Bloom's Sixth

The intellectual work that goes into teaching often goes unnoticed. All too often, departments rely on simple lists of classes and scores from student surveys of teaching to “evaluate” instructors. I put “evaluate” in quotation marks because those list-heavy reviews look only at surface-level numerical information and ignore the real work that goes into making teaching effective, engaging, and meaningful. Debby Hudson via Unsplash An annual evaluation is a great time for instructors to document the substantial intellectual work of teaching and for evaluators to put that work front and…

Watching David Johnson’s class in digital logic design is a bit like watching synchronized swimming. After a few minutes of announcements, Johnson and half a dozen GTAs and undergraduate teaching fellows fan out across an Eaton Hall auditorium as 60 or so students begin to work on problems that Johnson has assigned. David Johnson works with a student during Introduction to Digital Logic Design. A hand goes up on one side of the room. Johnson approaches, and students around him listen intently as he asks questions and quietly offers advice. Across the aisle, a group of four young men…

The recent (Re)imagining Humanities Teaching conference (PDF) offered a template for the future of teaching in higher education. With its emphasis on teaching as a scholarly activity, the conference challenged participants to find effective ways to document student learning, to build and maintain strong communities around teaching, and to approach courses as perpetual works in progress that adapt to the needs of students. Pat Hutchings speaks during a plenary session at the (Re)imagining Humanities…

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The humanities have gone through much soul-searching over the past few years. So asking instructors in the humanities to take on hard questions about the way they teach seems like a natural step. For instance, what do they value in their teaching? Is that truly reflected in their teaching and assignments? Why do they teach the humanities? What is humanities teaching and learning good for? Those are some of the questions that arose in opening sessions…

Two recent education conferences I attended raised similar questions about developing and sustaining high-quality teaching. Things like: How do we measure the success of course transformation? How can we get buy-in from colleagues? How do we gain the support of department chairs and administrators? How do we share ideas among campuses? How do we sustain and grow communities around the idea of improving teaching? That last question was central to both conferences, one at KU and one at the University of California, Davis. Participants in the Trestle launch…

By Doug Ward Course redesign has become a crucial piece of helping college students succeed. The statistics below about enrollment and graduation rates make it clear that success is too often elusive. Course redesign is hardly the only solution to that problem, but it is a proven, tangible step that colleges and universities can take. Course redesign involves moving away from faculty-centered lectures and adopting student-centered techniques that improve learning. It usually includes online work that students do outside of class and in-…

By Doug Ward PALO ALTO, Calif. – Nearly all college faculty members want to teach well but few have both the pedagogical background to make their classes more student-centered and the incentive to do so, the Nobel laureate Carl Wieman said Monday. Carl Wieman (Stanford photo) Wieman, a physics professor at Stanford, has been a leader in promoting effective teaching practices in the sciences, primarily through his Science Education Initiative. He spoke Monday at a meeting of …

Active learning helps students learn in deep, meaningful ways, as study (There was a link here, but the page no longer exists) after study has shown. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. On the contrary, students who have grown accustomed to sitting through lectures with one eye on their phones and one foot out the door often rebel at changing to hands-on exercises, in-class discussion among dozens or hundreds of students, peer learning, group projects, and other techniques that force them…

Will students one day piece together their own degrees by assembling courses a la carte from a variety of colleges and universities? Derek Newton of the Center for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says no. Writing in The Atlantic, Newton argues that technology won’t force the “unbundling” of degrees and programs in higher education the way it has the music industry and cable TV.…

Why a phone book isn’t a good learning tool Daniel J. Klionsky of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan asks why so many instructors or programs continue to teach facts that students don’t need to know. In an article in Faculty Focus, he uses the telephone book as an example. No one needs to memorize all the numbers in a phone book. The idea is absurd. And yet, many instructors in science courses insist that…