We humans seem to resist change even as we yearn for the ability to make change. Look around at the stacks of self-help books on the bestseller lists today on making change and you’ll see that they talk almost as much about how to overcome our resistance as they address how to make change in the first place.

Recently, I came across a website committed to helping us make the change we’d like to make in any area of our life. “Join our FREE community” it said and “create a profile, set your goal, receive encouragement, find inspiration” and then “Live the life you were meant to live!”

I was struck by the open-ended, generic nature of this call that seemed to say: we know you want to change your life from its current state to a new one and whatever the specifics of your goals and journey of transformation, we’ll help you get there.

The notion of transformation fascinates me although transformation – as I’ve sometimes experienced it – isn’t necessarily a comfortable thing.  What, then, makes us morph from one state to another? And who prompts that transition?

As a teacher I think about transformation as a process of entering new states of being and am struck by its power particularly as I witness it in the classroom.  The world of education – of teaching and learning – has an implicit goal of transformation. The process of acquiring knowledge and skills and preparing oneself for one’s future, at the very least suggests a change from a current state of not knowing to knowing and being prepared to engage the future.

So what does it mean to intentionally teach for transformation?

Looking back at my own experiences in teaching it seems important to design the moments and experiences where transformation can occur.  When we have experiences that touch our humanity at a deep level, transformation is likely to occur. In four recent teaching experiences, I watched students at the University of Minnesota go through a transformation of sorts.  The transformation was a kind of movement where they were learning to move between worlds, while simultaneously opening up new dimensions in their own skills and capacities.

• On a Global Seminar to India that focused on the sacred and the sustainable, a physical journey, meeting and working with school children among the urban poor in India and starting to build using local methods on a sacred site there were profound experiences.  Here, it was being in two completely different geographies and cultures of US and India with radically different ground realities that triggered the transformation.

• In a design studio and seminar course on homelessness I co-taught at the College of Design, spending a day in the life of a homeless person, designing to meet the needs of a homeless person in the street and then designing an upgrade for the space in a local shelter, created powerful experiences. The students interacted with and had their own work reviewed by homeless persons in Rapson Hall. Here, it was the encounter of an alternative life, the meeting of and working for people that often exist as stereotypes that triggered the transformation.

• With a visiting Canadian colleague, I taught a design studio that brought graduate and undergraduate students together to work with a local Mendota Dakota community. Here, the impact of understanding history from a contemporary perspective, getting to know members of a Dakota tribe, understand their traditions, being mentored in their skills, and designing and building for their sacred ceremony created a transformational experience.

• And in a recent design thinking based class I taught, freshmen connected to an expanded view of design, engaging their own creativity and visited other places and units within the university’s Twin Cities campus that supported creativity and design.   Here it was the on-going reflection across multiple contexts that led to transformative insights and experiences.

In all of these above stories, the students moved from their current states and ways of seeing the world to new ones. In the process they uncovered new passions, skills and capacities that seemed to empower them enough to want to continue the journey. As I reflect on these stories, a few principles stand out for me:

Principles supporting teaching for transformation

Connect to Life in all its diversity
We often limit our lives and connecting to Life in all its fullness and diversity opens us up in ways not experienced before.

Involve the whole body
Embodied beings that we are, teaching and learning that involves the whole body, engages all the senses and crosses the three realms of body, mind and spirit triggers transformation. Teaching and learning experiences that engage the whole body push our abilities and our comfort.

Connect self to community
We are individuals but embedded in the collective, whether we accept this or not.  Experiences that connect the two are really helpful towards transformation.

Connect to purpose
We each have a sense of purpose and a desire to make a difference and teaching and learning that taps into that can be transformative.

Connect to creativity
We are all creative beings and experiences that lead us to re-discovery our own creativity in different ways helps us transform.

Using the above principles as we plan our teaching and learning experiences will spark questions such as these:

• Does this course experience try to connect to life in as much of its diversity as possible? 
• How does learning in this course involve the whole body?
• Do the experiences of the course foster ways for students to connect self to community?
• How does the course overall help students connect to their sense of purpose?
• And finally, how does the work foster creativity, the development of valuable and original ideas?

Continuing my journey in teaching for transformation

In my continuing journey – especially when I encounter discomfort – I seek inspiration from others on this path of working with transformation.  On this journey, I not only look to my students – their work, comments and transformations – but also to other teachers who empower us to discover ourselves and live creative lives to our fullest potential.

Some of my favorite in-print teachers:

• Frederick Franck, a sculptor/painter/doctor/artist and author of The Awakened Eye, relentlessly helped people to truly see while they also learned to draw and in so doing transform themselves.
• Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher, researcher in human capacities, primary founder of the human potential movement and author of The Possible Human helps anyone interested in transforming themselves towards capacities they never dreamed of.
• Michael Gelb, authority on da Vinci, and author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day teaches people to unlock their creativity using principles from da Vinci’s work.

My creative and diverse thinking colleagues here in the university community are those I seek for conversations and brainstorming in person or over a phone call.  As I develop and re-design courses, I seek out teaching conversations with my colleagues at the College of Design, School of Architecture and the Center for Sustainable Building Research; I brainstorm with colleagues across disciplines from the coordinate campuses; I meet with colleagues through the incredible opportunities provided by the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Center for Writing and the Global and Strategic Program Alliance’s Internationalizing the Curriculum network.

In my conversations with these colleagues I am reminded to not be bound by the confines of my own discipline and to approach teaching for transformation in a fluid and inclusive way.  And then, lest I get comfortable with my role as a university teacher, conversations with teachers from among my community partners in the community-based research and outreach I am involved in across Minnesota remind me to ask the central question:

What does it mean to teach for transformation, in the university and in the world?

By Virajita Singh, who teaches and learns at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design and the Center for Sustainable Building Research. Write to her at singh023@umn.edu with your thoughts or ideas about teaching for transformation or anything else.

Additional Resources – in suggested order for review

1. Frank Coffield.  Just Suppose Teaching and Learning Became the First Priority.  2008.  The “Back to Basics” section develops a robust definition of learning, suitable to transformative learning and teaching practices.
2. Jean Marrapodi. “An Overview of Adult Learning Theories.”  2002.  This slide presentation opens with a focus on Transformational Learning as one of five adult learning theories.
3. Kelly McGonigal.  ”Teaching for Transformation: From Learning Theory to Teaching Strategies.”  Sets out challenges along with links to teacher-generated strategies from a range of disciplines.
4. Stephen Brookfield.  “Adult Cognition as a Dimension of Lifelong Learning.” 2000. Addresses student and teacher discomforts with transformative learning as part of adult learning processes and practices.

Aggregate I

The fine and coarse aggregates that comprise actual concrete need water to initiate the hardening phase and become rock-like. The chemical reaction is dramatic and permanent—a fusing or growing together of the individual components. For students, solid images, rich examples, and colorful language comprise the aggregates that fuse course material over time. Instructors need presentations, class assignments, and projects that are embedded with these aggregates to deepen the impact of the course experience.

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2008), authors Chip and Dan Heath note that of the six principles that characterize their model, “concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of the traits” (p. 129). Why? Because concrete language is the “universal” language” (p. 115) that all of us relate to. Across a day, we regularly and fluently speak concretely, and students in particular crave the concreteness of real-life examples to give meaning to course content.

Concrete ideas are grounded in the senses—what we see, hear, and touch—and this characteristic makes them firmly rooted in memory. Visualize the concept of a bicycle; contrast the clarity and speed of accessing that image with the difficulty of accessing the concept of transportation infrastructure. No contest.

This doesn’t mean instructors should avoid talking about abstract concepts.  Instead, we need to be a bit more creative in creating the bridge toward concreteness; we need to look to the aggregate material, the layered series of concrete examples that build toward abstract understandings.

Aggregate II

Typically, the term concrete is contrasted with abstract, and university courses are full of abstract concepts. Imagine an undergraduate course in philosophy in which the concept of truth is under debate. The conversation can easily spin into a fascinating set of propositions as one teases out its essence through argumentation and theory.

Consider next a criminology course in which truth is also under examination but in a radically different way: students are shown a police video that demonstrates stumbling behavior and slurred speech in a field sobriety test of a driver who may be under the influence of alcohol. The criminology students are experiencing a truth of concrete evidence and weighing what may be necessary to demonstrate if the case comes to a jury trial.  Looking back to that philosophy course, might the abstract conversation also be layered – scaffolded – through a series of life scenarios to make use of the concrete to understand the abstract?

Aggregate III

Think of an instructor’s language on the first class meeting in which the syllabus is being reviewed.  Compare the following two ways that outline student success in this course:

Abstract: “To succeed in this class, you’ll have to work hard and be committed. You need to put a lot of effort into each assignment and prepare well for tests ”

Concrete: “Students have told me over the years that they need to do four things to succeed in my class: a) go to every class, b) do all your reading before you go, c) write several drafts of each paper, and d) review your notes regularly for each class.”

Which would students need to hear, particularly those who may be uncertain or anxious about their ability to achieve at a high level?  How else might instructors use concrete experiences with past students to inform and enrich the learning experiences of their current students throughout the course?

Description with Petter Duvander’s photo: “Concrete pig, with a twist …thingys that are supposed to be disturbing traffic are called concrete pigs in Swedish. On our largest island, Gotland, rams are kind of mascots, so of course their pigs are rams instead.”

Aggregate IV

Becoming more concrete as a teacher can also involve the skilled use of imagery. In my disciplinary field of kinesiology, we leverage the principle of concrete heavily and regularly. For example, the meaning of an abstract idea such as “aesthetics” in a sport philosophy class can be visualized in reference to the pure athleticism of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, the simultaneous power and grace of tennis player Serena Williams – frankly, in reference to world-class athletes in any sport who we see grow from novices to nimble professionals across a career. The ability of our students to recognize useful examples and generate their own is a direct reflection of their immersion into the language and imagery of this highly concrete discipline.

