The Tyranny of the Contact Hour (or is it the Tyranny of the Text?)

Posted on August 17, 2011 by sgreenla

I am in involved in a project to develop online courses in the liberal arts & sciences, and I’ve run into an interesting question, a variant on something I’ve written about since the beginning of this blog: What defines a college course?

If one plans to teach a standard course in the traditional face-to-face way, it’s easy enough to adopt a text and then decide how much of the text one can reasonably cover in the length of a term, defined as X minutes per class meeting times Y class meetings a week times Z weeks in the term.  Most texts contain more material than can be covered in a single course to allow the instructor to take the approach/cover the material they think is important, so the content of the course is essentially defined by the amount of contact time.  I suppose it’s possible to “cover” all the content in a text, but in my experience it’s rarely possible for students to learn it all.

Which brings up the interesting question at hand:  What content defines an online course?  The approach taken by most of the participants in our project is to take an existing face-to-face course and convert it to an online environment.

Most would agree that an online course consisting of the text and all the assignments and examinations from a face-t0-face course does not make for a quality learning experience, certainly not one comparable to a quality face-to-face course.  After all, a significant part of a course is the lectures or class sessions.  This may be one of the straw men behind the widely held view that online courses are inferior to face-to-face.  (This is not to say that most online courses are like this, only that for people who don’t teach online, this may be the model of online teaching that comes to mind.)

Which raises another interesting question: How does one “move” lectures online?  More precisely, how does one take what is done in the classroom and provide a comparable learning experience online?  Well, that depends on what exactly is done in the classroom.  Clearly a 50 minute class session is not 50 minutes of lecture.  What then does it consist of?   It’s probably some combination of:

  • Introductions: Welcoming the students and reminding students where we are in the syllabus, what we did last class.  Answering any questions students have about the previous material, upcoming assignments, anything else.
  • Direct Content Delivery, e.g. lecture.
  • Indirect Content Delivery or Content Construction, e.g. Class Discussion or similar student collaborative activities.
  • Problem solving or laboratory activities (individual or collaborative).
  • Closing: Wrapping up the session, giving students assignments, reminding students of previously assigned tasks or upcoming events/quizzes/exams.

How can these things be done online?  This is one of the key questions our group is exploring and not one that I’m going to answer in any detail here.  One direction that I think worth pursuing–in recent years, I’ve thought carefully about how to make the best use of scarce class time.  My conclusion has been that in general, spending class time to lecture from the book is not the right choice.  Rather, I lecture only on things that I know students have difficulty learning on their own.  I imagine the same approach, though not necessarily the same answers will work for online teaching and learning.

So let’s return to the original question I posed: Suppose one created an online course that one had never taught before?  How would one define the course content?  How would one determine how much of a text should be covered?

I suspect that since we don’t have the scaffolding of contact hours, we need to use something more substantive.  What ultimately defines a college course is the collection of things (knowledge, skills and experiences) a student should learn by the end of the course.  For example, what should students learn in an intermediate microeconomics course?  While that’s a standard course, taught in every undergraduate economics department in the U.S., exactly what is taught almost certainly differs from one department to the next.

I think the only way to determine the course content (and some readers are going to hate this) is to clearly define the learning outcomes of the course.  This is true for face-to-face courses, but it’s even more true for online courses, especially those which one has never taught before in a face-to-face mode.  The learning outcomes need not be mechanistic, but I believe the instructor needs to be able to articulate what they are, ideally to at least the second level of detail.  For example, one of my two course objectives in my intro course is for students to learn how to analyze issues & problems the way an economist would.  A second level learning objective (i.e. a specific example of the course objective) would be for students to learn how to analyze the effects of a change in demand or supply on the market for some good or service.   These second level learning objectives essentially define the course.  Once one articulates those, one can determine what learning activities are necessary for students to learn the objectives.  Those activities comprise the content of the course.

 

Posted in Teaching and Learning | 2 Comments

High Impact Learning

Posted on July 29, 2011 by sgreenla

It’s the time of the year when I start thinking about redesigning my courses for the coming academic year.  Last year at this time I was preoccupied planning for my new job as director of our university teaching center.  As a consequence, I didn’t spend much time thinking about how I was going to teach my fall courses.  When the semester came around, I taught more or less on cruise control.  I just pulled out the lecture notes, and taught the class sessions.  I wasn’t very tuned in to the mood/emotion/psyche of the class.

This was particularly true in my principles of macro course.  One result, or at least one concurrent event, was that the students didn’t do very well in that course.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that it was entirely my fault.  The instructor can create a course environment in which the incentives are designed to promote behaviors that enhance student learning.  But ultimately the students have to decide the extent to which they will follow through.

I saw some evidence that students were not following through last year.  One thing I observed was that a lot of students missed class on a regular basis, which is unusual in my courses.  I noticed something else.  A couple of years ago, I started the “Do over” in which I allow students to come in after an exam and explain the right answer on the questions they got wrong, for which I give them half a point.  This gives students an opportunity to earn back half the points they got wrong on the exam.  If someone scored a 50, after the do-over they can get a 75, a substantially better grade.  In past years, the majority of students (perhaps 90%) attempt the do-over.  Why not?  I give them the right answer and they just have to figure out and explain why it’s right.  On the first exam last year, only 39% of the students came for the do-over.  After the second exam, which is more challenging, only about half came by.  Maybe this group didn’t care that much about how they did in principles of economics.

If students haven’t been putting in the effort, as the teacher I have a responsibility to rethink the course learning environment.  One of the things I’ve been hearing about over the last year is “High Impact Learning”.  The seminal work seems to be George Kuh’s High Impact Educational Practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter, AAC&U, 2008.  Pretty much every source I found identified nine items as “high impact practices.”

  1. First Year Seminars and First Year Experiences
  2. Common Intellectual Experiences
  3. Writing-Intensive Courses
  4. Collaborative Assignments and Projects
  5. Undergraduate Research
  6. Diversity/Global Learning
  7. Service Learning and Community-Based Learning
  8. Internships
  9. Capstone Courses and Projects

After reading this list in multiple places, I began sense them as being portrayed as “silver bullets.”  Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I don’t believe in silver bullets.  The curriculum at our institution includes most of these practices, some more successful than others.  I have to say that simply offering internships, for example, is no guarantee that they will be quality educational experiences, better than the average course.  The same can be said about the other items on the list.  What I really want to know is what is it about these practices that leads to deep learning.  Or to frame it differently, how can I improve what I do in my existing courses to enhance student learning.

Kuh’s report (p. 24 of the pdf; p. 15 of the printed report) identifies several elements of high impact teaching.

  • Students need to devote regular time and effort to what Kuh calls “purposeful tasks”.  Instructors probably need to think carefully about what sorts of tasks are purposeful.  Students can’t coast or take the course on “cruise control,” they can’t simply attend lectures and hope to cram for exams.  Or if they do, they won’t learn deeply.
  • The course design should include a high degree of interaction between the student and faculty and his peers.  What is meaningful interaction?  Ideas might include:
    • Careful peer review of one’s writing, or
    • Good class discussion in which participants prepare in advance.

    Students need to feel that they are among colleagues who take the course seriously. They also need to feel that the instructor cares about their learning.

  • Interacting with diverse individuals, approaches, ideas.  This requires students to challenge their own ways of thinking, their own assumptions, etc.
  • Frequent (and low stakes) feedback.  Students need to know on a regular basis whether or not they are on the right track, and how well they are doing.  This implies regular, meaningful tasks with timely assessment.  A student once told me he “only buys the textbook if he finds out he needs it.”  I asked how he answers that question and he said he waits to see how well he does on the course’s mid-term exam.  Frequent and low stakes feedback requires something other than the traditional mid-term exam/final exam grading scheme.

Tom Angelo, in a preconference workshop at this year’s ELI Annual Conference, suggested another element:

  • Regular reflection on what one is learning.  Faculty should take time out from lecture to enable students to ask themselves: What does this mean?  What does this mean in my life?  Why should I care?  As Angelo said,“It’s only in moving from the moment to the reflective that we get deep learning.”   For more on deep learning, see Gardner’s recent post.

How can I reinforce these elements in my courses this fall?  Stay tuned.

Posted in Teaching and Learning, The Experiment | 3 Comments

The College Course as an Experience (or set of experiences)

Posted on July 23, 2011 by sgreenla

In my previous post I explored mastery-learning which implies a specific body of content to be learned.  In this post, I want to look at the opposite extreme.  Can a  legitimate college course be an experience or set of experiences, rather than a body of content or skills to be learned?  There is certainly learning occurring, but if we can’t articulate it can we really say it exists?.

