Bloom's Sixth

Using technology to help students take risks Rather than use technology to make education more efficient, why not use it to help students take more risks in learning? That’s the question that Greg Toppo poses in an article for The Hechinger Report. “Good teaching is not about playing it safe,” Toppo writes. “It’s about getting kids to ask questions, argue a point, confront failure and try again.” He’s exactly right. By helping students push…

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…

There’s no shortage of ideas for remaking higher education. Consider a few recent ones: Identifying educational niches and providing more flexibility in course structure for students. Replacing classes with modules.…

Whenever I give workshops about teaching with technology, I try to provide a handout of resources. This is one I distributed after workshops I led at the Best Practices Institute at CTE last week and at the School of Education. It’s a relatively modest list, but it includes sites for visualizing text; for editing images; for creating maps, charts, infographics; and for combining elements into a multimedia mélange. My goal in creating lists like this is to help instructors think about ways to incorporate multimedia elements and technology into their teaching. I never insist that instructors…

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan specializes in a branch of probability theory called stochastic systems, which views problems through a lens of randomness. She teaches courses in that area, as well as in subjects like applied statistics, linear algebra and optimization theory. When faced with a high dropout and failure rate among students in a large 100-level calculus class, though, Pasik-Duncan found a solution in a distinctively humanistic…

Angelique Kobler offered an uncomfortable question about education last week. Kobler, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at the Lawrence school district, met with the KU Task Force on Course Redesign and explained the steady expansion of blended learning in Lawrence public schools. To illustrate the need for new ways of engaging…

In a previous post, I wrote about my experiences with room design, student behavior and learning. I found that students were far more engaged when I moved class to a collaborative space, and that they reverted to passive behavior when class returned to the traditional space we were assigned. The March issue of …

If you want to find a quick answer to a question, where do you go? Google, most likely. If you want to help students from half a dozen disciplines understand how the elements of linear algebra apply to them, where do you go? Again, Google. But this time, think outside the search box. That’s one of the tricks Erik Van Vleck, a professor of math at KU, uses to help students learn linear algebra. Students in all disciplines use Google to search for information. Van Vleck pushes them to look at the search…

Here’s my challenge for the week: Rearrange the furniture in your classroom. Go ahead. Have students help you. Some may look at you quizzically, but they will soon understand. If the room has tables, push them together and create collaborative clusters or arrange them in a U shape. If it has individual seats, get rid of the rows. Make it easier for students to see one another and to talk to one another. Make it easy for you to sit among them. Break down the hierarchies. Break down the barriers. Photo via sxc.hu. Illustration by Doug Ward. Are you with me? If not, ask yourself why. Yes,…

Notes by hand or with laptops? Sorry, wrong question. Cathy Davidson raises exactly the right question in the debate about whether students should take notes by hand or with laptops in class. The real issue, Davidson writes, is that instructors should be working to avoid lecture and instead engage students in active learning. Even in a large lecture hall, …