Teaching in Higher Ed

By Bonni StachowiakEducation How To

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Teaching in Higher Ed episodes

November 12, 2015 The public and the private in scholarship and teaching, with Kris Shaffer
Podcast Notes

On today’s show, Dr. Kris Shaffer talks about two topics: public scholarship and student privacy.
Guest: Kris Shaffer
Website: kris.shaffermusic.com
Twitter: @krisshaffer
GitHub: kshaffer
We don’t have a nice, fuzzy boundary between completely private and completely public like we used to.
—Kris Shaffer
We don’t advance human knowledge by publishing something and putting it inside a fence and making it hard to get.
—Kris Shaffer
Social media is about more than just projecting my identity online; it’s about cultivating a community online.
—Kris Shaffer
And by raising a question, sometimes we advance knowledge more than by simply stating a fact.
—Kris Shaffer
Links:
www.openmusictheory.com
www.hybridpedagogy.com
Open-source scholarship on Hybrid Pedagogy
Recommendations:
Bonni:
Zotero tutorials: http://universitytalk.org/zotero/
N. Cifuentes-Goodbody on Twitter: https://twitter.com/doctornerdis
Kris:
CitizenFour: A documentary about Edward Snowden, streaming on HBO. Watch trailer here.
Hello, by Adele: Watch here.
39 min
November 12, 2015 The public and the private in scholarship and teaching
Podcast Notes On today’s show, Dr. Kris Shaffer talks about two topics: public scholarship and student privacy. Guest: Kris Shaffer Website: kris.shaffermusic.com Twitter: @krisshaffer GitHub: kshaffer We don’t have a nice, fuzzy boundary between completely private and completely public like we used to. —Kris Shaffer We don’t advance human knowledge by publishing something and putting it inside […]
39 min
November 05, 2015Team-based learning, with Jim Sibley
Jim Sibley shares about Team-based Learning.
Podcast Notes
Team-based learning has come up a few times on the show previously (Dr. Chrissy Spencer in Episode 25). Today, however, we dive deep into this teaching approach and discover powerful ways to engage students with Dr. Jim Sibley.
Guest: Jim Sibley
Jim Sibley is Director of the Centre for Instructional Support at the Faculty of Applied Science at University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. As a faculty developer, he has led a 12-year implementation of Team-Based Learning in Engineering and Nursing at UBC with a focus on large classroom facilitation. Jim has over 33 years of experience in faculty support, training, and facilitation, as well as managing software development at UBC. Jim serves on the editorial board of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.
Jim is an active member of the Team-Based Learning Collaborative and has served on its board and many of its sub-committees. He has mentored colleagues in the Team-Based Learning Collaborative’s Train the Trainer mentorship program. He is a co-author of the new book Getting Started with Team-Based Learning that was published by Stylus in July 2014. He is an international team-based learning consultant, having worked at schools in Australia, Korea, Pakistan, Lebanon, United States, and Canada to develop team-based learning programs.
Jim’s Book: Getting Started With Team-Based Learning
Jim’s Website: www.learntbl.ca
More About Jim’s Personal Story:
The Stroke
Interview with Brainstream
Hiccups
Team-Based Learning Defined
A form of small-group learning that gets better with the bigger size of class you have. The idea is to discuss the question until you get to some sort of consensus.
Team-based learning could easily be called decision-based learning, because as soon as you make a decision, you can get clear and focused feedback. That’s what team-based learning is all about.
Think about a jury, where you need brainpower. Then imagine you’re presenting the verdict, and you look around and see five other juries, on the same case as you. You can bet they’ve put a lot of thought into the verdict, and if they all have a different verdict than you, you can bet they’re going to give feedback.
Team-based learning is not a prohibition on lecturing…but it’s in smaller amounts, and it’s for a reason like answering a student need or question. An activity will often make students wish they knew about something, then you teach it.
About Teams
The Achilles heel of group work are students at different levels of preparedness. Team discussion has a nice leveling effect.
Experience shows that smaller teams are the ones that have the most trouble
5-7 students is the ideal size for a group.
Big teams work because you’re asking them to make a decision, and that’s something teams are naturally good at.
Because team-based learning is focused on teaching with decisions, there is less opportunity for people to ride on the coattails of others.
Instructors don’t have to teach about team dynamics or decision-making processes because teams are naturally motivated to engage in good discussion (if their conclusion is different than every other group, there will naturally be a lot of feedback).
The Team-Building Process:
The instructor builds teams, trying to add diversity to each team.
The instructor of a large class can do an online survey for diversity of assets.
Even freshman classes can have diversity (different people are better at different subjects).
CATME has an online team maker function, as does GRumbler.
Should students ever elect their own teams?
Student-selected teams are typically a disaster, mostly because they’re a social entity, and you tend to pick people that are the same as you.
It does work when students are passionate about the project.
Team-based learning requires commitment:
Team-based learning is something you have to commit to, not just something you try on for a day. it’s not a pedagogy that you can sprinkle on top of your lecture course; it’s a total change to the contract between you and your students.
It used to be that you were a “sage on the stage” or a “guide on the side.” Team-based learning means you’re a “sage on the side.”
Roles change. Everybody is uncomfortable at the beginning; students are in a new role, you’re in a new role.
You’ll get some student resistance, but if you commit, student evaluations at the end of the semester will show that students rate team-based learning courses better than conventional ones.
Teachers who do commit talk about “joy” and say things like “I’m falling in love with teaching again” and “class is so much fun.”
When should we use Team-based learning? Any cautions?
It works for all disciplines, but if you, as a teacher, are a last-minute person, be cautious with team-based learning. Because you’re making your students uncomfortable, and they’re looking for someone to pin it on, and if you’re disorganized, you’ll become a target.
For teachers, it’s a similar amount of work as a traditional course, but because you have to do all the work upfront, it might seem like more.
Resources
teambasedlearning.org
Jim’s Site: www.learntbl.ca
Jim’s Book: “Getting Started with Team-Based Learning”
Use the ERIC database to research your topic
Use peer-evaluation tools like those available on CATME
Recommendations
Bonni uses Feedly to subscribe to student blogs. It serves up all new student posts in one place, saving her from having to go to each blog individually. Feedly Pro allows you to gather student blogs, and then students can subscribe to the class collection with one click.
Jim recommends an article in the Journal of Excellence in College Teaching by Bill Roberson and Billie Franchini. The article discusses why some teaching activities seem to crash while some seem to soar.
38 min
November 05, 2015 Team-based learning
Jim Sibley shares about Team-based Learning. Podcast Notes Team-based learning has come up a few times on the show previously (Dr. Chrissy Spencer in Episode 25). Today, however, we dive deep into this teaching approach and discover powerful ways to engage students with Dr. Jim Sibley. Guest: Jim Sibley Jim Sibley is Director of the […]
38 min
October 29, 2015How to use cognitive psychology to enhance learning, with Robert Bjork
Robert Bjork on using cognitive psychology to enhance learning.