The trend towards outcomes assessment, which I support, threatens at least one dimension of higher education, and that is experience.   When students live at home, they miss an important aspect of college, which is the experience of living on one’s own in a community of one’s peers.  Some may argue that this “growing up” should not be counted as part of higher education (and that the state should not subsidize it anyway.)  We know there’s a great deal of learning, even academic learning, which occurs outside of the classroom.  Students who live at home undoubtedly miss out on some of this.  There’s another aspect of higher education which involves experience.  Do transfer students obtain the same education as students who attend an institution for all four years?  Do students who are admitted to college with many AP, IB, or dual enrollment credits obtain the same education?  (It’s not unheard of at my institution for students to come in with at least one year’s worth of credits.)  Many who trumpet assessment would say yes–the less time spent in residence, the more efficient one’s education.  But I wonder.

I would like to argue that there is an experiential component to higher education, both in terms of the time, and in terms of the courses.  Even though students may be able to learn the content in less time, they may not obtain the experience.  Does summer school offer the same experience as regular terms?  I have never taught summer school, but I’ve often heard faculty who do, observe that summer terms offer less time for students to process what they’re learning and less time to complete the assignments due to the compressed nature of the courses.  Is writing a matter of simply expressing what you know, or is it a means of working out what you know?  Does the writing process require time for one’s ideas to mature like fine wine?  If so, then doesn’t compressing the process risk drinking the wine before its time?

While we tend to think of individual courses as being about content (knowledge and skills), I think that there is an experience component to individual courses also.   Probably every course is a mix of the two elements.  Some are more content-based; others are more experience-based.  Consider an introductory course in some discipline versus an individual study or a senior thesis in the discipline.  In the former, the content is critical, while in the latter the process probably matters more.  In my experience, the latter are almost graded in a pass-fail manner.  In other words, what matters most is completing the experience.

Assignments are context-dependent.  How one responds to an assignment depends on the experience one has had in the course.   Students get a sense of what the instructor is looking for, and respond appropriately.  Students respond based on what the teacher emphasized in the course.  There is no such thing as objective grading (though admittedly some disciplines can be closer to this than others).  Many of us would be uncomfortable having someone other than the teacher grade assignments, because the result would be necessarily reductive, in other words, it would emphasize the subject rather than the specific content that is conveyed in the learning experience.  (There is something to be said for calibrating the teaching and grading in multiple sections of the same course, but that is a different story.)

Senior economics majors can do more than first year economics students can.  Part of that is no doubt that they have learned more in the economics courses they have taken, but some of it is that seniors have assimilated what economists do, which goes beyond what is taught explicitly in courses.  Why do seniors who take introductory courses, for example to satisfy a Gen Ed requirement, find intro courses less challenging when they’ve had no more background in economics than their first year classmates?  Because there’s something to college that goes beyond the facts of the courses one takes.

What is it that one obtains in an experience-based course?  Is it legitimate college learning?  Part of it is the opportunity for working more independently.  Part of it is in the practice of a discipline.  Perhaps experience is how we describe the higher-order learning that is difficult to articulate.  This may relate to Gardner’s argument in a recent post.

Posted in Teaching and Learning, What is Education? | 1 Comment

What kind of teacher are you?

Posted on June 2, 2011 by sgreenla

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a column by Steven Pearlstein that caught my attention.  Pearlstein makes an argument that won’t be new to many of you:  that the internet has the potential to be a disruptive technology in education, that instructional technology has the potential to move us from an industrial model of schooling to a very individualized model of education.  The specific example he offers is the video approach of the Khan Academy.    Pearlstein observes:

Think about it for a minute. If education moves to a teaching model in which students learn through online tutorials, exercises and evaluations created by a handful of the best educators in the world, then how many teachers will we need preparing lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading quizzes and tests? Surely we’ll need some for one-on-one tutoring, or to run small group discussions, or teach things that can’t or shouldn’t be taught online. Despite assurances to the contrary, however, there’s likely to be fewer than we have now — fewer but better-paid with more interesting jobs — just as has happened in nearly every other industry that has gone through a similar transformation.

This isn’t a completely novel idea.  It’s similar to the model used by Western Governor’s University, though WGU is not the only model consistent with this idea.

