questions and active learning

A while ago I met up for a coffee with a former student of mine. We discussed how med school was going but also ended up discussing how they learn and how they viewed my teaching while a student at Augustana. Granted this may not be a candid assessment but it is interesting how they said that it was my way of asking the class questions during my lectures that made the material become significant for them and made it stick in their understanding. They were so pleased that in the previous term they were able to map out the explanation for the acetone scent on the breath of diabetics. It just flowed out of their head and mouth while they explained the concept and how it was relevant to their team problem on metabolic acidosis.

So, a nice example of what I am trying to achieve in my teaching: deep learning.

This made me think about my own efforts to master team-based learning (TBL) and make my classroom more actively engaged. According to my former student, my classes are already engaging with my questions, but I know that this is not the perception of all of my students. So, I wonder if what I really need to do is not lose what I already do well - asking questions that highlight the relevance of what I am teaching - but mix it up with other active learning strategies.

Students have been indicating this on the end of term student ratings of instruction for those courses in which I implemented TBL. Many students suggest that either a little less or a little more TBL (depending upon the course and degree I implemented TBL) mixed in with the questioning style of lecturing I have used in the past might be good.

So maybe I simply need to identify in my courses those topics that would best benefit students as a TBL module would be a better way to go rather than being a slave to the TBL teaching strategy? One of my English colleagues does this in her literature courses; she ensures that the TBL process is peppered with mini-lectures. I have been trying to ensure this happens to a greater extent instead of relying on student feedback to inform me what they need help with. But many students are reluctant to provide this sort of feedback. This results in me needing to be a mind reader of my students' strengths and weaknesses and intervene when I identify weaknesses. 

Difficult, but necessary. As novices, students have difficulty identifying what they do and do not understand. I need to find strategies that help us identify those areas for both myself and my students. Better designed quizzes would help - but also going back through the decades of experience I have will also help identify those areas.

Maryellen Weimer has a nice article that discusses an article by Allen and Tanner about asking questions. The Allen and Tanner article focuses on using Bloom's taxonomy of learning to assess the quality of our questions and notes. Similar to Eric Mazur, Allen and Tanner suggest that students will study for the types of questions being asked on assessments. We may wish to have students engaged in analysis and evaluation - application of the material being taught. But if we only ask factual recall questions, then students will realize that is all they need to study for and the opportunity for deeper learning will be lost. Mazur advocates that our assessments must be authentic and that if they are, that will drive how we teach and how our students learn.

So, if an excellent student such as the one I had coffee with tells me that my questioning during class compelled them to consider the deeper significance of what they were learning while learning it and that this led to long-lasting understanding, then I must be doing something right with my questioning approach during class. I think I could do better if I were more conscious about the kinds of questions I ask.

Resources

Allen D, Tanner K. 2002. Approaches to Cell Biology Teaching: Questions about Questions. Cell Biol Educ 1(2): 63-67. 

Mazur E. 2014. Why you can pass tests and still fail in the real world. 2014 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Annual Conference, Queen's University (Kingston, ON, Canada). June 18.

Weimer M. 2013. The Art of Asking Questions. The Teaching Professor 27(3): 5. 

 

metacognition and students' learning process

This article from the Teaching Professor website discusses how active learning - engaged learning - needs to go hand-in-hand with students' meta-cognition of their own learning process. This is why I have been advocating the use of ePortfolios (or a learning portfolio) to enable students to think about how they learn in addition to why and what they learn. How did they come to a particular decision? How did they solve a particular problem? Why did a particular concept in the course give them difficulties and how did they overcome it? These are some of the issues that students need to consider in order to become actively engaged in their own learning and which, I believe, will produce deeper learning in students. Another way to think about this, is that students need to be supported in developing their own learning philosophy.

Resource

Weimer M. 2013. Three ways to help students become more metacognitively aware. Faculty Focus, Oct 10. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/three-ways-to-help-students-become-more-metacognitively-aware/

mindfulness in the classroom

Mindfulness is a practice that continues to pop up in different contexts for me for the last year or more. It seems to be a method to reprogram our brains to eject old habits that interfere with our goals and aspirations and replace them with habits that can create in us the person we wish to be. I first became aware of this ability to intentionally rewire our brains when I read The Shallows. It seems that there are similarities between rewiring our brains through distractions vs meditation and is not unlike the rewiring that people have to go through when engaged in physiotherapy to relearn how to walk or talk after a stroke or suffering other types of nervous damage. It seems to me that we should be able to take these same insights from physical therapy and observations about how computer and internet use affect our brain - affects our thinking - and apply them to improving our ability to learn and perhaps our ability to teach by creating learning environments that foster students' ability to stay on task and focus. This post on Faculty Focus suggests some approaches for promoting mindfulness in our classrooms and personal lives.

Resources

Carr N. 2011. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. WW Norton & Co. http://www.theshallowsbook.com/nicholascarr/Nicholas_Carrs_The_Shallows.html

Roush KL. 2015. Moving from Multitasking to Mindfulness. Faculty Focus (March 9). http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/moving-multitasking-mindfulness/

the role of narrative in teaching and learning

Marilla Svinicki writes the recurring column 'Ad Rem' in the National Teaching and Learning Forum. For the last couple of issues she has been writing about the 25 principles of teaching produced by the APA and APS and recently published. In her February 2015 column Marilla discusses the importance of teaching through stories and how the research shows that students learn deeper when the content is contextualized as a story rather than as a list of facts. Doesn't matter how well those facts are organized, they simply will not be remembered - learned - as well as they would be when learned within a narrative. Stories speak to humans. For whatever reason we crave stories in all their forms, TV shows, movies, novels, anecdotes, case studies. I am sure that someone out there knows the academic reason for this propensity. For me, it speaks to my need to make sense of my world and my life. Hearing others' stories helps me place my own personal story in context and helps me make sense of what is happening in my life.

I think this is what makes stories such a powerful teaching tool. This is what makes case studies valuable to student learning - it places a problem in a narrative that draws in the student and engages them in the issue that needs to be addressed. When I teach biochemistry, molecular cell biology, histology, history and theory of biology I try to structure the entire course with some sort of narrative to draw the students into the subject matter. In biochemistry it is following the flow of energy and matter and how organisms have evolved to release that energy in usable forms. In molecular cell biology it is considering the problem of how proteins in all of their myriad forms are able to get to the right place and time. In history and theory of biology it is about how we understand the world through the filter of our experience and theories. In each of these courses, to draw the students into the narrative, I need to provide students with different examples - stories - of how each concept has significance and consequence to how we live our lives.

Narrative plays a powerful role in teaching and learning.

Resource

Graesser, A.C. 2009. Inaugural Editorial for Journal of Educational Psychology. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(2), 259–261. http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/edu-101-2-259.pdf

Svinicki, M. (2015), One Story is Worth A Thousand Pictures?. The National Teaching & Learning Forum, 24: 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ntlf.30020

cumulative exams promote long-lasting learning

This is something that I have long suspected but never had the evidence to back up my suspicions. Now I have the evidence: cumulative exams promote long-term learning. But what is interesting, that will likely affect my course design, is that what matters is that each subsequent exam/quiz, throughout the course be cumulative, not just the final exam. I have always made my MT exams and quizzes, non-cumulative, much to the satisfaction of my students. However, the study cited in this Faculty Focus blog post suggests that it is the cumulative nature of tests throughout the term that makes the difference, not just having a cumulative final exam.

My students may resent me for it, but my job as an educator is to design a learning environment that best promotes their learning. Looks like this is the end of non-cumulative tests in my courses.

Resource

Weimer M. 2014 Do Cumulative Exams Motivate Students? Faculty Focus, April 10. http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/cumulative-exams-motivate-students/

if the medium is the message... what does that say about online learning?

I wanted to follow up on last week's post has the internet traded wisdom for knowledge? Marshall McLuhan's assertion that the medium is the message is something I have always found intriguing but have difficulty understanding. A quote from the Marshall McLuhan website explains that the medium is the message in the way that it controls, shapes, and impacts the pace of the message. By doing so it affects how the message is read or interpreted and thus has an effect on the message itself. So when Carr asks the question whether Google is making us stupid he is clearly applying McLuhan's analysis of mass media: the internet is impacting the message by encouraging us to be distracted and superficial.

A McLuhanian analysis of educational technologies does suggest that there are some trade-offs as McLuhan asserted for any new technology (Bates 2011, Morrison 2014). As a result of reading Carr and thinking about McLuhan (I have to be honest: I have read about his work but have never read his work) I wonder if my embrace of using educational technologies needs to be tempered? If the internet is a distracting technology as Carr suggests, what does this do to educators' desire for their students to deeply learn? Is providing online texts with hyperlinks enabling the connection of different sources of knowledge enabling deep learning or is it distracting students from learning? I know that question will annoy a lot of people and it is odd coming from me because I am a proponent of using digital tools for education. I like having access to the vast educational literature by simply querying Google Scholar, Wikipedia, or if I am deep into an investigation, the myriad of library databases available through my university. In addition, I believe that there is value in integrating knowledge: finding and investigating the connections that exist among the academic disciplines. To some degree it might be argued that the internet/Google is breaking down the academic silos that have existed in academia for so very long.

However, I still come back to Carr's implied question: is connectivity worth it if in exchange we give up deep reflective analysis? Newstock (2013) argues for this deeper approach to learning. We need to design learning environments/experiences for our students that enable their deep consideration of our current understanding of our world. Perhaps this is simply a problem of the tension that exists between breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding. Deep understanding requires considered focus on a very narrow topic. Yet breadth allows one to scan the horizon for connections to that knowledge.

On the surface this sounds like an argument for the merits of truly blended learning. Blended learning that does not trade in-class learning for online learning but rather completely blended learning where both focus and integration are encouraged: both breadth and depth of learning are enabled.

But we still have the problem of the distracting internet - that can still cause problems for considered thinking about which connections are meaningful and which are simply.... a distraction. And if Carr's review of the neurobiology is correct (Carr 2010) then the internet is rewiring our brains for shallow thinking.

Resources

Bates, T. (2011). Marshall McLuhan and his relevance to teaching with technology. online learning and distance education resources, July 20. http://www.tonybates.ca/2011/07/20/marshall-mcluhan-and-his-relevance-to-teaching-with-technology/

Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic, 302(1), 56–63.

Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (p. 276). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Morrison, D. (2014).What Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’ Tells Us About Education Technology in 2014.  online learning insights, June 9. http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/what-marshall-mcluhans-global-village-tells-us-about-technology-in-2014/

Newstok, S. L. (2013). A plea for “close learning”. Liberal Education, 99(4), 16–19.

has the internet traded wisdom for knowledge?

I remember this article when it came out. It still makes for interesting reading and I find that some of his concerns about reading habits and thinking resonate with my own experiences of reading. Carr likened surfing the internet to shallow thought with minds being stretched thin over the connections of the network. It inhibits deep thinking and instead promotes superficial skimming of text while being bombarded with suggestions for where else to focus your attention. He suggests that this is in the best interests of advertisers and data miners for commerce. Deep thoughtful consideration does not promote concentration on how to best spend your salary. Somehow the medium is the message in Marshall McLuhan's terms. The medium/the internet is changing the way we think looking for connections rather than consideration of the text at hand. Rather than carefully considering what has been written, rather than carefully considering the meaning laden within the text we would rather look for how it is connected to other knowledge - we wish to see how far the network can spread.

I found it an ironic experience to be reading Carr's article online at the Atlantic website. Exactly what he describes in his article was happening to me. While reading his article about how reading on the internet is a distracted activity, there were advertisements and suggestions for connected reading popping up in the midst of his article. I suspect that Carr would have laughed or cried at that.

Carr does acknowledge that with new technologies (printing press, writing, the computer) come new capabilities that improve human interaction and knowledge. He acknowledges this despite his scepticism about how Google is changing how we think. I wonder if one of the blessings of the internet is the integration of knowledge. But does it come at the cost of deep understanding of the knowledge? Have we gained integration of knowledge at the expense of wisdom?

Resources

Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic, 302(1), 56–63. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

transformation an ontological condition for learning?

Nope, I changed my mind about this article - it really is getting at the idea of students' developing their own learning philosophy. The first time I read this article I thought it was another article that was conflating teaching philosophy with learning philosophy discussing what the educator does for the learner. A teaching philosophy to my mind is an educator's philosophy for how to set the learning environment for students and thus takes into consideration a philosophy of learning - how do students in general learn? In contrast, a learning philosophy is something the learner develops for themselves. Learners, when taking a course, do not design the educational environment; that is the work of the teacher. A learning philosophy, in my opinion is something that a student discovers and constructs for themselves.

However, the argument that Bramming is making here is that transformation of the student is an ontological condition for learning. If transformation does not occur, then true learning really has not happened. This actually makes sense to me - if learning does not change a student, then what has happened in the process? Nothing, it has not impacted their knowledge structure - they have memorized without processing. Transformative learning will alter students' learning structure - they should see their world in a new way as a result of their education.

Bramming makes an interesting appeal to Nietzsche's acting and reacting forces linking it to Piaget's assimilative (surface) and accommodative (deep) learning. The author, notes however, that Nietzsche did not denigrate one over the other - both are necessary for learning: the actor is the accommodative force (interior) and the social learning structure being the assimilative force (exterior). Learning requires encouragement and the establishment by mentor (authority) of the degree to which skills will be mastered whereas the will/desire to master derives from within the student.

So Bramming is suggesting that we should be considering strong and weak learning experiences rather than strong and weak students. Has the educational environment set the challenge such that students must be actively engaged in their learning? Students need to transform their expectations and desires for learning from passive to active engagement with the course material and consider what the material means for themselves rather than memorizing what it means for an author or instructor - they must construct their own meaning. To do that students must question why and how they are learning something and not only what they are learning. These are the basic questions that undergird my understanding of developing one's own learning philosophy.

The analysis of Nietzsche's strong and weak learning forces is counter-intuitive because the weak forces can actually negate strong learning - they interfere with students' active engagement with the educational experience.

Thus, the argument here is to not allow the nature of the educational experience be determined by students' satisfaction, because for transformation to occur, frustration, anger, and loss may be part of the learning process as students experience a deconstruction/reconstruction of their knowledge structure which forms the filter through which they view their world. Thus real learning - deep learning - alters the way we see the world.

Resources

Bramming P. 2007. An Argument for Strong Learning in Higher Education. Quality in Higher Education 13(1): 45-56. DOI:10.1080/13538320701272722