Teaching in Higher Ed

All that cannot be seen

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On today’s episode, I talk about all that cannot be seen.

ALL THAT CANNOT BE SEEN
Photo by Jim Frazee of Southwest Search Dogs. Used with permission (he's my Dad).

 

Podcast notes

  • Mystery commercial that I really hope someone can find and send to me
  • Augmented reality
  • Yik yak chat service (For reasons explained in the podcast, I would rather not link to this particular app/service)
  • [EDIT: 1/15/15/ at 10:20 am]: Right after recording this episode, I listened to episode 9 the Reply All podcast by Gimlet Media. I have even less certainty now about whether or not we should stay far away from Yik Yak, or get in there and spread some positivity and make our presence known. I welcome your thoughts either privately, or in the comments, below.  
  • Southwest Search Dogs

Online forum introductions

Our perceptions really do matter

Our expectations can shape outcomes in others…

This American Life previewed Invisiblia on an episode called: Batman

Especially the beginning re mindset on This American Life

NPR Science reporters Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller explain to Ira Glass how they smuggled a rat into NPR headquarters in Washington, and ran an unscientific version of a famous experiment first done by Psychology Professor Robert Rosenthal. It showed how people’s thoughts about rats could affect their behavior. Another scientist, Carol Dweck, explains that it’s true for people too: expectations affect students, children, soldiers, in measurable ways. (6 minutes)

Invisibilia

Invisibilia is a series about the invisible forces that shape human behavior. The show interweaves personal stories with scientific research that will make you see your own life differently.

Assume the best… and talk through the gaps…

Episode 14 on Dealing with Difficult Students in Higher Ed

Our diverse students

Recommendation

Coach.me

Teaching Naked

with Jose Bowen

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It is easy to want to cover up in some way as professors…

In today’s episode, President Jose Antonio Bowen encourages us to become good at “Teaching Naked.”

A conversation with Jose Bowen

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Jose Antonio Bowen, President, Goucher College

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

Recommendations (part 1)

This episode, we start with Bonni's recommendation and ask Dr. Bowen questions from Storycorps.

Teaching Naked

The thing that teachers do best in the classroom is to be human beings, and to get to know their students as human beings, and to make that connection between what matters to their students and what matters to them. (Jose Bowen)

  • Start with what matters to your students
  • Used to have the advantage, based on knowledge
  • Use class time to make genuine connections and not simply for providing information
  • Technology works great outside the classroom for quizzing, communication, etc.
  • We know more about teaching than we did when we were in school
  • Pedagogy needs to be our central focus, and most of us weren't trained in it

A teaching failure

Bonni admits to one of her bigger failures in teaching in the past few years

Driving the stick shift car and not always having it turn out the way we want it to

Overcoming the failures – Jose gives advice

We are opaque as to our own intellectual accent. Everybody has an accent in the way they speak, but they also have an accent in the way they think.

Academics, in particular, are bad examples of learning, because we learned in spite of the system. We're the odd balls. We're the weirdos. We're the people who liked school so much that we're still here.

Most students don't learn that way.

Failure is simply part of the game. Disconnect is just part of what happens. (Dr. Jose Bowen)

  • Embrace mistakes
  • Admit when things go wrong
  • Describe why you tried what you did
  • Model change (“I changed my mind.”)

The end of the story

The Naked Classroom

  • Furniture moves around; no rows
  • No technology / screen
  • Index cards
  • Noisy
  • Laptops aren't typically necessary

Nobody uses a laptop while doing yoga or playing tennis (Jose Bowen)

I believe in noisy and messy classrooms. Complexity. Lots of failures. People having to confront real problems. Confront each other. Confront me… (Jose Bowen)

For beginners… need to set the stage and expectations… after that, they know how the game works.

Twitter

Recommendations (part 2)

Jose closes the podcast episode with his recommendations.

Change is hard. It's hard for you and it's hard for your students… Keep asking your students what's working. Expect some failure. It's not a linear process.

That's the process of learning and we're all learning how to do something new: And that's how to be better, more engaged teachers.  (Jose Bowen)

Closing credits

  • Subscribe to the weekly update and receive the Educational Technology Essentials Guide
  • Give feedback on the podcast or ideas for future topics/guests

 

Specifications Grading

with Linda Nilson

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There’s something wrong with the way we’re grading that isn’t being talked about nearly enough.

On today’s show, Dr. Linda Nilson shares about a whole new way of thinking about assessing students’ work and making grades mean more.

Podcast Notes

Dr. Linda B. Nilson

Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University

Specifications grading

Advocating a new way of grading from University of Pittsburgh University Times

The problem with “traditional” grading

Academic and Occupational Performance: A Quantitative Synthesis (Samson, Graue, Weinstein & Walberg)

.155 correlation meta analysis done by Sampson
2.4% of the variance in career success

2006 study by the American Institutes for Research
Fewer than 1/2 of four year college graduates
Fewer than 3/4 of two year college graduates
Demonstrate literary proficiency

Explanation of specifications grading

Bundles
Virtual tokens

Robert Talbert blog
Casting out nines

How specifications grading came to be

Benefits

Concerns

Recommendations

Bonni: PollEverywhere (new features)

Linda: Cultivate your courage by trying out things you’re afraid of…

How to see what we’ve been missing

with Cathy Davidson

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Fears and concerns over changes in higher education persist.

Whether it is our disdain for lecturing to a bunch of disconnected, texting and Facebooking students, or their boredom at being put to sleep by a droning professor reading from his powerpoint, something’s got to give…

In today’s episode, Dr. Cathy Davidson joins us to talk about finding the right practice, and the right tools, and being able to see what we’ve been missing in higher ed.

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Cathy Davidson

Cathy on Twitter 

Attention

The gorilla experiment

Selective attention test video by Simons and Chabris (1999)

We have a capacity for learning constantly. -Cathy Davidson

Patients as co-learners with their physicians in the healing process

Examples of facilitation of learning, unlearning, and relearning

Students write a class constitution

What happens if you take responsibility for your own learning? – Cathy Davidson

Alvin Toffler's term: unlearning

Alvin Toffler has said that, “…in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in ones tracks, see what isn't working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

This requires all of the other skills in this program but is perhaps the most important single skill we will teach.”

…Sadly, we all find gorillas in our lives. They usually come through tragedy… We have all had those moments when there's a before and an after in your life when the world looks different. The world was not different. What changed was your ability to see a world that you didn't have to see when you were priviledged not to… when you thought the world only had basketball tosses in it. It wasn't that the gorilla didn't exist; it was that you didn't see it. -Cathy Davidson

Multitasking

  • Fears about the calculator
  • Debates in state legislatures and in the senate when Motorola wanted to put a radio in the car
  • Radio actually helped save lives, especially in night driving, to combat the issue of falling asleep at the wheel
  • Brain is constantly multitasking; we just don't realize it

Flow tasks (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

  • Brain surgery, playing chess, dancing to rock music, video game playing
  • Reading a book is not considered a flow task – people go off the page in 2-3 minutes; we think we are concentrating, when we are not

Unitasking

  • Howard Rheingold on Attention Literacy
  • There's always something we are missing
  • Index cards: Write down three things we've missed and we haven't talked about…
  • Tools, methods, and partners are needed to fight attention blindness

Recommendations

Closing Credits

  • Subscribe to the weekly update and receive the Educational Technology Essentials Guide
  • Give feedback on the podcast or ideas for future topics/guests

Teaching through student research

with Bethany Usher

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Getting students engaged in research is one of the ways we can make their learning experiences more tangible and more profound. In today's episode, Dr. Bethany Usher joins us to talk about what happens when we turn students into scholars.

Teaching through undergraduate research

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Bethany M. Usher

Challenges of getting student research to work

  • Recognizing that research can happen in any discipline
  • Getting faculty to recognize that students can make a contribution
  • Helping students see that research is something they can do
  • Setting expectations for students

Examples of this kind of research

Rebecca Nelson (now a grad student at University of Connecticut) textile exhibit; band of knitted heads

  • Discovered a new knotting technique and how the piece had been repaired along the way
  • Currently living in Guatemala, studying textile production
  • Rebecca's blog

Student did research on a skeleton population and was the winner of the student researcher award at Mason

Authentic research

When the faculty member and the student don't know the answer when they begin

Other guidance

Recommendations

Closing credits

  • Subscribe to the weekly update and get the EdTech Essentials Guide
  • Give feedback on guests or topics for the 2015 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed