Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Tuesday Teaching and Learning (Commencement Edition)

Today we have two items we would like to share: First, a column by Donald M. Murray from the Boston Globe, "Friends' caring and sharing shows the way" Second, check out the website Humanity.org for all your commencement speech needs.

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Commencement Speeches

"The commencement ceremony affirms each student's search for knowledge. It often includes a graduation speech which seeks to put their recent hard (or not so hard) work into the context of their future. Many of us hear one or two commencement addresses as graduates or listen to a handful as spectators. Yet -- as we graduate from one year to another, one relationship to another, one experience to another -- we always are learning.

Though these myriad departures and arrivals of everyday existence are seldom met with ceremony, words traditionally reserved for momentous occasions may ring true and inspirational at any hour. That's why we created this unique archive of commencement addresses, selecting an eclectic menu of twenty nine extraordinary speeches from the thousands that we have reviewed since beginning work on this initiative in 1989.

Though some of these wonderful remarks were given decades ago, we believe they are as relevant and important, perhaps increasingly so, as the more current speeches. Thus we encourage you to read them all, recognizing and celebrating your own constant commencement into tomorrow, finding ways to place it firmly within the context of progress for all humankind."


- Tony Balis
INDEX OF OUTSTANDING SPEECHES FROM 1936 TO 2007
Bill Gates "Great Expectations"
Harvard University, 2007
Alice Greenwald "Why Does Memory Matter?"
Sarah Lawrence College, 2007
Ken Burns "A Vanguard Against this New Separatism"
Georgetown University, 2006
Steve Jobs "Find What You Love "
Stanford University, 2005
Thomas L. Friedman "Listen to Your Heart "
Williams College, 2005
Toni Morrison "Be Your Own Story "
Wellesley College, 2004
Bono "That's not a cause. That's an emergency."
University of Pennsylvania, 2004
Lewis Lapham "Merlin's Owl"
St. John's College - Annapolis, 2003
Wally Lamb "What do Novelists Know?"
Connecticut College, 2003
Martha C. Nussbaum "Compassion and Global Responsibility"
Georgetown University, 2003
Daniel S. Goldin "Gallileo and the Search for Truth"
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001
Madelaine K. Albright
University of California, Berkeley, 2000
with response from Fadia Rafeedie, a Palestinian student
Desmond Tutu "Fly, Eagle, Fly!"
Brandeis University, 2000
Aung San Suu Kyi Bucknell University, 1999
Richard N. Kaplan University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999
The Dalai Lama "Education and the warm heart"
Emory University, 1998
Roger Rosenblatt "Get A Job"
Brigham Young University, 1998
Elie Wiesel "Learning and Respect"
DePaul University, 1997
Russell Baker "10 Ways to Avoid Mucking Up the World Any Worse Than It Already Is."
Connecticut College, 1995
Vaclav Havel
"Civilization's Thin Veneer"
Harvard University, 1995
Gordon Matthew Sumner Berklee College of Music, 1994
Romulus Linney Oberlin Collge, 1994
Cornel West Wesleyan University, 1993
Robert E. Leestamper Richmond College, London, 1989
Meg Greenfield "A Better Truth"
Williams College, 1987
Gloria Steinem Tufts University, 1987
Margaret Atwood University Of Toronto, 1983
Ursula Le Guin "A Left-Handed Commencement Address"
Mills College, 1983
Alan Alda "The Wilderness of Your Intuition "
Connecticut College, 1980
William Gass "Learning to Talk"
Washington University, 1979
Theodor Seuss Geisel "My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers"
Commencement poem at Lake Forest College, 1977
John F. Kennedy American University, 1963
George C. Marshall "The Marshall Plan"
Harvard University, 1947




Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Tuesday Teaching and Learning

Today we have three items we would like to share: First, an article by Libby Sander, writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses a new study that argues community colleges "would be wise to reach out to their new students earlier and more aggressively in such areas as orientation, academic advising, and financial aid." See article: "At Community Colleges, a Call to Meet New Students at the Front Door." Second, check out the article "Making the First-Year Classroom Conducive to Learning" by Bette LaSere Erickson and Diane W. Strommer in the book Challenging and supporting the First-Year Student - A Handbook for Improving the First Year of College, by M. Lee Upcraft, John N. Gardner, and Betsy O. Barefoot. Lastly, explore The National Institutes for Health Office of Science Education; The Office of Science Education (OSE) coordinates science education activities at the NIH and develops and sponsors science education projects in house. These programs serve elementary, secondary, and college students and teachers and the public.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Tuesday Teaching and Learning

Today we have three items we would like to share: First, an article by Ken A. Graetz, the director of e-learning at Winona State University, discusses learning environments in his article "The Psychology of Learning Environments." Second, check out the article "Problem Based Learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework" by Savery and Duffy. Lastly, try out Ask a Scientist, a website sponsored by HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), which the Institute's original charter states, "The primary purpose and objective of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute shall be the promotion of human knowledge within the field of the basic sciences (principally the field of medical research and medical education) and the effective application thereof for the benefit of mankind.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Tuesday Teaching and Learning

Today we have three items we would like to share:First: A dying 47-year-old professor gives an exuberant ‘Last Lecture’ Second, check out Grammar Girl's quick and dirty tips for better writing.Lastly, try out Ask a Biologist, a website sponsored by Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, which delivers on its promise: ask a biology question and they’ll send you an answer.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Voicethread

One of my favorite new teaching tools is Voicethread at http://voicethread.com

Rubrics

Want to creat a rubric for your class? Check out Rubistar at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php

Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning: A Panel Discussion with Stanford Faculty

