Author Archive

Sir Ken Robinson gives an excellent testimony to how we need to move beyond data-driven quantification to more organic, more poetic ways of teaching and learning.

from TED Talks, 2010.

I was stumbling around the Internet today and happened upon an article on The University of Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning’s website.  “The Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching” were compiled by Robert A. Ferguson, a former Literature Professor at Chicago (he is now at Columbia).

Ferguson’s commandments are:

1. Make the classroom your own.
2. Effort!
3. Remember the formal process of instruction.
4. Be aware of your students.
5. An idea is not an idea until you hear it from your students.
6. Never answer your own questions.
7. Take a few calculated risks in your class and, now and then, even some uncalculated ones.
8. Welcome change.
9. Make sure that they enjoy it

Ferguson chooses to have nine and a half commandments instead of ten because he wants to keep the list open-ended.  So his 9.5th commandment is: It is what your students take outside of the classroom, not what they do within it, that counts.

To read Ferguson’s discussion of each of these “commandments” and several additional insights as well, visit http://teaching.uchicago.edu/handbook/tac04.html.

We found this video from a recent post on The Chronicle‘s “Wired Campus” blog.  It was produced as a class project by some students at the University of Denver, and while it probably goes a little further than it needs to, it definitely makes its point in a playful and entertaining way.

On September 17, Dorothy Mollise (Student Academic Success and Retention) led an excellent Teaching Seminar on Learning Outcomes.  Her presentation was centered around two basic questions;

• What are learning outcomes?
• Why do we need them?

She explained that learning outcomes are tangible descriptions of what we expect students to know at the conclusion of a lesson (or course or program).  The important thing about this is that they are measurable and are directed toward student behavior, not instructor performance.  This significant shift in emphasis doesn’t consider what the instructor covers or does, only what the student learns.

Dorothy also stressed that learning outcomes should not only be in the syllabus, but also communicated every class period.

The reason we need learning outcomes is because they help us improve student learning by giving instructors a guideline for designing instruction, assessing student performance, and evaluating our performance.

We can determine if our learning outcomes are any good by asking if students will have the opportunity to practice and receive feedback, and if we can apply an appropriate assessment method to measure whether students have achieved them.

On September 22,Phil Carr (Archaeology) led a panel of faculty members in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work in a Teaching Seminar on Teaching Social Sciences Online.  Phil, Roma Hanks (Sociology), Nicole Carr (Sociology), and Mark Moberg (Anthropology) each spoke about their experiences of building and teaching online courses, and while they all approached teaching online very differently, several of them said they wouldn’t want to go back to the traditional classroom.

Mark said that instead of speaking his lectures in the classroom, he simply types them out and makes the lecture available to his students as online text.  His approach was to inundate students with information.  He also doesn’t give exams, relying instead on papers and online discussions.

Roma tried service-learning and chat in the past, but neither seemed to go over very well with her students.  She has had success with group projects, and she loves the threaded discussions.  She gives students half credit for their first post and then the other half when they respond to someone else or refer to the readings.

Phil added that his favorite online activity is peer review.  He will take the student’s name off a paper and send it to another student for feedback.

Perhaps the best thing about the seminar, however, was a note I received soon after from a faculty member who had attended.

Great workshop.  Very useful to have one that was more about content than about the technical stuff.  I feel more optimistic about on-line teaching.

And that is what drives everything we do in PETAL, whether it’s a Teaching Seminar (as this session was) or a Technology Workshop.  We’re not about the “technical stuff.”  Sure we’ll talk about that to some extent, but we try, as much as possible, to talk about ways to improve teaching and learning.  Sometimes technology is involved in that, but teaching strategy is always involved.