Month: May 2011

A Reflection on a Misconception – Martin Smith

Last week while I was judging at a science fair I had a motivating conversation with a small group of lecturers and fellow graduate students.  We were sharing our experiences in teaching science when I was surprised that the others believed it near impossible to interactively teach a large class of undergraduate students.  It made me ask how many other instructors share this misconception.  Motivated by this conversation, I wanted to share some recent evidence that you can engage large classes and some evidence that it works. 

It was only a coincidence that I came across an article on engaging large classes as I perused the May 14th edition of The Economist.  The article profiled an experiment to increase student learning on a large class of 850 unsuspecting introductory physics students.  In the experiment, the observers broke the students up into two groups.  The first group was taught in the traditional lecturing style, while the second group was broken up into small interactive groups.  In these small experimental groups the students were assigned pre-class readings to familiarize themselves with the material.  Then, rather than lecturing during class these students were given problems and asked to solve them.  This makes the instructor’s main role to facilitate the interaction between students who were busy solving these own problems.  Then after the two groups finished the defined curriculum they were given a test (not for credit) to determine if the non-traditional style had an effect.  The results were overwhelming!  The experimental group had scored significantly better on the test than the control group.   In fact, the claim has been made that the improvement is the largest that has been observed in this type of study.  The investigators argue that focussing teaching time on getting students to analyze problems can increase the effectiveness of the classic chalk-and-talk mentality.  As a disclaimer, the test was given immediately after the new method was tried so the increase may have been larger than one observed during a final exam.  Also, critics often argue that anytime you suddenly change how students learn their performance will increase simply because you are forcing them to adapt (this is an application of the Hawthorne effect).  Personally, I think the results are promising regardless of the mechanism of action.  Whether they are working because students are solving problems or because you are messing with their habits, the result is that students learn better. 

When I think back to my days in undergraduate physics class, it was only when I solved the assigned problem sets did I fully grasp the material.  Hopefully, studies like this one performed by Deslauriers et al. in Science will help dissuade people from the common misconception that you cannot engage large classes (1).

If you are not convinced, that’s OK.  Regardless of your academic background and whether you believe the evidence presented in this study, my hope is that you will take a moment to reflect on your own teaching and how much effort you put into engaging your students.   If we can make the effort to incorporate interactive activities into our lecture I think that you will find that both student and teacher will get much more out of the learning experience!

References:

(1) Deslauriers, L., Schelew, E. and Wieman, C., (2011) Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class. Science, 332, 6031, pp 862-864

______________________________________

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.

The 360 Degrees Feedback- a way to excel in your Career- Samar Mohamed

In a previous CTE blog titled Musings on feedback, Gina Passante presented some thoughts about different kinds of feedback such as the feedback she provides to grad students, the feedback she receives on her research presentations and the feedback that students provide to instructors in the course evaluations. All these feedback formats are useful but they are all one directional and may lead to misinterpretation and defensiveness even with critisizm meant to be constructive .
Gina’s blog posting reminded me of a session that I enjoyed during the 2011 University of Waterloo Staff Conference. The title of the session was “Excel in your Career” and was facilitated by Liz Koblyk (Centre for Career Action) . During this session Liz talked about four main keys to excel in our careers which are: Emotional Intelligence, Feedback, Connectedness and Accountability.
While talking about feedback, Liz suggested that we better acquire feedback outside of the performance appraisal process and from a range of people. Liz proposed some interesting ideas that would make the feedback process among peers more fruitful, and she suggested that we:

  • Request feedback often.
  • Ask carefully about what to “start –stop –continue” doing.
  • Thank without defending.
  • Act on feedback.
  • Ask about our progress regarding the provided feedback [1].

Liz also highlighted some challenges for the feedback process such as:

  • If the work is good; there is no need for feedback.
  • Feedback may hurt and improvement may be tough to accomplish.

Liz talked briefly about an interesting method that merges both the recommendations of getting feedback and a solution to it’s challenges, which is the 3600 feedback method.

What is 360 degrees feedback?

The 360 degrees feedback method is a multi-rater technique that is used to gather and process anonymous feedback on individuals from different stakeholders such as peers, supervisors, other supervisors, partners, clients, and one’s self; and then feeding back the results to the recipients [1]. Typically, 3600 reviews are conducted by Human Resources departments for upper level staff, but anyone can conduct their own version of a 3600 feedback.

