Bloom's Sixth

Asked to describe the things that help them learn, students provide a remarkably consistent list: Engagement Interaction Clarity Openness Accessibility A sense of belonging That’s hardly a complete list, but those ideas came up again and again during a focus group at KU’s recent Student Learning Symposium. Not surprisingly, those same components come up again and again in research on learning. Holly Storkel accepted the university’s Degree-Level Assessment award on behalf of the Speech-Language Pathology program. She was joined at the Student Learning Symposium by Sara Rosen,…

Doug Ward In this month’s Teaching Matters (There was a link, but it does not exist anymore), Mike Vitevitch writes about his experiences in having honors students give group presentations in lieu of a final exam. Vitevitch, a professor of psychology, says he was “bowled over” by the quality of the students’ work at the end of the spring semester. As he explains in the accompanying video, honors students in Introduction to Psychology tend to do very well on exams. They know the material, and Vitevitch…

At workshops for graduate teaching assistants on Monday, I shared one of my favorite quotes about education. It’s from Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. In a TED Talk on innovation last year, he said: “Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.” Andrea Greenhoot, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, leads a discussion during the open session of the GTA conference at KU…

James Burns of Boston College uses a term I hadn’t heard before: “swirling students.” Writing in The Evolllution, Burns says swirling students are those who move in and out of college, collecting a few hours here, a few hours there as they move toward a degree. They often have full-time or part-time jobs, families, health problems or financial challenges, he says. Photo by Doug Ward The best way to attract – and keep – those students is through personal attention,…

Jennifer Roberts walks through the lecture hall during her geology class, above and bottom, working with students on collaborative problem-solving. Several teaching assistants also help in the classroom. Jennifer Roberts first noticed the difference a few years ago in Geology 101. The course regularly draws 300 or more students a semester, and Roberts, an associate professor of geology, was teaching in much the same way she had since she took over the course in 2002: lecture and exam. Problem was, exam scores were…

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…

Earlier this week, I wrote about the unlikelihood of competition and cultural forces pushing higher education to “unbundle” its degrees and services. Jeff Young of The Chronicle of Higher Education provides yet another take on that notion. Young says that providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have pledged to democratize education, allowing anyone to become an educator and a learner. He describes platforms like Udemy, edX and MOOC.org collectively as the “sharing economy meets…

The note cards I handed out to students in my hybrid class last week drew astonished looks. Each contained a hand-written list of three things: events, people, animals, objects, locations, movies, songs, television shows. All were random, created one evening in a stream of consciousness. For instance: “Eye of the Tiger” Eye of a needle Arctic Ocean and Fire alarms Fairy tales Calvin Klein “Here’s the fun part,” I told students. “Find a connection among the three things.” That’s where the astonishment came in. The main goal of the exercise was to help students synthesize, to open…

Teachers and administrators say they want to see more innovation in teaching but blame each other for creating obstacles to experimentation, The Hechinger Report writes. In the article, Jordan Shapiro says that lack of a “dependable shared language” may contribute to the problem. Education buzzwords abound, but clear definitions of those buzzwords are in shorter supply (see Audrey Watters below). That makes it harder to gauge what administrators want or what teachers are doing…

Two recent surveys help illustrate the barriers that block much-needed changes in teaching, learning and course design at colleges and universities. In one, conducted by Gallup for Inside HigherEd, most full-time faculty members saw little value in online courses and took an even bleaker view of online courses at their own institutions. The survey found that only 24 percent of full-time faculty members agreed or strongly agreed that…