So my “teaching” experience is not in the traditional college setting, but I completely agree with the get up and move approach. Most of my experience comes from teaching a diverse audience classes on disaster response for the American Red Cross. When I started out, I was a very serious presenter, dutifully clicked through slide after slide and at the end of the three hour session, I was bored, exhausted and less than inspired. I can only imagine the pain my “students” felt. Unhappy with the experience, I decided to try a more interactive approach that brought the “disaster” to the classroom. For example, when I teach the class on how to run a shelter, I start by giving the students a pile of materials and tell them to follow their instinct and set up a shelter with no instruction. Watching them I can see what they instinctively know that is correct and what areas would cause confusion or safety issues. Then we can walk through the space they have created and instead of flipping slides, we can talk about methods and reasons for setting up the shelter or policies and procedures that are important. Tuesday, I had the great experience of facilitating an exercise for a Tribal government that I have been working with over the past two years. Not only did they address a lot issues that had been discussed in various classes over the past two years, but they had adapted policies and processes that worked better given their Native culture. At the end, one of the social workers who was attending came to me and said that even though she hasn’t been able to attend all of our training sessions, she still remembers the shelter class because it was the first and only time she has had any experience like that. So thinking of authentic teaching, I hope I can take this experience and turn that into something I can use in the academic environment.

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I am many things, but funny is not one of them. Without wanting to sound like I am jumping on the bandwagon, I also support everyone’s comments about finding other ways to engage the students and material. The degree of difficulty in coming up with active learning strategies, I think depends a bit on the subject matter and your audience. If you teaching to a beginning (100 or 200 level) audience, I would look for ways to apply the concepts to the world around them. Where could they experience the theories or ideas that you are trying to teach them about. I think this goes back to our earlier discussions about using imagination and play to encourage students to explore the ideas themselves and then bring it back to a discussion of what they experienced. Then you can work with them to construct the ideas and concepts based on that experience.

Yes! Exactly what I want to avoid for my students. I am not sure how we could create such a space. One possibility that occurred to me was to offer an alternate time for an existing course. Students could choose which session to attend. Then in the alternate time slot you could tryout some of the techniques and get feedback from the students. That would require a lot of extra time on our part, but would be worthwhile if it created a better learning environment. One challenge to doing that would be measuring learning and ultimately assigning grades at the end of the semester, I’m not really sure how that would work. But I am still thinking about it.

Ken & Homero

My thinking was really more along the line of a place to practice different teaching methods to figure out what works for my specific content, less about how to make the technology work. Sure there are plenty of articles and videos, like we read this week, but how do you know what works for you before you invest a whole semester and the lives of umpteen students? How do you know the method you choose is going to create authentic learning with your specific students and have a substantive outcome, in other words not just turn into play without learning?

I have to support your concerns about the pedagogical practices that put kids in front of screens for extended periods of time. I do not believe a computer is a healthy substitute for a teacher and chalk board. But what I would challenge you to go back and rethink how technology was being used to engage the minds not just transfer information. The digital sources, be it creating a computer program, producing a video, creating podcasts, or digital scavenger hunts are really a backdrop to the learning. If you look twice, the students had to engage in real dialogues to conceptualize, imagine, create and produce a reflection of their learning. There is much more at work in the new media learning than just the technology.

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Why should assessments or for that matter students be standardized? Isn’t each student unique in the way they view and live in the world? Is it really impossible to think that each person can learn information and, if truly understood and embraced, could apply the information in standard and non-standard ways? I had a great English teacher, who was also a Catholic nun, tell my class that the reason we needed to learn the conventions of grammar was so that we could apply them or break them in meaningful ways. As a 10th grader, I was unimpressed by her wisdom at the time, but have truly come to believe it and find myself repeating the idea in many aspects of my life and teaching.

I think the problem most definitely lies in society; I have not heard a single person in class or in their blogs express the idea that his or her motivation for teaching is to have students pass a test. Rather, it seems that a current trend in society, focused on how to get ahead or make the most money for our stakeholders and ourselves, is to measure success in terms of what we get out of it. Sadly for education, this has driven the desire for grades as a means to separate or segregate people from each other. Fortune Five Hundred companies clamor for the graduates who rank at the top of their classes in college with little regard for understanding the whole person and the value of a person’s life to the company, simply because the stockholders aren’t interested in that. So I think, if we are to slowly change the dialogue, we must begin with performance based assessments and the “apprenticeship” type experiences which can still provide a basis for the ever-loved grade, but do so in a meaningful way.

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Thanks for such a personal reflection on your experiences. As with many of our colleagues, I am also a very experiential learner who did not excel (barely passed high school and undergrad with a 2.0) in “traditional” school environments, but really found my true talents beyond the classroom. Those experiences taught me more and have contributed to my success in two masters programs and currently in my doctoral work. I think, for those of us with similar experiences, that being mindful and open with our students about our own journeys can foster a caring supportive learning environment for our students.

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I love the experiment idea. Our discussion of teaching back material makes me think of all the peer-taught classes I have been involved in during my graduate education. Every single one has been a lecture to cover some material in a given reading and then debated within the confines of the existing literature. The result is a conversation that is steeped in or confined and constrained by the language and heuristics of the “known” with little regard for the possible.

So after she explained what she liked about science labs, we talked about how that learning method was more meaningful to her. In part it was because her lab experience & science more generally is very tangible; you can observe the phenomena. By that logic, we should be able to construct lab experiences in most humanities subjects, regardless of the academic level (elementary, secondary, post secondary/higher). The other part of what connected for her was that she likes to be out in the world, so exploring things around her was meaningful. I wondered if other subjects could also be inspiring if connected to her other interests, for example music. Could we engage in a conversation about post Civil War reconstruction and some of the key social, economic or political themes through musical lyrics. Maybe find old music that gives insight into the issues of the day, and then newer or even current reflections of how those issues have been woven into the fabric of our lives today. You still get to pass on the information about the issues but then it becomes more than just facts about a time long ago. I think this ties into Willie Caldwell’s discussion last week about arts integration. She liked the idea and added that even if you couldn’t do something “complicated” like this, if she was given the facts and allowed to present (teach) them back in a creative way, she would be more likely to pay attention. She recalled a lesson they did this for two years ago and she still remembers all the details.

So whether we connect ideas in creative and relevant ways or simply present information in creative ways, clearly there is a better way to engage learning. That said, I am much like her in that I am still at a loss to think about how this could be done for maths. Any math or engineering folks have ideas? What would Math 1026 Elementary Calc look like if we were to go to a more creative approach to learning? Or is this creative approach only useful for humanities and sciences?