Teaching in Higher Ed

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.

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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

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.

Correcting mental models

with Meg Urry

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Meg Urry shares approaches we can use to help our students correct inaccurate mental models and grasp complex information.

Correcting mental models

 

PODCAST NOTES:

Correcting inaccurate mental models

Interest in science

At some moment it clicked and I understood what it meant. Not only was that the moment that I started to like physics, but also the moment I realized everybody can learn physics if they get this key that unlocks the door. You don’t want to leave them in the same state that I was in… of wondering why the heck we’re doing this… You want people to get over that hump and suddenly see that this is really simple, straightforward, beautiful, and useful.” – Meg Urry

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Gender discrimination in the sciences

“It was very typical for me to be one of the only women in the class and the guys just sort of took over.” – Meg Urry

“I always assumed that if someone claimed authority about something, that they must, indeed, know about it. It turns out lots of people do that all the time.” – Meg Urry

“When I entered graduate school in 1977 at John Hopkins university, it had allowed women in as undergraduates only since 1970.” – Meg Urry

It hasn’t been easy [for women].” – Meg Urry

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People who feel different than the norm (who feel outside the tribe) have a harder time learning.” – Meg Urry

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Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J. and Handelsman, J. (2012) ‘Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(41), p. 16474. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1211286109.
(Moss-Racusin et al., 2012)

Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.”(Moss-Racusin et al., 2012)

“Both the women and the men made this gender-biased judgment.” – Meg Urry

Early lessons in teaching

“I didn’t realize how hard these students were working.” – Meg Urry

The first year, I did straight lecture intro to physics, but, I realized something was missing.” – Meg Urry

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“You listen to what the groups are saying and you can tell from that what their misperceptions are…” – Meg Urry

What they need to do is to explain it to someone else, because that is how they will come to understand it better.” – Meg Urry

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Learning catalytics

More ways to teach complexity

They’re not going to get there by you talking at them. It just doesn’t work.” – Meg Urry

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Real learning takes time. We often don’t allow students the time they need to get there.” – Meg Urry

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“You can only get them to understand stuff when they have had to think about it and reject some possible alternatives.” – Meg Urry

Trying to tell students things, before they were in a state to listen.

“You have to make them care about what you’re saying before you say it, or they’re not going to hear you.” – Meg Urry

That moment when they don’t know what to do is a perfect teaching moment.” – Meg Urry

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Tool: How to solve problems

Meg's prescriptive checklist for solving problems

  • Always share a picture of what you’re trying to solve.
  • Figure out the principle of what you’re trying to solve.
  • Etc.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Bonni recommends:

IMG_0118

 

Meg recommends:

“This book is a gift to any person who is a minority in science.”

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.

Grading exams with integrity

with Dave Stachowiak

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Bonni and Dave Stachowiak share about ways to reduce the potential for introducing bias while grading exams.

PODCAST NOTES

Grading exams with Integrity

In today's episode, Dave Stachowiak and I share about ways to reduce the potential for introducing bias while grading exams.

Risks of bias in grading exams

Techniques to reduce potential bias

  • Blind grading (sticky notes, LMS-based, etc.)
  • Grade by question, not exam
  • Inner-rater reliability practices
  • Block time for grading during peak energy hours
  • Be transparent and over-communicate your practices and rationale
  • *** Re-grade the earlier exams, to avoid what Dave spoke about…

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Asking your students what they want to listen to before class

Coming Home, by Leon Bridges

Dave recommends:

Coaching for Leaders episode #211: How to be productive and present

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.

Personal knowledge management revisited

with Dave Stachowiak

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Bonni and Dave Stachowiak revisit the topic of personal knowledge management and discuss how our processes have evolved.

Personal knowledge management

Podcast notes

Personal knowledge management revisited

James Lang's article in The Chronicle about Teaching in Higher Ed

Harold Jarche

PKM is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society. PKM means taking control of your professional development, and staying connected in the network era, whether you are an employee, self-employed, or between jobs.

Seek

Sense

Share

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

  • Mid-exam stretch break

Dave recommends:

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.

Making challenging subjects fun

with Ainissa Ramirez

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Ainissa Ramirez shares about how and why to make challenging subjects fun.

Making challenging subjects fun

Guest: Dr. Ainissa Ramirez

http://www.ainissaramirez.com/bio.html

“I learned that this thing of investigating and being curious around the world was the thing that people called science.” -Ainissa Ramirez

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Early influences

 

“By seeing my reflection in this young [African American] lady on television doing science, it gave me permission to say, ‘maybe I should be doing this.’”. -Ainissa Ramirez

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  • Teachers as a big influence

Making learning fun

“When it comes to teaching, I try to come across as approachable.” – Ainissa Ramirez

“I don't think I have the luxury to come off as extremely heady, because there's so much stuff that's going to prevent communication from [happening].” – Ainissa Ramirez

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Service-oriented teaching approach

“I feel like it's my job to get you there. I can't get you there completely, but I can at least figure out where the gaps are and tell you where to head.” – Ainissa Ramirez

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More approaches for making learning fun

  • The importance of a hook
  • Experimentation vs memorization
  • Failure as data collection

“If we think of failures as data collection, they lose their sting.” – Ainissa Ramirez

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Materials research society

DemoWorks (a cook book for materials science experimentation with items you can buy at a local hardware store)

“It's the messy stuff where you learn.” – Ainissa Ramirez

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A call to get musicians involved in the call to make science fun

Adventures in giving a TED talk

Ainissa's TED talk

STEM education advocate via TED blog

“It's vulnerability that people really resonate with… If you're willing to be vulnerable, it is a position of power, because you'll connect with many more people.” – Ainissa Ramirez

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Great videos of Ainissa in action, getting people excited about science

Gina Barnett – Play the Part: Master Body Signals to Connect and Communicate for Business Success  (helps you get out of your way)

Importance of having passion in our teaching

“Get back in touch with that thing that made you excited and then share that with other people. Be a beacon for that.” – Ainissa Ramirez

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Recommendations:

Bonni recommends:

Making invitations to learn (my experimentation with extending Remind this semester)…

Ainissa recommends:

Learn from Einstein – “If you can’t explain it to your Grandmother, you don't understand it.”

Teaching lessons from Pixar

with Josh Eyler

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Josh Eyler, and Bonni Stachowiak talk about lessons in teaching from Pixar.

teaching-lessons-from-pixar

 

PODCAST NOTES

#065: Teaching lessons from Pixar

Guest:

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

Josh’s Pixar course

  • The hero's journey
  • Loss in children’s media
  • WallE – environmental messages, religious messages/themes

Student-taught teaching, supported by Rice’s Center for Teaching Excellence

Heard on Twitter: Pixar favorites

Brian Croxall – Toy Story 2

Shyama – Finding Nemo and The Incredibles

Edna Mode

Sandie Morgan

Monsters Inc.

Cautionary note

Funny episode of Very Bad Wizards where they discuss the criticisms of the Inside Out movie, when it should have been clear to everyone that the movie wasn’t intended to actually represent how the brain works…

Opportunities to learn from our students are abundant

Finding Nemo

“If we only focus on [our role of imparting wisdom], we miss out on those moments when students can share something with us that opens our eyes to the material in a way we have never seen it before.” – Josh Eyler

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Bonni shared about making assumptions on episode 63

Great teaching begins with a boundless passion for our subject

Ratatouille

Great teaching begins with a boundless passion for our subject

“Passion is sometimes an underrated part of what we do as teachers that can be really effective in reaching our students.” – Josh Eyler

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Gradually reducing coaching helps students learn

Finding Nemo

David Merrill’s advice on instructional design: Instructional guidance should be gradually reduced

“In order to learn anything, we need to confront the failure of faulty knowledge, of faulty mental models. Students aren’t given enough opportunity to do that and when they are, the stakes are way too high for them.” – Josh Eyler

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Mindset matters and so does proximal development

Toy Story

“Understanding our intellectual development in more complex terms can help students wrap their minds around the learning process.” – Josh Eyler

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The pursuit of knowledge can be heightened through curiosity

