Teaching in Higher Ed

The public and the private in scholarship and teaching

with Kris Shaffer

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Podcast Notes

 

On today’s show, Dr. Kris Shaffer talks about two topics: public scholarship and student privacy.

Guest: Kris Shaffer

Website: kris.shaffermusic.com
Twitter: @krisshaffer
GitHub: kshaffer

We don’t have a nice, fuzzy boundary between completely private and completely public like we used to.
—Kris Shaffer

We don’t advance human knowledge by publishing something and putting it inside a fence and making it hard to get.
—Kris Shaffer

Social media is about more than just projecting my identity online; it’s about cultivating a community online.
—Kris Shaffer

And by raising a question, sometimes we advance knowledge more than by simply stating a fact.
—Kris Shaffer

Links:

www.openmusictheory.com
www.hybridpedagogy.com
Open-source scholarship on Hybrid Pedagogy

Recommendations:

Bonni:
Zotero tutorials: http://universitytalk.org/zotero/
N. Cifuentes-Goodbody on Twitter: https://twitter.com/doctornerdis

Kris:
CitizenFour: A documentary about Edward Snowden, streaming on HBO. Watch trailer here.
Hello, by Adele: Watch here.

Team-based learning

with Jim Sibley

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Jim Sibley shares about Team-based Learning.

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Podcast Notes

Team-based learning has come up a few times on the show previously (Dr. Chrissy Spencer in Episode 25). Today, however, we dive deep into this teaching approach and discover powerful ways to engage students with Dr. Jim Sibley.

Guest: Jim Sibley

Jim Sibley is Director of the Centre for Instructional Support at the Faculty of Applied Science at University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. As a faculty developer, he has led a 12-year implementation of Team-Based Learning in Engineering and Nursing at UBC with a focus on large classroom facilitation. Jim has over 33 years of experience in faculty support, training, and facilitation, as well as managing software development at UBC. Jim serves on the editorial board of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.

Jim is an active member of the Team-Based Learning Collaborative and has served on its board and many of its sub-committees. He has mentored colleagues in the Team-Based Learning Collaborative’s Train the Trainer mentorship program. He is a co-author of the new book Getting Started with Team-Based Learning that was published by Stylus in July 2014. He is an international team-based learning consultant, having worked at schools in Australia, Korea, Pakistan, Lebanon, United States, and Canada to develop team-based learning programs.

Jim’s Book: Getting Started With Team-Based Learning

Jim's Website: www.learntbl.ca

More About Jim’s Personal Story:

Team-Based Learning Defined

  • A form of small-group learning that gets better with the bigger size of class you have. The idea is to discuss the question until you get to some sort of consensus.
    Team-based learning could easily be called decision-based learning, because as soon as you make a decision, you can get clear and focused feedback. That’s what team-based learning is all about.
  • Think about a jury, where you need brainpower. Then imagine you’re presenting the verdict, and you look around and see five other juries, on the same case as you. You can bet they’ve put a lot of thought into the verdict, and if they all have a different verdict than you, you can bet they’re going to give feedback.
  • Team-based learning is not a prohibition on lecturing…but it’s in smaller amounts, and it’s for a reason like answering a student need or question. An activity will often make students wish they knew about something, then you teach it.

About Teams

  • The Achilles heel of group work are students at different levels of preparedness.  Team discussion has a nice leveling effect.
  • Experience shows that smaller teams are the ones that have the most trouble
  • 5-7 students is the ideal size for a group.
  • Big teams work because you’re asking them to make a decision, and that’s something teams are naturally good at.
  • Because team-based learning is focused on teaching with decisions, there is less opportunity for people to ride on the coattails of others.
  • Instructors don’t have to teach about team dynamics or decision-making processes because teams are naturally motivated to engage in good discussion (if their conclusion is different than every other group, there will naturally be a lot of feedback).

The Team-Building Process:

  • The instructor builds teams, trying to add diversity to each team.
  • The instructor of a large class can do an online survey for diversity of assets.
  • Even freshman classes can have diversity (different people are better at different subjects).
  • CATME has an online team maker function, as does GRumbler.

Should students ever elect their own teams?

  • Student-selected teams are typically a disaster, mostly because they’re a social entity, and you tend to pick people that are the same as you.
  • It does work when students are passionate about the project.

