It’s Not Just the Students Who Multitask

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Elizabeth Thornburg

StudentMultitaskingI started reading the Chronicle piece entitled “You’re Distracted.  This Professor Can Help” feeling very smug and superior.  Those foolish students — why do they not realize that their constant response to electronic devices is counterproductive (and it is).  Checking Facebook in class, texting while researching, checking that funny cat video when slightly bored . . . none of this is conducive to the kind of focus that leads to deep learning.  And so I was wishing that SMU had a course like the one described, “Information and Contemplation” that uses meditation and other tools to help students become more mindful of the ways in which they flit from medium to medium.  (The professor and his colleagues did an experiment establishing the impact of meditation on productivity in the workplace, too.)

And then I started reading about some of the class assignments:  take 15 minutes and do nothing but focus on your email.  Don’t open your browser.  Don’t look at text messages. Don’t Google anything.  Deal with it thoughtfully, and then be done.  Or this one:  use Camtasia to capture what’s going on on your computer screen.  How many windows do you have open? What are you doing with them?  What does your face look like (it captures your webcam, too) when you hear an incoming email ding? (expectant? anxious?).  I watched the video embedded in the article and wondered what my own screen would look like. The electronic crack of stimulation can work as powerfully on us as on our students, and just as they will not learn efficiently while constantly switching tasks, I’m afraid my use of time is less productive as I bounce among stimuli.

The academic life is a high pressured one, and it can feel like the competing pressures of scholarship and teaching hardly leave time to brush your teeth.  How much faster and more thoughtfully would I be able to prepare to teach class if I don’t constantly interrupt myself? How much more research or writing could I get done if I am not repeatedly switching from my Word document to immediately check that incoming email, or catching up with professional gossip on law blogs?  So I’m going to try ratcheting down the beeping stimuli and try to do one thing at a time . . . well, mostly.  Anyone care to join me?

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Do I need to make classroom attendance more important?

Posted on March 14, 2013 by David Son

In a previous blog posting, I outlined my use of a tablet PC in the classroom. One of the ways I use the tablet is to screencast my lecture, recording both the visual output (my notes and PowerPoint) and my voice. Students who miss a lecture can catch up, or students who are struggling with a tough topic can simply fast forward in the recording to review the topic again.

In my previous experiences with screencasting, I noted very little dropoff in class attendance. However, this spring is different. I teach organic chemistry to around 100 students. As the semester has progressed, I have observed a gradual decrease in classroom attendance accompanied by an increase in viewings of the lecture screencasts. Part of the decrease in attendance could be due to the 8AM start time (for a TTh class that also means a class that lasts 1 hour and 20 minutes). But could that be the only reason? I have also observed that this class is performing better than previous classes. What does that mean?

On the first day of class, I tell the students I’m screencasting the lectures, but I also tell them that viewing the recordings should not be a substitute for actual classroom attendance. Why not? For one thing, during the lecture they can ask questions. Furthermore, the recordings won’t pick up the laser pointer I liberally use during my lectures. But is that it? If there are no other advantages to coming to class, then why bother dragging yourself out of bed to attend an 8AM class if you can just watch the recording later? Students can always visit during my office hours to ask any questions they might have, and they can figure out from the recordings what I might be pointing at with my laser pointer.

One possible conclusion is that I have simply become the dreaded “content deliverer.” If my students are generally doing well and learning what I think they should be learning in organic chemistry, then even though my lectures are just content delivery, I’m doing my job. There’s no reason to come to class. Is that a bad thing? In chemistry, we teach our students “the facts,” leaving little room for discussion or debate. As a result, I would argue that many of our classes (and classes in other sciences I would imagine) are more or less content delivery.

Maybe I need to give my students a better reason to attend class. But do I really need to do this if the students are in fact learning what they should? Does attending SMU mean you will get something beyond simple content delivery? What if I’m really good at content delivery and teaching the facts? In all of my classes, there are always some students who do poorly. Does that mean there’s some special in-class technique out there I should be implementing that can help those students? Should I feel obligated to do more in class than what I’m doing already?

