Teaching in Higher Ed

Cheating Lessons

with James Lang

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Catching a student cheating can evoke all sorts of feelings: frustration, disappointment, anger, ambivalence. In episode 19 of Teaching in Higher Ed, Dr. James M. Lang joins me to talk about lessons learned from cheating.

Podcast notes

Our reactions to cheating

  • Disheartening experience
  • Feels personal

You're the last thing on their mind. When a student is cheating… their cheating isn't an assault on your and your values. – James M. Lang

  • The reality of how many students are cheating in higher ed today

[Cheating] is a long term and persistent problem in higher education. – James M. Lang

The learning environment's contribution to cheating

  • A positive or a negative contribution
  • The curricula
  • The individual classes

Reducing the likelihood for cheating

  • Infrequent, high-stakes assessment
  • Engage in more frequent assessment (with feedback)
  • When students have the opportunity to retrieve knowledge from their mind multiple times, and then do something with it, the more likely they are to remember it.
  • Service learning: helps foster students' intrinsic motivation
  • Offering unique learning experiences each semester

Plagiarism vs cheating

  • Both fall on a spectrum from easy/opportunity cheating to more planned
  • Cheating and how learning works

Academic integrity as something that has to be learned

lamar_academic_integrity
Integrity at Lamar University Poster Project

Advice for when we inevitably still encounter cheating

  • Step back emotionally
  • Have an educational response
  • Report it when it happens

Other cheating lessons

  • Self efficacy: Carol Dweck's research on mindset (video)
  • Growth or fixed mindset
  • Fixed mindset
    • “I can't write.”
    • “I can't do math.”
    • Fixed mindset were more likely to report that they would cheat the next time
  • “Learning is hard, but you're capable of getting better.”
  • “You say you worked hard on this.”
  • Early success opportunities

Recommendations

Bonni recommends: James Lang's Fullbright Specialist Program and speaking

Jim recommends: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gives a TED Talk on Flow: The secret to happiness

Lessons for us in our lives, but also for how we approach our teaching

Ending Credits

Thanks again to James Lang for joining us for this important dialog on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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Also, if you have topic or guest ideas, please visit https://teachinginhighered.com/feedback

How technology is changing higher education

with Audrey Watters

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Audrey Watters joins me for episode 18 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast to talk about how technology is changing higher education.

Podcast notes

Audrey Watters
on Twitter

The mythology

  • Science and technology obsession
  • We tend to not look at the past very well, in considering EdTech

The history of teaching machines

  • Predates computers
  • Patents in late 1800s building devices that would teach people
  • Teachers would be freed from lecturing and could be freed up to mentor and support students
  • Educational psychology
  • BF Skinner perhaps best known inventor of teaching machines

The programable web

Different model. Comes from the web.

Rather than being just the recipients of knowledge, [students] now can be active contributors… building and sharing their own knowledge in a meaningful way. – Audrey Watters

Constructing knowledge and sharing it with a network

Reevaluating what we expect students to know and do

How do we assimilate, how do we process, how do we share knowledge?

Easier to participate as an academic in these new networks

Privacy implications

I know you you are and I saw what you did by Lori Andrews

These digital tools demand our attention in a different way. – Audrey Watters

There is a level of vulnerability that learning always involves, but it does take on a different level when we do it in public. – Audrey Watters

The downside of having all student work live within the LMS

Distractions abound

Digital literacy

Where to get started

Privacy and politics

  • More than cheerleading
  • Data and privacy
  • The women and people of color gap in the EdTech universe

Recommendations

Bonni recommends Aziz Ansari defines feminism on letterman

Audrey recommends Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour A. Papert

What happens when we study our own teaching

with Janine Utell

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study our own teaching

Guest

Dr. Janine Utell

Study your own teaching

  • Be a reflective practitioner
  • Collect data on yourself
  • Involve the students

Teaching is something that is happening all of the time. – Dr. Janine Utell

Bonni used Remind service/app to connect with her students to see if the song sung at the start of this This American Life episode was still in their heads, the day after we listened to it in class

The Dip

The Course of a Course, by James Athernon

The trouble with course evaluations

Failure can be a good thing to value. Failure, in terms of what didn't work for me, but also failure on the students' part. – Dr. Janine Utell