Constructivism

“Curiosity is one of our most deeply rooted mechanisms by which human beings learn.” – Josh Eyler

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“It’s that curiosity – that desire to know – that we need to be cultivating in our classrooms.” Josh Eyler

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The knife that solves the butter problem

spreadthelove

Learning happens everywhere

Up

“The reality is that learning is a very big idea and it happens everywhere.” – Josh Eyler

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“My wife has been very sick for the last year and I’ve learned quite a bit about courage from her. I learn so much from my three year-old daughter about how to tackle life with a toddler’s zeal.” – Josh Eyler

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RECOMMENDATIONS

Bonni recommends:

Josh’s essays:

Josh recommends:

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.

The weekly review

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Bonni Stachowiak shares how she improves her productivity through a structured, weekly review.

weekly-review

Podcast notes

The Weekly Review

Getting Things Done, by David Allen

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. – David Allen

GET CLEAR

GET CURRENT

  • Review task manager (I use OmniFocus)
  • Review calendar (last week, next 2 weeks)
  • Review Waiting
  • Review Project Lists
  • Review Checklists

GET CREATIVE

  • Review someday/Maybe List
  • Add new projects
  • Refine system

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Give a weekly review a try for one month… and share how it goes…

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.

Triumphs and failures – Day 1

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Bonni Stachowiak shares about the triumphs and failures in her first day of teaching this semester.

TRIUMPHSFAILURES

Podcast notes

Triumphs and failures of day 1

Failures

Treyvon trip up

Forgotten supplies

Triumphs

  • Mostly kept pace between three sections of the same class
  • Kept my stuff together – cords, etc. Grid it system worked like a champ
  • Experience what my teaching is like, versus me talking about it (while still explaining while we go)
  • Continually working on just-in-time learning/demonstrations, when possible (tapes, SnagIt)

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

[reminder] Share your own failures and triumphs [/reminder]

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.

 

Mindset

with Rebecca Campbell

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Rebecca Campbell shares about the power of mindset.

Podcast notes

Mindset

Guest: Dr. Rebecca Campbell

Recommended by Michelle Miller, from episode #026.

Associate Professor of Education and the Director and Department Chair for Academic Transition Programs at Northern Arizona University.

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.  – Christopher Robin

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Background on mindset

  • Early introductions
  • Dissertation work on a piece: epistemological beliefs – where knowledge comes from.
  • “You either get it or you don't.”

Growth vs fixed mindset

Isn't about teaching differently, but about framing the conversation differently. – Rebecca Campbell

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Performance barriers

A better way of describing those things holding students back from academic achievement

How to help students achieve more of a growth mindset

  • Normalize help-seeking behavior: supplemental instruction, tutoring, writing centers, office hours, peers
  • Help seeking behavior is a big deal

The shift between high school and college is pretty big. – Rebecca Campbell

… students come and arrive with lots of incoming characteristics. None of these things have to be overcome, in order for them to be successful.

  • How they engage in learning. How they leverage help-seeking behaviors. << That's what defines student success.

These processes can be guided, coached, mentored and taught. – Rebecca Campbell

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When we make the processes explicit, we make effort explicit and we are saying everyone can grow if you engage in the right processes. – Rebecca Campbell

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We can guide students about the process of learning.

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Rebecca recommends:

Be kind to students. Don't make assumptions. – Rebecca Campbell

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More on performance barriers

Reframing the conversation

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.

 

All that is out of our control

with Lee Skallerup Bessette

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Lee Skallerup Bessette joins me to talk about how to deal with and manage when stuff get's out of control in our lives, as well as how to address those situations when it happens to our students.

All that is out of our control

 

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette

  • Faculty Instructional Consultant at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at the University of Kentucky
  • Dr. Skallerup on Twitter: @readywriting
  • Dr. Skallerup on Inside Higher Ed

Digital humanities

… the intersection between technology and what technology can help us do in the humanities. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

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  • Big data, distance reading, social networking and network graphs
  • Digitization and archives
  • Making research, primary sources more available
  • Computational linguistics and mapping
  • Media studies

Digital pedagogy

We have unprecedented access to tools, to information, to interfaces, and the question that digital pedagogy attempts to answer is: ‘So what? What do we do with them?' – Lee Skallerup Bessette

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  • EdTech versus digital pedagogy

Often educational technology are almost commercially based, not to say that all of them are. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

Lee's digital pedagogy definition   “Making, bending, and breaking. #hilt2015”

Blogs at College Ready Writing on Insidehighered.com

Losing control during a course

  • Decided how to make this work, but learned some lessons along the way
  • Too much focus on “covering” the content
  • Disappointing results in students' un-essay projects

[When things happen outside your control], sometimes you've got to let go of some of the coverage [of course content] in order to accomplish the learning goals. – Lee Skallerup Bassette

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Finding balance

  • Tends to happen in stages/seasons (especially regarding the kid's ages)
  • Husband just got tenure and those demands also needed to be taken into consideration

Blogging was one of the things that I used to try to maintain some sort of balance. It was something I did for me and my own sanity. – Lee Skallerup Bassette

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Students losing control

  • Worked at diverse institutions
  • Had students research the resources available on campus to them during times of struggle
  • Cultural aspects to a death in the family

I saw my role as listening, so that they felt heard, and then guiding them to a place where they could be more effectively helped. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

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Final advice

Sometimes it's ok to let go of some of the content. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

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Recommendations

Lee recommends:

Cathy Davidson's blog post – Handicapped by being underimpaired: Teaching with Equality at the Core .

Note: Cathy was a Teaching in Higher Ed guest on episode #028

Perhaps the worst people to teach writing are the best writers. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

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Bonni recommends:

Critical Digital Pedagogy Resources and Tools by Andrea Rehn

Lee inspires us for the start to the academic year:

Be hopeful. Be optimistic. And give your students the benefit of the doubt right from the start. – Lee Skallerup Bessette

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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.

Practical instructional design

with Edward O'Neill

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Edward Oneill joins me to talk about practical instructional design.

Podcast notes

Practical instructional design

Guest

Edward Oneill, Senior instructional designer at Yale.

Teach Better Podcast

I know a little bit about a lot of things. – Edward Oneill (and also Diana Krall, etc.)

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What Edward's clients often need

  • intuitively-appealing ways of conceptualizing the learning process
  • a survey of the relevant tools & which fit their needs & capacities

Edward's special skill

…finding the points in the learning process where assessment and evaluation can be woven in seamlessly

Design approach of Edward's early courses

Successes

  • Made sure students had to do something every week
  • Ensured consistent deadlines
  • Weekly messages, creatively introducing them to that week

Failures

  • Disconnected topics, no second chances

You don't learn anything by doing it once. – Edward Oneill

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  • Not opportunities for practice

I wanted to see it as the students' fault. It's so hard to get out of that [mindset]. – Edward Oneill

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Biggest challenges in our teaching

  • We know our content, but we don't realize how tightly packed our knowledge is…
  • Edward's blog post about the Five stages of teaching
  • Peter Newbury – prior Teaching in Higher Ed guest on episode #053 shared about recall / connections

Rehearsal and elaboration

It's about stepping away from the center and helping [students] communicate with each other. – Edward Oneill

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Methods for incorporating assessment and evaluation into the design of courses

  • Have shorter/smaller forms of assessment that aren't necessarily graded 100% of the time
  • Use their performance as your own assessment

Bonni shares about teaching with Ellen's Heads Up iPad game

Jeopardy game as form of reinforcement

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Parker Palmer quote

I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know. – Parker Palmer

Edward comments:

There is a special privilege in people letting you help them grow and change. – Edward Oneill

Edward recommends:

On Becoming a Person, by Carl Rogers

As a teacher, I need to see you as a unique learner. If I really try to understand you and try to help you grow, it is not so much about information transfer; it is a more humane kind of relationship. – Edward Oneill

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When you're passionate about teaching and you focus on it and you try to improve – you do. – Edward Oneill

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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.

The terror of teaching

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Bonni Stachowiak shares some of her fears about teaching and ways that she often attempts to resolve them.