Posted in Teaching Methods, Technology | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Why the University is Still Relevant in the Age of Wikipedia

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Kristina Booker

Last Friday’s excellent symposium, “Higher-Ed in the Crosshairs,” examined some of the most relevant issues facing our community.  What is the value of a university education?  How does the university confront changes in technology and the demands of an evolving twenty-first century work force?  How can university teaching respond dynamically to the ways modern students communicate, process information, and learn?

For me, the most striking of these questions had to do with arguments for our continued relevance in a digital world.  It reminded me of a recent conversation with a young family member who has chosen not to attend college.  ”Why should I spend thousands of dollars on a college degree,” he asked me, “when I can learn anything I want to know on the Internet for free?”

I’ll confess, even as a graduate student a year away from a Ph.D. and (hopefully, some day) a university teaching position, this question gave me pause.  I’m sure we’ve all heard a variant of this argument, but here’s the thing: this time, it was coming from someone who is an ideal candidate for university education.  He is intellectually curious, reads voraciously, finds great pleasure in mastering something new, and already thinks critically about the world he confronts on a daily basis.  He obviously views the university’s mission as we do: not as mere vocational training, but as an immersion in ideas and modes of thinking that prepare you for membership in professional and civic communities.  He just doesn’t see this immersion as the exclusive property of higher education.  If this kid doesn’t want to go to college, I thought, we’re doomed.

So, you can imagine my relief and delight when this exact issue came up on Friday.  The answer to this objection, eloquently provided by Marc Christensen, Dean of the Lyle School of Engineering, is–wait for it–good teaching: “The value of an educational experience is maximized with a sage and pupil working together, grappling with the material and practicing their craft.  The connected experience of teachers and students engaging together is what education is all about.”

I realized while listening to Dean Christensen that I can only talk about the value of my own undergraduate and postgraduate education in terms of the ‘sages’ who have taken me as their ‘pupil.’  As an English major, I could have read all those books by myself over the last ten years, but I would never have learned how to grapple with them without the mentorship of my professors.  That is the value that I want to add to my students’ college experience.  As Christensen said in perhaps the most-tweeted moment of the entire day, “At SMU we should never choose to compete in the marginal value of content delivery; we simply cannot win that game.  We will never be the deep discount big box purveyor of pedagogy.  Instead we must focus on the high value experience our constituents demand.  That is what we can be truly great at, and it is what most of us went into teaching to do: engaged learning in the classroom.”

Of course, this leaves my young friend’s point about cost unaddressed–and his point is a good one.  We should continue to do what we can to ensure that the sage-and-pupil experience isn’t the privilege of the few.  What this argument about engaged teaching does demonstrate, however, is that we can point to something other than earning potential as the return on a student’s investment.  If we could reframe the conversation about higher ed in these terms, the university wouldn’t need to justify its existence.  If we could consistently create this kind of value, our students would justify it for us.

 

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Moving Beyond Text

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Elizabeth Thornburg

One of my friends on the national teaching-center scene is Chris Clark, the Assistant Director and Learning Technology Lab Coordinator for the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning at Notre Dame.  Chris is also the author of the really helpful blog, NspireD2: Learning Technology in Higher Ed.

In today’s blog post, Chris reflects on whether faculty members have recognized the validity of mediums other than text in conveying meaning.  He notes:

A large number of us were educated at a time when other media were little more than a curiosity. For better or worse, however, the world has changed. The written word is still very important, but meaning is increasingly conveyed using images, video, and sound. That change applies not only to the research function of the university, but also to teaching and learning.

He provides a partial list of indicators that a class — whether in instructor presentation or in student assignments — uses the communicative power of multi-media techniques.  Here’s the list:

  • Students in one of my classes create concept maps
  • I have played a YouTube video during class to illustrate a point
  • I encourage students to include images in their essays
  • My course website features an audio or video welcome message
  • At least half of the slides in my last PowerPoint contain no text
  • I recently played music in the classroom
  • My most recent handout includes a photo
  • One of my class assignments is to critique an infographic
  • I have recorded voice comments in Word documents submitted by students
  • One of my course projects is a multimedia digital story
  • I know where to find images with a Creative Commons license
  • One of the “textbooks” for my course is a full-length movie

Do any of these methods apply to you, your students, or your class?  Chris’s challenge:  let’s make the list much longer.  In the comments to this entry, share some strategies that we can add to the list.

Image: Caffeine Crystals, by Annie Cavanagh & David McCarthy

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The Flipped Classroom

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Lynne Stokes

Dear [Chairman]:

As I hope you are aware, this semester, Professor Stokes has decided to try the “flipped-classroom model.” This involves the students practically teaching all the class material to themselves through the text reading, online “You-Tube” videos, etc. This also includes us (the students) being quizzed via online evaluations on the material before it is even mentioned in class. …

Sincerely, [Disgruntled Student]

I received this email last week, forwarded from my chairman. It is from one of my students in a large (~ 90) introductory statistics class. These students are typically young (freshman or sophomores), taking a required course, mostly to qualify to get in the business school.

The letter was startling to me, but did make me think about how different the vision of what teaching is to me and to some of my students. This student, and many others I presume, think teaching is synonymous with lecturing.  When I first became a professor, that’s what I thought too.

I had many role models of lecturers in my math and statistics training, some good and some not so good. However, they were all effective teachers for me. In graduate school especially, I typically didn’t have a clue how the lecturer got from one line to the next on the blackboard, but I knew if I copied it down, I could figure it out later when I had time to think carefully.  My ritual was to recopy my notes, with the rule that I could not rewrite a line until I understood it completely.  This would sometimes take hours for one class (I especially remember this part was true for my complex variables course with Professor Wally Smith who was a flamboyant, entertaining lecturer).  When I finished, I had a beautiful set of notes and a deep understanding of the material. I developed the confidence that I could figure out most any well written technical document, and that the key ideas needed to work any homework problem were in those notes somewhere.

When I first began teaching undergraduates, I used the lecture model too. As the years have rolled on, I have lectured less and less in my introductory undergraduate classes, and replaced it with having them “do things” in class.  My journey to this point started when I became aware of an NSF funded research group who articulated a body of knowledge and skills that a person educated about statistical thinking should master. They also developed an assessment of this fundamental knowledge in the form of a test.  This test covered concepts, not computations, and often the concept was couched in a real world application; that is, it was one step away from the actual statement of the concept. Since my course covered almost all of those key ideas and more, and I had the Powerpoints to prove it, I felt confident that my students would do well on the assessment.  . I began giving that test at the beginning and end of each semester. Surprise!  My students’ scores were not impressive at all. They scored at or slightly below the national mean.  Even worse, their change from pretest to posttest was modest at best.

How could it be? Aren’t SMU students better than the national average? And aren’t I a better than average teacher? (Don’t we all live in Lake Woebegone?) I came to the realization that teaching my students to do the computations was the easy part and I was effective at conveying that information to them in lecture format, for the most part.  Providing them with definitions and basic facts that they use for problem solving was also efficiently and fairly effectively done in lecture. But teaching them to select which of the computations or facts to use in any situation, or exactly what the computation was telling them about the world, was not getting through to a lot of them by listening to me say it or seeing it written on a slide.  Furthermore, the homework problems I had carefully selected to provide them the Eureka moment, while they sat alone in the comfort of their own dorm rooms, about how to use those concepts and what they meant, wasn’t working either. Most of them apparently don’t have the same ritual of recopying their notes that I did, and why should they? They are much less experienced students (not in grad school) and not training for a career in a mathematical field.

So I decided to see if giving them a guide (me) while they worked on a problem would help.  I began trying to select exercises for them to do in class. The difficulty here is that it takes longer for students to work through problems than for me to do it, and crowds out lecture time. What to do?! I began requiring that they read the book before class so that they would be familiar with the computations, the simple definitions and facts ahead of time. This saved class time for the more complex ideas, and for practice on how to use them, and for me to connect the dots afterward if the Eureka moment didn’t come to them on its own.  The way I chose to make sure that they had prepared was the aforementioned “quiz before the material is mentioned in class.”

I have been using this method for several semesters and have noted a small increase in average scores on the assessment; they now score slightly better than the national average.  But I’m hoping for more. This year I am in the teaching with technology learning community and had my consciousness raised about what technology tools I might use to improve student learning.  I decided to see if I could find a tool that could help deliver the class preparation I was hoping they would get from the book (let’s face it—many students do not enjoy reading their statistics text). So this semester I have provided links to You Tube videos covering the reading material. I selected videos for material that I believe is efficiently covered by lectures—how to do computations, basic definitions and facts.

Does this add anything to student learning? I don’t know yet, as the semester is still young.  I do know from the email that at least some of my students don’t like this way of doing things. They believe that I am not really teaching when I serve mostly as their guide, hint-giver, and dot-connector while they attempt the hard work of arriving at a deeper understanding of the material themselves.  I’ll know more after the posttest and will report back. Stay tuned.

I am on a panel in CTE’s Higher Education in the Crosshairs symposium this Friday.  The topic of this conference is what it is that we, as a private university especially, provide that is worth the money we cost.  I believe that there is some knowledge (e.g., how to do a computation) that can be delivered equally effectively by a lecture watched on You Tube, in a classroom of 500, or a classroom of 30.  Delivering this material is not where SMU has a competitive advantage. There is other knowledge that most students can acquire only through challenging themselves to do their own knowledge acquisition. We can provide the guidance, hand-holding, and interpretation to make this process less onerous to students.  This is one place we should excel, when compared with cheaper education delivery models. Another part of our value should come from our ability to select or develop materials for our students’ in-class experiences that elucidate the difficult-to-grasp concepts. We should also be able to adapt or replace these materials when they are not having the effect we want, or when some contemporary connection with the world can be incorporated. This is where most of the intellectual content of the flipped classroom model arises. It is also what is hard to do cheaply, since it cannot be “installed” and reused indefinitely.  Good teaching is always a work in progress.

Posted in Flipped Classroom, Students, Teaching Methods | 6 Comments

Higher Ed Faculty: Teachers, Mentors, Advisors, Parents, or Friends?

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Meghan Ryan

A recent inquiry by one of my colleagues regarding faculty members’ student attendance policies in class has prompted me to revisit a handful of related questions that I am often asking myself and others: What is the scope of my responsibility as a teacher to my students? Will it help or hinder my students if I am too stringent, lax, or paternalistic in my policies? Is it my job to instill in my students ideas about responsibility, etiquette, and professionalism? (Note that I teach at a law school.) Or would I be crossing the line, coddling my students, and undermining my students’ autonomy by undertaking such responsibilities? These questions that float through my mind pertain not only to the issue of attendance policies, but also extend to matters such as appropriate greetings, questions and comments in class and office hours, and e-mail etiquette.

The American Bar Association (ABA)—the institution governing law school accreditation—mandates that law schools “require regular and punctual class attendance” by students. Of course student attendance is important to law school education. Fully understanding textbook and lecture content is essential to law student learning. Moreover, class participation, including the unique faculty-student question-and-answer sessions that often take place in law school classrooms, is also essential to law student learning. But the students I teach already have college degrees, and many of them have also held full-time positions in the work force before attending law school. They are adults. Is there some point at which we should trust them to determine whether it is in their best interests to attend class? I imagine (and hope) that many law students would continue to attend class just as regularly if the ABA did not require law schools to mandate class attendance. And I am not certain whether I support or oppose (or neither) the ABA attendance policy. But it does make me question whether, as a faculty member, I should require class attendance only for the sake of attendance.

Something perhaps more concerning for me is what I view as an erosion, or at least change in, student communications with faculty. Call me old-fashioned, but I admit that I am sometimes shocked by e-mails that I receive from students because of their lack of formality and/or accuracy. It concerns me to receive e-mails with no greetings, where the student-author simply jumps into his or her questions. It concerns me to receive e-mails that begin: “Prof!,” “What’s up?,” or “Ms. Ryan.” It concerns me to receive e-mails that contain typographical errors, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes. When receiving these kinds of e-mails, I worry about the e-mails that my students might be sending to potential and current employers. When I was practicing law before entering into academia, these types of communications would not have been happily received by legal employers, and my guess is that employers today still do not appreciate these types of communications. But is it my place as these students’ doctrinal teacher to explain to them that they really ought to be more careful in sending e-mails? And if it is not my place to do it, will anyone else fill the void?

Today we find ourselves in a new place where relationships between students and teachers have changed, and the values placed on student autonomy, teaching, and technology have also mutated. This makes for a confusing academic landscape in which I know I could use some further direction. I have not found any clear answers to the questions I have asked, but I think it could be useful to highlight these seemingly minor matters that could potentially have a significant impact on the futures of students who graduate from our institution.

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Evidence-based Study Skills

Posted on February 11, 2013 by George Holden

How many times have students come to your office and asked your advice about how to study? Perhaps the student was a struggling first year or did poorly on the last test.  What do you tell them?

My standard response goes something like “the more you work with the information, the better you will learn it.” I would then go on to say:  “How you work with the information is up to you. You can do a variety of things to help you learn the information: highlight key points, take notes, outline the chapter, create flash cards, quiz yourself. Use whatever techniques best suit your learning style.”

According to a new review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, my advice was only partially correct.  Dunlosky and his colleagues (2013) review the evidence on 10 different learning techniques including highlighting (or underlining), rereading, summarization, keyword mnemonics, imagery use, practice testing, and “distributed practice” (spreading out study activities over time). Their review summarizes the evidence as well as considers key variables (age of student, content, etc.) in great detail (55 journal pages).

Although most students rely on highlighting and rereading, these techniques (along with summarization, keyword mnemonics, and imagery use) have been found to have low utility. Their conclusion: the best techniques to enhance student learning are practice testing and distributed practice.

So the next time a student comes by with that question, I am now prepared to give an evidenced-based response.

Posted in Pedagogical Theory, Students, Teaching Methods, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What’s my value as a teacher?

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Nathan Huntoon

As faculty at an institution of higher education, and private, expensive institution at that, I often discuss the future of education.  In situations that I’m sure many of you have experienced, family and friends often ask me why college is still important when everything this is available for free on line?  Why pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to ‘learn’ the same things you can learn for free?  Aren’t degrees issued from century old institutions going to soon be worthless, instead proving your skills/knowledge will be all that matters?  The upcoming CTE symposium, “Higher Ed in the Crosshairs” will be looking at these questions and more.  I look forward to hearing and discussing these issues with my peers.

One of these issues is one I think more about though, and that’s the value of a teacher.  I’m not talking about teacher salaries, I’m talking about the value that I, as a teacher, add to the education of a student.

With all of the available content, from Khan Academy, to MIT Opencoursware to Stanford OpenClassroom and everything in between, I’m prepared to admit that there is little information I know and teach that isn’t available to any student, anywhere in the world, for free.  So my value can’t be that I have more information.

Information though, isn’t knowledge.  While we often use the two interchangeably, they are different.  Information is facts, figures, dates, processes and procedures.  For information to become knowledge, it must be put in context and connected to all of the other pieces of information in your brain.  While really great videos can put information into a single set of contexts, we know that the best context comes from human interaction, and real world experiences.  This is where my value as a teacher come from.

