Tag: pedagogy

role play graphic
Assessment, Collaboration, Pedagogy, Teaching Advice

Role Play as a Learning Tool

Mendi Benigni

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I was inspired by a Faculty Focus article when creating this newsletter.  This article spoke about adding role playing activities to your teaching to act as practicum experience but I think you can take it further.  The article states, “Role play can be implemented by college instructors and professors as an additional way to increase practice of skills within the confines of a college classroom among peers.”  Staying within these constraints, this strategy can be used in almost any discipline.  It’s just a matter of creating a scenario or roles/characters and having your students submerge themselves into the activity.  Hopefully, during this submersion, they will get to experience a practical skill or what it’s like to be in a specific scenario.

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HERE’S HOW IT WORKS:

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  1. Create your outcomes.  Write down the outcomes you wish to happen as a result of the activity.
  2. Write up debrief questions that will let you know if you met your outcomes.
  3. Create a scenario.  Examples include: “You are in a pub in Nazi Germany…,” “It’s Parent-Teacher Conference day…,” “You are a member of FEMA’s first responders after a hurricane disaster…,” “You are on a team of researchers who will look at the effects of exercise on…”
  4. Create the roles/characters.  On notecards, write up the different roles that the students will take on.  From the examples above they could by “SS, Jew, Woman, etc.,” “parents of a student with a learning disability, parent of an unengaged student, etc.,”
  5. During class, post the scenario on the screen.  Give each group a stack of role notecards.  The students are then given a minute to get familiar with their roles and jump into the scenario.
  6. Debrief. Set a specific time for the activity to take place then debrief with all the student groups.

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Uses:

Just a few of the possible role playing opportunities are:

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  • Classroom management,
  • Parent teacher conferences,
  • Student teacher conferences,
  • Mentoring,
  • Historical scenarios,
  • Exercise Science testing,
  • Disease containment,
  • Natural disaster recovery,
  • Interview with and Nutritional plan creation for a patient,
  • Interview with and Exercise plan creation for a patient.

These are only a few.  Let your imagination run wild.

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Become a teaching superhero
Assessment, Best Practices, Collaboration, Distance Ed, Pedagogy

BECOME A TEACHING SUPERHERO WITH TLThd’S CLASS OBSERVATIONS

Mendi Benigni

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TLThd is launching a new service to all instructors at CofC…CLASS OBSERVATIONS

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These observations can be for your face-to-face or your online classes.  An instructional technologist will come to your class (or review your OAKS online class) and observe you and your students.  At the end of the observation we will provide you with a full report of everything that occurred during the class.  You can then use that information however you see fit! The important thing to remember is that this is just for you, no one else. We don’t mention it to your Chairs, Dean, or Colleagues nor will we conduct an observation at the request of anyone else. The only purpose of the observation is to give you the data to allow you to reflect on your teaching and your student interaction.

Currently we are offering In-class, Videotaped, and Student Focus Group observations for the face-to-face classes and a Module Review in the online classes.  We hope to expand our online offerings in December. 

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Teaching team-based learning in large classrooms. TLThd Faculty Focus
Collaboration, Innovative Instruction, Pedagogy

Using Team-Based Learning in a Large, Fixed Seating Classroom

Mendi Benigni

Do you teach in a large, fixed-seating classroom and think you can’t do group work successfully? Well think again!

Team-based Learning, or TBL, is a teaching strategy that is an “evidence based collaborative learning … strategy designed around units of instruction, known as “modules,” that are taught in a three-step cycle: preparation, in-class readiness assurance testing, and application-focused exercise.” (1)  It shares many of the same structures you see in a flipped classroom, problem-based learning, and active learning but the process is what sets it apart from these other strategies.

Graphic depicting the three step process

The Process:

  1. Pre-class preparation designed to give the students the appropriate background and understanding of the concept
  2. In-class readiness assurance testing as an individual and then in their group. This ensures that the student not only did the pre-class prep but understands it as well. Competing the assessment as a group allows an additional opportunity for misunderstandings and knowledge gaps to be rectified prior to the group exercise
  3. In-class application focused exercise is designed to apply and extend the knowledge from the pre-class prep material. It’s normally case or problem-based and the team must arrive at consensus on the best solution. This then leads to a class discussion to explore the topic between groups.

While this strategy works in many different disciplines, it’s perfect for science, exercise science and public health classes.  The problem is these are usually some of our largest classes and faculty worry that they can’t successfully conduct this type of team work in a large, fixed seating classroom.  The folks at the Faculty Innovation Center at The University of Texas at Austin would disagree.  Watch this video on how they have been successful using TBL in large classrooms

Team-Based Learning from Faculty Innovation Center on Vimeo.

Want to know more about TBL?  Visit the resources below.

1 Team-based Learning Collaborative: http://www.teambasedlearning.org/definition/

2 Team-based learning in large enrollment classes by Jonathan D. Kibble, Christine Bellew, Abdo Asmar, and Lisa Barkley  03 OCT 2016 https://physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00095.2016

Innovative Instruction, Pedagogy, TLTCon

The Path of Least Resistance Makes Both Men and Memories . . . Duller?

Michael S. Overholt

Effortful retrieval—bleh!  The terminology ages more like milk than wine.  Fortunately, it’s a concept with substance and one of the main learning strategies promoted in Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Most educators have fallen for gimmicks that claim to make learning easier.  I know I have. The authors of Make It Stick don’t buy it.  Two hundred and fifty pounds will always be difficult to press for most people, and for most people memorizing the essential two hundred and fifty verbs of any foreign language will always take a lot of effort.  The solution?  Effortful retrieval—”ET” from now on.  Recollection that takes a lot of umph.

We are quite familiar with ET’s relative, aka “dipstick tests.”  These are often prevalent in online courses.  Read, test, move on; read, test, move on.  It’s not the worst type of learning.  We could force ourselves to sit through fifty-minute lectures and then take a test once every six weeks. But the problem with dipstick testing is that we are compelling students to load and unload information.  Like the recycle bin. Knowledge retention is rarely a deliberately calculated objective.  We assume students will remember because—why?  The content is important to us, the professors?

The data, however, doesn’t support our assumption, which is an unfortunate predicament given the fact that knowledge retention is one of the basic steps in getting to the higher order thinking skills.  There’s a reason that Bloom’s Taxonomy keeps “Remembering” at level one, and it’s not because level one is least important. The level is foundational.  Foundational concepts are built upon brick by brick so that the edifice—the evidence of our ability to create with the knowledge we retain—changes our horizons.  Languages are especially vulnerable to the insufficiencies of dipstick tests; ET aims at retaining knowledge over an extended time period.

So, what is ET really?   ET inculcates obstacles for the sole purpose of challenging the student to put more effort into the remembering process with strategies like delayed testing, alternative scenarios, and different but appropriate terminology.

Think of a language course, though the leap to other disciplines is minimal.  Students often struggle to remember simple vocabulary words.  Add to this difficulty verb conjugations, singular/plural differences, gendered nouns, and the inflections to boot.  It’s a lot to remember.  If dipstick’s virtue is providing regular testing, ET enhances the regular testing strategies by forcing the student to relearn material multiple times.  A very simple strategy can be implemented with vocabulary quizzes in a secondary language class.  For Chapter 1, there’s an initial quiz on thirty vocabulary words.  When students get to Chapter 2, the instructor gives another vocabulary quiz but this time selects twenty words from Chapter 2 and ten from Chapter 1.  For the Chapter 3 quiz, fifteen words come from Chapter 3, eight from Chapter 2, and seven from Chapter 1.  You get the picture.  Of course, students are informed that they’ll be tested on previous vocabulary chapters, which is the point.  They’ll need to relearn previously studied chapters.

But that’s just one simple application of delayed testing.  Here’s a more creative ET strategy.  I remember when Asher, my older son, tried Boy Scouts for a year.  The camp leader told me that the students would learn all of the knots from memory.  Eventually, they would not only practice knot-tying indoors at camp meetings but also outside in the dark, which is the more likely scenario of when campers’ abilities would really be tested.  What sort of alterations would force the student to remember differently, to retrieve the necessary information within a different context, scenario, location?  That is the core set of questions ET attempts to answer.  “The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided you succeed,” claims Roediger, “the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval.”  Make It Stick maintains that there’s no easy way to learn, but certainly a better way.

Maybe you can imagine a time before we Googled what we forgot.  Someone asks you to recall the name of an actor from a particular film—say, the lead role in The Shawshank Redemption.  You can remember his face, the way he climbs through the sewers of the prison, his triumphant emergence from the culvert and into freedom, and even Morgan Freeman’s great supporting role as Red.  But you can’t name the leading actor.  So, you go through the letters in the alphabet: A, no; B, huh-uh; C, nein; D, nyet—all the way to R.  Something about saying “R” sounds right, and so you attempt a couple of R-names until “Robbins” emerges from the rubble, and you’re good.  His first name is Tim.  Guess what.  You won’t so easily forget his name next time.

TLT's Summer Reading List
Best Practices, Innovative Instruction, Pedagogy, Teaching Advice

TLT’s Summertime Reading List

Jessica Smith

Summer is a great time to catch up on reading! When you take a break from your research, why not explore the scholarship of teaching and learning?

Here are my current favorite books related to pedagogy, student engagement, and how the brain works:Cheating Lessons Book Cover

Cheating Lessons by James Lang — a guide to tackling academic dishonesty at its roots. Lang analyzes the features of course design and classroom practice that create cheating opportunities, and empowers instructors to build more effective learning environments. In doing so, instructors are likely to discover numerous added benefits beyond reducing academic dishonesty.

Make it Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel — Drawing on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, Make It Stick offers techniques for becoming more productive learners, and cautions against study habits and teaching methods that are quite common but counterproductive.

The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion by Sarah Rose Cavanagh — Cavanagh argues that if you want to capture your students’ attention, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and enhance their motivation, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. She provides a wide range of evidence as well as practical examples of successful classroom activities from a variety of disciplines.

The Spark of Learning Book CoverSmall Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James Lang — This book bridges the gap between research and practice by sharing how faculty can take incremental steps towards improving student learning and engagement. Lang provides simple, concrete, classroom-tested strategies that do not require a lot of preparation or class time but can make a big impact.

The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux by Cathy Davidson — Davidson argues that our current system of higher education hasn’t changed much since the early 20th century and is not suited to prepare students for our digital world and gig economy.  The book provides case studies of innovators from the Ivy League to community colleges who are striving to change how we educate young people.  Not all the ideas shared are new, but it’s an engaging read.

What are YOU reading this summer?  Please share!

Small Teaching Tip 12
Best Practices, Small Teaching Tip, Teaching Advice

Small Teaching Tip #12: Spice Up Your First Day of Classes

Jessica Smith

Take a moment and envision the first day of classes.

Does it resemble the following?

  1. introduce yourself
  2. hand out your syllabus
  3. tell students which textbook to buy
  4. ask them to introduce themselves
  5. call it a day

Many faculty do just this, letting a golden opportunity pass them by.

I get it.  The first day of classes can be tough.  With department retreats, meetings, and Convocation, you may have run out of time to put the finishing touches on your course.  Plus, students may be hounding you to get into your class, while others are dropping like flies, so your class roster changes by the minute.  And let’s admit it, icebreakers can be incredibly corny, even painful to introverted students (and professors).

But, despite these challenges, it has become my annual tradition to encourage you to “spice up” your first day of classes.  So here is my advice:

Don’t let them go after five minutes.  What’s the point of meeting if nothing is going to be accomplished the first day?  I used to think students would perceive me as “cool” if I let them go after only a couple minutes.  Not so.  Most students felt their time was completely wasted.  Put yourself in their shoes.  If you were asked by a colleague to come to campus for a meeting then, after just a couple minutes, they said “Eh, let’s just continue this conversation later,” you’d likely be frustrated.  Take advantage of the opportunities the first day presents to build connections and start forming a supportive learning environment.

Don’t make the first day of class “Syllabus Day.”  Avoid reading the entire syllabus to students.  This is a waste of everyone’s time.  Students who care about their learning will read the syllabus on their own.  If you’re wary of putting that onus on students, ask them to sign a syllabus contract or include a syllabus quiz the first week (which is very easy to accomplish using the OAKS quizzing tool).  Perhaps more importantly, write a syllabus that students might want to read rather than one that looks like a Terms of Service agreement.  David Gooblar, lecturer at the University of Iowa, recently wrote about this in Chronicle Vitae: “Your Syllabus Doesn’t Have to Look Like a Contract.”  If interested, this rubric (bit.do/syllabusrubric) may help you critically examine your syllabi.

Establish intentions.  Rather than spending time listing policy after policy, consider setting intentions for the semester and involving your students in this process.  What do you hope they accomplish and what do they want to learn?  What do you expect from them and what can they expect from you?  Is there a way both parties can be satisfied?  Here are some ideas I have tried in my own classes:

  • Ask students to think about their favorite classes and the classes they hated.  Then (without revealing identifiable characteristics), ask them to generate lists of qualities that made the classes awesome or terrible.  Students love this activity and it always results in a fruitful discussion of expectations.  It also provides fantastic insight into the minds of both students and professors, which leads to better understanding and empathy.
  • I also ask students to compile a list of what they would like from me.  Punctuality, availability, and fairness are usually mentioned and these are qualities that I already deem important.  But because students composed the list themselves, it gives them the sense that I’m willing to share my power and that I’m open to their perspectives.
  • Consider establishing a classroom code of conduct.  Some of you may find this infantile, but I believe it’s one of the best and easiest ways to establish a respectful classroom culture.  When students generate the rules, they’re more likely to own them.

Google search results for icebreakers that aren't lame

Build icebreakers into the entire first week, even beyond.  Most professors include some type of “getting to know you” activity on that first day.  But the class roster doesn’t solidify until after the add/drop deadline.  Therefore, I suggest icebreakers are even more important during the third and fourth class periods.  This doesn’t have to take much time.  I typically incorporate self-introductions into roll call, asking students silly questions to make them chuckle.  I’m consistently surprised by the number of times students find unexpected connections: “Seamus Finnigan is my favorite Harry Potter character too!!!”  Some students may be grumpy about icebreakers, which is understandable considering they do them in every class, but that encourages me to find new ones each semester.  For example, I’ve had them do “speed dating,” play 6 degrees of separation, and go on scavenger hunts.  There are so many possibilities!  Google “icebreakers that aren’t lame” or ask your colleagues how they facilitate introductions.

While the first day of classes arrives too quickly and many of us feel underprepared, it is still ripe with opportunity.  Make the most of it and it will set you up for a successful and enjoyable semester!

This post is part of a series which presents low risk, high reward teaching ideas, inspired by James Lang’s book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning.

Best Practices, Collaboration, Pedagogy, Small Teaching Tip, Teaching Advice

Small Teaching Tip #11: The Benefits of Peer Teaching

Jessica Smith

When we ask students to work in groups or turn to their neighbor to discuss course content, many of us wonder whether this kind of collaboration is worthwhile.  Students aren’t experts, so could they be teaching each other incorrect information?  Or perhaps what they discuss is superficial or watered down?  Not to mention the drama and interpersonal conflict that can arise when students try to work together.  Is peer teaching really worth it?

Despite these concerns, and many others, a significant amount of empirical research indicates that there are numerous benefits of peer teaching.  For example, a recent study published in Teaching in Higher Education, found that working with peers has a positive influence on students’ psychological wellbeing, including autonomy, environmental mastery, and personal growth.  The research of Eric Mazur, who popularized peer instruction in the sciences, demonstrates learning gains frequently double and sometimes triple when peer instruction is integrated into class time.

Beyond the research, we must also recognize that peer teaching happens informally all around us.  Maryellen Weimer argues that students instinctually learn from one another.  When they have a question about course content, they often turn to their peers before their instructor.  Students are often intimidated by professors and don’t want to appear “stupid,” so they approach their classmates first.  I can’t tell you how many times I overhear students in the hallways turn to a classmate and say “I have no idea what Dr. so-and-so wants for this assignment. Do you?”  Students are constantly learning from one another, so why not use our classes to cultivate stronger collaboration and communication skills?

Here are a few simple peer teaching strategies to try:

Microteaching:  Students choose or are assigned class periods during which they are responsible for teaching the entire class.  They act as the professor for the day and are charged with developing a lecture, crafting activities, and facilitating discussion.

Think-Pair-Share: The professor poses a complex, challenging, or controversial question and asks students to think about their responses alone.  To encourage deeper thinking, students should write down their thoughts.  Then, ask the students to turn to a neighbor and compare answers.  The students are tasked with reaching a consensus or formulating arguments to support their views.  Finally, students report back to the rest of the class.

Peer Instruction using an Audience Response System:  Students are assigned a reading or video lecture prior to class and then quizzed on the more difficult or complex topics using an Audience Response System, such as Poll Everywhere, to submit their answers. Students then form small groups, discuss the quiz question, come to a consensus, and re-submit a group answer. Instructors can then instantaneously see where clarification is needed based on incorrect answers provided by both individuals and groups.

Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique:  This is the low-tech version of the above strategy.  Students are presented with multiple-choice questions that they discuss with group members.  Then, using cards that are similar to scratch-off lottery tickets, students choose their answer by removing the foil covering options A, B, C, or D.  If their choice reveals a star, they know they’ve answered correctly.  If they don’t see a star, they must problem-solve with their classmates and endeavor to determine the correct answer.  If you are interested in this technique, TLT can provide IF-AT cards to try with your students.

IF-AT scratch card used with peer teaching.

The Jigsaw Technique:  In this strategy, the instructor first divides a topic, problem, or assignment into parts.  Next, students are split into “home teams” with one member assigned to each topic.  Working individually, each student learns about his or her topic.  For example, if the content is divided into parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, group one would contain four students and one student would work on part 1, one student on part 2, and so on.  Next, groups are reformed into “expert teams” so that everyone in the group worked on the same topic (e.g. all the ones become a group, all the twos, and so on).  These students share their findings and collaborate to discuss, verify, and synthesize all the information gathered.  Finally, the home teams reconvene and listen to presentations from each member. These final presentations provide students with a better understanding of their own material, as well as the findings that have emerged from other groups.

Jigsaw method
Image via Eliot Aronson

 

These are just a handful of popular peer teaching strategies that do not require a significant amount of labor on the part of the instructor.  Consider giving one a try.  But remember, it’s important to recognize the benefits of peer teaching do not result from simply putting students together in groups. Group work that promotes learning and other positive outcomes is carefully designed, implemented, and assessed.

This post is part of a series which presents low risk, high reward teaching ideas, inspired by James Lang’s book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning.

Reference: Hanson, J. M., T.L. Trolian, M.B Paulsen, and E.T. Pascarella. 2016. Evaluating the influence of peer learning on psychological well-being. Teaching in Higher Education 21 (2): 191–206.

Best Practices, Pedagogy, Small Teaching Tip, Teaching Advice

Small Teaching Tip #10: Creating Connections

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One of the most challenging aspects of education is getting our students to use prior knowledge and to connect that with the new information we are trying to teach them.  It seems as if students walk into each class and compartmentalize it in their brain, often, it feels as if they do this for each unit within a single class.  So how can we have them see the bigger picture?  How can we get them to view their education as a living, changing whole instead of a segmented path?  James M. Lang (2016) offers some tips and strategies to bring in prior knowledge before building upon it.

  • Have the students take a short quiz prior to class asking them to pull from prior knowledge, use the first few minutes of class to go over the results.
  • In the beginning of class tell the students what the lesson is about and have them write down everything they know about the topic, take the next 5 minutes to solicit responses.  
  • At the start of the semester pretest or use group activities to assess prior knowledge
  • After the first class of the semester have the students write down three things the know about the subject matter and three things they would like to learn, discuss these during the second class.
  • Have the students create a minute thesis connecting different themes throughout your course.  You can have them do this in a few minutes or over a whole class period.  Have them share their ideas and discuss it as a class.
  • Create concept maps linking together ideas throughout the course.  Have the students share and explore their peer’s ideas.  They can add to these maps for the whole semester or make new ones depending on the topic at hand.

Remember, as experts in your field it is easy for you to draw connections and see the big picture but for your students it may take more time and coaching.  Make sure to provide the framework for these connections and refer back to them often.  Again, James M. Lang (2016) offers “Quick Tips” on helping your students to connect concepts.

  • Ask students about their prior knowledge at the beginning of the course with oral questions or a “class knowledge dump”
  • Give students the scaffolding or framework of your lecture ahead of class time and let them fill it in using their prior knowledge.
  • Offer examples from everyday life and allow students to offer their own.  Help them to connect the “real world” with class concepts.

In order for us to really educate our students we need to help them see the bigger picture, help them create connections and guide them along the path of a whole, connected, educational career.

This post is part of a series which presents low risk, high reward teaching ideas, inspired by James Lang’s book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning.

Assessment, Best Practices, Collaboration, Distance Ed, Events, Innovative Instruction, Pedagogy, Teaching Advice

DE 2.0 Workshop: Humanizing Your Online Course

Amy Ostrom

humanize-your-content-900x423
“I miss getting to really know my students. It’s just not the same.”

“There’s no way of knowing who is on the other side of the screen.”

Sound familiar? If so then you aren’t alone.

Not only do some instructors feel this way about online learning, but students do as well. Often they feel isolated, disconnected, and insignificant. These feelings of seclusion can often lead to decreased motivation, attention, and engagement. As part of the online learning process, it is vital to intentionally design elements to make sure that that the human connection isn’t lost in the online learning process.

 

What is Humanizing?

Humanizing your course involves considering the teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence of all participants in order to build community and enhance communication. The ultimate goal of this process is to make online education as personal and individualized as possible while building relationships between your students, the content, and yourself.

About the DE 2.0 Workshop

This 3-week long, self-paced session will take you through some strategies that you can use in your online class to make you and your students feel more connected. While this course is held fully online, it does contain three optional synchronous sessions with experts in humanizing online education from around the world!

You might be interested in this session if:

  • You feel you are not connecting with your students in your online class the way you do in your face-to-face class.
  • You feel like your online class lacks community.
  • You want to make your course more engaging and personal for the students.

 

humanizing-youronline-course

Workshop Goals

  • Discover the elements of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence as it applies to the online learning environment, particularly in the areas of facilitation, learning domains, and course design.
  • Research assessment and engagement strategies, community building/maintaining platforms, and technology tools for increasing the humanized element.
  • Discuss elements of humanized learning with other faculty teaching online at College of Charleston.
  • Ask questions, exchange ideas, and meet other CofC faculty teaching distance education courses.
  • Create engaging content and online activities that foster the elements of teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence.

Learning Outcomes

  • Explore instructional theories that lead to a more humanized online class.
  • Identify areas of your course that can be made learner centered and/or interactive.
  • Revise and/or create course interactions, including social learning experiences, content delivery methods, and assessment of student learning.

Register now on TLT’s DE Readiness Blog!

Applications are open until January 31, 2017!

 

Best Practices, Pedagogy, Small Teaching Tip, Teaching Advice

Small Teaching Tip #4: Incorporate Active Learning into Your Lectures

ratcliffcr

Most faculty members have lectured to their students at some point in their careers. In traditional lectures, this means that the instructor speaks while students listen. While some lectures can be dynamic, engaging, and even entertaining, research has shown that student concentration typically drops after 10-15 minutes. With many questions during a traditional lecture being purely rhetorical, there are few opportunities for students to engage with the material or their instructor and classmates. What can you do to be sure that your students are engaged?

Try implementing low risk, high impact strategies such as interactive lecturing. Instead of a traditional hour-long lecture, break the content into several 10-15 minute “chunks.” In between each chunk, incorporate small, structured activities. This can be as simple as asking a question that requires student responses, encouraging students to participate in a brief think-pair-share exercise, or having students complete a one-minute paper. These active learning strategies will re-focus student attention as soon as concentration begins to drop while also giving you the opportunity to assess student comprehension throughout the lecture.

What kind of active learning strategies have you used to enhance your lectures? Please share your tips!

This post is part of a series which will present low risk, high reward teaching ideas. Inspired by James Lang’s book Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, this series will inspire you to implement small but powerful changes to your teaching.