PODCAST NOTES
Guest:
Dr. Robert Bjork
Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA
Learning and memory; the science of learning in the practice of teaching.
The Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab
Common misperceptions
Belief that we work something like a man made recording device.
In almost every critical way, we differ from any such device.” – Robert Bjork
How can it be that we have all these years of learning things and formal education and then end up really not understanding the process? You might just think by sheer trial and error during all of our educational experiences we would come to understand ourselves better than we apparently do.” – Robert Bjork
We found all these different situations where the very same thing that produces forgetting then enhances learning if the material is re-studied again. Forgetting is a friend of learning.” – Robert Bjork
The spacing effect
Delay in re-studying information
The environmental context
If you study it again, then you’re better off to study it in a different place.
This is counter to the advice to study in a single place.
Retrieval practice
When you recall something, it does far more to reveal that you did indeed have it in your memory.
“Using our memories shapes our memory.”- Robert Bjork
As we use our memories, the things we recall become more recallable. Things in competition with the memories become less recallable.”- Robert Bjork
We should input less and output more.”- Robert Bjork
Test yourself; retrieval practice
Low-stakes or no-stakes testing is key to optimizing learning.”- Robert Bjork
“When I say they become inaccessible, they are absolutely not gone.”- Robert Bjork
Interleaving
“In all those real-world situation where there’s several related tasks or components to be learned, the tendency is to provide instruction in a block test. It seems to make sense to work on one thing at a time.”- Robert Bjork
“We are finding that interleaving leads to much better long-term retention. It slows the gain in performance during the training process but, then leads to much better long-term performance.”- Robert Bjork
“Forgetting is not entirely a negative process. There are a number of senses in which forgetting can be a good thing.”- Robert Bjork
“The very same people who just performed better, substantially, with interleaving, almost uniformly said that blocking helped them learn better.”- Robert Bjork
Desirable difficulties
They’re difficulties in the sense that they pose challenges (increased frequency of errors) but they’re desirable in that they foster the very goals of instruction (long-term retention and transfer of knowledge into new situations).
Interleaving vs blocking
Varying the conditions of learning and the examples you provide rather than keeping them constant
Spacing vs massing (cramming)
“The word desirable is key. There’s a lot of ways to make things difficult that are bad.”- Robert Bjork
The generation effect
Any time you can take advantage of what your students already know and give them certain cues so that they produce an answer, rather than you giving them an answer, you greatly enhance their long-term retention.”- Robert Bjork
Incorporating generation is a desirable difficulty but people have to succeed at the generation. If they fail, it is no longer a desirable difficulty.”- Robert Bjork
Errors are a key component of effective learning.”- Robert Bjork
Successful forgetting
Memory relies on being in the same situation
Present it in a different context, produces longer-term learning
Encode the information differently; encoding variability
Retrieval is powerful, but depends on success to make it so
Many things are involved in remembering people’s names.” – Robert Bjork
Self regulated learning
The key is for us all to learn how to learn more effectively.”- Robert Bjork
As a consequence of our complex and rapidly changing world and also changes in technology and educational environments, more and more learning is happening outside any formal classroom setting. It’s in our own hands.”
Across a lifetime
Recommendations
Bonni recommends:
GoCognitive’s Robert Bjork videos on YouTube
Bob recommends:
Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning
Several books on research on learning
Make it stick: the science of successful learning

