students discussed a quiz.  It is quite a shock as we realize that they have been carefully restraining themselves in order to listen to the lecture, yet they have a lot to say.  As classroom managers of large groups of students, we might worry about what they are doing.  However, this discussion is extremely important in terms of understanding and long term retention.


If you are looking for the most comprehensive survey of recent teaching news, consult the recent Carnival by ProfHacker.  Post September 1, this blog lists a multitude of interesting teaching and learning articles, including but not limited to Chronicle articles.  I particularly recommend Cathy Davidson's essay on collaborative learning, as she expounds on students' collective imaginations, crowd-sourcing, and public grading.

Enjoy!

How We Make an Impact as Teachers

Ken Bain wrote about great college teachers at length, and in our workshops for new faculty, we start with a discussion of those teachers that we admired.  What characteristics did we appreciate?  In a recent discussion, we came up with qualities such as honest, personal, generous, competent, fair, responsible, resourceful, and understanding.  We also discussed how instructors can encourage and reinforce students in their learning, someone who can encourage creativity, someone who strives to move forward in their teaching and in their content knowledge, and someone who can create connections for students. 



How do our personal characteristics matter?  We can use our natural tendencies to great effect.  And, we can work on those characteristics that we want to adopt.  Some professional attributes are part of our areas--part of our content expertise.  How do we bring into the classroom our experience with the content and our knowledge and experience how that content is used in the world?

Two aspects of teaching stand out consistently as highly influential for students: engaging them in learning and connecting with them personally.   In the classroom, students are engaged when they are asked for input, which helps them connect new learning with previous learning.  They are also engaged through narrative.

We, as teachers, often speak about how good visuals impact student learning.  We know that technology has increased the impact of visuals in learning (we are already a very visual species).  We talk less these days about the importance of narrative, but narrative makes just as much impact on learning.

By narrative, I mean creating a story about your content.  When you walk into the classroom, what do you want to convey?  What is your objective?  How do you express yourself with passion?  For students who come to a physical classroom, they come to see us.  As UT acting professor Jed Diamond often says, we are the focus in the room--not the powerpoint slide.

When we step up, and we can create a story about our content, we capture student attention.  I do not mean that we have to be story tellers.  Yet, we can introduce a significant case with details woven into our lecture.  We can ask students a significant question and work our lecture around that question. We can inject our professional experience--adding a personal aspect--into our talk with students.  And we can build in activities around these cases and experiences, asking students about their ideas, opinions, and even their own experiences. 

Summer

Ensuring a Productive End to Your Summer

There are people out there who believe college professors work just a few hours a day each week and get a 3-month vacation every year.  Clearly, this is not the case, but what are you doing this summer to stay busy? Many faculty currently have book projects and research underway, are attending development workshops, planning their courses, and possibly even teaching. These faculty know that a productive summer can lead to an even more successful fall semester.

But others may view the summer as unstructured time, as a break from a tough previous semester, or even develop a sense of isolation during summer months—and this can impede getting a jump on the summer to-do lists. If you haven’t accomplished what you had hoped to so far, it’s not too late. So what are the secrets to getting the most (professionally speaking) out of the summer? 

• Start by making a personalized summer plan with realistic goals. Identify what needs to be accomplished and note the steps needed to make each item on your list happen.
• Next, be a daily writer! Even if it’s just a paragraph, write something every day, and even look for a group of “daily writers” for support. It’s also helpful to keep a log of what you do each day and how long you spent doing it. Finally, commit to accountability. Create the same sense of urgency for yourself that your students and colleagues feel regarding teaching and service, and apply it to your summer research and projects.
• If you are on track or ahead with research and writing, it might be a good time to review plans and materials for the fall semester by incorporating some new techniques or innovative teaching strategies into your already-prepared course.
   
• In case you missed the 2011 UT Summer Teaching Institute, you can get plenty of tips online by visiting some easy-to navigate sites and libraries that will help you revamp what you already have… or create something entirely new. The TENN TLC offers a variety of teaching tools and resources, including how-to guides and suggestions for improving your course.  For more information, Active Learning in Higher Education is a collection of research, focusing on development and innovative teaching. And for access to research studies, reflective essays, literature reviews, case studies and critiques/ comments, visit The Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Service.

If at this point in the summer you are caught up on research and writing, have no workshops or seminars to attend, are not teaching, and have reviewed course content and materials for the fall, you’re probably way ahead of your colleagues. Why not just find a cooler, a chair, and a good book? Here are the best reads for the summer for those of you that deserve an award for your summer productivity!

·        NPR’s Favorite Books for Summer

·        Good Housekeeping’s 10 Best Beach Reads

·        USA Today’s Hot Summer Reads

And, finally, for those who simply can’t bear the thought of opening one more book this summer, why not get out and enjoy the summer here in Knoxville? Here are some great local events & attractions to stimulate the mind. The Knoxville Writer’s Guild  is a community of writers who provide support and promote education and publication.  The East TN Historical Society and Museum  offers a wide selection of programs and events for anyone interested in history. And for a group outing with like-minded people, check out all of the available Knoxville Meet-ups, including interests for oenophiles, nature-lovers, entrepreneurs, and more; there are more than 130 meet-up groups available at www.meetup.com; just search for Knoxville, TN.

guest writer Karen Brinkley, Tenn TLC

Reading

It can sometimes frustrate college teachers when they realize that their students don't read well (who am I kidding--it confounds and frustrates a lot of us!).  Students have most likely been given instruction on active reading either in high school or during a composition course; however, it may not be habit for them and students may not be accomplished at or confident about college-level reading. 


There are strategies to encourage students and offer help. Articles from the Teaching Professor Blog can help you decide on an approach.  "How Students Read Textbooks" discusses a study on the "sink or skim" methods used by most students--who either "sink" the knowledge by careful reading or "skim" their texts, often the day of or the day after a lecture.  Assessments designed to hold students accountable for careful reading vary from assigning journals to given a "just in time" quiz before class (see the article on reading quizzes: "More on Students and Reading").


As for whether it makes a difference if the text is print or e-book, the active reading strategies may vary.  Consider the reading support provided in many e-books (often they come with glossaries, linked indexes, and dictionaries).  However, before you throw away a student's option to read a print text, you might want to consult the following article: "Another study points to advantages of printed textbooks."   The study by the University of California Libraries cites the advantages of e-books (including e-highlighting, annotation, and downloading options), yet shows that print books have other advantages in terms of deep learning.  Readers will move to print copies for "reading, note taking, text comparison, and deep study" (see the May 2011 study).  This preference is shown more by students in the arts and humanities (the same group that scores highest in writing and critical thinking, according to the authors of Academically Adrift).   What is most interesting is the reported preference for print-on-demand options for textbooks. 


So, as you plan for courses next year, consider how to integrate reading into your courses--and how to encourage your students to adopt deep reading strategies!

Summer News

Summer, for many of us, is a time to catch up on news in higher education and to spend a bit of time reading more than the headlines. Here's some recent articles of interest:

Do you think about the future of education?  Check out the 2020 Forecast which provides ideas for you to explore, in terms of drivers of change, trends, signals, and learning agents.
 
Ever wonder about the debate between the effectiveness of lecture versus active learning?  There is a great deal of research supporting the effectiveness of pedagogies that engage students.  Take a look at this recent article on the results from research on an undergraduate physics course, "Applying science to the teaching of science"; "according to Dr Deslauriers and his team, their result is the biggest performance boost ever documented in educational research."


Want to learn more about options for new classrooms and learn about new trends (and possibly throw in your recommendation with an administrative committee?).  Campus Technology has an interesting article on new "active learning classrooms" that integrate technology for positive results. http://bit.ly/j43Rw6


And finally, read the new Faculty Focus special report on Course Design and Development Ideas that Work.  You can download the report for free.  There are several relevant topics to teaching at a university today, and my eye was caught by the discussion of scaffolding (supporting) learning:

"But the point of teaching cannot be to eliminate or even reduce the likelihood of failure. To eliminate failure throttles the learner. For the student does the learning. The student must be free to think and act and, in so doing, err—and recover. That is the cost of learning. To prescribe that teachers enable learning is a tautology. Of course that is what we want to do—the question we beg is: “How?” If scaffolding is to help answer that question, it should illuminate the differences between what the teacher does and what the student does. It should get us to think about the instructor as a planner and initiator of activities that invite students to develop their own goals and strategies. As we know, learning grows out of the students’ previous knowledge and skills. But the assignment must challenge without being so difficult as to discourage learning or so easy as to evade it. Both student and instructor have to be active."

Reflecting on our semester

Having finished courses for the year, I regularly think and write about what went well and what I want to change.  Reflecting on your course is best done in the moment, by thinking about what has just happened and how you reacted to the events of the semester.  Reflective writing can take many forms, such as an entry in a teaching journal or through a quick note added to your course material folder or notebook, even a brainstorm list that you file for reference next year.  Be sure to note what worked as well as what did not; these jottings can help you remember how the course worked in action (often different from your mental image and plans!) and help you make improvements to the course. 


I posted previously on creative teaching and reflective practice, but at this time I want to share with you a letter from a faculty member who participated in the Faculty Inquiry Group on Creative Teaching (we at the Tenn TLC offer several FIGs each year).  Each person ended the semester with a reflection--a letter to colleagues--on the group's discussions. In her letter, Dr. Polly McArthur, PhD, RN, from the UT College of Nursing, writes:

Dear Colleague,

For the past 8-10 weeks, I have had the pleasure of meeting on Friday afternoons with a small group of professors to talk about creativity in teaching. We are interested in engaging students in creative learning activities at the university. We brought topics of interest to the group, shared ideas and experiences, and asked for help with particular challenges.

            Our group leader asked us to write a letter to you – an unnamed “you” who perhaps represents a college professor in the early 21^st century. I want to share with you my thoughts on creativity in teaching. I would like to be a creative person, but I question exactly what I mean by the term creative. Does this mean being original, talented, gifted, unique, outstanding, exciting, inspiring, or just memorable? I am certainly not the next American Idol of College Professors. I believe my goal is to try new ways of doing things in my course that accomplish the learning objectives but give the students some freedom to make the experience their own.

            If I strive to innovate, where do I find my inspiration, support, and energy to imagine something anew? For me, there are three critical pillars for this process, which is ongoing and never fully attained. First, I have to stay rooted in the basics of my discipline of nursing. I must examine and re-examine the knowledge of my field. Second, I must associate with people who are inspiring, skillful in collaboration, and constructively critical of my teaching, my vision, my interactions, and anything related to my professional aspirations. Third, I must try to walk in the students’ shoes to understand their responses to the learning environment. How am I creating both opportunity and means for them to create a personal experience that facilitates a change in capacity?

            Creativity, in essence, is open to interpretation. It is a breath of fresh air when life seems weighted down with the mundane or the expected. Perhaps just working towards higher levels of creativity is as important as finding a definite answer to some perceived problem or deficiency. As professionals who guide learning in the university setting, we are fortunate to connect with other people and continually transform our being in the world.

`                                   Sincerely,

Polly

An off-the-wall idea

A recent article in the NY Times points out that we may think we remember and know material well when we have an easy time processing what we read. A review of recent studies of memory points out that processing is not the same as recall--and that difficult fonts make us pay more attention and learn better.


You might want to send out study sheets today in Lucinda Handwriting!


Joking aside, the studies reviewed are interesting; I recommend the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/health/19mind.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3