Finally, Something Worth Giving Extra Credit For.

“ Is there any extra credit?” Don’t you hate that question?  Even if you are not an extra credit bestowing softy, this might be worth it trying so please read on.  Math Professor Mel Ackerman has an answer to that question and it is YES! Professor Ackerman encourages her students to help themselves by attening Macomb’s Student Succes Seminars.  These offer students an opportunity to learn strategies that will enhance their ability to succeed in college. The seminars, which are free to Macomb students and earn 0.1 CEU (Continuing Education Unit) credit per session, take place in the Learning Centers.   Students need  to bring their student ID to register.  Students who attend 10 or more different sessions during a two year period will be awarded a certificate of completion!

Professor Ackerman has her students register for these seminars through WebAdvisor.  At the end of the semester the students print out thier non-credit transcript.  They are given 2 points for each seminar.  Great idea, right?

Here is how you can kick it up a notch.

If a student chooses to attend a seminar, have them write a short paragraph on what they learned in the seminar and how they have implemented what they learned in their studied, not limited to your course.  Or have your students write out a study plan based on your course.  Now isn’t that worth extra credit?

Click here for the Student Success Seminar Schedule

What the Best Teachers Know About Preparation ….Matters

Bain and his colleagues discovered through years of observation and interviews that the best college teachers prepare for a new semester by asking important questions about how their students learn and what the best approaches are to teaching those students. These fundamental questions cluster around four general areas if inquiry.

What should students be able to do intellectually, physically, or emotionally as a result of their learning?

What big questions will my course help students answer?

What reasoning abilities must students develop in order to answer those questions?

How can I best help and encourage them to develop those abilities and habits of heart and mind to use them?

How can I motivate students to reveal and challenge the mental models they bring to my class?

What information will students need in order to challenge their assumptions?

How will I encourage students to grapple with the issues inherent in my discipline?

How will I create an environment in which students can explore, try, fail, receive feedback, and try again?

How can my students and I best understand the nature, quality, and progress of their learning?

How will I help students who have difficulty understanding the questions of the discipline?

How can I uncover and reconcile any differences between my expectations for the course and theirs?

How will I help students learn to learn, to examine and assess their

How can I communicate with students in ways that challenge them to keep exploring and thinking?

How can we (my students and I) understand the nature, progress, and quality of their learning?

How can I evaluate my efforts to foster that learning?

How will I provide feedback to students before the formal assessments?

How can I clearly communicate my standards for assessing their work

That’s a lot of information! Here’s our challenge to you: Ask yourself just one of these questions as you begin the new semester. You might start with the first question in the list: “What big questions will my course help students answer?” Generate a list of two or three “big questions” and weave those questions through the course this semester. Encourage discussion around the questions and watch as your students explore your discipline!

References

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. (1st ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Help your Students Research, Write, and Stay Informed.

Here is the scenario: You want your students to write a persuasive or argumentative essay about a current topic.  Typical assignment, right? Except you have some concerns.

• How do students pick a topic?
• How does the student get relevant, accurate and balanced sources in a timely manner?
• How do they cite and share their sources?
• Your students do not have very strong organization, writing or research skills and you DON’T have time to devote a lesson to all three skill sets.

We have a helpful tool  it’s called Opposing Viewpoints in Context.  It is a free database for students and teachers available through MeL,  (Michigan e-Library)  Opposing Viewpoints in Context is the premier online resource covering today’s contested social issues, from Offshore Drilling to Climate Change, Health Care to Immigration. Opposing Viewpoints in Context helps students research, analyze and organize a broad variety of data for conducting research, completing writing assignments.  This is an extremely rich resource and will definitely be one of your most powerful teaching tools.

Highlights include:

• More than 14,000 pro/con viewpoint essays
• 5,000+ topic overviews
• More than 300 primary source documents
• 300 biographies of social activists and reformers
• More than 775 court-case overviews
• 5 million periodical articles
• Nearly 6,000 statistical tables, charts and graphs
• Nearly 70,000 images and a link to Google Image Search
• Thousands of podcasts, including weekly presidential addresses and premier NPR programs

Benefits: Students can browse for topics using keywords or by subject. The topic page includes multimedia sources that the students can then use to craft their argument or learn about the controversy.  By giving your students some structure and more specific sources you will prevent them from drowning in a sea of information.  Using this model can reinforce of concepts from lecture in a real-world context, while also stressing organization and proper citation.

Here is how you get there:

Go to mel.org Click on MeL databases.  Scroll down to Opposing View points…they are in alphabetical order.  You may have to go through  authentication which may include typing in your driver’s license. 

Try This:   Send your students to Opposing View Points topic page  for homework have them study the various articles.  Instead of lecturing stage a debate style discussion OR create a jigsaw discussion group.  Then give a quiz on the basic information.  After this you will have accomplished:

1. An engaging lesson,check.
2. Student self-directed study, check.
3. Real word application,check.
4. One less class comprised of straight lecture, double-check.

With all those checks you can write one payable to the CTL…or just tell us how it went

Feed Me: Adding and RSS to your Online Course

You may already subscribe to RSS feeds from your favorite blogs or news sites but did you know that you can insert RSS feeds into your ANGEL course? Do your students know that they can add their own feeds to their personal ANGEL pages?

Are you still wondering what exactly is an RSS feed? Never fear, all will be explained.

Q: What is an RSS feed?

A: Incorporating RSS feeds allows you to automatically stream news, podcasts or stats from other websites into your course. No need to go to the actual website, it get’s delivered to you.

Q: Why should I use RSS feeds?

A: RSS feeds help you stay top of interests and issues that are important to you and your students.  Because the feeds point to other sources they can help connect communities of teachers and learners.

Q: How do I add a RSS to ANGEL?

A: It’s simple. From your course page click the “Edit page” in the top left part of your screen. Click the “Add Component” and scroll down to the Course feed, scroll down and check the box for RSS feed. Open the Course RSS Feed component and using the pencil open the Headline Settings Screen, click “Add Feed”. You can search for a feed, or paste the link directly into the box to the right.

Q: How you can use RSS feeds to engage your class?

A: This all depends on whether you teach an online, hybrid or web enhanced course. Here are some quick ideas to get you started. If you are interested in more detailed ideas, you know who to call.

1. Both Sides of an Issue/ Track a Topic Take a current issue that has pros and cons. For an example lets say, Ethics and Biology. Divide the class into groups. Each group tracks a specific journal/news source. Each week the group reports on the coverage and comments on any prejudice or leaning tendencies of the website, author, or journal. This can be used as an in class or online discussion.

2. Show and Tell Have each student research and subscribe to a different RSS feed. Throughout the semester have each student submit a journal or give a two-minute presentation on a topic that pertain to the course. This lesson is an excellent platform for discussing reliable resources and a great opportunity to collaborate with the librarians.

3. Make it Real Keep your examples crisp and current by using examples from your course’s RSS feeds. Having your students find examples of theories put into a real-word context will enhance their understanding. Statistics, Economics and Marketing courses lend themselves to this method.  Instead of using a problem from the text-book, why not look at the news for the data and let your students apply what they learned.

Do you already use RSS feeds in your ANGEL course? If so, share with us how you used them for a project or an assignment. Are their other resources we should know about? Leave us a comment.

 

What the Best Teachers Know and Understand, Matters

The best teachers possess an expansive (and expanding) knowledge of their subject. They keep up with theoretical and practical developments in their field; they study what others in the field are doing and thinking. “In short, they can do intellectually, physically, or emotionally what they expect from their students” (Bain 2004, pg. 16).

But a great scholar does not necessarily make a great teacher. Bain and his colleagues discovered that the best teachers have an intuitive understanding of how their students learn and are able to communicate their rich disciplinary knowledge in ways that students can understand. By simplifying and clarifying concepts, and drawing close relationships between those concepts and how they are applied, these instructors help students build a firm foundation of knowledge and skills.

The best teachers not only understand how to present disciplinary concepts in ways that support learning, they also know that people are curious by nature, and they use that basic observation of human nature to help students ask important questions about their discipline. These wonderful teachers understand that we learn by problem-solving, so they design instructional events that require students to grapple with problems, and they create classroom environments where the struggle to solve problems is valued.

“The best college and university teachers create what we might call a natural critical learning environment in which they embed the skills and information they wish to teach in assignments (questions and tasks) students will find fascinating – authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenge students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental models of reality” (Bain, 2004, p. 47).

Great! So how can you create a learning environment that students will find fascinating? Give your students a real-world problem to wrestle with, something that has several good solutions and fewer best solutions.  First, consider the kinds of real-world problems content experts like yourself face; be sure to also consider the knowledge and skills they bring to those problems. Next reflect back on the content you’ve already presented in class: have you clearly and succinctly presented the concepts students need to understand the fundamentals of that real-world problem? Write the problem down, simplifying if necessary, in the form of a case study or word problem. Be sure to also write two or three of your own solutions. Finally, give students an opportunity to grapple with the problem and propose solutions. They can do this individually, but the learning may be richer if they work in small groups.

