Instructional Strategies
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Effective – By Design
[social_share/] [social-bio] I just observed in a large first-year class that has incorporated an undergraduate research experience. Today one third of the class attended to work on operationalizing their research questions into items for a survey in their small groups. Last week I observed a whole group lecture. The differences are notable: On lecture day, students were packing up and leaving by 10:13 (the class wasn’t over. Some were just leaving.) Today students had to be reminded that the class was over and then they started to leave. On lecture day there were many more students using computers and smart phones and—from where I sat—not all were looking at the…
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Using Google Hangouts to Bring in Guest Speakers
[social_share/] [social-bio] This post was originally published on Heather Ross’s blog on February 28, 2014. I’m considering myself very fortunate that I’m the instructor for Introduction to Learning Technologies. I get to meet with students in the blended cohort. I get to communicate with participants in both groups through email, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and a couple of weeks ago I got to sit down and have a Google Hangout with John Boyer, a geography professor at Virginia Tech. He’s done some amazing things with learning technologies in his World Regions course. I started following John some time ago on Twitter and he was kind enough to respond to my…
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WOW!! Polar Bears, Tundra, Teams AND Learning…
[social_share/] [social-bio] Ryan Brook teaches Animal Science 475.3 Field Studies in Arctic Ecosystems and Aboriginal Peoples and about 120 students have taken the course in the ten years he has been teaching it. Ryan has spent twenty summers on the Hudson’s Bay coast. Here is the course description: This field-based travel course will provide hands-on research experience in natural ecosystems in the sub-arctic of the Hudson Bay coast in northern Manitoba at the interface between animals, people, and the environment. This experiential course is an intensive introduction to and connection between the ecology and Aboriginal cultures of the sub-arctic. This is a paired course with the University of Manitoba so…
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What? A Menu of Assessment Options?
[social_share/] [social-bio] I have recently come upon a few interesting ideas about the conditions we create for assessment in higher education, especially with respect to deterring academic dishonesty. Standing out to me right now is a 2013 book I’ve been reading by James Lang titled “Cheating Lessons.” This book provides inspiration, encouragement, and practical advice to teachers in higher education. Lang’s premise is that cheating is an inappropriate response by students to environments that convey an emphasis on performance within the context of extremely high stakes and where extrinsic motivators overpower the “intrinsic joy or utility of the task itself” (p. 30). Lang points his readers to an innovative assessment…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, General, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
Four Student Misconceptions About Learning
[social_share/] [social-bio] The main section of this blog post is a reprint of an article from Faculty Focus by Maryellen Welmer. It follows a brief introduction by Nancy Turner. I thought readers of this blog would be interested in the article reprinted below on common student misconceptions about learning. These points are usefully discussed openly with students at the start of a course or year of study but are also points for faculty to be aware of when planning curriculum and learning experiences. Both explicit discussion of the misconceptions alongside curriculum, assessment and session design to implicitly counter their effects (specific examples for each are included in the text of…
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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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Supporting Your Flipped Classroom with Open Resources
[social_share/] [social-bio] We’ve talked about flipped classrooms in this space before. In a nutshell, flipped classrooms involve taking the regular lecture style content out of the classroom and assigning it as homework prior to coming to class. The majority of the time, this involves having the students watch videos, often created by the instructor, to prepare for class. Recently I came across the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and have considered how it would couple with a flipped classroom. The Open Learning Initiative “is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. [Their] aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute…
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Variations on Think Pair Share
[social_share/] [social-bio] In preparing to teach about active learning methods this week, I came across an interesting variation of think pair share developed by Johnson, Johnson, & Smith (1991) called Formulate Share Listen Create. If you aren’t familiar with it, the think pair share is a versatile activity that can be done in many creative ways during a class. It combines discussion with an application of course content, while providing think time for problem-solving and/or reflection. Think: ask an engaging question or pose an interesting problem; students are given a minute to think about or write down their responses Pair: Students share responses with each other and re-evaluate Share: Instructor…
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Got the Group Project Blues?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Last week I gave my students back their group project assignments. They actually did quite a superb job, across the board. I asked them to provide me with comments on their own contribution, using a rubric I developed that was my adaptation and a shorter version of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) “teamwork” rubric that can be found at http://www.aacu.org/VALUE/rubrics/. And, then I also left it open if they wanted to share any comments with me about the teamwork demonstrated in their group. I knew because of some individual requests for guidance that most of the groups had encountered some conflict or difficulty and a…
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Experiencing and Embracing Controversy in the Classroom
[social_share/] [social-bio] Students in the leadership classes I have taught report general personal discomfort with conflict. They also report enjoying (and learning from) engaging classroom discussions. Providing students with a debating experience in class responds to both quite nicely. My post today is about a teaching strategy I have successfully used twice now, called “structured controversy.” Structured controversy is ultimately an active learning activity where small teams of students (3 or 4) prepare for and then argue different sides of the same issue with different opponents in a rotating cycle. Groups each take a turn arguing the affirmative and the negative, but arguing against a different group each time. Needless…