Maryellen Weimer's Blog, page 2

Meet your Conference Chair: Marilyn Steinberg

Marilyn Steinberg is the Science Librarian at a private pharmacy and health sciences college in Boston, MA. Her research interest in information literacy and teaching and learning, especially first year students. Favorite article:

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm

Meet J. Ricky Cox: Past Teaching Professor Conference Chair

Dr. James Ricky Cox is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Anna S. Brown and Ruth B. Logan Endowed Chair in Pre-Medicine at Murray State University.  While at MSU, he has published numerous papers with his research students in the areas of protein biochemistry and antibiotic resistance.  In addition, he has also been active in developing and publishing new technology-based teaching methods and integrating tablet PC technology into the chemistry curriculum. 

In the past seven years, he has published six articles in the areas of antibiotic resistance and protein structure in journals such as Biochemistry and the Journal of Physical Chemistry and 11 articles about teaching and learning in publications such as the Teaching Professor newsletter, Journal of Chemical Education and the Journal of College Science Teaching. His disciplinary and educational research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Kentucky Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network, American Chemical Society-Petroleum Research Fund, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft Research.

Introducing the 2011 Teaching Professor Conference Ambassador

Hello everyone. My name is Keith Whittington and I am the Ambassador for the 2011 Teaching Professor Conference and I would like to welcome you to the upcoming conference. I may be a little prejudice but I believe it is the BEST teaching & learning conference in the world!

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I have attended and presented at this conference six years and have been on the advisory board since 2006. I have also chaired this conference. The one thing that stands out for me about this conference is the fun and excitement that overwhelms the participants. If this is your first time, be prepared to learn all sorts of cool, pedagogically sound techniques and sharing your own ideas. This conference is always filled with instructors focused on improving their students' learning and experience. I also believe that what separates this conference from others is the lack of competitiveness amongst the attendees. Everyone is primarily here to learn and share, and not to promote their own research.

A little bit about myself….

I am an Associate Professor at RIT and I believe that it is critical for a teacher to actively engage their students in the learning process in order to maximize their learning. Beyond this, my goal is to build relationships in the classroom.

Several years ago I transformed the way I taught my courses by developing and infusing highly structured active learning techniques into the classroom. Based on the results, the NSF supported my work.

I received RIT's prestigious Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching. And have over 50 publications, presentations, workshops, invited speaker engagements, and keynote addresses at multiple universities, technical conferences, and teaching & learning conferences.

Enough about me…

Once again, welcome, and I hope you learn a lot and have a great time. I will be presenting and attending lots of sessions. Feel free to ask me any questions that may arise at any time.

Make sure you bring a large notebook, and I look forward to meeting you all.

The Teaching Professor blog is now part of Faculty Focus

We've moved! The Teaching Professor blog is now part of its sister site, Faculty Focus.

What does this mean for you, my loyal readers? Well, other than the different look and location, you're not going to notice any big changes. The subject matter, style, and tone of the blog will remain the same. All previous posts and comments from the blog have been retained on the Faculty Focus site.

Plus, for those of you who are regular readers of both the blog and Faculty Focus, you now have one place to go for your articles on the most effective pedagogical strategies, the scholarship of teaching and learning, classroom policies and all the other topics you've come to expect from us.

To make sure you don't miss articles please be sure to bookmark the Faculty Focus site. Better yet, if you're not already a member of the Faculty Focus community, sign up for the free Faculty Focus e-newsletter, and get the articles delivered to your inbox.

Go to Faculty Focus now »

Best for the Holidays

My best wishes for your holidays. Thanks to those who read the blog faithfully as well as those who read it intermittently. I enjoy meeting you on my travels and hearing about a blog post that you've read and appreciated. I work hard to make them useful—hoping to enlarge your understanding, challenge your thinking, and offer new instructional ideas. Thanks to those of you who send emails commenting on various entries and most especially to those of you who post comments. The most regular commenter is my great friend and colleague, Larry Spence. He deserves a special thanks.

 

Larry and I had breakfast this morning. He's just about the smartest person I know—one of those people with expansive knowledge about a whole array of things—Renaissance art, cooking, coaching soccer—but his passion is learning and now neuroscience research which seeks to unlock how the brain works. "What they're really finding out," Larry tells me "is how much we don't know about brains and learning." Larry discusses what he's reading and how his writing is going. I share one of my recent article finds—which Larry has read and found wanting. We regularly disagree, but we also give each other credit for making points.

 

The holidays are for celebrating and there are many things worth celebrating like good friends and colleagues, rich conversations that engage our minds, and those who share resources, offer advice and linger with us over coffee. We all need these times of refreshment and rejuvenation. I wish them for you this holiday. They are gifts, perhaps even more important than the ones under the tree.

 

Until next year, here's to a season that celebrates all things that bring you joy, but most especially those people (family, friends, colleagues, students, and co-workers) who make our lives so worth living.

 

Teachers as Guides

Still finishing up? I remember one semester when I was doing my final grading in my office on a Saturday morning. It was very close to Christmas. I finally finished, submitted the grades, and exuberantly headed home with Christmas music on the radio far louder than it should have been. It was such a relief to finally be finished. At a stop light, I was singing with the radio and thinking about making Christmas cookies. The light changed and I zoomed forward, failing to notice the car in front of me had not zoomed forward. I did not exuberantly drive the rest of the way home.

 

As we close out this semester, I thought we'd revisit a familiar metaphor: the teacher as guide, in this case, mountain guide. I never thought much about this metaphor or saw its potential richness until I read the essay referenced below. It's an old piece, but many of the essay's comparisons have stayed with me across the years.

 

"The mountain guide, like the true teacher, has a quiet authority. He or she engenders trust and confidence so that one is willing to join the endeavor. The guide accepts his leadership role, yet recognizes that success … depends on close cooperation and active participation of each member of the group. He has crossed the terrain before and is familiar with the landmarks, but each trip is new and generates its own anxiety and excitement."

 

Author Nancy K. Hill, then a professor of humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder, describes how the rope links those who climb so that they may assist each other. But the rope also ties those it connects to risk and vulnerability. I like how this metaphor gets at the role of teacher who is there to guide, to protect, and to encourage, but not to climb for those who ascend to the peak. They must do the climbing themselves just as students must do the learning themselves. But it's Hill closing paragraph that I know by heart and frequently use during workshops with faculty.

 

"The teacher is not a pleader, not a performer, not a huckster, but a confident, exuberant guide on expeditions of shared responsibility into the most exciting and least-understood terrain on earth—the mind itself."

 

Reference: Hill, Nancy K. "Scaling the Heights: The Teacher as Mountaineer." The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 1980, p. 48.

           

Sculpting: An Inspiring Metaphor

What can I offer this week, which for many is one of the busiest weeks of the semester? It is such stressful time for teachers and students—everybody gets tired, even the best of us get cranky. I know what many teachers would love to have: a grading machine, delivered overnight with no assembly required.

 

Minus the grading machine, I'm thinking what teachers might need at a the moment is a bit of inspiration, a reminder that even though this work is hard and tedious and seems endless, especially this week, it is work that matters very much. And here's a quote that offers just that sort of gift.

 

"Every man or woman who ever accomplished anything magnificent was touched, somewhere, sometime by a teacher. Every teacher then may turn out to have been the teacher of a magnificent man or woman. Even the not-so-magnificent men and women of the world, however, are touched by teachers. Some people achieve immortality by building monuments or writing books or painting pictures or sculpting marble. We teachers achieve immortality by sculpting lives."

 

I know it probably doesn't feel like you're making much of a statue this week, but keep chipping away and when the semester finally is over you can stand back and admire how much you accomplished this semester.

 

The quote appears in an article, "The Joys of College Teaching," written by Peter G. Beidler. It was published in the Phi Kappa Phi Journal. I can't tell you when. When I first started collecting articles I wasn't always careful about affixing dates, but my copy is on paper that has yellowed.

           

Discussion: Light-Weight and Loose-Jointed

 Here's Margaret Morganroth Gullette's great description of feelings associated with discussion. "Discussion … can feel light-weight, loose jointed, like holding hands in zero gravity. The sense of weightlessness can overcome you—even if you're good enough at leading discussion so that your students are uninhibited and exploratory; even if you guide it subtly by the weight of a question or an inquiring gesture; even if you're sure that at each session they've learned three new ideas in the most unforgettable way, by discovering them and stating them themselves." (p.32)

 

My mentor and friend Gene Melander was over for lunch yesterday. His always active mind is currently exploring how metaphors, imagination, and education intersect. Our conversation makes me mindful of the metaphors in this quotation. Do you replay discussions that have occurred in your class? I like to retrace discussion exchanges I've had in my workshops, although I almost always leave these revisits a bit depressed. When I think about a question that was asked and how I responded or I remember a question I asked about a comment offered, I can almost always think of better responses—ways to say it more clearly, stronger evidence to support the point, more openness to a new perspective. Why didn't I think of that then?

 

The quote gets at the out-of-control feeling that always a part of discussion. You may know the answer you hope to get when you ask a question and if it's a straightforward, closed question (like the numerical answer to a problem), you may get it. But if it's an open-ended query, one designed to get students thinking, who knows what you'll hear. You may well get something you've never imagined—something you've never thought about, something you have no idea how to respond to. That's the loose-jointed, free-floating feeling the quote so ably describes.

 

What I don't feel in the quote is the excitement inherently a part of the metaphor. With weightlessness comes freedom, a profound change that makes movement everywhere a possibility. Discussion offers that to teachers as well. Ideas link in unexpected ways, taking thinking to new levels of insight and understanding. When discussion goes well, the author is correct, students can learn ideas in unforgettable ways—so can teachers. That makes discussion worth the risks it involves.

 

Reference: Gullette, M. M. (1992). Leading discussion in a lecture course: Some maxims and exhortation. Change, (March/April), 32-39.

Test Messages

"The type of assessment used in a course provides a clear indication of what the course goals truly are. No matter what the teacher says, tests are proof of whether the goals are memorization of chemical facts, plug-and-chug mathematical problem solving, or the ability to understand and apply the concepts of chemistry." (p. 678)

 

I can't remember reading anything that makes this point quite as clearly and succinctly. Yes, the writer is a chemist, but I can't think of a discipline where her point doesn't apply. I happened on this statement just after reading Paul Ramsden's chapter in Improving Learning: New Perspectives. (Yes, I'm still cleaning.) "… students' perceptions of assessment and teaching profoundly affect their approaches to learning and the quality of what they learn. The evidence is often negative; pleasing teachers, gaining high grades and understanding do not necessarily overlap."

 

Both observations should motivate us to look long and hard at the questions on our exams. We are too easily persuaded that our questions aren't asking for details that can be memorized. That's a conclusion to be drawn cautiously. Much research documents that most multiple-choice questions test knowledge at the recall level on the Bloom taxonomy—this is especially true of the questions that come to us from textbooks. You can test your objectivity by asking a trusted colleague to take a look at one of your exams and offering to do the same in return.

 

Isn't there some incrimination inherent in how motivated students are to memorize the facts—not true of all students, I realize, but characteristic of many of them. I expect you'd agree. "What do I need to know for the test?" they ask us and anybody who has taken a class with us previously. They memorize the facts (too often without understanding them) because they've seen lots of fact-based tests previously.

 

We don't aspire to write fact-based questions or at least not a lot of them. We do because test construction is yet another teaching task we tackle when we are pressed for time. Fact-based questions are much easier to write than questions that test understanding of concepts and the ability to apply content. That's why I believe we need to preserve those questions that do test higher-order thinking. Yes, tests can be distributed to students for an in-class debrief, but then they should be returned to the teacher. I didn't record grades until after the debrief, and that ensures that all the tests are returned. Students may come to the office any time to review their tests but not to take them home. That way I can recycle good questions—maybe not the next semester, but sometime subsequently, and after a few semesters you can have assembled a good test bank of your own.

 

References: Bunce, D. M. (2009). Teaching is more than lecturing and learning is more than memorizing. Journal of Chemical Education, 86 (6), 674-680.

 

Ramsden, P. Studying learning: Improving Teaching. In P. Ramsden, ed., Improving Learning: New Perspectives. London: Kogan Page, 1988.

 

Rubrics: The Essentials

"Teaching with Rubrics: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly." What a great title and the article is equally as good. For a quick review, rubrics, as this author points out, are most simply lists of criteria and levels of quality. (p. 27) What makes them good, bad, and ugly? Here's a list condensed from the article.

 

The Good

Rubrics help teachers clarify expectations and focus instruction.
Rubrics helps students understand the goal of an assignment, which means less time trying to figure out what the teacher wants.
Rubrics enable teachers to "provide individualized, constructive critique in a manageable time frame." (p. 31)
Students can help teachers create rubrics and in the process learn about standards and associated quality issues.
Rubrics can let teachers assign more challenging work.
Rubrics keep teachers fair and unbiased in their grading.

The Bad

Rubrics are not entirely self-explanatory. Students, especially those unfamiliar with rubrics, need help understanding what they are and how they can be used.
Rubrics don't replace good teaching. Students still need models, feedback, the chance to ask questions, opportunities to revise, and everything else teachers provide that rubrics don't.
Rubrics don't automatically improve self- and peer assessment. Students still need to be convinced that their feedback and the feedback they receive from others can expedite improvement.
Rubrics aren't just scoring tools. "Rubrics used only to assign final grades represent not only a missed opportunity to teach but also a regrettable instance of the teacher-as-sole-judge-of-quality model that puts our students in a position of mindlessness and powerlessness." (p. 29)

The Ugly

Rubrics are not valid, reliable, or fair automatically. What makes them so is their alignment with reasonable standards, and the curriculum being taught. "These concerns do not require us to perform complex statistical analyses but, rather, we simply worry enough about them to subject our rubrics to critique. Rubrics improve when we compare them to published standards, show them to another teacher, or ask a colleague to coscore some student work." (p. 30)

Reference: Andrade, H. G. (2005). Teaching with rubrics: The good, the bad and the ugly. College Teaching, 53 (1), 27- 30.