I believe that on my best days teaching, I have created connections for my students between their lives and experiences and the information they recently learned.  These connections are created in a myriad of ways, but often they are through one on one, or one on few conversations.  Being able to engage with a student on a human level and work through the implications of new information, and being able to adjust the track of the conversation in real time is the most effective way to transition information to knowledge.  My value now not just my experience and knowledge, but also my ability to share that experience and guide a student through the transition of information to knowledge.

Being a guide, and leading this kind of process is hard.  It requires committment and effort, which cost me energy.  It also means I develop emotional engagements to students, which as an introvert is challenging.  It also of course takes time.  So what is my value as a teacher?  My value comes from investing time, energy and effort into the success of my students as they take in information (from where ever) and synthesize that into knowledge.

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Teaching Lessons from Project Runway

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Elizabeth Thornburg

Today’s New York Times has a piece reflecting on Project Runway’s Tim Gunn as a model mentor.  His tag line — “Make it Work” — can also ‘work’ for faculty members giving students feedback.  In fact, a Tumblr feed called “Academic Tim Gunn” hilariously turns Gunn’s comments on designer choices into advice on a humanities thesis (including advocacy of the Oxford comma).  Sounds silly, but Gunn actually was an academic before he turned basic-cable media darling.  Here’s some of his teaching advice:

  • What makes a good mentor? “Someone who challenges students to do the best work they’re capable of, and a truth-teller about when that work simply isn’t good enough. I’m here to guide, I’m here to support, I’m here to be the cheerleader, but you’re doing the heavy lifting. If you’re thinking you’re going to be a little bird in a nest and I’m going to drop worms in your mouth, you’re wrong.”
  • What advice would you give to other teachers? “Be a keen listener. I learned quickly that if the student’s perception is that you’re not listening to them, and not understanding them, they discredit you. We’re in this together. I want you to ascend.”
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Technology in the classroom: Good for logisitics. Good for learning? Maybe not so much.

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Thomas Mayo

There’s a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education (online: Jan. 28, 2013) about a paper that appeared in Science, Technology & Human Values (April 2012) entitled, “Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate.” That’s not a very revealing title, but the abstract is a bit better:

Scholarship on technological change in academe suggests that the adoption of instructional technologies will erode professional control. Researchers have documented the pervasiveness of new technologies, but neither demonstrate how technological change is experienced by faculty nor collect data that permit assessment of consequences for professional control. Drawing on a sample of interviews with forty-two professors at three research-intensive universities, this research makes two contributions to existing research. First, in contrast to existing depictions of technological change in higher education, the findings reveals that academics perceive instructional technologies to have limited value in enhancing education and that technology use is rarely motivated by pedagogical innovation. Second, the study suggests that a relationship between technological change and ‘‘unbundling’’ of the academic role may be overstated. These data indicate that technological change threatens professional autonomy through exclusion from decision-making processes, increased workloads, and delimited
teaching and research roles.

As the first commenter in The Chronicle wrote:

Is anyone really surprised by this finding? It is good to have one’s gut sense confirmed, however. At my institution, technologies go begging for users. “Here’s this great technology,” the nabobs tell us. “Use it in the classroom!” But we are never presented with models of how it might be used to improve our teaching, because the people foisting it on us have NO IDEA how it might be used. It is just new and cool and sometimes useful in a managerial sense. Technology DOES have its uses. It is great to be able to return work to my students directly, rather than lugging around the sad little stack of never-collected papers. It gets the work back faster to the students who would have picked up their papers anyway. But it doesn’t address the students who aren’t engaged any better.

It ought to be pretty clear by now that CTE understands this issue and is working hard to address it. What do PowerPoint, YouTube videos, clickers, and online portals do for our students and how does it enhance their learning? We all want our students to be engaged learners, but are we faculty up to the task of being “engaged sharers”? What — other than logistical convenience — has technology added to your classes? What worked? What didn’t? Can 15 minutes be spent on these questions at an upcoming faculty meeting in your department or school? Or a brown-bag lunch hour? Can CTE help facilitate these discussions? Let us know.

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