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How we learn: The surprising truth about when, where, and why it happens
<br />
What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
<br />
Closing notes
Rate/review the show. Please consider rating or leaving a review for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on whatever service you use to listen to it on (iTunes, Stitcher, etc.). It is the best way to help others discover the show.
Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
Subscribe. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, you can receive a single email each week with the show notes (including all the links we talk about on the episode), as well as an article on either teaching or productivity.
34 min
October 29, 2015 How to use cognitive psychology to enhance learning
Robert Bjork on using cognitive psychology to enhance learning. PODCAST NOTES Guest: Dr. Robert Bjork Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA Learning and memory; the science of learning in the practice of teaching. The Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab Common misperceptions Belief that we work something like a man made recording device. In almost […]
34 min
October 22, 2015Flipped out, with Derek Bruff
Derek Bruff gives his unique take on the flipped classroom… what to have the students do before they enter the classroom and what to do once they get there.
PODCAST NOTES
Guest:
Dr. Derek Bruff
On Twitter
His blog
Ph.D., Mathematics, Vanderbilt University, 2003
Director, Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University, November 2011 to present
Bruff, D. (2015). An indirect journey to indirect impact: From math major to teaching center director. In Rogers, K., & Croxall, B. (Eds.), #Alt-Academy. Online: MediaCommons
The flipped classroom
Shin, H. (2015) ‘Flipping the Flipped Classroom: The Beauty of Spontaneous and Instantaneous Close Reading’, The National Teaching & Learning Forum, 24(4), pp. 1–4. doi: 10.1002/ntlf.30027.
What are the experiences and activities we want to have our students engage in that will help them make sense of this material and have them do something interesting with it?” – Derek Bruff
Eric Mazur – learning as a 2 stage process
Transfer of information (during class)
Assimilation of that information by the students (outside the classroom)
A definition
A shift in time to that process
Class time spent on the assimilation process
The classic flipped classroom
Students encounter the info before class
Come to class already having exposure
Practice and feedback
Flipped Classroom resources
Vanderbilt flipping the classroom
FlippedClassroom.org
The Learning process
If students aren’t doing the pre-work before they come to class, the time together isn’t going to be well-served.” – Derek Bruff
Concerns that the flipped classroom is doubling the work for the students.
First exposure
Effective Grading, by Barbara Walvoord
Schwartz, Daniel L. and Bransford, John D.(1998)’A Time For Telling’,Cognition and Instruction,16:4,475 — 522
Diet coke and Mentos experiment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS2vG1o7Op4
This video is just an example of the Mentos/Diet Coke experiment; it isn’t Derek’s daughter
Creating times for telling
Students first need to encounter a problem, or a challenge, or something mysterious… and then that provides motivation to hear the 15 minute [explanation].” – Derek Bruff
Linear algebra course
Look at the board game Monopoly. What are the best places to buy on the board?
Markov chain modeling
Classes should do hands-on exercises before reading and video, Stanford researchers say. (2013, July 16). Retrieved 21 October 2015, from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/july/flipped-learning-model-071613.html
Even when you have defaults [in your teaching], you want to have good defaults…” – Derek Bruff
Peter Newbury on Teaching in Higher Ed talks about Peer Instruction
RECOMMENDATIONS
Bonni recommends:
Pictures as a means for reminders
Derek recommends:
The adventures of Babage and Lovelace
<br />
40 min
October 22, 2015 Flipped out
Derek Bruff gives his unique take on the flipped classroom… what to have the students do before they enter the classroom and what to do once they get there. PODCAST NOTES Guest: Dr. Derek Bruff On Twitter His blog Ph.D., Mathematics, Vanderbilt University, 2003 Director, Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University, November 2011 to present Bruff, […]
40 min
October 15, 2015Not yet-ness, with Amy Collier
Amy Collier joins me to talk about not yet-ness, geekiness, Jazzercise, Stevie Ray Vaughan, teaching, and learning.
Podcast notes
Guest: Dr. Amy Collier
Amy’s blog
Connect with Amy on Twitter
Amy admits to some shenanigans
Stevie Ray Vaughan sings Mary Had a Little Lamb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cGphy7XeZk
The great thing about Lego is that it gives kids these tools and they don’t have to be built a certain way.” – Amy Collier
Vaughn builds Lego with instructions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=nMohv6GQBHc
Vaughn builds Lego without instructions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRXtAcHIGq4
Thoughts on education and teaching
You can work with students to do something related to what you’re talking about in class, but they can find creative ways to do things you might not have predicted.” – Amy Collier
…finding out what drives them, keeps them coming back, and helping them find their own voice – that’s what education is about. That’s where I find the most joy.”
Not Yet-Ness
Amy’s post on Not Yet-Ness
Jen Ross
Creating conditions for emergence
Living in that not yet-ness…
When you embrace not yet-ness, you are creating space for things to continue to evolve.” – Amy Collier
By not creating space for those things, we end up creating a more mechanistic approach to education, rather than something that feels more human and more responsive to our humanity.” – Amy Collier
Multidisciplinary examples
Domain of One’s Own
They have this flexible interface while also connecting to a community
Messiness
How do we evolve the ways in which we understand what learning is?” – Amy Collier
More conversation is needed
Amy invites us to consider for which students not yet-ness works best and for which students might it cause some kind of disequilibrium that will cause them not to be successful in their educational experience?
More on not yet-ness
Audrey Watters: Privileged Voices in Education
Embodiment
Recommendations
Bonni recommends:
Doug McKee’s advice: “Your job is to move them one step along a path. You can do that job no matter where they are when they enter your class.”
Amy recommends:
Anne Lammot
“These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.” – Anne Lammot
We are human and our dance is one of the things that we bring to a human interaction.” – Amy Collier
Closing notes
Rate/review the show. Please consider rating or leaving a review for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on whatever service you use to listen to it on (iTunes, Stitcher, etc.). It is the best way to help others discover the show.
Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.
Subscribe. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, you can receive a single email each week with the show notes (including all the links we talk about on the episode), as well as an article on either teaching or productivity.
39 min
October 15, 2015 Not yet-ness
Amy Collier joins me to talk about not yet-ness, geekiness, Jazzercise, Stevie Ray Vaughan, teaching, and learning. Podcast notes Guest: Dr. Amy Collier Amy's blog Connect with Amy on Twitter Amy admits to some shenanigans Stevie Ray Vaughan sings Mary Had a Little Lamb The great thing about Lego is that it gives kids these […]
39 min

About Teaching in Higher Ed

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Thank you for checking out the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase…