Educational Theory
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High quality, respectful classroom dialogue
Summary: High-quality, respectful classroom dialogue can enhance student learning and understanding. How can you create an open, healthy, and inclusive learning environment? Date: August 15, 2024 High quality, respectful classroom dialogue is essential in helping student learning. When students are engaged in actively thinking about their own learning and discussing it with others, they are more likely to understand deeply. If students are just listening to an expert talking without the interaction, they are less likely to remember the learning 6 months later. However, understanding more deeply and remembering more works best if the interaction in class is focused on the most important learning and it is safe and encouraged…
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Building Broad Minds: Active learning strategies for large classrooms
Building broad minds is not about back filling. Broad minds are the byproduct of encountering diverse ideas, thinking deeply about them, and integrating those ideas into our own worldviews and cognitive frameworks. In higher education, the opportunity to be exposed to the thinking of a wide variety of disciplines usually happens at the first year level. However, those are also often large courses where the primary method of instruction is listening to your professor speak. To actually get broad minds, our learning activities have to be active, even in the large classrooms where active learning strategies are limited by the room, and even when students are first encountering the subject…
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Getting More Active (and getting more learning)
Summary: Boost engagement and deepen learning with active learning strategies. Discover tips to make your classroom more interactive and effective. Date of publishing: December 20, 2018 This post focuses on easy changes to make your course more active. Step 1- Clarify the purpose of active learning in your class Active learning is time in your classroom when students are actively thinking, talking, and making sense of ideas. It is contrasted with passive learning, when students are being receptive (listening, note taking, etc.) An individual class is typically considered active when 60% or more of the time is students thinking and talking, rather than the instructor explaining. To get started with…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Theory, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, SoTL
What is the science behind your course design madness?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Fred Phillips, Professor, Baxter Scholar, Edwards School of Business As we begin another year, students are encountering some of the course design decisions made by their instructors. Some will be introduced to “flipped classrooms”, where students prepare by reading/viewing/responding to a learning prompt before it is formally taken up in class. Others will encounter new learning tools, such as adaptive reading systems that embed interactive questions within reading materials with the goal of assessing each student’s comprehension so that new topics can be delivered the moment he or she is ready to comprehend them. Just as instructors have questions about these approaches and tools, students are likely…
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Practice Problem Sets: Issues of Timing and Mixing
[social_share/] [social-bio] While looking for resources for a faculty member in the sciences who was interested in incorporating more problem sets into her lectures to increase student engagement, I came upon a 2007 article by Rohere and Taylor, appearing in Instructional Science. This article describes two experiments where particular timing and mixing of mathematics practice problems improved learning. The authors point out that it is usual for practice problems to be assigned: • immediately following the relevant lesson (massed), and • for problems of the same type to be grouped together (blocked). Through Rohere and Taylor’s experiments, they found that spacing the timing of two sets of practice problems 1…
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High Impact Teaching Practices
[social_share/] [social-bio] NOTE: There are ten high impact educational practices that reportedly increase student success. You can access that list and brief description at https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm, http://www.uwgb.edu/outreach/highimpact/assets/pdfs/kinzieHO2012.pdf, or watch this short 6-minute video: For the back-story—the elements that make these high impact practices check out http://us.tamu.edu/Faculty-Administrators/High-Impact-Learning. A summary is provided here: High impact practices have these elements in common: 1. EFFORTFUL is not a bad thing. In fact, “effortful” stimulates learning and increases retention of that which is learned. “Effortful” is also engaging and focuses attention for an extended period. One of the greatest disservices we can do for students is to reduce the required effort and make things easy. 2.…
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Visual Note Taking As A New Way of Listening
[social_share/] [social-bio] Text notes are not the best method of note taking for many students. Some do better simply listening and taking it in, while others thrive on visual representations of what is being said. I just watched Giulia Forsythe at Brock University describe her visual note taking. The video is about 4 minutes long and brings together the why and the how of this technique. It makes great sense from a “how the brain learns” perspective, and can be viewed below. After watching the video I did a little digging and came upon this resource that is indeed comprehensive if you want to learn more—a LOT more about visual note-taking using…
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Recipe for SoTL
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Many a metaphor is used to make new ideas feel more familiar. I’m an avid baker, so I wanted to share this alternative sweet way of seeing the elements and processes involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Let me know if you’ve got something cooking. 1 cup questions, concerns or new possibilities 2 cups curiosity and excitement for your teaching and your students 1/2 cup reading literature inside your discipline about teaching courses and students like yours (see for example the list at http://pod.nku.edu/sotldisc.asp) 1/2 cup reading literature from educators in other disciplines with similar questions or approaches (see the list at…
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Reducing Confusion and Improving Teaching by Sharing Who We Are as a Discipline
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler The Book: The University and its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning Within and Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries. Edited by Carolin Kreber (2009). Routledge, Taylor and Francis* Each time I meet with individuals from across campus I am reminded how disciplines are not just collections of faculty, rather they encompass specific ways of knowing: What constitutes evidence? What questions do we ask? What ways do we conduct research and to what end? Such answers form the epistemological foundation guiding our scholarly activities. However, this foundation is often implicit, not explicit, and thus a mystery for students. The result? The encounter of student and instructor can degenerate into an…