Teaching the Course

We recognize that there are many different teaching strategies and
practices, and that the particular strategies and practices an instructor uses can change depending on such characteristics as the size of the class, the educational level of its intended student, and whether a class is primarily for disciplinary majors. We offer below some general guidelines for some of the major teaching strategies and practices, but begin with two overarching points.

First, teaching in a student-centered way requires that you have some understanding of who your students are and what they value. It’s not unusual for faculty to plan to teach classes made up of students just like them – not because they explicitly decide to do this, but rather because they don’t decide not to do it. Useful questions to ask yourself as you prepare for a course are:

• Who are the students I imagined as I planned this course?
• Whom might I be leaving out?

For a good discussion of the issues and links to resources about inclusive teaching from a variety of institutions, see http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/resources/teaching_resources/interactions/diversity.htm.

Second, one strategy that makes a significant difference in virtually all teaching contexts is the practice of learning students’ names. Joan Middendorf, Associate Director of Campus Instructional Consulting Center and Adjunct Professor in Higher Education at Indiana University in Bloomington, discusses the importance of learning students’ names and a variety of techniques for doing that in an article in the National Teaching & Learning Forum (http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/names.htm).

Good classroom discussions rarely just happen. Most good discussions grow out of someone’s careful planning and execution.

The nature of the discussion varies some depending upon the discipline and the course. Often, a discussion session in a math class is an opportunity to go over homework assignments together. In a philosophy or literature class, a discussion might involve the critical unpacking of a text that all have read before coming to class. The following comments are oriented toward the latter sort of discussion.

Managing Discussions Effectively

Good classroom discussions rarely just happen. Most good discussions grow out of someone’s careful planning and execution.

The nature of the discussion varies some depending upon the discipline and the course. Often, a discussion session in a math class is an opportunity to go over homework assignments together. In a philosophy or literature class, a discussion might involve the critical unpacking of a text that all have read before coming to class. The following comments are oriented toward the latter sort of discussion.

Deciding the role you will play in the discussion
It’s helpful here to consider (again!) your goals for student learning. If one of the goals is that students learn to think critically and creatively about a text or problem in your discipline, then you should consider giving students an opportunity to practice this sort of thinking. If the class is one for students just beginning work in the discipline, you might think it important to model the sort of questions and analysis you expect them to bring to the text. If students are farther along in their studies, you might work more narrowly as a facilitator of
the discussion.

Developing a structure or road map for the discussion
Such a structure is not a verbatim script that you expect you and your students to follow. In fact, depending on the discipline and course, it’s possible that any number of radically different but still fruitful discussions could happen within the structure you develop. Some instructors prepare what is sometimes called a question thread, a series of questions that lead a pathway through a text. Others find this “thread” metaphor too confining, and instead enter a class discussion with several themes, issues, or text passages that they expect the class to address at some time in the discussion, leaving the order to emerge from students’ questions and comments.

Preparing students for the discussion
Even instructors who expect students to take the lead in
shaping the discussion find that they can help students to take on this role. In fact, in all but the most advanced classes, students are more likely to engage the text productively if they have some guidance from you as the instructor. For example, you might begin a semester by providing two or three focusing questions for each reading assignment. As the class progresses, you might pass this responsibility on to the students, requiring each of them to prepare and circulate discussion questions for one or two classes. Alternatively, you might ask each student to come to class with a question or two about the text that they recognize as important but that they aren’t able to answer to their satisfaction. An online discussion forum makes it relatively easy for students to make comments and questions available to you and their peers before the face-to-face class begins.

There are many other things that one might say about discussions. You can find a rather comprehensive presentation of various strategies for managing productive discussions in the book Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, by Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill. Or, for a brief presentation of strategies to organize and prepare for a discussion, consider the guide “Teaching Through Discussion” from the University of Washington’s Center for Instructional Development and Research. Finally, consider preparing yourself ahead of time to manage difficult or ‘hot’ discussions as they may arise in the course of your teaching. A good summary resource on this topic from Harvard’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning can be found at http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58474/hotmoments.html.

Creating Engaging Lectures

We suggest the development of lectures that are punctuated with
moments of student activity. Such activities range from silent reflection to ordering notes to answering questions via raised hands or personal response systems to highly organized group activities. In a sense these are examples of the Classroom Assessment Techniques, or CATs, discussed in the assessment section later—formative classroom assessment techniques which offer instructors a window into student thinking and help both students and instructor to get a sense of the degree of student learning.

While spontaneous moments of student engagement can and do occur, planning for them makes it much more likely that they will be effective learning experiences. A typical pattern of lecture development and delivery might look like this:

Preparing for lecture
It may be helpful to apply to the design of your lecture the principle of backward design recommended above for the design of the whole course. This principle will then guide you through choosing the most important points and aligning those points with your goals for students. This information will guide the ordering of your topics (introduction, body, and conclusion perhaps) as well as suggest the most obvious CATs with which to engage and challenge students. An excellent tutorial on lecture preparation can be found at http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/lectures/overview/index.html.

Delivering a lecture
The CATS and the time you take with them provide another opportunity for you to demonstrate your commitment to student learning-such as interrupting your lecture to open it up or student discussions. Students will notice your willingness to engage their thinking and your desire to bring them into the discipline. While it is important to take this time it is also important to know when to suggest the discussion may need to be moved “offline” to office hours or on-line discussion. This stresses the value of preparing for these interactions so that engagement is focused on those items of “enduring knowledge” (in backward design terms) and not merely on trivial aspects of the discipline. For tips in large class settings see http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/largelecture.html.

Evaluating your lecture
We can’t consider here the many different ways in which instructors
can evaluate their own performance, but we will say that it’s very difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of your own lecturing. It’s difficult, not only because you are giving it and not just listening to it, but also because you are already expert in the material and will naturally assume much of the implicit context for what you explicitly say. The CATs mentioned above provide some insight into the effectiveness of your lecture insofar as they give you an immediate report of what students are hearing. There are other methods as well. You might pair up with a trusted colleague and plan to listen to one another’s lectures.

Using Technologies In and Beyond the Classroom

There is a wide range of classroom technologies - from chalkboard or whiteboard to recent multimedia and collaborative environments - all of which may have a legitimate place in today’s classroom.

In lecture-based courses, a chalkboard or an instructor computer
connected to a projector can be sufficient technological resources. Student response systems can be used to enhance student attention and learning.

More advanced technologies can be incorporated in the very design of the course. Moving parts of a course to an online environment may free up and/or focus precious class time for typically communal, face-to-face activities. Is the class based on a pre-class reading? The reading can be distributed on line and/or students can be asked to answer questions or to post comments, in Blackboard or in a course blog, before class time as a way of focusing the class-time conversation.

Students learn in different ways and their learning can be better supported by the use of multiple teaching methods and modes of instruction (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and read/write). When judiciously integrated in the course, multimedia technologies can be key in extending the range of ways in which students acquire new knowledge and skills.

Current “social software,” such as blogs and wikis, allow for considerably more advanced forms of student collaboration and student authorship in the course. Indeed they may well foster a “community of learners” within the class. Consider making students’ familiarity with technology an ally by allowing them to co-design activities or models of assignments based on their expertise and communicative habits. When students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning, they are more likely to develop higher-order thinking skills. For more info see http://www.unsw.edu.au/.

Real-time online collaboration and feedback can inform learning activities and become drivers in student work. Learning cooperatively with peers helps students to develop interpersonal, professional, and cognitive skills to a higher level. Some instructors have found that the judicious incorporation of technologies and workflows that are part of student’s natural toolset contributes significantly to student learning and to the class’s overall success.

Assessing Students

Assessment is an important part of the learning process. As noted above, your assessment criteria should align well with your goals for student learning and with the classroom activities that you build out of those goals.

Student assignments
You will likely require students to complete different sorts of assignments over the course of a semester. As noted above, it’s important that these assignments require students to practice and demonstrate the skills and understandings defined in your learning goals. Most of us think of student assignments as the basis for the grades that students will receive in the course. While such assignments are often formally evaluated and contribute to the course final grade, they should also be activities that allow students to practice what they are learning and what they have learned.

Formative and Summative Assessment
The distinction between formative and summative assessment is crucial, but it’s better to think of the two sorts of assessment as being on a continuum rather than as being fully distinct from one another. Briefly stated, formative assessment is intended to help the student learn, and summative assessment is a measure of what the student has learned. In many instances, assessment is both summative and formative. Instructor comments on an essay can both indicate what the student has already learned and also help the student to learn more. In some instances, perhaps most often at the end of a course, a grade serves almost exclusively as a summative assessment. At the other end of the continuum, your reinforcement or development of a student comment in a class discussion might function exclusively as a formative assessment.

Assess early and often
Students learn much better from their engagement with course material if they’re encouraged to engage publicly and then get feedback from others about their engagement. As noted in the description of formative assessment, this feedback might be informal and relatively unstructured. Note that formative assessment doesn’t have to come only from you as an instructor. It can also come from other students in the class.

In-class assessment techniques
It can be very informative to know something about what students are learning even before they write a paper or an examination. Learning this can give you a richer understanding of how students’ preconceptions and misconceptions are informing their work with the material provided in class readings, discussions, and lectures. Classroom Assessment Techniques, often referred to as CATs, can do this for you. The classic collection of CATs is the book Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd Edition, by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross. You can also find a briefer listing of different CATs on the CNDLS website at http://cndls.georgetown.edu/view/support/resources/cats.html.
To offer just a couple of examples here: you might consider
at the beginning of a class or unit having students respond
to questions that elicit their background knowledge about the material to be studied. Another very popular CAT is to ask students to take a minute or two at the end of a class session to write out a question about the assigned reading or the lecture that they believe to be both important and unanswered. A quick read through these questions after class gives you an indication of the depth of students’ understanding and also of some points that you might want to address in subsequent classes.

Grading
The learning goals you have defined for your students should shape the overall design of your course and of student assignments. They should also shape the design of your grading criteria and practice. Many faculty find it helpful to develop an explicit grading rubric. Such a rubric lays out the criteria an instructor will use when evaluating student work. Developing a rubric before grading an assignment can take time, but using it as you grade will help you maintain consistency and fairness in your grading. For a detailed discussion of rubrics and suggestions for how best to develop them, consult Craig Mettler’s essay “Designing Scoring Rubrics for Your Classroom,” available on the web at http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25. There are many other issues to consider as you plan your evaluation of student work; you can find important information and links to other resources on the web at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/resources/teaching_resources/assessment/grading.htm.

Science Labs

It’s hard to imagine student mastery in the natural sciences without laboratory experiences. At its best, the lab bridges the content and process of science—allowing students to engage in the process or methods of science to see how this leads to the content of science.

To create such lab experiences, your learning goals once again need to be central. What exact outcomes do you have for the lab and how do those outcomes connect to the classroom? What lab experiences will best support students in learning the desired outcomes? Think about the variety of students you have and how the lab experiences will work with or against their strengths. Is there anything you can do in your lab curriculum to shift the balance in positive directions for the students?

Besides the learning goals you have for a particular topic in your lab, remember that there are also overarching goals associated with lab experiences. These include an increased interest in science, development of scientific and quantitative reasoning, building of collaborative work practices, and an appreciation for the nature of science and the ambiguity of empirical work.

Although no single laboratory experience is likely to achieve all of these goals, by having them firmly in mind you can ensure that each one is emphasized at least once during the semester and those you consider especially important are visited several times.

In practical terms, consider deliberately including a variety of lab interactions to draw out and demonstrate, for them and you, student questioning and eventual grasping of the connection of procedure and principle. Include as well a variety of materials from across the range of learning styles that will introduce, reinforce, connect, or extend the principle of the laboratory to the classroom/textbook. Materials such as visuals (e.g. charts, graphs, and cartoons), auditory files, texts which give analogies or applications of the laboratory principle for example, demos, and plenty of white boards for drawing, have a place in the laboratory (not just in pre-lab or later in review sessions). The lab is a time for the instructor to think about supporting the student in making the cognitive transition from thinking to doing and back again.

Finally, remember the power of formative feedback and consider having students do small informal presentations of the lab as you would in your own research lab. In addition to providing a window into student thinking for you and their peers, this will allow the student to explore different roles in relation to science and possibly expand the ways they think about their own learning and ability to communicate (teach) the aspects that make up the practice of science—data, hypotheses, methods, connections, etc. This is also excellent formative feedback for you on the effectiveness of the lab experience you have designed.

In addition to the work cited in the call out box (America’s Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science), another excellent resource, also from the National Academies, is Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Language Labs

Language labs have a long tradition of using current audio-visual technologies to simulate natural language learning conditions. They were designed to allow students to practice listening, pronunciation, and particular grammatical constructs, either independently, in pairs, or more rarely in small groups. Since advanced language courses allow for more natural, varied, and higher-level types of communication, language labs are traditionally most heavily used by beginning and intermediate language courses. As multimedia technologies combined with the world-wide web have taken the place of tape-based materials, language labs have evolved significantly to include more up-to-date, "authentic," and varied materials often delivered in a more distributed environment.

As you design your course, consider how your students may use language lab resources to enhance their learning, either on their own or collaboratively. In addition to (or instead of) assigning activities from the textbook and accompanying workbook, does it make sense to design assignments around "authentic," non-digested content, such as web sites or media broadcast in the target language? Can students use new lab technologies to become more productive and creative in the target language? Make sure lab assignments are in keeping with the overall learning goals and have appropriate assessment rubrics.

Remember that today's language "lab" is often a combination of
resources, some localized, some de-localized, that students can access anywhere and anytime - online, on their computer, and increasingly on portable devices. Think of how, where, and/or when you will ask students to access and interact with the lab resources, and how their work with those resources connects to in-class activities and to assessment. Today's "lab" incorporates mainstream authoring and communication technologies that allow for student production and collaboration. It may be worth exploring with the lab director how these tools can serve your course goals. Construct "treasure hunts" using specific target-language web sites. Enforce new vocabulary by having students design and share online cartoons in which they use new words creatively. Foster research and writing skills by having students build an encyclopedia of relevant concepts as they collaborate using wikis. All of these tasks, developed by Georgetown faculty - and their students - successfully combine resources of the new language lab with course content
and goals.

We recommend that faculty explore the labs and resources available to their discipline early and incorporate them into the course schedule, assignments, and assessment. Discuss your learning goals and ideas for student work with the lab director or manager so that you may develop well-timed, realistic, and rewarding assignments with clear assessment criteria, putting physical as well as on-line resources to best use for your students’ learning.

Choosing and Using a Classroom Space

In addition to syllabus and activities design, it is important to consider the physical layout and characteristics of the classroom space. While this is not a factor that the instructor controls to the same extent as the course design, instructors have the ability to request particular classroom characteristics, features, and locations from the Registrar. In some cases, the Registrar assigns different rooms to a single course, allowing the instructor to schedule activities around each room’s specific characteristics.

Some classrooms lend themselves better to reconfiguration than others. If your class includes different types of delivery and activities, such as lecture, small group work, and round table discussion, mobile or modular desks and chairs and the space for instructor and students to move around can be crucial to the class’s success. If you require in-class collaborative work, make sure that the students have easy ways to reposition themselves as needed for the collaboration. Short of this, instructors should not give up on small group activities even in fixed-seat arena classrooms: while not ideal, students are likely willing to talk to those immediately beside and behind them.

Other things to consider as you request a classroom:

• If your class requires a lot of reading from books or papers, or revolves mostly around face-to-face communication, a classroom with natural light may be most appropriate. If instead you tend to display materials on a projection screen, choose a room where the light can be easily dimmed.
• Do you or your student bring laptop computers to the course? If so, make sure that the room has adequate desk space and a reliable wireless internet signal.

 

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