Backtext: This year I’ve attempted to bring alternative media into my teaching.
For the last week or so, we’ve been discussing the “art” of conducting policy in my intermediate macroeconomics class so it seemed fitting to end the semester with this music video. (Thanks to Phil Miller at Market Power for the reference.) Incidentally, the students loved it.
This semester I’ve been teaching a seminar on contemporary economic issues. I’ve blogged about this course before, most recently this morning. A key part of the course is a wiki that we have used to identify the topics we wanted to study, find references for those topics, as well as posting notes from the references and from class discussion. The wiki has been a very useful way to facilitate the course. We decided (and I mean, we–another characteristic of the course is that students have had key role in defining every aspect of the course) that we should end the course with a final project rather than an exam. Here is an excerpt from the project description.
Wikis are known to be excellent tools for brainstorming or more generally facilitating group processes. One of the criticisms of wikis, though, is that they are not pretty. In a sense, that’s not a fair criticism since wikis aren’t really designed to be products. At the same time, there’s no reason why they can’t be.
The purpose of this final project is to turn the wiki from a process-oriented website into a product-oriented one, or more precisely, into a collection of reusable text resources. The product should be addressed to college students who are not necessarily economics majors. The class will be divided into three teams: one for each of the major topics we studied: Globalization, the European Union, and the U.S. Budget Deficit. Grades will be determined based on the quality of your group’s product, how well your group documents what you did, and your contribution to the group as evaluated by the other members.
I also told the class that I have enlisted several outside experts to assess their product. These include two students who recently graduated but with whom I remain in touch, and two students from my first year advising group, who are examples of the types of students the product should be addressed to.
If you want to follow the progress of the groups, you can reach the wiki here.
Today is our last class of the semester in the seminar which is using a wiki. I am trying something today for that class, which in retrospect isn’t that big a deal–it seems very straightforward for me, and yet, I’d never thought of doing it quite this way.
The class asked if we could use today to work on their final group projects (more on this later) and I agreed. In the last month, I’ve begun to use IM to communicate with my students–the seminar group took it on themselves to teach me, but that’s another story. Anyway, what I’d be doing in class today is sitting, watching the groups work, and occasionally answering a question. Yesterday it occurred to me–I don’t need to be physically present in the classroom to do that.
So, I am sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee and holding virtual class (or I will be in 30 minutes). I will be watching their progress on the wiki and will be accessible via IM. I’ve done this before without IM, but only because I was unable to be in class. Today it’s a choice, and I feel confident that IM provides a level of real time communication that isn’t available on the wiki.
Postscript: It worked pretty well. I spent about half the classtime, responding to questions. I told students they needed to document what they accomplished today, and they did so. One group in particular made a lot of progress on the project.
The other week, I blogged on Carl Wiemer’s podcast on research-based teaching. After thinking about it some more, I think I can do a more succinct job of defining what Wiemer calls research-based teaching.
1. Research-based teaching starts with an understanding of the recent literature on cognition. A good place to start is the National Academy of Sciences book, How People Learn. Research-based course design requires that you incorporate your understanding of how people learn into your thinking about what you’re trying to teach. Wiemer observes that teaching using heuristics can often be more effective than teaching as a practitioner. For example, students can learn more from a simulation than from an actual experiment since the simulation can be tailored to emphasize the key elements you want them to learn while de-emphazing real world complications.
2. Decide on well-defined course objectives, both in terms of content to be learned and performance goals: what students should be able to do when the course is complete.
I can hear some of my humanities colleagues complaining that this is reductionist. But if you can’t define what you’re trying to teach, how can you assess it?
3. Construct valid/reliable assessment tools to assess how well the students reach the objectives. Put some effort into designing tests that correctly assess your course objectives.
4. Be prepared to make changes to your teaching approach to the extent that the assessments warrant. If students are not learning the material, what you do in the class is not working.
I recently came across this excellent article by Laura Blankenship published in Inside Higher Education. The article starts as a defense of technology in the liberal arts, but goes far beyond that to make another case for University 2.0. As an instructional technologist at Bryn Mawr College, Laura is in an excellent position to speak on this.
Here is just one of several interesting example she provides:
No matter how much instruction is offered on the Web, the core of these schools is the classroom experience. Technology can do a lot to enhance that experience [emphasis added]. At Bryn Mawr, Michelle Francl, a professor of chemistry, is recording all of her lectures for her physical chemistry course. She’s capturing her computer screen and her voice, saving the video and the audio file, and posting them to her blog. For now, these recorded lectures, or screencasts and podcasts, serve primarily as review for the students. In the future, however, she plans to assign these recorded lectures much as she would assign a text and use class time for something more engaging than a lecture.
Laura also makes a compelling case for blogging as a tool for teaching the liberal arts. Perhaps most importantly, she addresses several questions of interest to many faculty:
Aren’t we losing control if the students are creating the content? If all the content is online, what need is there for books? What need is there for a teacher then?
Her answers, which I won’t reveal here, are encouraging. Welcome to University 2.0.
I had an advising appointment with a student recently. He is not average by any sense of the term. I found myself seeing him as a model for students in University 2.0. It was quite an atypical advising session. I said very little. He came in and laid out his plans for the next 1-2 years. He spoke about his plans for a senior thesis and the problems he was anticipating. He asked me how his plans would mesh with his intention of going on to graduate school. There was very little for me to say, other than to affirm his plans and raise a couple of questions of clarification.
I don’t think the session went as it did merely because the student was bright; rather it was because he has a plan or a vision for his education. I want to know how can we make all students as self-directed and in-charge of one’s education as he is. Any ideas?
I recently listened to a provocative podcast on what’s wrong with traditional science education. (Thanks for the reference, Brian.) The speaker was someone with the credentials to be taken seriously: Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate in Physics and 2004 U.S. Professor of the Year. But will he be? That remains to be seen, I think.
Wieman starts with a paradox: Why do scientists overwhelming leave their research methodology at the door to their lecture hall? In other words, why do scientists not design their teaching as they design their research? Why do professional researchers avoid letting research inform their teaching?
Wieman surveys research, both his own and that of other science educators, about the effectiveness of the traditional lecture mode of science education. He then compares it with a new approach based on the recent research. He looks at three measures of learning: Retention of basic facts after the lecture, ability to understand and apply concepts, and beliefs about science and problem solving. He finds that only 10% of students retain the information they were lectured on just prior to the assessment; conceptual understanding is just 30%; and beliefs about science and problem-solving actually decline after a semester in a science course.
Wieman then goes on to argue that with fairly minor modifications to the course, one can convert to a more effective, research-based pedagogy. Research-based teaching is teaching based on theory and measurement. By theory, he means knowledge of recent research on cognition. By measurement, he means developing well-defined course goals as well as valid and reliable assessment instruments. I can’t speak for other disciplines, but in economics, the quality of textbook test banks ranges from merely adequate to poor. Wieman acknowledges that developing these takes some effort, but no more than a careful researcher would spend on a research project. In his experience, retention of facts increases dramatically (to more than 90% of students); similarly, conceptual understanding and beliefs about science show improvement.
What are we to make of Wieman’s argument? It has some flaws: He emphasizes cognition over other modalities, and he doesn’t really believe in diverse learning styles in science. He observes that many science faculty simply deny the research results. [This denial is not limited to faculty in the sciences. See the similar point by Linda Hodges.] But the research is not solely his. In fact his presentation is quite similar to the one Bob Beichner’s gave at ELI06. If this research is correct, what implication does it have for your teaching? Hint: If you say, you can’t consider anything other than lecturing because we have to cover the content, Wieman has a killer response to that.
While Wieman’s examples were all from undergraduate science, I see this really as an indictment of higher education generally rather than only science education. In listening to Wieman, I found myself wondering about all the students we write off in our intro courses. At some level many, if not most of us, believe that our discipline is only for select students, those that can handle it, not for all. A reason for this belief is that only some students excel in the intro courses. But what if the problem is not the students, but our teaching methodology. What if, by adopting new
Yesterday Gardner posted a remarkable reflection. In his post, he expressed a reluctance to blog about his personal experiences as a teacher, which I can sympathize with, but I hope he will continue to do so for several reasons. Such reflections reveal the intangible benefits of teaching and can help others understand why education can be such a transformative experience, for the students but also for the teacher. I treasure opportunities to see what respected peers are doing inside their classroom. How else can one learn the art and craft of teaching? (The alternative is to blunder around on one’s own.) Additionally, such posts remind us of what to work towards.
(Note to Economists: Yes, this is a good example of a positive externality where the product is underprovided since the provider doesn’t see the value it gives to others.)
Last week at more or less the last minute I ran into a family conflict that required my missing class. I quickly took what I had planned to do in class: collecting and analyzing data on the size of the budget deficit, and repackaged it as two group assignments. I put the assignments on the wiki and sent an email to the class informing them that they would be on their own for the day.
How did it work? Not perfectly, but still reasonably well.
1. All the students stayed until the end of the class period.
2. They completed the assignments, though not perfectly, and posted their work on the wiki. The flaws were based on a slight misunderstanding of what I was asking for and they were very easy to fix.
3. Two students independently emailed me mentioning that the class had completed the assignments. I didn’t ask for any confirmation and found it interesting that they wanted to mention it to me.
4. I ran into another student the next day and she said, “Please don’t look at the wiki yet since we haven’t had a chance to add the graphics.” Again, I found that an interesting comment. Does it suggest they took the assignment seriously?
At the beginning of the next class period, I gave the students a brief survey to assess what they thought of the previous class. I asked them to rate the session on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 indicated how productive the class was on a typical day when I was there. All but one student rated the session from 6 to 8. The unsolicited comments were revealing too:
* I think we completed all the assigned tasks, and I actually learned about the deficit.
* A little more chatting, but work still got done.
* Not many people involved in posting/discussion.
* Several people did work on computers researching, but I will be honest to say I did not.
* 6 out of 9 people participated in research (using articles, wikipedia, and making graphs)
* Everyone was on a computer getting work done but it took a while to get…warmed up.
* 1/2 the class was probably much more productive. I however, was not…I had a rough week and couldn’t focus.
Today’s Washington Post has an article on blogging as an educational tool. It’s not too bad an article, even though it puts a bit more emphasis than I would prefer on the “personal journal place to complain to one’s peers aspect” of blogging and not enough on the “entree to a broader conversation among practitioners about education.” The article does a reasonable job of looking at different points of view on blogging including a sidebar interviewing Will Richardson.
For the really interesting commentary, you need to follow the links to actual blogs commenting on the article, which are included in the on-line version of the article.
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