We’re taking a writing break in December, but will return in the new year with thoughts on how the best teachers approach lectures, discussions, and other elements of teaching as serious intellectual work.

References:

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. (1st ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mid-Course: Check Your Progress

Our Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) can be very helpful in providing feedback.  However, these surveys are only administered at the end of the semester, much too late to assist the current students.  Also specific feedback on assignments, organization or anything else often gets lost in the sands of time if the course is not one that you teach on a regular basis.  So what is a Prof to do?

Self-reflection is a powerful tool used to improve ourselves personally and professionally.

October brings with it pumpkins, a possible frost and Midterms.  While students begin to sweat under pressure of tests, midterms are also a good time to take stock of your own progress.  Creating a midterm evaluation for both you and your students is great way to make sure you are hitting your mark, plus it gives you enough time to tweak things if you need to.  We find that students are much more candid when writing informal evaluations; they also appreciate your willingness to make accommodations.

Here are some ideas for evaluating your own teaching:

Self-Monitoring

Keep a log, checklist, or list of goals for each lesson and at the end of class note whether you have met those stated goals.  Self-monitoring requires self-judgment and the difficult part is to let go of your ego.  Biases and misinterpretations of students’ reaction by the instructors themselves could interfere with objectivity of the evaluation. Even with these hurdles, there is great value in documenting your goals and getting in the routine of reflecting on achieving them.

Audio and Visual Recording

The camera may add ten pounds, but it also captures exactly what you said and how.  It is much easier to monitor others and notice their fumbles and foibles but is much more difficult to monitor yourself, especially when you are devoting most of your attention to explaining content, helping students and keeping the class engaged.   It might be a good idea to schedule recordings at the beginning middle and end of the semester to check your progress.  The CTL can help you with this.  We now have lecture capture availability or we can do a standard video taping.

Questionnaires/ Surveys

You can create your own survey to hand out in class.  A few simple questions go a long way.  If you are web-enhanced, you can use ANGEL surveys and results can be sent anonymously. Another way is to use TurningPoint (our “Clicker” system) to take a quick poll.  Don’t worry, results can be saved on TurningPoint and viewed later after class

Peer Feedback

Invite your colleagues to view your video, or sit in on your lecture.  Or ask to sit in on another colleague’s lecture.  What kind of assignments do they give, how do they explain the same topic? Ask them what kind of course evaluation questions do they give their students?   Why reinvent the wheel?

How do you obtain informal feedback throughout the semester? Do you use any of the techniques above or do you use a different technique that works better for you?

What the Best Teachers Do, Matters

The next several postings in the …Matters series will focus on the question What do the best teachers do. We’ll base the posts on Ken Bain’s 2004 book “What the Best College Teachers Do,” winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize awarded annually by Harvard for an outstanding book on education and society.

In the mid-80’s, Ken Bain, then a professor of history and Director of the Center for Teaching in the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University, began a 15-year research project that attempted to answer the question “What do the best college teachers do?” Bain and his colleagues studied nearly one hundred college and university teachers with proven records of effectiveness – those who had the most sustained, substantial, and positive influence on the way students thought and acted (Bain, pg. 5). Once these outstanding teachers were identified, the researchers examined their practice through classroom observations, conversations with the teachers and their students, examination of course material and student artifacts, and small group analysis. Based on their findings, Bain and his colleagues identified six broad patterns of thinking and practice common to these outstanding teachers (Bain, pp. 15-19):

The best teachers:

1. Know their subjects extremely well
2. Treat their lectures, discussion sections, and other elements of teaching as serious intellectual work
3. Expect great learning results from their students
4. Create “natural critical learning environments”
5. Treat students with respect and trust
6. Continually assess their effectiveness and make appropriate changes

The big question is … Can what these outstanding teachers do inform OUR teaching practices? We believe the answer is a resounding YES. To that end, we’ll devote the next several blog entries to examining each of the six areas of practice and offer practical ideas on how to strengthen what you already do and, perhaps, adopt a handful of new practices.

We leave you this month with a question for reflection: Is the ability to teach effectively innate or can it be developed? Can anyone become an outstanding teacher?

References

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. (1st ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.