"Four panelists were invited to respond to one or more of the following questions: What is interdisciplinary thinking? How does interdisciplinary research inform teaching? What kind of student work does interdisciplinary teaching and learning produce? What are the pressing questions for you or for Stanford?"
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Folks:

The posting below reports on a Stanford University panel discussion on interdisciplinary teaching and learning . It appeared in the newsletter: Speaking of Teaching, Center for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University - Spring 2007, Vol. 16, No.2, http://ctl.stanford.edu/Newsletter/ produced by the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Making the First-Year Classroom Conducive to Learning

Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning

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Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning: A Panel Discussion with Stanford Faculty


This newsletter is dedicated to the issue of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Thinking and teaching across the disciplines has long been an honored tradition at Stanford. In fact, the university's first interdisciplinary program was established in 1947. More than a thousand faculty members are currently affiliated with one or more interdisciplinary programs (IDPs), and together, these faculty members have created a rich web of scholarly thinking that has contributed significantly to the learning experiences of Stanford students, a quarter of whom graduate with an interdisciplinary major or minor. Recently, several multidisciplinary initiatives-among them the Arts Initiative, the Bio-X Program, the Initiative on Environment and Sustainability, and the International Initiative-have been launched to meet President Hennessy's call for the creation of new knowledge that responds to global challenges.

As a way to foster a discussion about interdisciplinary teaching and learning at Stanford, CTL dedicated a panel discussion to this topic at the Celebration of Teaching event in May 2006. Four panelists were invited to respond to one or more of the following questions: What is interdisciplinary thinking? How does interdisciplinary research inform teaching? What kind of student work does interdisciplinary teaching and learning produce? What are the pressing questions for you or for Stanford?

In this newsletter, we offer highlights of the comments by Professors Harry Elam, Pam Matson, Penny Eckert, and Eric Roberts to invite a discussion about interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and to reflect a range of views that are just as varied and diverse as the intellectual approaches that emerge from interdisciplinary scholarship.

Panel Highlights

Harry Elam, the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Chair of the Drama Department,
explained how team teaching encourages professors to "step out of [their] comfort zone." He
pondered what different models of interdisciplinary teaching work well. Not only does research
inform interdisciplinary teaching, but to what extent are new practices, spear-headed by students,
already transforming the process of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary thinking?

"I throw this out as a question. Is there a way that a solo person teaching a course can do interdisciplinary teaching? My wife and I now teach an IHUM [Introduction to Humanities] course together and one of the things that students like is the point of disagreement. Team teaching takes more time. And it takes an investment both in terms of time and resources. You can't just appropriate the material. You have to think about it in a way that the other person coming from a different discipline is getting at it. So, you have to deal with them, with it, in a variety of ways. This sense of team teaching, in terms of interdisciplinarity, is something that forces you out of your comfort zone. Within that comes the question of how many faculty want to step out of that comfort zone, and how productive it can be in terms of the classroom environment. My sense is that it is incredibly productive and fun, and a learning experience, not simply for the students, but also for the faculty engaged."

"One of the things that team teaching does, too, is open up different assignments and different potential for solutions, be they group projects or other projects that somehow ask students to approach a subject differently. The [group] projects produce some form that incorporates all the things that havehappened within the course and tries to get the students to think about them differently."

"One [model of interdisciplinarity] is what I would call the model of theory in practice, which happens in our department specifically, but also happens in the arts across the board at Stanford. In our department, we are looking at how the scholarship in performance works together with practice [and how] one informs the other. When you're doing scholarship on a play, thinking about it, interpreting it, how is it informed by seeing that play in practice? That is a process which is, in ways, interdisciplinary. And that is something that often takes you working with someone else or working and thinking about the process differently."

"One of the things that has changed interdisciplinary research is the power of the Internet, technology, the sense that lines are blurred in terms of what's open and what's available. How does that come into the arts? One of the ways, particularly at Stanford, that we can see things happening is something like the new design center-with engineering, with architecture, coming into drama in terms of stage design. There is a space for shared communication and a space for looking across at how the visual can inform the idea of what each of these fields do. ...In the Drama Department, we did a production with the dance division, something called Spring Migration, and the lights were done by an engineering student. They were just incredible, incredible what this student did. The magic you can see [is] that the training that he got in one [field] came together with the training he got in another. Students become, in some ways, the resource. They become the thing where you see interdisciplinarity, because they're doing it in a variety of different ways."


Pam Matson, the Chester Naramore Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, the Richard and Rhoda
Goldman Professor in Environmental Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute, drew on
her interdisciplinary research experience as a point of departure to reflect on how to teach
students new ways of thinking across disciplines. She suggested that the principles that hold true
in research could also inform interdisciplinary teaching. What concrete examples work well in
demonstrating the process of interdisciplinary thinking?

"The things I learned in interdisciplinary research hold for teaching as well. I think the first absolute is, if you want to do interdisciplinary research successfully, there has to be among all the players respect, respect for multiple perspectives, multiple ways of knowing multidisciplinary insights. We found it very important over time, not to privilege one discipline over another. We realized that interdisciplinary research takes a lot of extra time because it takes time to understand the language of different disciplines. It took me about a year to realize that economists and ecologists use the term productivity in completely different ways and that it matters to how we talk to each other, learn the tools, and understand the assumptions that underlie the different disciplines' research approaches and the perspectives they bring. So, all of those things I think are true in interdisciplinary research, and I think they're also really true in teaching. One of the challenges is to find the time and to make sure that we are actually bringing the students into the opportunity to learn the language, the assumptions, and the tools and the approaches, and to respect the different ways of looking at particular issues."

