Teaching Resource, Christopher Motz, page 1
Teaching Resource
Created By: Christopher Motz
Department of Psychology
Carleton University
2013
“A small step, guided by good intention; that is all you need to start a meaningful change.”
Table of Contents
I Don’t Have Time to Read All of This!
The Purpose of This Document
Thanks!
I Am Going to Be Teaching A Course; How Do I Start to Prepare?
Designing A Course: The Big Questions
Designing A Course: Let’s Get Specific About Planning
Learning Objectives and Learning Outcomes
What Are Learning Outcomes, Student Outputs, And Learning Objectives?
What Does Carleton University Say About Learning Outcomes?
Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives: Revised by Anderson & Krathwohl (2001)
The Knowledge Dimension
The Cognitive Processes Dimension
The Taxonomy of Learning Objectives Turned into A Useful Table (With Examples)
How Do I Create Course Learning Outcomes?
Student Learning and Development
The Most Fundamental Question: What is Learning?
What Do We Know About Learning?
Individual Differences in How Students Learn
Kolb’s Learning Styles
Felder & Soloman’s Learning Styles
Individual Differences In “Styles of Knowing And Reasoning”
Undergraduate Cognitive Development
How Can I Foster Cognitive Growth in My Students?
Undergraduate Psychosocial Development
Teaching Information Versus Teaching Knowledge
What Does Critical Thinking Really Look Like?
What Do We Know About Effective Test Design?
Summative Versus Formative Assessment
The Design of Multiple-Choice Questions
Content Concerns
Style and Formatting Concerns
Writing the Stem
Writing the Choices
Medium and Long Answer Questions
Grading Essay Exams
General Points to Consider
Help Creating Questions: Question Starters
Good Talk About Good Teaching
Common principles of effective teaching
Active Learning Strategies
First day of class
More to Come!
References
Appendix A: Index of Learning Styles
I Don’t Have Time to Read All of This!
“A small step, guided by good intention; that is all you need to start a meaningful change.”
Hello friend! I hope you will find much here to get you thinking about teaching and learning. The creation of this resource has certainly done this for me, and I am happy to be able to share this with you. But I recognize that there might be more here than you have time to read. For this purpose, I have tried to create a table of contents that facilitates quick interaction with the material – the page numbers in the Table of Contents are clickable, and each section of the document has a link to take you back to the Table of Contents. It is my hope that you will find yourself returning to this document for some “just in time” support as you progress through the preparation and teaching of your courses.
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The Purpose of This Document
This teaching support document was developed as one of my 2012 sabbatical projects. For me, this has been a revitalizing exploration of what it means to be an educator. This resource is intended for the purpose of stimulating my own teaching, and it is also my hope that it might be of use to some of my colleagues at Carleton. However, it is not intended as an “academic document” – therefore, I have felt free to quote heavily and to use the words of others liberally. But I have made every effort to always give credit to my resources[1].
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Thanks!
A “Thank you” section in a teaching document? But of course. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit mushy, but we don’t teach in a vacuum, and I am grateful to have been surrounded and supported by a wonderful community of colleagues. My sincere thanks go to my guide and sounding board, Matt Sorley. I am also grateful to Anne Bowker and to the Department of Psychology for the support over the years. I am also thankful for the ideas and guidance provided by Joe Lipsett, Samah Sabra, Maggie Cusson, and Anthony Marini of the Educational Development Centre. And finally, no document on teaching would be complete without acknowledging the warm guidance provided by Tim Pychyl, the educator’s north star.
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I Am Going to Be Teaching ACourse;How Do I Start to Prepare?
In a discussion about preparing to teach a course, Ken Bain[2] (2004, p. 17) poses the question“What do you ask yourself when you prepare to teach?” We might start with the basics – asking about the class size, the number of TAs, how many and what kinds of exams, etc. But in preparing to teach, good educators begin by asking about student learning objectives. According to Bain, learning objectives go beyond whether students can “plug and chug” to pass our examinations, and instead focus on whether their education “has a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on the way they think, act, and feel.” More specifically, rather than asking “what the students are supposed to learn” (which focuses on the transmission of knowledge), we should instead be asking what we might do to help and encourage students to learn (creating an environment in which they learn). Here are four key questions to ask:
(1) What should my students be able to do intellectually, physically, or emotionally as a result of their learning?
