Bloom's Sixth

Collin Bruey and Laura Phillips check out posters at the Service Showcase. Bruey and Phillips created their own poster about work at the Center for Community Outreach. By Doug Ward I’m frequently awed by the creative, even life-changing, work that students engage in. The annual Service Showcase sponsored by the Center for Service Learning, provides an impressive display of that work. This year’s Showcase took place last week. As a judge for the Showcase over the past two years, I’ve learned how…

By Doug Ward BLOOMINGTON, Indiana – We have largely been teaching in the dark. By that, I mean that we know little about our students. Not really. Yes, we observe things about them and use class surveys to gather details about where they come from and why they take our classes. We get a sense of personality and interests. We may even glean a bit about their backgrounds. That information, while helpful, lacks many crucial details that could help us shape our teaching and alert us to potential challenges as we move through the semester. It’s a clear case of not knowing what we don’t…

By Doug Ward A peer review of teaching generally goes something like this: An instructor nears third-year review or promotion. At the request of the promotion and tenure committee, colleagues who have never visited the instructor’s class hurriedly sign up for a single visit. Sometimes individually, sometimes en masse, they sit uncomfortably among wary students for 50 or 75 minutes. Some take notes. Others don’t. Soon after, they submit laudatory remarks about the instructor’s teaching, relieved that they won’t have to visit again for a few years. ChangHwan Kim (left), Tracey LaPierre…

Two vastly different views of assessment whipsawed many of us over the past few days. The first, a positive and hopeful view, pulsed through a half-day of sessions at KU’s annual Student Learning Symposium on Friday. The message there was that assessment provides an opportunity to understand student learning. Through curiosity and discovery, it yields valuable information and helps improve classes and curricula. The second view came in the form of what a colleague accurately described as a “screed” in The New York Times. It argued that assessment turns hapless faculty members into tools of…

Student motivation is one of the most vexing challenges that instructors face. Students can’t learn if they aren’t engaged, and serious classroom material often fails to pique the interest of a generation that has grown up with the constant stimulation of smartphones, social media and video on demand. Some instructors argue that motivation should be up to students, who are paying to come to college, after all. Most certainly, instructors can’t make students learn. Students have to cultivate that desire on their own. Instructors can take many steps to stoke that desire to learn,…

By Doug Ward The University of Kansas has made many gains in its recruitment of minority students, who now make up 20.6 percent of the student body. By at least one measure, though, the university still has considerable work to do. According to an analysis by The Hechinger Report, there is a substantial disparity in the number of Latino students who enroll at…

The criticism of liberal education often carries a vicious sting. For instance, listen to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor: “Universities ought to have skin in the game. When a student shows up, they ought to say, ‘Hey, that psych major deal, that philosophy major thing, that’s great. It’s important to have liberal arts … but realize, you’…

American higher education has taken a beating over the last 40-plus years. Many of those blows came from the outside. Many others were self-inflicted. I won’t rehash those here, other than to say that higher education has done a poor job of fighting back. Much of the time, it has seen itself as above the fray. Its arrogance not only blinded it to its own shortcomings but let critics paint an unflattering portrait that has lingered in the minds of millions of Americans. A board at the AAC&U meeting asked participants to share their thoughts about higher education. The theme of the…

Students try to assemble a Lego creation after instructions were relayed from another room. By Doug Ward Here’s some sage advice to start the semester: Don’t be a jerk. That comes from a student who will be an undergraduate teaching assistant for the first time this spring. Actually, he used a much more colorful term than “jerk,” but you get the idea. He was responding to a question from Ward Lyles, an assistant professor of urban planning, about things that undergrad TAs could do to set the tone in classes they worked in. More about that shortly. Lyles’s workshop on fostering an…

If I were to design the perfect learning experience, it would have all the components that Chad Kraus included in a studio architecture class he taught this fall. Chad Kraus with a prototype of the Haitian center his students designed. Start with a problem that has no single or simple solution. Study the problem, the context and the people involved. Learn the skills that will help solve the problem. Practice the skills with teammates. Get feedback from instructors and peers. Apply the skills in an authentic assignment. Teach others the skills you have learned. Reflect on the work…