"[What] has been very useful for me is to illustrate the multiple perspectives in the process of teaching, and you can do that through team teaching. One of the first experiences I had in team teaching was at UC Berkeley with a sociologist before I came to Stanford- and you know I'm a biogeochemist-and we were teaching an environmental problem-solving course. It was so exciting to realize that we saw the world completely differently and neither of us had really understood each other's perspectives. We played this out in front of the students, which was incredibly frightening for them especially in the first year. By the second year we taught it, we had calmed it down a little bit, but basically what we were doing was showing the multiple perspectives in our teaching."

"Team projects are another way to go about doing [interdisciplinary thinking], asking each of the students to bring to it different perspectives, different world views, and different knowledge bases. I think that case-based education works really well, where you start with a problem, or an issue, or a question, and encourage the teams to explore the perspectives and the assumptions around that issue. So again, I've taught environmental problem-solving courses where you really explore issues from multiple points of view, and the students, as being part of that exploration, began to frame the issue not as a black and white issue, but as one that has many different levels of gray. And [the students] began to realize that they needed to understand those different levels of gray if they were going to actually work through the problem."

Penny Eckert, Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Program in Feminist Studies, found that
the often challenging conversations among faculty from different disciplines informed the basis of
her interdisciplinary work. She pondered how students can arrive at a kind of thinking that
integrates different disciplines. Don't students first need to learn the language of the disciplines
before they can begin to think in interdisciplinary ways?

"Interdisciplinarity for me was something that entered when I started pushing up against the bounds of my own research. My own life-changing interdisciplinary experience was at a research institute that was self consciously interdisciplinary. At first, we couldn't figure out how to talk to each other. There were computer scientists, psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists. So, what we did was to start a seminar and talk about the relation between the social and the cognitive when you are thinking about, for instance, learning. Of course, the split between the social and the cognitive sciences is where my interdisciplinary passion lies. Each person would assign a reading in their discipline, and we would all read this work. Then we would sit down and discuss it. Ultimately, what we had to do was come to terms with-in your discipline-what constitutes a question, and what constitutes an answer to that question, what counts as an answer to that question, and then what counts as an argument. It was really through fighting our way through these texts in all of these different disciplines that we actually got to a point where we could talk together about a new way of thinking of learning."

"When I think about interdisciplinary education at Stanford, and particularly about the fact that this all has to happen in four years, I think that good interdisciplinary education has to begin with good disciplinary education. I direct an IDP, and so I am constantly engaged in trying to make interdisciplinary education happen. One of the things that always surprises me is when the students show up to plan their major. In Feminist Studies, we make every student have a focus - usually some issue-and then they build their major around it. We sit down and we say, 'Well, what disciplines are currently the ones that you think are most relevant to your problem?' It turns out that students really aren't that clear about what the various disciplines do. What students really need to know is what a discipline is. I suggest that departments ought to be rethinking how they teach their introductory courses because people know what the subject matter is-like a literature course is about literature-but what is the practice that makes it a discipline? What did the discipline arise around? What are the questions that get asked? What kinds of answers do people look for? Who are the players?"

"I would encourage departments to provide a more disciplinary education, but then the question is: Do we want interdisciplinarity built into that? Or, do we want to leave the IDPs completely responsible for interdisciplinary stuff? I would guess the former rather than the latter. I would say, certainly, it would be a good idea to think about how you provide support for the IDPs, which are the main locus for the interdisciplinary teaching in this university."

Eric Roberts, Professor of Computer Science and the Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of
Engineering, teaches interdisciplinary courses as a way to help students think outside of the box.
He asked what professors can do to encourage complex thinking in light of the fact that students
often see themselves as "fuzzies" or "techies," and therefore may be reluctant to cross
disciplinary boundaries.

Talking about an introductory freshman course he taught with then Vice Provost for
Undergraduate Education Ramon Saldivar years ago, Professor Roberts described his reasons for
interdisciplinary teaching.

"The idea that got us thinking about this together comes out of the famous essay by C.P. Snow about the two cultures. I've always felt that it was perhaps better substantiated here at Stanford than at most places where he talks about the split between, if you will, techies and fuzzies. Literary intellectuals at one pole and at the other the scientists, most represented by the physical scientists, between the two of them, a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes particularly among the young, hostility and dislike, but most of all, lack of understanding. So, what happens if we take a literary intellectual in Ramon and a scientific intellectual in me, and look at the same sorts of questions? How do we bridge that gap? How do we look at theories of science and writings about science?"

"The other course that was my most interdisciplinary course is the technology and society requirement for the School of Engineering and has most to do with computer science-computers, ethics, and social responsibility. I've taught it for about 12 years. Every student in the School of Engineering has to have some course in that area because people who are doing technology need to have some sense of what impact that technology has on the world. They don't just need to know something about how that technology affects the rest of their world. They [also] have to know something about the interdisciplinary ways of thinking about how you might assess the effect of technology. I find that either I, or most likely, people that I bring in, have to talk about various other disciplinary issues, because no single perspective will get you the right picture."

"By bringing in a series of guest lecturers from those different departments, I can encourage people to take a multidisciplinary view. The reason I think it's important to do that is to break down hostility between different disciplines so that you don't get that 'lording over.' It's not the economists who are gods or the computer scientists who are gods, but we all need to bring our perspectives to the table."

"I think we can do it in our own courses by bringing in different perspectives, and certainly by moving towards more team-taught courses where we take a broad overarching issue, such as the ones that the new initiatives are looking at, from a research perspective. Then take slices of it from different perspectives and synthesize those slices into a full spectrum of understanding of the problem." ®

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Does Your College Really Support Teaching and Learning?

"The shortcoming of too many of these discussions focused on student learning, however, is that faculty-and the role that faculty play-is often an afterthought. While the integration of the diverse aspects of a student's educational experience can only be a good thing, we cannot lose sight of the fact that at most of our institutions, learning is "classroom-centered": the majority of student learning either takes place in or is directed through classroom activities. In order to affect any kind of widespread change in student learning, we need to offer specific pedagogical support to faculty who will play an essential role in that change."

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The posting below looks at how to create a create a "faculty community of critical practitioners who teach in a reflective and intentional manner that leads to better student learning." It is by by Michael Reder, director, Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, Connecticut College. The article is from the Fall, 2007 issue of Peer Review, Volume 9, Number 4. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2007, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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Does Your College Really Support Teaching and Learning?
Michael Reder

I believe that although small liberal arts colleges claim to care about teaching, the majority only give lip service to the idea. Small liberal arts colleges, for instance, have a reputation for being student-centered and focused on teaching as core to their mission. They emphasize the centrality of undergraduate education. They boast of small class sizes that allow for interactive learning. They go out of their way to hire faculty who "know" how to teach and are interested in working with our students. Good teaching is taken for granted at such institutions. I mean taken for granted in two senses, both good and bad: good teaching is assumed to be the norm (which is good). However, because it is assumed, there is often the collective illusion that good teaching happens "naturally" (which is bad) (Reder and Gallagher 2007.) The false logic goes something like this: "We all value teaching; that is why we are here; therefore, we must be good at it." Not surprisingly, most administrators are complicit with the idea that good teaching always happens on their campuses, without the need for support or intervention. And, as a whole, faculty members do care about their teaching and improving student learning, but caring is not enough. Too many institutions are failing miserably when it comes to actually supporting faculty to become the most effective teachers possible.

Although my remarks are focused on small liberal arts colleges, my argument is certainly applicable to a range of institutional types that claim to be focused on undergraduate teaching-which includes larger universities. I focus on such small colleges because as institutions they make special claims about their focus on the education of undergraduate students.

Another way of stating my point is this: Good teaching does not happen naturally-and when I say good teaching I mean effective teaching: the types of intentional pedagogical practices that lead to significant and deep student learning. In the past decade or so, higher education as a whole has spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about student learning and, in the case of the ever-growing pressure for accountability, how to measure the effect of the education we offer our students. Most of the recent movements in higher education are centered on improving student learning: the use of technology inside and outside of the classroom, experiential learning, information fluency, learner-centered teaching, community learning. The Association of American College and Universities' focus on liberal learning outcomes, civic learning, diversity, global education, residential learning, general education, and critical thinking echo this current trend of concentrating on student learning.

The shortcoming of too many of these discussions focused on student learning, however, is that faculty-and the role that faculty play-is often an afterthought. While the integration of the diverse aspects of a student's educational experience can only be a good thing, we cannot lose sight of the fact that at most of our institutions, learning is "classroom-centered": the majority of student learning either takes place in or is directed through classroom activities. In order to affect any kind of widespread change in student learning, we need to offer specific pedagogical support to faculty who will play an essential role in that change.

>From Faculty Teaching to Student Learning

Over the past ten years there has been a fundamental shift away from teaching (which views knowledge as central, something that is objective and simply passed on from teacher to student) to learning (and the idea that knowledge is something that is constructed and relational, a process in which the learner is central). It is a mistake, however, to think that this shift in focus away from what is being taught to who is learning de-emphasizes the importance of the teacher. If anything, the role of the teacher is even more demanding and complex, as she is forced to negotiate not only a body of knowledge, but also an ever-changing and diverse group of learners. As Robert Barr and John Tagg note, this new learning paradigm views faculty as designers of learning environments who work in consort with learners (and other support mechanisms on campus) to "develop every student's competencies and talents." They argue that, far from the traditional notion that "any expert can teach," "empowering learning is challenging and complex" (1995). In other words, although the learner may be at the center, the teacher's role is more varied and demanding.

This relatively new role provides an excellent opportunity for faculty to become learners themselves. As Trudy Banta asserts in a recent issue of Peer Review, "Most current faculty are not trained as teachers, so extensive faculty development is needed to raise awareness of good practice in enhancing teaching" (2007). The programs that I and my colleagues at other faculty teaching centers coordinate ask faculty to connect across disciplines and ranks in order to think critically about something they all share in common: teaching. Our work provides faculty with the opportunity to overcome what Lee Shulman, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, terms "pedagogical solitude." Faculty from different departments, some on the opposite ends of our campus, many with differing levels of teaching experience, work together and learn from each other. By providing occasions during which faculty may talk about their teaching, we create the opportunities for them to learn: from each other, from the literature about teaching and learning, from reflective practice.

>From Student Learning to Faculty Learning

Many at liberal arts colleges are quickly becoming aware of the reality that favorable conditions for good teaching are not the same as truly supporting teaching in a visible and intentional manner. This new emphasis on effective teaching explains the tremendous growth over the past five years in faculty development programs at such institutions (Mooney and Reder 2008). One strong indicator of this trend is the significant increase in small-college membership and participation in the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network, the professional organization for faculty and administrators running faculty development programs and centers for teaching and learning. Once mostly the domain of large research universities, centers for teaching are also being established at small "teaching" colleges all over the country, as such schools have realized that teaching deserves attention, and that for professionals to do something well, they need to practice their craft publicly and critically.

