Research about Teaching – Page 4 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

The Challenge: Experiential Education for All – Katherine Lithgow

“Experiential education for all” is one of the goals set out in our strategic plan and stems from our recognition “that learning is stronger when knowledge is tried and tested”. It is the ‘for all’ part that sounds a bit overwhelming, doesn’t it? I mean, how can we provide this opportunity in a meaningful way for all of our students? Continue reading The Challenge: Experiential Education for All – Katherine Lithgow

10th Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference July 2013 — Paul Kates

The 10th Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference took place in Boston this year and I was lucky enough to attend. There were over 200 presentations throughout the three day event. I was drawn towards talks about mathematics and MOOCs – massive open online courses. You can find my notes on the talks I attended online.

Many of the presentations were recorded and most presenters provided slides. If you find a talk in the conference schedule or list of talks in my notes that you want to know more about please send me email at pkates@uwaterloo.ca.

Contemplating Quality + Teaching at Waterloo – Donna Ellis

Over the last few months, I have been working on a multi-institutional project on identifying indicators of an institutional culture that fosters “quality teaching”. One report that our group has been reviewing comes from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Institutional Management in Higher Education group. Published in 2012, the report entitled Fostering Quality Teaching in Higher Education: Policies and Practices outlines seven policy levers that institutional leaders can use to foster teaching quality. The levers provide reasonable actions to take: raising awareness of quality teaching, developing excellent teachers, engaging students, building organization for change and teaching leadership, aligning institutional policies to foster quality teaching, highlighting innovation as a driver for change, and assessing impacts. But what constitutes “quality teaching”?

At its most basic level, the authors indicate that “quality teaching is the use of pedagogical techniques to produce learning outcomes for students” (p.7). More specifically, they explain that quality teaching includes “effective design of curriculum and course content, a variety of learning contexts (including guided independent study, project-based learning, collaborative learning, experimentation, etc.), soliciting and using feedback, and effective assessment of learning outcomes. It also involves well-adapted learning environments and student support services” (p.7). These definitions focus on student learning, the honing of instructional and critical reflection skills by teachers, and the need for institutional infrastructure to support learning. What they do not focus on is the adoption of any particular pedagogical method nor the specifics of an instructor’s performance in a classroom (think about what course evaluations tend to highlight…).

The authors also identify the need to ground any efforts to shift the quality of teaching – or the culture in which teaching happens – within a collaboratively developed institutional teaching and learning framework. This framework should reflect the identity and differentiating features of an institution and define the “objectives of teaching and expected learning outcomes for students” (p.14). At uWaterloo, we have endorsed the degree level expectations (undergraduate and graduate) as the benchmarks for program level outcomes. But we do not yet have a succinct statement about our goals regarding quality teaching.

Our newly released institutional strategic plan asserts that one way we will offer leading-edge, dynamic academic programs is by “increasing the value of teaching quality and adopting a teaching-learning charter that captures Waterloo’s commitment to teaching and learning” (p.11, emphases mine). I wrote about another institution’s teaching and learning charter in the September 2012 issue of CTE’s Teaching Matters newsletter. What will our charter entail? What do we value about teaching and learning? What kind of institutional culture do we want to promote with regard to teaching quality at Waterloo? These aren’t small questions, but they’re very exciting ones to contemplate.

Good Teaching, Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning – Monica Vesely

I recently had the good fortune to attend the New Faculty Developers Institute in Atlanta where I attended a session on Supporting SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning). As many of us are now preparing for the start of a new academic year in September, this topic area is, if not top-of-mind, at least a component of the many thoughts swirling in our brains. With this mind, I thought I would share my synopsis of this session with you.

The presenter, Thomas Pusateri from Kennesaw State University, opened the session by citing excerpts from Hutchings and Shulman that endeavoured to make the distinction between good teaching and scholarly teaching, and ultimately, the scholarship of teaching and learning (from “The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments,” in Change, September/October 1999. Volume 31, Number 5. Pages 10-15.)

Hutchings and Shulman proposed that “all faculty have an obligation to teach well, to engage students, and to foster important forms of student learning” and they concede that “this is not easily done” and that “such teaching is a good fully sufficient unto itself”.

The authors go on to say that “when it (the practice of good teaching) entails, as well, certain practices of classroom assessment and evidence gathering, when it is informed not only by the latest ideas in the field but by current ideas about teaching the field, when it invites peer collaboration and review, then that teaching might rightly be called scholarly, or reflective, or informed”.

