Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Weekly Teaching Tips, 2013 - 14

Good afternoon Regis faculty!

As you all participate in pinning and hooding ceremonies and graduation festivities today and this weekend, I just wanted to say Great Job!  You should be proud of the work you have done inside your courses, the advising and mentoring you have done and the role models you have been to your students.  You and I both know how much time and effort goes into what you do on a daily basis and that it often extends beyond work hours and likely over much of your own lives.  This weekend is the reward so kudos to you.

(Excuse the abrupt left turn but this will make sense further down)  Many of you may not know that I am a native New Yorker.  Not the city but the larger part of the state.  Although I will likely never move back there, it does hold a special place in my heart.  What you may not know is that the state motto of New York is ‘Excelsior’ meaning ever upward.  Longfellow wrote a poem by the same name.  I thought that this was appropriate theme for this week’s teaching tip.  For one, our role as educators is to create a foundation for better things to come for our graduating students.  That is one version of Excelsior.  Second, our students provide us with a resource for understanding our work so that we can live by the motto, Excelsior.  Let me explain.

As I sit and grade the work of my students from this past course I have been teaching, I see two things. I see what a great job they did by the end of the course and how meaningful (I think) their learning was.  But I also see – very clearly – what I could have done differently to make their learning deeper, more applied, broader, etc.  You see, I worried a lot about this last class.  I lost sleep and lay awake many nights before class running through thoughts and ideas.  As with many first offerings of a course, there was a lot of trial and error.  While I wish there was less error, having error is OK.  In fact, I would argue that it is ‘normal.’  What we do with our reflection looking backwards however, is important for us and our students’ learning.  This is where Excelsior comes in.  Enjoy the weekend celebrating but then consider next week, how to make your course better.  What different questions could be asked?  Excelsior!  How could you give the students more responsibility and hold them to it?  Excelsior!  What projects would allow students to be innovative and creative and discerning while you facilitate and become increasingly wowed?  Excelsior!  What new teaching technique could you implement to help your students meet your outcomes?  Exclesior! How will you document your thoughts so that they can become actions?  Excelsior! (and the friendly CETL reminder – do it sooner rather than later while this is fresh)

In the context of this idea of Excelsior, let me offer some small suggestions to consider:

1.        Attend or make a Course Design Retreat.  Use your ideas or start over.  As a matter of fact, there is an opportunity in Colorado Springs this year from June 3 -6 to attend for free.  A few colleagues and myself are running a retreat for 4 days focusing on applying the research on teaching and learning to design transparent, aligned and integrated courses.  Please find the flyer attached.  Attendance is free and CETL can arrange housing ( and maybe even pay for) if you wanted to stay there.  Unfortunately, this opportunity just came up and there are only five slots for Regis University faculty available.  Please let me know if you are interested in attending and we can discuss details.  Alternatively, CETL could make arrangements to deliver a version of a retreat-like experience in your departments, schools, etc.  Let me know if this version would work so we could discuss the details.

2.       Mark Your Calendars for the 3^rd Annual 2014 Regis University Celebration of Student Learning!  Speaking of Excelsior, now as the CETL enters its third year, I am starting to get my act together and have scheduled the 3^rd annual Celebration of Student Learning for Tuesday, December 2^nd from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm.  Room to be announced on the Lowell campus.  If you haven’t attended or had your students participate, the event is designed to showcase student learning of all kinds.  Options include:  opening up your course so that other students and faculty could come and see all the way to presenting student work – like posters, presentations, research, etc.  Last year, we had students read from papers, present research, a debate from the debate team, a poetry performance in Spanish.  The sky is the limit.  You come up with the ideas, CETL handles the logistics.  But now is a perfect time to plan this into your course!

3.       Workshops.   You may or may not know that CETL can offer workshops at your request.  These are perfect for smaller groups like departments.  And, while we are busy planning some options for the fall, we are always open to suggestions.  Let CETL know if you want to know more about a topic and its use in your course.

4.       Faculty Learning Communities.  Discussing and exploring a topic with a cohort of colleagues in collegial conversation is one of the best ways (that is all the alliteration I have) to become a better teacher, mentor and colleague.  CETL welcomes suggestions for books and topics and can offer a stipend to faculty to create and lead an FLC.  For more details, please let me know.

With your students at the end of our courses (be it the 5-weekers that ended last week or the 8, 13, and full semester courses that end this week and next) may need a little help switching these frames to the positive as well – especially if you are seeking useful information in the student evaluations.  Many students, as they approach the end of a course, can often fall victim to lamenting what they didn’t do, how they should have put more effort in, what they don’t know and will need to focus on before the final exam or final project, or what you, the instructor, didn’t do for them.  Many think this is what you want to hear or a way to vent.  But critical reflection on what has been learned, what has been done and what it means, and what difference it makes in our futures is really what we want our students to do.  With that in mind, I submit to you the archive of teaching tips (they are all online from the start of the Regis University CETL) and point specifically to the tips from last year titled:

“Give Students Something to Take With Them” – dated April 29-May 3, 2013

“ Last Days (Or Nights) of Classes” – dated April 22 –  April 26, 2013

“Summative Assessment: What Did Your Students Learn In Your Class?” – dated April 15 – April 19, 2013

All of these can be found on the CETL libguide under the 2012-2013 Teaching Tips Tab or by using this link:http://libguides.regis.edu/content.php?pid=382788&sid=3169224.

I sincerely hope that your week began (that assumes that it ended last week!) well. Students from my class are out interviewing people from across campus on how they define health and what in their backgrounds and identity formation has led to that definition. In the beginning, it made my students very uncomfortable. It was often not concrete enough for them. Their questions were along the lines of “how do we do this correctly?” and “what do you want us to do now?” You likely receive a plethora of similar student questions. Resisting answering these questions is one of the more difficult roles of being an effective teacher – especially when students are nonplussed by your lack of responses or your cunning ability to answer those questions with questions of your own. Have you ever wondered why these are such common questions from students? Dr. Terry Doyle, author of some great books about teaching and learning and sets the answers up well when he offers this summary in his 2013 book, The New Science of Learning:

“Learning is a complicated practice. Several thousand years ago the primary obligation of the human brain was to figure out how to find food, not get eaten by a predator (including finding a safe place to sleep), and how to find a mate. Now, in addition to those basic human functions, our brains are inundated with things that need to be learned.”

Learning is hard work (anyone that went to many years of ‘extra’ school knows this). And, students have good reason to resist learning. In another of his books, Helping Students Learn in a Learning Centered Environment (2008), Doyle shares eight reasons why students may show resistance to learning. Among the reasons mentioned include having a fixed mindset, prior experiences that may not have held the same expectations for learning, and a desire to steer clear of risks when it comes to learning. For the full list of reasons, see his website where he shares an excerpt from his book: http://learnercenteredteaching.wordpress.com/articles-and-books/book-excerpt-eight-reasons-students-resist-learner-centered-teaching/. While the list items are certainly not absolutes or explain each of our students, the points are good ones to consider – especially if you are trying to challenge your students and facilitate their learning.

Deep and meaningful learning can be promoted many ways and often includes repetition and lots of dedicated time – for the student and the teacher. But as you have more years and experience with learning, is there a good balance for student learning? I have seen Terry present many times and he is very fond of saying “whoever does the work does the learning.” As you reflect on your own courses and your own lessons, I urge you to consider the reasons behind students’ resistance. But as you spend many hours prepping for classes and exams, I also encourage you to ask who does more work for student learning? You or your students? And, is that the right balance for the depth of learning, growth, skill development that you want? If not, how can CETL be a resource?

Have a great rest of the week – and keep encouraging your students to seek and find their own answers!

Many college faculty have heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy and have probably used one of the many helpful lists of accompanying verbs to craft measurable learning objectives. The six categories in Bloom’s Taxonomy for the Cognitive Domain (revised in 2001) – remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create – has been the go-to resource for writing learning objectives for over 50 years, assisting countless educators. The goal of using Bloom’s Taxonomy is to articulate and diversify our learning goals. So why has the writing of learning objectives, considered to be an essential aspect of creating effective and engaging learning experiences, too often been viewed as an uninspiring task? Shouldn’t this be where our passion as teachers comes through? Could it be we are focusing on a limited aspect of learning? Blooms Taxonomy has been used for so long because it makes sense and is useful, but perhaps it is time we move beyond Bloom to explore all the types of learning we are trying to achieve in a college-level course. Luckily there are other taxonomies we can use. In fact, Bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive domain is only one of the taxonomies created by Bloom and his colleagues. A quick Internet search will uncover the work begun by Bloom and furthered by other scholars in the psychomotor and affective domains.

Additionally, L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning Outcomes goes beyond cognitive processes and includes other aims of teaching. Fink’s taxonomy contains six aspects of learning:

· Foundational Knowledge – understanding information and ideas

· Application – developing critical, creative, or practical thinking skills

· Integration – making connecting between information, ideas, perspectives or real life

· Human Dimension - Learning about oneself or others

· Caring - Developing new feelings, interests, or values

· Learning How to Learn - Becoming a better student, inquiring about a subject

Similarly, Wiggins and McTighe’s backwards design model describes Six Facets of Understanding:

· Explain – provide justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts, and data

· Interpret — tell meaningful stories, make subjects personal or accessible through images, analogies, and models

· Apply — effectively use and adapt what they know in diverse contexts

· Have perspective — see and hear points of view critically; see the big picture

· Empathize — perceive sensitively on the basis of prior indirect experience

· Have self-knowledge — show metacognitive awareness; perceive the prejudices, projections and habits of mind that shape and impede our understanding

Both of these taxonomies start with the foundational knowledge necessary for deeper learning, and allow us to tease out the type of thinking we want students to be doing. But both go beyond cognitive processes and application of knowledge to also explore some of the larger goals of our courses. Nearly all courses including some affective goals, whether it is a deeper appreciation of culture, or simply to change someone’s deep dislike of math or feelings of inadequacy about writing. And nearly all courses should include some metacognitive aspects, helping students develop the habits necessary of a lifelong learner in the 21st century.

Once we have clarified and articulated all the various objectives in our course, we can then choose the most appropriate teaching and assessment methods. For example, lectures and presentations are well suited for the transfer of foundational knowledge and could be useful for some cognitive processes, but are not effective for promoting application skills or perspective taking or self-discovery. Davis and Arend provide yet another categorization that can help educators determine which teaching methods are best suited for which learning objectives:

· Building skills – supported through practice and feedback

· Acquiring knowledge – supported through presentations and explanations

· Developing critical, creative, dialogical thinking – supported through question-driving inquiries and discussions

· Cultivating problem solving and decision-making abilities – supported through problems, case studies, labs, projects

· Exploring attitudes, feelings and perspectives – supported through group activities and team projects

· Practicing professional judgment – supported through role playing, simulations, scenarios and games

· Self-discovery and personal growth – supported through reflection on experience

Which taxonomy you choose, or how you mix them together, might be a matter of personal choice. But articulating our goals beyond what we are used to describing will allow us to capture the entirety of what we are teaching, and perhaps become more passionate about our work. It’s worth a look into some of these other taxonomies, beyond Bloom, that can help us with these larger goals.

Resources:

Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R., Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Raths J. & Wittrock, M.C. (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, New York: Longman.

Bloom, B.S., Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H. & Krathwohl, D.R. (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals; Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, New York: Longmans, Green.