For any university course, consider the following tangible ways that students can show their capability to know and understand course material:

1. Providing a demonstration/performance associated with a course assignment
2. Displaying one’s understanding through a diagram or figure (e.g., concept map)
3. Designing and conducting a mini experiment to test a hypothesis
4. Taking a series of photographs that symbolize the focus of a class assignment
5. Writing up a real-life story or narrative on a topic
6. Solving a specific problem that is implied by a course objective
7. Bringing forward a three dimensional artifact that supports a thesis or conjecture
8. Shooting a video that captures the essence of a class project

Certainly, each of these eight tools are fully available for instructors to use as well in the design and delivery of a course.

Aggregate V

To come full circle on the meaning of concrete and its Latin origin: Solidify course material for students through clear language, vivid imagery, and memorable examples. This dictum is difficult to ignore for instructors in virtually any university course. And for those of you who have always been “true believers” in the importance of leveraging the concrete principle:

• Push yourself to use language that helps students bridge the gap between complex ideas and their concrete manifestation.

• Leverage the power of examples whenever possible as they are a primary way in which students make sense of difficult ideas and concepts.

• Develop multiple concrete examples to spark conceptualizing processes and practices across a full, broad range of learners.

• Invent or uncover stronger and more relevant ways to represent your disciplinary content using more of the eight tools listed above.

Resources

• SUCCESS in Teaching – Simply an Introduction and a First Principle: http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-9X
• Active Learning will not (in itself) lead to SUCCESS in Teaching – Part 2, Unexpected: http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-am
• Photos: Making Concrete series – HEA Engineering Subject Centre’s photostream, and Concrete Pig by Petter Duvander used under Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial licenses.

Blog Post by David Langley, CTL Director.

Not an assertion you were expecting us to feature?  

Nope.  So, do read on, letting this unexpected bit of information unwind:

The ability to gain and keep people’s attention is essential to teaching.  In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath suggest a number of methods for gaining and keeping your students’ attention. One approach for gaining attention is to break the expected pattern of starting a class.  For instance, a typical large statistics class might begin with an instructor saying, “In today’s class, I’d like to cover the topic of probabilities.  Let’s start with the pigeonhole principle.”

However, an unexpected way to start the same class might begin with the instructor saying: “All right, let’s make a wager.  I’m willing to bet that at least two people in this lecture hall share a birthday. If you don’t believe me, then make a bet of a dollar and if there aren’t at least two people in this room who don’t share a birthday, I’ll pay each of you two dollars.”

While taking money from one’s students may not be ethical (and most certainly does not reflect an endorsement by the author of this posting, the Center for Teaching and Learning or the University of Minnesota), starting a statistics class with the birthday paradox will get their attention.

A technique for keeping attention is to make people curious, perhaps by using cognitive disequilibrium to highlight a counterintuitive finding, like, for instance, research that asserts that active learning methods don’t work.  So, why in the classrooms studied and in similarly contexted classrooms did active learning strategies not lead to more student learning?  First, some background on the study:

Drawing on a sample of 33 different instructors from 28 schools and more than 8,000 students, the article authors (citation and link to article below) assessed beginning of the term pretests and end of the term posttests to assess how much students had learned about natural selection in introductory college biology classes.  Instructors of the related courses provided lists of the types of active learning exercises that they used and the frequency with which they used them.

Analyzing the data gathered, the researchers did not find an association between the frequency of active learning exercises and how much students learned about natural selection.  In short, giving students lots of clicker questions or asking them to participate in think-pair-share activities on its own did not lead to more learning.

So does that mean that we should use a chalk-and-talk approach to teaching?

No.

What the authors advocate is a more careful and deliberate use of active learning since those who say that they use active learning in their classrooms are not necessarily effective in using active learning as a pedagogic strategy.  For instance:

• An instructor may use active learning strategies in her/his classrooms but only solicit one answer from the class, thereby failing to expose students to a range of ideas from students.
• Or, the instructor may not provide sufficient time for students to process their thoughts.
• The instructor may also simply misuse a technique, even a “simple” one  like think-pair-share: one study cited suggests that 63.5% of instructors reported using the technique but 83% of those who used it did not used it as suggested by the researchers.

The article also recommends using not only more pretest/posttest assessments to assess overall effectiveness, but also more formative assessments to measure ongoing learning.  Finally, the authors recommend that teachers directly confront students’ preconceptions about content, since those preconceptions can interfere with learning new material.  The authors’ decision to test students’ knowledge of natural selection is particularly apt because students are more likely to benefit from engaging and processing in such a difficult and long misunderstood topic.

However, if instructors do not directly address students’ preconceptions, students are unlikely to be able to transfer and apply that knowledge in an accurate manner, hence the lack of improvement in their posttest results.

As the authors conclude, “Simply adding clicker questions or a class discussion to a lecture is unlikely to lead to large learning gains.  Effectively using active learning requires skills, expertise, and classroom norms that are fundamentally different from those used in traditional lectures.”  Instructors therefore need to be savvy in making course planning decisions about why and how as well as when and in what ways to apply active learning approaches to their teaching; otherwise, they may very well be investing a significant amount of time and effort in deploying these strategies in ways that do not lead to animating and deepening student learning.