What are the stages of the 360 degrees feedback?

A typical 360 degrees process that would focus on self awareness and development involves different stages or questions to be answered:

1-   What is the purpose of the feedback process?
The two main reasons of performing this kind of feedback process are employee development and performance evaluation. In this blog my main focus is on employees’ development.

2-   What is the suggested tool to perform the feedback?
A typical tool consists of questionnaires that are filled out by different stakeholders (raters). For the purpose of this blog, I would point out that there are some free 360 degrees tools that are available online.

3-   Who are the stakeholders (raters)?
Typically the feedback recipient chooses approximately ten raters who are mainly: manager, other manager, self, subordinates, peers, partners, internal clients and external customers.

4-   Questionnaire distribution
I suggest that one inspects the available online tools and selects the tool that best fits one’s needs. He/she would send out the link of this questionnaire to the raters and assure them that the questionnaire is voluntarily and anonymous.

5-   Thanking the raters for their feedback.

What are the advantages of the 360 degrees feedback [1]:

1-   It can build more effective work relationships, increase one’s opportunity to evolve, reveal and resolve conflicts and show respect for raters’  opinions. This will function to  build better teams and detect barriers to success.
2-   The 3600 feedback data will be resonably valid since it comes from diverse sources.
3-   The recipient’s self awareness will increase by identifying and addressing one’s weaknesses and highlighting strengths that one can build upon. This is an important step in the career development process.
4-   The use of the 3600 feedback method allows peers/co-workers to praise or criticise their colleagues anonymously.

I really liked the idea of 3600 feedback and intend to adopt it in order to progress in my career. I also encourage people to learn more about the process and to try it out.

References

1-   Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”, Hyperion; ISBN: 1401301304 ,2007

2-   Alma M. McCarthy and Thomas N. Garavan, “Understanding 3600 feedback”, Journal of European Industrial Training, 2001, pages 5-32.

Conflict – Veronica Brown

 

“What was the most significant learning you have experienced or witnessed in your lifetime?”

That was a question posed yesterday by Ashlee Cunsolo Willox and Dale Lackeyram during their presentation at the Teaching & Learning Innovations conference at the University of Guelph. In pairs, we chatted away about some significant learning we had experienced and, as teachers, what we had witnessed. Then, we had a large group discussion about these experiences.

Before I continue, you are probably wondering what that question has to do with conflict. I wondered that, too, as their presentation was entitled, “You’re Stuck with Them: Now What? Managing and Maintaining Conflict in Group Settings”.

After participants shared some of the learning they had experienced or witnessed, Ashlee and Dale drew our attention to the role conflict had played in these experiences. The level had varied; some were intense, emotional events while others’ conflict was intrapersonal as they questioned themselves, their convictions, and their perception.

BirdWallpaper.com conflict birds image

I really enjoyed their presentation, which then focused on the value of conflict and its role in group work. For me, the most important take-away was a reminder of how conflict can be a powerful catalyst for change. I witnessed its transformative power a few weeks ago at the Teaching Excellence Academy (TEA), a four-day workshop in which participants re-design a single course. At the TEA, participants spent four days wrestling with themselves. What did they really want their students to get from this course? Why were they teaching it a certain way? How would they address external variables over which they had little control? Why had they come to the TEA and what were they trying to accomplish? It is an intense period of reflection.

Conflict, of course, also has as much potential to destroy as to transform. How, then, do we support our students as they deal with the conflict associated with their learning? In our professional lives, how do we support our colleagues as they face new challenges? How do we support ourselves? These are questions that I am wrestling with at the moment.

I was grateful to be reminded that conflict, rather than something to be avoided, can be productive and meaningful.

______________________________________

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.

Why don’t you come inside and get some stale air? – Michael Pyne

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on what exactly makes a great engineer. Or, better yet, what traits and skills allow top engineering students to excel? I’m sure we would all agree that the best engineers are superb problem solvers, creative thinkers, innovators, and are as sharp as they come. But what I want to know is how did they acquire these traits? Although I like to think I possess many of these qualities, I am merely a half engineer at best. Perhaps a quasi-engineer or pseudo-engineer is more fitting. You see, I completed a BSc in Biochemistry and Biotechnology before joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo as a PhD student. Thus, my “expertise” lies somewhere awkwardly between applied molecular biology and chemical engineering.

