Bloom's Sixth

We called it a non-workshop. Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 1, via Catbird.ai The goal of the session earlier this month was to offer lunch to faculty members and let them talk about the challenges they continue to face three years into the pandemic. We also invited Sarah Kirk, director of the KU Psychological Clinic, and Heather Frost, assistant director of Counseling and Psychological Services, to offer perspectives on students. In an hour of conversation, our non-workshop ended up being a sort of academic stone soup…

Martha Oakley couldn’t ignore the data. The statistics about student success in her discipline were damning, and the success rates elsewhere were just as troubling: Martha Oakley, a professor of chemistry and associate vice provost at Indiana University, speaks at Beren Auditorium on the KU campus. Women do worse than men in STEM courses but do better than men in other university courses. Students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students have lower success rates than women. The richer students’ parents are, the higher the students’ GPAs are. “We have no problem…

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…

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…

By Doug Ward Let’s call it pride. That’s probably the best way to describe the look of Sandra Gautt as she wandered among the 45 posters and the dozens of people at The Commons in Spooner Hall. Xianglin Li and Moein Moradi from mechanical engineering discuss the work that went into their posters. Gautt, former vice provost for faculty development, returned to KU for CTE’s third annual end-of-semester poster session on teaching. More than 40 instructors from more than 30 departments contributed posters, demonstrating the work they had done over the past year transforming classes to…

A new grant-funded initiative at the University of Kansas will promote the use of data to improve teaching, student learning and retention in science, engineering, technology and math programs. KU is one of 12 universities to receive a $20,000 grant from the Association of American Universities as part of a major AAU project to improve STEM education. The grant will be used to promote faculty-led course and curricular changes that enhance student learning among undergraduates, and to help eliminate long-standing…

A colleague pulled me aside this week and said she wanted my thoughts about something. She seemed apologetic. She is relatively new to college teaching, having made the switch to academia after a distinguished professional career. Students rave about her. She pushes them to think creatively and to stretch their abilities through hands-on projects. She holds students to high standards, but she is also accessible and serves as a strong mentor. When we talk, I always leave feeling energized and hopeful. This week, though, she seemed uncharacteristically down, and she wanted my advice. “How do…

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 …

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, but it included work from participants in last year’s …