WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

Join us this Thursday, January 3rd for a workshop on Blogs and Wikis in Academia. We will explore the use of these tools in academic contexts. UPDATE: Slides from the session now available  http://www.slideshare.net/warters/blogs-and-wikis-in-academia/ 

Here are the details:

• Thursday, January 3rd
• 1:30 – 3:30 pm
• 150 Purdy Kresge Library
• (TRC Instruction Lab)

The beauty of smaller class sizes (the dream of many a professor!) is that they provide us a space to conduct discussions in a different way. We can explore issues in more depth and potentially give students more ownership of ideas and more voice in the process. As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I recall being presented with different models for classroom discussion:

• The Free-for all (people talk over each other, no order or coherence)
• The Beauty Pagent (people work hard to sound smart, while everyone judges critically the person who has the floor. Instead of listening, we are preparing for our next turn “on the runway”.)
• The Distinguished House Tour (we get introduced to old, venerable ideas by someone who knows about them, but we have to stay behind the velvet rope and not touch anything)
• The Barn-raising (people build on ideas that came before, working to fill in content in needed areas, working together to create something of value)

Obviously, after I’d thought about it for awhile, I wanted to be barn-builder. Since then, I’ve tried to create the same atmosphere in my classes.

Michele Jacobsen, a faculty member in the Department of Education at the University of Calgary, has done a nice job spelling out some of the qualities that need to be in place for a real learning conversation. Her handout, entitled Cultivating Shared Leadership in a Scholarly Community of Inquiry, presents some suggestions and group agreements that are designed to encourage scholarly discourse. Here’s a quote from the section on shared leadership:

Sometimes what is heard and what is actually meant are very different. Questions that may serve to guide self-reflection on intent include: Is your/our goal to be correct or superior? Is your/our goal to seek truth by asking questions, or to defend a favorite idea by making emotional statements? Is leadership relative and contextually bound or is leadership absolute?

Definitely worth a look. Thanks for sharing Michele!

The Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota has published a useful online tutorial supporting Active Learning strategies in the classroom. The tutorial is called Scenes From a Classroom: Making Active Learning Work, and it really does have scenes. After an introduction to a whole range of approaches to making classes more engaging, users are invited to watch a series of video clips demonstrating various active learning techniques and some of the challenges instructors might face as they adopt these new methods. Fortunately, the videos also provide a “second take” where things go better. Here’s the list of scenes presented:

Scene One: My Students Don’t Want Active Learning!
Scene Two: My Students Are Complaining about Active Learning!
Scene Three: I’m Not in Control with Active Learning!
Scene Four: Active Learning Takes Too Much Time!
Scene Five: My Students Won’t Work Together in Groups!
Scene Six: My Students Don’t Take Peer Review Seriously!