(2) How can I best help and encourage them to develop those abilities and the habits of the heart and mind to use them?
(3) How can my students and I best understand the nature, quality, and progress of their learning? And…
(4) How can I evaluate my efforts to foster that learning? (Bain, 2004, p. 49)
We can think of our courses as ways to help students learn to reason well, and to join in the conversationsamong professionals in our discipline. Bain found that “highly effective teachers often talk about what they want students to ‘do’ intellectually rather than about what they should ‘learn’” (Bain, 2004, p. 49). Which leads to two questions: “What reasoning abilities will students need to possess or develop to answer the questions the discipline raises? How can I cultivate the habits of mind that will lead to constant use of those intellectual skills?”
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Designing A Course: The Big Questions
“I do not have any formal education. What use is education when we do not become human beings? My school is the welfare of humanity.” (Abdul Sattar Edhi, n.d.)
Whether we are creating a brand-new course, or whether we are working to improve a course that we’ve taught before, there are a few “truths” about the process of learning that we can use to guide our thinking. In his research, Bain found that effective educators usually hold four key understandings about their students’ learning (Bain, 2004, p. 26-31):
1. Knowledge is constructed, not received.
Learners come with pre-existing schema, which they use to make sense of new information. “The students bring paradigms to the class that shape how they construct meaning. Even if they know nothing about our subjects, they still use an existing mental model of something to build their knowledge of what we tell them, often leading to an understanding that is quite different from what we intend to convey.” Thus, as educators, we are “stimulating construction” rather than “transmitting knowledge.” Picking up on this idea, Nilson (2010) argues that with information so readily available online, one of our educational objectives as educators should be focusing on knowledge rather than information. Information consists of isolated facts, whereas knowledge “is the structured set of patterns that we have identified through observation, followed by reflection and abstraction – a grid that we have carefully superimposed on a messy world so we can make predictions and applications” (Nilson, p. 6). This emphasis on the big picture will help with organizing and storing information, understanding the relations between ideas, and grasping the meaning of the content of our courses. As I am putting together some new content for a class, I have to ask what sorts of ideas the students will already have about this material, and how might I propose these new ideas in a way that will challenge their pre-conceptions and get them to work to reconcile this new information with their existing knowledge.
2. Mental models change slowly.
“Learning” means that we have changed the way we understand the world. Our pre-existing mental models were insufficient and needed to be expanded or completely revised – this is deep learning rather than surface learning. To accomplish this, learners must “(1) face a situation in which their mental model will not work (that is, will not help them explain or do something); (2) care that it does not work strongly enough to stop and grapple with the issue at hand; and (3) be able to handle the emotional trauma that sometimes accompanies challenges to longstanding beliefs” (Bain, p. 27-28). I can’t just transmit facts. Instead, I have to allow my students to learn facts within a context of problems, issues, and questions – allowing the students to use them to make decisions about what they understand or what they should do (Bain, p. 29). This needs to be balanced. Mental models change slowly, and not necessarily in a linear fashion; there may be areas where change is suspended or even reversed (Felder & Brent, 2004). Our objective is to balance challenge with support; enough challenge where we stimulate them to think about the ideas in a new way, with enough support where they feel comfortable to relinquish their old way of thinking.
3. Questions are crucial.
Questions help to reveal holes in our understanding, they help us to construct knowledge, and most importantly, they help us to properly sort and index new information with our existing knowledge structures. “Better indexing produces greater flexibility, easier recall, and richer understanding” (Bain, p. 31). The foundation of learning is to stimulate our students to ask their own questions. We can model this for our students as part of the process of effective studying behaviour. But we’re not just improving studying behaviour, we are also modeling the questioning process used by professionals in the discipline – moving our students toward a more complex information processing style (Baxter Magolda, 1992; Perry, 1968).
4. Caring is crucial.
We learn best when we care about answering an important question, or when we have a goal that we want to reach. We can encourage our students to be invested in the material in a variety of ways: by demonstrating how the content addresses important issues, by connecting the material to their own lives, or by stimulating the student to think about their future self as potentially having a career working in this area (Bain, 2004; Nilson, 2010).
These four concepts are important for shaping our perspective on the relationship between our course and our students’ learning. As I am putting together my course, or adding some new material or activity, I have to remind myself to think about whether I am meeting these standards.
