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Sara Thompson

Harvard Seeks to Jolt University Teaching - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop.
  • Such approaches would demand much more of students and faculty. Students should be made to grapple with the material and receive authentic and explicit practice in thinking like an expert, Mr. Wieman said. Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information.
  • Higher education once was immune, he said, until the spread of online learning, which will allow lower-cost providers to extend into the higher reaches of the marketplace. "Higher education," he said, "is vulnerable to disruption." And, while students are changing, several speakers described conventional teaching approaches as being ineffective.
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  • "We assume that telling people things without asking them to actively process them results in learning," Mr. Wieman said. The conference, which also featured demonstrations of innovative approaches to teaching, was the first event in a new Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching
  • Take, for example, the lecture, which came up for frequent shellacking throughout the day. It is designed to transfer information, said Eric Mazur, professor of physics at Harvard. But it does not fully accomplish even this limited task. Lectures set up a dynamic in which students passively receive information that they quickly forget after the test. "They're not confronted with their misconceptions," Mr. Mazur said. "They walk out with a false sense of security."
  • The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context.
  • Asking students to explain concepts or to teach one another the material they have just learned are also effective.
  • Writing is often an effective pedagogical tool, too, several speakers said. For his history of psychology course, Mr. Roediger asks his students to send him short essays before each class meets. They respond to the reading. (Others at the conference who use this method said they sometimes ask their students to identify outstanding questions or relevant areas of their reading that have been left unexplored.) Mr. Roediger reads the one-page essays before class and works their thoughts into his comments.
Sara Thompson

Course Planning & Teaching Resources :: Iowa State U, Center for Excellence in Learning... - 0 views

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    Incredible list of resources about teaching -- course planning, classroom management, learning activities, assessment and more. Wealth of information here. 
Sara Thompson

Essay on making student learning the focus of higher education | Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Culture -- in higher education, and in our society -- is at the heart of the matter.
  • We have reduced K-12 schooling to basic skill acquisition that effectively leaves most students underprepared for college-level learning. We have bastardized the bachelor’s degree by allowing it to morph into a ticket to a job (though, today, that ticket often doesn’t get you very far). The academy has adopted an increasingly consumer-based ethic that has produced costly and dangerous effects: the expectations and standards of a rigorous liberal education have been displaced by thinly disguised professional or job training curriculums; teaching and learning have been devalued, deprioritized, and replaced by an emphasis on magazine rankings; and increased enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, and more research grants have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision-making.
  • The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.
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  • Degrees have become deliverables because we are no longer willing to make students work hard against high standards to earn them.
  • Rethinking higher education means reconstituting institutional culture by rigorously identifying, evaluating and challenging the many damaging accommodations that colleges and universities, individually and collectively, have made (and continue to make) to consumer and competitive pressures over the last several decades. What do we mean by “damaging accommodations?
  • We mean the allocation of increasing proportions of institutional resources to facilities, personnel, programs and activities that do not directly and significantly contribute to the kind of holistic, developmental and transformative learning that defines higher learning.
  • We mean the deplorable practice of building attractive new buildings while offering lackluster first- and second-year courses taught primarily by poorly paid and dispirited contingent faculty.
  • We mean the assumption that retention is just keeping students in school longer, without serious regard for the quality of their learning or their cumulative learning outcomes at graduation.
  • The primary problem is that the current culture of colleges and universities no longer puts learning first -- and in most institutions, that culture perpetuates a fear of doing so. Isolated examples to the contrary exist, but are only the exceptions that prove the rule.
  • In calling for the kind of serious, systemic rethinking that directly and unflinchingly accepts the challenge of improving undergraduate higher education, we are asking for four things; taken together, they demand, and would catalyze, a profound, needed, and overdue cultural change in our colleges and universities.
  • 1. The widespread acceptance and application of a new and better touchstone for decision-making in higher education, linked to a strong framework of essential, core principles. A touchstone is a standard, or criterion, that serves as the basis for judging something; in higher education, that touchstone must be the quality and quantity of learning. A touchstone and a clear conceptual framework link our advocacy for change to a powerful set of ideas, commitments, and principles against which to test current policies, practices, and proposals for reform.
  • 2. A comprehensive re-evaluation of undergraduate education and experience guided by those core principles. This must occur both nationally, as an essential public conversation, and within the walls of institutions of all types, missions, and sizes.
  • 3. The leadership and actual implementation and renewal of undergraduate higher education needs to be led by the academy itself, supported by boards of trustees, higher education professional organizations, and regional accrediting bodies alike. Such rethinking ought to be transparent, informed by public conversation, and enacted through decisions based on the new touchstone, improving the quality and quantity of learning.
  • 4. Learning assessment must become inextricably linked to institutional efficacy. The formative assessment of learning should become an integral part of instruction in courses and other learning experiences of all types, and the summative assessment of learning, at the individual student, course, program, and institution levels should be benchmarked against high, clear, public standards.
  • Cultural problems require cultural solutions, starting with a national conversation about what is wrong, and what is needed, in higher education. The country should reasonably expect higher education to lead this conversation. For real change to occur, discussions about the quality and quantity of learning in higher education and the need for reform must occur at multiple levels, in many places, and over a significant period of time -- most importantly on campuses themselves
  • If enough change occurs in enough places, and if our public expectations remain high and consistent, learning may become the touchstone for decision-making; the quality and quantity of learning -- documented by rigorous assessment -- may become both each institution’s greatest concern and the basis for comparisons between various colleges and universities
  • Richard P. Keeling is principal, and Richard H. Hersh is senior consultant, for Keeling & Associates, a higher education consulting practice. They are authors of the recent book, We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), from which this essay is partly excerpted.
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    The core explanation is this: the academy lacks a serious culture of teaching and learning. When students do not learn enough, we must question whether institutions of higher education deliver enough value to justify their costs. Resolving the learning crisis will therefore require fundamental, thoroughgoing changes in our colleges and universities.
Mark Lindner

