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Providing Authentic Learning Experiences – Katherine Lithgow

This past May, I had the great pleasure of presenting at Laurier’s Integrated and E ngaged Learning Conference with Jill Tomasson Goodwin (Associate Professor -Faculty of Arts teaching in the Digital Arts Communication (DAC) specialization program; Scott O’Neill (Associate Director, Marketing and Communications within the Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment (MUR)department and Madhulika Saxena (a student in the W2014 DAC 300 course and a recent graduate from uWaterloo’s Arts & Business program).

We wanted to explore how we might bring high quality high impact practices (HQ HIPs) into the classroom. Our presentation focused on DAC 300’s collaborative project that provided students with an authentic experiential learning opportunity where the students worked in teams to address an on-campus community partner’s real world need. Our goal was to highlight how a course might embody the characteristics of HQ HIPs and what can be done in terms of course design and course delivery to make a course a high quality high impact practice. Using DAC 300 as an example, throughout the presentation, we provided ‘tips’ which we hope will help others incorporate high quality high impact learning opportunities into their classrooms.

Experiential education has always been important in education, and it is of particular importance at uWaterloo. We say it is in our DNA. We’re known for our co-op program; experiential learning is one of our Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations and our strategic plan promises ‘Experiential Education for All’. We know that when done well, that is, where learning is “as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as abstract,” and emphasizes both judgment and exploration, experiential education helps students better absorb, retain and transfer knowledge (Lombardi, 2007).

So… what are the characteristics of a high quality high impact practice?

Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels
Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time
Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters
Experiences with diversity
Frequent,timely and constructive feedback
Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning
Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications
Public demonstration of competence

(Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S., 2013)

You can view our presentation here to see how these characteristics came to life in DAC 300.

A lot of things came together to make the DAC 300 course a great learning experience. A couple that I want to highlight centre around 1) collaboration and 2) the impact on the instructor and students.

Experiential learning opportunities often bring students into meaningful contact with future employers, customers, clients, and colleagues. What struck me about the DAC 300 project was the extent to which Jill collaborated with an on-campus ‘community partner’ (Scott O’Neill and the MUR department) to provide her students with this real-world, relevant learning opportunity. In turn, Jill’s students collaborated together to provide MUR with a solution to address their real-world need. If we want to make more of these high impact practices available to our students, we will likely have to collaborate with campus partners -campus partners from writing centres, student affairs, living learning communities, residence life and librarians are just a few examples of who these campus partners might be. More important, the collaboration has to benefit all parties.

The role of the instructor often changes when you provide authentic learning experiences to your students. Prepare to learn along with your students. Incorporating authentic learning experiences into your course can be disorienting and uncomfortable for you AND your students. Your role shifts from ‘instructor’ to ‘coach’. Students will come up with solutions or approaches that you have never thought of. That can be a good thing, but it also means relinquishing a certain amount of control, being flexible, and adapting to circumstances- just as we do in the real world.

Jill Tomasson Goodwin has kindly created and shared these 6-Tips-and-10-Tricks-to-Facilitate-Classroom-based-Experiential-Learning. Jill encourages you to adapt them to your needs and invites you to email her (jtomasso@uwaterloo.ca) to chat with her further about how these choices worked in practice.

DAC 300 is a 12-week reflexive theoretically-informed, practice-based course in User Experience Design (the art of understanding, designing, and creating an ‘end-to-end’ experience of technology for users). The course design choices are based on a very real-world application of knowledge — facilitated inside, and tested outside, the classroom, for an actual client, with a pressing need.

During the W2014 offering, Professor Jill Tomasson Goodwin and her third-year Digital Arts Communication class consulted with UWaterloo’s MUR department to design an augmented reality version of a tour brochure. To complete the project, teams of undergraduate students drew upon their knowledge of user experience design, interviewed high school students, and then iteratively prototyped a range of augmented reality experiences, all designed to engage and inform students as they visit and explore the campus. The project and technology have been so successful that UW will use augmented reality to enhance other recruitment publications.

Resources

Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are. Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Kuh, G. D. (2008). Excerpt from “High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter”. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm

Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S. (2013). Ensuring quality and taking high-impact practices to scale . Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Lombardi, M. M. (2007). Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. Educause learning initiative,1(2007), 1-12. http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/authentic-learning-21st-century-overview

Integrative and Applied Learning Value Rubric (AAC&U) http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/integrativelearning.cfm

The skills gap dilemma — Mary Power

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tashbandicoot/10455369376/

I recently attended the annual Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education STLHE 2014 Conference in beautiful Kingston. It was a week of great learning and connecting with colleagues from across Canada and beyond. The theme of the conference was Transforming our Learning Experiences and in his welcoming address Alan Harrison, Provost and Vice-Principle Academic of Queen’s University told a story about an event that transformed his thinking. While travelling on a plane he struck up a conversation with a young man sitting next to him who, it so happened, was a recent graduate of his university. The response of the young man when asked about his experience at university, which stuck in Alan’s mind and now mine, was: “You never taught me to tell people what I know”. I was reminded of a Higher Education Quality Council (HEQCO) meeting in November: Beyond the Buzzwords where the skills gap question was being discussed and an employment recruiting specialist commented that it was not that young prospective employees did not necessarily possess the skills they were looking for, but they did not recognize that they had them, or know how to articulate them. Often these skills that are talked about more and more in academe, the media and the population at large are non-subject specific skills but rather transferable cognitive skills, such as critical thinking, communication, problem solving, team work, professionalism.

When we work with Departments on curriculum mapping exercises the list of so called “soft skills” and values that we desire of our graduating students is often the longest, and I admit sometimes most contentious. Part of that dissention, I believe, arises from the fact that these skills are much harder to define and I would argue, have been implicit in higher education. The question as I see it is: How do we make these expectations explicit and how do we effectively guide assess their development? And perhaps even more challenging, how do we help the students recognize that these skills or attributes were indeed the desired outcomes of the activity, course or program?

At another excellent conference down that road at Wilfred Laurier University in May (yes – I have been blessed with attending a number of these brain filling events lately!) this question was partially answered. I had the pleasure of hearing Robert Shea, Provost and Associate Vice President Academic, Marine Institute at Memorial University give a keynote address entitled “A National Call to Action: Do We Need a New Discourse on Learning?”, in part discussing the Career Integrated Learning project let by MUN. The key take away for me was the idea to clearly define these life skills as learning outcomes on our course syllabi as the first step to making them explicit. Simple but brilliant and more often than not overlooked. We cannot stop at stating these skills as outcomes, however, but need to help students identify where they are being introduced, practiced, assessed and ideally to allow time for reflection on their development. In doing this not only will our students (hopefully) be able to recognize that they are attaining these skills but will be able to then “tell people what they know” once they leave our doors.

Overhead Projectors, Scratched Chalkboards and… Mirrors? Oh MY! – Amy Hackney

This past year I had the opportunity to teach my first university course. Not only was I the sole instructor, but I was also permitted to re-design the course. As a recent participant in both the Fundamentals of University Teaching and the Certification in University Teaching programs, I was extremely excited to apply the information I had obtained throughout the experience. Not surprisingly, I eagerly set to work to incorporate a variety of interactive activities, planned in-class mini assignments where I imagined that groups would work together on the whiteboards or in small pods of desks and even planned to spice up the course material by adding media teaching methods and resources. I was so excited and proud of my new course design. These students were in for the most interactive and engaging learning experience they have ever had, complete with all the bells and whistles.

Boy, was I ever in for a surprise.

No media center…
No moveable tables on wheels…
No white boards…

Instead, I walked into a classroom with an old overhead projector, fold-able chairs with squeaky armrests about the size of a single piece of paper and a worn out chalk board that was so well used it was nearly impossible for students to read off of. And to make matters worse, this “classroom” was an old fitness/yoga studio with mirrors. Yikes.

