Thinking About College Teaching

Hi, I’m back after a long hiatus.

Professor Ruth Walden of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (UNC-Chapel Hill) gave me a great opportunity today. She went to the Bahamas for her son’s wedding, and she asked me to be the substitute teacher for her Mass Communication Pedagory course. The scheduled topic was Student Learning, and I jumped at the chance.

This gave me an opportunity to read some excellent articles Ruth had assigned her students to read, and I recommend them.

• “The Case Against Teaching,” CHANGE, November/December 2001, pp. 11-19.  Larry D. Spence of Penn State University argues that a 15th century teacher from the University of Paris would find himself at home in a modern day college classroom  He makes other provocative points: “We haven’t improved teaching for 4,000 years because it works so well one-on-one that we believe we understand how it works in general.” Or, “Teachers practice a superstitious ritual aimed at the imaginary individuals they think they see out there.” Or, “Our testing practices assume that students’ brains are homogenous and that they all learn the same things.” Or, “A lot of technology in education looks like bolting an internal combustion engine on the back of a horse and buggy. We get something more exciting and noisy,  but the rig can’t go any faster.” Spence proposes a solution however, saying “We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.” He says they need to create learning spaces and experiences where students can learn on their own and at their own pace.
• “Taking Learning Seriously,” CHANGE, July/August 1999. Noted teaching guru Lee Schulman describes learning as “an interplay of two challenging processes–getting knowledge that is inside to move out, and getting knowledge that is outside to move in.” The first influence on new learning, he says, is not what the teachers do but what the students already know. He promotes the scholarship of teaching, work that makes our work “public and thus susceptible to critique.”
• “Applying the Science of Learning,” CHANGE, July/August 2003, pp. 36-41. Diane Halpern and Milton Hakel argue that the primary goal of education should be long-term retention and transfer–that we should be teaching for the moment when we will not be present–and “preparing students for unpredictable real-world tests that we will not be giving.” They state emphatically that “the single most important variable in promoting long-term retention and transfer is practice at retreival.”

I told the students about my favorite book about learning: THE ART OF CHANGING THE BRAIN, by James Zull. In clear and useful prose, he explains what scientists have learned about physical changes in the brain when it is exposed to new information–it relates it to what we already know. I also described an article in the New York Times (January 13, 2009) that told how MIT has done away with its old freshmen lecture classes in physics and replaced them with student-centered collaborative learning experiences.

In our discussion, we focused on how to apply those principles to teaching–to relate new material to what students already know and to give them frequent and varied opportunities to practice retreiving that stored information. It was a great experience to be exposed again to the bright young people who will be teachers of the future.

Rich Wells asked, “I would like to better understand how to get students to think rather than just spoonfeeding them facts and expect the facts to be memorized for tests. I’ve been told I do this well, but I still want to improve. What are the right kinds of questions, exercises, etc.?”

That is an important question, and I hope to hear from others who have their own ideas and techniques. Think about how you present material in class and how you test students’ knowledge of the material. Instead of spoonfeeding facts to students, I tried to engage them in a dialogue and make them think as I presented material. I don’t claim that it was true Socratic dialogue, however.

When I presented new material for them to learn, I tried to start on the foundation of what they already knew, and I did not introduce formulas until I had talked through the problem that a formula was supposed to solve. (I recommend James Zull’s great book, The Art of Changing the Brain, which explains how the brain changes physically when it encounters new information. The first thing the brain does is to try to match the new information with familiar information in its memory.) When you introduce a new topic, tell students how the concept relates to what they already know–and why they will find the new concept useful.

A simple example from my advertising media planning course illustrates this. One concept I used to discuss was “cost per thousand,” a way to compare the costs of advertising by taking into account the size of the audience. I began by saying, “An ad in magazine A costs $100,000, and an ad in magazine B costs $150,000. Which is the better bargain?” Students said that it depended on the size of the audiences, and I asked, “How can you compare the two?” Eventually, a student would say that one needed to know the cost for reaching one person, and I said, “How do you find that?” A student would explain that you needed to divide the cost of the ad by the number of people in the audience (and multiply by 1,000 to get cost-per-thousand). I asked students to say in words what the process was, and then I asked them to make their own formula as a way to explain how to make the comparison. I found that process to be more effective than starting by saying, “The formula for cost-per-thousand is <(C/Audience)*1,000.”

When you use a process like this, it is important to be patient for students to respond and to guide the incorrect responses to correct ones. You should also call on students and not wait for volunteers; that will keep all the students alert and thinking about the topic.

On exams, you can pose questions as hypothetical situations and ask students to think about and solve the problem instead of asking for memorized answers. To make this more effective, make sure students have a chance to practice this kind of problem-solving before the exam.

Other ideas?

Serena Fenton and Don Wittekind have asked about how to engage extremely intelligent students who seem to know the material already, hold contempt for the course, and balk at assisting others. This is an issue that many teachers have to deal with.

Approach this with an open mind and do not be judgmental. Avoid the temptation to conclude that such behavior is a sign of lack of motivation or even hostility toward the course and teacher. It might be due to other factors. Students may be facing outside pressures or problems or may have decided to exert their best effort in other courses. They might be reacting to other students in the course. This emphasizes how important it is to get to know students on an individual basis. Some of their behavior may be due to a perception that you do not care about individual students. Many students will naturally be motivated to perform better for teachers who take a personal interest in them.

I would try to learn more about such students and what might be causing their behavior, but I would do it in a subtle way, avoiding direct questions about why they don’t seem to be motivated. In other words, don’t tip your hand and don’t make a big deal out of it. Make a point of greeting those students and talking to them in and out of class. Point out positive things about their work and suggest how it could be even better. Try to learn how they approach assignments to see if that offers any clues. Ask how they learned the material and skills associated with the task. Praise them in class and ask them to explain how they did the assignment. They may be willing to help other students who ask them but resist your efforts to assign them as helpers.

You may have to acknowledge that you cannot motivate all students to perform to the best of their ability. Keep a positive attitude toward such students, but don’t feel that you have failed in their case. Don’t write them off or give them cause to think that you have given up on them. React to student performance and not student personality.

Anyone else have ideas or experiences?

Theories about how students learn could and do occupy entire courses and books, and this post is not intended to be an in-depth review of learning theory. I will list a few references at the end of the post. Most of my focus will be on a book that I found to be extremely useful in understanding how people learn new material and how I could use teaching strategies to take advantage of how students learn.

That book is The Art of Changing the Brain, written by James Zull in 2002. It is available on Amazon.com for about $17, and it is well worth the price. Zull is professor of biology and director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University. In easily understood language, he summarizes what researchers have learned about brain chemistry and physical changes associated with cognitive activity. It opened my eyes to new ideas and confirmed many things I had already been doing as a teacher.

Zull uses an excellent and simple exercise to demonstrate what the brain does when it encounters new information, and I have used that example when I have talked about student learning. You, too, can participate, as long as you follow instructions and do not skip ahead.

On a sheet of paper, write the meaning of the following word, which should not be familiar to you. Do not read beyond the line until you have written the meaning.
flabmonk

_______________________________________

People will usually write variations of the following:

• an overweight monkey
• an overweight member of the clergy

The fact they do shows that their brain naturally tried to associate the new cognitive input with familiar cognitions already in their brain. Students do that when they encounter new information in class or in their reading, and teachers should use strategies to correlate with that tendency of the brain.

Essentially, you need to remind students of what they already know and explain how the new material will fit with knowledge they already have. In my previous post about “The First Day of Class,” I described a way to assess student knowledge at the beginning of the course, and that helps to show students that the new course will build on what they already know. Another strategy is a preview at the beginning of each class session–or at least the beginning of new topics–in which you review previous material and showing how the new material will build on that base of knowledge. Likewise, regular reviews of material at the end of class sessions can help to fix the material in students’ minds. Such previews and reviews will be even more effective if you show them visually as an agenda at the beginning of the class and a written summary at the end. You do not have to be the one who does the review every session. Allow three or four minutes at the end of a class and ask students to write a short, anonymous paragraph to summarize what they learned that day. Collect and review them to see if you achieved your learning goals for that session. If you aren’t satisfied, devote time at the beginning of the next class to clear up misunderstandings. In addition, the act of writing the summary will help to cement the material in students’ minds.

Here are references to other sources I found useful in understanding and explaining how students learn:

• Halperin, Diane F., and Milton K. Hakel. “Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond.” Change, July/August 2003. This useful article summarizes important principles from learning theory to the college classroom and beyond. It is one of the best articles I have found on the topic.
• National Research Council. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. National Academy Press, 2000. This book also deals with cognitive science and how our growing knowledge of the physical nature of learning is shaping approaches to teaching. It is more of a compendium of research and is not as useful as the Zull book.
• Shulman, Lee S. “Taking Learning Seriously.” Change, July/August 1999.
• An inexpensive way to identify one’s learning style is to go to http://vark-learn.com and take a simple test.