Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below looks at the emerging practice of integrative education. It is by Mary Taylor Huber, senior scholar; Pat Hutchings, vice president; and Richard Gale, senior scholar– all at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The article is from Peer Review, Summer/Fall 2005, Volume 7, Number 4. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2005, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The International Professors Project

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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INTEGRATIVE LEARNING FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION

Educators who follow the listserv of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD)–whose members staff and direct teaching and learning support centers–may have seen the following query pass over their screens in January this year: “Dear PODers,” wrote Victoria Mundy Bhavsar, “In my discipline (agriculture), we are very fond of talking about integrated multidisciplinary learning experiences. I imagine other disciplines do this, too. Could I get some reflections on what this might actually mean in practice? Besides making students take a whole big lot of classes in several different departments and hoping they ‘get it’ by the end!”

This is the $64,000 question for many educators concerned with the reform of undergraduate education today. Convinced that undergraduates’ experience has become too fragmented to prepare them for the complexities of today’s world, educators across the country are designing new opportunities to help students put the pieces together. These innovations and experiments aim to help students connect their learning across fields, and also to integrate classroom work with experiences in larger campus and community contexts–and to do so in ways that strengthen learning throughout the college years and beyond.

Such work is in keeping with recent thinking by Carol Geary Schneider and her colleagues at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), who identify three key themes in the “reinvention of liberal education” today–themes that, taken together, define a “New Academy that is taking shape within the old one” through a variety of campus, system-wide, and national initiatives. These include a new, across-the-curriculum focus on “inquiry and intellectual judgment,” a renewed concern with “social responsibility and civic engagement,” and a new interest in “integrative learning.” Indeed, they suggest that integrative learning may one day “take its rightful place alongside breadth and depth as a hallmark of a quality undergraduate education” (Schneider 2004, Leskes 2004).

This interest in integrative learning is the focus of a partnership between the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and AAC&U–a national project involving ten campuses, each committed to deepening our understanding of this crucial aspect of undergraduate education. One of the first products of this work has been a “Statement on Integrative Learning,” which points out: “Integrative learning comes in many varieties: connecting skills and knowledge from multiple sources and experiences; applying theory to practice in various settings; utilizing diverse and even contradictory points of view; and, understanding issues and positions contextually.” Of course, developing such a synthesizing, creative cast of mind has long been a goal of liberal education, albeit one that students have been expected, more often than not, to pick up for themselves. What’s new today is that institutions are seeking to help students see the larger patterns in their college experience, and to pursue their learning in more intentionally connected ways. To put it a bit differently, the capacity for integrative learning–for connection making–has come to be recognized as an important learning outcome in its own right, not simply a hoped-for consequence of the mix of experiences that constitute undergraduate education.

Integrative Learning for Twenty-First-Century Life

There are many good reasons for this emphasis, including a new appreciation of the importance of integrative learning for contemporary life and thought. Students headed for professional careers will still need specialized expertise. But with flexibility and mobility as watchwords in today’s economy, few college graduates can expect to spend a whole career with the same employer or even in the same line of work. Further, the role of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange is growing both within and outside the academy. In government, industry, medicine, and higher education alike, problems are vetted and solved by bringing together people who are trained in different fields. Because of changes in knowledge and communication practices, including technological advances and globalization, all of us are faced with information that is more complex, fast moving, and accessible than ever before, challenging the integrative and critical capacities of experts and novices alike. Psychologist Robert Kegan summarizes the scope of the issue succinctly in the title of his 1998 book In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.

This is true of civic life as well. We no longer live in a world where it is easy to feel in control or empowered to affect what’s happening in one’s own neighborhood, much less in the nation or the world. Yet at the same time, our personal choices, even the food, clothing, and cars we buy, have immediate consequences for those far away. Speaking about the results of a massive international study of air pollution, University of New Hampshire scientist Berrien Moore said in an interview on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, “What happens in Beijing will affect Boston, what happens in Boston will affect Paris, et cetera. And I think that’s one thing that we will have . . . even as we begin to solve local problems, this connectivity of the planet will come back at us time and again” (2004). To participate responsibly as local citizens, then, people must also be citizens of the world, aware of complex interdependencies and able to synthesize information from a wide array of sources, learn from experience, and make connections between theory and practice.