There are several widespread misconceptions about the work of faculty teaching programs, and I would like to address three that I encounter most often when working with faculty and administrators:

Misconception One-Programs for faculty teaching and learning are about remediation. In reality, programs that focus on faculty teaching are about intentionality and critical practice. People who do things well are constantly reflecting upon what they do, gathering information, and making it better. Our programming allows faculty to become more intentional, and therefore more effective, teachers. At Connecticut College, for example, the faculty regularly involved in the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) programming are not only exceptional teachers, they are also well-known scholars and campus leaders. Our most engaged faculty-in terms of research, teaching, and service-participate in and help lead our programming. Especially at a small liberal arts college, there is a symbiotic relationship between effective teaching and scholarship (see Misconception Three).

Misconception Two-Programs for faculty teaching and learning advocate one right way to teach. How one teaches is shaped not only by a person's individual identity (race, gender, age, sexuality, experience), but also the nature of the discipline, the difficulty of the material, the size of the course, and the experiences of the learners. Successful faculty teaching and learning programs must embrace a diversity of teaching styles in order to accurately reflect both the variety of disciplinary approaches and the individual personalities of faculty. Our work acknowledges this diversity of approaches; such diversity is essential because exposure to a range of options is required to allow faculty to make informed choices about their teaching practices. The discussions that the CTL fosters are almost always interdisciplinary, where scientists might learn from studio artists, or economists from humanists. Additionally, when we focus on the question of who is doing the learning, the diversity of the learners themselves becomes central to the educational enterprise. Thus, programs for faculty teaching address not only diversity related to teaching and content, but also diversity related to our students-in terms of their abilities, experiences, learning preferences, as well as race, gender, and class.

Misconception Three-Programs for faculty teaching and learning force faculty to make a choice between being scholars and being teachers. Teaching well and disciplinary scholarship require the same habits of mind: teaching and learning programs ask faculty to become learners themselves, in a way that is similar to their engaging in their research or creative work. As teachers we are asked to learn about our own teaching, about student learning itself, about designing learning activities, and about improving instruction and curricula. Like our research, which is reflected upon, made public, and therefore improved, our teaching should undergo the same processes. At many kinds of colleges, faculty are asked to be both teachers and scholars, and the lines between faculty teaching and research are often blurred, particularly when we involve our students in our own research. Above all, teaching needs to be conceived as a collaborative practice (something done within a larger community that is open to discussion) and a critical practice (something shared with an eye toward discovery, integration, refinement, and improvement), just as faculty do with their disciplinary scholarship.

Teaching and Learning: What Really Makes a Difference

Recent research suggests that there are specific classroom practices that lead to improved student learning. The preliminary results of parts of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education create direct links between faculty teaching methods and achieving the goals of a liberal arts education. The results indicate that faculty interest in student development (both inside and outside of the classroom), a high level of challenge, and the overall quality of teaching, are just a few of the conditions that correlate positively with student growth in areas such as motivation, openness to diversity and change, critical thinking and moral reasoning, attitudes toward literacy, and the desire to contribute to the arts and sciences. Having clear goals, requiring drafts of papers, incorporating class presentations, offering prompt feedback, and utilizing higher-order assignments (writing essays, solving problems not presented in the course, and making and analyzing arguments), all contribute to student growth in areas that many schools identify as overall educational goals. Although these teaching characteristics may seem obvious, Charles Blaich, the director of Wabash's Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, notes that preliminary results show great room for improvement in our classrooms: "... a majority of the students at our institutions are not getting 'high enough' levels of these teaching practices and conditions, which may explain why students, on average, do not seem to grow much in the first year on the outcomes we measured." Just as most colleges support faculty undertaking their own scholarship, it is equally important for schools to support faculty in their quests to become as effective teachers as possible.

Supporting Faculty as Teachers and Learners

Efforts focused on improving teaching can be coordinated using a variety of models, the most common of which include a faculty development committee, a dean's office, a rotating faculty coordinator, or a center model with a director. At many colleges, faculty learn about teaching in a variety of often-decentralized locations: first-year experience programs, community learning projects, information fluency initiatives, the writing program, instructional technology, and departmental discussions. Beyond helping to shape and connect faculty to these many initiatives and opportunities, an effective teaching and learning program will offer at least two types of programming: a yearlong experience designed specifically to meet the needs of incoming faculty with the primary goal of helping them make the successful transition to teaching at the institution, and some form of ongoing programming open to faculty of all ranks.

Supporting Incoming Faculty

Doctoral education emphasizes research, not teaching, and as the vast majority of faculty are trained at research universities, the need for faculty teaching development is particularly salient at small liberal arts colleges, where the teaching ethos and classroom practices contrast considerably. The excellent literature on early-career faculty (Rice, Sorcinelli, Austin 2000; Moody 1997; Boice 1992, 2000) clearly defines the challenges new faculty face across institutional types. However, faculty at small liberal arts colleges confront a variety of distinctive challenges that the literature does not directly address, including the small cohorts of incoming faculty and the relatively small size of departments and the faculty as a whole. In addition, diversity has been slow coming to many small liberal arts colleges, and new faculty, often hired to diversify the curriculum or the composition of the faculty in terms of race or gender, can be challenged to find like peers. Thus, early-career faculty might feel an isolation that their counterparts at larger institutions do not experience, not only in terms of their own research and disciplinary interests, but also in terms of pedagogical approaches, methodological training, and lifestyle.

There are additional issues that can impact early-career faculty at small colleges in ways different from their colleagues at larger institutions, such as the distinctive missions of many small colleges (including those with a religious affiliation) and their locations, which are often away from larger metropolitan areas (meaning that dual-career couples may need to commute to find employment, and faculty who are single may want to commute in from a larger community). Connecting incoming faculty to other early-career faculty across the institution provides them with a network of colleagues who have experience negotiating similar issues. Connecticut College, which uses a peer mentoring model to connect first-year faculty to each other and across cohorts to second- and third-year faculty (Reder and Gallagher 2007), and Otterbein College, which employs a single-cohort learning community (Fayne and Ortquist-Ahrens 2006), are two schools that have successful yearlong programs that are designed to address the issue that small-college faculty face.

Continuing Support for Faculty: Creating a Community of Learners

In addition to orienting new faculty, it is essential to support faculty at all stages of their careers. Although there are many types of programming for faculty beyond their first year, the programs that often have the most impact are ones in which faculty engage in a yearlong exploration of some aspect of teaching and learning, or programs that offer a series of standalone events that faculty can attend according to their interests and needs. Many of these discussions focus on curricular objectives to liberal arts values and goals, such as critical thinking or teaching writing or oral communication skills. Programs such as Colorado College's "Thinking Inside and Outside the Block Box" series (www.coloradocollege.edu/learningcommons/tlc/programs_luncheons.asp) and Connecticut College's "Talking Teaching" series (ctl.conncoll.edu/programs.html#talking) offer faculty the opportunity to discuss specific teaching issues with colleagues in an informal setting. Other successful yearlong programs include Allegheny College's Teaching Partners (Holmgren 2005), Macalester College's midcareer faculty seminar (www.macalester.edu/cst/Mid%20Career%20Seminar) St. Lawrence University's Oral Communication Institute (Mooney, Fordham, and Lehr 2005), and St. Olaf College's CILA Associates Program (Peters, Schodt, and Walczak 2008).

Colleges that support faculty in the development of their teaching skills recognize the difference between "caring about teaching" and "critically practicing teaching." They are working to create a faculty community of critical practitioners who teach in a reflective and intentional manner that leads to better student learning. And this community, composed of colleagues from across the disciplines right on campus, creates the opportunity for faculty to become lifelong learners.

References
Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). 2004. Portfolios transform writing assessment at Carleton College. AAC&U News 4 Jan. 2005 www.aacu.org/aacu_news/AACUNews04/december04/feature.cfm.

Banta, T. W. 2007. Can assessment for accountability complement assessment for improvement? Peer Review 9 (2): 9-12.

Barr, R. B., and J. Tagg. 1995. From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education." Change Magazine (27) 6: 13-25.

Blaich, C. 2007. Personal correspondence. 23 November.

Boice, R. 2000. Advice for new faculty members: Nihil nimus. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Boice, R. 1992. The new faculty member: Supporting and fostering professional development. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Fayne, H., and L. Ortquist-Aherns. (2006) Learning communities for first-year faculty: Transition, acculturation, and transformation. In S. Chadwick-Blossey and D. Reimondo Robertson (Eds.), To improve the academy: Vol. 24. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (pp. 277-290). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Holmgren, R. A. 2005. Teaching partners: Improving teaching and learning by cultivating a community of practice. In S. Chadwick-Blossey & D. R. Robertson (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Vol. 23. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (pp. 211-219). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Jones, L. F. 2005. Exploring the inner landscape of teaching: A program for faculty renewal. In S. Chadwick-Blossey and D. R. Robertson (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Vol 23. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development. (pp. 130-143). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Moody, J. 1997. Demystifying the profession: Helping junior faculty succeed. [3 papers.] New Haven: U of New Haven P.

Mooney, K. M., T. Fordham, and V. Lehr. 2005. A faculty development program to promote engaged classroom dialogue: The oral communication institute. In S. Chadwick-Blossey and D. R. Robertson (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Vol. 23. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (pp. 219-235). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Mooney, K. M., and M. Reder. 2008. Faculty development at small and liberal arts colleges. In D. R. Robertson & L.B. Nilson (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Vol. 26. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (pp. 158-172). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Peters, D., D. Schodt, and M. Walczak. 2008. Supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning at liberal arts colleges. In D. R. Robertson and L.B. Nilson (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Vol. 26. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (68-84). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Reder, M. and E. V. Gallagher, 2007. Transforming a teaching culture through peer mentoring: Connecticut College's Johnson Teaching Seminar for incoming faculty and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In D. R.

Robertson and L.B. Nilson (Eds.), To Improve the Academy: Vol. 25. Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (pp. 327-344). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Rice, R. E., M. D. Sorcinelli, and A. E. Austin. 2000. Heeding new voices: Academic careers for a new generation. New Pathways Inquiry #7. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education.

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American Association for the Advancement of Science. (AAAS)

In addition to publishing Science and other science-related publications, hosting scientific conferences and meetings, and helping scientists advance their careers, AAAS undertakes numerous programs and activities that promote science to the public and monitor issues which affect the scientific community.

Follow this link: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Friday, March 14, 2008

CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES

By Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross

From Classroom Assessment Techniques, A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd Ed.

In the 1990's, educational reformers are seeking answers to two fundamental questions: (1) How well are students learning? and (2) How effectively are teachers teaching? Classroom Research and Classroom Assessment respond directly to concerns about better learning and more effective teaching. Classroom Research was developed to encourage college teachers to become more systematic and sensitive observers of learning as it takes place every day in their classrooms. Faculty have an exceptional opportunity to use their classrooms as laboratories for the study of learning and through such study to develop a better understanding of the learning process and the impact of their teaching upon it. Classroom Assessment, a major component of Classroom Research, involves student and teachers in the continuous monitoring of students' learning. It provides faculty with feedback about their effectiveness as teachers, and it gives students a measure of their progress as learners. Most important, because Classroom Assessments are created, administered, and analyzed by teachers themselves on questions of teaching and learning that are important to them, the likelihood that instructors will apply the results of the assessment to their own teaching is greatly enhances.