Cue a mini panic attack.

What was I going to do!?!?!! How was I going to implement everything I had planned and practiced in such an amazing classroom before?!?! This was going to be horrible. But as I stood at the front of the classroom, slightly defeated, wishing and hoping that maybe by slim chance nobody would show up… the door opened and my students walked in. No escape now. So I improvised.

Miraculously, things didn’t go so bad. Sure, there were some bumps along the way and a few friendly laughs at our “ideal” situation but I realized that it’s not the fancy equipment and swanky technology that makes for a good lecture, it’s the quality of the delivery, the time and care put into the planning and the motivation of the students. I didn’t need the desks and chairs on wheels to make discussion groups, or five white boards to demonstrate a topic. I didn’t need PowerPoint to delivery information or a funny video clip to get student’s motivated to participate. All I needed was the skills that I had obtained during my training (and a bit of creativity). Sure, having all these resources available to me would have been helpful and I hope that my teaching situation changes in the future. But for now having some flexibility, a willingness to adapt, a bit of creativity and confidence in my own teaching skills will do just fine.

University of Waterloo’s Annual Teaching and Learning Conference: OND 2014 — Julie Timmermans

This year’s Opportunities and New Directions (OND) 2014 Conference took place on Thursday, May 1^st. We were excited and humbled by the participation of over 200 people, mainly from the University of Waterloo, but also from other local universities. This made it clear that, as teachers at Waterloo, we are part of a growing, thriving community of people dedicated to teaching and learning. The day began with an enthusiastic welcome by Vice-President, Academic and Provost, Geoff McBoyle.

The theme of this year’s Conference was “Rethinking and Reframing the Assessment of Learning.” A diverse array of panels, workshops, and presentations explored the many facets of assessment – from assessment practices in different disciplines, such as Math and English, to assessment in online, blended, and face-to-face environments. Assessment at the course level, program level, and on work-terms was also explored by presenters who included faculty and staff members, as well as graduate and undergraduate students from across the disciplines.

There was an unmistakable and enduring excitement about the ideas presented by Presidents’ Colloquium Keynote Speaker, Dr. John Bean. During his session, John explored how students’ growth as disciplinary thinkers can be enhanced by integrating problem-based writing assignments into our courses, whether we teach in the humanities, sciences, or social sciences. John also explored how using writing can be useful for assessing not only learning outcomes related to writing, but also for assessing skills that are critical in the formation of disciplinary thinkers – skills, such as inquiry, research, critical thinking, and problem-solving. If you’re intrigued by these ideas, you are welcome to download the handouts from the keynote session, available through the Conference website: https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/research-teaching-and-learning/university-waterloo-teaching-and-learning-conference-ond/keynote-speaker-dr-john-bean-seattle-university . In her lead article in the CTE Newsletter coming out later in May, Donna Ellis, Director of CTE, also explains and reflects on John’s session.

Another highlight of the day was the “Igniting Our Practice” session. Kelly Anthony, AHS’s Teaching Fellow, and Hamid Jahed, Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, drew us into the learning spaces they create for their students by teaching us a concept from their own courses. As Hamid noted when he began his session, both he and Kelly addressed the idea of “structural stability,” but did so from very different perspectives. Kelly explored the stability – and fragility – of some of our social structures, and took us on an emotional journey of the experience of youth in foster care. She discussed how collaborating with members of the wider community can be a powerful teaching tool. Hamid also explored the idea of structural stability, this time from an Engineering perspective. Through engaging demonstrations involving broken rulers and crushed pop cans, Hamid brought to life the concept of how structures behave under load. Hamid and Kelly’s session was inspiring and moving, generating thoughtful questions from the audience.

The Conference closed with a wine and cheese reception. It was time to connect with colleagues over a drink and some food. Associate Vice President, Academic (AVP-A), Mario Coniglio closed the Conference, thanking the many people who had contributed to the Conference, including the participants, the Teaching Fellows, members of CTE, the people who had provided technical support, CTE’s Co-op students, as well as FAUW for generously sponsoring the delectable breakfast following the Presidents’ Colloquium. At CTE, we’re particularly grateful for the vision and support of the current AVP-A, Mario Coniglio, and Vice-President, Academic and Provost, Geoff McBoyle.

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 OND 2015.

For details about the Conference, please visit the OND 2014 website: https://uwaterloo.ca/cte/ond2014 .

This post also appears as an article in the May 2014 CTE Newsletter

Standards, Judgments and the Finnstep – Veronica Brown

Until today, I had never heard of the Finnstep. Now, it is streaming across social media as yet another debate emerges on the subjectivity (and potential corruption) of judging figure skating. It’s rather a timely debate as I work my way through Eisner’s (1985) The Educational Imagination. Having skimmed the first few chapters (which deal with social factors that influence the curriculum, an assessment of the state of education at the time, and some curriculum basics), I have landed at Chapter 6, “Educational Aims Objectives, and Other Aspirations”. He begins with a nice overview of behavioural objectives, how best to define and use them, their merits, and their shortcomings.

I am see great value in behavioural objectives because they provide specificity, measurability and, one hopes, objectivity in assessment. Those behaviours are often tied to standards, which Eisner describes as “crisp, unambigous, and precise” (p. 116). They are best when you know what the end product will look like. Consider swimming lessons. A swimmer must be able to fulfill all criteria for a given level (e.g., complete a front dive off a 1m board, swim front crawl 50m, swim back crawl 25m, tread water 1 minute, etc.) before moving to the next level. Swimming lessons exemplify a competency-based system based on well-defined standards. A swimmer does not move to the next level until all elements of the current level are completed. It is not a system where you can pass 60% of the elements and move on, you must pass everything or you re-do that level. The outcomes are very specific and the same standard is applied across all swimmers in that level. There is a little bit of room for judgment (e.g., the quality of the front crawl might vary) but most elements are fairly objective (e.g., you can tread water for one minute or you can’t).

The reality, however, is that not everything is as clear as your success swimming across a pool. Eisner acknowledges there is a place for such behavioural objectives, but exposes the limitations of this approach. He asks,

But what about the rhetorical force of a students’ essay ? What about the aesthetic quality of her painting? What about the cogency of his verbal argumentation? What about her intellectual style, the ways she interprets the evidence in a science experiment, the way in which historical material is analysed? Are these subject to standards? I think not.

But to say that such qualities cannot be measured by standards is not to say that judgments cannot be made about them. It is not to say that one can have no criteria through which to appraise them. Judgments can say much about such qualities, not by the mechanical application of prespecified standards, but by comparison of the qualities in question to a whole range of criteria that teachers or others making the judgment already possess. (p. 116)

This is the part that makes me nervous about assessing the affective domain. Before joining CTE, I was an instructional coordinator, managing very large classes. Leaving all this to “judgment” makes me nervous. Some of our courses had more than 40 markers. How could I be sure their judgment was the same? How could I minimize variance in that judgment? Can you really trust “judgment”? How many judging scandals have we heard about? Just how “fair” is judging? OK, I admit maybe I’m just in a slightly cynical mood having watched the Olympics all day only to hear tonight that people are talking about figure skating judges, again. Before worrying about these larger issues, let’s get back to the question of the day, how do we define outcomes related to the affective domain? Not to say behavioural objectives cannot be used in the affective domain, but I do think they are limited.

Eisner gives two alternatives to behavioural objectives, not to replace behaviour objectives but to complement them. First, he describes problem-solving objectives. One of the limitations of behavioural objectives he identifies is the need to know what the end product will be before students begin. But many of the questions we pose to our students do not have a single, clearly-defined answer. Instead, we ask them to solve a problem, with varying constraints. Even in the introductory programming course I taught, students solved the problems in different ways. My solution to the problem was not the only one and so I could not judge them based on whether they solved the problem my way, I had to develop an evaluation scheme that provided for that flexibility. An example Eisner shares is that of an architect, who must meet the constraints provided by the client, such as budget, site, and architectural style, but the product cannot be fully assessed until it is completed. He explains that, “what is known is the problem; what constitute appropriate solutions remains to be seen after the work has been done” (p. 119). Those constraints can help to form the criteria against which the solution is evaluated but there is no single solution to the problem.

The second alternative is expressive outcomes. Something I missed as I read the earlier part of the chapter was that he used the terms “behavioural objectives” and “problem-solving objectives” but calls these “expressive outcomes“. I tend to use the two interchangeably but he’s sees a clear distinction. Objectives represent the goals we have for our students, which lead to activities. For example, we might have a goal of evaluating students’ ability to analyse a budget, which leads to an activity in which we present a case study and ask them to analyse someone’s budget. But for expressive outcomes, we begin with the activity and the outcome is

essentially what one ends up with, intended or not, after some form of engagement. Expressive outcomes are the consequences of curriculum activities that are intentionally planned to provide a fertile field for personal purposing and experience. (p. 120)

I have read this chapter several times but it is only now that I realized my error. I didn’t pick up this subtle difference because I use objectives and outcomes with the same meaning. But what is truly different about expressive outcomes is that it is the activity that we plan, not the outcome. As an educator, I cannot foresee all the outcomes that activity might yield but I might have the sense that it has value. We trust that while each student might have a different experience, participation in the activity will have value. To achieve such an outcome, Eisner recommends we “have students engage in activities that are sufficiently rich to allow for a wide, productive range of educationally valuable outcomes” (p. 121).

I like this idea of planning the activity and allowing the outcome to come forth. But I am still uneasy. At the end of the day, I have to give my students a grade. How can I assess students who have a different outcome based on that experience. Is one outcome better than another? What is the criteria against which I judge this experience? How can I be assured that a panel of judges (or the 40 people marking the assignment) will yield the same result? Thankfully, we are not starting from scratch. There are many valuable tools that can help us to evaluate these experiences, experiences that I think are critical to the development of elements in the affective domain.

Veronica

Eisner, E. (1985). The Educational imagination : On the design and evaluation of school programs (2nd ed.). New York: Macmillan.

Teaching: It’s not about technology – Brett Beston

LectureChairs1

Much of my work-life is spent teaching: If I’m not lecturing myself, I’m helping others achieve teaching their teaching goals. However, I don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject, just a ‘student of the game’. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what I can do to keep the attention of my students. Sometimes, I’m not assuccessful as I’d like to be, so I keep thinking of what to do next.

In the current teaching climate, I hear a lot of talk about integrating technology in the classroom. This works out well for me because I like to ‘tinker’ and it’s all too easy for me to think about the different ways to play with technology in the classroom. As teachers, we often use technology as learning management systems to organize our courses, post lecture slides, create web-modules, hold discussion forums, and even poll students in our classes.

But the more I teach, the more I realize that a great teaching experience need not have anything to do with technology.

Technology is a tool that can be used to enhance a classroom experience, but shouldn’t be the focus of our teaching. No smart boards, iclickers or projectors will make us good teachers. What limits my performance in the classroom is the quality of my instruction.

So, I’m going back to my teaching-roots. When I started teaching, my mentor, Dale Roy, asked me to identify effective things that instructors do in the classroom. Not once did I think of anything related to technology. Instead, the most effective instructors that I’ve experienced seem to entertain as much as they inform.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that our lectures should be a circus act kind of entertainment. But, the best teachers that I’ve had go beyond simply doling out facts. Rather, they take a more personal approach to tell stories and experiences that provide context to the subject matter at hand. We are often experts in the area that we teach; why not share our own experience to make a subject matter more personal and create real world context that students connect with.

So I’m shifting my focus away from technology and towards an approach that shows my passion for what I’m teaching about and the experiences that I’ve had: To show them how I connect with the material that they are learning about.

I forget who said this to me, but I’ll always remember this little saying: “It’s not about the tech, it’s about the teach”.

Why Krathwohl helps make the affective a bit less mysterious – Veronica Brown

Let’s face it. I’m a mathie. Not in the Big Bang Theory way. It’s just that I tend to think in numbers. Numbers help me understand things and explain things. My teaching career reflects that. I taught general math at an agricultural college. Later, I taught introductory courses in computer science (computer usage and introductory programming). As a result, until recently, I haven’t given the affective domain a lot of thought. Not that it wasn’t on my mind. In my research, which has focused on different kinds of support systems (at the workplace and for students), it was a critical element – I just didn’t call it the affective domain.

As I discussed last week, the affective relates to our values, beliefs, behaviours, and attitudes. I am trying to figure out how to effectively assess these elements. Again, my early teaching career was spent teaching first year courses that focused primarily on knowledge and skill development. Topics that progressed in a fairly linear way. It didn’t make sense to ask students to create arrays or debug complex code before they had a decent understanding of the basics, such as variables, repetition, and selection. There’s no need to consider the affective if I’m just trying to teach them these basics, right?

Well, actually, it’s not that simple. As I think back to those programming courses, one of the basics we introduce is documenting your code (adding short comments throughout that explains the code to other users). These were small programs. Most of the code was self-explanatory, documentation wasn’t really necessary. But I wasn’t just teaching them about basic documentation. I wanted them to understand why it was important. I didn’t want them to write good documentation because they were expected to, I wanted them to value documentation so that it became an ingrained habit – where code just wouldn’t look right without a few lines of documentation.

But how could I instill that value with such short programs. Imagine writing a program that is only 20 lines long and having to write 5 lines of comments to explain it. Hardly seems worth it. And so I shared a story with them about why documentation was so important to me, hoping it might inspire them to find value in those comments. My first co-op job involved designing software for small robots. We used a language called Behavior Language (Brooks, 1990), which I had never seen before. I had four months of programming experience (one term of C++) and there was little available to help me learn the language. My best option was to read the code. The problem, I soon discovered, was that the last co-op student decided to use Alice in Wonderland characters for all of the variable and function names. So, instead of writing something like RobotTurnLeft, it said MadHatter.

Did sharing this anecdote mean I saw beautiful documentation in every project at the end of the term. No. But, it exposed my students to a reason to make an effort on documentation. At the very least, now it was on their radar. In 1964, Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia expanded on the taxonomy of learning and explored the affective more deeply. They described five levels: receiving (awareness); responding (complies with set of values); valuing (expresses values through behaviour); organization (considers more critically – compares, synthesizes values); and internalizing (value system that is pervasive and consistent in behaviour). My students probably reached the awareness phase – they recognized that there was value in writing good documentation but might not have internalized it to the point of changing their behaviour.

As I consider how to assess elements of this domain, I come back to the idea of alignment among outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment. So next week, I’ll spend some time talking about outcomes in the affective domain. By defining where I want my students to be by the end of the course, I can plan the activities and assessments appropriately. But the first step is to define the outcome. What would an outcome be in an area such as lifelong learning or diversity? What does it mean to value humility or critical thinking or creativity? How do I define an outcome related to ethics?

These are the questions I’ll be pondering for the next week. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Veronica

References

Brooks, R. A., (1990, April). A.I. Memo 1227. The Behavior language; User’s guide. Retreived Feb 4, 2014 from http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1227.pdf.

Krathwol, D. R., Bloom, B. S., & Masia, B. B. (1964). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. New York: David McKay.