Teaching in Higher Ed

Retrieval Practice

with Pooja Agarwal

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On today’s episode, I get the pleasure of talking with Dr. Pooja Agarwal about retrieval practice.

retrieval practice

Guest: Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D.

Cognitive Scientist, Memory Expert, and Education Consultant,
Founder of RetrievalPractice.org

www.retrievalpractice
www.poojaagarwal.com
Twitter: @poojaagarwal

Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D. is committed to bridging the gaps between research, teaching, and policy. Passionate about evidence-based education, Pooja has conducted retrieval practice research in a variety of classroom settings for more than 10 years, in collaboration with distinguished memory scholar Henry L. Roediger, III. In addition to her career as a scientist, Pooja earned elementary teacher certification and has extensive teaching experience at K-12 and university levels. To advance the use of scientifically-based learning strategies, she contributes her expertise through collaborations with students, educators, scientists, and policymakers worldwide.

Recommendations

Bonni:

Change the culture in your classroom by asking students (in reference to retrieval practice): “What is it we’re doing right now?” and “Why are we doing it?”

Pooja:

Check out www.retrievalpractice.org for helpful resources.

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Strength Through Habits

with Natalie Houston

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Natalie Houston talks about strength through habits.

Strength through habits

Quotes

Habits save us tremendous time and energy, but they can also lead us to doing a lot of things mindlessly.
—Natalie Houston

Sometimes we have goals or intentions that are outdated, they’re from who we used to be.
—Natalie Houston

Habits often work really well when they’re connected to each other.
—Natalie Houston

If you successfully create one habit, it’ll be easier to create others.
—Natalie Houston

All of us have habits that we’re less than happy with and they’re there because they’re meeting some need.
—Natalie Houston

Resources

TIHE episode 34: Practical Productivity in Academia (Natalie Houston)

Natalie’s Blog: re:focus now

Natalie’s articles at the Chronicle of Higher Education

Book: The Power of Habit* by Charles Duhigg

Three Steps to Creating a New Habit

  1. Identify why you want to create a new habit
  2. Get very clear and specific about how you’re going to measure that behavior
  3. Track your behavior

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

Natalie recommends:

Small Teaching

with James Lang

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small teaching

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.

Choose your own adventure assessment

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On this week's episode, I share my experiences with “choose your own adventure” assessments.

choose your own adventure

Background on choose your own adventure assessments:

What is it?

Resources

App: Scannable* by Evernote

Recommendation

Peter Felten (@pfeltenNC) from the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University shared on Twitter: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Annotated Literature Database

Are You Enjoying the Show?

  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.

Take-aways from the Lilly Conference

with Todd Zakrajsek

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On this week's episode, Todd Zakrajsek and I discuss our key take-aways from the 2016 Lilly Conference.

Lilly Conference

Guest: Todd Zakrajsek

Conference Director, Lilly Conferences California

Twitter: @ToddZakrajsek

www.lillyconferences.com

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.

Todd was previously featured on Episode 47: Developing metacognition skills in our students

See list of Bonni’s resources from the Lilly Conference: www.teachigninhighered.com/lillycon

Quotes

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

Resources

Recommendations

Bonni

  • Presentation polling app: Sli.do*

Todd