On this week's episode, James Lang shares about his book: Small Teaching
Quotes
What I started to notice was that the coaches who paid attention to these little things, and focused on small fundamentals, tended to do a lot better than the teams that didn’t.
—James Lang
I’m a big believer in the opening and closing minutes of class … I think those are really ripe opportunities for small teaching.
—James Lang
I try to do framing activities to help the students realize the value of what we’re doing.
—James Lang
Resources
Small Teaching: Small modifications in course design or communication with your students. These recommendations might not translate directly into 10-minute or one-time activities, but they also do not require a radical rethinking of your courses. They might inspire tweaks or small changes in the way you organize the daily schedule of your course, write your course description or assignment sheets, or respond to the writing of your students.
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Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, Ph.D., is the former Executive Director of the Academy of Educators in the School of Medicine and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Zakrajsek is the immediate past Executive Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and prior to his work at UNC, he was the Inaugural Director of the Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching at Central Michigan University and the founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Southern Oregon University, where he also taught in the psychology department as a tenured associate professor. Dr. Zakrajsek also sits on two educational related boards and several editorial boards for journals in the area of teaching and learning, is an international speaker requested regularly for keynote presentations and campus workshops, and has published widely on the topic of effective teaching and student learning.
Teaching should be more than telling.
–Todd Zakrajsek
If a worker knows why they’re doing something, they’re much better at doing it than if it’s a mystery to them. It’s the same thing in teaching.
–Todd Zakrajsek
Any time we start looking at these concepts and saying, “Should we do this, or that? Do the students fall into this category or the other category?” we lose the richness of all the individuals in between.
–Todd Zakrajsek
Lecturing alone simply does not return the same kind of advances you get when you add in engaged, active kinds of learning.
–Todd Zakrajsek
On today’s show, Betsy Barre joins me to share about the research on course evaluations.
Guest: Betsy Barre
Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University
After making the move to Rice in 2012, she was able to pursue her interest in undergraduate pedagogy by working with students and faculty in Rice's newly developed Program in Writing and Communication. In this role, she taught a series of disciplinary-based first-year seminars and contributed to the PWC's faculty development programming for those teaching first-year writing courses. And in July of 2014, she began her current position as Assistant Director of Rice's newly established Center for Teaching Excellence. More
Quotes
One of the biggest complaints faculty have about student evaluations is that it’s not a reflection of teaching effectiveness.
–Betsy Barre
Just because a student likes a class doesn’t necessarily mean they’re learning.
–Betsy Barre
It turns out that the harder your course is, the higher evaluations you get.
–Betsy Barre
If students think the work is valuable and something that’s helping them learn, you can give up to twenty extra hours a week of work outside of class and students will still give you higher evaluations.
–Betsy Barre
When we want to know if students have learned, one of the best things to do is just ask them if they’ve learned.
–Betsy Barre
Part of the movement in student evaluations now is to ask questions about learning, rather than questions about what the faculty members are doing.
–Betsy Barre
Betsy’s Six Most Surprising Insights about Course Evaluations
Taken from her article “Do Student Evaluations of Teaching Really Get an “F”?”
Yes, there are studies that have shown no correlation (or even inverse correlations) between the results of student evaluations and student learning. Yet, there are just as many, and in fact many more, that show just the opposite.
As with all social science, this research question is incredibly complex. And insofar as the research literature reflects this complexity, there are few straightforward answers to any questions. If you read anything that suggests otherwise (in either direction), be suspicious.
Despite this complexity, there is wide agreement that a number of independent factors, easily but rarely controlled for, will bias the numerical results of an evaluation. These include, but are not limited to, student motivation, student effort, class size, and discipline (note that gender, grades, and workload are NOT included in this list).
Even when we control for these known biases, the relationship between scores and student learning is not 1 to 1. Most studies have found correlations of around .5. This is a relatively strong positive correlation in the social sciences, but it is important to understand that it means there are still many factors influencing the outcome that we don't yet understand. Put differently, student evaluations of teaching effectiveness are a useful, but ultimately imperfect, measure of teaching effectiveness.
Despite this recognition, we have not yet been able to find an alternative measure of teaching effectiveness that correlates as strongly with student learning. In other words, they may be imperfect measures, but they are also our best measures.
Finally, if scholars of evaluations agree on anything, they agree that however useful student evaluations might be, they will be made more useful when used in conjunction with other measures of teaching effectiveness.
Recommendations
Bonni
Think about how you administer the student evaluations.
Check out her Betsy’s screencast (see above).
Betsy
Design your own evaluation instrument and distribute it yourself, especially at the mid-point of the source.
Take advantage of the teaching center on your campus for student interviews and classroom observations.
Are You Enjoying the Show?
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.
Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
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Sean is a digital teacher and pedagogue, with experience especially in networked learning, MOOCs, digital composition and publishing, collaboration, and editing. He’s been working in digital teaching and learning for 15 years. His work as a pioneer in the field of Critical Digital Pedagogy is founded in the philosophy of Paulo Freire, and finds contemporary analogues in the work of Howard Rheingold, Cathy N. Davidson, Dave Cormier, and Jesse Stommel. He is committed to engaging audiences in critical inspection of digital technologies, and to turning a social justice lens upon education.
Quotes
There are no principles that I’m aware of in instructional design that allow for the human to creep in; it’s very mechanistic.
–Sean Michael Morris
I believe that teaching isn’t method; teaching is intuitive.
–Sean Michael Morris
Every time we step into a classroom or design a new course … we have to step back and realize we don’t know anything, that each time it is new.
–Sean Michael Morris
I approach everything by asking, “What is it that you’re wanting to get out of this?” and, “What is it that you want your students to get from this?”
–Sean Michael Morris
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.
Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
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.
Bonni shares strategies to help “get it together” during stressful times of the semester.
Quotes
Never succumb to the temptation to say you don’t have enough time to stop.
—Bonni Stachowiak
Listening might be the most important part of our jobs.
—Bonni Stachowiak
Sometimes we’re so worried about entertaining our students that we miss the opportunities for them to have creative insights of their own.
—Bonni Stachowiak
In today’s episode, Dr. Bill Robertson introduces us to “action science” and the ways he is making his teaching relevant, creating opportunities for the most active kind of learning I can imagine.
Guest: Bill Robertson
Dr. Skateboard
Bill has a Ph.D. in Education and has been a skateboarder for over thirty-five years. He has done hundreds of demonstrations nationally and internationally in festivals, events and in academic settings.
Bill has been an educator for over twenty years. His academic areas of expertise are science education, curriculum development, and technology integration. He also teaches and does research in the areas of problem-based learning and action science.
People who are learning a second language may know exactly what they’re talking about but might not be able to express themselves.
—Bill Robertson
The things that made me successful in skateboarding made me successful in education.
—Bill Robertson
I realized there was a lot of physics and concepts in these sports that can be expressed and could be engaging and motivating for the students.
—Bill Robertson
The skills [students] are really good at can apply to something like education … if they can master something, they can probably master something else.
—Bill Robertson
You have to find ways to integrate the interests of your learners into your curriculum.
—Bill Robertson
Book: Training in Motion* by Mike Kuczala. Emphasizes the importance of movement for learning (and not just regular exercise)
Bill:
Non-profit organization: Skateistan. Using skateboarding as a tool for empowerment, with a large commitment for young women in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa.
Educational Portal: Edutopia. Dedicated to transforming K-12 education.
Are You Enjoying the Show?
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.
Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
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.
Doug Leigh on helping graduate students come up with interesting research topics.
Dr. Doug Leigh earned his PhD in instructional systems from Florida State University, where he served as a technical director of projects with various local, state, and federal agencies. His current research, publication, and lecture interests concern cause analysis, organizational trust, leadership visions, and dispute resolution. He is coeditor of The Handbook of Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions (Wiley, 2010) and coauthor of The Assessment Book (HRD Press, 2008), Strategic Planning for Success (Jossey-Bass, 2003) and Useful Educational Results (Proactive Publishing, 2001).
Leigh served on a two-year special assignment to the National Science Foundation, is two-time chair of the American Evaluation Association's Needs Assessment Topic Interest Group, and past editor-in-chief of the International Society for Performance Improvement's (ISPI) monthly professional journal, Performance Improvement. A lifetime member of ISPI, he is also a member of the editorial board for its peer-reviewed journal, Performance Improvement Quarterly. More
QUOTES
Some of the differences between doctoral work and master’s work have to do with the amount of original data collection.
—Doug Leigh
I try to set up the expectation that when a dissertation chair is doing a good job, they’re giving a lot of feedback, and that may involve several iterations of drafting.
—Doug Leigh
Though we call them defenses, they’re not interrogations. They’re not about getting lined up to be battered with questions to prove your worth before a student is allowed into the club.
—Doug Leigh
Students who can avoid just reaffirming what’s already known are able to position themselves to do research that sticks with them as a passion.
—Doug Leigh
Interestingness by Composing or Decomposing: what seems to be varied and complex is really better understood simply, or something that is currently understood to be simple is actually elaborate, distinct, independent, heterogeneous, and diverse. Example: Quanta's “The New Laws of Explosive Networks”
Interestingness by Globalizing or Localizing: what seems to be a global truth is really just a more local one, or that something thought to be experienced just locally is actual more global. Example: Pew Research Center's Views on Science poll
Interestingness by Stabilizating or Destabilizating: what seems to be stable and unchanging is actually unstable and changing, or things thought to be unstable are surprisingly stabilit and even permanent. Example: BBC's “The Libet Experiment: Is Free Will Just an Illusion?” (video)
Interestingness by Effective or Ineffective Functioning: some aspect of the world that was believed to function effectively is actually ineffective, or vice versa. Example: Derek Muller's “Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos” (video)
Interestingness by Re-assessment of Costs or Benefits: what seems to be bad is in reality good, or what was believed to be good is actually bad. Example: On Point's “Is Recycling Really Worth It?” (radio broadcast)
Interestingness by Inconsistencies or Consistencies: what has been thought to be able to exist together are in reality things that cannot, or phenomenena thought to be mutually exclusive actually can co-exist. Example: Quanta's “Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science“
Interestingness by Positive or Negative Covariation: what has been thought to co-vary positively actually co-varies negatively, or what has been thought to co-vary negatively actually co-varies positively. Example: Big Think's “How Hearing Something Now, Can Lead You to Believe the Opposite Later“
Tim Clydesdale talks about how we can all better support our students in navigating college and beyond by talking about vocation.
Quotes
[Vocation] is about the type of life you want to lead and the type of person you want to be.
—Tim Clydesdale
It may be that the broader sense of who you are isn’t being fully expressed in your work but it’s being expressed in many other places: in your volunteer work, or your care for a family member.
—Tim Clydesdale
Vocation is a much better way to talk to students [than career] because it captures much more of the breadth of life as it’s really lived.
—Tim Clydesdale
Doug Grove discusses practical program development: what works and what doesn’t when building learning experiences for today’s students.
Quotes
We see a lot of benefits of synchronous class sessions, but we’re not sure every student wants that. There’s a tradeoff with flexibility.
-Doug Grove
One of the mistakes we made when developing some of these programs was trying to be all things to all students.
-Doug Grove
Every program is a little different. One of the bigger mistakes we’ve made was we just took our existing structure and placed it on any new program.
-Doug Grove
Stephanie Vie researches the construction of digital identities in social media spaces as well as critical approaches to composing technologies such as plagiarism detection services. Her research has appeared in First Monday; Computers and Composition; Computers and Composition Online; Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and The Community Literacy Journal.
She is a Reviews Section Co-editor with Kairos; a Project Director with the Computers and Composition Digital Press; and an editorial board member of the undergraduate research journal Young Scholars in Writing.
Her doctorate from the University of Arizona (2007) is in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, and her dissertation, “Engaging Others in Online Social Networking Sites: Rhetorical Practices in MySpace and Facebook,” examined the use of privacy settings in these sites within a Foucauldian framework. More
Quote
The more moments you can take from an active, engaged classroom and bring them into your assignments, that’s going to significantly help reduce plagiarism.
-Stephanie Vie
Recommendations
Bonni:
Go for a walk. It’s easy to forget how great it feels walk.
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.
Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
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.
Mary Gene is an assistant professor and director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Calgary in Quatar. More
Quote:
I create a situation where I ask my students to think about things from multiple perspectives, but also allow their voices to be honored.
–Mary Gene Saudelli
Mary Gene:
In difficult circumstances, stop to consider your own thoughts: When you have extreme positions, does that extreme thought mirror who you want to be as a person and what you want to believe?
On today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Robin Paige about the potential impact of stereotype threat inside and outside of our classrooms.
