Taking images for granted.

David Noah February 8th, 2010

I wonder why we rarely pay attention to the different kinds of graphic media we use in the classroom?  I’m especially thinking about the epistemological claims that photography makes as opposed to illustration or painting.  When it comes to text, we do pay attention–the provenance of a source is crucially important to our evaluation of it.  But we are much readier to accept a photo at face value because we assume that an ‘un-doctored’ photo presents a true picture.

David Hockney once said:  “I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed cyclops – for a split second.”  Every time we take a photo we’re making semantic choices; how we frame, light, shoot, and print an image always suits the purpose of the photographer.  So any time we offer a photograph as a record of something we are really offering an argument.  With illustrations this is more obvious.

This is increasingly important as the visual become more central to our culture, in and out of school.  Understanding and promoting visual literacy is becoming as much a part of education as print literacy.

The best laid schemes…

Denise Domizi February 5th, 2010

Paul’s post yesterday was about what happens when activities in the classroom don’t go as we’d planned. It was quite timely for me. Yesterday in class, I was talking to my graduate students/TAs about the importance of explaining the task to their students. Professors are not always great about explaining the task, and students are not always very good at deciphering. Ironically, the *homebuyer/burglar exercise that I had planned to illustrate this point (kind of) bombed because, as we debriefed, it became apparent that either 1) I hadn’t adequately explained the task, and/or 2) they hadn’t adequately followed directions. Don’t you love those teaching moments?

(It strikes me now that I’m getting better at recovering from these classroom mishaps and at finding that teachable moment. Too much practice???).

We had a lovely conversation about what happened with this communication breakdown. About 2/3 of them got it completely, and 1/3 completely missed the crucial bit of information I gave them about the task. My fault? Theirs? It doesn’t matter. This happens with our students all of the time. The question is, what can we do to make the task more explicit?

For those who believe that it is our job to give the assignment and theirs to figure out what we really want, I’d just like to say that for me at least, it’s a lot easier to grade an assignment that was done as specified than it is to grade those shot-in-the-dark assignments.

My first instinct was to make note of what happened so that the next time I do this exercise with my students the “task” will be more explicit. I’m wondering now though if that teachable moment was a perfect way to make my point. In retrospect, I couldn’t have planned this better if I’d actually planned it!

*The classic study about reader-imposed structure and retention by Pichert and Anderson (1977) is described fairly well here. The “story” can be downloaded here.

“I tried that. It didn’t work.”

Paul Quick February 4th, 2010

Why, after years of advances in understanding how humans learn and advances in technology enabling professors to teach student in innovative ways, is lecturing still the dominant form of instruction in higher education? Certainly, increased class sizes hasn’t helped break the habit of the sage-on-the-stage model, but I also think that failure has led many professors to resort back to the relatively safe and reliable teaching method of straight lecture.

I’ve had the experience of offering up a new idea, technique, or methodology to faculty interested in improving their teaching and being told, “I tried that. It didn’t work. I went back to lecturing.” My instinctive reply wants to be, “How did you try it? Why did you think it didn’t work? How do you know that it didn’t work?”

Just this week, watching an instructor implement a suggestion that I had offered for engaging students at the start of a class, I found my suggestion being implemented in a way that didn’t take into account the learning goals for that session. It made me feel like the woman in T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” who responds, “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” In the spirit of recursive feedback, I suggested that the technique be constructed in a way that leads to the topics being covered in the session. I’m eager to see how the instructor tweaks the technique next time.

In the latest edition of McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, the thirteenth to date (!), an expanded chapter on teaching with technology highlights the problem that some faculty have with integrating new ideas and technologies into their classrooms. While student response systems (“clickers”) have seen widespread adoption on campus, some students are reporting that they don’t like the devices because they are being used for attendance. For a faculty member, adopting a new technology and going through the process of learning how to use it is a major investment of time; when they get less than what they expected from a teaching innovation, some faculty are tempted to give up on it before experimenting with different, more intentional ways of using it. Though the immediate advantage of using clickers is to deal with every-increasing class sizes in terms of attendance and summative assessment, the burgeoning research indicates that clickers are most effective when used to “gauge students’ conceptual understanding when combined with strategies for active learning, such as peer instruction” (246) or think-pair-share. The answer to less-than-positive results with clickers is not to abandon them but to examine how you are asking students to use them to learn the material.

Intuitively, most of us now that teaching tricks or new gadgets aren’t going to improve teaching and learning. It takes reflective practice to understand how innovations in teaching will best serve the teaching and learning goals we have for our classes. Too often, though, we try something once and if it fails we blame the tool and not the user. I encourage folks to try something new in their classes and if it fails, try to figure out why. Or call CTL. Maybe we can help you figure it out.

Why do you use eLC?

Sherry February 3rd, 2010

A 2009 article by Steven Lonn and Stephanie D. Teasley in the journal Computers & Education outlined a study on how faculty and students at one large research institution used that school’s learning management system (LMS) and how those users described the benefits of the LMS. The results of the study showed that the LMS was used primarily to facilitate administrative tasks, such as distributing reading materials, making important announcements, and collecting assignments. Use of interactive tools such as chat, discussions, and wikis was limited. Faculty described the benefits for communicating with students, and students said that using the LMS saved time. The authors concluded that few faculty and students identify the benefits of LMS tools for facilitating teaching and learning.

While this is not entirely surprising to me, it does make me reflect on the sorts of things I highlight in eLC workshops. The same day I assigned the article as reading for my class, I also did some eLC training. What did I focus on? Assignments and Grade Book – administrative tools – but also Discussions, Goals and Learning Modules. I like to think that I insert bits of good pedagogy in with the procedural matters, but I will definitely be thinking about that more the next time I prep a workshop.

Pleistocene pedagogy

David Noah February 2nd, 2010

Maybe we’re just not equipped to learn what we need to learn.  I’m reading Boyd’s new book, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. As I read about how art-making, especially story-making, can be understood as a survival mechanism, I can’t help but wonder about Pleistocene pedagogy.  What kind of teaching and learning methods helped us survive as a species?

Pitfalls abound for anyone drawing conclusions about the lives of our distant ancestors, especially for anyone as ill-informed as myself.  But I’m probably not too far wrong in thinking that classrooms, chalkboards, PowerPoint slides, and Bloom’s taxonomy had little to do with primal schooling.  The apprentice model was most likely the norm.

“Now watch as I insert the pointy end of the spear into the lion’s rib cage, paying special attention to the rather large teeth at one end of the animal…”

And maybe that’s all we evolved to deal with:  monkey see, monkey do.    But of course, you will argue, our cognitive gifts make abstract reasoning possible, and this, among other things, opens up more nuanced ways of teaching and learning.  To be sure.

I think, though, that the apprentice model serves 95 per cent of our learning needs.  If only hunting lions was all we needed to do…

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