They suggest that the final step of “making one’s scholarly teaching public (“community property”), open to critique and evaluation, and in a form that others can build on” transforms the scholarly teaching into the scholarship of teaching and proceed to define it as follows:

“Scholarship of teaching will entail a public account of some or all of the full act of teaching—vision, design, enactment, outcomes, and analysis-in a manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher’s professional peers and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of that same community.”

If we choose to take up the torch, how can we navigate the path from good teaching (in and of itself a laudable goal) to scholarly teaching and then, to the scholarship of teaching and learning? Below I have gathered just a few of the many resources available to help guide your way:

On-campus: University of Waterloo Resources

External Conferences and Professional Organizations

Journals

Happy travels!

The disposition to think critically – Veronica Brown

As I write this post, several Waterloo colleagues are attending the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s (STLHE) annual conference. Seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on my experience at last year’s conference. STLHE was the first conference I attended when I joined CTE three years ago. It was held in Toronto that year, wrapping up on the same weekend as the G-20 summit. Last year, it was in Montreal, where I watched people march a block or two from our hotel as part of their day of protest.

Interestingly, the session that continues to haunt me was related to critical thinking. In her session, Beyond skills to dispositions: Transforming the critical thinking classroom, Shelagh Crooks, a professor at Saint Mary’s University, explored elements of the instruction of critical thinking, her goal to “raise questions in the participants’ minds about the purpose of critical thinking education, rather than propose clear solutions”(Abstract, para.3). She certainly fulfilled that goal in my case.

This idea of the disposition to think critically is what is really stuck in my head. Not just for critical thinking, but other areas of the curriculum in which we must move beyond the knowledge and skills of a topic and encourage thought in the affective domain. Consider themes such as health and safety, societal or environmental impact, ethical behaviour, integrity, teamwork, management, etc. As educators, what is our role in the development of our students? Take health and safety for instance. Is it enough for our students to know about hazardous materials, for example, and to have the skill to work with them appropriately? Or is there a third element, to actually value health and safety? To look critically at a situation, to question a current practice when appropriate, to have the disposition to continuously look at the lab through a health and safety filter.

And so here I am, a year later. I find myself with more questions about this disposition idea than answers. It is something I am exploring as part of the curriculum work I support. Many of us are wondering not only about teaching and learning in the affective domain but, as a next step, how to assess it. If developing this disposition is our instructional goal, how will we know our students have achieved it? If this is a question you are pondering, too, let me know, I’d love to chat with you about it.

WaterlooWinter — I realize this image isn’t related to critical thinking but I thought I would share it for anyone missing the snow…

Celebrating Five Years of Opportunities and New Directions in Teaching and Learning at uWaterloo — Julie Timmermans

The theme of this year’s Conference — “Barriers and Breakthroughs: Accounts of Change in Teaching and Learning” – reminded us that one of the most important things we can do to facilitate teaching and learning is to talk to each other, to exchange honest accounts of the teaching strategies that have worked and those that have failed. Presenters included faculty and staff members, graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines who explored obstacles and frustrations faced, but also breakthroughs experienced – pivotal moments when new possibilities for teaching or learning became evident.

During the Presidents’ Colloquium keynote address, David Pace and Leah Shopkow from Indiana University Bloomington led us through the “Decoding the Disciplines” model – a framework for helping to identify and “decode” the “bottlenecks” that students experience in their learning, and to determine how we might motivate learners and assess their understanding of those often tricky conceptual stumbling blocks. Their ideas left us with a new lens with which to examine the design of our courses.

Another highlight of the day was the “Igniting Our Practice” plenary session during which Jean Andrey, Carey Bissonnette, and Troy Glover – three of uWaterloo’s outstanding faculty members – taught us concepts for their own courses. We learned about a bit about Chinooks, a bit about Chemistry, a bit about assessing outcomes, rather than outputs, and a lot about how to teach with expertise, panache, and a good measure of humour. It was evident why these three instructors are beloved by their students.

The Conference closed with a wine and cheese reception and, as befitting an anniversary celebration – a cake. It was a time to eat, relax, connect with colleagues, and to thank the many people who had contributed to the success of the Conference. We’re particularly grateful to the current Associate Vice President, Academic, Mario Coniglio, and the past AVP-A, Geoff McBoyle, for lending their vision and financial support to the Conference. And, once again, FAUW generously sponsored refreshments following the Presidents’ Colloquium.

And now, it’s time to pursue the ideas that were sown at the Conference. We look forward to learning about the ways in which those ideas have developed at next year’s OND.

For an overview of the Conference, please visit the OND 2013 website. Presentations and materials from the day will be posted within the next few weeks.

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!