Quote
When dealing with stereotypes, one of the things we can do on our campuses or in our classrooms is create a space of accountability but without saying “You’re a bad person for thinking that.”
—Robin Paige
Good checklists, on the other hand are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything–a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps–the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.
―Atul Gawande
We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us—those we aspire to be—handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.
―Atul Gawande
A checklist is a documented process for something you’ll do daily; a to-do list is something you assembled yourself that you need to do at a certain point of your day: Article on alphaefficiency.com
Philip Crawford, software entrepreneur on Quora, gives his definition: Question on Quora
Natalie Houston on checklists
A checklist ensures communication and confirmation among members of a team and catches errors.
—Natalie Houston
There are Two kinds of checklists:
Read-do: read each step and perform the step, checking off as you go (like following a recipe)
Do-confirm: perform steps of the task from memory until you reach a defined pause point when you confirm that things have happened.
Advice for making checklists:
Keep it simple
Make it usable – need to be able to check things off
Therese Huston received her B.A. from Carleton College and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. She was also awarded a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship with the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Therese was the Founding Director of CETL (now the Center for Faculty Development) and served as Director from 2004 to 2010. Drawing upon her background in cognitive science, she has spent the past decade helping smart faculty make better decisions about their teaching. Her first book, Teaching What You Don't Know, was published by Harvard University Press (2009).
Quotes
If I could go back to my 28-year-old self and give her one piece of advice, it would be to talk to a content expert. -Therese Huston
I wish I had offered to take an expert to coffee once a week to brainstorm what I should be teaching. -Therese Huston
Teaching is more than just knowing every single detail there is to know; teaching is much more about stimulating learning. -Therese Huston
You have to be thinking, “I’ve got to do something that I know well, but if I’m going to be the best teacher I can be to my students I’ve also got to teach them some things that are perhaps outside of my comfort zone.” -Therese Huston
No one can be an expert on this material, and what I’m going to be doing is to always look for the most recent, most important topic that I can be teaching you. -Therese Huston
If I’m doing a good job up here, I’m going to be pushing the boundaries of what I know. -Therese Huston
Notes
Teaching what you don’t know looks at it from two perspectives:
A subject you don’t know
A group of students you don’t understand
Things unique to people who experience minimal anxiety when teaching outside of their expertise:
They had a choice about whether or not to teach the subject
They addressed the “imposter issue” with their students
They embraced a teaching philosophy that emphasizes the idea: “I don’t need to master the material”
You have just been assigned to teach a course outside of our expertise. What are the most important steps to take in preparing to teach it?
Tell someone (deal with the imposter issue)
Find five syllabi for similar courses online
Get a timer and start practicing preparing for your class in set chunks of time.
In today’s episode, Doug McKee joins me to share about online courses. His Introduction to Econometrics class is taught about as close to an in-person as you can get, but without being bound by geographic barriers.
We weren’t lowering the price, but we were lowering the geographic barriers.
–Doug McKee
You don’t need a big film crew, and snazzy digital effects; you just need to be clear, and communicate it well.
–Doug McKee
Students show up, and they don’t have any questions. What I do is come with questions.
–Doug McKee
On today’s episode, ten prior guests, as well as Dave and I, come together to celebrate 75 episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed. We look back at episodes that have had a big impact on us, take a listener question, and make recommendations.
Guests:
1) Sandie Morgan
The Eight Second Rule – Wait eight seconds to give students a change to respond https://teachinginhighered.com/6
3) Scott Self theproductivenerd.org
Rebecca Campbell – Normalize help seeking behavior by being transparent with our students https://teachinginhighered.com/62
Mail App add-on: Act-On
4) Josh Eyler (two coming up both mentioning Cameron Hunt McNabb)
Cameron Hunt McNabb – How to bring more creative assignments to students https://teachinginhighered.com/24
8) Jeff Hittenberger
Appreciates Bonni’s vulnerability about her own teaching, that she's willing to admit her own mistakes.
Questions from a Listener:
Question: When seeking a professorship, how do you stand out from the crowd? Or, how do you find opportunities to the things you love in other career paths?
Peter Newbury from UCSD, who appeared on Episode 53, answers the question.
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.
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.
Use peer-evaluation tools like those available on CATME
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.