Through close observation of students in the process of learning, the collection of frequent feedback on students' learning, and the design of modest classroom experiments, teachers can learn much about how students learn and, more specifically, how students respond to particular teaching approaches. Classroom Assessment helps individual college teachers obtain useful feedback on what, how much, and how well their students are learning. Faculty can then use this information to refocus their teaching to help students make their learning more efficient and more effective.

College instructors who have assumed that their students were learning what they were trying to teach them are regularly faced with disappointing evidence to the contrary when they grade tests and term papers. Too often, students have not learned as much or as well as was expected. There are gaps, sometimes considerable ones, between what was taught and what has been learned. By the time faculty notice these gaps in knowledge or understanding, it is frequently too late to remedy the problems.

To avoid such unhappy surprises, faculty and students need better ways to monitor learning throughout the semester. Specifically, teachers need a continuous flow of accurate information on student learning. For example, if a teacher's goal is to help students learn points "A" through "Z" during the course, then that teacher needs first to know whether all students are really starting at point "A" and, as the course proceeds, whether they have reached intermediate points "B," "G," "L," "R," "W," and so on. To ensure high-quality learning, it is not enough to test students when the syllabus has arrived at points "M" and "Z." Classroom Assessment is particularly useful for checking how well students are learning at those initial and intermediate points, and for providing information for improvement when learning is less than satisfactory.

Through practice in Classroom Assessment, faculty become better able to understand and promote learning, and increase their ability to help the students themselves become more effective, self-assessing, self-directed learners. Simply put, the central purpose of Classroom Assessment is to empower both teachers and their students to improve the quality of learning in the classroom.

Classroom Assessment is an approach designed to help teachers find out what students are learning in the classroom and how well they are learning it. This approach has the following characteristics:

* Learner-Centered

Classroom Assessment focuses the primary attention of teachers and students on observing and improving learning, rather than on observing and improving teaching. Classroom Assessment can provide information to guide teachers and students in making adjustments to improve learning.

* Teacher-Directed

Classroom Assessment respects the autonomy, academic freedom, and professional judgement of college faculty. The individual teacher decides what to assess, how to assess, and how to respond to the information gained through the assessment. Also, the teacher is not obliged to share the result of Classroom Assessment with anyone outside the classroom.

* Mutually Beneficial

Because it is focused on learning, Classroom Assessment requires the active participation of students. By cooperating in assessment, students reinforce their grasp of the course content and strengthen their own skills at self-assessment. Their motivation is increased when they realize that faculty are interested and invested in their success as learners. Faculty also sharpen their teaching focus by continually asking themselves three questions: "What are the essential skills and knowledge I am trying to Teach?" "How can I find out whether students are learning them?" "How can I help students learn better?" As teachers work closely with students to answer these questions, they improve their teaching skills and gain new insights.

* Formative

Classroom Assessment's purpose is to improve the quality of student learning, not to provide evidence for evaluating or grading students. The assessment is almost never graded and are almost always anonymous.

* Context-Specific

Classroom Assessments have to respond to the particular needs and characteristics of the teachers, students, and disciplines to which they are applied. What works well in one class will not necessary work in another.

* Ongoing

Classroom Assessment is an ongoing process, best thought of as the creating and maintenance of a classroom "feedback loop." By using a number of simple Classroom Assessment Techniques that are quick and easy to use, teachers get feedback from students on their learning. Faculty then complete the loop by providing students with feedback on the results of the assessment and suggestions for improving learning. To check on the usefulness of their suggestions, faculty use Classroom Assessment again, continuing the "feedback loop." As the approach becomes integrated into everyday classroom activities, the communications loop connecting faculty and students -- and teaching and learning -- becomes more efficient and more effective.

* Rooted in Good Teaching Practice

Classroom Assessment is an attempt to build on existing good practice by making feedback on students' learning more systematic, more flexible, and more effective. Teachers already ask questions, react to students' questions, monitor body language and facial expressions, read homework and tests, and so on. Classroom Assessment provides a way to integrate assessment systematically and seamlessly into the traditional classroom teaching and learning process

As they are teaching, faculty monitor and react to student questions, comments, body language, and facial expressions in an almost automatic fashion. This "automatic" information gathering and impression formation is a subconscious and implicit process. Teachers depend heavily on their impressions of student learning and make important judgments based on them, but they rarely make those informal assessments explicit or check them against the students' own impressions or ability to perform. In the course of teaching, college faculty assume a great deal about their students' learning, but most of their assumptions remain untested.

Even when college teachers routinely gather potentially useful information on student learning through questions, quizzes, homework, and exams, it is often collected too late -- at least from the students' perspective - to affect their learning. In practice, it is very difficult to "de-program" students who are used to thinking of anything they have been tested and graded on as being "over and done with." Consequently, the most effective times to assess and provide feedback are before the chapter tests or the midterm an final examinations. Classroom Assessment aims at providing that early feedback.

Classroom Assessment is based on seven assumptions:

1. The quality of student learning is directly, although not exclusively, related to the quality of teaching. Therefore, one of the most promising ways to improve learning is to improve teaching.

2. To improve their effectiveness, teachers need first to make their goals and objectives explicit and then to get specific, comprehensible feedback on the extent to which they are achieving those goals and objectives.

3. To improve their learning, students need to receive appropriate and focused feedback early and often; they also need to learn how to assess their own learning.

4. The type of assessment most likely to improve teaching and learning is that conducted by faculty to answer questions they themselves have formulated in response to issues or problems in their own teaching.

5. Systematic inquiry and intellectual challenge are powerful sources of motivation, growth, and renewal for college teachers, and Classroom Assessment can provide such challenge.

