Teaching Strategies – Page 11 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

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.

Reading with the Warriors Pilot – Zara Rafferty

Back in teacher’s college, I wrote a research paper about the challenges surrounding boys’ literacy in today’s classrooms. Having always been an avid reader myself, I have to admit that I knew very little about the social and pedagogical factors that can help or hurt young students’ acquisition of essential literacy skills (for an introduction to this discussion in the Ontario context, start here).

This year, I set out to create a program here at UW that brings varsity athletes into elementary school classrooms to promote literacy skills and an interest in reading. While I hope that this program will benefit all learners, I believe it could have a particular impact on boys’ literacy. Male reading role models are one of the key strategies that classroom teachers recommend to support both boys’ literacy skills, and their attitudes toward reading and writing.

To this end, Reading with the Warriors was created in partnership with the UW Athletics Department. Last week we launched the first of five pilot sessions with two student-athlete volunteers from the varsity hockey team. Justin and Andy (pictured above) joined two Gr. 2 classes for story time and a craft related to the books they had chosen to read (Thomas’ Snowsuit and Just One Goal!, respectively). Justin and Andy shared their own reading history (e.g., challenges they had with reading, favourite books, why reading is important to them), and answered a variety of student questions relating to school, hockey, and life in general.

The program has been well-received thus far, and I am looking forward to continuing our pilot throughout the month. I am particularly grateful to the five student-athletes who have agreed to participate in the pilot sessions – they have been wonderful! If all goes well, it’s my hope that this will become a regular part of varsity athletics’ community programming beginning this Fall.

At the end of the day, it isn’t necessarily about the stories (although, those are important, too), it’s about students having the opportunity to see interesting, articulate men reading and engaging with books. Research and practice show that male mentors from the community can help all students, but especially boys, see a purpose in reading. I love the idea that our students can collaborate with classroom teachers to strengthen literacy skills in our little guys.

This program has also gotten me thinking: how often do we bring role models and mentors from the community into our university classrooms? I would love to hear examples from the UW community.

If you’re interested in learning more about boys’ literacy, check out this guide from the Ontario Ministry of Education: Me Read? No Way!

The hidden classroom

Public School, 1892. (Boston Public Library)

As you stand at the front of your class, about to start the session, what do you see? What do you notice about your students? Who sits at the front? Who sits at the back? Who is chronically late? Who rarely makes it to class? Who always sits alone?

While we see our students at class, what do we really know about them? There was once a student in my class who consistently fell asleep. As a very new teacher, I was really surprised and, at times, wondered if there was something I was doing wrong. Was my class really that bad? I also wondered about the student and the choice to come to class just to sleep through it. The reality is that I don’t know why the student was falling asleep. Perhaps it was from the fatigue of working two or three part-time jobs in order to pay for school. Possibly, the student’s role outside class was the main caregiver for a sick relative. Maybe 3:30pm on Monday in a darkened 250-seat lecture hall just didn’t work.

In course design workshops, we ask participants to explore the context of their classroom. As part of that reflection, we discuss factors such as the class size, required/elective course, the distribution of majors and non-majors, TA support, etc. But what about the hidden context, the part we rarely hear about.

The reality is that we don’t know what is impacting students’ participation or engagement in our classes. I remember speaking with a colleague several years ago who spoke about how she never attended class. Having never pondered the idea of missing class when I was a student, and knowing how successful my colleague was at school, I was surprised. In essence, the lecture hall didn’t work for her. It was much better for her to learn from the textbook and the assignments. She wasn’t “skipping” class, she was making a choice that made sense for her as a learner.

Given that there is no way for us to know about all the contextual factors that are impacting our students’ success in our class (and, of course, online), what can we do? One option is to consider universal design, which focuses on design for all. Although its roots are in designing accessible places and spaces for persons with disabilities, anyone can benefit from this design modality. Consider curb cuts. Although originally designed to support people with mobility limitations, as a mom, I can tell you they are a blessing when you are pushing a stroller, your toddler is on their tricycle, or your pre-teen is pulling a wagon full of flyers to deliver. There are examples all around campus of design choices that originally served one purpose but benefited many others.

The same holds true for our courses. Thoughtful design that focuses on engaging a broader spectrum of learners, or one that was made consciously to support a specific group, can have far-reaching benefits. Consider transcriptions of video content. While this text helps students with hearing impairments, it can also be really helpful for students whose first language is not English. I would have loved podcasts and video content as a student simply because I am not the best note-taker in the world and am sure I lost a lot by scrambling to take notes. With a podcast, I would have the chance to go back to catch what I’d missed.

There are countless examples of how we can make small changes in our course’s design, our teaching methods, learning activities, and assessments, that can provide deep learning experiences for a broader spectrum of students. If you would like to explore this idea, why not join Jay Dolmage and I next Friday, March 8, as we explore universal design. For information about the workshop, please go to CTE’s events listing.

What do you need to know about the Flipped Classroom? – Jane Holbrook

The concept of flipping a classroom has been causing a stir in the world of educators over the last year or so. Seems you can’t open an educational blog or newsletter without finding an article or someone’s thoughts on what a flipped classroom is (and isn’t). The simplest explanation of the term is that active learning is achieved face-to-face in the classroom through discussion, problem solving, and group work or other activities, and what we think of as the lecturing, or “content transfer”, part of a class is done elsewhere (not during classtime) independently.

Discussions of flipped classrooms often include the comment that this isn’t a new concept and that courses in the humanities have been using this learning sequence for eons; in these disciplines instructors are the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage” and are in the role of facilitators, guiding discussion of concepts or texts that students have ingested on their own through traditional textbooks or online sources. Also much of what is written about flipped classrooms implies that online media consumption of some sort is part of the independent work. However putting lectures online or giving students access to videos through a course website doesn’t make for a flipped class, the key is that students are active in the classroom; the out of class activity could be reading the text book. As learning management systems and a plethora of online screen casting and lecture capture tools make online components to courses easier to provide and create, many instructors are using online lectures, websites, online videos, or online documents to prepare students to come in and be active learners during class time. An excellent summary of thoughts around flipping or inverting the classrooms can be found in Derek Bruff’s blog called “Agile Learning” http://derekbruff.org/?p=2108.

[As an aside Derek Bruff’s posting was written as a response to another blog posting by Steve Wheeler about a Wired article and I picked up the whole thread through Twitter. You just have to love social media for the layers and connections – check out @CTELiaisons ***).

My colleague, Mark Morton, and I offered a workshop during the fall 2012 CTE Focus on Teaching week and put together this list of reasons why someone might consider flipping at least some classes:

Allows you to spend class time having your students engage in active learning activities such as debates, discussions, Q and A, demonstrations, peer tutoring and feedback, role playing, and so on. This is the “constructivist” aspect of the learning theory known as Social Constructivism.
Allows you to spend class time having your students learn with and through each other. This is the “social” aspect of the learning theory known as Social Constructivism.
During class time, you don’t “lose” your students: in a lecture, the attention of most students starts to flag after ten or fifteen minutes.
Students have time to process and reflect on content before coming to class to apply and work with that content.
Students can control the time, place and pace of learning of the “lecture”.
Allows you to re-use your video content in multiple courses or across multiple years.
Lets you vary the pace and structure of the classes throughout the term which can impact student engagement.

Also we compiled this list of “things to consider”:

You need to devise strategies to ensure that students actually ingest the content outside of class. For example, start each class with a brief quiz that assesses their knowledge of the content. The quiz could be done via clickers or via LEARN (our LMS), both of which can automatically grade the responses and add them to the grade book in the LMS.
Convey to the students that the videos, or other components, are not supplemental to the course but rather are essential. Remind them that if they don’t watch the videos, they won’t be able to participate in the classroom activities.
Spend some time at the beginning of the course explaining to your students the pedagogy behind the flipped classroom model.
Don’t re-lecture. If students come to class without having ingested the content, move forward with the learning activities anyway. If you resort to lecturing in class to bring them up to speed, you’ll only reinforce their decision to not ingest the content prior to class.
Make sure the video includes some questions or reflective activities that you want the students to think about in preparation for the next class. These can appear at the end of the video or can be inserted at appropriate times throughout the video.
Determine what format will work best for your students (and for you). For example, you might videotape yourself talking in front of a flip chart. Or you might create a screencast that focuses only (or primarily) on the the content that appears on your computer screen. Or, depending on your discipline, you might be able to create an audio podcast rather than a video.
Accept the fact that you might need to decrease the amount of content that you cover in your course as a whole. However, students will experience deeper engagement with the content that they do cover.

Please feel free to add to this list through the comments!

Also see some examples of flipped classes in higher ed, http://www.emergingedtech.com/2013/01/flipped-classroom-successes-in-higher-education/.

***Follow the @CTELiaisons on Twitter – we’re following some interesting folks and retweeting from many sources.

Turning Information into an Invitation – Trevor Holmes

I’ve been teaching undergrads since 1994 I guess, as a TA at first, and by 2001 as a course instructor. Since 2006 I’ve been the instructor of record on a large first-year cultural studies course (and assisted in 2005 on the same one). This post is in the head-scratching, old dog / new tricks category, and is about office hours.

Generally speaking, I hold 1.5 to 2 hours of office time for consultation with students. I’m happy when I see three to six students in a week, which only happens around essay writing time. Some students come for help getting started, others with drafts to go through together, and others afterward to understand feedback. Although I ask students to show up or make an alternate appointment, I probably only see ten percent of my class that way in a good year (I teach 200).

Over the years I’ve read about some ways to use office hours more effectively. Don Woods (McMaster, Chemical Engineering Emeritus and architect of their problem-based learning approach) always talks about using student ombudspeople (1 or 2 per 50 students), with whom the professor meets each week or two to have a dialogue about how the class is going. A former professor at York when I was a graduate student there used to have his undergraduates come in to receive their essays — they’d have to read them aloud to him in order to get them back (this usually led to a deeper understanding on their part of their grades and their own writing). Teaching tips abound — and of course CTE has our own version of advice for the beginning TA or instructor.

This year, though, thinking I was past all such tips — surely these are all for beginners, not for seasoned oldtimers like myself — I once again posted my office hours for the term in the learning management system calendar tool. Week in, week out… can I remove just the one instance over Reading Break this time? Yes! Great. But…

…instead of writing “Trevor’s Office Hour” like I normally would, I wondered what might sound more inviting. I’m so tired of the discourse of “information delivery” as our role in higher education. In lecture, I’m not an information-delivery specialist. My discipline isn’t about transmitting information from me to many. That is a subject for another post, but it’s important to think about the whole endeavour, and how I communicate this belief I have. If I simply post my hours as information, how am I welcoming the discussion and support I feel I can share with my first years? So, I tried instead posting the calendar entry with the words: “Trevor’s Office Time: Come and Visit me in xxxx-xxxx from 4:30 – 5:00” (and the same, but an hour, on the other day).

For the first time in nearly 20 years of teaching, two students showed up for my first office hour before the first lecture day. I told them I was happy to meet them, we talked about their interests, majors, futures, and I asked them what made them come see me before the class had even begun. They said “because you invited us to come and visit you.”

I was pretty much gobsmacked, not having expected anyone to pop by until three weeks hence when the paper is due. I hope this signals an increase in the frequency of visits and the diversity of visitors. Pleasant surprises like this, that by the students’ own account were because of the three small words “come visit me,” are the kinds of things that keep my enthusiasm for teaching so high even after eight iterations of the same course.

Make Tutorials Matter – Mihaela Vlasea, Graduate Instructional Developer

It is often mentioned that with large engineering classes, it is difficult to truly engage students and provide them with the opportunity to get involved in classroom activities. I recently had the opportunity to teach a tutorial review session, for which I prepared extensively. I presented the material in a very organized fashion, while being careful to periodically ask a few questions while I was solving problems on the blackboard. Based on the answers I was receiving, as well as some feedback from the class, I felt that students understood the material very well. However, upon marking a final exam question, one very similar to the one I had solved in class, I was quite surprised to see that the majority were not capable to meet the basic framework of the solution. Upon reflecting on this fact, I realized that there is a major difference between students understanding my approach and them being able to solve questions on their own. This realization was quite important, because it has forced me to somewhat re-think my tutorial teaching strategies in the future.

Gear Wheels - photo by Ian Britton via flickr — Get the Gear Wheels Turning (Gear Wheels photo by Ian Britton via flickr)

Provide more opportunity for students to think about the problem

Instead of dwelling on copying the problem requirements on the board, I could provide students with a copy of the question (wither on a Power Point slide or a handout) and ask them to take two minutes to read it carefully. Then, I would ask students a few clarifying questions to make sure they have understood the problem requirements.

Provide more opportunities for students to solve the problem

After going through the first step, I would allow students to work in pairs or about 2-3 minutes to discuss a few ideas on how to start solving the question. I feel that it is important, as it would make students feel that their suggestions are valuable to the development of the solution. This would increase their level of “ownership” over what is discussed in the class, rather than having a one-way teaching approach.

Facilitate and moderate discussions on alternate solutions

Often times, students only have the opportunity to be exposed to a single solution to a problem. Offering students the opportunity to think and suggest alternate solutions in a supportive environment would be a great opportunity to expose students to more approaches as well as to encourage creativity in engineering classes. This is a critical point that should be endorsed in tutorials. Students may be encouraged to propose an alternate solution in class or they may be to be allowed to post their own solutions on a forum or wiki page, where their peers can discuss or correct their input (this would be a bit harder to moderate, but it would certainly be interesting).

In general, I think that tutorials in engineering should be more student-focused and should promote discussion, rather than being an extension of lecture time. These are just some of my ideas which stemmed from recent experience in teaching tutorials in large engineering classes.

Slow Learning: Mitten Ball Debates — Shannon Dea, Department of Philosophy

Sometimes, great teaching and learning solutions are right at our fingertips.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching a winter term night course. It was mid-way through the term and the students were clearly exhausted. My usually participatory class clammed up, and I had to do something.

I stopped “delivering lectures” per se years ago. As I’ve grown into my teaching, I’ve become less and less concerned about transmitting content, and much more interested in helping my students to engage with the material sufficiently that they’ll be motivated to seek out the content on their own. So, nowadays, I’m more of a facilitator or master of ceremonies than a lecturer. I don’t tell my students what the readings say; they tell me. And, as they do so, they tell me what’s plausible about the positions we’re considering and what requires a more critical response.

I’ve developed a bunch of different methods to encourage students to participate in class discussions, but that night nothing was working. My mind raced as I struggled to think of a way to kickstart the conversation. And, then it clicked.

I grabbed my wool mittens from my coat pockets, turned them inside-out into a soft ball and told my students, “Ok. Time for a mitten ball debate.”

I wrote a controversial statement related to that week’s material on the board. Then, I drew an imaginary line down the middle of the lecture hall and told the students that everyone left of the line was on the “Pro” side and everyone right of the line was on the “Con” side. I gave them a few minutes to gather their thoughts and jot them down before elaborating the rules of the game:

The only person permitted to speak is the person holding the mitten ball.
Speakers must make new points, not repeat those points other speakers have already made.
No one may hold the mitten ball more than once.
After one has finished speaking, s/he must toss the mitten ball to someone on the other side of the lecture hall (and, hence, on the other side of the debate).
If you catch the mitten ball and have nothing to say, you may toss it to someone else on your side who has not yet participated.
Whichever team runs out of novel comments first loses. (Or, more constructively, whichever team doesn’t run out of points wins.)

I closed my eyes and tossed the ball toward the students.

And it worked. The discussion that followed was energetic and engaging. And, in the remaining weeks of the term, the students themselves several times requested mitten ball debates. There were several mentions of the mitten ball on student evaluations of the course, including such pseudo-koans as “Trust the mitten ball.”

So, what is it about mitten ball debates that students like? I’m still working it through, but here are a few of my ideas about this:

It’s fun to throw things. Moreover, having to follow a projectile with one’s eyes, to throw and to catch, pulls students out of the “alpha state” they so often slip into in three-hour classes. Just that little bit of physicality can make a huge cognitive difference.
Mitten ball debates involve everyone, not just the smartypants who sit in the front row with their hands up all the time. Students too easily fall into patterns about who the speakers are in the class and who the non-speakers are. Mitten ball debating is premised on breaking those patterns. And, students are often grateful when the usual suspects don’t get to weigh in three times on the same point. (The corresponding advantage for instructors is that, in a mitten ball debate, one need never say, “That’s another really great point, Smartypants, but let’s hear what someone else has to say…”)
Mitten ball debating takes the pressure off to make the best point. Since the game just requires teams to come up with as many points as possible, students are helping their team just as much with comparatively weak points as with strong ones. This means there’s less stigma associated with “saying something stupid.”

There are a few different ways you can run a mitten ball debate. You can, as I did, arbitrarily assign a position to each side of the class. Or, you can allow students to move to whichever side of the class corresponds to their own view. Alternatively, you might ask students to move to whichever side corresponds to the opposite of their own view. Adducing evidence for the opposite side is always a great exercise!

And, of course, there’s nothing saying you have to limit the teams to two. In a Classics class, for example, one could divide the class in three and have a mitten ball debate about the comparative merits of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Crassus.

When I’ve held mitten ball debates, inevitably, some students colour outside of the lines – either “crossing the floor” once they become persuaded of their opponents’ position, or remaining where they are but shouting suggestions to the opposite side when they notice an argument the other team has neglected.

Fine by me. After all, the point of a mitten ball debate isn’t to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules, but to warm students up to a topic that at first leaves them cold. I suppose it should come as no surprise that, even in the depths of the winter term, mittens help to provide a little warmth.

Have your own ideas about why mitten balls work? Or, tips to share about cool teaching and learning solutions you figured out on the fly? Log in below to comment, or email me at sjdea at uwaterloo dot ca.

Shannon Dea is currently the Teaching Fellow for the Faculty of Arts. This blog post originally appeared on the Arts Teaching Fellow Blog.