Davis, J.R. & Arend, B.D. (2013) Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective, and Enjoyable College Teaching, Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Fink, L.D. (2003) Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe J. (2005) Understanding by Design, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

I return to work this morning from conference travel last week and am slightly (still) jetlagged. Thus, my ability for imagination on little sleep is limited. As I lay awake last night while my body thought it was 8 hours ahead of the clock, I was thinking about emails from my students this semester and the email train bouncing around on my professional listserv and the way people were interacting at the conference I just attended. I share them with you below in the hope that these questions may be similar to questions you might think about for your teaching and your students’ learning.

Reflections from my class this semester:

My students are required to keep and submit what I am calling a Metacognitive Journal entry each week from my class. Last week, my students were required to take a step back and look for change in themselves in terms of what they were writing about in these jouranls. I asked the students to wordle* their journals on a week-by-week basis and then overall and to write about the changes in their work as represented by the submitted word clouds. And, I asked them to tell me what they thought their grade should be at the midterm based upon the context of the syllabus. Now, let me say, in a class of 25, there are some students taking this kind of work extremely seriously and others that are obviously trying to figure out what to write that will appease me on a weekly basis (despite my addressing this head on). I get some journals submitted on Wednesday afternoon after our last class meeting for the week. But I get many submitted on Sunday evening between 11 and midnight. Know that we have class at 9:00 am Monday morning.

Here is what I observe: the students that are open-minded and exploring this diversity core course and are taking it seriously are usually underestimating their grades (I should note here that there are no points associated with particular assignments in this seminar class. We are operating on the premise that students have choice in whether to engage or not). Conversely, those students holding tightly to their preconceived ideas that they held prior to the course and doing enough to get by are typically overestimating their grades and relying on criteria like class attendance and submitting things on time as their main criteria (despite me trying to explain that these were never mentioned as important grade-wise).

How would your students rate themselves as performing in your course? Would this same phenomena occur for you? Why or why not?

*A wordle is a word-cloud generation tool that any amount or type of text can be entered and a word cloud is generated. Words that appear more often appear bigger in the cloud. Less used words appear smaller. The tool is located atwww.wordle.net.

Thoughts from my professional organization’s listserv:

Yesterday, this op-ed from Tom Friedman was in the New York Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-google.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0. Titled, How to get a job at Google, my professional peers engaged in an intellectual tennis match that was exciting at times but fairly predictable. I invite you to read and form your own opinion but I will share mine here. First, I must share that I do not believe that we are supposed to prepare people for jobs (unless we are part of a professional degree-offering program) but rather are supposed to prepare people to be successful once they graduate. Successful is not necessarily a synonym for employed.

In a nutshell, the author shares a conversation with a Google exec discussing what things they look for when hiring new employees. The so-called ‘soft skills’ of leadership, intellectual humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn were mentioned as the five things by Google. Having experience in these areas cemented them.

In my professional organization of teaching and learning professionals, many claimed that this was yet another indictment of higher education not preparing people for jobs. Others read the commentary (again, it was an op-ed)as helping to frame questions about which pedagogies would be helpful for students to develop attributes similar to Google’s ideas: 1) the desire to learn and the ability to predict and adapt; 2) the willingness to take on and to release leadership roles, regardless of your nominal position in an organization; 3) intellectual humility such as how to learn from failure, and how to let the ideas of others win the day if they are better than your own; 4) ownership in and responsibility for the projects and duties at hand; and 5) last, expertise, tempered by the ability to see a problem or task with new eyes. Admittedly, this is how I read the article.

As you read the short op-ed, which side would you fall on? Or, would you have a different perspective?

Attending a professional conference outside of teaching and learning and my own academic discipline:

Now, funding is more of an issue than ever for everyone but one thing I would recommend as beneficial for your own scholarship is to work with some peers and go and attend and present at a conference that is not normally in your own purview. Here is why I think it is valuable. For one, the context is often so unique that the opportunity to observe professional identities without really having a proverbial horse in the race is enlightening. At this conference, Writing Research Across Boarders, I was way out of my league in terms of expertise relative to the others in attendance thus I was incapable of any professional peacocking. And, while some things were transferable (like the analysis of twitter feeds at a conference as a way of looking at attendee’s learning), others were so context specific that I struggled to find use or application to my work at Regis University. But aside from the little time that I presented, I was in the role of a student and observer. It is that humbling experience I believe is useful and, while uncomfortable (I think I actually grossly misunderstood someone’s use of the word ‘genre’ and put my own definition to it as ‘discipline’), makes me a better teacher.