Team-based learning requires commitment:

  • Team-based learning is something you have to commit to, not just something you try on for a day. it’s not a pedagogy that you can sprinkle on top of your lecture course; it’s a total change to the contract between you and your students.
  • It used to be that you were a “sage on the stage” or a “guide on the side.” Team-based learning means you’re a “sage on the side.”
  • Roles change. Everybody is uncomfortable at the beginning; students are in a new role, you’re in a new role.
  • You’ll get some student resistance, but if you commit, student evaluations at the end of the semester will show that students rate team-based learning courses better than conventional ones.
  • Teachers who do commit talk about “joy” and say things like “I’m falling in love with teaching again” and “class is so much fun.”

When should we use Team-based learning? Any cautions?

  • It works for all disciplines, but if you, as a teacher, are a last-minute person, be cautious with team-based learning. Because you’re making your students uncomfortable, and they’re looking for someone to pin it on, and if you’re disorganized, you'll become a target.
  • For teachers, it’s a similar amount of work as a traditional course, but because you have to do all the work upfront, it might seem like more.

Resources

Recommendations

  • Bonni uses Feedly to subscribe to student blogs. It serves up all new student posts in one place, saving her from having to go to each blog individually. Feedly Pro allows you to gather student blogs, and then students can subscribe to the class collection with one click.
  • Jim recommends an article in the Journal of Excellence in College Teaching by Bill Roberson and Billie Franchini. The article discusses why some teaching activities seem to crash while some seem to soar.

How to use cognitive psychology to enhance learning

with Robert Bjork

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Robert Bjork on using cognitive psychology to enhance learning.

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PODCAST NOTES

Guest:

Dr. Robert Bjork

Common misperceptions

Belief that we work something like a man made recording device.

In almost every critical way, we differ from any such device.” – Robert Bjork

How can it be that we have all these years of learning things and formal education and then end up really not understanding the process? You might just think by sheer trial and error during all of our educational experiences we would come to understand ourselves better than we apparently do.” – Robert Bjork

We found all these different situations where the very same thing that produces forgetting then enhances learning if the material is re-studied again. Forgetting is a friend of learning.” – Robert Bjork

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The spacing effect

  • Delay in re-studying information

The environmental context

  • If you study it again, then you're better off to study it in a different place.
  • This is counter to the advice to study in a single place.

Retrieval practice

When you recall something, it does far more to reveal that you did indeed have it in your memory.

“Using our memories shapes our memory.”- Robert Bjork

As we use our memories, the things we recall become more recallable. Things in competition with the memories become less recallable.”- Robert Bjork

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We should input less and output more.”- Robert Bjork

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Test yourself; retrieval practice

Low-stakes or no-stakes testing is key to optimizing learning.”- Robert Bjork

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“When I say they become inaccessible, they are absolutely not gone.”- Robert Bjork

Interleaving

“In all those real-world situation where there's several related tasks or components to be learned, the tendency is to provide instruction in a block test. It seems to make sense to work on one thing at a time.”- Robert Bjork

“We are finding that interleaving leads to much better long-term retention. It slows the gain in performance during the training process but, then leads to much better long-term performance.”- Robert Bjork

“Forgetting is not entirely a negative process. There are a number of senses in which forgetting can be a good thing.”- Robert Bjork

“The very same people who just performed better, substantially, with interleaving, almost uniformly said that blocking helped them learn better.”- Robert Bjork

Desirable difficulties

They're difficulties in the sense that they pose challenges (increased frequency of errors) but they're desirable in that they foster the very goals of instruction (long-term retention and transfer of knowledge into new situations).

  1. Interleaving vs blocking
  2. Varying the conditions of learning and the examples you provide rather than keeping them constant
  3. Spacing vs massing (cramming)

“The word desirable is key. There's a lot of ways to make things difficult that are bad.”- Robert Bjork

The generation effect

Any time you can take advantage of what your students already know and give them certain cues so that they produce an answer, rather than you giving them an answer, you greatly enhance their long-term retention.”- Robert Bjork

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Incorporating generation is a desirable difficulty but people have to succeed at the generation. If they fail, it is no longer a desirable difficulty.”- Robert Bjork

Errors are a key component of effective learning.”- Robert Bjork

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Successful forgetting

  • Memory relies on being in the same situation
  • Present it in a different context, produces longer-term learning
  • Encode the information differently; encoding variability
  • Retrieval is powerful, but depends on success to make it so

Many things are involved in remembering people's names.” – Robert Bjork

Self regulated learning

The key is for us all to learn how to learn more effectively.”- Robert Bjork

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As a consequence of our complex and rapidly changing world and also changes in technology and educational environments, more and more learning is happening outside any formal classroom setting. It's in our own hands.”

  • Across a lifetime

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

GoCognitive’s Robert Bjork videos on YouTube

Bob recommends:

Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning

Several books on research on learning

 

Closing notes

  1. Rate/review the show. Please consider rating or leaving a review for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on whatever service you use to listen to it on (iTunes, Stitcher, etc.). It is the best way to help others discover the show.
  2. Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
  3. Subscribe. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, you can receive a single email each week with the show notes (including all the links we talk about on the episode), as well as an article on either teaching or productivity.

Flipped out

with Derek Bruff

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Derek Bruff gives his unique take on the flipped classroom… what to have the students do before they enter the classroom and what to do once they get there.

flipped-out

PODCAST NOTES

Guest:

Dr. Derek Bruff

On Twitter

His blog

The flipped classroom

Shin, H. (2015) ‘Flipping the Flipped Classroom: The Beauty of Spontaneous and Instantaneous Close Reading’, The National Teaching & Learning Forum, 24(4), pp. 1–4. doi: 10.1002/ntlf.30027.

What are the experiences and activities we want to have our students engage in that will help them make sense of this material and have them do something interesting with it?” – Derek Bruff

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Eric Mazur – learning as a 2 stage process

  1. Transfer of information (during class)
  2. Assimilation of that information by the students (outside the classroom)

A definition

  • A shift in time to that process
  • Class time spent on the assimilation process

The classic flipped classroom

  • Students encounter the info before class
  • Come to class already having exposure
  • Practice and feedback

Flipped Classroom resources

Vanderbilt flipping the classroom

FlippedClassroom.org

The Learning process

If students aren’t doing the pre-work before they come to class, the time together isn’t going to be well-served.” – Derek Bruff

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Concerns that the flipped classroom is doubling the work for the students.

First exposure

Effective Grading, by Barbara Walvoord

Schwartz, Daniel L. and Bransford, John D.(1998)'A Time For Telling',Cognition and Instruction,16:4,475 — 522

Diet coke and Mentos experiment

This video is just an example of the Mentos/Diet Coke experiment; it isn't Derek's daughter

Creating times for telling

Students first need to encounter a problem, or a challenge, or something mysterious… and then that provides motivation to hear the 15 minute [explanation].” – Derek Bruff

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  • Linear algebra course
  • Look at the board game Monopoly. What are the best places to buy on the board?
  • Markov chain modeling

Classes should do hands-on exercises before reading and video, Stanford researchers say. (2013, July 16). Retrieved 21 October 2015, from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/july/flipped-learning-model-071613.html

Even when you have defaults [in your teaching], you want to have good defaults…” – Derek Bruff

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Peter Newbury on Teaching in Higher Ed talks about Peer Instruction

RECOMMENDATIONS

Bonni recommends:

  • Pictures as a means for reminders

Derek recommends:

Not yet-ness

with Amy Collier

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Amy Collier joins me to talk about not yet-ness, geekiness, Jazzercise, Stevie Ray Vaughan, teaching, and learning.

not-yet-ness

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Amy Collier

Amy admits to some shenanigans

Stevie Ray Vaughan sings Mary Had a Little Lamb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cGphy7XeZk

The great thing about Lego is that it gives kids these tools and they don't have to be built a certain way.” – Amy Collier

Vaughn builds Lego with instructions

Vaughn builds Lego without instructions

Thoughts on education and teaching

You can work with students to do something related to what you're talking about in class, but they can find creative ways to do things you might not have predicted.” – Amy Collier

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…finding out what drives them, keeps them coming back, and helping them find their own voice – that's what education is about. That's where I find the most joy.”

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When you embrace not yet-ness, you are creating space for things to continue to evolve.” – Amy Collier

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By not creating space for those things, we end up creating a more mechanistic approach to education, rather than something that feels more human and more responsive to our humanity.” – Amy Collier

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Multidisciplinary examples

  • Domain of One's Own
  • They have this flexible interface while also connecting to a community
  • Messiness

How do we evolve the ways in which we understand what learning is?” – Amy Collier

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More conversation is needed

Amy invites us to consider for which students not yet-ness works best and for which students might it cause some kind of disequilibrium that will cause them not to be successful in their educational experience?

More on not yet-ness

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Doug McKee's advice: “Your job is to move them one step along a path. You can do that job no matter where they are when they enter your class.”

Amy recommends:

Anne Lammot

“These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.” – Anne Lammot

We are human and our dance is one of the things that we bring to a human interaction.” – Amy Collier

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Closing notes

  1. Rate/review the show. Please consider rating or leaving a review for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on whatever service you use to listen to it on (iTunes, Stitcher, etc.). It is the best way to help others discover the show.
  2. Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
  3. Subscribe. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, you can receive a single email each week with the show notes (including all the links we talk about on the episode), as well as an article on either teaching or productivity.