SearchReSearch: What is AND about, really? - 0 views

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    One question I hear quite a bit is this: Don't we have to teach the basics of Boolean search to our students? The answer, from a Google perspective is this: We teach Boolean searching only for using traditional database systems.
Sara Thompson

Classroom.NEXT: Engaging Faculty and Students in Learning Space Design | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

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    The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University undertook a project to find out what a classroom would look like if it were designed by faculty and students-and then to build that classroom. The goal was to promote innovation in learning space design and to advance instructors' understanding of how classroom design impacts teaching and learning. Classroom.NEXT initiated a campus-wide dialogue on the design of informal and formal learning spaces, and faculty, students, and administrators identified flexibility and interactivity as key attributes to be promoted in all Texas Wesleyan learning spaces. Collaboration, particularly student-faculty collaboration, was a central component of the success of Classroom.NEXT. Faculty participants commented that they learned as much from their students about learning space design and technology as they did from the research.
Sara Thompson

Student success courses catch on, slowly, at community colleges | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Community colleges can improve graduation rates by offering a course that teaches students how to navigate college with lessons on study skills, time management and how to find the bursar's office. Yet while "student success" courses are increasingly common, resistance remains strong at many community colleges.
Sara Thompson

Can You Put that in the Form of a Question? | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • One of their assignments is to interview a researcher in their field. This year, since the students had a nice mix of majors from across the curriculum, we used reports from the interviews as an opportunity to analyze on how research traditions vary from one discipline to another and how these experts’ processes differ from those of non-experts.
  • One thing that many students remarked on as they reported on their interviews: the activities that define research are enormously varied from one discipline to another. The process a researcher goes through to examine the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote one of his history plays is a world apart from what a researcher does to develop a new vaccine or what an ethnographer does when studying an isolated culture in Brazil.
  • The scientists all had co-authors; the social scientists were a mix of solo and collaborative projects, and the humanists all performed solo acts. And yet, it became clear that all of them were working within an ongoing conversation. None of them was doing work that didn’t draw on and respond to the work of others.
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  • Every interview subject conducted some sort of a literature review as part of any research project
  • Every researcher described some strategies for keeping up with new developments in their area of expertise, all of which involved some scanning of new publications and some personal contact with individuals exploring the same territory.
  • For most, presenting research at conferences was a common part of bringing their research to completion. For all, writing up results for publication was an important final step, and they seemed acutely aware of the pecking order for publication venues in their field.
  • (In contrast, undergraduates mostly encounter articles within databases, called up by key words, not as artifacts within a particular journal which carries clout.)
  • One thing the students all gained through these interviews was an appreciation that research is not a matter of finding answers in other people’s publications. Every scholar interviewed described how they had asked a question that nobody had asked before, a question they couldn’t answer themselves until they had completed the research. It struck me that so much of what undergraduates experience as “research” is very nearly the opposite, a process of uncovering answers others have already arrived at.
  • I’m also thinking about what these interviews said collectively about how real research is conducted. It makes me a little crazy when students abandon a truly interesting question because they can’t find sources to quote that provide the answer, or when they change their topic based on what they can find easily. Or (shudder) when they say they've written their paper, but need help finding five sources to cite. Clearly, they are not learning how to do research; they aren't even learning what research is.  What I would really, really like is to figure out how to give every student the experience of not worrying so much about getting the right answers, but learning how to ask a really good question. The kind they won't find answered in the library.
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    "I teach a course in the spring called Information Fluency... It's an upper division undergraduate course pitched to students who are planning to go to graduate school, giving them a chance to learn more about the way the literature of their field works as well as generally how to use library and internet tools for research."
Sara Thompson

New interactive teaching techniques | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2012 - 0 views

  • The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Astonishingly, the test showed that their introductory courses had taught them “next to nothing,”
  • “They had a bag of tricks, formulas to apply. But that was solving problems by rote. They floundered on the simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”
  • More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur—and this is the crux of the method. You’re a student and you’ve only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it’s not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces.”
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  • Reviewing the test of conceptual understanding, Mazur twice tried to explain one of its questions to the class, but the students remained obstinately confused. “Then I did something I had never done in my teaching career,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t you discuss it with each other?’” Immediately, the lecture hall was abuzz as 150 students started talking to each other in one-on-one conversations about the puzzling question. “It was complete chaos,” says Mazur. “But within three minutes, they had figured it out. That was very surprising to me—I had just spent 10 minutes trying to explain this. But the class said, ‘OK, We’ve got it, let’s move on.’
  • Interactive pedagogy, for example, turns passive, note-taking students into active, de facto teachers who explain their ideas to each other and contend for their points of view.
  • Interactive learning triples students’ gains in knowledge as measured by the kinds of conceptual tests that had once deflated Mazur’s spirits, and by many other assessments as well.
  • Peer-instructed students who’ve actively argued for and explained their understanding of scientific concepts hold onto their knowledge longer.
  • This innovative style of learning grew into “peer instruction” or “interactive learning,”
  • “Now, think of how you became good at it,” he says next. Audience members, supplied with wireless clickers, can choose from several alternatives: trial and error, apprenticeship, lectures, family and friends, practicing. Data from thousands of subjects make “two things stand out,” Mazur says. “The first is that there is a huge spike at practicing—around 60 percent of the people select ‘practicing.’” The other thing is that for many audiences, which often number in the hundreds, “there is absolutely zero percent for lectures. Nobody cites lectures.”
  • The active-learning approach challenges lecturers to re-evaluate what they can accomplish during class that offers the greatest value for students. Mazur cites a quip to the effect that lectures are a way of transferring the instructor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either.
  • So I began to ask my students to read my lecture notes before class, and then tell me what questions they have [ordinarily, using the course’s website], and when we meet, we discuss those questions.”
  • Students find a neighbor with a different answer and make a case for their own response. Each tries to convince the other. During the ensuing chaos, Mazur circulates through the room, eavesdropping on the conversations. He listens especially to incorrect reasoning, so “I can re-sensitize myself to the difficulties beginning learners face.” After two or three minutes, the students vote again, and typically the percentage of correct answers dramatically improves. Then the cycle repeats.
  • ‘We’ve never done a problem of this kind.’ I tell them, ‘If you had done a problem of this kind, then by definition, this would not be a problem.’ We have to train people to tackle situations they have not encountered before.
  • “It’s not easy. You get a lot of student resistance,” he continues. “You should see some of the vitriolic e-mails I get. The generic complaint is that they have to do all the learning themselves. Rather than lecturing, I’m making them prepare themselves for class—and in class, rather than telling them things, I’m asking them questions. They’d much rather sit there and listen and take notes.
  • In addition to student resistance, there is architectural resistance. “Most classrooms—more like 99.9 percent—on campus are auditoriums,”
fleschnerj

Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos - 0 views

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    Just a video explaining a novel approach to teaching.
Sara Thompson

A Model of Learning Objectives : Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy - 1 views

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    Really great visual cross-section of cognitive process with knowledge dimensions.  Fascinating way to think about learning activities. 
Mark Lindner

New From JISC and Open Humanities Project: "Launch of 'Living' Books Breaks B... - 0 views

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    The books present recent research on these subjects in a palatable way using interactive maps, podcasts and audio-visual materials. The result, which can be shared freely amongst both academic and non-academic individuals alike, is an engaging and diverse resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities.
Sara Thompson

Pedagogy and Space: Empirical Research on New Learning Environments (EDUCAUSE Quarterly... - 0 views

  • In the new technology-enhanced learning spaces at the University of Minnesota, students outperformed final grade expectations relative to their ACT scores. When instructors adapted their pedagogical approach to the new space by intentionally incorporating more active, student-centered teaching techniques, student learning improved. Students and faculty had positive perceptions of the new learning environments but also had to adjust to the unusual classrooms.
Sara Thompson

Take Online Modules - For Teachers (Library of Congress) - 1 views

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    One-hour professional development modules for educators to teach themselves about copyright and primary sources of various kinds.
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    Thank you, I have been keeping this site in another folder for consideration with our new "lib guides" on our new web site. Now we will know where they are when we need them.
Deb Robertson

