Teaching in Higher Ed

It is easy to want to cover up in some way as professors…

In today’s episode, President Jose Antonio Bowen encourages us to become good at “Teaching Naked.”

Guest: Dr. Jose Antonio Bowen, President, Goucher College

Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

This episode, we start with Bonni’s recommendation and ask Dr. Bowen questions from Storycorps.

The thing that teachers do best in the classroom is to be human beings, and to get to know their students as human beings, and to make that connection between what matters to their students and what matters to them. (Jose Bowen)

Bonni admits to one of her bigger failures in teaching in the past few years

Driving the stick shift car and not always having it turn out the way we want it to

Overcoming the failures – Jose gives advice

We are opaque as to our own intellectual accent. Everybody has an accent in the way they speak, but they also have an accent in the way they think.

Academics, in particular, are bad examples of learning, because we learned in spite of the system. We’re the odd balls. We’re the weirdos. We’re the people who liked school so much that we’re still here.

Most students don’t learn that way.

Failure is simply part of the game. Disconnect is just part of what happens. (Dr. Jose Bowen)

The end of the story

Nobody uses a laptop while doing yoga or playing tennis (Jose Bowen)

I believe in noisy and messy classrooms. Complexity. Lots of failures. People having to confront real problems. Confront each other. Confront me… (Jose Bowen)

For beginners… need to set the stage and expectations… after that, they know how the game works.

Jose closes the podcast episode with his recommendations.

Change is hard. It’s hard for you and it’s hard for your students… Keep asking your students what’s working. Expect some failure. It’s not a linear process.

That’s the process of learning and we’re all learning how to do something new: And that’s how to be better, more engaged teachers.  (Jose Bowen)

There’s something wrong with the way we’re grading that isn’t being talked about nearly enough.

On today’s show, Dr. Linda Nilson shares about a whole new way of thinking about assessing students’ work and making grades mean more.

Dr. Linda B. Nilson

Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University

Advocating a new way of grading from University of Pittsburgh University Times

The problem with “traditional” grading

Academic and Occupational Performance: A Quantitative Synthesis (Samson, Graue, Weinstein & Walberg)

.155 correlation meta analysis done by Sampson

2006 study by the American Institutes for Research

Bundles

Robert Talbert blog

Benefits

Concerns

Bonni: PollEverywhere (new features)

Linda: Cultivate your courage by trying out things you’re afraid of…

Fears and concerns over changes in higher education persist.

Whether it is our disdain for lecturing to a bunch of disconnected, texting and Facebooking students, or their boredom at being put to sleep by a droning professor reading from his powerpoint, something’s got to give…

In today’s episode, Dr. Cathy Davidson joins us to talk about finding the right practice, and the right tools, and being able to see what we’ve been missing in higher ed.

Guest: Dr. Cathy Davidson

Cathy on Twitter 

The gorilla experiment

Selective attention test video by Simons and Chabris (1999)

We have a capacity for learning constantly. -Cathy Davidson

Patients as co-learners with their physicians in the healing process

Students write a class constitution

What happens if you take responsibility for your own learning? – Cathy Davidson

Alvin Toffler’s term: unlearning

Alvin Toffler has said that, “…in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in ones tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

This requires all of the other skills in this program but is perhaps the most important single skill we will teach.”

…Sadly, we all find gorillas in our lives. They usually come through tragedy… We have all had those moments when there’s a before and an after in your life when the world looks different. The world was not different. What changed was your ability to see a world that you didn’t have to see when you were priviledged not to… when you thought the world only had basketball tosses in it. It wasn’t that the gorilla didn’t exist; it was that you didn’t see it. -Cathy Davidson

Getting students engaged in research is one of the ways we can make their learning experiences more tangible and more profound. In today’s episode, Dr. Bethany Usher joins us to talk about what happens when we turn students into scholars.

Guest: Dr. Bethany M. Usher

Rebecca Nelson (now a grad student at University of Connecticut) textile exhibit; band of knitted heads

Student did research on a skeleton population and was the winner of the student researcher award at Mason

When the faculty member and the student don’t know the answer when they begin

Educational technology that is designed “with the brain in mind” can be a catalyst in facilitating learning.

On today’s episode, Dr. Michelle Miller draws from her research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology and shows us how to facilitate learning for minds online.

Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology

For the Internet generation, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning. Drawing on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller shows how attention, memory, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches. (Book description)

Becoming an expert in a discipline, that journey from novice to expert… (Dr. Miller)

We made the internet to satisfy our needs and desires…

Expertise and knowledge cannot be fully separated

 [Motivation] is not all about the points [in the online environment]. (Dr. Miller)

Bonni recommended Dr. Miller’s book (Minds Online) and ClassTools.net’s Fakebook tool to create a fake Facebook page/timeline… Going to teach business ethics next semester and have students create one for the Enron crisis.

Michelle recommended the following books: