ESWE and social justice

Back in August of 2014 Barbara Walvoord delivered a teaching workshop at the Augustana Campus. She was great. One of the things that stuck with me was hearing for the first time about Edited Standard Written English (ESWE). Dr Walvoord spoke of it as a social justice issue. I hadn't really thought about teaching students to write English as a social justice issue before. But that perspective makes sense. Without the ability to write English well, students may be barred from certain professions and employment.

This year I was again teaching the capstone course for Augustana's Biology degree programme which is the last chance we have as biology faculty to ensure that our students are leaving Augustana with well-developed writings skills. I tried something different this year when I returned students' first written assignment back to them with my comments about their structure and style in addition to their thinking. What I explained to them was that they would be judged on their basis of their writing by future employers and professional schools. Without even having a chance to speak with a potential employer or supervisor or admissions counsellor, their ability to succeed will be judged on the basis of whatever writing they have submitted to the programme or employer.

It was interesting to see my students pay attention when I said that. Even those students who already had good writing skills paid attention. I think this may be another example of promoting student engagement in their learning by making explicit connections between what teachers are teaching and what students need or will need. It is another way of making learning relevant to students.

Did it make a difference in student learning? I don't have any hard data to show that actual student learning outcomes improved but I do have one anecdote. One student who had been avoiding classes requiring writing discussed her aversion to writing and her new understanding of what that could mean when she graduated and moved into her working life. She knew that her writing ability was weak. I suggested that she make it a habit to meet with the Writing Centre on our campus to help develop her writing skills. She did that - and I could clearly see the improvement in her writing in the MT submission of her writing dossier and again with her final submission.

Explicitly stating the impact writing can have on students' lives after university clearly had an impact on one of my students this year. From that perspective, it does makes a difference on student learning outcomes.

Resources

Weimer M. 2012. A Strategy for Grading Student Writing Assignments. Faculty Focus. January 31.
Haave N. 2015. Developing students’ thinking by writing. The National Teaching & Learning Forum, 25(1), 5–7.

using labs to teach critical thinking

Yesterday oCUBE hosted their monthly online journal club during which we discussed this article from Carl Wieman and colleagues. In this paper, they describe the results of an approach to developing students' (first yr) critical thinking skills when analysing and designing experiments. The cohort under study were first-year physics students from 2012 and 2013 (n~ 130). A limitation of the study is that the experimental and control groups are in different years. However, the investigators seem to have controlled for this with their tests of understanding physical principles - the two cohorts (control and experiment) did not differ significantly between the two years. The interesting finding from this study is that students who were prompted to consider the accuracy of their measurement in relation to how close the data supported the physical model was encouraged over the first few weeks of the course. But the support was gradually removed from the students (instructions from the text/lab manual, then explicit instructions from the instructor and finally no longer included in the marking rubric). What they found was that by the end of the course students in the experimental cohort without being prompted continued to assess their data and develop and implement ways to improve their measurement accuracy and implement these modifications which lead them to consider whether the theoretical model was representative of the data. That is, students no longer just attributed differences between their data and the theory as being due to "human error". And what was remarkable about their findings is that this difference seemed to persist into 2nd yr PHY courses. A limitation of the study is that only ~30 students continued on into 2nd yr PHY but the differences are still striking. Another limitation of the study is that the researchers evaluated students critical thinking from what students had written in lab reports and notebooks. There is the possibility that students were engaged in higher order thinking with their peers when discussing the data but that this analysis never made its way into their writing. It could be that students in the experimental (prompted to think) cohort were encouraged to write this down and include this assessment in their lab reports whereas students in the control never realized that this was something that was valuable and insightful to include in their lab report and notebooks.

Regardless, the data indicate that by being explicit about the epistemic values in science and how to do the science needs to be made explicit to students. Similar to what I have been finding regarding student awareness of their academic skills being developed in their Augustana degree. The data also suggest the importance of giving students the time in class to reflect on what they are doing/learning. As Kimberly Tanner has written in her oft-cited article on student metacognition, just because students are being active in their learning doesn't mean they are actively learning. What this means is that the experience (activity) is only meaningful if students are given the opportunity and prompted to reflect on that experience. Without the reflection, students will not necessarily integrate the learning activity into their existing knowledge structure. Learning is a developmental process that takes time to synthesize our learning with our prior experiences/knowledge. What I find ironic, is that our labs in the sciences are ripe with active learning experiences, but that we so often pack the three hours of a lab with activities that students don't have time to process what they are doing leading to the accusation that science labs are just about following a recipe. This is likely true if students are simply following instructions in their lab manual without taking the time to consider why they are doing things they way they are. I think the prompting to think described in this article is a way of breaking the routine so that students are encouraged to consider what, how, and why they are doing things in the lab.

And that should produce a deeper learning experience.

Resources

Rodgers, C. (2002). Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 842–866.

Fox, E., & Riconscente, M. (2008). Metacognition and self-regulation in James, Piaget, and Vygotsky. Educational Psychology Review, 20(4), 373–389. 

Holmes, N., Wieman, C. E., & Bonn, D. (2015). Teaching critical thinking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 112(36), 11199–11204. 

Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113-120.

implementing active learning by assessing the current state of our teaching practices

A few articles have been published over the last couple of years in an attempt to facilitate the development of faculty teaching. One is a simple self-assessment that consists of a checklist that faculty check off and then are returned a score and assessment of where in their teaching practices active learning is well implemented and with suggestions of active learning practices that could be further developed or implemented.

A couple of others are assessments that are conducted by classroom observers. The PORTAAL is directly linked to active learning practices that have been shown in the literature to improve students learning outcomes. The COPUS does something similar. Both tools are designed to try and produce an objective glimpse of how student learning is facilitated in the classroom but does not include other elements that contribute to the design of learning environments (e.g. how out of class assignments or exams are designed).

All three of these tools are designed to facilitate faculty development of their teaching and contribute to developing a multi-faceted assessment of teaching praxis. However, they only provide glimpses from two points of view: the instructor and objective or peer observer. The third viewpoint that needs to be included is that of the student. Granted, virtually all post-secondary institutions gather end of term student reviews of teaching, but I suspect that my institution is no different than others that our student surveys of instruction have not been updated to accurately portray the active learning teaching strategies that have been demonstrated to facilitate student learning. And this needs to be done. Instructor's reflective self-reports are useful in engaging faculty in thinking critically about their own teaching but what the instructor thinks is happening may not always be what is experienced by the student. On the other hand, what the student experiences in their learning environment may not be appropriately interpreted by students. Learning is hard work and an excellent learning opportunity may be misinterpreted by students as being uncomfortable and thus an unwelcome experience. Students are not always the best assessors of what constitutes good teaching and learning while in the moment of being challenged that is required for learning to occur. This is where the objective or peer observer is important to provide perspective of what the teacher and the student report.

It would be nice if a tool could be developed that incorporated all three viewpoints. As it is we have different tools for each which require considerable interpretation, translation and contextualizing to truly understand the quality of students' learning environment. This will likely always be the case. But I think there is still room to make this process easier and usable for faculty as they develop their ability to design educational experiences. We need formative assessment tools that are not onerous to use or interpret otherwise they will never be used. They will instead end up being one more item that is added to the pile of things that would be good for faculty to do but likely never will given the time constraints imposed on us by research, service, & teaching.

Resources

Eddy, S. L., Converse, M., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2015). PORTAAL: A Classroom Observation Tool Assessing Evidence-Based Teaching Practices for Active Learning in Large Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Classes. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 14(2). http://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.14-06-0095

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8410–5. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111

Lund, T. J., Pilarz, M., Velasco, J. B., Chakraverty, D., Rosploch, K., Undersander, M., & Stains, M. (2015). The Best of Both Worlds: Building on the COPUS and RTOP Observation Protocols to Easily and Reliably Measure Various Levels of Reformed Instructional Practice. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 14(2). http://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.14-10-0168

Smith, M. K., Jones, F. H. M., Gilbert, S. L., & Wieman, C. E. (2013). The Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS): A New Instrument to Characterize University STEM Classroom Practices. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 618–627. http://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-08-0154

Wieman, C., & Gilbert, S. (2014). The Teaching Practices Inventory: A New Tool for Characterizing College and University Teaching in Mathematics and Science. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13(3), 552–569. http://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.14-02-0023

Wieman, C. (2015). A Better Way to Evaluate Undergraduate Teaching. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 47(1), 6–15. http://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2015.996077g

on liberal education

A recent paper (Chaddock & Cooke 2015) considers the history of liberal education and how our understanding of what it means has changed over time. It was once termed liberal arts which focused on content. In recent decades it has changed to liberal education which emphasizes process. What I found interesting in the paper is how liberal education always seems to be stretched between two opposing views:

• general vs professional education
• classics (e.g. the Great Books) vs current context
• shared (imposed) curriculum vs freedom to set own course of study
• sciences vs arts
• skills training vs education for citizenship
• research vs liberal arts
• creating knowledge vs disseminating knowledge
• liberalism vs utilitarianism
• culture vs science
• past vs present

What Chaddock and Cooke discuss in their paper, however, is that these tensions were much more nuanced than is typically understood. Often opposing sides were simply in opposition in terms of degree and not that liberal education should be this vs that. For example, some would argue greater emphasis on a common experience whereas others would emphasize giving students greater freedom in choosing their courses. But neither side would say there should be no common experience or no freedom of choice. The argument typically distilled down to the number of credits assigned to each.

The AAC&U have attempted to hold on to these tensions by advocating their essential learning outcomes (skills and knowledge) without imposing them on any one discipline and thus do not contrast general vs specialized education. Their learning outcomes simply need to be embedded throughout students' curricula. The advantage is that attention to these outcomes has the potential to produce coherent learning throughout the degree rather than having skills and knowledge parceled out to individual courses. A different compromise between shared experiences vs student freedom to explore learning was developed in the early 20th C with students being required to complete a distribution of courses across the arts and sciences in addition to a concentrated focus in one discipline. In recent decades this has become the general education requirements and major that all students must complete to earn their undergraduate degree. This is the compromise the Augustana core developed in the mid-2000s with our general education + major requirements being within a choice of courses but our skills being met across the curriculum. Thus our core is a hybrid of what was developed in the early 20th C plus what is being advocated by AAC&U.

I like what the AAC&U are recommending especially in the light that they encourage institutions to implement their essential learning outcomes in a manner that makes sense for individual colleges and universities - they understand that local context matters. However, these still seem to me to be recommendations about what to teach. I am beginning to wonder whether how we teach plays a greater role in students' education than what we teach.....

Resources

Bok, D., Bradley, M., Brown, S., Casteen, J., Coleman, M. S., Cooper, M. A., … Wilson, J. M. (2011). The LEAP Vision for Learning: Outcomes, Practices, Impact, and Employers’ Views. Washington, DC: American Association of College and Universities (AAC&U). 

Bok, D., Brand, M., Coleman, M. S., Crutcher, R. A., Duster, T., Eaton, J., … Wooden, R. (2007). College Learning for the New Global Century. Washington, DC: American Association of College and Universities (AAC&U). 

Chaddock, K., & Cooke, A. (2015). Endurance Testing: Histories of Liberal Education in U.S. Higher Education. In M. B. Paulsen (Ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research (Vol. 30, pp. 187–244). New York, NY: Springer International Publishing. 

why do teachers feel personally attacked when the lecture is critiqued?

A recent post in the New York Times by Molly Worthen has provoked a number of responses both for and against the lecture as pedagogical strategy (See Eyler and Franke below for two different responses). This is apparently not new as exemplified by Cath Ellis' post from 2010 reflecting on the response of Donald Clark's conference keynote on the pitfalls of the lecture. Indeed, those that call for the evidence which indicate that the lecture is not a great teaching strategy seem to be unaware that the evidence has been around for some time. As Cath Ellis suggests, read Bligh's 1998 book. In the first couple of chapters he reviews the evidence that lectures are no better than assigning reading for impacting student learning outcomes. And then of course there is the 2014 meta-analysis of the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science which shows that active learning strategies have very real positive effects on student learning outcomes.

I think that for whatever reason lecturing vs active learning touches on people's sense of self identity. Teaching is such a personal act. What makes some teachers naturally good is that the teaching act meshes so well with their personality or that they have a very good sense of self. Thus a critique of lecturing or active learning is received as an attack on the self as teacher/person rather than a consideration of what produces the best student learning outcomes. In addition, I think Cath Ellis makes an insightful assessment that lecturing is the normative discourse in academia and thus its critique creates unease as the icon of university teaching is called into question.

However, as others have suggested, this really is a false dichotomy. It is not that instructors must choose between lecturing or active learning as their teaching strategy. Teaching is like science - we use whatever will get the job done. Sometimes that means that a particular class needs more lecturing than activities to help students understand a particular assigned reading. Other classes will use activities to help engage students in the concepts being considered to produce deep learning. What I aspire to as a teacher is to be able to read my class and be able to pick out of my bag of teaching strategies what will best deepen my students engagement with and understanding of the material and make their learning stick. Even those of us who use the most student-centered teaching strategy of all (IMHO), Team-Based Learning, still need to  make use of the mini-lecture.

The lecture is not dead. The lecture simply needs to make room for the other teaching and learning strategies which enhance student learning outcomes as shown by the published evidence. Perhaps what is really at stake is the understanding of who the class is for: is it for student learning or is it for instructor self-identity?

Resources

Bligh, D. A. (1998). Evidence of what lectures achieve. In What’s the Use of Lectures? (5th ed., pp. 10–23). Exeter: Intellect.

Ellis C. (2010). Tweckling, iconoclasm and lecturing as a normative discourse: reflections on two ALT-C keynotes. cathellis13, Nov 16.

Eyler J. (2015). Active Learning Is Not Our Enemy: A Response to Molly Worthen. A Life Time's Training:Thoughts on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Oct 20.

Franke D. 2015. Why Lecture Matters: A View from the Trenches. The Winds of War, Oct 18.

Friesen, N. (2011). The lecture as a transmedial pedagogical form: A historical analysis. Educational Researcher, 40(3), 95–102.

Weiman, C. E. (2014). Large-scale comparison of science teaching methods sends clear message. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111(23), 8319-8320.

Worthen M. (2015). Lecture Me. Really. New York Times, Oct 17.

is teaching not a scholarly activity worthy of tenure?

I don't understand why there is the assumption that a teaching track professor should be non-tenured? I suspect that it is a result of thinking that teaching is not a scholarly activity that requires the same sort of protection that tenure gives researchers. Is discovery scholarship the only thing that counts? The only scholarly activity that requires protection? Is it not equally important to nurture (protect) the scholarship of application? The scholarship of teaching? Or is it assumed that teaching is simply delivery of whatever the institution wishes to be taught? Are scholarly teachers not risking themselves when they determine what is relevant to teach even when those decisions may go against the prevailing views of the university or government of the day?

To flip it around to make the point, what about doing away with tenured faculty researchers and instead hiring short-term or long-term contract researchers? Why the assumption that that cannot work for research but that it can work for teaching?

Resource

Chiose S. 2015. Rise of the teaching class. Globe & Mail, Sept 30. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/rise-of-the-teaching-class-changing-makeup-of-canadasuniversities/article26603696/

laptops in the classroom are not the problem - it is the lack of engagement

An interesting discussion on CBC's The Current about whether or not laptops should be banned in the classroom. I am glad that the second interviewee takes a more nuanced view than this oft cited study from last year by Mueller and Oppenheimer. The argument is that students do not think about what they are taking notes about in class when using a laptop whereas taking notes by hand requires more cognitive effort on the part of the student and thus produces better retention/learning of the taught material. However, this assumes that the classroom is the place where information is imparted from the instructor to the student. I agree with Chris Buddle in this interview that if we understand learning to be an act of knowledge construction within the learner, then the classroom should be a place where this is supported. Classrooms and the teaching that goes on in them need to be redesigned re-imagined such that students are actively engaging with the material rather than only taking notes.

Don't get me wrong - there is a place for note-taking. But that is certainly not all that should be going on inside of our classrooms. And active learning instructional strategies often are able to capitalize on laptops/tablets/smartphones as a learning tool for personal response systems, crowd sourcing research, or collaborating on a common project.

Educational technologies can be used poorly or ignored resulting in a distracting learning environment. But if they are properly used, they can enhance the active engagement students can make with course material.

Resource

Bart M. December 5, 201. How Technology Can Improve Learner-Centered Teaching. Faculty Focus.

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

Mueller P.A. and Oppenheimer D.M. 2014. The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25: 1159-116.

Tremonti A.M. September 07, 2015. Laptops in classrooms distracting students, teachers call for ban. CBC - The Current.

Weimer M. February 20, 2015. Why Students Should Be Taking Notes. Faculty Focus.

Weimer M. January 30, 2015. How to Help Students Improve Their Note-Taking Skills. Faculty Focus.

Willis L. June 29, 2015. Using Google Web Apps to Improve Student Engagement. Faculty Focus.

Zipp G.P. June 11, 2012. Be Not Afraid: Embracing the iPad and the Wonderful World of Apps in the Classroom. Faculty Focus.