Looking for inspiration on teaching or some specific strategies? David Gooblar, a lecturer in rhetoric at the University of Iowa and a blogger on teaching, writes about classroom issues in these pages. Here is a sampling of his recent columns.
After all, the basic science of nutrition hasn’t changed: People who consume more calories than they burn tend to gain weight. But just telling people to cut down on calories isn’t enough to change their behavior. (If it were, we’d all have our ideal BMI.) So what did the researchers behind the JAMA study do differently? They taught people how to adopt the sort of eating habits that naturally lead them to consume fewer calories.
Participants attended classes — once a week for the first two months, then less frequently throughout the year — to learn about healthy eating habits. Class size was small (with no more than 22 students), and the instructors focused on making "sustainable lifestyle changes, not simply following a temporary ‘diet.’" Moreover, based on early feedback, the researchers
modified their teaching to make it "less dense, less didactive, and more interactive." Instructors lectured less and began organizing classes around activities, including students cooking their own recipes.
Small class sizes? Fewer lectures? More active-learning activities? Does any of that sound familiar?
Paré, D. E., Collimore, L.-M., Joordens, S., Rolheiser, C., Brym, R., & Gini-Newman, G.
(2015). Put Students’ Minds Together and their Hearts Will Follow: Building a Sense of Community in Large-Sized Classes via Peer- and Self-Assessment – Appendix. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
Last week, in my final rhetoric class of the semester, we did an end-of-term exercise that I’ve assigned for the past few years. I use notecards to write a series of prompts meant to encourage students to reflect on the semester and what they’ve learned. Each student comes to the front of the classroom, takes a notecard, and responds to the prompt in front of the class. There are also doughnuts.
Among the prompts is this one: "Before this class, I thought rhetoric was [fill-in-the-blank]. Now I think rhetoric is [fill-in-the-blank]." I got the format from Kimberley Tanner, who calls such prompts "retrospective post-assessments."
Among the trickiest decisions teachers make is whether to round up the final grade for a student who is just a few points shy
of a passing score.
Although some students need a “second lap” to master academic skills needed for later coursework, repeating courses makes it harder for students to progress toward a degree. Time is money (literally, in higher education), and when students are asked to spend more of both on a class they already took, they may get discouraged or drop out. This is a consequence we need
to take seriously, as nearly half of students do not complete a bachelor’s degree in four years.
So, how should we decide what to do?
Behind the doors of the University of Toronto’s Simcoe Hall, the school’s governing council voted in favour of passing a controversial policy that would mandate students who are experiencing a mental health crisis to take a leave of absence. The policy drew criticism from students who said it neglects to include the voice of those who are living with a mental health issue.
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-
based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based
approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario
to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs
within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms
include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy
implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
Keywords: internal quality assurance, external quality assurance, accountability, continuous improvement, learning outcomes
Writing and teaching are the two great common denominators of academic life (OK, the departmental meeting is a third). With few exceptions, no matter your discipline, you have to teach, and you have to write.
I co-teach a writing course for graduate students at the University of Iowa, and I’ve been surprised at how often discussions of writing evolve into discussions of teaching. It makes sense: Both involve translating ideas so they can be understood by other people. As we ease out of one semester and start planning for the next, I’ve been thinking about how we might apply writing strategies to our course planning.
Particularly now, when you have several weeks until the next semester starts, it’s worth thinking of your courses like you think about your writing — as the result of a series of drafts. You don’t expect to sit down and write a journal article in one go. Why would creating a course be any different? Acknowledge that drafting and revision are essential to any creative project and give yourself plenty of time.
Cheerful and helpful workers are beloved by their bosses, and just about everyone else, really. Enthusiastic optimists make for great colleagues, rarely cause problems, and can always be counted on.
But they may not necessarily make the best employees, says Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist and Wharton professor.
Speaking in Chicago at the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management, Grant said he separates workers along two axes: givers and takers, and agreeable and disagreeable. Givers share of themselves and make their colleagues better, while takers are selfish and focused only on their own interests. The agreeable/disagreeable spectrum is what it sounds like: some workers are friendly, some are grouchy.
This month, we’ll focus on how to prepare for existing state and national tests. I’ll focus on three things that can help your students improve their chances to score up to their potential. By the way, kids never score above their potential; they’re just not going to randomly make enough lucky right answers time after time after time (in statistics, it’s called regression to the mean).
But, they often underperform for a host of reasons, even when they should perform much better. While we could focus on dozens of variables that influence standardized testing, we’ll focus on these three: 1) brain chemistry, 2) priming, and 3) episodic memory triggers. Some of these suggestions got so many rave reviews that they are reproduced from an earlier bulletin!
I’ve been following, with something like exasperation, the discussion over Harvard University’s new study on teaching. Not
surprisingly, the study found that physics students performed better on multiple-choice tests if they were taught via active learning
strategies than by lecture alone. Yet it also found that students tended to feel they learned more from listening to a
polished lecture.
Research shows when people are curious about something, not only do they learn better, they learn more. It should come as no
surprise, then, that inquiry-based learning is proving to be an effective education model. In fact, one research study found inquiry-based learning produces increases in affective and cognitive outcomes.
I got lucky this semester. I’m teaching two undergraduate courses, and in both of them, my students have bonded in a way that makes my job easier. They start talking to each other before class begins, and are still talking as they walk out the door. They are excited to share their views on the readings and participate eagerly in class discussions. It’s great.
I’m not under the illusion that I had much to do with creating that dynamic. Sometimes a group of students just clicks. But I recognize how a sense of community among students helps me — when students enjoy coming to class, when they trust each other, when they seem to genuinely like each other, they are more likely to learn more.
Real learning is a trip to an unknown destination. It involves revising your previous beliefs in ways that can be
difficult, frightening, or painful. A cohesive and supportive community can ease that process for students. Even when
faculty aren’t as lucky as I’ve been this term, we should be looking for ways to build such a community — one that
offers a safe environment for students to do the sort of experimentation and risk-taking that is necessary for learning
to occur.
For 25 years, I have diligently, thoughtfully, and fastidiously written comments on my students’ essays. In my neatest hand, I’ve inscribed a running commentary down the margin of page after page, and at an essay’s conclusion I’ve summarized my thoughts in a paragraph or more. I’ve pointed out problems in the argument and explained basic mistakes of grammar and style. I’ve demonstrated my enthusiasm for a sharp idea and a well-hewn sentence. I’ve carefully moderated my tone, combining praise with correction. I’ve read papers that moved me to tears, literally, and others that left me frustrated — and tried to be sensitive in letting my students know that in either case.
Ice crystallized on the windshield, then a tire burst on the way to school, making you late. By the time you arrived, the computer (with the video clip and presentation cued up) froze. Minutes later, Jason pulled the fire alarm while you tried to catch up on parent emails. During lunch duty, a student was punched in the nose. Your nose is stuffy while you explain to the principal right before an IEP meeting why your plans haven't been submitted yet. The day trudges along. . . At last, the final bell rings, and in your first quiet moment of the day, thoughts of leaving the teaching profession suddenly seem, well, right.
It's that moment when you want to say, "I quit!"
Interviews for campus-leadership positions have shifted entirely to video, in our Covid-19 era of travel bans and social distancing. Many of the clients I work with as a campus search consultant expect that shift to remain a trend, even after our shelter-in-place era passes. Video interviewing has its advantages — it saves money, for one — but it also creates a unique set of stresses for candidates.
In more than 100 administrative searches, I’ve seen an array of video snafus: cameras angled to focus on shiny foreheads, cameos by pets and naked toddlers, unmade beds clearly visible in the background. I’ve seen candidates — thinking they were on mute — shout at a spouse to be quiet and tell a child to "go pee." I’ve seen committee members — thinking they were on mute — talk about a candidate. I’ve watched candidates put on their eye makeup, sneeze into the screen, and bring in their kids to help manage the technology.
Want your students to think more creatively? The trick, a new study suggests, is all in the timing.
In an experiment, groups of students were found to generate twice as many ideas when they were quizzed around midday, compared with at the start or the end of the working day.
No time for lunch again? You’re the typical modern academic.
Maybe we should be making a stronger pitch for student-led study groups. There’s all sorts of research documenting how students can learn from each other. But, as regularly noted here and elsewhere, that learning doesn’t happen automatically, and some of us worry that it’s not likely to occur in a study group where there’s no supervision and distractions abound. Recent findings should encourage us to give study groups a second look.
In the past few years, the business world has increasingly embraced failure. Entrepreneurs, once coy about past losses and missteps, now flaunt their failures like badges of honour. The idea of “failing upward” has become a recurring motif in blog posts, TED Talks, business conferences and self-help books – and this fetishization of failure has started to infiltrate the world of higher education.
Names … why do we have such trouble learning them? For those of us who struggle with names, it never gets easier, no matter how many tricks we try. It can be embarrassing—to ourselves and to others. I remember once visiting a mall while out of town and hearing someone calling my name.
Soon, a vaguely familiar person was greeting me with enthusiasm. “I am so happy to see you! It’s
been so long? How are you?”
Who is this?, I’m thinking to myself. Course rosters roll through my mind. Nothing. No associations. No connections. Finally, in embarrassment I admit. “I’m terribly sorry but I can’t remember your name.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to reread some of my favorite teaching and learning resources, especially those I haven’t looked at in a while. I’m enjoying these revisits and decided to share some random quotes with timeless insights.