While spending most of my waking hours in the laboratory with a mixture of talented undergraduate and graduate engineers, I have come to observe an underlying commonality between such students. What I am referring to is a hobby that many true engineers have grown up with. Many of them still actively take part in this hobby as adults. What I am referring to may frustrate or annoy some parents. What I am referring to, of course, are video games.

Despite the stigma that has plagued video games since the inception of Pong and Pac-Man, I am confident that they have helped me acquire important problem-solving, cooperation, strategy, and teamwork skills, in addition to a keen eye for detail; all things that are ever so important in a molecular biology laboratory, not to mention dozens of other disciplines. At UW, I continually observe much brighter engineers than myself who, as I am usually quick to find out, were also much bigger gamers than me growing up. Perhaps gamers are so drawn to engineering because they love challenges and are able to treat real-world problems not unlike the problems they solved in games as kids. I apologize if I am generalizing, as I am certainly not suggesting that to be a great engineer you must have clocked thousands of hours gaming as a teenager. I am also not implying that students who were non-gamers growing up will have trouble succeeding in engineering as adults. Indeed, I know many brilliant engineers who have never had much interest in video games and have likely acquired many important skills from a range of other activities.

Video games have always received a bad rap, particularly from parents who claim that they contaminate young minds, distract youth from more nourishing activities, and lead to aggressive behaviour. I think we have all been victims of the indefensible “Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air?” argument. By the way, I never understood what parents meant when they said that. Was my Super Nintendo emitting some highly toxic gases which prevented me from playing beyond 2 or 3 hours at a time? Does gaming contaminate the air we breathe, thus requiring excessive ventilation? As a kid, I found out that this was not true – opening all the windows in the house, setting up an elaborate electric fan network, and even hooking up my system to an electrical outlet in my backyard on a sunny summer day still did not allow me to extend my playing time. But was I contaminating my young mind? Did I waste my youth playing video games when I could have been doing more productive things? Hardly.

Just as I am a quasi-engineer, I am also a quasi-gamer. As a child, my gaming interests typically did not venture beyond the realm of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong; hardly games for parents to lose sleep over. However, these games were jam-packed with puzzles, obstacles, and a slew of problems just waiting for my young and developing mind to solve. While playing video games, I was able to explore, to discover, to figure things out for myself, all at my own pace. I was able to feel an immense sense of accomplishment, whether it was through beating a challenging level or an entire game that I had spent a great deal of time mastering. And these joys were often shared. My brother and I would play games together for hours on end, sharing, taking turns, and figuring things out together. Or I would play with a couple of friends and we would work as a team and collaborate. My love for video games was also coupled to an equal love for jigsaw puzzles and number and math games of all shapes and kinds. So it is no surprise to me that, come high school, I developed a strong interest in chemistry and biology, or more specifically, cells, DNA, and proteins. As a graduate student, the genetic engineering experiments I conduct in the lab can be thought of as puzzles in which I cut DNA into thousands of pieces and paste them back together to form new recombinant molecules. I feel that I was able to acquire so many important skills from video games that have helped me immensely as an undergraduate and graduate student, and also as a developing scientist and engineer.

Although many view video games as time wasters, even more worrisome to parents is the violent nature and mature content of many modern games. This is where my pro-video game stance crumbles. I will not deny that any game that is “rated M for Mature” is not suitable for anyone under 18. I will also not deny that there is an unnecessary amount of violence, sexual content, and gore in video games these days. Although Mario games continue to do well commercially, more violent games such as World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty have created much worse dilemmas for new parents than my parents likely ever faced. As my favourite comedian, Demetri Martin, puts it, “I like video games, but they’re very violent. I want to design a video game in which you have to take care of all the people who have been shot in the other games. ‘Hey man, what are you playing?’ ‘Super Busy Hospital 2. Please leave me alone. I’m performing surgery on a man that was shot in the head 57 times.’” Jokes aside, I believe that video games have done immensely more good than harm, so long as they are regulated and screened by parents. Also, as with most things in life moderation and variety are paramount. So if you find your children spending excessive time outdoors this summer why don’t you have them come inside and get some stale air?

______________________________________

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.