Instructional / Course Design
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Learning Through Osmosis
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler The phrase “learning by osmosis” conjures ideas of sleeping with a textbook or sitting near the smart students. What about in the classroom? Lecturing while students passively listen is like letting the difference in osmotic pressure between the students’ brain and the instructor’s brain (or the classroom air) be the driving force to promote transport or diffusion of knowledge. This statement is paraphrased from a recent conversation with a faculty member about how faculty are expected to learn about the culture of their departments (another post, perhaps) and students are expected to learn when sitting listening in a classroom. As I learned in the conversation,…
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Formative Feedback For Improving the Teaching and Learning Experience
[social-bio] In January of 2012 I taught my first university level course in the College of Education. It went “OK”, but not great. I had a good rapport with many of the 24 students, but no overall sense of connections with the class as a whole. Some of the comments on the SEEQ at the end of the term really surprised me and made me question myself as an educator. Teaching students is not a required part of my job, but rather an opportunity, and I was left wondering whether I wanted to let the opportunity slip away. Instead, I looked over the SEEQ results for recurring themes and looked back on…
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Weeds, Cheating and Success
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler I remember pulling weeds in a vegetable garden and coming across a strong healthy canola plant whose seed must have drifted in from the neighbour’s field. Was it a weed? If it had grown in the field then it would be considered a strong specimen, but what about in a vegetable garden? What about milkweed, wildflowers or grass? Sharing ideas and drawing on one another’s skills to reach the best answer, process check or polish a report are valued skills in the workplace and even within group projects in classes. However, during a typical test these same behaviours would be considered cheating. In his post,…
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So You’re Thinking of Flipping your Class: We Can Help
[social-bio] Perhaps you’ve been hearing rumblings about flipped teaching. Maybe you even read my post about it in December (What is Flipped Teaching?). If you haven’t heard of it, flipped teaching is, “the process of moving lecture content from face-to-face class time to before class by assigning it as homework. This allows for more interactive and student-centred types of learning to take place during the scheduled class time. Flipped teaching often involves, but is not limited to, students viewing lecture videos as homework.” So, now that we’re all on the same page, I am pleased to announce a new support from the Gwenna Moss Centre that we’re referring to as…
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Reflecting On Your SEEQ Course Evaluations
[social-bio] Most of us dread, or at the least, have mixed feelings about receiving feedback on our teaching, especially from standardized course evaluation tools such as the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality instrument (SEEQ). However, many new insights may be gained by continuously reflecting on our actions as teachers and by opening ourselves up to a process of continual learning about pedagogy. In a pdf booklet entitled Students Rating Teaching, teachers are challenged and encouraged to reflect upon the quality, usefulness, and potential difficulties of SEEQ data in relation to their teaching practice as opposed to simply reading their SEEQ results (Lawall n.d.). This year when you receive your SEEQ…
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Anything But …
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Not exams. Not this example. Not that textbook again…Anything but that! Our rejection of a particular method or medium for teaching may be motivation enough to try something new. However, “Not ____” just rules out a single direction, leaving open all other possibilities. Deciding between the many alternatives involves setting a goal and sensing what features we want to change and what we want to retain. For example, “Not an exam” leaves open many possibilities depending on our goals. If we want to measure students’ learning of all material in the course, we can decide to keep the end-of-term timing of final exams. A second…
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Looking Back, Moving Forward
[social-bio] As the academic term draws to a close and after my marking is complete, I find myself looking back over the semester, determining which learning activities went well and why, the teaching goals I set forth for myself, where I succeeded and fell short, and what I should do differently the next time I teach. For me, the process of reflecting on my teaching practice, or “recapturing my experience, thinking about it, mulling it over, and evaluating it” (Boud, Keogh, & Walker 1985) begins on the last day of class when I ask my students to come prepared to tell me one significant thing they’ve learned or taken away…
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Richness of Research on Active Learning: Let’s Stand on the Shoulders of Giants (or at least Other Educators)
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and scholarship of teaching and learning research promote the benefits of active learning, student engagement, and faculty-student interaction with courses that challenge students, shake them out of the passive listener role, and engage them in collaboration with peers to improve student academic performance. Prior evidence and strategies are summarized for several disciplinary areas including. Cell biology Education by Deborah Allen & Kimberly Tanner Engineering Education by Smith, Sheppard, Johnson and Johnson or by Prince Physiology education by Joel Micheal In addition to research studies in many disciplines including: History and political science Geography and Environment studies For a…
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Syllabus Template Developed For Use at U of S
[social-bio] The syllabus is probably the most important document that you will provide your students during a class. It ideally conveys the learning outcomes, information on the methods of assessment, contact information for the instructor, time and locations for labs, required and supplemental readings, exam information, and other important details about the class. The University of Saskatchewan has a number of required items that must be included in the syllabus for any course (Academic Course Policy, 2011). They include: The type and schedule of term assignments with approximate due dates, as well as the type and schedule of term examinations Learning outcomes of the course and of the assignments and…
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Grades: Something to Lose, Something to Gain
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler At the start of each course, the syllabus outlines the assessments on which students’ marks will be based. Through this document, a rubric given with the assignment, or after receiving the marked up pages, students learn how we have chosen to grade. Specifically, they have learned if we are focused on loss or gain. We can frame grades as starting from nothing with everything to gain through phrases such as “Everyone starts with 0, work hard and you will earn marks on each assignment”. Whether a student’s goal is 50 or 90, they all start with zero and have nothing to lose. Assignments are marked…