ACRLog » Convenience and its Discontents: Teaching Web-Scale Discovery in the... - 1 views

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    Providing a unified interface through which patrons can access nearly all of your library's collection has an obvious appeal on all sides. Users get the googley familiarity and convenience of a singular, wide-ranging search box and, according to a recent case study done at Grand Valley State University, the reduced friction patrons face when using library resources correlates to an increase - potentially dramatic - in the frequency with which they access them. If the new tool is like Google, then why does it require instruction?
Sara Thompson

Blogs vs. Term Papers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • Sara Thompson
       
      It almost sounds like he's saying that term papers, by their very nature, must be NOT interesting.
  • Her conclusion is that students feel much more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging with it. They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.
  • “The sad thing is, he’s now convinced there is brilliance in the art world, brilliance in the multimedia world, brilliance in the music world and that writing is boring,” Professor Davidson says. “I hated teaching him bad writing.”
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  • He proposes what he calls the “page a year” solution: in first grade, a one-page paper using one source; by fifth grade, five pages and five sources.
  • The National Survey of Student Engagement found that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than half of seniors weren’t asked to do a single paper of 20 pages or more, while the bulk of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.
  • “Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market,” says Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal and founder of the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”
  • The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.
fleschnerj

How to get kids to think critically | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine - 2 views

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    A wonderfully-done and highly engaging series of short videos teaching kids the basics of critical thinking.
Sara Thompson

Visualizing the First-Year Research Essay: Transitions « « crossing borderscr... - 0 views

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    Classroom activity using about 200 random photos to help students see transitions across ideas in a different way.  The previous blog post on this activity had the students working individually: http://blog.billiehara.org/?p=729  This post is about a similar activity in small groups. 
Sara Thompson

Ithaka :: Taking Steps Toward "Interactive Learning Online" - 0 views

  • “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in US Higher Education,” an Ithaka S+R report released today and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlights the challenges to be overcome by institutions so that they can take advantage of online learning technologies, and explores why highly interactive online systems have yet to take hold in any substantial way. 
  • “As online learning systems of this kind are developed, however, a critically important question will be who is going to control the student usage and performance data,” added Mr. Guthrie. “On the web, all actions and behaviors can be tracked and analyzed. These data are critical to refinement of these systems and to our overall understanding of how people learn. These data should not be privatized.”
  • “Barriers to adoption of these systems vary greatly. Perhaps most importantly, most current systems that are highly interactive do not allow faculty to customize content to suit their specific needs. Faculty are also concerned that online education might distance them from their students. Finally, very little good data exist on the effectiveness of existing highly interactive online systems.”
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  • While this is a time of great experimentation in the use of educational technologies, with almost as many approaches as there are colleges and universities, the report highlights several challenges that are common across all sectors. First, faculty at every type of institution take great pride in their ability to select content and craft a learning process for their students; they want to have the ability to continue to customize that learning experience in an online environment. Second, while a number of institutions are capitalizing on online learning to generate net revenue by expanding their offerings to new and non-traditional students, colleges and universities generally find it very difficult to employ these technologies to reduce costs in their traditional residential curriculum.
  • The report offers academic leaders strategies—rewarding early adopters, offering incentives, providing technical support, sharing incremental revenue, experimenting with new administrative structures—to facilitate the adoption of online learning,
  • two system-wide issues emerge from the report that require careful consideration: the need for open, shared data on student learning and performance tracked through these new systems, and the need for sustainable and customizable platforms that can be used across higher education.” 
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    "The report summarizes and provides analysis based on the experience and impressions of senior administrators and deans from a range of institutions including research universities, small colleges, and community colleges."
Sara Thompson

Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

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    "Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education's mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations."
Sara Thompson

Hack Your Learning Spaces? - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • I propose a THATCamp session in which we think about ways to hack campus space. And I mean hack in the most generous sense of the term. How can we use these spaces in ways they weren’t designed for? How can we turn their flaws—bolted down desks, windowless rooms, tiered seating, and so on—into advantages (or at least neutralize them)? How can we turn institutional places into dwelling spaces that we inhabit and habituate? I was initially thinking mostly of classrooms—because I have taught in dreadfully designed rooms—but I’d extend this idea to include all campus spaces. And I’d like our hacks to go beyond the simply practical (though we need those too) to include what amounts to philosophical and ideological hacks.
  • What would a temporary autonomous zone look like on campus? …in the student union? …in your classroom? How can we change attitudes about what can or can’t be done in certain spaces? What’s the most surprising thing we can do with a campus space, and conversely, what’s the most predictable thing we can do in a new way?
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