June 2011 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

“Best Practices” or…? Have your say! – Marlene Griffith Wrubel

I had a brief conversation with a colleague about the words “best practices”. My colleague felt there must be a better phrase to convey tested and successful ways of summarizing new information for learners. I like the phrase and what it means. The term is widely known and is particular to the Training and Development world. I believe it still has application in the field of Education. That’s where you come in. It’s said a picture’s worth a thousand words. Take a look at the picture below. What comes to mind when you think of this phrase? What is your definition? What other terms exist for this sentiment? Send your comment, definition, or ideas to me and I will post it to this blog.

BestPractices3 — Best Practices filled in

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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.

‘Objectives’ should sound simple too !!!

With the new guidelines, the standard of the micro-teaching sessions have gone up significantly. Earlier the talks were more like micro-presentations due to lack of guidelines to the speakers. I enjoy those sessions a lot because I get to refresh my memory in so many different fields…physics, bio, history, geography and so on :). Also sometimes I get to know some unusual thought provoking perspectives from the participants. For instance, in one of the micro teaching session a student raised a concern that the objectives of the talk should not be disclosed upfront. Initially I was surprised by his view and asked his reasons for thinking so. He said that he often felt that the objectives, especially in the engineering or science talks, have so many new/ complex terminologies that the audiences tend to get scared by those. He was of the view that the objective would be disclosed at the end of the talk while concluding. For a while, I did understand his point of view and also realized that it had happened to me too at times when I was an undergraduate. Professors used to walk into the class with a list of unknown terminologies and I used to indeed feel intimidated. One can lose interest on seeing so many unknown terms by the fact that he would have to learn or understand so many things in the lesson. But I think this factor is more to do with how the objectives are written. Now I think that the objectives, apart from being measurable and precise, should also be presented to sound simple and easy. This may be tricky in some situations where there are many new terms introduced to the audiences. May be if nothing seems to simplify the objectives, the speaker can always assure the audiences verbally that the things may look complicated but are easy to learn. Good luck everyone with writing effective yet simple objectives 🙂 !

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Having recently read Walden…

I’m currently enjoying a little break as I’ve recently finished my comprehensive exams. I’m enjoying reconnecting with friends, family and the world around me. What I’m noticing the most in this period of time is how much clearer my thoughts are. I’m attributing this to lower stress and having time to go for a walk outside and having time to work in my garden.

My best ideas happen when I’m out near the ocean or going for a walk in an area where I don’t hear traffic and I can take in the world around me at a leisurely pace. This isn’t to say that my ideas evolve independent of study, they don’t, but I would say that having time to relax and reconnect with the more than human world is essential to being healthy and whole. In fact it is usually when I’m out for a long walk that the things I’ve been reading come into focus and that new ideas start forming.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, during his stay at Walden Pond, that “it appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature” and yet I find that is exactly where I exist — in sympathy with both. And so, I do my best to connect with what it is to be human and what it is to be of the earth. It is in fact in an effort to seek these connections that I study and write and try to learn as much as I possibly can so that I can come to negotiate these actualities and ideas through a fluid mapping of clearly overlapping territories.

To rest, fresh air and new ideas…

Jen

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” Henry David Thoreau

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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.

Desire to Grow — Mary Power

The other weekend I was with my daughter at a belated Earth Day tree planting event in Waterloo Park. It was a cold day, but we had a good turnout and planted all the trees and bushes within a couple hours. A great day! Part of what made it exciting for me was looking around at the wonderful mixed demographic working together. I would guess the group represented the cultural and age demographic of Waterloo region fairly well, and included a fairly large group of our university students. The group planting near my daughter and I were engineering students, who had gone to bed at about 4 am after an organized school event and were out planting trees at 10 am. Oh youth! However, they were out there because the wanted to be engaged in the community in which they find themselves and because they care about our planet.

The conversation drifted to urban forests and education and the desire to learn (more). We were talking about the need to know about issues and opportunities, how to find the spark, and that ultimately this increase in knowledge will create the desire and passion to learn, to care and to act. We were discussing environmental issues, but with my being so wrapped up currently in our new learning management system project and our new vendor Desire to Learn, I began making inferences. I realized that is exactly what a learning management system can do if used effectively – help instill the knowledge and create the desire to learn.

I hope we use this transition, that will initially takes us outside our comfort zones, as an opportunity to grow and to capitalize on the “Desire to Learn.” Isn’t that what university is all about?

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More than Numbers – Donna Ellis

Just last month, I presented on CTE’s annual report at Senate. Having an opportunity to share our accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities is always something that I welcome. And it has been a very busy year at CTE. We provided more than 3,000 consultations to almost 1,000 individuals at Waterloo in the Fall and Winter terms this past year. This is a 43% increase from our total consultation activity the previous year. And in the past three terms, we ran more than 100 workshops for almost 800 different attendees (registrations of almost 2,600). The majority of our consultations are with faculty members (83%) whereas the majority of our workshop registrations come from graduate students (74%). These numbers make sense given that most of our consultations were done by our Faculty Liaisons and most of our workshop activity is for the Fundamentals of University and Certificate in University Teaching programs. It is wonderful to be able to report such impressive data – I give thanks to the efforts of our staff members in tracking their activities the past number of months so that the data could be shared.

But do the numbers tell the whole story? Of course not. Despite being a challenge to collect, numeric contact-focused data often remain easier to track than the longitudinal data that would help to demonstrate a change in practice or attitude regarding teaching and learning. Often you can really only understand the impact of an activity by digging below a simple measure of participation.

One evaluation model that’s causing a fair bit of buzz in educational development (ED) comes from organizational training. Kirkpatrick’s 4-Level Model identifies different areas to assess: reaction, learning, behaviour, and results. Some teaching centres are looking for ways to adapt this model to ED work, but as with any longitudinal data collection methods – qualitative or quantitative – a fair bit of horsepower is needed to collect and then analyze whatever meaningful data are identified. It seems unrealistic to think that all services could be assessed all the time, or even need to be. Perhaps through collaboration, teaching centres can continue to identify and engage in research about assessing the impact of ED work. Some of our upcoming new programming will hopefully have such data built right into it. The more that data collection can be part of our practices, the more achievable it becomes.

For now, we will continue to collect our numbers and the unsolicited feedback that comes our way about the value and impact of our many services. We thank our university community for your participation with us, and we look forward to learning more about how our efforts affect your instructional work.

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