Bloom's Sixth

By Doug Ward Matthew Ohland talks confidently about the best ways to form student teams. In a gregarious baritone punctuated by frequent, genuine laughs, he freely shares the wisdom he has gained from leading development of a team creation tool called CATME and from studying the dynamics of teams for more than two decades. Ohland, a professor of engineering education at Purdue, visited KU recently and spoke with faculty…

By Doug Ward SAN DIEGO, Calif. – Here’s a harsh question to ask about the classrooms on our campuses: What are they good for? Yes, there’s more than a tinge of sarcasm in that question – answering “not much” comes immediately to mind – but it gets to the heart of a problem in learning and, more broadly, in the success of our students. Oregon State drew from several models as it created new classrooms, including a learning studio, an emporium style (below) and the set of a television talk show (bottom). Tim Reynolds of the architecture firm …

Students engaged in active learning tend to be gloriously noisy. They share ideas and insights with each other. They write on whiteboards. They debate contentious topics. They work problems. They negotiate group projects. In Genelle Belmas’s Gamification class, though, active learning took the form of silence – at least for a day. That’s right. Silence — in a room with more than 100 students. A seat creaked now and then. Someone coughed. A notebook rustled. Otherwise, nothing. If you don’t believe me, listen to the video in the multimedia file below. Just don’t expect to hear much.…

By Doug Ward A young woman with a flower headdress caught my attention as I walked through Budig Hall earlier this week. I stopped and asked her what the occasion was. “It’s Hat Day in Accounting 200,” she said. I wanted to know more, and Paul Mason, who teaches the 8 a.m. section of the class, and Rachel Green, who teaches the 9:30 section, graciously invited me in. Hat Day, they said, is a tradition that goes back 20 years. It takes place one day toward the beginning of each semester and works like this: Students get a bonus point if they wear a hat to class. Teaching assistants…

“What just happened?” Carl Luchies asked his graduate teaching assistant.  They stood at the front of a lecture hall in early 2013, watching as 120 normally subdued engineering undergraduates burst into spontaneous conversation. Luchies, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, had just given the students a problem to work on and told them it was a collaborative quiz due at the end of class. Students could work with anyone in the room, he said. “Anyone?” they asked. Carl Luchies works with a student in a graduate-level biomechanics class Anyone, he said. They could move…

It’s no secret that we are big fans of active learning at the Center for Teaching Excellence. So when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a call to action for active learning and declared today Active Learning Day, we had to join the festivities…

Here’s a glimpse into the classroom of the future. It’s huge, and I mean HUGE: big enough for a football field, a magical playground, a dig site for studying bones, and an area for playing with dogs, bears and dolphins. It has cool carpet and places for listening. The tables are spread out and you can choose among giant chairs, bouncy chairs and floating chairs. It has crayons, of course, but also drawers to hold skulls (from the dig site, no doubt) and a secret room. Best of all, it has a portal to a lake and a monorail that will take you anywhere. Are you on board? I was when I visited…

Here’s a thought to start the semester with: Education offers only a blueprint. Learning takes place in the application. If that sounds familiar, it should. It lies at the heart of active learning, an amalgam of practices that that moves education beyond the mere delivery of information. It’s an approach that improves student learning, especially …

Alma Clayton-Pedersen offers this vision for higher education: “Imagine what a nation we would be if students really took away everything we wanted them to have,” she said at last week’s Teaching Summit in Lawrence. Alma Clayton-Pedersen at the KU Teaching Summit Problem is, they don’t. Much of the reason for that, she said, has to do with their background, the quality of the education they received before college, the way they are treated in college, and the connections they feel – or don’t feel – to their peers, their instructors and their campus. We talk about college readiness as…

The future of teaching went on display Friday afternoon in Spooner Hall. By display, I mean the 30-plus posters that hung from the walls of The Commons, documenting the changes that KU faculty members and post-doctoral teaching fellows made to courses this academic year. Greg Baker of geology explains his poster to Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little. The poster session was the culmination of this year’s C21 Course Redesign Consortium(There was a link but the page no longer exists), but it included work from participants in last year’s …