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Designing A Course: Let’s Get Specific About Planning
The big concepts from the previous section provide a good foundation for our thinking. However, we still need something more specific in order to get started. Bain (2004, p. 50-60) outlines 13 specific planning questions that educators generally ask when designing a course. The focus is less on “what the teacher does” and more on “what the students are supposed to learn” – with the result being that we then think of what we might do to encourage this learning. Each of these can be applied to the development of a course, but most of these could also be applied to the development of each lecture.
1. What big questions will my course help students answer, or what skills, abilities, or qualities will it help them develop, and how will I encourage my students’ interest in these questions and abilities?
The best teachers plan backwards; they begin with the results they hope to foster. Start with the largest question the course will address, and then list the questions that need to be explored to address the larger issue. Further, if I expect certain results, I must foster in my students the belief that they too want to achieve those same ends.
2. What reasoning abilities must students have, or develop,in order to answer the questions that the course raises?
Our courses are more than just rote memorization. What does it mean to think like a professional in our discipline? How can I provide a sequence of experiences that will encourage students to refine their reasoning abilities?
3. What mental models are students likely to bring with them that I will want them to challenge? How can I help them construct that intellectual challenge?
We all have pre-existing schema for how the world works. Part of the process of learning involves assimilating new information into our existing schemas, or if our previous schemas are faulty, either changing them to fit with our new understandings or creating new schemas. I need to plan for opportunities for my students to test their mental models, allow them to experience the failure of their schemas, and help them to construct new schemas.
4. What information will my students need to understand in order to answer the important questions of the course and challenge their assumptions? How will they best obtain that information?
What do my students need to learn? The focus is on helping them learn to reason, to use new information (lifelong skills). The focus is not on what I do in my class; the focus is on allowing them to learn by reading and thinking – activities that happen largely outside of class. What can I do in class to help my students to learn outside of class?
5. How will I help students who have difficulty understanding the questions and using evidence and reason to answer them?
I might carefully plan my explanations, or construct good questions that focus attention on significant issues, or plan to emphasize assumptions that we might otherwise easily ignore. I might also think about what sorts of writing tasks, or group activities, would facilitate this process. This is not just about helping weaker students, this is about helping all students develop understanding, and the capacity to think as well as think about their own thinking.
6. How will I confront my students with conflicting problems (maybe even conflicting claims about the truth) and encourage them to grapple (perhaps collaboratively) with the issues?
Our discipline is not just a body of immutable facts to be memorized. Instead, scholarly knowledge is constructed and continually revised. Our students are better served if we help them to understand how to construct and revise knowledge based on scientific evidence. Historically, our field has undergone paradigm shifts, often as a result of intriguing questions or conflicts. We can embroil our students in these conflicts and allow them to work through the issues. We can help our students to understand current scientific conclusions by looking at earlier beliefs that brought us to this moment.
7. How will I find out what they know already and what they expect from the course, and how will I reconcile any differences between my expectations and theirs?
We have to reconcile the fact that we know people learn most effectively when they are trying to answer their own questions, with the fact that we, as educators, set the educational agenda. Can we somehow manage to survey students for their own interests, and then incorporate their interests into our classes? Are we prepared to make changes to incorporate these interests? How might we stimulate students to ask good questions and take charge of their own education?
8. How will I help students learn to learn, to examine and assess their own learning and thinking, and to read more effectively, analytically, and actively?
Good educators understand their responsibility to help students become better, self-aware learners – this includes helping them to think about their own learning, as well as helping them to think using the standards of our discipline. This might involve demonstrating our own learning and problem-solving methods. This might involve helping students to learn to read in the discipline though modeling of particular analytical strategies, or perhaps through collaborative exercises where groups grapple with a section of complex text.
9. How will I find out how students are learning before assessing them, and how will I provide feedback before – and separate from – any assessment of them?
Rather than thinking of ourselves as the gatekeepers to academia, selecting good students, good educators know that most students are capable of learning, and look for ways to help them do so. To accomplish this, we might look for ways to allow students opportunities to work through their thoughts out loud or in writing, and receive some form of nonthreatening feedback. This might involve discussion, or group activities in class, or this might involve smaller writing assignments, or perhaps turning in drafts of a larger assignment. The idea here is that grading is really a separate concept from learning – and that sometimes the first gets in the way of the second.
10. How will I communicate with students in a way that will keep them thinking?