Reduce Cheating

In cooperation with the Writing Center and the Composition Program, the Center for Faculty Development will be offering a workshop on Tuesday 10/27 on Teaching Practices to Prevent Plagiarism. To help get us thinking in that direction of prevention (rather than only focusing on what we do with the students we catch cheating), Faculty Focus offers these 5 Tips to Reduce Cheating in the College Classroom.

• Clearly articulate your expectations for the class and EACH INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT. Can students work with others on their homework assignments, for example? Can they use old exams, lab reports, etc. as aids in the course?
  
• Explicitly link assignments to learning objectives. Students often cheat on assignments that they see as meaningless or "busy-work." If they understand the point of the assignment, especially how it will help them learn the material, they are more likely to push through it on their own rather than copy from someone else.
  
• Reduce temptations to cheating. We cannot control student behavior, but we can at least show them that we care about the integrity of our classes by doing little things. For example, space students out during exams, provide multiple versions of the same test, require students to leave all non-essential materials at the front of the room, and have the WiFi turned off in the test room.
  
• Talk to students about the relation of academic integrity to professional ethics and their future chosen career. Students are more likely to uphold integrity in academic assignments if they see it as holding more value than just being "another institutional rule."
  
• Report all cheating when you see it, rather than ignore it or handle it on your own. A professor can become known as someone who does not tolerate cheating or look the other way, and then the cheaters will not choose her class! Also, many professors mistakenly assume that they can reduce cheating on their own, but it takes the entire campus. If instructors do not report cheating, that same student may be cheating in other courses and no one would ever know!
  

Knowing Your Students

Prof Hacker, of which I have only recently become aware of, is devoted to delivering "tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education." A recent post mentions 5 sites your undergraduates need to know and (I would add) by extension, 5 sites that you, the instructor, should at least know of, as well. The sites and their taglines are:

• HackCollege, work smarter, not harder.
  
• Isbn.nu, find the best price for books online.
  
• Study Hacks, demystifying student success.
  
• Schoolr, the only resource you'll need (think "Google for student life").
  
• OCWFinder, find free online courses.
  

HackCollege and Study Hacks both provide RSS feeds (as does this blog along with additional 24/7 faculty development resource sites compiled by the CFD) so you can stay on top of information that is finding its way to your students.

Will Colleges Go the Way of Newspapers?

A number of recent commentaries pointing to the cost advantage of online learning, such as this one in Money Central and this one in the Washington Post, both by Zephyr Teachout, along with this one by Kevin Carey in Washington Monthly, have sparked wide ranging discussion on faculty development discussion boards posing the question, among others, "will the Web kill colleges as we know them?"

I think Ed Nuhfer, Director of Faculty Development at Cal State Channel Islands, pretty much gets it right in a posting today to the POD Listserv:

A new study out today—see <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/22/hybrids> finds best value in hybrid courses.

I do not think online will replace face to face learning communities. Those who understand the value of resident learning communities to life will not be preparing to have their kids sit at home on a computer as a replacement.

It seems to me that colleges who survive best will be those better at making their classes learning communities.

Departments and institutions that are full of infighting and have low faculty morale can't possibly foster healthy learning communities. I think places characterized by years of bad climate and low faculty morale ought to take this as a wakeup call.

I leave it to others to comment on where Metro State stands with regard to climate and faculty morale, but I believe the emphasis on learning communities in the classroom is the right one. Metro State has made important strides in this direction recently, and there are faculty committed to this goal working alongside some key programs (First Year Success, Center for Urban Engagement, Center for Faculty Development, to name just a few off the top of my head). Yes, there is more work to do, but we're on the right track at Metro State.

Social Networking

I've read recently of some very innovative and interesting approaches to incorporating social networking (i.e. Facebook or Twitter) into courses. I've tagged several of those descriptions on the CFD Resources page—scroll down that page to see, for example the tags "twitter" and "web 2.0", or you can go directly to the CFD Delicious.com tags to find the same links.

A recent post in Faculty Focus, "Students and Social Networking: Should You 'Friend' Your Students?", offers some useful cautionary advice to any faculty thinking about using Twitter or Facebook in their classes. Among the suggestions is to think clearly about the following question:

How much do you want your students to know about you? Do you want your students to see pictures of you, read messages sent by your friends, or know whether or not you have a partner or children?

