Teaching in Higher Ed

On this week’s episode, James Lang shares about his book: Small Teaching

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What I started to notice was that the coaches who paid attention to these little things, and focused on small fundamentals, tended to do a lot better than the teams that didn’t.

I’m a big believer in the opening and closing minutes of class … I think those are really ripe opportunities for small teaching.

I try to do framing activities to help the students realize the value of what we’re doing.

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Small Teaching: Small modifications in course design or communication with your students. These recommendations might not translate directly into 10-minute or one-time activities, but they also do not require a radical rethinking of your courses. They might inspire tweaks or small changes in the way you organize the daily schedule of your course, write your course description or assignment sheets, or respond to the writing of your students.

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On this week’s episode, I share my experiences with “choose your own adventure” assessments.

App: Scannable* by Evernote

Peter Felten (@pfeltenNC) from the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University shared on Twitter: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Annotated Literature Database

On this week’s episode, Todd Zakrajsek and I discuss our key take-aways from the 2016 Lilly Conference.

Twitter: @ToddZakrajsek

www.lillyconferences.com

Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, Ph.D., is the former Executive Director of the Academy of Educators in the School of Medicine and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Dr. Zakrajsek is the immediate past Executive Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and prior to his work at UNC, he was the Inaugural Director of the Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching at Central Michigan University and the founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Southern Oregon University, where he also taught in the psychology department as a tenured associate professor.  Dr. Zakrajsek also sits on two educational related boards and several editorial boards for journals in the area of teaching and learning, is an international speaker requested regularly for keynote presentations and campus workshops, and has published widely on the topic of effective teaching and student learning.

Todd was previously featured on Episode 47: Developing metacognition skills in our students

See list of Bonni’s resources from the Lilly Conference: www.teachigninhighered.com/lillycon

Teaching should be more than telling.

If a worker knows why they’re doing something, they’re much better at doing it than if it’s a mystery to them. It’s the same thing in teaching.

Any time we start looking at these concepts and saying, “Should we do this, or that? Do the students fall into this category or the other category?” we lose the richness of all the individuals in between.

Lecturing alone simply does not return the same kind of advances you get when you add in engaged, active kinds of learning.

Bonni

Todd

On today’s show, Betsy Barre joins me to share about the research on course evaluations.

After making the move to Rice in 2012, she was able to pursue her interest in undergraduate pedagogy by working with students and faculty in Rice’s newly developed Program in Writing and Communication. In this role, she taught a series of disciplinary-based first-year seminars and contributed to the PWC’s faculty development programming for those teaching first-year writing courses. And in July of 2014, she began her current position as Assistant Director of Rice’s newly established Center for Teaching Excellence. More

One of the biggest complaints faculty have about student evaluations is that it’s not a reflection of teaching effectiveness.

Just because a student likes a class doesn’t necessarily mean they’re learning.

It turns out that the harder your course is, the higher evaluations you get.

If students think the work is valuable and something that’s helping them learn, you can give up to twenty extra hours a week of work outside of class and students will still give you higher evaluations.

When we want to know if students have learned, one of the best things to do is just ask them if they’ve learned.

Part of the movement in student evaluations now is to ask questions about learning, rather than questions about what the faculty members are doing.

Taken from her article “Do Student Evaluations of Teaching Really Get an “F”?”

Bonni

Betsy

On this week’s episode, Dave and I share our top five gadgets for teaching.

Bonni’s twitter: @bonni208

On today’s episode, I talk with Sean Michael Morris about what the best digital teachers do.

Sean is a digital teacher and pedagogue, with experience especially in networked learning, MOOCs, digital composition and publishing, collaboration, and editing. He’s been working in digital teaching and learning for 15 years. His work as a pioneer in the field of Critical Digital Pedagogy is founded in the philosophy of Paulo Freire, and finds contemporary analogues in the work of Howard Rheingold, Cathy N. Davidson, Dave Cormier, and Jesse Stommel. He is committed to engaging audiences in critical inspection of digital technologies, and to turning a social justice lens upon education.

There are no principles that I’m aware of in instructional design that allow for the human to creep in; it’s very mechanistic.

I believe that teaching isn’t method; teaching is intuitive.

Every time we step into a classroom or design a new course … we have to step back and realize we don’t know anything, that each time it is new.

I approach everything by asking, “What is it that you’re wanting to get out of this?” and, “What is it that you want your students to get from this?”

Bonni:

Sean

Bonni shares strategies to help “get it together” during stressful times of the semester.

Never succumb to the temptation to say you don’t have enough time to stop.

Listening might be the most important part of our jobs.

Sometimes we’re so worried about entertaining our students that we miss the opportunities for them to have creative insights of their own.

In today’s episode, Dr. Bill Robertson introduces us to “action science” and the ways he is making his teaching relevant, creating opportunities for the most active kind of learning I can imagine.

Bill has a Ph.D. in Education and has been a skateboarder for over thirty-five years. He has done hundreds of demonstrations nationally and internationally in festivals, events and in academic settings.

Bill has been an educator for over twenty years. His academic areas of expertise are science education, curriculum development, and technology integration. He also teaches and does research in the areas of problem-based learning and action science.

Find him online:

People who are learning a second language may know exactly what they’re talking about but might not be able to express themselves.

The things that made me successful in skateboarding made me successful in education.

I realized there was a lot of physics and concepts in these sports that can be expressed and could be engaging and motivating for the students.

The skills [students] are really good at can apply to something like education … if they can master something, they can probably master something else.

You have to find ways to integrate the interests of your learners into your curriculum.

From listener Pamela:

Bill: