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Gary Brown

Assumptions about Setting the Right Classroom Climate - 0 views

www.facultyfocus.com/...ng-the-right-classroom-climate

classroom management agency

shared by Gary Brown on 02 Sep 09 - Cached
  • September 2, 2009 Assumptions about Setting the Right Classroom Climate By: Maryellen Weimer in Effective Classroom Management   SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Assumptions about Setting the Right Classroom Climate", url: "http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-classroom-management/assumptions-about-setting-the-right-classroom-climate/" });ShareThis For quite some time now I’ve been interested in a widely held set of assumptions faculty make about the need to assert control at the beginning of a course. The argument goes something like this: When a course starts, the teacher needs to set the rules and clearly establish who’s in charge. If the course goes well, meaning students abide by the rules and do not challenge the teacher’s authority, then the teacher can gradually ease up and be a bit looser about the rules.
  • If all potential challenges to authority are headed off at the pass, then the teacher can devote full attention to the content, and isn’t that where the teacher’s expertise really shines? And so the classroom becomes a place that showcases teaching more than learning? My suspicion is that most teachers overreact to potential threats.
  • Gary Brown on 02 Sep 09
     
    Our friend Mary Ellen Weimer sets the stage for addressing a critical bottleneck to innovation, suggesting faculty insecurity/inexperience result in exerting authority.
Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

www.aacu.org/...program.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09 - Cached
  • This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
  • Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
  • Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
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  • Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students.  Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college. 
  • The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
  • They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
  • One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact. 
  • a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
  • This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
  • Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study.  However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
  • hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes? 
  • As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      see Theron's ideas for COMM.
  • Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
  • For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
  • Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
  • To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
  • Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
  • If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it?  How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? 
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
  • But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
  • Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Jan 09
       
      Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...63718

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
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  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10
     
    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
  • Matthew Tedder on 26 Jan 10
     
    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Nils Peterson

WSU Today Online - Professor brings new approach into classroom - 3 views

www.wsutoday.wsu.edu/...Publications.asp

shared by Nils Peterson on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • What do Wikipedia, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Threadless Tees have in common? All were created outside the traditional product development model using a mass collaborative approach. In mass collaborative product development (MCPD), large groups of people compete and collaborate globally to develop new products and services.
  • the MCPD phenomenon is under way in the management and business communities. But few have examined it from an engineering design standpoint.
  • A more natural process
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • companies are trying out MCPD to not only foster a more collaborative workplace but to bring in outside innovation
  • But engineering curricula, said Panchal, tends to remain focused on traditional approaches to product development.
  • “This is not a hierarchical model," said Panchal. "Rather, people self-select activities they’re interested in."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 10 Mar 10
       
      see various harvesting gradebook ideas from 2008, student finds problem in community, that becomes a motivating spine for their personal curriculum
  • Gary Brown on 09 Mar 10
     
    collaborative development on our doorstep. We should introduce ourselves.
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