Pearlstein argues that this would make the way we organize students in cohorts, for example 1st grade or 12th grade, essentially obsolete, since though  students would work in parallel, the would progress at their own rate.  In a way, that’s what higher education is already doing. While we think of a bachelor’s degree as taking four years, increasingly students are taking more time or less than that.  What determines graduation is the accumulation of sufficient and appropriate course credits.  So the designation of first year or senior is less meaningful than perhaps it once was.

What particularly struck me  from the article,  though, was a throw-away line, a quote from Salman Khan:

[G]rading will suddenly become simple: Everyone gets an A in every course, with the only question being how long it takes each student to earn it.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  How do you feel about the idea of all of your students earning As in your courses?  Does that make you feel uncomfortable, or does it make you feel excited?  The answer to that question, I think, identifies what kind of teacher you are.

Khan’s idea is a form of “competency-based learning.” and it has the potential to radically change how we view higher education.  The way college works now is that students take 14 week courses (the length of a “semester”), and they are evaluated on how much they’ve learned by the end of that period.  Some students get As, more get Bs, more get Cs, and some fail.  But if you think about it, isn’t 14 weeks an arbitrary period of time?  What if it takes someone 16 weeks to master the material?  Why shouldn’t we let them do that?  Would an employer care?  I suspect not, since right now what they seem to care about is whether or not a potential employee earns a degree, regardless of how many semesters it takes.

Some of you are no doubt thinking this idea is crazy.  Every student can’t earn an A.  If they did, it would diminish what an A grade means.  Only a select few, the best students, should earn an A.  Okay, what does an A mean?  Is it a statistical notion, e.g. the top 10% of students?  Or does it mean mastery of the material?  I want to argue for the latter.

I’m not advocating grade inflation.  I’m not a particularly easy grader, so I’m not arguing that we simply define A work as what most of our students achieve.  Rather, I’m suggesting that teachers should think carefully about what mastery means in the context of a specific course.  Then, if students can master the material with additional time spent studying it, why not change higher ed to allow that?

Perhaps, deep down, you think that some students just aren’t bright enough to earn an A. I used to think that way, but Khan has thrown a wrench into that thinking. (I’m not saying that every student is happy or even willing to do the work to earn an A.  That’s a different issue.)  Why do you think that?  What does an A mean to you?  Does it mean mastery, or does it mean the grade only the best students get?  I had a student some years ago, who graduated earning As in every course but one.  That course she took in her first year.  When she asked the instructor where she fell short, he replied, “No where, but I reserve As for majors only.”

If you agree that A means mastery, why don’t you think that everyone should be able to master the material?  What does it say about you as a teacher if not all of your students can master the material?  Could it mean that you’re not willing to put in the effort it would take to help them master it?

Maybe we should reward our best students, not by giving them As (and relegating the rest of our students to lower grades), but by allowing them to demonstrate mastery in less than 14 weeks, and then moving them on to higher level courses.  (This could also mean Master’s-level courses for our undergraduates.)  Wouldn’t we be doing them a service if they complete the degree in less time? Then we could use the “time” saved (in terms of teaching effort), to help the weaker students.  In the end, all students (or at least most) master the material, though admittedly this would make it harder on graduate schools to discriminate between applicants.

By defining college-level work as mastering the material what I am actually proposing is grade deflation, since the passing grade is now an A.  We would need to provide support for students to learn at their pace–they couldn’t just cruise (or “ride the escalator” as I tell my students) until the end of 14 weeks, take the credit and move on–they would have to actually master the material.

Is our primary responsibility as professionals to be teachers or graders/sorters/screeners? If we created a system that led to mastery, wouldn’t that be a better outcome for  students, the higher education system, employers, nearly everyone?

I don’t claim to have the answers to all these questions.  I realize there would be massive problems of implementation.  But I think the questions are worth grappling with.  Don’t you?

Posted in Assessment & Grading, Teaching and Learning | 5 Comments

Race to Nowhere

Posted on April 5, 2011 by sgreenla

Do you have children?  Do you care about our children?  Are you a teacher?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you must watch Race to Nowhere, an independent film on what’s wrong with school with parenting with society today in the U.S.

It’s 90 minutes well worth your time.  If you go to the bottom left of the webpage, you can find a screening near you, but hurry because soon it’ll be too late.

Posted in Teaching and Learning | 1 Comment

Inside-Outline Seminar?

Posted on January 3, 2011 by sgreenla

I should be spending this time “getting ready for classes to start” next week, but perhaps this can be considered an investment of my time.

It is almost time for my Spring seminar—that’s the course where I try out most of my crazy new teaching ideas, such as the Global Financial Crisis project from two years ago.  This semester the seminar will explore the question “Does the occurrence of the Great Recession signal a failure of macroeconomics as a discipline?”  The seminar will explore the history of macroeconomic thought since 1930 as a way to develop our understanding of macroeconomics so that we can construct an answer to the question as a collaborative final project.  You can see the course website at http://econ488.umwblogs.org .  It is very much a work in progress.  As a seminar, the course will involve reading, writing and discussion, both in-class and on student blogs, using the quasi-collaborative design I’ve employed in past seminars where we structure the course as a research team to explore “The Question.”

What I’m trying to do differently this year is invite interested outsiders to participate in some meaningful way.  Credit for this idea probably goes to two people: Gardner Campbell through his New Media Studies Seminar, and Bryan Alexander who expressed interest in the topic of the seminar since its inception in my head a year or so ago.  I have invited a few economist friends and a few non-economist friends to participate as I think both might bring something to the table.  But what exactly?  My vague idea is that they could help by asking interesting questions, questions which prompt my students to look more deeply at what we’re exploring.

So here is my question for you:  In what ways could interested outsiders participate meaningfully to the seminar?  I’m looking for specific ideas, such as comments on student blogs or course discussion pages (as we finish each segment of the course outline, we will post a summary of class discussion—see the right side bar of the course site).  Can you imagine other ways outsiders could contribute?

No rush; I’ve got seven days to get this figured out.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

What should grades include?

Posted on December 2, 2010 by sgreenla

Now that Martha has shown me up, I figured it was time for me to blog again. 😉  I have four posts in the pipeline right now that I need to publish–really, I do.   This post began as a link to the article I mention below on our Teaching Center website, http://TeachUMW.org.   Upon reflection, I realized I had more to say on the topic than just to refer readers to an interesting article, so here goes.

If you’ve read my blog, you know I’ve thought a great deal about the question posed in the title above.  A couple of weeks ago I participated in a discussion on the extent to which one could use grades for program and institutional assessment.  The major take-away from the discussion was the point that only part of what goes into grades reflects what students know or have learned.  That is the part that can appropriately be used for assessment.  The rest of grades measure student effort or other aspects of “good citizenship” in the classroom.

This distinction was amplified in in a recent New York Times article “A’s for Good Behavior”.   “Standards-based grading/education” seems like it should be a good thing.  I have spent a lot of time in recent years thinking carefully about how to assess the skills and concepts that I want my students to learn.  Consider how much of published test banks ask questions which don’t do that.  Part of that reflects the fact that texts try to allow instructors to teach in a variety of ways, to emphasize different aspects of the material so uncareful (or random)  selection of questions from the testbank may well yield questions which assess material that either wasn’t covered in the course or wasn’t central to it.  Sometimes it’s hard to find enough good questions, and when pressed for time teachers just plug questions in to fill out the exam.   But I digress.

Why do we give students credit for things that don’t measure mastery of the material?  The NYT article implies that this is wrong-headed.   I give credit for effort, not because effort is “good behavior,” but because effort leads to mastery.  Many people believe the myth that most accomplished people have natural talent, rather than that accomplished people have gotten to where they are by working to cultivate what talent they have.   If I can encourage students  with grade incentives, I hope that will also lead to learning.  In a sense, I am recognizing that students target grades, rather than learning.  Of course, that’s a slippery slope.  My students don’t need any encouragement to value grades over learning.  It’s understandable, even rational that they do, but it’s a mistake since it undercuts the reason for education.

Standards-based grading isn’t as pure as one might think. In principle, we should only count what students know at the end of the course.  Yet, we usually count mid-term examinations in our grading.  And what about homework which is graded on correctness (as opposed to effort).   On the other hand, putting all the weight of a final grade on a final exam can easily cause students to perform at a lower level than they are able—for example, I’ve found that final exam grades decline the later in the final exam period they occur.

All of this may beg a more important issue:  When students focus on grades (and perhaps when teachers focus on standards-based grading like the Virginia Standards of Learning or similar No-Child-Left Behind metrics), there is a tendency to emphasize what Bain & Zimmerman term “shallow learning,” in which students memorize for the test and then forget it afterwards.  This is the real problem of a system when students focus on grades rather than “deep learning,” that is, learning for real.  All the blame doesn’t go on students–I am sure that NCLB leads at least some teachers to teach-to-the-test, where the test is the point rather than the learning.  In recent years, I have begun to see large proportions of students who haven’t learned to think critically or write at the university level before they enter higher education.  But this is a subject for another post.

Which brings me back to the NYT article.  When I began to read it, I was intrigued:  What could be wrong witht standards-based learning?  The more I read, though, the more I began to worry about the tendency we all have to take the easy way out:  to assess what is easy to articulate and easy to test, for example, lower-level cognitive skills.   Is then, the solution to abstain from thinking carefully about one’s learning objectives, one’s teaching strategy, and the way one goes about assessing student learning?  I don’t think that’s the solution.  Rather, I think we need to keep focus on what should be our goal:  Teaching for deep learning, and doing our best to assess that, not settling for assessment which is easy but invalid.

Posted in Assessment & Grading | 2 Comments

Rethinking Assessment

Posted on November 2, 2010 by sgreenla

Our school is engaging in a major effort to revamp and improve institutional assessment.  Like many schools, we have been “doing” assessment for about 15 years.  Or I should say, we’ve been going through the motions.  Assessment was viewed as a necessary response to an external mandate from the State (we are a public institution) and from our accrediting body.  But few academic units took assessment very seriously.  In general, we did some minimal assessment, then filed the results away without thinking much about them.   Real assessment requires careful thought about the findings to guide changes in our actions to improve our programs, something we haven’t done.  In other words, we’ve been faking it.

And why not?  Doing assessment well takes significant time and effort.  There were no rewards for doing it well—instead it was an unfunded mandate that had no apparent benefit to academic units.  There was another problem as well, something perhaps unique to academia.  College professors are assumed to be excellent teachers, by virtue of their terminal degree.  Never mind that the Ph.D. is a research degree and that until recent years, almost no Ph.D. programs trained their students to teach.  Colleagues have told me in all seriousness “Why should I change the way I teach, when I’ve been successful all my career?”  It remains an axiom of our profession that faculty are good teachers, without any evidence to support that.

Assessment appears threatening to many faculty.  Perhaps this is because it could reveal them to be less than excellent teachers.  Perhaps deep down, faculty realize that they received little training in how to teach as graduate students.  Additionally, few faculty are familiar with the research in learning and cognition that has occurred in recent decades, or with pedagogical research in their fields.  Why should they, since there is little reward to improved teaching.  After all, if we are all excellent teachers, there is no room for improvement.

Do all academics teach at Lake Wobegon U?  Is it even credible to believe that however good we are as teachers, we can’t improve?  I don’t think so. As professionals, we have a responsibility to assess how well we are doing and to make improvements where we can.  Most faculty realize this.  It’s not enough to be good at what we do, though.  As a public institution, we have an obligation to provide evidence of our teaching effectiveness.

Admittedly, excellent teaching is only one input towards student learning.  Ultimately, what students learn depends on their efforts.  However, shouldn’t we want to know how much our students are learning?  Even if a lack of learning is not our fault, wouldn’t we want to know a problem exists so that we can take steps to correct it?

A first step in our new initiative is to develop a vision for our goal of creating a “culture of assessment.”  What would such a culture look like?  Here are some thoughts:

Assessment is viewed fundamentally as being about student learning, or more precisely, about improving student learning, rather than being about faculty evaluation.  Administrators (e.g. Deans and department chairs) agree and commit to never using program assessment for individual faculty evaluation.

Assessment is viewed as something departments do, where every faculty member has a responsibility to contribute.  Assessment is not something which is only the responsibility of one or two department members.

All departments have a well-defined mission (and a list of learning outcomes) that is appropriate to their discipline.  Faculty in each department buy-in to their mission and understand what the learning outcomes are.  They understand how each course they teach contributes to  the learning outcomes and they accept responsibility for helping students achieve those outcomes as part of their courses.

Each teacher reflects (at least annually) on how well each course they taught achieved its learning goals.  Program assessment is conducted as a regular, reoccurring cycle (e.g. annually) similarly to how course scheduling is done (semi-annually, or three times a year counting summer session).  The assessment process includes a departmental analysis of the assessment results and a departmental discussion of what the results mean and how the curriculum and teaching of courses should be changed.  While the analysis may be done by a subset of the department, the discussion should include all members of the department.

Posted in Assessment & Grading, UMW Teaching Center | 1 Comment

What are the dimensions of Teaching Excellence?

Posted on September 18, 2010 by sgreenla

We claim to value teaching excellence at UMW, but what does teaching excellence look like?  This was the topic of a lunch discussion sponsored last week by the UMW Teaching Center.  John St. Clair observed, “Teaching excellence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be described, identified, or that a professor can’t enhance their own practice.”  After a wide ranging conversation, the group came to the following conclusions:

  • There is no single way to teach excellently.

Excellent teaching depends on the characteristics of the students, the teacher, and the course being taught.  Teaching excellence is not so much a question of technique (Is class discussion better than lecture?) as a question of the core values one brings to a course.  What are these core values?

  • Passion for the Subject

Excellent teachers have and show passion for their subject.  Stephen Davies expressed this as “inspiring students with a contagious sense of wonder and curiosity about the material.”  Several participants recommended modeling disciplinary practice and showing by example that true learning is exploratory and has no easy answers.

  • Engaging the Students

Excellent teachers see engaging their students as a critical element of their teaching. There are, of course, many different ways to build engagement into a course.  Excellent teachers find effective ways to “hook” students on the material they teach.  Leaving engagement up to the students is not a characteristic of excellent teaching.

  • Respect for students

Excellent teachers take their students seriously, treating them as individuals who genuinely desire to learn, even while understanding that not all students do.

  • Interest in the academic and life success of their students

Excellent teachers have a genuine interest in the success of their students and they desire them to reach their potential.  They seek to develop professional relationships with their students so students feel connected to their teacher, the course material, and their colleagues in the course.

  • Learning Assessment and Teaching Reflection

Excellent teachers fundamentally care about their students’ learning.   Laurie Abeel describes a focus “on ensuring … students actually learn and apply the concepts, develop critical thinking skills and synthesize the information” being taught.  This implies a need for careful assessment of student learning (beyond perhaps the grading process) and regular reflection on the effectiveness of one’s teaching.  (We didn’t identify a frequency, but say after each semester or at the end of the academic year.)

Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do (2004), defines what he calls the fundamental teaching evaluation question this way:  Does the teaching help and encourage students to learn in ways that make a sustained, substantial and positive difference in the way they think, act or feel—without doing them any major harm?  Does your teaching meet these criteria?

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Rethinking Assessment

Posted on September 18, 2010 by sgreenla

Last spring I was appointed acting director of our University Teaching Center.  The center has been alive for two years before this but we’ve never had a director.  I’ve worked this summer to revamp the old programs and create new ones.  You can see the details on our website at http://TeachUMW.org.  One thing I plan to do is publish regular content on the site, to which anyone can subscribe via RSS or list-serv.  I’d love to have some outside recipients.  (If you subscribe via RSS, I appreciate your letting me know so I can track the number of users.)

A major new initiative that we are responsible for is changing the culture of assessment among faculty.  We have done some form of assessment for 15 years or so, but this has always been perceived by faculty as an unfunded mandate to meet a meaningless goal put on us by an external authority.  Not surprisingly, few academic departments have taken assessment seriously, and even fewer have used assessment results to improve their programs.  The individuals in charge of departmental assessment have typically been the most junior members of departments with little power to create change.

One thing that has struck me is the disconnect between how administrators view assessment and how faculty view it.  The goal I will be working towards is to get faculty to believe that there are significant benefits to serious assessment that offset the very real costs of doing assessment well.  I think it’s going to be a tough sell.

The second week of the semester, I sent out an email announcing the Teaching Center to all faculty and as many staff as I could identify.  The response was a bit underwhelming.  I suspect that not every recipient  took the time to read the email carefully or explored the website.  How do I reach faculty/staff to at least make sure they make a conscious decision not to participate?  Still working on that one.  Suggestions are welcome!

I plan to blog my thinking this year as I direct the Center.  Perhaps it will be of some benefit to others.

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