Research about Teaching – Page 3 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

Notes from the Music Studio — Christine Zaza

When I reflect on teaching and learning in higher education I realize that much of what I learned, I learned when I was a music student. Here are some of the highlights from the music studio that are just as applicable to university teaching and learning:

Practice, practice, practice. Actually, this would more aptly be phrased Practice-Feedback, Practice-Feedback, Practice-Feedback, but the rhythm just isn’t as good. I wouldn’t expect anyone to become a professional violinist without regular lessons with a qualified teacher. Regular feedback is critical to guiding students as they develop new skills. Without regular feedback, bad habits can become engrained and difficult to correct. In university, students learn a number of new skills and new ways of thinking and they need multiple opportunities to practice these skills with regular feedback. To ensure that students focus on the feedback and not just the grade, instructors can give a follow-up assignment students to make revisions highlighting how they have incorporated the feedback that they received on their first submission.

Practice the performance. When preparing for a recital or audition (a summative test), music students are advised to practice performing in front of friends, family –teddy bears if need be – several times, before the actual performance. Preparing for a performance is different from preparing for weekly lessons. Good performance preparation is crucial because in a performance you get one shot at the piece. There are no do-overs on stage. Similarly, when writing music theory or history exams, practicing the exam is an expected part of exam preparation. To facilitate this preparation, the Royal Conservatory of Music sells booklets of past exams. The Conservatory also returns graded exams so that students can see exactly where they earned and lost marks: considering that the Royal Conservatory of Music administers thousands of exams, three times a year, across the globe, this is a huge undertaking. At university, we know that self-testing is an effective study strategy and some instructors do provide several practice exams questions in their course. However, due to academic integrity concerns, the common practice is to deny students access to past exams as well as their own completed exam. I wonder if academic misconduct would be less of an issue if students were allowed to use past exams as practice tools. Amassing a large enough pool of past exam questions should address the concern that students will just memorize answers to questions that they’ve seen in advance.

Explicit instruction is key. It’s not very helpful to just tell a novice piano student to go home and practice. In the name of practicing, a novice student will, more than likely, play his or her piece over a few times, from bar 1 straight to the end, no matter what happens in between, and think that he has “practiced.” I know. I’ve heard it hundreds of times, and if you have a child in music lessons, I’ll bet you’ve heard it too. Explicit instruction means addressing many basic questions that an expert takes for granted: What does practicing look like? How many times a week should you practice? For how long should you practice? How do you know if you have practiced enough? How do you know if you have practiced well? Similarly, not all first students arrive at university knowing how to study. Many students would benefit from explicit instructions about learning and studying (e.g., What does studying look like? How do you know when you’ve studied enough? I’ve gone over my notes a few times – is that studying? Etc.

Know that students can’t learn it all at once. A good violin teacher knows that you can’t correct a student’s bow arm while you’re adjusting the left hand position, improving intonation, working on rhythm, teaching new notes, and refining dynamics. In any given lesson, the violin teacher chooses to let some things go while focusing on one particular aspect of playing otherwise the student will become too overwhelmed to take in any information at all. Suzuki teachers know that you always start by pointing out something positive about the student’s playing and that you can’t focus only on the errors. Students need encouragement. I think this is true at university as well. Becoming a good writer takes years and novice writers will likely continue to make several mistakes while at the same time improving one or two specific aspects of their writing. While giving feedback on written assignments, it’s important to acknowledge the positive aspects – that’s more encouraging that facing a sea of red that highlights only the errors.

Even if you didn’t take piano lessons as a child and even if have registered your 6 year old for hockey rather than violin lessons, I hope you’ll find these lessons from the music studio applicable to the university classroom.

Photo privided by Samuel Cuenca under a Creative Commons license.

‘Seeing beyond the self’: Using reflective writing as an assessment tool – Dan McRoberts

For many years, post-secondary educators have been encouraged to move outside the classroom and create transformative learning experiences for university students. Field courses, service learning, and cooperative education are all examples of the kinds of programming that have become increasingly common and popular amongst undergraduates looking to incorporate some unique and useful experiences in their university careers.

Despite the popularity and growth of transformational learning, questions persist about the most effective ways of assessing student learning that results from these experiences. Experiential learning is hard-to-measure so traditional assessment measures often fall short of the mark. Reflective writing is often at the heart of assessment measures employed to qualitatively measure transformative learning, with self-evaluation, and journaling common assignment formats. There are significant challenges with using reflection to assess students, related to the highly personal nature of the transformations being recorded. Pagano and Roselle (2009) find that there is usually little clarity or systematization involved in using reflective practice. What is involved can vary substantially between courses or instructors. Also, reflection tends to rely on students’ own accounts of events and responses and as such it is very hard to discern if learning has indeed taken place. Woolf (2008) also identifies concerns with the confessional ‘dear diary’ approach to reflective writing, as he aligns this with highly personal change or transformation. Given that much of the possible value in transformative learning comes from the opportunity to ‘see beyond the self,’ the question becomes how to design assignments and assessments that will help students develop this awareness and critical reflexivity.

Sometimes it helps to divide the task into two parts, one which focuses on personal development and the other that relates to key academic objectives or themes. Peterson (2008) profiles a service-learning course assessment that combined personal narrative with more academic analysis. Students were asked to prepare two journals with these respective foci, rather than being asked to write whatever came to mind. Doubling the student (and instructor) workload may not be the ideal solution, but fortunately there are models for designing reflective writing that can assess several components in the same assignment.

One is the DEAL model developed by Patti Clayton, which involves students Describing their experience, Examining the experience in light of specific learning objectives, and Articulating their Learning. The assignment is guided by specific prompting questions that encourage students to complete these various tasks in their reflective writing, from the who, what when and where of an experience (describing learning) to more detailed prompts about what was learned and how (examining and articulating learning).

Another, perhaps less well-known, approach is the ‘refraction model’ proposed by Pagano and Roselle (2009). Refraction tries to incorporate critical thinking into the process of reflection to encourage students to move beyond their own perceptions and consider how to address problems or scenarios they may have experienced in their course. This process begins with reflection and activities that are common to the assessment of transformational learning outcomes. From here, however, the authors propose using critical analytic and thinking skills to refract this knowledge and generate learning outcomes. The first stage – reflection – involves asking students to log events and journal reactions. The critical thinking phase asks students specific questions about these experiences, and the refraction stage invites them to suggest solutions and interact with others and their ideas about the same events or issues.

Whether or not the DEAL approach or refraction model are applied, it is useful to remember what Nancy Johnston from Simon Fraser University says about reflection as a means of assessment. “We are looking for evidence of reflection, which means that students are challenging their assumptions, appreciating different points of view, acknowledging the role of power and discourse, the limitations of their conclusions and in short moving from black and white understandings towards recognizing varied shades of gray.”

(image credit: Paul Worthington)

Making Teaching and Learning Visible at the University of Waterloo’s Teaching and Learning Conference – Julie Timmermans and Crystal Tse

It is moving and inspiring to see 250 colleagues gathered for a day of thinking and talking about teaching and learning. This year’s Teaching and Learning Conference took place on Thursday, April 30^th, with over 200 people from the University of Waterloo and numerous colleagues from neighbouring universities participating in over forty research-based and practice-based sessions.

Vice-President, Academic and Provost, Ian Orchard, set the tone for the day: he opened the Conference by underscoring the value placed on teaching and developing as teachers at the University of Waterloo:

“The University of Waterloo values excellence in teaching, just as it does in research. […] Investing time in developing teachers is a vital aspect of fostering a culture that values teaching and learning and that develops teaching in a community environment. This conference helps foster community, and makes the sharing of teaching experiences possible, creating a community of scholars of teaching.”

The theme of this year’s Conference was “Making Teaching and Learning Visible.” There is indeed much about teaching and learning that remains unintentionally hidden and unspoken. And so, through this theme, we explored what we can do to clarify and communicate the processes underlying teaching and learning so that learners and teachers work towards the same outcomes. We explored challenging and provocative questions, such as “How do we know what students already know, what they don’t know, and what they have learned?” and “How can we make the thinking underlying our instructional decisions more explicit for ourselves, our students, and our colleagues?”. Each of the day’s panel discussions, workshops, and presentations attempted to reveal and communicate assumptions or practices in some way.

Presidents’ Colloquium Keynote Speaker, Dr. Linda Nilson, pursued this theme in her talk, “Making Your Students’ Learning Visible: How Can We Know What They Know?”. During this session, Linda delved into one of the most common yet challenging questions we have as teachers: How can we gather evidence of and measure student learning? She advocated for setting measurable learning outcomes in our courses, and for ensuring alignment between these outcomes, teaching and learning strategies, and assessment methods. Drawing on examples from across the disciplines, Linda provided concrete strategies for measuring and interpreting gains in student learning. If you’re intrigued by these ideas, you are welcome to download the slides and handouts from the keynote session, available through the Conference website.

A highlight of the Conference was the “Igniting Our Practice” session. Two inspiring and award-winning University of Waterloo professors, Gordon Stubley, Associate Dean, Teaching in Engineering, and Jonathan Witt, Teaching Fellow in Biology, each taught us a concept from their courses and, in doing so, drew us into the ways of thinking of their disciplines. Does the impressive display of feathers in the tail of the male peacock serve an evolutionary purpose? What do pre-tests reveal about fourth-year students’ knowledge of particular concepts in their third fluid dynamics course? Through vivid examples, Gordon and Jonathan led us to think about designing teaching for student learning, and how we might integrate these ideas into our own teaching.

The Conference closed with a wine and cheese reception where colleagues had the opportunity to connect over a drink and some food. Associate Vice President, Academic (AVP-A), Mario Coniglio closed the Conference, thanking people for their commitment to enhancing teaching and learning. He also took time to recognize the many people who had contributed to the Conference, including the participants and presenters, the Teaching Fellows, members of the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE), people who chaired sessions and provided technical support, Creative Services, as well as FAUW. At CTE, we’re particularly grateful for the vision and financial support AVP-A, Mario Coniglio, and Vice-President, Academic and Provost, Ian Orchard.

And now, it’s time to pursue the ideas that were sown at the Conference. And these actions have meaning and impact. As Ian Orchard said,

“All that you do as individuals allows students to be successful, allows teachers to be successful, and, if individuals are successful, the community is successful and therefore the University as a whole can be successful. Thank you for all you do.”

For details about this year’s Conference, please visit the Conference website. Planning for next year’s event has already begun!

(Image credit: Sanatanu Sen)

Exploring Curiosity about Teaching and Learning through LITE Grants

The intent of The Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Grants is to promote curiosity, reflection, and exploration in the areas of teaching and learning, with the ultimate purpose of fostering deep student learning. At uWaterloo, we have a vibrant community of faculty and staff members, graduate and undergraduate students involved in this exciting and important work.

Since the inception of the LITE grants just over two years ago, over 30 projects from across all six faculties have been funded. The range of project topics is rather remarkable and includes inquiries into online learning, experiential learning, case-based and community service learning, learning across disciplines, language learning, assessment, written communication, teamwork, and many more. Almost 90 people have been involved in a LITE Grant project. Indeed, most projects are collaborations – some within departments, others across departments or units. Several projects also include graduate or undergraduate students as co-applicants. For most projects, graduate or coop students are hired.

The LITE Grant website features descriptions of the projects and provides a forum for sharing resources generated by the projects, such as reference lists and presentation materials. We invite you to browse through the project descriptions, findings, and resources. You may find answers to a question you’ve had, ideas for a topic you’d like to explore, or the names of colleagues with whom you can connect to talk about shared interests in teaching and learning. We also invite you to consider applying for a grant. The next deadline is October 1, 2014 for the LITE Full Grants and February 1, 2015 for LITE Seed Grants.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce that nine new Seed Grant projects will begin this fall. For more information about the projects, please visit the LITE Grant website.

Peeling Back the Layers: Uncovering Organizational Culture and the Place of Teaching — Donna Ellis, CTE Director

At CTE, we work collaboratively with a wide variety of our campus colleagues – it’s an integral part of what we do. But we also work collaboratively with our colleagues at other institutions. I have been very fortunate to be part of a research group with my teaching centre colleagues from seven other Ontario universities. And our project has been an absolutely fascinating one: how can we uncover the value that our institutions place on teaching?

Our group’s underlying belief is that one fundamental way to ensure quality teaching at our institutions is to foster an organizational culture that values teaching. Full stop. This organizational culture comprises the deep structure of an organization that is rooted in its members’ values, beliefs, and assumptions (Denison, 1996). These elements lead to norms and patterns of behavior. Austin (1990) identified various factors that contribute to the perceptions of university members about their institutional culture, including institutional mission and goals, governance structure, administrators’ leadership style, curricular structure, academic standards, student and faculty characteristics, and the physical environment. Hénard and Roseveare (2012) provided seven levers for promoting an institutional culture that values quality teaching which significantly influenced our research study.

To dig deeper into our research question and underlying belief, we secured a provincial Productivity and Innovation Fund (PIF) grant to review existing literature, develop a survey instrument, and run a pilot study at three of our institutions in the Winter 2014 term. Nearly 4,000 faculty members and students at Western University, McMaster University, and the University of Windsor completed the pilot version of our Teaching Culture Perception Survey. Follow-up focus groups were also run to collect further feedback and insights.

We included two main scales on our survey: perceived existence (agreement rating) and perceived importance of a variety of indicators related to an institutional culture that values teaching. A sampling of the items includes:

there is a strategic plan that positions teaching as a priority
teaching effectiveness is considered in hiring
evidence of effective teaching is considered in the evaluation of faculty members’ job performance (e.g., tenure, promotion, annual evaluations)
there are rewards for effective teaching
learning spaces such as classrooms, labs, and/or studios are designed to facilitate learning
educators are encouraged to use the teaching feedback they receive to improve their teaching
there is an adequately resourced teaching support centre
educators can get financial support to develop their teaching (e.g., grants programs, teaching conferences)
opportunities exist for educators to develop leadership in teaching (e.g., Teaching Fellows program)
programs are evaluated based on student learning outcomes

The factor analyses completed on the data from the faculty and the student versions of the surveys revealed some differences between what is perceived as being in place and what is perceived as important at an institution. Consistently, the importance ratings were higher than the agreement of existence ratings, suggesting that respondents valued the various elements of a potential institutional teaching culture more than they perceived them to actually be in existence. The results also revealed differences between the faculty members’ perceptions and those of the students. The focus groups helped to uncover some of the complexity of the perceptions. For example, when discussing awards to recognize excellent teaching, some participants indicated that such awards are not valued, particularly in relation to research. Others spent time discussing the barriers to effective teaching that stem from aging and inappropriately designed teaching spaces. Another common theme involved issues surrounding poor existing methods for evaluating teaching.

While our analyses have indicated that we need to further refine our survey instruments, we are encouraged by the interest in our work from our colleagues across Canada and beyond. We have also launched a website where we can share information about our ongoing project, including the results as we are able to release them.

So what’s the value placed on teaching at the University of Waterloo? I hope that in the near future we can run the revised survey at our institution so that we can better understand our university community members’ perceptions about the value being placed on this critical part of our fabric: teaching. I think it’s time to peel back the layers and take a closer look.

By Donna Ellis

References:

Austin, A.E. (1990). Faculty cultures, faculty values. New Directions for Institutional Research, 68, 61-74.

Denison, D.R. (1996). What is the difference between organizational culture and organizational climate? A native’s point of view on a decade of paradigm wars. Academy of Management Review, 21, 619-654.

Hénard, F. & Roseveare, D. (2012). Fostering quality teaching in higher education: Policies and practices. France: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Jurinals — Mark Morton

An email I received this morning momentarily pleased me: I was being invited to submit to a journal called the American Journal of Education Research a version of a presentation I recently delivered at the annual conference of the Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association.

But then I noticed some odd grammatical errors in the email. My suspicions raised, I went to the journal’s website, and then to the website of its publisher, Science and Education Publishing. On the surface, everything looked legit: the 70 journals published by Science and Education Publishing all have hundreds of articles written by academics from all over the world. Each journal also claims to be peer-reviewed, and provides a list of its peer reviewers. But then I came across a tab that explained the “processing fees” that an author must pay in order to have his or her paper considered for publication.

A bit more sleuthing revealed that Science and Education Publishing (and all of its subsidiary journals) are considered by the scholarly community to be “predatory” publishers – that is, they are bogus. They even invent journal names that are easily confused with legitimate journals. For example, the American Journal of Educational Research appears to be trying to ride on the coattails of the American Educational Research Journal, published by the highly regarded Sage Journals.

On the one hand, I wasn’t surprised by all this, as I’d recently read an article about a Canadian journal called Experimental and Clinical Cardiology that used to be legitimate, but which has been lately purchased by an offshore corporation that has turned it into a predatory publisher. But what I was surprised by was how much digging I had to do to confirm that Science and Education Publishing journals are bogus. As a former English professor, I was usually able to detect plagiarism in seconds – and I guess I thought that that skill would transfer over into the realm of fake journals.

Anyway, there are apparently hundreds or even thousands of bogus “academic” journals out there. Here’s helpful a list that’s published annually by a librarian at the University of Colorado.

What I’m still unclear about is this: are the academics who publish in these predatory journals being duped? Or are they knowing participants in this ruse? Is the market for academic research so saturated that even bona fide articles by good scholars can’t find publication in legitimate journals?

Storytelling as a Teaching Tool – Angela Nyhout

Storytelling isn't just for the young. Your undergraduates may appreciate it (almost) as much as this crowd. — Storytelling isn’t just for the young.

Take a moment to think about the number of stories we encounter in an average day; think about the anecdotes told by friends, the prime-time dramas we watch, the mini stories on our Facebook news feeds, the advertisements we see. It’s a wonder we get any work done at all. The human mind loves stories. Even where no “story” exists, we often make one. For example, most people will tell a selective account of the events in their lives that led to their chosen career or educational field.

Given the human propensity to tell stories, and the equally fascinating desire to consume them, I want to discuss why stories belong in the classroom and how they can be an effective teaching tool. Earlier this year, CTE co-op student, Zahra Razavi discussed the role of sto rytelling in the classroom from the perspective of a student. In this post, I want to talk about storytelling from the perspective of the teacher. My research is on the psychology of narrative, and there are some intriguing findings that have come out of labs around the world on the topic recently that speak to the power of stories to move us (almost literally).

The neuropsychology of story processing

On uWaterloo posters around campus, you may see the Benjamin Franklin quote, “tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” As Mr. Franklin alluded to and as more and more evidence is suggesting, direct lecturing isn’t the most effective way to teach our students. However, many instructors are faced with large class sizes and limitations in time and resources that make methods like demonstrations or debates difficult to implement. Stories, however, are a quick and simple way of involving your students.

Through neuroimaging studies, researchers have found that when we read or hear about a particular action, corresponding motor and perceptual areas of our brain are activated that would also be activated if we were actually carrying out the described activity (here and here). So if we read a passage like the following,

“There was no sign of the bus and the instructor was going to be late for her first day of class. She knew she wouldn’t make a good impression with the second years if she arrived 15 minutes late. She started sprinting for the lecture hall. She breathed in the crisp, autumn air as her feet struck the sidewalk. As she neared the university, her bus passed her by.”

our mind really plays along. Motor areas corresponding to running and olfactory areas perhaps corresponding to that crisp autumn smell will be activated in the brain. This activation isn’t strong enough to actual get our legs running, but is more of a simulation of running.

Other studies, not involving brain imaging, have also shown that our minds do become active participants in events we read about or hear. Adults are faster to respond to a blurry image of an animal when a character sees it through foggy goggles. Children process a story more slowly when the main character is walking compared to driving. Adults’ pupil diameters adjust in response to imagined luminance or brightness.

For these reasons, stories have been described as a flight simulator for the mind. Although students would undoubtedly get a richer experience by going out into the field and collecting soil samples, for example, hearing a story about another individual collecting soil samples (and potentially encountering an unexpected obstacle) is a sort of “experience lite” for the budding soil scientist.

A quick and relatively simple way to involve your students, then, is to tell them a story related to the content they are learning.

How stories may be used in the university classroom

Many instructors inject the odd story into their teaching, whether intentionally or not. However, most academic writing, presentations, and lectures do not include stories. Anecdotes are often contrasted with evidence; fiction with fact.

As I’ve described above, when we hear or read a story, our minds play along. The consequences of the engagement – much greater engagement than one would see when just presenting facts or data – are deeper processing, and often greater retention. Experimental studies (here and here) have found that undergraduates’ learning from stories can be quite robust – a pro if the story information is correct, but a con if the information is truly fictional.

Here, I present three possible ways in which instructors may intentionally incorporate storytelling into their teaching:

Story as example. The instructor may decide to use a story as a way of introducing or reinforcing concepts. In Teaching Economics with Short Stories, Philip Ruder suggests using stories such as Proulx’s New Yorker piece, What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick? to help reinforce economic concepts of supply and demand, and externalities. In this respect, stories can be used to contextualize abstract concepts. Story types include anecdotes, fictional short stories, current or historical events, and analogies.

Story as evidence. In some cases, the instructor may be able to use events in the world to get students to build hypotheses or refute prevailing or previous theories. This may be by telling students about the story of a scientific discovery (an aha! moment), or by recounting a historical or current event. In psychology courses, instructors often present the news story of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese to get students to generate hypotheses about why, even though so many witnesses were present, no one acted or intervened. Story types include current or historical events, personal experiences, or science stories.

Story as practice/experience. The instructor may wish to use stories to engage general skills, such as problem solving, or more discipline-specific skills. The website sciencecases.org contains a wealth of case studies from various disciplines that can be used for this purpose. In addition to case studies, story types include role play, videos, or any form of story with reflection/discussion.

A cautionary tale…

A few things to consider in the selection and delivery of stories in the classroom:

Be careful with the types of stories you present. If any incorrect information exists in them, students may integrate it into their knowledge-base. Integration of knowledge is often robust.
Stories can be more compelling than facts and data. Certain psychological biases often cause us to use anecdotal evidence to refute factual statements (e.g., “Well, all the people with younger siblings that I know have really good social skills!”). Students may approach stories less critically and cynically
Selecting the right stories can be difficult/time-consuming. Delivery can also be time-consuming.

Whether telling a story to encourage students to generate hypotheses, or simply to provide a comic aside during an otherwise dry lesson, stories are an effective way to captivate one’s audience and engage them in ideas and practices in the field from the “comfort” of their seat.