Good question-making at the root of effective teaching--an interview with Ken Bain

In 2004, Ken Bain wrote about creating "natural critical learning environments" in his book What the Best College Teachers Do.  Presently, Dr. Bain is working on completing his new work What the Best College Students Did. 


The Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal features an interview with Dr. Bain in the second volume its International HETL Review. Dr. Bain takes the opportunity to expand on his ideas about teaching and research--how they are related without having to be in opposition to each other--and about the centrality of questions to both teaching and research: 

Rather than dwelling on the perceived conflicts between them (teaching and research), we need to explore ways that the learning of teacher and student can complement each other rather than stand in conflict. I think the most fruitful way of doing that may be in understanding the power and importance of good question-making in the success of each. The ability to ask good questions has long been recognized as central to research and publication success, but we also need to see its importance in cultivating someone else’s learning, and how, in turn, the ability to ask good questions to spark someone else’s learning can help drive a research agenda. Great teacher/scholars recognize that already. 

The connection is this: people are most likely to take a deep approach to their learning when they are trying to answer questions or solve problems that they, the learners, have come to regard as important, intriguing, or just beautiful. Yet in a formal educational environment, the learner is usually not in charge of the questions. We could solve that problem by putting the learners always in charge of all the questions, and some people have attempted to do just that. But while that has some benefits, it also has limitations. Novice learners cannot imagine some of questions that advanced learners have begun to consider. Thus, we need to have advanced learners (teacher/scholars) raising questions for novice learners (students) to think about.  

However, that often creates a gap between the conditions that prevail in a formal educational environment and the conditions that may stimulate deep learning. The great teachers have learned to fill that gap by asking questions that students will find important, intriguing, or just beautiful, and they manage to do so because of their own deep understanding born out of their own learning. Their own struggle to frame the questions that will provoke students often leads to new insights that will influence their research. Cultivating someone else’s learning entails more than asking great questions, but it is the necessary ingredient that underpins everything else. 

Classroom management workshop

The Judicial Affairs Office in Student Life will offer a "Student Conduct and Conflict Workshop" on Wednesday February 8. More details are at the Faculty Development Events Calendar.

It is not uncommon for our faculty to struggle with classroom management issues. Faculty who have attended this workshop in the past have found it helpful both in prevent classroom management problems and in dealing with problems if and when they arrive. From the workshop description on the Events Calendar:

In this workshop, we will be presenting information about the student code of conduct violations (academic dishonesty or behavioral), reporting procedures, how to work with disruptive students, and conflict resolution support for faculty and students.

Online resources at Delicious.com

The Web can be a tremendous source for online instructional resource and faculty development materials. To help you access the most useful of those materials, the Center for Faculty Development continuously sifts through relevant Web sites and "saves" the best by bookmarking them in Delicious.com.

If you haven't yet explored the online resources that are bookmarked and tagged under the MetroCFD profile of Delicious.com, you may be pleasantly surprised by the range of (mostly teaching related) resources found there. Topical tags help to organize the resources, and you can view all the tags in a word cloud.

Some of the online resources bookmarked at Delicious.com are the same as those made available at the CFD instructional resources Web page. Finally, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the MetroCFD profile to be notified whenever a new Web site or online resource is added to the collection.

Can we get students to come to our office hours?

In a recent post, Faculty Focus offers some tips for encouraging students to interact with their professors outside of class. Some of the tips (which students themselves generated in the course of 33 in-depth interviews) are pretty basic, like "be there for office hours." Others, though, are tips that can pretty easily be added to our teaching routines if we're not already doing them. For example:

Write your email and office hours on the board regularly, maybe even every class session at the beginning of the course. Say more times than you think necessary that you welcome questions, comments, and the chance to interact with students.

And

Offer tutorials during office hours and encourage small groups of students to attend. 

In sum, the authors state,

students do pay attention to those classroom behaviors that convey we care. If we vigilantly maintain our office hours and employ the strategies recommended by these students, then we can more actively engage students in academic discourse, facilitate a deeper understanding of our fields and their associated professions, and serve as better advisors and mentors. 

Lecture capture--a growing trend in higher education

Interested in knowing more about lecture capture and its pedagogical benefits?

CHECO, the Colorado Higher Ed Computing Organization, is sponsoring a day-long program on lecture capture on Tuesday February 7 in Lowry.

Description and Details:

The morning session will consist of a vendor exhibit that will facilitate hands on demos and interactive discussions. We currently have 7 vendors confirmed for this event; Cisco, Crestron, Desire To  Learn, Echo360, Mediasite, Panopto and Tegrity. The afternoon will consist of presentations from the Colorado Higher Ed community on the status, successes and challenges related to supporting lecture capture technology at their institutions. 

Date: February 7, 2012

Location: Lowry Conference Center, Denver CO

Time:

-          9am-1pm – Vendor exhibit

-          1pm-4pm – Lecture capture update from Colorado institutions

More details will be sent in January to those who register including maps, parking info and food options (as lunch will be ‘on your own’).


Although the event is free, registration is required. Registration is now open and available on the CHECO Web site.

The syllabus as literary work

I try to write my syllabi to reflect the attitude that teaching is a scholarly endeavor. As I was putting the final touches earlier this month on my syllabus for spring semester, I was reminded of the buzz last fall over the posting of a couple of David Foster Wallace's syllabi. You can find the actual syllabi here and here.

While I don't necessarily recommend these as model syllabi, it's always a useful exercise, I think, to exchange our ideas and attitudes about teaching. DFW's syllabi contain some gems about his own thoughts regarding teaching and the learning process. I especially like that he freely borrows from other professors' syllabi (thereby recognizing that teaching is a community endeavor that is made better by sharing) and cites them accordingly (demonstrating good practice to his students while also conveying that a syllabus is, in some respects, a scholarly document).

One example of where DFW borrowed from a colleague's syllabus:

English 67 is a seminar. By way of elucidation, please look at the following gloss from Prof (name removed)'s E67 syllabus for Fall '05: "This is a discussion-based course; it is not a lecture course. What we learn will be driven primarily by the questions, comments, ideas, and energies that you bring to our discussion. In other words, we will learn about texts by actively engaging them and each other in our regular meetings."

And he follows this up under Course Rules & Procedures with:

Even in a seminar course, it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can't always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good, serious students. On the other hand, as Prof. (name removed) points out supra, our class can't really function if there isn't student participation--it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways. There is, therefore, a small percentage of the final grade that will concern the quantity and quality of your participation in class discussions. But the truth is that I'm way more concerned about creating an in-class environment in which all students feel totally free to say what they think, ask questions, object, criticize, request clarification, return to a previous subject, respond to someone else's response, etc. Clinically shy students, or those whose best, most pressing questions and comments occur to them only in private, should do their discussing with me solo, outside class.

 

IRB Workshop for Undergraduate Research

Have you supervised undergraduate research projects, or are you interested in doing so? The undergraduate research project that you want to supervise may fall under the category of "human research" and require review by the human subjects review committee of the Institutional Review Board. Find out more by attending the upcoming workshop (Undergraduate) Research and the IRB Process on Thursday January 26 from 11am to 12:15pm in SI-1086. Be sure to register for this workshop at the Faculty Development Events Calendar.

Team-based learning in action

Duke-NUS (National University of Singapore) Medical School has produced this video to showcase their team-based instructional approach. To me, the video is valuable in that it shows how team-based learning combines the benefits of peer instruction with the rigor of working to solve conceptual problems.

Yes, Metro State is a far different educational context than Duke-NUS. Still, I think the video conveys a perspective on the role of the instructor that can be extremely useful to us:

As faculty (who practice team-based learning), we spend a lot of time writing the questions well... this is done behind the scenes. What we do not spend our time doing is talking to the students directly. It’s the students who talk.

Answers to some questions from affiliate faculty members

Earlier today I facilitated the workshop "Introduction to College Teaching at Metro State for New Affiliate Faculty." We were able to respond to some questions during the panel discussion, but not all.

Here are responses to some more of the questions submitted by participants in their "minute papers":

1. "How do you deal with students who complain about requirements?" If this question is referring to assignments that students are required to complete in the course, I think the best way to preempt these kinds of complaints is to show early and often how the assignments align with the course learning objectives. Then your answer can be, "you're required to do this in order to master the learning objectives of the course." It's when students don't see that alignment, I think, that they're more inclined to complain about a required assignment.
2. "Are faculty software downloads or discounts available (e.g. Adobe or Word)?" Yes! All affiliate faculty are entitled to the Microsoft Office suite of applications, which includes Word. Contact Information Technology to find out where to pick up the CD-Rom (you'll need to show your Metro State ID, and you can only receive one CD-Rom).
3. "I would like more teaching examples." Observing others' teaching is a great way to get ideas about your own teaching. One helpful resource (which I mentioned during the workshop) is Merlot. Specifically, look for the Elixr Case Studies of teaching for some great examples. If you're interested in seeing live examples of teaching, consider taking part in this semester's Peer Instructional Coaching cohort offered by the Center for Faculty Development. I will email a call for participation within a couple of weeks from now.

Several people mentioned that they would have liked to hear more about active learning and strategies to engage students. This will be a topic featured at the Spring Forum on March 30 In addition, because so many people mentioned it, I will offering a stand alone workshop sometime during the first half of the semester. Check the Faculty Development Events Calendar and this blog for the latest updates regarding workshops, etc.

Overcoming the oldest problem in pedagogy

A short article by Lee Shulman does an excellent job capturing both the challenges and the goals of educating our students. Shulman, who has been at the forefront of the movement for a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), focuses in on "the oldest problem of pedagogy":

What is the oldest problem of pedagogy? The appearance of learning, or illusory understanding, that is, the problem of people who appear to know something that they really don't know.

We often hear that we need to "engage" our students, and now we know why--so our students can overcome the problem of illusory understanding.

The only way we as teachers know whether our students understand something is by getting them to write or talk about it. As long as it remains inside their heads, we cannot teach, and in fact they don't know whether they understand it either. Deborah Meier (1995) once put it very well, in explaining why pedagogy was both straightforward and dauntingly difficult. She observed that, when properly understood, teaching is mainly listening, whereas learning is mainly talking.

So, students need plenty of opportunities to write and to talk, to make the "internal external, to render it what [Shulman has] called community property."

You can find resources at the CFD Web site to help you incorporate these opportunities into your courses. Specifically, click on the questions "What are my options for incorporating active learning into a course?" and "How do I incorporate collaborative, or peer to peer learning, in my course?" and you will be directed to additional resources. And if you know of online resources that are not referenced in the CFD Web site but should be, please let the staff know.

Citation: Shulman, Lee S. (2000). Teacher development: Roles of domain expertise and pedagogical knowledge. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 21(1): 129-135.

  

"Learning is not a spectator sport."

"Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers." This line comes from Chickering and Gamson's (1987) "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." It had been a while since I last read the short article, but the "learning is not a spectator sport" line came to mind recently as I listened to "Don't Lecture Me," a feature production of American Radio Works. The program makes a strong case for  active engagement of students in the classroom:

The fact that people learn better when they're actively engaged is one of the central findings from an explosion of cognitive research conducted over the last several decades. Another major finding is that short-term memory is very limited - your brain can only store so much at once. A lot of the information presented in a typical lecture comes at people too fast and is quickly forgotten. Eric Mazur says lecturing is a waste of time. It's not an effective way for students to learn information; reading the textbook is better. 

What I liked about the program is that it gave a real feel to what learning is like in the classroom when students are doing more than sitting like spectators.

The program aired locally on public radio a few months ago. I only now had the chance to listen to it with focused attention. I recommend it as what will surely be an interesting and thought-provoking diversion during the Winter break. You can access the audio file and the transcript here.

When is the right time to ask for student feedback?

Many faculty ask students for feedback around the middle of the semester in order to be able to make mid-course adjustments. And then, of course, there is the end-of-semester Student Ratings of Instruction instrument that is intended both to furnish numerical data for evaluation and also to elicit student comments helpful for improvement. The problem with relying on the Student Ratings of Instruction, though, is that the results are returned to us too late often to do anything about whatever points the students raise.

There are other (probably better) ways to get end-of-semester student feedback for your own purposes of improvement, and I'll be writing about those in the upcoming November Newsletter from the Center for Faculty Development.

In the meantime, Susan Codone offers this simple yet effective way to elicit student feedback at any time in the semester: The Plus/Delta method. Why wait for the middle or the end of the semester when sometimes we want to know what's working for students and what's not working for students at multiple points in the term?

Reflections upon teaching improvement: Why?

At the annual POD (Professional and Organizational Development) conference this past weekend, Peter Seldin shared some research results that the number one most frequent practice designed to improve teaching and reported by educational developers is faculty self-reflection on teaching performance. In 1990, reflection was only the eighth most frequent practice reported by educational developers. Why did reflection move from being a relatively unimportant practice (ranked in 1990 as less frequently practiced than "informal assessment by colleagues" and "senior faculty working closely with new instructors") to the one that is now the most frequently practiced (reported as more frequent, now, than "systematic ratings by students" and "workshops that help faculty use technology in their teaching")?

The answer, John Zubizarreta suggest, is in the power of the "why" question. Reflection is much more than a description of activities; when prompted by "why" questions, reflection can lead us to deep investigations and (re)assessments of our teaching practices. The result is often real, meaningful, change.

From my own teaching, here are some "why" questions that might serve as entrées into productive reflection:

• Why do I wait until 2 weeks before deadlines to distribute essay prompts to my students? (This is an actual "why" question that I asked myself about a year ago and that directly resulted in a change of practice).
• Why don't I use PowerPoint?
• Why is my attendance policy as lax as it is?
• Why (in some classes) do I give quizzes?
• Why do I write some names, dates, and terms on the board and not others?
• Why do I use images and visuals as infrequently as I do?

The list could go on and on...

What are your "why" questions? The Center for Faculty Development is exploring offering an Academic Portfolio Workshop in May during which participants will engage in self-reflection, share results and ideas, and produce drafts of their portfolios. Generating "why" questions and then exploring answers to them will likely be part of the workshop. Stay tuned for details.

Source: Peter Seldin, Elizabeth Miller, and John Zubizarreta, "Improving College Teaching," workshop presented at the POD Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA, October 2011.

Why Change?

In an interview with Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal, Dee Fink shares his ideas for why the "traditional" approaches to teaching, which have for long (centuries, even) served society well, are no longer the best ways to teach.

His two reasons:

The first is all the evidence, using multiple criteria, that we are not currently doing a good job in higher education.  One of these is a study by Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University.  He did some careful research on how well American students were achieving eight kinds of learning we would all like to see in college graduates, e.g., how to communicate, how to think, how to live with diversity, preparing for a global society, etc.  His conclusion for all eight kinds of learning was the same:  Students are achieving each of these desirable kinds of learning to a degree but nowhere near what they could be and should be achieving.

And secondly:

The second source of concern is the new kinds of learning that are being identified as important in the 21st century.  AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities) recently asked a major set of civic and corporate leaders what kinds of learning they thought were essential today.  They identified, among others: Information literacy, teamwork and problem solving abilities, intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning, integrative learning, preparing for lifelong learning.

But there is an even more succinct and powerful reason for changing how we teach: Most faculty, Fink claims, already want to change, and so the case in favor of change is one that can be readily digested by college faculty: 

When working with professors, we need to recognize that they obviously do not enjoy seeing disinterested students in their courses, or the evidence of lackluster learning in the final exams.  If we can help them see that new ways of teaching can make dramatic changes in both these situations, it would go a long way toward helping professors take a more positive attitude toward learning about new ways of teaching. 

Read the full interview at the HETL portal, and if you would like to consult more resources, see here, here, and here. (Tip: You can find many online resources about course design at the CFD's Delicious.com social bookmarking site, http://delicious.com/metrocfd/course_design).

Making Your PowerPoint Iconic

Today's Faculty Development Updates post comes from Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, Teaching and Learning Center, Eastern Kentucky University. It is made available by the 2011-12 Teaching Issues Writing Consortium.

Ever receive an email with one of those High Importance icons brightening your Inbox? The point is that the icon, being more visual than the printed word, indicates something powerful to the brain. Maybe that’s why those stars we all craved on our elementary school papers meant so much to us.

Humans are visual learners. Most of us have learned to apply that principle to our PowerPoints (PPTs), but we’d like to suggest another addition to your PPTs that is sure to improve deep learning and student learning outcomes. 

In Learning to Think Things Through (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall: 2009), Gerald Nosich define fundamental and powerful concepts as “those basic concepts that lie at the heart of a discipline or course” (198). And if you haven’t heard us explain the importance of beginning each class with the key concept(s) you’ll be discussing that day, you’ve heard someone talk about the value of daily learning objectives.

So here’s our tip. One way you can minimize PPT clutter while magnifying student learning is through icons. On your PPTs, get in the habit of starting each day with a slide that lists those fundamental and powerful concepts (FPCs). And to make your students metacognitive, let them know these introductory concepts are key by adding an icon beside the FPCs.

For instance, since we want to hammer our students over the head with FPCs, we use as our icon Mjollnir, so whenever they see the hammer of the Norse god Thor beside a key concept, they know—in their terms—it will be on the test.

Now what would happen to student learning if every course in our discipline, our college, or even our university adopted the same PPT symbol? That’s an inquiry for another time.

Submitted by:

Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet

Teaching and Learning Center

Eastern Kentucky University

www.tlc.eku.edu/

(For more from Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, see their feature in the December 2008 issue of Thriving in Academe, "Keeping Your Classroom C.R.I.S.P.")

It's time for mid-semester check-ups

A post from last week on ProfHacker reminds us that it's time to conduct mid-semester course assessments--those formative check-ups that tell us how we're doing in time to make adjustments to our courses. The timing of that post coincided with a workshop sponsored by the Center for Faculty Development that presented numerous options for framing midterm assessment instruments, including the thoroughly tested and widely applicable "College and University Classroom Environment Inventory."  Maryellen Weimer has written about this instrument here, and it is available for the asking if you email the Center for Faculty Development.

A simpler approach suggested in the ProfHacker post is to ask your students to write responses to these questions: What's going well? What needs improvement? What can the students do to improve the class? What can the instructor do to improve the class?

Even a simple approach like this that takes no more than 10 or 15 minutes of class time can convey to students that you care about their learning while providing you with some rich feedback useful for teaching improvement.

This week in faculty development...

A lot is going on this week, including  workshops that you can still register to attend:

• Career Advising 101--develop a best-practice tool box to help students with their career preparation. This workshop is offered twice. The first offering is TODAY, Tuesday 9/27, from 12:30 to 1:45 in SO-111 and then again on Friday 9/30 from 10-11:15am in NC-1316.
• Mid-semester check-up--work with Jeff Loats (Physics) and Mark Potter (Center for Faculty Development) to develop your tailored approach to asking students for mid-semester course feedback. Wednesday 9/28, 9:30-10:45 in Science 1086.
• Accessing and Integrating iTunes Media into your Curriculum--iTunes is more than music. Learn how to find and access everything from in-depth interviews with Chinua Achebe to films of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake-most for free and all available to share with your students. Friday 9/30 from 9:30 to 10:45am in the Auraria Library Jackson Enhanced Learning Center.

Register for any of the above workshops at http://www.mscd.edu/cfd/calendar/.

Help Students Develop Paraphrasing Skills to Help Deter Plagiarism

Today's Faculty Development Updates post comes from Claudia Stinny, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at University of West Florida. It is made available by the 2011-12 Teaching Issues Writing Consortium.


Although many discussions of academic integrity and plagiarism focus on failures in ethical reasoning, student problems with good authorship practices are often motivated by weaknesses in reading comprehension or skill in writing paraphrases (e.g. Roig, 2007). Students frequently have problems paraphrasing ideas from primary sources because their understanding of the original work is weak. Sometimes these problems manifest as an over-reliance on quotations. The student who has difficulty paraphrasing might string together quoted material to create a paper and contribute few, if any, thoughts stated in the student's own language. Some students may attempt to disguise their reliance on quoted material by omitting the quotation marks (and, even worse, omitting a citation) and then discover they are now charged with plagiarism.

Use an in-class reading and paraphrasing activity to promote comprehension of source material and good authorship practices

·         Assign a brief source passage for students to read and then write a one paragraph summary in which they describe or paraphrase an idea or argument presented by the author of the reading. If you think this part of the activity will take too much time, assign this in advance and require students to bring their written paragraphs to class.

·         Use a pair-share activity in which students share their one-paragraph paraphrases with one another and evaluate how accurately they describe the original idea or argument and how well they use original language when writing their description.

·         After discussing their paragraphs in small groups, ask the students to draft an accurate paraphrase of the original passage as a group. Describe the methods used in your discipline for providing a citation for the original passage and include an appropriate citation in the draft created by the class.

This exercise will give students practice in writing appropriate paraphrases. It will also serve as an immediate source of feedback about how well they understood the original passage and the concepts discussed. When the class develops a paraphrase that is both accurate and original, misunderstandings of the original ideas will be clarified and corrected. The class will also get direct practice with good authorship practices.

Based in part on an audio workshop, Avoiding the Plagues & Pains of Plagiarism¸ presented by Caroline L. Eisner, Academic Coaching & Writing (www.AcademicCoachingandWriting.org), February 1, 2011.

Roig, M. (2007). Some reflections on plagiarism: The problem of paraphrasing in the sciences. European Science Editing, 33, 38-41.

Submitted by:

Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D., Director

Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

University of West Florida

www.uwf.edu/cutla/

Peer Instructional Coaching--Last call for participants

This week on Wednesday 9/14, a cohort of faculty will be meeting at 2pm at the Center for Faculty Development to form a peer instructional coaching cohort. More information about this opportunity is at Center for Faculty Development Web site.

Experience from past semesters has shown that for a cohort approach to peer observation and peer coaching to be effective, we will need to take the time to get to know one another, particularly around the topic of teaching, and build trust. This is why the cohort will be meeting twice before pairs break off and observe one another’s classes. But don’t worry, we won’t be falling backward into each other’s arms!

It's not too late to become part of this cohort. Cohort members have some light shared reading to do before this first meeting. To receive those readings and to be added to the list for Wednesday, email Mark Potter.

Announcing the fall-semester cohort of Peer Instructional Coaching

Formerly "Peer Observation of Instruction for Continuous Improvement," Peer Instructional Coaching is an initiative designed to take the threat and risk out of peer classroom observations and make them useful and relevant for Metro State faculty.

Participants benefit both from observing and from being observed. Past participants have remarked that the experience:

• enabled one another to see how different students in different disciplines interact with their teachers.
• provided the opportunity to see how teachers in different departments approached their teaching.
• opened their perspectives to very different teaching styles.
• provided actual ideas and constructive feedback.

Additional information, including expectations and instructions for joining this semester's cohort, is at the Peer Instructional Coaching page of the CFD Web site.