Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog – Page 43

International Women’s Day Turns 100 — Trevor Holmes

Logo for IWD centenary

As I write, I am reading news reports of men harassing women in Cairo, women who assembled to celebrate International Women’s Day, women who protested alongside men to oust Hosni Mubarak.

As I write, I am hopeful about initiatives to help women and girls get educated all around the world.

I note tertiary education efforts too, like Women’s Education Worldwide.

And I think hard about the post over at Hook and Eye, a blog co-owned by Aimée Morrison (Waterloo English) and guest-blogged today by Shannon Dea (Waterloo Philosophy).

I feel like we need to act locally and think globally about feminism… a point I keep making to my own first year students still, relentlessly…

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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.

“Active Learning is good as long as it does not take additional time”!!! – Prashant Mutyala

This is one of the things I learned from the conversations I had with the students in the past two years of teaching at UW. Earlier while planning learning activities, I never thought of this aspect so much but now it has become one of the major factors.

I usually supervise day long labs for final year Undergrad students. They are committed to stay from morning 10.30 AM to evening 6 PM on those days. Earlier the practical sessions were preceded with a quiz session which I found was not very productive in upgrading the knowledge of the students. Therefore I designed some activities to make the learning more fun and productive too. Ofcourse, that took more time than the usual straight lectures. The students who were really interested to learn liked the new method but the neutral students were not that much happy. The formative feedback showed some 60% students supporting the new pattern and many of them pointed out that ‘Active Learning is good as long as it does not take additional time’.

Soon I came up with a new pattern. The activities were distributed in such a way that the students now used to spend time in them after starting their experiments, typically when waiting for the equipment to reach some steady state or when the equipment is collecting results. In other words the activities now were ‘not taking additional time’. As a result the end-feedback showed 90% of class support to the new pattern.

It seems that the new generation students (who grew up alongside netbooks, iphone and tablet pcs) prefer everything (including learning) to be not only productive but also fast. I wish enhancing the learning process was as simple as installing an additional RAM in a computer. Students now are not looking just for active learning methods but they are looking for time-efficient active learning methods and that adds a challenge for the teachers while planning learning activities.

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Unwitting Learning — Mark Morton

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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Exercise = Brain Power — Marlene Griffith Wrubel

I try not to make New Year’s resolutions. But this year I did; I’ve decided to improve my cognitive capacity. The first thought that came to mind was to purposely learn something new such as enrolling in a language course this Spring. Instead I’ve decided to accomplish two things with one activity: I’m going to improve my physical and mental health through exercise. Continue reading Exercise = Brain Power — Marlene Griffith Wrubel

“Chance Favours the Connected Mind” (S. Johnson) — Jen Doyle

Where Good Ideas Come From… Steven Johnson

One of my favourite things to do when I’m relaxing or working around the house is to listen to CBC radio and at the beginning of January I was listening to Spark. Nora Young was interviewing Steven Johnson. His most recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Continue reading “Chance Favours the Connected Mind” (S. Johnson) — Jen Doyle

The Power of Community — Donna Ellis

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we’re trying to accomplish in CTE (one of those off-shoots of having to prepare for a job interview!) and I keep coming back to building community and building capacity. While it’s important to build capacity Continue reading The Power of Community — Donna Ellis

Testing: good practice! – Mary Power

If you have been reading our blog lately you may have noticed a bit of New York theme going on. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to continue the trend. Maybe not quite so glamorous as a trip to the Big Apple, but a recent article in the New York Continue reading Testing: good practice! – Mary Power