Importance of taking risks in studying our own teaching and assessment

Recommendations

Bonni's recommendation

Use the B key when presenting with Keynote or PowerPoint

Janine's recommendations

Dear Committee Members: A Novel, by Julie Schumacher

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, by Jose Antonio Bowen

Jose Bowen on Twitter

Biology, the brain, and learning

with Josh Eyler

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Joshua Eyler

Biology, the brain, and learning

Guest

Dr. Joshua Eyler, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University

His Bio on Rice University's Center for Teaching Excellence

His Blog

Follow Josh Eyler on Twitter

Initial interest in the field of teaching and learning as a scientific enterprise

What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain

Brain-based learning

  • Amazing discoveries, but some limitations
  • Gulf was created between the scientists and educators
  • Cherry-picking results
  • Too limiting, looks primarily at neuroscience and cognitive psychology

The New Science of Teaching and Learning: Using the Best of Mind, Brain, and Education Science in the Classroom, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

Framework for a biological basis of learning

  • Bolster what we are learning from neuroscience to also include evolutionary biology and human development
  • Context about anything that we are learning.

The journey of an educator

  • Doesn't see students as subjects of experiments
  • Understanding teaching and learning as a science, really created a bridge
  • Prior knowledge – biological construct
  • Mental models

Learning from failure

  • The expert blind spot
  • Making assumptions about prior learning

Advice for next steps

Mind, brain, and education at Harvard's graduate school of education

The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning by James E. Zull

What I find exciting is that we're starting to ask different kinds of questions now. -Josh Eyler

Guest post Josh wrote on MassMedievil.com

Finally, nothing but a breath, a comma, separates us from our students–for we do not teach medieval literature, medieval art, medieval history, or medieval archaeology; we teach students about these subjects, about new ways to see their world through the lens of the past. Our field will continue to live and breathe only insofar as we dedicate ourselves to teaching it. And here I look to the wisdom of my dissertation director, Fred Biggs, who once told me that *everything* is a teaching activity—writing, presenting, publishing, but especially our work in the classroom, where we will teach hundreds and even thousands of students over the course of a career. The work we do with our students will push back the boundaries of our knowledge about the Middle Ages ever further, but to accomplish this we need to tear down the tenuous hierarchies of our classrooms—professor/student, expert/novice—and move forward together as fellow learners, engaging in projects together, teaching each other, finding meaning together in this moment—our own pause, our breath, our comma.

Movie clip: “student/teacher… learners… not much really separates us.” – Josh Eyler

Empathy is the foundation for all good teaching. – Josh Eyler

Video clip of professors reading aloud negative student evaluations

There's a vulnerability in the teaching/learning interaction. Students put themselves in a very vulnerable place, willingly, when they say, ‘I don't know that; please help me learn that.' It's almost sacred that they're doing that. We have to take that and value it very highly. – Josh Eyler

Recommendations

Bonni's:

Overcast – a powerful yet simple iphone podcast player

Josh's:

IMDb: Wit (2001)

A renowned professor is forced to reassess her life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.

Faculty Focus newsletter

Tomorrow's Professor from Stanford University

How to get students to participate in discussion

with Stephen Brookfield

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The reading has been assigned. You have prepared the questions, in advance. As you ask them, you are met by blank stares. This week on Teaching in Higher Ed: How to get students to participate in discussion with Dr. Stephen Brookfield.

Podcast notes

My guest this week is Dr. Stephen Brookfield. His career has spanned decades, with a focus on helping those of us in higher ed more effective at facilitating learning.

Guest information

Dr. Stephen Brookfield

His band: The 99ers

Playing music… brings a completely different part of your being into existence. I love that I have this very visceral and emotional side, right front and center in my life, which is a nice contrast to the cognitive element of thinking about teaching.

His bio

Teaching as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, by Dr. Stephen Brookfield

Definition of terms

Discussion

It isn't people talking. You can actually have silent techniques, like when you use the chalk talk technique.

When a majority of learners are involved in exploring some topic that is of mutual concern to them. In exploring that topic, they're trying to gauge its multiple shades… by taking into account other people's views on it…

Teaching with discussion

Creating the conditions under which that kind of “to and fro”ing can take place.

Assessing discussion

Class participation grading rubric

Techniques for engaging with discussion

Allows for thinking time

Structured silence

TodaysMeet

Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won't Stop Talking

50 Great Ways to Get People Talking (coming in 2015)

Actualizing democracy

Critical incident questionnaire (been using it for 22 years now: out of thousands of responses – “We really appreciate when you tell us why we're doing what we're doing.”)

The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom

Modeling discussion when teaching

Recommendations

Google voice + hangouts (Bonni)

“Try to find some way of researching how your students are experiencing your teaching.” (Stephen)

Maximize the value of Teaching in Higher Ed

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