Category: Teaching & Learning Theories

A while ago I heard about interesting research in psychology that discusses the state of optimal experience called flow. This fascinating research, pioneered by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-lee), suggests that the state of flow is characterized by complete mental and physical commitment, clarity of focus, mindfulness and loss of sense of time.  Continue reading Flow as an Optimal State of Learning – Svitlana Taraban-Gordon

My colleague Monica Vesely recently blogged about connecting with our students by being more transparent in our teaching.  This is solid advice and helps us to think about putting our students and their learning experiences at the core of our teaching.  It fits with a recent e-flyer that I received about the 5Rs that we can use to better “engage” students: relevant learning, research-based approaches to instruction, rationales for course designs, relaxed and participatory learning environments, and relational opportunities and rapport with professors.

I have my own thoughts about how to connect with our students.  I recently delivered a keynote talk at a geotechnical engineering conference on teaching and learning where I was asked to provide my insights on how to promote effective learning in the lecture setting.  Traditional didactic lectures have not been the ideal setting for students to learn deeply – to retain key concepts and apply and connect knowledge across multiple contexts.

In a non-traditional interactive format, I explored principles of deep learning with the participants and then presented a model about making connections in our teaching to promote effective learning:  learner to content, learner to learner, and learner to instructor.

At the core of this model is the learner, not the instructor.  I asserted that our learners need to be at the core of our teaching and provided various strategies for connecting with our students during our face-to-face teaching time.  To connect with the content, we can use compelling questions, discussion via questions, one-minute summaries, concept maps, and narrated modelling (explaining your thinking processes as you solve a problem).  Connecting with other learners can be achieved through activities that have students working together during class time and sharing their thinking.  Making our own connections with students involves using nonverbal strategies (e.g., smiling) and creating trust through sharing information about ourselves and our learning or asking students for their feedback on our course during the semester.

In an effort to connect with my learners in that conference setting, I demonstrated as many of these strategies as I could, and I enjoyed our lively discussion around what they planned to apply in their own settings.

So what about you?  It can be truly satisfying to connect with your students during the few hours of class time you have with them each term.  Being able to witness their learning in class is much more energizing than looking at a sea of disengaged faces.  Why don’t you give it a try?  Remember, we’re here to help.

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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.

Recently, I opened a box containing some of my academic possessions which, years ago, were deemed worthy of being transported across the Atlantic from my native Ukraine.  Among them were two artefacts from my secondary studies captured on the photo – high school diploma with honours and ‘silver medal’ that accompanied it.  In Ukraine, the medal, like the one on this photo, is given to top students in each graduating class, and reads, “In recognition of high academic achievements, community work and excellent classroom behaviour.”

To me, these artefacts from my academic history are reminders of the years of hard work, self-discipline and work ethic that I developed and nurtured at a young age.   At the same time, they remind me of many difficult and frustrating learning moments when, despite effort, hard work and motivation, I struggled to understand basic math concepts and was able to achieve only average performance in math and science.

To explain this learning conundrum, I concluded early on that motivation and effort can take you far as a learner but they are not the only determinants of learning success.  Other factors had to account for my differential performance in social sciences and math classes.  I reasoned that I was not able to get straight A’s because I was simply not good in math. It never came as naturally to me as humanities and social sciences.  Abilities and aptitude had to be the reason for twice the time I needed to spend on my math homework (with parental help to boot) only to achieve average marks.

During my graduate studies, I came across an exciting line of research in educational psychology that looks at individual cognitive and personality differences among learners and might help us explain differential success among learners in our classrooms.  This research showed me that motivation, abilities and intelligence are not the only determinants of learning outcomes. A number of other individual variables shape what and how well students will learn. These include:

• prior knowledge and experience which refer to the quality and accuracy of relevant prior knowledge;
• learning strategies and tactics which refer to cognitive and metacognitive strategies used by learners;
• learning or cognitive styles which refer to preferred ways for processing information and approaching a learning task;
• learners’ conceptions of learning and themselves as learners;
• personality (self-esteem, risk-taking, resilience, sensitivity to rejection, tolerance to ambiguity, anxiety, etc.).

In each learning situation, these characteristics of learners interact in complex ways which are not fully understood by researchers.  However,  I found that being aware of these individual differences – along with cultural, generational and demographic characteristics – helped me be more attentive to diversity among learners and differences in their academic performance.  I am encouraged by the central message of this research – most of these characteristics are states not traits and as instructors, we have the ability to influence learning attitudes, conceptions and behaviours of our students and help them become more effective learners.

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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.

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

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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.

On Taxi, a TV sitcom from the 1980s, there’s an episode in which Jim Ignatowski, whose memory has been permanently addled by chronic drug use, sits down at a piano and is startled when his hands begin to move over the keys and a beautiful sonata flows forth. “I must have had lessons,” he mutters, with surprise. I felt a bit like that last week when I turned on the car radio, which my kids had inadvertently tuned to Radio Canada. As I listened to the French-language newscast, I was amazed that I could understand it. Two years ago I could read French, but I had almost no aural comprehension of it — I simply had a terrible ear. Moreover, over the course of the last two years, I hadn’t studied or tried to improve my comprehension of spoken French one bit. So what happened?

Well, what happened was that two years ago I began studying Arabic at Renison University College. I suspect that as I worked hard to understand Arabic words, phrases, and eventually sentences,  I developed auditory processing skills that I previously didn’t have. True, those skills emerged because I was studying Arabic — but they transferred over, without any conscious effort on my part, to French as well. It’s a bit like developing motor skills by playing tennis, and then discovering that you’ve also, unwittingly, become a better dancer.

Of course there must be limits to this sort of “skills transfer.” Mastering chess might make me a better bridge player, and it might even make me better able to spot logical fallacies in my kids’ arguments about why they should be allowed to stay up late, but it won’t make me a better driver on the 401. Or might it? Is it possible that everything we learn enhances everything else that we’ve previously learned? !آمل ذلك

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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.

During a post-Christmas trip to New York City, my wife and kids and I walked to Ground Zero, the site where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. At first, it seemed that our visit would be underwhelming: the site now looks like any other construction zone, Continue reading Teaching for Change: A Conversation at Ground Zero — Mark Morton