Resources

• Andrews, Leonard, Colgrove, and Kalinowski.  ”Active Learning Not Associated with Student Learning in a Random Sample of College Biology Courses.”  CBE – Life Sciences Education 10.4 (1 December 2011): 394-405.  http://www.lifescied.org/content/10/4/394.full.pdf+html
• SUCCESS in Teaching – Simply an Introduction and a First Principle - http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-9X

Blog Post by Paul Ching, Lead for the Center for Teaching and Learning Consultation Group

Pigeons in flight photo by Danko Dubric; used via Creative Commons ShareAlike/Attribution License.

What, exactly, is SUCCESS in teaching?

For me, whether I am teaching a history, literature, composition, women’s studies, american studies or Preparing Future Faculty courses, SUCCESS is achieved when the course both provokes and sustains more learning for more students.

For etymologists parsing the Oxford English Dictionary, SUCCESS happens in the sequel; the termination (favourable or otherwise) of affairs; the issue, upshot, result.  It is something that happens over time, as part of a process, and emerges as the prosperous achievement of something attempted.

For  brothers, academics and authors Dan and Chip Heath, SUCCESS in teaching involves six core principles – listed below – which we at the UMinn Center for Teaching and Learning propose lead to practices of Savvy Learning and Teaching:

Throughout February and March, the Techniques in Learning and Teaching blog will address the principles and practices of SUCCESS in teaching through a series of posts.  Each post will focus on one principle, setting out core components of that principle, offering select examples, culling a few follow up resources.  The writers of each post are CTL staff members who incorporate these ideas in on-campus workshops for instructors, and in seminars and courses on teaching in higher education.

First Principle – SIMPLE

As the opening words for descriptions of Simple, Dan and Chip Heath share this sentence: “Simplicity isn’t about dumbing down; it’s about prioritizing.”  It’s also about building generative analogies, key phrases, and remembering what it’s like to not know something.  What’s “in there” for us to consider as teachers in higher education settings – whether we are meeting on campus, online, in community settings?

Simple is about choosing. In news reporting it’s making determinations about the look of the front pages of each section, about what will be the day’s headline stories, and what will be the wording of lede paragraphs in stories at the top of each page.  In teaching, simple is about planning for learning and teaching through thoughtful course design, about mindfully determining student learning outcomes, and about  prioritizing the outcomes – what’s in and what’s out – in order to set a learning course for the semester.

Simple is about visualizing and enacting the complex process of course design, which – on its own is a rather simple schema, as you can see below:

The Intended Learning Outcomes - these are the lede of news articles, the principle concepts, content and concerns that readers, or for our purposes, students and colleagues, need to understand if the rest of the article, the course being taken, is to make sense and come to a successful resolution – a deepened understanding – when the reader, the student, reaches the end.

From the outcomes, the assessments and learning/teaching activities follow – or as the Heath brothers say it throughout their work on sticky teaching - we stage the learning across units, topics, days so that we build with our students the complex understandings needed for success in a particular course.

The assessments – like a good photograph – capture aspects of learning as it happens, allowing teachers to respond to learning as it happens, and inviting students to view the products of their learning alongside viewer’s/teacher’s comments as part of re-seeing, reflecting on the original shot, the original substance of the assessment.

The learning/teaching activities – like articles in a solid investigative journalism series – build each day, aim to interact with actual and diverse audiences while building new insights or sources of information over time.  The layering of assessments and intertwining with feedback/responses invites participation from the journalist/teacher and reader/student alike in building complex ideas.

Savvy Learning and Teaching – with Simple in Mind

For the purposes of designing courses, I see three core principles for the practice of Savvy Learning and Teaching with Simple in mind:

1. Define learning – as a personal construct, as a principle guiding course design, as a practice to convey to students from day one.
2. Enact mindful course design – as reflected in the visualization and analogy above, as a practice of organizing learning and teaching for the era we’re in, which is one in which we cannot ever again aim or hope to “cover the content” in a world that moves at paces that will require students to be able to uncover, co-create, invent the content every day of their lives.
3. Consider multicultural learning and teaching as everyone’s everyday work – as part of living in a world requiring divergent thinking that welcomes dissent and creativity in order to take on the dense, complex, multi-pronged “wicked” problems of contemporary life, we need to understand the richly rigorous ways of thinking our many students bring to the classroom.

For the purposes of delivering courses, I see  three core principles for the practice of Savvy Learning and Teaching with Simple in mind:

1. Be sure students see learning – as a core component of student outcomes reflected in your syllabus, as a process they will be expected to practice/engage throughout a course, and as something they record daily:  what I learned today, and that I learned today – simple notations of how learning happens each day is how students and their teachers will recognize learning at work.
2. Be part of the learning – flip the classroom, as my K-12 colleagues say: have students do the reading, hear the lecture, complete the homework, collaborate with a peer and/or send an integrative question to you ahead of class so that when they are with you the class session begin with doing work together, begins with work at a next level of difficulty that you can all engage and discuss.
3. Provide simple structures for learning – slide presentations that show thinking at work, lecture outlines that invite engagement, Twitter hashtags to facilitate sharing of resources, assignments that layer learning so that students build insights as they would do as practitioners in your field of study.

Resources

• Teaching Backward: Course Design with No High Heels Required - http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-6g
• Cultivating Learning - http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-1L
• Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides – http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-40

Gloria Mark has shown that modern workers switch tasks an average of once every three minutes.  Once their focus on a given task has been interrupted, it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to it.  Some say we should eliminate those distractions.  But I think today’s managers are capable of coping with and sometimes even thriving on them.

Mark’s research also shows that 44% of the switches cited above are caused by “internal” rather than “external” sources of distraction – meaning that our minds simply wander.  We can’t blame technology for our failure to focus, because our brains are built to multitask.

If - as Cathy Davidson notes here and throughout her research on neuroscience, technology, learning and change – our brains are wired to multitask, constantly “on”, and shaped/reshaped by all we do,

then the class sessions we shape as teachers can help foster processes of learning by making wise use of disruptions and divided attention.

If – as Davidson notes of neurological research in this passage:

Research shows that accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase our motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively

then, as educational psychology and scholarship of teaching research note, discussion for learning strategies can provide frameworks and tools for creating positive interruptions.

For this post I’ll propose that selecting occasions for group discussions and creating class session plans incorporating select formats for small group and/or whole class discussions can create positive interruptions and divide attention deliberately so that students engage in

• perspective taking
• divergent thinking
• comparative analysis and
• collaborative problem solving

while also practicing the skills of

• making sense of an important reading alongside homework & presentation elements,
• working in tandem to talk through important information & difficult ideas,
• delegating who will make use of what tools during discussion for further, clarifying research,
• organizing their work related to topic under discussion for the time on task,
• using technology tools to seek and organize information, and

As I watch students given structured discussion opportunities with room for mucking about enough to discover new questions as they look for what more to understand about a given topic, I see – in classes I observe, classes I teach, classes at the core of consultations – students who find ways of engaging.  And always, the tracks they take end up being pretty darned amazing.

• Items 1-4 below set out of resources culled from a collection I curated for my Teaching in Higher Education future faculty students – here, those created by the University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence (and quoted directly in passages below), and
• Item 5 below will become a place for sketching out ideas – big, adaptable ideas that could be a spring board for thinking about ways of coupling discussions with homework, classroom lectures and in-class use of technology during an early-in-the-term class session focusing on key course ideas/a core course concept.

1.  Framing Small Group & Whole Class Discussions within Class Session Planning

• Plan how you will conduct the discussion.
• Help students prepare for the discussion.
• Establish ground rules for participation in a discussion.
• http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/facilitating_effective_discussions.html

2.  Types of Small Groups

What type of small group should you use? It depends on the size of your class, the length of time you have available, the physical features of the classroom, and the nature of the group task. Here are several options you could try.

• http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/group_work_types_of_small_groups.html

3.  Small-Group Tasks

Groups thrive most when their task is challenging and closely related to the course content, course objectives, and students’ experiences and interests. Following are some sample tasks that you can adapt to your discipline.

• http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/group_work_in_the_classroom_small_group_tasks.html

4.  Related Resources 

• Planning Class Sessions – to align class sessions to an overall course plan by making use of integrated design process of linking outcomes, assessments and activities
• Types of Questioning – to guide asking/talking aloud some reminders of question types
• Classroom Demonstrations – to foster integrative analysis with demos, labs, experiments
• Review Sessions - to engage analysis & problem solving via adapting end-of-term ideas to a more frequent pattern – end of month or unit; before each major assessment
• College Level Reading Skills – to provoke and scaffold reading for learning by understanding why & how students can be overwhelmed by college level readings and our way of attaching reading to courses rather than incorporating it into learning.

5. An Early Term Scenario

Undergraduate Classroom

As someone who incorporates reading of primary sources, writing with specific tasks and for specific audiences, and a combination of teacher- and student-driven formal and informal research through out a semester, I typically assign a discipline specific reading early in the term – and typically I know students will have several difficulties with the article as they read and respond to it.  Those difficulties include wrestling with research structure, unfamiliar language, new uses of familiar ideas, and potential disinterest with the topic of this particular article.

But to have students push through these difficulties – which are moments for disengagement – I might just ask them to report on four things about the reading via a short response they will bring to class, along with the annotated reading:

For the article overall,

(1) a sentence summarizing the research question or focus with authors’ reasons for pursuing it;

(2) a one sentence description of the research process used – including theory, method, strategies, hopes;

(3) a statement of the  main finding with bullet points allowed for setting out a list of important results or ideas.

And groups of students are assigned each to a particular section of the article in order to write

(4) A paragraph explaining that section to someone who has not yet read the article, noting alongside the key ideas where a reader might face difficulty with the section – as a reader, as a thinker, as someone in the discipline, whatever.

The thing of discussion that’s important following a reading assignment like this is that students have opportunities to check their reading understanding, to hear information and insights they’ve missed, to seek out connections, and to converge a shared understanding of points of analysis/agreement/disagreement.

So maybe this class discussion would begin with students in small group clusters assigned to take on one of the short sentence writings – to come to a consensus, for example, on the research question.  And perhaps someone could transcribe this on GoogleDocs or use the white board and a photograph to capture the idea while another student made use of an online resource you’d suggested to verify understanding or key terms or to see what else the author had written on this topic that might help illuminate the research question.  Distracted?  Nope, intentionally delegating tasks and using tools, interests, skills of the group.  Along with each group doing this work, there are opportunities then for the entire class to come together for a follow up discussion of research question, methods, findings – the students’ shared writing and work together providing support across the broad discussion.

The longer paragraphs?  Perhaps these come in as a close to the class.  By asking students to revise their paragraph based on ideas heard in groups and insight clarified by the class discussion, the ideas that drifted by can be wrangled into a statement of revised learning at the end of class.  By asking them to follow up that paragraph with a sentence about how and whether reading theory became less difficult because of or during the class conversation, you help remind learners that meeting difficulty and going on that journey is part of the learning.

What to do with this writing?  Perhaps students keep a log of their learning – in notebooks of paper or via blogs.  Perhaps the writing gets posted to a class discussion thread so that student record their collective learning.  Perhaps along at the end of the focus on this article some of your students develop next questions they’d pose to the author – and send those to the author via Twitter.  Perhaps other students curate a bibliography of related readings that’s posted to a shared social bookmarking site.  Maybe still others record professionals in the field talking about the everyday use they make of theories embedded in the article and post these to YouTube.

And, in the end, perhaps what your students provoke in their own positive interruptions in learning will become starting places for others’ learning.

Graduate Classroom

When confronted with the task of discussing “learning” with graduate students and post doc fellows enrolled in my Teaching in Higher Education course from multiple disciplines who will – or already do – teach in formats varying from small seminars to large enrollment courses that might be held in campus, community or online classrooms, and who I already knew to have every kind of learning preference I could imagine while also having very little grounding in the research methodologies and practices of teaching/learning researchers from across spectrums and countries, I made use of my Personal Learning Network to divide the task of finding resources that would help me scaffold learning and attention, make room for divergence ideas and corollary questions.

For that group of students, Class Sessions 1 required absorbing, analysing, comparing and assessing learning theories in order to derive personal meaning and professional frameworks; while Class Session 2 proposed that developing a cross-disciplinary interpretation of scholarly methodologies regarding research into learning alongside theorizing about teaching.  All grounds for distraction animated by drift from dissent or overwhelment, perhaps. All grounds for divided attention sparked by needs to understand the material theoretically, professionally and personally.

While I have posted a set of reflective field notes from the Teaching in Higher Education Class Session 2 as part of a public record that’s taking shape in restructuring that course, I wanted to suggest here ways of thinking about teacher-facilitated, student-discussions as positive interruptions for learning in graduate courses across the curriculum.

Cited References

• Gloria Mark http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Welcome.html
• Cathy Davidson
  • The Myth of Monotasking http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2011/11/26/myth-monotasking
  • Dividing Attention Deliberately http://today.duke.edu/2011/12/cathyhbr

So, two aims shape this post, published on the first day of Spring Term at my home university, the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and written at my home away from home university, the University of Salford, in greater Manchester:

• to tell a bit of a story about technology supporting learning and teaching across 3 decades;
• to gather from colleagues a sampler of technology that we might might try out – whether as teachers thinking about technology for the first time or as part of their own on-going history of infusing learning, teaching and technology; whether as scholars thinking about ways in which technology can be of use as we innovate in our teaching or research or community engagement work.

I.  Teaching with Technology - a third decade

In Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education & Ways People Learn, John Seeley Brown – now an independent researcher and consultant, then Xerox chief scientist working on radical innovation, digital media & new forms of communication/learning – notes that electricity became “a transformative medium for social practices” only in the 25 years after its introduction.  And, interesting to note in this season of film awards, that it took 20+ years for film makers to discover “capabilities of their medium,” especially those “radically different from what had been possible in theater.”

Given that context, I shouldn’t be surprised that teaching materials from 1984 to 1994 – my first decade of teaching full time, while also a graduate student – show forays in teaching with technology that are rather like early uses of electricity and film.  Initially, I required students to use word processors (in an Apple lab at Mankato, at mainframe “dumb” terminals at the University of Iowa) for formal assignments and provided resources to coach this skill development in drafting and revising, while also teaching the production transparencies for overhead projection of excerpts for peer review.

My second foray into learning and teaching with technology happened at the UIowa where students across my sections of American Values: Introduction to American Studies and in the History of Feminism and Activism special topics course were engaged in, essentially, weekly blogging via UIowa’s mainframe computer.  As the assignment sheet described it:

You might take off your glasses and bring the object close. You might step back to get the full picture. You might walk around the other side or put it under a microscope. To see with new eyes, we can move ourselves or shift the object to get a better angle, or we can gaze through various lenses to filter what we see. This term I did both to take a new look at my teaching. Under a one-year contract, I moved myself to a new place and, through my colleagues, am beginning to see with new eyes.

This fall I began teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth, a public four-year institution, three hours from my home in the Twin Cities. The distance, too far for a daily commute, was still close enough to drive home nearly every weekend. The long weekly drives were expectedly beautiful through the fall, with the turning leaves, bright skies, and golden fields. The change of scenery reminded me that I was approaching something new, new campus, new classes.

Arriving on campus, I was informed that the shortage of space meant I would be sharing an office with three other teachers. This turned out to be a great blessing. Teaching can sometimes be a solitary profession, and having colleagues nearby was a great gift for a newcomer in a strange place. My colleagues are smart; they are devoted pedagogues and generous humans. We regularly engage in conversations about teaching (its theories and its practicalities); about students both challenging and lovely; about writing—our shared expertise; and about families, social justice, and coffee. I have learned much from this trio.

One colleague, Brandy Hoffman, has an uncanny connection with students. Current and past students come in to talk about classes, ask her advice, update her on their latest project, or just to say hello—and she always knows their names, a talent that impresses me greatly! She really likes her students and they see an ally in her. It does me good to see how good teacher-student relations can be.

Another of my colleagues, Susan Perala-Dewey, is committed to and works actively for social justice. She also writes for herself. She has the heart of a mother and an artist, often sharing snippets of natural beauty she picked up on one of her walks. She appreciates the complexity of teaching and ably guides not only students, but also fellow teachers, through the light and the dark that can arise in education.

Our third officemate, Avesa Rockwell, is exceptionally good at establishing and communicating standards. She is firm without sacrificing friendliness. She expects excellence from her students, and they respect that and deliver. She inspires me to expect more of my students, and of myself.

These professionals showed me anew the richness and complexity of good pedagogy.

Once the leaves fell, I anticipated that my drive would seem long, and my attitude about the semester would turn similarly drab. But the drives continued to supply satisfying new vistas: intricate patterns of stark tree branches, wide open fields, and dramatic skies. Likewise, through friendship and example, my three colleagues have continually presented me with a prism which displays teaching in a full spectrum, surprisingly beautiful, even inspiring light. Because of them, I return this January with renewed anticipation—new term, new students, and new eyes to appreciate it all.

Merry Rendahl (PhD, 2010, University of Minnesota Twin Cities) is an Assistant Professor in the Writing Studies Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

To read more about the importance of collegiality, especially for new faculty and instructors:

The Importance of Intellectual Community

Young PhDs Say Collegiality Matters

Why Collegiality Matters

Given the atmosphere here, I’ve pulled five “semester starting” posts from the archives in order to pull a bit of that hallway energy into a blog post.  So read on, plan well, and query via the comment / reply feature if you have want to make a query along the way.

Here’s to a great semester!

• Great Expectations: Or, What makes a syllabus clearer?
• Cultivating Learning 
• Listen Up! Strategies to Promote Student Active Listening 
• (How) Does reading – and learning to read well – matter?
• Creating Exams – Now Is the Time to Review a Few Key Guidelines

And, a post script to University of Minnesota, Twin Cities readers – if you have plans to work this semester on designing a new course or revising an existing course, the Making a Difference Teaching Seminars provide a supportive, informative structure for the work of course design and syllabus development:

• Apply by January 20: www.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/faculty/seminars/index.html

Teaching seminars are semester-long, small group, facilitated discussions for faculty and instructional staff creating new and refining existing courses.  Through the hands-on sessions, participants will develop course syllabi – drafting student outcomes, identifing assessment strategies to measure higher level learning, and developing classroom activities to help students achieve goals. This spring, we offer three distinctive Making a Difference course design seminars:

• Designing Courses to Improve Student Learning and Teacher Satisfaction – begins February 2012
• New! Designing Your Learning Abroad Course – begins March 2012
• New! Teaching with Public Engagement – May Term 2012

Shut Up and Write! Meetup is a venue for writers to work in the company of other writers on a regular basis. Writing, whether approached as a profession or as an avocation, is an isolating activity. We provide this forum, writing resources and meeting times as a method of developing a community of creative people. We welcome people who are serious about ‘writing down the bones’ and are looking for the companionship of other writers.

I’ve been doing “Shut Up and Write” days in tandem with a friend in the UK – when she’s working on a dissertation, I’m working on a classroom research project.  When she’s moving into revising in the afternoon, I’m starting the morning with generative writing.

What Do You Need to Write?  

This is Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s question in a summer Inside Higher Ed blog:

What do I need to maximize my writing this [break]? Academic writers have lots of different needs. For example, some people need to physically share space with others while writing, some need a stern authority figure to answer to, some need solitude and the kind of support that is silent, some need a quantitative accounting of their progress, some need to be in groups with similar others, some need to be regularly inspired, some need ongoing substantive feedback by those in their specialty field, some need regular cheerleading, some need therapy, and some need an occasional exorcism (from the demons of bad academic socialization). It’s even OK if you need all of these things at different times! The important thing is to identify what you need without judgment, shame, or self-flagellation.

Knowing what you truly need to maximize your productivity is what will allow you to construct a writing support system that is effective for YOU.

I need to write before I’m ready to explain core ideas to other people, to exteriorize – which Robert Boice notes as including acting “to put private notes and formative manuscripts [out] for public comment” among my a group of colleagues also in the midst of writing.  I need strategies so that I am more often in the third group described in Robert Boice’s study of fauclty writers, reported in “Procrastination, Busyness and Bingeing” (Behaviour Research and Therapy 27.6 [1989]: 605-11):

Participants were divided into three groups: (a) The first group (“controls”) did not change their writing habits, and continued to write occasionally in big blocks of time; in 1 year they wrote an average of 17 pages; (b) the second group wrote daily and kept a daily record; they averaged 64 pages; (c) the third group wrote daily, kept a daily record, and held themselves accountable to someone weekly; this group’s average was 157 pages.

I need “The Faculty Writing Place: A Room of Our Own” described by Peter Elbow and Mary Deane Sorcinelli – regular days of writing in a room with others.  But that’s not going to happen.  So, here’s an idea.

You Say Tomato, I Say Pomodoro

The Pomodoro Technique is one Shut Up and Write strategy that’s suitable for a winter break day or weekend or series of days  when I know that what I need are on-going, semi-structured, not exactly predictable periods of writing that I can sustain as chunks of activity nestled between planned for breaks.

Like Pasta Pomodoro – which mixes fresh tomatoes with pasta, olive oil and basil for a quick and light meal that leaves you nourished and ready for a next course and maybe even for the pudding course – this Pomodoro requires few basics: a writing task, place to write, writing tools, and a timer for an intial two hour chunk of time.

Here’s the pattern

1a. set the pomodoro (timer) to 25 minutes

1b.  work on the task until the timer rings; record that stopping place with an X

1c. take a short break (5 minutes).

Repeat these components three more times, so that a full pomodoro includes rounds 1abc, 2abc, then 3abc, and finally 4abc.  A two hour chunk of writing.  Followed by a longer break:

At the end of four pomodoros, you’ll take a a 15–20 minute break- time to walk away, to take a walk, to do one part of an exercise routine, to taste the cup of tea or coffee, to let your mind wander to the next Tomato Round.

A lovely thing about these four tiny pomodoro excursions in one session is that as as writer you get to watch ideas grow and you get to feel motivation build.  As Inger Mewburn notes,  one full Pomodoro is a heck of a way to get to 1,000 words in a day – and maybe even during a break week for the cumulative writing that crafts a 4,000 word article in draft.

Need Some Apps with that Tomato?

Worried about distractions during the sustained writing because, after all, you’re at a computer with browsers that you “need” to track down an exact quote in order move on with your writing.  Or you need to keep the browser open to run a timer for the 25 minute sessions.  There’s an app for that -

Pomodoro Timers

• Android http://www.appbrain.com/app/pomodroido/net.artifix.pomodroido.free
• iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pomodoro-time-management-lite/id323224845?mt=8
• PC friendly http://download.cnet.com/Pomodoro/3000-2124_4-75024062.html
• Mac friendly http://www.focusboosterapp.com/

Blocking Select Sites While Writing

• Nanny for Google Chrome
• LeechBlock for Firefox
• SelfControl as OSX application

I use the Mac version of Focus Booster for timing and am just setting up Self Control so that during the predetermined time I’ve set out for writing, I block all but Google Docs across the web tools I use for communication with my collaborators.  This way I write the docs rather than talk about writing the docs.

* Additional “Writing Workout” Resources - http://www.slideshare.net/alexa032/handout-for-pechakucha – gathered while working with post graduate researchers at the University of Salford.

Observation and likely fact:

many students quickly forget large amounts of content and often have difficulty transferring ideas from the classroom to novel contexts. How can we create “sticky” teaching messages that will be memorable, understandable, and useful to students?

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2008), provide six principles that can help teachers create those messages. The principles are:

Simple: focus on a core idea in compact form.

Unexpected: gain and keep student attention

Concrete: use real-life examples and language that evokes images

Credible: provide believable evidence for your assertions

Emotional: help students care and be emotionally invested in the content

Stories: use narratives of real occurrences to inspire students

As you see, the bold letters are capitalized for a reason…

The feedback I have received in numerous workshops this year convinces me that optimizing these principles is a sound approach to improve presentation skills. Most importantly, the principles are inextricably tied to deeper student learning—perhaps the best reason we should use them in the first place!

During the Spring 2012 Semester, the Techniques in Learning and Teaching blog will expand upon each principle in future posts. This deceptively simple framework is teacher-friendly and easily adaptable to any discipline. And it is easy to remember, too!

To review Dan and Chip Health’s short overview of “Teaching that Sticks” see either the Center’s slideshare site or the Heath’s web site.

Editor’s Suggested Additional Resources

“Teaching that Sticks! A New Look at Teaching Impact” – slides and notes from the Center’s interactive seminar are available for viewing our Slideshare account.

“Learning that Sticks!” – because whether it’s a duct tape or velcro analogy that holds this together, both the learning and the teaching will need to be sticky for the thing to work

• All Things Learning blog – posting on How to Make Learning Stick
• Sticky Learning blog – overall source for designful ideas on learning that sticks

Image from Katie Is a Teacher blog at http://katieisateacher.com/2011/12/06/the-case-of-several-unrelated-items/.