Teaching in Higher Ed

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)

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Engaging difficult students in higher ed

with Dave Stachowiak

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Dave and I talk about how to deal with students that we perceive as difficult, engaging them in the learning experiences in higher ed.

Podcast notes

Engaging difficult students in higher ed

Guest: Dave Stachowiak

Dave and I talk about how to engage students that we perceive as difficult. We start by describing the dangers in labeling people as difficult.

Be cautious about focusing on the more challenging students, at the expense of the learner who is engaged and desiring to learn.

Dave tells a story about how his chemistry teacher created a memorable experience for his students.

Distinguishing students who don't want to be there, but aren't distracting other students from learning, and those who are barriers to others' learning.

Help students save face, when possible.

Attempt to keep conversations one-on-one, unless there's a compelling reason that the dialog needs to happen in the classroom community.

Recommendations

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Shelia Heen

Hear Shelia Heen talk on Dave's Coaching for Leader's podcast about her latest book about feedback

The End

Subscribe to the weekly update, receive the free Educational Technology Essentials ebook, and get an email each week with an article about teaching and the notes from each podcast episode.

[reminder]What do you think about when you're driving down the road? How do you try to engage your more difficult students?[/reminder]

Engaging millennials in the learning process

with Chip Espinoza

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Help classrooms become worthy of human habitation… a dialog with Chip Espinoza on generational cohorts, specifically millennials.

Podcast notes

Generations

“We aren't saying that all these people are the same, just because they are the same age.”

“My desire is not to have a conversation about millennials, but have a conversation with millennials. I don't want to have a conversation about professors; I want to have a conversation with professors.”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Won't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

Millennials

The “before” and “after” of teaching in the early 90s and today

In the 90s – no one would look at a syllabus

In the 2000s – more legalistic view of the syllabus

  • Can tend to perceive that quantity and quality are equal
  • Think that everything is negotiable (the most effective leaders and teachers of this generation enjoy the collaboration)

Frustrations of working with this generation

Teaching multi-generational audience: Baby boomers, GenX, and Millennials

What did you think about the book you were assigned (Chip's book)?

“What's your theoretical framework for saying it's hogwash?”

Characteristics

Access to information – where subject matter experts come in

Sage on the stage >> Allison King 1990s article to Guide on the side >> to Learning with…

KickStarter campaign for getting Chip's book into the hands of millennials

Importance of immediate feedback

Recommendations

Managing the Millennials

managing-the-millennials

Millennials at Work

Take the quiz

millennials-at-work

iRobot Roomba

How to get better at learning names

with Dave Stachowiak

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It that season again: A lot of new faces and a lot of new names. How to get better at learning students' names.   learning-names

Podcast notes

How to get better at learning names

Dave and I talk about the approaches we use to learn students' names.

Attendance2 iphone app on iTunes (iOS) There is an iPad app, in addition to the iPhone app, but they don't sync/connect with each other. It is best to choose the device that you'll have with you during each class session, to make the process of attendance tracking easier.

SoundEver app on iTunes – saves audio recordings into Evernote

Recommendations

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie  (Dave)

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle  (Bonni references this book, in relation to Dave's recommendation)

Visual thinking talk by Giulia Forsythe – her bio on Twitter is great: “I work at a university supporting teaching & lifelong learning. I think in pictures. Doodling helps me be a better listener, problem solver and communicator.”

Article: A learning secret: Don't take notes with a laptop from Scientific American Counter-point article: Study proves why we need digital literacy education

Pencast example from Bonni on marketing (created with a LiveScribe smartpen)

Doodle breaks My visual notes from Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipine

The End

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We have not been paid for any of the recommendations we made on this post, or received any free products. However, many of my students have commented that the people over at LiveScribe should give me a free smartpen, given how many times I've talked about them in my classes. As of now, they've got me hooked, buying my own…

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Back to school prep

with Sandie Morgan

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It can be stressful to head back into another year of teaching in higher ed. However, there certainly are actions we can take to make our experience more peaceful and be more present for our students as we get our new academic year underway.

sandie_morgan_vu

Our foci for the Fall

Sandie and I share about where we are focused for the start to our academic year. We both have very different roles at the university, but share a desire for continually wanting to improve our students' learning experiences in our classes. We talk about the technology tools we will be using to support our work this year, along with other ways we will seek to facilitate learning more effectively.

Updates to classes

Technology-using professors on LinkedIn

Cheating Lessons, by James Lang

Attendance 2 iPhone app

Remind

Check list for class planning

Grant Wiggin's checklist resources

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Asana

Recommendations

Camscanner app, which connects with Evernote (Sandie)

Evernote‘s use in giving students feedback on their resumes (Bonni)

The End

Ending Human Trafficking podcast

Free ebook: Educational Technology Essentials

Sign up for the weekly update, which has an article each week, along with these show notes

Developing 21st Century skills

with Jeff Hittenberger

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It is going to take creative collaboration to better equip college students to develop 21st century skills. My guest, Jeff Hittenberger, has worked in higher ed, K-12; in the U.S. and abroad; and as a teacher and as an administrator. His unique perspective helps us think about how to prepare our students in higher ed for tomorrow's challenges and opportunities.

Inspiration from childhood in Haiti

Learned from experiences growing up in Haiti.
Most common response to the question: “What's up?”
“I'm on fire.”
Regardless of what kind of adversity you are facing, you are alive, and you have something to say.

21st Century Skills

What does higher education have to learn from what's happening in K-12, as we all work to develop 21st century skills?

Disconnect between higher ed and K-12

Communication that one might anticipate happening between these educational bodies doesn't happen. Can lead to gaps in students' educational experiences. 21st century skills gives us one way to talk about what we have in common.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Resources for educators

4 competency areas, referred to as the 4Cs

PIMCO partnership

Carnegie hour

Lipscombe – competency-based higher education

Critical thinking and problem solving

Important for faculty to discover where there are differences in how they gauge critical thinking and develop ways to assess it in similar ways

Creativity

SmartBoards being used to teach physics

“He who opens a school door closes a prison.” – Victor Hugo

The maker movement

TED Talk: Thomas Suarez – 12-year-old app developer

Communication

How can we tap into the passions of our students and engage them?

Why Do Americans Stink At Math by Elizabeth Green in the New York Times

Collaboration

How the increase in technological capabilities is changing our ability to collaborate

Character

As parents of a college-age daughter, Jeff and his wife care more about who their daughter becomes as a person, in terms of her character, than they do about the knowledge she is gaining. Answering: “Who am I? Who am I becoming? What am I contributing to the world?”

Recommendations

Cheating Lessons, by James Lang (Bonni)

21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times, by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel (Jeff)

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century, by The Committee on Defining Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills (Jeff)

Academic personal knowledge management workflow

with Crystal Renfro

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Librarians can be such a wonderful resource to us as faculty. Today's guests are Georgia Tech Academic Librarians: Mary Axford and Crystal Renfro. They  have been a tremendous help to me – and I've never even met them in person. Call it a testament to the power of academic personal knowledge management…

Episode 9: Academic personal knowledge management

These are the notes from our dialog together about academic personal knowledge management for academic researchers and librarians.

Podcast notes

Guests

Crystal Renfro

Mary Axford

The comments made by Crystal and Mary during the podcast are their own opinions and do not represent those of Georgia Tech.

Academic personal knowledge management

Our recent PKM discoveries

PKM Foundations

  • Compares it to a Trapper Keeper folder; Ways of organizing information (Crystal)
  • First discovery of PKM was from a colleague at Georgia Tech, Elizabeth Shields (Mary)
  • Loves using Evernote: Helped her accomplish a move a few years back in a very short time (Mary)

Academic databases and PKM

How the databases have kept up, as well as how the researchers have kept up with the new features (Crystal)

It's very individual. What works for one person may not work for someone else.

Be sure that you don't let the ‘doing the tool' well become more the goal versus achieving your purpose with the tool. (Crystal)

Recommendations

ProfHacker  |  GradHacker  |  Catherine Pope's The Digital Researcher  (Mary)

Tweet about the random sandwich generator from Dan Szymborski (Bonni)

ScoopIt : Robin Good's Scoop.it sites on content curation (Crystal)

Reminders

  1. Write us a review on iTunes or Stitcher to help other people discover the show
  2. Subscribe to the weekly update and receive the EdTech Essentials eBook, as well as the podcast show notes via email – only one email per week and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Workflow show – Personal knowledge management tools

with Dave Stachowiak

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Enough with the hypothetical. Now we share what tools we use in our personal knowledge management systems.

Podcast notes

This episode walks through each of the phases of a personal knowledge management system and the tools we each use for each step.

Discipline of finding information, making meaning of it, and sharing it with others.

 

 

pkmtools

Personal knowledge management definition

“Discipline of seeking from diverse sources of knowledge, actively making sense through action and experimentation and sharing through narration of your work and learning out loud.” – Harold Jarche

Key posts on PKM from Harold Jarche

Bonni's online PKM modules

Framework

Bonni and Dave describe what tools we use in each of the stages of personal knowledge management.

Seek – capture

Feedly

Newsify

Mr. Reader

Unread

Podcasts

Follow Dave on Twitter

Follow Bonni on Twitter

Subscribe to Bonni's Twitter lists

RSS

NextDraft: The day's most fascinating news

Audible

Drafts

Sense – curate

Dave's Pinboard

Bonni's Delicious

Evernote

Share – create

WordPress.com – free blog, good place to get started, but for most customization, you will want a self-hosted WordPress site

20 minute tutorial by Michael Hyatt on how to start your own self-hosted WordPress blog / website

Twitter

LinkedIn

Facebook

Recommendations

TextExpander (Dave)

Breevy (Bonni)

Feedback

On this episode: https://teachinginhighered.com/8

Comments, questions, or feedback:  https://teachinginhighered.com/feedback

Personal knowledge mastery

with Dave Stachowiak

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Personal knowledge management and mastery. How to capture information, curate it, and create new knowledge from it. It can be so challenging to keep up with everything we have on our plates, let alone to what's happening in the world and in areas that are most important to us.

Podcast notes

Guest: Dave Stachowiak

This episode introduces the terms personal knowledge mastery and management.

Discipline of finding information, making meaning of it, and sharing it with others.

pkmtools

Personal mastery

“Personal mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.” -Peter Senge

Personal knowledge management

Harold Jarche's PKM resources

Harold Jarche's introductory video

Personal knowledge mastery

Skills for 2020

KickStarter campaigns

StorkStand

Potato salad

Framework

Seek – capture

Sense – curate

Share – create

Definition

“Discipline of seeking from diverse sources of knowledge, actively making sense through action and experimentation and sharing through narration of your work and learning out loud.” – Harold Jarche

Key posts on PKM from Harold Jarche

Bonni's online PKM modules: 

1. Introduction to PKM

2. PKM demo (the actual tools I use in my PKM process)

3. PKM for academics

Recommendations

Practical Typography by Butterick (Dave)

Dave Pell's NextDraft – The day's most fascinating news (Bonni)

Feedback

On this episode: https://teachinginhighered.com/7

Comments, questions, or feedback:  https://teachinginhighered.com/feedback

Eight seconds that will transform your teaching

with Dave Stachowiak

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How can we use silence to condition our students to answer the questions we pose?

Podcast notes: Eight seconds of silence that will transform your teaching

It is counter-intuitive. We want students to engage with us, so we pose questions. Then, they just look at us, or down at their desks, with a pained or bored expression. We decide this whole question-asking thing is for the birds… or, at least, for a different kind of class/discipline than the one in which we teach.

Guest: Dave Stachowiak

How we condition ourselves not to ask questions and condition our students not to answer them.

We try to get our students to engage by asking a question. They stare back at us, blankly. It's awkward.

Thinking in terms of what to cover in class, versus where the needs actually are.

What has to happen before a student will answer a question.

  1. Process what's been asked.
  2. See if they can formulate an answer to the question.
  3. Formulate an answer in their head (how they will convey their answer).
  4. Decide if it is safe to answer.
  5. Raise their hand, or speak (depending on the cultural rules in the classroom).

The 8 second rule takes this time I to account. It used the power of silence to pressure students to take to risk of engaging.

EdTech Finds

Broadening the definition of EdTech for the purpose of sharing a couple things that have captured our attention:

Evernote water bottle (Bonni) After recording the show, I saw that not only is this a great water bottle, but it is also associated with a great cause: WaterAid.

Turning off email on phone (Dave); Essentialism book

What this Trader Joe’s sign teaches us about professional development

with Dave Stachowiak

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Overcome the excuses we make that stop us from pursuing more professional development opportunities in this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed.

There's a sign posted in our local (and beloved) grocery store: Trader Joe's. “Please do not use this machine if you have not been trained,” it reads. The machine in question is a drink dispenser. As absurd as this is, in some cases, there's more training required to dispense raspberry lemonade than there is to teach a college class.

traderjoesdrink

 

Guest: Dave Stachowiak

There are abundant resources out there for professional development, but we can sometimes be held back by our own excuses.

