April 2013 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

Finding opportunities and taking new directions – Veronica Brown

Today is the Opportunities and New Directions (OND) conference at the University of Waterloo. I just learned that we’re expecting almost 160 participants, most from Waterloo but lots from other institutions, too. When I realized my blog date was the same as the conference, I thought it would be exciting to blog from the conference. Instead, as I began to think about what to post, I realized there are a few stories I’d like to share as a participant for the past five years. If you’d like to check out a play by play of the conference, there’s a Twitter feed that I understand will appear on the OND web page (the hashtag is #OND2013 – oh, I just noticed the Twitter feed is already there!). I’d like to share two opportunities and a new direction with you today.

Opportunity – Presenting my research

For a variety of reasons, disseminating my research was not on my radar as a grad student. I’m sure that sounds strange but grad school was a part-time affair juxtaposed with family (two toddlers), a full-time job and all the other things life throws at you. I was in a professional program that many would consider a “terminal” degree. As such, sharing my results beyond finishing my thesis wasn’t a priority. The OND conference gave me the chance to share my findings in, as a new researcher, a fairly safe place. It was just a short research presentation (I think it was 20 minutes with 5 minutes for discussion) but it was an important first step, which led to opportunities at larger conferences, both within my discipline and beyond.

Opportunity – Finding a community of practice

Having completed my degree, I felt a bit lost. My work did not necessarily afford opportunities for research and yet I was left with many unanswered questions thanks to the “future considerations” area of my thesis. How would I find time to answer these questions? What I discovered at OND that many of my colleagues shared the same tension. Research on teaching and learning was an add-on to a plate already full of scholarship, teaching, and service. Yet, there they were, sharing new findings or best practices. Their efforts encouraged me to continue to pursue research, particularly action research, despite a perceived lack of opportunity.

New direction – Becoming an educational developer

Finally, the most significant impact OND has had on my career was my decision to join the Centre for Teaching Excellence. Strange how we spend so much time “planning” our lives yet never realizing what hidden opportunity might arrive at our door suddenly. I think it’s fair to say that I stumbled into educational development, having every intention of staying with the Professional Development (WatPD) program for a very long time. Then a role as instructional developer came along and, having met some lovely CTE folks through the conference, I took a closer look and I’m so glad I did. I love my job, which shares many attributes with OND. I spend time with colleagues from across campus and beyond, who genuinely care about the success of their students and strive to make things better for them. I’m encouraged to use a scholarly approach in all aspects of mywork. And, most importantly, I get to spend my day focused on every possible aspect of teaching and learning.

Many, many, many thanks to everyone who has supported and contributed to the conference. Best wishes to my colleagues today who are presenting, collaborating, sharing, investigating, and just plain enjoying!

Mistakes– Keemo Delos Santos, CTE Co-op Student

Mistakes are one of life’s great inevitabilities (along with death and taxes). From small blunders to monumental life-altering ones, mistakes are destined to terrorize our numbered days. In fact, the capacity to err comes so naturally to us that it might as well be a bodily function. However, in spite of (or maybe because of) this certainty, we have grown scared and indifferent to failure.

A side-effect of my continuous years of test-taking is a tendency of assigning a great deal of weight on grades rather than mastery of the material. The upshot: a fear of failure shackling me to the comfortable and routine. Often times, this fear has prevented me from speaking up in class or visiting office hours. But, as humbling and humiliating as they are, mistakes should not be avoided or ignored as they are critical to the learning process. Our attempts at ignoring them serve as barriers to learning. By way of example, the questions that I’ve gotten wrong on tests, and the topics I’ve failed to fully comprehend on the first try are the ones that have stayed with me long past the two-week statute of limitations after exam period ends.

While it’s a struggle to be deal with our insufficiencies, it is vital that we change our attitudes on erring as it is from them that we can grow as learners and citizens of this world. Ultimately, our errors, the inconsequential to the significant, are our becoming. The grace to admit our mistakes and the willingness to learn from them is not only a useful skill to have in university, but is also imperative to our survival in the “real world”.

Presenting lectures with iPad and 2Screens — Paul Kates

Please visit the Presenting lectures with iPad and 2Screens page to learn about combining the ability of the iPad app 2Screens to make presentations to students in the classroom with the iPad’s ability to capture handwriting with a stylus.

Display, annotate, browse, or write-freehand with 2Screens on an iPad tablet. Using files from Microsoft Office or Apple iWorks; or files (pdf), images and video from the web you can present to your students or audience through the lightweight iPad with a VGA adaptor. With an additional pen stylus, pages can be annotated or new pages written, live in class. Files in 2Screen are displayed on tabs, so it is easy to switch among different content pages, jumping from a slide tab to a whiteboard tab for example, to work on a problem or exercise.

Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047

This is Real Life – Katherine Lithgow

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them” –Aristotle

We know that students learn best when learning is personally meaningful and when they are able to use knowledge and concepts to solve real-world, complex problems. They retain that knowledge longer when they learn-by-doing. Authentic learning experiences have the following ten design elements (Lombardi, 2007)

Real-world relevance
Ill-defined problem
Sustained investigation
Multiple sources and perspectives
Collaboration
Reflection (metacognition)
Interdisciplinary perspective
Integrated assessment
Polished products
Multiple interpretations and outcomes

Authentic learning experiences are effective because they help learners make connections between new concepts and existing knowledge structures. When learners can see how new knowledge is personally meaningful, they are better able to retain and assimilate that knowledge into their existing knowledge structures. Working with the concepts regularly and repeatedly in different contexts with others helps with retention and understanding. Including a cycle of reflection on action gives students the time and space they need to consider why they acted as they did, consider the group dynamics and begin to develop the habit of questioning their actions and ideas to help inform future action. Finally, authentic learning experiences help students connect the concepts to the ‘big picture’ which includes the richness of the social setting- the people, the environment, and the activity. This helps the learner explore the concepts in different contexts.

Qualtars (2010) contends that “experiential education needs to be viewed as a unique form of pedagogy involving deep reflection, collaboration and assessment” (p.95). There are a number of courses on campus that offer authentic learning experiences; some of these have been presented at the Integrative and Experiential Learning Series. Examples include the following. Students in Knowledge Integration complete an undergraduate senior research project and present their findings at a poster session- (See the abstracts for the 2013 class projects). Mary Louise McAllister (Environment) offers an integrative, blended course which combines lectures with field trips, peer teaching and tutorial–based project work. The students present their qualitative research findings in a multi-media journal format. Troy Glover (Rec & Leisure Studies) offers a course on program management where students work with a community partner to offer a program. During the course, the students work in small groups with the community partner to conduct a needs assessment and design, implement and evaluate a program. The course is designed so that the students have a number of opportunities to reflect on the experience. In addition, the students participate in a weekend retreat which serves as a team building exercise as well as providing them with a program to critique and use to inform their own program planning. Students in Kelly Anthony’s (SPHHS) course can opt to work on a project with a community partner rather than complete traditional forms of assessment. These students enrich the class readings and discussions by sharing their experiences with their classmates throughout the term.

Initially, students may experience frustration as they deal with the ill-defined problems but they are motivated to carry on because the activity connects the course to the ‘big picture’. Participating in an authentic learning experience helps students relate to the concepts and processes on a personal level and better appreciate nuances that cannot be adequately captured by reading or listening to a lecture. They begin to immerse themselves in the practices of the discipline- both the social structures and the culture of the discipline; they begin to envision themselves as members of the discipline’s community.

There are challenges associated with implementing authentic learning experiences. Risk-taking for both the learner and the instructor is involved; as with any real-life ill-defined problem, neither the student nor the instructor can accurately predict how the experience will unfold. Authentic learning is a collaborative effort. Taking the time to develop teams…well it takes time, effort and requires support. But, the advantage of placing such an experience in an early course is that students can use these skills in later courses as well as outside the academic environment. And it helps students get to know people in their class and program.

Qualtars ( 2010) raises a point worth considering- “unless experiences outside the classroom are brought into the classroom and integrated with the goals and objectives of the discipline theory, students will continue to have amazing outside experiences but will not readily connect them to their in-class learning….Without a careful curriculum involving structured, reflective skill building, students may never learn what we hope they will outside the four walls of the classroom” (p. 95-96). This raises a number of questions and challenges – How can we ensure that students have the opportunity to experience authentic learning at least once during their time at university? What kind of support structures have to be in place to support authentic learning experiences?
How can these courses be identified so students can take advantage of the opportunity? [Some university websites provide a list of courses that offer experiential learning components. These can be further categorized according to faculty or department. See for example:
o Elon University , Kent State, DePaul University Catalogue
o Simon Fraser University – a place where students can find the curricular and co-curricular EE opportunities

If we agree that authentic learning is beneficial to students, is it worth leaving to chance?

Resources:

Qualtars, D.M. (2010). Making the most of learning outside the classroom. In D.M. Qualtars, (Ed), Experiential Education: Making the Most of Learning Outside the Classroom. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 124, (pp. 95-99). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 978-0-470-94505-6.