How do they all link together?

The good news from the conference is that everyone I encountered was intrigued by the idea and mission of Jesuit education and what it means when they heard about it. Part of me wants to believe that the ideals of Jesuit education are at the heart of what many of us want higher ed to be – the development of the very Jesuit concept of Eloquentia Perfecta. This concept – that of a good person writing and speaking well for the common good – seems to me to be where there is balance of the development of the so-called ‘soft skills’ that Google apparently values with that of the skills developed from the content of the disciplines. I encourage you to ask your students about where their ‘grade’ would be relative to each of these items (both the disciplinary content and associated expertise as well as the broader skills) and to ask them why they think their grade would be there.

Would your students overestimate or underestimate their own learning? What, if anything, do we do with those answers?

I hope you had a wonderful weekend! I have to share that, in the class that I am teaching this semester, my students are interviewing people from the community about how they define health and why. My students needs to find out people’s stories – about relationships, about finances, about change, etc. In our practice interviews, they have found out some amazing things. In the end, my students need to create a visual display of the information they collect (as a single group). With all of these interview transcripts, they will have a lot of data. Displaying this information visually is a really great way to convey a lot of information quickly – but they will need help. So, for my benefit and yours, this week’s teaching tip focuses on infographics – the visual display of trends and patterns in complex information and is shared courtesy of Dr. Molly Baker of Sauk Community College in Dixon, IL.

"Infographics … can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design, or information architecture." (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infographic). One of my personal favorites are the RSA Animates created for TED talks like the one from Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms.

You might have had the opportunity to see some wonderful infographics, perhaps in the slides provided to you by your textbook publishers, in your disciplinary publications or even popular publications. You may have also heard about the value of using the “assertion-evidence” method for creating effective slides to accompany your presentations, which depends on using relevant infographics. Wouldn't it be great if you could create infographics yourself for your classes? “Yes,” you say, “but I am not an artist or particularly talented at thinking of visualizations.” Fortunately, there are a number of amazing, free tools on the Internet these days to help us out!

Many of them have templates that you can type in or import your data so that visual infographics are created for you! (and can then be linked to from your PowerPoint slides or downloaded for importing into slides or your Learning Management System (LMS) or ...). [I will check with those in the know on this].

Others provide creation tools and templates that make it relatively easy to select and build your own, without much visual talent or experience.

And if you have more ideas than you know what to do with, these tools can save you time by providing efficient tools for creating them, as well. Take a look at the sites below for some great tools and ideas!

· http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations

· http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/page/Visualization_Options.html

· http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

To see this and any other teaching tip from the last two years, visit the archive of CETL Teaching Tips at:http://libguides.regis.edu/content.php?pid=382788&sid=3169224.

This week’s teaching tip is designed to share the insights of Dr. Maryellen Weimer. Maryellen is the author of a book that I refer to often: Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. From the book cover: “Learner-Centered Teachingshows how to tie teaching and curriculum to the process of … learning.”

In one of the chapters of the text titled “Taking a Developmental Approach,” Weimer argues that a students’ achievement of becoming an independent and autonomous self-directed learner is not necessarily an inevitable happening due to a college education and that we need to intentionally choose methods to facilitate this for our students. Below I share with you the author’s questions and comments around what she labels as three main instructional challenges for us as college educators:

Challenge 1: Understanding the development process in context

Authors points in summary: All students come to class with backgrounds that influence their learning and development. This context includes the other parts of their lives that are occurring at the same time. Don’t be afraid to posit theories as to what those influences are and what impact they have on learning. But merely thinking that you know the context and its impact on a students learning is not enough. You need to test these hypotheses by observation and changes in the learning environment. This is the action researcher part of being a teacher.

Challenge 2: Responding to students at different levels

Authors points in summary: How do you respond to very different learning needs within the same class? Consider that the pace of the class should not be constant if you have different learners in class. Change the pace at which the class is designed to present ideas and content. Slow down the pace of the course when working on central ideas or important concepts or skills. Present the most important part first, taking more time to do so. This allows for the most students to develop an understanding. Then quicken the pace with less central and even more sophisticated material. This sounds counterintuitive but the author’s point is, if you want students to make decisions for themselves, “is there any reason why some cannot be making more sophisticated learning decisions than others?” [I am looking for other work to back up this point]

Challenge 3: Designing a sequence of learning experiences

Authors points in summary: The author asks a collection of questions to include: How many of a particular kind of assignment or learning activity do you give students before you become confident that the students’ will be ready to move on? One? Multiple? Can certain types of assignments or combos of assignments be better for promoting learning? How far and how fast can I push students? There is no better way than quick formative type assessments and student reflection. But, as the author states, this feedback and what you find out is usually not generalizable to other courses and may not even be indicative of other students in the same course so use this type of information accordingly.

If you are still reading, you may have thought that the answers to such questions were in the text as well. Unfortunately, there are not consistent answers to such questions. They are dependent upon your students and your courses and the contexts therein. If you want to see what Maryellen Weimer says, her book is available through our library as an electronic book. Or, invite the CETL to your class to discuss.

Finally, if you are looking for something concrete to do to seek answers and solutions to these questions (or other instructional questions), consider this week’s bonus tip: Guerilla teaching! Often, a slight change in the ‘traditional’ approaches helps reveal answers and our colleagues can help with this.

Well I don’t know about you, but the game didn’t live up to my expectations (either in excitement or in the outcome) but it did make me return to thinking about Monday, my class, and, of course, the teaching tip. Many of the teaching tips to date play around with the idea of getting student thinking out in the open where we can teach to it. This week’s tip is in a similar vein but around the issue of student reading and their understanding of what they read.

Now, let me acknowledge that we all have the issue of getting our students to read what they are assigned. Students not reading could be a time issue or even student laziness issue. Or perhaps it is something different altogether? What if it is an issue of student comprehension of what they read? Adler and Van Doren, in their 1972 book, How to read a book: The classical guide to intelligent reading state:

Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not. And books that are over your head weary you unless you can reach up to them and pull yourself up to their level. It is not the stretching that tires you, but the frustration of stretching unsuccessfully because you lack the skill to stretch effectively.

Reading books above our heads is a great thing. But, what if our students are not deeply skilled in how to read what we assign them? I am working with a faculty member who, noticing a pattern of student thinking in his class, wondered if his students’ ability to understand what they were reading was what was holding them back. He and I discussed ways to uncover his students’ ability to read for meaning. We improvised a 5 minute timed reading exercise with a couple paragraphs followed by a few multiple choice questions about that reading. They are based on a widely used test that many colleges and universities use. The instructor gave this exercise to two of his classes and scored them. Then, we suggested some quick and simple resources for students to take advantage of to improve their understanding and take-aways from what they read.

Some of the advice is very basic like look up the words you don’t know with a phone dictionary app. Other advice is more complex like how to read a text by scanning for the author’s main points and where those main points might be located. Here is a great resource from The Brigham Young Center for Teaching and Learning that goes into details about these items and more: http://ctl.byu.edu/node/329. Another great resource is the second section of this page titled “teach reading strategies”: http://www.nea.org/home/34689.htm. Many of these activities require some work and/or creation of materials for the students to use. Stop by CETL (Loyola 12) or drop me an email if you would like advice or assistance in creating such materials. The Regis University Tutoring Center in The Learning Commons is also a great resource to send students to.

Finally, we shared with the students a little secret – that in graduate school, we all talked to each other. We explained what we were learning and others challenged our thinking and, perhaps, even helped reframe that thinking. Some of us tried this method as teaching assistants with real students. But nearly all of us did this with our peers and even our professors. How can we replicate this type of experience with our students? Structuring student learning teams may be one possible solution. But, effective cooperative work need be designed clearly for it to work as intended. Perhaps this is fodder for next week’s tip.

Weekly Teaching Tip: How to Motivate Our Students

As we progress into our courses and away from the first meetings/interactions with our students, our direct attention to student motivation can potentially wane. In this week’s teaching tip, I borrow from the Ambrose et al. (2010) text How Learning Works: 7 Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching and the work her and her coauthors present on student motivation to call your attention to just some of the factors that influence how motivated our students are in our courses. This text is available as a hardcopy and also as an e-book in our library AND is also the text of the Faculty Learning Community that will begin meeting soon (contact CETL if you are interested. There are still spots left.).

                        Sometimes we as instructors/professors/disciplinary experts/holders of more life experience, etc. value components of our courses more than our students may and we may have more desire to engage in the types of conversations/research/exploration needed for deep learning in our fields. This differential valuation affects all sorts of things in our courses from the feeling during the course to the kinds of questions students have about the assignments to the depth of student learning. The good news is that we can (and likely, should) influence student motivation by addressing what students value and expect during learning and the teaching and learning research can point us in the direction to do so. The e-book is linked above and this is the third chapter in that text (pp. 66-90). I have recreated Figure 3.1 (p. 70) here to tempt you to open the text and read more deeply. Below are some brief definitions of importance:

Motivation - the personal investment that a person has in reaching a desired state or outcome (Maehr and Meyer, 1997).

Goals – the compass that guides and directs purposeful actions (Ford, 1992). There are multiple types of goals: performance goals, learning goals, work-avoidant goals, affective goals, social goals. Some are the ones we want students to pay attention to. Others are not. We need to enforce the right ones.

Values – three terms are important here and I share a snapshot of the definitions of each from the Ambrose text along with my additions in brackets.

Attainment value = the satisfaction one gains when they master a task or accomplish a goal.

Intrinsic value = satisfaction from doing the task [of learning] rather than the satisfaction of the outcome of the task.

Instrumental [Extrinsic] value = how much accomplishment [of the learning goals or tasks] helps students accomplish other goals (i.e., jobs, money, grades, points, etc.).

Expectancies - beliefs that the goals are accomplishable. These can be positive or negative in terms of how students think about their own ability to accomplish (this is also known as efficacy).

The values and goals of our students work together to influence motivation and, while some teachers intuitively navigate this constant barrage of feedback successfully, many of us have to work hard to do so. This text is a wonderful resource for how to create a supportive environment for students that maximizes expectancies and values. I strongly encourage you to take a look.

Welcome to the beginning of the semesters! I sincerely hope that you had a wonderful holiday and hope that the new year brings you happiness and ever-increasing student learning. If you have worked with me, you may be familiar with how much I like reflection. Certainly my own students quickly become aware of this. That said, deep and meaningful reflection can often be difficult and time consuming. But, with this week’s teaching tip, I hope to take an easy pass at reflection and offer you something that applies to you.

Weekly Teaching Tip from CETL – Faculty Focus Top 13 Articles of 2013

Questions like those above will be explored in this week's teaching tip.

If you click on the picture, you will be taken to the Faculty Focus Top 13 Articles of 2013. The articles cover face-to-face and online teaching. They cover everything from setting cellphone rules in your course to deciding what to teach in a ‘flipped’ manner to encouraging participation from introverted students. They also have helpful hints to offer your students to improve their learning (see the one on different ways of note taking). Something for everyone to read and reflect upon. And – there is a great inclusion on how to create a climate for learning on the first days of class.

Hopefully, something sparks your interest and can serve as a useful resource!