6. Classroom Assessment does not require specialized training; it can be carried out by dedicated teachers from all disciplines.

7. By collaborating with colleagues and actively involving students in Classroom Assessment efforts, faculty (and students) enhance learning and personal satisfaction.

To begin Classroom Assessment it is recommended that only one or two of the simplest Classroom Assessment Techniques are tried in only one class. In this way very little planning or preparation time and energy of the teacher and students is risked. In most cases, trying out a simple Classroom Assessment Technique will require only five to ten minutes of class time and less than an hour of time out of class. After trying one or two quick assessments, the decision as to whether this approach is worth further investments of time and energy can be made. This process of starting small involves three steps:

Step 1: Planning

Select one, and only one, of your classes in which to try out the Classroom Assessment. Decide on the class meeting and select a Classroom Assessment Technique. Choose a simple and quick one.

Step 2: Implementing

Make sure the students know what you are doing and that they clearly understand the procedure. Collect the responses and analyze them as soon as possible.

Step 3: Responding

To capitalize on time spent assessing, and to motivate students to become actively involved, "close the feedback loop" by letting them know what you learned from the assessments and what difference that information will make.

Five suggestions for a successful start:

1. If a Classroom Assessment Techniques does not appeal to your intuition and professional judgement as a teacher, don't use it.

2. Don't make Classroom Assessment into a self-inflicted chore or burden.

3. Don't ask your students to use any Classroom Assessment Technique you haven't previously tried on yourself.

4. Allow for more time than you think you will need to carry out and respond to the assessment.

5. Make sure to "close the loop." Let students know what you learn from their feedback and how you and they can use that information to improve learning.

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By Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross

From Classroom Assessment Techniques, A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd Ed.

"Beyond Best Practices": Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser
Contributing Editors, Textbooks and Teaching

Section Introduction

How do we teach American history? And what do our students learn? In this year's "Textbooks and Teaching" section, we present reports from the field, exploring what happens when historians self-consciously study their classroom practices. Inspired by Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, proponents of this kind of rigorous analysis of pedagogy refer to it as "the scholarship of teaching and learning."1 When we first approached this subject, we must admit, we had reservations: Would we be moving into the domain of education departments and teacher certification programs that addressed such issues as the relative merits of various classroom technologies, effective construction of multiple-choice tests, and the mysteries of rubric creation, all to serve us better in our quest for efficient "content delivery"? Would we be presented with mind-crushing correlations between student assessment scores and proportions of lecture/discussion observed for various courses at distinct levels of the curriculum? Would we see lesson plans for successful classes presented like recipes in a "best practices" cookbook? Were historians being asked to "dumb down" their specialties in order to don the guise of entertainers who could reach students more accustomed to amusement than to serious intellectual inquiry? To our relief our skepticism proved misplaced. The work presented below is analytically sophisticated, well grounded in empirical research, and provocative. It demands that we engage questions not just about the merits of particular pedagogies, but about our central purposes as academics who both study and teach the American past.

Above all, the scholars whose work appears in this section taught us that exploring teaching and learning in history requires that we consider our goals before we turn to evaluating our methods. What are we trying to teach? What do we want students to know after they have completed a history course, and for how long do we wish them to retain that knowledge? Contributors to this section recognize and register the familiar concern with the lack of historical knowledge today's students manifest, but rather than simply trying to fill empty vessels with incontestable, abstracted, and correct facts, they seek to help students develop an appreciation for history as the practice of interpretation and narration, based in the systematic analysis of evidence. In this way, they argue, students learn both content and what to do with it. In other words, these practitioners illuminate strategies for teaching historical thinking, not a long list of names and dates or even a short list of lessons of history. These case studies are rich with discussions of the components that constitute our disciplinary mode of analysis: posing historical questions; evaluating contested interpretations; interrogating and contextualizing sources; using evidence to create a narrative; revising established narratives in light of new findings. The best historians use these skills unselfconsciously; they are part of our cast of mind. But how do we teach these skills to our students so that they will think like historians, not just memorize the thoughts of their teachers? The scholarship of teaching and learning, then, not only encourages us to bring our skills as researchers into our work as teachers; it also asks us to articulate the core substance and significance of our distinctive expertise as historians. Perhaps, as T. S. Eliot has said, "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."2 Teaching history may yet be reconnected with doing history.

The article continues at: http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2006/index.shtml :This Web site serves as a companion to the "Textbooks and Teaching" section published each year by the Journal of American History. Here you may find syllabi and other supplemental material from authors who participated in "Textbooks and Teaching," as well as the full text of the print articles.

Talylor Mali

A brief aside from the serious: here’s a video clip of Taylor Mali performing the poem “What Teachers Make” Having met Taylor last year at Asilomar I can attest to his passion for education.

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What Teachers Make, or
Objection Overruled, or
If things don't work out, you can always go to law school

By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

He says the problem with teachers is, "What's a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?"
He reminds the other dinner guests that it's true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the other dinner guests
that it's also true what they say about lawyers.

Because we're eating, after all, and this is polite company.

"I mean, you¹re a teacher, Taylor," he says.
"Be honest. What do you make?"

And I wish he hadn't done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall
in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups.
No, you may not ask a question.
Why won't I let you get a drink of water?
Because you're not thirsty, you're bored, that's why.

I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:
I hope I haven't called at a bad time,
I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today.
Billy said, "Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don't you?"
And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.

I make parents see their children for who they are
and what they can be.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write, write, write.
And then I make them read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).

Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?

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Another video clip you may want to checkout “The Impotence of Proofreading” is a real ruckus.”