This is not meant to dissuade faculty from using social networking sites for their professional purposes, but rather to encourage them to think carefully before jumping in. And my suggestion, as with any use of technology as a teaching tool, is to consider first whether you're jumping in just to try something new, or if the technology (in this case social networking) really does optimize the achievement of the learning objectives. Obviously, the latter is the ideal perspective from which to approach the decision to adopt any new technology.

Plus, you want to avoid the creepy treehouse effect!

Faculty Development 24/7

If you haven't had the opportunity recently to look at the Center for Faculty Development resource pages on the Web, I hope you will take a moment to do so soon. I've constructed these pages keeping in mind that Metro State faculty, whether full-time or affiliate, are very busy and can't always find the time to attend CFD workshops. These resources are organized in a way to provide you with information and insight in just a few clicks. Web links are organized as a tag cloud, and Google Books allows you to search key terms among the books that are part of the CFD library. With many of the titles, you can even browse through several pages from your desktop. I have also added workshop handouts for download from nearly all workshops sponsored by the CFD.

I recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feeds that we've set up for the CFD library and for the Web links tag cloud. This will ensure that you are kept updated every time we add a book or a link to the resources available to you. If you're unsure about RSS feeds and how they work, check out this video from Common Craft.

What Are Our Students Learning?

And how do we know?

I've said it before in front of different audiences, and I'll write it here, probably not for the first time: I think these are the most important questions we can ask ourselves about our teaching.

This Teaching Professor post, with the rather uninteresting title "Interesting Interview about Attention" underscores why. Maryellen Weimer describes some new research and what it means for classroom learning:

But what the interview really got me thinking about was how different the same classroom experience can look to those experiencing it. Students don't focus on the same parts of an activity, and that changes how they experience it. Yet, how quickly and easily we homogenize student experience. "Oh, they all really got into that group project" when in fact they probably all got into it at different levels and in different ways. Even more frightening is how often teachers assume what they experienced in the classroom was shared by students, or assume they can tell how students experienced something without any feedback from students.

How do we know what our students are learning? It shouldn't be a mystery to us. Simply put—though not always simply executed—it requires us to take a proactive and thoughtful approach to obtaining feedback from students, or employing what are often referred to as classroom assessment techniques.

Active Learning in the STEM Fields

In about an hour I am going to go visit the Engineering Technology Department and talk mostly, though not exclusively, to their affiliate faculty about active learning. I have 60 minutes, which seems just barely enough time to get faculty to begin the process of rethinking the role that content might play in their instruction. In addition, though, I really want to model some specific approaches to active learning. Here's what I plan:

1. Begin our discussion by modeling the Pro/Con/Caveat grid approach to brainstorming over the issue of the use of lecture for instructional delivery. Angelo and Cross (1993, pp. 168-171) describe the Pro and Con Grid, which I've adapted by adding a column for "caveats," and they offer the following example of an exercise from a Civil Engineering class:
   

   The seminar has just studied two proposed designs for a new suspension bridge. The second design proposes a structure that is significantly more massive and more rigid than the first. Briefly list three to five major advantages and disadvantages you see in the second design.
   

2. Continue considering the advantages and disadvantages of lecturing by reading part (the first page or so) of Black (1993). We will then model a "write-pair-share" exercise over the question "What points from what you just read are most likely to get you to reconsider how you structure your classroom time?"
   

   
    

3. Participants will then take time to read a short posting from Faculty Focus, "Problem-solving Exercises that Promote Intellectual Development." I will ask them to break into groups of 3 and come to agreement on two, among seven total, approaches described therein that would work best in their classes. In doing so, I'm hoping to model one of the seven problem-solving exercises described in the posting:
   

   Generating ideas and brainstorming—The idea here is to use open-ended exercises to disconnect students from their belief that every problem has one right answer. For example, a teacher might present students with a product design and have them brainstorm as many possible flaws and failures as they can think of. No answer is considered wrong during the brainstorming process.
   

4. Discuss with participants the importance of knowing your objectives. Black (1993), for example, is clear about his objectives as he describes them:
   

   There are at least three dimensions to introductory organic chemistry that should be addressed by effective pedagogy—factual content, conceptual understanding and problem solving (p. 141).
   

   I will introduce participants to the Teaching Goals Inventory as a tool to help them evaluate what they think important for their students to accomplish.
   

5. Finally, I will close by modeling the "minute paper" exercise as a means of answering the all-important question that we should all be asking, "what are my students learning, and how do I know?"
   

The only question that remains is how much of this I will accomplish in an hour.

Sources:

• Angelo, T.A. & Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  
• Black, K. A. (1993). "What To Do When You Stop Lecturing: Become a Guide and Resource." Journal of Chemical Education. 70:2, pp. 140-144.
  

  
   

Welcome Back!

As we gear up for a new academic year, I plan to post to this blog once a week, generally on Thursdays. I will use this space to draw your attention to upcoming faculty development opportunities at Metro State, to Web resources that I think would be useful to bring to your attention, and to issues that are pertinent to our professional—in particular our teaching—lives.

In that spirit…

If you have not registered for the Fall Forum, I hope you will take a look at the program and consider registering. We have only a limited number of spaces left, and registration will close tomorrow (Friday 8/6) at noon. The conference goals are to welcome faculty and staff to a new academic year and provide them with some tools for success over the coming year. We have tried hard this time to include consideration of both staff and faculty in the programming, and the lunchtime keynote address by David Skaggs, Executive Director of the Colorado State Department of Higher Education, will surely be of interest to all members of the Metro State community.

I look forward to seeing many of my Metro State colleagues there and then hearing from you after what you thought of the event.

Sustaining Your Writing Productivity

Two fairly recent posts in Tomorrow's Professor capture very succinctly the skills and approaches toward writing that we will be developing during Metro State's Scholarly Writing Workshop on May 28 & 29.

In their post How to Write Anything, Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent argue:

The strategy of waiting for large blocks of time to work on major writing projects has two significant flaws. When you finally get to a block, it's been so long since the last one that it can take hours or days to build momentum again and you're likely to run out of time before much gets written. Also, as soon as the block arrives other things rush in to fill it, such as your family, whom you've been neglecting for months and who now legitimately think it's their turn.

A much more effective strategy is to make a commitment to regularly devote short periods of time to major writing projects. Thirty minutes a day is plenty, or maybe an hour three times a week.

And in a more recent post, Gina Hiatt urges, very simply, to "write before you're ready."

Both arguments are expanded on in the respective blog posts, and both are attributed to Robert Boice, Professors as Writers (Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press, 1990), which will figure prominently in the Scholarly Writing Workshop.

All Metro State faculty, administrators, and staff are invited to be part of the Scholarly Writing Workshop. Registration closes on May 8.

Presenting and Explaining, or, The Lecture

I'm in the middle of reading Teaching First-Year College Students, and I've come across a section of the book where yet again the suggestions and examples given can apply not only to courses for first-year students, but to all of our courses. In this case, it's with regard to how we lecture, or, as the authors prefer to call it, "present and explain".

Most of us lecture at least some of the time we spend teaching, and for good reason: "a clear explanation or demonstration is often a good place to start instruction." (87)

What the authors would like us to do, though, is move away from the 50-minute non-stop lecture:

Our content is important, and we can cover a lot of it in class if we are not interrupted. Most of us will, of course, acknowledge that it makes no sense to cover material if students do not understand it and do not remember it. Nevertheless, covering content is a powerful drive, and it often rules that day—usually at the expense of activities that would result in greater learning. (91)

This is the thinking behind the active learning movement. But what if we want to hold onto lecture? There are some adjustments that we can make to cultivate what students need to learn and make meaning of the content presented. Just of a few of the recommendations offered are:

• Define objectives. Specify what students need to do with the information. Will you be asking them to remember definitions, procedures, or factual information? Will they be expected to recognize new examples or illustrations? Will you want students to use the information somehow?
  
• Highlight the major points. Better yet, pause during the lecture for 5 or 10 minutes and ask the students to do this either through reflective writing, small group discussion, class discussion, or any combination thereof.
  
• Select appropriate examples. So-called "seductive details", though interesting, can divert students away from the key learning objectives, as a recent student has found.
  
• Check for understanding. A simple Classroom Assessment Technique, the "minute paper", is a useful tool for this. There are many descriptions of the minute paper on the Web, including this one.
  

