Thursday, August 13, 2009

Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes

Like most faculty members, we began our academic careers with zero prior instruction on college teaching and quickly made almost every possible blunder. We’ve also been peer reviewers and mentors to colleagues, and that experience on top of our own early stumbling has given us a good sense of the most common mistakes college teachers make. In this column and one to follow we present our top ten list, in roughly increasing order of badness. Doing some of the things on the list may occasionally be justified, so we’re not telling you to avoid all of them at all costs. We are suggesting that you avoid making a habit of any of them.

Mistake #10. When you ask a question in class, immediately call for volunteers. You know what happens when you do that. Most of the students avoid eye contact, and either you get a response from one of the two or three who always volunteer or you answer your own question. Few students even bother to think about the question, since they know that eventually someone else will provide the answer. We have a suggestion for a better way to handle questioning, but it’s the same one we’ll have for Mistake #9 so let’s hold off on it for a moment.

Mistake #9. Call on students cold. You stop in mid-lecture and point your finger abruptly: “Joe, what’s the next step?” Some students are comfortable under that kind of pressure, but many could have trouble thinking of their own name. If you frequently call on students without giving them time to think (“cold-calling”), the ones who are intimidated by it won’t be following your lecture as much as praying that you don’t land on them. Even worse, as soon as you call on someone, the others breathe a sigh of relief and stop thinking. A better approach to questioning in class is active learning.[1] Ask the question and give the students a short time to come up with an answer, working either individually or in small groups. Stop them when the time is up and call on a few to report what they came up with. Then, if you haven’t gotten the complete response you’re looking for, call for volunteers. The students will have time to think about the question, and—unlike what happens when you always jump directly to volunteers (Mistake #10)—most will try to come up with a response because they don’t want to look bad if you call on them. With active learning you’ll also avoid the intimidation of cold-calling (Mistake #9) and you’ll get more and better answers to your questions. Most importantly, real learning will take place in class, something that doesn’t happen much in traditional lectures.[2]

Mistake #8. Turn classes into PowerPoint shows. It has become common for instructors to put their lecture notes into PowerPoint and to spend their class time mainly droning through the slides. Classes like that are generally a waste of time for everyone. [3] If the students don’t have paper copies of the slides, there’s no way they can keep up. If they have the copies, they can read the slides faster than the instructor can lecture through them, the classes are exercises in boredom, the students have little incentive to show up, and many don’t. Turning classes into extended slide shows is a specific example of:

Mistake #7. Fail to provide variety in instruction. Nonstop lecturing produces very little learning,[2] but if good instructors never lectured they could not motivate students by occasionally sharing their experience and wisdom. Pure PowerPoint shows are ineffective, but so are lectures with no visual content—schematics, diagrams, animations, photos, video clips, etc.—for which PowerPoint is ideal. Individual student assignments alone would not teach students the critical skills of teamwork, leadership, and conflict management they will need to succeed as professionals, but team assignments alone would not promote the equally important trait of independent learning. Effective instruction mixes things up: boardwork, multimedia, storytelling, discussion, activities, individual assignments, and group work (being careful to avoid Mistake #6). The more variety you build in, the more effective the class is likely to be.

Click here to read the full article. Source: On Course Newsletter April 2009

'A Great Man, Dumbledore'

Anticipating the release of the sixth Harry Potter movie this summer, I spent much of the spring rereading all seven volumes of the popular series. (Mixed in with the usual Proust and Kierkegaard, of course.)

Taking them one after another, rather than waiting a year between installments, gave me a new perspective on the novels and provided some interesting insights -- not the least of which is that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, might just be the greatest academic administrator of all time.

Indeed, in her books, J.K. Rowling covers the entire spectrum of administrative types, giving us not only Dumbledore but also his antithesis: the petty, vindictive, rule-mongering bureaucrat-cum-"professor" Dolores Umbridge. Since I can find no evidence that Rowling ever worked at an American community college, I can only conclude that administrators are much the same the world over.

The truth is, while I've known a few administrators who were Dumbledore-esque, I've also seen my share of Umbridges. Most campus officials, frankly, fall somewhere in between, but I like to think that a heartening number have Dumbledorean potential.

So what is it, exactly, that makes Hogwarts's headmaster such an exemplary leader? And what can two-year college administrators learn from him?

Click here for the full article. Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education by Rob Jenkins

No Size Fits All

If you visit a four-year college, you can predict what sort of student you are going to bump into. If you visit a community college, you have no idea. You might see an immigrant kid hoping eventually to get a Ph.D., or another kid who messed up in high school and is looking for a second chance. You might meet a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training or a 50-year-old taking classes for fun.

These students may not realize it, but they’re tackling some of the country’s biggest problems. Over the past 35 years, college completion rates have been flat. Income growth has stagnated. America has squandered its human capital advantage. Students at these places are on self-directed missions to reverse that, one person at a time.

Community college enrollment has been increasing at more than three times the rate of four-year colleges. This year, in the middle of the recession, many schools are seeing enrollment surges of 10 percent to 15 percent. And the investment seems to pay off. According to one study, students who earn a certificate experience a 15 percent increase in earnings. Students earning an associate degree registered an 11 percent gain.

Click here to read the full article. Source: The New York Times July 16, 2009 by David Brooks

Carnegie Calls for More Useful Assessments at Community Colleges

Stanford, Calif.—A new report from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching calls for community colleges to develop richer, more revealing measures of student learning—beyond the traditional indices of grades, retention, persistence and degree attainment.

Toward Informative Assessment and a Culture of Evidence is the final publication from Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a three-year, action research project that explored the teaching and learning challenges in basic skills math and English at 11 California community colleges. A partnership of the Carnegie Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SPECC asked participating faculty to use innovative forms of assessment, such as common exams and think aloud protocols (audio and video records of students verbalizing their thought process while trying to read texts or solve problems) to better track student learning and to improve instruction.

Working with their campus's institutional research offices, the faculty also explored different approaches to data, including collecting it directly from students through interviews, focus groups, special surveys and diagnostic tests; and faculty considered actual growth over a course through "value added" or pre-post assessments.

Click here to read the full article. Source: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching