School of Computing - University of Kent



1. Using Images in Presentations I was asked to look into education for sustainable development when I joined my last employer, a university in the midlands, as the Stern Report had just been published. As a result I asked around for any colleagues interested in helping me to run an exploratory workshop (I am and educational developer). As a result I met an inspirational colleague who taught me a fair bit about sustainablity. However the reason for telling this story is to do with his presentation style - he used almost entirely images, virtually no text at all in his powerpoint presentations. There were dozens of them too. So the result was that he did not speak to the slide, as there was no text to read, but the images were carefully selected to expand on illustrate the points that he made. Since then I have always tried to include far more images, although I rarely do without text at all. I find that I speak far more fluently and I think am more interesting to listen to as a result.2. Off the Stage ... I participated in a series of HHMI workshops on science teaching at Haverford College as well as MSPGP workshops on teaching at Bryn Mawr College and began to see evidence that the old lecture style I was using was really not very effective -- in fact, it be getting in the way of "real learning." I had always used group work to a limited degree (mostly to make some time while I was getting ready for the next topic), but I was becoming convinced that group activities where students teach each other, make mistakes and adapt is more effective (if only the students realized this and provided better evaluations :). So now I find that I have adjusted by reducing the nuber of concepts covered and instead trying to go as deep as possible, injecting various pedagogies I have discovered over the years (including singing songs I have written about computing). I still get mixed reviews, but I think the course is more effective and certainly more engaging.3. Changing expectations of distance learning students I was teaching a distance learning M level module to a group of professionals. We had planned to release material at timed intervals and support this by individual mentoring support and group discussion activities. The assessment was a portfolio, addressing specific aspects of the course, based on the learning outcomes. The intention was that students would complete sections as they went along and compile these at the end of the course. They were encouraged to do this and given access to an ePortfolio system to support them. It became clear that our basic assumptions about the students (e.g. their level of competence with technology, their regularity in accessing the module etc) were unrealistic and the external pressures on them from their work context (which they all shared) were far greater than anticipated so we made changes to try to support the students. One less critical element of the syllabus was dropped, the requirement to participate in group activities was reduced, and we allowed submission in a range of ways, rather than just through the ePortfolio. We also added a number of synchronous web conference support sessions to address the issues they were having. 4. Getting the courage to use teams I wanted my students to work in teams so they could do bigger things and learn how to work with others. I was afraid of freeloaders, fighting, and power battles. I took a PBL workshop where I got to talk directly to many instructors who were using teams. They reassured me that the kinds of problems I feared are not common, and with that reassurance I dove in the next semester. I now find that instead of bringing out people's worst, working in teams brings out their best. My students will work harder for their teams than they will for me or for an individual grade.5. The importance of the chain rule I ran data mining on student test data in Calc I by building a decision tree. I found that almost all the students who had gotten the "differentiate using the chain rule" question wrong had done terribly on the exam, and almost all the ones who had gotten it right had done quite well. After that, I doubled the amount of time spent teaching the chain rule.6. CS3 Research So we were just getting started in teaching Lisp, 61a had been running since 1986 and at that time, CS3 was still in pascal. After a while, it became clear that we were sticking with Scheme. Oliver Grillmyer taught it for a year, and then I taught it for two years in a row, and we had NSF funding. So here I am teaching this lisp course – early on I showed them the lisp evaluation algorithm. E.g. if it’s a number then it is self-evaluating – etc. Evaluate the arguments, then apply the function. Etc. So – here was a harry tree recursion, that I was expecting the student to be able to deal with – time after time – students late in the course were getting unbound variable messages and not having a clue what to do with them. The second year of our work, Betsy Davis showed up. She knew how to program from her background. She started to learn LISP and kept a log of the things she was having trouble with. She though “if I’m having this trouble – what must the students do”. In that class – we required everyone in the class to sign up for an interview. She kept track of what was going wrong – mainly parentheses and quotes. She interviewed students and had them solve problems out loud. She discovered the rules she listed in her paper about in her paper – misconcpetions like every argument should have parens, or no arguments should have parens. Looking back it was easy to see how they had acquired these misconceptions. The activities were such that they couldn’t easily get rid of these misconceptions. It was easy to see from my lecture notes – how they might improperly generate the rules. Betsy cooked up some exercises that are still used and the problem went away. 7. Learning styles..................a light bulb moment. I was fortuante to particpate in a seminar session with Neil Fleming (Fleming, N.D. and Mills, C. (1992), Not Another Inventory, Rather a Catalyst for Reflection, To Improve the Academy, Vol. 11, 1992., page 137.) on his work with learning styles and inparticular the VARK questionnaire. I was interested in his approaches and the way in which he identified a students perferred method of learning. I had previoulsy been aware of the variery of students needs and attempted to ammend or adapt my approaches in order to be able to fulfill the needs of the range of students. However Fleming highlighted the fact that although I may have recognised a students learning style it was much more beneficial when the students themselves also began to understand their learning style. To this end I began to suggest that my postgraduate students undertook the VARK questionnaire and make me aware of the results (). This approach had a significant impact on the way I managed and resourced a post graduate taught module delivery. I began providing resources for students based on their VARK anaylsis. I also encouraged and guided students in accessing and utilising resources for learning based on their preferred learning style. Wherever possible I created a resource in more than one learning style but this was VERY time consuming, so I began to find resources which supported my own materials. Since that time I have been encouraging students to undertake the VARK questionnaire for their own benefit and I have begun to use a wider range of resources to support their learning.8. Change in the era of cellphones This is a change-in-progress story. In general, my goal is to run a highly-interactive class that involves the students coming up with much of the solution and me helping along the way. The increased prevalence of laptops and cellphones with internet connection makes interaction more difficult sometimes because students get distracted by the technology and don't interact in class. Dealing with this new technology -- leveraging it rather than trying to stomp it out -- is the larger issue I face. So the event that caused a change for me was a student coming up with a definition using wikipedia (for a question that I usually asked as "what do you think X is?"). It let me know that he actually was paying attention in class and I realized I could leverage him in particular. The rest of the course, and indeed every course involving that student through the rest of his career, would be designed so that there were times when we all knew he would provide the formal definition. Student interaction increased, student learning increased, and it was the best run of that particular course that I had in ten years. The problem I now have is -- how do I maintain this change and continue to find ways to leverage their technology. In almost every course someone has a phone with access, but I'm still trying to figure out how to leverage their quick access to the information infrastructure to push us deeper into process and problem solving. I had become really good at being spontaneous and encouraging wide interaction and collaboration but this is a new variable that I haven't mastered in any way at all. I only know that I refuse to believe the solution is to force students away from these devices. 9. the case for change i was teaching a Foundation course in university learning and teaching and the students complained that there was only so much work on butchers paper they could take. they foudn it repetitive and unstimulating, the very things that i did not want to model. i wanted them engaged and connected and constucting understanding through dynamic group discussion. so i decided to change what i was doing, and looked around for what might work. I happened to go to a session on teaching using case study and so decided to try a case. I searched for some, but in the end wrote my own, brainstorming the ideas with my colleagues. i tried it in the next class and asked for feedback afterwards, and have done each time i have run the session. students are engaged and excited by the case and talk most readily and opening about a whole range of issues i had always hoped to cover. i constantly fiddle with details of the case, changing some points and adding or subtracting details, it keeps it fresh, and the discussion a little different every time. i like that 10. Keep limits in the beginning I used to let my students draw flow charts as they would like to draw them and not set exact limits of what they would do. The freedom of the general form of the flow chart, was not helping them to draw it in the right way. They could n't learn! So, I put limits. And say, I want it exactly like that. Don't make anything diffirent. After they did some proccess, I let them do some changes. So my conclusion is, in new fields, where students do n't know what to do and learn for the first time, keep limits. Give some certain forms of what they can do and keep it this way until they really understand what they are doing. Then, you can let them free to change it in their own way. 11. Forced to conform I had been running a Level 3 module for several years and had developed it based on a two-hour weekly seminar, which included interactive activities, mini-lectures and discussion, in groups of 20. The module was very successful - good level of student engagement, popular and above average results. However the Faculty decided to introduce a common module structure across the Faculty and all modules had to have the same delivery approach. We therefore had to change the module delivery to be an hour lecture and an hour tutorial. This meant that we had to redesign the whole module to accommodate a single weekly lecture for the whole cohort (sometimes before and sometimes after the tutorial) and a tutorial (for 20). As a result we were unable to do so much interactive work or cover material in such depth. Students became less engaged and the module was less interesting to teach. 12. Technology Changes Teachers I participated in a course on Teaching with Technology. Although I had aways used technology where I could, this course exposed me to dozens of different tools and uses for these tools in the classroom. I now incorporate many of these tools in my teaching and also keep abreast of new developments by following blogs of others involved in the same process. 13. Show me how I used to lecture on software design to undergraduate students. I would go through the material and discuss notations and processes and give the students some examples in class - the 'normal' approach to teaching students something 'new'. I would illustrate my points in the class by showing various aspects of 'good' design and some 'poor' or weak design. I would then discuss the consequences of poor design and the benefits of good design etc. Students would then have to complete an assignment, in a team - e.g. create a design document for a piece of software using UML. The thing is, students only had images from my slides and some links to guide them. They had no idea still of what I really wanted. I changed my practice for the assessment by giving students a template and by letting them submit a 'formative' version of the assignment that received no grade, only feedback. This is what teaching is really about - letting students try something out, giving them feedback on how to improve and then letting them try again. We don't do this enough, or at least, I didn't. What made me change my practice is a student reminding me - "I have never done this before, I don't know what you want". This caused a fundamental change in my approach to assessment and its purpose. I always assumed that what I taught in the lecture and gave examples of, was enough. I forgot all about the real way we learn and the fact that learning means students should be able to make 'mistakes' and be given the chance to try again. I incorporate this into all my classes now. I am not sure why I 'forgot' it was important to do this, but I am glad I remembered. It's a basic idea really, for good teaching, isn't it?14. New Space, new teaching and learning When I first started teaching, I taught GCSE English to students at a further education college. However, the college had just started to set up 'Flexible Learning Centres' which were open plan, open access and included a range of self-study workbooks and learning resources. It was impossible to teach in a traditional 'chalk and talk' way as there was no whiteboard, the students were spread around the room and other staff and students were using the same room at the time. It was necessary to adapt my teaching methods to suit the space. I created a 'self-assessment' check list for the students to identify the areas they needed to develop and pointed them to the relevant self-study workbooks. I set up small group tutorials, 1-1 sessions and group work activities. There were also a set of PC's in the room and set up a range of computer-marked quizzes (the students loved these!), reference materials etc. This was a very successful approach and contributed to a large increase in our pass rates for the 1 year re-sit classes. 15. Death to essays This anecdote relates to change any years ago but which has some contemporary resonance. When I began teaching in universities a quarter of a century ago I set students essay titles, because that’s what happened when I was a student. For a couple of years I was depressed at the more or less identical rehearsals of textbook material which students handed in. These must have been very dull or them to write, and were certainly dull to mark. So one year I made them devise their own coursework. I encouraged them to select a topic and decide how they wanted to address it, and decide how they wanted to present it too. I didn’t set a word limit because I wanted them to decide what they needed to do justice to the subject matter and how much time they were prepared to spend on it in relation to their other commitments. Whilst a number of people wanted a good deal of support through the process when the work came in, it was much more exciting to mark and there was a sense that many of them had actually got quite interested and enthusiastic about what they were doing and consequently had done much better than they anticipated. So I never went back to setting essay titles. Over the years I learned that many students with difficulties could see their problems reduce considerably once they found something that they could pursue with commitment and dedication. Dyslexic students could spell and construct sentences, the depressed and anxious could be propelled towards greater efforts which ultimately they found rewarding and the night-before-the-deadline merchants could be persuaded to start their work early. Not in every case, of course, but in sufficient numbers to make the process worthwhile. After doing this for a number of years, in 2006 I saw an article in the THES about someone who had allowed his students to devise their own exam questions, and this was presented as if it were an innovation. Similarly, there has been a good deal more discussion about the value of student centred work assignments in the pedagogic literature. Moreover, these days it addresses the PDP agenda, as it enables students, if they wish, to do something related to their future employment ambitions. It also helps with that bugbear of the NSS, feedback. Students are encouraged to come and talk to me about what they’re trying to do, so there are lots of opportunities for feedback early in the module, prior to the NSS. Aside from these instrumental considerations, what it has brought me over the years is the sheer pleasure of seeing young people (and the occasional not so young one) getting interested and enthusiastic about topics that mean something to them. 16. Regular moderating of marking A sample of marking is always reviewed by a fellow academic. I'd been marking quite successfully with good feedback from students that the comments were helpful however my peer commented that I might like to try focussing much more on feed forward advice so that the student could make specific improvements in approach for future assignments. Incredibly helpful. In reviewing peers marking I also pick up on good ideas to incorporate into my own marking style. It's a two way process the "moderated" gets advice and the "moderator" can learn too. 17. Less can be more when teaching programming This is a story of a subtle change in approach rather than a radical change. It was prompted by working with a colleague and observing their practice. I teach programming and have always placed great emphasis on good software engineering practice and students getting the details right. In labs I would always spend time making sure students understood nuances that were missing in their software solutions. My colleagues had a similar approach, so we worked well together. Due to voluntary redundancies, my colleagues left and last year I was supported by a different lecturer, whose main interest did not rely on teaching programming. He is a good and popular lecturer and his style is completely different from mine. His lectures were short (sometimes only 20 minutes long). He concentrated on putting across two or three main ideas in a lively and fun way using cartoon figures or relevant metaphors. He did not go into detail. Sometimes he even misinterpreted the aim of the lecture and taught something different from the accompanying exercises that I and my previous colleagues had prepared. I observed that this did not seem to matter and the students did not appear any less well prepared to tackle the exercises. My colleague was very generous when marking the exercises. He did not look closely at the code and if the student's program was roughly correct, he awarded them full marks. On the other hand, my style is to look more critically and offer suggestions for improvements. My marks were rarely 100%. As a result, my colleague was in demand for marking but marked each exercise very quickly. Students were motivated by the good marks, so attendance was very good. In the past, poorer students became discouraged and their attendance became patchy. The overall results were good with poorer students doing better than previous years. It isn't in my nature to adopt this approach - I do have to point out errors if I see them and there is a lot of important detail in programming. However, I have learned a lot from observing my colleague about the importance of motivation. I have now reduced the content of my lectures and concentrate on the main concepts, not worrying too much about the detail. I have redoubled my efforts to make them lively and interesting. I have learned to trust my students to learn through experience, rather than trying to teach everything. I am also more relaxed about marking the exercises as long as students show understanding of the main learning outcomes. I have learned to let my students make mistakes. 18. Don't do work in your head On a data structure and algorithms exam, I frequently gave students recursive code to do something in a binary tree and asked them to give me the output (there was typically some numeric calculation). I would get 80% incorrect answers. I observed that students would show very little work. I changed the instructions to the problem to include showing the execution tree. Making students show their work flip-flopped the percentages. Typically 80% get correct answers now. 19. Thinking With Your Hands I’m not sure when I started thinking of my classroom as a sensory deprivation chamber. Was it the day, more than a decade ago, when I brought a box of Lego to my Sustainable Development class and asked my students to model a more environmentally friendly, anti-sprawl community? Was it the semester of leave I spent as a visiting social scientist, studying and participating in studio education at a leading school of architecture? Perhaps it was later, when after years of speaking and writing about the strengths of studio education in disciplines with no studio tradition, my university created a multidisciplinary studio-style classroom where my colleagues and I could teach? In any case, the day when, after three semesters of teaching in the studio, my Sustainable Development class was assigned to Olsen 412, the fairly typical undergraduate classroom I’ve described above, was the day I began to feel that my students and I were unwitting participants in a grand but diabolical experiment: “We know that after an extended time in a sensory deprivation chamber people stop being able to think properly. Let’s see if this will happen to our brightest young people!”You may be thinking that it should not matter that the classroom is empty. I’m the professor, and it’s my job to vivify the room and engage the students with my virtuoso performance. All eyes should be on me, all ears open, all fingers still except for taking notes. I should want an empty room: no distractions! And I shouldn’t want any student activity to slow me down—isn’t it best to cover the most material? But I’ve found that my students are far more engaged, alert, and able to absorb information when they are active learners in a classroom rich with materials, and that coverage without understanding is a waste of everyone’s time.After my first successful use of Lego in that undergraduate classroom long ago, I tried Lego again in my graduate interdisciplinary social science seminar. (I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that one of the ways in which the first Lego exercise was a success was that it revealed that my students had not understood the reading or the film on sustainable communities.) I asked my graduate students to use the building toys I provided to model an important concept from their discipline. One student formed Silly Putty into a rectangular solid, then squeezed one dimension to demonstrate a truism of project management: you can have your new product on time, on budget, or with all features, but if you compress one of these, at least one other will expand. Another student built a physical model of the digital “header” of a data packet being routed on the Internet. I built a decision tree out of Tinkertoys, and I’m still thinking fruitfully about that diagram all these years later.At the next class, the students burst out, “Where is the Lego?” I had not planned anything involving Lego for that day, and told them I was concerned that if they were building with Lego they would not be listening. But two students, one of whom was a particularly capable and mature working professional, objected strenuously. They insisted that engaging their hands in simple tasks would help them to listen better. I have since heard this from knitters as well. ********** Now let me invite you into my new classroom, the studio learning space we call the “Lab for Interdisciplinary Design.” I teach here whenever I can. You might notice the large table in the center of the room, composed of smaller tables, so that my students and I can sit around and have a single discussion. We can also pull the tables apart and have several smaller discussions, or work on in-class exercises and projects in small groups. There are shelves full of Lego, Tinkertoys, Post-Its, craft materials, Magnetic Poetry, and a big roll of white butcher paper so that groups can make quick posters, diagrams, or collages to display and discuss.We also have lab benches around the periphery of the room, with Internet-linked computers, glue guns, hand tools, and soldering irons. (What can I say? I’m a social scientist who has become convinced that one of the best ways to promote students’ sense of agency in the 21st century is to teach them to solder.) On the shelves and windowsills are student projects from previous semesters—models of energy-saving houses, concept prototypes of interactive devices (such as the one that reads product barcodes and displays a report on the degree of environmental and social responsibility of the manufacturer), and small handmade posters showing redesigns of our classroom to make it conform to “universal design” principles.The tools, the materials, the furniture, and the projects all announce “this is a space for being active, for making, and indeed for meaning making.” Sennett’s motto, “Making is Thinking,” motivates this space. The Lab promotes student inquiry by giving learners a rich ecosystem of things to inquire about as well as tools to use to support their inquiry. At last my colleagues from across the disciplines and I have a place where we as teachers can truly be “the guide on the side” rather than “the sage on the stage.” We are free to play this role because our students have available to them so many ways to develop and to express their understanding, and to make it visible to us. (A graduate student in Community Psychology said, “This is like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter,” where the things you most need are present and available.)The Lab’s ‘thinking with things’ approach is built on the premise that active, hands on, multi-sensory learning helps students to make sense of what they are being taught. Unlike the lecture in Dewey’s canonical lecture hall, we enlist students’ hands, bodies, and environment. As my friend Alison, a gifted personal trainer at my neighborhood gym, said: “I wish they had taught physics in the weight room. Then I might have understood it better.” Even Piaget, who brilliantly documented the child’s journey toward abstract thinking, did not believe that once we become abstract thinkers in one domain we think abstractly in all domains. When learning something new, even adults benefit from starting from the immediate, using embodied learning as a springboard to abstract understanding. That’s why I’m glad my students and I now have a place of refuge from the sensory deprivation chamber. 20. The day I realised why we need a co-constructed curriculum I prepared a special class for an option module, based upon a topical example. It took a lot of work, but it was well received and crucially, the learners clearly gained the learning outcome, and I sensed this was quite deep learning - motivation, enjoyment, re-application all emerged during the discussion part of the class. The following year I had the same learning outcome to achieve for a mainstream class, and while I had recently inherited the module and found that I had a lot of updating to do, far exceeding the time allowance, I drew comfort that my investment of time the previous year would at least require minimum adaptation for one week's class. But when I looked into their eyes halfway through the introduction I could see that a 15 month old example was no longer topical - indeed most had never heard of something that had been a lead news item a short while ago. I rescued the class by managing to work in a more recent example. But the experience was a bit of a shock. Afterwards I reflected on this and decided where I had gone wrong, was that I had chosen the topical example, and not they. I could not judge what they would find topical or not. I further realised that the optimal solution was getting them to discuss and choose a topical example that exemplified a phenomenon I had just explained to them.21. A virtuous cycle of trust I'm sure many of the stories are from people just wanting to be better teachers, going from good to great or better. I'll be honest, though, that when I started teaching at my current school, my teaching reviews were poisonous -- job-threateningly bad. So, of course, I panicked, but I wasn't sure what to do different. I wasn't teaching differently than I had at the previous school, where my reviews were, if not wonderful, they were fine. So, I started sitting in on colleagues classes, but that didn't help much. I didn't see anything they were doing that was all that different from what I was doing. But I persevered. I wish I could tell you of some epiphany that helped, but I don't think there was one. There has, however, been a virtuous cycle of trust and accommodation. Here's what I mean. When I started out, a colleague reminded me that if I wasn't firm, the students would walk all over me, so I tried hard to be tough. That, I guess, worked okay at the first place, but at the second place, the students seemed to want to be trusted more. I would, for example, grant more extensions when they claimed that they were too busy to get the assignment done by the deadline. I would consult the students about when to have things due. Just last week, I told my students that having assignments due at 5:00 on Friday wasn't working (they were skipping the 2:50-4:00 class in order to do the homework), and when should we move the due-time to. They vote for Saturday at 5:00, voting down Friday at 2:50 and Friday at 9pm. So, they sacrificed their Saturday, but they chose it, and I feel like they appreciated that. This seems to be a virtuous cycle, because the more I trust them, and the more control I give them, the more they seem to deserve it:. They take the course seriously and they do want to do the work. They, in turn, seem to trust me more that I'm trying to deliver the best course I can. I hope you find this story useful. 22. Engaging students in textbook reading I had been lecturing as my standard practice and getting mediocre result on student exams. I did all the preparation, and although I assigned textbook readings, students generally waited until I told them what as really important in the reading. I did all the preparation. I wanted students to do the preparation that I did. In the summer of 2004 I particiipated in a writing across the curriculum workshop and a subsequent train the trainer session. I adopted the reading response question techniques from WAC to my textbook reading and used the student responses as the basis of in-class discussion based on important concepts. Students engaged the material more than once and had to pick the important information with guided but open-ended questions. Generally, test results improved. 23. Blogging for assessment We started teaching an existing optional module on internet culture and communities to level 3 students. The assessment required the students to complete a portfolio of reflective responses to a selection of the topics covered in the module. The idea was that the students would complete these as the module progressed and get formative feedback but there was no clear mechanism for this to take place. At the time (several years ago) we were exploring blogging personally but this was not commonly used in teaching. Given the nature of the module we decided that it would be appropriate for students to keep a blog about their learning on the module and we made this part of the assessment (to replace the reflective portfolio). The students were given some guidance as to appropriate topics to blog about and the blogs were in the public domain. They were also told that they would receive formative feedback on their blogs at specific points in the module. This approach worked very well. Most students did maintain the blog throughout the module rather than producing it retropectively and we were therefore better able to provide formative feedback. The assessment also became much more relevant to the subject matter and introduced the students first hand to internet communities. An added bonus was that in some cases students had the opportunity to interact with people outside of the course who had found their posts and responded to them. This was a strong motivation for the students. We presented our experiences of this at a number of workshops and conferences and we are aware of the approach being adopted by colleagues elsewhere. 24. Encouraging creativity Repeated disappointment with senior projects led us to think deeply about our curriculum. We decided a major issue was less technical and more imaginative -- our students were not choosing to be creative and adventurous in their choices of the project even though they were allowed to do anything they were interested in. The result was modifying our curriculum as a whole to emphasize more creativity. In our earlier programming courses, an A could not be achieved without students exhibiting more effort and pushing a project beyond the basic specs. We designated a few of our elective (to ourselves, not our students) as research-based courses. In these courses we introduced topics, such as genetic algorithms, and then turned most of the cours over to the students to build their own projects, to read and present the literature, and to discuss new ideas. We added more structure to our senior seminar to ask for timelines and student presentations of work related to their project. The net result of our effort has been pretty positive, with a definite increase in the quality of student projects and, we think, to the creative and inventive aspects of our graduating students. Now that it has been going for awhile, our challenge is to make sure we keep the curriculum sharp to keep pushing our students. It isn't clear to me we are doing as well now as we were doing five or six years after our change. 25. Learning Preferences Learning Preferences I attended a keynote lecture about learning preferences and VARK as part of staff development. This really made me think about how students learn and made me reflect on the utility of using only powerpoint and lecture delivery in certain sessions. As a result of this I have radically changed all my teaching to take account of different learning preferences and use multi-media approaches and blended learning activities to engage students with diverse ranges of abilities, skills and learning styles. In classroom teaching I consciuosly try to vary activities to take account of this diversity in the student group 26. Module evaluations work! The most recent experience I have of changing my practice comes from student feedback - some formal and some informal. I asked the students to complete a midway evaluation of the module I was leading. I did not get a large volume of returns, only around 25% of the class, however from those I got, there were some similar comments which were focused on making clear the differences between the subject that I was teaching and the clinical application. I was surprised - I had worked really hard to deliberately merge the two in order that the students could see the relevance of the subjcet to their own practice. However, it becqame apparent that the students could not see where the theoretical subject finished and their practice began, and this was causing them concerns and some confusion. So, I changed some slides for the next week lecture, made a point of emphasising the differences between the theory and practice at the srat of the session, at times during, and then again at the end, and then followed this up be relating back to the differences when I when itno the tutorial at the next teachign session. I know that the differences in my approach worked because the class rep spoke to me after the class and thanked me for taking on board the comments which she was aware had been made in some of the feedback. My plan now is to continue flagging up the difference between theory and practice while continuing to ensure that I always make sense of the material with the students. I plan to monitor this again at the end of the module to see how it might have helped (or otherwise) the students with their learning.27. Activity, Enjoyment, Purpose In 1976, I went to the first Level I clinic (rugby) organised by the National Coaching Certification Program of Canada. I expected a lecture session with films and slides and talented coaches telling me what they did and how I might copy them. What I received instead was an instruction to work with 3 other beginning coaches and a ball in a square that measured 10 yards by 10 yards. In this space I learned how to perform all the basic skills of the game. Every so often, the head coach would stop the practice, demonstrate a detail, usually with the participation of one of the learners who had performed a specific set of actions particularly well, but sometimes with a wayward performer whose mechanical skills were typical of a specific class of learner who showed a specific and common error. The one on one coaching allowed us to oberserve each other and ourselves. We discussed and analysed our own mistakes. We encouraged each other to perform better, quicker, in less and less space, sometimes under the mental pressure of time limits or pressure limits or something similar. The coaching sessions went from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. When I returned to my own lecture room the following Monday, I divided the class into small groups and set them tasks which they could do on their own, assessing and analysing one another. There was no more lecturing from the podium. As a resut, I found I had time to talk to each student and to understand where they were coming from and what particular skill sets they possessed and what new skill sets they needed. I had the time and the space to do this on an individual basis. To state that my teaching had been radically altered in one weekend is to sum up exactly what happened. Activity: the students were now always active; they no longer made notes or sat and listened to me lecturing. Enjoyment: the students were engaged and enjoyed their engagement in the new exercises I was forced to design specifically for them. Purpose: exercises and corrections could be made one on one. Each class had a purpose: more, each execise had a purpose and the students could see and uderstand, immediately, for themselves, the reasons why things were happening and the purpose behind each drill. In addition, by listening to each other and practicing together, they learned new team work skills and new methods of interpretation, judgement, and analysis, things that we talk about as teachers, but rarely obtain from our students. Coup de foudre: a thunderbolt, a streak of lighning that lit up my skies and changed forever, not only me and my teaching, but also the way in which my students learned. 28. Up, down, up: how a desire for improving teaching brought on change, depression, and more change This is a story of repeated change over a long period of time. In 2004, looking for somewhere to present work I did in my further education college, I joined a conference on Computer-Science Education. Finding such a community of people focused on education, and on documenting, testing, sharing their practice, opened up immense possibilities both personally, of making my work meaningful, and professionally. At the same time as I developed my work for students the context I was working in worsened. In an attempt to improve the results (that is, the proportion of qualifying students) in colleges, without funding the effort, increasingly close political control was exerted on further education colleges. Particularly poor was a small-minded, tick-in-the-box approach to teacher training and inspection, where "reflective practice" replaced scholarship and "shared practice" encouraged office politics. This led to a long period of work-related stress, starting precisely at a time when computer science education offered me a little funding and recognition: possibilities were closing as they were opening. Returning from depression I found myself obliged to reduce my work to part-time. Work to share outside my college resumed in earnest. I wanted to transform my approach to teaching and turn around the bitter, demoralised impression that office politics, government interference, and underfunding left me with; I also wanted to create enough recognition for my work, to be able to find an alternative post in a university, where a larger academic community would support my desire to work more meaningfully. More conferences allowed me to maintain contact with a computer science education community, and to join one "creative commons" on teaching databases. This was exhilarating. I returned to teaching with new ideas, a sense of shared purpose, and a growing desire to improve the teaching with the ideas exchanged there. The commons paid off in one more way. I have now found a post in a University - a direct result of the personal transformation brought on by many years of determined search for ways to serve and support students. I am hoping to continue developing my teaching and my desire to support young people.29. Research informing practice in relation to the development of Graduate skills and capacities. I was recently involved in a research project funded by a HEA subject centre focusing on Employer Perceptions of Graduate Skills and Graduate Identities, which involved about 150 companies in my region covering the full range: small, medium and large, public and private etc. The feedback derived from key individuals in these companies was instrumental in identifying which skills and attributes/attitudes employers actually value, and how they value these on appointment, after 6 months and after a full year. The results were quite surprising in many ways and have begun to inform employability strategies at University level. They have also influenced my own approach to teaching and learning - we now have a much clearer picture of what employers actually value and I have begun to engage UG students in dicussing the project findings, many of which focus on what might be loosely termed 'professional capacitie and attitudes', as opposed to 'skills' or 'knowledge' per se. This enables UG students to develop a more robust grasp of the link between their academic studies their personal development and how both can/should prepare them for the world of work and employment. I guess this is a good example of research feeding directly into practice, and an important reflection of the research-led approach to teaching encouraged by my University. I am now starting to plan for 2011/12 and the insights provided by this project will continue to re-shape and inform the way that I build and develop students' skills and capacities in future modules.30. Encouraging positive mindsets to help students to program While visiting Quintin Cutts in Glasgow related to public engagement we chatted about teaching programming which we are both also involved in. He mentioned about Dweck's mindsets and an experiment he had done with the first years that suggested giving open mindset messages had a significant effect on their results. I decided to include the ideas in an informal way as it also tied in with other things I do such as telling anecdotes arguing skills are about hard work and having the strength of will to avoid temptetaion that students have told me was life changing for them. In early lectures I made it clear that my view was that programming is not about talent but hard work and anyone can program. The context is that students come to first year programming with very wide background experiences so it appears to them that some are naturally good and others not. It is a large module with about 160 students. I reinforced this message throughout the term whenever the opportunity came up. I also added notes to feedback sheets about the fact that even if they had done badly, if they worked hard and made use of the feedback they could still become good programmers. The end of term results were the best I have had (though there were other things I did in parallel so it cant definitely attributed to this). Virtually all students who took the summer exam passed and the proportion getting top grades because they demonstrated they could write programs and explain concepts was high. Even at Christmas the grades were noticably higher and it was stunning how many could write programs well in exam conditions even at that stage.31. (Dis)engagement and personally meaningful education I had a student come to my office during my first term teaching. She was having a hard time in her 2nd year of univeristy, was shifting from Science to Social Sciences, and was struggling. She was in an introductory Human Geography class, and she felt lost, not connecting to the material. We were touching on international issues, and she admitted to me that she JUST DIDN'T CARE. I was stunned that she was so honest, and could not respond to her honesty with anything but compassion, even though I was at a loss to imagine how an intelligent person could be so disconnected from social and environmental injustices and suffering that were our topics. I asked the student to tell me what she looked at when she got online; "I only go online to check email". I asked her what section of the newspaper she read; "I don't read the newspaper, unless it is the local one from my small hometown." Why do you read that newspaper?, I asked; "Because it's about people I know and it has direct relevance on my own life." I designed an assignment for that class where students were asked to consider a "favourite place" and use it to explore and consider a wide range of geographic concepts. I did this because I believe that when learning is made personal, it is also made more meaningful. I encouraged the student to choose her own home town as her favourite place, and to begin to think about how globalized processes are affecting things like local agricultural systems. I then told the class that whenever they read about natural disasters or social unrest, to try to imagine what it would feel like if these were happening in their "favourite place," explaining that other people would feel as connected to their places as we each are to ours. It was like a lightbulb going on when they could find that point of connection with people a world away. My initial instinct was to respond poorly to this student, as I had a hard time finding compassion for someone who openly admitted that they couldn't understand why people in Canada cared that a tsunami in Asia and the Phillipines killed hundreds of thousands of people. I connected to her in her context, and tried to show her ways to connect to others. I can proudly say that this is one of my greatest acheivements as a professor, and this student has since expertly completed projects on the experiences of conflict on youth in Northern Ireland, women's and children's rights in the developing world, and gender violence in Latin America. I learned from this student that I can assume nothing about my student's engagement, understanding of "global citizenship", and interest in the world around them. I can, however, show interest in their personal experiences, show them how they are meaningful places to begin academic exploration, and suggest ways that those personal experiences can help make meaningful connections in a global context.32. the challenge of teaching threshold concepts teaching about threshold concepts my colleagues and i were teaching about threshold concepts to teachers within the FE sector with the aim to help them see the threshold concepts that appear in their own curriculum areas.we had read articles about the conept and found it difficult to find a process to share the importance of threshold concepts within a subject to our learners. we felt very challenged. a chance conversation over the phone with my colleague when we tried to unpack the ideas led me to a discussion around teaching chefs (my original curriculum area) and how important it was for them to select the right pan and heat source to make a dish. so fast cooking required a wok and a gas flame. however what i was really teaching was about the transfer of heat and how different metals support or inhibit this process (physics). pans are therefore devised for a specific purpose. relating threshold concepts back to my original teaching made me able to 'see' the concept. almost immediatly i was able to put together a 3 hr session called 'pots and pans and troublesome knowledge'. we delivered this session the following weeks to 36 learners who loved the activites and were able at the end of the session to relate this back to their own area of work, pick out the threshold concepts and also identify the challenges teaching these aspects of their curriculum brought.33. Virtual facilitation I facilitated reflection upon critical incidents in work situations. After some years I decided that I would not meet the students, as the other module staff did, and would relate purely virtually. I only met the students after the results for my part of the module had been declared. I did not provide a bio or a photograph. In open ended feedback, I received frequent messages endorsing the "virtual only" relationship, and several which said "It was much easier to tell you about things that worried me, when you were just a name at the foot of a screen."34. Ethics of 'help' I haven't really had occasion to use this story to change my practise, it is more something that opened up all sorts of questions about collaboration for me, which could go in some far-reaching directions, in terms of the increasing use of on-line tools such as wikis, etc., and the simultaneous concern about plagiarism - as so often in life, one and the same phenomena seem to go in schizophrenically opposite directions. This involves a postgraduate course within the Open University; I tutored on this until last year. This part-time taught MA (the only part-time one in its discipline in the UK) involves 3 different courses, each lasting a year. The final year course is the Dissertation, so for this course my tutorial duties involved supervising the students' 16-18,000 word dissertations. At this time students could get either a 'clear fail', which meant they could resit the course (once only), a 'bare fail', which meant they could resubmit without resitting the course, a 'pass' or a 'distinction'. Two years ago I had a student on this final year of the MA course, who was deeply dyslexic and who claimed also to be 'dyspraxic', and thus not able to use computers - really problematic as the OU is about distance learning, and this student lived 500 miles away from me (I never actually met her), so electronic communications are really important. This second issue was somewhat resolved by her husband acting as amanuensis, reading and printing my email messages, and putting her work into MS Word via dictation, helping with formatting of references, etc. And I did lengthy written summaries of all our many phone conversations. She was a very difficult customer indeed with a long history within the OU as I subsequently discovered, of complaints and demands to be switched to different tutors (in one case, involving then a demand to be switched again to the original tutor!)(She had done her UG degree with the OU also.) Resisting her desire that I only tell her how brilliant she was, not what she needed to change, involved me in some very stressful discussions with her. Her written expression was poor, involving much use of inappropriate jargon, incomplete sentences etc. Her structuring of lines of discussion was also very poor, often 'back to front' as can be typical of dyslexics, and often involving a great deal of fairly irrelevant detail, sidetracks, etc. HOWEVER... she was also a born researcher. In the end she accessed all sorts of unpublished archives, which few other students do at this level. From talking with her I knew that she understood what was significant about them, in terms of the basic approaches this MA course inculcated, and which students did have to show they were aware of. In fact her central thesis was full of interest, and involved subject matter which had not been treated in an up-to-date way at all. Her approach genuinely made a start on redressing this. It could easily have led, I felt, to very interesting and fruitful research at PhD level. So to summarise - we have a student who is highly intelligent, who understands the texts she is reading in terms of quite sophisticated issues, who has a real knack for researching (knowing which archives are relevant, how to handle archivists! etc etc). But whose written expression is very poor indeed, both in detail and in the large sense of structuring a coherent discussion. We got through to her final draft, with hours and hours and hours of work on my part as she had to be given feedback in very specific types of formats. (But with hours and hours of work on her and her husband's part also, while simultaneously helping out a daughter with serious health problems to care for a granddaughter.) At this point she submitted the 400-word 'Abstract' required, which is the very first item the second reader would encounter. This was appallingly badly-written. We had many drafts back and forth but all her changes always seemed to make things worse. So - and this is the point of this story - I finally rewrote the Abstract myself, from beginning to end, though sticking with the student's phraseology, etc, as much as I possibly could. I certainly did not change what I felt was the student's INTENDED line of discussion. I looked on this in fact, as a work of translation, and thus justified it to myself. Unfortunately the task of writing a concise, coherent SUMMARY of her actual achievement, - which I still feel was admirable! - was simply one she could not deal with because of the nature of her processing problems. I knew that the Abstract would be the first thing the second reader would read. I also knew that starting their assessment of that MA with her version of the Abstract would be really damning, and the thought of this student failing was just a risk I did not want to take. But I still don't know whether this was the right thing to do, and the second marker's comments made me particularly uneasy. Basically, she said that this MA was almost at Distinction level, because of the quantity and quality of the research; only the basic line of argument seemed not quite to achieve Distinction level. I had to ask myself at that point, what would her report have said, had I not rewritten that Abstract? I think it would have been quite a different story. Discussing this with a friend who tutored undergrads. in the same brick Uni I'd worked in, she had a very similar story - a student who was deeply dyslexic, but very bright, who ended up getting a FirstClass mark on their undergrad. dissertation - with a LOT of help from my friend! Both of these stories do have worrying implications, because I know that decisions about who to admit to PhD programmes, can be based on looking at undergrad. dissertations, to say nothing of MA ones. Later that year, by chance I found myself in company with a whole bunch of senior academics in a completely different discipline (a science one) from various higher-ed institutions in the US (including Stanford and Harvard if I remember rightly). I asked them if they ever had similar problems with students on taught MA programmes, and it was as if I'd opened a floodgate. Everyone had similar stories. Broaching this subject on the on-line forum for all the tutors on the OU course, had similar results, and also started quite a passionate debate on the ethical issues involved.35. As a student I need lots of small brain breaks At the end of every course I teach, I always do a retrospective. So a workshop with the students that looks at what occured on the course (so a nice revision) as well as understanding what worked well, what didn't work so well and what remained a bit puzzling to the students. We do this exercise with the intent of me changing the course for the next time the course is run, and I normally tell a story about what a previous group of students has changed for the course I am currently teaching. This is an example of one change I made. The course is a week long and squeezes a full semester into a week (9am to 5.30pm). The feedback from the students was that it was too tiring ... and as we dug into that in more detail, it was that 3 x 30 min case study presentations was too much for them to handle without a break, it was too intense. At the time the course was cut into 90 minute chunks with 30 min breaks in between and a 60 minute break for lunch. The simple change I made was to adjust the sessions so it was a 60 min chunk with 15 min breaks in between ... this pace works much better.36. Can't get digital precision in an analog world In Artificial Intelligence, after the first round of assigning projects on LEGO robots, i realized that robots are as imprecise as analog machines. So asking students to meet "strict digital precision with analog robots" was insane - students spent inordinate amounts of time "putzing" aroud with the robots instead of learning the concepts. Solution: I asked them to thereafter "externalise" the state of software instead.37. Learning from (Computational) Singing OK, so I have always played guitar and sang as a hobby, but never considered injecting this work into my teaching. As I was walking my daughter in her stroller, I started singing a song that eventually became "The Recursion Song" (which can go on forever, but rarely past ten verses :). I sang the song for my wife, and she asked, "Well, why don't you sing this to you students?" I then replied, "Because I really like my job." In other words, I was afraid that such an activity would not be viewed as professional enough for my College.I think it was only a few weeks later that I discovered that a professor in the physics department had been singing to his classes for years. Armed with this new information, I started writing a few more songs and singing them to the introductory courses on a Friday as a reward. The students did not really laugh at me (as far as I could tell), but did laugh at certain concepts were covered in the song, especially infinite loops and recursion. I even have a computing carol about loop invariants.Once I had about five songs I sat down and began assessing the impact of the songs on student attitudes. I was amazed about not only how popular they were but how much they were appreciated. I composed and submitted a paper to a regional CCSC conference, which not only was accepted but was awarded best paper. I have since been invited as a banquet speaker/performer a couple of times, and even been able to get students to submit original work.In other words, it seems that effective ideas can come from the most unexpected places; moreover, teaching students is more than providing material, but connecting in whatever way works.38. From Crisis to CoreDogs This may be too dramatic and broad to be of use, but here goes. It started in 1999, with infidelity, divorce, psychiatric treatment, ... nasty stuff. It caused me to think about my life. I studied various topics in the mind sciences. That included moral psychology, the study of how people decide on what is right and wrong. Another field I studied was positive psychology, particularly the parts about happiness. John Haidt's recent book summarizes the implications of the research for average people. I also read philosophy, particularly ethics. But I found it less useful. As I was studying, I started to rethink various aspects of my own life. That was the goal of the work in the first place, so I suppose it worked. I realized that I had been failing in one of my main professional duties: teaching. So was my university, and the academic social system I was (and am) part of. Students give us time and money, and trust us to help them build a future. We violate their trust. Faculty focus their scholarly efforts on research. Teaching is something to be done as quickly as possible, so we can get back to the "real" work. My response was to study the various disciplines that encompass learning science. Much is known about learning, and how we can support learning. I discovered that I had not been doing a good job in the classroom. I also found that the standard textbooks for my field - information systems - don't support learning well. After one false start, I decided to improve my intro Web courses. They are skill-building courses, and the learning science literature has much to say about how they should be organized. Some highlights: * Deep learning. Think four chapters, not twelve. Help students learn to use a few concepts, rather than memorizing many ideas without being able to apply them. * Outcomes. Focus on what the students should be able to do at the end of the course. Only include material relevant to those goals. * Feedback. Give students many exercises, and fast, formative feedback. That is, don't just give a grade. Tell them what they did wrong, and give them a change to resubmit. * Personal help. Make sure there is an expert students can go to. The expert should be able to diagnose students' misconceptions, and help correct them. * Metacognition. What students think about their learning is important. Acknowledge their frustration. Suggest how they might respond. Doing these things requires a complete rethinking of the way intro Web tech courses are run. I designed new courses and built an online tool to support this way of learning. I'm a geek, and am fortunate to have the skills to do that. The tool is online at . It's free, and anyone is welcome to use it. BTW, I know that this story is not anonymous any longer. That's OK with me. The courses run like this. Students work independently through an "active book." The content follows guidelines from learning research, e.g., simple language, concrete examples, appropriate use of media (e.g., Mayer's research), etc. The content has metacognitive elements. Two virtual students accompany the reader through the book. These students model metacognition in various ways. For example, they challenge the author (me) about the relevance of some of the content. They say when they're overwhelmed with new information, and ask for help in dealing with it. Students submit many exercise solutions. They enter their solutions directly into the content. There is no artificial separation between content and application in CoreDogs. They work together naturally. There is a sophisticated "grading" mechanism for instructors. I used the quotes because assigning a score is not the goal. The goal is to tell students exactly how their solutions are deficient, if they are. Students get comments alongside their solutions, again embedded directly in the content. There's also a discussion thread for each exercise. Any user can share his/her experiences. The instructor's feedback workflow is streamlined to within an inch of its life. I eliminated every mouse click and keystroke I could. Each exercise has a rubric that is presented to grader, along with the exercise, and a student's solution. This reduces recall effort, and improves feedback consistency. Getting the feedback system right was very important. Most faculty are not rewarded for teaching. That will not change, at least not very quickly. I wanted to let faculty improve their teaching, without spending a huge amount of time on it. With CoreDogs, there is no need for a professor to sacrifice his/her research career to improve teaching. Maybe that should be a slogan: "CoreDogs - no martyrdom needed." :-) How does the time trade-off work? The extra time spent on feedback is compensated for by the elimination of lectures. But that only works because the feedback system is streamlined. There's much more to CoreDogs than I will explain here. Details are on the site at . The CoreDogs Way has incredible potential. A few faculty could get together and create a pedagogically effective active book. Just by themselves, no publisher needed. They could sell the book for maybe 20% of the price of a traditional text, and make a handsome profit. If many small faculty teams did this? A better HE system, without requiring institutional change. So there's the story. You can attribute it if you want. Let me know if you have any questions. Oh, and I'd like to get instructors to try CoreDogs, and give me feedback to improve it. It costs them nothing. If you have ideas about how I might contact intro Web tech instructors, please let me know. Kieran Mathieson kieran@39. A Plan a Day Keeps the Naps Away so one semester i decided that i should actually be reflective and i decided that one of my goals had been to be a really active teacher, but i wasn't doing that. so i decided i should have a plan for one of my classes that was to include active learning exercises (something active) in every class that semester. it worked! in my lesson plans i specifically thought about the content and what would be an active way of connecting to that content for every class. sometimes it would be something happening at the beginning, sometimes the middle, sometimes the end. because i had it planned, it was something that was seamless in the presentation of the class as opposed to a "hmm.. i wonder what I could do?" this took a couple years of teaching to realize i had to actually plan this in my teaching. ok this is EXACTLY when we're going to do think/pair/share, this is exactly when i'm going to have them walk through problems, this is exactly when we're going to do group problem solving. i taught this class for five years, and that one semester of planning had an impact on the class every time i taught it. it was totally worth it. 40. Lighting a fire I was reading a book and stumbled upon a quote that was written in one of the margins: "Teaching is not filling a bucket; it's lighting a fire". This really resonated with me in my role as a computer science lecturer. I constantly spent time worrying about "covering" all of the material in class. There just never seemed to be enough time to get through all the nitty-gritty syntactical details that are necessary to successfully becoming competent in many of the objectives of the course. However, once I read that quote, I began to realize that my job is really to create moments for the students where they want to learn these details, rather than simply lecturing about the details themselves. My lecture plans shifted from talking about semi-colons and parenthesis to outlining interesting program ideas/usage scenarios/reasons to want to write a program and then developing the code in real time. Students are still exposed to syntax in lecture, but I truly believe my most important objective is to get them excited enough about the possibilities being able to write programs affords that it movtivates them to seek out and understand the syntactical details through practice on their own time.41. modelling it and thinking out loud I was running a three hour workshop for the tird time to get students (who were also associate teachers gaining a basic teaching qualification) - getting them to prepare for an assessment that focused on dealing with diversity in the classroom. It was a very diverse group (experience, nationality, discipline, level of commitment to teaching, ideas and assumptions about teaching). I had run the session three times before for other cohorts and the format seemed fine. Input by me, set up work groups of three where they work on each other's critical incidents (so, asking them to tell their story .... perhaps that is why I thought of this for this exercise). They got back the advice from their colleagues, each group got to see and work on three different issues, and they applied the advice I gave beforehand. Except the last thing didnt happen. The results were always disappointing in terms of product, underpinning rationale, any kind of theory..... all the stuff I had provided before they write their story and workshopped each other's stories. . They didnt use the input to give advice to the person who wrote the story. They didnt pay attention to the assessment criteria which I has signalled. They fell back on quick conclusions, facile advice and steroetyping. So, I added a middle bit: modelling one myself. Then and there. I thought out loud, made overt links to the input. Referred to the assessment criteria as I worked through the template. I wrote up points on the whiteboard and stepped back and modelled reflection. Not just acting it, but doing it (I hope) though with a more theatrical slant perhaps. The assessments were better for this group - richer reflection, more theory, wider set of options etc. But then it could just be a bettter group. 42. Putting the spotlight on context in engineering design I was tasked with revamping and teaching an intro to engineering design course for pre-major, engineering-bound undergraduates. One substantial, new component of the course was an emphasis on consideration of contextual factors in engineering design, a topic that previous offerings of the course had not covered much. My decision to make this change in the course was mainly for two reasons. First, my research background in engineering education focuses on the importance and relative lack of consideration of context by undergraduate engineering students. Second, recognizing that conventional engineering courses (which most of my students would go on to take) tend not to discuss consideration of context, I wanted this intro course's content to supplement this conventional coursework. p.s. The intro to engineering design course is slated for cancellation due to budget cuts. Discussion about how to reconfigure the course has been all but cancelled. 43. For the love of teaching. Teaching was always a trip for me except for one activity, grading, in particular final exams. "Who the hell taught them this non-sense?" I repeatedly asked myself. Then I made a change. I started "buying" courses. For a small nominal fee, and a little story about teaching research, I was` given a reduced teaching load. The less I taught the more enjoyable teaching became. 44. 'Recycling' graduate experience in to undergraduate teaching I invited one of my graduates in to address current undergrtad's; it made me think what a HUGE resource our graduates represent in terms of sharing current material with students, showing them what careers may be open to them, and being able to be 'nosey' in asking recent graduates things like - 'do you like your job', 'how much do you earn'?! It's made me 'use' graduates much more purposefully in teaching for - placements, live project visits, live assessment tasks, guest lectures, field trips etc. It also means that I keep the link with graduates......and they are invariably flattered to be asked. 45. Teaching a course no-one likes Initially, I optimistically believed that all students should be interested in my courses. By "should" I mean that either they are, or I am supposed to make them interested. Until one year I was assigned a course that virtually no-one liked, including myself. And then a miraculous thing happened: sharing the dislike to the course with my students, I could finally understand that you can make classes enjoyable and useful, without making students like the course. The approach we took was to fight the monster together, and it worked. The brotherhood of fighters emerged effortlessly: I think we all liked the classes even if we did not like the topic. And I am sure students benefited quite a lot. This incient made me change my approach to disinterested students. I simply focus on preparing them to the exam: they notice this immediately, and appreciate it. This makes them more willing to cooperate and sometimes even develop a taste for the subject.46. Individual differences in preference for sound animation When giving lectures (as a postgraduate) I used to play around with the animation on powerpoint quite a bit, and had text swooshing in, and had sounds attached to the text coming in, and I remember being observed by my Head of Dept. who at the end, gave feedback on the lecture as a whole (which was generally good) and then said 'and for God's sake, get rid of those noises every time a bullet point comes in!' When I went back to my office (feeling rather embarrassed), I played through the lecture and realised that this was, indeed, very annoying and did not look very professional. I have not since added sound animation to my slides when lecturing (unless specifically an audio clip, like an extract from a song or something). What was particularly interesting about this experience, is that as part of the observations (which were for my PG Cert in Learning and Teaching in HE) I also asked the students to reflect on 3 negative and 3 positive aspects of the lecture, and having read the comments at the end of the lecture in week 2, and week 3, it turned out that some of the students had liked these noises as it kept them engaged and awake (it was statistics lecture at 9am in the morning), whilst other had really disliked them.47. Case study questions Have you tried giving students the questions but not the case study which underpins them? Maybe this mainly applies to business type programmes, but it could well have an application to other discipines. The normal approach is to provide a case study, let the students do some research and understand it fully, then provide some questions in an examination for them to answer. The problems with this approach are twofold: firstly it is very easy for the majority of students to predict the questions, if not exactly then the broad target area. Secondly it focuses the students' attention on the specific case study as opposed to giving them an understanding of the models and tools needed to respond to a more general situation. There is probably a third disadvantage in that the work submitted will be very lengthy and will often be really boring to read after the first 20 scripts. On one occasion (and I can't remember why) I did it the other way round - I provided the questions a few days in advance, but not the case study. The questions were naturally anonymised, so I couldn't say "What techniques did Richard Branson use.....?". Of course I had to provide a case study that was sufficiently short to be able to read and digest in a relatively short period of time, but I found that the great advantage of this approach was that students couldn't predict the case study, therefore they had to know much more about the problem solving techniques in order to succeed. That meant that "mugging up" was not possible, and only students with a genuine understanding of the subject could apply their learning. The results were a lot less lengthy (because the reading/digesting time had to be taken out of the exam so I couldn't ask for as much - yet I got a wider spread of marks), and the variation was a lot more interesting. This system also meant that I could genuinely test some of the learning outcomes of both the award and the module - outcomes such as fast evaluation of a situation, synthesis in reading, focusing on the key elements of a question, organising a competent answer at short notice..... In fact, this approach was also favoured by (many) students because it prevented any form of collusion or prior preparation of answers, and it was much more akin to a real-life situation where a boss will ask for a report this evening (or yesterday) and he/she doesn't want to read reams of extraneous material before getting to the heart of the matter. It probably works best with level 6 and 7 students, and as I say is more appropriate for some disciplines than others, but it's a great way of cutting down on your marking whilst providing a bigger spread of marks within the group.48. Assessment Kills Learning. Assessment kills learning. That's my conclusion after delivering a series of modules in H.E. where all the students focus on is on the assignment. From day 1, it's question after question about the assessment! What am I doing about this? I am starting a new module (Qualitative Modelling - computer models and simulations in education) and I am not going to give the students the assessment; (not on day one anyway). I am going to set session activities and follow up patchwork activities which they need to complete and upload to their eportfolio. I shall provide feedback and further suggestions (to help their learning). I want students to synthesise learning across the module outcomes and build on the 'headroom' that is built in to those modules (in other words, they can attain the basic threshold, but I want them to aspire to bigger and better things). Anyhow, they won't know which of the patchwork activities counts towards the assessment, because I am not going to tell them. The weekly activities will provide the learning opportunities and the formative techniques which (when mastered) will contribute a fair bit to the final assignment. I will however, need to provide assignment details probably half-way through the course; but certainly not on day 1. 49. Moving to concentrated learning and teaching For many years I used the lecture-seminar format when teaching sociology. I have taught other subjects where such a format was used far less frequently. Anyhow it occurred to me that I was spending too much time teaching/speaking in lectures and students were not spending enough time learning and showing their learning to each other and me. This was not a matter of simply increasing the amount of group work. So I decided that where I could I would shift the module to asingle weekly two hour slot, would discuss with colleagues teaching on the modules how we could use this time period. That was not a problem as my colleague on the two modules concerned for undergraduates and several colleagues on the three slot we do in evenings for postgraduates were keen on this. So we changed. Now the lecture part might come mid way thorugh the session, or even at the end of the session. It rarely comes at the start. Now we ask students to bring their reading and issues to the sessions. This was scary - would they do it? I intorduced a fair bit of formative assessment - the two undergraduate modules have three peices off ormative assessment each as well as online support. They do turn up - attendance has not dropped below 78% in any session for five years now. Pass rates have remained constant but the numbewr securing 60+ final mark has improved and has doen so within reasonabel limits. Thus the 40+ category has moved markedly closer to the high 40s and it is non-participants who fail. The 50s are distributed as before and the 60+ have moved away from the 60/61 line and we have more clear mid 60s. External examiners have all been happy with the two modules concerned. Both are on historical-comparative sociology It is not dissimilatr with the taught postgrad modules which ar eon philosophy of research for social science50. Guided Slides Several years ago, I taught in a classroom with no white or chalk boards. So that I could write examples for the students, I started using a tablet PC and Classroom Presenter from the U. of Washington. This has evolved into a set of "guided slides" that are partially completed that I finish in lecture, and posted soon thereafter. Students routinely report that this approach is better than pre-completed slides. 51. Using Student Exam files to your advantage At my university, there is a substantial student culture of "examination files", mostly maintained by the fraternities and sororities on campus. This puts extra pressure on instructors (well, at least the conscientious ones) to continually change their exams from term to term, for fear that students will simply memorize old answers and repeat them by rote, without really 'learning' the material. My 'typical' exam for a course has a variety of types of questions, at different levels of Bloom's taxonomy and/or difficulty. While the larger, more open-ended questions clearly are less amenable to rote memorization, the simpler questions usually are, which makes it even more critical to keep changing them. Or so I used to think. A few years ago, it occurred to me that, for those sort of simple "rote recall" questions, it didn't really matter whether or not they had appeared on previous exams. If the students learned the answer, did it matter whether or not they learned it from my notes, or the textbook, or from an old exam? Not really. The important point was that students learned the material, not that they had learned it while sitting in my particular class. This particular story was prompted by Henry Walker's comment at the "Sharing Stories" session at SIGCSE. He noted that it's not really important what we say; what's really important is what they learn. It was also prompted by another remark from someone else about using student behaviors (e.g. cellphone, laptop use in class) to our advantage. 52. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in student programming A few years back, I participated through the University of Washington Tacoma campus in a Disciplinary Commons run by Josh Tenenberg; "A Disciplinary Commons involves a group of educators from diverse institutions who teach within the same discipline meeting monthly during an academic year to share, reflect on and document their teaching. The participants prepare a course portfolio, describing their own teaching of a particular module during a single academic term; additionally they critique each other’s portfolios, and visit each other’s classrooms. This combination of critical self-examination and peer review helps participants understand their own teaching, identify places where innovation and change are desirable, share what works, borrow from others, and see their own teaching in the context of a broad range of possibilities." One change in my teaching from that experience was the creation of a student feedback mechanism for beginning programming student homework which I called "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" after the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western movie (1966). In the process of grading student homework, I took screen snapshots of program code, execution runs, etc. for the purpose of showing them examples of what would be consided "good", "bad" and yes even "ugly" from what they learned in class and the learning outcomes as related to the specific assignment. These "snapshots" were anonymous and shared in front of the whole class where we then discussed the pros and cons of what they saw. This led to a reduction in future homework for common mistakes, better understanding of the goals of assignment, and motivated many students to turn in superior work. The student themselves have indicated to me that they found this student feedback tool to be helpful in their learning and I continue to use in my beginning programming courses.53. How I learned to love toys in class During one of my first semesters of teaching, though I was doing my best to be engaging and involving of my students, I realized one day as I prepped that I was feeling somewhat bored -- we were entering the last third of our semester and we were all probably feeling worn out. So instead of prepping that afternoon, I wandered out to a toy store, hoping to find something that would amuse me. In the toy store, wandering about, I saw some baby toys called "bear links." That reminded me of the linked lists I was supposed to be worrying about for class... so I decided to get them and use them in class. I pause to note that bear links are superior to monkeys from barrel-o-monkeys because it was easy to do multiple links hooking to a single node -- trees would be achievable using these toys. As I worked with the links planning the lecture, I realized the best way to this was to think about the bear, a link, and a node that holds both. This required some extra work to pull some bear links apart. It turns out the plastic used for baby toys is actually pretty tough to saw through, particularly if you only have a pocket knife. And then I discovered that the toys can be snapped apart pretty easily. So in class I started by talking about bears (Yogi, in particular) and then on keeping track of bears. At this point I pulled out a bear node and a link -- that got a raised eyebrow reaction from the students. As I started talking about the value of dynamic memory I spilled out the entire box of links -- and that got a reaction. (Much better energy than we'd had in awhile.) The revelation to me was when I then put them in groups with these toys and asked them to design solutions for adding new bears to the list. They quickly came up with ideas that they were happy to share. And though the toys didn't quite succeed in one sense -- not all solutions were correct, they quickly saw what went wrong when we demonstrated at the front with the links and poor Yogi flew off to the depths of hell because they didn't keep him linked as they added new bears. So what I learned was that finding some way to shock the senses a bit would help increase interactivity and in turn improve the attempts to learn inside the classroom. This change moment continues to challenge me as I think about designing classes even many years later. 54. Evaluation of teaching Critical Evaluation of Teaching Plans Introduction The focus is on the critical evaluation of three teaching plans. I will be reflecting on the design of the teaching plans which targeted a group of ITE (Initial Teacher Education) students’. Reflective teaching is the “involvement in a dynamic, continuous, reflexive process, an active researching of one’s own practice leading to self monitoring, reflection and change.” (Warwick, 2007, pg7) I will particularly explore, evaluate and reflect on modelling and active learning in HE (Higher Education), and its possible impact on deep and surface learning and its relationship to the students’ professional practice in the classroom. The consideration for redesign of some teaching plans will give me the opportunity to show how I developed my thinking as a result of feedback from tutors and students, further reading and my own professional experience. There has been research regarding the positive outcomes from active learning, “students value active, co-operative and tradition learning activities….in Higher Education there are calls for active learning …rather than accept students as passive learners” (Jungst et al 2003, in Machemer & Crawford, 2007, pg 9) Further supporting this Synder wrote “active learning methods generally result in greater retention of material.” (Synder, 2003, pg161), thus supporting the deeper learning obtained through active learning. However, “quality of our students’ understanding is intimately related to the quality of their engagement with the learning task” (Ramsden, 2003, pg 17); thus implying that the quality of the active learning and task provided leads to the overall success. In my critical commentary I will explore active learning, modelling and diversity within the series of seminars and look at how my philosophy for the teaching of the module was brought about from the overall aims, intended learning outcomes and indicative content stated on the mdf (module descriptor form – appendix 1). Situational Analysis The following is a situational analysis of the three sessions taught. The three sessions were part of a total of five sessions forming QEP902, a 10 credit qualificatory module forming part of the second year of a three year degree for BA with QTS (Qualified Teacher Status). The module was validated in May 2003 and first taught in 2005 (see mdf appendix 1). Although not revalidated the indicative content is broadly revisited each year. The content is based on key requirements needed by students for their school placements; this can change slightly due to feedback from students, placement schools or government legislation, e.g. assessment is now based around assessment for learning, and planning, such issues as differentiation and use of adults in the classroom. Clearly the mdf (module descriptor form – appendix 1) also drives the learning objectives of the session. The notion of the mdf (module descriptor form – appendix 1) driving the learning objectives of the sessions fits in with Biggs (1999) Constructive Alignment , which has two elements: ? Students constructing meaning from what they carry out to learn. ? The lecturer aligns the planning of learning activities to the learning outcomes. Therefore the curriculum is designed so that the learning activities and assessment is aligned with the learning outcomes of the mdf for the module. Adapted from Biggs (1999, pg27) This module is taught on four campuses, Lancaster, Ambleside, Carlisle and London. I co-ordinate the delivery at Ambleside, Carlisle and London which deliver the three year degree; Lancaster is co-ordinated separately as it forms part of the four year degree and the delivery does not coincide with the other campuses, however content is broadly similar. As the module is taught on three campuses, as co-ordinator, I write session plans for the delivery to eight groups of approximately 24 students. There are five members of staff involved in the delivery of the module, therefore the session plans are detailed and often include resources ready for print, or key web links… Due to ensuring equality across the campuses we do aim to broadly cover the same activities, the learning objectives remain the same but there is freedom for staff to adapt and change activities according to the diverse needs of the students. There is very good email communication between staff and we aim to share our ideas and expertise on different areas and good practice is communicated by all. Active learning often requires the need for a much wider range of resources. Due to this it was important to list key resources required on the lesson plans. It is also part of teaching to ITE students that we at times aim to model what is required within a primary classroom situation; planning and preparation of high quality resources is required of ITE students, ITT QTS standards, 2006, state a requirement as “using a range of teaching strategies and resources” (, accessed 1/5/08), and we expect ourselves as tutors to be good role models. In the three year degree the students study for three EPC modules and three QEP modules run by Education Studies. The differences are in both content and assessment. The EPC modules are assessed across the three years at the end of each module by either an assignment, presentation, blackboard postings or exam. The content is best described as of an ‘academic’ nature requiring attendance at lectures and seminars and further reading of books, journals…. is also essential. The content of the QEP modules is based on the needs Taken from the year 2 placement booklet of the student to become qualified teaching professionals and meet and required standards. The QEP modules are assessed during the school placements; where the student is assessed by the associate tutor and link tutor against criteria which cover aspects taught on the module. Example of one criterion is given below. Very Good Good Satisfactory GRADE 1 GRADE 2 GRADE 3 ? Is systematic in their use of assessment, consistently make accurate assessments of pupil achievement, and uses a variety of methods including: observation, questioning, testing and marking; ? Consistently makes accurate assessments of pupil achievement, and uses a variety of methods including: observation, questioning, testing and marking; ? Is usually able to make accurate assessments of pupil achievement, and uses a variety of methods including: observation, questioning, testing and marking; In analysing the constraints on course/curriculum design the impact of external stakeholders in Education, for example; the government, TDA (Training & Development Agency for Schools), Department for Children, Schools and Families, QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority), to name but a few, can not be ignored, and have a great bearing on the emphasis of the content. Therefore taking Barnett’s Curriculum model (2001), the above stakeholders may influence: the ‘knowledge’ we as tutors must teach or facilitate the learning of; ‘self’ because being the critical reflective practitioner is within the ITT standards (within TDA); and ‘action’ the competencies are modified and amended according to constant change and new initiatives brought about by external bodies. Fraser & Bosanquet, 2006, conceptualised the curriculum into four categories, one of which was “the structure and content of a programme of study” (Fraser & Bosanquet, 2006, pg 272); here the content is prescribed and it is seen that professional bodies dictate to some degree and that the nature of knowledge is therefore what is relevant to the discipline. This element can be seen through the impact of key stakeholders in Education on the curriculum of the three year degree. However, external bodies can also impact on the philosophy and aims of the whole of the three year degree programme which in turn can have a bearing on the aims of the programme which can influence the curriculum content and learning which takes place in each module. What we as lecturers place in the module has a bearing on the teaching professionals we ultimately produce. Philosophically the course content can have social, ethical and moral implications; and it is also a factor to a deep, significant viewpoint of knowledge. (Cited Light and Cox, 2001) The course, as does the whole degree programme, addresses professional views, and a great deal of Education Studies in the three year course encourages the students to explore and consider their principles, ethics and values. Long term, the students we are teaching need to understand that their philosophy, culture, socio background, values and beliefs will have an influence on their pupils and hence society. Pollard, 1994, wrote “the consequences of our actions as teachers may show in the perspectives, attitudes and behaviour of children whom we may influence. Indeed to ‘socialise’ children into the ‘values of society’ has often been part of a teacher’s role.” (Pollard, 1994, pg 275) Outline Plans There are three session plans included consecutively in the appendix (appendices 2, 3, & 4). I have not included all the handouts as these are not directly linked to the assignment. These sessions had themes of: differentiation, assessment and working with others. Two of these elements can be seen in the indicative content of the mdf (appendix 1) and working with others/as a team shows the fluid dynamics of the course and how the curriculum changes as the knowledge needs to take a new shape and new topics emerge (cited Barnett, 2001, pg 440). The three topics of the sessions are assessed on the student’s second year school placement and seen as key areas for professional development. Although the assessment takes place in school the objectives and activities are aligned to module assessment, an example of Biggs constructive alignment (Biggs, 1999). Differentiation is the focus of the first session (see appendix 2). The objectives of the session being: to be familiar with different approaches to differentiation and to be able to identify possible strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. My main aim was to be as sure as possible that the students are aware of the many different ways that differentiation can take place in the classroom. Therefore there were five different activities based around the differentiation theme before moving onto a more tentative link to differentiation, that of grouping. The first activity took the words: resource, response, task, outcome and support and asked students to match phrases to these, e.g. ‘Matthew is retelling the story ‘Dear Zoo’. He uses a wordbank on the computer to match starts and ends of sentences, and retell the story in the correct order.’ The students decided on the method of differentiation described. Activity two and three further explore the understanding of the words related to differentiation, thus aiming to deepen the learning. The fourth activity then involves the students in considering possible benefits and disadvantages to the types of differentiation. I aimed to model a range of interactive teaching and learning strategies in the session. I believe it is important as teacher educators that we integrate into our sessions the modelling of good practice to the students. In our modelling we are attempting to scaffold their learning, widen their experience. Drawing on Vygotsky’s ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development), 1962; like the children the students will be teaching, we aim to take them beyond the point of their current learning and into a new zone. accessed 18/5/08 The emphasis on working in groups brings us back to Bruner, 1966, who put an emphasis on the social context of learning, “and that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.” (, accessed 18/5/08) Matching learning activities to learning theory is I believe something which the students struggle with and needs to be an element that is explained more explicitly. This modelling of interactive strategies was included within the group activities, the discussions that took place within these groups, feedback to the whole group, and the debate which incorporated a participatory approach to learning (see activity 7, appendix 2). Assessment was the focus for the second seminar (see appendix 3). The objectives for the session being: to have an understanding of the purpose of assessment, to introduce assessment for learning and to analyse more deeply the methods of assessment. Once again I aimed to incorporate a variety of teaching strategy ideas to the students, and also involve them in active learning; therefore I was getting them to analyse and discuss points within the seminar rather than offering an obvious answer. These first two seminars are preceded each time by an hour lecture which sets the scene for discussion and active learning in the seminars. The seminars are not intended as a time where the lecturer stands in front of the students and gives out knowledge, the seminars are intended to check, correct, and stretch their knowledge and understanding. The third seminar in the sequence of sessions focused on team work and working with others, and I wanted this to be part of the activities within the seminar. Student feedback (see appendix 6), showed the students felt the variety of different teaching strategies was a strength of the module and ‘tag team presentations’ were very well received. This active involvement seemed to bring home their learning about being part of a team and led well into the theoretical element on Belbin. As with the seminar on differentiation, I used a Teachers TV clip. Teachers TV offer a range of resources for teachers, students, governors… that can help with Continued Professional Development, if they are reviewed prior to use and checked for suitability many of the videos can provide a classroom based case study for analysis. Before beginning the critical analysis it is necessary to place these seminars in the context of the ‘new’ degree. For September 2008, there has been a re-validation of the three year degree and these seminars no longer stand as delivered previously. The elements discussed: differentiation, assessment, working with others… will be covered in new modules, and I currently believe the modelling of good practice and bias towards active learning will continue to take place. Critical Analysis In the critical analysis I particularly want to focus on modelling and active learning that is taking place in the seminars as I believe these aspects are where I would be looking to decide what I keep and reject when redesigning these seminars. My main aim is to increase the deep learning rather than surface learning of the students. As highlighted on a PowerPoint slide “deep learning is more easily retained… it is useful in professional practice… it encourages broader understanding of the context… involves integrating new ideas with existing learning” (PGC LT HE PowerPoint, 2008, slide 6). More importantly to my reflection “Good teaching… encourages students to adopt a deep approach.” (Biggs, 2003, pg11) I also believe the taxonomy table by Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, (see below) helps me reflect on what dimension I want to take my students; and I personally deem it important that I should challenge them to reach a metacognitive level where they can also understand and apply a process and then think analytically and evaluate the process. (adapted from Anderson, 2003, pg29) Through this reflection and growing knowledge I now feel I am becoming more of an effective teacher in HE (Higher Education). I had goals for my students but the link to relevant theory is helping me develop a more concrete philosophy. Pike et al write “An interesting, creative, and caring teachers philosophy statement does not come from thin air; it evolves from a range of reflections and insights about students and the learning process.” Pike et al go on to say “teaching requires that the teacher take time to gain valuable experience and to continually shape and reshape … the philosophy that addresses the teacher's own needs as a developing professional as well as the complex learning needs of students.” (Pike et al, 1997, Pg n/a) It is important to reflect on our own and the students experiences and make the link between theory and practice. Kolb (1984) developed a cyclic model of experimental learning: Kolb, 2004 Cycle of experiential learning (Adapted from , accessed 21/5/08) In the seminars described in the ‘outline pans’ and seen in the appendices (appendix 2, 3, 4), there is a constant desire to experiment in order to take student learning to a higher level and also seek to improve as an effective teacher. I also feel the reflection process described by Sch?n (1983) of ‘reflect in action’ (i.e. while you are doing something) and ‘on action’ (i.e. after you have completed the event) is extremely important in the reflective process and something I find very useful. Student feedback is requested at the end of all modules and under appendix 6 there is a summary of the student feedback I received. There were many positive comments under the heading “aspects which have helped you meet the learning outcomes” which lead me to believe on reflection there were many positives from modelling and active learning. However, I take on board the need for better instructions and more handouts, although on contemplation most handouts are now placed on the University Blackboard site. Two specific comments from my peer observation of teaching (see appendix 5); ? “ It might be worth explicitly sharing with the students why and how you are using particular techniques” and ? “We also talked about wider possibilities for activities *(4) and approaches with a student rather than a pupil group: doing posters, perhaps them presenting on the OHP or PowerPoint,” got my attention, which I felt were principally relevant and could provide me with re-design possibilities, were ‘modelling’ and ‘active learning’. Initially I will examine the issue of why I use particular techniques and why we as ‘teacher trainers’ find it important to model. I have looked at this from two angles: a. Policy in the Education sector Taking the TDA QTS professional standards, 2007, the following can apply to previous two pages of writing: “Q7 a) reflect on and improve their practice, and take responsibility for identifying and meeting their developing professional needs. Q8 have a creative and constructively critical approach towards innovation, being prepared to adapt their practice where benefits and improvements are indentified. Q25 a) use a range of teaching strategies… take practical account of diversity… promoting inclusion Q29 evaluate the impact of their teaching on the progress of all learners, and modify their planning and classroom practice where necessary.” We are teaching our students to be reflective and reflexive practitioners – therefore it would be hypocritical if we are not ourselves. There is evidence for modelling to students in the Secondary National Strategy which comes from research carried out by Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds,2001 , suggesting that modelling is an effective technique to help learners. In a similar vain Ofsted, 2008, recently published the following statement, “The quality of the taught element of the training is good … with increased modelling of good practice by teacher trainers” (Ofsted, 2008, pg 1)) b. Theory Northedge, 2003, argues that students come form increasingly diverse backgrounds, expectations and levels of ‘preparedness’, consequently this is calling for a shift in teaching to modelling learning, to help students acquire the skills to participate in the discourse and serious discussion of an unfamiliar knowledge community. In considering the work of Northedge this also emphasises the need here for us as teachers to be aware of the diverse needs of our students. In a very recent paper, Viera et al, 2008, writes about the need to promote teacher and learner autonomy in teacher education, in a way that uncovers the forces acting on teacher education, this is in order to help us understand what we do more, and so envision new ways to best serve our students. Furthermore, Loughran and Berry, 2005, discussed at length the modelling by teacher educators and recorded that, “a desirable professional competency of teacher educators is the ability to explicitly model for their students” (Loughran & Berry, 2005, pg 193). They saw two levels: firstly overt, precise modelling in our practice of what we expect our students to do in their teaching. So as described in one of the standards above, we might engage in modelling innovative practice rather than just delivering in a ‘transmissive’ style. Secondly, we need to put forward our pedagogical reasoning, what we consider and deliberate as part of our practice when we are planning and delivering a range of teaching and learning experiences. Loughran and Berry, 2005, thought that by considering these two view points we were opening up the possibility for meta-learning by our students, which is why for me modelling fits into achieving my aims and philosophy. Reflecting using Sch?n,1983 ,reflection ‘on action’ I do believe I model many areas e.g. lesson planning, clear objectives, group ideas, peer teaching, analysis … the list is endless. However, as suggested in the peer observation I need to be more explicit (see appendix 5). The student feedback (appendix 6) shows many recognise the varied teaching styles and variety of tasks, but the question to my-self must be - do they relate this to their practice? Contemplation leads me to feel this is not something I have considered closely enough as yet. It is also perhaps an indication that they don’t always relate this practice, because as link tutors (tutors observing students in school) we often raise issues of differentiation, assessment and using teaching assistants to their full potential. “Active learning methods contrast with the passive learning techniques that characterize the typical college classroom” (Synder, 2003, pg161). Passive learning is certainly not a way I would describe my seminars and I hope from the lesson plans and student feedback in the appendices that this is apparent. Nonetheless, if we as teacher educators are modelling active learning there must be pedagogical reasoning behind this. Nicholls, 2002, wrote about three models of effective teaching. The first model had two ‘constructs’ which are key to effective teaching, one of these was ‘active learning time’. The third model focused on the ‘craft of teaching’ and how these “may be translated into experiences that enhance student learning” (Nicholls, 2002, pg 16). Active learning can support a deeper approach to learning, therefore it is important to consider the degree to which an activity is learning-related and likely to stimulate the student. Biggs, 2003, considered student activity and placed this in a graph showing teaching method and the level of engagement of the student. See Fig. 1. The graph shows a higher level of engagement when the student activity is more active than passive. Level of Fig.1 Engagement Biggs, 2003, Teaching Method Machemer & Crawford, 2007, suggest there is a move in paradigms within universities from that of teacher-centred learning to student-centred learning. They indicate that student centred learning is typified by active learning which may include team based learning or groups, providing more opportunity for reflection, analysis and evaluation. There also needs to be a distinction in that whilst active learning involves ‘doing’, co-operative learning must involve ‘doing something with others’. Whilst co-operative learning is most successful in small groups; it is easy for students to feel they are working together but in actual fact they are not co-operating, but piecing different understanding together. This need for co-operative learning within groups is important to take active learning to the levels of reflection, analysis and evaluation. Therefore as a teacher educator it is an area that I know I must keep a height of awareness. Also when re-designing the new modules I will need an analysis whether I am getting the most out of the activities; if I am setting up a problem solving approach through the learning events and moving student learning to a meta-cognitive level. Qualters, 2001, found that students in general have a very positive attitude towards active learning. He wrote that they found that it was, “a real world experience… breaks up monotony … helped connect and integrate course material… helps integrate ideas… fun and helps us to learn… “ (Qualters, 2001, pg 54-56) However some were less keen, “new techniques are stressful… I prefer the blackboard… it is not helping… the method makes it frustrating at times” (Qualters, 2001, pg 54-56); and one of my own students asked for opportunity to work individually. Students therefore need to know why we are choosing to use active learning, and this links to modelling and the sharing of pedagogical ideas. Here it is important for them to make the link to deep and surface learning. “Teachers who are more likely to lead students to deep learning structure lessons, set tasks, and provide feedback and challenge that encourage the development of deep processing” (Hattie 1998, 2002 cited in Smith & Colby , 2007, pg 206); with careful planning this can be the outcome of active learning. Fig.1 on page 11, shows that the less effective learner (non academic student) struggles with engagement when asked to memorise or note take, whereas their level of engagement is better when generating ideas or reflecting, which can be done effectively in small groups and through active learning. Vygotsky's (1962) theoretical framework is around social interaction and the important role it plays in the development of cognition; Bruner (1966) also moved onto social constructivism, seeing learning as a process, building on existing knowledge; which is an active process requiring dialogue. This social element of learning comes about through discussion with other people and takes place when working in diverse groups. Designing my seminars I knew I had a dyslexic student but I need to question more how inclusive I am being. In Shaw, 2007, I looked at the depth of understanding of students in the area of ‘inclusion’. I believe that ‘inclusion’ is infinite, i.e. there are no limits to ‘inclusion’, and therefore my ontological position should possibly be that of “idealist”. Fig. 2, seen on page 12, shows the findings of my research, many of the comments found during research could also apply to us as teacher educators. Do we cater for all students, do we isolate when we address specific needs (SDAS support in the classroom), does our philosophy impact on the classroom? On reflection, when re-designing I believe I need to consider the growing diversity of the student body, not necessarily in the design of the activities but more in relation to student grouping. I need to consider my own depth of clarity when considering diversity, I thought I was perceptive but when re-designing ideas for the new modules I need to confirm in my own mind that I am ‘inclusive’ and carry out my belief of ‘inclusion’ being infinite. Am I mixing cultures, ages, abilities, gender…? I believe in order to ‘conform’ almost with the students I allowed them to organise their own groups and there would be great value considering the make-up of groups to further reflection, analysis and evaluation. Fig. 2 Depth of clarity and understanding quadrant. Depth of understanding Depth of clarity superficial perceptive vague ? Catering for all pupils ? All pupils have personal needs ? Teachers’ perceptions of what is normal ? Integrating the special needs of all ? Common experiences for all ? Give the same opportunities and inclusive strategies ? Accommodate within the classroom ? Idealistic / positive ? Segregation / negativity / isolation ? Do we isolate when we address specific needs? ? Inclusion is broad, it is a massive amount of pupils ? Every child's entitlement to learning being aware of the needs of the minority and the needs of the majority ? Whilst we have division we can't be truly inclusive clear ? Inclusion for all ? Access to all the curriculum ? We should have high expectations of all children ? Engaging / involving all pupils ? By highlighting ‘inclusion’ are we labelling? ? Can we put a % on pupils with 'inclusion' issues? - does that label? ? Your own philosophy, personality and culture impact on your view of inclusion ? There is a social impact, from socio-economic groups (Table adapted from : Simco N, 1995 pg, 49-60 cited in Shaw, 2007) Conclusion Philosophically I have continuously throughout my career in teaching believed that we are on a constant learning journey. Moving from teaching in schools to teaching in HE draws on you to develop once again as a professional in new surroundings, with new overt and covert cultures and context of employment to take on board; additional knowledge and understanding to draw on needs to be acquired. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, developed a model moving from ‘novice’ through to ‘expert’: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert. On the continuum I sense I have moved beyond ‘competent’ and certainly have learned the need for flexibility, but do not always see the strategic long term implications of actions. Being able to be a part of a team developing the ‘new’ three year degree has enabled me to have a much wider perspective of the very broad and varied task of training students to become teachers, and my knowledge has deepened because of this. I am convinced when I respond to judgement calls when planning the content of new modules I will be able to summon up my new knowledge and understanding of the wider picture and aims of the degree. My critical analysis has raised the following points for the future development: ? to be more explicit with students regarding my pedagogical reasoning behind my planning ? to take the activities to a new level, where I am considering at all points - analysis, reflection, and evaluation; and where possible developing the activity to become more of a problem solving undertaking ? incorporating my philosophy of ‘inclusion’ Due to the nature of the change in modules these will not be alterations to current plans but help in the development of totally new learning events. Wordage: 4,916 Bibliography accessed 18/5/08 accessed 20/5/08 accessed 1/5/08 accessed 18/5/08 accessed 18/5/08 Anderson, L.W. & Krathowl, D.R., 2001, A Taxonomy of Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, New York: Longman Barnett P, Parry G & Coate K, 2001, Conceptualising Curriculum Change, Teaching In Higher Education, Vol 6 (4) pg 435-449 Biggs J, 1999, Teaching for Quality learning at University, Buckingham: OUP Biggs J, 2003, Teaching for Quality learning at University 2nd edition, Buckingham: OUP Bruner J, 1966, Learning about learning, US DEPT. of Health Dreyfus H L and Dreyfus S E, 1986, Mind over Machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer, Oxford; Basil Blackwell Fraser S & Bosanquet A, 2006, The curriculum? That’s just a unit outline, isn’t it?, Studies in Higher Education, Vol 31 (3) pg 269-284 Kolb D A, 1984, Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Light G & Cox R, 2001, learning and teaching In Higher Education, London: sage Loughran J & Berry A, 2005, Modelling by teacher educators, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 21 pg 193-203 Machemer P & Crawford P, 2007, Student Perception of active learning in a large cross-disciplinary classroom, Active Learning in Higher Education, Vol 8 (1) pg 9-30 Muijs D & Reynolds D, 2001, Effective teaching: evidence and practice. London: sage Nicholls G, 2002, Developing Teaching and learning in Higher Education, London: Routledge Northedge, Andrew (2003) ’Rethinking teaching in the context of Diversity’. Teaching in Higher Education, Vol 8 (1) p.17–32 Pike, Beth, Bradley, Fred, 1997, The philosophy of teaching: Developing a statement that thrives in the classroom, Clearing House, 00098655, Jan/Feb97, Vol. 70 (3) Pollard A & Tann S, 1994, Reflective teaching in the primary school 2nd edition, London: OUP Qualters D, 2001, Do Students Want to be Active?, Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,Vol 2 (1) pg 52-60 Ramsden P, 1992, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, London: Routledge Ramsden P, 2003, Learning to Teach in Higher Education 2nd edition, London: Routledge Sch?n D A, 1983, The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action London: Temple Smith Shaw S J, 2007, MA dissertation, : 'Exploring images of 'inclusion' held by trainee teachers in HEI/School partnership programmes.' Smith T & Colby S, 2007, Teaching for Deep Learning, Clearing House, May/June 2007 Synder K, 2003, Roles, poles, and space: active learning in Business Education, Active Learning in Higher Education, Vol 4 (2) pg 159-167 Vygotsky, L, 1962, Thought and language, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press Warwick P, 2007, Reflective practice; some notes on the development of the notion of professional reflection Subject centre for Education ESCalate Appendix 1 – MDF Faculty of Education Division: Description of Qualificatory Unit of Study Title: Understanding and Applying Professional Practice 2 Code: QEP 902 Date Validated: May 2003 Date Amended: Location: Lancaster, Ambleside, Carlisle, London Leader: Christine Ditchfield /Karen Mills Names of staff teaching Study Unit Christine Ditchfield, Stephen Williams, Verna Kilburn, Tony Ewens, Robin Bundy, Andrew Waterson, Karen Mills, Deborah Roberts Mode of Delivery: Full-time Start Date: September 2003 Aims ? To prepare student teachers for the requirements of the block placement. ? To develop student teachers’ professional knowledge and skills at least to the standards required to gain qualified Teacher Status. Intended Learning Outcomes By the end of this Unit, students will be able to demonstrate: i. an understanding of the variety of approaches to differentiation. ii. a knowledge of the range and scope of pupil profiles. iii. an understanding of the application of the planning cycle across the wider primary curriculum. Indicative Content ? Differentiation ? Cross-curricular planning ? Profiling ? Assessment and record keeping ? Evaluation of teaching Student Workload Contact Hours Lectures/Seminars 10 Hours Private Study Preparation & follow-up 30 Hours Assessment Plan ? Students will be judged to have passed this unit of study if they have: a) attended the sessions b) completed a self-evaluation of any written work c) at the conclusions of the unit, completed an evaluation of their learning experience LOs Assessed Observed Teaching practice I II III School Placement file I II Contribution to Group work I II III Reassessment If teaching is unsatisfactory, a student will fail the placement and only 1 re-assessment opportunity will be offered throughout the programme. If the Resource Portfolio is unsatisfactory, a student will be given the opportunity to resubmit at a time to be negotiated between the student and the Unit Leader. There is not normally an opportunity for reassessment of group work. It is continually monitored and, for those students who are seen to be having difficulties, Student Review procedures (see Section 5.3 of the Student Handbook) are implemented at an early stage. Core Bibliography ? Cohen. L, Mannion, L and Morrison, K (1996) A Guide to Teaching Practice London: Routledge ? Jacques, K and Hyland (2000) Professional Practice: Primary Phase Exeter Learning Matters ? TTA (2002) Qualifying to Teach ? Recent and Relevant DfES QCA TTA and OfSTED publications. Additional Notes This document needs to be considered in relation to the Block Placement Module Descriptors as follows: ? Q3: Yr.3 ? Q4: Yr.4 Appendix 2 - Lesson Plan 1 Seminar One Differentiation (up to two hours) By the end of the session you will: ? Be familiar with different approaches to differentiation ? Be able to identify possible strengths and weaknesses of the approaches Activity One – Differentiation Game Give out differentiation game. Groups put definitions against correct activity. Once done let each group have a look at the other tables. Then go though each activity. Activity Two _ Understanding Check Check understanding of 4 main differentiation methods: Task, outcome, support (adult and peer), resources. Discuss other methods eg. Teacher input and response Activity Three – Link to Placement Each group folds flip chart paper in quarters allocating each section one of the 4 main differentiation headings. Groups discuss which differentiation methods they have seen on their placements and list examples of each one. Groups to be encouraged to discuss the pros and cons of each method. Activity Four -Differentiation- methods and critique Group work- flip chart paper per group, fold into three columns ? List methods of differentiation in column 1. ? Define different methods of differentiation. Let groups identify methods, prompt if necessary: Teacher input, questioning, resources, adult support, peer support, outcome, task ? Share definitions with whole group, check shared understanding. All groups to update own lists to have full complement of methods ? Head 2nd and 3rd columns on flip chart paper – Benefits for children, Potential disadvantages for children Groups track across paper from each method, reflect on readings and school experiences, discuss entries for each column. Activity Five – teachers TC for group and whole group discussion This programme follows the progress of Simrit Riat and Vicky Rutherford as they begin their teaching careers at Oldknow Junior School in Birmingham. Sue Cowley joins Simrit in her Year 3 classroom for some classroom coaching. She offers some practical hints and tips and concentrates particularly on differentiation, exploring what it means and how it can be applied. Activity Six - Match types of groups to headings Cut up the two sheets on grouping – ie cut along each type of grouping. Then keep benefits, limitation & when to use in one strip and the type of grouping separate. E.g. Activity Seven - Differentiation by grouping children –one debate or two ? Identify one/two groups to argue in favour of grouping children by ability and one/two groups to argue against. ? 5 min to prepare points ? Arrange room to facilitate one or two debates ? Refer to Galton document, Grouping for Success for further reading Alternative to Debate with all students, could try Participatory Approach ? Need two teams of about 3 each to be the only speakers in debate ? Clear space in room to allow rest of group to move around ? Sit two debating teams in middle of space and opposite each other. ? Rest of class listen to debate and indicate their individual agreement with points made by moving to stand near speaker. Individuals can move at any point (there tends to be crowd persuasion effect) ? Can introduce Yes. Yes but. No but, No labels on a continuum on floor or on walls. Listeners now have to refine their level of agreement or disagreement to each point made ? Opportunity to discuss approach and debate Assessment: as in line with mdf Contribution to group work Appendix 3 - Lesson Plan 2 Seminar Two Assessment (up to 2 hrs) Objectives ? To have an understanding of the purpose of assessment ? To introduce assessment for learning ? To analyse more deeply the methods of assessment Activities 1. Order the statements relating to the purpose of assessment. Using the information on these slips of paper: ? Group the purposes under 4 headings To diagnose. To evaluate teaching. To inform others. To grade. ? Produce a ‘diamond 9’ to show which purposes you view as most important. Arrange the nine most important slips in the order 1,2,3,2,1 where the first is the most important. ? Formative/Summative assessment – to discuss differences, show possible types of recording ? What types of assessment have you seen in school? Time: approx 20mins 2. Reflect on your own primary school days contrast your experiences with schooling today ? To what extent were you aware of the learning objectives in lessons when you were at school? ? Were your views on your learning listened to? ? How involved were you in planning our own learning? ? Were you active or passive learners? Time: approx. 20mins 3. Assessment for Learning in the classroom Introduce the concept of assessment for learning (AfL). Share the following quote: ‘Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there’. (Assessment Reform Group, 2002). Explain that the idea of assessment for learning is a dynamic one – it involves a continual process of finding where pupils are in their learning and deciding their next steps. Done well, AfL takes time. However, this time investment will reap rewards if pupils become more involved in their own learning and are clearer about the purpose of their learning. Use Handout 1 as a tool for discussion. This sets out the 10 principles underlying the Assessment for Learning concept drawn up by the ‘Assessment Reform Group’. (The Assessment Reform Group originated in 1989 to ensure that government policy and practice took account of research evidence). Handout AfL (to be shared in pairs) Trainees discuss each of the ten AfL principles in pairs. The aim of the exercise is to relate the principles to pupils with diverse learning needs. They should look at each principle in turn and highlight where it might be difficult for teachers to involve all pupils. Take feedback under the following headings (issues in italics): 1. Planning (tracking back through objectives; overlapping SEN); 2. How pupils learn (difficulty of having a dialogue with some pupils as some pupils may have memory problems); 3. AfL as central to classroom practice (difficulties with involving some pupils in reflecting/gauging their next steps – they may not be very aware of their own learning paths); 4. AfL as a key professional skill (teachers may be faced with the need to learn about diverse learning needs – will have to prioritise); 5. Sensitive and constructive assessment (teachers need to be aware that some pupils find it hard to take positive comments and have a negative self-image); 6. The importance of pupils’ motivation (some pupils find all learning hard and easily lose momentum to learn); 7. Commitment to learning goals and a shared understanding of the criteria by which pupils will be assessed (again there may be the issue of the difficulty having a dialogue and discussing criteria by which pupils will be judged); 8. Pupils should receive constructive guidance about how to improve (some pupils may find it hard to receive comments about improving their work and may not want to edit or rewrite as this may be difficult physically for them); 9. Develop pupils’ capacity to self-assessment and reflection (similarly, some pupils may find it hard to receive comments about improving their work and may not want to edit or rewrite as this may be difficult physically for them); 10. AfL should recognise the full range of achievements for all pupils (some pupils may not produce work which can easily be displayed). Explain that all these barriers can be overcome with careful planning. Ask the trainees to think about how they might tackle the issues raised for all pupils. Discuss responses Time: approx. 30mins 4. Methods of Assessment ? Discuss types : Product, Observation, Discussion/Questioning ? Ad. & Dis. Sheet ? Discuss answers Time approx. 30 mins 5. Look at the sample of a record sheet. (only if there is time) Students to discuss whether they have used this idea -advantages/disadvantages. What other forms of record keeping have they used/seen? Assessment: as in line with mdf Contribution to group work Appendix 4 - Lesson Plan 3 Seminar Three Theme: Team work/working with other adults Time: 2hrs Resources: Flip paper, questionnaire, IT for video Objectives: ? Know about recent and relevant legislation with regard to roles in school, particularly with regard to the role of teaching assistants ? Be able to identify your own preferred roles within a team ? Be able to identify new areas you could develop to increase your flexibility within a team Activity 1 (30mins).Team Roles Tag Team Presentations Exercise: Teams of participants prepare and deliver a 5 minute presentation on an environmental topic. The team member speaking is tagged at random intervals by another team member who must continue fluently with the presentation. What role did they play within the group? Activity 2 (5/10mins). Team Role Types (Belbin) Exercise: Participants study the key aspects of each Belbin Team Role Preference as flipcharted and stand by the one most like them. Activity 3 Belbin Questionnaire (20mins) Carry out shortened questionnaire, see if it matches their idea form Activity 2 Activity 4 Working with other adults. (10 mins) Ask the trainees to work in groups of three. They should each then choose one of three roles ? Class teacher ? A TA whose work includes supporting pupils with SEN or disabilities ? A pupil with SEN or a disability Ask the trainees, in role, to tell the others in their group their thoughts on what makes for effective support. Give them an unfinished sentence to use as an opener, for example: ‘Extra adult support works best when …’, or ‘As a TA I find that my support in the classroom works best when …’ ‘As a pupil, what would help me most would be …’ Activity 5 Working with other adults. (10 mins) a)In groups: Flipchart heading: ‘Extra adult support works best when …’. b) Give the trainees Handout 1 and ask them to compare the points on the handout with those on your flipchart. Activity 6 Working with other adults. (30 mins) Whole Group n Watch the TV clip (13.36 min) n Make notes on: Ways in which the teacher focused on developing the relationship with the teaching assistant. Compile a list of key ways to develop positive relationships Discusss as a small group then whole group. Assessment: as in line with mdf Contribution to group work Appendix 5 - Peer observation of teaching Peer observation of teaching Assignment two : comments and areas for action from the peer observation of teaching Comments received: You are clearly a highly experienced primary school sector teacher and manager and have a great deal to bring to working with these student teachers both in terms of your professional knowledge and in relation to the range of skills and attributes you have to manage the learning situation for your students. We discussed the above list and how the observed session met all of them. My sense is that the areas of development in your work in the HE context are likely to be in relation to adapting your current well-developed approaches from the primary sector to the differing demands, opportunities and context of HE learning. The first area of possibility seemed to me to be in how you can relate differently to these (young) adults and use characteristics of that age group and professional aspiration to enhance what you are doing. For example I noticed that you are using techniques (e.g. the ‘diamond 9’) which could be of use to the students in their own practice. It might be worth explicitly sharing with the students why and how you are using particular techniques and the extent to which they are adaptable for other age groups and contexts – or better still eliciting from them how they think these things could be used. It is motivating for student teachers to be treated like fellow professionals in the formal learning situation. *(1) The other example was in how you are managing the activity, and getting their attention. At the moment you are using your voice to gain their attention, which is probably a tried and tested technique from your school days. But I wonder about the appropriateness of you having to, in effect, shout at them. This risks, I think, establishing a relationship of teacher-pupil rather than lecturer-student. It was evident that the atmosphere changed when you were able to use your normal voice level to speak – the students seemed more likely to listen to you. It might be worth trying other techniques – something to make a noise to indicate you want their attention, or telling them that you will turn on the OHP when you want them back into plenary mode. The other risk in having to use your voice in this way is the strain on it, of course. I mentioned the idea of agreeing ground rules with the students to establish your various responsibilities for the classroom process. This would mean again you would need to be less in ‘teacher’ mode as they established appropriate ways of managing the time and activities in conjunction with you. It’s about sharing out the power and responsibility more than is possible in the school context. Agreed ground rules and processes might also allow thought about the work-group size *(2) issue we talked about – once they have been given the task they might then decide what is an appropriate group size – pairs, triads or larger units.*(3) We also talked about wider possibilities for activities *(4) and approaches with a student rather than a pupil group: doing posters, perhaps them presenting on the OHP or Powerpoint, preparation of activities using the Blackboard facility before the session and so on. It might be worth picking up from other PGC group members what innovations in approach they have adopted or exploring some of the more ‘tricks and tips’ areas of the HE teaching literature. These thoughts are all aspects that you might give you scope to develop your work rather than criticisms of your current practice. You are clearly committed to development and enhancement, and our conversation showed that you are curious about possibilities and I hope that the course will provide you with some directions for development of these. Thank you for having me in the session – I enjoyed it very much. Reflection Response: reflection & areas for action ( *(..) is to enable a link to the feedback that had been given and to future targets) Sch?n (1983, 1987) wrote about professionals facing situations, and how we use our knowledge and experience as a framework for action. With 21years in Primary Education I am often reflecting on teaching situations by using the explicit and tacit knowledge accumulated from the experiences had in the classroom; which to a great extent is transferable skills and knowledge which I take into the HE context in find myself in. Pollard (2002) developed a frame work and process for reflection, which developed partly from the work of Dewey(1910) and Sch?n (1987). (The 'Process of Reflection' is added as a link to this asset).I find this cycle a useful tool for organising my reflections. Sch?n (1987) developed the idea of 'reflection -in-action' and 'reflection-on-action’. Furlong and Maynard (1995) go on to say 'reflection-in-action' is being able to articulate tacit and spontaneous intelligence through language. Sch?n thought reflection in-action and on-action encompassed our 'values, knowledge, theories and practice' (Zeichner and Liston 1996 p16). I believe many of my seminars and lectures reflect this statement. What I value is indicative in my planning and I acknowledge it is part of my educational philosophy My actions within my teaching reflect this as I often find myself talking about ‘valuing the children’ to the students, and this was behind my thinking in the seminar on assessment and therefore the objectives I wrote. I also take this forward into teaching in HE as I think it is important to value the knowledge the students bring. This in turn forms part of the constructive align theory (Biggs, 2004), as I am aligning my teaching and trying to bring in constructivism by developing activities within which they can acquire a deeper approach and understanding.* (1) The issues surrounding grouping *(2) are much debated in the school setting. There is link to a linked asset Grouping Children for Success (2006), which although focused on schools discusses the benefits of large, small, social groupings… What it doesn’t do is discuss peer tutoring and support, which can benefit the tutor and tutee, consolidating learning and enhancing esteem. “We Learn 10% of what we read 20% of what we hear 30% of what we see 50% of what we see and hear 70% of what we discuss 80% of what we experience 95% of what we teach others.” (William Glasser Principles of Learning) This is also worth considering when planning the activities for the seminars and not just the issue of grouping. *(3) Reflecting on Assessment for Learning and the ten principles I was discussing as part of one of the activities (see Lesson Plan linked asset) I would now consider dividing the class into small groups of only two or three students, for them to considered one of the principles and the strengths and weaknesses, then for them to teach the others about the principle and lead into a mini discussion about each principle. The one seminar observed did not reflect the wider range of activities *(4) used over the series of three seminars which linked together for what is a short qualificatory module prior to students going onto placements in schools. Biggs (2004) writes about the “acquisition of knowledge in itself” does not bring about the change in learning but “the way we structure that information” can bring about changes, He also goes on to say “motivation is a product of good teaching, not its prerequisite.” (Biggs, 2004, pg13) My personal belief is that some of the motivation comes from the activities created and aligned for student learning. The series of seminars used a variety of activities including: video clips, discussions, group posters, participatory learning debates, team presentation tag… From the evaluation of the seminar from the peer observation and reflections above I have drawn out four targets which I believe will help develop my teaching in the HE context. Conclusion Bibliography Biggs, J (2004), Teaching for Quality Learning at Uuniversity 2nd Ed., Buckingham: OUP Glasser ??? cited accessed 28.02.08 Pollard, A. (2002). Reflective Teaching: effective and evidence-informed professional practice. London: Continuum. Pollard (2002) cited accessed 27/2/08 Sch?n, D. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. New York,NY: Basic Books. Sch?n, D. (1987), Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Zeichner, K. & Liston, D. (1996), Reflective Teaching: an introduction. Mahwah, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaun. Planning Future Targets *(1) To be explicit in sharing my reasoning for objectives and activities to enhance student understanding they can take back into their classroom situations. *(2) To consider appropriate grouping in seminars, less use of social grouping. *(3) Developing the students’ own educational need for Assessment for learning within the University setting. *(4) Continue to adopt and wide ranging variety of activities and seek to benefit from what other techniques colleagues may use. Appendix 6 - Summary of student feedback Feedback from student questionnaire How satisfied were you with the module: Extremely satisfied 1 Very satisfied 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Satisfied 1 1 1 1 1 1 Dissatisfied Very dissatisfied Extremely dissatisfied ‘The delivery and organisation of this course has helped me meet the learning outcomes of the module: Very strongly agree 1 Strongly agree 1 1 1 1 1 Agree 1 1 1 1 1 1 Disagree 1 1 Strongly disagree Very strongly dissagree Aspects which have helped you meet the learning outcomes: Really enjoyed the team work session and the presentation in it Teamwork Teachers TV clips Handouts Teaching style of lecturer Chance for group work Useful for the future – especially differentiation and assessment Watching situations on teachers TV and reflecting in groups on the ideas that it brought up Working and discussing in groups and getting peoples ideas and views Assessment for learning very useful Useful handouts PowerPoints on Bb Well organised lessons Variety of types of tasks make it interesting Good subject knowledge of lecturer Activities participated in Handouts of important information on Bb Pointed out important notes to take down Looking at differentiation and how to implement Different styles of teaching by lecturer Assessment methods for the classroom Good variation of teaching styles used Formative/summative assessment in the classroom Assessment in the classroom POD (product, observation, discussion) Good variety of teaching styles to meet learning styles Clarity of understanding gained from the seminar Guidance on classroom differentiation and assessment Increase confidence in group work and presentations I particularly liked the variety of teaching methods used Involved in many different tasks and activities Differentiation and assessment sessions useful and very informative I found the focus on teamwork and group discussions very beneficial and feel I have developed in confidence of knowledge Aspects of the module you would like to see changed: Directed tasks take time to prepare Not all lectures delivered are written by the lecturer delivering them Less group work Bigger sized font Can’t always find things on Bb Chance to work individually Give students an assessment to encourage to concentrate More handouts More handouts Instructions sometimes need to be more clear Instructions could be made clearer at times55. Writing Master Class I work in a music department as a historian. I am surrounded by practical musicians who practice every day to maintain their craft. As part of that, and for students who are also studying music, the Master Class model is used to teach. A famous performer/musician comes to town, and two or three promising students have a lesson with this person in public. The Master listens to the students and gives and advice and direction, but also teaches to the audience, eliciting comment sometimes from them, and explaining their pedagogy. It occurred to me that in writing, which is part of what I teach in a fourth year bibliography course, the same model might work. So, instead of having all students submit essays and writing that I alone grade and correct, I formulated the "writing master class." So, I take some student writing, and we read and talk about it together, finding strengths and weaknesses in a public setting. This allows the students to learn from each other and watch me "teach" intensively one student. It changed a paradigm for me and I saw writing as a performative, artistic craft and skill.56. Multimedia learning theory based slides in CS1 Several years ago I read a book titled "Beyond Bullet Points" by Cliff Atkinson that kept mentioning Richard Meyer's work on multimedia learning theory. I read several of his papers and his book as well. Over a summer I revised all of my CS1 slides to incorporate his mutlimedia learning principles. In particular, his idea of not including all of the text I planned to say because it causes students to process it twice (auditorially and visually) which Meyer's research shows decreases learning. I was very pleased with them. Then, several days before classes started, I got a letter from Student Services saying I was going to have a hearing impaired student in my class that term. And I had just removed most of the text from my slides. Yikes! Thankfully, the student had some hearing and was an excellent lip reader, so it wasn't a problem. 57. Teaching by discussion In our department, we teach a computer ethics class. When the instructor who normally taught the class left, we were left with no one to teach it. I was one of two professors who decided to try teaching the course. Having been trained technically as a computer scientist, I was familiar with how to teach programming, data structures, etc., but it became clear to me that teaching students about ethics and the societal impact of computing would require a completely different style of teaching. I determined that it would have to be more discussion-based, readings-based, and writing-based. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about how to construct a sequence of classroom experiences that would reinforce the readings as well as show students that there is a diversity of thoughts about these topics. The challenge was to get students out of their own frame of thinking about technology, computers, and ethics, and think about other people's points of view and think about problems from a societal perspective. I had to construct out-of-class and in-class activities (discussions, group role-playing activities, etc.) to match the content. I was pretty scared at first, since one could not predict how any class period would go -- it would depend on the dynamics of discussion. I now know the pedagogical issues humanities and social science instructors face in every course they teach. One effect of teaching this course -- I have taught it several times now -- is that I now try whenever possible to incorporate these pedagogical techniques into the technical courses I teach. Teaching by discussion, role-playing, etc. In other words, getting students engaged in the material by active participation. Teaching the computer ethics course transformed my way of thinking about my role as a teacher and how students learn.58. Concept map review I was reading a book (7 things research says about learning, or something along that line) and one of the chapters talked about how students had trouble putting all of the small pieces of knowledge they had learned together into a whole picture. It suggested that instructors could build a concept map to allow the students to see how everything they learned was integrated together by an expert in the field. So, instead of doing my standard pre-exam review (reviewing each of the small items...iteration, conditionals, etc...) I spent the forty minutes in class filling three white-boards with a large concept map.59. Going paperless There have been so many changes to my teaching. “Going paperless” was the most dramatic in terms of my working day. This change was triggered by my extreme frustration at trying to track bits and piece of paper that students submitted for their written assignments, and wading through programming assignments sent by emails. I read about an online learning management system in a journal. After trying it out, I managed to convince my colleagues about the benefits of the system. Now, my entire institution is able to monitor assignments and return feedback effectively. No more notebooks and portfolios to carry around! 60. Economic geographies of organised crime My teaching interests shifted significantly in Nov 2006 when I introduced a new lecture in to a second year module on economic geography. I had always found teaching this module a bit of a drag as I wasn't really an economic geographer. I was always looking to find new things to introduce to make the module more interesting. During the summer 2006 I read a newspaper article that said that 15-20% of world trade was linked to organised crime. That prompted me to introduce a session into the module on the economic geographies of organised crime. A couple of weeks before the session I turned to my usual textbooks for material only to find that they contained nothing on organised crime as an economic activity within the global economy. My first reaction was panic but this subsided when I managed to find some relevant material within criminology texts. Subsequently though I realised what an omission is was for economic geography not to consider the economic geographies of illicit activity. This has prompted what is now my main research area. In terms of teaching, the students really embraced the idea of organised crime as a geographical phonomenon. I soon introduced this to my first year globalisation module as well as developing a third year module in global crime delivered to both geography and criminology students.61. Service users make all the difference I inherited a module about communication skills taht aimed to improve the confidence of trainee social workers for going out onto professional practice placements. The module has been taught very traditionally in that the students were expected to role play a variety of scenarios to help develop their skills. At best this made them aware of some key issues; at worst it was tokenistic and not taken seriously. Feedback was rarely honest as students did not like to criticise each other. One student said "it will be so much better and easier when we are doing this for real" As a result of this comment I changed the whole approach to the module, and brought on board our service user and carers group to help with the skills development programme. They were trained in how to give feedback and play the roles, and as a result each student then had two face to face encounters with a memberof the service user group who role played various scenarios for them to respond to. This has an immediate impact - the role plays felt real ; the service users could give honest and detailed feedback and the students felt far more conifident for their impending practice placement. And the service users felt they were contributing effectively to the real task of social worlk education. 62. Adult training In preparation for my teacher training I re-read some literature on adult training which had a deep impact in me when I was an undergraduate. As a consequence, I tried to apply those principles to my teaching. The literature and priciples I tried to apply are those of the empowerment based adult training, but in order to comply with the University expectations and regulations I had to significantly change the way this kind of training is delivered. 63. A less macho approach to walkthrough assessments After an influx of Greek Cypriot students onto the module I altered my approach to the walkthrough assessment. The original format was that the assessor would fire questions at team members about the work. I thought this approach would disadvantage anyone with limited understanding of English so I changed the format. I put more time into setting up the assessment, giving information about the areas to be assessed and asked the students to take responsibility for the walkthrough and who would be explaining sections of the documentation. This worked well for the Greek Cypriot's but also worked well for less confident students. The walkthrough will still be a stressful event for students but I think it has been alleviated to some extent by my approach which allows them to show what they have learned rather than whether they can react quicly to a question from an assessor. 64. Not lecturing This is a big individual change but a conscious decision made a number of years ago not to give a formal traditional lecture again. There were multiple causes: 1. Getting mis-understood versions of lecture notes back in assignments, again. 2. Students comments that they wanted to do some 'real' history 3. A growing awareness that other subject areas seemed to do fine without all these formal hour long lectures and that there were alternatives available. 4. This was related to working with others outside History and doing some reading about teaching in HE 5. Getting bored in my own lectures. 6. Being asked to talk about the best lecture I received as an undergraduate - I couldn't remember a single one of them but I could remember the feeling of pointlessness! So I took the modules I taught and converted them all from hour lecture plus hour seminar x 2 as the weekly teaching into 3 hour workshops. Instead of me lecturing the students, I put copies of historical documents out and the students did group work on these and presented their findings to each other. I could usually round-up the sessions with 20 minutes of drawing out the key findings and filling in any gaps at the end. The students enjoyed seeing the 'real' documents and struggling to make sense of them. The modules evaluated well. I certainly felt more comfortable that the students were doing much more learning and that my practice now fitted my beliefs about active learning. Collegaues had trouble with it and with student feedback on their practice as a result. 65. Sally Fincher changed my life Sally Fincher's Plenary talking about disciplinary commons inspired me to go out and find one. FInding this group was the single best faculty development idea I've ever done. Getting to meet other teachers once a month and discussing their best practices constantly gives me ideas to bring back into my classroom. Even things like worksheets. I never used worksheets before but I brought in a member of the DCCE's worksheet on recursion and it was the fastest I've had students understand recursion ever. 66. The birch and the beech A colleague told me about a little boy who had undergone a special assessment at school, because there were concerns about his learning. He was shown pictures of everyday items and asked to name them. He said very little, apart from "I don't know." Afterwards, my friend asked him what was going on. Why couldn't he identify a familiar picture like a tree? His response made me want to laugh and cry both at once. He said, "It could have been a birch or it could have been a beech. I don't know: it was so badly drawn." This story has changed the way I approach students' assessment. I always ask myself if I am overlooking an important piece of learning because I am focussing too narrowly on a specified learning outcome. I often tell the story to participants on the PG Cert in University Teaching. 67. Putting practice before theory I have been teaching a postgraduate module for several years. It is based on some interesting theory and ideas that the students find engaging and I get good feedback on my lectures. However the final assignment, about strategic thinking in their professional life is always a disappointment, they haven't really moved on in their ideas or recognised the challenge we set. Also we have quite a few international students taking this module at the start of their Masters degree and some research we have done indicates that they feel alienated from the home students and tend not to develop their language and communication skills quickly enough to fulfill their potential in a one-year MA. This year I have moved to nearly all teaching being through group activity. This starts with very fast tasks to organise and present what they know as a group and moves on to similar work with more time to investigate specific questions. Nearly all the work has used a scientific poster format which provides a good arena for collaboration, uses different skills in the group, and allows us to have exhibition presentations/critiques which are very fluid and encourage discourse. Ironically, as these are art and design students, these are practices they understand quite well from creative practice although they are not used to using them for more theoretical work. To make this work for the international students, I select groups from mixed geographical and discipline backgrounds, so there is little opportunity to stay in your comfort zone and everybody has to work in English. The mixed disciplines (different areas of designing) also brings in some useful diversity of expectations and ideas. International students have told us that they feel undervalued because we tend to focus on our local culture and professional practices and ignore the history and experience they bring. So the early assignments were about where you come from, your previous experience, your skills and aspirations and how they contribute to the composite resources of the group. They enjoy this a lot and there was a good deal of playfulness emerging. For example the groups all adopted quirky names, like the "Chaos Bumpkins" who explained that they came from a mixture of City (Urban Chaos) and Country (Country Bumpkins). By the time they moved on to more serious research and wrestling with theory each group had established a strong identity, were collaborating well and the international students appear to have been integrated very quickly, certainly they seem very confident in joining discussion and taking a role in the work. Now they have moved on to individual work it appears that more students seem able to come up with new strategic thinking that brings the theory we have examined together with some good reflection on their professional directions. It's too early to say whether we have made a big difference to the International students but they certainly seem to be very comfortable and interact well outside their national group. 68. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander It was the day after 9/11. I was travelling on holdiay ot Italy. I had taken Jenny Moon's book on reflective practice, just to re-read on the journeyings and waitings. There was quite a lot of waiting. I chanced on mention of a teacher who had shared his own learning journal with his students. I knew that my Soc Sci students initially had problems with reflective journalling. I thought "Why don't I share mine with them?" So I wrote a journal to the same remit as the incoming class: "Identify something that I have to do in the coming week and with which I expect to have difficulties, and think through how best to tackle these." When my students sent in their journals for the facilitative comments which I provide in Rogerian style, I acknowledged as usual, told them when to expect my comments and (with an attachment) also said "Here's my journal; I'd welcome your comments on it." Very few exercised their option to comment on my journal, though most thanked me for letting them see it. I had chosen, incidentally, to limit my choices of difficult tasks by excluding anything to do with the course on which I and these students were associated, After perhaps six weeks, I wrote a bad one. I thought "I can't send them this - what a mess it is" And then I thought that, if I were a student, I would not be able to afford myself the luxury of doing another one. So I sent this one out in the usual way, with a brief explanation, as I have just given here. Within ten days, not immediately, I had several messages with much the same content, telling me how reassuring it had been to see that a lecturer could "make a mess of journalling the way I often do." I have persisted with this practice. It is always rated positively in end of modujle evaluations. 69. Making groupwork happen in class I observed a colleague teaching a class as part of our QA. During the class, he handed out an exercise for students to do in class. He told them that they could do the exercise in groups or by themselves. Only 2 pairs of students (out of about 20) worked in pairs. Many of the rest sat looking at the sheet of paper with the exercise on it for 10 minutes. There was no evidence that they were working the problem - they were certainly not externalizing any of this work. Afterwards we debriefed the observation. I asked what the purpose of the in-class exercise was. He told a story that I would call an "active learning" story, about how important it is for students to DO when learning computing, not just listen. I pointed out to him that students might not be doing as much as he hoped. And I suggested that he structure the group interaction - that he require students to do it, that he arranges them into groups, sitting face to face. A week later, he told me that he did just this during his next two class sessions. And that the interaction among students was very high -- lots of noise in the classroom, high levels of engagement. 70. Mentoring Change I never would have made this change if it weren't for a trusted friend who told me to do this and I was sort of convinced. And when I tried to get ready for the next class that would implement the change, it seemed harder and harder, seemed more difficult, more radical, and I couldn't picture how it would work. But this friend was there following up... asking are you going to do this, saying you need to do this -- there in the moment of crisis, providing a certain amount of confidence building. The change was to go from more or less traditional lecture with a handful of active learning activies punctuating it, to a completely or almost-completely question-driven style with peer-instruction. It was a case of having been a student for ... let's not count the years, and overcoming that view of what it means to be in a class. I had done a lot of reading about it that was intellectually compelling, but despite that it would never have happened without this push. 71. Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning During 1998-2002 or so I interacted on a daily basis with several chemistry educators and we became close friends. These colleagues told me about their use of Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), which combines specially designed scripted inquiry activities with team processes (). It sounded interesting but labor intensive, since there were no POGIL activities for computer science. At ASEE 2009 I attended a POGIL workshop, learned more about the theory & practice of POGIL, and started thinking more specifically about how to develop POGIL activities for computer science. In Fall 2009 I was on sabbatical and teaching at the University of Kerala (southern India), where I was asked to teach a new course (soft computing) to a different audience (graduate students). Since I had a much lighter teaching load and very few other responsibilities, I decided to try to create & use POGIL activities. The students were initially hesitant, but in time we all came to appreciate the advantages (& limitations) of POGIL. In Spring 2010 I was back home in the US but still on sabbatical, and decided to write a NSF TUES proposal to develop POGIL materials for CS, and attended a regional POGIL meeting to learn more. In Fall 2010 I learned that my proposal would likely be funded, and applied & was accepted to a POGIL train-the-trainers workshop in Jan 2011. In Spring 2011 I again have a reduced teaching load and have been able to draft more POGIL activities, and I look forward to my TUES project and broader collaborations with a variety of POGIL & CS faculty. 72. Seeing the obvious I once had an observation of my lecture. This is a routine thing within the dept done every year. I asked a colleague whose area is natural language stuff to come and observe my lecture on visual design. I have taught this lecture for a while and I know the principles of visual design in user interfaces quite well. But his main feedback was very simple - I didn't have examples of visual design on my slides! I had exercises for the students to do using the principles but as I was describing the principles, I wasn't illustrating them. Obvious really. Anyway, the next time I had to give that lecture, I made sure I had lots of examples along the way before I gave the students exercises to do in the lectures. And it works really well. You can almost see the light going on above the students' heads. 73. tutorials I tutor for the Open University, in an Arts subject. I started tutoring however for one of the old Scottish universities, in two different Arts discipoines. In the Old university I was explicitly told NOT to focus on assignment topics in tutorials. Tutorial attendance was (supposedly!) compulsory. Students didn't have a textbook, only a reading list, and lectures (which weren't compulsory) In the OU I also got some advice like this. However in the OU I soon realised that for our time-starved students some focus on assignment topics was one of the main reasons they came to tutorials - which are not compulsory. Plus for the undergraduate courses, students did get textbooks and course-published compilations of primary sources, and were expected to use these exclusively for their assignments. So, a very different set-up. My first 'lightbulb' moment came when discussing tutorials with one of the other OU tutors on the course I was originally hired to teach. (Since then, I've taught about 8 or 9 other courses for the OU as well). She herself got her undergraduate degree from the OU, so was well-placed to give advice as to what students were seeking. She strongly advised focus on assignment topics and indeed said tutorials should be timed to be about 2 weeks before assignments were due (advice that was given to me by many other OU mentors and advisors). However it eventually transpired that she actually more or less gave the students an outline of how to answer the topic in their assignments. The drawback to this system I discovered when, due to illness, I was unable to mark a batch of assignments, and she marked them for me. My students got much lower marks than expected because basically she was expecting them to follow HER outline. So my basic apercu about focus on the topic for tutorials had to be examined. In the end I decided that what made sense, in terms of focus on the topic, was 1) Unpicking the topic - making sure the students understood what was being asked of them. 2) (which follows on naturally from 1) connecting the topic, in a broad way, to important UNDERLYING ISSUES in the course material. So in the end I evolved what seemed to be a successful format for tutorials, which didn't involve too much spoon-feeding. This involved focussing on basic issues, but foregrounding the ones most relevant to the topic, for most of the two-hour tutorial. Then, for no more than 1/2 hour, and sometimes less, unpicking the top, sometimes suggesting OBVIOUS specific e.g.s that were probably most relevant, but not spelling out WHY they were relevant. 74. Towards a more instrumental yet intellectually honest approach to doctoral supervision I have changed significantly as a supervisor of doctoral and Masters level theses over the 12 years since my appointment as a lecturer in mathematics education. I started off seeing supervision as a collaboration and an open intellectual journey. I assumed that research students shared an appreciation for this openness and were ready to embark on this journey, almost unconditionally. Sadly my assumptions proved to be marred by naive idealism. Students need concrete guidlines, deadlines and short- term goals; most appear to have a 9-5 approach to research and endorse a minimal-effort policy, even on matters such as reading relevant literature, exploring the possibilities of different theoretical frameworks and practising academic writing on a regular basis where this policy is clearly restricting. Following a series of supervisory experiences that led to substantially lengthier study periods or drop-outs, I have now come to the conclusion that an approach that combines a more instrumental approach to producing a dissertation with the intellectual elements that drove me to this job in the first place is necessary. Here is one example relating the issue of assisting students' reading of relevant literature: (Note: Both approaches apply following an elaborate induction to our Library, its hard copy and electronic resources) WHAT I USED TO DO After a few introductory discussions on what the student's research interests and potential foci are, I used to ask the student to start searching the resources, find his/her way around them and start bringing to me examples of these searches for further discussion. I aimed that epistemological and methodological questions would emerge from these initial encounters with research and would lead to deeper reflection on those matters by the student in this early part of their studies. HOW THIS WORKED (OR NOT) On several occasions above approach did work; on several however it did not. The students often mistook the task as an opportnuity for a leisurely start to their post-graduate studies or floundered aimlessly in often irrelevant or completely inappropriate directions (if I am allowed this type of strong judgement) WHAT I DO NOW To start with, I do not assume that above mentioned induction to the resources actually works and I engage the students gradually with one or two key journals in the field. I give them weekly or fortnightly tasks on identifying a small number of relevant pieces in a small number of resources. I then gradually open this up. I ask them to produce summaries of every item they read and to start organising these summaries in themes (as a first step of learning how to write literature reviews). I encourage them to use bibliographical databases such as EndNote and to write their summaries with at least three things in mind: what this paper is about; what I think of this paper; how this paper relates, or not, to what I am planning to do. I am already seeing good results... 75. Modifying lecture style to better suit students I make heavy use of examples when I teach CS1 and CS2. On most days, I've got an IDE open and am projecting the screen for the students to see. We work together to solve problems that I've crafted very specifically to illustrate the topics of the day. It lets me be as concrete and accurate as possible when expressing solutions, and I can leave the completed code online for students to view and play with on their own. The student evaluations praise this approach, for the most part, but it's not unanimous. A vocal minority express frustration at how quickly the code gets created and edited, and report that they can't follow along and/or take notes at sufficient speed. A few years back I made several changes to address this, and my sense is that the number of complaints on the evals has dropped. Specifically, I now: 1) Talk to students at the start of the semester about my lecture style, and give them tips on how best to take advantage of it. I recommend that they not attempt to copy the code we're writing, since it'll be available online once we're done, but that they try to record notes about how we approached the problem, and how we recovered if we screwed it up or got off to a false start. 2) I make sure to write an outline of the problem in English -- a "to do" list -- in comments before we start trying to turn it into code. The hope was that it would keep more students on board, and that they'd feel like they could participate with the creation of the "to do" list even if their Java was a little shaky. 3) I take the time to comment the code heavily as we go, both to improve the quality and utility of the finished product, and as a way to deliberately force me to slow the pace of the code development. 76. Madness-style presentations and teaching After viewing minute madness presentations at a CHI-related university event, I got intrigued by the notion of "madness-style" presentations and the potential benefits to teaching. A couple of years ago, I started adding such presentations to all student project assignments--during a class session prior to project due date, the students have to give a 1 or 2 minute presentation on their project solution. The use of such presentations satisfies the goal that all students have an idea of other student projects... but the brevity of the presentations ensures that the presentations go quickly and that the presenters have to cpature the highlights. While I have not done any formal evluatoin of this technique, I've been delighted by the way it works. The class is engaged, the students have fun, no one gets bored, and the effort to encapsulate the essence of their project in such a presentation seems to help them prepare better project reports. While such an approach might not work for really large classes, it can work for rleatively large classes. In fact, I just came from a class where *29* students gave 1 minute presentations on their final projects and it was very interesting. 77. Slides or handouts? initially in my lectures I used OHP slides with no handouts. Much of the time students were merely copying from the screen. This reflected my experience as a student: I often perceived the lecturer as a hindrance – s/he was making it hard for me to concentrate on slide copying. Hence I started to use handouts. I had been at lectures in which handouts differed from the presentation. I rejected this on the grounds that it gave an unduly high cognitive load – should listeners concentrate on the slides, handout, or both? Hence I adopted a model whereby handout and slides had the same contents. It then became clear that the opportunity for students to ‘switch off’ was high, since they believed they could catch up by reading the handout. I therefore changed to giving handouts following the slides but with elements missing. The theory is that it encourages students to concentrate and allows questions to be asked, allowing an element of interactivity within the lecture. Students have commented that they like this approach. The approach enabled me to introduce a ‘genius of the week’ competition in lectures, something with which students engage with a ridiculously high level of enthusiasm. 78. Moving to a more student-focussed T&L model About 8 years ago I finally realised that presenting material didatically (albeit with attempts to interact) in a traditional lecture theatre context was not really working well enough for me or the students (although recognising that there is still a place for the occasional inspirational lecture). I then focussed much more on the design of the learning activities (including assessments) and the online resources needed to support these activities. Furthermore, I repositioned my role to "facilitator" and designed improved team activities to better harness the peer student in the learning process. 79. The Venn Diagram : Something in Common This is a story about learning something from a different discipiline that I experienced as staff development and how I adopted it into my own practice for students and staff. I was attending a CETL networking event where staff from different universities were sharing their experiences. The facilitator came from a Geography discipline. We were put into groups of three and handed a large Venn diagram and some pens. We were asked to find out what we had in common around our projects and what was different. I had not seen a Venn diagram since my Maths at secondary school and was intrigued about the actvitiy. It worked really well and I felt I could use it in my own work. I have a role as an educational developer and often work with staff in sessions around diversity or working wih international students. When I came back to my own university I integrated it into a new staff developemnt programme I was developing with a colleague. The session was entitled : Making the Group Work- diverse perspectives. It starts with the exercise putting the staff into threes and asking them to find things in common with their colleagues. Then I get them to reflect on this as an activity that they perhaps could use with their studnets. It is very simple but starts to build trust in the classroom. I have also used this in first sessions with studnets and they always enjoy it. 80. Encouraging campus-based students to use online discussion forums Small change, but it has made a difference to MA students' use of the VLE Blackboard on a campus-based module I run. We do not finish all tasks in class,and I often ask students to up-load postings on the tasks to a Blackboard discussion forum.Typically, they do this for the first couple of weeks, do not read each others' messages and then it stops. I can see they prefer face-to-face discussion, but we run out of time.Plus this allows non-native speakers of English time to formulate their utterance. What I've introduced this time is a system of Forum Respondents: each discussion forum has a volunteer who, after a deadline, reads all the postings and notes three interesting points about them all (similarities/differences from their perspective, eg, or just things that catch their imagination). They post this message as kind of summary and closure of the forum. It is working a treat - everyone is posting messages by the deadline and at least the Forum Respondent is reading them all! 81. Lab-centric instruction In the beginning was self-paced. So the self-paced courses – Dick White designed them – when I arrived at Berkeley – there was a self-paced EE40, and a aself-paced intro for engineers – and a self-paced intro for everybody else. And I looked at these – they’d been running for the past couple years – I showed up in the CS department in 1977 and I think they got started in 1975. And I looked at these and thought – self-paced – too whacky – can’t possibly work. But observing over the next couple of years – it seemed like – I learned for some people – it works pretty well. That got me into the idea that maybe students could learn by doing on their own. Part 2. Scheduled labs. What we were set with in 1980 was way more student than we had computers for. (no personal computers) – so the computing we got was dictated by our resources available. Our Cs1.5 course – we decided (and for CS1) – we should have scheduled labs – there were three hours of lecture and four hours of lab or a fair amount of lab. And then CS3 (our CS1) they had their own lab room – and TA’s staffing it – so it was an open lab. What we found – was we adapted labs for a logistical reason – we weren’t aware of any pedagogical need – we were rationing computer time. But then we found that labs could be useful pedagogically. For what are now obvious reasons. So that’s where labs came from. And then – then we switched to semesters and we invented a very intense 5 unit course for majors (before that we did have a course for majors). We invented a course – CS50 – it had 3 hours of lecture (maybe 4 though) and 6 hours of lab. The labs went until Midnight and actually one of the most popular one was from 10pm to midnight, Monday/Wednesday/Friday. CS50 died a horrible death – it was just much too much to do for the students. But we got the experience of a lot of lab hours and how students were learning. We tried to have 6 person teams to work on the final project – and that crashed and burned. But we had had labs running for quite a while. And then came Citris, and Marcia Linn was in the middle of her WISE stuff. The decision was made to focus Citris on application of technology to society – and education was an obvious thing. The people at Merced contacted us to see what we could do to help them install lower division CS courses. What we thought was maybe they won’t like our courses so we should give them some choice of what’s in the course – so that led to a modular version of the courses – which then led to me basically putting together our current CS3L (our cs1) drawing from self-paced drawing from wherever I could get stuff. It was such a great experience that summer. There were all these great kids. Letters of recommendation for 3 of them to get into college. So I was running a lab – 5 days a week. All these neat kids. I had about a week of the course ready before the class started – so I always had to keep on my toes to stay caught up with the students. And UC WISE was fragile. So that was always exciting. I had a great time! And then we gave them this final – and they did something like a standard deviation above the people before. That was summer of 2002. The first 61B pilot was fall 2004. All wonderful people again. Again it was me and them 7 hours a week. I felt like I was always coming home bubbly about how the lab went. So then we did that a few times. There was a spring 04 CS 3 where the women did half a grade better than the men and that was neat. And then 61C and then here we are. It just fit perfectly with what I find immensely enjoyable – interacting with the students and cooking up activities. 82. ICER presentation on learning theory inspires podcasts and programming exams in CS1 At ICER 2007, I attended a talk by Michael Caspersen and Jens Bennedsen on their paper titled, Instructional Design of a Programming Course - A Learning Theoretic Approach. I was impressed by their research using videos of worked examples and programming exams to improve students learning in CS1. In their talk they discussed the importance of the worked example videos giving students additional opportunities to observe the programming process and how the programming exams motivated students to practice their skills. Over the next year, a colleague and I applied for a small classroom technology grant and created a set of a dozen video podcasts and began giving mid-term programming exams in our course. Survey results, course evaluations, and comments from students suggest that they have been extremely successful. Creating the podcasts was a lot of work, but getting the grant helped. I had always been nervous about programming exams. What if something went wrong? Would the students hate them? Would it make it easier to cheat? Actually, the exams have gone quite smoothly and seem to offer a more accurate assessment of students' programming ability than written exams. 83. Pretty Pictures and Me Me and a fellow teacher in earth & ocean sciences discussed this crazy idea. The crazy idea was to exchange classes. I feel like I have a good general educational background. I could teach an intro chemistry course, a multi-section course, with plenty of support. I chat with Carl Wieman and he thinks it’s great but it’s crazy. It turns out he thinks I mean we should observe other classes. Which I don’t think is crazy. I observe her class. Someone else got a post-doc with funding to look at cross-disciplinary teaching exchange. So I observe this biologist. I look at her pedigree and genetic diseases class, an hour and a half minutes. I’m amazed at how different they are than CS classes. They really bring research into the classroom. It feels totally different. For example, there’s this big debate about global warming and here’s things to think about. In my classroom when I bring in research it’s like here’s a new programming language.The other thing that I noticed is that she gives this great presentation. Her slides are two words and a picture or two words and a chart and that’s all there is. She’s got questions and longer term projects. This catalyzed my idea that I would go to problem solving clicker questions. I got style ideas and I changed the style of presentation to be more streamlined, more image based and I’m doing a lot more problem solving in class and student driven stuff in class. 84. Using checkpoints to scaffold a large implementation project I teach the computer networks course once a year at my current institution, and taught it with the same frequency at my previous institution. I give students a very large implementation project each semester that's meant to pull together much of the material from the course and give them practice at designing and implementing a large project. When I changed departments, I reused the project that I'd honed to perfection over several years in my old department, but it didn't work nearly as well in the context of my new department. A non-trivial number of my new students struggled with the scale of the project, and essentially gave up in defeat. (My previous institution was quite a few rungs higher in the academic pecking order. While the best students in my current department are essentially as good as the best in my old department, there are fewer of that caliber in the new department.) After spending some time reflecting on their performance, the questions they asked me and when, and the general work patterns I observed, I concluded that I needed to scaffold the project better for my new students so that they didn't flounder. I ended up breaking the project up into finer-grained checkpoints than had been necessary in the old department to help pace the students and give them structure. While I've made no effort to rigorously assess the outcome of this intervention, it's certainly the case that more students are now completing working implementations. It comes at a cost though: The extra structure has constrained the problem for the stronger students, and weakened the design aspect overall since I'm providing more of the structure. (There may be hope that this will be less necessary in the future, as we've recently rearranged our curriculum and the software engineering course will now be required before the networking course.) 85. An epiphany I remember quite clearly about two years after I started teaching, I was in London for a meeting with my old PhD supervisor. We were talking about our classes and she said "I never do lectures". "Never?" I said. "Really never? So what do you do?" She explained that the students did activities, solved problems, had discussions. This all made sense intellectually from the point of view of educational theory, it's just I had never seen a class taught this way when I was an undergrad. I didn't know people could do that. :-) So I started trying it myself, and came up with a personal rule of trying not to talk for longer than 20 minutes at a time. I realised that it was actualyl less time consuming to prepare classes of this sort, and that you can come up with templates for different styles of learning task which makes it easy to keep the material current (e.g. if you have a literature review class format, you can swap in the most recent relevant papers each year). This seemed to work reasonably well, or at least I found it much more interesting and I felt I was seeing the students' learning better. So I have been doing that ever since. And now when I am co-teaching with less experienced lecturers I try to influence them in this direction too. 86. Active AI I was faced with designing a new grad AI course, but I did not look forward to straightforward lecturing from the book, so Ilooked for alternatives. I came across an article by L. Dee Fink, "A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning", and I also read the book "Drive" by Pink, on self-determination theory. I followed Fink's design exercise while applying SDT principles. 87. Learning through wirting I was teaching a course on computer arch itecture for the sixth and final time. This is a third year course, potentially the final year for all (they could choose between a 3-year and 5-year degree) .I was really bored and decided I had to change the way I taught the course. I decided I was going to make the students write about the subject instead of me teaching it. What I would be teaching is how to write a report. I made this decision several months in advance so I had time to think carefully on the principles I was going to follow. In no particular order: -Practice makes perfect: they had to write several reports (the final number was five). It was going to be the same drill every time - I had to engage the students: they were as part of this innovation initiative as I was. We would dedicateof plenty time to assess the process and I would listen to them and accept their suggestions as much as possible. They were assured that as long as they put in an honest amount of work, they were going to get a good grade no matter the result. - I was going to see it through. If the first results were not good I (we) would make the necessary changes, but would not revert to the old ways. - The stuedents had to have a clear perception that this class was different. The first few weeks the class started with some wacky exercise, to change their frame of mind. The structure of this year-long course was the following. We had 5 cycles, each five weeks long. On each cycle I would dedicate one week to breeze over what would have been five weeks of regular classes, and the other four weeks would be dedicated to writing a paper on the subject of the cycle (arithmetic circuits, processors, and so on). There was a standard textbook they could follow, but they were also free to look at other material. Each class session of these four weeks would be dedicated to teach some aspect of technical writing, and work on some exercise that would be directly useful to the completion of their paper (designing the exercises was the hardest thing I had to do). There were some 30 studentsand they teamed up in pairs. That was done because I had to assess their papersw and it wouldn't be possible for 30 papers. The (unplanned) pairing had excelent results, as the students bounced out ideas, discussed them (sometimes heatedly), and revised each other's work. After each cycle I would review the report with each group in depth. For the first and second cycle I spent between one and two hours with each group, going over each section, discussing alternatives, answering whatever concern they had. After that it reduced to some 30 minutes. The first cycle did not go too well. The students had a hard time getting their reports going. They thought it was because they knew too litle on the subject before they started writing. The suggested that for the second cycle I should lecture for two weeks in more detail. I did not think that was a good idea (I knew that it was always hard to start a paper, and having more time at the end would be better for them), but I did what they suggested. The second cycle produced results as bad as the first, but the students realized that delaying the start was a bad idea, and asked me to go back to the one-week lecture. Following the students 'wrong' suggestion,and then returning to my way was very beneficial. They also expressed concern that each one was working on a different topic, so they were each learning something different. In a moment of divine inspiration, I told them that when they finished college and started working their employers would also set different demands on each of them, and that they were learning to find, read, and understand computer architecture and that would be beneficial to all. The "ahhh" that followed was clearly audible. The third cycle produced reaconalbly good results. Students had caught on and worked efficiently. The fourth was even better. After the lecture week of the fifth and final cycle the students asked if I minded letting them work on their own and not come to class. I realized they didn't need me anymore. That was one of the highlights (if not "the" highlight) of my teaching career. Most of the papers were outstancing. Three of the students told me, years later, after graduating, that this was their best learning experience ever. I learned form this experience to trust the students, to ask them for their opinions,to get them involved in their own education, to challenge them, and to work with them. My teaching methods and principles changed forever. 88. Case studies Three of us grad students got together... Well to back up a bit - I had TA'd a fair amount in grad school. Second semester the first year I was there - I TA'd intro. Then I TA'd the intro lisp course - which was a graduate intro lisp course. I did intro during the summer team teaching with 3 other grad students- we decided process was more important than product. The feature of htis intro course was: after every assignment we produced a case study. We figured this needed to happen to focus the students on multiple solutions to a problem and things like that. We had oral exams in the class. we gave 2 orals exams. One was that we had a forced office hour so that they could ask any questions they had - then we asked them a problem to see how well they did it. Then the final was (after the project) was another half hour - and we grilled them on their project. So - then I left stanford, went to Cal, thinking that case studies were really too advanced for intro students to be writing, but I taught data structures twice and for each of their assignments, the students were supposed to come up with a case study and we came up with a case study at least for the final project. The first few projects were a case study that we had written. There was the data structures course - and we had thought that just laying writing case studies on the student was a good thing. Then Marcia Linn got involved with this. What we were doing - there was a group of people - a couple of other education people, and Marcia had linked up to study atonomous learning, and how to help students learn on their own. The topic of case studies came up as a possible vechicle with wich students could develop skills in autonomous learning. One thing led to another and we rounded up around 10 high schools who were teaching AP. And we prepared 4 case studies. And we wrote a few papers about it - the various courses were assigned one of three groups, and one of them was did the assignment first then got the case study. The second group got only the case study, and the third group - got only some solution code. These were all we thought - reasonable and authentic conditions. Most classes just handed out solutions. So then we - asked them questions about how well they understood the program that was the result of the case study. As it turned out - the two groups with the case study, did a much better job of answering our questions about the case study program than the students that just got the solution, without all the narrative. That convinved us that case studies were appropriate for a curriculum entity by themselves. One could use them and build them into your class - instead of having them be some sort of extra thing. And it could still be good for learning. We wrote two case study books. We thought that maybe case studies were too advanced for the students to be writing them, but we were working with a teacher in palo alto and she had students write them as part of their homework and having students write them surprised me. Another neat aspect was another high school teacher in SF. She went through our case study book, and didn't have students write a program independently. Only at the very end of the course did she assign programming assignments where students started from scratch. Everything up till then was doing some work with our case studies. The students apparently compalined to their parents that they were not getting a chance to be creative. so the first PTA meeting was a little intense. Fortunately, she had copies of our case study papers to show people to show it wasn't some whacky thing. so that's why I got on the AP test development committee. They sent us the specs for the first AP test development and I thought it was a crock - and just details at Berkeley. Really different than what we do at Berkeley. So they said "you should put your money where your mouth is" and that is now part of my legacy - the inclusion of the case study. Case studies for me are just emensely fun to write. Partly because the way I typically put together a case study is I write something up and then hand it off to a colleage to review. And these days I'm sensitive to why i'm making decisions and why. But they will still bring it back and ask me questions and point out big jumps. It is so fun for me to realize what I know that I don't know that I know. And I still think that - I have not found a better way to adress conplex concepts but to use a case study to make concepts concrete. 89. Attendance and engagement: chicken or egg? I was becoming increasingly frustrated at the poor attendance of some of my students despite the fact that I was working very hard to make their learning engaging and relevant. Many of my colleagues were suggesting that that's how it is...lessons to be learned for them...students are adults..it's their choice... However, my interviews with some of these students made it clear that their decisions to attend were not based on their perception of the quality of my sessions but more the fact that they would rather not make the effort. Often they simply wanted more sleep! So I decided that I would offer a combination of sticks and carrots designed to get them there. First of all I would use a register to make sure it was clear i was noticing who was there and who wasn't. Secondly I would offer two different assessments one of which could only be completed and accessed by attending 80% or more of the sessions. Thirdly, each session would allow the students to gather evidence in a booklet which formed part of the vidence base they would draw on in their written assignment and thereby allow them to feel good about building up materials for the assessment each week rather than leaving it all to the end. Fourthly the relevance of all the activities to the assessment would be clearer and more explicit. Finally I would not offer any additional individual assessment support to students who failed to attend less than 80% of sessions ( except where they had documented mitigating circumstances) on the basis that I would not make up for deficiencies in their learning which were of their own making and could then devote more time to those who had engaged regularly. The response has far outweighed my expectations. I have virtually full attendance from the 160 + students on the module and a far happier group of students. 90. Lesson basics: teach so others will learn Many years ago, I was a participant in the 3-day Instructional Skills Workshop. These workshops started in Victoria, BC, Canada, but are now offered in many parts of the world. The focus of the three days is to design and lead a 10-minute lesson each day that includes 6 basic elements, then reflect on how it went, and try to build in feedback from the facilitators and fellow participants into the next day's lesson. I went on to be a facilitator of these workshops and even coordinate one of the programs for many years. The ideas and experiences from those three days changed forever how I teach and facilitate in many positive ways. Two key examples: 1) I create a detailed lesson plan for each thing that I teach or lead, be it a 50-minute class, a 3-hour seminar or an all-day or multi-day workshop. The lesson plan includes what I will do, what the learners will do, and what kinds of materials, handouts or other 'stuff' I will use. Part of the success lies not only in putting time limits on each component, but in making sure that you have included all 6 'lesson basics' in each lesson; 2) working with the elements (which are hook, pre-test, learning objective, participatory component, post-test and summary) really helps you to make sure that everything connects and interconnects, and that everything you do during the lesson is for the learners. What are they getting out of this? How will they meet the objectives? How will they (and you) know when and how that has happened. Using these ideas and practising them whenever I can has made me a more efficient and organized designer and teacher or facilitator of lessons, courses and programs. And I feel strongly that it has helped countless students and other learners over the years to be able to know 'what they learned in school today'. Some of my students have joined me in conducting surveys and presenting studies at conferences to show the ways that learning has taken place. 91. Meeting Marcia Linn The thing that changed my life is when Marcia Linn showed up at my door with Joan Heller she said, we want to research people learning to program and we've heard you teach a lot of those, There was a vast set of things I got from this. I was a clueless teacher, trying things as a whim and flying by the seat of my pants. What I got from Marcia is that she could see the big picture and say "oh yeah - what you're doing is - and here's how it is in math, physics and chemistry". It was like pedagogical patterns only more scientific authentic. But then I could see how what they were doing in other disciplines related to what I was trying. So that gave me the motivation for trying more experiments, and they were guided experiments with a cognitive basis. I used to believe that you could teach recursion, by focusing on the leap of faith. If my goal was to teach all of my students to deal with recursion as the leap of faith - then I wanted to get them all to leap! In our CS1.5, students learned pascal and pointers and some baby software engineering things. So it was less data structures than we have in our data structures at the moment. So we took maybe 12 students, and we gave them some buggy recursive thing. Sat them down, here's a buggy thing, sat them with a computer for machine feedback, and let them go. so of course, no body tried the leap of faith method to understand the recursion, and these were some of my best students, so i thought, well - I became rather less secure with the leap of faith as a way to deal with recursion. Then someone in the group posed me a problem, adding to the end of a list, where you do it with a var parameter in Pascal, so I coded this and then the base case is, if your parameter is null, then store the link to the new element in the parameter. I needed to trace it out to convince myself that it worked. And marcia pointed out "ah ha! Not leaping of faith - are you" so i became more sensitive to tracing out recursions. So then the question became - how much tracing do you need to really understand what's going on. That was another thing that came out of working with my students in these interviews. One of the bugs was a bug in a binary search tree. The tree we gave them with the bug, had 20 nodes in the tree. Several of these students, instead of trying reasonable tests, that they could verify quickly, they started tracing with enormous N, and they trace it out and get lost somehow. So I succeeded neither in helping them manage recursion, nor coming up with small but interesting test cases. So that led me to more and different lab activities.92. A cure for lectures Four years ago I was appointed quality assurance coordinator for my institution and in an attempt to bring myself up to speed for my job I took the University of Ulster PGDip Course in Further and Higher Education. The programme exposed me to the latest ideas on learning and teaching and when I looked at how I had been teaching over the last ten years I was appalled! All I had been doing was lecturing for content! This led me to start innovating in my teaching - becoming more student centred. I'm attempting to do this by using reflective exercises, group discovery and discussion methods. The principle I try to follow is never to cover in a didactic session anything that students can reasonably discover or work out for themselves given the right encouragment and learning framework. 93. The virtual pedagogy initiatives One event that made me change my teaching plans was speaking to student called Victoria Hollingsworth. Victoria was a very quiet unassuming student that sat at the back of the class and rarely made an impact during the standard sessions. This particular session I asked the students to come to see me if they had any questions regards the coursework (indeed I set at scheduled times which mandated them to come and discuss the work) but also case of all students I opened the one-to-one tutorials with an icebreaker does asking you what they did in after-hours etc etc. Victoria then told me that she volunteered in a cattery, she acted as a mentor for the students in the other years, she was also active in the student-based psych soc–which is the student run society in the psychology group. I was readily submit all of the course works in time obtaining good grades etc etc. I was surprised summary so young had such a hectic life schedule and she got me wondering how I could facilitate and assistin her learning. When we started to discuss this she came up with several ideas that would help other, pod casts, recordings of lectures, lectures on demand!, Lectures in her pocket… Anything that would allow her to learn around the busy schedule at her own time. I got to wondering what the other students Phelps and started to investigate their experiences, attitudes, and expectations towards learning. This led me to develop the virtual pedagogy initiative, which is a grassroots bottom up lead program of flexible learning strategies are designed around a student needs. Now all of my lectures recorded, all students can subscribe to all of my lectures via RSS feeds, they can get recordings really smart phones which they can return to time and time again. In fact it was Victoria's influence that has really revolutionised my current teaching practice.94. An old dog can learn new tricks. I used to work in a state secondary school, then retrained in TEFL. We were very short of teachers at the language school one summer and I was tearing my hair out. I bumped into an ex-colleague from my secondary school. He had been a Senior Teacher and my boss, but was now retired. It didn't take much to persuade him to come and teach with us. My first observation of his teaching showed it to be disastrous: he was not at all au fait with the communicative techniques required in the new institution. I took him to one side, with trepidation - he was my former boss, after all, and a good 30 years my senior. He was wonderful and told me that he was aware he wasn't doing a good job and that I was, now, the expert. This man has blossomed in his new role because of his total lack of hubris. He is able to take advice from anybody without a qualm. He is now approaching 80 and maintains his position as a well-respected and valued member of staff.95. Assessing the Assessments I'm a member of a science education reading group on campus. We're educators from a variety of disciplines, but we're all scientists who are focussed on education in our field. We read a paper a week and one of the papers recently was on how to evaluate your assessments (specifically tests/exams). The paper was written by a testing center at a different university and was aimed at educators in all fields. So it was very general info. But one person in our reading group was a psychologist who researches "psychometrics" and does extensive quantitiative test analysis for her courses. The reading group that day quickly devolved into Nancy telling us her methods for evaluating and assessing the tests. Based on her experiences and advice, I was inspired to go over a test I was in the process of writing for my CS0 (Principles of CS, non-majors) course the following week. One piece of advice was to do a simple count to make sure the test was covering material in the proportions I wanted. So before I started, I thought about the proportions and decided I wanted about equal representation of material from all 4 chapters the exam covered (so about 25% of the exam material on each chapter.) After analyzing my test, I discovered I was actually pretty far from what I wanted and was quite surprised. I had written an exam that was closer to 40%, 10%, 20%, and 30% respectively for the 4 chapters. I reworked the exam to balance the material and more closely mirror what I wanted to assess in the class. This is now a standard practice before I give exams. I do a quick check to count the number of points per topic, per slide-deck, per chapter, etc. It's very quick and doesn't require much effort from me, but I change almost every exam I write. 96. moving on and saying goodbye I have designed a new Masters programme that is primarily on-line content - this has changed from a predominantly face-to-face programme through a 'blended model' phase to this current on-line mode of delivery. The triggers for the change were to make access to the programme more flexible - this is a part time programme for 'busy professionals' - so students can access the 'teaching' at a time that suits them; to be more 'inclusive' by widening access; and to create resources that can then be re-used in other learning situations. Although we had used blended learning for this programme for sometime, moving to an 'almost totally on-line' programme has been quite a wrench for me. I miss the face-to-face contact with the students and find this contact hard to replicate in the on-line process .... I know the theoretical models that will make this work, and I am fully committed to the on-line model, but even so I find myself mourning the loss of some familiar sessions that I used to love running. This programme is also serving as a 'model' for others, and is seen as the reality of provision for the future - and creating it has been not only good fun but also enabling real creativity. So I guess my story is a familiar one of change - exciting future - challenging present - and some favourite things left behind in the ever receding background. 97. Getting the students to do more, inspired by a lecture This semester, I'm using Peer Instruction in my data structures class, and I'm extending that with out-of-class Video Quizzes. I think that what convinced me to do this was hearing Carl Wieman's talks at SIGCSE 2010 and ICLS 2010. The key phrase that stuck with me was, "It's not what we do as teachers that matters for student learning, it's what the students do." I realized that I needed students to do more -- not necessarily big things (like extra homework), but activities that resulted in them thinking more about the materials. To implement Peer Instruction, I moved all my lectures to Ubiquitous Presenter (with Beth Simon's help) so that I could use those student-polling tools. The out-of-class Video Lectures are something I'm coming up with, based on readings on worked examples and on multimedia instruction (e.g., Richard Catrambone's and Richard Mayer's work). I wanted students to see more code, but with my verbal explanation of the code. I added quizzes about the code (e.g., "By the end of the video, how many nodes are in the linked list that was being manipulated?") so encourage the students to pay attention to the videos. I don't know which is going to result in more learning gains: Adding the in-lecture questions (to get them to think about the lectures more and more deeply) or the out-of-class video quizzes (to get them to spend time reviewing the code). But both are about getting the students to DO more. One surprising value of this: I'm getting more insight into what the students do and don't understand. And that's changing what I present and how I present it. 98. Collaborative pedagogic action research as a form of continuous professional development Evaluations and cycles of action research related to specific modules - undertaken in partnership with the module teaching team, student feedback and external examiners has caused me to change not only my teaching but assessment practice as well. Alongside this gradual evolution in my thinking about pedagogies 'fit for purpose' in the particular module, there have been other influencing factors such as my own personal interest reading and attendance at various staff development or personal development workshops. I brought teaching qualifications, career guidance diploma and adult education experience to the job in the first place, so I think I was in a different place to my colleagues as regards my perspectives and abilities. So I think a range of influences are important, and the way in which one makes connections between them, including a willingness and ability to experiment with innovative ideas, explore and reflect on what works and why - preferably in collaboration with others - and then continually refine and improve the student experience and engagement. It is always immensely encouraging when students derive the benefits - personally, socially, academically and professionally. Their feedback is crucial as a motivating factor for teachers - or 'learning enablers' as I like to call staff who stimulate and motivate intrinsic motivation and student engagement in their learning and development.99. Loosening up in the lecturing 'gym' When I started university teaching I was very 'controlled' - all "chalk & talk". It took my colleague - who resembled King Lear - to loosen me up! We did team teaching together and he regularly inserted activities, interactive tasks, buzz groups, video snatches for students to comment on, role play, group work etc. Basically, the 'scales dropped from my eyes' and I saw how valuable these more discursive, open-ended, student-centred approaches were; and how memorable they were to us & to the students alike. ................
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