Spring Faculty Showcase

         Friday, May 6th, 9:00 – 12:30

There are so many new and interesting technologies that Stonehill currently has available on campus, or will be introducing in the fall. Faculty are invited to attend any one or all of the showcase sessions (featured speaker list below). If you can’t make it, perhaps you could spread the word about this event to others in your department. There will be plenty of good food, a chance to share ideas, and a gift for having attended!

• Rob Carver- JMP  9:30
• Todd Gernes- TurnItIn   10:00
• Scott Cohen- iPad for teaching and learning    10:30
• Stacy Grooters- Discussion boards in eLearn  11:00
• Jane Swiszcz- RefWorks    11:30
• Brian Glibkowski- FIT         12:00
• Jan Harrison- Windows 7   12:20

Teaching Tip: Critical Incident Questionnaire

Today’s Teaching Tip is written by the CTL Faculty Fellow, John Lanci (Religious Studies).

Sometimes when introducing new material or trying to breathe new life into the tried and perhaps no longer true, I don’t want to wait until the end of the semester to discover if the New was also the Effective. I want current, concrete responses to what we have done in class to discover if students “got” what we did and to help me figure out where to go next.

In the second edition of his book, The Skillful Teacher, Stephen D. Brookfield provides a tool for just such an occasion: the Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ). He created the CIQ to help us get a handle on “how students experience their learning and [our] teaching” (Brookfield 41). The CIQ consists of a single page with five or six questions that students can fill out during the last five minutes of class.

Teaching Tip: Role Playing

Role Playing activities and assignments are a great way to mix things up in your class.  They can help break down students’ inhibitions and get them thinking about ideas from new perspectives.

Giving students the chance to speak or write from an alternate persona can sometimes alleviate the pressure to “always be right” and can help students feel more comfortable taking intellectual risks in class.  The following are some different role play activities you might try.

“Managing the Lecture Class”

Tenured Radical, a popular academic blog by a historian at Wesleyan, featured an essay this week on “Managing the Lecture Class.”

In it she expounds on three basic rules for lecture classes:  1) establish the rules, 2) know your audience, and 3) make personal contact.

Although her advice is geared towards people teaching larger classes than we have at Stonehill, it certainly can generalize to many teaching contexts. Most interesting is her suggestion to let students help define the “rules” for the class:

Instead of establishing a set of rules and becoming an enforcer (something that is easier to get away with when you are older and your reputation as a cantankerous old fart is well established), consider setting aside a portion of the first class to consult your students about what they think is appropriate classroom behavior.

Teaching Tip: Fishbowls

“Fishbowl” activities can be surprisingly effective in increasing student engagement in class discussions.

By constructing clear expectations of who should be speaking and who should be listening — and by establishing clear guidelines for how one can step into a conversation — the “fishbowl” can make it easier for typically quiet students to assert their voices in the classroom.

The basic model for a fishbowl has a small group of students sitting in a circle in the center (or at the front) of the classroom. Those students then engage in a discussion, and the rest of the class listens.

Teaching Tip: Evaluating Group Work

Most faculty recognize the value of collaborative work for engaging students and furthering their learning.  However, finding a way to evaluate collaborative projects can be challenging.

To some degree, we might need to adjust our understanding of what “fair” grading means when we evaluate group projects, but there are also some strategies we can use to make it easier to evaluate collaborative work:

Award individual and group grades: Some faculty organize collaborative projects so that they include both individual and group products (and thus both individual and group grades).

Teaching Tip: Think-Pair-Share

The “Think-Pair-Share” is an easy-to-implement activity that can be useful for kicking off class discussions or for making space for student reflection during lectures.  It’s also easy to adapt to pretty much any classroom scenario or size.

As the name implies, the activity has three parts:

1. THINK: After you’ve proposed a question, point, or task you’d like the class to respond to, start out by giving the students some quiet time to gather their thoughts (15 seconds up to a minute or so).
2. PAIR: Then ask the students to turn to a neighbor and discuss what they think.
3. SHARE:  After a few minutes of discussion, invite (or call on) some of the pairs to share what they discussed.

Depending on the complexity of the question you pose, this whole process can take from five to fifteen minutes — even less if you set out a fairly straight-forward task (like defining a key term).

Teaching Tip: Collaborative Test-taking

Although “collaborative test-taking” might sound like a euphemism for cheating, many faculty find that introducing collaborative elements into testing improves student understanding, retention, and motivation. It allows testing to be a learning opportunity as well as a means of evaluation.

“Second chance” testing: For this approach, students take the test individually, but they are then given a “second chance” to correct any errors.

The instructor returns the test with all the problems marked that contain one or more errors — but with no other feedback about what the error is or how to correct it  (the instructor may choose to provide a hint as to whether it’s a small or large problem).  The students are then given a limited amount of time to collaborate with each other to revise their errors.

Teaching Tip: Jigsaws

The “jigsaw” is a collaborative class activity that can be useful when you’re asking students to manage a large amount of material or to grapple with a complex problem.

It allows students to divide up the work into more manageable pieces that they then share with each other.

In the first stage of the jigsaw, students are divided into groups who are each charged with a different task, typically one that involves that group becoming an “expert” on a particular topic or question.

In the second stage, the groups are remixed so that at least one student from each original group is now part of a new group.  Those representatives then share what was discussed in their original groups.  In this way, all students get to learn what was discussed by all the groups.

In other words, if you started out with group A (A1, A2, A3), group B (B1, B2, B3), and group C (C1, C2, C3) as the expert groups, you’d then have students move to group 1 (A1, B1, C1) group 2 (A2, B2, C2) and  group 3 (A3, B3, C3) for their sharing groups.

A simple jigsaw might ask each initial group to come up with a definition for a different key term.   Then, once students move into their new groups, each student shares their group’s definition with the others in her new group.  In this way, each student will get to learn all the groups’ definitions.

For more information on jigsaws, see the following links:

http://clte.asu.edu/active/usingjig.pdf

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/jigsaw.html

http://ctl.iupui.edu/common/uploads/library/CTL/CTL941858.pdf

Teaching Tip: Angelo’s “Teacher’s Dozen”

As we get ready for a new semester, it can be helpful to step back and think about the principles that guide our teaching.

In a 1993 article published in the American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, Thomas Anthony Angelo outlined what he called a “teacher’s dozen” of research-based principles for teaching.  Among them are:

• Active learning is more effective than passive learning.
• Learning requires focused attention and awareness of the importance of what is to be learned.
• To be remembered, new information must be meaningfully connected to prior knowledge, and it must first be remembered in order to be learned.
• Unlearning what is already known is often more difficult than learning new information.
• Information organized in personally meaningful ways is more likely to be retained, learned, and used.
• The ways in which learners are assessed and evaluated powerfully affect the ways they study and learn.
• High expectations encourage high achievement.

You can download the full article here.

And find some practical suggestions for implementing these principles here.