I feel developed
August 16th, 2006 by SplineGuy
So I’m back at work full time. Today was the first full day I have spent back at Wayland after my summer “break.” It was a full day of professional development meetings. Ranging from departmental updates to actual faculty development, I must say it was, overall, a pretty good day. I’m mainly comparing it to days past. This is actually my 7th round of these meetings that start off every school year. This year, our classes for the fall semester get started on Wednesday, August 23 so the layout of the next few days is as follows:
- Wed., Aug 16: Faculty/Staff Development
- Thu., Aug 17: Division Meetings, Faculty Assembly and Retirement Reception for long-time Wayland faculty member, Wayland Family Dinner (Cajun theme, yeehaw!), and “Over the Hedge” showing for the kids.
- Fri., Aug 18: Student move-in, maybe more meetings, installing computer lab, class prep
- Mon. Aug 21 (my 30th birthday): Schedule changes, class prep.
- Tue., Aug 22: Registration, class prep.
- Wed., Aug 23: First day of classes.
As I mentioned, I was pretty pleased with today’s professional development. Here were the highlights in my eyes:
- The retiring faculty member mentioned above is a former pastor and is retiring from the position of Chair of the Division of Religion and Philosophy. He led us in a devotional in which he walked us through the difference between living a “good” life and a “great” life. It’s just as important, maybe even more important to be “good”, rather than trying to be “great.” Of course, the meaning behind “good” here is the sense of living with integrity, generosity, and decency. Whereas, being “great” denotes excelling in whatever you do.
- I got to be the butt of a couple of jokes as a result of an email mistake on my part the night before our meetings. An email was sent out that assigned faculty and staff to committees. I had been involved in the committee selection process. The chair of the committee on committees inadvertently left my name off the list of participants in the selection process and so I emailed her back, letting her know of her mistake. With a bit of jest, I complained but also thanked her for letting me avoid complaints and gripes from people not liking their committee placements. Unfortunately, I hit the “reply to all” instead of just “reply”. I ended up getting a good amount of complaints as result. All in good fun.
- Good statistics joke came up this morning as well:
“Two statisticians went bow-hunting together. After waiting a while, a buck came up near where they were. The first statistician pulled back and fired a shot. He missed just two feet behind the buck. The next pulled back and fired his shot. He missed just ahead of the buck by two feet. So they gave each other a high-five and went home.” HT: Dr. Claude Lusk - I am mostly gold with some green. We took a “True Colors” personality profile. Turns out that I am an organized personality (gold) and a hard-worker/curious personality (green). Big surprise. This session simply served as a reminder that different personalities respond differently to various motivators. It is important to incorporate a variety of approaches to learning that correspond to different personalities. Not all learners are the same.
- “Anyone? Anyone?”: The first seminar I attended after we broke up into smaller groups (~30) was one on learning to ask appropriate questions to aid in the learning process.
> I would like to incorporate a few more open questions in my courses. These are questions without a specific answer but that several students can contributes ideas to. For example, I might use questions such as “What are some applications of this particular model?” or “Which of these methods would be prefered? Why?”
> Think-pair-share: I like the idea of using short, quiz show like questions where the entire class can vote on the answer. For example, I often will have the class work a specific problem then ask a few people to give their answers. If there is more than one answer, I put it to the class for a vote. If the class is fairly split on the vote, then we do a Think-Pair-Share activity. They get together with a neighbor and share what they did and discuss the problem. Then, I’ll put the class to a vote again.
> 3 - 10 Second Rule: Although I have become quite comfortable with silence after the question, I never was given good guideline as to how long to wait. I think I am comfortable up to 6 seconds before I rephrase. Although I have occasionally waiting even longer than 10. One idea that was presented was the possibility of having a student rephrase the question for me, that is, if it is the question that is the problem.
> I will work on giving stronger encouragement following correct answers.
> I still have no idea what the best way to handle the wrong answers. I often feel that I am too harsh on the off-the-wall answers. I know this discourages students from further responses. The one tip given was to avoid, “Yes, but . . .” answers as they are really a back-handed complement. - Active Learning: The second seminar was regarding the use of Active Learning techniques. A couple of items stood out at this seminar
> According to a particular paper, an average of 5% of the material covered in a traditional lecture style class is retained by students after 24 hours. An average of 75% of the material covered in an active learning environment is retained after 24 hours. A colleague of mine made a good point about this statistic. If 100 topics are covered in traditional lecture verses 5 topics in an active learning environment, then what is the advantage? It is unclear whether his critique is valid without access to the paper .
> We covered some of the pros and cons of active learning environments. I am certainly in favor of expanding my use of group learning exercises, projects, muddy points surveys (where is the material “muddy” or still unclear?), content mapping, etc. The risks or negatives include a loss of control by the instructor, changing my role as instructor (from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side”), sometimes more prep work, better assessments are needed, less material can be covered because of time constraints, risk of wrong information. The pros include better understanding, more enjoyable learning environment, student relationships, better simulation of future work environments.
> Afterward, a colleague of mine and I had a discussion related to a problem we’ve both had in using group work environments, namely regulating the speed at which groups work. Given a certain set of problems, there are usually a small number of students that can finish the problems very quickly and then most of the groups will take their time. They then become a distraction to the rest of the class, or the rest of class time is a waste of their time, waiting for the other groups finish their work. I’ve tried giving more problems to guarantee that the fast groups would not finish, but then this convinces the slower groups that it doesn’t matter how fast they go, they’ll never finish. They then take even longer finishing only a single problem without much focus or drive to move on. I’ve tried motivating them to work more dilligently by offering rewards or extra credit, but this tends to only motivate the faster groups to move even faster and with less interaction. Again, the slower groups throw up their hands and resign themselves to not acheiving the extra credit. If the readers of this blog have any other suggestions, I’m all ears.
I would simply say again that most of today was a successful development day, giving me a few ideas to incorporate.
I think Kevin and I were the only ones from our general area of the room who got the statistics joke.
That last issue about speed is always a problem. Usually the differences in speed are due to differences in ability or preparation — the faster groups consist mainly of students who have higher levels or ability and/or preparation than the slower groups. With that in mind, there are a few things you can to do level the playing field before the group activities begin. You can assign the students to fixed groups that change every so often, and mix up the levels of students that are in each group; that way the lower-level students benefit from being around the higher-level ones, and the higher-level ones benefit from having to explain the material to the lower-level ones.
Or, you can assign specific roles to each person in the group — in a group of four, for instance, you can put one person in charge of technology, another in terms of writing everything up, another in charge of managing the workflow, and another to be the skeptic, or something. In other words, make the groups less about levels of ability and more about executing certain roles with regards to solving a problem.
In the past when I’ve done the role-centered groups, I’ve started out a period of group work with a mini-quiz that covers some basic elements of the material being studied in the group work — stuff that any reasonably prepared person should know before doing the group work — and factor in the average of the quiz scores to the group’s grade. This motivates everybody in the group to come to class prepared and ready to work.
You can also intervene in a group that’s working faster than the others and engage them in a little problem-solving or out-of-box thinking one-on-one right in the classroom. This will keep their brains occupied while the other groups catch up.
I also wanted to say that this remark from your colleague:
“A colleague of mine made a good point about this statistic. If 100 topics are covered in traditional lecture verses 5 topics in an active learning environment, then what is the advantage?”
…is missing the point. The point of a college class is not to “cover topics” but to have students learn things, not just in a surface-level recall way but with deep comprehension. We don’t measure the success of a class in terms of how many bullet points from the syllabus we can tick off, and students have not learned if the only thing they can do is recall facts. I think it’s undoubtedly true that you end up covering less content in an active classroom than in a pure-lecture environment — although I don’t think it’s a 100-to-5 ratio — but what does get covered is learned much more deeply. We have to let go of the idea that the quantity of the content that is mentioned is an accurate gauge of how good our classes are.
See this post over at my place for more on that.