Podcast Notes

The Skillful Teacher, by Stephen Brookfield

Common fears

  • Quantity over quality
  • Confusion
  • Lacking balance
  • Being inadequate

Attempts to resolve fears

Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less, by Greg McKeown

  • Have evidence to the contrary (letters, emails, etc.)

Recommendations

Tommy Emmanuel's Tall Fidler

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.

 

Teaching with Twitter

with Jesse Stommel

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Jesse Stommel, shares about how he enhances his teaching with Twitter.

Teaching with

Podcast notes

Teaching with Twitter

Twitter basics

Jesse's background

When I grew up, I always wanted to have my own school… [Hybrid Pedagogy] is not really as much a repository for articles, but a space for community and for engaging. – Jesse Stommel

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Was recently in Canada for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, where he broke his ankle

On kindness

Kindness is what drives my pedagogy. It's about seeing people for who they really are and engaging with their full selves. – Jesse Stommel

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Part of [kindness] is also about bringing your full self to the relationship you have with your coworkers, your students, and [other collaborators] that you use as a guiding ethic. – Jesse Stommel

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What the 140 limitation does

The constraints of Twitter are also its affordances. Being asked to take an idea and put it in this constrained linguistic space of 140 characters forces us to think about and question our thinking in ways we wouldn't otherwise. – Jesse Stommel

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Twitter allows for improvisation within a framework

What students should know

Twitter lets us play out our ideas

Twitter is a space for trying out ideas. It encourages us to iterate… – Jesse Stommel

[Twitter] is like a tool in the way that a pencil is a tool. A tool that lots of people can use for lots of different reasons. It becomes this platform that you can use in different ways and environments. – Jesse Stommel

Conversation with Steve Wheeler re: digital natives on episode 38

Literacies

Each person has to find a different relationship to these tools and build their own self inside of the network. – Jesse Stommel

Privacy literacy

Anyone who imagines that they can become private just with the flip of a switch is not really understanding how these networks work. – Jesse Stommel

Reflections on Teaching in Higher Ed episode 31 on the social network Yik Yak

Creative ways to teach with Twitter

Some things need to be public. – Jesse Stommel

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Canvassers study in episode #555 of This American Life has been retracted

He was peer-reviewing my tweets before I sent each one out [at our wedding]… – Jesse Stommel

I want my students to know someone in a place that is so different than the place that they are in. – Jesse Stommel

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Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Jesse recommends:

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.

 

Universal design for learning

with Mark Hofer

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Mark Hofer shares how he implements Universal Design for Learning in his teaching, so that all students have the opportunity to learn.

Podcast notes

Guest: Mark Hofer

Universal design for learning

Student, Tony, who helped Mark identify the need for Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

…gives all individuals equal opportunities to learn. – National Center on Universal Design for Learning

If you think about [the UDL] components as you're designing your course, you're going to wind up with better learning experiences for all your students. – Mark Hofer

Addressing concerns about UDL

We inadvertently put up barriers for our students in their learning.

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Mark's compare and contrast example, written about on his blog

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Get started incorporating UDL into a course

Step 1:

  • What do I know that students struggle with related to this [topic or competency]?

Step 2:

  • What kind of options could I include to help them with [those common challenges]?

It does take students some time to get used to the idea that there may be more than one way to [accomplish] something. – Mark Hofer

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Guidelines

  • Engagement – Mark is building his course around badges and experiences (through gamification and choice)

…goal is to try to make the learning as relevant and interesting to the learning, not just initially, but to sustain their interest in the learning… – Mark Hofer

  • Representation – pulling together readings, videos, interactives, where you can choose the way to learn
  • Action and expression – Mark is creating, for each project, 3 different options, all measured by the same rubric

While it is more [work] to select the various kinds of resources, it's paid back when in class the students are more prepared and we can go into further depth. -Mark Hofer

Getting started with UDL

Don't try to do [UDL] for every lesson, every day; it's a recipe for burnout. – Mark Hofer

  • Make sure all assignments aren't of the same type, over the course of a semester
  • “Pick a topic / concept that you know that students struggle with and try to find a range of different materials and see if it makes a difference.” – Mark Hofer

mark-hofer-quote4

Common misconception about UDL

  • While technology can help you implement UDL, it isn't dependent on using it…
  • UDL is an instructional approach and does not require technology

In relation to universal design

If you apply good accessibility practices to [course content], it will really benefit multiple learners in the process. – Mark Hofer

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Mark recommends:

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.

 

Getting to zero inbox

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Managing email using the Inbox Zero approach.

ZERO INBOX

Podcast notes

Getting to zero inbox

  • Be strategic about what times you check email
  • Use email like a real mailbox with physical mail
  • Leverage a to do list / task manager
  • Make use of snippets for commonly-asked questions (TextExpander or Breevy)
  • Schedule meetings with doodle or the best day
  • Create a hub for committees and other collaboration

Merlin Mann's video on Inbox Zero

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

 

Approaches to calendar management

with Dave Stachowiak

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Bonni and Dave Stachowiak talk calendar management.

Approaches to Calendar Management

Podcast notes

Guest: Dave Stachowiak

Dave shared about his “Wayne's World” moment, coming back as a guest on the show.

Chart on Twitter about service hours invested by gender/race:

Keep the calendar’s purpose central

Exceptions to only having items calendared that have to happen at a particular time

  • Grading, as a means of budgeting time

See the big picture

My/our set up

  • Mac Calendar (BusyCal)
  • Exchange / Outlook
  • Planbook
  • RSS Calendar Subscriptions
  1. Preschool
  2. TIHE from Asana
  3. US holidays

Make it easy for your students and other stakeholders

  • TimeTrade for office hours and podcasting appointments
  • Time blocks

Support collaboration through scheduling tools

Review and reflect

  • Weekly review – each of us goes through a review each week to help us reflect on priorities and commitments
    • Look back to last week
    • Look forward next two weeks
  • Monthly review – the monthly review allows for a bigger picture view of how we are tracking toward goals
    • Look at next month

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Dave recommends:

Finding meaning in our work

with Jonathan Malesic

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Jonathan Malesic on finding meaning in our work.

finding-meaning

PODCAST NOTES

Guest: Jonathan Malesic

What typically doesn't show up on Jon's bio: The Parking Lot Movie

I learned a lot working as a parking lot attendant. I think it's made me a better worker and a better person. – Jonathan Malesic

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Don’t search for “purpose.” You will fail. by Jonathan Malesic in The New Republic.

Pursuing “purpose”

The components of finding “purpose”

  1. You love it
  2. The world needs it
  3. You are paid for it
  4. You are great at it

The intersections

  • 1/2 = Mission (you love it and the world needs it)
  • 2/3 = Vocation (the world needs it and you are paid for it)
  • 3/4 = Profession (you are paid for it and you are great at it)
  • 4/1 = Passion (you are great at it and you love it)

The often unlabeled overlaps in the Venn diagram

  • Please don’t be a physician (you love it; the world needs it)
  • Burnout (the world needs it; you can be paid for it)
  • Kardashian (you can be paid for it; you are good at it)
  • Exploitation (you are good at it; you love it)

jonathan-malesic-quote2

Pursuing “success”

The best productivity tool we have as faculty is not a technology; it's our personal self-investment in our work. It's our commitment to students. It's our commitment to research. It's our commitment to our institutions. – Jonathan Malesic

We can be so committed to our work that we eventually start to hate it. We have identified ourselves so strongly with it that it becomes too much of  a burden for our work. – Jonathan Malesic

Students' evaluation of us and student learning doesn't necessarily match up very well with our evaluation of ourselves. – Jonathan Malesic

That's still something worth hoping for… But, it's important to tell students that [the center piece] isn't always attainable. There's a lot of meaning to be had in our work, even if we don't hit that “sweet spot.” – Jonathan Malesic

Article: Job, career, vocation, life by Charles Matthews in Inside HigherEd

Other articles suggested by Jon on this topic

In the Name of Love, by Miya Tokumitsu

A Life Beyond Do What You Love, by Gordon Marino

No Time: How Did We Get so Busy?, by Elizabeth Kolbert

jonathan-malesic-quote3

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Jon recommends: