I sincerely hope you enjoyed your weekend but I have one word for you – PHEW!  It sure does seem like the end of the semester sneaks up in these last few weeks.

If you have ever been with me to think about designing courses, I always like to start with The Dream Exercise.  That is, what will students who have taken your course be able to know do or feel 3 or 5 years from now that students who have not taken your course will be unable of?  Said another way, what is the impact of your course on a student?  Now because we dream off in the future, this is not what we actually design our courses for.  After all, we couldn’t take credit for 3-5 more years of our students’ life experience.  We design our courses and our curriculum to plant seedlings that have the potential to grow into those dreams.  With these ideas in mind, I want to share a couple things with you this morning as well as some questions to ponder.

First, I want to share this video about learning at MIT: https://vimeo.com/122455604.  What would the Regis video look like?  What would the video look like if your students made it now about your class?  Now, a video might be too much of a stretch for many classes.  But consider these questions:

• When will your students reflect on their learning?
• What will they have challenged for themselves?
• How do you know?

Next, a different question for you.  At the end of all of our courses, we ask students for feedback about their experiences.  Without poking the hive here, do the questions on those forms inform you sufficiently about what you really want to know?  If not, how can you ask them?  I bet the answers to what you really want to know, if they are not on those evaluation forms, are actually the feedback that we would most likely use to improve their learning.  Just because they may not be on the form – don’t be afraid to ask them in a different way.  (And while it is too late at this point of the semester, please know that CETL can run focus groups in your classes at the end or (even better) in the middle to find out some of those important things.)

Finally, something to share with you from my own class this morning.   My students knew that they had to do a final class-wide presentation at the end of the semester.  I and they didn’t figure out what that looked like until last week.  They decided on a video.  They all shot independent or group videos and they have edited together a really cool video of their learning experience.  Feel free to come and see their final presentation of their video (9:00 – 10:15 am, Wednesday April 22 in Main 333) as it is a wonderfully reflective piece about them and their learning (I got a sneak preview of the rough version this morning).  But more importantly, I want to share what they dreamed for the audience that views the video.  Once they determined that they would be making a video, I asked them to fill in this sentence:  “At the end of the presentation, the audience will …”   Here is what they answered:

• Be more open-minded and willing to go experience other cultures
• Question their own perspective of health
• Go and get to know other people around you
• Reflect on their own lives and how they are/how they live today
• Change how they view certain aspects of health
• Be inspired/attached/interested in others’ lives
• Be transformed like we were

We will see how the final video comes out for these folks but I am excited and proud of what they were able to do.  How would your students have answered that question about their work in your classes?

Oh, and don’t forget that there are many open classes and presentations happening across campus – all campuses – where you can see evidence of students’ learning.  Attached is the most recent version of what I know about.  And, as soon as I can edit, I will update the webpage here:  http://libguides.regis.edu/c.php?g=53870&p=346896

I don’t know about you but these are the days that give me spring fever!  I want to be outdoors riding my bike, playing catch or napping in the sunshine.  And so do our students.  Even the most dedicated students get a little spring fever.   (In fact, my workstudy students did our bulletin board on this topic – what signs to look for and how to push through.  Come and see outside of Loyola 12.  There are even handouts inside if you want to drop by and say hello!).   And, when spring blossoms, it happens to coincide with the end of classes when time seems to be in short supply and stress is at all-time highs for our students and for us.  Despite the distractions, if you are like me, this is the time when we want students to figure out what all of their learning means.  This is the season of synthesis, analysis, and evaluation.  So, how can we help students through this time of stress, busy-ness, and spring fever?  Make their learning public, of course!  Think of it as learning as public performance.

We understand this in graduate education, right?  We end those journeys with theses and dissertation defenses that are open to the public.  The fine and performing arts often employ this tactic.  As does athletics.  Capstone courses and honors programs also.  But, on a class by class basis, we tend not to open the doors of our classrooms and make student learning visible to folks outside of our classes.  Why not I say?  This may be the best way we have to enhance students’ learning – by us discussing what students can do and asking the questions that lead to improving it.  Here in CETL, we have been trying to make student learning as public as possible.  In the fall semester, we hold the Regis University Celebration of Student Learning (4^th annual: December 1^st, 2015).  In the Spring semester, we try to ‘Highlight Regis University Learning.’  Last year, we were able to collect about a page-long list of whose classes were open for folks to come and see and where students  were showing off projects and experiments and portfolios.  Learning!  Yes!  (if anyone was in my office right then, I would have high-fived them!).  I am hesitatingly proud to say that, this year, we have already doubled that list and are adding more as we learn more.  Please see the attached for a list of dates, times, and locations to see students’ learning across Regis University.  It can also be found on the CETL libguide site at: http://libguides.regis.edu/c.php?g=53870&p=346896.

Let me personally invite you to come and see the final presentation in my class at 9:00 am on April 22^nd.  My class has been interviewing faculty, staff, and students around and even off campus about how they have come to define what ‘health’ is.  I know they have surprised themselves with what they have found and learned.  I think their final presentation (as an entire class working together) will be really great.  Come and see and we can discuss how to make it better next year.

If you have class events/projects/presentations that you want added to the list, please let me know and we will continue to add to the list.  Thank you for sharing and allowing others to share in our students’ learning.

I hope you enjoyed a fantastic long weekend.  Perhaps you celebrated Passover or Easter or perhaps you enjoyed the outdoors or got some post-winter (maybe) yardwork done?  I know my family enjoyed each other’s company – that is, as soon as my near-teenage daughter resumed speaking with me.  Here is how it happened.  On the way home from church, we had a conversation about watching people pass the peace.  Some important context here – since we have moved to the Denver area, we have been searching for a church community to belong to and have yet to find one.  Also, Easter Sunday (along with Christmas Eve) in our faith is the most attended service a church might see all year.  Often standing room only.  Visiting relatives and children that return attend.  Even friends come along sometimes.  So, when the peace is passed during the service, the reality is that people don’t really know one another.  They may be acquaintances or know of someone but they are, in effect, strangers.  And the peace being passed was often indicative of that separation.  It is a gesture that we engage in but often don’t deeply mean.  So I thought about relationships and what they mean and what they promote and what a lack of relationship can do.  That conversation helped my daughter and I make up.  Certainly far from best buds today but I know more about her now than I did yesterday.  I understand her better (my words, not hers).  And so, I return to learning.  Relationships show up many places here at Regis.

Institutionally: If you don’t know, Regis University undergraduate students participate each year (since 2004) in the National Survey of Student Engagement (called the NSSE or Ness-ee).  This survey, given to first-year and senior students, is designed to gauge student engagement and participation in high impact educational practices – those kind of experiences that the research has shown to lead to deep learning.  One of those engagement indicators is the area of learning with peers, in the subcategories of collaborative learning and discussion with diverse others.  Our results are pictured here below from last year and compared with the results of our Jesuit peer group, institutions that are in the same Carnegie class as Regis University, as well as to the total of all NSSE results.  If you can see the picture (and I apologize to the mobile users on this one), you might see that we are doing really well in many categories.  But we are statistically similar to other institutions in the category of conversations with diverse others and our students report that they participate in collaborative learning less than students at other institutions in both their first  and their senior year.   If relationships are important for understanding the world around us, for not tolerating social injustice, and being socially responsible, do we want our students to describe their experiences this way?

At a class level: Like many professors do, I make my students fill out index cards to help me know about them on the first day of class.  I read these and try to remember where people are from, what their hobbies are, and what makes them unique.  All of that info can only serve to help me make their learning experiences better relate to them.  But, on the second class, they all have to do a scavenger hunt about all the answers they shared with me.  I outline the rules like not allowing them to ask others what they got and let them go.  Here is how one student responded to the exercise:

“The first class made me incredibly uncomfortable. In my three years at Regis, I have never learned so much personal information about the strangers I call peers in the classroom. Writing even the most basic things about my family up on the board for the class to scrutinize made me feel really uncomfortable. However, with that discomfort came a sense of understanding that the classroom was a judgment free zone because it put us all on the same level of dissonance. With that understanding, I think that excellent discussion will be had because a comfort level had been established on day one.”  How do you help students in your classes from relationships and know about each other?  Is this a necessary component to answering the question, “How ought we to live?”  (thank you to Brianna Randall, Regis College Psych and Neuro major, for allowing me share)

I will stop with these two examples although there are many other – both good and not-so – that speak to the importance of relationships here at Regis.   The final question – if we were to all ‘pass the peace’ as if we were in temple, mosque, church, or even on a chair lift, what would our version look like to someone watching from behind?

If you have any questions about the NSSE results or want to discuss, please let me know.  Also, if you want to share what activities and assignments you use in your class to develop relationships between students and relationships with students, please do so.  I will collect and share with the University community.

Sharing Student Learning Spring 2015

In the Fall semester, CETL hosts a University-wide Celebration of Student Learning (date for 2015 is December 1^st!).  In the spring, I get an increasing number of inquiries as to whether we are hosting something similar.  We don’t to such a large scale but the interest of showing students’ learning and opening classes is always present.  So, I will be putting together a calendar of open classes, student demonstration and presentations to share with the community and CETL will support small classes showcasing their work.  Some examples of students’ showing off their work/learning this semester are:

April 8^th – University Research and Scholarship Council 2015 Excellence in Research and Scholarship Celebration.  Many students are presenting research work.  10- 4:30 pm.  Claver Hall Classrooms and Recital Hall.

April 20^th – Biology-Course Students will present posters of their research and projects.  Second Floor of the Science building

April 16^th – The Department of Psych and Neuroscience hosts their 2015 Research methods independent projects poster session. Lower level of the science building from 4:00 – 6:00 pm.

There are many more being added to the list.  If you would like your course’s times/dates/presentations/locations added and shared, please contact me ASAP so that I can begin to put this list together and assist in advertising.

I hope you enjoyed the weekend of nice weather!  I only heard that the weather was nice as I was in St. Louis through Saturday evening at a conference.  The conference was the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education conference – a part of the Council of Independent Colleges – that included many small colleges and universities around the country.  This biennial conference focused on sharing best practices in furthering students’ exploration of vocation.  But, as with any conference, memorable keynote addresses can make a conference great or mire it in mediocrity. Luckily, this conference was lifted to excellent by two of the keynote addresses.  I apologize in advance for my lack of brevity in this week’s tip but these ideas are too good not to share.

Let me give a little context as to why I thought the keynote speakers at this conference to be excellent.  I have been really thinking lately about higher education and the meaning we want students to become makers of and the societal forces that can drive some of our work such as economic concerns, students’ and parents’ desire to have jobs be the result of an education, and the sometimes-transactional nature of higher ed.  This thinking has had me focused on the difference between nouns and verbs in what we do.  See, we offer and students tend to think they receive an education.  They come to school to gain knowledge and skills.  Students often want answers.  These nouns – education, knowledge, skills, answers – are seen as the currency of what we do by the public.  But, I would argue, the difference a Jesuit education can make is not the collection of nouns, but the practice of a related and similar set of verbs.  I will explain below.

First, Friday evening at our conference was keynoted by Krista Tippett, host of the public radio show On Being.  She is working on a project called the Civil Conversations Project, a public forum that provides ideas and tools for re-creating public spaces that bind people together instead of driving them apart (think for example, any conversation between our nation’s two major political parties).  In her address, she spoke of how her work has been focused on finding ways to ask questions about a topics that welcome people into the conversation without driving dichotomous thinking.  Through this way of exploring, conversations can begin to heal.   She prompted the audience to rediscover questions and to honor the difficulty of finding good questions so that we can make human connections.  Now, most of our students want answers (noun) but she had one great line that sticks with me and that was to “live the questions so that you grow into the answers.”  Here, living, questioning, and growing are verbs.  Answers come but only as a result of doing.  Wouldn’t it be great if our students, at graduation, told people that Regis University was a place where they sought answers by living the questions?

Finally, on Saturday morning, the conference ended with an address by Dr. Jonathan Walton, a professor in The Divinity School at Harvard and also a minister.  What a great speaker he was! And the audience responded with some of the most intelligent questions I have ever heard at a conference that size.  His talk, titled Vision or Stare? How to “See, Judge, and Act” challenged us all to see things not as they are but for their potential.  My words cannot even begin to do his talk justice but I do want to share that he wanted us to encourage our students to know the difference between two sets of nouns: intelligence and intellect and information and insight.   He defined the difference in these nouns as the way they are enacted.  He described intelligence as pragmatic, applied, and practical - the capacity to adjust, adapt and assimilate as in claiming a goal and coming up with a plan to accomplish that goal.  He went on to describe intellect as being not always present or practical – a critical and creative examination of asking ‘is it possible to live differently?’  In his description of the difference between information and insight, he described the former as morally neutral and the latter as generative and productive.  Information is a noun.  Something we can get.  Insight is something we have to practice.  That noun is born out of making connections, contemplating contexts, and predicting – all verbs.

I thought these all to be great questions to consider.  Are your students considering the differences between these verbs?  In all their classes, not just in capstone or similar experiences?  Are they living the questions, as Tippett encourages us to?  I welcome your thoughts on these questions.

Sharing Student Learning Spring 2015

In the Fall semester, CETL hosts a University-wide Celebration of Student Learning (date for 2015 is December 1^st!).  In the spring, I get an increasing number of inquiries as to whether we are hosting something similar.  We don’t to such a large scale but the interest of showing students’ learning and opening classes is always present.  So, I will be putting together a calendar of open classes, student demonstration and presentations to share with the community and CETL will support small classes showcasing their work.  Some examples of students’ showing off their work/learning this semester are:

April 20^th – Biology-Course Students will present posters of their research and projects.  Second Floor of the Science building

April 16^th – The Department of Psych and Neuroscience hosts their 2015 Research methods independent projects poster session. Lower level of the science building from 4:00 – 6:00 pm.

There are many more being added to the list.  If you would like your course’s times/dates/presentations/locations added and shared, please contact me ASAP so that I can begin to put this list together and assist in coordinating.

Want to go a Course Design Retreat?

Want to spend time working or reworking your courses but always seem to be too busy?  Well, what if you were away for 3.5 days focused solely on your course?  And what if someone guided you through that thinking?  And what if you had colleagues from other disciplines doing the same thing and you all gave feedback to one another?  Well, that can happen.  This June 2-5, CETL will be hosting (in partnership with the Air Force Academy) a course design retreat in Colorado Springs.  CETL will pay for your lodging and you get a book and a guided retreat to focus on your courses.   There are still a few open slots.  Let me know if you are interested by emailing me what course you would work on, what level of freedom you have to make changes to that course, and your willingness to engage in a deep renegotiation about the entire course.  Let me know if you have questions.

A few weeks ago, Regis University hosted the Heartland-Delta Faculty Conversations Weekend.  This was a group of AJCU (Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities) Conference for schools from the middle of the country.  This year, the conference was themed as ‘Ignatian Imagination and Teaching Excellence.”  We were led by Dr. Tom Landy of Holy Cross through such sessions as Recapturing and Sharing the Capacity for Wonder, The Spiritual Exercises as a Model for Our Role in The Classroom, and Cultivating Imagination, Composing Place.  

For this week’s teaching tip, I want to share some of the questions that we were asked to reflect upon.  After a month, there are two questions that have been haunting me and I think they are wonderful questions to explore for our classes – both the individual lessons themselves but also the entire course and even the curriculum.

The first question is: What do you want?  Talk about an elegantly simple yet deeply complex question!  When asked that question, I was struggling to name what I really wanted for CETL.  So I went back to my office and, in typical teacher-like fashion, I used my whiteboard.  I have attached the picture of the reflection that I did on this one.  Admittedly, I felt very guilty naming some of these things and, because I had focused on work, scrambled to write some personal things in there as well. 

The second question we were guided to reflect upon was:  What are you willing to leave behind?  Again, a very difficult question.  I am still struggling with this one.

These are important questions to consider for your classes.  Often times, it is easy to claim some kind of wonderful deep and transformative learning as what we want but are unwilling to give up some other things.  These contradictions are worthy of discussion with peers and colleagues (and CETL).  I would love to know what your reflections on these questions may be and welcome your responses.

For this week’s teaching tip, I want to pose a couple of questions about teaching.  If we have spoken in, say, the last 12 months, you might have heard me say something like, “whoever does the work does the learning.”  Ideally, in my own courses, my role as facilitator of student learning is to invite students to learn (very Jesuit, by the way).  They get to do the work.  But, as you know with an invitation, some accept and some don’t and others don’t even follow the RSVP directions.  No one wants my students to accept the invitation for learning more than I do in my classes but my role as the inviter is not to force an acceptance but rather to offer the invitation.  But honestly, some of the students really don’t want to accept that invitation to learn and that can get frustrating and honestly, sad.  So here are my questions to ponder this week

• Is your course an invitation for students to learn?    
• An invitation that students realistically can turn down?  What does this mean if students don’t accept?
• Or, is it full of checkpoints so that students appear to accept the invitation? 
• What would happen if all of the checkpoints were not there?

The Four Properties of Powerful Teachers from this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Ed: http://chronicle.com/article/The-4-Properties-of-Powerful/228483/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en.  Do you agree that these characteristics are important?  Necessary?  Develop-able?  Are there different properties in different teaching environments?

Evidence-Based Practice

I spent Saturday at CU Boulder for a day-long conference for doctoral students who are looking to become faculty members like yourselves.  The focus of this annual conference is always to help those professors-to-be understand the larger landscape of higher ed and to especially learn what it is like to work at different kinds of institutions.  The students are always very interested in knowing more about Regis University and what it is like to teach at a Jesuit university.  My specific role there was to be on a panel that discussed why evidence-based learning is important in the Arts and Humanities as well as in the STEM fields.  As I was preparing for that panel, I put together a handout meant to cover the super broad but extremely important areas of teaching and learning where there is much evidence to rely upon.  Most of our disciplines have teaching journals where we can get the specific applied research but they mostly come from or are related to some cross-disciplinary research.   I thought that this may prove useful as many of the links will take you to some great resources.

Classroom Observation Form

One of the students at the conference on Saturday, having been on a bunch of unsuccessful job interviews, asked our panel what he could do to make himself stand out as a teacher.  We all shared our thoughts to that gentleman and I want to share my thoughts with you.  If you want to be an outstanding teacher, one of the best things to do is make it obvious that you think about your teaching.  We all think about our teaching.  Sometimes it is at night or when we are in our office and creating materials that will blow the minds of our students.  But it isn’t obvious to others.  How can we make this kind of thinking obvious?  By inviting others to see us in action!  Open classrooms and classroom observations allow us to have public discourse about teaching and learning.  CETL is always available to come and observe your teaching (on-ground or online) and discuss.  In fact, it is one of my favorite things to do.

And instead of having teaching observed only when it is being evaluated, having it observed so we can share intentions and new strategies helps us all get better as educators and leads to deeper learning by our students.  Some of the College faculty had asked me about a better tool to observe classes with – one that was indicative of our Jesuit values.  I include that draft here for your consideration and welcome what you might add or take away that would lead to engaged discussion around teaching and student learning.

As some will have spring break next week, I thought a Friday afternoon email may serve better than Monday morning.  This free workshop is next week and thought that many may find it a good time to discuss keeping your teaching fresh with one of the premier teaching and learning authors in the field, Dr. Maryellen Weimer.  Details are below on how to sign up (and there were a few really good articles in the Teaching Professor last week that show up in the weekly review).

5^Th Annual Learning Technology Fair – Thursday March 12^th, Mountain View Room, 10-2.

From the ID&T website: “The Learning Technology Fair highlights the variety of learning technologies being used to enhance student learning in Regis campus-based and online classrooms. All Fair presenters are Regis University faculty and staff that freely share their classroom technology solutions.  Presenters demonstrate their learning technology while answering questions on its use in the classroom (both online and face-to-face).”  For more information, see http://idt.regis.edu/website/resources/resources_lt_fair.html.

If you have some break next week, I hope you enjoy some well-deserved time.  If not, I hope you have great classes!

In this week’s teaching tip, I want to share a quick article about teaching first generation college students.  Allow me to put this conversation  in a larger context for just a moment.  All of our students are unique in some way and the cognitive and learning research informs us that we are supposed to work to bring these unique-nesses of our students into their learning if we truly desire that learning to be deep and lasting.  And when we engage our students and their uniqueness, we tend to more easily engage difference around gender because we can ‘know’ that difference in names alone often.  When we can see our students, some of us may find it easy to engage race and ethnic backgrounds as well.  And maybe we are even getting a little better with discussing sexuality as a quality of being human that can affect learning on our campus.  As higher education strives to bring more people than ever before to colleges and universities, we will need to continue to work tirelessly on our understanding and support of all of these student traits.  One additional piece of a student’s background that may be as important, especially for first generation students at all levels of education, is that of social class.  I share this article as a great piece discussing how social class can matter to some of our students: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/abc.21093/pdf.  It should be accessible if you are signed in to our library.

As we approach the  fifth week of the semester  and 8 week courses or the second week of a five-week course, I don’t know about you but I start to get tired of grading and giving feedback despite the fact that this can be the most helpful for students and their learning.  Today’s tip focuses on how to share that workload with the students themselves.  Peer review, when taught and done well, can be an invaluable tool for improving student work and their learning.  After all, our scholarship often relies on and places deep value upon peer review.   Attached is a handout with resources for teaching your students how to peer review each other from multiple disciplines.  In addition, I like the descriptions of the case studies and lessons learned included in this article: http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/resources_teach/teaching_in_practice/docs/Student_Peer_Review.pdf.  And for me, when I teach my students, I share with them exactly how I am reading, what I am looking for when I go over their work and what questions I am trying to answer.  It serves to let students have a peek under the hood at how their work is evaluated.

Perhaps if you had a better teaching and learning center, it would be busy writing a blog with great teaching ideas for both on-ground and online teaching.  Instead, you have me and I merely  share the great collection of blogs that already exist!  Check them out for some great teaching and learning ideas including teaching students how to better listen to others, does taking notes really matter, and how to build instructor and social presence in your online course .  And share your favorite teaching and learning blogs with me so that we can share with the whole university.

• Science Edventures by Peter Newbury, Associate Director of the Center for Teaching Development at the University of California, San Diego.
• A Lifetime’s Training by Josh Eyler, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University.
• Teach Better by Douglas McKee, Associate Chair and Senior Lecturer, Economics at Yale University.
• Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed by Paul T. Corrigan, Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern University. (This is actually a group blog)
• Of Courses Online by Kelvin Thompson, Assistant Director of the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida.
• Re-Imagining Teaching and Learning by Ashley Kehoe, Instructional Designer at Dartmouth College.
• Bryan Alexander, Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE).
• Technology and Learning by Joshua Kim, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at the Dartmouth center for the Advancement of Learning.
• Fringe Educational Technology by Dave Ghidiu, Instructional Designer at Monroe Community College.
• Cassidy in View by Alice Cassidy, In View Education and Professional Development.
• Natasha Kenny, Director of Educational Development at the University of Calgary.
• Teaching Without Walls by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Instructional Technologist for Online and Blended Learning at CSU, Channel Islands.
• Grazing by Stephen C. Ehrmann, Associate Director for Research and Evaluation at the University System of Maryland’s Center for Academic Innovation.
• Flip It Blog by Flip It Consulting.
• Tim Lepczyk, Director of Faculty Instructional Technology at Hendrix College.
• Agile Learning by Derek Bruff, Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.
• Hapgood by Mike Caufield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washing State University Vancouver.
• Online Learning Insights by Debbie Morrison, Instructional Designer and Online Educator Consultant.
• http://www.facultyfocus.com/topic/articles/teaching-professor-blog/ by The Teaching Professor and Maryellen Weimer and crew.
• http://www.gomarca.com/blog/    
• https://illinoisstateuniversitysotl.wordpress.com -
• http://scholarlyteacher.com/  
• http://eduhacker.net
• http://languages.oberlin.edu/blogs/ctie/

And don’t forget the Regis University Instructional Design & Technology (ID&T) blog: http://idttoday.blogspot.com/

If you are anything like me, working with students and seeing them explore during their education experiences are highlights of being a teacher.  For this week’s teaching tip, I share a blog  from the Chronicle of Higher Ed with you about being a digital teacher.  As we run the spectrum across our institution from face-to-face to fully online teaching, I was very hesitant about using this as I thought that some may perceive it as not pertaining to them.  But let me explain why I am sharing it this week.  This blog post is about digital pedagogy.  What is digital pedagogy, you ask?  I like this definition from the digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology,  Hybrid Pedagogy: “Digital pedagogy is precisely not about using digital technologies for teaching and, rather, about approaching those tools from a critical pedagogical perspective.  So, it is as much about using digital tools thoughtfully as it is about deciding when not to use digital tools, and about paying attention to the impact of digital tools on learning.”  I include this because making informed decisions about student learning is something we all do.  

So, as you consider which tools and how to best use those tools in your courses – whether they be email, a social media platform, an electronic portfolio or D2L, you are really trying to deepen and strengthen interactions with our students.  Take a look at this list of best digital teaching practices and see if any make sense for your courses: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/882-10-things-the-best-digital-teachers-do?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en.  Oh, and in here, you’ll find things like ‘grade less’ and ‘don’t worry of you don’t know what digital pedagogy is.

Have a great week!

“Today, it is going to be 70 degrees!  Can you believe it?  And there are lots of changes going on at the University!  And, my classes are having their first major things due!  I have two journal articles and a book chapter review that are due soon!  When am I going to finish installing the backsplash in my kitchen!  My near-teenage daughter is being a pain in my neck.  How can I do my job better?  Know more people and what they are doing?  Connect deeper with my friends?  How can I forgive the people in my life I am holding a grudge against?  Did I say it was going to be 70 degrees?  How do I get outside instead of in my office?”

I don’t know about you but this is just an example of my typical inner conversations.  ALL THE TIME.  It never really stops – unless I am asleep and not dreaming.  And, this has the potential to prevent me from many things like truly knowing my students and being able to respond to and nurture them appropriately but also my own learning.  This was never more apparent to me than when I went with Pablo Burson and the Service Learning office to accompany the Romero House students to El Salvador and Guatemala over the winter holiday as part of their year-long class.  For five of the 14 days, we stayed with families in Guatemala.  In my case, I took college Spanish 25 years ago so I realistically speak little to none of the language.  The families I stayed with spoke no English.  That meant for five days, I had to be there.  My entire being had to be present.  As I look back at the journal I kept, emotionally I was there.  I saw things that mattered that I may miss in my everyday world.  I let feelings guide me to ask questions.  I was curious.  I stopped being protective of things about myself.  I was vulnerable.  And with all that came a clarity about myself and my own learning that had been opaque for a while.  Thanks to the students who accompanied me as well as to Pablo Burson for inviting me to have this experience.  (If you would like to know more about the pilgrimage to El Salvador and Guatemala, the Romero House students are hosting a community night and sharing the stories of their trip and what they learned tonight from 6-8 at Romero House, 5201 Julian Street, right behind Claver Hall).   

Rodgers and Raider Roth, in their 2006 article “Presence in Teaching” state it like this: Teaching demands connecting with students and their learning, and the health of that connection is nurtured or jeopardized by the teacher’s relationship to herself (p. 271).”  I encourage you to read the linked article, especially the section titled Presence as connection to self.  Teacher presence has been tied to increased efficacy for teachers as well as a factor that improves student motivation.

So, whether you are teaching in a traditional classroom or online, in a clinical setting or laboratory, are you truly present when you teach?  Are you open to new experiences?  Are you ready to be ‘re-storied” as Holstein and Gubrium (2000) term it?   If not, what do you need to get there?  

Happy Tuesday!  As we all had MLK day off yesterday, it may have been easier to think about what MLK meant to the world while you were at home.  Perhaps it is a stretch to figure out how to tie Regis’ MLK week events into your content.  Issues around diversity and equity surely deserve to be celebrated but not only on a day here or there.  Higher education needs to continue to talk about these issues as we all share the responsibility to do diversity work.  Each year, the Chronicle of Higher Ed puts out an annual report called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  This issue features a collection of narratives and opinions such pieces as a student’s struggle with racial identity, how a scholar of color is perceived, and other unique perspectives on diversity.  It is well worth your time to contemplate where we are in terms of equity in our world.  Consider using one or more of the pieces as discussion fodder this week.  And, remember that there are events happening on campus all week.

Top 8 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Articles of 2014

So, for the first teaching tip of 2015, I pose the following questions to you:

• Would you like to know more about innovative instructional approaches that lead to deeper student learning?
• Would you like new insights to teaching and student learning?  Including why some students may resist learning?
• Would you like useful information on how to have your students learn deeply and think critically?

If you answer yes to any or all of these questions, the articles mentioned here: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/best-list-celebrates-scholarship-teaching-learning/  will be extremely useful for you.  These eight articles, from journals ranging from education and teaching in the sciences to the humanities, are all available electronically from our library databases with the exception of the article on student resistance which can be found here: http://www.lifescied.org/content/12/4/586.full.  Happy reading.

When you stop into the 3^rd Annual Regis University Celebration of Student Learning (notice the not-so-subtle subliminal messaging here) tomorrow from 8:00 – 8:00, you will see many posters about courses, student posters about what they did in class or during internships, you will have the opportunity to hear research talks, attend a session on writing Ignatian poetry, and hear how faculty are changing courses to promote deeper student learning (as well as many other kinds of student learning).  See the full and up-to-date schedule here: http://libguides.regis.edu/c.php?g=53870&p=1135653.

But the day is about celebrating student learning, not evaluating it.  So let me give a quick User’s guide to the Celebration:

1. At a recent conference I attended one of the keynote talks was on learning to learn.  In that talk, the speaker referred to a quote by Alvin Toffler, a writer and futurist.  He said, “the illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”  So, first, look for students’ learning, unlearning and relearning.  Do you see or hear how students started and how they have changed?  If not apparent, ask students that question.
2. Look for critical thinking – through students and faculty’s examination of their work, experiences, and thinking and their reflection upon that examination.
3. Expect creativity.  How are students and faculty showcasing the talents of our many different individual students?
4. Ask if the students will be better global citizens because of the work they are doing (or how their work in a particular class may add with others in the curriculum toward this ideal).
5. If whoever does the work does the learning, ask students if they feel like they worked hard.  And don’t be afraid of having them feel like they did most of the work.  That is how they are supposed to feel.
6. Remember the difference between the kind of learning that occurs in courses is supposed to be there and we should value the diversity in student learning.  See this cartoon to support this thinking:

7. Ask students what they would improve next time – not about the course – but what they personally would do differently.
8. And, finally, have fun, be entertained in your conversations with students, and delight in their “a-ha’s.”

I look forward to seeing you there.

In 2001, Jon Wergin wrote an article entitled “Beyond Carrots to Sticks: What Really Motivates Faculty” in an issue of Liberal Education.  As long as I have worked in higher education, I am always asked about motivation and how to have more, expect more, prompt more, etc.  It does not matter how much research you look at, intrinsic motivation is the desired characteristic and yet, most situations – including those inside and beyond higher ed – often use extrinsic motivation as the building block to get to intrinsic motivation.  However, the research is also clear that too much extrinsic motivation, when removed, actually lessens intrinsic motivation.  So, if we want lifelong learners as our graduates, we have to carefully negotiate this balance as we consider motivating our students.

In his article (available in HTML on our library site by clicking here after you have signed in: http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=efba0a96-b531-4831-8baf-72fde9731a30%40sessionmgr4004&vid=13&hid=4114&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=eric&AN=EJ626671), Wergin ponders how to motivate faculty.  But I believe the parallels to student motivation are strong and clear.  He says that, for promoting intrinsic motivation, we should rely on ACRE - autonomy, community, recognition, and efficacy – as ideals that guide our decisions of how to develop intrinsic motivation.  Here is a little description of each ideal:

Autonomy – the freedom to experiment within the given constraints.

Community – the desire to belong and feel part of a nurturing group

Recognition – the opportunity to feel valued and that others are paying attention

Efficacy – this gives our work meaning.  The sense that our work has a tangible impact.

So, the question of this cold day (and many others) is, how do you provide a learning environment that promotes these four characteristics for your students?  I welcome your responses.

I don’t know about you but I voted today.  By mail.  It just doesn’t feel like I really did anything.  I think there is a tendency for students to have similar feelings when we ask them to reflect as a part of their learning.  With voting, there was something about pulling the polling booth lever that made it seem real.  I bet if you asked your students, they would say that their learning feels real when they: take a test, write a paper, do a project, work in groups, engage in discussion, or something similar.  These physical things equate to accomplishment for us.  They are concrete.

Reflection on the other hand is often abstract.  It is smack in the middle of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (Context, Experience, Reflection, Action, Evaluation) directly between two seemingly concrete items.  But, it is also arguably the most important component as this is where students make sense of their learning and prepare for action.  But reflection needs to be critical in order to have students truly understand themselves and how they are changing through their experiences.  Let’s be honest, assigning reflection can also be the locale where students give us the most eye rolling and struggle to understand what we are trying to get them to accomplish.  John Dewey, the famous education philosopher, wrote about reflection as a process of inquiry.  His writing from the early twentieth century can be difficult to read but Carol Rodgers (p. 845) summed up Dewey’s criteria for critical reflection:

1.       Reflection is where students make meaning of their experiences so that they can approach the subsequent experiences with a better understanding of relationships and connections to other experiences and ideas.

2.       Critical Reflection is a systematic, rigorous, and disciplined way of thinking.  It’s roots are in scientific inquiry.

3.       Reflection should happen in community and in interaction with others.

4.       Attitudes that value the personal and intellectual growth of oneself and of others is required in reflection.

I asked one of my students to define reflection for me and this is what they wrote: “For me, reflection has three components. The first component is remembering. Sometimes, this is the most difficult of the three. When remembering an event, you want to focus on what was said and its purpose. It is not quite time to add your own voice, but rather, try to remember an event exactly as it happened, without bias. The second component is feeling. Now that you have recreated the event in your mind, it is time to bring your feelings to the surface. Did what was said make you angry? Did the volunteer work make you feel happy? Whatever the feelings are, it is important to open your mind to them and allow yourself to recall the experience as it was. The third component is connection/understanding. It is in this third part where you want to begin to recognize why you feel the way you do and grow into deeper understandings of the effects of this experience.”  She may not be completely in line with Dewey’s thinking when she discusses reflection but she does recognize that it is difficult, it has a structured way to go about it, and is in line with the required attitudes.  But, you see how much of the idea of reflection is based in opinions and how one feels.  And, it looks backwards only, instead of influencing future actions.

Why am I sharing all this with you?  Well, critical reflection is not a one-shot deal.  It needs to be iterative and the complexity and depth has to increase each time with some feedback.  In other words, critical reflection needs to be scaffolded (the educational jargon for today). This idea is easy to understand and difficult to envision and enact in our courses.  As you consider how the assignments and activities in your course are sequenced and build upon one another, consider this example of how one instructor scaffolds critical reflection assignments (3 total beginning with an in-class example):

http://www.gavan.ca/academia/teaching/how-we-scaffolded-critical-reflection/

If you have examples of how you scaffold reflection or other components of you course and would like to share, please send them along.

References:

Esparza, K. (2014, October 22). What is reflection? Retrieved from From Student to Teacher: A College Student’s Experience at http://studenttoteacher.blog.com/.   

Rodgers, C.A. (2002).  Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking.  Teachers College Record, Volume 104, Number 4, pp. 842-866.

Watson, G. (2014, February 21). How we scaffolded critical reflection. Retrieved from Gavan P.L. Watson at: http://www.gavan.ca/academia/teaching/how-we-scaffolded-critical-reflection/

Being acknowledged for the work you do does not come often enough so let me say it here:  THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIRELESS EFFORT TO TEACH OUR STUDENTS.  See, as I read my two students’ blogs looking back at the first half of their semester, I was bombarded with a single message – how different their experiences are and what else they have going on.

One student wrote:  “The Monday of midterms week, my roommate and I were asked to move to a new dorm building and we were reassigned new roommates. I will spare you the boring details, basically, we had very different sleeping habits and living together simply did not work. The move, which was not as hard as it was annoying, took a total of six hours. By the end of it, I was mentally and physically exhausted.

On that Tuesday, I received a phone call from my mother regarding a situation that is going on in our family. It was something that was very hard for me to hear and the news made it difficult for me to reapply myself to my school work. While I knew I needed to be reviewing terms and memorizing structures, all I could focus on were the structures of my life at home that were changing more and more each day. I wrestled with worry, becoming frustrated that I could not be home with my family to help. As I began to refocus on what needed to be done, everything suddenly seemed overwhelming. It seemed impossible to complete all of my assignments and part of me did not even want to try. I pushed through as much as I could and ended up falling asleep disappointed in myself.

On Wednesday, I was ready to get on track, but those feelings of motivation were screwed up when I threw up in the middle of the day. I have been having terrible, chronic headaches for a couple weeks now. They come everyday, accompanied with severe dizziness, blurred vision and nausea. I spent the rest of the day talking to my doctor, resting, and trying to stop the room from spinning. It was one of the worst headaches yet.

I am not sharing this with you in an effort to create excuses or to gain sympathy. I am sharing this because I believe there is something to be learned from it. You never really know what your students are going through. Likewise, we never really know what you, our professors, are struggling with. It is imperative that a basic understanding is apparent between a student and their faculty. Being quite honest, when all of this was occurring and I was putting off assignments, I was not upset because of a low grade I might receive. I was upset because I knew that it was unfair to my teacher for me to show up to class unprepared. It was unfair to my classmates, as well. I guess my point is this: cut your students some slack. Sometimes the best teaching you can do is teaching your students that their health and happiness is far more important than some freshman quiz.”

My other workstudy wrote: “So far Freshman year has a been quite the experience. Moving in was stressful and the first few weeks of getting to know the campus and the people were definitely one of the hardest times so far. Its been different and at points difficult but Regis has such a great support system to help everyone along the way and I honestly don't know what I would have done without them the first weeks. The smaller classes has really made it easier to get to know my professors therefore, I feel more comfortable talking to them about any help I need for class which is really helpful. I feel like coming in from all over the country and so many different schools, the freshman as individuals are all on different levels of learning which has made it a bit difficult to really challenge myself for the professors have to adapt to so many students. This means that they can only do so much to challenge us for what may be challenging for one student might not be for another. The professors do not have the resources not time to personalize courses for students, it is the students who must adapt and challenge ourselves when necessary. I think the best help I could get from my professors would be advice on how I could take the project, paper, presentation etc. further to fully challenge myself and get more out of the class. I really think it falls upon my own shoulders to go the extra mile and really challenge myself and have my professors there to merely help and guide me.”

If we were to take nothing else from the research on learning, we should make sure we take away that experiences matter.  And the context of those experiences matter.  It is no coincidence that the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm begins with these two items: Context and Experience.  And every student has a different set of contexts and experiences (and they may not be similar or steady).  So, we have an ultimately tough job to do in Jesuit higher education – to teach every student.  We have to ask and answer these kinds of questions:

·         How do we lend importance to and intentionally draw upon our students’ contexts and experiences in our courses? 

·         Where are the natural locales for these within the content we teach? 

·         Is there enough space in our courses to allow this to happen effectively?  If not, how can we create more?

·         How can we feel supported (institutionally, within our colleges and departments, in our classes) to promote and encourage students to bring themselves to their learning?

So, again, thank you for your work on this fine Monday morning and for all of the extra effort you put in to making Regis University a great, student- and learning-centered institution.  Please let me know how CETL can assist you.

One item that has been floating in the back of my brain comes out of the book the Learning Community with the Instructional Design and Technology unit (see more on ID&T below) has been reading.  That book, Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your Classroom will Improve Student Learning (Bowen, 2012), has been an interesting read and the discussions have been interesting and unpredictable.  In the chapter titled “The Naked Classroom,” the author states: “ As academics, we understand the value of research, yet we hesitate to reject our own assumptions, even in the face or overwhelming research that tells us how we can improve learning and retention. “ (p. 191)  What a broad and accusatory statement that is.  But he backs it up from a wonderful article for a scientist-gone-teaching-scholar from Indiana University, Dr. Craig Nelson.  Nelson, wrote an article in 2010 that argued that the evidence for alternative pedagogies being more effective is so compelling that the burden of proof for learning should lie with the traditional methods.  His article, titled “Dysfunctional Illusions of Rigor,” laid out nine common ideas within many colleges and universities many cling to and call rigor.  For example, some are:

“Traditional methods of instruction offer effective ways of teaching content to undergraduates.  Modes that pamper students teach less.”  (p.180)

“Students should come to us knowing how to read, write, and do essay and multiple-choice questions.” (p. 182)

“Traditional methods of instruction are unbiased and equally fair to a range of diverse students.” (p. 182)

“Hard courses weed out weak students.  When students fail, it is primarily due to inability, weak preparation, or lack of effort.” (p. 179)

Nelson’s article lays out these illusions of rigor and explains the research and scholarship on teaching and learning and presents that evidence that refutes the claim.  The whole Nelson article is available in hard copy in our library or can be found as an e-reserve by signing in at:

http://https://https:///ares/ares.dll?SessionID=T165523124O&Action=10&Type=10&Value=42191.

Good sunny Monday afternoon Regis College Faculty!

I hope you had a great weekend.  I know I needed one!  Last week was a little hectic.  Let me quickly give the highlights:

·         I try to take advantage of the campus happenings and so I attended the talk of Jonathon Kozol, author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America on Tuesday night.  What a talk!   I left discouraged and angry about our country’s K-12 school situation and worried about how my kids were seeing the world as they grow up.  I also left asking questions of myself and of Regis University about what I/we could do and how I/we should change things.

·         On Thursday, Regis College invited Dr. Randy Bass from Georgetown University in.  We had a small group meeting to discuss how e-portfolios could be leveraged to get students to do the kinds of learning we really are after.  I left that meeting curious about potential possibilities and what my students could do and show in e-portfolios.  I also left asking questions about my own teaching and how the university could better support the kinds of learning that e-portfolios has the potential to do.

·         On Friday, Regis College hosted their Fall Faculty Conference.  There, Dr. Bass keynoted the conference asking us to consider what the university and higher ed might look like in 2030 and to dream about connecting the university, unbundling structures that we have in place so that we can better integrate, and to shape an education for our students that is an active part of the larger learning ecosystem.  I left that keynote address encouraged, puzzled, bewildered, excited, and nervous about the future of our institution and the education we offer to our students.  I also left asking questions about different structures for our university and how we could engage the faculty and staff in their creation.

·         On Thursday, I also attended an awards ceremony that recognized outstanding teaching.  Unfortunately, while it did recognize one of Regis University’s outstanding faculty members, it was not at Regis.  Martin Garnar, one of our library faculty was recognized where he teaches as an adjunct faculty member – the University of Denver.  If you see him, congratulate him for receiving the Murray Underhill Teaching Award – given in recognition of excellence in teaching (see photo of Martin as he is acknowledged by the DU provost).   I attended the award ceremony to support teaching excellence as well as to support my colleague and friend.  And, as I heard the student comments about Martin as a teacher, I left both amazed and bewildered.  What a great way to encourage great teaching and student learning – by acknowledging it!  I left asking questions about why we at Regis don’t recognize teaching excellence in such a fashion?  I left asking what teaching excellence was and how we defined it at Regis and how one would know.

In a week where my curiosity was encouraged, where my emotions ran from low to high, where I was proud and puzzled, I believe I was taught and I learned many things.  I contemplated.  I considered.  I contextualized. I applied.  I dreamt.  I discerned actions.  I came up with questions from which to seek answers.  I believe I witnessed teaching excellence but I leave you with these questions:

1.       What does “teaching excellence” mean to you?  What does it mean to your colleagues?  To your college?  To our university?  Where do these definitions converge?  Diverge?

2.       How can we increase the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of conversations among and with each other so that we can get to the point where we, as an institution, acknowledge your great teaching and our students’ great learning?

Good morning RHCHP Faculty!

I don’t know about you and perhaps it is the weather but I was not completely ready to relinquish the weekend this morning.  I felt like it was a long and intense week last week.  If you were teaching a 5-week course, maybe you finished up and are in the midst of grading final exams and papers.  The 8-weekers are coming up on the home stretch.  16- weekers  like me, maybe you are starting to wear out with the first round of everything happening and being given back.  (This clip might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU)  What keeps us all going?  Well my answer is: THE STUDENTS!  Honestly, I had brainstormed  what to write for this week and was having a hard time identifying something that would be interesting to you, timely, and groundbreaking.  But, this morning I got to my office and found three independent things that lifted my spirits.  First, my wonderful workstudy students this semester are brand new freshman in Regis College.  One is an education major and one is a dual major in graphic design and communications.  As part of their role here and to help them reflect upon their education, I asked each of them to keep a blog about their experiences at Regis.  I usually give them a prompt question to write from and leave them to their devices for what to focus on.  At some point, I will ask for their permission to share the entire link to their posts but for now, here are some excerpts, my takeaways and my questions for you.

In the second week of classes, I asked both of my students to reflect upon their experiences so far.  With their permission, here is what they wrote:

In a post titled “Little Things”, Katelyn shared: “One day during orientation, we met with our writing seminar classes and did an activity with them. My class walked to a memorial garden and spoke with a woman who lost her son to gang violence. The walk there was long, but it gave me a great opportunity to talk with my teacher. During that talk, I was able to open up to her about my expectations of the class and where I want to be in 4 years and, in return, she supported me with words of encouragement and also tore down some of my misconceptions about service and what it means to serve. Within that short conversation, I could already feel myself growing in my thoughts. Later that week, I saw her as I was walking to lunch, and she went out of her way to pull me aside and ask me how I was doing. I was shocked that she even remembered me. When she approached me and brought up the conversation we had, I felt heard. I realized that she had been listening to me and that she did care about how I was doing.

I have several other stories about how teachers made me feel appreciated that I will share in another post. If I could leave you with one piece of advice from this, it would be that your students cannot always tell how much you care. It is very similar to the way that you cannot always tell how much they appreciate your hard work. Sometimes, approaching them to remind them of something they did/said that stuck with you can really affect how they feel about themselves.”

TAKEAWAY: Student and teacher relationships matter.  It doesn’t matter the format of instruction but the literature is clear, when students feel supported and that you are paying attention to them as an individual, they engage with the material in deeper and more meaningful ways.  Make the time in your courses to get to know each of them.

QUESTION: How would your students describe how well they feel supported?  How do you approach them and offer your support and encouragement?

Alejandra spoke to something different when she described her experience in her post titled “One Month Down!”: “As a new freshman, I expected a lot coming into college like more freedom, harder classes, increase in work load, increase in time, the basics, but in this past month of being here I'm surprised at how relaxed it all actually is. I keep expecting my classes to get dramatically harder, keep waiting for it, but nothing...at least not so far. I'm taking 5 classes, Monday through Friday, and also work after I'm done with my classes every day. So in a way I have a busy schedule but I still manage to find myself with a lot of time. Homework wise, the work load is, I suppose, reasonable if not somewhat light. I have homework every night but manage to finish it in an average of maybe 3 hours tops on rough days. The homework consist of the usual, a lot of reading for just about every class, a couple essays and write ups and maybe some research here and there.
I've noticed that this "easy load" isn't a school wide phenomena, on the contrary just walking to my dorm I feel like all I ever see are people stressing and freaking out about how much homework they have. My roommate does homework every chance she gets and at times stays up much later than I ever could have to finish it, yet we have similar classes.”

TAKEAWAY:  Different students have different experiences of their education.

QUESTION:  How can we pay attention to our individual students’ experiences so that we can support the ones that are “stressing and freaking out” and push the ones that need it?

The third item that made me do a little happy dance (for some Monday humor and to get your own feet tapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM)!  I am having students create electronic portfolios for my HES: Intro to Health and Exercise Science  course.  In their portfolios, I ask them to guide me through and show me how their thinking is changing during the course.  One of my students shared their portfolio with me this morning and I opened to find a note telling me what to see and what its meaning was to them as well as a voiced over presentation that highlighted how their thinking was changing as a result of what we did in the course.  THEY GOT IT!  (I am still navigating how to make the best use of the electronic portfolio platform that we are using and I will try to share as soon as I get permission from my student.)

TAKEAWAY:  Learning makes me happy!  It makes me happier when students see it for themselves and can describe it!

QUESTION:  How do you encourage your students to describe how they are changing as they move through your courses?  In other words, what would make you do your own happy dance (see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS1cLOIxsQ8 for inspiration and perhaps some new moves)?

Excuse the cheesi-ness of this week’s email.  It just felt like a somber day that needed a little kick!  In all seriousness, if CETL can help in any way to brainstorm ideas about how to find out what your students’ experiences are and how those experiences can be leveraged to help your students describe, acknowledge, and explain what they are learning, please let me know.

Good morning Faculty!

Whenever I run into Academic Dean Tom Bowie and ask him how he is doing, he says something like “I am pedaling fast.”  I think Tom’s metaphor is very fitting and I immediately picture the Wizard of Oz scene where the teacher, Miss Gulch, is shown multiple times on her basketed bicycle traversing across the screen – in real time and in Dorothy’s dreams (pic included in this post).

Sometimes the lack of special effects in those old movies were better at showing meaning than some of the fanciest tricks we have now.  If you know the movie, you know that the actress that played Miss Gulch, Margaret Hamilton, also portrayed both of the wicked witches.  Tom’s metaphor of his busy-ness relates here to the ‘wicked’ as well.  You see, as Peter Felten points out in the upcoming foreword to Building a Pathway for Student Learning, “Teaching is a classic example of a “wicked problem.”  John Kolko (2012) describes wicked problems as ones that resist solutions because they involve changing, incomplete, and even contradictory contexts and requirements.  And, while wicked problems are not inherently evil, they are very difficult to resolve.   I bring this up because I have worked at many institutions and I have to say that the pace of work here seems more frenetic than others a lot of the time.  This is likely due to the extreme amount of care and devotion you all have to your craft – a desire to do great things and be engaged while trying to continually do more with less.  From the start of my time here at Regis University, getting people together to have meaningful conversations around teaching has been difficult with all that we always seem to have going on.  It takes a great big effort to get people together.  As a result, it is very hard to get deep and sustained conversations about teaching and learning started and to keep them going.  Imagine what that would look like.

Now imagine if we tried to do the same things across institutions with the many experts on higher education out there.  Imagine what it would be like to have them in the same place at the same time discussing higher ed together?  And do so over many months?  Perhaps in a dream?  No.  In reality, this has been happening.  A group called the Reinventors gathered 50 of the top folks in education and asked them to sustain a conversation around the globe for a few months that explored how to reinvent the university to develop the whole person.  I encourage you to take a look at the overall video but also consider delving into the specific areas of assessment (‘New Metrics’) and integrative education (‘Next Skill Sets’).

http://reinventors.net/the-culmination-of-the-reinvent-the-university-for-the-whole-person-series/

Good afternoon Regis Faculty!

I sincerely hope you are well on this sunny Monday afternoon and enjoyed the sunshine of this past weekend.  For the most part, my family and I enjoyed ourselves.  Except when it was hard.  My poor kids (and partner)!  You see, you have heard me mention this before but I think a lot about teaching and learning.  My pre-teen kids would argue, that isn’t always good.  Here is the context.  My family stayed out late on Friday evening watching the Regis Women’s Volleyball team go to a nail-biting and exciting fifth set match against Colorado Mesa University (we won!).  Then we had volleyball games of our own on Saturday morning.  That left the afternoon to get some of the necessary around-the-house chores done despite us all being tired.  We all had them.  My kids were both supposed to clean their rooms and finish homework.  Clean rooms and completed homework were the outcomes.  Well, by dinnertime, we had the following:  a mown lawn and an away neighbor’s lawn mowed, a washed car, a freshly sanded and primed dining room buffet, and homemade pizza crust.  We also had a couple of Netflix shows watched and some complaints about being bored.  But we did not have clean rooms and completed homework.  As parents, my wife and I were faced with some decisions about what to do.  Here were some of the potential possibilities:  Take away the electronic devices (except the ones ours kids now need to finish homework) OR sternly discuss what they were supposed to do (and try not to get angry) OR help our 10 and 12 year-olds pick up their rooms and finish their homework OR have dinner like nothing happened.  What would you have done?

As a teacher, sometimes we are faced with amazingly similar situations.  We need students to do some work and spend some time engaging in the ways we have requested and yet, they choose not to OR they ask so many questions along the way about each little thing that our answers almost do ‘the work’ for them OR they do the work so superficially that we need to revisit it so we can move forward.  And what if the students are in five week and eight week classes and fail to realize that the shortened time frame doesn’t mean less work but the opposite – more intense work?  Just like my parenting example, here are some potential options:   sternly discuss what they were supposed to do (and try not to get angry) OR help our students do the work OR continue on like nothing happened (taking away electronic devices doesn’t seem to apply here).  Neither being a parent or a teacher and making these choices seems very easy.  Whether a parent or teacher, asking someone to take responsibility because they want to and not judging it with our emotions is very difficult.   And it is increasingly difficult when things don’t go as planned.

Terry Doyle, the author of Learner-Centered Teaching: Putting the Research on Learning into Practice,challenges us as teachers to think this way: Whoever does the work does the learning.  So, how do we get students to own the responsibility for their own learning?  Especially when they have other things that they want to do (and let’s face it, may be more fun in the short term)?  Here is a short read (a tad bit dated with some of its references) about how to get students to own the responsibility for their own learning:http://www.usciences.edu/teaching/Learner-Centered/tenstrategiess.pdf. (Know that these suggestions also are influenced by how students will perceive what you do from their perspective.  Take a look at this short reflection for example: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/didnt-teach-learn/?ET=facultyfocus:e110:250241a:&st=email.  The comments are especially revealing.)

Good afternoon Regis Faculty!

I sincerely hope you enjoyed the weekend and the sunshine (and upcoming moon-shine) we have today!  As I go from meeting to meeting this morning, a conversation from my professional listserv keeps making its way into my consciousness today.  One about failure.  Admittedly, as the person in the teaching and learning center, suggesting that students should experience failure may seem odd but it is actually well supported as a best practice in education as well as from philosophical roots.               

Let me explain.  With a nod to the Philosophers amongst us (and a finger crossing to not corrupt this thought too much), I want to paraphrase Hegel’s introduction to his work Phenomenology of Spirit (I am not sure of the date on this one).  Hegel’s work is devoted to the ways in which consciousness (and self-consciousness) explores every wrong path before it finally accepts the right path and moves on to the next level of knowledge, stating roughly that knowledge comes from travelling “the highway of despair.”  In his work What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain (2004) suggests that learning is promoted when a student has an opportunity to “try, fail, receive feedback, and try again.”

For fodder, consider this NY Times Magazine article from last week: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html  In this article, you should find an argument for giving something akin to a final exam in the early parts of your course.  This kind of pre-testing is a way of setting students up for learning by giving context from their own ‘failures.’  And, as we are all in the third week of our classes, it likely is not too early to try it out.  What do you think about this pedagogical approach?  Would it work as intended in your classes?  If not, why not?

Good morning Regis Faculty!

Happy first day of classes!  I know you have all been doing great work designing your courses over the summer and have run into many of you as you moved from meeting to meeting this past week.  Loyola Hall gets a little lonely in the summer and I very much look forward to the learning commotion beginning. In this week’s teaching tip, I want to share one piece of information that has long been written about: The Freshman Myth and why it is important to consider as we begin courses and the academic terms.  If you have yet to hear about the freshman myth, here is how I describe it:  Freshman come to college and they believe that they will have a learning experience like no other – both in the classroom and outside of the classroom, that their minds will be expanded and opened, that they will have deep and meaningful discussions with the professors (yes, they want to talk to us!), etc.  But, for many students, the expectations of the upcoming experience are not realized.  For a more cogent explanation, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-harke/high-school-to-college-tr_b_620043.html.   

And, believe it or not, faculty claim some expectations as part of the freshman myth that new students will be better than the last ones.  That we will be able to go deeper into the course material, that students’ curiosity and motivation will be off-the-charts high.  Often, our expectations can also go unmet.  But fear not, as this is the Teaching Tip and not the Monday downer!  For, whether it is the first day of classes with new students or the middle of the semester with students we have had before, the Freshman Myth serves as an important reminder for learning, engagement, and persistence.  Let me explain.

From the research on student engagement and high impact educational practices, the very first indicator of student success and persistence is goal realization (see George Kuh’s work on student success in college).   That means that a student should think about their courses, their individual lessons, their choices for extracurricular activities, etc. in terms of what they intend to learn AND SET THEIR OWN LEARNING GOALS.  I know that this may seem a little odd.  After all, don’t we give them the learning goals (sometimes called student learning outcomes or SLO’s) on the syllabus on the first day?  Frankly, these are not the same.  The syllabus learning goals are specific to your course.  Those course goals (or insert program goals, lesson goals, etc.) may mean something different to each student in terms of their career aspirations or desires or willingness to engage or whether it is a core requirement or a chosen elective course.  Our jobs as effective educators is to help our students identify and name what their own goals are for learning in our courses.  Not like committing to do A or B work but putting our course and their learning in the context of the big picture for them and their lives.  (And, when we ask students for reflection, the learning goals they have set for themselves will serve as a useful anchor for them to be able to critically examine themselves and their learning).  If we do this well, we will eventually debunk The Freshman Myth – theirs and ours.

Good afternoon Regis Faculty!

I hope that you are well this afternoon.  I find myself re-invigorated after a day and a half with the new faculty (and ‘seasoned’ faculty in new roles) and excited and thinking about teaching and learning more than ever (and, believe me, that is a lot!).  In last week’s teaching tip, I sent a little teaser for this week being about leading successful discussions.  I have often been asked how many discussion posts should be required for students and I think that is a wrong question.  I think we should ask (and answer) what kind of learning do we want as a result of our discussion?   

Before I share the resource, let me lay out a few foundations to consider:

1. You are an expert in what you do.  We hired you for your expertise in your discipline.  And we value your subjectivity.
2. In his book, What the best college teachers do, Ken Bain argues that great teachers are not born as the saying goes but rather, grow into their effectiveness.
3. Effective Teaching – at all levels, in all formats, with all students – involves some trial and error (although we want to limit the error when we can).

With those ideas in mind, I invite you to take a look at the link below which is really about what kind of thinking we want students to do while in discussion (the science behind discussion) and how to facilitate that discussion for learning (the art of leading these discussions).  While the article is focused on online discussion, I encourage you to see how the bullets shared by the authors are applicable in any locale/setting for discussion. 

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/art-science-successful-online-discussions/?ET=facultyfocus:e95:250241a:&st=email