Our colleges and universities can play an important role in helping students develop the “integrative arts” necessary for meeting today’s challenges (Schneider 2004), and many campuses already embrace such a goal. College catalogs make powerful promises about students’ personal and intellectual development as thinkers and citizens–and certainly there are inspiring models and existing proof to show what may be possible (Colby et al. 2003). To meet these commitments to integrative learning more fully, and to meet them for all students, is the difficult challenge ahead.

A Difficult Challenge

No one should underestimate the difficulty of this new direction because it runs against the grain of many of the most established features of the undergraduate experience. Consider, for example the experience of University of Kansas psychologist Dan Bernstein, who wants his psychology majors to develop “a nuanced understanding of the complex origins of human action,” but worries that “individual courses typically promote specialized understanding of one explanatory model”:

Teachers who are trying to cover as much of the course material as possible rarely give assignments that ask students to step back and compare different models of human action. Instead they typically presume (or hope) that the range of courses required for the major will provide an occasion for students to make those comparative reflections on their own. (Bernstein, Marx, and Bender 2005, 40)

Clearly Bernstein’s analysis applies well beyond the field of psychology, and the challenges are not only at the level of the individual course. There are structural arrangements that privilege departmental and disciplinary agendas over general education and interdisciplinary work. Administrative systems that define faculty roles and rewards have been slow to recognize interdisciplinary and applied scholarship, not to mention the extra efforts involved in designing, teaching, and assessing courses aimed at integrative learning, and the persistent gaps between programs in the professions and the liberal arts and sciences, the curriculum and the cocurriculum, and campus and community life.

Many of the ways that courses are delivered and taken encourage faculty and students alike to think of learning as discrete, unconnected chunks. As Gerald Graff explained in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1991, “The classes being taught at any moment on a campus represent rich potential conversations between scholars and across disciplines. But since these conversations are experienced as a series of monologues, the possible links are apparent only to the minority of students who can connect disparate ideas on their own.” Faculty often talk about valuing the transferability of knowledge and the meaning making that occurs when students link diverse ideas from multiple sources, classes, courses, and disciplines–but teaching for such outcomes can be difficult, and is rarely explicit.

Exacerbating this tacit message of fragmentation is the increasing complexity of students’ lives. According to the U.S. Department of Education, traditional students entering college full-time right after high school, supported by parents or working only part-time, now account for only 27 percent of undergraduates; and more than 40 percent in 1999-2000 were more than twenty-four years old. Many have families and jobs that necessarily take precedence over schoolwork. And a growing proportion of students are attending more than one institution over their college careers (McCormick 2003). By further fracturing undergraduates’ college experience, these “swirling” patterns of enrollment make integrative learning across courses and contexts even more difficult.

They suggest, too, that while curricular changes can do a lot to help students connect the dots, such changes cannot be the only solution. We also need approaches that help students develop these capacities to make connections for themselves. Helping students to become more self-aware and purposeful–more intentional–about their studies is a powerful idea, and it is, in our view, the key to fostering integrative learning.

Intentional Integration

Integrative learning does not just happen–though it may come more easily for some than for others. Whether one is talking about making connections within a major, between fields, between curriculum and cocurriculum, or between academic knowledge and practice, integrative learning requires work. Of course, students must play an important role in making this happen, but their success depends in large part on commitment and creativity from everyone involved.

To support integration, many colleges and universities are developing new kinds of institutional scaffolding within and between their general education programs (breadth), their majors (depth), and–in many cases–campus and community life. On a national tour of campuses today, one will find linked courses that invite students to take different perspectives on an important issue, capstone projects that ask students to draw on learning from earlier courses to explore a new topic or solve a problem, experiences that combine academic and community-based work, or systems of journaling and reflection like those known as learning portfolios. But these useful examples also serve to highlight one of the next challenges: to link the various sites and strategies for integration by putting in place a variety of structures and practices that enable students to connect, say, their first-year learning-communities experience to a final capstone course or to study abroad in the junior year. In order to be truly effective for students, integrative learning must be not an isolated event but a regular part of intellectual life.

As the articles and examples in this issue of Peer Review attest, combinations of such designs can be found in institutions of all types and persuasions. Although each has a unique approach growing out of campus mission and history, there are common threads. Most institutions that have made headway are creating new and varied opportunities for integrative learning, engaging students in reflection on their learning, involving faculty in teaching that nurtures integrative arts, and building campus-wide interest and experience in assessment.

If there is a through-line, in all these initiatives, it is the importance for everyone involved of being intentional about pursuing integrative learning goals. Indeed, as Carnegie Foundation President Lee Shulman reminded participants in the Integrative Learning Project in July 2004, there’s a sense in which all learning is integrative–the real questions are around what, for what purposes, and how intentionally integration is sought. It is hard to think of a college course or curriculum that could not be taught or designed–and taken–with integrative learning in mind.

We conclude by returning to the $64,000 question with which this article began. “Could I get some reflections on what this might actually mean in practice?” This is the winning question not only because of its focus but also because it was asked in a public forum. It is a reminder that efforts to strengthen programs that foster integration need not, and should not, be pursued alone. Too often, good work in teaching and learning remains with its creators, unavailable for others to consult, review, and build on and inaccessible to those who really want the help. Colleagues–and campuses–need to work together, sharing what they are finding out about integrative learning, developing new assignments for fostering integration, creating new models for assessing outcomes, and building on one another’s insights and accomplishments.

Local efforts can be reinvigorated through participation in a community of educators working toward similar goals, and that community, in turn, can contribute to building knowledge that informs efforts to foster integrative learning at colleges and universities around the world. Such an approach will not only deepen our collective understanding of how students learn to integrate their undergraduate experiences and what that “might actually mean in practice”; it will give us the tools and knowledge and networks necessary to go beyond “hoping they ‘get it’ by the end.”

This article draws on a publication by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings, Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain (Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2004).

References
Bernstein, D., M. S. Marx, and H. Bender. 2005. Disciplining the minds of students. Change 37 (2): 36-43.
Colby, A., T. Ehrlich, E. Beaumont, and J. Stephens. 2003. Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Graff, G. Colleges are depriving students of a connected view of scholarship. Chronicle of Higher Education. (February 13, 1991).
Leskes, A. 2004. Foreword to Integrative learning: Mapping the terrain, by M. T. Huber and P. Hutchings. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
McCormick, A. C. 2003. Swirling and double-dipping: New patterns of student attendance and their implications for higher education. New Directions for Higher Education 121:13-24.
Moore, Berrien. 2004. Interview by Betty Ann Bowser. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS. September 9.
Schneider, C. G. 2004. Practicing liberal education: Formative themes in the reinvention of liberal learning. Liberal Education 90 (2): 6-11.

Folks:

The posting below looks at some of the expectations of today’s 21st Century Learners. It is by Michael Rodgers and David Starrett, Southeast Missouri State University and is number 30 in a series of selected excerpts from the National Teaching and Learning Forum newsletter reproduced here as part of our “Shared Mission Partnership.” NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum–like the printed version – offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, Volume 14, Number 5 © Copyright 1996-2005. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Circle of Support

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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TECHPED: DON’T BE LEFT IN THE E-DUST

Michael Rodgers and David Starrett, Southeast Missouri State University

He sits at the computer with headphones piping music from an iPOD to his ears. Ten different MSN chat windows blink and chime on the computer screen. An online role-playing game is minimized on the Windows taskbar. A music video blares from a TV in a corner of the room. A calculus book lies nonchalantly open by the cell phone, which itself sits next to the PC. He is doing his homework. He is real. He is a 21st Century Learner.

Diana Oblinger, Vice President for EDUCAUSE, refers to youngsters born in 1982 or after as “Net-generation” learners.1 Other terms sometimes used are “Millennial Student,” “Generation-Y,” and “Digital-native.” Regardless of the term, they all refer to students who have grown up in a technology-enabled world, never knowing life without computers, the Internet, CDs, and cell phones. To these students, life without digital technologies seems distant, alien, and quaint. Consider the spot for an 80s flashback show which recently aired on a small-town radio station that caters to a teen audience: over a song sung by Madonna, a voice invites the audience to imagine a world in which cell phones weighed five pounds! Rather than coins, slingshots, marbles, and string, Net-Gen students fill their pockets with debit cards, memory sticks, picture phones, and MP3 players. They communicate via cell phones, text messaging, e-mail, chat and IM. They “google,” expecting instant access to infinite amounts of information. They want it all, and they want it now.

They’re HereŠ

The first of these learners are now graduating from college. Many more are making their way through the K-12 system and into college. They have expectations, needs, and wants shaped by childhood spent in a tech-enabled environment. Such characteristics as multi-tasking, a preference for visual modes of communication, a need for instant gratification, and a strong desire for social connectedness partly define how they learn. The technology enhanced world in which we live has impacted their development as individuals and as learners. Indeed, many believe that the unprecedented interaction with technology has resulted in neural development markedly different from that of all previous generations. Yet, we all learn and interact in the classroom differently because of the pervasive technology surrounding us. For this reason we choose not to refer to these students as Net-generation learners, but rather to use the term 21st Century Learner because it includes digital natives and older learners who are also influenced and impacted by technology in and out of the classroom.

Who Are These People?

Although technologies-especially cell phones, instant messaging (IM), chat, e-mail, text messaging, and others that facilitate connectedness-are fascinating to the 21st Century Learner, these students are not especially interested in how the technologies work, as an engineer would be. Rather, the 21st Century Learners’ ideal technologies will meet the need for interactivity and continuous connectedness while fitting well with the students’ multi-tasking skills. Such technologies favor multimedia over pure text-based information. Where the current technology falls short, 21st Century Learners have improvised, developing abbreviations in the form of acronyms and emoticons which vary, depending on such things as need for speed in writing (IM or chat) or the need for brevity (text messaging). Consequently, text literacy often suffers, at least from the perspective of us digital immigrants.

The answer to almost any question is sought through a search engine such as Google (so popular that we now use the verb “to google” to describe looking up information on the Web). Google and the communication technologies have fostered a culture in which the expectation is that answers and responses are available nearly instantly and for free. The use of search engines like Google have led to confidence that the right answer will always be found, and that typically it will be the first answer found. However, the focus on quick procurement of answers and responses suggests that the 21st Century Learners are perhaps unwilling to pause and reflect on the deeper significance of the findings. While these students know how to get answers quickly, they are not as good at evaluating the accuracy and integrity of their findings. Information literacy has thus become an important concern to many librarians and other educators.

Four Conclusions, Four Experiments

While we are not Net-generation learners, we are 21st Century Learners. Does this mean we are automatically 21st Century Teachers? No. Can we become 21st Century Teachers? Of course. How do we teach to a 21st Century Learner? Oblinger draws four conclusions that can guide us as we explore ways to adapt our teaching to these new students.

* It’s Not About Technology: Studies show that 21st Century Learners want a moderate amount of technology integrated into courses. Too little technology in courses risks losing the power that technology has to help students organize course material; too much technology risks losing interaction with the instructor. If you are renewing your course, consider a hybrid approach that makes the syllabus, notes, lectures, and other resources available online, and reserves class time for Q&A, practica, or other highly interactive events. Remember, 21st Century Learners are comfortable in informal learning environments.

* Multiple Media Literacy: We’ve seen that 21st Century Learners favor visual media over text-based media. When designing course websites, let icons, sketches, movie clips and simulations do the heavy lifting of content presentation; let text support the visuals. Oblinger cites a wonderful example at Nethead Online2: the Kids and Families page consists almost entirely of images, but the Seniors page is almost all text. Who are your students?

* First-Person Learning: The 21st Century Learners are comfortable with experiential and informal learning modes, including those that require a high degree of self-teaching. To tap into these characteristics, try games (especially role-playing games) and simulations. Can students learn history from Rise of Nations?3 If you are looking for a less daunting approach, send students on Webquests or into the community to do research. For example, the current controversy over opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling might be used in an English writing course to explore the Journey as a theme4: how might a geologist or environmentalist get to ANWR? How would the landscape change with the seasons? Instead of directing students to text-based materials on Alaskan geography, send them to the Federal Aviation Administration’s online weather cameras5 for real-time views of many areas in rural Alaska-have the students discover for themselves what Alaska is like, and then write about it.

* Importance of Interaction: As we have seen, 21st Century Learners place high value on interactivity. But what can be done in a traditional lecture course to build in some interactivity, especially if the course enrollment is large? Try implementing clicker6 devices! These handheld units allow the instructor to survey student understanding of course concepts in real time; if the responses indicate misconceptions, the instructor can ask students to discuss the survey results amongst themselves, and then resurvey the class. This technology is now surprisingly accessible: textbook publishers such as Prentice Hall now bundle clickers with textbooks for many courses. The instructor’s receiver hardware and software is provided free of charge upon adoption of the text. This distribution system thus ingeniously allows implementation of the clickers at virtually no cost to the institution, because the system’s costs have been passed to the student as part of the cost of the textbook.

We’re Here . . .

Why is the 21st Century Learner important to us? Surely there is a threat here: not only must we understand new content and integrate it into our teaching at a record pace, but we are now called to adapt our teaching to students quite different from those we’ve seen in the past. Will we be forced to rethink how we deliver education, even to the point of scrapping the course as the basic unit of instruction? Is the course, with its fixed starting and ending dates, its inflexible schedule, and its focus on individual encounters with a pre-selected body of content, really the right way to serve 21st Century Learners who prefer informal learning? Or might it be better not to change how we teach at all? After all, the world our students will enter is still dominated by those who are not of the Net-generation. Perhaps the best answer is to meet in the middle. Could we teach them to reflect while they teach us to multi-task (e.g., we can be more understanding and tolerant of their use of acronyms and emoticons in online discussions but encourage them to use standard English to write a term paper)? This approach echoes the fundamental assertion of those who argue for the benefits of diversity: creativity and success are fostered when people with different perspectives work together.

Notes

1 Diana Oblinger, “Educating the Net Generation,” Keynote Address delivered at Educause 2004, Denver, CO, Oct. 11, 2004. The address is available at http://mslive.sonicfoundry.com/mslive/viewer/NoPopupRedirector.aspx?peid=2808fd88-7ab3-49e6-bc25-93f2c1b7dc39&shouldResize=False# 2 http://www.netheadonline.com/ 3 http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/ 4 We thank Greg Salyer, of the English Department at Longwood University, Farmville, VA, for discussions on the theme of the Journey in English writing courses. 5 http://akweathercams.faa.gov/ 6 Taken together, the devices used in a course comprise a “Personal Response System.” See, for example, http://www.gtcocalcomp.com/interwriteprs.htm

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Folks:

The posting below, a bit longer than most, looks at the importance of generating “reflective comments” on your lectures and other teaching activities. It is from Chapter 3: Change can be Piecemeal, in Leaving the Lectern: Cooperative Learning and the Critical First Days of Students Working in Groups, by Dean A. McManus of the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. [ISBN 1-882982-85-1]. Published by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. Bolton, Massachusetts. [www.ankerpub.com]. Copyright © 2005 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Reinventing the Research University

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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REFLECTIVE COMMENTS

Faculty can be quick to cut and run before even considering how they might begin to change the way they teach. (Don’t let that notion nudge you toward the door.) An all too handy excuse given to me for this behavior is that they don’t have time to sit down and work out changes for the whole course. Although you certainly can change the whole course, you don’t have to. I didn’t. You can make the change step by step. This is easier to do when you have the end in mind so that you know where you are going. Nevertheless, you may already have taken some of those preliminary steps without thinking of them as being part of charging the way you teach.

I was surprised to find that my lecture notes for the first course that I taught, notes I had not looked at for years before writing this book, contained a few reflective comments in the margin that indicated I had begun making changes while teaching my first course. As I have mentioned, most of them dealt with reorganizing the topics or adding or dropping topics, but a few dealt with presentation. For example, beside the lecture notes for one topic is a marginal scribble, “very unsatisfactory,” in triple underline, no less. The section on another topic is condemned: “This is terrible!!” An abbreviated comment suggests a different presentation for a concept that is particularly difficult for students to understand on first hearing, but the comment is crossed through, apparently a record of the failure of that presentation. No sign of what happened next. Finally, a diagram sketched on the back of a page of notes as an alternative illustration of a certain natural process bears the comment: “This works very well on the blackboard.”

As you can see, most of these reflective comments record my dissatisfaction at not being able to present the material clearly to the class. My guess, in hindsight, is that dissatisfaction arose from insecurity, from lacking the command of the material that would have enabled me to use a depth of understanding to present the content as simply and clearly as possible. But though restricted solely to content, the comments also must have been my early desultory attempts to enhance student learning. Therefore, if you have written such comments as these in your lecture notes, then you, too, may have already begun to make piecemeal changes in the way you teach. If you haven’t, now is a good time to begin.

These comments are one type of information to go in a teaching portfolio (Davis, 1993, Teaching Dossier; Seldin, 2004). For now, though, you aren’t interested in creating a teaching portfolio, but you should know what it is. A teaching portfolio is your collection of information about your teaching. Think of it as similar to artists’ portfolios of their work, or photographers’ portfolios of their work. It contains several types of information about your teaching and your students’ learning, some that you create, some that come from your colleagues, and some that come from your students. The basic piece of information is you self-reflective statement about your teaching, which includes your teaching goals, perhaps as you have determined your general goals by completing the Teaching Goals Inventory. The portfolio would also include the changes you made in the materials in the course and in the methods you used to teach that material, your reasons for making the changes, and the results of the changes.

So you see, the little reflective comments on your lecture notes about making even minor changes in the content or the presentation are an inchoate self-reflection, albeit not very critical yet. The teaching portfolio is the collection of all this information. We’ll come back to the subject of this portfolio collection from time to time. Incidentally, whereas the teaching portfolio is a record of your teaching in all your courses, either for your use to improve your teaching or for your department’s use to consider you for tenure or promotion, there is a course portfolio that you may develop for your use to improve your teaching in a single course. (Hutchings, 1998; Peer Review of Teaching, 2001).

Making Small Changes

Let’s return to the senior-level course that I changed. We’ll consider first the small changes I made in it during the first three times I taught it alone. Then we’ll at a bigger change I made that turned out to be a transitional stage to the final change from lecture to a form of active learning called cooperative learning.

It will suffice for us to consider active learning as all the formats or arrangements which “require students to apply what they are learning” (Meyers & Jones, 1993, p. xi). Many of these activities can be carried out by individual students or pairs of students. (For a more thorough description and various examples, see Meyers & Jones or the following online references: Center for Teaching Excellence, n.d.; McKinney, 2004; Paulson & Faust, 2003.) Some activities require groups of students, such as cooperative learning (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991; Millis & Cottell, 1998; see online Cooperative Learning Center, n.d.). Other group formats include problem-based learning (Duch, Groh, & Allen, 2001; see online University of Delaware Problem-Based Learning, 1999) and case studies, the latter being common in business, law, and medicine (for science see online National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science, n.d.).

My course met four days a week for 50 minutes. (We are on a quarter term.) It was now my course, after years of team teaching. During the last year or two, I had made a few changes, mainly in the presentation. For instance, I had begun showing slides of the geologic shoreline features I was lecturing on so that students could see what I was describing. I guided students’ assigned reading by providing them with study questions. And I even tried writing two or three questions on the blackboard at the beginning of each class period to prime their attention for the important points of the lecture. I cannot take credit for these innovations. I copied them from a couple of colleagues. I also noticed that the other instructor in the course, while we team-taught it, used problem sets (homework) effectively, and I stored away the observation. In other words, I had begun to copy some teaching methods that I saw other instructors use of that I heard about their using. You, however, can discover other teaching methods more easily. You can read about them in the books I have cited, in other books, on the web, or from the staff at the teaching center on your campus, as well as from colleagues.

Because the course was no longer team-taught, now I had to cover all the topics, which meant I had to expand my lecture notes, always a lengthy task. The course outline was the usual list of topics, one or more for each day. I also had my own outline, however, on which I noted what I actually covered in each class period. What I covered was invariably less than what I had planned to cover, a situation that would call for adjustments before the end of the term.

Although I see from my notes for the first day of class that I told the 25 students “class time will be more question and discussion than lecturing,” I’m sure the long list of topics caused me to lecture all the time. The significant point, however, is not that there was little discussion but that I would have had the gumption to tell the class to expect more question and discussion than lecturing. I obviously wanted to change the was I taught but didn’t know how to make the change and fell back into just covering the material, the easy way out, the old habit.

On the first day of class I also asked the students about their main sub-disciplinary interest in their oceanography major, which was my first attempt to learn something about my students. I found out that most of the students in my marine geology course were biological oceanographers, not marine geologists and geophysicists, but I did not make use of the information in the way I taught the class. It never entered my mind to do so-and if it had, I wouldn’t have known how to do it (Davis, 1993, Responding to a Diverse Student Body).

I also had come to know myself well enough as a teacher to realize that I was not comfortable preparing study questions about the reading or attention-guiding questions to write on the blackboard. So I dropped both activities. Rather, I chose to spend my time preparing weekly homework problems, which provided the students with something to do, rather than think about. (I’ll elaborate on this “doing” in a moment.) The homework was graded by the TA, an arrangement that continued the TA’s responsibilities in the course but also kept me at a distance from the students. In retrospect, I think this arrangement supported my ambivalence toward the students; I wanted to know more about them, but from a distance. The need to distance myself from them must have been grounded in my anxiety. I suppose I could have been lumped into what Palmer (1998) calls a “bad teacher,” by which he means those teachers who “distance themselves from the subject they are teaching-and in the process, from their students” (p. 11). But I must have been making progress in overcoming my anxiety, for no longer did I need to wear the white lab coat to class.

I also told the students on the first day that the problems in the homework were of the type that would be on the exams. As you recall, the students had always complained that my exams were impossible for them to study for. My exams consisted of questions about data that would be presented with the exam itself, on a map or chart in the room during the exam, or as a sample on a table. It finally dawned on me that the students had never experienced the situation they encountered during an exam; that is, they had never worked any problems like the exam problems. No wonder they couldn’t study for the exams. Now, however, they would have solved some problems in the homework that were of the type on the exam. Although I stumbled onto this improvement in testing the students, I remained ignorant of other aspects of testing that could have enhanced my students’ learning (Davis, 1993, Testing and Grading; McKeachie, 2002, Assessing, Testing, and Evaluating).

Probably the most significant little change I made was to begin the practice of writing myself more informative comments about the course for the next year. My first comment suggested revisions in the homework, which I made. It also recommended giving more time for certain topics that I had rushed through, rearranging the order of some topics for a more logical connection, and dropping one topic. Dropping the one topic gave me the extra time for the rushed topics. But oh, the topic I dropped! How I hated to drop it, because I understood this topic very well, unlike topics I had dropped in the past because I didn’t understand them. It was some research I had done, and I found it very interesting, so interesting that I wanted the students to know about it. (Did you catch that? “To know about” it! How vague!) But the day I was lecturing on it, a student raised his hand and asked: “Why are we learning this?”

I’ll never forget that day. My first thought was: “Why is that student talking to me like this?” I can still picture the classroom, a snapshot, as though looking over my own shoulder toward the student. No one moved. And I can still feel the silence, the long, long silence. My cheeks burned. My throat shriveled shut. Finally I mumbled something that was supposed to be coherent. Later in my office, after the shock had worn off, I tried to come up with a better answer, but every attempt was pitiable. They were all pitiable because the student was right: There was no reason for them to learn what I had told them.

I had included the topic because it was about my specialty in the discipline, my own research. (So much for being close to the subject you are teaching!) What is so sad about this incident is that I was totally unaware of being on the receiving end of a teaching moment, or as Palmer (1998) would call it, a “critical moment”; that is, a learning opportunity, in this case for me rather than the students. I dropped my interesting but irrelevant topic, but what I failed to learn from this moment was the need to define what I expected students to learn in my course; call it my goals or my expected learning outcomes (Davis, 1993, Deciding What You Want to Accomplish; Fink, 2003, Appendix A: Planning Your Course: A Decision Guide; McKeachie, 2002, Write Objectives, Goals, or Outcomes). As you have read, that failing had dogged me from the beginning and would continue to do so. It was just too easy for me to say that I wanted them to learn everything I told them. After all, everything I told them interested me. When I began teaching not everything I taught interested me, but all of it had now become important to me.

Examining my course folders for the next two times I taught the course, I see that I kept adding to the course with great enthusiasm. Oh, I added more topics to the outline; each topic was important for them “to know about”. I added more papers to the reading list; there were so many really important papers they should “know about”. I added displays of the kind of data that would be on the exams. In computing there grade I added to the usual two midterm exams, final exams, and weekly homework, a quiz about shoreline features as shown in 35mm slides and a two-page paper of independent research on a shoreline hazard assessment.

In part, what I was adding to the course were additional ways for the students to do something with data or observations. In an undesigned and unfocused manner, I was making them more active in the course. Being ignorant of the research on student learning, I didn’t even think about student learning as a goal, strange as that may sound today. Learning was something that just happened, an activity, not a result. Rather, I took the track of preparing them for the practical needs of employment. For employment, it seemed to me, they needed to be able to do things with what they had learned, although I didn’t know just what they should be able to do, having never been employed with a bachelor’s degree, not having talked to employers. That said, I still lectured to them four days a week, unaware of the contradiction between my ill-formed goals of their things and my method of teaching that had them merely recording my words.

No longer, however, did I tell then on the first day of class that there would be more questions and discussion than lecturing. I had wised up. Instead, I told them: “I’m assuming you could be a practicing oceanographer a year from now, so I’ll treat you more like scientists that students. I’ll expect you to learn some fundamentals of marine geology, develop your ability to derive your own opinions by accepting or rejecting observations and data and making different interpretations.” It certainly sounds good, doesn’t it? But my expectations for them were still vague. I’m sure I had no idea how to achieve those goals.

Nevertheless, I must have been doing something right, for after the second time I taught the course I received my best teaching evaluation thus far and, on the students’ nomination, was awarded the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences award for distinguished undergraduate teaching. That was simply unbelievable. What a thrill! Quite possibly owing to the excitement of receiving that award from the students, I added even more to the course, and as you might guess, I ended up overtasking the students the next year. I hadn’t meant to do that. They were not happy. I sank from a marvelous emotional high to a deplorable low. It was obvious that I had to make a major change for the following year, and I did. Little did I know that the change was actually a transitional change into a completely different type of teaching-and student learning.

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