I was looking at one of my old teaching and learning books, Kenneth Eble’s 1988 book The Craft of Teaching. Some parts are now a bit dated, but many are not. It was one of those books that greatly influenced how a lot of us
Differences in content and teaching style can lead two instructors to take different approaches to blended course design, said Thomas Cavanagh, associate vice president of distributed learning at the University of Central Florida, in a recent Magna Online Seminar.
Here’s the scenario: Students are taking a chemical thermodynamics course. The instructor solicits clicker responses to a conceptually based multiple-choice question. Students answer individually, write a brief explanation in support of their answer, and indicate how confident they are that their answer is correct. They
Teachers who use group work frequently incorporate some sort of peer assessment activity as a means of encouraging productive interactions within the group. If part of the grade for the group work depends on an assessment by fellow group members, students tend to take their
One consistent question facing educators today is “What are some ways to improve student thinking?” (Houghton, 2004) As educators, we can start by examining and utilizing Bloom’s Taxonomy, which can be summarized with a few words: understanding, remembering, analyzing, applying, and creating. These terms can
According to self-determination theory, a theory developed by Deci and Ryan, three basic psychological needs affect motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Susan Epps, associate professor of Allied Health Sciences, and Alison Barton, associate professor of Teaching and Learning, both at East Tennessee State University, have
What began as a routine summer workshop on incorporating games and game-like elements into instruction turned into the surprise of the summer; two weeks of fun and intense online game play by an engaged and committed cadre of faculty and staff who were working to
Researchers Daniel Smith and Thomas Valentine begin by making an important point. At two-year colleges “the classroom serves as the epicenter of involvement.” (p. 134) The same could be said for commuter campuses as well. Students who attend two-year colleges often do so part- time
We all know faculty who do; often we do so ourselves. But overall, how many faculty grade participation? Would you guess a majority? What reasons justify our decisions to grade or not to grade participation? Those questions help get at our assumptions about participation, and
At one time or another, most of us have been disappointed by the caliber of the questions students ask in class, online, or in the office. Many of them are such mundane questions: “Will material from the book be on the exam?” “How long should
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For indeed, the whole sum of what may be said about questioning is comprised in this: It ought to set the learners thinking, to promote activity and energy on their part, and to arouse the whole mental faculty into action, instead of blindly cultivating the memory at the expense of higher intellectual powers. That is the best questioning which best stimulates action on the part of the learner; which gives him a habit of thinking and inquiring for himself; which tends in a great measure to render him independent of his teacher; which makes him, in fact, a rather skillful finder than a patient receiver of the truth. (Quoted on p. 91 in Eble's book, pp. 138–39 in Fitch's book.)
The language is gendered and far from our current vernacular, but even so, the message is clear and just as relevant today as it was then. The power of teachers' questions lies in their ability to generate students' questions. I don't think most of the questions we ask students lead to that end. My dear friend and good colleague Larry Spence repeatedly tells me that teachers should stop asking questions. They do not promote learning nearly as well as the questions students ask themselves, their peers, and their teachers. Too many of our students haven't gotten beyond asking questions that are banal and trivial—“Will there be multiple-choice questions on the test?” I know questions like that are important to students, and I know why they ask, but we must help them find their way to better questions. I was listening to a panel of science “communicators”—two professors and one novelist—who write and speak about science to those outside the scientific community (Science Friday on National Public Radio, moderated by Ira Flatow, March 29, 2013). One of them made the point that he became interested in science when he figured out there were no answers to the most important questions (the “who are we?” “why are we here?” “what does life mean?” kind of questions). He became a scientist not because science can answer those questions but because “science lets you get close to the questions.” I thought that was an interesting turn of phrase. Getting close to a question doesn't necessarily mean getting close to the answer. It usually means finding, in what looks like an answer, more questions. Questions don't play the role in learning that they could or should. Teachers can change that.