Professional development excuses and opportunities

Here are the most common excuses for not pursuing more training on how to teach and how to overcome each of them:

Not enough time

      1. Adam Grant's Give and Take
      2. Essentialism by Greg McKeown
  • When you're waiting (Pocket)

Too hard to keep up

  • Subscribing to blogs (feedly)
  • Twitter
  • Bonni's professional development Twitter lists:
    1. Teaching in Higher Ed
    2. EdTech
    3. Teaching and learning centers
    4. ProfHacker

My discipline is unique

Nothing I've tried before works

  • Filming or recording yourself teaching

My university doesn't dedicate resources for professional development

EdTech tools

JotPro stylus (Dave)

iAnnotate (Bonni)

Your teaching philosophy: The what, why, and how

with Dave Stachowiak

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How to formulate, refine, and articulate your teaching philosophy.

Podcast notes

The academic portfolio: A practical guide to documenting teaching, research, and service by J. Elizabeth Miller

Miller provides examples of the narrative from actual promotion and tenure portfolios.

What is a teaching philosophy?

  • Why we teach. Why teaching matters.
  • Not just a formula for teaching structure, but the rationale behind the structure.

Why is having a teaching philosophy important?

Helps guide our teaching methods. Needed in the job hunting process. Typically part of the promotion/tenure process at most universities.

How to identify, articulate, & refine it?

Questions from The Academic Portfolio (p. 13):

  • What do I believe about the role of a teacher, the role of a student?
  • Why do I teach the way I do?
  • What doesn't learning look like when it happens?
  • Why do I choose the teaching strategies and the methods that I use?
  • How do I assess my students learning?

Questions of my own that  I have found useful in articulating my teaching philosophy:

  • Who are my students? How I describe them says a lot about how I approach my teaching.
  • Who am I, as an educator? How I describe myself says a lot about my teaching, too.
  • What is teaching? Is the purpose to convey information, or to facilitate learning (or something else altogether)?

Planet Money episode about young woman becoming a business owner in North Korea.

  • What are the artifacts of my teaching? Observable things.
  • What would I see/hear/experience that would be evidence of those beliefs, if I was in your class?
  • Espoused beliefs vs theories in use. Chris Argyris / Edgar Schein

Podcast updates

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Lessons in teaching from The Princess Bride

with Dave Stachowiak

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This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Lessons in Teaching from The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride on Facebook – official site

Store (selling magnets… if only today's fridges were magnetic)

Princess Bride party game

 IMDB: The Princess Bride

 Test your knowledge: The Princess Bride quiz

From: “Who played the grandson?” (Fred Savage) to “What town is Inigo Montoya from?” (huh?)

The Wonder Years

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Help students break things down. visualization. pencasts.

As you wish.

Pay attention to wishes… dreams… going to take a lot to get there. grit. resilience.

From Psychology Today:

“Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback.”

Beware of ROUSs (rodents of unusual size)

Politics in higher ed. power. French and Raven's five bases of power.

From MindTools:

“One of the most notable studies on power was conducted by social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven, in 1959.” They identified five bases of power:

  1. Legitimate – This comes from the belief that a person has the formal right to make demands, and to expect compliance and obedience from others.
  2. Reward – This results from one person's ability to compensate another for compliance.
  3. Expert – This is based on a person's superior skill and knowledge.
  4. Referent – This is the result of a person's perceived attractiveness, worthiness, and right to respect from others.
  5. Coercive – This comes from the belief that a person can punish others for noncompliance.

EdTech Tools

HaikuDeck (Bonni)

Pinboard (Dave)

Still not sold on rubrics?

with Dave Stachowiak

| | TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmail

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Quotes

n/a

Resources Mentioned

Seek

Sense

Share

Recommendations

Remind (Bonni)

Tapes (Dave)

Note from Bonni re: Tapes. The application only includes 60 minutes of recording per month, which would not be enough for most of us educators in a typical semester, if we were using the service for a number of assignments. The app makers are not very forthright about this shortcoming in their documentation, when you purchase it. They indicated to me on Twitter that they are exploring options for expanding what's available, but as of this recording, no solution has been communicated.

Three things my children have taught me about teaching

with Dave Stachowiak

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Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Guest

Dave Stachowiak, Ed.D

Strawberry Farms

family

Three things my children have taught me about teaching in higher ed

  • It’s often not about me
  • You never know what they’ll remember
  • It’s the little things that add up to something big

EdTech Tools

Canva.com

Omni Outliner 

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