Source: Erickson, B.L., Peters, C.B., and Strommer, D. W. (2006). Teaching First-Year College Students. Revised and Expanded Edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

 

Knowing When Students Are Learning

The faculty learning community on course (re)design meets Friday to talk about evaluating students, and in preparing for that discussion, I was rereading chapter 6 ("The Purpose and Processes of Evaluation") of Maryellen Weimer's Learner-centered Teaching. In it, she refers to "a classic article, 'Angels on a Pin' (Calandra, 1968)." Intrigued, I found the article online. It's short, funny, and well worth the quick read.

I don't know that the final paragraph of this story really captures the lesson of the exchange between the student, his physics professor, and the arbitrator/author. The postscript that you'll find appended to this particular Web version of "Angles on a Pin" raises some questions about the origins and context of that final paragraph.

Rather, I think Maryellen Weimer has it right when she states that the story "is actually a damning critique of how our evaluation methods fail to measure some important kinds of learning" (p. 120).

Encouraging Students to Assess Their Work

Most of us want our students to develop into lifelong learners. Part of meeting that goal is cultivating the skills of self-assessment. Successful lifelong learners are those who know when their learning is on the right track or who know when they're being effective in applying their knowledge and solving problems.

It's probably fair to say, however, that we have different comfort levels when it comes to having students assess their work. A recent blog post to The Teaching Professor suggests a few approaches to self-assessment that might appeal to faculty with varying comfort levels. Examples include:

On written work, most easily a paper—have the writer underline or otherwise mark the paragraph, sentence, passage that represents their best writing. Also have them underline the passage that isn't up to snuff, that they tried to fix but still aren't happy with, that doesn't make the point they wanted to make. Leave the best passage alone, but offer suggestions for fixing the other and maybe some token points for a rewrite of just that section.

During an exam debrief—identify a question that lots of people missed. Have everybody find the date in their notes when that material was covered. Have students look at what they have in their notes that pertains to the question. Ask someone who got the answer correct to read their notes to the rest of the class. How does that compare with the notes of those who missed the question?

After work on a group project, before receiving their grades, ask students to write a short paragraph that identifies what they contributed to the group's progress and what they could have done that would have made the group even more successful.

There are a couple more ideas in The Teaching Professor post tailored to different types of learning activities. What I like about these ideas is that they don't assume students yet have the skills to fully assess their work—that still remains our job—but they begin the important process of developing those very skills.

 

Learning In and Out of Class

I've been reading L. Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences, and I came upon a short passage that is useful to keep in mind as we think about our course designs. From the section "Selecting an Effective Teaching Strategy":

[Barbara Walvoord] postulates that all teachers face two common tasks. Teachers want and need their students to

• Master the content of the course.
  
• Learn how to use that content in some way.
  

In a general sense, the first task, introducing students to the content, is primarily valuable as a means to a more important end—the second task: learning how to use that content and identifying its value or significance.

What tools do teachers have to accomplish these tasks? They have a variety of different learning activities (which I call teaching techniques) that can be sorted into in-class activities and out-of-class activities, as in the diagram [above].

The problem, as Walvoord sees it (and I agree), is that most of us end up with very little time for the second task. Why is this? Because we spend so much class time trying to accomplish the first task (covering the content) that we have very little time left for the second one (helping students learn how to use the content). What is the solution to this problem? Finding some way to move the initial learning of the content to out-of-class activities, leaving more in-class time for learning how to use it.

We often underestimate the amount of learning students can, and indeed do, accomplish out of class. One of the biggest mistakes we can make in course design, I think, is to focus on content mastery both in and out of class. This can lead to redundancy and to students calculating that they either don't need to read outside of class or remain engaged in class, as one or the other suffices. Let's hold students responsible for the learning we expect them to do outside of class by focusing on application of that knowledge in class.

Source: L. Dee Fink (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Student Resistance to Active Learning

In our workshops last week devoted to the topic of active learning, participants discussed the real likelihood of running into student resistance. A recent article in Faculty Focus entitled Large Courses and Student Expectations confirms what we might expect: students in large classes do indeed resist active learning.

The original study published in College Teaching (2007) finds that students who already had experience with large classes were especially inclined to expect "passive" learning via lecture, and 90 percent of all students expected to be tested using lower level thinking skills with multiple-choice style exams.

Students, thus, are being socialized to expect passive learning, and this problem is compounded when their introductory courses lean heavily toward being "large classes." To their credit, the authors of the study did not use these findings as reason to retreat back to lecture-only courses:

The findings also rejuvenated their commitment to use strategies that involved students in these courses. In addition to a number of other helpful strategies the researchers are now using successfully in their large classes, they conclude with an important reminder: "Not all students are prepared for active learning experiences. … Therefore, we are very open at the beginning and throughout the semester in discussing our expectations for the course, the teaching, learning, and assessment methods planned for the course, and how to be successful in the course." (p. 132)

That openness with students about what we're doing and why is absolutely integral to our success. And why not go further and share with our students research findings that show they will learn more from active learning than from lecture alone?

The original study cited in this piece is Messineo, M., Gaither, G., Bott, J., and Ritchey, K. (2007). "Inexperienced versus experienced students' expectations for active learning in large classes." College Teaching, 55 (3), 125-133.

Active Learning at Metro State

The Center for Faculty Development sponsored two workshops last week with the objectives of exploring our own comfort levels with active learning and establishing some steps we can take to make learning more active in our classes. An important message conveyed during the workshops is capture nicely in a passage from Bonwell and Eison, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom:

In short, while not every technique described earlier is equally appropriate for every academic discipline, no discipline can categorically disavow all strategies promoting active learning. (71)

In exploring which strategies work for us, the variables that we need to examine and take into account are situational factors (class size, the nature of the subject matter, the characteristics of our students, etc.), our own comfort level with the risks involved with active learning, and the learning outcomes that we are trying to meet. A close examination of these variables should precede any serious and committed change to our teaching strategies.

At the end of the workshop, faculty wrote some of their individual goals for implementing active learning. Several plan to modify their approach to lecture to incorporate pauses every 10 or 15 minutes for discussion or exercises:

"Pausing every 10-15 minutes for short discussion or writing questions and comments"

"Stopping the lecture for group exercises or discussions"

"Use reflective writing in class—write-pair-share—and pause during lecture."

Others planned to modify their lectures by framing them either at the beginning or at the end with discussion or reflective writing:

"Use end of class question: what was the most important thing you learned today?"

"Start lectures with questions (that the students submit from the reading)"

"I am going to try using student generated questions in my classes."

Another participant recognized that in her discussions she needs to "give more time for students to respond (to questions)." (The research on this issue suggests that most teachers pause about 1 second after asking a question before beginning to rephrase it. What if we paused 5 seconds to give students an actual chance to form their responses and speak up?).

And as a final example, one workshop participant recognizes that students need to be brought on board with their responsibilities for active learning at the beginning of a term: "Start the semester by informing students of their role as active learners and define those roles."

 

 

Can We Safely Employ Learner-centered Teaching?

This is a question we must engage in, and it's one that came up in today's Faculty Learning Community on course (re)design. We encounter risk when we change our approach from a teacher-centered focus on material to a student-centered focus on learning: students might resist (and penalize us in our evaluations); peers might resist (and penalize us in our evaluations); department chairs might resist, and on and on. It's important to note, however, that our options are not limited to 1) throwing our hands up in surrender and joining the resistance to change, or 2) delving head first into change, torpedoes be damned! It's okay to be cautious while mapping for ourselves a program of change. Here are just a few points raised in today's discussion:

1. Know where you're going and why. What is it you want to change? What is it about your teaching currently that creates the desire for that change? How will you get to that point you want to arrive at?
   
2. Explain to your students why control and responsibility for their learning is shifting toward them. Cite the scholarship that demonstrates the advantage to their learning that comes with these changes.
   
3. No peer evaluation of teaching should ever occur without a pre-visit meeting. The Metro State peer evaluation form states "It is suggested that the observer(s) arrange a pre-visit and post-visit meeting with the instructor." I find it unfortunate that this is merely suggested. Insist on a pre-visit meeting to explain your learner-centered approach to teaching. (And bring the literature that backs up that approach).
   
4. Describe your growth as a teacher in the self-assessment section of your annual evaluation. Contextualize the student evaluation scores within the teaching change process that you've laid out for yourself.
   

Mostly, cultural change needs to occur, and this will happen gradually at best. Yes, in the meantime there will be risk, but we can take steps to manage it.

If We Want Students to Remember

As devotees of our fields, we all want, even expect, our students to remember our course material after they leave class on that last day of the semester. The best, and perhaps only, way to assure this happens is to build active learning experiences into our courses. The research seems clear on this, according to a recent posting on The Teaching Professor blog. To encourage Metro State faculty to begin thinking about and developing active learning approaches, the Center for Faculty Development will host a workshop on Thursday 2/19 (4-5:30pm) and Friday 2/20 (9:30-11am) entitled "Active Learning: What Is It, and Will It Work in My Classes?" Details (including registration links) are at the MetroCalendar.

Teaching Students How to Learn: Online Quizzes

A learner-centered approach to teaching recognizes that time devoted to developing students' learning skills, even if that time takes away from content presentation, is ultimately time well spent. A large and growing body of literature supports this approach to teaching, but actual implementation is not always easy. Most of us are far more comfortable mastering our content and conveying it to students than we are retreating to the sidelines, so to speak, and facilitating students' learning. The need, thus, is to look for openings where learning skills can be worked on, and the recent post "Cheating on Online Quizzes" in the Teaching Professor blog points our way to just such an opening.

With growth in the use of the Blackboard Vista course management system in our face to face courses at Metro State, questions will likely arise whether students are cheating (or would cheat if given the opportunity) on online quizzes. Research reported in this post, however, suggests the answer is no:

For example, consider what a biology faculty member documented about the use of online quizzing in two large biology courses. Quizzes for these courses could be taken across a three-day period, leaving plenty of time for students who had not taken the quiz to consult with those who had. However, students who took the quizzes near the end of the access period actually scored 10 percent to 15 percent lower than students who took the quiz early during the access period.

What the research did find, on the other hand, is that "those students who took the quizzes between midnight and 8 a.m. had significantly lower quiz scores."

Here, then, is the opening that I see for developing students' learning skills: If an instructor opts to administer quizzes online so that she can save class time for instruction, a portion of that time can be used to discuss with students their study skills—ways to prepare so they'll be ready to respond to questions in the time allotted and, seemingly just as important, ways to manage their time so they're not rushing through the quiz at the last moment. Just raising the issues to get students to think about them and make decisions as intentional learners could well pay dividends in the form of higher test scores.

Self-Awareness and Teaching

In preparation for the first meeting of the Faculty Learning Community on Course (re)Design this Friday, I'm reviewing some materials on the role of instructor self-awareness in designing and implementing instructional change. The teaching professor is often attracted to "teaching tips"—those simple, easy to apply, small changes that she can learn from her campus faculty developer and try out, without too much hassle, in her classes. The problem with this approach is that it steers faculty away from deep and transformative understanding of the principles that underlie effective teaching and learning. (See DiPietro, Ambrose, Bridges, et al. for more on this tension from the faculty developer's perspective). If the teaching professor then decides she's not comfortable with the changes she's made, she abandons them, usually without asking why they didn't work, and reverts to the way she did things before.

Maryellen Weimer (2002) encourages faculty to examine more deeply how they currently teach ("where you are"), how they want to change ("following that up with an equally complete analysis of where you want to be"), and how to put that change in effect ("finishing up by developing a plan for how you will get from here to there"). She sums up her thoughts on this as follows:

At the same time, I strongly encourage making some changes (probably only a few, though) that you take to the edge. What is gained by instructional risk taking? For starters, the nature of the teaching task—same content; same courses; same students, administrators, and colleagues—makes it all too easy to get into instructional ruts. Then change that is just about like what we already do does not bump us out of the ruts and into a different piece of the road. When we opt for change that is not comfortable and is entirely out of the ordinary for us, we open ourselves to teaching as a learning experience, a point of personal development. (188)

This is what the members of the faculty learning community will be doing together this semester. (If you are not part of the community this time around, we'll be establishing a new community with different Metro State faculty every semester).

In the meantime, a useful tool for developing your self-awareness as a teacher, and one that we'll begin with when the faculty learning community meets, is the Teaching Goals Inventory. Designed as a critical first step in Classroom Assessment ("Once teachers know what their instructional goals are, and have determined the relative importance of those goals, they can begin to assess how well students are learning what they are trying to teach", Angelo and Cross), the TGI can also be a good first step in the process of course (re)design. Our conversation in the faculty learning community about what the TGI tells us with regard to our goals and values and what we want to be accomplishing with our course (re)designs will make for a very interesting conversation.

Citations:

Angelo, T.A. and Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

DiPietro, M., Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M., Fay, A., Lovett M.C., Norman, M.K. (2008). Defeating the Developer's Dilemma: An Online Tool for Individual Consultations. In Robertson, D.R. & Nilson, L.B. (Eds.), To improve the academy: Vol. 27. . Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (pp. 183-198). Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.

Weimer, M. (2002). Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Beginning Your New Semester

Though we're already a few days into it, it's not too late to put these practices in place to get your classes started on the right foot. You don't need to adopt all these practices. There are a few that everyone should do; others you can pick and choose what works for you.

1. Learn students' names.
   
2. Introduce yourself.
   
3. Ask students to introduce themselves.
   
4. Have students fill out a questionnaire. (I want to add to this the suggestion that you fill one out yourself to share with students).
   
5. Meet one-on-one with students.
   
6. Establish standard of grading. (This everyone should be sure to do for every class).
   

You can read more about each of these suggestions at the Faculty Focus post, "Building Student Engagement: First Class."

The Multiple Choice Option

I've always been skeptical toward multiple choice exams in my discipline (History), but this recent posting on Faculty Focus has led me at least to examine my skepticism. Mary Bart's argument is that multiple choice exams, when crafted carefully, can assess higher level thinking. She includes "10 tips for creating good multiple choice questions":

1. Don't make vocabulary unnecessarily difficult.
2. Make sure the "stem" (question) asks a complete question.
3. Don't ask questions about trivia.
4. Avoid negative items.
5. Avoid grammatical clues to the right answer.
6. Avoid "none of the above" and "all of the above."
7. Make all options roughly the same length.
8. Use common misconceptions or stereotypes as incorrect options.
9. Repeat keywords between the stem and the incorrect options.
10. Use interpretative exercises to get away from rote learning.

I can also accept her point that "One of the advantages of multiple choice tests is that they provide a fast and easy way to not only measure student learning, but to identify problem areas as well." This sort of real-time assessment of student learning can be really valuable to an instructor who takes student learning seriously. Metro State's faculty development conference, incidentally, will be featuring a session by Sheila Thompson on classroom assessment techniques for those who want to explore ways to continually assess student learning throughout the term of a course.

A Look at MSCD Faculty

In preparation for the Metro State faculty development conference on Feb. 6, I'm doing some research on career-stage distribution of MSCD tenure-track and tenured faculty. Now, there are several ways of delineating the stages of an academic career between early, mid, and late—number of years teaching, academic rank, age, etc. I will get into this more deeply at the conference workshop. For now, here are some interesting numbers I've come up with.

The median age of Metro State faculty is 50, which, by itself, is not particularly striking. On the other hand, I am struck that nearly a quarter, 22.6% are over the age of 60. That is a significant percentage of the faculty whom we can expect to retire over the next 5 to 8 years or so.

On the other hand, fully half the faculty at Metro State have been hired in the last 8 years, and this data includes any years they may have spent teaching on an adjunct contract before being hired into their tenure-track positions.

Does this mean we have a "bi-polar" career-stage distribution, with many old(ish) faculty, many young(ish) faculty, and not many in between? Well, not so fast. We don't seem to hire many very young people, which in academia could mean recently minted PhDs in their late twenties or early thirties—we hire people, on average, somewhat later in their lives. I still need to refine the data to support this hypothesis, but it seems likely to hold up.

Not knowing anything about the history of hiring binges and freezes at Metro State, we might expect a career-stage distribution graph to be bell-shaped, since the years one spends in the "middle" of a career tend to be longer than in either their early or late stages. Thus, more people should fit into that stage than the others, but again, that's not the case at MSCD. Here, instead, is what's going on:

1. By rank, where assistant professor=early career, associate professor=mid career, and full professor=late career, the curve is distinctly U-shaped.
   
2. By age, where <40=early career, 40-60=mid career, and >60=late career, the curve is bell shaped.
   
3. By years teaching at MSCD, where <10=early career, 10-30=mid career, and >30=late career, the curve shows decline (initially steep, then leveling somewhat).
   

How, then, can we characterize the career-stage distribution at Metro State?